The General wandered out to the middle of the field and stopped—the moonlight, a wrinkled blanket of silver beneath his feet; the stars, a bag of scattered diamonds above his head. It hurt his neck to look at them tonight. He was tired, but anxious, too; felt that the crews and the building of the trap during the past few days had put him behind schedule. And then there were all the technical rehearsals coming this weekend. True, he’d called in sick a couple of days the week before—that had given him ample opportunity to take care of the lawyer—but little time to figure out who was to be next. Of course, the Prince wanted him to rest, but still …
Sighing, the General walked back to the house. Once inside he turned off the alarm and immediately reset it to STAY/ INSTANT. He’d had the alarm installed after his grandfather’s death just in case anyone should ever come snooping while he was busy in the cellar. But no one ever came snooping anymore. No relatives, no friends, no more men from Big Tobacco offering to buy the farm.
Then again, that was all part of the equation, too.
He took off his shirt in the front hall and smelled his armpits. He needed a shower, needed to wash off the residue of his day-life before got into bed. If the Prince wanted him to sleep, then he would sleep as the General
The General finished undressing in the upstairs bathroom and turned on the shower. He stared at himself for a long time in the full-length mirror until the steam billowed out from behind the curtain and made his reflection disappear. He understood the message—knew that he had watched himself become smoke, become spirit.
The General smiled and stepped into the shower.
He stood there for a long time staring down at his chest, watching with the eyes of a child as the scalding hot water reddened his flesh.
Chapter 9
Tonight had to be about Donovan and only Donovan. But as he drove away from the lawyer’s house in Cary, Markham felt the beginnings of what was sure to be a splitting headache. He was tired, but knew the pressure behind his eyes was coming from his impatience to know right away how the victims were connected.
Donovan’s wife and two children were staying with relatives. Schaap got him a key and squared it with the local authorities so he could have the place to himself. But after two hours of walking the property, of sorting through the family’s belongings and sitting with his feet up on the desk in the lawyer’s lavish home office, he’d left feeling cold and empty. Nothing had spoken to him. Nothing at all.
Of course there were a lot of people who would’ve liked to have seen Randall Donovan dead. But how was the lawyer connected to Rodriguez and Guerrera?
Only Vlad knew for sure.
Without the connection to the Colombian cartels tying the victims together, the killings could almost be seen as random. But Markham knew in his gut that Vlad’s victims had been chosen because they met specific criteria that went beyond just fitting the bill of the historical Vlad’s victims. In other words, if Vlad saw these men as criminals or moral undesirables, why did he choose these undesirables specifically?
Markham would thus have to work backwards, beginning with the victim about whom he knew the most. Randall Donovan. And other than the details of the lawyer’s murder, Markham didn’t know much.
He took a deep breath and concentrated on the pressure behind his eyes; envisioned it as a bright red ball and kept shooting it from his forehead until he felt the tension in his face relax. By the time he reached the crime scene about fifteen minutes later he felt much better. The baseball field was located in a more rural area of town—at the north end of a small, secluded park—and Markham arrived to find the Cary police already waiting for him.
“Thank you, Schaap,” he whispered, and parked behind the patrol car. He slipped his case files into a small duffel bag and stepped out in tandem with the policeman—was about to reach for his ID, but the policeman waved him on without a word.
Markham nodded and headed down the steep embankment to the baseball field. When he reached home plate, he removed a flashlight from his bag and made his way across the pitcher’s mound to the outfield. After a few seconds of searching he found the marker he’d left there earlier that afternoon: an old bike reflector placed on the exact spot where Randall Donovan had been discovered impaled. The hole had been filled in, the crime scene tape gone for a couple of days now. And to make things worse it had rained on Monday, leaving nothing to indicate that only five days ago poor Randall Donovan had played center field with a stake up his ass.
Markham rifled through his bag and removed a large compass, charged the glow-in-the-dark coordinates with his flashlight, and then cut off the light. Turning slowly in place over the posthole, he allowed his eyes time to adjust to the dark. He settled on west, then stood for a long time gazing out over the field. The sky was clear, the moon an almost perfect half—not the same, of course, as it had been for Donovan, but he wasn’t sure if its position had changed also. He had an inkling it had but would need to check that out later.
His eyes played back and forth between the moon and the jagged silhouette of trees on the horizon. He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a bath towel he’d taken from his temporary apartment, balled it up behind his head, and lay down in the grass. Maintaining his direction west, he approximated Donovan’s line of sight and stared up at the sky. The scene was breathtaking—reminded him of a Lite-Brite set he used to have as a child. He let his eyes wander back to the moon and saw that the stars were slightly washed out around its perimeter. With a crescent moon, he thought, the stars would’ve been clearer.
“Of course,” he whispered. “Makes sense if you want to replicate the Ottoman symbol for Islam in the sky. But you can’t replicate the symbol exactly; can’t get the star inside the crescent. Would you accept that, Vlad?”
He scanned the sky for a long time and let his eyes wander from the crescent moon to the stars. He didn’t recognize any of the constellations except the Big Dipper. That would be something he’d have to check out on the Internet, too. Maybe a constellation associated with Vlad. But how many were there? The voice in his head began taunting him with signs from the zodiac, but he quickly stifled it and allowed the stars to enfold him in their sparkly blanket of igno-rance—of junior high school science projects and that astronomy class he’d always wished he’d taken at UConn.
Donovan’s glasses and the sight lines of the other vic-tims—they couldn’t have been looking at the crescent moon.
Well, what about the star? You need a star to complete the symbol for Islam.
But which one? There are thousands of them!
Markham scanned the sky and felt his brain beginning to squirm; felt the pressure building up again behind his eyes. He closed them and focused on his breathing, on emptying his mind into the sounds of the night and the orangey speckles burned on the backs of his eyelids. His muscles began to relax—a sinking sensation, as if he were suddenly lying on a bed of warm sand. The day was catching up to him, and soon his thoughts drifted to his wife, to the afternoon they drove up to Rhode Island and the night they made love for the first time on the beach at Bonnet Shores. Afterwards, gazing up at the stars, Michelle pointed out the constellation Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia, she said, was one she could always find.
“A good sailor can always find his way home by the North Star,” she told him.
Markham smiled at the memory of how he tried to impress her with his knowledge of Greek mythology, explaining that Cassiopeia was a vain queen who boasted that she was more beautiful than the goddess Hera herself. Michelle didn’t buy it; said that anybody who’d seen Clash of the Titans would know that. Markham laughed, and the two of them traded parts humming the movie’s cheesy music.