“To us,” she toasts. “You, me, and baby make three.”
Strawberry Quik, he thinks. She always drinks strawberry Quik.
“What’s a good name for a strawberry?” she asks.
“I won’t let it happen,” he replies. “Not this time.”
But the voice comes anyway—out of sight, from behind. Just like it always does.
“How ’bout Elmer?” cackles the man in the closet. “Elmer Stokes is a good name for a strawberry.”
He tries to turn around, tries to cock his hands back à la Spiderman and shoot the webs from his wrists like he did the last time, but his muscles are slow and rubbery today, and the hulking, square-headed figure of Elmer Stokes glides right past him.
Pop-pop goes the gun—a silly pop that reminds him of bubble wrap—and then the blood begins to pour from his wife’s head.
Elmer Stokes laughs and disappears into the kitchen.
“You got anything to eat, Agent Dipshit?” he calls out of sight. “I got the munchies from smoking your wife!”
But he does not follow—knows from experience that it is better to stay with Michelle, to spend what little time he has left with her. He rushes to her side, takes her in his arms, and tries to plug up the bullet holes with the bouquet of pink tulips that had only moments ago been her glass of strawberry Quik.
It’s cold, he thinks. Her blood is always so cold.
“Cold like a shower to wake you up,” his wife spits through bloody lips.
And with a start Sam Markham opened his eyes—his lungs clawing at the darkness as the wave of despair washed over him. He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and pushed the pressure in his sinuses down to his stomach. And after a moment he felt his breathing level off, felt his heart rate slow and his face relax.
He rolled over and stared at the big orange numbers beside his bed—5:11 … 5:12 … 5:13—and when his mind had settled, he reached for the nightstand and checked the date on his BlackBerry.
Wednesday, April 5th, he said to himself. Almost two weeks since the last one.
He closed his eyes and made a mental note of it.
Later, just after dawn, he sat at the kitchen table watching the ducks dawdle around the pond. He crunched his Wheaties methodically, in time with the waddle of a fat one that was poking around in the reeds. He had many years ago given up analyzing the dream itself; stopped trying to understand exactly why sometimes he saved Michelle and sometimes he didn’t.
True, for a long time he hadn’t dreamed of her at all. Started up again only after that nonsense in Tampa. No need to ask why. No need to worry. No, just as he had learned to do in another lifetime, if he absolutely had to dream of his dead wife, he preferred instead to control and catalog his feelings afterwards. Like a scientist.
Pensive, he said to himself as the fat duck plopped into the pond and paddled away. Buoyant? No. Treading water.
He gulped down the last of his milk and dropped the bowl in the sink; walked aimlessly from the kitchen and felt pleased for some reason with how spongy his running shoes felt on the hardwood floors of his new town house. He ended up in the living room, the boxes from Tampa and his ten years with the Bureau stacked before him like crowded gravestones. The move, the promotion to supervisory special agent at Quantico had been quick and painless, no attachments, no regrets—just the way he liked it.
Of course, his people would welcome him, would try to bond with him in subtle ways like inviting him to the occasional poker night or asking him to join their fantasy football league. And when he refused, like he always did, he knew what they would say about their new boss: at first, that he was arrogant and aloof, perhaps snobbish and condescending; then later, that he was simply reserved and private. But he also knew that, in time, his people would grow to respect him—would grow to admire his work ethic and eventually accept his desire for distance.
And for Sam Markham that was enough.
He scanned the boxes and quickly settled on one labeled MISC BEDROOM. If the Bureau was good at anything it was packing, he thought, admiring the organization and care with which they moved him from Tampa.
That’s because you’re a “special” special agent, a voice said his head. Not standard protocol for everybody. Just another carrot they dangled to get you back here.
Markham sliced open the MISC BEDROOM box with his house key, unwrapped some newspaper, and found what he was looking for: a long, wooden plaque with neatly engraved letters that read:
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Markham whispered.
Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, line 9. The warning posted over the gates of Hell. A student in his English class had made it for him in wood shop as a joke, and Markham had enthusiastically hung it above his classroom door. That had been over twelve years ago—on another planet, it seemed—and all at once he felt ashamed when he realized he could no longer remember the name of the student who made it for him.
As always, his first order of business was to hang the plaque above his bedroom door. There had been some women over the years who’d asked him about it; others who’d not even noticed it. He knew there’d be more of each variety here, but he also knew he wouldn’t reveal the plaque’s true meaning any sooner than he would reveal anything meaningful about himself.
When the plaque was straight and secure, he zipped up his hooded sweatshirt and began stretching his hamstrings. It was going to be a bit chilly, he could tell. That was good. He would shoot for six miles today—would follow the road out of the complex and up to the park just as the real estate lady had shown him on Monday.
Markham had just finished knotting his house key into the drawstring of his track pants, when suddenly a knock on his front door startled him. He glanced at his watch.
7:20? Who the hell could that be?
Peering through the peephole, he recognized the man in the gray overcoat immediately: Alan Gates, chief of Behavioral Analysis Unit 2 at Quantico.
His boss.
Markham opened the door.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They found another body in Raleigh,” Gates said. “Male, spiked like the others, but forensics came across something interesting. It’s ours now.”
Markham was silent for a moment, then nodded and let him inside.
Chapter 2
“How much do you know about the Rodriguez and Guer-rera murders?” Gates asked. The unit chief sat across from Markham at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of instant coffee and gazing out at the ducks.
“Not much,” Markham said. “Only what came across the Tampa wire back in February for the Gang Unit. MS-13, they seemed to think it was. The brutality of it, the victims being from the gang’s territory. Only reason they brought it to my attention was because of how they were killed. Morbid curiosity more than official business.”
“Mara Salvatrucha,” Gates said. “Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans mostly. Raleigh’s been having trouble with them these last couple of years, but the local homicide and gang units want to keep the media out of it. Don’t want to give them any more recognition than they’re already getting. That’s one of the reasons why the details of the lawyer’s murder were kept out of the papers—why the media has yet to make the connection to Rodriguez and Guerrera.”