Stokes told police that he wore a ski mask—said he “pulled a pistol on the bitch” and tried to push her in his car. But Michelle Markham fought back—kicked him in the balls and bit him hard on the forearm. She also tore off his ski mask, and Stokes said it was then he panicked—said he “shot the bitch twice in the coconut” with his .38 Special and fled. Two days later another performer at the seaport spotted the bite marks on his arm and called the police. They found the ski mask and the .38 in Stokes’s car. He confessed to everything, and the authorities eventually tied him to nine rapes in four states going back over a decade.
The fact that his wife had been the Smiling Shanty Man’s only murder was of little consolation to Sam Markham, who discovered her lying dead in the Mystic Aquarium parking lot after she failed to return home that evening—his happy two-year marriage, his idyllic life in the sleepy little town of Mystic all shattered in the blink of an eye. It took him a year to pass through the wake of his wife’s death, the waves of which brought him straight to the shores of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Gates was right, Markham thought as the plane leveled off. The superposition principle. It was how he caught Jackson Briggs, the man the press called the “Sarasota Stran-gler.” And so Markham knew the only justice for Elmer Stokes lay in the superposition principle, too. After all, there was no way a Neanderthal like Stokes could ever comprehend the totality of his crimes unless he experienced what his victims experienced. And just like Michelle, the bastard would come out on the other side with two bullets in his head, courtesy of Sam Markham himself.
Markham often fantasized about killing Elmer Stokes. Usually, he substituted himself for Jackson Briggs and Stokes for the Sarasota Strangler’s victims. What Briggs did to his little old ladies would be perfect for Elmer Stokes, and Markham himself wouldn’t even have to touch the filthy son of a bitch when all was said and done. That Markham so enjoyed these fantasies of playing Jackson Briggs was what bothered him the most—a mixture of elation and shame as he stared down in his mind at the Smiling Shanty Man’s violated corpse. Briggs didn’t finish off his little old ladies with bullets, but in order for the superposition principle to work—
But of course, none of that could ever happen.
Markham gazed out the window into the gray-white fog, the wispy patches of green and brown breaking through the low-lying clouds like memories sent up from the world below. He thought about Michelle’s parents, who in the eleven years since their daughter’s murder had enrolled themselves in Connecticut’s restorative justice program. Markham knew they had met with Stokes via a mediator at least twice, but had corresponded with him many times. He understood his in-laws’ need for closure, but never understood why they always forwarded the Neanderthal’s letters to him.
Even worse, he never understood why he always read them.
He opened the brown cardboard envelope and removed the files. On top was the letter from Stokes, along with a printout from CNN.com about the pending execution—only Connecticut’s second after nearly forty-five years of rehabilitative bliss. Markham crumpled the news article into a ball and tossed it on the empty seat across the aisle. But as always he read the letter.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Keefe. This letter here is going to be the last one I send most likely I think. It is going to be the shortest one to I think because all I have to say is I just want to thank you for meeting with me all them times, and that I am sorry again for what I done to your daughter. I diserve to die for doing that to her, and may be for what I did to them other ladys to. I hope you knowing that I want to die because I diserve to makes all of you feel better. I know I am not going to heaven, but if I was I would apolagise to your daughter up there because I know that is where she is living now. Yours truly, Elmer Stokes.
Markham traced his finger over the Neanderthal’s words—the childlike print, the poor grammar, the refusal to call Michelle by her name.
The name Stokes is one letter in the alphabet away from Stoker, a voice whispered in his mind. What are the chances of that? Is there a connection here, Sammy boy? Is something in the collective consciousness bringing you and Vlad the Impaler together?
Markham crumpled Stokes’s letter into a ball and tossed it onto the seat with the discarded CNN article. Then he opened the Donovan file.
Gates had placed the UV close-up of Randall Donovan’s torso on top of some preliminary research, including a brief biography of Vlad the Third, Prince of Wallachia—more commonly known as Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula.
Thought these might be of interest to you, Gates had scrawled along the margin of the first page.
Vlad the Impaler, Markham read, scanning quickly. Prince of Wallachia, the area known today as Romania. The Romanian surname of Draculea means “Son of Dracul.” Vlad’s father’s title was Vlad Dracul the Second, or Vlad the Dragon. His son, Vlad the Third, earned the moniker Tepes after his death. Tepes is the Romanian for “Impaler”—de-rived from his preferred method of executing his enemies. Vlad Dracula was born in 1431, and had three separate reigns from 1448 to 1476. A member of the Order of the Dragon, he was a fervent and violent defender of Wallachia against the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Known today for his exceptionally cruel punishments and as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“The Ottoman Empire,” Markham whispered. “Modern-day Turkey. The Ottoman Turks conquered in the name of Islam and adopted Arabic as their official language. Is that what you’re getting at, Alan?”
Yes, replied the unit chief in Markham’s mind. Look on the next page.
Markham obliged and quickly read through some background on the Ottoman Turkish language—the heavy Arabic borrowings, the Persian phonological mutations, the three major social variants. It all meant nothing to him, didn’t register in his gut as important, and he flipped to the next page—information on the symbol for Islam.
“Interesting,” Markham said, reading. “It wasn’t until the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 that they officially adopted the crescent moon and star as their symbol. Around the same time Vlad began his reign.”
Another connection to the crescent moon, Gates said in his mind.
Markham read on—discovered that many Muslims today reject the crescent moon and star as a pagan symbol, especially in the Middle East, where the Islamic faith traditionally has had no symbol.
“I have returned,” Markham whispered.
To defend against Islam? Which would mean then that the Arabic and the other Middle Eastern scripts are a message to the Muslim community. But why Rodriguez and Guerrera? Why Donovan? What’s the Islamic connection there, and why didn’t you write anything in Romanian, Vlad?
Markham flipped to the next page.
Impalement has been an institutionalized method of torture and execution for thousands of years, dating as far back as the tenth century BCE in the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations of Assyria and Babylonia. Throughout history, however, the fundamentals of impalement have remained the same.