The Impaler (12 page)

The answer came to him almost immediately.

And now, months later, as he placed the Prince’s head atop the shelf and stepped back to admire the completion of the doorway, the General cracked a smile when he remembered the first time the Prince spoke to him.

But there was little time for nostalgia.

The doorway was now open again.

It was time for the Prince to speak.

But more important, it was time for the General to listen.

The reason Otis Gurganus always got the big bucks wasn’t because his family owned some of the best hunting grounds in North Carolina, but because he prepared long in advance. In the spring, usually five months to the day before bow season began in September. Oh yeah, the monsters—the fourteen-pointers and bigger—didn’t get that way by being stupid.

Sure, you had to know your enemy; had to know the lay of the land and the habits of the deer that lived there. But for Otis Gurganus, it all came down to preseason scouting: finding out food sources and watering holes; setting up a stand in the trees just the right distance from their bedding areas; getting settled at least a couple of hours before sundown or sunup. Commonsense stuff, but a delicate operation nonetheless. He knew from experience that the biggest bucks bedded alone and came out looking for food later than the others. Yeah, nowadays, he didn’t waste his time with anything less than a twelve-pointer with a twenty-eight-inch spread; always left the smaller ones for other hunters to keep the kill stats for his lodge high.

Gurganus hunted with a bow. Nowadays, he thought, the
big bucks, the
record breakers
, would only get bagged with a bow. They weren’t stupid enough to stick around or congregate with other deer once they started hearing gunshots. Gurganus was still the record holder for the biggest buck bagged in North Carolina: a behemoth of a twenty-two-pointer that he nailed broadside from twenty-five yards just after his thirtieth birthday. That was almost ten years ago, but Gurganus knew his next and biggest buck was close; might even bag him this coming season if he was lucky.

The hunter stepped out of his pickup truck, flicked on his night-vision goggles, and headed out into the woods. He had been using the NVGs now for years and almost creamed his pants two Christmases ago when his wife gave him the newfangled GPS calculator. Wasn’t a cheap gift, either. Cost his wife over four hundred dollars, and cost him almost a whole week of nonstop boning her. But Gurganus never really got the hang of the GPS calculator until the following summer, when he started documenting deer activity and plotting it on his son’s computer. It paid off in spades for him this past season, even though he didn’t bag his next record breaker.

Tonight, however, he didn’t carry along his GPS calculator. No, on this, the first night of his preseason scouting, all the hunter had with him were his NVGs and his .45-caliber Sig Sauer. You couldn’t be too careful all alone in the woods at night; never know when you might come across something unfriendly, a rogue bear from the western part of the state or a pack of hungry coyotes.

But Otis Gurganus didn’t plan on using his gun tonight. No, tonight was all about listening; about sitting up in last season’s stands and getting a sense of movement. He had not been out in his woods for over three months now, but he would not kill any deer with his bow until September. Just like everybody else.

Yeah, Otis Gurganus always played by the rules.

The stand was only about three hundred yards into the
woods and was situated at the edge of a large clearing that the hunter knew would be peppered with spring clover. And he made good time—got there at exactly 3:30 a.m. and had settled himself comfortably in the tree five minutes later. He’d not heard any deer running away from him while stealing through the woods; hadn’t seen them with his night vision, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t around—especially the big bucks, who never gave up their positions unless they were sure they’d been spotted.

Gurganus hadn’t been in his stand long when his NVGs picked up something strange. The goggles were only rated for detail to about a hundred yards, but, whatever the thing was, the hunter could tell it was closer than that—just at the opposite edge of the clearing. It looked like an oddly shaped tree trunk, but for some reason Gurganus couldn’t take his eyes off it. Had it been closer to the season, had he dumped a pile of corn in the clearing to attract the deer as he’d done when he shot his record breaker ten years ago, well, he might’ve waited until after daylight before climbing down to investigate.

But tonight, so early in the off-season, with the woods so still and no sign of any deer activity at all, Otis Gurganus’s curiosity got the better of him. And in no time he was back down the tree and heading across the clearing. He’d traveled only a few yards when his goggles finally registered what he’d been unable to put together from his stand. The sight of it stopped him dead in his tracks.

The oddly shaped tree looked like a man—a skinny green man leaning against a pole.

“Hey!” Gurganus called out impulsively. “This is private property!”

No response—only the sound of his own voice disappearing into the woods—and suddenly he felt his cheeks go hot; felt a flash of anger in his stomach as he reached down for his Sig Sauer and began running across the field.

But as he drew closer and the skinny green man became clearer, Otis Gurganus’s fury quickly turned to terror. The skinny green man was not leaning against the pole. No, the pole was running up through the middle of his body—through his ass and out his shoulder! His legs were missing below the knees—made him look as if he was floating in the trees—and somewhere in the back of Otis Gurganus’s mind flashed a clip from some zombie movie he’d seen as a kid back in the eighties.

The skinny green man smiled back at him—mouth open, teeth bared, the lips pulled back or missing altogether. Someone had tied the guy’s head to the pole so that he appeared to be gazing down and to his left. His eye sockets, however, were empty; his eyeballs and his nose gone.
Breakfast for crows,
Gurganus thought in numb horror.

His heart was pounding wildly now; and standing there, staring up at the shriveled corpse not five feet away from him, Otis Gurganus suddenly felt a hot wetness running down the inside of his thigh. He registered it absently, as if it were happening to someone else. And years later, when he would tell this story to his grandchildren, more than coming upon a dead body all alone in the middle of the woods, the old man would swear that what
really
made him piss his pants was the glowing white symbols on the trespasser’s rotting torso.

He is on a spaceship that looks like his bed at his parents’ house—is speeding through a ceiling of pasted plastic stars toward a fuzzy planet in the distance. He is almost there now—feels as if he can reach out and touch the yellow glow-in-the-dark circle through the windshield.

Then a message flashes on the console. The fuel gauge—
STUPID FUCK!
it says in bright orange letters—and he understands.

“This is the wrong planet!” he says, panicking. “I’ll have to switch to impulse power!” He flicks some switches and presses some buttons when suddenly another message starts flashing—this time across the windshield:

“I’m going to burn up on entry!” he says as the theme from
Rocky
comes over the loudspeaker. The cabin is on fire and a heavy sinking feeling overpowers him as the flames lick up at his elbows. “Mayday! Mayday!” he wants to say, but the com-link is gone and the controls come off in his
hands.
I’m not going to make it,
he thinks, and all at once his burning spaceship brightens …
into the light of his bedside lamp—the theme from
Rocky
blaring away from his BlackBerry on the nightstand.

He’d fallen asleep while working.

Groggily, Markham reached for his BlackBerry, but his fingers weren’t awake yet and he knocked it to the floor. He lay there for a moment, unsure of where he was until the missed-call ding brought him back to life—pissed him off and rolled him over. He found his laptop on the bed beside him; wiped off the screen saver and saw the time in the lower right hand corner: 7:15 a.m.

The ding of a voice mail came from somewhere on the floor to his left, and suddenly he realized he couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about. Only a vague sense of anxiety and bright yellow helplessness.

Then the ring of the landline startled him. He answered it.

“Hello?”

“It’s Schaap.”

“Jesus, what—”

“I’m on my way to your apartment now. Get dressed and meet me out front as soon as you can.”

“What’s going on?”

“They found another body. Out in the boonies about fifty miles northeast of Raleigh. Bird’s already being puddle-jumped from Fort Bragg as we speak. We go airborne in twenty minutes.”

In no time a black Bell Huey II had whisked Markham and his team from a nearby heliport, sped them through the North Carolina skies at 120 knots, and touched them down in Otis Gurganus’s field just after 9:00 a.m. A storm was almost upon them, and the pilot had warned that the landing would be tight—ended up having to circle the small clearing twice to accommodate for the wind and to allow time for the state police helicopter to clear out.

During the flight, Schaap brought Markham up to date on what the FBI knew so far: the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body, the preliminary time line of the murder, the similarities to the other victims, and the length of time the body had been exposed to the elements. They had a good idea who the guy was—had already laid some groundwork in conjunction with the missing person reports from February—but Markham didn’t need any database to tell him that the victim had been out in the woods since the first crescent moon of March.

From the air, he’d not been able to see him; only the blue tarp and the half-dozen or so state troopers surrounding it.
And once they were on the ground, as the FBI agents approached from the Huey, the troopers, like children in a schoolyard, formed a curtain in front of the crime scene—held down their hats against the wind from the propellers and stared back defiantly, as if to say,
“Red Rover, Red Rover, don’t you
dare
come over!”

“Who’s in charge here?” Schaap hollered.

“I am,” a voice hollered back, and a tall man with a red face and a lump of chew beneath his lower lip stepped forward. “Sergeant Powell,” he added. “You boys got your fingers deep in this one, don’t you?”

Markham and Schaap held up their ID badges, introduced themselves, and thanked the state troopers as the Huey’s propellers winded to a stop. The forensic team sprang into action, and the line of state troopers reluctantly broke apart.

Sergeant Powell looked annoyed.

“I’ve already secured the site, goddammit,” he said. “Fucker’s been out here for over a month it looks like. You boys ain’t gonna find nothing that the animals ain’t already dragged away.”

“You’ve established a perimeter on the nearest access roads?” Schaap asked.

“How the hell you think we got in here?”

“I don’t have time to get in a pissing contest with you, Powell,” Schaap said. “All right with you then if my men have some room?”

Markham suppressed a smile as the red-faced trooper spat and signaled for his men to move away. Finally, the FBI agents had a clear view of what was waiting for them beneath the tarp.

“Jesus Christ,” Schaap said amid the clicks and flashes from the forensic cameras.

The corpse was little more than a skeleton and appeared
to be impaled up through the rectum. The victim was male, Markham could tell, but his genitalia had been torn away, and his legs were missing below the knees. The rest of the body was intact—shriveled, hairless, the flesh mostly gone, and what little of it remained looked tanned and dried like leather. The victim’s head was still lashed to the stake, the nose an open triangle, the hollow eye sockets gazing downward in what was not their original position. The head had moved as the body decomposed. And had it not been for the little crossbar under the victim’s groin, the man with the tattoos and the missing pecker would have slid all the way down to the ground.

“Word’s been on the wire for some time now about who you feds’re looking for,” Powell said, spitting. “Same guy who spiked ’em in Raleigh, I reckon.”

“Same guy,” Schaap said absently.

Markham stepped under the tarp, donned a pair of rubber gloves, and removed a small flashlight from his Wind-breaker. He slowly circled the corpse, shining his light as close as he could on the victim’s arms without touching them.

“All them tattoos,” said Powell. “He’s got one on the back of his head, too. Skin is covered in them. What’s left of it, anyway. Looks like the animals got to him soon after your boy spiked him. More woulda been gone if he wasn’t hanging like that. Dried him out quicker, I suppose. Tats will make it easier to ID him. Looks like the fella in the database. Kept his head shaved, it says, so whatever hair’s there grew in after he disappeared. Prolly some after he died, too.”

Markham held his light on the victim’s sunken chest and studied the yellowed symbols for a long time.

A rumble of thunder in the distance.

The skies were darkening.

It would rain soon.

“He took the time to thoroughly bleach these out,” Mark-ham said finally. “The symbols are larger. Wrote only one line of each language, too.”

“You mean them white marks is some kind of writing?” Powell asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s it mean?”

Markham clicked off his flashlight and turned back to the trooper, stone-faced.

“It means he’s getting better.”

Two hours later Markham sat alone at his laptop, the rain beating heavily on the hunting-lodge roof as he studied the driver’s license picture on the screen before him. The profile had been forwarded to him by the NC State Police. The guy had been on their missing persons list since mid-February.