LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Are you planning on going to the cast party?” she asked. “I don’t know if you know, but it’s after the show next Friday. Don’t remember ever seeing you at any of the other ones this year. But anyway, you should come.”

      “Not sure if I can,” Edmund said in his thick Southern drawl. “Gotten behind on things at home because of all the work here.”

      “Well, I hope to see you there. I know you’re a little older, but the cast parties are pretty chill—not a bunch of drunk freshmen making fools of themselves if that’s what you’re worried about.”

      Edmund nodded vaguely. A flourish was heard onstage, the signal that the newly crowned king of Scotland was about to give his final speech.

      “Cindy!” hissed an assistant stage manager. “Get your ass to places!”

      But Edmund knew the actress had a little more time; would only have to run down the vom stairs and into the electrics shop to get under the trap, from where she’d rise to take Macbeth’s spirit into Hell. In fact, she still had to wait for the end of that stupid dance number with the Witches—something the director had inserted at the last minute so that the actor playing Macbeth would have enough time to get back onstage in his spirit costume. And although Edmund hadn’t been around to hear it, word on the street was that Macbeth had put up even more of a stink about his bow than Cindy had.

      “I gotta get moving,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll talk to you before then, but think about coming to the cast party next Friday, okay, Edmund?”

      “Okay.”

      Cindy smiled and disappeared into the darkness of the vom.

      A short time later, Edmund caught her eye when she stepped out of the pit to meet the spirit of her dead husband. And whereas the young actress most certainly must have thought he was watching in the wings for her, all Edmund Lambert really cared about was that the trap was working properly.

      It was just after midnight when Edmund turned his old Ford F-150 down the long dirt driveway that led to his grandfather’s farmhouse. The sprawling, two-story rambler with the dilapidated front porch was set back about two hundred yards off a country road on the outskirts of Wilson, almost exactly halfway between the Harriot campus and downtown Raleigh.

      Edmund’s grandfather had once grown tobacco here; had taken over the family business from Edmund’s great grandfather and made himself quite a killing in the sixties and seventies. And even though the tobacco fields had been barren and brown for a long time now, Edmund was glad his grandfather never caved in and sold the farm.

      For now Edmund understood why.

      He had lived with his grandfather all his life, but the house had only officially become his when he returned from Iraq, after his grandfather died and left him everything. That had been over two years ago now, but even then Edmund had understood that the timing was no accident.

      It was just part of the equation. Everything connected.

      And once he was safely past the stone pillars at the foot of his driveway Edmund Lambert was the General again.

      He cut off the pickup’s headlights. He liked to return home this way—the crumbling silhouettes of the old tobacco sheds passing by him like a grim honor guard as his eyes adjusted to the dark. He parked the truck by the front porch and stepped out—took a deep breath and headed for the field behind the old horse barn. There hadn’t been horses in the barn for almost fifty years—only his van and his chin-up bar now.

      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

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