LITMIR.BIZ

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brother?” Markham asked. “Says here Rodriguez has a sister, eleven, and a brother, fifteen. About the time the gangs usually start recruiting, isn’t it?”

      “Nothing there. Family, the kids are devastated; parents moved them out of Fox Run to live in another apartment complex in North Raleigh. All dead ends since the beginning of March. Of course, Raleigh’s abandoned the MS-13 theory now that it’s been turned over to us, but who knows what will happen if the media gets wind of the similarities between the crime scenes.”

      “What about the possible link between Donovan and the Hispanics exclusive of outside entities?”

      “That’s being explored, yes, but nothing so far.”

      Markham scanned through the Donovan file again.

      “You’ll find what you’re looking for at the end,” Gates said.

      The FBI forensics report. Alan Gates knew him well; knew that his former student would look next for the real reason why his boss had decided to pay him this early-morning visit—the answer to Markham’s “Why me?”

      “The field office in Charlotte’s got a good team,” Mark-ham said at last, reading. “And I’ve heard of Andy Schaap—used to be one of the best forensic specialists around until the restructuring went down and he took the supervisory position in Charlotte. State medical examiner’s got a decent setup, where Schaap’s been working so far. ME’s preliminary report shows no physical evidence. No semen or saliva, no trace DNA; nothing left by the killer except—is this right? Comet residue?”

      “Yes. Looks like our boy scrubbed the lawyer clean. Sound like a hit to you?”

      “And the others? State ME find anything on them?”

      “No Comet residue, no. Killer just shot and impaled them, but it looks like he did scrub them clean. ME found traces of water in their ear canals.”

      “Covering his tracks?”

      “Maybe.”

      “But a bit too cliché, too simple if we’re speaking metaphorically of dirty drug dealers and a dirty lawyer—the Comet, the cleaning. You wouldn’t be here if you thought it was that easy a read, would you?”

      “No, I wouldn’t. The killer wasn’t concerned about using Comet on Rodriguez and Guerrera. Might not have been important until Donovan; might have done something different to him that needed attending to.”

      “Developing his MO, you think? Evolving?”

      “I think so, yes.”

      “The bodies—were they facing in the same direction?”

      “Good question, but no. Rodriguez and Guerrera faced due east; Donovan, his body turned west, his head tilted back at almost a ninety-degree angle. The killer attaches a crossbar at groin level so the bodies won’t slide.”

      “Then he’s a planner. It’s about more than just the violence of the impalement. The aesthetic is important, too. The display.”

      “And the head tilted backwards?” asked Gates. “The glasses, the eyes open?”

      “Textbook. The victim is supposed to see something and understand. However, the victims’ sight lines, the directions are different. Rodriguez and Guerrera, the cord across their faces, their eyes looking almost due east; Donovan’s body to the west, the cord around his neck, his head arched back looking up at the sky.”

      “Right.”

      “Our boy drops them off at night; has to have a van or a large truck. Might be a moon freak. Do the disappearance dates correspond with the new moon?”

      “No, different visuals on the nights the victims were last seen. However, on the nights they were found, there was a crescent moon. Could be a textbook lunar pattern; seen it many times before. Most recently, in that long-haul-trucker case—”

      “The crescent moon,” Markham said suddenly. “Isn’t that the symbol for Islam? A star inside a crescent moon?”

      “That’s right.”

      “Could he possibly be imitating Vlad the Impaler? The Romanian prince who was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula?”

      “I’m glad to see you’re still up on your history,” Gates said, smiling. “And that was my first thought even before I made the crescent-moon connection. After all, before Stoker immortalized him in Dracula, the historical Vlad was known as one of the great defenders against the spread of Islam during the Middle Ages. Definitely the cruelest, as his moniker would imply.”

      “And the victims?” Markham asked. “Any Islamic connection?”

      “None that we can see so far, but we’re looking into it.”

      Markham was silent, thinking.

      “Then again,” Gates said, “we could be totally off base. Everything happening toward the end of the month could indicate something with calendars, but why the displays in February and April and not March? Might all be just a coincidence.”

      “You wouldn’t be here if you thought that.”

      Gates shrugged and smiled, his eyebrows arching like a pair of thick, white caterpillars. Markham flipped again through the Donovan file, the forensics report.

      “This light scratch that the ME notes,” Markham said. “The one he picked up near Donovan’s right armpit that looks like an arrowhead. Is that it?”

      “Is that what?”

      “The reason you’re here. The reason you’re convinced this guy is a wannabe Vlad and not just some cartel hit man with a flair for the dramatic.”

      “Why you, you mean?”

      “Yes. Why me? Why do you want to pull me off my new assignment at Quantico and fly me off to Raleigh when you’ve got good people in Charlotte? After all, that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”

      Gates rose from the table and dumped the remainder of his coffee into the sink, rinsed the cup out, and placed it on the counter upside down on a paper towel. The silence, the intended dramatic effect was beneath him, Markham thought, and suddenly he felt himself getting irritated.

      Gates walked back to the window and looked out over the pond; but much to Markham’s surprise, he did not adjust his glasses.

      “You’ve been in ten years now, Sam,” he said finally. “Only reason I didn’t ask you back after five is because I knew you’d be happier in the field. Agents are banging down our door to get reassigned to BAU, but it never occurred to you to put yourself in for a promotion back home, did it?’

      “I thought about it.”

      “That’s a load of crap. Your biggest fear is becoming a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher like me. You need your boots on the ground; would rather take orders and get things done than give them and lose touch with why you signed up with us in the first place. And that’s your problem. You’re too ob- sessed with your work; you’ve let it define who you are to the exclusion of everything else. It’s why I played the personal favor card with you, but that’s not why you agreed. No, only reason you took me up on my offer is because you know deep down you’ll be more of an asset here.”

      Markham said nothing.

      “We were lucky to have you in Tampa with Briggs. I think because you were already assigned there, you don’t believe we couldn’t have nabbed him without you.”

      “I got lucky in Tampa.”

      “Maybe,” said Gates. “But you didn’t get lucky in my class. Your paper, your application of that physics principle to behavioral science—what was it called again?”

      “The superposition principle. Says that the net response at a given place and time caused by two or more stimuli is the sum of the responses

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