Free The Impaler by Gregory Funaro Page B

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 nothing to indicate that only five days ago poor Randall Donovan had played center field with a stake up his ass.
    Markham rifled through his bag and removed a largecompass, charged the glow-in-the-dark coordinates with his flashlight, and then cut off the light. Turning slowly in place over the posthole, he allowed his eyes time to adjust to the dark. He settled on west, then stood for a long time gazing out over the field. The sky was clear, the moon an almost perfect half—not the same, of course, as it had been for Donovan, but he wasn’t sure if its position had changed also. He had an inkling it had but would need to check that out later.
    His eyes played back and forth between the moon and the jagged silhouette of trees on the horizon. He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a bath towel he’d taken from his temporary apartment, balled it up behind his head, and lay down in the grass. Maintaining his direction west, he approximated Donovan’s line of sight and stared up at the sky. The scene was breathtaking—reminded him of a Lite-Brite set he used to have as a child. He let his eyes wander back to the moon and saw that the stars were slightly washed out around its perimeter. With a crescent moon, he thought, the stars would’ve been clearer.
    “Of course,” he whispered. “Makes sense if you want to replicate the Ottoman symbol for Islam in the sky. But you can’t replicate the symbol exactly; can’t get the star inside the crescent. Would you accept that, Vlad?”
    He scanned the sky for a long time and let his eyes wander from the crescent moon to the stars. He didn’t recognize any of the constellations except the Big Dipper. That would be something he’d have to check out on the Internet, too. Maybe a constellation associated with Vlad. But how many were there? The voice in his head began taunting him with signs from the zodiac, but he quickly stifled it and allowed the stars to enfold him in their sparkly blanket of igno-rance—of junior high school science projects and that astronomy class he’d always wished he’d taken at UConn.
    Donovan’s glasses and the sight lines of the other vic-tims—they couldn’t have been looking at the crescent moon.
    Well, what about the star? You need a star to complete the symbol for Islam.
    But which one? There are