glossy photographs. Yes, Markham thought, Gates had been waiting to show him his aces all along.
“This first picture,” said Gates, “is a close-up of Donovan’s chest under normal light. You’ll notice the scratch on the right pectoral near the armpit is almost imperceptible in the photograph. Schaap bought into the dirty-lawyer idea at first, and thought the bleach from the Comet might yield some clues under the Wood’s lamp. He never expected to find this.”
Gates handed Markham the second photograph. It was a close-up of Donovan’s torso on the autopsy table. Under the ultraviolet light, Donovan’s skin looked bluish-purple. The writing was a faint, glowing pink: a series of neat lines running across his chest in what looked to Markham like hieroglyphics from a pharaoh’s tomb.
He felt his stomach tighten, his tongue go dry.
“According to Schaap,” Gates said, “the killer could’ve used a charred stick or something. Whatever he used, it was just a little too sharp when he started.”
“And even though the ash would’ve rinsed off much more easily than ink,” Markham said, studying the picture, “the stick and the properties of the ash could still damage the epidermis enough to react with the Comet and also remain invisible to the naked eye. Did they find any other chemical residue?”
“Other than the chloroform in Donovan’s nostrils, no. But Schaap has two running theories regarding the writing: the first, that the killer wrote on Donovan for some reason having nothing to do with the final display; the second, that the killer intentionally used the Comet to produce the effect you see before you.”
“That would mean he’s not trying to cover his tracks.”
“Well, not if you approach it from the angle that the writing was meant to be discovered by someone with a UV lamp.”
“And Rodriguez and Guerrera?” Markham asked. “State ME use UV on them?”
“No, not standard unless the murder is sexual in nature. Guerrera’s body was sent back to his family in Mexico, but we fast-tracked a court order for exhumation of Rodriguez. Family’s been notified, taking place as we speak. Kid’ll be shipped with Donovan to Quantico later today.”
“A possible message then,” Markham mumbled to himself. “But to whom?”
“The official autopsy report on Donovan won’t be issued for a while. But given the crossover on the case, until we can get a gag order, Schaap and the ME are going to delay submitting anything about the writing. His funeral has also been delayed while his body undergoes further analysis in our labs here.”
“And the writing?” Markham asked. “You’ve already sent the information to our language specialists?”
“Yes,” said Gates. “Report came back late last night. A single phrase written over and over in six ancient scripts: Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Babylonian Cuneiform, Egyptian, and Greek.”
“Nothing in Romanian?”
“No.”
“What does it mean?”
Gates motioned with his finger for Markham to turn over the photograph. He obliged, and felt his stomach go cold when he saw his boss’s handwriting on the back. It read simply:
I have returned
Now he was the General.
Seated at the computer in his white robes, the General scrolled his mouse to the top of the Web page and hit the print button. An article from the Raleigh Sun about the murder of Randall Donovan—details still sketchy, appeared to be some kind of drug hit, investigation ongoing. Just as he expected. Everything part of the equation.
The General rose from his chair, tore off a piece of Scotch Tape from the roll on the workbench, and retrieved the article from the printer. The cellar felt cold to him this morning—colder than usual—and as he sauntered out of the workroom, he thought he could feel his nipples grow hard.
“I thought I heard you calling. You thought you heard me speak.
Tell me how could you think I ’d let you get away?”
The music in the background was much softer than it had been for Randall Donovan. “Dark in the Day” was the song—a Clone Six remake of the 1985 version by the one-hit won- der High Risk. The General had been only five years old when the original came out, but still he remembered it from the days before his mother died. There had been messages back then, too—keys to his understanding of the equation—but back then, through the ears of a child, the General had simply been too stupid to understand.
Now, however, the General understood the equation perfectly. The others were capable of understanding, too, but they needed to be reeducated, needed to hear the song over and over—old and new, old and new—to finally understand like he did.
“There were many who came before me, but now I’ve come at last,
From the past into the future, I’m standing at your door.”
The General entered the adjoining room—the reeducation chamber, he called it—and taped the article to the wall. He stood back and admired how it looked among the others—thousands of messages he’d printed from his computer or copied on the machine during his day-life.
All parts of the equation.
The General breathed deeply. The dentist’s chair and the floor were clean now, and the room smelled refreshingly of Pine-Sol.
“I thought I heard you calling. You thought you heard me speak.
Tell me how could you think, I ’d let you get away?”
“Your body is the doorway,” the General said along with the Clone Six lead singer. And then the chorus kicked in.
The cover version was slightly different from the original, but the message was the same—always the same, always part of the equation. Just as it had been long before his mother died.
The General often thought about his mother, but never about his father. He knew him only from a yearbook photo that his mother sometimes showed him before bedtime. “All right,” she’d say. “You can kiss your father good night.” The General could no longer remember what his father looked liked; only blurry rows of black squares that smelled in his mind like perfume and old paper. His mother kept the yearbook hidden underneath a loose floorboard in her bedroom, and made the boy promise never to tell his grandfather she had it. And the boy kept his promise.
For even as a boy, the General always kept his promises.
Smiling, the General walked from the reeducation chamber, down the darkened hallway, and entered into the last of the cellar’s three rooms: the Throne Room.
The General dropped to his knees and bowed his head.
The Throne Room was the smallest
