The Impaler

Chapter 59

It was almost 2 p.m. when Andy Schaap emerged from the wooded subdivision in Wilson. He drove about a half mile then pulled into a Bojangles’ parking lot, where he crossed another name off his list and rested his head back, wondering what Sam Markham would think had he known what he was up to.

Indeed, all day he’d been expecting his partner to call him. Schaap had decided not to lie to him; would say that he was following up on his lists but wouldn’t go into detail unless Markham asked him. Of course, Schaap had no way of knowing that Markham had fallen asleep in his childhood bedroom early that morning and would sleep a vampire’s sleep until the sun went down. But Schaap would’ve understood; he was tired, too. The last couple of days had been exhausting for both of them.

Names.

Christ, there were so many from the cemetery—over three thousand that his computer program had linked to Iraq War veterans living in and around the Raleigh area. The program had already weeded out servicemen who still lived on base; and thus Schaap focused first on men not only who had served in units with lions or lionlike creatures as their symbols but also who lived in areas remote enough for the Im-paler’s operation.

Schaap gazed down at the list in his hands—just over one hundred names. A much more manageable number, yes, but still daunting for one person. And so far he’d come up empty—had knocked off only nine names that day and met the tenth with a groan when he saw the address was located over an hour away near Fayetteville.

Schaap thumbed through a series of pages and found another list the computer had generated by cross-referencing the cemetery records with a list he’d received that morning from the U.S. Army. The program had also ranked the names by unit symbol and location.

He ran his finger down the page until he found a name in the city of Wilson.

“Here we are,” he said. He leaned over to the passenger seat and checked the address against the satellite imagery on his laptop. “Sergeant Edmund Lambert. 101st Airborne, 187th Infantry. Eagle and a seal-tailed lion. Nice, Wilson boy. That’ll make you number ten and then we’ll call it day.”

Schaap programmed Lambert’s address into his GPS and drove away—decided against a snack of Bojangles’ chicken and biscuits and vowed to treat himself to a Dubliner steak when he got back to Raleigh.

After all, he’d earned it.