The Impaler by Gregory Funaro Page A

nursing it for half an hour, the beer tasted stale and sour. The craving for steak, the determination to enjoy and savor the experience were perhaps a bit of subliminal suggestion, he thought, from all that business with those other kind of
stakes.
    Fucked up the way the mind works.
    Schaap replayed his examination of Donovan over and over again in his mind—the glowing pink symbols scrolling across the backs of his eyeballs like an electronic stock ticker. Yeah, they were going to have a problem with this dude. Schaap could feel it. “Vlad,” the boys at the Resident Agency were already calling him. “Vlad the Impaler.”
    Just wonderful.
    Schaap sighed, swigged the last of his beer, and reminded himself not to take it personally that Markham was a half hour late. He took off his wedding ring and began bouncing it on the table. He’d been divorced for over a year now, but for some reason he still couldn’t part with it—wore the thick platinum band on his right hand instead of his left, and often found himself fiddling with it when he was agitated.
    Platinum. His ex had insisted on them getting his-and-hers platinum rings. It was the strongest of all the metals, she said, and symbolized the strength of their bond. Lot of fucking good it did them. She just woke up one morning andsaid she didn’t want to be married anymore. He tried to get her to go the counseling route, but she didn’t want to hear it. He wondered if she’d been two-timing him, but could never prove anything. In a way he wished she had been screwing someone else. At least then he’d know what happened. That was the hardest part. Not knowing what the fuck he did wrong, not knowing exactly what made her fall out of love with him.
    True, he couldn’t give a shit about her now, but it was the way she tried to screw him in the end that still bothered him—almost as if she thought he was the one who’d been fucking around on her. She got the house, the kids, a nice fat alimony check, of course, but the judge stopped her short of taking the ring back. That’s why he still wore it. A big “Fuck you, bitch.” He toyed for a while with getting it resized for his middle finger, but decided against it in the end. Figured his wife would get the message anyway when he picked up the kids and she saw the ring on his right hand.
    Schaap had slipped the ring back on and was about to signal for another beer, when he spied Markham standing by the vacant hostess station. Schaap thought he looked shorter than in his photo: clean cut, chiseled features, his jaw more pronounced.
All-American apple pie
, he said to himself, and made a mental note to order dessert.
    Schaap waved him over.
    “I apologize for making you wait,” Markham said. “I lost track of time. Drove out to the crime scenes, took me longer to get back than I expected. Left you a voice mail. Looks like you didn’t get it. Sam Markham, by the way.”
    The men shook hands.
    “Probably no reception in here,” Schaap said. “And call me Schaap.”
    Markham slid into the booth across from him.
    “Can I get you something to drink?” Schaap asked, signaling his waitress. “An appetizer or something?”
    “A beer is fine. And no appetizer. They tell me the steaks here are the best in the city; want to make sure I savor every cent of my piece-of-shit per diem.”
    “I heard that,” Schaap said, laughing, and ordered for the both of them. And as they exchanged small talk over a fresh round of beers, Schaap found his new partner to be quite pleasant and down to earth—much less brooding, much less “intellectual” than he had come to expect from all the water-cooler talk.
    But after the waitress brought them their dinners, Mark-ham grew quieter—hardly touched his steak, for that mat-ter—and Schaap began to wonder if the celebrated Quantico profiler hadn’t been putting on an act simply to disarm him.
    “I assume the report came back on that steak,” Markham asked out of nowhere.
    Schaap