Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  After a brief lunch in the lab’s cafeteria—the profiler didn’t have much of an appetite and only had half a bagel—Grove spent several hours in Okuda’s cramped private office in the bowels of the Schliemann Lab, going through reams of material on the tests that had been done to the Iceman. He studied the endless sequences of mitochondrial DNA that were extracted from the mummy’s bone marrow. He went through all the X-rays and scans of the Iceman’s presumably fatal wound—the sharp trauma injury that had sunk the hook into Grove. After placing a long-distance call to Quantico, the profiler had one of the bureau secretaries fax him a series of pathological reports on the Sun City victims. Grove began assembling visual comparisons between the ancient victim and present-day victims. The wounds were absolutely identical. The only anomalies were the missing internal organs. The Sun City victims, as far as Grove could tell from the forensics, were all internally intact.

  No detail was considered trivial or irrelevant. Grove learned that the Iceman carried a strange object—a small piece of mossy fungus pierced by a leather band—that had initially baffled archaeologists. The fungus contained chemical substances now known to be antibiotic, which suggested to Okuda that the fungus was part of the medicine man’s arsenal. Grove also saw elaborate clay reconstructions of the mummy’s face, as well as meticulously repaired grass sheathes and clothing worn by the Iceman. Grove even handled the Iceman’s hatchet, which felt oddly comfortable in his hand, well balanced and finely crafted. In a mystical sense, Okuda explained, each swing of the Iceman’s axe partook of the sacred. To slaughter an ibex or chop down a seedling would be linked to some god whose own axe had helped bless the world. Or perhaps the act emulated some mythic figure who had ridden the land of evil.

  Grove wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he had a feeling that the more he knew about the mummy’s origins and environment, the better he would be able to reconstruct the Iceman’s murder and ultimately draw whatever connections there might be to Sun City.

  He worked through dinner that night, absently picking at a box of chop suey that Maura County had brought him from a campus eatery. The journalist had been regularly checking in with the two men throughout the day, giving them encouragement and asking if they needed anything. Grove was very subtly—almost imperceptively—becoming fond of the fair-haired, punkish young lady. He found himself joking with her. He found his mood brightening whenever she showed her face. And he felt the fondness reciprocated. She seemed to be worried about him. At around nine o’clock that night, for instance, she appeared in the doorway of Okuda’s office with her hands on her hips and a sideways smirk on her face.

  “You think maybe it’s about time you knocked off for the day?” she asked.

  Grove stretched, rubbing his neck. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Getting a little cross-eyed.”

  She asked where Okuda was.

  “He abandoned me, he went home.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  They closed down the office, turned out the lights, and locked the door.

  Maura gave Grove a ride back to the motel, and they found the coffee urn in the lobby still warm and still half-full of bitter, stale French roast. They sat near the front window, the lights of passing SUVs flickering through the glass and flashing off their faces, the muffled sound of tires crunching in the snow. Grove rubbed his weary eyes. “The truth is, I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he finally said with a sigh.

  “Welcome to my world,” Maura muttered.

  He smiled at her. “You seem pretty buttoned down to me.”

  She laughed, and the sound of her voice—that goofy, hoarse chortle—touched something deep within Grove. He noticed a tiny fleck of gold in the pale blue iris of the journalist’s left eye, and all at once Grove felt something that he hadn’t felt since his wife had died, and it bothered him. He felt an attraction toward this waifish young thing, as sure and hot as electric current running through him, and it made him miss his wife all the more. “I’ve been accused of a lot of things,” Maura said at last, “but never being buttoned down.”

  “You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

  “Yeah, it’s an idea. Maybe a new approach to all this. When you’re ready to go public.”

  “Go on.”

  “It might be a waste of time. I don’t know. But I have this idea. With your permission.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She lit a cigarette and blew a circle of smoke away from the profiler. “To be honest, I got the idea from the FBI Web site, of all places.”

  “Tell me.”

  “This database that FBI agents use? VICAB it’s called?”

  “VICAP,” Grove corrected. “Stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.”

  “Sorry, right. VICAP. Anyway. I was thinking. Why couldn’t you create a similar database for ancient history?”

  Grove told her he wasn’t following.

  “Okay. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, we could send out an e-mail or a letter or whatever to the entire archeological community.”

  “Is that possible? The entire community?”

  Maura shrugged, took another drag. “I asked Michael Okuda about it. He said they had a pretty decent mailing list. Anyway. What if we solicited the entire community and asked them if they had any evidence of similar murders? You see where I’m going with this?”

  Grove looked at her. “Why would you think we’d find similar murders?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a hunch. Maybe we won’t. I just thought it would be . . . you know. Kinda fascinating. What do you think?”

  Grove got up and paced across the deserted motel lobby. The front desk was unoccupied, the murmur of a television set from the inner warren of offices barely audible. Grove thought of his nightmare. The eerie, visceral quality of it still clung to his brain. In the dream, he was the Iceman, he was a human sacrifice—a casualty of some cruel, inexorable fate.

  At last he turned and looked at Maura County, who still sat by the window, waiting for his answer with her gold-flecked blue eyes. Grove grinned at her and said, “I gotta admit, it is an interesting idea.”

  That night, a thousand miles to the south, just outside Las Vegas, on the edge of the high desert near the Moapa River Indian Reservation, the Mason Dixon Truck Stop sat in the nimbus of a hundred sodium vapor lights.

  The cumulative illumination was so bright, so relentless, so pervasive, that the stars in the vast Nevada sky were not visible for at least a quarter of a mile in every direction. Mayflies the size of walnuts swarmed by the lights. They made ticking noises that were just audible underneath the sound of canned music blaring across the cement lot. A score of fuel pumps—twelve diesel, eight gasoline—stretched across the bleached concrete. A single vehicle sat at one of the gas pumps: a sea-mist-green Honda Odyssey. The driver, a forty-three-year-old mother of two named Carolyn Kenly, had just turned the engine off.

  She got out of the car and strolled quickly across the lot toward the minimart and restaurant. Dressed in a denim sundress, she moved with the kind of nervous energy and purpose a lone woman acquires late at night, her gaze fixed on the entrance, her sandals snapping rhythmically. She vanished inside the minimart for a moment.

  A moment was all the killer needed. He emerged from the shadows behind a garbage Dumpster, then strode across the radiant lot with his head held high and casual, his arms at his side. A tall, sinewy man with a long, gaunt face streaked with filth, he reached the green SUV and paused by the front quarter panel, glancing once over his shoulder to be certain no one was watching. His movements were precise and deft, despite the fact that he wore rags and smelled of BO and dried feces. The thing inside him cared nothing of hygiene. The thing inside him cared only of its higher purpose.

  The killer pulled a folding Buck knife from the back pocket of his stained, torn khaki pants. He worked quickly. Kneeling down by t
he front left tire, he unfolded the blade and slipped under the chassis. The task required less than a minute. Thirty seconds at the most. The killer found the proper cable and severed it with a flick of the knife.

  By the time the woman in the sundress had returned to the SUV, the killer had retreated back behind the garbage Dumpster, where his own vehicle, a stolen Mercedes SL-500, sat idling in the dark. He climbed behind the wheel. The interior of the Mercedes reeked of urine, spoiled food, and old sweat, but the killer hardly noticed it.

  The Honda SUV pulled out of the truck stop and started down Highway 15.

  The killer followed.

  The next thirty minutes or so were like a dance. The killer hovered behind the SUV, his headlights off, keeping just enough distance between him and the target to remain buried in the darkness of the desert. The woman named Carolyn Kenly drove above the speed limit. She seemed in a hurry to get somewhere. The killer watched as the rear of the SUV began to fishtail, the broken cable doing its job. Taillights flared. The SUV rattled over to the side of the highway.

  The killer performed the rest of the procedure with tremendous accuracy and aplomb. A half mile or so behind the SUV, he pulled over to the shoulder, parked, and turned off his engine. His bow, quiver, and tools were in the trunk. He gathered them up, slung the quiver over his shoulder, strapped the tool belt to his waist, and gripped the bow tightly in his left hand. Then he started toward the SUV.

  The desert was so dark, and the sky such a riot of stars, it was like walking across the dark side of the moon.

  It took just under five minutes for the killer to reach the disabled SUV and the frantic woman. The Honda’s hood was up. The woman was inside the vehicle, raving into her cell phone to somebody, probably her husband, or perhaps the clerk back at the Mason Dixon Truck Stop. It did not matter. The killer found an egg-sized rock and hurled it at the rear of the Honda.

  The noise sounded like a pistol shot, and made the woman jerk as though someone had slapped the back of her neck. She moved instinctively, throwing open her door and lurching out of the vehicle. She stumbled. The killer watched from behind a grove of joshuas. The woman still held her cell phone and still babbled as she staggered across the deserted highway and into the scabrous pasture to the north.

  “What was that? What was that!” she stammered into her cell phone as she hobbled along. “Danny, can you hear me? Danny, oh God, what was that? Danny, Dannnneeeeeee!”

  The killer closed in.

  Loping across hard-packed sand, not more than twenty yards behind her, not even breaking stride, he reached back over his shoulder to his quiver as if he were scratching his back. He was getting good at this part. With one graceful movement, he plucked an arrow out of the sheath and brought it up to eye level, snapping the bow back like a spring. The sling coiled. He held his breath, aimed, and let one go.

  The arrow whispered through the night.

  It hit the woman so hard in the back of her neck that her body rose off the ground. A yawp burst out of her that sounded like the squeal of air being forced out of a balloon, and she tumbled hard. Her body folded into the dirt, a rag doll tossed by a petulant child.

  The killer approached.

  Carolyn Kenly clung to life for several minutes. Over the course of those minutes, as she gasped for breath, choking on her own blood, convulsing in the agony of a pierced vertebra, she thought of her children, and she thought of her husband of twenty-two years, and she thought of her dreams and plans that would never come to fruition. But mostly she listened to the muffled footsteps approaching.

  The woman expired just as the killer came into view, pulling a pair of rubber-handled pliers from his tool belt.

  Grove couldn’t sleep again. He tried everything he could think of short of taking a sleeping pill—which he didn’t like to do unless absolutely necessary—but nothing worked. He watched infomercials on TV, he paced, he turned the fan up on the heater in order to fill the air with white noise. All to no avail. The motel room with its burnt-orange carpet and hideous seascape paintings was the inside of a kettledrum, and Grove’s heart beat its insidious music, pounding in his ear, keeping him awake. His mind refused to shut down.

  A repeating series of images and feelings would not leave his brain: the vision of being on an ancient mountain in the snow, the fleck of gold in Maura County’s eye, the day he found out about Hannah’s cancer, the Iceman’s contorted look of horror, the curve of Maura County’s neck, a fragmented memory of the last time he had masturbated, when an unexpected tear fell from his eye and mixed with droplets of semen on his wrist. Finally, some time around four o’clock that morning, Grove gave up trying to sleep and got up.

  For the next couple of hours—right up until the moment dawn pushed back the shadows and sent rays of early morning light through his venetian blinds—the profiler sat at the desk by the window, studying notes from the Iceman project and copies of X-rays and files from the Sun City murders. The clues were in front of him, buried in the documents, but the answers were still just out of reach. Like a word on the tip of Grove’s tongue, a name or place just beyond his grasp.

  At some time around six o’clock, Grove’s cell phone tweeted, and when he answered it he was not at all surprised to hear Terry Zorn’s impudent drawl in his ear. “Hope I didn’t wake ya’ll up,” the voice crackled.

  “Terry . . . no . . . I was up already.”

  “How’s it going up there in the Great White North?”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Understand y’all got some kinda mummy up there.”

  “Uh . . . yeah, it’s a long story.”

  “I’d love to hear it. Y’all want some company?”

  “Yeah, great. Tom mentioned he might be able to tear you off the Baltimore sniper.”

  “I’m all yours, buddy.”

  “Great.”

  “Fixin’ to get on the nine-oh-three outta Dulles, be touchin’ down in Anchorage about one o’clock Alaska time. Any chance you could pick me up?”

  “Of course. Be happy to. Give me your flight number.”

  Zorn gave him the information, and Grove told him to have a good flight.

  Grove clicked off his phone and felt a slight twinge of nervous tension in his belly. He had worked with Zorn a couple of times in the past, and respected the Texan’s abilities, but there was something about the man that had always bothered Grove. Maybe it was the subtle contempt just beneath the surface of Zorn’s constant joking, or the faint spark of hostility behind the man’s gaze. And that good old boy facade had always gotten under Grove’s skin. Zorn was the guy who had started the running gag at Quantico that Grove looked like a member of the Nation of Islam. The two men had worked together on the Oregon Happy Face Killer case, and Zorn had been a competent partner, but the jokes had really gotten to Grove on that job.

  Was Grove too sensitive? Was he inordinately touchy about such things? He wondered sometimes if this tenderness was formed at an early age.

  Ulysses Grove came from a place of clashing cultures, a place of dislocation. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, he was educated in the public schools, and tossed in with the general population who valued conformity over individuality. But it wasn’t easy for young Ulysses to fit in. His Jamaican father, Georges Grove (né Groviere), had become nothing more than a bad memory by the time Grove was born, and Grove’s mother, Vida, was not exactly Carol Brady. She would dress her son in multicolored kitenge tunics and dashikis, and send him to school with tribal adornments. And on the rare occasion that one of Grove’s friends would visit the Grove household, Vida served traditional Kenyan cuisine and instead of providing silverware would make all the kids use the traditional injera—a doughy flat bread the consistency of human flesh—to pick up their food. Grove was teased unmercifully. But Vida was too proud to assimilate, and kept draping her reluctant son in African beads and sweet potato sacks.

  All this cultural angst had much to do with Grove’s estrangem
ent from his mother. Now in her late seventies, the woman still lived alone in the same modest bungalow in Chicago, surrounded by her gourds and beads and tribal charms. But Grove hadn’t seen her in years. He said good-bye to that life in the late 1970s when he left Chicago for the University of Michigan. And as his assimilation deepened—first in the army, and later at the FBI academy—his resentment toward his mother’s stubborn ethnicity only festered. Nowadays he tried to think about it as little as possible.

  Which was why he was currently clicking nervously through the radio presets in his rental car as he cruised south on Highway 3 on his way to Anchorage International.

  All he could find was either shrill country-western music or annoying right-wing talk radio, so he finally turned off the radio and concentrated on driving the Nissan Maxima through the canyons of granite rock-cuts that bordered the outskirts of Anchorage. The spring sun had broken through the clouds a few hours ago, and now the rugged landscape seemed to be thawing before Grove’s eyes. The highway teemed with traffic, and Grove had to squint against the glare in order to see the exit signs.

  A symbol of an airplane loomed on an oncoming sign, and Grove took the next exit ramp.

  Ten minutes later he was pulling into the short-term parking lot adjacent to the terminal. He parked and took the underground walkway into the building. An escalator brought him up into the bustling noise and light of the terminal, and he consulted a piece of notepaper on which he had written Terry Zorn’s flight number and arrival gate.

  Grove found the Texan standing next to a phone booth, a suit bag thrown over his shoulder, his cowboy hat cocked at a jaunty angle on his bald head. Zorn was on the phone, making notes. His eyes lit up when he saw Grove approaching.