“He was the invisible man around here . . . a ghost, the ghost in the three-piece suit.”
Grove pulled a small tape recorder from his briefcase, then looked up at the woman, indicating the recorder. “Do you mind?”
She waved an okay.
Grove turned the tape recorder on and said, “Do you mind elaborating on Mr. Ackerman being a ghost, as you say?”
“You want me to elaborate. Gee, okay. How about this: what kind of man goes limp after a minor little surgical procedure, gets a prescription for Viagra, and never uses it?”
There was a pause, a glance between the two men, and then Grove looked back at the woman. “Your husband had health problems?”
“He was as strong as an ox.” She bit off the word ox like a child taking foul medicine. “He was also a hypochondriac, and oh my God, when they finally found that teen weeny little blockage in one of his arteries, it was like his wish had come true . . . and we’re not talking a massive coronary here. It was totally curable. Big deal. They put a little tube in you, they Roto-Rooter it out. No problem. But not with Richard. Oh my God . . . you would have thought they cut his penis off. Of course he hadn’t used that in years, so I guess it didn’t make any difference.”
After a beat Grove asked what Richard Ackerman did for a living.
“He crunched numbers for Deloitte and Touche,” she replied with a sour look on her narrow, surgically tucked face. “Numbers, accountants . . . who cares anymore? He’s gone. I get the house when the papers come through, and he’s gone.”
Grove measured his words. “Can you tell us about that day? When you found the mummy?”
She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “What about it?”
“Your husband was the first to stumble across the mummy?”
A thin smile crossed her face. “You could say that, yeah, he stumbled all right.”
“Something funny?”
She gazed off at the rain-spangled glass as though remembering something hilarious. “He’d get these things in his head,” she murmured. “Out of the clear blue, he’d decide he’s going to run in the Chicago Marathon, or he’s going to swim a mile, and he just goes overboard. With the outfit and the training and the equipment. . . so pathetic, a fifty-year-old man behaving like this. Anyway, we’re on this cruise up in Alaska, and he decides he’s going to climb this mountain—”
“—Mount Cairn?” Grove asked.
“Yes, yes, Mount Cairn, it was Mount Cairn this, and Mount Cairn that, for a week I have to hear this nonsense. And he’s training on the ship, doing these ridiculous exercises, and eating raw eggs, the idiot. And I’m saying, ‘Stop with the eggs already!’ So finally he gets me up at four o’clock in the morning, and we drive out to the park, and we start out on this stupid climb.”
“This was a technical climb you were trying?” Zorn asked.
She looked at him. “A what?”
“A technical climb, you know, with the axes and the pitons and the ropes?”
She waved her hand. “God no! An old lady could make it to the top of this thing. You walk the whole goddamn way. They had a business meeting up there for Mary Kay Cosmetics, for Chrissake, but my moron of a husband spent thousands on all this equipment, and that morning he drags me out of my warm bed, and he’s got me out there in the pitch-dark. And he’s bounding along, right? Like he’s Sir Edmund Hillary, with this idiotic walking stick, and I’m bringing up the rear. I’m covered in mud and I’ve ripped a hole in my brand-new Eddie Bauer fleece jacket, and Richard is ignoring me, ten paces ahead of me. And then he trips, and it was the funniest thing I have ever seen, Richard tripping like that—Mr. Big Time Mountain Climber—I mean, God, it was so funny. His walking stick goes flying and he falls on his ass and he slides about twenty yards or so. And I’m just laughing my ass off. I remember the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I was laughing so hard. I don’t know why that struck me as being so funny. But it did. God, it was funny. That idiot.”
She paused, and Grove asked her what happened after that.
Helen Ackerman’s smile faded. “The rest is not so funny. I mean . . . when I figured out what he had tripped over . . . Jesus.”
Grove said, “You’re talking about the mummy? He tripped over the mummy?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
Grove glanced at Zorn, who was staring at the woman, waiting. “Go on,” Grove urged the lady with a gentle nod.
She rubbed her makeup-caked eyes. “Oh God, it sounds so melodramatic. The eyes play tricks. Okay? It was the thin air, or it was menopause setting in, I don’t know, but the thing is, I couldn’t see the thing until he crawled back over to that spot on the trail and touched that thing. It was like seeing frost forming on a window.”
Grove asked what she meant by “frost forming.”
She was silent for a long moment—overcome by the memory of watching her husband hunkering down over a mummy that was visible, initially at least, only to him—as Grove’s tape recorder continued rolling, recording the leaden silence.
9
The Opposite of Divine
“So he crawls over to this slushy patch of trail, and he’s staring down at the ground, and I can’t see a damn thing. I mean, I’m probably as close to him as I am to that chair over there, and I’m wondering what the hell he’s looking at. And he says something. I can’t really hear very well at this point. I mean, the wind is blowing, and it’s snowing, and it’s freezing cold. But then he reaches down like he’s going to stick a finger in a socket. I mean he’s got that look on his face. That look that little bratty kids get when they’re about to do something naughty . . . you know what I mean?”
The tape recorder sat whirring softly in the center of an oval meeting table in the conference room of the Restin, Virginia, Annex Building. The room was just large enough for the table, half a dozen swivel chairs, and a small cadenza at one end from which assistants served coffee and Danish pastry and documents.
Suddenly Grove’s voice rattled out of the tiny speaker:
“What do you think he was saying?”
Helen: “I have no idea what he was saying. I mean, to this day, I’ve never figured out what it was he was mumbling when he crawled back over to that spot and looked down at the ground. It might have been just a moan or something. You should have seen the look on his face though. I never asked him about it . . . but it gave me the creeps.”
A pause then.
Four people sat grim-faced before the tiny recorder, listening to the playback. Grove and Zorn, each in his shirtsleeves, sat at one end of the table. Tom Geisel was at the other end, chewing on a pen, his feet propped up on the corner of the table. Next to Geisel was Natalie Hoberman, a steely-eyed woman in a gray suit dress whom Geisel had recruited years ago from the Sexual Crimes Task Force. Hoberman was one of the top brass at the Serial Crimes Unit, and was a trusted sounding board on difficult cases. Grove had always got along well with her, despite her enormous ego. At the moment, Hoberman had her arms crossed across her chest as she listened skeptically to the playback.
Grove: “So when did you finally see the mummy?”
Helen (after a pause): “What do you call it when you see a flower growing real fast? In one of those hideous, boring nature films?”
Grove: “Time lapse?”
Helen: “Time lapse! Yeah, it was like that. I see Richard reaching down and touching . . . something . . . or nothing. . . but then there was something. It’s hard to explain. Like an ice cube melting in reverse. I see this disgusting frozen thing, and it’s taking shape right there in the slush, and he’s poking at it, and I think I yelled at that point, I think I told Richard to get the hell away from the thing, it could have rabies, it could be crawling with germs or whatever. He just looked up at me with this weird expression on his face. God, he was a strange bird.”
Grove: “Can you describe the expression? When he looked at you?”
Helen: “I don’t know. It was like, I don’t know, like . . . he had seen a ghost.”
Grove: “And what happened then?”
Helen: “He climbed to his feet like he was drunk or something, and he stood there staring at me with this bizarre look on his face.”
Zorn’s voice: “And what did you do then?”
Helen: “I went over and saw it was a body. I guess I went a little nuts. Never mind the look on my husband’s face! The look on that dead thing’s face was . . . it was horrible. I mean, I’d never even seen a dead body for real before, and even though it turns out this thing was, you know, this prehistoric man or whatever, I just kind of freaked out.”
Grove: “Go on.”
Helen: “Well, you gotta understand, I didn’t want to be there in the first place. Okay? And now this! I mean, I never would have dreamed in a million years we had stumbled upon anything valuable or rare or important . . . or whatever. First thing that crossed my mind was, this was some drifter or homeless guy, or maybe somebody from that Indian reservation who had wandered off drunk and frozen to death.”
Grove: “So what did you do then?”
Helen: “I insisted we go back, I insisted we take that hideous thing back down to the trailhead and give it to the cops.” A brief silence then. “Look . . . I know we probably shouldn’t have moved it. They told us we actually damaged the thing, and then they kind of threatened us in this really slimy way, like somebody was gonna sue us or something. That asshole detective—Pinsky— he told us we actually broke its thing off in the ice when we pried it out. Which is totally ironic when you think about it.”
Zorn’s voice: “Its ‘thing’?”
Helen: “Its thing—its prick, its penis—which by the way was stiffer than anything Richard could have come up with. And we broke it off! Me and my impotent moron of a husband . . . whose own schwantz hasn’t worked in years!”
Another pause on the tape, accompanied by a series of uncomfortable shuffling noises and wry laughter from Helen Ackerman.
Natalie Hoberman spoke up. “Turn it off for a second, Ulysses. Please.”
Grove reached out and snapped the Pause button. “Does it get any better?”
Grove sighed. “If you just listen—”
“Let’s hear them out, Natalie,” Geisel broke in. “We’re all working for the same thing here, and right now, this is all we got.”
Zorn leaned forward and gave Grove a friendly slap on the back. “Hey, amigo, why don’t we fast-forward to that stuff about the husband turning up missing?”
Another sigh from Grove as he picked up the tape player and fiddled with the buttons for a moment. Chipmunk gibberish squealed from the speaker as he fast-forwarded through a couple of minutes of the recording, watching the counter. At last he reached the section on Richard Ackerman’s disappearance. He put the recorder back on the table and pressed the Play button. Helen’s voice squawked at them.
“. . . and it was the same thing when we got back home. Barely said two words to me that week after we got back. He was like a zombie, wandering around, bumping into things. Drove me crazy. He didn’t go into the office, didn’t go golfing, wouldn’t see any of his friends. Usually just sat staring out the window. It was like he was in a deep depression or something.”
Grove’s voice: “Didn’t you ask him what was the matter?”
Helen: “I didn’t want to know. We stopped talking to each other years ago, and this was just another one of his idiotic mood swings. I always said he was bipolar. His therapist babied him like nothing you ever saw. I always thought he was on the wrong medication.”
Zorn: “What about his firm? Didn’t they call? Didn’t they wonder where he was?”
Helen: “He was a senior VP with an army of ass-kissers covering for him. We got a few calls from Deloitte, which I don’t think he ever returned. I mean, I think I heard him say maybe two words that whole week. You ask me, I think he finally blew a gasket. Or maybe had some kind of stroke. Or whatever. What difference does it make? He’s gone now.”
Grove: “Tell us about that.”
Helen: “What do you mean?”
Grove: “His disappearance . . . the details, the circumstances.”
Helen: “I woke up one morning and he was just . . . not here anymore. It’s as simple as that. And to reiterate a point I made earlier: who gives a damn.” (Pause.) “Wait a minute. Hold on a second. Why are you people so interested in Richard? What did he do? What did that sick fuck do now?”
Grove: “Nothing, nothing at all . . . we’re just gathering information at this point, Mrs. Ackerman.”
Helen: “Whatever you suspect him of, I’m sure he’s probably guilty.”
Grove: “Anyway . . . you were asleep when it happened? When he vanished?”
Helen: “I don’t know, I guess . . . I literally went to bed a married woman . . . and when I woke up, I was single, alone in my own house. Simple as that.”
Grove: “Did you hear anything in the night?”
Helen: “Nope.”
Grove: “And when you woke up, did you find a note, or signs of any disturbance?”
Helen: “Nope . . . nada, nothing. The place looked like he had never even been there. His clothes were still hanging in his closet, sure, and his lucky coffee cup with the golf tee on it was still sitting upside down by the draining board . . . but that was it, those were the only signs he had ever even existed. And I threw all that crap out the next day.”
Zorn: “Did you a file a missing person report, ma’am?”
Helen: “Are you kidding? The last thing I wanted was for somebody to find that idiot and drag him back home, I was delighted he was gone. I think his sister Phyllis filed a report, maybe a week or two later, I’m not sure. I’ve never been very close with his family. They all live in Detroit . . . Bloomington Hills, very preppie. Ivy League types. Total assholes. I’ll give you their numbers, if you want to waste your time talking with those—”
Click.
Grove snapped off the player and looked at Geisel. “This is our guy . . . this is Sun City.”
Geisel frowned. “You got DNA on the guy?”
“We got a hairbrush that survived the wife’s scorched earth campaign . . . yes. It’s on its way through the lab over at Arlington as we speak.”
Hoberman was clicking her nails on the table. “And we’ve got DNA from the scenes?”
Grove nodded. “We’ve got a smorgasbord from the series, but I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find a match.”
“Shoes?”
“She threw out his shoes, but we got a heel impression from the Colorado scene that suggests a big man, a man Ackerman’s size and weight.”
Zorn spoke up. “Tell them about the tools and the tool belt.”
“Tools?” Hoberman said.
Grove explained that Ackerman kept a little workshop down in his basement, very anal, everything neatly labeled, hanging on a Peg-Board. “We saw his tool belt was missing,” he said with a shrug. “As well as a favorite pair of needle-nosed pliers and a linoleum knife. Which could easily match the Sun City pathology.”
“Sounds pretty circumstantial,” Natalie Hoberman said after a beat.
Across the room, Zorn flashed a smile. “Sweetheart, if I had a nickel for every conviction we’ve gotten on circumstantial evidence I’d be rich enough to take you out.”
“Please don’t call me sweetheart.”
“Okay, children, let’s get specific here,” Geisel broke in, putting his reading glasses back on. He gazed down at the briefing document that Grove had written up for him. “We’re basically basing this theory on a shared connection that Ackerman and Sun City have with the pathology of the mummy, the Iceman. Is that correct?”
Grove told him yes, that was more or less the case, then Grove pushed himself away from the table, stood, and went over to the window.
The iron-gray sky hung low over Restin, the spring breezes blustering through the elms and high-tension wires. A hundred miles to the south, tropical storm Beatrice was currently lashing the low country with hundred-mile-an-ho
ur winds. For the past day and a half a ceiling of clouds had shrouded the entire state of Virginia, with the promise of rain in the forecast.
For just an instant Grove gazed through those blinds at the overcast day. A faint moaning noise rose and fell outside the pane, the breeze telling tales of primordial winds and flashing skies. Grove felt another dizzy spell teasing at the edges of his equilibrium. He grabbed the edge of the window to steady himself, then blinked away the faint sputter of artifacts on the back of his eyelids like flickering sunspots. Not now, he thought, not in front of these people. Finally he turned back to the room and said, “It’s not just a copycat situation.”
Geisel looked at him. “Excuse me?”
Grove went back over to the table and stood there with his hands in his pockets. “That’s what I thought it was at first. The flaw in the pathology, the fact that Sun City left the organs intact. But now I’m not so sure. Ackerman’s the guy all right, but what he’s doing, the meaning of it . . . I believe it goes deeper than just replicating something he saw. I don’t know what to make of the time lapse talk, but I’m telling you this thing goes deeper than ‘copycat.’”
There was a pause then, a few eyebrows raising around the room. Hoberman glanced over at Geisel, who had resumed chewing on his pen. On the other side of the table, Zorn studied the patterns in the carpet. At last Geisel said, “You want to explain?”
Grove gestured at the little tape player sitting mute on the table. “It’s in the behavior, Tom. It always is. I don’t know exactly what’s driving it yet, but it’s in the behavior.”
Another uncomfortable pause. Hoberman spoke up. “What do you want, Ulysses?”
He looked at her. “I want bulletins at every squad, in every wire room, on every onboard computer in every trooper car west of the Mississippi.”
A pause, Geisel chewing the inside of his cheek, thinking it over.
Grove went on: “We got photos, we got deep background on Ackerman . . . I’d like to distribute the materials throughout the central and western regions. He’s dealing with some pretty heavy dissociative behavior, he ought to be fairly easy to spot.”
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