Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  As he worked in the shadows, preparing his instruments of death, Ackerman’s hound-dog eyes filled with tears. The tears tracked down his face and mingled with the drool gathering at the corners of his mouth and the bottom of his gray-whiskered chin, then dripped across the front of his torn flannel shirt, saturating the fabric. The thing inside him wept as well. It wept silently as it worked, the great shimmering dragon eyes welling with tears of agony for all the innocents, all the sacrificial lambs. Its ancient mission—soaked in blood and anguish—could only be completed through death, mayhem, and devastation.

  The New Richard slung the quiver over his back and tucked the bow under his arm. He tossed the empty duffel back in the car, then strode across the front of the office to the entrance. He appeared to be an ordinary customer arriving for the night—a sportsman, perhaps, just in from a duck hunt on Hayden Island. He entered the lobby through a glass door and instantly smelled sputtering radiator heat, burned coffee grounds, and faint traces of disinfectant.

  “Evenin’, sir,” said a voice, tugging the New Richard’s gaze across the room to an elbow-high counter behind which stood a gray little man in a threadbare cardigan sweater. The innkeeper wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses and looked to be about a hundred and fifty years old. “Any luck out there tonight?”

  The New Richard reached for one of the arrows when another voice rang out.

  “No bow-huntin’ allowed this early in the season!” The voice was feminine, old, and gravelly. The New Richard looked over and saw the obese woman sitting in an armchair in front of a console TV tuned to CNN, a bent aluminum walker parked next to her. She sported multiple chins and a faded floral-print housedress. The undersides of her arms jiggled as she wagged her plump finger in the stranger’s direction.

  “Aw, put a sock in it, Evelyn!” the innkeeper barked at her.

  The old woman sneered: “Them game wardens’ll bust you just as soon as look at ya!”

  “Be still now!”

  “Just tryin’ to help—”

  “Would ya let the gentleman check in already!”

  From over his shoulder the New Richard plucked an arrow from the quiver, then brought it down hard against the bow. The bow creaked as it was drawn back. The other two barely noticed this strange creature standing in their lobby, about to take their lives.

  “I ain’t stoppin’ him!” the old lady crowed, ignoring the stranger.

  “Please shut your pie hole!” the innkeeper shouted back at her.

  “You shut your hole, you old cocker!”

  “I’ll kick your ass right on outta here, you think I won’t!”

  “Stuff it, Pete!”

  “You think I won’t?”

  The thing that was once Richard Ackerman suddenly called out in a garbled, booming voice, “Turn around!”

  Their voices cut off immediately. The innkeeper stared. The fat lady stared. A long beat of silence then, the only discernible sounds being the drone of CNN, and a moth, ticking against the front window, trying in vain to escape. The New Richard smiled sadly. “Turn around, please.”

  Late that night, alone in his forlorn apartment, amid the scattered notebooks and tented dictionaries, clad only in his underwear, Michael Okuda realized he was down to his last half bag of dope, so he decided to work the rest of the evening as straight as a judge. (In Anchorage, heroin cost eleven dollars a bag—although Okuda, on his paltry assistant lab-manager salary, was forced to buy in bulk. A bundle of ten bags usually set him back seventy-five dollars. Hoarding became a way of life.) Which was probably why he experienced the epiphany.

  At first he thought it was the dope fading on him—he had snorted a half bag that afternoon, and by two o’clock that morning he was beginning to zone out. He could barely see the flip chart that he had positioned in front of the sofa, nor could he read his chicken scratchings that passed for notes. His vision began to blur and fracture everything into pairs. Which was when the discovery happened.

  He was trying to concentrate on the repeating symbols scrawled in felt tip all around his living room—renderings of the mummy’s tattoos, the little sharp petals that made no sense whatsoever—when they started to sprout doppelgangers, ghostly doubles in his wavering field of vision that swam and oscillated as though passing under a milk glass—

  —and all at once he was reminded of the old “floating hot dog” phenomena from the fifth grade: Killing time in Mr. Gibbons’s civics class, fascinated by optical illusions, little Mikey Okuda and his pals used to get a huge kick out of pointing their two index fingers at each other, and looking directly over the tips, and seeing the tiny little phantom “hot dog” floating between them. The hot dog appears because the focal point of the eye is crossed at that range. But now, so many years later, the adult Okuda was looking at a similar illusion floating only inches away from him on his wall, and it was making his gut stir with the strangest feeling.

  And that’s when the revelation jolted through his weary brain center, touched off by that vague, cryptic linkage that had been rattled loose by an image in an old Boris Karloff movie: a mummy reaching down, gently running a petrified fingertip along an ancient scroll . . . insane laughter howling offscreen.

  The tattoos, when viewed in Okuda’s drugged double vision, revealed a secret inner structure: they were crypto-graphs! Symbols for words! Sumerian probably! Words that could be translated!

  A linguistic breakthrough for a junkie cryptologist, even an amateur one like Okuda, is more sobering than an IV cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline.

  He jerked forward on his ratty sofa, knocking over a box of Cheez-Its. He grabbed a ballpoint. Writing madly, alternately flipping pages in his dog-eared Oxford Compound Sign Dictionary, he translated the symbols into elemental Sumerian: en-nu . . . en-nu-un . . . en-nu . . . en-nu-un. Hooray for heroin, the anthropologist’s best friend! Okuda didn’t even realize he was both giggling and shaking.

  When he had the phrase cold, he paused and stared down at it, cuneiformed across the notepaper like a bloody ink blot. The giggling stopped. He needed to call somebody right away. Mathis? God no. The bitch would scoff. Or worse: she’d take credit for the breakthrough. Okuda got up and paced, his skinny legs trembling. He stopped and thought about it some more, chewing a fingernail.

  Maybe Grove was the one he should call.

  The New Richard sat on a shopworn sofa in the blood-spattered lobby of the Regal Motel, staring emptily at the console TV, which was still droning in the corner, its screen misted with arterial spray. Head cocked as though hearing an ultrasonic whistle, the pliers gripped in his big hand, he watched a banal advertisement for the Amazing Kitchen Magician while the bodies of the innkeeper and the old lady lay cooling in puddles of dark fluids on the floor in front of him. The arrows rose out of their necks like signposts. Bloody drag-trails fanned out from the innkeeper’s corpse.

  There was much work left to do. The bodies had to be posed, and the arrows removed with the pliers like all the others. Removing the arrows was the messy part—like cleaning fish—as the tips were always embedded in the gristle and sinew of the upper vertebra. But posing them was a transcendent experience for the New Richard. Like taking communion. He would raise the right arm into its ritual position, then step back and pray in a language long forgotten by denizens of the current era. Someday the cycle would close again. The vessel would return, the sacrifice complete.

  At that moment, however, the process seemed daunting to the thing inside Ackerman. Operating Ackerman’s body had gotten laborious, gummy and slow, like a machine with sand in its bearings. A faraway pain throbbed in Ackerman’s chest, the angina constricting his vessels, tightening his joints. He had a weak heart. The New Richard wondered if Ackerman’s body would survive the rigors of the mission.

  Ignoring the unexpected frisson of pain, the New Richard rose and went over to the first body, kneeling down with the rubber-handled pliers. He was about to clamp onto the end of the arrow and start working it out . . . when he stopped.
Something coming out of the television had pierced his consciousness. Eyes tracking over to the TV, head turning like an automaton, his gaze found the screen.

  CNN was playing softly. At the moment a blond anchorwoman addressed the camera: “An FBI spokesman offered a statement earlier today regarding the Sun City killings. After a twelve-month-long investigation, the suspect at this hour remains at large, as well as a complete mystery, leaving authorities scrambling for answers.”

  The New Richard focused suddenly with laser intensity on that television screen.

  The TV flickered with file footage of FBI headquarters, a reporter’s monotone accompanying the image: “As the entire western United States reels from another senseless killing in the Nevada desert, FBI profilers are seemingly grasping at straws for clues and motives . . .”

  The New Richard froze and watched the broadcast cut to shaky, handheld footage of a handsome black man in a tailored suit hurrying down stone steps, trying to elude the prying gaze of the camera.

  “Even renowned criminologist Ulysses Grove, the man whose analysis led to the arrest and ultimate conviction of the Oregon Happy Face Killer back in 1990, is apparently stumped by this disturbing series of random murders. . .”

  Pop!

  The revelation struck the New Richard like a lightning bolt piercing the top of his skull, sending jolts of high-voltage recognition down through his marrow, the message transposing itself into a daisy chain of ancient languages, until it burst forth in the tongue of the current place and time. Behold! Behold!

  “Agent Grove! Can you comment on the stalled Sun City investigation?”

  Snap!

  The New Richard jerked backward with the sheer power of the realization, a black hole imploding down in the nucleus of his being, sucking everything into it, distorting time and space, until the entire motel lobby seemed to contract like a great eye, like a huge black iris shrinking down around the membrane of that flickering cathode ray tube.

  “Sorry, folks, I have no comment, no comment, you can address all your questions to FBI Community Relations, but right now I have nothing to say.”

  Boooooommmmmmmmmm! The television screen imploded into a single, dreamy, grainy close-up of the chiseled ebony face of Ulysses Grove. A great onyx god sculpted by some divine artist. And the puppeteer inside Ackerman stared at it, and stared at it, and stared at it.

  Grove found Maura County waiting for him in the lobby of San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko.

  “C’mon, you got to see this,” she said, leading him over to a bank of elevators. They boarded one of the posh enclosures—the accoutrements echoing the rich carpet nap, deep green color schemes, and elegant brass fittings of the hotel’s central hallways. Maura pressed the button for the BR level. “Never seen anything like it,” she was saying as the doors rattled shut, “in almost thirteen years of working in this racket.”

  The elevator rose, and they stood there—just the two of them—in the awkward, intimate silence.

  “So how was your flight?” Maura asked him, mercifully breaking the silence.

  “Um . . . you know . . . uneventful,” Grove told her, his hands in the pockets of his herringbone jacket. His head spun. More than ever, he felt like a human pinball, bouncing back and forth across the country at the whim of the Sun City case. He had arrived in the Bay Area around dusk, less than an hour ago, and already had that flaky, dissociated sensation of the overtraveled. Terry Zorn had come along on the trip, but had elected to check in with the Frisco field office first, before joining Grove and the journalist later at the Hotel Nikko. Now Grove felt oddly tongue-tied in the elevator, alone with Maura. She wore a sleek black turtleneck and black jeans that set off her milky complexion and pale blue eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and Grove felt his gaze drawn to the back of her neck. The compulsion made him feel guilty and jittery. “So what am I about to see, anyway?” he finally asked her.

  “Sorry about all the mystery,” she said with a tepid smile. “It’s the journalist in me, I guess.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A perpetual fear of burying the lead.”

  The elevator stuttered to a stop, and the doors opened, revealing the stone planters, gold sconces, and mirrored panels of the ballroom level. Grove followed the journalist out of the car, then down a carpeted corridor bordered on either side by meeting rooms.

  They passed the Muir Room, the Juniper Room, the Larkspur Room, and the Madera Room—all empty, all dark with chairs up on round tables and spaces glistening with metal polish and carpet cleaner. “So what is the lead here?” Grove asked as they strode briskly along. The journalist was moving so quickly, so excitedly down that corridor, that Grove thought he might have to start trotting in order to keep up with her.

  She thought about his question for a moment, licking her lips. “I’m really not sure, I was thinking you might be able to figure it out for me.”

  “I take it you got some responses to your e-mail?”

  She gave him a look. “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Evidence of similar deaths over the years? Bodies with similar pathologies?”

  She nodded. “You could say that. Yeah. I think you ought to just see it with your own eyes.”

  “Let’s take a look then.”

  “Right up here.” She indicated the end of the hallway. “Last door on the left.”

  Grove followed her, preparing himself for another encounter with a cranky archaeologist like Lorraine Mathis, or perhaps a dozen dusty old professors sitting around a table, pontificating about clay pottery and arrowheads. They approached the last door, which was closed, a placard marked in gold inlay reading REDWOOD ROOM.

  Maura paused for a long moment in front of that door, her hand on the knob. Grove stood behind her, waiting. He got the feeling this pause was for dramatic effect. Finally she glanced over her shoulder and uttered, “You ready for this?”

  “Sure,” Grove said with a nod. “Lay it on me.”

  She nodded back at him, then opened the door and ushered him inside.

  Grove was engulfed in chaos.

  The noise was tremendous, at least a hundred archaeologists, maybe more, talking, arguing, milling about a banquet room that was far larger than Grove had expected. Round tables crowded with people stretched in all directions. The ceiling rose up at least twenty-five feet high, with dozens of chandeliers shining down on the throngs. Every conceivable nationality seemed to be present—Arabs in full headdress, Hindi professors, men with turbans, Asians, African scholars with dashikis and traditional headgear, and even a Muslim woman with a black burka shrouding her face. Grove had to step back and scan the whole length of the hall just to take it all in. And the longer he looked, the more he realized what he was looking at.

  Flip charts and dry boards faced many of the tables, many of them displaying hastily drawn stick figures, victims, mummies, and fossilized human remains, most of them lying supine, arrows pointing to neck wounds, diagrams of entry vectors, blood trails, pathologies, and little stick-figure arms posed in supplication identical to the Sun City victims. Some of the attendees were standing at the charts, pointing things out to their colleagues, voices rising in spirited debate. Hands wagged and heads shook, and Grove stood there for a long moment, taking it all in, unnoticed by most present.

  “Oh my God,” Grove finally muttered, his scalp crawling with gooseflesh.

  Maura looked at him and nodded very slowly, almost sheepishly. “Exactly.”

  PART III

  CARRIGAN’S CYCLE

  “There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe.”

  —W. Somerset Maugham

  11

  Cornucopia

  While Grove and Maura huddled in a banquet hall on the West Coast, holding court well into the night with a room full of archaeologists, an FBI laboratory on the edge of a marine base in Virginia ran test after test on genetic material recovered from both the crime scenes
and Ackerman’s house in Wilmette. They had several strands of hair from a brush and a bathroom catch basin, as well as blood chemistry reports from Ackerman’s angioplasty at Chicago’s Northwestern Hospital three years earlier. They also had an array of trace tissue samples from the various scenes—a flake of dandruff, a particle of skin, a single hair, and a damp spot on the body of Carolyn Kenly believed to be saliva. They had a partial fingerprint as well (authorities in both Colorado and Nevada believed that the Sun City Killer operated without gloves, judging by the smudged print found on a button), but they had yet to gather enough of a sample against which to make a comparison.

  The genetic “fingerprint” was another story.

  The lab in Virginia discovered that the killer was a “secretor.” This meant that the perpetrator’s blood type and genetic information could be determined by bodily fluids other than blood. From that tiny spot of saliva found on the Kenly sundress, technicians extracted a perfect multilocus DNA pattern. This strand, which under a microscope looked like a tiny bar code, became the reference standard to which Ackerman’s genetic information was compared. The hair sample taken from the Wilmette house matched perfectly. The test was run three times before the call was made to Tom Geisel in the middle of the night. Geisel spoke briefly with the head of the lab, a German woman named Sabine Voer-krupper, before getting dressed and initiating a nationwide manhunt.

  Years ago, the police called it an all-points bulletin. Usually dispatched and transmitted over squad radios, the bulletin announced the crime, described the alleged perpetrator strictly for investigation purposes, and authorized arrest on “reasonable belief.” But in the early twenty-first century—an age of constitutional ambiguity, political correctness, and rampant litigation—extraordinary measures had to be taken to ensure airtight legalities during the course of a cold pursuit. Especially in cases involving a prolific nationwide serial murderer the magnitude of Sun City.