There was a brief pause as the professors looked at each other as though trying to decide who would answer. Professor de Lourde finally spoke up. “For the most part, I would put my money on holy men.”
Professor Armatraj was nodding. “Definitely. These were shamans. We know this by the artifacts that were found with most of the bodies, by the tattoos and the bundles.”
Grove looked at Armatraj. “The what?”
“Bundles, medicine bundles.” The Indian made a cupping gesture. “Small leather pouches in which primitive men from poor societies kept supplies, tools.”
Grove remembered the fungi that was found on the Mount Cairn Iceman. “Yeah, right, okay . . . I know what you’re talking about.” He shot a glance at Maura. “They found something just like that in Alaska.”
She confirmed it with a nod.
Another pause, and Grove glanced over his shoulder, finding Zorn at the opposite end of the atrium, maybe a hundred feet away, across a wide expanse of lush carpet, standing by a potted palm, illuminated by rays of morning sun slashing down through skylights. The mezzanine bustled. Glass elevators full of early risers rose and fell behind Zorn as he talked intently into his cell phone.
Maura’s voice tugged at Grove’s attention: “But what I’m still wondering is, what were these holy men doing out in these remote areas?”
“I’m not following, my dear,” Professor de Lourde demurred with a confused look on his lined face.
“What I’m saying is, the Mount Cairn remains were found at something like ten thousand feet . . . and Flodden Bog is way out in the wilds . . . we know what these areas were like because of the fossil record. Right? So basically most of these victims were murdered in the wilderness.”
De Lourde touched his lip and thought for a moment. “I suppose you’re right.”
“So what were they doing? What were these holy men doing out in the middle of nowhere when they were killed?”
The question hung in silence for a moment as Grove glanced again across the mezzanine.
Zorn was coming this way. The Texan walked with a grim sort of purpose, snapping his cell phone shut, his expression all furrowed with urgency. Only one thing would make Terry Zorn look like that, Grove thought, and felt a cold splinter of ice pierce his stomach.
Edith Endecott was saying, “A legitimate question, Miss County, but alas, there’s only so much one can learn from human remains.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Maura said with a weary sigh.
“Excuse me, folks,” Terry Zorn broke in as he approached in a whirlwind of nervous energy, all business, eyes flashing with that weird and sudden urgency. “Gonna have to borrow Mr. Grove for a few minutes.”
Grove didn’t have to ask why, he knew, he knew everything he needed to know by the look on Zorn’s face.
Maura County’s room was on the twenty-third floor—a single suite with a small lounging area and a breathtaking view of the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Park to the east. She had reserved the room on the magazine’s tab in order to conduct private, one-on-one interviews with any of the participants who had interesting stories to tell. Now she found herself standing in the room’s tiny vestibule, watching Grove and Zorn over by the immense king-sized bed in the center of the room, arguing with each other about guns and crime scenes.
“We’re supposed to be criminologists, Terry, suits, we’re not tactical, I haven’t carried iron in over ten years,” Grove was saying as he buckled his suit bag and stowed his few remaining belongings into his attaché.
Zorn’s expression flared with anger as he fiddled with a metal travel case on the bed. “This Portland scene is already out of control—okay? Now did you or did you not say you think this perp’s a spectator?”
“Terry, c’mon—”
“Did you or did you not say that!”
Grove sighed. “Okay, yeah, I think it’s possible he’s haunting the scenes, yes, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Then you’re carrying a piece today,” Zorn said, opening the road case, revealing a large handgun nestled in black molded blister pack. Zorn paused for a moment, glancing over at Maura, who suddenly felt like an outsider eavesdropping on some arcane negotiation she had no business seeing—like a child watching two adults argue about sex.
She cleared her throat. “You know what . . . maybe I should wait downstairs.”
“No, hey, no.” Grove glanced over at Maura. “This is your room, for God’s sake, you don’t have to leave.”
“I’ve got some calls to make,” Maura pressed, backing toward the door.
“No, please—” Grove went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re part of this investigation now, Maura. I want you to stay.”
His touch was so gentle—tender, even—that for the briefest instant, as their gazes met, Maura felt something new pass between them. Something subtle and inexplicable. Like fate, or some kind of chemical reaction. In the heat of the moment, it was fleeting, and later, Maura would wonder if she had merely imagined it, her brain fueled by stress and excitement. She swallowed hard. “Great, great—no problem, the calls can wait.”
“C’m’ere, Ulysses, time’s burning,” Terry Zorn said from over by the bed. He had the handgun out of the case at that point and was clicking open the cylinder. The weapon made a clunking sound, which put a fine layer of gooseflesh along the backs of Maura’s arms.
Grove went back over to the bed and took the gun from Zorn. “Haven’t been on a range since I was in the army,” he muttered, pointing the stainless steel sidearm at the floor and gazing down its barrel. To Maura the revolver looked massive and intimidating, its barrel maybe eight inches long.
“Just like ridin’ a bike, old hoss,” Zorn said, digging in the case for something else.
Grove studied the gun. “What is this, a .38 Bulldog?”
“Charter Arms .357 magnum Tracker with hollow-point loads, liquid tip.”
To Maura’s untrained eye, Grove appeared to be proficient—albeit a little rusty—at handling the gun. “Single-action, right?” he asked, easing the cylinder back into the frame and locking it home with a click.
“No, sir, that’s a double-action weapon, just point and squeeze. And one shot will stop the hell outta this son of a bitch.”
Grove sighed. “Terry, is this necessary?”
“Yes, it’s necessary, and watch out you don’t shoot your foot off with it, or we’ll find your toes somewhere in the vicinity of China.”
“That’s lovely.”
The men spoke very fast, without humor, their nervous tension as thick as a veil drawing over the room. This made Maura all the more uneasy.
“Here, catch.” Zorn tossed him a leather harness sporting a holster and a couple of smaller compartments the size of change purses. “Put it on and keep it on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then Zorn threw him a couple of smaller objects that looked like tiny metal canisters of ball bearings. “Keep two speed-loaders in the belt, and a box of rounds in your suitcase.”
Grove asked Zorn if he had checked with customs about traveling with the firearms.
“We’re not flying commercial.” Zorn was securing his own holster-harness over his oxford shirt and tie, checking his own piece, which looked like an automatic to Maura. It was sleeker and made of brushed black metal. “Geisel scrambled a chopper out of Travis Air Force Base.”
Grove finally got all the weaponry strapped on properly, then shrugged on his suit jacket. “What’s the ETA?”
“Flight time’s about an hour, should be back on the ground before noon. Let’s move. They’re picking us up downstairs in ten minutes.”
Maura watched, marveling at how, even now, Grove seemed to maintain his grace under pressure. He still looked meticulously groomed, even after a sleepless night listening to the chatter of a bunch of overcaffeinated scholars. But the seams were starting to show. On his face, in his posture. Maura could see the exhaustion and stress darkening the skin aroun
d his eyes, slumping his shoulders.
He came over to Maura and touched her gently again on the arm. “This is a bad one,” he said. “They’re escalating, and we’ve got to stop this guy.”
“I understand, Ulysses, I completely understand.”
“Sorry to leave you with this mess.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just do me a favor and be careful.”
“Will do.” He gave her a quick smile and a pat. “Keep the professors talking, they’re giving us great stuff.”
“C’mon, partner,” Zorn called over his shoulder as he whisked past them and made for the door. “The scene’s gettin’ old and so are we.”
“I’ll call you,” Grove told her and touched her cheek, just a touch. Then he withdrew his hand very quickly as though second-guessing himself.
She wished him luck, then watched him walk out the door.
For a moment Maura lingered there in that empty room—feeling helpless and small and ridiculous in her one good dress—the echoes of clanging gunmetal in her ears. Then she went over to the door and peered around the corner.
The two profilers were already halfway down the corridor, making their way toward the bank of elevators. Zorn walked a few paces ahead of Grove, mumbling orders into his cell phone. Grove was checking his watch, the tails of his beautiful overcoat billowing behind him.
For one brief and awful instant, Maura County wondered—somewhat irrationally, perhaps—if she would ever see Ulysses Grove again.
14
The Beckoning
They were airborne by ten o’clock, lifting off the tarmac at Travis in a light drizzle, the intermittent gusts goosing the Huey Cobra like breaking waves. The chopper pilot was a ’Nam throwback named Zimmer with a jarhead Mohawk and steroid-rippled arms. He babbled ceaselessly the whole way, his voice blending with the droning roar of the blades, the shifting horizon reflecting off his mirrored aviator sunglasses. Grove and Zorn sat side by side on the gunner’s bench—in front of the pilot’s seat—like two overgrown children in a school bus. Through the grimy canopy glass they could see the world tumbling away in nauseating, glacially slow gyrations as the helicopter bored through the thick, changing atmosphere.
What should have been an hour-and-a-half trip turned into a three-hour thrill ride through all manner of spring weather. First it was the wind. It chased the Huey out of Travis, across the black spires of the Mendicino National Forest, and halfway up the western seaboard. The arrhythmic gales made the rivets groan. Rain lashed the bonnet, and Captain Zimmer had to two-hand the stick for nearly an hour, wrestling with the bucking bronco of an aircraft. Miraculously, neither Grove nor Zorn got sick. They simply spent most of the time giving each other looks, nervously glancing down at the convulsing treetops five hundred feet below them, occasionally grabbing hold of the bench seat’s torn leather edging for dear life.
At one point Grove called out over the din of rotor: “You thinking about putting her down?”
“What’s that?” Zimmer hollered.
“Flying a little low, aren’t ya?” Grove indicated the jagged precipice looming beneath them. It looked as though the landing skids were only inches away from scraping the granite. Grove’s gut wrenched with panic.
“That’s Mount Shasta, boys, take a good look!” The captain nodded down at the alien planet of craggy tundra rushing beneath them, and as he nodded the entire aircraft seemed to nod along with him, yawing to one side like a ship tossing on a stormy sea of air.
“I said, you’re flying a little low, aren’t ya!”
Zimmer smirked, his mirrored eyes flashing. “It’s the only way!”
“The only way for what!”
“For stayin’ under the wind!” The pilot cackled. “Used to do it back in the ’Nam, flying Cobras over the Mekong! Scared the bejesus outta the slopes!”
And it went like that for what seemed an eternity, but was, in fact, maybe an hour and a half, or maybe two hours at the most, until finally the wind settled into a steady barrage of rain against the Huey’s bulwark. Grove tried to concentrate on the Ackerman case as he sat there stiff and coiled, the safety harness cutting into his midsection, but his brain would not cooperate. A fireworks display assaulted his mind, the shards and shrapnel from his nightmares flashing at him with each bump—shadowy figures on a mountainside, an inhuman wail, an ash-handled flint dagger scraping the ice. Grove could feel the lump of the .357 magnum pressing against his kidney. What the hell am I doing with this firearm, he kept thinking, like I’m John Motherfucking Wayne or something?
The word enemy kept bubbling to the surface of Grove’s consciousness. How had de Lourde’s article on John George Haig put it? The voice of God had come out of the mummy and commanded Haig to perform cleansing rituals until the enemy is found. So maybe Haig was a nutcase who heard voices. But what enemy was he talking about? And what was the purpose of the ritual?
Somewhere over the Oregon border, as the chopper lurched and pitched over columns of swaying redwoods, the sky darkened so abruptly it was as though the aircraft had flown directly into a long tunnel. Grove felt the g-forces lift him out of his seat as the chopper dipped, and the light plunged away. Hazard lamps flickered on inside the fuselage. Day turned to night. Voices crackled out of Zimmer’s radio, and the pilot started communicating with people on the ground. Then the noise started. It sounded like firecrackers going off. The pilot yelled something, but Grove couldn’t understand a word.
“What!”
“Hail!” Zimmer yelled.
Zorn spoke up. “Is that a problem?”
The pilot was gritting his teeth. “Not unless we run into lightning!”
The next forty-five minutes or so were a blur. Grove and Zorn vise-gripped the seat frame as Zimmer fought the stick and commandeered the chopper through the tunnel of black sleet. The ice crystals tommy-gunned against the canopy, and the rotor shrieked. And for the first time during the flight, Captain Elvin Zimmer didn’t talk much.
They did eventually run into lightning but, luckily, not until the final leg of the journey, just as they were entering Takoma air space. Zimmer managed to put the craft down on the edge of an overgrown auxiliary airfield about fifty miles south of Fort Lewis, and when they finally touched down, the entire Huey creaking like old bones settling, Grove said a silent prayer of thanks. His skull was throbbing, and for some reason, right at that moment, as the heavens opened up above the base, and torrents came crashing down on the idling chopper, he thought of his mother. Which was strange because Grove rarely thought about his mom, but here he was again, thinking about Vida, and all her African mumbo jumbo, for the third or fourth time in as many days.
He remembered how Hannah used to write letters to the old lady, humoring her, asking her about Africa and the old days in the mother country. “You oughtta be inviting that woman over here more often, Uley, she’s your mama, for God’s sake,” Hannah would nag Grove, and he would just shake his head and give his wife mortified looks and absolutely refuse to have anything to do with the old woman and her primitive chicken-bone-and-feathers Nubian nonsense.
Grove shook off the memories as he extricated himself from the shoulder harness and climbed out of the aircraft.
The rain had risen to a full-fledged downpour, lightning strobing and popping every few seconds, tearing across the angry sky like the claws of a great beast. The two profilers splashed through puddles, hustling toward the main hangar holding newspapers over their heads.
“You don’t really buy any of that cow pucky, do ya?” Zorn called over the noise of the rain as they jogged along.
“What cow pucky is that?”
“Bad mojo comin’ off these mummies? Some innocent S-O-B comes along, gets infected by it?”
“The truth?”
“No, I want you to lie to me.”
“The truth is, I’ll buy anything at this point,” Grove yelled as lightning bloomed again all around them, momentarily turning everything into silent-movie slow-mo
tion.
The bureau escort was waiting for them in the hangar doorway. A paunchy veteran agent from Portland Community Relations named Karyn Flannery, the escort wore a frumpy raincoat and plastic scarf, and had a couple of spare umbrellas under one arm. She looked like a tough little gal, standing there, snapping her gum as the profilers approached, her hard eyes glinting.
“Gentlemen,” she said, indicating the far door, which led into a breezeway connecting the main building with the front entrance. “I know you’re probably in a hurry to get out to the scene.”
Zorn gave a nod at the heavens. “If the goddamn scene’s still there.”
She gave a shrug as she started toward the door. “Whatta ya gonna do? Washington state in the spring, right? Watch your step, gentlemen.”
A moment later they emerged from the building, hunching under their umbrellas as they trotted through the downpour toward Special Agent Flannery’s Jeep Cherokee. Zorn sat in the backseat, Grove sat shotgun. Flannery gunned the four-wheeler out of there in a gasp of exhaust vapors.
The thirty-minute trip down to the Regal Motel took them through Cowlitz County, a vast stretch of small towns and protected lands so densely forested the landscape swallowed whatever dim daylight managed to filter through the clouds. Riding swiftly along that two-lane highway, the wipers beating a counterrhythm to Flannery’s monotoned rundown of the scene logistics, Grove gazed through the rain-strafed window glass at the passing landscape. He knew he should be taking notes on Flannery’s thumbnail scene analysis, but instead he found himself thinking about fairy tales, “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” The dark woods always beckoned in those stories. Had they beckoned to Ackerman today? Was he out there skulking in the shadows?
Flannery was telling the profilers about the discovery of the victims in their guest rooms. Vancouver Homicide had not been certain about the matching signatures until they had started going through the doors, discovering that each victim exhibited the same apparent time-of-death and cause-of-death, and the same bizarre postmortem pose. It was officially the worst mass murder in southeastern Washington State history, and before the Olympia crime lab had even arrived at the scene, the Vancouver chief of detectives had put out a bulletin announcing to all divisions and media outlets that a man who was wanted by the FBI named Richard Conrad Ackerman was probably at large in their area and should be considered armed and very dangerous and very likely unstable. Photographs of Ackerman were ready in time for most of the morning news shows. The details of the murders—including the identities of the victims—were still being withheld pending notification of the victims’ families.
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