Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  The worst part, the part that nearly choked the breath out of Grove, was the fact that all this was probably done for his benefit. It was a sick, scrambled message to him. Ackerman wanted him.

  “Don’t do this to me !”

  Grove’s primal scream shook the air, shook him, nearly popped a blood vessel in his head. He was out of breath and stood there for a moment, shaking, trying to figure out what to do next. Call the cops? No. The local bureau field office? No way. Not yet. Not until he could get a handle on this, get a handle on himself, on his emotions.

  When it was painfully obvious that he was alone in the mortified condo, he eased his grip on the gun and let it fall to his side.

  23

  Cold Linkage

  He paced the living room, limping back and forth across the front window, trying to engage his investigative instincts. Before he called the crime lab in, before he turned the place into a circus, he had to get it fresh, get whatever he could get. Finally he went back over to the front door.

  Careful not to arouse any suspicions from nosy neighbors, he slipped outside, then descended the narrow steps. The cool, moist air on his face was a hideous taunting slap. He went over to the car.

  He dug the briefcase out of the suit bag with trembling hands. His tools were in there—he needed them now. He needed them to think.

  Back up the steps. Back inside. The clunk of the dead bolt sealing him in that horrible silent mess.

  The writing on the wall disturbed him the most, fixated him the most. He couldn’t bring himself to think about Maura’s blood loss. The realization swam around like a shark beneath the hectic currents of his consciousness—that was her blood up there, across the floor.

  There was a lot of it.

  Most of the writing was illegible—slash marks, smudges, and splatter patterns—but some of the words or fragments of words scrawled like crimson ribbons across the plaster molding and baseboards strummed a familiar chord inside Grove: un una gu susa unna se enu un enuna—

  —the same diphthongs and sibilants that had spewed out of the rotting mouth of a madman in a cave. Nonsense words? Crazy bullshit or something important? Grove’s mind was an engine revving impotently, seizing up without oil, without the lubricant of calm.

  Settle down, settle, come on, think.

  He should take some pictures of the scene. That’s what he should do. He knelt down on one of the stained Persian rugs and shoved the gun behind his belt. He fumbled with the clasps on the attaché.

  He froze.

  The briefcase was vibrating. It felt as if bees were in there in a frenzy. And for an insane instant Grove actually was afraid to open the case.

  Then he remembered why the case vibrated once in a while and opened it up, holding it precariously on his knee, hands still shaking.

  His phone was telling him it had at least two stored messages waiting. It buzzed like a hair clipper. Grove picked it up and tossed it across the room.

  The phone bounced against the wall but didn’t break. It slid under the couch.

  He fumbled for the rubber gloves. Awkward moments stretching them onto his wounded hands. He was bleeding. The attaché tipped and one of the spiral notebooks tumbled out, dropping to the floor.

  “Goddamnit!”

  He hurled the briefcase across the room. It flipped once and skidded upside down across the hardwood. The contents spilled across the floor—the Blackberry, the notebooks, the tape recorder, the cotton gloves, the case folders, the Polaroid camera, the lucky charm in its little pouch.

  Grove put his face in his hands and swallowed the urge to scream.

  A noise made him jump.

  His cell phone was trilling under the sofa.

  Grove took deep breaths. Swallowed acid. Girding himself. Something cold and sharp stabbing his gut. Intuition again? You should answer the phone. A bitter, ironic voice deep within him: It’s Ackerman calling, you idiot, he’s watching, you’ve got to answer it!

  Rising to his feet, he managed to lurch across the room to the couch, bend down, and retrieve the phone. It vibrated in his gloved hand.

  “G-Grove,” he croaked into the cell after thumbing the Answer button.

  The voice was shrill and familiar: “Ulysses, Jesus, we’ve been trying to reach you for hours, it’s Mike Okuda, where have you been?”

  “Who?”

  “Michael Okuda, from the Schleimann Lab. I’m sorry, it’s just that we’ve made this amazing—I don’t know what you would call it—discovery, I guess. Hello? You still there? Can you hear me?”

  Grove could barely speak. “Who’s we?”

  “What? Oh, um, I’m sorry, I’m talking about me and Professor de Lourde, and Father Carrigan, from the conference, from Maura’s meeting.”

  Grove said, “What do you want? I have to go, I have a situation—”

  “Look, I know we’re kind of out of bounds here, but we had to be sure, okay, before we went down this road, all right, so . . . look, I’m not making any sense. Father Carrigan had a theory. So we got a sample of your blood from the hospital, and we had a sequence done on it—”

  Grove gripped the cell phone hard enough to crack it. “You what? You what!”

  “Ulysses, listen to me. It’s the same. It’s a perfect match to Keanu’s DNA. Did you hear what I said? Hello?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense. But the DNA never lies. The fact is, you’re a genetic descendent.”

  Grove was paralyzed. “A what?”

  The voice crackled: “A genetic descendent—of the mummy, is what I’m talking about.”

  Grove said nothing. A pang in his hip made him sniff back the urge to scream.

  “You have the same DNA, Ulysses. Which sort of brings me to Father Carrigan’s theory. Are you ready for this? Ulysses?”

  Grove was staring at the floor—at the clutter of investigative tools fanning out from the fallen, overturned briefcase.

  “Ulysses? You there?”

  Grove could not speak. All he could do was stare at the upended briefcase.

  The spiral notebooks lay there, cryptic ballpoint doodles slathered across their covers, the Blackberry Palm Pilot lying cracked open like a dead beetle, the cotton gloves spidered here and there, the good luck charm in the corner.

  The linkage suddenly engaged in Grove’s brain like a pulley clasping on to a roller-coaster car.

  “He was hunting somebody,” Grove uttered under his breath, his voice barely audible as he continued to gaze at his personal effects on the floor.

  The voice in his ear: “What did you just say?”

  Ulysses said very softly, “He was an investigator. Just like me. They all were. The mummies—they were hunting killers just like me.”

  After a long, long pause, Okuda’s voice crackled: “How the hell did you know that?”

  24

  Legacy

  Grove’s ability to make cerebral leaps was legendary among bureau insiders. His brain seemed to be wired visually. When he was barely two months old, Vida noticed his acuity with shapes and colors. Then came the visions, which Grove shared with no one. But he knew—even at an early age—that they were more than mere hallucinations. In the military, he scored off the charts on the requisite psych exams—thematic apperception and symbol-image-symbol. His visual acumen reached its apex in the midnineties. He caught Keith Hunter Jesperson after staring at a happy face sticker on the wall of a truck stop restroom. He led authorities to Anatoly Onoprienko after gazing at a wedding ring on the finger of a prostitute. He never explained the macabre shadow-plays that danced before his eyes at those moments. He never told anybody at the bureau about his visions. How could he? But he found himself using them. He used visions and dream images as the mathematician uses equations. As the wizard uses runes.

  Standing in that blood-spattered condominium, staring at the contents of his briefcase strewn across the hardwood floor, his wounds burning and itching furiously, Grove experienced another vis
ual epiphany.

  All the loose ends of the past months swam before his field of vision like a graphic animation of swirling DNA strands spontaneously reconstituting themselves—the dizzy spells that accompanied each crime scene, the strange familiarity of a Copper Age mummy, the recurring vision of inhabiting the body of a neolithic mountaineer, the inexplicable behavior of Richard Ackerman, and the insane ramblings of an eccentric Jesuit priest. In the half-light of the condo Grove saw the spilled contents of his briefcase morphing like items carved out of candle wax, melting and reforming, taking the shape of ancient artifacts that he had seen arrayed across an examination table at the Schleimann Lab.

  A ballpoint pen became an onyx arrowhead. A spiral-bound notebook became a curled tube of birch bark. Cotton gloves became bound hanks of dried grass. A Palm Pilot became a lizard’s foot, and a .357 magnum revolver became an ash-handled flint dagger. Finally Grove saw in the gloomy stillness the last item transmuting: an old key chain that Hannah had given him for luck, a powerful talisman, changing into a saber-toothed medallion on the end of a leather thong—a prehistoric charm to ward off evil. One medicine bundle transforming into another.

  “Ulysses? Ulysses! Are you there?”

  The tinny sound of Okuda’s voice rattled in the cell phone’s earpiece. Grove didn’t move for a long time, didn’t say anything, didn’t even avert his gaze from the items spilled across the floor, which had suddenly changed back to their prosaic selves.

  “Hello? Hello!”

  Grove hurled the cell phone against the wall, shattering it, the shards and fragments bouncing back at him. A flake of plastic got stuck in his dark hair. He wiped it away, then sniffed back the pain in his hands.

  He went over to the sofa where he had laid his weapon. He peeled off his rubber gloves and tossed them aside. His brain was a furnace. He snatched up the gun and checked its cylinder. Six rounds. He shoved the gun down the back of his belt. Then he went over to the corner where the lucky key chain lay. He picked it up. Put it in his pocket. Grabbed the folder with Okuda’s topographic maps and diagrams, and stuffed it inside his jacket.

  Then he went over to the phone mounted on the wall near the kitchen door.

  A handkerchief over his hand to preserve any prints. Then he punched out 9-1-1. When the local emergency operator came on, Grove spoke clearly and rapidly, “Listen to me very carefully because I’m going to say this only once—”

  “Sir—”

  “I said listen to me very carefully, and if you miss something, use the transcript tape. Okay, now I want you to send a unit, a CS lab tech, and somebody from the local bureau field office—”

  “Sir, I’m going to need you to—”

  “Listen to me or I will hang up, and I will see that you go before IAB and probably lose your job. Now what I said was, I need you to send these units to the following address, 2217 Madera Drive in Corte Madera, and the door will be open, and it is now the scene of an apparent kidnapping. Now do your fucking job!”

  Click!

  And then he was on his way across the room. Bang! The door bursting open. Into the chill sea air. Down the narrow, weathered stairs. Around the front of the sedan. Wrenching open the door, slipping behind the wheel. He repositioned the .357 around his hip so that it wasn’t pressing against his bandage, then started the car.

  Gunning it out of there, he roared away in a thundercloud of exhaust.

  A casual observer, perhaps peering through the curtains of an adjacent condominium, watching Grove boom away, would very likely conclude that the man seemed to know exactly what he had to do, and where he had to go to get it done.

  PART IV

  THE SUMMONING

  “On the path that leads to Nowhere I have found my soul.”

  —Corrine Roosevelt Robins

  25

  Blood and Turpentine

  Long after the Sun City case had been relegated to the annals of law enforcement legend—not to mention the tawdry pages of yellow journals and sensationalist tabloids—Grove’s flight would be much debated, fervidly analyzed and argued over. The truth of the journey was much simpler than history would have people believe.

  The truth of the matter was that Grove did not flee the scene in Corte Madera in any way—although technically he was no longer an agent of the law, thus making his disappearance problematic for the bureau, the Justice Department, and their legal representatives. In the inevitable civil cases that followed, Tom Geisel argued under oath that Grove was simply pursuing unfinished business—acting, as always, in a consultative capacity. The urgent nature of the trip was officially played down. The portrait of Ulysses Grove painted for the courts was one of a methodical perfectionist. No mention was made of his visions, or his relationship with the hostage, or his unorthodox presentations to the bureau brass, or even how he had drawn his conclusions that Ackerman had returned to Alaska, to Lake Clark National Park, to the place where he had first encountered the Iceman.

  The truth is, the reality of those frenzied twelve hours after the discovery of Maura County’s savaged condominium—during which time Grove consumed a grand total of eight codeine tablets—would be difficult to explain to a court.

  Grove proceeded directly to San Francisco International that evening, and got lucky. There was one remaining flight to Anchorage about to push off from the Jetway at 7:41 p.m., and Grove convinced the desk clerk that he had urgent government business up there, and he needed to be rushed through security. His gun had been safely tucked into his luggage, and he flashed an old bureau business card that he had found in his wallet. They let him on at the last minute.

  He had no way of knowing—at least, with any degree of certainty—that Maura County was still alive, or that Ackerman had retreated to Alaska. At the rental car place outside the airport, he made one hasty phone call to an old friend who worked at FBI headquarters in Washington, and asked if anything had come through the wire room—or the wire rooms of field offices in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, or Anchorage—which had the aroma of Sun City. Normann Pokorny, Grove’s friend in Latent Prints, reported that there had been dozens of calls, maybe even a hundred or more throughout the day, regarding sightings or suspicious behavior that smacked of Ackerman. But Tactical Commander Simms and most of the field office managers working in the Pacific Northwest had pretty much discounted the majority of the calls as either pranks or dead ends. Grove had asked Pokorny if there were any calls that were being taken seriously, and Pokorny had said he only knew of two. One was from an Oregon state trooper who had spotted a sign painter’s van that had been reported stolen speeding north on Highway 5. The trooper had subsequently lost the van. But later, a call had come in from the Royal Canadian Police in British Columbia, reporting a vehicle matching that description breaking through a roadblock on a northern provincial highway.

  It didn’t take long for Grove to triangulate the information, a luminous arrow slashing across his mind-screen—the kidnapping in San Francisco, the trooper’s discovery on Highway 5, and the roadblock in British Columbia—forming a straight line toward Alaska. But even without the eyewitness reports, Grove probably would have returned to the great rugged North, the scene of the original crime, because he believed that Alaska was the only place on earth where he had any chance of resolving the case. And there would have been no way to explain that to anyone—especially bureau personnel—without appearing insane.

  Grove was painfully aware that he was violating every procedure in the book by not calling in the feds, by leaving the scene in Corte Madera, by going on this insane trek across hundreds of miles on sheer intuition. But he also had the epiphany. He knew what the Mount Cairn Iceman had been doing on that mountainside six thousand years ago. Perhaps he knew what all the mummies had been doing.

  Hunting killers.

  Grove now believed that each of the mummies had been ambushed somehow in the heat of pursuit. Perhaps the killer had doubled back on them. The pose was still undetermined. Grove could not make much sen
se of Father Carrigan’s theory that it was a “summoning.” But that didn’t matter anymore. Grove believed that there was only one chance to save Maura. One chance to bring this thing to a close. One chance.

  Something that would never be known to the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility—or any of the reporters, journalists, or hacks writing about the case in the coming years—was that Grove never once doubted his theory. Never once second-guessed himself. Even sitting in that small, prop-driven airliner with its engines roaring so loudly that the single flight attendant had to shout to ask if anyone wanted a bag of peanuts. He never once considered that he might be wrong.

  The night flight to Anchorage can seem endless to the uninitiated. For five excruciating hours a turboprop aircraft bumps and pitches and yaws on a northwestern vector over the black sky above Vancouver, then banks north across the wilds of the Cariboo Chilcotin Coastal Range, then skirts the western edge of British Columbia, and finally crosses the endless black Pacific Ocean before beginning its descent into Alaskan air space over the Aleutian Islands.

  Strapped into a seat in the rear of the business-class aisle, Grove hardly noticed the passage of time.

  He was in a zone now, studying maps that Okuda had prepared for him, ignoring the burning pain down his side and along the tendons of his mangled wrists, ruminating over Maura and praying that she was still alive.

  She fought against the currents of her own black ocean, struggling to lift her face above the waterline, to gasp a lung full of air, but it was very difficult, very difficult, and she figured instead she would just give up—instead of living, instead of fighting, she would just sink into the cold, empty depths.

  Some distant, buried part of her psyche realized that she was not in the sea at all. She was actually in a vehicle. She was actually lying facedown on the cold, corrugated floor of an Econoline panel van in her underwear, her hands bound behind her, her elbows and breasts and tummy stuck to the floor in a drying puddle of her own blood.