Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  Mathis reached over to a metal lockbox mounted next to the door, spun a few tumblers, and opened the lid. From inside the container she pulled out a couple of sealed packages. In one package was a sterile mask. In another was a pair of rubber surgical gloves. She handed the packages to Grove and nodded at them. “You have four minutes, Mr. Grove,” she announced without ceremony or emotion.

  The door wheezed open.

  Ulysses Grove took a deep breath, set down his attaché, put on the mask and gloves, then went inside the suite.

  He didn’t need four minutes. He didn’t even need four seconds. All he needed was one good look at that six-thousand-year-old corpse and everything changed. Everything rearranged itself inside Grove like tumblers in his brain clicking into some horrible new combination, altering his world forever, causing an icy rush of gooseflesh along his spine. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t move. All he did for several agonizing moments was stand there gazing down at that narrow stainless steel examination table in the center of that sterile room.

  The Iceman lay there in a pool of silver light, a runner of gauze beneath him and the metal table. Even to an uneducated eye it was obvious that this was an ancient cadaver, the skeletal arms and legs sheathed in flesh the color of burnt tobacco, so old it looked vacu-formed around the bones and tendons. The body was so well preserved its eyeballs were still intact—two overdone quail eggs gazing up emptily at the miracle-light of a future millennium. In life the mummy had been diminutive by modern standards—perhaps no more than five feet tall—with the prominent jaw of early Homo sapiens.

  But in death, it had taken on an eerie tableau of a toy posed by a disturbed child.

  Dizziness jumped on Grove again, and he reached for something to hold on to. There was nothing to grab—only the examination table—so he staggered slightly. Then he stood there, blinking away the bewilderment.

  One time when he was only eight years old, a group of class bullies lured him into the school gymnasium at night, locking him in, and then proceeding to torment him with ghostly projections shone through skylights with a jury-rigged slide projector. It had taken the young Ulysses over an hour to overcome his terror and analyze the situation, eventually figuring out the source of the “ghosts.” But during that hour, the utterly debilitating confusion had almost been worse than the fear. He hated not understanding something. And on that terrible night, especially during that first hour, he just kept on thinking, There’s an explanation, a logical explanation for this.

  He finally tore himself away from the mummy and turned toward the door.

  The latch clicked, and he stumbled into the outer room, nearly tripping into Lorraine Mathis’s arms. The scientist jerked away with a mortified look on her face. Maura County stepped forward with concern knitting her expression. “Ulysses, you look like you saw a ghost. What’s wrong?”

  Grove took another deep breath. He had to cope with another jolt of dizziness before he could speak. “The MRI . . . the one that told you it was a wrongful death.”

  Mathis frowned at him. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The MRI you did on the mummy.”

  “It was an X-ray actually,” Okuda chimed in. “We’re publishing a piece on it next month in Scientific American.”

  Grove looked at the young Asian. “Did it show a sharp trauma wound to the first cervical vertebra?”

  Okuda stared at him for a moment, then shot a glance at Mathis, who was staring at the profiler. The silence stretched.

  3

  Puzzle Box

  “It could have been anything—warfare, murder, a dispute over land,” Lorraine Mathis commented as she scuttled back and forth across her cluttered office. She already had her coat on, and was banging drawers and turning things off and generally making “leaving” noises. She had apparently run out of patience for Grove and his sudden, mysterious interest in the Iceman’s demise. “The anthropology part is all speculation, anyway,” she added with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And besides, I thought that was your bailiwick, Agent Grove.”

  Grove sat across the room, near the door, his attaché on his lap, his hands folded on top of the briefcase. He hadn’t revealed much about his stunning discovery in the wet containment room, but he could tell that all those present could sense his nervous excitement. “I’m just wondering what the pathology has been so far,” he said with monumental deference in his voice, trying to tease as much information as possible from the harridan of a director. “After all, I’m used to getting to crime scenes a little sooner than this.”

  Mathis showed no amusement in her heavily mascaraed eyes as she buttoned her coat. “I’ll have Michael make copies of the X-rays and the initial reports.”

  Grove told her that would be great.

  She looked at him. “Is that it?”

  Grove offered her a smile. “I’m wondering if there’s anything else you can tell me about the victim. The Iceman himself.”

  “In regard to what?”

  Grove shrugged. “I don’t know . . . in regard to background, I guess . . . cultural stuff.”

  The woman sighed as she slipped on a pair of elegant calfskin gloves. She looked like an impatient mother waiting for her children to clean their room.

  Maura County was perched next to Grove on a file cabinet, scribbling feverishly in her notebook. Okuda stood in the far corner, wringing his delicate little hands, taking everything in, looking a little shaky. The office was situated in the depths of the lower level, a four-hundred-square-foot swamp of paper and loose-leaf binders crammed into every available inch of shelf space. The stale air smelled of toner and ink and Mathis’s acrid perfume, and the glare of the overhead fluorescents only added to the stolid, institutional quality of the place.

  “I’m sorry, Agent Grove,” Mathis finally offered, “but I’m just not in tour-guide mode at present. You understand. I’ve got a funding committee breathing down my neck, and hearings coming up in June with the BLM and the Association of Indigenous Peoples over who owns the remains. I’m sure you see how my thoughts would be elsewhere.”

  Grove managed another placating smile. “I understand completely.”

  She went over to the door and paused, tying a scarf around her gray-streaked hair. “I hope your visit has given you everything you need. I’m afraid that’s probably the only time you’ll be able to see the artifact up close. There’s been far too many examinations, too many temperature fluctuations. My priority has always been with the find.” She flicked a terse smile at the room. “Michael will show you out. It was a pleasure meeting you, Agent Grove.”

  “Same here,” Grove told her.

  The director swished through the door, leaving a slipstream of tension flagging after her like a contrail. The door whispered shut, and the room remained silent for a moment as the latch clicked.

  Michael Okuda put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the floor.

  “I feel like I’ve offended her somehow,” Grove said to no one in particular.

  Okuda shook his head. “Not at all. Look. She’s really not normally this . . . brusk.”

  Grove waved it off. “It’s okay.”

  “She’s actually quite brilliant.”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “Certainly she can be difficult,” Okuda tried to explain. “And yes, she’s mistrustful of outsiders. But her work’s impeccable. Believe me.”

  Grove nodded. “I don’t doubt it.”

  “She’s just wary of outsiders coming in right now, with all the arbitration going on.”

  “Where does that stand?”

  “I’d put my money on the Native Americans,” Okuda mused as he crossed the room. He sat down on the edge of Mathis’s desk with a depleted sigh. His hands were shaking. “They’ve got the state constitution on their side. We’re trying to learn as much as possible while Keanu’s still here.”

  “Who?”

  Okuda smiled. “It’s a bad joke, really. Couple of guys up in Carbon Dati
ng—big Matrix fans—started calling him ‘Neo’ because of the neolithic aspect.”

  Grove was nonplussed, and Maura must have seen the look on his face because she stopped scribbling and said, “Neo was Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix movies.”

  Okuda’s grin lingered. “Yeah, and there was this joke going around the lab that the Iceman was just slightly more animated than Keanu Reeves. I guess the name just stuck. It’s pretty sophomoric.”

  Grove asked if pictures of the scene were taken.

  Okuda looked confused. “The scene?”

  “The crime scene, the place where the Iceman died.”

  Okuda thought about it for a moment and said he wasn’t sure but he might have seen some aerial photographs of that part of the glacier.

  “But there were no photographs taken before the body was moved?”

  “I think that’s correct. There are sketches though.”

  “Sketches?”

  “Yeah, the investigator from the State Police Homicide Unit, a guy named Pinsky—Lieutenant Alan Pinsky, I think his name was—he had the hikers draw sketches of the way the body was positioned when they found it.”

  There was a pause.

  Maura looked at Grove. “What happened in there, Ulysses?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” he said and rubbed his eyes. His head throbbed. A dagger of a migraine shot through his temples.

  “Do you mind if I ask how you knew about the sharp trauma wound? I don’t think I ever mentioned that in the e-mail, and they discovered it after the articles came out . . . so you’d have no way of knowing about that.”

  Grove looked at her and wondered how far he should take this, how much he should reveal. He felt exposed, out of control. These were new emotions for Grove. He was supposed to be merely killing time here in this remote world of rutted roads and weathered boardwalks . . . but now everything had changed. Fate had slithered into Grove’s world.

  The sound of a secretary pecking away at a keypad in an adjacent office drifted through the seams of the door. At last Grove looked at Okuda. “Is there somewhere we can go, maybe a place we can talk?”

  Night rolled in and flooded the hills and ice-crusted streets with indigo shadows.

  The parking lot of the Marriott Courtyard—barely visible through the front drapes of Maura County’s room—flickered in the cold, desolate light of sodium vapor lamps, which were winking on at odd intervals.

  She turned away from the window and went back into the small bathroom vestibule where her overnight things were spread across the counter. For some reason she had brought along her makeup kit in its little imitation leopard travel pouch. The kit contained a couple of different lipsticks, an eyeliner stick, a box of Q-tips, and a disc of blush-on that she hadn’t used in years. She looked at her pale face in the mirror. She felt ridiculous, trying to make herself pretty for her upcoming dinner with the profiler. She was a journalist, for Christ’s sake, and Grove was her subject. Plus, the man was married. Maura had noticed his wedding ring only minutes after meeting him.

  So why was she standing there, primping at the mirror like a high school girl on prom night? Whom was she trying to impress? A decade of failed relationships had reduced Maura to this—a desperate, needy woman looking for approbation in a world of fast-food relationships. In recent months she had even resorted to an Internet dating service with disastrous results. The last matchup was a creep from San Rafael rebounding from his second divorce. This loser had treated Maura to a live sex show at the O’Farrel, then a trip out to the Sybaris for a little light bondage and discipline. It was enough to turn a girl’s heart into burnt toast.

  She pulled her hair back in a tight ponytail and applied generous amounts of liner to each eye, trying to occupy her thoughts with the Iceman article. Grove’s strange reaction to the viewing of the mummy—as well as his mysterious behavior after ward—had not only mystified Maura, it also excited her, intrigued her. Occasionally an assignment will crack open like a Chinese puzzle box, and Maura had a feeling this one was about to do just that. She wasn’t sure how exactly, and Grove’s reluctance to explain until they met at dinner that night was a bit maddening, but Maura’s instincts told her that something important was unfolding.

  Her gaze drifted over to the photocopy taped to the edge of the mirror.

  When she had arrived at the motel earlier that day, she had spent some time organizing her notes and cassette tapes. She had brought along some Xeroxes of the mummy taken from her previous articles, and had taped a couple of the pictures around her room for inspiration. Now she gazed at that ancient face, and those parboiled, egg-white eyes gawking up at the black void of eons. There was something deeply disturbing about the expression preserved on that mummy’s leathery visage. At first it had looked like terror to Maura, or at least a kind of shock, contorting the Iceman’s features. But the longer Maura studied it, the more it looked like a sort of knowing stamped onto his face. But what did he know? What awful knowledge—

  Maura jumped at the sound of knocking.

  It took her a moment to steady herself before she made her way across the room.

  “You ready?” Ulysses Grove asked her after she had opened the door and greeted the profiler with a wan smile. Grove’s topcoat was buttoned to the neck, his collar raised against the evening chill.

  “Let me grab my coat and my tape recorder,” she said, and started toward the bed, where her notes were fanned out across the cheap taffeta spread.

  “Um . . . about the tape recorder,” Grove said from the doorway.

  Maura spun around. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave it in the room.”

  She looked at him. “So this is off the record now?”

  “Something like that.”

  She licked her lips. “Okay, but promise me something: whatever it is, whatever you saw in that lab today, you’ll give me an exclusive on it . . . when you’re ready.”

  After a beat, Grove smiled and said, “Let’s go spend some of your magazine’s money.”

  They walked across the street to a place called the Black Bear Lounge.

  The broken neon Schaffer beer sign over the massive, worm-eaten oak door should have been a clue to Maura as to what they would find inside. It was one of those dark, moldy taverns that masqueraded as a restaurant—the kind you find in every American college town—with the butcher-block booths, Tiffany lamps, and peanut shells on the floor. A few antler chandeliers and crisscrossed snowshoes added local color. But mostly it was a place for coeds to come and pound some beers.

  Okuda was waiting for them at the hostess stand. Grove asked the hostess if they could have a table in the rear. The peroxide-blond matron led the threesome through the malty shadows as the Rolling Stones pondered with thunderous volume why brown sugar tasted so good.

  They settled into a booth in the far corner and ordered a round.

  After the drinks arrived—a draft for Okuda, a glass of pinot grigio for Maura, a single malt scotch, neat, for Grove—Maura asked Grove if he was going to tell them what was going on, or if he was going to keep them in suspense forever, and Grove replied, after taking a sip of his Glenlivet, that the information he was about to give them was not for public consumption. He looked directly at Maura as he explained that it was highly irregular for bureau personnel to reveal the facts of an active investigation, and Maura felt a twinge of defensiveness. Not only was she a consummate professional when it came to discretion, but the chances of somebody in law enforcement actually noticing one of Maura’s articles in Discover seemed fairly remote.

  After a long pause Grove finally told them about a series of murders he had been investigating. Unlike most serial killers—who reflect some type of identifiable psychosexual need or fetish in their crimes—this guy, even after seven murders, was still a complete mystery, and one of the toughest cases Grove had ever encountered. Grove described the manner in which the killer apparently hunted his random victims, then
dispatched them with some sort of sharp weapon, a spear or a sword. Then, in a low, almost pedantic drone, like a teacher informing students of their failing grades, Grove elaborated on the postmortem staging and posing.

  “Good God,” Maura uttered without really being aware of her own voice in her ears.

  “It’s a coincidence,” Okuda blurted, his dark eyes shimmering and fixed on Grove.

  Grove shrugged. “I’ll show you the forensic photos from the last scene, and you tell me whether that raised arm, that supine position, and that wound in the neck—all of it—you tell me whether it’s all just a coincidence.”

  “It’s not possible, is it?” Maura asked.

  Another shrug from Grove.

  “What are we talking about here?” Okuda wanted to know.

  Grove looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . you’re telling us you’re investigating a series of homicides that have a similar—what do you call it?”

  “Signature, pattern.”

  “Signature, right . . . which means, what, the victims ended up looking a lot like Keanu?”

  Grove corrected the young Asian. “Not ‘a lot.’ They’re identical.”

  A cold finger touched Maura’s spine all of a sudden—the way the profiler said the word identical, with that cutting gaze, and those almond eyes set deep in that sculpted brown face. For years, Maura County had found refuge, and perhaps even solitude, in the protective coating of history. Pain and savagery were an abstraction. But now, all at once, this assignment had become more than mere petrified bones and frozen flesh. In the space of an instant, the subject had turned to the here and now, and real grief, and warm blood and electric shock. And the change rattled the journalist.

  She glanced over at Okuda and saw the incredulous look in the young scientist’s eyes. “I still don’t understand how you can rule out coincidence,” he said after swallowing a gulp of lager and stifling a belch.

  “Technically you’re right,” Grove replied with another shrug, “but the truth is, in this business you follow everything out to its logical conclusion.”