Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  “But where’s the logic here?”

  Grove regarded the watermarks on the stained tabletop. “All we have right now is a connection, a visual connection, and that’s all.”

  “Okay . . . so?”

  “We might be dealing with some sort of ritual, some sort of cult thing that gets its inspiration from ancient man.”

  Okuda looked away for a moment, thinking, and Maura saw something glint in the young Asian’s eyes. Grove saw it, too, but didn’t comment. Okuda’s hands were trembling again. Grove wondered how a young man with such pronounced tremors could do delicate slide work at a microscope or finesse a brittle, priceless artifact—regardless of whether the shaking was a simple nervous tic or some kind of reaction to the current turn the conversation was taking.

  “On the other hand,” Grove said, “you’ve got to look at the possibility of a copycat situation.”

  Maura perked up. “But how would anybody—”

  “Pictures have been published, correct? Photographs, maps, diagrams. Shots of the mummy’s position, the pose.”

  Maura thought about it for a moment. “What are you saying? Some sicko saw the Iceman in Discover and decided to recreate the death over and over again?”

  “It’s a possibility we have to look at.”

  Okuda looked up at Grove. “What else?”

  Grove let out a sigh. “What else? Well, there’s the X-factor.”

  “Which means?”

  “The X-factor is a connection we haven’t figured out yet.”

  “What other possible connection could there be?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “We’re talking about the early Copper Age here,” Okuda reminded him.

  “I understand that—”

  “That’s six thousand years ago. Okay? They were just figuring out how to use the wheel.”

  “If you don’t mind, what I’d like you to do is tell me everything.”

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

  “Tell me about that time, and this guy, this Iceman, who he was, tell me everything.”

  Okuda slumped as though he had just been asked to swim the English Channel with an anchor around his neck. “It’s kind of a big subject, Ulysses.”

  Grove flashed his smile. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  They went through that first round of drinks pretty rapidly as Okuda described what the world was like six thousand years ago. The bar began to fill up with rowdy college kids, as well as grizzled townies looking to drown some sorrows on a lonely weeknight. The jukebox seemed to get louder and louder with each banal pop song, and Okuda had to strain his voice to be heard. He explained that the consensus among archaeologists was that the Iceman was European, or at least a native of Central Asia, who had reached the North American continent across the Bering Strait. From the tools found near his body, chances were good that he was a mountaineer. Maybe some sort of itinerant.

  At some point, the waitress returned to ask if they wanted to order food. Nobody was hungry, but they did order another round of drinks. After the waitress had trundled off, Okuda said, “He might have been a shaman, somebody who went from village to village, healing people. . . you know.”

  Grove looked at him. “A medicine man, is what you’re saying?”

  Okuda nodded. “That’s why the Copper Age is such a fascinating period—anthropologically speaking—because basically, before then, there was no such thing as a métier or specialty.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “People basically did everything for themselves before the Copper Age. They farmed, they took care of their kids, they built their own shelters, they hunted, they basically did everything. But right around four thousand BC, people started developing specialties.”

  “You’re talking about occupations?”

  “Exactly. One guy would come and build stuff for you, another guy was good at making tools, another guy could repair things. This changed everything.”

  Grove was pondering, swirling the ice cubes in his glass of scotch. “A traveling medicine man.”

  “It’s all speculation, of course,” Okuda went on, “but we can tell a lot from the artifacts that were found on him and around him. He was so well preserved in that snow capsule, we recovered a lot of stuff that just blew the lid off conventional thinking. Like the axe blade.”

  “What about it?”

  Okuda’s eyes practically twinkled. “Up until now we thought axe blades from that era were all primitive and flat, pounded on rocks. But Keanu’s is flanged, with ridges, very advanced. It’s like digging up the tomb of a medieval warrior and finding a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

  “Do you know anything about his language, his culture, his religious beliefs?”

  “Again it’s all guesswork, but chances are he spoke a language called Indo-European. Basically most European languages come from this parent language. In terms of religion, polytheistic is my guess, especially when you consider the tattoos.”

  “Tell me about the tattoos.”

  “They’re not like today’s tattoos, which are pretty much simple ornamentation—‘mom’ and ‘born to lose’ and whatever. Keanu’s tattoos were located in hidden places like his lower back and on the inner part of his ankle. Which suggests—to me, at least—that they’re designed to give him some sort of supernatural power or protection.”

  The waitress returned with the drinks. Maura watched Grove. The profiler was thinking, gazing off into the fragrant shadows, as the waitress awkwardly cleared the empties and replaced them with fresh drinks. The silence hung over the table like a pall, and for a long time after that, and throughout most of the remaining conversation, Maura found herself wondering what was going on inside Grove’s head.

  What dark vein had they tapped?

  The wind sluices down the dark corridor of skeletal trees. It whistles past the shaman like a banshee howling in his ears. He takes one step at a time, his grass-netted boots sinking into the snow up to his knee. His feet are numb, and he can barely see his hand in front of his face as he climbs the crevasse. He’s almost there. Almost at the plateau.

  He pauses to catch his breath.

  Gazing back over his shoulder, he sees the valley of larch trees spreading off into the distance like a great animal skin draped over the land. The sun lies on the horizon in streaks of magenta and gold. The temperature is dropping. It will be dark soon, and the darkness brings with it new dangers. He must hurry now.

  He hears the scream again. It starts out low, as always, coming from a great distance, then rising in one great ululating howl that pierces the wind and echoes down across the valley. It is a primal death wail—half animal, half human—that penetrates the shaman’s marrow and shoots through his soul like a sudden ZZZZZAP!

  “What!”

  Grove’s eyes jerked open in the dark room, his face pressed against the pillow, the linens bunched at his feet.

  Pale moonlight seeped into his motel room from somewhere off to his right. He shivered. The night-sweat dampening his sheets had chilled in an icy, inexplicable draft. He could still hear that keening sound from his dream, the horrible shrieking, and the beating of his own heart.

  He lay there for an awkward moment, waiting for blessed reality to drive the nightmare away. But something nagged at the back of his brain. He blinked. He stared at the darkness around him. Particles floated in the gloom. At first they appeared merely as spots drifting across his sleepy, compromised vision. Artifacts. Like specks on the backs of his dilated pupils. But the more he gazed at the darkness, the more he realized he was witnessing something far more corporeal than an optical illusion.

  Snow.

  It was snowing in his motel room. Grove swallowed dryly and clutched at the bedsheets. He glanced around the room and realized the walls had vanished. His heart quickened as he quickly registered several indisputable facts: somehow, in some spontaneous shifting of realities, his tousled bed now sat in a snowdrift on the side of a great primo
rdial mountain, a sheer granite cliff rising up into the night sky behind his pathetic little veneer headboard.

  Grove sucked in a startled breath—the air icy in his lungs.

  A neolithic moon shone down on the alpine wilderness around him like a sinister, luminous face; and a gelid, angry wind swirled around Grove’s ludicrous, incongruous bed. His breath halted. The strangest part—the part that would be most difficult to explain to the uninitiated—was that Grove had experienced moments like this throughout his life, especially during times of great stress. Like the time when he was twelve and he saw a premonition of his best friend’s death by a hit-and-run drunk driver . . . or that time in basic training when he awoke one night to find himself chained to the lower deck of an eighteenth-century slave ship. Over the years, Grove had learned how to suppress the visions with little physical tricks, like a person with Tourette’s syndrome learning to bite his tongue or breathe more steadily.

  Without thinking, Grove suddenly did the one thing that he had always done as a child when such visions plagued him at night: he closed his eyes.

  In the blind darkness Grove felt—or perhaps sensed is a better word—a sudden, atmospheric whoomp, followed by a great inhalation of breath as the air pressure in the room seemed to return to normal. When he opened his eyes, he was back in his cheap Marriott single smoker, dimly illuminated by the predawn light coming through the dusty venetian blinds.

  Grove glanced around the room at the particleboard desk to his left, his suit neatly draped over the back of an armchair, the twenty-four-inch Sony mounted on a swivel to his right. He drank in all the insipid details like a seasick mariner gaping at the horizon line, clinging to the promise of dry land. He could see the tiny red night-light in the bathroom, and he could see his cell phone sitting in its charger near a tented pay-TV movie schedule. For some reason the sight of that little green dot glowing on his phone charger brought him back to reality. He let out a long, pained breath.

  He sat up. Clad only in his underwear, he noticed his entire body was rashed with gooseflesh. His teeth ached. His head throbbed, and needles of sleep still numbed his bare feet. He glanced over and saw the digital clock radio on the far bedside table.

  It said 3:11 a.m.

  He let out another long sigh. It had only been a couple of hours since he had stumbled back to his motel room from the Black Bear Lounge. But he felt as though he had been on a long, arduous journey since then. Now is not the time, he silently scolded himself. Put it away, forget about it. You got bigger fish to fry. You got a mummy with the same signature as an open case. Just stick with reality and do your job and forget the damn visions.

  But “vision” was a woefully insufficient word for what he had just experienced—something he had been experiencing off and on since elementary school. “Dimensional shift” was closer, although the sound of that phrase still rang a tad “woo-woo” for Grove’s forensic mind. Perhaps “neurological episode” came the closest. Not that these crazy spells had ever been given a diagnosis. These visions would always remain the province of Grove’s secret world.

  He got up and got dressed. It was time to call Tom Geisel and tell him about the Iceman. But before Grove had a chance to punch Geisel’s number into the bedside phone, he realized it was still a tad early for a phone call to Virginia.

  Another placard tented on top of the TV promised guests a delicious continental breakfast in the lobby every morning from four o’clock until ten o’clock.

  Grove went down to the deserted lobby and found a meager buffet set up along one side of the room that included miniature cereal boxes, a large plastic bowl filled with ice and small sealed containers of milk and orange juice, and a big stainless steel tureen of Seattle’s Best coffee. Grove filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and sat alone at a round table, reading the morning edition of USA Today while CNN droned through a wall-mounted television.

  At nine o’clock Grove went back up to his room and placed a call to Geisel’s private residence in Fredericksburg.

  “So how’s the mummy business going?” Geisel wanted to know after the two men had exchanged good mornings.

  “The mummy business is good, actually,” Grove told him. “Better than I thought.”

  “Excellent.”

  A long pause.

  “Tom . . . are you sitting down?”

  PART II

  THE DOORWAY

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / That are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  4

  Dark Side of the Moon

  The innocuous high-rise stood on a peaceful street corner in the sleepy bedroom community of Reston, Virginia. Insiders called it the Annex, a massive conical pile of mirrored glass and iron gridwork rising up against the robin’s-egg-blue sky. Soccer moms in SUVs and kids on skateboards clattered by its unmarked facades, oblivious of the grim proceedings going on inside, the gruesome slide shows and morbid death talk.

  The bureau had moved its administrative overflow here in 2002, amid the paranoid post 9-11 funding boom, and nowadays the corridors buzzed with ceaseless activity. The Behavioral Science Unit had an operations office here, a six-agent group headed up by Terry Zorn.

  “That’s a helluva theory,” Zorn was marveling in his corner office, leaning back on his swivel chair behind his cluttered desk, a wireless headset connecting him with Tom Geisel over at headquarters. Fluorescent tubes shone down on Zorn’s meticulously shaved cranium.

  “And that’s all it is, Terry,” Geisel’s voice buzzed in the earpiece. “Matter of fact, I’m not even sure there’s a theory involved. At this point it’s essentially just an observation, an interesting wrinkle.”

  “I remember when they discovered that damn thing, I recall reading an article about it—where was it, maybe in National Geographic?”

  “Anyway . . . that’s the situation up there.”

  “What does he want, Tom?”

  “He wants to work the case. He wants to play this mummy thing out.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s my fault, actually. I sent him up there. Who knew, right? He’s a good man, Terry.”

  “Damn straight he’s a good man, he’s a goddamn prodigy. If he said there’s a connection between the Sun City perp and the Easter bunny, I’d believe him.”

  On the other end of the line Geisel let out a sigh. It was an exasperated sound, the kind of noise a coach makes when a game becomes hopeless, and Zorn secretly delighted in the sound. At the age of forty, one of the youngest profilers in the division, Zorn was a mover, a bundle of ambition, from the top of his stylish bald head down to his thousand-dollar lizard cowboy boots. Originally from Amarillo, with a bachelor’s from Texas A&M and a master’s from Yale, he still spoke with a faint drawl. Cops loved him. At crime scenes he played the good old boy sleuth to the hilt.

  “I’m not saying I don’t have faith in the man,” Geisel finally murmured in a low tone. “For all I know, this mummy holds the key to Sun City. Just like Grove claims. What I’m saying is, we’ve had Grove on the case for twelve months now, and he’s up there operating all alone, no other perspective. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Y ’all want me to go there.”

  “I know you’ve got a hellacious workload, Terry, and the review’s coming down the line.”

  “Don’t give it another thought, Tom. I’ll be on the first flight out tomorrow morning.”

  “I really appreciate it, Terry.”

  “How’d you leave it with Ulysses?”

  “He asked me if I could send help, and I told him I’d ask you.”

  “Outstanding, Tom.”

  “Which reminds me, Terry . . .”

  There was a pause then, and Zorn waited. He knew the old man had a soft spot for Grove, and it was probably killing the director to undermine his golden boy. But it was also obvious to Zorn that Grove’s days were coming to an end. The Great Ulysses Grove had finally blown a gasket, and was up t
here in the wilds of Alaska, picking apart some cockamamie fossil when he should be working on a rapid-response plan for the next Sun City crime scene.

  Zorn said, “What is it?”

  The pause went on for another beat. Another sigh. “Terry, I’m sending you up there in an official capacity of second banana on this mummy thing. You take orders from Grove. You’re there to help. Ostensibly. But unofficially . . . I want you to keep tabs. Reign this thing back in. Get Grove back on track with Sun City, if you can. Bottom line is, you’re my guy. You’re my eyes and ears up there. Does that make any sense?”

  Zorn smiled to himself. “It makes perfect sense, Tom.”

  Grove spent the rest of that day learning everything he could about the Iceman. He went to the graduate archaeology library with Okuda, and underwent a primer in early Copper Age man. He snuck back into the Schleimann Lab and took another look—albeit through layers of hermetically sealed glass—at the mummy. He took digital pictures of the thing and found himself staring for inordinate amounts of time at the Iceman’s leathery face. There was something about that face, and those gaping, waxen eyes, that transfixed Grove. Maybe it was the nightmare he had had the previous night, or perhaps it was the matching victimology. But something about the expression frozen onto the mummy’s face fascinated Grove.

  He mentioned this to Okuda, who commented that he thought the expression cemented onto the mummy’s face was a clue as to how the Iceman had died. Okuda believed that the mummy was a victim of human sacrifice. Copper Age humans worshipped many nature gods, including mountain deities, and believed in the significance of sacrificial offerings in order to affect the weather, the harvest, even the birth rate. This was known now, according to Okuda, because of the fossil record, and because of the tools, belongings, and implements that had been found alongside mummies such as Keanu. Plus, recent CT scans and three-dimensional computer imaging of the mummy’s internal organs revealed that part of the liver and the heart had been removed postmortem (this was done through a ragged opening beneath his ribs, a wound that was initially thought to be the result of a fall). Okuda saw this latter discovery as further evidence of some kind of ritualistic killing.