Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  The crime lab people found a potpourri in the rooms—hairs, fibers, saliva, prints, the whole enchilada—so much hard evidence that even a first-year law student would be able to seal a conviction. Extra teams of investigators were called in to do canvasses in the area. By noon, extra foot patrols as far away as Yakima and Eugene had been enlisted to canvass rest areas, bus depots, train stations, and airports. That was two hours ago, and so far nothing had turned up. Nobody had seen any strange cars parked around the hotel. Nobody working the third shift at neighboring firms had seen any strange men loitering in the area during the night. It was as though Ackerman had done his evil deed and had simply vanished. Into the dark woods he went. To grandma’s house—hi-dee-ho hi-dee-ho!

  Grove gazed across the Jeep’s interior at Agent Flannery, who was squinting to see through the rain as she steered the vehicle around a hairpin. “I’m gonna need you to help us out at the scene, Agent Flannery,” Grove said at last, “if you feel up to it.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “What time you got, Agent Flannery?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Ten after two o’clock. Should be there in five minutes or so.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing: I’m sure Olympia is doing a fine job collecting evidence.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We’re not interested in that right now, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re gonna be looking at something altogether different at the scene today, is basically what I’m saying.”

  The woman shot him a glance. “You’re going to be looking at something different than evidence.”

  “I need you to understand what I’m saying here, I need your help at the scene.”

  She chewed her gum a little faster. “If you want me to help you, you’re gonna have to be a little more specific.”

  Grove glanced over his shoulder at Terry Zorn, who sat in the backseat like some millionaire oilman with his cowboy hat in his lap, his bald cranium beaded with rain. “We’re gonna be looking at the rubberneckers, ma’am,” Zorn told her.

  Agent Flannery didn’t say anything.

  “I assume you got a crowd out there, a peanut gallery?” Grove asked her.

  The lady chewed her gum even faster. “You’re gonna be looking at the gawkers.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Because you think he’s still at the scene,” she said softly, chewing that gum furiously now.

  “He’s probably not,” Grove said.

  “It’s just a theory,” Zorn added from the darkness of the backseat.

  “We’re dealing with an organized personality here, Agent Flannery,” Grove explained. “It’s all about ego with these guys, is what I’m saying.”

  A searing flash of magnesium light erupted outside, illuminating the corridor of trees, and the lonely highway, and even the interior of the Jeep, as though someone had just taken a photograph of the scene. A volley of thunder followed on its heels.

  “Okay, real good,” the stocky woman said then, a slight stiffening of her spine against the driver’s seat the only sign of any reaction to all this—other than the frantic chewing and snapping of that Juicy Fruit.

  Zorn chimed in from the back: “You’re gonna be our front line, ma’am.”

  “Pardon?”

  Grove looked at her. “The minute we get to the scene, everybody’s gonna want to talk to us, put their two cents in. We’re going to need you to run interference. You follow?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Gonna need you to buy us some time, keep the detectives away from us while we scope the crowd. Do you understand?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “What I’d like to do,” Grove went on, “is appear like I’m working the scene, but what I’m really doing is working the crowd. You see?”

  “Got it.”

  “So what you’re going to be doing, Agent Flannery, if you’re feeling up to it, is bullshitting both sides. Make the crowd think we’re finding clues and whatnot, and at the same time you’re distracting the detectives and the MEs. Keeping them away from us.”

  “I can think I can handle that, Agent Grove.”

  Grove gave her a smile. “I don’t doubt it.”

  Five minutes later they crossed the outskirts of Vancouver and saw the first signs of the Portland metro sprawl sliding past them behind curtains of rain—gas stations, bait shops, convenience stores—all deserted and forlorn in the mean weather. They reached the Columbia interchange and turned west onto the narrow access road that snaked along the river, winding its way through fishing burgs toward the state line.

  Soon the first hints of chaos glinted in watery coronas of red and blue light ahead of them like sinister holiday decorations in milk glass. Zorn had said the scene was out of control, but Grove had not expected such a mess. It looked like something Dante might have reported on his journey down the seven circles of hell. At least two dozen sheriff’s cruisers were scattered at odd angles along the road, some of them stuck in the mud, rear wheels grinding, fishtailing, and sending gouts of filth in all directions. An ocean of umbrellas undulated along the north side of the road and up along the adjacent rise. Hundreds of onlookers had gathered. The cordon was in complete disarray, huge tails of yellow tape wagging in the rain and the wind.

  Flannery reached down under the dash and flipped on her chasers, the red beams suddenly illuminating the Jeep’s backwash.

  “It’s worse than I thought,” Zorn grumbled from the back, slamming his cowboy hat down onto his shimmering pate.

  Flannery flipped on her headlights, then flipped them off, then on and off, on and off, on and off, as she pulled up to the disintegrating roadblock. A fat man in a hunting vest dashed across the beams of her headlights. Somebody bellowed angrily. A voice crackled incomprehensibly through a megaphone.

  “Just play it nice and natural,” Grove advised as a trooper in a clear plastic rain poncho loomed outside Flannery’s window. She rolled it down and started to say something.

  “The hell you think you’re going!” the trooper boomed at her.

  She sighed and flashed her federal investigator tag, and then gave the guy a look that had daggers in it. “You mind if we go in, sweetheart?”

  For a brief instant the trooper looked as though he had been slapped, the rain dripping off the bill of his Stetson. Then he waved them on as though everything had been authorized to his satisfaction.

  Grove braced himself, feeling the bulge of the revolver under his coat, as Flannery plunged ahead.

  Inside the cordon things were not much better. At least a half dozen morgue wagons were fanned out across the shoulder of the road in front of the motel, lights boiling, rear hatches bustling with miserable attendants shrouded in white plastic haz-mat gowns, wrestling slippery apparatuses in and out of the vehicles. The motel’s tiny pea-gravel lot, which was littered with plastic garbage bags and drenched bed linen, had flooded to the consistency of overcooked oatmeal. Investigators in sodden topcoats hopped puddles as they circulated, weaving through clusters of patrolmen in yellow slickers. Silver strobe-light flashes from forensic cameras popped at odd intervals, syncopated with the occasional flicker of lightning.

  Flannery found a place to park between one of the morgue wagons and a light pole on the far southwest corner of the property. “Let’s start with the front row,” Grove said, kicking open his door and nudging open his umbrella. “Then we’ll move outward from there.”

  Lightning flickered again as Grove emerged from the Jeep, the cold, clammy breeze engulfing him. He looked at the building for a moment through the rain, through squinting, burning eyes, marveling at the depressing sameness of the place. How many of these fleabag roadside motels dotted the American countryside? And why did they all look the same? Regardless of whether they were owned by big franchises or were mom-and-pop shops, like this one, they all had the same neon signs made at the same factory, the same itchy sofa fabrics, the same cheesy c
olor schemes—burnt-orange tiles and olive-green drapes—and the same cheap, papery-thin, interchangeable amenities. The same Styrofoam cups, rust-stained sinks, little stale soaps in paper sleeves, and sour, rubbery odors in the bathrooms.

  The loud stench of death merely put an exclamation point on all this inhuman sameness.

  Grove glanced over his shoulder for a moment, not too long, just a quick look, just to get a feel for the layout of the crowd. In that brief instant, Grove’s studied gaze took in a lot. He saw the heartiest onlookers up front, extending a good city block, pushed up against the edge of the cordons in front of the motel, most of them under umbrellas. Behind them, others were craning to get a better look, spilling across the road, which had been blocked earlier in the morning. The demographics looked fairly homogenous to Grove: mostly male, mostly blue collar, mostly harmless. Hunters, local teenage boys, merchants from up the street. Grove saw a few consumer video cameras getting wet, a few women clutching at scarves against the chill wind.

  “Excuse me—you the profiler?”

  The voice came from behind Grove. He whirled around to see one of the local field agents approaching, a big guy with broad shoulders in a soaked London Fog. The man’s square, mustachioed face was dripping.

  Flannery came dogging up behind him. “Sir!” she barked. “Hold on a second!”

  “It’s okay, it’s all right,” Grove said with a nod to Flannery, then turned to the field agent and extended his free hand, clasping the umbrella with the other. The umbrella was proving handy, a way to shield Grove’s face from the crush of onlookers. “Special Agent Ulysses Grove, Behavioral Science, and that gentleman over there, that’s Special Agent Zorn.” Grove nodded as nonchalantly as possible toward the cowboy hat bobbing under a flimsy umbrella thirty feet away.

  A wet handshake.

  And then a rapid-fire exchange, their voices raised just enough to be heard over the rain and noise, but no louder than that:

  “I’m Agent Masamore, Portland field office, sorry about the circus here, I’m not sure what else we can glean from this one. Seems like he’s flaring out. Already got a six-state search going on. We’ll get him.”

  Grove nodded. “Excellent, great.”

  Masamore jacked a thumb toward the building. “You’ll probably want to speak to the FOS—”

  “Agent Masamore,” Grove interrupted with an open face and a raised hand, as nonthreatening as possible. “Let me just break in here at this point—”

  An arched eyebrow from the stocky field agent. Flannery gazing at the ground.

  “Because what we’d like to do is just ease into it, if that’s okay.” Grove wiped a bead of moisture from his nose. “Maybe start a spiral out here and work our way toward the center of the chalk line.”

  “That’s fine but . . . just so you know . . . we did that already.”

  Grove kept his expression polite, warm. “We’ll definitely huddle with you in a few minutes, probably use a lot of your notes . . . if that’s okay.”

  Special Agent Masamore shrugged, raising the collar on his coat. A little on the irritated side. “Knock yourselves out—me, I’m getting out of the rain.” The stocky special agent turned and trundled back across the mushy gravel toward the Regal’s office.

  Grove watched the agent vanish inside the gaping office door as another bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, flickering white-hot light everywhere. The rain thumped relentlessly on Grove’s umbrella as he felt something on the back of his neck. Somebody’s watching me. The sudden and unexpected feeling bubbled up from Grove’s subconscious, and he immediately dismissed it. Nervous tension, old hoss, that’s all it is, he thought. There’s a lot of people watching you right now. Flannery is watching, Zorn is watching. Grove turned and shot another furtive glance at the crowd.

  Scores of anonymous faces, many of them creased with a lifetime of work and drink and smoke and worry, were compulsively scanning the scene. They were like spectators at a slow-motion sporting event. Grove had studied crowds in the past. He wrote a thesis about them years ago at the academy. He had developed several theories. One he called the “radiant attention” theory, which stated that a minimal amount of interest was required to keep a crowd gathered at a scene. In other words, if one guy seemed interested in something, a hundred other guys would stand there like sheep waiting for something to happen. Attention was passed through osmosis.

  Another theory Grove had developed came to be known—in his final paper, at least—as the “interest/frequency response ratio,” which merely meant a crowd required a minimum frequency of action to stay put, to stay coalesced, to stay intact. In the case of the Regal Motel scene, this stimulus was provided by white-suited morgue attendants emerging from guest rooms with bodies in tow. Like lab rats caught in some morbid Pavlovian experiment, the crowd would begin to disperse every thirty minutes or so, their compulsion to leave certainly exacerbated by the downpour, but then another body would be borne from the shadows of a blood-soaked room, and the crowd would snap back into position. Victims were coming out, one at a time, about every forty-five minutes or so—which was, as it turned out, just frequent enough to keep the crowd riveted to the scene despite the inclement weather.

  Grove made eye contact with Zorn and gave a slight nod, reaching under his raincoat and into his inner breast pocket. He had brought along a couple of one-sheet bulletins he had taken off-line back at the Hotel Nikko. The letter-sized pages, which were folded in half, had a recent picture of Ackerman in the upper right-hand corner. Grove pulled them from his jacket, unfolded one, and looked at it. Raindrops pattered on the photo of Ackerman, which was rendered in the smudged, shadowy quality of a second-generation copy: a gaunt-faced, graying man with tired eyes and pallid skin. In the photo—which had been provided to the FBI by Ackerman’s sister, not his wife—he was dressed for a company portrait, clad in suit and tie, and posed against a standard satin backdrop. He was smiling in the photo, but it was a humorless, passport smile.

  Even through the inky layers of disintegration caused by multiple copying and faxing, that dead impression behind Ackerman’s eyes was apparent.

  Zorn was making his way toward Grove, slowly yet steadily moving along the flapping yellow tape. Every few moments the Texan would pause and glance casually over his shoulder at the crowd, registering any changes, noting faces, then turning his attention back to the ground as though he were investigating footprints.

  Grove went over and handed Zorn one of the soggy bulletins, and the Texan took it, acknowledging it with a nod, but didn’t look at it. “If he’s here,” Zorn said under his breath, gazing at the ground, “I’m thinking he’s gonna be across the street or lurkin’ somewhere in the rear.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Grove countered, giving the crowd his back. “Remember it’s about the show, he’s putting on a show for us, for our benefit.”

  Zorn pretended to look at something on the ground, the rain sluicing off the rim of his umbrella. “You gotta balance the ego with the prospects of getting caught.”

  “That’s part of what fuels the fantasy, the thrill of it, what he gets out of the risk.”

  “You want to take the box seats? And I’ll take the bleachers?”

  “Yeah, good.”

  Without ceremony the two profilers turned and went their separate ways. Zorn casually limboed under the cordons and headed toward the other side of the road looking as though he had forgotten something. Grove lingered near the front row of onlookers.

  Squatting down and acting as though he were inspecting something embedded in the muddy gravel, he took out the bulletin and looked at the picture in the corner again. The rain had blurred it. Now Ackerman’s emaciated face was streaked in distorted tears of black ink. The gaunt visage burned itself into Grove’s midbrain as lightning flash-popped again overhead, turning the premature darkness to silvery daylight. Somebody’s watching you again . . . somebody in the crowd is concentrating on you, now, look!

  Grove peered around
the edge of his umbrella, and through the veils of rain studied the closest ranks of bystanders. It looked like a working-class Mount Rushmore: a perfect row of chiseled, scabrous Caucasian faces shaded by umbrellas, all eyes fixed and pointing forward, their gazes locked on the Regal’s facade. They looked hungry for more carnage.

  Grove’s gaze traveled down the row of onlookers: guys in orange down hunting vests, teenage boys in shopworn denim jackets, a bearded biker in glistening black leather, an old geezer in a yellow oilman’s slicker who looked like he just stepped off a tuna can label, a portly woman holding field glasses to her eyes, and finally, at the end of the row, a tall man in a hooded coat looking this way.

  Gazing directly at Grove.

  15

  One Shot

  The man wore a dark blue nylon raincoat, which bulged slightly in the back, his face obscured by the oversized hood. In the rain, at such a distance—fifty, maybe even seventy-five feet—it was almost impossible for Grove to positively identify the man by his picture. The only things visible within the black hole of that hood were the very tip of the man’s long patrician nose and a dull gleam of teeth—either a smile or a grimace . . . or both.

  The man made no sudden movements. He looked like a statue standing there in the rain at the end of that long row of onlookers, gazing out of the shadows of that hood directly at Grove. And even as Grove hesitated, looking away, attempting to give the impression that he had not noticed the hooded figure, he could tell in his peripheral vision that the man had not budged, his gaze still fixed on Grove.