A moment later a nurse swished through the door. Fluorescent lights stuttered on, making Grove jump, making his eyes pound.
“Mr. Grove, good morning,” the nurse said as she approached the bed with the nubs of a stethoscope in her ears. A plump, graying woman in a white uniform, she gently placed the contact on Grove’s sternum and listened intently.
“Not to be melodramatic,” Grove croaked in a rusty voice, “but what day is it?”
“Tuesday the seventeenth, you’ve been here going on forty-eight hours.”
“Terrific. And ‘here’ is . . . where? Portland?”
“Olympia General. The great state of Washington. How do you feel?”
“I’ll get back to you on that.”
The nurse pondered the monitors for a moment, taking readings. She reached under the bed’s carriage, then flipped a switch that elevated the head. “The doctor’s on his way down. Been having some wallopers the past day or two, huh?”
“Pardon?” Grove felt the bed raising him into a sitting position, and found his midsection set in concrete.
She looked at him with a wan smile. “Bad dreams?”
“Um . . . yeah.” Grove let out a sigh. “A few.” He remembered only fractured moments over the last two days. He remembered waking up in the chopper only minutes after the confrontation in the cave, glancing over his shoulder at the storm clouds falling away from the belly of the aircraft. He remembered falling in and out of consciousness as he was rushed through the harsh light and noise of the trauma center. He even remembered familiar faces hovering over him in recovery—Tom Geisel, Walt Hammerman from Justice, FBI Director Louis Mueller. They had muttered their comforting words, awkward and stiff, inhibited by the politics and protocol of the situation. Grove had made futile attempts to stay awake against the tide of Percocets and lingering shock, but mostly he had slept. For two days. Slept and occasionally awoke to experience horrible hallucinations. Ordinarily Grove would have written off such hallucinations to simple blood loss, hemorrhagic shock, and oxygen starvation. But over the last two days he had come to believe there was a deeper dimension to his visions. He had come to believe the visions were not merely being generated by his own nutrient-starved brain but were coming from outside himself. Organic, self-determined, telekinetic—whatever the source, it didn’t matter. They were messages meant to penetrate Grove’s psyche. He had never believed in the paranormal, and to some extent he still didn’t. But skepticism, when faced with the irrefutable, turns to madness. That’s why, as he groggily returned to the living that morning, he was so damn rattled.
“There’s our star patient.”
The voice rang out from the doorway, shattering Grove’s ruminations. The white-jacketed doctor was stunningly young—barely out of his twenties—with a thick shock of moussed hair. Approaching the bed with his furious smile and metal clipboard under his arm, he looked like a young insurance salesman about to give Grove a pitch on the benefits of term over whole-life.
“How ya doin’, Doc?” Grove had sketchy memories of seeing the youthful face hovering over him, partially obscured by a sterile mask.
“I should ask you that question. Take a deep breath, please, and hold it.”
The doctor’s stethoscope was cold on Grove’s chest as Grove dutifully breathed in and out. The profiler’s right side was still fairly numb. His groin tingled from a hasty shave in surgery. His throat was sore, and his hands were stiff and cold under all the gauze and white tape. He had pressure bandages around his waist that bulged on his right side. The rest of him was covered with an assortment of butterfly bandages.
Grove looked up at the man-child doctor. “What’s the prognosis, Doc? Am I gonna live or what?”
The doctor smiled at him. “Somebody up there likes you, my friend.”
The Sacramento Northern Pacific Railway runs along the attic of America like a calcified, forgotten length of plumbing, the fossilized tracks rotting in the earth. Once in a great while a freighter will trickle down the central line with a load of iron ore, making very few stops, passing through the pockets of civilization like a ghost ship in the night. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, just such a train made an emergency stop outside Eureka.
The engine—a backward conglomeration of loose bolts and greasy platforms—hissed and sputtered to a standstill in the pitch-darkness, disgorging a soiled little man in filthy dungarees. The engineer’s name was Jurgens, and he hopped off the runner and into the cinders with the practiced nonchalance of a lifelong railroad rat.
Jurgens marched along the length of rolling stock, tapping his hickory switch against the couplers like an elephant tamer. The problem was the subtle tics he had felt in the curves, the slight weight displacement in the middle boxcars. He suspected hobos. The old-style stowaways had all but vanished in recent years, but lately young street kids from down South were riding the rails, smoking crack or pulling tricks or doing whatever ne’erdo-wells do, and Jurgens had been told by the yard manager that he had to keep the cars clean.
A noise in the darkness yanked at Jurgens’s attention, and he picked up his pace to a jog.
Something stirred in the second-to-last boxcar, the Quaker car, the one with the broken hasp and gaps in the slats, and as Jurgens approached, he saw litter trailing off in the darkness along the rails. Shreds of newspapers and food wrappers. Jurgens’s heart started thumping, and he wished he had brought along something more substantial than a whittle branch, something like a crowbar or maybe a shotgun, because he saw the blood then. It looked black in the moonlight, splattered across the trash and looping over the dull gleam of iron rails.
“Who’s there!” Jurgens barked.
The two kids in the boxcar had been dead for some time, posed in the style of supplication that scholars had been pondering over the ages. But Jurgens would not see their bodies for several moments. He was too preoccupied by the blood-spattered litter on the ground along the gravel rail bed, and down the craggy embankment along the tracks.
He knelt down and picked up one of the ribbons of newspaper. It was speckled with a mist of blood. The headline said PROFILER KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY. Underneath the text was a formal portrait of Terry Zorn. Another photograph showed a second profiler who’d been wounded in the shoot-out, but most of the picture had been torn out. Jurgens tossed the shred of paper aside and picked up another. Here was the late edition of USA Today showing the two profilers. Grove’s face was missing. Another one showed the exterior of the Regal Motel—police cars scattered across the ravaged parking lot—and an inset of the two FBI profilers, the shot of Grove with a hole where his face should be. Another one, dotted with drying blood, Grove’s face missing.
Another, and another, and another. Each with Grove’s face torn out.
19
The Fabric of Dread
The good news, according to the doctors, was that the bullet had missed all of Grove’s major organs and arterial branches. It could easily have killed him if it had struck his femoral artery, or paralyzed him if it had chewed through his lumbar. It was apparent to Geisel and the guys from the bureau’s Department of Professional Responsibility that the shooter had gone for a disabling shot instead of a kill-shot, probably in order to make Grove more manageable for God-only-knew-what. Grove’s other injuries—mostly the results of the mauling—were essentially superficial. The deepest bite wound in his thigh, which had caused severe vascular injury, had bled mostly into the deep facia muscles. The resulting hematoma was enough to cause major shock and delirium. For a while the doctors had been worried that Grove would lose the use of his left hand due to a deep bite wound in his wrist, but luckily the trauma center in Olympia had one of the country’s top plastic surgeons. Physical therapy started almost immediately. Every few hours Grove would get out of bed and shuffle around his room with his IV drip-stand like a limp dance partner squeaking along beside him. Considering the extent and profusion of the wounds, he was moving around pretty well. Apparently he had emerged f
rom the incident in fairly decent working order—physically, at least.
Zorn’s death had sent ripples through every division of the FBI, Justice Department, and Washington State Internal Affairs agencies. The fact that bureau profilers were not traditionally assigned to tactical work was pointed out to Grove repeatedly over those horrible seventy-two hours of recovery. Zorn had an ex-wife and two grown children back in Texas whom Grove had not known about. Much was made of Grove’s and Zorn’s legendary competitiveness and animosity. Captain Ivan Hauser of the Los Vegas Violent Crimes Unit had made statements about the two profilers being at each other’s throats in the desert the previous week.
Terry Zorn’s memorial service was held that Tuesday afternoon. Grove heard about it from one of the OPR guys who had come to the trauma center to take a statement. According to the Texan’s wishes, the affair was a small family ceremony. His body was cremated, and his ashes were given to his children. A fund was set up at Quantico for donations to the Zorn family’s chosen charity—the Big Brothers of America. Grove had five thousand dollars wired from his account to the fund.
Friends and colleagues of Special Agent Terrence Zorn were not the only ones galvanized by his death. The Washington State Bureau of Investigation—one of the country’s crack investigative agencies—took the debacle in the river woods personally. They mobilized their state-of-the-art SWAT group, as well as every sister law enforcement agency in the state, in an unprecedented manhunt to take down the fugitive Richard Ackerman. As of Tuesday evening, the subject was still at large, but reports had been flooding the transom all day. A suspicious individual had been seen at a service station by a mining company rep. Ackerman’s nylon raincoat had been found in a rest stop bathroom near Vancouver. The authorities were worried about the subject fleeing via the rail system or airliner, but so far none of the surveillance at any of the depots or terminals had turned up anything. They would find him eventually. Everybody knew it. Especially the coordinator of the manhunt—Commander Harlan Simms of the Tri-State SWAT Complex in Portland. It was Simms who had dragged Ulysses Grove from that abandoned mine shaft, and it was Simms who had glimpsed the shadowy figure of Ackerman as the cardiac arrest was setting in.
All this macho enervation only served to curdle Grove’s spirit and psyche. He felt no vengeance roiling in him, no need to get back to the hunt, no bloodlust to bag Ackerman. He felt only dread. Barren, desolate, incapacitating dread. For himself, for the human race, for the world. It was the kind of pathological emptiness to which FBI profilers were supposed to be immune. But there it was—suffocating Grove in that hospital room like a veil drawn over his face.
Maybe all the obscene violence and banalities of evil that Grove had cleaned up over the years had finally taken their toll. All this hoodoo about Grove being the “one,” the one Ackerman had been after—it was all part of the fabric of Grove’s private dread now. He simply wanted to crawl into a hole and die. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He didn’t want to give any more statements. He didn’t want to open any more wounds. Perhaps that was why he was so disconsolate when the nursing staff finally allowed Maura County, who had flown in from San Francisco at her own expense, into the ICU.
She came to his room around six-thirty that night.
“Oh my God, look at you,” she uttered, peering around the edge of the door, then gingerly padding into the room. She wore her trademark faded jeans and denim jacket, and carried a brown paper grocery bag full of goodies. She came over to the bed and put the sack down on a nearby rolling cart that was cluttered with the remnants of his half-eaten cafeteria dinner.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she said as she leaned down over him, putting her arms gently around him.
Grove was unable to hug her back. He simply could not do it. Physically, emotionally, he had nothing left for her—and she sensed it immediately. There was the briefest moment of hesitation, then she backed away with a stung look on her face. “They said downstairs you’re going to be okay,” she said, busying herself with the paper sack. “That’s awful about Terry, just awful. I brought you some things. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t resist.”
“How goes the twilight zone?” Grove asked her, propping himself up against the canted headboard.
“I sent everybody home. Although Professor de Lourde and Father Carrigan are still lurking around the Bay Area somewhere, making everybody nervous with their campfire stories.” A flurry of awkward business with the bag and a strand of hair in her eye. “I brought you some junk food, magazines—you know—the usual hospital effluvium.” She laid a can of peanuts, a few candy bars, and a spray of magazines across his lap.
“You didn’t have to come all the way up here, you know.”
“That’s what friends do, Ulysses. They visit their friends when their friends are in the hospital.”
“I do appreciate it.”
A pause, fiddling with the hair. “Is there something wrong? Did I do something?”
“No, no . . . it’s just . . . the Percocets they’ve been giving me . . . I’m a little loopy.”
She sighed and glanced around the room for a place to sit. She found an armchair, dragged it over to the bed, and plopped down. “I understand he had a family?”
“Zorn? Yeah . . . a little estranged but yeah.”
She shook her head. “Horrible.”
“We’ll get the guy. Don’t worry.”
She looked at him. “I heard he said something to you, something in the cave.”
Grove shook his head. “Schizophrenic babble. But how the hell did you know about that?”
“Word gets around the media, somebody bribed one of the field agents in Portland.”
“Christ.”
“So you’re leaning toward this guy being just some nut job with a fixation on the mummy?”
Grove looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m just wondering if you buy any of that stuff from the conference—cycles of murder, something being unleashed when they dug up the mummy?”
Grove looked away, letting out a pained breath. “Who knows what’s inside this guy’s head? I don’t believe in evil spirits. In a way, I believe in everything. And in nothing. It’s hard to explain.”
“Any idea when you’ll be released?”
Grove gave her a shrug. “Couple of days, I don’t know. I’m walking pretty well.”
“You sure there’s nothing wrong?”
Grove managed a smile. “There’s nothing wrong.”
“Nothing I said or did?”
“Relax, kid. This guy goes down, you’re gonna win the Pulitzer.”
Maura shuddered a little. “I just want him caught. God. I never dreamed my little article would lead to . . . Jesus.”
“It’s all right.” He reached over the bed rail and patted her shoulder with his bandaged right hand. “They’ll catch the guy, and you’ll write your article, and everything will be okay. You’ll see.”
“What about us?”
Grove took a pained breath. He didn’t know what to say. His mind had gone blank.
“Ulysses, it’s not a proposal . . . we just talked about getting together when this was over. I just wondered . . . you know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. This is probably a totally inappropriate time to—”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Grove blurted, cutting her off.
She looked down almost immediately. “Um . . . sure. You’re probably right.”
“It’s not your fault, Maura, it’s something I gotta work out for myself,” he said, his words sounding wooden and hollow in his own ears.
She managed a smile. “It’s okay. You don’t have to dissemble for my benefit.” She sounded rueful all of a sudden. She looked away when her eyes began to fill. “I’m a big girl, Ulysses. I can handle it. Believe me.”
Regret stabbed at Grove’s gut. “Maura, don’t take it personally—”
She raised her hand, looking back at him, her expres
sion hardening. “Please. I’m all right with it. I presume you don’t mind if I still care about you.”
Grove smiled. “The feeling’s mutual, kid.”
There was a brief silence, the beeping of the pulse-ox monitor thundering in Grove’s ears.
Maura finally broke the silence: “You going to join the manhunt when you get out?”
Grove sighed. “Me? Naw . . . I’m hanging up my magnifying glass.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“I’m quitting the bureau, taking early retirement.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Grove gazed across the room. “No . . . I’m done. Maybe Terry was right. I’m burned out. Haven’t cleared a case in years. Glory days are over.”
“Have you told anybody about this?”
“Not yet. You’re the first. Quite an honor, huh?”
“Ulysses . . . why?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why not!” She got up and started pacing around the room. “For starters, you’re the one who tracked down Ackerman. Remember? I mean . . . come on. You’re the guy. You’re the—”
“Easy now.”
“I’m just saying . . . okay, it’s none of my business . . . but it seems to me you’re quitting at the peak of your powers.”
“Is that right? Did you know they’re laughing at me back in Washington? In the Hoover Building I’m a big joke. Terry was right.”
“Ulysses—”
“This whole Sun City case, where it ended up, the mummy, the nonsense about ancient cycles of evil. It doesn’t matter that it led us to Ackerman. It’s unseemly. You see? The whole case has become a bad joke.”
Maura strode back and forth across the foot of the bed for a moment, thinking, chewing a fingernail. “You’re sure all this doesn’t have something to do with me and that Weekly World News piece?” She pointed at the spray of magazines on the bed. “Ulysses, I didn’t talk to anybody from that rag, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have—”
“What are you talking about?” Grove looked down at the magazines. “What article?”
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