And that's when the revelation jolted through his weary brain center, touched off by that vague, cryptic linkage that had been rattled loose by an image in an old Boris Karloff movie:
a mummy reaching down, gently running a petrified fingertip along an ancient scroll . . . insane laughter howling offscreen.
The tattoos, when viewed in Okuda's drugged double vision, revealed a secret inner structure: they were crypto-graphs! Symbols for words! Sumerian probably!
Words that could be translated!
A linguistic breakthrough for a junkie cryptologist, even an amateur one like Okuda, is more sobering than an IV cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline.
He jerked forward on his ratty sofa, knocking over a box of Cheez-Its. He grabbed a ballpoint. Writing madly, alternately flipping pages in his dog-eared Oxford Compound Sign Dictionary, he translated the symbols into elemental Sumerian:
en-nu . . . en-nu-un . . . en-nu . . . en-nu-un.
Hooray for heroin, the anthropologist's best friend! Okuda didn't even realize he was both giggling and shaking.
When he had the phrase cold, he paused and stared down at it, cuneiformed across the notepaper like a bloody ink blot. The giggling stopped. He needed to call somebody right away. Mathis? God no. The bitch would scoff. Or worse: she'd take credit for the breakthrough. Okuda got up and paced, his skinny legs trembling. He stopped and thought about it some more, chewing a fingernail.
Maybe
Grove
was the one he should call.
Â
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The New Richard sat on a shopworn sofa in the blood-spattered lobby of the Regal Motel, staring emptily at the console TV, which was still droning in the corner, its screen misted with arterial spray. Head cocked as though hearing an ultrasonic whistle, the pliers gripped in his big hand, he watched a banal advertisement for the Amazing Kitchen Magician while the bodies of the innkeeper and the old lady lay cooling in puddles of dark fluids on the floor in front of him. The arrows rose out of their necks like signposts. Bloody drag-trails fanned out from the innkeeper's corpse.
There was much work left to do. The bodies had to be posed, and the arrows removed with the pliers like all the others. Removing the arrows was the messy partâlike cleaning fishâas the tips were always embedded in the gristle and sinew of the upper vertebra. But posing them was a transcendent experience for the New Richard. Like taking communion. He would raise the right arm into its ritual position, then step back and pray in a language long forgotten by denizens of the current era. Someday the cycle would close again. The vessel would return, the sacrifice complete.
At that moment, however, the process seemed daunting to the thing inside Ackerman. Operating Ackerman's body had gotten laborious, gummy and slow, like a machine with sand in its bearings. A faraway pain throbbed in Ackerman's chest, the angina constricting his vessels, tightening his joints. He had a weak heart. The New Richard wondered if Ackerman's body would survive the rigors of the mission.
Ignoring the unexpected frisson of pain, the New Richard rose and went over to the first body, kneeling down with the rubber-handled pliers. He was about to clamp onto the end of the arrow and start working it out . . . when he stopped. Something coming out of the television had pierced his consciousness. Eyes tracking over to the TV, head turning like an automaton, his gaze found the screen.
CNN was playing softly. At the moment a blond anchorwoman addressed the camera: “An FBI spokesman offered a statement earlier today regarding the Sun City killings. After a twelve-month-long investigation, the suspect at this hour remains at large, as well as a complete mystery, leaving authorities scrambling for answers.”
The New Richard focused suddenly with laser intensity on that television screen.
The TV flickered with file footage of FBI headquarters, a reporter's monotone accompanying the image: “As the entire western United States reels from another senseless killing in the Nevada desert, FBI profilers are seemingly grasping at straws for clues and motives . . .”
The New Richard froze and watched the broadcast cut to shaky, handheld footage of a handsome black man in a tailored suit hurrying down stone steps, trying to elude the prying gaze of the camera.
“Even renowned criminologist Ulysses Grove, the man whose analysis led to the arrest and ultimate conviction of the Oregon Happy Face Killer back in 1990, is apparently stumped by this disturbing series of random murders. . .”
Pop!
The revelation struck the New Richard like a lightning bolt piercing the top of his skull, sending jolts of high-voltage recognition down through his marrow, the message transposing itself into a daisy chain of ancient languages, until it burst forth in the tongue of the current place and time.
Behold! Behold!
“Agent Grove! Can you comment on the stalled Sun City investigation?”
Snap!
The New Richard jerked backward with the sheer power of the realization, a black hole imploding down in the nucleus of his being, sucking everything into it, distorting time and space, until the entire motel lobby seemed to contract like a great eye, like a huge black iris shrinking down around the membrane of that flickering cathode ray tube.
“Sorry, folks, I have no comment, no comment, you can address all your questions to FBI Community Relations, but right now I have nothing to say.”
Boooooommmmmmmmmm!
The television screen imploded into a single, dreamy, grainy close-up of the chiseled ebony face of Ulysses Grove. A great onyx god sculpted by some divine artist. And the puppeteer inside Ackerman stared at it, and stared at it, and stared at it.
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Grove found Maura County waiting for him in the lobby of San Francisco's Hotel Nikko.
“C'mon, you got to see this,” she said, leading him over to a bank of elevators. They boarded one of the posh enclosuresâthe accoutrements echoing the rich carpet nap, deep green color schemes, and elegant brass fittings of the hotel's central hallways. Maura pressed the button for the BR level. “Never seen anything like it,” she was saying as the doors rattled shut, “in almost thirteen years of working in this racket.”
The elevator rose, and they stood thereâjust the two of themâin the awkward, intimate silence.
“So how was your flight?” Maura asked him, mercifully breaking the silence.
“Um . . . you know . . . uneventful,” Grove told her, his hands in the pockets of his herringbone jacket. His head spun. More than ever, he felt like a human pinball, bouncing back and forth across the country at the whim of the Sun City case. He had arrived in the Bay Area around dusk, less than an hour ago, and already had that flaky, dissociated sensation of the overtraveled. Terry Zorn had come along on the trip, but had elected to check in with the Frisco field office first, before joining Grove and the journalist later at the Hotel Nikko. Now Grove felt oddly tongue-tied in the elevator, alone with Maura. She wore a sleek black turtleneck and black jeans that set off her milky complexion and pale blue eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and Grove felt his gaze drawn to the back of her neck. The compulsion made him feel guilty and jittery. “So what am I about to see, anyway?” he finally asked her.
“Sorry about all the mystery,” she said with a tepid smile. “It's the journalist in me, I guess.”
“How do you mean?”
“A perpetual fear of burying the lead.”
The elevator stuttered to a stop, and the doors opened, revealing the stone planters, gold sconces, and mirrored panels of the ballroom level. Grove followed the journalist out of the car, then down a carpeted corridor bordered on either side by meeting rooms.
They passed the Muir Room, the Juniper Room, the Larkspur Room, and the Madera Roomâall empty, all dark with chairs up on round tables and spaces glistening with metal polish and carpet cleaner. “So what
is
the lead here?” Grove asked as they strode briskly along. The journalist was moving so quickly, so excitedly down that corridor, that Grove thought he might have to start trotting in order to keep up with her.
She thought about his question for a moment, licking her lips. “I'm really not sure, I was thinking you might be able to figure it out for me.”
“I take it you got some responses to your e-mail?”
She gave him a look. “Um . . . yeah.”
“Evidence of similar deaths over the years? Bodies with similar pathologies?”
She nodded. “You could say that. Yeah. I think you ought to just see it with your own eyes.”
“Let's take a look then.”
“Right up here.” She indicated the end of the hallway. “Last door on the left.”
Grove followed her, preparing himself for another encounter with a cranky archaeologist like Lorraine Mathis, or perhaps a dozen dusty old professors sitting around a table, pontificating about clay pottery and arrowheads. They approached the last door, which was closed, a placard marked in gold inlay reading REDWOOD ROOM.
Maura paused for a long moment in front of that door, her hand on the knob. Grove stood behind her, waiting. He got the feeling this pause was for dramatic effect. Finally she glanced over her shoulder and uttered, “You ready for this?”
“Sure,” Grove said with a nod. “Lay it on me.”
She nodded back at him, then opened the door and ushered him inside.
Grove was engulfed in chaos.
The noise was tremendous, at least a hundred archaeologists, maybe more, talking, arguing, milling about a banquet room that was far larger than Grove had expected. Round tables crowded with people stretched in all directions. The ceiling rose up at least twenty-five feet high, with dozens of chandeliers shining down on the throngs. Every conceivable nationality seemed to be presentâArabs in full headdress, Hindi professors, men with turbans, Asians, African scholars with dashikis and traditional headgear, and even a Muslim woman with a black burka shrouding her face. Grove had to step back and scan the whole length of the hall just to take it all in. And the longer he looked, the more he realized what he was looking at.
Flip charts and dry boards faced many of the tables, many of them displaying hastily drawn stick figures, victims, mummies, and fossilized human remains, most of them lying supine, arrows pointing to neck wounds, diagrams of entry vectors, blood trails, pathologies, and little stick-figure arms posed in supplication identical to the Sun City victims. Some of the attendees were standing at the charts, pointing things out to their colleagues, voices rising in spirited debate. Hands wagged and heads shook, and Grove stood there for a long moment, taking it all in, unnoticed by most present.
“Oh my God,” Grove finally muttered, his scalp crawling with gooseflesh.
Maura looked at him and nodded very slowly, almost sheepishly. “Exactly.”
PART III
CARRIGAN'S CYCLE
“There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe.”
âW. Somerset Maugham
11
Cornucopia
While Grove and Maura huddled in a banquet hall on the West Coast, holding court well into the night with a room full of archaeologists, an FBI laboratory on the edge of a marine base in Virginia ran test after test on genetic material recovered from both the crime scenes and Ackerman's house in Wilmette. They had several strands of hair from a brush and a bathroom catch basin, as well as blood chemistry reports from Ackerman's angioplasty at Chicago's Northwestern Hospital three years earlier. They also had an array of trace tissue samples from the various scenesâa flake of dandruff, a particle of skin, a single hair, and a damp spot on the body of Carolyn Kenly believed to be saliva. They had a partial fingerprint as well (authorities in both Colorado and Nevada believed that the Sun City Killer operated without gloves, judging by the smudged print found on a button), but they had yet to gather enough of a sample against which to make a comparison.
The
genetic
“fingerprint” was another story.
The lab in Virginia discovered that the killer was a “secretor.” This meant that the perpetrator's blood type and genetic information could be determined by bodily fluids other than blood. From that tiny spot of saliva found on the Kenly sundress, technicians extracted a perfect multilocus DNA pattern. This strand, which under a microscope looked like a tiny bar code, became the reference standard to which Ackerman's genetic information was compared. The hair sample taken from the Wilmette house matched perfectly. The test was run three times before the call was made to Tom Geisel in the middle of the night. Geisel spoke briefly with the head of the lab, a German woman named Sabine Voer-krupper, before getting dressed and initiating a nationwide manhunt.
Years ago, the police called it an all-points bulletin. Usually dispatched and transmitted over squad radios, the bulletin announced the crime, described the alleged perpetrator strictly for investigation purposes, and authorized arrest on “reasonable belief.” But in the early twenty-first centuryâan age of constitutional ambiguity, political correctness, and rampant litigationâextraordinary measures had to be taken to ensure airtight legalities during the course of a cold pursuit. Especially in cases involving a prolific nationwide serial murderer the magnitude of Sun City.
Reaching out to local police departments has always been problematic for the bureau. Detective squads often accuse the FBI of scooping cases, sending out press releases before a crime is solved. And some cops even accuse the bureau of adding police-solved crimes to the FBI's clearance reports. But at the same time, local authorities are integral to the bureau's tactical operations. Regional investigators know their territories, have critical informants, and live on the streets. This is why a special unit called Reactive Crimes was established in the late 1960s to act as a specialized conduit between the bureau and local cops.
The Reactive Crimes Unit was designed to react to crimes that have already happened, such as bank robberies and motiveless spree murders, and maximize assistance and cooperation from individual police departments. Within this unit, a special squad known as UFAP (Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution) had become the central command post for complex manhunts, handling all the bulletins, dispatches, communications, and logistical aspects of the physical pursuit.
At approximately 2:30 a.m. on that restless night of revelations, Tom Geisel placed a phone call to the director of UFAP, and briefed him on the latest developments of the Sun City case. He faxed him the case files along with all the materials Grove and Zorn had amassed on Ackerman. Within an hour, jpegs and PDF files zipped across Internet servers to hundreds of regional violent crime units. E-mails flooded FBI field office terminals. High-priority messages sizzled across phone lines, and dispatches crackled over radios. Photographs of Ackerman landed on the desks of every police captain or lieutenant in the western United States. Most major metro post offices received bulletins. Memos went out to every tactical unit. Even bounty hunters got calls.
Before the sun rose on the West Coast, Richard Ackerman was, as the old shamuses used to say, “number one on the hit parade.”
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“Hold it down for a second, pleaseâ
please!
”
Ulysses Grove made a halting gesture with his hands, palms out, silencing the crowd of scientists. A few whispers trailed off in the rear, but mostly the hundred or so archaeologists settled and waited, the light from the chandeliers reflecting off bespectacled, expectant faces.
The profiler stood before them at a blackboard, his jacket off, his sleeves rolled up. His briefcase sat on a podium next to him, lid open, exposing its contentsâa Blackberry Palm Pilot, notebooks, cell phone, tape recorder, rubber gloves, case folders, and a Polaroid camera. Not readily visible was a lucky key chain that Grove's late wife, Hannah, had given him years ago as a Valentine's Day present. Grove kept the trinket tucked into a pocket in the lining of the briefcaseâa tiny magnifying glass on a two-inch spindle, attached to a worn leather pad. The word
Sherlock
was embossed in Old English letters across the little pad. Grove was not sure why he carried the thing with him. He was not superstitious. He just felt better having it in his briefcase at all times.
It was nearly dawn, and Grove had that wired, shaky, wrung-out feeling one gets after a rough night of work and too much coffee. Maura County sat behind him on a stool near the blackboard, her black turtleneck smudged with chalk dust. She had been keeping notes for the last hour or so, trying to keep track of it all, trying to make sense of all the data, but it wasn't easy in this room full of clashing cultures and egos. At the moment, the board reflected in hastily scrawled bullet points the common causes of death among the remains:
⢠fatal woundânear 1 vert.
⢠undetermined pose
⢠supine pos. at death
⢠organs miss.
Terry Zorn stood by the door, arms crossed, nervously chewing his lip, his cowboy hat hanging off the doorknob. He had wandered into this hornet's nest around two o'clock that morning. Around four o'clock they had brought in another silver urn full of Starbucks, and the attendees had sucked it down like dying patients receiving plasma. But the truth was, nobody really needed coffee to stay awake and alert and engaged. The exchange of information was more than enough to spike their collective adrenaline, the pattern repeating itself over and over.
Among those assembled that morning was Dame Edith Endecott, a blue-haired Scottish crone from Oxford who had discovered a perfectly preserved mummy in a bog outside Edinboro, dating back to the fifteenth centuryâsame signature, same neck wound, same pose. Also present was the flamboyant Dr. Moses de Lourde, a fey, anachronistic old southerner from Vanderbilt, who had been involved in unearthing a two-thousand-year-old murder victim from a mound site at Poverty Point, Louisiana. There was also the dapper Indian gentleman, V.J. Armatraj, a professor at the University of Delhi, who had led the team that discovered the “Year Zero Mummy” high in the Italian Alps, a frozen specimen with evidence of a fatal neck injury dating back to the time of Christ. Adding to the din was one of Saudi Arabia's infamous intelligentsia, Professor Akmin Narazi, who had amassed data on dozens of discoveries over the last five thousand years exhibiting evidence of wrongful deaths, many of them practically identical to the Mount Cairn Iceman.
Some of the scientists present already knew of the repeating pattern. They had corresponded with each other about it, drawing very few conclusions. But none had suspected such a pervasive repetition down through the ages.
“I need everybody to calm down and focus on one thing right now, the
link
, the connection,” Grove told the room. “What is the common ground here?”
“Is it not obvious!” Professor Narazi barked from across the room, his dark, olive eyes glittering with anger. He was a compact little brown man in his midsixties with luxurious silver hair.
Grove looked at the Saudi gentleman. “Sir?”
“We've given description for hour upon hour,” Narazi snapped at him. “Is it not obvious the pathology of the specimens is similar? What more is there to say?”
“Ostensibly, you're right, that's all there is to it,” Grove said, “but I'm looking for a deeper connection, something psychological, culturalâ”
“Dear sir.” Edith Endecott spoke up, interrupting Grove with her soft burr. Her pear-shaped form was clad in an elegant navy blue dress, her cat's-eye glasses riding low on her long aquiline nose. “There is perhaps a feeling among my distinguished colleagues that you've not been forthcoming. No offense to Miss County or to her fine publication . . . but surely you've not been grilling us all night for a mere article of general interest.”
Grove sighed, then gazed across the room at all the impatient faces. He glanced at Zorn, who said nothing, just nodded. It was time to tell them. “Okay . . . look,” Grove said finally. “I'll admit we're dealing with something a little more . . . specific.”
The Scottish woman cocked her head. “Yes. Specific. Please go on.”
After another pause, Grove swallowed hard and told the crowd everything.
He told them about the Sun City murders. He told them that the FBI was currently hunting for a “person of interest” who had come into contact with the Mount Cairn remains. He told them everything, and then implored them to keep the information strictly confidential. He told them he had just broken about a half dozen bureau regulations by disclosing details of an active investigation. As he spoke, he noticed rumblings out in the crowd, furtive whispers, worried glances. He figured he had lost about half the room. He figured that maybe fifty or more of them were now plotting their escape, planning to hop on the next flight out of San Francisco. These were, after all, merely academics, some of them still working on their doctorates.
Professor Armatraj, the Indian, was the first to break the uneasy silence. “Am I to understand, you believe this suspect is somehow recreating the mummy record?” The dusky-skinned professor wore a sedate linen suit and bow tie, and looked like a throwback to old Colonial India, as though he had emerged fully formed from an E.M. Forster novel.
Grove nodded. “In a manner of speaking, yeah.”
“Good
Lord
,” Armatraj exclaimed, more to himself than aloud.
A sudden eddy of whispers and low voices swirled through the room.
“What does this have to do with archaeology?” a jittery woman in the back called out.
Another voice: “This is not why we came here!”
More voices swelled, and Grove held up his hands in a calming gesture. “Folks, please!” The voices subsided slightly, and Grove took a breath. “I understand your concern. Why don't we take a break? And those of you who need to get back home, or those of you who would prefer not to continue working with us . . . you're certainly free to go. And we thank you. Anybody else who might have further information, or might be able to help us out, we'll discuss this later today, after everybody's had a chance to get something to eat and get some rest.”
Finally Grove thanked everybody once again, and asked those who were departing if they could possibly leave their documentation with Agent Zorn.
The exodus began on a rush of voices, squeaking chairs, and clanking coffee cups. Some of the attendees went over to Zorn, who had a stunned look on his face as they inundated him with manila envelopes, file folders, business cards, and loose documents. Most of those present milled their way out the door, then into the gathering throngs in the corridor. A dozen or so lingered.
Maura came over to Grove and said under her voice, “So what now?”
Grove shrugged. “We start going through the materials, see if we can learn anything else from the brave souls who stay with us.”
“Y'all certainly know how to clear a room,” said a voice to Grove's immediate left.
Grove turned and came face-to-face with Dr. Moses de Lourde. The small thin man was dressed in a brilliant white suit with a red silk cravat tucked neatly in his pocket. He looked like he could be the fashionable author Tom Wolfe's older gay brother.
“I'm sorry?” Grove said to the man.
Professors Endecott and Armatraj stood behind the southern gentleman, listening closely, each looking alternately worried and engrossed.
“I said y'all know how to clear a room, which unfortunately is somewhat akin to the effect I have on my own students,” de Lourde said with a smile, offering his delicate, manicured hand. “Moses de Lourde at your service, sir. Professor of Antiquities, Tulane University.”
“Pleasure, sir, thank you,” Grove said.
“I must say, Agent Grove, I detect the tip of an iceberg in your query regarding the psychological connection between your suspect and the mummy record.”
Grove gave de Lourde a weary smile. “Very perceptive, Professor, you got me.”
Edith Endecott spoke up then. “I must concur, Agent Grove. You've piqued my interest as well.”