From the moment he had picked up his first Conan-Doyle novel as a child, to his undergraduate studies in criminology at the University of Michigan, to his years as a noncommissioned officer in the armyâfirst as an MP, and then as an investigator in the military's crack CID unitâUlysses Grove had proved himself a natural. When he received his honorable discharge in 1987âonly months after marrying one of his fellow investigators, the lovely and amazing Lieutenant Hannah S. WashingtonâGrove was snatched up by the FBI. Affirmative action had nothing to do with it (although the top brass at Quantico were secretly pleased to have such a brilliant, polymath black man on their roster). There was a simpler reason that Ulysses Grove had been on such a meteoric career trajectory: he got results.
Grove was the one investigator in 1990 who believed that Oregon police had the wrong man in the “Happy Face Killer” case. Following a hunch after seeing a happy face scrawled on a gas station restroom wall, Grove eventually led detectives to the real killerâa deranged long-haul trucker named Keith Hunter Jesperson. In 1996, working with Interpol, Grove helped catch Anatoly Onoprienko, a former Ukrainian mental patient and perhaps the most prolific serial killer of all time (with a record fifty-two confirmed homicides). Grove's discovery of a stolen wedding ring on the finger of Onoprienko's girlfriend helped close that case.
Then . . . along came the Sun City Killer.
The instant Grove saw the first victim last spring in that northern Illinois retirement villageâthe woman lying supine in a cornfield with a sharp trauma wound to the back of her head, her cold, dead arms crossed awkwardly against her breast, one skinny arm frozen in a position higher than the otherâhe was stumped. None of his tricks had worked. Like an artist wrestling with a debilitating creative block, Grove could not translate the patterns, could not extrapolate one scintilla of psychology.
He was brain-dead.
As dead as all the random victims frozen in their inexplicably baroque poses.
Â
Â
For most of the flight, Grove was vaguely aware of a young woman in a Colorado State University sweatshirt sitting across the aisle from him, pretending not to stare at him. Grove was accustomed to such lingering glances. Most men would be delighted by such stares from womenâbut not Grove. His good looks were the bane of his existence, and it wasn't just the beefcake factorâthe male equivalent to being a beautiful woman who perpetually struggles to be taken seriously. The deeper problem was that Grove didn't
feel
handsome. He didn't feel desirable. In fact, there was a lot about his appearance that he hated. He hated his tightly coiled, onyx hair, his sculpted, almost feminine cheekbones, and his long eyelashes. He hated his dark skinâa mixture of his deep black African mother and his caramel-skinned Jamaican dad.
On some level Grove probably overcompensated for all this self-loathing through a certain formality of dress. He never dressed down, never wore jeans or shorts or sneakers unless absolutely necessary. Even on his days off, he dressed in shirtsleeves and pressed slacks. His colleagues back at Quantico teased him about it, joking that he often looked like one of Lewis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam goons. Which irked Grove even more than the comments about his looks, since he also had issues with his own culture, at least in America. He detested militant blacks, and rap music, and gangster chic. He felt that his own race was responsible for all the black-on-black violence, and if there was one thing Grove understood implicitly, it was violence.
The plane touched down at Denver International a few minutes ahead of schedule, thanks to an unexpected tailwind. Grove disembarked in a hurry.
Nobody waited for him at the gate, none of the customary police liaisons or community relations people who usually escorted him to crime scenes. This was a stealth mission, unannounced to all but the primary detectives working the scene up in Estes. The evidence clock was already at eight to ten hours past probable time-of-death, and the evidence was deteriorating rapidly.
Grove strode through the glass doors into the fragrant mountain air of the cab stand, his briefcase in one hand, his overnight bag in the other. It was late spring, and the rains had lifted, and now the Mile-High City was redolent with the perfume of a crystalline early morning. The sky was high and scudded with clouds, and the distant snowcapped peaks of Berthoud Pass, dappled with columbine, were visible on the western horizon of the terminal. But all this scenic splendor went completely unnoticed by Grove as he flagged down a Rocky Mountain airport cab.
He spent the two-hour cab ride north consulting his notes, saying very little to the chatty driver. He arrived at the crime scene a few minutes before ten, the morning sun slicing through the tops of the Englemann spruce that bordered the nature preserve like ancient sentries. A fleet of squads and unmarked bureau cars crowded the trail head. Clutches of men in sport coats and uniforms huddled here and there. Crime scene tape fluttered in the wind.
The dizziness started the moment Grove emerged from the cab. At first he figured it was the altitude. Or maybe his nerves, or his empty stomach. Or perhaps a combination of all three. He went around to the driver's-side window, paid the cabby, then carried his attaché and duffel bag across the dusty gravel lot. He was greeted near the tape by a sandy-haired man in a suit with a Colorado State Police ID tag dangling around his neck, twisting in the mountain breeze.
Grove identified himself.
“Made good time,” the sandy-haired man commented, glancing at his watch, then offering a hand. “Lieutenant Jack Slater, CSP Homicide. Appreciate the fast response.”
Grove felt light-headed as he shook the man's hand, then was introduced to the other primaries. The detectives gave Grove the typical once-over, their suspicious gazes masked by cursory nods and polite smiles. Normally Grove would shrug off such a cool reception. Local detectives, as a rule, mistrust government experts and high-paid consultants. But that morning, their baleful gazes made Grove's stomach clench and his head spin. He felt as if he were drunk.
They led him under the tape, then down a winding path through a grove of balsams. Sunlight filtered down through the canopy of branches and flickered in Grove's eyes. The pine-perfumed air was cooler in the woods, cleansed by the evening's rain. Gnats hummed in Grove's face. The ground felt spongy beneath his feet. His mind swam.
“First-on-the-scene was a state trooper,” Slater's voice droned as Grove followed the group deeper into the forest. “He was checking on an abandoned garbage truck, found it idling a mile or so down an access road.”
Figures appeared about a hundred yards ahead of them. Near a toppled iron trash can a couple of plainclothes technicians were crouching on the edge of the trail, taking measurements, dusting for prints. Grove swallowed hard, the dizziness washing over him. He could barely stand. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. Sure, he had experienced dizzy spells before. But never at a crime scene. At crime scenes, Grove was usually a machine, focused with laser intensity.
It'll pass
, he thought,
it's just the thin air, it'll pass
.
The group approached the fallen barrel.
“The vic's just up ahead,” Slater announced over his shoulder, pretending not to notice that Grove was lagging behind, coughing and weaving a little. “ME puts the initial time of death sometime between midnight and two o'clock in the morning. We're waiting for the initialâ”
The light dimmed, and Grove staggered.
“Whoa! You okay, Professor?” Slater's voice sounded watery and distant all of a sudden.
Grove steadied himself against the trunk of an Englemann, the woods spinning around him as if he were on a carnival ride. Through unfocused eyes he got his first glimpse of the body ten yards away. It lay supine in the leaves, a hefty man, posed like all the others, the ham-hock arms frozen with encroaching rigor mortis across the chest, one higher than the other. Blood trails, blurred by the rain, fanned out from the corpse across the moist floor of pine needles. Blood, as black as onyx, pooled beneath the garbage man's head, apparently the result of a sharp trauma wound. The same MO and signature as all the others.
“Grove? You all right?”
The profiler tried to say something, but a veil was lowering over his face. He staggered just before his balance went completely haywire and the ground came up and slammed into the side of his head.
Then everything went black.
Black and silent.
Â
Â
The next twelve hours were an ordeal for Groveâmostly because the doctors at Loveland General could find no serious physical maladies. His heart was fine, his circulatory system healthy, his brain scan normal. His collapse, occurring in full view of a dozen hardened lawmen, was the ultimate embarrassment for Grove. According to the doctors, it was probably the result of stress. Grove didn't buy it. Stress was a factor that he lived with every day. And nothing like this had ever happened.
For most of the afternoon Grove sat on the edge of a hospital bed in a private room, doing a crossword puzzle, waiting to be released. Every thirty minutes or so a nurse returned to check Grove's vitals, which were consistently normal, heart rate a steady sixty beats per minute, blood pressure a tranquil one twenty over eighty. Grove couldn't wait to get out of there. He wanted to put the humiliation of passing out in front of a bunch of coppers behind him, and he wanted to get back to work. But there was another reason he wanted out. His wife had died in a room just like thisâthe same gigantic contraption of a bed, the same faded drapes, the same rattling wall heater, the same bank of percolating monitors. Grove would never forget sleeping on that hardbacked armchair every night for over a month while his sweet Hannah was eaten alive by cancer.
Just before dinner, a voice crackled through the tiny loudspeaker mounted above the bed's headboard. “Mr. Grove, you've got a visitorâ”
Up to that point Grove had been pacing in his ridiculous gown, the cool air on his bony black ass, but now he frowned and headed over to the door, wondering if it was Lieutenant Slater coming to pay his respects, or one of the boys from the state IAB checking in to make sure nobody on the force was liable for Grove's collapse. Grove peered around the frame of the open doorway and gazed down the corridor, seeing nothing but a bustling throng of white-clad nurses, doctors, and wheelchair-bound patients milling back and forth.
Suddenly a familiar gray-haired head appeared from around the corner of the nurse's desk, a man carrying his topcoat in his arms, a sheepish expression on his craggy face.
Grove's jaw dropped open. “Tom?” As Geisel approached, Grove felt his stomach seize up. “The hell are you doing all the way out here?”
“Can't a general visit a wounded soldier in the field?” Geisel grinned and gave Grove's shoulder a friendly tap, and all of it seemed a little forced.
“I'm fine . . . it was just . . . a fluky kind of thing . . . exhaustion, I guess.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They say I have the heart of a twelve-year-old.”
“And don't tell meâyou keep it in a jar on your desk back at your office?” Geisel gave him a look, and the two men shared a nervous smile.
After an awkward moment Grove jerked a thumb at his room and said, “Come on in.”
They shut the door behind them for privacy, and Geisel draped his topcoat over the back of the armchair, then sat down. Grove sat on the edge of the bed, feeling exceedingly self-conscious in his baby-blue robe with the little faded chevrons on it and his rear end sticking out the back. The two men shared some small talk for a few moments. Finally the silver-haired section chief rubbed his mouth thoughtfully and came to the point. “Ulysses, I'm going to need you to take some time off,” he said.
“Tom, I know how this looks, but I promise youâ”
“I don't care how it looks, I care about
you
,” Geisel interrupted. “I need for you to have all your cylinders firing.”
“I'm fine, Tom, I promise you, I'm fine.”
“I understand that, kiddo. I do. I just think maybe you need to step back, take a breather. Maybe clear your head for a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks.”
“Ulyssesâ”
“A couple of weeks and Sun City could be back in hibernation, you said so yourself.”
Geisel gave him a hard look. “This is not up for discussion, kiddo.”
Grove sighed.
Geisel reached inside his sport coat and dug something out of his inner pocket. “I knew you weren't exactly the type to go drown some worms somewhere,” he said, unfolding a letter-sized document. “This thing came over the transom a couple of months ago, and I thought, âWait a minute . . . what a perfect way for Grove to get away from the case for a few days.' Here. Rather than me chattering on about it, why don't you just go ahead and read it?”
Geisel stood up and handed the document over to Grove, who glanced down at it. He had to read the entire document twice just to comprehend the contextâ