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 feltâor perhaps
sensed
is a better wordâa 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 experiencedâsomething 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?”
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 itâwhere 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 there 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.”
Â
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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 lookâalbeit through layers of hermetically sealed glassâat 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.
After a brief lunch in the lab's cafeteriaâthe profiler didn't have much of an appetite and only had half a bagelâGrove spent several hours in Okuda's cramped private office in the bowels of the Schliemann Lab, going through reams of material on the tests that had been done to the Iceman. He studied the endless sequences of mitochondrial DNA that were extracted from the mummy's bone marrow. He went through all the X-rays and scans of the Iceman's presumably fatal woundâthe sharp trauma injury that had sunk the hook into Grove. After placing a long-distance call to Quantico, the profiler had one of the bureau secretaries fax him a series of pathological reports on the Sun City victims. Grove began assembling visual comparisons between the ancient victim and present-day victims. The wounds were absolutely identical. The only anomalies were the missing internal organs. The Sun City victims, as far as Grove could tell from the forensics, were all internally intact.
No detail was considered trivial or irrelevant. Grove learned that the Iceman carried a strange objectâa small piece of mossy fungus pierced by a leather bandâthat had initially baffled archaeologists. The fungus contained chemical substances now known to be antibiotic, which suggested to Okuda that the fungus was part of the medicine man's arsenal. Grove also saw elaborate clay reconstructions of the mummy's face, as well as meticulously repaired grass sheathes and clothing worn by the Iceman. Grove even handled the Iceman's hatchet, which felt oddly comfortable in his hand, well balanced and finely crafted. In a mystical sense, Okuda explained, each swing of the Iceman's axe partook of the sacred. To slaughter an ibex or chop down a seedling would be linked to some god whose own axe had helped bless the world. Or perhaps the act emulated some mythic figure who had ridden the land of evil.
Grove wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he had a feeling that the more he knew about the mummy's origins and environment, the better he would be able to reconstruct the Iceman's murder and ultimately draw whatever connections there might be to Sun City.
He worked through dinner that night, absently picking at a box of chop suey that Maura County had brought him from a campus eatery. The journalist had been regularly checking in with the two men throughout the day, giving them encouragement and asking if they needed anything. Grove was very subtlyâalmost imperceptivelyâbecoming fond of the fair-haired, punkish young lady. He found himself joking with her. He found his mood brightening whenever she showed her face. And he felt the fondness reciprocated. She seemed to be worried about him. At around nine o'clock that night, for instance, she appeared in the doorway of Okuda's office with her hands on her hips and a sideways smirk on her face.
“You think maybe it's about time you knocked off for the day?” she asked.
Grove stretched, rubbing his neck. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Getting a little cross-eyed.”
She asked where Okuda was.
“He abandoned me, he went home.”
“C'mon,” she said. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, there's something I want to talk to you about.”
They closed down the office, turned out the lights, and locked the door.
Maura gave Grove a ride back to the motel, and they found the coffee urn in the lobby still warm and still half-full of bitter, stale French roast. They sat near the front window, the lights of passing SUVs flickering through the glass and flashing off their faces, the muffled sound of tires crunching in the snow. Grove rubbed his weary eyes. “The truth is, I really don't know what I'm doing,” he finally said with a sigh.
“Welcome to my world,” Maura muttered.
He smiled at her. “You seem pretty buttoned down to me.”
She laughed, and the sound of her voiceâthat goofy, hoarse chortleâtouched something deep within Grove. He noticed a tiny fleck of gold in the pale blue iris of the journalist's left eye, and all at once Grove felt something that he hadn't felt since his wife had died, and it bothered him. He felt an
attraction
toward this waifish young thing, as sure and hot as electric current running through him, and it made him miss his wife all the more. “I've been accused of a lot of things,” Maura said at last, “but never being buttoned down.”
“You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
“Yeah, it's an idea. Maybe a new approach to all this. When you're ready to go public.”
“Go on.”
“It might be a waste of time. I don't know. But I have this idea. With your permission.”
“I'm listening.”
She lit a cigarette and blew a circle of smoke away from the profiler. “To be honest, I got the idea from the FBI Web site, of all places.”
“Tell me.”
“This database that FBI agents use? VICAB it's called?”
“VICAP,” Grove corrected. “Stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.”
“Sorry, right. VICAP. Anyway. I was thinking. Why couldn't you create a similar database for ancient history?”
Grove told her he wasn't following.
“Okay. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, we could send out an e-mail or a letter or whatever to the entire archeological community.”
“Is that possible? The entire community?”
Maura shrugged, took another drag. “I asked Michael Okuda about it. He said they had a pretty decent mailing list. Anyway. What if we solicited the entire community and asked them if they had any evidence of similar murders? You see where I'm going with this?”
Grove looked at her. “Why would you think we'd find similar murders?”
“I don't know. Maybe it's a hunch. Maybe we won't. I just thought it would be . . . you know. Kinda fascinating. What do you think?”
Grove got up and paced across the deserted motel lobby. The front desk was unoccupied, the murmur of a television set from the inner warren of offices barely audible. Grove thought of his nightmare. The eerie, visceral quality of it still clung to his brain. In the dream,
he
was the Iceman,
he
was a human sacrificeâa casualty of some cruel, inexorable fate.
At last he turned and looked at Maura County, who still sat by the window, waiting for his answer with her gold-flecked blue eyes. Grove grinned at her and said, “I gotta admit, it
is
an interesting idea.”
Â
Â
That night, a thousand miles to the south, just outside Las Vegas, on the edge of the high desert near the Moapa River Indian Reservation, the Mason Dixon Truck Stop sat in the nimbus of a hundred sodium vapor lights.
The cumulative illumination was so bright, so relentless, so pervasive, that the stars in the vast Nevada sky were not visible for at least a quarter of a mile in every direction. Mayflies the size of walnuts swarmed by the lights. They made ticking noises that were just audible underneath the sound of canned music blaring across the cement lot. A score of fuel pumpsâtwelve diesel, eight gasolineâstretched across the bleached concrete. A single vehicle sat at one of the gas pumps: a sea-mist-green Honda Odyssey. The driver, a forty-three-year-old mother of two named Carolyn Kenly, had just turned the engine off.