Frozen (23 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Frozen
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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 from 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 expression 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?”
She gaped at him for a moment. “You haven't seen it?”
“Seen
what
?”
“Oh, Jesus.” She stood there for a moment, staring, clenching her fists. She came back over to the bed and rooted through the magazines she had brought, mumbling, “I thought maybe you'd just laugh at it . . . I even brought along an extra copy for you, you know, just for laughs. Now I'm feeling like I've really screwed things up.”
Buried under the weekly magazines—
Time
,
Newsweek
,
Esquire, Entertainment Weekly
—was a black-and-white tabloid with garish forty-eight-point letters at the top reading
THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS.
Grove plucked it from the pile and took a closer look. The headline screamed
J-LO'S BUTT IMPLANTS EXPLODE
!—
GAL'S DREAMS OF A BODACIOUS BEHIND BURST AS DOCTORS BOTCH SURGERY
! Grove had seen the rag many times in line at the supermarket, occasionally picking it up for a few grins while he waited on an especially slow cashier.
At the bottom of page 1 was a box labeled
EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOGRAPHS OF A MONSTER HUNT.
Grove glanced at the minimal copy, which yammered with purple alliteration about “Ulysses Grove, the mysterious manhunter from the FBI, and his mystical methods.” A few lines farther down the page, the article crowed about “a monster on the loose, possessed by the spirit of an ancient mummy.” But it wasn't the copy that bothered Grove. What bothered him was the accompanying photograph, rendered in grainy paparazzi-style shadows along the bottom corner of the page.

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