Frozen (24 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Frozen
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Up until now, Grove had somehow managed to avoid being photographed by the tabloid press. Now he stared at a telephoto shot of himself and Maura in front of the Marriott Courtyard in Alaska, at the precise moment that he had asked Maura to go out on a date. In the picture, Grove was smiling awkwardly, sharing some intimate conversation with the young journalist.
They looked like lovers.
“Okay . . . great, just great,” Grove muttered.
Maura County looked as though she had something else to say, but instead turned away and gazed emptily at the overcast light glowing behind the shaded window.
 
 
Michael Okuda felt like a street urchin, skulking in the alley behind Olympia General Hospital. He thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his ratty cargo pants, hunching his shoulders against the chill spring wind. Dressed in a denim jacket, frayed at the collar, his silky onyx hair tufted and cowlicked from restless sleep, the young scientist could easily be mistaken for a crank addict waiting impatiently for his connection. In reality, that perception was not far from the truth. Okuda
was
a drug addict, and he
was
waiting to purchase a sort of contraband substance, and he
had
been tormented by a series of “connections” over the last few days that had sent him on an unexpected journey north to Olympia, Washington, where he was acting like a common street punk.
“Hey!”
The voice came from the depths of the alley, near the hospital's service entrance. A beefy black orderly in a stained white uniform and hair net was striding toward Okuda with an angry scowl on his face. He carried something in a hazardous-waste baggie.
“You got it?” Okuda asked, shivering from the wind.
“Thought you were gonna wait in the damn car,” the orderly grumbled as he approached. “I could lose my job, dawg. Somebody see us.”
“Don't worry about it.”
The orderly handed over the Zip-Loc bag. “C'mon, let's see some Benjamins.”
Okuda paid the man—two brand-new hundred-dollar bills—then gave a quick nod. The orderly turned and jogged off without a word. Okuda stuffed the Zip-Loc in his pocket and hurried toward the mouth of the alley.
Okuda's pockmarked Toyota Tercel sat idling across the street. Two elderly gentlemen sat in the backseat, like owls, silently watching Okuda approach. Okuda slipped behind the wheel, then handed the Zip-Loc bag over the seat-back to Professor Moses de Lourde.
The southerner, garbed in his elegant white ensemble, pursed his lips as he looked at the blood-spotted gauze. “‘They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb,'” he muttered.
“Shouldn't we just talk to Grove about this first?” Okuda asked somewhat rhetorically.
De Lourde waved off the question. “No reason to bother the man until we've got something more than just a theory.”
“You're sure this is enough to get a sequence?” asked the old priest sitting next to de Lourde.
Okuda assured him that it was enough, then put the car in gear and pulled away.
20
Uninvited
The figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, outlined by the fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor. At first Grove thought he was seeing another vision. The swish of the opening door had awakened him, but words had yet to be spoken.
Even in shadow the figure looked so familiar: a woman, standing there in the doorway as silent and still as a doe. The long graceful curve of her neck, the pile of hair, the pear-shaped curve of her matronly hips—all so familiar. Grove tried to call out but for some reason could not coordinate his lips. He gazed over at the clock and saw that his afternoon nap had stretched into evening.
There had been one interruption earlier that day—at around three o'clock—when the young doctor had stopped by to remove some of the bandages and examine Grove's hip. The prognosis had been excellent, and Grove was informed that he would be released the next morning. But now, flexing his bare hands, sitting up against the headboard, blinking away the grog of sleep, he felt completely disoriented.
“
Mtoto tamu
,” the woman said, lingering in the doorway, tilting her head with a regal quality that pierced Grove.
“Who is it?”
“
Mazazi hapa huku
.”
The words were familiar—Bantu or Swahili—and the voice, that velvety voice plugged right into Grove's central nervous system like an ultrasonic whistle jolting through a dog. Grove sat up straight. “Mom?”
The fluorescent overheads stuttered on as Vida Grove stepped tentatively inside the room and stood there for a moment, her elegant brown hands clasped in mortification, her long, handsome face furrowed with worry. “
Hivi . . . kwa hiyo a kutisha
,” she uttered softly.
Grove swung his bare legs over the edge of the bed, quickly covering himself. “In English, please.”
“So frightened, I was . . . so frightened,” she uttered, putting her hands to her mouth, then shuffling over to him with the broken grace of an aging ballet dancer. She put her arms around him, pulling him into her bosom, and he didn't move, did not even raise his arms. He breathed in her smell—Estee Lauder and bacon grease and cigarette smoke—and he recoiled from it.
Vida backed away. “Your friend says you were hurt badly,” she said after standing there for a moment. She wore a long, tunic-style African dress known as a
maasai
—the linen dyed vibrant shades of scarlet and indigo—which hung loosely off her spindly limbs. She had a little paunch belly, and her cigarettes hung in a pouch that dangled from a leather strap around her neck. The smokes bounced against her sagging breasts as she gesticulated frantically. “Your friend says you been shot, chasing this evil man, you need surgery.”
Grove looked at her. “I'll live. What friend?”
Vida glanced nervously over her shoulder.
Another voice drifting in from the hallway: “It was me, it's my fault.” Maura County stepped into the room, her denim jacket buttoned to her throat. She looked sheepish and a little defensive. “I know it was none of my business, but I thought somebody should call her.”
Vida started to say, “
Mtoto—
”
“How the hell did you find her?” Grove wanted to know. His gut burned, his scalp tingling with anger. Sorrow and regret—even fear—easily curdles into rage. “I never even mentioned her.”
“That night in the Marriott lobby, you said your mom lived in Chicago.”
Grove rubbed his face. “Jesus Christ.”
“I called Tom Geisel, ran it by him, asked if it was okay if I called her.”
Grove looked at his mother. “I'm sorry you came all this way for nothing.”
The elder woman looked confused. “For ‘nothing'? For nothing I come here? I do not understand.”
Grove shrugged. “As you can see, I'm gonna be fine, I get out tomorrow morning.”
Vida touched the rail on his bed as though she were absorbing his pain. “When your son is hurt, a mother comes, this is just the way that it is.”
Grove shook his head. “Okay . . . you're right. Thanks for coming all the way out here. But I'm fine now. Really.”
Vida looked at the journalist. “He was this way even as a child.”
Maura smiled. “Why am I not surprised?”
“He would fall down, get in a fight, I would try and comfort him, and he would push me away, just push me away—”
“All right, Mom, that's enough—”
“Never wanted any help.”
“Enough!”
The volume and intensity of Grove's voice stiffened both women into silence, and held the room for several moments in awkward stillness. Grove turned his face away. Vida gazed at the floor. Maura stood there, flabbergasted by this unexpected display.
Finally Maura broke the silence: “I thought she had a right to know, Ulysses. She's your mother.”
Grove shot an angry glance at her. “You have no
idea
who she is, and you have no idea who
I
am.”
Maura looked away as though punched in the gut.
Vida cocked her head defiantly at her son, her great pile of gray, woolly hair looking almost regal. “
Mtomo
, I come here only because—”
“Look, I don't want to offend you,” Grove interrupted, searing his gaze into his mother's huge, sad eyes. “But I don't need any magic charms or chicken bones or rain dances—I'm fine. All right? Now if you don't mind, I have to rest. Thank you for coming. I appreciate the effort, but right now what I need is some time alone.”
After a long, agonizing silence, Maura gently took the older woman's arm and ushered her out of the room.
 
 
The Irving Potok Center for the Analysis of Forensic Evidence—known among law enforcement insiders around the Pacific Northwest as the CAFE—is the Home Depot of police laboratories. The squat brick building, which is located on a busy street corner in Seattle's Pike County market district, offers hair, fiber, blood-type, and DNA analysis to everyone from U.S. Government agencies to junior college biology classes. And just like its retail counterpart, the CAFE is open twenty-four hours a day and always busy.
Its dank lower level, with its cramped warren of CRT cubicles, regularly bustles with pathologists and assistant medical examiners gathering evidence for some bureaucratic headache they're trying to soothe. Once in a great while, the CAFE will get an academic—an archaeologist or a geologist looking to authenticate a specimen. But never in their entire eleven-year history have the lab personnel seen such a strange and motley little threesome huddle in one of their basement cubicles, awaiting the results of a DNA test.
“Here it comes,” Michael Okuda said, nodding at the screen. The Asian sat in a swivel chair, shaking with dope-sickness, his hair askew, his eyes drawn and bloodshot. Professor Moses de Lourde stood behind him, arms crossed against his natty double-breasted white suit. Father Carrigan stood farther back in the corner, leaning against his cane.
The first sequence flickered on the screen, a checkerboard of black and white stripes that resembled a very complicated retail bar code.
“Now this is, what, the Iceman's DNA?” de Lourde wanted to know.
Okuda nodded, staring at the computer. More bar codes flashed across the screen—the headings and keys mostly numerical. Okuda had to correlate them with a guide he had been given by a lab assistant. His vision was bleary and he had to blink away the nervous tension. His trembling worsened. Finally he saw his vague suspicions confirmed in a pulsing brushstroke of glowing cathode ray light.
“Lord have mercy,” Professor de Lourde commented as the final sequence sputtered and typed onto the screen, the blue-green light reflecting off Okuda's and de Lourde's faces: two wholly different matrices superimposing over each other like a colony of insects falling into perfect luminous rank and file.
“Holy shit,” Okuda muttered under his breath as he gaped.
It had seemed like such a non sequitur when it had first occurred to the young Asian, like such a reach. But the translation of the Iceman's tattoos had sunk a hook into Okuda.
En-nu—en-nu-un
—loosely translated as “Protect us while We protect them.” At first Okuda had figured it was simply a comfort-prayer, like “Saint Christopher, protect us,” but after de Lourde and the priest had started babbling about these “feelings” they had about Grove, and the cycle of evil, and elliptical histories, Okuda had started seeing all sorts of alternative meanings to the words. All of which had led him
here
, to this damp, subterranean lab, and the converging stripes of light and dark on the computer screen.
“We've got to talk to him about this,” Okuda said at last, feeling a twinge of guilt, as though he were sifting through another man's fate with the carelessness of a transient rifling through a garbage can.
“The blood is secondary,” a voice murmured behind Okuda. Father Carrigan was staring at the floor as he spoke to no one in particular, his deeply lined face creased with solemn regret. “The blood is not what is most important.”
De Lourde turned to his new friend. “And what is most important, Father?”
The old man looked up and uttered in a deathly soft voice, “What is important is the summoning.”
 
 
They sat in a blue cigarette fog, two incorrigible smokers hunkered down in a deserted ham-and-egger across the street from Olympia General Hospital.
Vida Grove held her L&M between slender brown fingers and puffed daintily from it, as though she were sipping medicine. “He was not even supposed to
be
,” she said with a wistful nod of her magnificent gray head. “I never told Ulysses this, but he was never supposed to
be
.”
“I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean,” Maura said. She sat across the booth with a cup of coffee and an untouched cruller in front of her. She felt wrung out, drained, ridiculous. But now she listened closely to what the elder woman seemed to be about to confess.
“When I was just a young girl,” Vida began, “and I was—how do you say it,
with
him? With Ulysses?”
“Pregnant?”
“Yes, there were problems, the doctor told me, I had the diabetes, six months carrying this baby, and they told me I would probably lose the child.”
Maura nodded. “That must have been terrible. You were a single mother, right?”
Vida waved away the question. “My husband remained in my life long enough to give me the child, and then he was gone like a ghost.”
“Oy vey.”
Vida dragged on her cigarette. “I would not accept this news, however, that I would lose the baby. I went to a seer—”
“A what?”
“A
seer
—a Sudanese man who lived down the street, a shaman. This man was a healer, and he told fortunes, and he helped other Africans. I know it sounds strange, but I would not accept this news that my baby would die and I went to the seer and asked him what I should do. I will never forget that morning I went to his home. He had me down into his basement, where it was dark, with beads across the doorway, and I sit down in front of his brazier—”
“Brazier?”
“It is a ceremonial fire, very full of magic, like what you call—what is it,
incense
? In a Catholic church?”
Maura gave her a nod. “Right, right.”
“And here I am sitting there, this frightened girl, six months along, and this man, his eyes get very big, like his face is very surprised, and perhaps frightened even, and I am saying, ‘
Washiri
? What is wrong?' And he says, ‘This baby of yours is very special. And he will be a prophet, and he will walk with great leaders.'”
Vida paused then, casually exhaling smoke and snubbing out her cigarette in a scorched foil ashtray sitting next to a bottle of congealed ketchup.
“I just want to know whether my baby will survive,” she went on, “and what I can do to save my baby, but this seer is telling me my baby will grow up to be a great man, and will walk across the dimensions. I cannot take it anymore and I ran out of there. I ran.”
“What happened?”
“It is difficult to explain but it was a kind of—what is the word?—a
turning point
for me. I took herbs and I did a ceremony every night. I prayed for my son to be born healthy, and I tried to
believe
he would be born all right, and he was. He was small but he was all right.”
Another pause, and Maura noticed the African woman's eyes were wet.
Maura touched her hand. “He turned out okay, I'd say. You were a good mother.”

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