Frozen (6 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Frozen
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“Good God,” Maura uttered without really being aware of her own voice in her ears.
“It's a coincidence,” Okuda blurted, his dark eyes shimmering and fixed on Grove.
Grove shrugged. “I'll show you the forensic photos from the last scene, and you tell me whether that raised arm, that supine position, and that wound in the neck—all of it—you tell me whether it's all just a coincidence.”
“It's not possible, is it?” Maura asked.
Another shrug from Grove.
“What are we talking about here?” Okuda wanted to know.
Grove looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well . . . you're telling us you're investigating a series of homicides that have a similar—what do you call it?”
“Signature, pattern.”
“Signature, right . . . which means, what, the victims ended up looking a lot like Keanu?”
Grove corrected the young Asian. “Not ‘a lot.' They're identical.”
A cold finger touched Maura's spine all of a sudden—the way the profiler said the word
identical
, with that cutting gaze, and those almond eyes set deep in that sculpted brown face. For years, Maura County had found refuge, and perhaps even solitude, in the protective coating of history. Pain and savagery were an abstraction. But now, all at once, this assignment had become more than mere petrified bones and frozen flesh. In the space of an instant, the subject had turned to the here and now, and real grief, and warm blood and electric shock. And the change rattled the journalist.
She glanced over at Okuda and saw the incredulous look in the young scientist's eyes. “I still don't understand how you can rule out coincidence,” he said after swallowing a gulp of lager and stifling a belch.
“Technically you're right,” Grove replied with another shrug, “but the truth is, in this business you follow everything out to its logical conclusion.”
“But where's the logic here?”
Grove regarded the watermarks on the stained tabletop. “All we have right now is a connection, a visual connection, and that's all.”
“Okay . . . so?”
“We might be dealing with some sort of ritual, some sort of cult thing that gets its inspiration from ancient man.”
Okuda looked away for a moment, thinking, and Maura saw something glint in the young Asian's eyes. Grove saw it, too, but didn't comment. Okuda's hands were trembling again. Grove wondered how a young man with such pronounced tremors could do delicate slide work at a microscope or finesse a brittle, priceless artifact—regardless of whether the shaking was a simple nervous tic or some kind of reaction to the current turn the conversation was taking.
“On the other hand,” Grove said, “you've got to look at the possibility of a copycat situation.”
Maura perked up. “But how would anybody—”
“Pictures have been published, correct? Photographs, maps, diagrams. Shots of the mummy's position, the pose.”
Maura thought about it for a moment. “What are you saying? Some sicko saw the Iceman in
Discover
and decided to recreate the death over and over again?”
“It's a possibility we have to look at.”
Okuda looked up at Grove. “What else?”
Grove let out a sigh. “What else? Well, there's the X-factor.”
“Which means?”
“The X-factor is a connection we haven't figured out yet.”
“What other possible connection could there be?”
“I don't know yet.”
“We're talking about the early Copper Age here,” Okuda reminded him.
“I understand that—”
“That's six thousand years ago. Okay? They were just figuring out how to use the wheel.”
“If you don't mind, what I'd like you to do is tell me everything.”
Okuda looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me about that time, and this guy, this Iceman, who he was, tell me everything.”
Okuda slumped as though he had just been asked to swim the English Channel with an anchor around his neck. “It's kind of a big subject, Ulysses.”
Grove flashed his smile. “We're not going anywhere.”
They went through that first round of drinks pretty rapidly as Okuda described what the world was like six thousand years ago. The bar began to fill up with rowdy college kids, as well as grizzled townies looking to drown some sorrows on a lonely weeknight. The jukebox seemed to get louder and louder with each banal pop song, and Okuda had to strain his voice to be heard. He explained that the consensus among archaeologists was that the Iceman was European, or at least a native of Central Asia, who had reached the North American continent across the Bering Strait. From the tools found near his body, chances were good that he was a mountaineer. Maybe some sort of itinerant.
At some point, the waitress returned to ask if they wanted to order food. Nobody was hungry, but they did order another round of drinks. After the waitress had trundled off, Okuda said, “He might have been a shaman, somebody who went from village to village, healing people. . . you know.”
Grove looked at him. “A medicine man, is what you're saying?”
Okuda nodded. “That's why the Copper Age is such a fascinating period—anthropologically speaking—because basically, before then, there was no such thing as a métier or specialty.”
“How do you mean?”
“People basically did everything for themselves before the Copper Age. They farmed, they took care of their kids, they built their own shelters, they hunted, they basically did everything. But right around four thousand BC, people started developing specialties.”
“You're talking about occupations?”
“Exactly. One guy would come and build stuff for you, another guy was good at making tools, another guy could repair things. This changed everything.”
Grove was pondering, swirling the ice cubes in his glass of scotch. “A traveling medicine man.”
“It's all speculation, of course,” Okuda went on, “but we can tell a lot from the artifacts that were found on him and around him. He was so well preserved in that snow capsule, we recovered a lot of stuff that just blew the lid off conventional thinking. Like the axe blade.”
“What about it?”
Okuda's eyes practically twinkled. “Up until now we thought axe blades from that era were all primitive and flat, pounded on rocks. But Keanu's is
flanged
, with ridges, very advanced. It's like digging up the tomb of a medieval warrior and finding a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
“Do you know anything about his language, his culture, his religious beliefs?”
“Again it's all guesswork, but chances are he spoke a language called Indo-European. Basically most European languages come from this parent language. In terms of religion, polytheistic is my guess, especially when you consider the tattoos.”
“Tell me about the tattoos.”
“They're not like today's tattoos, which are pretty much simple ornamentation—‘mom' and ‘born to lose' and whatever. Keanu's tattoos were located in hidden places like his lower back and on the inner part of his ankle. Which suggests—to me, at least—that they're designed to give him some sort of supernatural power or protection.”
The waitress returned with the drinks. Maura watched Grove. The profiler was thinking, gazing off into the fragrant shadows, as the waitress awkwardly cleared the empties and replaced them with fresh drinks. The silence hung over the table like a pall, and for a long time after that, and throughout most of the remaining conversation, Maura found herself wondering what was going on inside Grove's head.
What dark vein had they tapped?
The wind sluices down the dark corridor of skeletal trees. It whistles past the shaman like a banshee howling in his ears. He takes one step at a time, his grass-netted boots sinking into the snow up to his knee. His feet are numb, and he can barely see his hand in front of his face as he climbs the crevasse. He's almost there. Almost at the plateau.
He pauses to catch his breath.
Gazing back over his shoulder, he sees the valley of larch trees spreading off into the distance like a great animal skin draped over the land. The sun lies on the horizon in streaks of magenta and gold. The temperature is dropping. It will be dark soon, and the darkness brings with it new dangers. He must hurry now.
He hears the scream again. It starts out low, as always, coming from a great distance, then rising in one great ululating howl that pierces the wind and echoes down across the valley. It is a primal death wail—half animal, half human—that penetrates the shaman's marrow and shoots through his soul like a sudden ZZZZZAP!
 
 
“What!”
Grove's eyes jerked open in the dark room, his face pressed against the pillow, the linens bunched at his feet.
Pale moonlight seeped into his motel room from somewhere off to his right. He shivered. The night-sweat dampening his sheets had chilled in an icy, inexplicable draft. He could still hear that keening sound from his dream, the horrible shrieking, and the beating of his own heart.
He lay there for an awkward moment, waiting for blessed reality to drive the nightmare away. But something nagged at the back of his brain. He blinked. He stared at the darkness around him. Particles floated in the gloom. At first they appeared merely as spots drifting across his sleepy, compromised vision.
Artifacts
. Like specks on the backs of his dilated pupils. But the more he gazed at the darkness, the more he realized he was witnessing something far more corporeal than an optical illusion.
Snow
.
It was snowing in his motel room. Grove swallowed dryly and clutched at the bedsheets. He glanced around the room and realized the walls had vanished. His heart quickened as he quickly registered several indisputable facts: somehow, in some spontaneous shifting of realities, his tousled bed now sat in a snowdrift on the side of a great primordial mountain, a sheer granite cliff rising up into the night sky behind his pathetic little veneer headboard.
Grove sucked in a startled breath—the air icy in his lungs.
A neolithic moon shone down on the alpine wilderness around him like a sinister, luminous face; and a gelid, angry wind swirled around Grove's ludicrous, incongruous bed. His breath halted. The strangest part—the part that would be most difficult to explain to the uninitiated—was that Grove had experienced moments like this throughout his life, especially during times of great stress. Like the time when he was twelve and he saw a premonition of his best friend's death by a hit-and-run drunk driver . . . or that time in basic training when he awoke one night to find himself chained to the lower deck of an eighteenth-century slave ship. Over the years, Grove had learned how to suppress the visions with little physical tricks, like a person with Tourette's syndrome learning to bite his tongue or breathe more steadily.

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