Read Online Frozen by Jay Bonansinga - Free Book Online Page A

Okuda saw this latter discovery as further evidence of some kind of ritualistic killing.
    After a brief lunch in the lab’s cafeteria—the profiler didn’t have much of an appetite and only had half a bagel—Grove 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 wound—the 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 object—a small piece of mossy fungus pierced by a leather band—that 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 subtly—almost imperceptively—becoming 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œHe abandoned me, he went home.”
    â€œC’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.
    â€œWelcome to my world,”