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

Maura muttered.
    He smiled at her. “You seem pretty buttoned down to me.”
    She laughed, and the sound of her voice—that goofy, hoarse chortle—touched 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.”
    â€œYou said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
    â€œYeah, it’s an idea. Maybe a new approach to all this. When you’re ready to go public.”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œIt might be a waste of time. I don’t know. But I have this idea. With your permission.”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œThis database that FBI agents use? VICAB it’s called?”
    â€œVICAP,” Grove corrected. “Stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.”
    â€œSorry, right. VICAP. Anyway. I was thinking. Why couldn’t you create a similar database for ancient history?”
    Grove told her he wasn’t following.
    â€œOkay. 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.”
    â€œIs 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?”
    â€œI 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 sacrifice—a 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.”
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    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 pumps—twelve diesel, eight gasoline—stretched 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.
    She got out of the car and strolled quickly across the lot toward the minimart and restaurant. Dressed in a denim sundress, she moved with the kind of nervous energy and purpose a lone woman acquires late at night, her gaze fixed on the entrance, her sandals snapping rhythmically. She vanished inside the