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fine.”
    â€œUlysses, great. Um . . . yeah.”
    â€œSo . . .”
    Maura sighed. “Ulysses, I promise you, I’m usually not this flaky. And call me Maura. I’m really sorry, it’s been a crazy week.”
    â€œI’ve had plenty of those,” the voice wanted her to know. Maura could almost see the weary smile on the other end of the line.
    She felt a ripple of relief travel through her. She had never in her life dealt with a member of any law enforcement agency. Had never, thank God, been a victim of any crime. Had never even talked to a policeman. Hell, she didn’t even like cop shows or mystery novels. And here she was, talking to Sherlock Frigging Holmes, and he sounded like a decent enough guy. “Anyway,” Maura finally said, “as you can imagine, everybody in the field’s buzzing about this Iceman discovery, especially because it looks like he was murdered. I mean, we’re talking a perfectly intact Copper Age man here. Discover ’s already done two full stories about it.”
    â€œI assume they’ve done DNA sequences on the mummy?”
    â€œYeah, well, see . . . that’s where things get kind of complicated.” Maura pushed herself away from her desk and stood. She began to move around her cubicle like a caged animal with the phone glued to her ear. “There’s been a battle between the state of Alaska and the park service over who owns the thing. It’s kind of a mess.”
    â€œWhere is it now?”
    â€œIt’s still at the University of Alaska. They’ve got a pretty impressive lab up there, and they’re keeping him frozen. They thawed him out once to get samples.”
    â€œBone and tissue, I assume?”
    â€œYeah, exactly.” Maura nodded. “About a gram from his hip. Which was damaged when the hikers pried him out of the ice. The first analysis was sort of confusing.”
    â€œLet me guess,” the voice said. “They got a lot of different sequences.”
    â€œExactly, exactly. How did you know that?”
    â€œWe see that at crime scenes a lot. You try to do a mitochondrial test, but you end up getting a lot of different sequences because you’re working with the surface. It’s a lot like picking up a dozen different fingerprints at a scene because the victim’s been handled so much.”
    â€œThat’s it, that’s it,” Maura said, still nodding. “That’s why they did a second test, cutting away the outside tissue. When they assayed the core they got one clean sequence. And that got everybody excited.”
    After a long pause the voice said, “I suppose we should get together and take a look at the thing.”
    A spurt of cold adrenaline traveled through Maura’s belly. She couldn’t believe that this was actually going to happen. Screw the “Paleolithic Diet”—Maura County was going to win the damn Pulitzer Prize after all! But in the midst of all the sudden excitement was a momentary hiccup of doubt in the back of her brain. Something about the profiler’s voice bothered her. This guy Grove didn’t sound right. He was saying all the right words, but the tone of his voice sounded wrong. It sounded reluctant, maybe even a little sad. And for a brief instant Maura wondered if she was about to involve the wrong man in this amazing, all-important, once-in-a-career project. But almost as quickly as the notion had crossed her mind, she brushed it off and said, “Great, fantastic . . . then I guess the next step is setting up a meeting in Alaska.”
    The voice said that sounded good.
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    The following Monday, which was the fifth of May—a mild time of year for Alaska—Maura County found herself waiting in the outer lobby of the Heinrich Schleimann Building, which housed the university’s archaeology laboratory, on the northwest corner of the campus. It was a clear day, and the mountain sun was a