The 2012 Black Hole Killer™

By Arthur T. White

The 2012 Black Hole Killer is a cross-genre murder-mystery/cosmological Bonfire of the Vanities novel about the predicted universe's end on December 21, 2012. The book begins with a seeming murder that occurs on July 28, 1977. The victim is floating in mid-air and frozen to the coldest temperature of the universe, absolute zero, when it's 95 degrees outside. The book then takes you to what happened the day before and next to the day after the body is discovered.

The plot centers around the travails of the Hindu Goddess Kali. Fourteen billion years old, She possesses all the powers of the black hole which birthed Her in the Big Bang. We then learn that a team consisting of a psychiatrist avatar of the Hindu God Shiva, two members of Kenyan Kikuyu royalty, two New York City detectives, and an astrophysicist Hopi Chief join forces to hunt Her down.

They confront Her at the summit of the devil volcano Shaitani in Kenya one month later. There they learn that Kali and the universe's fate are inextricably linked to the Black Stone of Mecca, Jomo Kenyatta's Burning Spear, a sacred Mayan throat-slitting black sacrificial knife, and Himmler's Wewlesberg Castle's occult Black Sun mosaic. After the confrontation, Kali kills two of the six and escapes.

Then, after escaping, Kali between the years 1997 and 2010 links up with a group of corrupt politicians and Wall Streeters with whom She in 1977 had founded the Weather Derivatives Hedge Fund. With its help, She uses Her black hole powers to raise one trillion dollars cash from the natural disasters She creates. She needs this money to build an atom smasher under the Himalayan Mountain K2 which She plans to use on December 21,2012.

The tale concludes by tying cosmological and financial "black holes" and "bubbles" ever more tightly together until Her final confrontation with our psychiatrist avatar at the very moment the universe is scheduled to end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456730703

Arthur T. White

• The author's research intoan experience with astronomy and cosmology began in elementary school. He then was part of the group of the first "science nerds" propelled into New York City's eighth grade skipping Special Progress after Sputnik was launched. His Bar Mitzvah present was a 2.4 inch refractor and a subscription to Sky and Telescope. • He then was part of his high school's "Science Corps," receiving multiple awards in national science competitions. He also after taking a special exam was one of the few New York City students accepted by Columbia University's School of Engineering to spend his Saturday mornings there. • He also was honored as a National Science Foundation Fellow, spending one summer studying astrophysics and cosmology at the Hayden Planetarium. • In college, he took extensive coursework not only in literature and mythology but also in business and economics. A nationally ranked squash player, he graduated with High Distinction in Psychology and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. • During college and afterwards he worked and traveled extensively. At one point, he was a management trainee for one of the largest shipping companies of the world in Rotterdam. He also worked at a military hospital in Israel as well as with a general practitioner in the "hillbilly" hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky. • He also while at medical school figured out a way both to get a Master's degree at another university by commuting there on his motorcycle. Later on, he simultaneously enrolled in an Ivy League law school while still in medical school. • After his psychiatry residency he has consulted for and treated many Wall Streeters. He also successfully paid for his children's educations by successfully speculating in natural gas options while being a "stay-at-home" dad. • He had a golf ball sized but fortunately benign brain tumor which was removed about two and a half years ago. Writing this book at that time got added to his "Bucket List" -- along with his deciding to go to the Super Bowl if the Giants won the NFC championship (they did and he did) and relocating to Florida during the winter. • Despite his brain injury, he this year nonetheless managed to be one of the oldest people sitting for and passing the Florida Bar.

Book preview

Chapter 1

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

Noon, between 95° and -459.67° F

Given the 95° heat outside, there shouldn’t have been a vertical, blue ice–encased, naked, mirrored body suspended in midair. The body was slowly spinning clockwise. The bottoms of the soles of its feet were suspended six feet above the two inch thick blue ice that coated the ebony floor.

And yet, there it was. Incomprehensible. A seeming affront to the laws of nature.

The body in turn was surrounded by a frozen cloud of similarly blue ice–encased, perfectly mirrored flies. This cloud rotated exactly at the same speed and in the same languorous fashion as the floating body. The flies at first glance looked like a bodyguard, concealing and protecting its charge.

Both the body and its bodyguard of flies appeared impervious to the record-breaking heat outside the Ninetieth Street and Central Park West 1940s brownstone’s twentieth floor circular bedroom. No water rivulets ran down it sides. There were no puddles on the floor below it.

Instead, the frozen mass voraciously sucked into its center all heat in the room. The mass hungrily devoured and then coated with deep tanzanite-blue ice everything near it: the twenty foot high black Bengali Makassar ebony ceiling and matching black ebony floor; the twelve mirrors, each ten feet tall by six feet wide; the bed with its ebony sideboards; the thirteen two foot tall ebony pedestals; the four foot tall objects sitting on top of the pedestals; the huge, ten foot long by seven foot wide king-sized bed; the six foot long by three foot tall picture above the fireplace; and even the entire fifteen foot long by ten foot high fireplace itself.

The ceilings and floors not only were coated with the same six inch thick blue ice layer, but six foot long shark tooth stalactites also sprouted thickly from the ceiling.

Matching six foot tall shark tooth stalagmites rose from the blue ice–coated ebony floor to meet them. The impression the shivering and cautious, yet almost unbearably and helplessly curious, detective got was that of a huge blue ice prehistoric shark’s open hungry maw—waiting, expectantly, hopefully, to clamp down and tear to bits anyone stupid enough to get near it.

Twenty five year old Twentieth Precinct Major Case Squad NYPD Detective (Third Grade) Brian X. MacBoru stood outside the bedroom door. Paralyzed by both the unbearable cold and the sudden cloud of terror that seized him, he could only stare at the bizarre combination. His body trembled uncontrollably while he instinctively crossed himself.

As he tried to force himself to cross the bedroom’s threshold to investigate this bizarre scene, he again was paralyzed, this time with shock. This was because, when he then inspected more closely the bluish, translucent ice fog aura that surrounded the frozen body’s head, he realized that this aura itself was shot through with the tiniest bits of blood-streaked grey brain matter.

Brian could only stare in numb amazement at what had been by far the most bizarre thing he’d ever encountered over the course of his skyrocketing but still brief three year career as an undercover police officer and then as a highly decorated detective. Torn equally by on one hand his powerful professional duty to investigate and on the other by the mindless terror threatening to overpower him, he at first could not force himself to enter the room. Instead, he first remained frozen in place at the doorless threshold.

MacBoru’s arrestingly deep, bottle-green eyes, the ones that he’d inherited from his Irish royal ancestors, widened as he noticed the door. Easily sixteen feet tall, its black ebony was twisted and torn. Lying on the floor like it was made of paper, now it was ripped in shreds as if torn by giant, razor-sharp talons.

MacBoru’s eyes, the color of glass as old as his family patriarch and namesake, the last great king of Ireland, Brian Boru, blinked.

Turning his gaze away, he desperately but unsuccessfully tried to beat back the waves of dizziness that quickly overcame him.

As the room spun violently, he fell to his knees.

Then, after slowly forcing himself to rise, trying to hold on to the slick, blue ice–crusted, ripped door jamb for support, he reminded himself to follow procedures. First, he checked the bulky battery-operated cassette tape recorder he always carried and positioned its carrying strap over his left shoulder.

Then he reached into his right pocket and checked carefully to make sure the magnetic tape cassette was properly inserted and the battery was working.

Next, he equally and carefully checked the tape and battery of the much smaller experimental microcassette that he had just been issued the day before for field testing. Then, trying to compose himself, he resumed his investigation.

Reminding himself of his professional responsibilities and determined to accept the consequences of what he was about to do, he courageously forced himself to cross the bedroom’s threshold, ignoring the screaming warnings from his survival instincts.

The moment he did so, he found himself now strangely, helplessly, impelled to approach the body. It was as if he were captured by some kind of unspeakably powerful gravitational pull, which appeared to become ever stronger the closer he approached the body. He had a fleeting thought of being a fly being sucked into the web of the huge spider that was about to sink its fangs into his neck and then suck his insides dry.

His now nearly frozen fingers reached to his holster to pull out his gun, just in case the killer was nearby. But just as he was about to pull out his gun, he was distracted and his bottle-green eyes again widened as he realized that the magnetic pull suddenly had ceased at the very instant he’d found himself only inches away from the frozen corpse. His eyes now were helplessly drawn to the corpse as the fingers of his right hand instinctively moved from his holster to turn on the two tape recorders.

He then dictated his description of the body, noting that the frozen, floating, blue ice-encased corpse was about six feet long. Its frozen arms hung there crucifixion style. They were outstretched, and one foot lay crossed over the top of the other.

The frozen, mirrored mass that imprisoned the body had to weigh hundreds of pounds, he thought to himself. It and its escort of rotating, frozen mirrored flies each flawlessly reflected the opulent décor of the luxurious twenty foot tall, thirty foot long, twenty foot wide brownstone’s master bedroom in which they hovered.

And together they all created a bizarre Versailles Hall of Mirrors series of infinite reflections in the twelve ebony-framed ten foot tall by six foot wide mirrors occupying three of the four walls behind the body, the fourth being occupied by the frozen fireplace.

Brian now was close enough to the crime scene to see that there were six hand-carved ivory and gold-inlaid bedposts hidden underneath their blue ice coating marking the boundary of the ten foot long by seven foot wide blood-red, velvet covered bed. The ice-coated ebony floor, and what he now saw was the ivory inlaid blue ice–coated black ceiling, both now were seamlessly reflected back to him as MacBoru continued to stare.

Transfixed again by what he saw, MacBoru found himself also literally beginning to become frozen in place. He now only could helplessly stare at the blue ice that immediately covered his shoes and began to slowly march up his legs.

To Detective MacBoru’s added amazement, the ice teeth sprouting from the ceiling and floor had already, since the time he’d entered the room, grown from being six feet to eight feet long. Their stiletto-pointed tips now reached ever more menacingly downward. The gap between them and the equally potentially death-dealing tips of the opposing now eight-foot stalagmites left only an eight-foot enclosing gap between them.

MacBoru realized to his horror that he somehow had to grab onto to the tips of the stalagmites and vault over them if he were ever going to be able to fully inspect the crime scene. He also knew intuitively that he’d better do so quickly. He doubted that, even though he’d been a champion pole-vaulter in high school, he’d be able to leave the bedroom alive if the gap between these frozen teeth closed more than another two feet.

MacBoru needed all of his Alaskan pipeline construction-hardened muscular strength to somehow manage to stamp his feet and shatter the rapidly thickening blue ice sheath covering them. He then was further startled by the realization that the ice by this point had covered his ankles and already was threatening his knees.

He shivered uncontrollably in the fierce cold he knew already was more deadly than the frigid sixty mile per hour gales he’d encountered when he’d worked on the pipeline during the two years before he had joined the NYPD. He then was reminded of the years he’d lived in the bone-chilling, deadly Arctic air of Point Barrow, Alaska, the nation’s northernmost—coldest and darkest—point.

He realized to his horror that somehow the frozen mass he faced had caused the temperature of the room he was in to have dropped well below even the -20° F temperature he’d encountered at Barrow.

MacBoru again looked around the master bedroom. He now was close enough to see that, hidden within each four-foot-tall blue ice mass atop each of the thirteen pedestals was what he realized was a sacred Hopi Indian Kachina doll.

He realized that the reason he hadn’t noticed this before because each doll’s deeply vivid tanzanite-blue color was an identical match to the same dark blue color of the glacial ice covering them.

His gaze then swept over the sixteen foot long by ten foot high white Cararra two hundred million year old marble mantle surrounding the fireplace and the still blue ice–encased, six foot long by three foot tall picture hanging over it. He could see despite the ice that the marble was intricately carved, although its details were obscured and hidden from him by the ice sheath covering it.

He nonetheless realized that someone must have spent at least six figures on that fireplace and mantle alone. Whoever lived here was immensely wealthy—or had been. Was its owner the corpse, or was the corpse a guest, a trespasser, or an invited victim?

His practiced detective eyes then noted the fact that in the fireplace itself there was a four foot by four foot symmetrical cubes of more blue ice. Within that cube, Detective Brian X. MacBoru could make out what appeared to be the scattered pieces of charred dark embers of a recent fire.

He shivered again as he remembered that no vampire could enter a room unless first given permission to do so. He wondered if also the reverse were true: that vampires could not suck you dry unless you first accepted their invitation to cross the threshold of their lairs.

Silently praying for Christ’s protection, he prodded himself to proceed forward. He forced himself to gather almost all of his cold-zapped strength. Grasping the skin-shredding tips of two blue ice stalagmites, he ignored the burning pain and steaming blood now spurting from his lacerated fingers, closed his eyes, pretended he still was in high school, and vaulted through the still eight foot opening.

As he did so, he noticed that the icy fangs had stopped growing. It was as if those fangs had curled into a sardonic smile, inviting him to inspect the slowly spinning mirrored floating body before snapping shut on him.

He nonetheless came right up to the blue ice encased body. Shaking with cold, he couldn’t even begin to imagine how cold the icy mass actually was.

The frigid air didn’t take the form of the Alaskan gales that once had been blowing fiercely at him. Instead it seemed that the body itself was creating some type of inexplicable vacuum, one that now greedily was sucking in his rapidly dwindling body heat.

Now again, shivering uncontrollably and desperately trying to ignore his now totally frostbitten, blue ice–covered fingertips, as well as the now-screaming silent voices of his survival instincts, he helplessly extended those frozen fingertips to touch the mass itself. In the second before he did so, he had a sudden horrifying intuition. It was an intuition that, hidden in the room, perhaps even next to the body itself, someone—or something—might still be in the room. He shivered again, now with the certainty that whoever—or whatever—was responsible for the murder was in fact now waiting for him, hidden behind the cloud of flies. Waiting for him eagerly—hungrily.

He then at that same instant heard the whisper of a sound wafting across the room. Its tone was at once both harshly cold yet also sensually soft.

His fingers now paused, a mere fraction of an inch away from the body itself, as he had a quick glimpse of a blackness coming at unimaginable speed from behind the cloud of frozen flies. Totally without form or substance, it raced toward him.

As he flinched with the sudden realization that this darkness was now taking the form of a cloud in exactly the same shape as the ice fog surrounding the frozen body’s head, Brian realized that it would wrap itself around him even before he could touch the body. In fact, at that very instant of insight, the ice fog expanded to envelop everything in the room, including him.

To his horror, he then felt a surprisingly gentle, clearly sexual, touch of strange fingertips at the corners of his eyes and what he later swore sounded for all the world like the forlorn, soft, sad sigh of a lost, doomed soul.

Then the red LED lights winked out on both of his tape recorders. By this point, Brian wasn’t even surprised to see the older cassette one was totally encased in blue ice. Despite his building terror and his realization that his own life also was on the verge of winking out, Brian’s years of training nonetheless automatically kicked in, causing him to somehow manage to protect the brand new microcassette field trial model he’d gotten that very morning by burying it deep in his pocket.

He next heard the plaintive sounds of his own screams. Then, as the blackness totally enveloped him, he felt the unbearably searing pain in his now useless, totally frozen eyes.

Chapter 2

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

12:30 PM, 95°F

Then, knowing he was about to die, Brian desperately used the last reserves of his nearly exhausted life energy to seize the rope that suddenly, miraculously, looped itself around his blue ice–coated hands.

Brian’s death grip on the rope held as it dragged him back across the threshold out of the room and into the steaming hot hallway beyond.

As the ice on his arms and legs began to melt, he fought back to full consciousness. He then was able to use the rope to help him slide farther into the hallway on his still ice-encrusted belly.

Then two well-calloused, still powerful hands suddenly swung under his armpits. They pulled him upright and led his now ice water–saturated, five foot ten, fireplug-thick body onto a nearby chair.

Lieutenant, Brian now shouted in amazed relief, now recognizing by feel Galahad’s muscular forearms, still thick and sharply defined despite their forty seven year old age.

What he couldn’t see was the brown skin that covered them, the jet black, grey-flecked, Superman-style hair curl. He couldn’t see the equally curious and concerned furrowed brow over Galahad’s bright incisively intelligent, deep tanzanite-blue eyes. These now rapidly read their surroundings for potential danger. They reflected equal parts of wariness and worry.

Lieutenant Galahad Geist took a deep breath. He called for all the strength still within his forty seven year old, six foot two, but still whippet lean, 170 pound frame, to lift up Brian’s former All-American running back, twenty-five year old, Scotch-Irish, 220 pound body.

Grunting with the effort, the Twentieth Precinct’s Investigative Squad Leader and Detective (First Grade) Geist quickly ran his own sensitive, sure fingers over Brian’s still numbingly cold, fair-skinned, freckled face and thick, carrot-colored hair.

After satisfying himself that there were no obvious skull fractures, Lieutenant Geist whispered softly, "We don’t know who—or what—we’re dealing with yet.

"I ran after you but got near you just in time to see you go into that godforsaken room. And my own sixth sense told me right away that you were marked for death. I realized somehow that you—like the Jewish, Gypsy, and homosexual victims of Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann’s Final Solution—now were one of the ‘death candidates,’ one of the ‘todeskandidaten,’" Galahad added, gritting his teeth.

He then shook off the mood and smiled warmly at Brian. "Luckily for you, this same intuition had told me to bring with me my mountaineering rope. Otherwise, you’d be a frozen stiff yourself by now. Just like the victim.

"Then, even before I heard your scream, I had called for an ambulance and backup because my gut told me you were in deep shit.

We’ll have to talk more after we get you moved and after we get those eyes of yours looked at by the EMTs. But tell me, old friend. No bullshit. First, how badly do you think you’re hurt? And second, the truth: why did you ignore procedure and go in without backup? Finally, the truth: what the devil happened in that room?

Chapter 3

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

12:45 PM, 95° F

As for how badly I’m hurt, I’m totally blind. Feels like my eyeballs are fucking ice buckets.

Brian then turned his blue ice–encrusted blind eyes toward Lieutenant Geist’s voice. Trying to control his own now quivering voice, Brian forced himself to ask, Lieutenant, tell me straight, how bad do my eyes really look?

"The truth? Fair enough. I can’t even see them. They are buried in too much ice—glacial deep blue ice. Just like the ice we in fact saw on the glaciers when we went hiking in Alaska last summer.

"You surely remember how amazed you’d been when we’d been overwhelmed by the sight of that glacial blue ice last summer when we’d taken that two week camping trip right after I’d recruited you to work for me. We’d come across it right after we left Point Barrow where you used to work, remember?

"And don’t give up hope just yet. I have a hunch that your eyes will recover precisely because they were frozen. Remember what we learned from our water rescue course: when someone drowns, the colder the water the better chances of reviving the victim.

But we need to get you revived quickly. Galahad then warned Brian with a smile as he then joked, After all, it’s nearly past our union-guaranteed lunch hour. And after all, all the rest of us here are dying for one of your famous Detective Brian X. MacBoru world-class, mouth-watering triple-decker grilled sandwich specials. You know, the one covered with melted Swiss Alp cave-aged Gruyere and filled with your special mixture of filet mignon carpaccio, ripe avocado, sliced Sacramento tomatoes, fried Vidalia sweet onions, and best of all, Normandy butter broiled Matsutake mushrooms.

Brian in turn then smiled warmly himself despite his still-searing pain.

Ha, ha, ha, very funny. And see if you can keep up all of those alliterations. If you do, soon you’ll be as famous as Spiro Agnew, our famous crook President Richard Nixon’s equally crooked colleague, his fatuous and already forgotten former vice president. Brian then chuckled, adding, See? I can play the alliteration game just as well as you can!

Brian’s smile then quickly faded, his voice now whispering, urgently adding, "But seriously, I’d really like to believe what you just said. Not just about the sandwiches, but about my medical condition.

But thanks anyway. Too bad you’re not a real doctor but only a fucking lawyer with a Juris Doctor degree. Then maybe I could believe you.

Lieutenant Geist then threw up his hands in frustration. "Okay, I frankly have no clue as to your condition. But remember from your Catholic upbringing and Dante’s Inferno that the worst sin is the pride of despair. You simply can’t give up hope of being saved—not yet anyway. If you do, you will end up frozen in this hell as surely as the devil was in Dante’s.

"And Brian, remember that despite my German surname, I am part Hindu. You surely remember my having told you that, like my maternal grandmother before me, I too, in addition to being an NYPD lieutenant, also am a priest of Vishnu, Life’s Preserver—and the Universe’s Preserver. So what I must now do is pray to holy eternal Vishnu for you.

O Vishnu, O Supreme God, O Preserver, please watch over my noble best friend, this noble savior of so many lives … This prince of purity. Please protect him body and soul. Please balance the evil Kali the Destroyer has done to him with the Creator Brahma’s healing good. And for you, my Catholic sergeant, I’ll say ‘amen.’

Lieutenant Geist then gently but urgently whispered in Brian’s right ear, "The ambulance guys will take you to see a brilliant, world-class eye expert—and my world-class friend—Dr. Mark J. K. Lathem, chief of the division of neuro-ophthalmology at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. They’ll be here in just a few minutes. And I guess that whoever—or whatever—caused all this already has left. So at least we can get you out of here safely.

And, Lieutenant Geist added teasingly, "at least at New York Eye and Ear, you won’t have to share a room with that frozen stiff in the other room. He’s still floating in midair, still looking like a mirror, as is its bodyguard of flies.

"Instead, I’ll have to send that bizarre body somewhere else where they specialize in handling ‘frozen stiffs.’ Probably to Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.

And listen, Brian, you can already hear the three ambulances’ sirens. One’s for you. One’s for the stiff, and the last one’s for me.

Galahad’s voice took on added urgency as the sirens got louder, announcing their impending arrival.

"So forgive me, partner mine. I have to start my fact review. I have to know what happened.

And again, whatever possessed you to go in like that without me and without backup? You know I’d told you to wait for the rest of us after that weird 911 call had come in. But you didn’t wait for us. You instead flew out of the station like a bat out of hell. Why? That’s not at all like you, pal. And you know the drill: ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’ Or, Galahad now mused, Maybe the truth should be, ‘So please help me, God.’

He then picked up Brian’s frozen right hand in his own and softly asked, So my friend, please tell me. What happened?

Chapter 4

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

1:10 PM, 95° F

Okay, Brian replied, automatically slipping into his well-oiled grand jury testifying mode:

"The subject incident is all described on both of the tape recorders in my pocket.

"Here’s what I remember: as you know, the freaked-out female inhabitant of the building next to subject premises called 911. She’d demanded to speak to a ‘fucking real detective’ at our precinct.

"She’d been barely coherent. She’d said she was ‘fucking freaking out—Bellevue style.’ Her saying that then made me think that she’d been to Bellevue herself and now could be a violent psycho. That’s why I bolted out of there without talking to you first.

I was afraid she was losing it. I was concerned that she could be at imminent risk for jumping out of her own window or slicing her wrists. I became especially alarmed after the 911 operator told me that the woman reported having heard ‘a loud explosion, like glass shattering.’ The caller said that since her window had been open because her air conditioning wasn’t working, she’d ‘stuck my head out to see what the fuck was going on.’

Brian paused a moment before continuing, his head filled with the jarring recollections of what the woman had reported and how they squared with what he himself first had experienced. He then continued, "The subject next reported that she ‘nearly had my goddamn head cut off by a freaking flying two foot icicle, and I don’t mean the goddamn Good Humor kind. Flew right at me from next door.

‘Lucky I wasn’t hurt. There was glass and blue freakin’ ice all over my place. So I called you guys.’

Brian, Lieutenant Geist impatiently interrupted, Please listen carefully. The first ambulance, the one for you, already has arrived. Time’s running out. So please tell me only the key facts. Please, he pleaded with Brian.

"Okay, boss, I’ll make this as brief as I can.

"Sooo, anyway, after talking to her, I rushed over here. To keep an eye out until you all arrived.

"So why didn’t I wait for you once I got here and instead run upstairs and into that God-forsaken room and violate all our training and procedures? I really can’t say.

"Except that, I swear, I felt—and this is the only way to describe it—drawn there. Like by some kind of magnetic force I couldn’t control. And Lieutenant, you know what? The closer I got, the more powerful the draw. And the colder it got.

"Damnedest thing that ever happened to me, like I was paralyzed but my feet moved.

"Then when I got to the bedroom’s threshold, I saw that door.

"It looked like it was solid brass. Hand tooled. Twenty-two goddamned feet high, six inches thick, six feet across—must have weighed a ton.

"Yet it was ripped off its hinges. Jesus, Lieutenant, the door itself was actually shredded, ripped apart. I mean, in strips. Like paper strips we did in the second grade. Only jagged.

Like by huge claws.

Chapter 5

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

1:15 PM between 95° and -20° F

Brian sped up, trying hard to finish his verbal report before he was taken away by the ambulance.

Then I saw that body—hanging in the air and slowly spinning. Seeing it that way, I simply lost control. Stupid. I couldn’t help myself. I just had to go in and look. Curiosity and the cat, right? Or, he mused, was I being sucked in … ?

Brian then added, Oh. One last thing. I wasn’t a total moron. He then pointed with his head first toward his left shoulder and then to his pants pocket. I can’t use my hands, Lieutenant. They’re still too frozen. Willya please cut the frozen strap that’s keeping my regular cassette recorder stuck to my left shoulder? Then please reach into my right pocket to take out the new microcassette recorder, Lieutenant, okay?

Obeying Brian’s instructions, Lieutenant Geist pulled out his utility knife and severed the frozen strap, freeing the bulky still blue ice–encased cassette recorder.

Then he gently reached into Brian’s right pocket and carefully extracted out the new, experimental, tiny, voice-activated microcassette recorder as well. He then gingerly put each of them in separate evidence bags.

He then instructed the first ambulance’s driver to go immediately to the New York Eye and Ear infirmary where the renowned Dr. Mark J. K. Lathem already was waiting.

Detective Geist then instructed the second and third ambulance drivers to wait because the second ambulance was for the frozen body, which he now had to figure out a way to extract.

Fully realizing that his attempt to do so probably would put him in the same mortal danger he’d just rescued his colleague from, Galahad had taken the precaution of ordering a third ambulance for himself, grimly smiling with the certainty he’d soon be needing it.

Then, after handing the evidence bags to one of the paramedics for safekeeping, Lieutenant Geist then turned his attention to the still rotating, mirrored, blue ice–encased body in the room beyond.

He paused at the bedroom’s threshold now prepared to risk severe injury—or worse—because he had decided that his obligations both to Brian and the Department required him to cross that threshold.

Chapter 6

July 28, 1977, Manhattan

1:30 PM, between 95° and -20°F

Lieutenant Geist then instinctively sniffed the blue ice fog eddies that had crossed