It all starts as I'm sitting shotgun in my friend Dave Johnson's car. Wending our way up the serpentine roads of San Rafael, California. It's 1999, and my window's down, and the salty Pacific breeze is blowing in. All I can see is a cathedral of green in front of me, beside me, and behind me -- broken only by the blue reaches of the ocean in the far distance -- and my mind is an open door. Just drifting. Tabula Rasa. Thinking of nothing but the eternal beauty of nature...

... when Dave says, "Ever heard of Otzi the Tyrolean iceman?" 

I look over at him. "Who?"

"Otzi. It's the nickname paleontologists gave to a mummy discovered back '91 in the Austrian Alps."

"Hmmmm," I comment, not really that interested, but trying to be polite. My friend Dave is one of the smartest, most well-read people I know. Which is perhaps why he has a wider bandwidth for arcane subjects than I.

He nods. "It's kind of amazing, actually. The oldest intact mummy ever found. Carbon dated at 5500 years old, which is the frigging Bronze Age."

"Hmmmm."

"Yeah, and because he was encapsulated all those centuries in a glacier, he was perfectly preserved, in such pristine condition he still had his eyeballs. Even the contents of his stomach were still intact. Imean, you could tell what he had for breakfast the day he died."

"Hmmmm."

"But here's the weirdest thing," Dave enthuses. "They did an MRI on the remains and found an arrowhead embedded in his neck. Which means he was murdered."

"Excuse me?"

I stare at my buddy, my scalp crawling with the notion that I may have stumbled onto something really, really interesting.

Who knows how the imagination works? People ask artists and writers all the time, "Where do you get your ideas?" One of my mentors and heroes, Harlan Ellison, used to wisecrack, "Actually I get my ideas from Schenectady, New York... it's a subscription service. Every month I receive in the mail a fresh new six-pack of ideas." It was a droll, clever thing to say. Especially due to the fact that nobody really knows where ideas come from.

The human imagination is such a complex jumble of synapses and nodes, it would make AT&T blow a circuit. But once in a great while, you know precisely from whence an idea comes.

You just know.

On that blustery summer day, on that winding road to San Rafael, I knew. I knew I was in the presence of a great idea for a book or a movie. I knew the moment the words 'he was murdered' came out of Dave's mouth, I had a Paleolithic mystery on my hands -- a 5500 year-old cold case -- from which I had to extrapolate a story.

On that day, I caught lightning in a bottle... or at least in the front passenger seat of Dave’s 1993 Ford LTD four-door sedan.