"Liver, kidney, and muscle needn't be retained," Repasi suggested. "I can take samples only, and I'll see that they are kept for three or four years, if need be. I'll do the microscopic examination of the tissues, and I'll oversee the slides."
"Very thorough, Doctor," complimented Jessica. ''Please be sure to also make a positive ID of the victim as well."
He saw the glint in her eye. "Yes, of course." He managed a wry smile.
''To make a positive and unmistakable identification, a chest X ray will be taken to be used for comparison with those of the deceased man. His dentures will also be kept in the effort to ID him beyond a reasonable doubt."
Jessica knew that in fact a single tooth could positively identify Martin, but the old man didn't have a single tooth of his own remaining.
"So, as it stands, we have no evidence he was alive when the flash fire killed him, none other than your word, Dr. Coran."
"It appears so," she agreed, but she didn't care for Karl's accusatory tone.
Now he cut off the recorder. ''This business about the phone, about the killer's having constant contact with you, Dr. Coran. It's a bit far-fetched, wouldn't you say?"
The assistants in the room stopped what they were doing to listen to Repasi, who continued in the same vein, saying, "Why does he talk to you exclusively? Why?"
Jessica took her colleague aside. ''Trust me, Dr. Repasi, if I thought giving him your number would help matters-"
Repasi's raucous laughter cut her off. "So exactly when did he last speak with you. Jessica? What does he wish to convey to you? What is his ultimate purpose? His destination? His goal?"
"If I knew that, Karl, I'd have him surrounded with an army of law enforcement officials this moment. Believe me, if I could alter or end his madness, I would do so immediately."
"Would you really? Your record does not bear you out, Jessica. You're rather well known nowadays for rushing in where fools fear to tread, quite on your own, to grab the glory."
"The glory? There is no bloody glory in any of this!" She pointed to the petrified corpse, once again raising interest in the lab assistants.
"You garnered plenty in New Orleans, and with that madman Matisak, repeating a similar performance to your actions in Chicago, New York-''
Jessica's face grew stern as she listened to Repasi, her teeth grinding top to bottom, until she exploded, cutting him off. "Are you finished?"
"Oh, I see," he replied. "It only appears that you're interested in media attention as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. I get it." A curling smile snaked about his mouth.
He enjoyed making her uneasy, making her squirm, she realized. "That's contemptible, Karl."
"Jessica, I've no doubt we have a serial killer playing deadly with fire here, but that he grants you a private audience with each killing? I have a problem with that."
"Bullshit! I didn't make it up, Karl! And I'm not smitten with the press or building an image for myself. There's no hoax here! Certainly none of my doing."
"Oh, I hope I didn't suggest that you were part of some elaborate medical hoax, Doctor. It's just that I'm having trouble with the idea that this monster serial killer feels compelled to contact you every step of the way. It's sheer madness even for a madman."
''As I said, if I could alter his madness in any way, this moment-"
"So, when did he last talk to you?" he wanted to know.
"I've taken proper steps to inform, on a need-to-know basis, my superiors of any contact made. That doesn't include you, Karl."
"What has he conveyed to you? What is his ultimate goal? And this business of him telephoning it in. Are you sure he's not just some mental patient from a federal facility whom you've had… previous contact with?"
She considered the possibility for half a second. "No, he is not, Doctor. And I'm not sure I like what you're implying here."
"I didn't mean to imply anything unsavory."
She pointed her finger at his eyes and sternly said,' 'This conversation is taking a strange turn, Karl. I think it's at an end, now."
"I, personally, don't believe a word of the rumors being touted about, Jessica, but you know what they say about appearances."
"Whatever are you talking about? What rumors?"
"Press rumors."
"About me?"
"You and this madman, yes, and the idea there might be some former connection; that perhaps you know him, or knew him, but have put him out of your mind, perhaps?"
"No, no… I have as much knowledge of him as you, Karl."
"Some people are throwing it out there, Jessica, this theory, and it has just enough basis in fact that credence is being-"
"Basis in fact? Credence? What fact?"
"It's a well-known fact that you have both access and control over any number of serial killers and homicidal psychopaths in federal care. Is that not true?"
She gritted her teeth, angry, knowing that Karl was right about the press, particularly the tabloid press, with their unspoken motto: We print every half-truth fit or unfit to see print. And there was just enough half-truth in what Karl said to crop up in the rags. She took it out on Karl, saying, "You just reminded me again why I've always disliked you, Karl."
"Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I'm only telling you to watch your back, Jessica. That's all."
Like you care about my back, she thought, wondering anew about his motive in even being here. She tore off her gloves and mask and stepped away from the body. "I'm done here. You can finish up, Doctor." She stormed from the small autopsy room, angry and exhausted, her jaw clenched tight.
An hour later, Jessica was back at the resort marina, where she fell across the bed. She could hardly believe the madness of Karl Repasi, and the gall of the man. Hours of intense labor over a body that kept casting off bits and pieces of itself onto the floor, and then to have to deal with Repasi's obvious mental breakdown. She had suspected him of a fraud and a hoax when all of this began, and now he suspected her of the same. It seemed turnaround was fair game, but how could he believe that she'd be party to such cruelty? Cruelty even on a dead body, if he believed her capable of producing dead bodies for some fire maniac to set ablaze, and that she somehow had hidden the real Chris Lorentian and the real Melvin Bartlett Martin.
She must wash this day off, she told herself, climbing from the bed, feeling the absolute need for a long, hot shower.
First, however, she found a phone and called J. T., locating him still at work at the hospital she had stormed away from. He'd been right to distance himself from the odd and eccentric Repasi, but he was still working out of a lab down the hall from Repasi. She wondered if Karl had tried to feed any of his fantastic nonsense to John Thorpe. If he suggested it in the least to J. T., John would deck him with a single blow, but from J. T.'s tone, obviously, Karl Repasi hadn't repeated his crazy allegations.
''Any luck on the shoeprint?'' she asked J. T.
"Ruled out everyone else's having made the print," he replied.
"That's a positive step."
"Very funny. I oversaw the creation of a cast imprint of the shoeprint."
She let out a gasp of air. ' 'I hope you got more results and conclusions than we did from the autopsy."
"From the size of the shoe imprint, it's apparent that the killer wears an eight and a half shoe size, extremely well worn, and due to the impression it made, fair estimates of the height and weight of the killer are also now known. The Phantom, as the press in Nevada and Utah are now calling him, is in the range of five-eleven to six feet tall."
"That's about what the waitress put him at."
"And he weighs in at a hundred seventy-nine to a hundred eighty-nine pounds."
"Excellent work, J. T."
''I next packaged up the imprint and shipped it to Quantico for an expert FBI imprint man named Kenyan to go over. Kenyan's already at work eliminating any and all footwear that the cast could not have been made from. Through the process of elimination and comparison, it's hoped something spe
cific may be said about the shoes worn by the killer."
"That's good work, John, really."
"I take it the autopsy revealed nothing we didn't already know?''
"You take it right. Except for the fact of the victim's sex and age, the killings were identical, down to the use of a butane torch with a wand attachment."
"How do we know there's a wand attachment on the torch?" asked J. T. "Clear that up for me, will you?"
"According to the fire investigators, both Fairfax in Vegas and Brightpath here, the initial flames were extremely well controlled. They can tell from the controlled direction of the hot spots to the eyes, face, and chest."
J. T. softly whistled into the receiver and remarked, "You said this guy was a highly organized, controlled killer, Jess. Appears he has thought out his every instrument, his every move. Appears you were right again. Amazing ability of yours. You should be proud of it, the accuracy of your predictions."
"Proud? Hardly."
"Why not? They rank up there with Kim Desinor's psychic predictions."
"Believe me, John, knowledge doesn't begin to touch the feelings. Scientific investigation is one thing, instinct born of preparation, you might call it, but it doesn't soothe the gods of the dark night of the soul."
J. T., unable to respond to this bit of philosophy, stuttered into suggesting they meet later for a drink in the lounge at the Wahweap Lodge, where they were staying the night.
ELEVEN
His eyes are bloodshot, his back near broke,
For he has been chasing a distant smoke.
— Charles Scribner
Feydor had settled in at Ruby's Inn, a rustic roadside inn on Highway 63 in Bryce, Utah, within shouting distance of the fantasyland of rock formations created by nature that so dazzled hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. It was a place of sheer beauty, but Feydor had seen enough of rock formations from the bus window to last him a lifetime.
Whenever they got off the bus after the day's journey, everyone's bags were placed before the door at the hotel or motel they stopped at, and a key was pushed into each party's hands. The bus tour company made life easy for its passengers, and for Chris Dunlap in particular.
Inside his room now, alone, alongside a plethora of Polaroid photographs of burning bodies, Feydor stretched out his own body serpentine fashion, the mattress and his skin feeling fiery hot. But it was a good heat he now felt: neither rash nor burn. It was no longer the dreaded and hated redness Satan used to punish him with. No, this was more a warm glow, like the way other people described themselves feeling after what they termed "normal" sex, something Feydor had no firsthand knowledge of.
Still, for the first time in his life, Feydor Dorphmann felt whole and in control; there came a sense of accomplishment with performing the ritual that Satan had given him to do, but there also came a sense of purpose and power. He hadn't expected so much personal satisfaction. In fact, he hadn't expected any satisfaction to come of the gruesome work he had done, but in the doing he had discovered himself.
In fact, he had discovered some semblance of understanding that his purpose-guided as it was by Satan-must in fact be, dare he think it even, God's directive. For nothing Satan ever did came of his own volition, but as a scheme set into motion by God Himself, or so many Christian religious leaders professed.
Inscrutable as God himself, so must be God's plan to appease Satan, or to perhaps trip the Old Serpent up on some transcendent level mankind could never hope to glimpse, much less understand. Feydor knew himself to be in the presence of cosmic forces beyond himself; he felt privileged in glimpsing-although "glimpsing" was hardly the word-glimpsing the small truth he had glimpsed. He struggled for a better word than "glimpsed," angry at his limited thought patterns, the linearity and limited boundaries of the mind. A peek, an impression, a quick and momentary view beyond which his brain would fry. A subliminal image of his Satan, a force to be reckoned with, a force that, of course, must sense the whole as well as the parts of all existence, and this intense power must know that while Dorphmann was merely a pawn in this empyrean game of cat and mouse, that God would, in the end, redeem Feydor's soul because, after all, he was as much God's pawn as the Devil's.
And so, the grand and vast plan must go forward now of its own volition…
Yet Feydor, on some primal level he did not himself understand, felt a need to rekindle memories of his last three kills, one of which neither Jessica Coran, nor any of the other authorities, had as yet discovered.
His limbs felt strong and powerful for the first time in his life. Propped up now on one elbow, Feydor examined himself and the Polaroid photographs, one after the other. He'd earlier scattered what he called his "most memorable moments" about the bed, peeled his clothes off, and lay down nude beside the still memories. And from across the room he could see himself reflected in the mirror.
The others on the national parks tour bus with him had all been taken on a side tour, bused out to a copper mine somewhere nearby. In the relative peace here at the hotel, he found silence and solace, and he could here give full vent to his sexual excitement over the memories he had collected.
He clutched one of the photos and brought it to his chest, rubbing it into his nipples and down to his flat stomach. Each photo was taken at the moment the crackling fire opened up the bodies like melons.
God would forgive him his small and petty pleasures; Satan had directed him, and God had allowed it all. He was, after all, only human…
So he would continue to indulge and enjoy himself now as he had then, on seeing them die amid licking, stroking flames. He hadn't known it would be so potent a sexual high that he achieved when the flames' tongues licked a victim's fat away. It recalled his excitement as a child when he had burned small things and rubbed their ashes against his body. It recalled a certain moment in the dim past when he'd killed that little girl, had watched her being swallowed up in the jaws of a searing fire, in the very mouth of Satan.
He had forgotten the thrill of it all, had denied his true nature. Now he knew that in order to feel-to feel anything-for him, there was no other way. At least not until his pact with the Devil was a fait accompli.
He stared into the next photo he grabbed up, imaginatively climbing into it to become the burning victim, his body catching the wavelike fire. The photos helped him to return to the moment and excite himself anew.
He brought the picture down to his crotch, rubbed it along his inner thigh with the other one in his other hand pressed against his penis. Semen stained the photos with his release, and seeing it come forth, he saw, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted it as an epiphany of memory, and a monumental memory came like a horseman from his unconscious mind.
He had once seen with his amazed little boy's eyes the evidence of Satan's own semen where it bubbled up from Hell, had seen it and had wanted to leap into it, but he had forced the event into a corner of the deepest cave within him. And so it felt natural, this sexual explosion he felt with each burning body. It was as natural as nature itself, he believed.
And so it was natural for Satan to have selected him for the work at hand.
Feydor groaned at the overwhelming sexual release he now felt, and he rolled over onto the other photos, his brain replaying the actual events in his mind so vividly that he was once again there in the room with the flaming corpse, first this one and then that and then the other, again and again, over and over, hearing the tormented cries, which only further excited his genitals.
Still, Dr. Stuart Wetherbine had somehow managed to keep a foothold somewhere in the back of Feydor's brain, and he now loudly condemned Feydor's puerile connection with Satan's semen, with fire and flaming corpses. Wetherbine's was the one small voice remaining in his brain that told Feydor he was simply rationalizing away his conduct, but a larger part of his brain said otherwise, a larger part brought to the argument the actual fact that he-Feydor Dorphmann-had, of all the billions on the planet, been selected, that he had been contacted
by demonic powers due to his twisted birth needs, perhaps due to his DNA, his genetic makeup.
He'd spent years in self-analysis and had created a complete picture of his own needs, but for years after coming to the conclusion that only through burning himself with matches, cigarettes, and candles could he ever achieve any sexual satisfaction, only then could he control the urges. And he had successfully done so for most of his adult life, putting away "childish" things. However, the dike broke when Satan came into the picture, telling him to open himself up to Satan, to answer his own birth needs, to accept the seed placed in him at birth.
And so he had, and so others must burn so that he might rejoice. "Rejoice, ye sinners!" he said and laughed. "Rejoice, and behold the righteousness of evil."
Sated for the moment, he rolled over on his back, Polaroids sticking with semen to his body. He now stared up at the ceiling when Satan whispered anew in his ear, asking, "Who's next? Number four is waiting. "
Feydor contemplated number four. He didn't think of them as kills, as people being burned alive; he thought of them as gifts given over to him by Satan. Satan arranged for the firewood, Feydor the fire. And God… God allowed it all. God allowed Satan-and Feydor by extension-his way.
Again he told himself, speaking to the room and to Satan, "I have done your bidding in good faith. I have accomplished far more than I ever realized possible in so short a time and in good fashion; I am fully one third of the way to your goal of nine victims."
"It's… not… enough," Satan disagreed, his voice spilling over with threat.
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