Yellowstone, of course. It appeared the perfect place for Feydor Dorphmann to end his quest.
Jessica dared tell no one of her plan. The others would find out soon enough, as soon as they tired of Jackson Hole as a staging area to catch Dorphmann.
Still no word from Dorphmann came. The bastard, she thought, is going ahead as planned. This meant a likely death in Jackson Hole, another at Yellowstone, possibly two there.
She called the desk for a cab, picked up her waiting bag and professional bag, and was halfway out the door when the phone rang. She put down her things and moved toward the phone, taking it up on the third ring.
"Yes?" she asked.
"It's time for number six."
"Wait. Didn't you see the papers? You've already killed by fire two additional victims, Feydor. You don't need to do this."
"I can't take any chances," he replied. "Those others were flukes, mistakes, not planned by him and me. This way, I know for sure. Number six is number four: Avaricious amp; Prodigal. Understood, Doctor? Now, that, that is for sure," he finished, obviously removed a gag from his sixth victim, and with a whoosh of power, ignited the gasoline already poured over her or him. Jessica could not tell from the wailing, agonized screams whether it was a man or a woman.
"There's a fire, but I fooled you again. It's not in Jackson Hole, Doctor. Your pals won't be in the right place. Only you know where I am tonight, you alone."
She realized he could be anywhere between Salt Lake City and the great Yellowstone National Park, in any of hundreds of motels and hotels along Interstate 287, the main highway of 191, or back roads spreading fingerlike from these two roads, but she said, "All right, Feydor. I'll come alone to where you want me, to Yellowstone, but you've got to promise, no one else is killed. Understood? No one else between now and then."
He hung up, the fire engulfing everything around him, no doubt, but he'd heard her promise and her request. He had heard what he wanted to hear from her. She prayed he'd go for the bargain.
Jessica left the safety of her room for the waiting cab. She'd earlier arranged for a private helicopter to take her up to Yellowstone. It was nearing 6:00 p.m. Gallagher, Santiva, and the others in Jackson Hole would remain on a long vigil until they got word of the latest fire death, Satan, God, and Feydor alone knew where.
"Salt Lake Regional Airport," she told the cabbie, who muttered something about the nice evening as his tires screeched from the curb.
Eriq Santiva and Neil Gallagher and the others now had every hotel in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a small but bustling commercialized village, under watch. Eriq had taken time to oversee Gallagher's setup, and after approving of what the Salt Lake City bureau head had done, he began to question Jessica Coran's delay in getting to Jackson Hole.
He got on the phone to the hospital in Salt Lake City, and after several frustrating channels, John Thorpe was reached. Thorpe had earlier reached Eriq on the airplane phone, telling him of the planted newspaper coverage and the fact that all three men who'd been injured in Salt Lake City were in fact still very much alive.
Now Eriq asked, "Where's Dr. Coran at this moment?"
"She's not there in Wyoming? With you, sir?"
"No, she is not. When did she leave?"
"Well, she was planning on leaving mid- to late afternoon, but she was also supposed to contact me before she left. I'd planned, hoped to travel with her to Jackson Hole."
"I'm telling you, she is not here. She's made no contact with us here."
"I'll try to get her at the hotel. She may've overslept. She'd been going all night, sir."
"Do that, and get back to me! Meanwhile, how's Bishop doing? The other two agents?''
J. T. instantly hedged. He didn't like lying to his boss, but Jessica had asked him not to reveal the Lorentian connection to Bishop this way, over the phone. ''All of the men are out of serious danger now, and Bishop is showing good signs of recovery, but all are being kept heavily sedated, sir-for the pain, you see."
"Understood."
J. T. hung up and tried to hail Jessica at the Little America Hotel and Towers, but he was told by the desk that she wasn't answering her phone. A stab of fear split his heart. What was she up to? he wondered, feared. Then he made out someone talking in the background there at the desk, telling the fellow on the phone that Dr. Coran had checked out and had taken a cab to the airport.
"When? When?" J. T. pressed the man when he came back on with this information. "When did she leave?"
"Around six, sir, six this evening."
"Oh, all right… thanks." J. T. hung up and immediately got back to Chief Director Santiva.
"She's on her way, then. Good."
"I believe so, sir, yes. I'll call the airport to confirm."
"Do that."
Again they hung up, but now J. T. wondered what was going on with Jessica. Why hadn't she called him to tell him her plans, to include him on the trip northward? Something was wrong. He felt it in the bone marrow. A quick call to Salt Lake International revealed nothing save the fact she hadn't flown out of there either on a private or a commercial plane. He asked at the hospital about any small airports in the area, and he was given several names, but the one that everyone agreed on as the best was Salt Lake Regional. A call there proved frustrating. A helicopter had taken off at six thirty-five, but as was usual with helicopter charters, no flight plan had been left with the tower. It was assumed to be a sight-seeing run, but the helicopter in question hadn't returned.
"She's not going to Jackson Hole," he said to himself where he sat at the useless telephone at a nurse's station outside Bishop's room. "Damn," he swore. "She's gone after him alone." But where? Where had she gone? Where would the showdown occur?
He rushed from the hospital to Jessica's room at the hotel.
Once at her hotel, J. T., flashing his credentials and claiming it an emergency, stepped into the room so recently vacated by Jessica Coran. She'd left the room in immaculate condition, as typical of her, but J. T. prayed for any clue as to her whereabouts. On a notepad beside the phone he found a notation she'd made, and it had a chilling effect on J. T. as he stared down at the message, which read:
#6 is #4-Avaricious amp; Prodigal
"Damn it," he muttered, knowing what the message must mean. "He's killed again. Somewhere between here and Jackson Hole."
"Sir?" asked the bellman who'd unlocked the door for him.
"Nothing, never mind." J. T. then saw the discarded map in the wastepaper basket. He lifted out the map and unfolded it, spreading it across the bureau, instantly recognizing it for the answer he'd come in search of. "Yellowstone. She's gone to Yellowstone."
Another glance at the map and he saw the fine-pen circle mark around Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin, with the names of the various hot springs. One in particular caught his attention and his imagination, recalling to mind what Jess had said about the one phone call from the killer in which he mentioned Hellsmouth and the Devil's Well.
J. T. raced out with the map in hand. He had to get to the airport, and fast.
NINETEEN
The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous in only one, through their excess.
— Christian Nestell Bovee
The helicopter pilot taking Jessica to Yellowstone had at first balked at taking her, a lone woman, into Yellowstone's wilderness area. She'd shown him her badge, explained to him that she worked for the FBI, and that she must get to Old Faithful Lodge at the greatest possible speed. He then wanted to take the time to sketch out a flight plan for the tower, and she told him it would delay them too much. It was then that she offered him twice his normal rate for a ferry to Yellowstone.
He agreed, and they began their journey together. Still, he remained skeptical of her purposes, the familiar paranoia about government types filtering in, she believed. With the rhythmic scream of the rotor blades overhead, the flume of whirring sound and vibration rocking the carriage of the chopper, they spoke t
o one another through the headphones.
"You got business in the park, huh? With the rangers, huh?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"Fronval know you're coming?"
"You know Fronval?" she asked, surprised.
"Doesn't everybody? Man's something of a legend in these parts. So, does he know you're coming?"
"Not yet, but when we're in range, I'd like to call Sam on the radio. Do you know Sam personally?"
"Sure, everybody whose ever rangered knows Sam," the pilot, who'd introduced himself as Corey Rideout, said, more curious about her now than ever.
"Oh, so you've been a ranger?"
"A lot of people in these parts go into the service. It's almost a rite of passage, you might say. But it gets tiresome after a time. It can be a lonely existence, 'specially in dead of winter at a ranger station. A man could go nuts, and some do." He looked at her again, studying her. Then he asked, "Where do you know Sam Fronval from?"
"Met him the last time I was at Yellowstone."
"Oh, so you've been to see Sam before? I get it. You're one of those Washington sanitizers, aren't you?"
"Sanitizer, me?"
"Sure, you want to sanitize the wilderness, as if it could be done! Make it safe for every little boy and girl whose parents cart them into the park in their trailers. You know it's impossible. When I was a park ranger, some years back, a tourist fella comes up to me and points at the thousand or so buffalo rooting around some hundred yards from a crowd of gawking onlookers. You know what this slicker asked me, lady? Doctor?"
"What's that, Mr. Rideout?"
"He says, 'Tell me, Ranger, these animals we're looking at, just rooting around out here… they couldn't be wild, right?' "
" 'They are that, sir,' I told him.
" 'No way,' he tells me. if they were wild, you couldn't just have them running around loose.' The man was an injury waiting to happen," Rideout finished.
Jessica laughed appreciatively.
"There're four thousand bison in the park, compared to seven hundred fifty bears, so visitors see a lot more buffalo than grizzly, but either way, many of them have only seen such animals through Disney or MGM studio releases, and they think they're as cute and mindless as, as say, Thumper and Bambi. Fools try to put their kids on the back of a buffalo to get a Kodak moment. The moment the two-thousand-pound, unpredictable, and belligerent animal erupts, they get more Kodak moments and home video funnies than they bargained for and someone dies, usually in great distress because the nearest hospital trauma center is in Bozeman. So they sue the park, and so Washington pencil-pushers hear about it's happened again, and a hue and cry goes up to make people safe from wilderness, to sanitize places like Yellowstone now that so many people visit annually."
"I'm not here to sanitize the park," she assured Rideout.
"Then what's the big rush to get there and see Fronval? Wait a minute: You're here about the brucellosis, sure, aren't you? Now, that figures. The government sends a government doctor to Yellowstone to stamp a USDA approval on the herd, right?"
"Herd?" she asked, confused. "What herd? Heard what?"
"The park bisons. You were sent to keep the cattlemen and ranchers thinking everything's being taken care of, right?"
"Oh, I see." Jessica had heard of the unfortunate outbreak of brucellosis among the buffalo, a disease ranchers and farmers across America had done battle with for more than sixty years, and they'd nearly eradicated the nasty livestock disease, one of the reasons why milk was pasteurized. The fight against brucellosis by American stockmen, ranchers, farmers, and the USDA was no less than a miracle victory. In the meantime, another great success story had also unfolded-the story of the century of conservation effort on behalf of the American bison that once numbered fifty million and had been hunted to extinction levels in the nineteenth century. Now the breed had been rescued from its extinction-level population of six hundred remaining in 1889, the largest herd at the time a mere twenty-one, who, coincidentally, grazed and lived in Yellowstone. Yellowstone's free-ranging buffalo herd now numbered some four thousand, and Yellowstone buffalo experts boasted it was the largest free-ranging buffalo herd in the country. It was also the only herd that, throughout its history, had remained free. Today the park was proud of its herd. But now it was estimated that half of the herd was infected by brucellosis, and there was no cure short of destroying the animals.
The ranchers and cattlemen had a strong argument. For sixty years they'd fought what was commonly called undulant fever, and now it was almost nonexistent in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Only forty-six livestock herds still carried the disease, as compared to 124,000 infected herds in 1957. In a couple of years, the USDA had an excellent chance of completely eradicating the disease in all fifty states.
Yellowstone, the nation's first national park, had a history of becoming ground zero for many a fight, and now it was ground zero for this puzzling debate in which park rangers believed the buffalo and its disease posed no threat to surrounding livestock, and ranchers felt their herds and profits threatened by the infected buffalo. The media, conservationists, and cattlemen were all asking the same perplexing question: How do you eradicate the last remnants of a disease, when it's carried by a species you want to save?
"I guess there is more than one creature I'd like to sanitize the park of," she teased, "but I have no cure for the one, only the other."
"Nobody's got a cure for that buffalo disease. But what do you mean, two creatures you'd like to clear outta the park?"
"I'm hunting for the worst kind of animal in the woods, Mr. Rideout."
"A man? You… you're on a manhunt?"
"I'm with the FBI, not the U.S. Interior or the Department of Parks and Recreation."
"A manhunt. Wow, I'm part of a manhunt. Wait'll I tell Eleanor and the kids about this one. They won't believe it."
After this, Rideout burned with curiosity about her, her reason for traveling alone into Yellowstone after this killer he'd read about in the morning papers concerning him greatly. He'd worked up to what he wanted to say, and he finally said it. ''Just the same, even if you are trained in such matters as detection and apprehension, Dr. Coran, someone enters a wilderness area like Yellowstone every day without the least preparation for its special dangers. I mean Yellowstone down there is more than just forty thousand elk, four thousand bison, ten thousand hot springs, and two hundred lakes. It's also full of grizzly bears that run around as freely as you or me."
"I'm tracking a more dangerous animal than grizzlies," she replied.
"Yeah, so you told me, but once you're down there in this.. this resource, remember, it's not a zoo or an amusement park. Danger is a part of the resource."
"I know the drill, Mr. Rideout."
"You do?"
"Wilderness is impersonal."
He was mildly impressed by this, smiling. ''Nature demands we pay attention, doesn't it? Whether we're putting out to sea or an overland trek."
"I know that there's good reason for why the rangers in such areas as Yellowstone preach rules."
"Good," he replied with little conviction, as if he didn't believe her just because she said so.
"Mr. Rideout, I know it's fool's play to walk amid standing burned trees from a forest fire, even one that ended years before… that such dead trees routinely fall on people because they come down without a sound. I know that hiking alone is deadly and again foolish. I know that wearing any sort of perfume can lure a bear faster than it can a man, and the aroma alone can turn you into his next meal, and that the bear wouldn't let a tent or a campfire stand in his way, that in fact nothing stands in the way of the most consummate eating machine nature's ever devised."
"Good, very good," he replied, conviction taking hold now.
She added for Rideout's benefit, "Wilderness doesn't care whether you live or die, and it does not care how much you love it."
"Spoken like someone who's been there."
<
br /> "I have. I've hunted in some of the greatest wilderness areas left us. But this is the first time I've hunted a human in one."
This was met with an appreciative silence.
The pilot had finally gotten it, Jessica thought. Rideout couldn't tell Jessica Coran anything she didn't already know about this vast wilderness below them. She knew that there were disappearances in the national parks all the time, every day, and there were accidents involving the beasts and natural formations, and the natural flora when some fool ingested a poisonous plant in any given park, and that most of these deaths might have been avoided if and only if what rangers called "natural curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity" in the national parks could be stopped, but everyone knew that as the impossibility of all impossibilities. Still, of late, along with fire-related deaths in and around the parks, there had been a rash of deaths this year like nothing the major parks had ever faced before. No doubt Sam Fronval had already chalked it up to the turn-of-the-century blues, that people carried their phobias and eccentricities with them into the park, and there was no way for him to get them to check their deadly peculiarities at the gate.
Congress wanted more legislation to protect people in the national parks, while the people who lived, worked, and understood the parks tried to explain-once they stopped laughing at Congress-that you couldn't put a fence around the Yellowstone gorge, the hot springs, or such wonders as the Grand Canyon. There wasn't that much fence in the world, for one; for another, any fence or sign in the wilds detracted from the very nature of nature. To develop a national park was tantamount to not having one.
Still, some people, usually people who thought of a park as something akin to Central Park in New York City, wanted the immense parks of the West to be wild as long as they weren't too wild, so wild that it might harm them personally. These people, often the first to sue a park, required a park's wilderness, yet they denied its right to exercise its wilderness character upon them.
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