“I'll go straight to six-fifty and work my way back to you. And be careful of getting into any crossfire situation.”
“You forget you're dealing with professionals, G- man.”
Bishop gritted his teeth, hating every moment of this, hating Frank Lorentian, hating himself in the bargain. He looked into the eyes of the two professional hit men he'd contacted and waited for. Repasi had kept him appraised up to this point of Jessica's whereabouts, well-being, the dispensation of the autopsies, the geography of the crimes. Now it was time to erase all debts.
After this, he'd never again have any dealings with Frank Lorentian, and all Frank wanted was to see his daughter's murderer dead—no FBI involvement, no arrests, no cout room dramatics, no loony bins or life sentences, just dead.
“You smell something?” asked one of Lorentian's thugs.
“Smoke,” said the other.
“Damn it, we're too late,” conceded Bishop. “But the bastard's still in the building. You two, usher everyone off this floor and sound the fire alarms. I'm going down to five-twenty-two. Send backup when you can. Got that?”
“No way,” disagreed one of the hit men. “We stick together, Bishop.”
As soon as the elevator doors opened, it became clear there was indeed a fire on the floor. The two gunmen looked from the smoking door just ahead to one another. “We got the bastard right here,” said the taller of the two.
“Careful, he's armed and dangerous,” cautioned Bishop as the two thugs moved on the door, the hallway now becoming choked with smoke and people peeping from their rooms, some now shouting and racing for the stairwells.
The hit men continued toward the door where the hot spot existed, seeing smoke rising from the bottom and sifting through each side. Suddenly the door burst open, flames bursting out at the phony agents, burning their eyes, faces, hands they'd thrown up for protection with their guns extended when suddenly they were each engulfed in a shooting flame.
People had begun to pour from the rooms, racing past Bishop and into the elevator, taking it. Others screamed and ran for other exits. Through the commotion, the flame and smoke, Bishop saw the two hit men had caught hell, their eyes fried, each man flailing like a spiked tarpon, each going to the hallway floor, scurrying to place some distance between themselves and the shadowy figure that suddenly burst from the room, wearing a gas mask, holding a butane torch with the wand out, a dark bag tucked below his arm.
Bishop raised his gun to fire but one of the hit men suddenly found his feet and stood between him and the fleeing figure on the other side of the flames. Bishop steadied his weapon and dropped to one knee, choking on the smoke. He aimed and wanted to fire but the other two men remained in his way as they fought their own frenzied battle before him. Their clothing aflame now, smoke masking the killer, the dark figure in gas mask disappeared through a door marked stairwell.
Bishop smashed his gun into a glass containing a water hose. He pulled the alarm and turned the water on as furiously as he could, the hose getting away from him, spraying ceiling and floor until he got control of it and aimed he spray on Lorentian's two men, dousing them and the fire in the hallway.
Each man was hurt badly with serious bums to the face, arms, and body. Others had come up behind Bishop now, however, and they were helping their supposed comrades with words of encouragement.
“Ambulance is on its way!” Bishop assured the men he knew only as Steve and Rollo. He couldn't help but feel great pity for the two. Their faces were seared red, their eyes scorched, hair and skin falling away with the smoke that curled from them. “Hang in there, you guys,” he said to their suffering screams.
Bishop dialed 911 for assistance on his cellular phone, but paramedics came rushing onto the floor even before he could get out his request. “Over here,” he called out to them.
Firemen with hoses rushed past Bishop and the injured men, into the flames, beginning their battle with the room fire. Bishop knew what they would discover inside. He also knew the room number for Chris Dunlap's room in the building. Was the killer foolish enough to return there?
Bishop grabbed the elevator when it opened, carrying more FBI and police. He took the car down two flights where he glimpsed a killer, no longer wearing a gas mask but the distinct odor of smoke-choked clothes seemed to be rising off him, although the entire building now seemed permeated with smoke. The same stench had filled the carpeting and Bishop's own soggy clothes, so he could not be sure. The other man was about to dart into the room supposedly being used by Chris Dunlap this night, when Bishop leveled his gun at him.
“Hold it, right there, Mister Dunlap!”
“What?” The man jumped. “My name's not Dunlap. It's Sorensen, Thomas Sorensen.”
“FBI,” Bishop shouted, his gun extended at the harmless-looking little man before him. “Put your hands where I can see them.”
“Me? F-BI? What's this all about? Is this a stick-up?”
“Drop the case, you fire freak, and put your hands against the back of your head, or I blow your freaking head off where you stand.”
“All right, all right... Jesus, what's Martha going to say when I tell her about this?''
The man was unremarkable, plain, without any single outstanding characteristic. He wore a dark business suit and didn't look to be a touring tourist. He stood perhaps 5'6” or 7”, weighing in around 170, the size of their suspect, small in stature, like a Lee Harvey Oswald, Bishop was thinking when suddenly the black case dropped with a bang to the floor, thundering out its weight in a clear code.
“Hands behind your fucking head, now!”
The little man gulped while lifting his hands behind his head, then he turned full around to face Bishop straight on.
“That's more like it.”
“I wish you would tell me what in God's name this is all about.”
“I just witnessed your coming out of a murder scene two flights up, Mr. Phantom. Charon, is it? I've been chasing you since Vegas.”
“Vegas? Charon? But I've never been to Vegas, not yet. Our bus won't arrive there for another two, three days.”
“Then you are on the bus tour? So, what's in the case?”
“I sell life insurance—First Continental Casualty; have since '87. One of the couples on the bus wanted to buy some security after the near accident we had today coming down the highway into Salt Lake.” The man's mild manner was off-putting, and he had a ready answer for everything, and for a split second, Bishop wondered if he hadn't gotten the wrong man, and Bishop worried that if he had the wrong guy here at gunpoint, that the killer could be escaping the hotel through the underground parking lot or someplace else in the hotel. Yet this guy stood outside the door marked 522, and so it followed... so, he knew this must be the man posing as Chris Dunlap. Unless the desk or the stupid tour guides had gotten some number transposed.
“You're posing as Chris Dunlap, aren't you?”
“Posing? An impostor? Me? Dunlap... Dunlap... Why isn't that the unmarried, eerie fellow who sits in the back of the bus and talks to himself and no one else? Martha gets angry with me 'cause I talk too much to everyone. I'm Thomas G. Sorensen.” He brought one hand down as if to offer it in a handshake, but Bishop gestured with his gun for the man to keep his hands up, and he did.
“Open the door and let's talk to Martha then,” suggested Bishop who wondered now if the tour guide had gotten the room number wrong. This fellow had no red hair, and he saw no red rash along his neck as reported by the clerk in Vegas.
“Martha's not going to like this.”
“Fuck Martha! Fish out your keys and do as told. Open the fucking door.”
“All right, all right.” The man fished into his pocket for the electronic key the size of a credit card. Unlocking the door, he was saying through it, “Martha, it's me and we have company. Are you decent, dear?”
Bishop took a step closer and when he did, the suspect raised his keys and sprayed Bishop's eyes wit
h mace, causing Bishop to backpedal and scream. Bishop heard the gunshot, thinking his own weapon had gone off, when suddenly he felt the blood dripping down from his chest. He'd been shot by the suspect; and his head went in a dizzying spiral, and he realized only now that he was lying flat on his back, paralyzed, his life's blood draining from him.
He heard the footsteps of the Phantom as he raced away. Bishop sent up a hue and cry for help. “He's here! Somebody stop him! The murdering bastard's getting away! Damn me! Damn me to hell if I didn't let him get away!” What few people who hadn't evacuated their rooms began to reluctantly peek from behind their doors, and the sound of a man in obvious distress convinced some to step out of their rooms while others telephoned the desk to ask for medical assistance, and still others dialed 911.
SIXTEEN
The thing we run from is the thing we ran to.
—Robert Anthony
Jessica literally threw the bills at the cabbie, grabbed her valise, and raced into the Hilton, where she found FBI men had scattered in all directions, one agent taking her aside for her own safety, thinking her a civilian. “I'm FBI!” she shouted, unable to produce her badge and ID while he had her hands in his grasp. She pushed and pulled away from the man when suddenly she saw that several men were being rushed out on stretchers, two of them blackened from having fought their way from a fire, it appeared, their faces having taken the brunt of the flames.
Jessica didn't recognize the first man wheeled by but the second, even with the scarred tissue, looked familiar. She tried to place him when the elevator doors opened again and a third man was wheeled out. The form on the gurney lay still, inert, looking dead, but he had a truly familiar face. To her horror, it was Warren Bishop. He was bloody and unconscious but not fire-blackened or scarred like the other two men.
“Warren!” she called out, racing to him.
A strong-armed medic held her back.
“I'm a doctor,” she informed the medic. “Let me go!”
When the agent in charge gave the medic a nod, he released Jessica, who rushed to Warren's side. “Where are you taking him?”
“Salt Lake Memorial, ma'am, but first we've got to get him on life support.”
“He's been badly wounded,” said a tall, well-dressed man in a suit beside her now. She turned to face Neil Gallagher. “We got here as soon as we got your call, but too late, I'm afraid. I don't know what the hell Bishop was up to, but he wound up in a running gun-battle with your fugitive, Dr. Coran. The other two injured men haven't been thoroughly checked out as yet, but we know they're not federals, and they have no badges or law enforcement identification on them. They weren't carry anything to identify them. In fact, their pockets were stuffed with weapons, from brass knuckles to Lugers, and with thousands in cash, but their identities remain a secret.”
“What're you saying?”
“They appear to be citizens of one sort or another.”
She gauged his meaning. “They were hired guns?”
“They were both carrying what amounts to an arsenal.” Jessica suddenly recalled where she had seen one of the men, and the name Rollo rolled over in tumbler fashion in her brain. Frank Lorentian's man. What was Warren doing in the company of Frank Lorentian's men? It had to be a mistake, a coincidence, that Lorentian's hired assassins had located the Phantom just at the moment Warren had. Yet Warren had, for no accountable reason, jeopardized everything by withholding information from Gallagher and failing to locate her when he arrived in the city, as if... as if he meant to see the killer executed by Lorentian's henchmen.
These thoughts Jessica kept to herself, but she knew that Neil Gallagher's suspicions had already been aroused. “When... if Bishop recovers, he's going to have some explaining to do,” Gallagher said in her ear.
“He was following leads, like any good detective. He didn't know he was so close to the viper when it turned on him,” she said. “Simple as that.”
Gallagher let it go for the moment.
The Salt Lake City Hilton, a beautiful, prestigious hotel in the heart of Salt Lake City, Utah, served as a surreal backdrop to the sudden turn of events. “Is he... is Bishop expected to live?''
“It's a toss-up,” replied Gallagher as the medics rushed Warren away.
“What about the other two men, the burn victims?”
“Bad... very bad. No guarantees at this point.”
“And the perpetrator? Bishop's a crack shot. Did he get him?”
“I'm afraid not.”
“Damn it! You mean he's gotten away?”
“My people are scouring every inch of the hotel and surrounding area. He's believed to be afoot. We'll get the SOB.”
“I've got to get to the hospital. Be there for Warren.”
“He'll be in the operating room for hours. He was conscious when I found him. There's some paralysis to his left side. For you, Doctor, there's reason to stay on here, something you'll want to look at.”
Jessica looked into Gallagher's sad eyes for the first time. She knew he must mean the fire room, the body, the killer's latest grim communication. “All right, show me the way.”
The crime scene was a familiar one, displaying the same MO, the same cunning, and the same malicious disregard for the suffering of the victim, and in getting away this time, the killer had caused injury to three men, one of whom Jessica cared a great deal about. And settling over the entire scene lay the pervasive mystery of why Warren had attempted to take on the killer without proper backup or planning, and who the two men were who'd accompanied him if not FBI men.
Frustrated, feeling as if her hands were tied while she was being made to watch this horror played out again and again before her, Jessica stepped into the now all too familiar, grim consequences of the killer's modus operandi, the remnants of fire and murder. In the still-smoldering, gutted death room, she found the brutalized remains of the monster's latest victim, number five.
Neil Gallagher wondered how she could be so calm as she looked down at the charred body on the bed. She could see the confusion in his eyes when she turned to examine the mirror without having been told there was anything remarkable there to see. It was painfully obvious that Gallagher's office had been given little information on the case, and she was partially to blame for this. Again, she wondered why Bishop had kept Gallagher out of it.
She pushed all these thoughts back while she studied the Phantom's latest message, scrawled in grease across the glass surface of the mirror. This one read:
#5 is #5—Wrathful & Sullen
After having a cursory look at the body, and after taking a few samples, going through the motions, Jessica pronounced the victim dead due to her bums brought about through murder. She secretly cursed Eriq Santiva and the entire FBI apparatus for not having raised anything anywhere with the fingerprint evidence. Just the same, to seal the killer's courtroom fate when he was finally caught, she asked Gallagher to get his best fingerprint technician in to search for prints on the telephone and in the written grease message. When Gallagher asked for an explanation, she explained what they knew of the messages, handing him a copy of what J.T. had given her.
Gallagher said, “Damn. I guess I've been out to lunch on this one from the get-go. Sorry, Dr. Coran.”
“Not your fault, Gallagher.”
“I mean, I knew this guy was on a kill spree, but none of this,” he said, indicating the list of messages left at the crime scenes. “I didn't know any of this. I knew about the calls, the connection between you and the killer. Read about it in the papers, but nobody's got this.”
Gallagher appeared shaken to his core. To further disturb him, she told him how the killer wrote his messages in the byproduct of the burning body: grease. Gallagher's stony face began twitching when he looked anew at the message, now knowing that it had been written in the burning fat of the victim. But in the best machismo fashion, he held himself together while she added the latest words from the killer to the list she'd kept a run
ning tally of. It now read:
#1 is #9—Traitors
#2 is #8—Malicious Frauds
#3 is #7—Violents
#4 is #6—Heretics
#5 is #5—Wrathful & Sullen
No longer did Jessica have to wonder what the numbers and words used by the monster meant, what drove his obsession and murderous rage; she knew now that he meant to fill the nine rungs of Hell in Dante's conception of Hades.
“I've got to get out of here. Got to be with Warren,” she told Gallagher.
“Your services, your expertise, Doctor,” countered Gallagher, “are needed here.”
“Contact Dr. John Thorpe at Ruby Inn, Bryce, Utah. Get him up here for the autopsy. Failing that—”
“Failing that, call Dr. Karl Repasi,” said Repasi, who now stood in the doorway.
“God damnit, Karl,” she cursed. “You're starting to worry me. Are you and the Phantom the same man?”
Repasi laughed at the suggestion and said, “Of course not, although I can see why you might believe so, Jessica. No, Warren called me. Told me to be here as soon as I could get away from Bryce. Said you were on to something, and it appears he was right. Where is Warren?”
“Hospital, in a coma.”
“My God! How?”
Gallagher replied, “As Dr. Coran put it earlier, Bishop took a great risk and it bit him.”
Jessica took Repasi aside. “I think you know more about why Warren Bishop was here with two strange men than you're saying, Karl. You and Warren had an argument, a fight earlier today. What were you arguing about?''
“He was upset with me over what I'd said to you the other day, nothing more.”
“Nothing more? Nothing having to do with problems in Vegas? Nothing having to do with Frank Lorentian?''
Repasi's facial response gave him away. She had hit a nerve. She pressed her advantage. “Lorentian got to you, didn't he, Karl? And he got to Warren as well, didn't he?”
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