Extreme Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Meanwhile, Jessica waited for his call. Waited by the phone, her notepad in hand, staring down at the list of victims, studying it, wondering if he had spoken with his twisted god to gain permission to add the FBI intruders' names to his list of victims or not.

  As she waited in the silence of her hotel room for his call, she stared at the final list again, and she almost saw the final version of the list materialize before her eyes. At the bottom of the list of offenses and names, she saw her name.

  “Seems suitable enough,” she jested with herself. “I am suited for the Vestibule, for sure.” Her rereading of Inferno reminded her that according to Dante's description, the Vesdbule was the place for the indecisive, those who had never committed to anything, including life, so that, though they had not earned a place in Hell, neither had they earned a place in Heaven, so that they were left in a state of limbo, a state of no real death.

  The Vestibule sloped down to the River Acheron, the first of three circular rivers, each of which emptied into the next, finally to flow into the frozen lake at the center of Earth, the nethermost well or pit of frigid water of Cocytus.

  “Call me, you bastard,” she dared the phone, but it remained silent.

  She could wait no longer. She packed, called for a hel­icopter out of Salt Lake City's airport, and arranged for a cab to get her out to the airport. She looked again at the killer's itinerary, its final destination being Denver, Colo­rado, by way of South Dakota and Montana, but if he took the bait—if he read the papers and saw the reasoning, that Bishop's death, alongside those of the other two FBI agents, counted in his mad game, then he'd have only one more kill to make: her.

  She put her finger on the map of Yellowstone National Park, the stop after Jackson Hole, Wyoming. If he killed in Jackson Hole, she decided, there would be plenty of people, Repasi included, to clean up after. If she could get ahead of the bastard, be there at Yellowstone's Old Faith­ful Lodge, then she might take him by surprise and end this mental case's attempt to repopulate the Inferno with innocent people who got in his way. It would end one way or another with her in Yellowstone, where the bastard had wanted her all along.

  Yellowstone was the fitting place, the logical end, she realized.

  It was as if the killer knew that she'd been to Yellow­stone before, that he had somehow sneaked into her home in Quantico, Virginia, and rooted around in her many photo albums to know her past. It was as if Feydor Dorph­mann, or his personal devil, somehow knew that she had revealed the very first murderer in her long career as a medical examiner in Yellowstone National Park.

  Jessica recalled the last time she'd seen Ranger Samuel Marc Fronval and Yellowstone. She'd been on vacation with a girlfriend during her years just after college while she'd been employed as assistant to the M.E. in Baltimore. She was still taking finals at Georgetown University, com­pleting her education in the field of forensics. She was twenty-four at the time. The memory calmed her into a near sleep in which she recalled every event as vividly as if it were the day before.

  She recalled seeing the unremarkable poster of a missing young woman in the park, and how calm the park rangers were the day her body was discovered. Not to disturb park visitors, the rangers put up no hue and cry about the dis­covery; rather, they appeared more stone-faced than ever. But Jessica had felt the menace, a bubbling excitement below the surface at Old Faithful Lodge, just beneath the veneer of gift shops, restaurant, lounge, and the tourist crowd, an excitement that went unnoticed by most. But Jessica had sensed it, had seen it in the eyes of the various rangers and staff who daily worked at the lodge. News had spread among them of a body found out at one of the hot springs. Jessica had instantly offered her services when she learned it was a medical emergency, and since medical assistance was some thirty miles off by air, she was en­listed.

  The helicopter she then rode in thundered through the canyon pass, brushing over treetops, scattering nesting bald eagles above the Shoshoni River on a breathtakingly clear, snow-dusted morning. The pace of the helicopter and the gorgeous scenery all around young Jessica Coran made her gasp as much with awe as with the rollicking ride.

  The pilot had said over his earphones, “We'll be there in ten minutes. Hell of a sight.”

  She knew he was talking about the body and not the Yellowstone gorge below, which she marveled over alone, the pilot long jaded on the spectacular views. “You've made the run earlier then? You've seen the body?” she'd asked through the headphone set.

  “I was on call when we got word from the Park Service. The woman's been missing for three days, two nights out here. Everybody feared the worse, you know, that she slipped somewhere along the trail into a hot pool. You know those suckers just sear you to death, and the body's never found sometimes. Well, this one somehow scratched her way out and died half a mile away in thick woods.”

  He banked with the curve of the canyon wall, and then they lifted in a startling flash, rising as if yanked from above by a godly hand. The pilot had introduced himself as Wayne Patterson, a bright-eyed, clean-shaven young fel­low whose eyes lingered over Jessica. It frightened her a bit that he seemed so young and in control of her life at the moment.

  The dense brown hues of the Grand Canyon of the Yel­lowstone here in Wyoming bordering Montana gave way to lush forests. Pine trees below created a pillowy carpet of green life swaying beneath their wake. It didn't appear there was anywhere to land.

  “Just where do you intend to put this thing down?” she asked.

  “There's a ranger station with a clearing just ahead. We'll have to hike back down this way to the body, Dr. Coran. Mind my asking why”—he hesitated asking what­ever was on his mind—”why, ma'am, they sent you all the way out from Baltimore?”

  “Presidential order,” she joked. “Remember, his con­cern for the national parks ranks right up there with pov­erty and homelessness and every other big platform issue this year. Besides, I was in the area—Old Faithful Lodge.”

  “Oh, I get it.” Her little joke had hurt his country pride.

  The helicopter touched down at the remote ranger sta­tion, and Jessica, her medical bag in hand, rushed from beneath the whirring blades, sand, leaves, and twigs tornadoing about her. They got into a four-wheeled land crawler and raced to the scene. In fifteen minutes they came upon a handful of men, all standing about a prone figure in the dust, covered over with a woolen blanket. Jessica introduced herself to the men, most of whom looked dubiously back at her, wondering about her age and sex and experience, no doubt.

  One of the men, wearing the uniform of a ranger and looking like an aged John Wayne, introduced himself, say­ing, “I'm Sam, Samuel Fronval. In charge of this district.” He then casually pointed to the heap below the blanket and sadly announced the obvious. “She's beyond help... long dead.”

  Jessica stepped closer. “I'm Dr. Coran,” she replied. “Happened to be at the lodge. I'll have to examine her, pronounce cause of death.”

  “Cause is pretty clear,” replied another ranger, an over­weight fellow who had the arms and general appearance of a white, hairless bear—and who, in fact, the other rang­ers called Bear.

  “She never stood a chance,” mumbled a third man. “We figure it's that missing woman, Sarah Langley. She was hiking alone. Paid no attention to the warnings against hiking alone up in here,” urged Bear.

  “Just the same, I'll have a look.” Jessica went to the body and pulled back the blanket. She gasped at the horrid sight of flesh that had been literally boiled from the bones. The woman had no features, the skin having sloughed away. She was so badly burned, in fact, there seemed no way she could have come so far in her state. This strange fact stood out along with something equally strange about the nude body that immediately hit her. The victim's an­kles and feet, while scalded, were not in nearly as bad shape as the rest of her body. This struck her instantly as odd.

  “Anyone remove her shoes? Were her clothes burned off her?”

  “Maybe, can't tell. No evid
ence she had any clothes on, but superheated water like what she got into bums clothing into nothing,” replied Fronval. “I've seen it happen.”

  “She didn't have no shoes on,” said another ranger. “I mean when we found her.”

  Jessica looked again at the body, trying to make out any sign of clothing clinging to it, but there was nothing but the cloth like blotches and peels of skin remaining, whole portions moving in the invisible wind current coming off the ground. Well?” asked Fronval. “What's your diagnosis, Doc­tor?”

  “Yeah, how'd she manage to get so far from the pool that killed her?” asked the pilot, equally confused.

  She had to have had help, Jessica thought but kept her counsel.

  “Animals musta' got at her,” said Bear with a shrug. “Maybe a coyote or some grizzly come along and drug her here. There're signs she was drugged here.”

  Jessica and Fronval looked at the evidence the heavyset young man pointed to. Yes, the body had been dragged, but she doubted it was drugged, and Fronval was shaking his head, too. He near whispered to her, “If there were any bear tracks, they've been obliterated by last night's snow and destroyed by my overanxious men, but I don't think a bear got at her.”

  “Why not?”

  “No bear marks on her.”

  “Gashes, you mean.”

  “Bear'll tear its meat into strips. Even a coyote'd leave marks where he clamped down on her, if he could even manage to drag her dead weight this far up from the springs. So, we got ourselves a bit of a Devil's Triangle mystery here, huh? What do you think, Doctor?” urged Fronval.

  Jessica looked up from the corpse, the worst thing she'd seen in her young career as an M.E. student, the skin seared to molten, peeling sheets; sheaths of her skin had curled up, other portions of skin were missing, lost along the trail, revealing scorched, dehydrated veins, normally blue, turned to a white, milky hue, the blood boiled away.

  With third- and fourth-degree scald burns over ninety percent of her body, she could not have survived long enough to have taken ten steps, much less arrive at this destination on her own power. There were second- and third-degree burns over the remaining ten percent of her. All her facial features and hair had been dramatically boiled away. All the soft tissues, such as the eyes, scalded into oblivion. Dental records were a necessity for a one hundred percent ID on the woman, for even if she had once had a birthmark, it, too, was gone. “If she were burned to this degree in the doorway of the best bum cen­ter in the country—” she began.

  “That'd be Salt Lake City,” supplied Fronval.

  “—she still would have died....”

  “But?” asked Fronval, sensing there was more.

  “But the condition in which we find her, and so far from the hot springs—where is it?”

  “Closest one is a quarter mile that way.” Fronval pointed with an unlit pipe, and he next supplied the name of the hot springs that had apparently killed Sarah Langley, who, from what Jessica could tell, was a young woman in her mid- to late twenties who obviously enjoyed nature and taking her nature alone in the woods. Fronval said, “She was hiking along Fire hole River. She'd been seen by a couple of fishermen up that way, least that's what Brian, here, learned before we began the manhunt for her.”

  Jessica looked up to see which one was Brian, guessing it to be Bear. He only shook his head, suppressed eye contact, and said in response, “I figured she fell in, 'cause look, her ankles and feet didn't get it near so bad. She must've fallen in and clawed her way back outta the pool, and her feet were the only things working right. They got her away from the pool, and a large, predatory animal must've done the rest.”

  “We can get the body over to Mammoth Hospital. They got a long history of hot springs deaths there. They'll know what to do, all the paperwork, getting the body to her fam­ily, all that,” suggested Fronval.

  Jessica nodded to Fronval. “Are they equipped with a sheriff and a jail there, Mr. Fronval?”

  Fronval's eyes widened. “You suspect there's more here than meets the eye, Doctor?”

  “I do.”

  “Murder? Foul play?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you prove it?” he asked. “Take me to the hot springs where she allegedly fell in.”

  Bear defended, saying, “They don't always fall in. Sometimes some people jump in, confusing one pool with another, thinking it a safe sauna, you know.”

  “Bear's right 'bout that,” said a third ranger.

  Fronval agreed, saying, “Some pools are safe to swim and bask in while the one right beside it is hot enough to kill anything that dares touch it.”

  “So, she coulda decided to take a swim or bathe,” Bear said with a shrug.

  “That same place has claimed lives before. It's a tricky area on the trail,” agreed Fronval, “and there're three pools there. You slip and fall in, you could be killed. We figure, well, Bear here figured, she fell into Ojo.”

  “Ojo?” she asked.

  “Ojo Caliente.”

  “Spanish for hot springs,” added the young pilot.

  “Lower Geyser Basin,” added the third ranger, whose nameplate said Fred Wingate.

  “That's where that Lewis kid, six years old, fell in when he was fishing with his father back in '58. But he lived for two days afterward,” supplied Bear.

  Fronval supplied the rest, saying, “Yeah, the boy had third-degree burns over his entire body except for the head and neck. Died in Salt Lake. Wasn't anything could be done. Lost too much body fluids to the heat. Ojo's one of the hottest of the springs; fluctuates between a hundred ninety-eight and two-oh-two.”

  “But she went in headfirst—her ankles and feet weren't in the water as long as the rest of her,” Jessica said. “And there's a large contusion on the left side of her head where she sustained a blow.”

  “Coulda happened in the fall,” suggested Bear.

  The other men stood nodding, imagining the possible scenarios suggested first by Fronval, next by Dr. Coran, and then by Bear.

  “I'll need to examine the spot where she fell in and supposedly dragged herself out of this Ojo springs. See if her clothing is there....”

  “That could take days. You know how big Ojo is?” asked Bear.

  “But if she fell from the trail as you theorize,” replied Jessica, “then the search is considerably narrowed down, isn't it, Mr. Fronval?”

  “Sure is,” said Fronval. “I'll take you back that way on my four-wheeler. Weil have a look around while Bear and the others get the body over to Mammoth.”

  Jessica knew that the chopper was equipped to take on such cargo.

  “I want to go with you, Sam,” said Bear. “I'm the one found her. Feel I ought to carry through.”

  “No need, Bear. You go on to Mammoth with the body. Get things hopping there. Noufy the family she's been located, and Fred... Fred, you get back to the station. We've left it unmanned long enough.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fred immediately responded.

  “You're going to need help out there at Ojo, Sam,” complained Bear as Jessica stared at his gloved hands, wondering if they might not be scorched from the hot springs as well, and if they were .. . But all the men, and Jessica, were wearing gloves against the cold, frigid air.

  “No, Dr. Coran and me, we'll take care over to Ojo,” Fronval commanded in fatherly fashion. “You've done quite 'nough, son. I'll catch up to you in Mammoth.”

  Bear held them in his gaze until they disappeared in Fronval's four-wheeler.

  At Ojo Caliente, a quarter mile away, Jessica and Sam Fronval searched for almost an hour before finding what to both of them appeared the place where Sarah Langley entered and most likely exited the deceptively calm hot springs where a spectral cloud of sulfur gases caressed and embraced the humans onshore. The surface water was glasslike for the most part, and while it sent up a blanket of superheated air over its wide surface, it hardly appeared to be a killer.

  Fronval, using his wilderness skills, located an area where
broken branches and matted grasses told him she'd tumbled from. They found not a stitch of clothing onshore, no shoes, nothing of the sort. Furthermore, there was no indication of hiking equipment strewn about, no backpack, no tent, not a trace she was hiking in this area. Only the near invisible signs Fronval pointed to evidenced her ever having passed this way.

  “What do you make of it?” Fronval asked Jessica. “Did she fall in headfirst with every stitch of her gear weighing her down?”

  “Could, all that gear dematerialize in that cauldron of boiling water?”

  “Possibly,” Sam Fronval answered, drawing on his now lit pipe.

  “Highly unlikely, Mr. Fronval, that nothing survived her fall.”

  Fronval shook his head, continuing his devil's advocate tone. “Other people may've come along, picked up any­thing seen as useful.”

  Jessica shook her head in return. Anyone watching them would think them in heated debate. “Even if she did fall from the trail along here, there would likely have been some scattering of her things here and there. And this time of year, how many other people would be along here? And everyone knowing the girl's been missing, it would've been reported.”

  “Besides,” he said in an agreeing manner now, rubbing his chin, “the trail's much more slippery at other junctures. If she fell into the pool, why at this spot?”

  “You'd know more about that than I,” Jessica acknowledged. “But if she did fall in here, the natural place to've come out is right at this spot, here,” she finished, pointing. “Unfortunately.”

  “If she did claw her way out and walk away from the fall as suggested by Brian Cressey.”

  “Yeah, the fellow you call Bear?”

  “Nickname... suits him. He's strong as a bear and about as single-mindedly dumb. But if he had anything to do with the girl's death, why didn't he dispose of the body right here, same as the equipment? Leave not a trace. Wouldn't a murderer, given this great, natural opportunity to dispose completely and utterly of the body... wouldn't he?”