Extreme Instinct jc-6

by Robert W. Walker

  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. We'll 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. Notify 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?"

  "I couldn't tell you for certain what goes on in the mind of a murderer, but we know that in an unplanned murder-that is, one in which someone loses control-the killer seldom thinks clearly or in any orderly fashion."

  "I see."

  "And I've read that sometimes killers hold onto the body for long periods, you know, for… well, indelicate purposes."

  "My God," Fronval said, each word a groan.

  "As for the missing equipment, I'd look into Cressey's locker, and I'd look at his hands."

  Fronval's face was still twitching, still stuck on the part about keeping the body for indelicate reasons. "You really think he.. he held onto the body to stick it to the dead girl even looking like she does now?"

  "Depends on how cruel and psychotic a person he is. Just how well do you know Cressey? How long's he been a ranger?"

  "Not long. Transferred in from a park, Stone Mountain, Georgia, if memory serves. Don't know much about the kid, but you're right. We gotta take a look in his boots, and we need a look below his gloves…"

  "I didn't like what his body language was saying back there. I was a little afraid to call him on it, ask him to reveal his hands. He was holding a high-powered rifle."

  ''I had my suspicion when he suggested maybe a grizzly got at the girl and turned up its nose to the burned flesh, but there weren't any signs of a bear kill whatsoever. It wasn't the scene of a classic carcass fee
ding."

  "Of course…" She considered his meaning. "You're quite right, Mr. Fronval."

  "No coyotes, ravens, or magpies waiting their turn at the corpse. A bear makes a racket when he feeds, and he makes a stench and a mess of the carcass. There weren't no claw marks or teeth gashes I could see on her."

  "Perhaps the body hasn't been out in the elements as long as we suspect, sir."

  "You think she was dead when she exited Ojo Caliente, don't you, Dr. Coran?"

  "It will take a full-blown autopsy to be sure, but that bruise I mentioned, the one to the temple, was considerable, since it was deep enough to show below the skin that'd sloughed away from the cranium."

  ''She was dead when she exited the water. She was dead weight. All he had to do was hold her by the ankles. He likely fought with her, lost his temper, pushed her in, held her by the ankles until she was dead, pulled her out, and realized what he'd done."

  Jessica, staring into Fronval's sad eyes, bit her lip.

  "But you already knew all that, didn't you, Doctor?"

  She was glad he had said the words. Less argument that way.

  "The search for Sarah was already on, but he didn't know what to do. It wasn't something he planned, so he had no plan for disposing of the body. Then when the search became such a big deal for everyone, he saw an opportunity to emerge as the hero who had located the body-which wasn't so tough, since he'd held on to it.

  "Bastard probably kept it in a snowbank behind the ranger station where he was putting in time alone up here. Creepy bastard."

  "I suspect a thorough search of his sleeping quarters will reveal that she spent some time there after she was dead."

  "That would cinch it, wouldn't it? Can you be sure there'll be trace evidence there?"

  "The way she was dropping skin, yes."

  "God." Fronval moaned again. "Think of it-being held under that heat by your ankles. There was no way she could escape his grasp or the searing heat."

  "If she had pulled herself from the water, her feet and ankles would've been seared at least as badly as her hands, but they weren't. As for this location, we're not going to find any evidence without doing some archaeological digging about. It's an ideal spot for a murder, actually. No clues left to find. You can't without doubt know where she entered or exited the water."

  "I know it was here," Fronval said with conviction.

  "But it wouldn't hold up in a court of law, sir. Any other poolside in the wilderness, and we'd see indentations in the sand, evidence or a lack of evidence of her hands and nails having clawed her way out. But not here in all this mineral spillover."

  The land around Ojo Caliente was constantly being reshaped and rebuilt, in places spongy, in other places cracked and hard and brittle, the stuff of geyserite: a hydrous form of silica, a variety of opal deposited in gray and white concretelike masses, porous, filamentous, and scaly. Therein shown no footprints or telltale signs the woman walked or crawled from this place, but then, too, there were no signs of any attacker's prints, either.

  "We can't prove he killed her from what we can see here," she told him.

  "Sonofabitch, but we've got to prove he did it; I know it in my bones."

  "That bit of knowledge, I'm afraid, is also useless in a court of law, Mr. Fronval. We need to bring in photographic equipment and photograph everything, even this spot, showing the lack of any sign of struggle here. We need pictures of the body, and we need a warrant to search Cressey's quarters."

  "That camp belongs to the service. We don't need no damned warrant to get in there and search."

  "But we do, sir. Else the court will throw out all the evidence we find in the camp. It will be viewed as his private space, his sleeping quarters, where he has a reasonable expectancy of privacy, despite the ownership question."

  "That's crazy."

  "That's the law, sir."

  "Protects the guilty and his civil liberties, huh?"

  "Along with the innocent, yes."

  "Damn, I sent Bear off to Mammoth. You can bet he's going to make tracks for the nearest safe haven."

  "Maybe not. He still wants to be a hero. Besides, we can radio ahead to authorities there to pick him up. Our first worry is to get a judge to give us a search warrant."

  Fronval had hold of a rifle he'd pulled from his all-terrain vehicle. They were far enough into the wilderness that should a bear or other wild animal attack, he could use the weapon in the event of threat to human life. Now they stood and began to make their way back to the all-terrain when a gunshot rang out, striking a boulder beside Fronval's head, sending a rock shard into his forehead and knocking him down. Jessica looked up to see Brian Cressey smiling down at them. He raised his rifle scope again.

  Jessica dove for Fronval's rifle, hearing the report of a second shot fired by Bear and hearing Fronval groan with the impact. Jessica brought the rifle up, shoved the bullet into the breech, aimed, and fired, striking Bear in the solar plexus, sending him scudding down the rocky slope toward them, his rifle flying off in another direction.

  Fronval was hit in the shoulder and his head was bleeding, but he was okay. Bear was dead. Jessica went to his inert body, his staring eyes, and she yanked away his right-hand glove to reveal serious first- and second-degree burns in a splash and splatter pattern. She next unclothed his other hand, revealing even worse burns on his left hand. It was Jessica's first encounter with a murderer.

  Jessica's fear of Feydor Dorphmann quadrupled now as she sat beside the still and silent phone in Salt Lake City.

  It chilled her to know that somehow Dorphmann knew that she would follow him to Yellowstone. It felt uncanny, as though he knew of her earlier, fateful trip to the park. He knew that she had seen the bubbling cauldrons that licked Earth's crust there, like the liquid tongue of Satan, and no doubt Feydor had also been there at one time or another to look into the orifices of Hell. It was this geography that linked killer and hunter.

  Yellowstone was filled with geographic anomalies, both fascinating and bizarre, some ten thousand hot springs, geysers, mud pots, and steam vents scattered over its mountainous terrain, all atop a plateau. In dramatic, exquisitely beautiful natural formations, most of the strange thermal waters were hotter than 150 degrees Fahrenheit, 66 degrees Celsius, and many reached temperatures of 185 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit, or 89 to 96 degrees Celsius. This, and the fact that water boiled at 198 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, made the alluring, fascinating features also quite deadly, so much so that nearby Billings, Montana's, newspaper the Billings Gazette routinely reported more hot springs deaths in Yellowstone than they did deaths due to grizzly bear attacks.

  The worst tragedy in the area occurred on July 29, 1979, almost twenty years ago now, in midafteraoon when nine-year-old Markie Hoechst of Bainbridge, Georgia, walked along the visitors' boardwalk alongside Crested Pool with her vacationing family. This awesome hot spring had several names over the years, some quite colorful, such as Fire Basin, Circe's Boudoir, and The Devil's Well the same as Feydor Dorphmann had alluded to. Little Markie, enveloped in the billowing clouds of steam that the hot springs continually emit, lost sight of her parents. The hot vapor blew into Markie's eyes and no one knows quite what happened to her next, for she somehow got off the boardwalk and into the searing waters, which allowed her only a handful of screams before she was silenced, boiled to death in the hot spring. Despite the fact that a guardrail stood between little Markie and a searing, scalding death, she somehow managed to fall in. Some accounts claimed she tripped at the edge of the boardwalk; others said she'd climbed onto the guardrail and fell from there. At any rate, she plunged into the cauldron, where the temperature rose to more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Reports said the girl tried vainly to swim a handful of strokes before completely scalding to death and sinking. According to Newsday and Newsweek accounts, the final glimpse the girl's mother and father had of little Markie was seeing her rigid, mannequinlike body and stark-white face-the mark of her pain and fear-sinking awa
y from them and into the depths of the boiling water.

  Markie's father had to be held by others, restrained from jumping in after his daughter. Her mother fainted. Later, her father stated that no one present actually saw her fall or misstep; that she had been walking along behind them, skipping along on the boardwalk, when suddenly they heard a splash. They instantly turned, only to see other tourists helplessly staring and shouting down at someone who'd fallen into the hot spring, and next horror struck: It was little Markie.

  Her body sank from sight. Eight pounds of bone, flesh, and clothing were recovered by park rangers the following day.

  Jessica wondered again at Dorphmann's suggestion that she meet him at the Devil's Well. She calculated that he'd have been eleven years of age in 1979, and she wondered if he, too, as a child, had visited the Devil's Well, and if he had become captivated by it. She wondered if others, fascinated by the eyelid of Satan in this place, might not have wanted to see what would happen if they lifted a little girl over a rail and dropped her into such a pool of superheated water.

  She wondered if a Feydor Dorphmann had been on hand that day in Yellowstone to push a foolish little girl from a guardrail that she'd climbed up onto to impress, surprise, or gain attention from her parents.

  In any event, Yellowstone's geysers and hot springs remained from generation to generation beautiful and strange, and peripheral areas both awesome and ugly, such as the boiling pots and pits of white mud froth from which rose a sulfuric steam that covered onlookers. At dusk, all around Old Faithful Lodge, rising banshees of smoke rose and cantered off in the wind on all sides, creating the effect of an army of phantom souls released into the night. This from hundreds of hot springs and bubbling pools, some as searing as 280 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to strip an animal of its fur as well as its skin, should it fall in. The carcasses of buffalo, elk, deer, and other animals were routinely found in this obstacle course of superheated waters bubbling up from Earth's core. And many a person had foolishly lost his life to Yellowstone's unpredictable ways, so much so that a local historian who'd chronicled the foolhardy deaths in Yellowstone published a book under the title Death in Yellowstone. Sales of the book in the gift shops continued to be brisk each season.