Extreme Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “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 on to 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 feeding.”

  “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 snow bank 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 concrete like 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.

  “Son of a bitch, 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 bums 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 mid afternoon 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, manne­quin like body and stark-white face—the mark of her pain and fear—sinking away 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.

  Yellow stone, 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 & 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.”

  “Under stood.”

  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: