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 amp; 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 burns 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 running 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 amp; 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.
'Goddamnit, 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?'
