inaction, as the case turned out. She'd chosen to sit it out in Salt Lake City for a time, hoping now that Feydor, having had time to think things through and to 'talk' with his demon god, would contact her at her hotel room.
She knew that in Jackson Hole she'd have the backing of an entire army of FBI agents and local authorities, all wanting to put an end to the career of the Phantom; she knew that Eriq Santiva was flying there now. She understood that a coordinated effort to create a foolproof net to catch the killer would be instantly under way once Eriq took command there. The FBI crowd would bring to bear every known weapon in the arsenal of crime detection to apprehend the fiend responsible now for the deaths of three FBI men, the manhunt fueled with a vengeance not previously felt.
Meanwhile, an FBI hotline in D.C. was inundated with tips flooding in from every corner of the country, from people in all walks of life, from wastepaper managers to basketball players to TV evangelists who claimed divine knowledge of the messages left by the killer, to academicians whose specialty-the history of the occult and religions of the world-made them TV talk-show guests on Oprah and Rosie. Everyone had some take on the killer, each as distorted and twisted as the next.
However, not even the TV affiliates and networks, nor the newspapers buying into the exclusive coming out of the offices of the Salt Lake Herald, knew as much as the killer and Jessica Coran knew. But at least these more responsible sources named names and displayed photos of the killer, alongside his handwriting and his Dante's Inferno fetish, the nine rungs of Hades, the list of sins and victim names. They had the 'story' as Jessica had fed it to them; they had the prediction that Feydor Dorphmann would kill a ninth, unknown victim to fulfill his demented contract with the Devil or devils that haunted him…
She waited, armed with this knowledge; she waited this time for the killer to telephone her where she remained in Salt Lake City. 'I'm through chasing the bastard,' she firmly told herself.
In fact, New York publishers were in a frenzy since the release of Jessica's story about her discovery that the killer was into Dante's Inferno, in a frenzy to capitalize on the moment by rereleasing Inferno in all of its previous lives and permutations. Since it fell into a public domain document, any publisher could bring it out under any lurid cover it liked, softbound, hardbound, mass-market, or trade-size editions.
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 Vestibule 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.
