Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I'm only telling you to watch your back, Jessica. That's all."

Like you care about my back, she thought, wondering anew about his motive in even being here. She tore off her gloves and mask and stepped away from the body. "I'm done here. You can finish up, Doctor." She stormed from the small autopsy room, angry and exhausted, her jaw clenched tight.

An hour later, Jessica was back at the resort marina, where she fell across the bed. She could hardly believe the madness of Karl Repasi, and the gall of the man. Hours of intense labor over a body that kept casting off bits and pieces of itself onto the floor, and then to have to deal with Repasi's obvious mental breakdown. She had suspected him of a fraud and a hoax when all of this began, and now he suspected her of the same. It seemed turnaround was fair game, but how could he believe that she'd be party to such cruelty? Cruelty even on a dead body, if he believed her capable of producing dead bodies for some fire maniac to set ablaze, and that she somehow had hidden the real Chris Lorentian and the real Melvin Bartlett Martin.

She must wash this day off, she told herself, climbing from the bed, feeling the absolute need for a long, hot shower.

First, however, she found a phone and called J. T., locating him still at work at the hospital she had stormed away from. He'd been right to distance himself from the odd and eccentric Repasi, but he was still working out of a lab down the hall from Repasi. She wondered if Karl had tried to feed any of his fantastic nonsense to John Thorpe. If he suggested it in the least to J. T., John would deck him with a single blow, but from J. T.'s tone, obviously, Karl Repasi hadn't repeated his crazy allegations.

''Any luck on the shoeprint?'' she asked J. T.

"Ruled out everyone else's having made the print," he replied.

"That's a positive step."

"Very funny. I oversaw the creation of a cast imprint of the shoeprint."

She let out a gasp of air. ' 'I hope you got more results and conclusions than we did from the autopsy."

"From the size of the shoe imprint, it's apparent that the killer wears an eight and a half shoe size, extremely well worn, and due to the impression it made, fair estimates of the height and weight of the killer are also now known. The Phantom, as the press in Nevada and Utah are now calling him, is in the range of five-eleven to six feet tall."

"That's about what the waitress put him at."

"And he weighs in at a hundred seventy-nine to a hundred eighty-nine pounds."

"Excellent work, J. T."

''I next packaged up the imprint and shipped it to Quantico for an expert FBI imprint man named Kenyan to go over. Kenyan's already at work eliminating any and all footwear that the cast could not have been made from. Through the process of elimination and comparison, it's hoped something specific may be said about the shoes worn by the killer."

"That's good work, John, really."

"I take it the autopsy revealed nothing we didn't already know?''

"You take it right. Except for the fact of the victim's sex and age, the killings were identical, down to the use of a butane torch with a wand attachment."

"How do we know there's a wand attachment on the torch?" asked J. T. "Clear that up for me, will you?"

"According to the fire investigators, both Fairfax in Vegas and Brightpath here, the initial flames were extremely well controlled. They can tell from the controlled direction of the hot spots to the eyes, face, and chest."

J. T. softly whistled into the receiver and remarked, "You said this guy was a highly organized, controlled killer, Jess. Appears he has thought out his every instrument, his every move. Appears you were right again. Amazing ability of yours. You should be proud of it, the accuracy of your predictions."

"Proud? Hardly."

"Why not? They rank up there with Kim Desinor's psychic predictions."

"Believe me, John, knowledge doesn't begin to touch the feelings. Scientific investigation is one thing, instinct born of preparation, you might call it, but it doesn't soothe the gods of the dark night of the soul."

J. T., unable to respond to this bit of philosophy, stuttered into suggesting they meet later for a drink in the lounge at the Wahweap Lodge, where they were staying the night.

Feydor had settled in at Ruby's Inn, a rustic roadside inn on Highway 63 in Bryce, Utah, within shouting distance of the fantasyland of rock formations created by nature that so dazzled hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. It was a place of sheer beauty, but Feydor had seen enough of rock formations from the bus window to last him a lifetime.

Whenever they got off the bus after the day's journey, everyone's bags were placed before the door at the hotel or motel they stopped at, and a key was pushed into each party's hands. The bus tour company made life easy for its passengers, and for Chris Dunlap in particular.

Inside his room now, alone, alongside a plethora of Polaroid photographs of burning bodies, Feydor stretched out his own body serpentine fashion, the mattress and his skin feeling fiery hot. But it was a good heat he now felt: neither rash nor burn. It was no longer the dreaded and hated redness Satan used to punish him with. No, this was more a warm glow, like the way other people described themselves feeling after what they termed "normal" sex, something Feydor had no firsthand knowledge of.

Still, for the first time in his life, Feydor Dorphmann felt whole and in control; there came a sense of accomplishment with performing the ritual that Satan had given him to do, but there also came a sense of purpose and power. He hadn't expected so much personal satisfaction. In fact, he hadn't expected any satisfaction to come of the gruesome work he had done, but in the doing he had discovered himself.

In fact, he had discovered some semblance of understanding that his purpose-guided as it was by Satan-must in fact be, dare he think it even, God's directive. For nothing Satan ever did came of his own volition, but as a scheme set into motion by God Himself, or so many Christian religious leaders professed.

Inscrutable as God himself, so must be God's plan to appease Satan, or to perhaps trip the Old Serpent up on some transcendent level mankind could never hope to glimpse, much less understand. Feydor knew himself to be in the presence of cosmic forces beyond himself; he felt privileged in glimpsing-although "glimpsing" was hardly the word-glimpsing the small truth he had glimpsed. He struggled for a better word than "glimpsed," angry at his limited thought patterns, the linearity and limited boundaries of the mind. A peek, an impression, a quick and momentary view beyond which his brain would fry. A subliminal image of his Satan, a force to be reckoned with, a force that, of course, must sense the whole as well as the parts of all existence, and this intense power must know that while Dorphmann was merely a pawn in this empyrean game of cat and mouse, that God would, in the end, redeem Feydor's soul because, after all, he was as much God's pawn as the Devil's.

And so, the grand and vast plan must go forward now of its own volition…

Yet Feydor, on some primal level he did not himself understand, felt a need to rekindle memories of his last three kills, one of which neither Jessica Coran, nor any of the other authorities, had as yet discovered.

His limbs felt strong and powerful for the first time in his life. Propped up now on one elbow, Feydor examined himself and the Polaroid photographs, one after the other. He'd earlier scattered what he called his "most memorable moments" about the bed, peeled his clothes off, and lay down nude beside the still memories. And from across the room he could see himself reflected in the mirror.