Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

"How'd he take it?" she asked.

''He thought it a long shot, but agreed we had little else to gamble on with this nutcase, so he's okay with it, Jess. He still doesn't understand what Bishop and the 'other two agents' thought they were doing. He still doesn't know about the long arm of Frank Lorentian in this matter."

"He'll know soon enough, when he touches down at Jackson Hole. Gallagher will give him an earful, no doubt."

Jessica thanked J. T., finishing with, "For all you've done, John, over the years, thanks."

"Hey, don't go getting maudlin on me, Jess. As for sitting this out with Bishop, it's no big deal. You're needed up in Wyoming, so get saddled up and get going. And don't worry about Warren. On the QT, they're calling him a fighter."

"Has his prognosis improved?" she hopefully asked.

"His condition is stable but still critical."

"Damn…"

"He's a tough guy. He'll weather it, and he's out of surgery and in IC, where he's under constant watch, Jess. What kind of trouble do you suppose he was in with Frank Lorentian?"

"Most likely gambling debts. When I look honestly back on our early days together at the academy, I remember now how avid a gambler Warren always was. I'd rosily chosen to forget that aspect of his character."

J. T. replied, "Damn, I know it. I had a girlfriend once who'd bet on which of two apple blossoms would fall from a tree first."

"Yeah, Warren had that shortcoming, but I had no idea it had become a driving force in his life. Maybe it contributed to his divorce. I can't say."

Jessica felt badly that friends, coworkers, his agency, his former wife, and his kids would hear through the news media that Warren Bishop had died of a gunshot wound in the course of his duty as an FBI agent. She tried to minimize the horror of it all by pretending Bishop was, in a sense, doing decoy work in his most unusual undercover operation, most possibly his last as an FBI operative, and one he was not even aware of. She rationalized spreading the lie also in that it might save lives if Feydor Dorphmann bought into it.

"Where will you be, Jess, if he comes around?"

"I… I'll be at the hotel, getting some sleep," she lied.

"When will you be taking off for Jackson?"

"Sometime this afternoon."

"Maybe I can join you then. Call me before you make any arrangements, okay?"

"Will do," she lied again, knowing now precisely where Feydor Dorphmann was directing her to go. J. T. didn't know it, but she might well have said her final goodbye to him.

Rather than racing immediately off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Jessica chose another course of action, or 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.