Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

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 snowbank 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 concretelike 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.

"Sonofabitch, 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 burns 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 midafteraoon 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, mannequinlike body and stark-white face-the mark of her pain and fear-sinking away from them and into the depths of the boiling water.