Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

Jessica could see little of the majesty of Yellowstone below her now, shrouded as it was in darkness. She and Rideout had remained silent for some time as their approach brought them nearer Old Faithful Lodge and the ranger station there. Then without warning, Rideout erupted with words that seemed to burst forth like water from a busted dike. "In your line of work, Dr. Coran, you've probably seen it all, but you ever see a man killed by a grizzly?"

"No, no… I can't say I have."

"I did, once. When I was rangerin'. Went out with a search party for a hiker who disappeared. I'm telling you, it looked like a chainsaw had been taken to the man. He was cut clean in two at the belt. Blood everywhere, all over the snow."

"Sounds awful."

"It was high snow season, late November, most roads into the park closed by then. Guy's name was Teller, a real smartass who wouldn't listen to any words of caution, and him wanting to be a ranger someday. Who knows? Maybe he mighta made a good ranger if he'd lived. Hiked out alone one day, like a fool."

"How old was he?"

"Oh, nineteen, maybe twenty. His entire neck was missing. Head we found later, and the torso'd been left behind, but the kid's neck was clean chewed away. Sam figured he was running when the bear caught him on the fly at the neck and just ripped away with those massive teeth."

Jessica gulped at the image while the whirring and dipping of the helicopter vibrated through her ears and down to her stomach.

"Teller's other parts were scattered and buried in so many places, we never did come back with all of him. But we found his head under a hefty mound the bear had churned up."

"Put away for later feeding," she said with a knowing nod.

"They hunted that bear down. Rangers all knew him as Number 63, tagged the year before, but after the killing, we all began calling him 01' Claw."

"They put him down as a man-killer," she said matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, like it's going to teach a lesson to all the other bears-Hanna-Barbera, Jellystone Park thinking, you know. We always had to deal with that kind of mentality, sanitizers… but to appease the public, you know…"

"Yeah, 'fraid I do in my business, too."

He shrugged. "Sam says, 'We do what we gotta do,' but hell if I ever could understand the thinking. I mean, I just don't get it. Never did. Probably what made me a bad ranger. Whole thing was Teller's own stupid fault. The bear was only doing what come natural to bears."

"Maybe I'll get lucky," she said. "Maybe my man will run up on a grizzly or get gored by an angry bison."

"You can always hope…"

As the chopper neared Yellowstone's fantastic cauldera filled with lodge pole pine, Jessica imagined the thousands of tourists below, settling in for the night after long treks in the park of geysers and free-roaming bison.

Despite full disclosure in the newspapers about the killer, there still remained, she could be absolutely sure, an enclave of people here in the vast wilderness of Yellowstone who had been wholly untouched by the story. Few if any down at Old Faithful Lodge would show the least alarm, she imagined.

She learned that she was right, that there would be no general alarm sounded-nor did she want one-as she explained over the radio to Samuel Marc Fronval, a descendant of French-Canadian Native Americans and the head guy among the rangers here. She knew Fronval from years past, and he'd taken her warnings in such calm stride that she wondered if he'd gone feeble, but then maybe it was the place.

It was as if this place could not be touched by such gross evil, but Fronval had to know better. Still, it was a vacation destination for hundreds of thousands annually. People came here to view the fantastic geological wonders of the infinitely varied hydrothermal features of this region, from the obsidian sand at Black Sand Geyser Basin to the vivid blue, giant eye of Morning Glory Pool in Upper Geyser Basin. People came here to marvel at the extraordinary silica that dissolved in hot water precipitates as the minerals brought from the depths of the planet cooled to create grottoes and fountains and caverns turned inside out. Algae did the rest, painting the geyserite in all the hues of the rainbow. Rainbows captured in rock, strewn about the earth.

Jessica recalled in particular the spectacular Minerva Terrace at Mammoth hot springs as an outstanding example of the variegated patterns that travertine formed as it was deposited on the surface of the cooling waters of the hot spring. The place looked like a limestone cave turned inside out. The place made the clumsiest of amateur photographers suddenly gifted.

People were indeed here to play, to party, to have fun, and not to be concerned about what went on in the world at large. The fact that there was a serial killer at work, and that he was winding his way from vacation spot to vacation spot here in the West, and that he was bent on taking people's lives by burning them to death for some hideous purpose no one would ever fully understand except for the killer himself, remained of no consequence to the typical tourist or merchant preying upon the tourist. And God forbid that Jessica's manhunt should interfere with business as usual here.

Oddly, however, Jessica's radio call to Fronval below seemed to ''devil'' the helicopter pilot more than anyone on the ground. Fronval had promised to put extra men on alert in and around Old Faithful Lodge, the grand hotel of the park, within shouting distance to Old Faithful, where every thirty to thirty-five minutes, the magnificent, most famous geyser of them all spouted its hot whale spray to an adoring American public.

Still, Fronval promised Jessica a full green light when she arrived by having her way cleared, pleased to be hearing from her after all these years. Fronval had kept up with her career, and she his. He remained one of Yellowstone's best loved and most respected rangers.

Coming back to Yellowstone would, under normal circumstances, have been a balm to her, a reunion for her heart and soul. The place held a spectacular appeal that no words could capture; rather, it silenced men-and even women, she jokingly thought. It was a spiritual place, a place to renew body and soul. Perhaps this was its appeal to one Feydor Dorphmann as well.

Off the left side of the helicopter now, she could see the billowing clouds rising from hot water pools, searing hot springs that welled up out of the earth's crust at temperatures of more than 180 degrees, 205 degrees in other places here. Enough boiling water to scald the entire human race, she thought.

A handful of the pools were swimmable, but every hot spring in the park remained outlawed, off-limits to everyone, since only a trained park ranger could tell the difference between a safe and a deadly pool, and even some of these so-called experts had, on occasion, become victims of the pools and their own bad or impaired judgment, ignorance, or possible suicidal thoughts.

Jessica was immediately shocked back to the present when Corey Rideout shouted, "There's a fire down there at the lodge!" Rideout pointed down toward the lodge.

Jessica stared down at the scene, certain there lay a body in the flames below, a body that the killer, in his obsession, knew only as number seven. ''Damn him… He is here. He is here!"

Feydor knew that time was of the essence, that it was only a matter of time before they caught up to him and put an end to his-their-plans. He was angry with his demon god for not allowing him to count at least the two men in Salt Lake that he'd torched, the two that had died in the hospital. But there was no arguing with the supernatural being, the source of evil. That meant he must kill two more here at Yellowstone before Jessica Coran arrived.