"I told you! I have to talk to him.'"
"Where are you now?" she pleaded. "Are you still in the city?"
He cut her off.
Jessica looked up to see Mrs. Crighten staring at her with the frozen look of a statue, shaken at hearing just one side of Jessica's conversation with the killer. "I wouldn't have your job for all the money and prestige in this life," Mrs. Crighten finally said.
Jessica turned to the aide and said, "Let's go."
As Jessica was about to leave the hospital, J. T. located her and shouted for her to wait. She'd already gotten comfortable in the car and was about to depart from the parking garage. "Mrs. Crighten told me where I could find you, Jess. You're taking on too much alone again. Let me help you," he pleaded.
"You can help by being here when Warren Bishop recovers. He's going to need a familiar face at his bedside. Will you be there, John?"
He took in a deep breath. "Mrs. Crighten told me he called you at her office. How does this fiend find you, Jess? It's uncanny. It's almost as if-"
"As if what?"
"Nothing, never mind."
"You starting to think like Repasi, that we… the killer and I have some sort of link?''
"No, no… nothing like that, Jess."
"Then what? That there's some kind of supernatural psychic link at work? What?"
"I don't know."
"He's shrewd, smart, J. T. He knows we'd be at an area hospital; he goes the rounds with the yellow pages, just like you or me. That's all."
"Where'll you be, Jess?"
"Getting the story out. Talk to Crighten about it. We're going to spread the news that the Phantom has added three more kills to his kill list."
"Hey, I get it. Fill up his list for him and maybe no one else will be hurt on your account, right?"
She gritted her teeth before replying, "You really are beginning to sound like Karl."
"I think it's a brilliant stroke, Jess."
"Only if it works. Now, let me put it into motion."
"Have you cleared it with headquarters?"
"No, no, I haven't. Something like this, the fewer who know the real story, the better."
"All the same, if you want, I'll let Santiva in on the facts."
She nodded. "Yeah, do that. And J. T., thanks again."
"Where'll you be after you finish up with the news-people?"
"On to Jackson Hole with the others, it would appear."
"Gotcha. I'll join you there as soon as possible." The car pulled from the lot at Jessica's request. The car pulled upward on a slanting concrete hill and out into the predawn light of Salt Lake City. "Take me to the major TV stations first," she asked Crighten's aide, who yawned and apologized, saying she was not used to such crazy hours.
Jessica finished the rounds of TV and newspaper offices in Greater Salt Lake City and then said good-bye to Crighten's aide Sue Norris when the young woman dropped her off at Gallagher's nondescript FBI branch headquarters building. With Gallagher, Repasi, and that crew long ago off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a beautiful western town turned tourist haven nestled in Snake River Valley, amid the foothills of the Grand Tetons, Jessica freely acquired the fax forwarded to Salt Lake City headquarters from Eriq Santiva. As promised, she had every stitch of information they had on Feydor Dorphmann forwarded to the Salt Lake Herald. Returning to the Herald editors, she orchestrated the morning headline and layout of photo and computer-enhanced photo of the killer, alongside a sidebar carrying what Jessica and J. T had composed of the killer's cryptograms and the nine rungs of Hades in Dante's Inferno.
In the paper account, Morganstern and Howler were listed as fire victims number six and seven and Bishop as murder victim number eight, leaving only one rung to fill. The list now appeared:
#1 is #9-Traitors Lorentian
#2 is #8-Malicious Frauds Flanders
#3 is #7-Violents Martin
#4 is #6-Heretics Whitaker
#5 is #5-Wrathful amp; Sullen Grey
#6 is #4-Avaricious amp; Prodigal Morganstern
#7 is #3-Gluttonous Howler
#8 is #2-Lustful Bishop
#9 is #1-(the last victim?) sent into Limbo… through the Vestibule and over the River Acheron
The city editor and crime editor at the Salt Lake Herald had, upon Jessica's initial visit, immediately dispatched their best reporters to the phones and the hospital for verification of Jessica's story. At the hospital, Mrs. Crighten held a press conference, detailing the kinds of wounds each of the three FBI agents had endured, how the doctors worked tirelessly on their behalf, but that all attempts had met with unsuccessful results in the cases of all three men. Beside Mrs. Crighten, there on the podium, doctors lamented the conditions they'd had to work under, their long faces giving credence to the ruse. Jessica watched televised news reports from the city desk editor's office. Her plan was working like a charm.
The newspapermen were ecstatic to get an exclusive from the famed Dr. Jessica Coran, but for it, Jessica bargained: They must release it to every other news wire service in the country. She wanted to be certain that Feydor Dorphmann, wherever he was, knew that she knew that he knew that she knew…
At the newspaper office, Jessica found huge maps of Utah along one wall, each detailing the geographic beauty of the state, distances, and famous tourist attractions. On another wall, a similar map of Wyoming hung, and Jessica stared at the roads leading from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and she realized for the first time in years just how close Jackson Hole was to Yellowstone National Park.
"Doing a travel and leisure piece on Wyoming," said a mild-mannered female editor who noticed Jessica's interest in the map. "You know, places to get away to that aren't too far and aren't too expensive for the middle crowd here in Salt Lake."
"I'm interested in Yellowstone," Jessica told her. "You have any detail maps of Yellowstone?''
"It's one of the major highlight of the article, and yes, I do." The woman dug into a desk and came up with a detailed map of the park itself, spreading it in lumpy and crude fashion across the papers and junk that populated the top of her desk. "It's really a breathtaking, fantastic place, almost like stepping onto another planet," said the editor.
Jessica studied the map, which brought back instant memories of a time when she had once visited Yellowstone National Park as a young assistant M.E. on vacation with a girlfriend. ''Yes, I once visited Yellowstone, many years ago," Jessica told the other woman as she studied the large yellow mass, the park that formed the northwestern corner of the state of Wyoming.
"My husband and the boys loved it," the woman continued. ''The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, that was their favorite, and the fishing, of course. Me, I became fascinated with the geysers and hot springs and mud pots."
Jessica scanned the map, her eyes gliding as if directed by a Ouija board pointer to a select few of the more than ten thousand geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud pots in the park, gasping at their resemblance to Feydor's words of earlier. There on the map, she read of the Devil's Well and Hellsmouth geysers in Lower Geyser Basin near Old Faithful and Old Faithful Lodge. A flood of memories, too disconnected and too disorganized at the moment to make any but fleeting sense to her, assaulted her senses while the editor continued to carry on about the grandeur that was Yellowstone.
"And can you imagine people coming here from the East and telling us, the Forestry Service in particular, that we need to build protective walls and fences throughout the parks? What utter nonsense. People have no idea the scale of nature out here. Why, it's enormous. Would anyone seriously entertain the thought of putting a fence around the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania or Victoria Falls or Niagara for that matter?"
Jessica only half-heard the woman. Her mind was on Dorphmann. Feydor's thinking, his quest, came into full focus. Finally, Jessica knew where he'd been headed from day one, what his final destination must be, and how he planned to kill victim number nine. "May I keep this map?"