"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.
Markie's father had to be held by others, restrained from jumping in after his daughter. Her mother fainted. Later, her father stated that no one present actually saw her fall or misstep; that she had been walking along behind them, skipping along on the boardwalk, when suddenly they heard a splash. They instantly turned, only to see other tourists helplessly staring and shouting down at someone who'd fallen into the hot spring, and next horror struck: It was little Markie.
Her body sank from sight. Eight pounds of bone, flesh, and clothing were recovered by park rangers the following day.
Jessica wondered again at Dorphmann's suggestion that she meet him at the Devil's Well. She calculated that he'd have been eleven years of age in 1979, and she wondered if he, too, as a child, had visited the Devil's Well, and if he had become captivated by it. She wondered if others, fascinated by the eyelid of Satan in this place, might not have wanted to see what would happen if they lifted a little girl over a rail and dropped her into such a pool of superheated water.
She wondered if a Feydor Dorphmann had been on hand that day in Yellowstone to push a foolish little girl from a guardrail that she'd climbed up onto to impress, surprise, or gain attention from her parents.
In any event, Yellowstone's geysers and hot springs remained from generation to generation beautiful and strange, and peripheral areas both awesome and ugly, such as the boiling pots and pits of white mud froth from which rose a sulfuric steam that covered onlookers. At dusk, all around Old Faithful Lodge, rising banshees of smoke rose and cantered off in the wind on all sides, creating the effect of an army of phantom souls released into the night. This from hundreds of hot springs and bubbling pools, some as searing as 280 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to strip an animal of its fur as well as its skin, should it fall in. The carcasses of buffalo, elk, deer, and other animals were routinely found in this obstacle course of superheated waters bubbling up from Earth's core. And many a person had foolishly lost his life to Yellowstone's unpredictable ways, so much so that a local historian who'd chronicled the foolhardy deaths in Yellowstone published a book under the title Death in Yellowstone. Sales of the book in the gift shops continued to be brisk each season.
Yellowstone, of course. It appeared the perfect place for Feydor Dorphmann to end his quest.
Jessica dared tell no one of her plan. The others would find out soon enough, as soon as they tired of Jackson Hole as a staging area to catch Dorphmann.
Still no word from Dorphmann came. The bastard, she thought, is going ahead as planned. This meant a likely death in Jackson Hole, another at Yellowstone, possibly two there.
She called the desk for a cab, picked up her waiting bag and professional bag, and was halfway out the door when the phone rang. She put down her things and moved toward the phone, taking it up on the third ring.
"Yes?" she asked.
"It's time for number six."
"Wait. Didn't you see the papers? You've already killed by fire two additional victims, Feydor. You don't need to do this."