The body of a young woman was visible, floating at the surface but the lower torso confined to the truck’s cabin. A second body, a young man, floated face down in the waters and was drifting away from the wrecked vehicle.
Thick bands of water vapor flashed from the surface of the small lake. Wesley kneeled to the water’s edge and immersed a fingertip into the fluid.
“Yeow!” he yelped as he launched his hands up and away from of the surface.
“What’d I tell you, Wes?” said a voice behind him.
The electric shock of scalding heat rattled Wesley’s constitution. He knew the little lake to be nothing more than a shallow, frigid pool, just one of many of the park’s minor cold bodies of water that were pleasant to motor past but which attracted little attention. Overnight, the waters had metamorphosed into a lethal bath.
The geologist riveted his gaze on the body of the woman, floating just a dozen feet from shore. The exposed skin on the victim was the color of boiled chicken, ghostly white and puffed up, plump. The body was no more than cooked flesh. The realization sent a shudder along Wesley’s vertebral column.
“What are you going to do with these people, Lucky?” Wesley called over his shoulder to the Park Service employee.
“Well, somehow we’re going to have to fish them out of there.”
“They’ll fall apart.”
“What?”
“The bodies, they’ll fall apart. The flesh will come off the bones.”
Chapter Thirty
After 2 a.m., Winnie finished compiling a final report for her employer on Abel Whittemore and the Independency community he’d founded. Kansas City’s lights a dozen miles off pulsated through her darkened Florida Room but did nothing to chase the chill from the cool spring night air. With a click of the mouse, she sent the document from her Parkville home to her firm’s downtown office.
An electric space heater at her feet, Winnie fidgeted in a futile attempt to warm up and squirmed with melancholy over the contents of the report. Abel was not to be considered dangerous, she wrote, in that violence wasn’t in his tool kit, but he could certainly be seen as an emerging social activist with grand plans. The man’s computer files and the keylogger device had yielded comprehensive plans for Independency-style hybrid communities in most of the fifty states. More remarkable was the fact that Abel was amassing a war chest with dollars from Hollywood filmmakers and producers, from several high-profile alternative technology firms and from a few wealthy Wall Streeters possessed of a social conscience forged in the sixties and seventies. Funds were already being used to lay the groundwork for supporting political candidates for state and national office who supported environmentally sound technologies, renewable energy policies and sustainable development and lifestyles.
The take-him-down mindset Winnie fostered when she first arrived at Independency had atrophied. She had been keen to get at the man, Whittemore, and get under his skin so that her data and reports could be made available to intelligence professionals. Now she understood that the portrait that she and Midlands’ clients had of fulminating phantoms in the northland was well off the mark. Still, the information she had gathered might soon lead to the disruption of his full-blooded social experiment, one she now felt strongly should be left free to prosper and mature.
Winnie soaked in the heater’s BTUs, pretending she might tire and go to bed, but her nervous system was pulsing with the energy even as her thoughts descended to nadir.
Her training had been designed to wall her off from emotional attachment to subjects under scrutiny. The drill was to approach everything from a diamond-hard professional perspective. Fascination with a target was fine, but sympathy, adoration or complicity was impossible. Then why, Winnie chided herself, had she let her emotions derail her efforts? She got close to Abel, too close. Was it a lark and nothing more or was it a fundamental misstep?
Quandary, that’s what it was. She thought she had some inkling how Abel might present himself in the flesh, but his personality had confounded her and then pulled her into his orbit. He brandished a biting and calculating pen. Yet in person, he could set his weighty message aside and take delight in the lives and thoughts of others. Face-to-face, he relished simple pleasures, a friendly chat, a walk along the bluffs, a glass of homemade wine.
Winnie ran a hand through her wiry hair, trying to wring out the static in her head. The gesture didn’t work. Reaching across the computer desk, she gripped a coffee mug full of pens and pencils. In a single motion, she jerked the container off the desk and hurled it across the room.
The woman whistled loudly through her teeth and went to work hammering on the keyboard—something about a rendezvous in Sioux City. Meet at Buffalo Alice Restaurant for a $10 pizza and good beer. Get a room overlooking the river.
Winnie finished her keystrokes, sent the e-mail she just typed to a computer on a desk in Prospect Bluffs, Minnesota and loosed a volley of words to the darkened Florida Room. “God, I didn’t think I’d actually like the man.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Leaning against the window trim, arms folded tightly across his chest, Wesley stood laboring as if he were out of breath. Stroking his moustache, he gazed on funnels of loud mineral spring steam bellowing from the Mammoth Hot Springs thermal terraces just above and behind the headquarters. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Liz entered his office suddenly and stopped. She looked Wesley over. He did not look altogether well.
“Are you okay, Wes?”
The geo office veteran ran a hand over the bridge of his nose to clear it of accumulating moisture. “I need to make a decision. I’d like your professional opinion, Ms. Embree, before you vacate the premises for the weekend. I’ve been asking any and everyone their thoughts.
“At no time in my tenure here have I ever recommended to the park administrators that they close the park to the public during the summer season. Close certain terrain, yes, like Norris, but not all of Yellowstone. But I’m terribly concerned about the data stream. I need your input. Please don’t take this lightly. If an advisory hits at the start of the tourist season, it’s likely to impact the Park Service terribly and bring caustic responses from everyone, from the chambers of commerce to the halls of government.
“This place is the cornerstone of the economies of big portions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, you must understand. But it’s my duty to insure that the Park Service has the information necessary to safeguard the public. Nothing is more important than that.
“So, Ms. Embree, do you think there is, right now, a real danger to the public or don’t you, given what we’re seeing?” asked the supervising geologist.
Liz hesitated not a second. “Absolutely there’s danger, Wes, and it may get more so. I think you should insist that Parks close the park down—all of it, every square foot. The whole region from Norris to Park Point and the Brimstone is sweltering. The lake villages are uninhabitable and the lake itself is positively dangerous for recreation.”
“You’re afraid of another phreatic explosion in the lake?”
“That and the rapid accumulation of CO2 at ground level and in the water column. I think it would be criminal not to close access to the entire lake and its environs. Then what have we? Not a soul can walk into Norris geyser basin now. Other basins are really too hot for safe tourist access.”
Wesley rotated away from the window and took a seat behind his desk. “And what about the Brimstone, Ms. Embree? It’s looking very ugly.”