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 Character
Profiles
 Kier
Wintripp
Grandfather,
a.k.a., Stalking Bear
Jessie
Mayfield
In
her own self-analysis, Jessie Mayfield started out with one
major vulnerability: She was frightened to death of failing
at anything.
Even as a child, it was her credo that she had to be tough and
perfect. But something inside her was soft. It came out first
with the animals. Incredibly determined, she had created a backyard
menagerie of those particularly lucky creatures that fell into
her hands before they met the ultimate sanction at the city
animal shelter. To support her critters she got a paper route.
At age 15, however, the animals went. She swore off loving animals
as best she could, and at age 16, became a somewhat introspective
girl who plunged headlong into the world of computers.
It was only while earning her MBA that she had a sort of social
blossoming. Awkward at first, she learned how to reach out to
people. Shortly after school, she wed. She thrived at her first
job, at a high-tech company where she soon headed the information
technology division. While her career flourished her marriage
collapsed, adding to her suspicion that men were not to be trusted.
It was her best friend Gail who convinced her to join the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, effectively arguing that Jessie could
specialize in computer crime—no street work—and match
wits with the smartest crooks in the business. There was no
end to the personal creativity she could bring to the task of
hunting down virus disseminators, techno-terrorists, and other
computer criminals.
But Jessie fell on hard times with the FBI when her boss and
mentor Frank Belotti took cruel advantage of her best friend
Gail. Feeling thoroughly disillusioned with men, Jessie fled
to her sister's wilderness ranch on a brief sabbatical to sort
out her life. It was there that she met Kier
Wintripp, a man's man.
Where Kier is all wilderness she is all city. Jessie doesn't
even like picnics, much less mountain climbing. Although generally
fearless, she is deathly afraid of heights. When a plane crashes
in the mountains near her sister's wilderness ranch, she goes
with Kier to investigate the accident, feeling that her duties
as an agent not only require that she attend to the disaster,
but later, when they learn that criminal activity is involved,
that she take charge.
Where Kier's life has been steeped in a culture that values the
differences between the sexes, Jessie's life has been devoted to
equal opportunity. Nothing about her life as a career FBI agent
has prepared Jessie for surviving in a frozen wilderness on a mountain
with Kier.
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