Wells, holding onto a thick limb, peered down on Entrance. “If I were him, this would be my next target.”
Carlyle pulled binoculars from his pack and swept the valley floor with his lenses. “We’re vulnerable here, that’s for sure. The river’s got to be two hundred yards wide. There’s no way to set up a z-drag if we had a boat wrapped on those rocks.”
“He could lay a trap here and be back in these trees in minutes.”
“Once we started down Entrance, we’d never see it coming and there’s no place to pull over.”
“Is there any way you could protect yourselves?”
“This guy always tries something new,” Carlyle said. “How could we prepare for that?”
They turned their backs on Entrance, climbed steadily for another fifteen minutes, and then hiked carefully down a narrow switchback to the river. Breaking through undergrowth, they found themselves on a sand beach. White cedar, their bright green leaves glowing in the sunlight, lined both banks of the river.
Carlyle shrugged off his pack and stared at Blue Ledges, a three-hundred-foot wall of granite, on the far shore. The cliff dropped straight to the floor of the gorge. A sheet of ice sixty feet high and several inches thick hung from the rock. He remembered that one April morning as his raft slid silently past this spot, a ten-foot chunk of ice separated from the bluff and, shattering as it fell, crashed into the river not fifty feet from his boat.
Carlyle watched the Hudson cascade down through Entrance and into the basin at the foot of Blue Ledges. In the other direction, downstream, he could see the river gather momentum, rise into one massive standing wave, veer right, and then plunge into the Narrows.
“If some clients knew this trail was here, they’d probably walk out rather than face the gorge.”
Wells was sitting on a boulder with his back to the cliff across from them.
“Not interested in the scenery?” Carlyle said.
“I don’t need to see it.” Wells was silent for a minute. “My sister died in a place just like this.”
Carlyle said nothing.
“I was sixteen. She didn’t make it home one night. The police organized a search party. I spent two days walking through the woods behind our house. My parents, afraid of what we would find, stayed inside the whole time. They found her a week later. Someone raped and murdered her, then threw her body into an abandoned quarry.”
Carlyle stared at the ground. “What happened to your parents?”
“It took my mother six months to leave her bedroom. My dad had a heart attack two years later.” Wells picked at his lunch. “The guy got twenty years, plus five on probation. We got a life sentence.”
Wells turned to look at Carlyle. “That’s the problem with professors. You actually think you can explain why someone like my sister was murdered.”
Carlyle watched a hawk circle overhead. “Don’t you want at least some sort of answer?”
“I don’t believe all those clever explanations for why people become compassionate or cruel. Shit happens no matter what you or I do to prevent it.” Wells threw his lunch in his pack and stood up. “What are we doing out here, anyway?”
“There’s got to be some evidence that will help us locate this guy.”
“How do you know that?”
“DEC brought a dog to Cedar Ledges several days ago,” Carlyle said. “The animal found the tool that he used to drag the tree to the river. It’s called a peavey, a four-foot pole with a spike and a sharp curved hook.”
“Why bring something like that to the river?” Wells said.
Carlyle stood up and brushed the sand off his rain jacket. “That’s the way it was done seventy-five years ago, when nearly everyone was logging by hand.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
“I think Blake was murdered by a person who feels compelled to act out rituals that are important to him in some way.”
“You want to explain that?”
“Your father shave with a blade razor?”
“So what?”
“You use one?
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Wells said. “Our suspect is still a nut case.”
“At least we can work on the assumption that this guy has some connection, however weird, to the logging industry.”
Wells looked at his watch. “Time to get going.”
“As long as we’re here, might as well take a look around.”
“For what?”
“If this guy’s out for revenge, he probably can’t stop himself from planning another attack.” Carlyle paced the beach. “Blue Ledges is perfect. Steps from the gorge, a place he could watch boats drift by on their way toward his trap.”
“As long as we get out by dark,” Wells said.
Clambering over a series of boulders, Carlyle wandered downstream, deeper into the gorge. With only three feet between the cliff and the rocks lining the river, he soon ran out of space to walk.
The sun was high over his left shoulder. Scanning the hillside, he saw a dull blue object hanging from a limb near the ground. He slowly pushed his way uphill into the woods and found a carabineer suspended from a Scotch pine. Several large branches and a thin layer of earth had been thrown over a hastily buried object.
He bent down and carefully shifted the underbrush and dirt to one side. When he’d finished, he realized why the job of finding the person who’d been targeting Marshall had been so difficult.
He hiked back up the beach to Wells. “Grab your gear and follow me.”
They walked back to the hanging carabineer. Carlyle pointed to a snub-nosed whitewater kayak painted camouflage green, brown, and gray.
“Holy shit.” Wells bent down to get a better look.
“He must have paddled this thing down from Indian Lake. Give me a hand.” The two men, one on either side of the boat, rocked it back and forth to remove the remaining leaves.
“Why put it here?”
“So he could hike in early some morning, do whatever he needed to do, and be off the river before anyone found him.” Carlyle bent down
