“Sorry I had to call so early.”
Wells unzipped his jacket. “Forget it. What’s the emergency?”
“The state police received a call just after dawn this morning. Two fishermen in a dory spotted him near the bottom of Harris.”
“How do you know it’s our guy?”
“He was wearing a top hat, canvas trousers, knee-high boots, and a calf-length leather coat. They also said he was smoking a corncob and had a black beard. Who else could it be?”
“Jesus.”
“And he was carrying a weird axe in his right hand.”
“This guy say anything to them?”
“Not a word,” Carlyle said. “They assumed he was waiting for them to get out of his way. When they spotted the axe, they began rowing like crazy.”
“What’s he doing so far from the gorge?”
“It could only mean one thing—we’ve flushed him out of familiar territory.”
“Why would he let himself be seen out in the open like that?”
“He may think he’ll never get caught.”
“Or maybe he’s getting careless?”
“Him? Never. He’s too disciplined for that…or it could be part of his plan.”
“Is it finally time to bring in the cops?” Wells said.
“He’ll just go to ground once the troops arrive. We need to figure out where he goes next.”
Carlyle unfolded a large-scale map of the region running from Indian Lake to North River. “We’ve assumed the Huntley Point Trail was the only way he could get in there, that he would never attack Marshall in the gorge itself.”
“Did we make a mistake?”
“Not really. Once the river turns east, the Black Mountain Range makes it all but impossible to get into the canyon.”
“Where did we go wrong, then?” Wells said.
“What if the terrain is really no obstacle? What would happen then?”
“You can’t have it both ways. Either it stops him or it doesn’t.”
“Drag that light over here.” Wells brought a gooseneck lamp to the center of the table. “Look at the map again,” Carlyle said.
Wells put his finger on the Hudson at Blue Ledges. He could see the Huntley Point Trail dropping down from the north-east, then the canyon walls enveloping the river. “There’s no way for him to get in there.”
“Really? Look farther east.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got a four-mile wall of rock, six or seven hundred feet high on both sides. And nothing but wilderness behind it.”
“Keep going.”
Wells slowly traced the Hudson from the Narrows to the Boreas. “The freight line to the mine at Tahawus crosses the Hudson just below Harris. Why didn’t we see it?”
“Because it’s been abandoned for over two decades and we just assumed the trestle was impassable. That’s why we figured the gorge was invulnerable.”
“That means we could get hit on either side of Harris.”
“Right. He could hide his vehicle and be in and out in two hours and change. Or he may have a place to hide until we’ve given up looking for him.”
“What makes you so sure Harris is his next target?” Wells said.
“He keeps moving downstream ahead of us. This is the first place east of the gorge where he can come and go whenever he wants.”
“Are you saying we should bushwhack into the trestle?”
Carlyle got up and walked to a picture window overlooking the valley. “We have to find out if he can use it to attack us on both sides of the gorge. And he must have been planning something when those two guys spotted him.”
Carlyle turned and faced Wells. “We may have overlooked something else. It’s three miles from the trestle to the take-out at North River. There’s plenty of unobstructed shoreline on both sides of the river. He could be planning almost anything along this stretch.”
Carlyle drove slowly across the one-lane bridge spanning the Boreas, pulled his truck off the road to the right, and killed the engine.
Wells said, “You sure you don’t want to let the state police know what we’re doing?”
Carlyle opened up a thermos and handed Wells some coffee. “They’d only bring a SWAT team in an armored vehicle. He’d hear them coming a mile away and we’d never get near him.”
“What happens if we do run into him?”
Carlyle looked through the windshield as a rabbit ran across the road. “We calmly explain that we’re there to carry out a citizen’s arrest. If he doesn’t surrender, we run like hell.”
“Be serious,” Wells said. “I may get my ass shot off because of you.”
Carlyle got out of the truck. “I promise to find a pretty young doctor to sew it back on.”
After pulling on their backpacks, they began walking along the abandoned rail line, now almost completely overgrown by vines and thick bushes, that would take them to the gorge.
As soon as Carlyle entered the woods, the only sound he could hear was his feet striking the limestone chips between wooden ties. He felt hemmed in, cut off from the outside world. The tall pines and the granite cliff to his right blocked sunlight from reaching the valley floor. Ignoring the possibility that he and Wells were putting themselves in danger, Carlyle concentrated on moving south toward the river. Up ahead, the track snaked along the base of an escarpment, increasing his sense of isolation.
After a quarter mile, they stopped to look at the narrow, seething river on their left. The Boreas, boulder-strewn and only thirty yards wide, had carved a trench in the landscape from its source in a mountain lake twenty miles to the north. Once the snowmelt disappeared, it would again be a bone-dry ravine, though one day of heavy rain would convert the Boreas into a raging torrent again.
Wells said, “You mind telling me what our plan is today?”
“Every attack has been different. All we know so far is that he’s patient and deliberate. That’s not the portrait of a crazy person. I’m hoping that if we keep analyzing his methods, the puzzle will begin to make sense.”
“If we don’t stop him,” Wells said, “could this crusade of his turn into a killing spree?”
“Every time we fail to stop him, he
