There were two old canvas tarps folded under the bench seat of the truck and a first aid kit with one of those shiny fold-up space-age emergency blankets that were supposed to keep you warm and did a fairly good job of it. There was also a shovel for digging out the truck if it got stuck. Apparently, the old biddy believed in being prepared.
The only thing she hadn’t provided was a mess kit. He’d have to improvise and empty some cans to cook in. It would be a sin to waste the fresh meat and eggs.
He drove through the forest and half a mile on, he came to a side road with a partially open gate. A wooden sign attached to the gate read “1 Peter 2:24.”
Larson wondered what in the hell that scripture passage said. He guessed some kindhearted Christians had a mountain ranch down that road. Maybe he could take them hostage and use their place as a hideaway until the heat cooled off.
He decided to do nothing and lie low for a while. He drove on and the road soon turned into a rough, narrow, seldom-used track that cut through a dense forest. About two miles beyond the gate, Larson found himself deep in the woods with no signs of any human habitation, no more gates, no additional side roads, and no hiking trails. His only reference point had been a faded Forest Service marker that told him what road he was on, but he didn’t have a clue if it traversed the mountains, joined up with another Forest Service road, or simply petered out into a dead end somewhere up ahead.
He slowed to a stop and thought over his situation. If he went deeper into the mountains only to reach a dead end, the cops could box him in if they picked up his trail, and he’d have no chance of eluding capture on foot. Even if there wasn’t a dead end up ahead, the fuel gauge on the truck was showing about an eighth of a tank, which meant he might be forced to hike out of the mountains even if the cops were nowhere around.
Larson reflected on the gate with the scripture sign. Maybe St. Peter was telling him it might be necessary to slaughter a few Christians. It would be a sin to waste that opportunity, he thought, and laughed long and hard at the repetition of the words in his mind. He turned the steering wheel and drove deep into the woods, until he was out of sight of any vehicles that might pass by.
He walked back to the road, scuffed out the tire tracks with his boots and a stick, and kicked duff over them to hide any sign that could lead someone to the truck. Then he set up camp using the truck as a shelter. He shoveled pine needles in the truck bed and covered them with one of the canvas tarps, stretched the other tarp across the bed, tied it taut with some rope he found in the glove box, and put some small dead and down twigs and small branches over the tarp to keep it from flapping in the wind.
Larson tilted the driver’s-side mirror and looked at his face. His beard was growing in nicely, and he figured if he let it grow and shaved his head, the combination might give him a reasonably good disguise. He started to hack away at his hair with the small pair of scissors from the first aid kit and soon realized it would take a while to get it cropped short enough to shave. With nothing better to do, he kept clipping until his fingers got sore and his empty stomach started grumbling. He got into the truck, sat down on the passenger seat, opened a can of tuna fish and wolfed it down, grinning at himself in the visor mirror. Already he looked different with his hair cut short.
He threw the empty tuna fish can into the trees, got back out of the truck, and started to work with the scissors again. When his hair was short enough, he took a disposable razor out of the pack, splashed some water on his head, lathered up, and started shaving the rest of it off.
By his second morning in the mountains, Craig Larson had an itchy head from a dozen or so small razor cuts, as well as a twitch to get moving. Not once had he heard a vehicle on the road since he’d arrived. A horse and rider had passed by late the first morning, but by the time Larson reached the road, they were out of sight.
He was pretty sure the cops had no idea where he was. With the truck’s radio turned down real low, he’d listened to the news just enough to learn that Paul Hewitt, the sheriff he’d shot, was a paralyzed cripple, and the old lady he’d killed, Janette Evans, a former Lincoln County clerk, had been loved and respected by all. Supposedly, every cop and concerned citizen in the state was looking for lovable Janette’s truck.
Larson decided to leave the truck where he’d hidden it, walk back to the “Bible Gate,” and have a look around before figuring out his next move. He followed the forest road down the mountain until he got close enough to see the gate and then hiked through the woods paralleling the side road, expecting to come upon either a small ranch in a clearing or a vacation cabin in the woods. Instead, he encountered a large riding ring filled with teenage girls and boys on horseback, cantering in circles under the watchful eye of a wrangler.
From behind a tree, Larson watched for a minute. The girls looked quite tasty in the saddle as they bounced and jiggled. He moved past a barn, several stables, and a couple of equipment sheds. Beyond them, he found an enormous log lodge with a pitched shingled roof and a modern-looking building with a vaulted, needle-point roof. A number of railroad cars placed next to Old West-style false-front buildings lined several lanes near the lodge and the vaulted-roof building, which Larson figured might be a church. He wasn’t sure what the false-front buildings and railroad cars were used for, but guessed they might be housing quarters for guests.
He stayed in the trees and out of sight, but moved close enough to read a sign nailed to a post in front of the vaulted-roof structure, which told him it was the worship center. He’d entered some holy-roller summer Bible camp.
Off to one side of the worship center was a compound Larson took to be staff housing. Under a stand of leafy trees, some cabin-size houses and several larger ranch-style residences were partially hidden by evergreen junipers. Laundry hung on clotheslines, toys for toddlers filled small porches, swings and slides stood in backyards, and dogs yipped and yapped behind chicken-wire fences.
Larson retreated and the barking dogs fell quiet as he made his way back to the forest road and started hiking up the mountain toward the truck. Since slaughtering a couple of Christians to hide out at a remote mountain ranch was no longer an option, he would have to rethink his plans.
The image of those teenage girls so sweet and pretty on horseback stuck in his mind. Maybe he should kidnap one of them, steal a vehicle, and just find another hiding place where he could enjoy some female company until things quieted down.
Chief Deputy Clayton Istee of the Lincoln County S.O. saturated his jurisdiction with every available resource in an attempt to find and capture Craig Larson. All sworn department personnel were called back to duty, including one deputy who willingly cut short his vacation in California and flew home to join the manhunt. All municipal and city police officers eagerly joined in, as did district state police personnel, game and fish officers, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management officers, several New Mexico livestock inspectors, and dozens of local volunteers who were enraged about the murder of Janette Evans and the paralyzing injury to Paul Hewitt.
Even Sergeant Rudy Aldrich of the Lincoln County S.O., who was also the Republican Party candidate for sheriff in the November general election, had managed to set aside partisan politics for the time being and give his full attention to the manhunt.
Several area ranchers with private planes were flying aerial reconnaissance missions with volunteer spotters over the vast tracts of open range and the thousands of square miles of remote high country. Sheriff’s posse reserve officers were out on horseback riding into remote canyons, through large, dense cactus flats, and up dry arroyos and draws looking for any sign of recent foot or vehicle passage.
Clayton ran the manhunt from his unit. As time allowed, he knocked on doors in rural areas to ask if anyone had seen Janette Evans’s truck, backed up officers doing searches of abandoned or vacant properties, and spelled officers for breaks at the various roadblocks set up around the county. With each passing hour the odds of catching Larson decreased, and
the continued massive effort to find him was based solely on a hope and a prayer that he might have gone to ground in Lincoln County.
An hour before dusk on the third day of the search, Clayton stopped at the diner on Capitan’s main drag, got a container of coffee to go, returned to his unit, and went over a computer printout that showed all the rural locations that had been canvassed so far. On the slight chance that a hint of Larson’s whereabouts might have been missed during the first go-round, Clayton had ordered another heavy concentration of close patrols in areas with remote ranches, vacation cabins, or second homes, at all forest campgrounds, at mountain trailheads, and along river bottomland, especially near Fort Stanton, where there were caves that could be used to hide out.
He’d divided the county into sectors to be covered, and assigned all but one to his deputies. He had taken the Fort Stanton area for himself, and had just spent the last four hours tromping along the Bonita River searching the caves.
Before driving home for dinner—it would be the first meal with the family since Paul Hewitt had been shot and Janette Evans killed—he decide to check the Twin Pines Adventure Bible Camp at the base of the Capitan Mountains. He finished his coffee, drove east on Highway 380 to the county road turnoff, and made his way along the rolling, juniper-studded rangeland to the Bible camp.
When Clayton had first joined the Lincoln County S.O. as a patrol deputy, he’d made it a point to introduce himself to as many rural residents as possible during his work shifts. After his initial visit to the Bible camp, he’d looked up the citation posted on the gate and found that it basically said that Jesus had suffered on the cross to give mankind the opportunity to live a righteous life healed from sin.
A nominal Christian like most Apaches, Clayton wasn’t all that comfortable with the notion of a single, all-powerful deity. The traditional religion of the Mescalero was a personal, family, and tribal matter, not a theology to spread hither and yon.
The camp had been quite an eye-opener for Clayton. It operated year-round, but summer was the busy season, when teenagers came to ride horses, shoot rifles, mountain bike, backpack, rock climb, play volleyball, work out in the gym, study the scriptures, and engage in Christian fellowship.
He parked at the camp director’s house just as a spirited group of laughing teenagers came down the lane on their way to the worship center. He crossed the porch, knocked on the front door, and watched as the kids passed by, clowning, screeching, and teasing each other in the private world that adolescents inhabit.
The camp director, Reverend Gaylord Wardle, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man with a big, benevolent smile that Clayton had instantly mistrusted at their first meeting, opened the door. He greeted Clayton warmly.
“We’re keeping a close watch on our flock,” Wardle added before Clayton could speak. “We’re doing head counts four times a day. No campers are allowed to leave the ranch unsupervised. All are present and accounted for, and we’ve posted the photographs of the fugitive that another officer dropped off to us in every ranch building.”
“That’s very good,” Clayton said. “Have you or your staff encountered any strangers on the county road?”
Wardle shook his head. “There has been virtually no traffic. With that murderer still at large I think people are afraid to be out in the mountains on their own, away from civilization. The only vehicles we’ve seen have belonged to the Forest Service or the neighboring ranches.”
“Call 911 immediately if anyone unknown to you, your staff, or the campers shows up here unannounced.”
“Wouldn’t that be overreacting a bit?” Wardle asked. “After all, we do have photographs of the culprit.”
“Appearances can be easily altered,” Clayton countered.
Wardle stroked his chin. “Yes, of course. I didn’t think of that.”
Clayton stepped off the porch. “Thank you for your time.”
“Of course. Each day at prayer we ask Jesus to protect all the men and women in law enforcement who are working so hard night and day to keep us safe. Thank you so much for all that you do. Are you any closer to capturing this madman?”
“Not yet,” Clayton replied with a wave as he walked toward his unit.
He drove slowly through camp and out the open gate. On the county road he stopped, got out of his unit, and in the glare of the headlights took a close look at the surface of the road. It had rained in the mountains recently, just enough to wash away evidence of any vehicles traveling into the forest. But there was a set of fresh footprints on the road along with a set of hoofprints headed toward Capitan Gap.
He got a flashlight from his unit and followed the footprints a few yards past the gate, where the tracks left the road and cut through the woods parallel to the Bible camp access road. He got the local phone directory from his unit, paged through it, and dialed Gaylord Wardle’s phone number on his cell phone.
“Are you patrolling the access road to the camp?” Clayton asked when Wardle answered.
“Yes,” Wardle replied. “I’ve assigned nighttime sentry duty to several of my young-adult counselors, just to keep an eye on things, and we’re also locking the gate at lights-out.”
“Have you armed the counselors?” Clayton asked, hoping Wardle hadn’t been that stupid.
“Yes, with .22 rifles, but for their own protection only. Not to worry, they’re all National Rifle Association certified instructors.”
Clayton had no legal authority to order Wardle to disarm his counselors, but that didn’t stop him from offering some unsolicited advice. “To avoid a tragic accident, I suggest you lock up all your firearms, Mr. Wardle, including the twenty-twos your sentries are carrying.”
“These young men are certified instructors,” Wardle repeated in a bit of a huff, “and at Twin Pines we teach and practice the right to bear arms.”
“That is your right,” Clayton replied. “But your gun-toting counselors probably won’t be much of a match for a killer on the run with nothing to lose.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Wardle said icily. “Good-bye.”
Clayton disconnected, sat in his unit, and studied the computer printout of all the canvasses and field searches that had been conducted since the start of the manhunt. A sheriff’s posse member had traversed part of the Capitan wilderness area on horseback, passed through the gap, followed the four-wheel-drive trail to Seven Cabins Canyon, and then ridden cross-county to hook up with the Summit Trail that led to Capitan Peak before doubling back to check the only campground in the area, along Spring Creek.
There had been no sightings of anyone, but Clayton knew a regiment of searchers on foot and horseback could easily miss a person who didn’t want to be found in the vast expanse of forest and wilderness in Lincoln County. Although the Forest Service had removed all back-country hikers from the Capitan Mountains wilderness area, and was routinely checking all access points into federal land, Clayton made a note to have a deputy do a daily drive-by of the Bible camp starting tomorrow. Given limited resources, that was the best that could be done. He put the printout aside and started for the Rez, eagerly anticipating a home-cooked dinner with his family.
Clayton got home just as Grace, Wendell, and Hannah were sitting down to eat. They waited for him while he locked his sidearm in the gun case, washed up, filled his plate with barbecue short ribs and potato salad, and joined them at the table.
During dinner, the children dominated the conversation. Wendell, who attended the Boys and Girls Club several afternoons a week during summer vacation, talked with great excitement about disassembling an old computer that had been donated to the technology class at the club and learning all about what went into making the machine work.
Hannah, who attended a morning arts and crafts program run by volunteers, was having a grand time learning basket making and enlarging her Apache language skills at the same time, which was a requirement for participating. On the table in front of her was a small traylike basket, no more than four inches in circumfe
rence, done in the traditional star motif with four tapered points.
“What do you have there?” Clayton asked.
“My teacher said it is well balanced,” Hannah said modestly.
Clayton raised an eyebrow. To the Mescalero, balance was essential to the circle of life, a key concept in the Apache world-view. His daughter’s work had been highly praised. “Did she?” he asked.
Hannah nodded solemnly and held the basket out to her father. “It’s for you.”
Clayton wiped his mouth, took the basket from his daughter’s outstretched hand, and carefully inspected it. Hannah had used split yucca leaves to weave her basket, and for a girl not yet six years old, the workmanship was darn good.
Hannah kicked her feet against the rung of her chair and kept her eyes glued to her father’s face as she waited for his reaction.
“It is well balanced,” Clayton finally said, speaking in the Apache language. “My daughter is too generous with her gift.”
Hannah beamed delightedly.
After dinner, Clayton summoned up enough energy to shoot some baskets with Wendell at the hoop he’d installed over the garage door. Under the glare of exterior lights, Wendell faked, dribbled, and ran circles around Clayton, firing layups, jumpers, and hook shots at the basket with reckless abandon.
Taller than the boys on the Rez his age, Wendell had sprouted at least another inch since summer recess and was showing signs of becoming quite a good athlete. He had quickness, speed, and excellent hand-eye coordination. Clayton, who had lettered in cross-country track and basketball in high school, looked forward to the time when he could watch his son compete and cheer him on.
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