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Matts picked it up and scanned the boldfaced name in the center.

CHAPTER 26

OVER THE PAST twenty years, Oliver Paul had traveled all over the country. He prided himself on having spent at least one night in each of the fifty states. But this was his first visit to the famous Niagara Falls.

For some reason, he’d always pictured it as an overrated tourist trap. But tonight, staring out at the massive Horseshoe cataract, he finally saw what all the fuss was about. Even at its depleted winter volume, the falls dumped more than two thousand tons of water per second over a one-hundred-eighty-foot drop, the height of a fifteen-story building. The roar of the torrent created a natural wall of sound. Spectacular. Awe-inspiring. Mythic.

What’s more, at 4:00 a.m. in late February, Paul had the view mostly to himself. He shuddered in the cold mist and checked the Panerai Submersible timepiece on his wrist, rubbing his finger anxiously over the nub of the accessory stem he’d added in his workshop.

The watch was one of his recent masterpieces, modified not only to tell the time within a fraction of a second but also to send a discreet radio signal up to ten miles away. Tonight, Paul just needed the signal to reach six miles upriver. Child’s play.

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a much more primitive device—a twenty-five-dollar burner phone he’d picked up in a Toronto drugstore earlier that day.

Now he was standing just inside the US border.

One step closer to Bedford, New York. And to Archer’s Branch.

It was time to up the ante.

CHAPTER 27

BRENDAN HOLMES COULDN’T sleep. He was pacing along the balcony walkway of the lodge in his silk pajamas. He’d tried to read an old Conan Doyle story, tried listening to a true-crime podcast. Nothing worked. His mind was on Margaret, but he kept flashing to images of Dr. Alicia Bell. Her face, her legs, her neck. Not right.

He felt his phone vibrate inside his breast pocket. He pulled it out and checked the screen.

GET TO A TV, SHERLOCK. THE BIGGER THE BETTER.

Dammit! Holmes felt his chest tighten. It was Oliver Paul again. Were more people about to die?

He stepped up to the door of the bedroom Poe shared with Helene Grey. He knocked once for the sake of decency, then burst in shouting. “Poe! Downstairs! Now!”

He heard his partner groan, then saw him roll to the side of the bed, pulling off a black satin eye mask. “What? Why?”

On the other side of the mattress, Grey just mumbled in her sleep.

Holmes was already heading out the door again. “Just come! It’s Paul!”

He waited for a few seconds at the top of the staircase before Poe burst out of the bedroom, tying his bathrobe on the run. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Should we wake Margaret?”

“Not now!” said Holmes. “We need a TV!”

They rushed down the stairs, then hooked around the bottom post, heading toward a door on the north side of the great room. Holmes pushed in first and flicked a wall switch. A panel of LED lights popped on, illuminating a roomful of tables and electronics.

Decades back, the room had been the lodge’s guest library. The wooden shelves still held some musty paperbacks and fishing magazines. But over the past months, to keep himself busy, Holmes had turned the space into a sophisticated comms center, filled with modems, routers, signal boosters, monitors, and a world-class video hookup. A supersized flat-screen hung on the knotty-pine paneling beside the blackened fireplace. Holmes grabbed the remote and flicked the set on.

His phone buzzed. Another text.

CHANNEL 660.

Holmes punched 6-6-0 on the keypad. The screen lit up.

“Looks like a closed-circuit signal,” he said. “Just for us.”

The image was not high-quality. Probably from just a GoPro, mounted in a static position.

“What the hell are we looking at?” asked Poe. “Where is he?”

The camera showed a view across a flowing river, looking toward a massive stone structure six hundred yards across, with triangular supports along a wall that rose hundreds of feet. It was lit like a national monument, or a pharaoh’s tomb. Utility trucks parked at the base looked like dots by comparison. Workers in hard hats milled around the parking lot, looking even smaller. A police patrol boat churned in a slow circle in the dark water below, yellow lights blinking.