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the man and proved his guilt before a judge, he knew the citizens of Baggs would shun the man and turn him into a pariah, maybe even run him out of the state for good. Still, he’d rather send the criminal to prison.
    For the past month, Joe had poured his time and effort into catching the Mad Archer. He’d perched all night near hay meadows popular as elk and deer feeding spots. He’d haunted sporting goods shops asking about purchases of arrows and gone to gas stations asking about suspicious drivers who might have had bows in their pickups in the middle of summer. He’d acquired enough physical evidence to nail the Archer if he could ever catch him in the vicinity of a crime. There were the particular brand of arrows—Beman ICS Hunters tipped with Magnus 2-blade broadheads—partial fingerprints from the shaft of the arrows removed from an elk and Tube, a tire-track impression he’d cast in plaster at the scene of a deer killing, a sample of radiator fluid he’d gathered from a spill on the side of the road near the dead pronghorn, and some transmission fluid of particular viscosity he’d sent to the lab to determine any unique qualities. But he had no real leads on the Mad Archer himself, or even an anonymous tip with a name attached called into the 800-number poacher hotline.
    Many of his nightly conversations with Marybeth took place in the dark in the cab of his pickup, overseeing a moon-splashed hay meadow framed by the dark mountain horizon.
     
     
     
    JUDGING BY THE CALL from dispatch earlier, Joe immediately assumed the Mad Archer was at it again, and this time he’d claimed a bald eagle. Although bald eagles had finally been taken off the endangered species list the year before, it was still a crime to harm them. Plus, he liked eagles and it made him mad. So when the call came he checked the loads in the magazine of his Glock and chambered a round, moved his shotgun from behind the bench seat to the front, jammed his weathered gray Stetson on his head, and rushed up the canyon on the two-track, hoping the crime had taken place recently enough that there would be a chance of encountering the criminal in the vicinity. Since there was only one main road from the valley floor to the campground where the hikers had called in the wounded eagle, he thought he might have a chance.
     
     
     
    HE’D FOUND THE bald eagle as described. The hikers—who’d asked a seasonal forest service employee to call it in once the worker cleared the walled canyon—milled about helplessly while the big eagle stood between them and their Subaru with Colorado plates (an inordinate number of complaints were called in by people with Subarus and Colorado plates). The eagle had her wings outstretched an imposing seven and a half feet. Her talons gripped the soft dirt parking lot like a scoop shovel biting through asphalt. Her screech was shrill, chilling, ungodly, as if intended to scare pinecones out of the trees. Her eyes were as dark, intense, and piercing as hell itself, he thought. He couldn’t lock eyes with her more than a few seconds before breaking the gaze.
    There were three hikers, two men and a woman. College age, good equipment, scruffy half-beards on the men, the woman a brunette with her hair tied in a ponytail. They told him they’d spent three nights and four days hiking the trails and high-country lakes near Bridger Peak in the Sierra Madres.
    The woman told Joe, “We’re tired, dirty, and hungry and we need to get out of here. We have a dinner reservation tonight in Steamboat Springs. At the rate we’re going, we’re going to be late.”
    “Oh dear,” Joe said.
    “I’m serious,” she said, miffed.
    “Did you see anyone in the area other than the forest service guy? Any other hikers or vehicles?”
    They all shook their heads no. Damn.
    The eagle was big, Joe noted, probably fifteen pounds. Females were larger than males. The yellow arrow shaft went cleanly through her right wing and was lodged