Chapter One
Lone Wolf
In the end, the moon was just another enemy. It hadn’t always
been that way. When he started writing about his fugitive
years the word he chose was “addicting”: “There is something
addicting about the full moon on an early summer or fall
evening in the South …” Now the moonlight pinned him to
the shadows, kept him off the roads and dirt tracks where the
breeze would disperse his scent before the hounds could follow
it. The damp grass and foliage would hold his trail for days.
The years of hiding, he later said, had turned him into a
nocturnal creature, sleeping in the day, prowling for food at
night, always watchful.
Eric Rudolph kept his campsite orderly: hiking boots lined up
like soldiers on the cardboard pallet beneath a double tarp;
scavenged newspapers and magazines stacked up neatly beside
them. A small ring of stones for a cooking fire, with two
blackened pots upturned to drain. He had scattered overripe
bananas, tomatoes, and onions to dry in the sun. He could
store them, use them later when food was scarce. His life was
consumed with planning: figuring out the movement of police
patrols through town, knowing which days the grocery stores
dumped their expired bread and vegetables. He traced a grid on
notebook paper to make into a calendar and neatly crossed off
each day as it passed. When the federal agents found the
calendar at his camp, the last marked date was May 30, 2003.
It was a weekend night, not much of a moon, and Rudolph
figured that the lone patrolman would be distracted by teenage
drunks out looking for trouble. He pulled on his “rummaging”
clothes: a black cotton T-shirt, dark slacks, old black tennis
shoes. In the darkness his feet remembered the steep trail
down the small mountain overlooking town. When he reached the
bottom he watched for the glow of headlights approaching, and
when it was safe he ran across the four-lane highway,
following the bridge a short distance until it crossed the
Valley River. One time a car had surprised him and he’d had to
hang off the side of the bridge to keep from being seen.
Tonight the trip went smoothly and he dropped down quietly
into a field on the other side of the river. He followed
another well-worn path through the grass and weeds to the
alley behind a small shopping center. The patrol car usually
passed this way every hour or so. He crouched in the darkness
and waited.
It was late in the third shift on the first night of the long
Memorial Day weekend, and Officer Jeff Postell was running
through his routine business checks along Andrews Road in
Murphy, North Carolina. At about 3:30 A.M., Postell cruised
through the alley behind the Save-A-Lot grocery store and the
Sears appliance retailer, past a cluster of old, one-story
shops with their backs to the marshy bottomland of the Valley
River. Then he turned his patrol car back into the deserted
parking lot.
Postell was short and slight, a twenty-one-year-old rookie
with less than a year on the Murphy police force. But as his
colleagues had already noticed, Postell compensated for his
size with hard work and enthusiasm. More seasoned police
officers might slide through the bottom of the third shift,
waiting for trouble to call itself in. Not Jeff Postell. He
was flush with the optimism of inexperience, and he wanted to
catch himself a burglar before he switched over to working
days.
Murphy is the largest municipality in the mountainous western
tip of North Carolina. The town has 2,500 people in a county
with 25,000 scattered residents, a population that almost
doubles in the summer months. Locals like to boast that the
area is “two hours from anywhere”: two hours’ drive from
Asheville to the east, Chattanooga to the west, Atlanta to the
south. Due north is the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and
the Appalachian heartland. Now that the textile factories and
other light industries have packed up and moved to Mexico,
Murphy’s main industry is tourism. The visitors come for the
clean air and wide mountain views, fishing and water sports.
Four counties, Cherokee, Clay, Macon, and Swain, are set
within the 500,000-acre Nantahala National Forest. If you
don’t count the transgressions of marijuana growers in the
mountains or the crank syndicates that exploit the area as a
regional distribution center, crime rates are pleasantly low.
The most common police blotter items involve DUIs. Restaurants
close early and the streets empty out after dark. People sleep
soundly in the velvet warm nights of late spring, windows open
to the breeze.
As soon as Postell was clear of the lot, he cut off his lights
and swung the car around the corner and back into the alley,
hoping to surprise any prowlers. It was then that he spotted
the figure of a man crouched down and scurrying toward the
supermarket loading dock. The rookie saw something long tucked
under the subject’s arm, like a rifle or a shotgun on a sling.
The man heard him coming and darted behind a stack of milk
crates. Postell turned on his “alley lights” while he radioed
dispatch for backup. Then, using his open door for cover, he
got out of the patrol car, drew his sidearm, and shouted,
“Come out! Put your hands where I can see ’em!”
The man complied.
“Okay, drop to your knees. Now, down on the ground. Arms out.
Cross your feet …”
The subject seemed so docile that Postell felt comfortable
enough to approach and cuff him.
Cherokee County deputy Sean Matthews, known to all as Turtle,
was walking out of Fatback’s Citgo with a paper cup of coffee
in his hand when he heard a commotion on his patrol car radio.
As he climbed behind the wheel he could make out Jeff
Postell’s voice shouting, “Man with a gun!” It sounded pretty
urgent….
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Lone Wolf
by Maryanne Vollers
Copyright © 2006 by Maryanne Vollers.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2006
Maryanne Vollers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-06-059862-X
