Still, Bell knew that the Wrecker would find no shortage of high explosives. Dynamite was in such demand that trainloads arrived on the powder pier day and night. New Yorkers were blowing up the city's bedrock of mica schist to dig subways and cellars in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. New Jerseyites were blasting traprock from hilltops to make concrete. Quarrymen were carving building stone out of the Hudson River cliffs, from New Jersey's Palisades all the way up to West Point. Railroad builders were blasting approaches to the Hudson tunnels being bored under the river.

"When the rail tunnels connecting New Jersey and New York are finished next year," Archie bragged, "Osgood Hennessy can park his special eight blocks from Times Square."

"Thank the Lord the tunnels are not finished," said Bell. "If they were, the Wrecker would try to blow them with a Southern Pacific Limited trapped under the river."

Archie Abbott flaunted the New Yorker's disdain for districts west of the Hudson in general, and the state of New Jersey in particular, by reminding Isaac Bell that over the years entire sections of Jersey City and nearby Hoboken had been periodically leveled by dynamite accidents, most recently in 1904.

Bell did not need any reminding. The word about the new police presence had gotten around, and tips had poured in from a fearful public. Just yesterday, they had they caught some fool in a wagon carting a half ton of dynamite for the New York and New Jersey Trap Rock Company up Newark Avenue. Failure to dodge a trolley would have resulted in a deadly explosion on the busiest street in Jersey City. The company was protesting mightily about the expense of being forced to take dynamite up the Hackensack River to their Secaucus mine. But the Jersey City fire commissioner, not at all pleased by all the public attention, had stood untypically firm.

"These Jersey harebrains won't need any help from the Wrecker to blow themselves sky-high one of these days," Archie Abbott predicted, "purely through negligence."

"Not on my watch," said Isaac Bell.

"In fact," Abbott persisted. "If there were an explosion, how would we know it was the Wrecker and not a Jersey harebrain?"

"We'll know. If he manages to get around us, it will be the biggest explosion New York has ever seen."

Accordingly, Bell had stationed railway police on every train and boat and freight wagon owned by the Southern Pacific. He backed them up with Van Dorn operatives and inspectors borrowed from the Bureau of Explosives, newly founded by the railroads to promote safe transportation of dynamite, gunpowder, and TNT.

Every man carried the lumberjack's sketch. Bell's hopes for it had been bolstered by a report on the Ogden disaster from Nicolas Alexander, the self-important head of the Denver office, who, despite his flaws, happened to be an able detective. Some had wondered if the Wrecker had sought Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton out deliberately to attack Van Dorn agents. But Alexander had confirmed Bell's initial conclusion that Wally and Mack had pursued the Wrecker down an alley. Which meant they had recognized him from the sketch. And the by-now-familiar sword-puncture wounds left no doubt the Wrecker had killed them with his own hand.