The Killing Season (18 page)

There was a cough from behind them and the two of them turned. Blake’s hair was disheveled, his white shirt streaked with dirt, and there was a cut beneath his left eye. “I’m afraid, Agent Castle,” he said, “that your guess is as good as mine.”

36

3:28 p.m.

The three of them were hunched over a large map of the Midwestern states on a small table inside the mobile command center. Blake sipped his third cup of hot black coffee as he indicated points on the map.

“We don’t have any more than a day until he kills again,” he said. “Probably much less, in fact. So given that he has to keep under the radar, we’ll say a five-hundred-mile radius, max.”

“Less,” Castle said, cradling his chin between the thumb and index finger of his left hand as he considered this. “He’s got to dump your rental ASAP and find another vehicle. Did you get the optional insurance, by the way?”

“Always.”

Banner smiled. There had been no apology from Castle and certainly no gesture of contrition, but he had quietly dropped his open animosity for Blake. Whether he liked it or not, he had to work with the guy if he wanted to nail Wardell. And he wanted that badly; they all did.

“Say three hundred, then,” she said. “What does that give us? We’re looking at towns and cities again, since the next one’s got to be random. He’s out of personal targets.”

“Maybe,” Blake said. He reached for a pencil, guesstimated a three hundred mile to scale line stretching out north from Allanton, and drew a near-perfect circle on the map. Banner and Castle inclined their heads to look at what that gave them.

“Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota,” Castle recited, “or he could double back to Iowa.”

“He might want to rest up,” Banner suggested. “The ­nearest big town is Denver.”

“Kansas City is almost as close in the other direction,” Castle pointed out.

Blake was shaking his head. “Things changed today,” he said.

“You mean because you almost got him?” Castle asked.

“It wasn’t that close,” Blake said. “I was just trying to get out of that situation in one piece. I meant it changed because he’s taken out his first predetermined target. Maybe his only predetermined target. And, thanks to Daddy, he seems to have inherited an arsenal. He’s ready to kick things up a notch.”

Banner tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. She didn’t like to think about what the next notch would be to a guy like Wardell. “Meaning?” she asked after a moment.

“I don’t know,” Blake said.

“You’re right,” Castle said after a moment. “Serial killers tend not to keep to their initial pace. They escalate. A lot of the time, that’s why we catch them. More than likely, his next move is going to be something big.”

“Or some
one
big,” Banner said. This chimed with what she’d read in the psych reports. Wardell had never confirmed it, but the shrinks agreed he was working up to a single episode of killing on an unprecedented scale. Something with a lot of people in a confined space. A baseball game or rock concert had been suggested, but it could just as easily have been a hospital or a shopping mall. Wardell hadn’t sketched out his plans or written a journal, so there was no way to be sure. That was the challenge about protecting a big city—lots of places with lots of people.

Blake nodded in agreement. “Let’s hope we’re not there yet. If he sticks with random, we’re back to a guessing game. But if we can find a specific target he might want to hit within this circle—or even outside—we could make a guess at his direction at least.”

Castle repeated the names of the states that fell within Blake’s circle. Banner furrowed her brow in concentration. Nothing stood out. “What towns do we have in those states?” she said, then started picking them out on the map. “Lincoln, Omaha, Wichita, Topeka . . .”

“Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder . . .” Castle continued, looking west.

Blake picked up the baton and headed north. “Cheyenne, Rapid City, Sioux Falls . . .”

“Wait,” Banner exclaimed. The two men stopped, looked up at her, faces questioning. “Rapid City, South Dakota,” she said. “Something about Rapid City in the case notes.”

Blake snapped his fingers. “Of course. Hatcher.”

“John Hatcher?” Castle prompted. “The sheriff?”

Banner nodded. Hatcher had been the newly promoted sheriff of Chicago’s Cook County, barely two weeks on the job when Wardell had made his first kill. As the senior law-­enforcement representative in the county where Wardell’s first two victims had fallen, he’d been heavily involved on the multiagency task force during the first go-round and hadn’t been shy with the media. Hatcher had a weird mix of charisma and abrasiveness, which had worked to his advantage during the frequent press conferences. His prickliness and instinctive way with a sound bite had marked him out as a no-bullshit man of action, especially when contrasted with the more reserved
FBI
agents, including Steve Castle.

It was an entirely false impression. Away from the ­cameras, he’d contributed little to the case beyond getting ­people’s backs up. But he’d been the only one to come out at the other end with a genuine career boost. It had helped, of course, that it had been one of the detectives on Hatcher’s Special Investigations Division who had made the crucial breakthrough. But Hatcher wasn’t slow in taking as much credit for his subordinate’s actions as he possibly could.

“What about him?” Castle said.

“He retired,” Banner replied. “Departmental regs wouldn’t allow him to write a book about the case—you know,
How I Caught the Chicago Sniper
,
something like that—so he quit.”

Blake nodded. “He did the book. I skimmed it: It was one of those quickie cut-and-paste jobs thrown together in a weekend by a ghost writer. There was nothing new in the book itself, but the ‘about the author’ bit said he was now living in Rapid City, South Dakota.” He paused and narrowed his eyes, and Banner could tell he was running this new variable through the system, looking at what new scenarios it threw up. He looked back at her and said, “Good job, Banner. You’ve given us the one personal target Wardell could hit in this search radius.”

To Banner’s irritation, she felt herself begin to flush at Blake’s approval. She suppressed the smile and looked skeptical. “It’s just a possibility. We can’t be sure he knows about Hatcher, or that he’d consider him a target. Like you said, if he hits a random victim, we’re back to square one.”

“But we can’t do anything about that,” Castle said. “No more than we’re already doing, anyway. This gives us somewhere to focus. Doesn’t mean we have to bet everything on it.”

Banner turned to Blake, but his head was down again, staring at the map as though he could trace Wardell’s exact path on it. “It feels right,” he said softly, as though speaking to himself.

“You don’t think it’ll be too obvious a target for him?” Banner said. “Assuming he even knows about Hatcher, he’ll know that we know too.”

Blake paused for a beat, considered this. “I think that’s why it feels right, Banner.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I think I do,” Castle said. “He wants to prove he’s the best. That’s been his mission statement since day one. How better to prove it than to take out the very target we’re expecting him to?”

At that moment, Banner’s phone issued a brief fanfare, signaling a received text message. She took it out and read the message, which was from Kelly Paxon. Although she’d eschewed text speak, it was concise and to the point:
Missouri gun not a match. Will call soon
.

“What is it?” Castle said, noticing Banner’s look of surprise.

“That wasn’t Wardell’s rifle in the van down in Missouri.”

“You don’t say,” Castle said sharply, then murmured a brief apology to Banner. “So we’re not talking some half-­assed hoax. Heckler & Koch sniper rifles don’t grow on trees.”

Blake glanced at the map again. “So unless Wardell borrowed a helicopter, there’s no way he could have dumped that van as a decoy. Which means . . .”

“Somebody’s helping him,” Banner finished. “But who?
Why?
” The question was met with silence. It seemed even Blake didn’t have an answer for everything. “I’ll be back,” she said after a minute. “I’m going outside to call Paxon.”

“I’ll get things rolling on Hatcher,” Castle said.

Banner’s conversation with Agent Kelly Paxon lasted five or six minutes, but at the end of it she didn’t have any more information than she’d gleaned from the text message. After terminating the call, she sat down on the porch of the cabin neighboring Nolan’s and watched the red sun sink over the western ridge, pausing for a breath as the fevered activity of local cops and task force personnel continued to swirl around her.

The forensics team down in Missouri had found no trace of Wardell in the burnt-out van. No trace of anybody, in fact. The few parts of the cabin that had escaped the flames had been wiped down to erase any prints. The rifle was a Heckler and Koch
PSG
1, all right, but not the one that had killed Terry Daniels or Father Leary. And now Eddie Nolan.

It was an expertly executed diversion, falling apart only at the point of matching the rifle, but by then it had done its work. If the red van lead hadn’t been so convincing, the task force might well have followed Blake’s lead and Wardell might not have made it past this quiet little hunting town.

Somebody’s helping him
. Her own words echoed in her head. A careful, professional somebody. But that made no sense—Wardell hadn’t had a partner before. He’d gone out of his way to avoid human contact, in fact. No, Banner couldn’t see him accepting help, even if it was offered.

Turn it around then: Who would benefit from helping Wardell? Money was a dead end; Wardell had none. There had to be another reason.

One of the other agents, standing apart from the rest of the activity, caught her eye. She realized she didn’t recognize the man, was only assuming he was
FBI
because of the way he was dressed. He was tall and thin, wore a dark suit, a dark overcoat, and rounded glasses. He wasn’t a local cop or one of the forensics, so by a process of elimination, he had to be
FBI
. How else could he access the crime scene?

Banner thought about approaching him, then decided she was just being paranoid. She looked away again, turning her mind back to things of greater importance.

37

10:08 p.m
.

Mike Whitford leaned back in his leather swivel chair and yawned, looking out at the cold Chicago night through scrunched-up eyes. Getting on for another eighteen-hour day, the third in a row, and his whole being was starting to feel like an old pair of socks that had been worn for a week. It was worth it, though. For the first time in twenty years, he was looking forward to coming into work every day. He was back, and he still had it. He was feeling so good, in fact, that today he’d forgone most of his usual trips to the bathroom with the hip flask. Hell, maybe once this story had run its course, he would kick the booze entirely. Of course, there was no need to rush into anything. The important thing was he knew he could do it now, because he was back.

You didn’t have to take Whitford’s word for it, either. You could see it in people’s eyes. Mandy on reception. That acne-ridden, college-fresh prick on the sports desk. Even Urich. The grizzled old bastard had fixed Whitford with a stare after reading his latest copy and said, “Good job.” Eye contact and a couple of words of affirmation. It didn’t sound like much, not unless you knew Urich.

There was a predictable undercurrent of jealousy from some of Whitford’s rivals, of course. People who would previously have considered him not a rival, but an inferior. He was big enough to forgive that jealousy, because even he had to admit that an element of luck had been involved in his renaissance. After all, almost anyone could have picked up that ringing phone two days before. He’d hesitated a beat—he’d been on his way to the bathroom—but then he’d gone ahead and picked up the handset on the hotdesk. The calls bounced through to that one when the lines at reception were all busy. And, boy, was he glad they’d been busy. That two-minute phone call had turned his career around, put him right in the middle of a national story. Caleb Wardell, escaped from death row and killing already. Even better: a government-level attempt to cover the situation up. It was manna from heaven.

He’d been skeptical at first, his coworkers even more so. But when they’d investigated a few of the details the caller had provided, everything had checked out perfectly. The clincher was a phone call to the destination Wardell had never reached: the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute. They had quickly issued a terse “no comment,” but not quite quickly enough. There had been a stunned pause of no more than a half second, but that had been confirmation enough.

From there on, the cover-up unraveled like a hastily constructed cat’s cradle. The
FBI
had come for him within an hour of the story hitting the networks, but he’d cooperated fully. There was no reason not to. Every detail they needed to know about that two-minute conversation with Wardell was already plastered over every major news website. The agents had made it very clear that they were unhappy with Whitford and his employer, but for the moment, that seemed to be the extent of the situation’s downside. He wasn’t naive: First Amendment or not, he was sure there’d be blowback later. But later was later.

The telephone rang. His own telephone. It had been doing that a lot these past three days. He gave it two full rings, caught it on the third. He said his name with the confidence of twenty years ago.

The voice was quiet, as though it was coming from a long
way off, or the speaker did not want to be overheard. It said, “Am I speaking to Mike Whitford?”

Whitford grunted in the affirmative. “Make it quick. I’m busy.”

There was a low chuckle. “I can imagine. But don’t worry. I won’t keep you long, partner. I’m also a busy man.”