The Killing Season (5 page)

He looked into his own eyes again, fascinated with the reflection. Had incarceration made him vain, or would the novelty wear off soon?

The face had to change, along with the clothes. That death row mug shot would be everywhere once the story broke—and it would, sooner rather than later. But equally, he couldn’t simply trim his hair and go clean-shaven either, because they’d also run his service photo—twenty-two-year-old Caleb Wardell in his
BDU
s, seated demurely in front of the Stars and Stripes. They’d be looking for him both ways: bearded serial killer, or clean-shaven, buzz-cut Captain America. A happy medium was required. He lifted the nail scissors he’d bought in the store and began hacking away at the beard, laying the groundwork for the shave.

Ten minutes later, he’d been transformed. He hadn’t cut the hair, but had instead pulled it back tightly from his forehead, tying it in a short ponytail using an elastic band he’d found in the Ford’s glove box. The straggly beard had vanished, trimmed down to a neat goatee with razor edges. He looked a little pale, a little gaunt, a little older than he remembered, but otherwise pretty good. The hair and the goatee was an entirely new look for him, and he thought it made him look a little like an indie movie actor, or perhaps a beat poet. The important thing was that he looked nothing like a convict or a soldier.

So what’s the next step, soldier?

He knew what the next steps were: target practice and scores settled. He had a list now, having had time to think about it. It was a list he could keep in his head—there were only four names on it so far. But that was okay; there was plenty of room for more.

He put the sunglasses back on and went back outside. There was a pay phone on the wall. It was the kind with rudimentary Internet access, which gave him an idea. He inserted some quarters and set up a basic webmail account with an anonymous name. Then he put in some more change and made a five-minute call to a number he’d memorized.

When he was done, he looked around, surveying his pos­ition. The restrooms were out of the line of sight from the gas station, so the clerk wouldn’t be able to see his new look, but he kept his head down and walked away quickly anyway. He crossed the parking lot in the direction of the blue Ford. He opened the rear door and reached inside to grip the handles of the black duffel. He’d found it in the trunk earlier, and it was surprisingly roomy. After some thought, he’d left the original contents—a towel and athletic clothes—inside, to add bulk and to prevent the bag settling around the rifle. He hauled the bag out and closed the door. There was no need to lock it this time. He walked away from the Ford and climbed the steep grassy slope to the tree line, emerging on the side of the highway. He squinted east into the sun and saw the glass and aluminum of the small provincial bus station glint in the light two miles distant.

Time to get moving.

8

12:05 p.m.

I had never known the soldier’s name, and so the name Caleb Wardell had meant nothing to me when it was splashed across all those front pages all those years before.

Although I’d probably seen the mug shot a couple of dozen times in the media, I’d never taken a closer look. Not just because of the beard and the prison coveralls. But because, from a cursory glance, it looked like all the photographs of that type do: It looked like a man who was crazy and dangerous and pleased with himself. The killer’s name and the picture that went with it were unwanted background noise—like a summer pop song, or a ubiquitous commercial. They didn’t belong to the world in which I lived and worked, and so I’d never had a reason to take a closer look, to scratch below the surface, to see the familiarity.

But the old photograph in the file left no doubt. There was no mistaking the smiling young Marine in front of the flag that stared out at me. No mistaking those eyes.

Mosul. 2008. It was 112 degrees in the shade. Too many foreigners there for too many different reasons. By then, it had been a long time since Saddam had fallen, and whatever goodwill that had generated among the locals had long since evaporated like piss on hot sand. They didn’t want us there. They sure as hell didn’t want the insurgents there—particularly those who’d taken it on themselves to come on vacation from Pakistan to wage their holy war in somebody else’s backyard.

The resentment wasn’t just projected across races or nationalities; it was internecine too. The military didn’t want the
CIA
there, sneaking around, probably starting shit that would make life harder for the grunts. And neither of them wanted the mercenaries there: those Blackwater assholes making big trouble and small fortunes in equal measure.

And as for us? Nobody wanted us there either. As usual, nobody knew exactly who we were or why we were there. They didn’t need to know in order to form an opinion about us. I guess most people figured we were with one of the other groups. Some of the
CIA
guys had an inkling, had heard one or two whispered code names for something that had no name. They knew enough to know how much was being kept from them. And that was why they
really
hated us.

Mosul. Summer of 2008. Muhammad Rassam. A routine assignment, the best-laid plans royally fucked up by one rogue element with two cold blue eyes.

I’d looked into them and realized the owner didn’t give a shit whether I pulled the trigger or not. Those eyes conveyed no fear, no emotion, only the cold single-mindedness of a great white shark.

A dozen dead civilians. One dead million-dollar asset. All because of this cold killer. But I’d followed my orders, and now . . .

“We’re here.”

I looked up to see Agent Banner staring across the narrow aisle of the Learjet at me. “You ready for this? You don’t look too . . . alert.” She was looking at me in the manner of a big sister forced to take her kid brother along to a party.

“Just thinking. Let’s go.”

She held my gaze a minute longer, skeptical. Then she shot a wary glance at Castle, who was already heading for the open door of the jet. She looked back at me. “You mind if I drive?”

I shook my head and looked back down at the file in my hand.

Caleb Wardell. I knew his name now. And twenty dead civilians and counting said I should have put him down when I had the chance.

9

12:22 p.m.

Banner kept her eyes on the road for the most part, occasion­ally flicking them to the right to see what Blake was doing. He was still reading the Wardell file, seemingly deep in concentration. He hadn’t spoken since the plane, hadn’t even glanced out of the window as far as she’d noticed. If not for the whisper of paper as he turned a sheet every few seconds, she could almost forget he was there at all. In the silence, her thoughts shifted to her daughter. Helen—her sister—would be picking Annie up from school as usual, but it was looking likely that she’d have to call and ask her to keep her overnight. Again.

She shelved the familiar concerns for the moment to focus her attention on overtaking a giant semi. The midmorning traffic was moderate. Although they’d yet to hit rain, they seemed to be chasing it, since the road ahead was perpetually glistening.

This had been Castle’s idea, her driving from the airport to the crime scene with Blake. He’d taken her aside as they exited the conference room. Personal animosity had tem­porarily disappeared from his voice—from his point of view, she was on his side for the moment. As he watched the other three men, he kept his voice low. “Keep an eye on him,” he’d said. “See if you can work him out.”

Work him out
. She’d agreed readily enough back in the corridor, but thinking about it now, that vague instruction seemed to Banner to carry a lot of demands: Can he help us? Is he going to get in the way, or worse? And can we trust him?

Who is he?

So far, Banner had carried out only the first part of Castle’s request: keeping an eye on Blake. Not exactly an achievement, given the fact they were side by side in a gray Bureau
SUV
doing eighty on the highway. As for the second part, she was no wiser about Blake than she had been when they left the building.

Initially, her strategy had been to give him the cold shoulder. Perhaps that would encourage him to open up. Blake would probably want to get Banner to warm to him, if only to make her easier to work with. Her strategy had failed miser­ably. Either he was playing the same game—and doing it a good deal more effectively—or he really was as engrossed in that file as he seemed. Reluctantly, she decided to attempt conversation. It felt like a small defeat, like she was blinking first in a staring contest. “Doing your homework?” she asked, making sure to keep her tone cool.

Blake raised his head from the file. He looked slightly disoriented for a second, as though he had just awakened from a trance, and she knew then that his silence had not been part of a strategy. “Sorry.” He smiled. “I get tunnel vision sometimes.”

Something in his smile managed to pierce her guard a little, and Banner realized that she had been wrong before: He didn’t look nondescript at all. Sure, the impression his appearance left you with was “everyman,” but now that she’d spent a little more time with him, she couldn’t help notice the determined line of his jaw, the striking green eyes that seemed to gaze through to your innermost thoughts. She turned her own eyes back to the road quickly. “I don’t care if you don’t say anything at all.”

If Blake noticed the slight, he didn’t let on. “Just getting caught up on Wardell. Some piece of work, huh?”

His accent was another thing about him that was difficult to place. Not that it seemed out of place, exactly—more that it was difficult to pin down to any
one
place. Blake’s voice usually had a generic East-Coast cadence, but occasionally it sounded as though it hailed from farther afield, with an almost British feel. It was the voice of someone who had not grown up in a single, settled community.

Banner nodded curtly at Blake’s assertion. She hadn’t worked the original Wardell case; it had been a long, ­stiflingly hot summer that year, and she had been working bank robbery. But of course she’d followed the killings with the morbid fascination that everyone else in the Bureau had. Everyone else in the country, for that matter.

“I thought you jacked in the death penalty in Illinois,” Blake said after a minute.

“We did,” she answered. “The state did, I mean. But one of the charges Wardell was convicted on was kidnapping. That allowed the DA to bundle everything in as a federal case, which meant he was eligible for death.”

“Eligible for death,” Blake repeated thoughtfully. Then he shrugged and looked back down at the file. Banner kept looking at the road. The sun found a gap in the clouds and flashed dazzle off the wet road. Banner reached over and located a pair of sunglasses in the glove box. Blake turned more pages; the odometer notched up another three miles before she gave in again and looked at him.

“You’re familiar with the original case?”

“Just what was in the papers,” he said. He didn’t look up from the file, but she could see the edge of a small smile that told her he knew how much that counted for. “I was out of the country at the time.”

Out of the country doing what?
was the question that occurred. Instead, she asked: “So what do you think now? Could you have caught him any faster?”

Blake looked up. Banner looked back at the road. He waited ten seconds before replying, and she realized it was a technique. He was letting the animosity drain out of the question before answering it at face value.

“I’d have done some things differently,” he said. “But I think you would have, too.”

“Would I?”

“It was a multijurisdictional mess. Throw in media hysteria and some lucky breaks for the killer, and you people were up against a practically impossible task.”

Annoyingly, his assessment was correct, fair-minded even. The hunt for the man the papers had inevitably dubbed the Chicago Sniper had been characterized by interdepartmental wrangling, political interference, and screwups at both bureaucratic and operational levels. The media, initially supportive, had grown impatient as the bodies piled up. When Wardell was finally run down, they had turned nasty, especially once it emerged he was the ex-boyfriend of the first victim. He was also a disgruntled ex-Marine, to whom the psych profile of the killer fit like a wet suit. Just to ice the cake, the son of a bitch had actually been
interviewed
live on
CNN
as a horrified witness in the aftermath of the tenth and eleventh shootings.

When you added those facts to the public infighting and some well-publicized slipups, the consensus opinion of the national media and a few million armchair sleuths was that a ten-year-old child could have put a stop to the killings as soon as they’d begun.

Never mind that the family of the ex-girlfriend—Mia Jennings—had never met Wardell and didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. Never mind that his home town was Birmingham, Alabama, and that there was nothing on record to place him in Chicago. Never mind, either, that he was a professional killer doing what he was trained to do, with the deck stacked squarely in his favor. None of that mattered, because it complicated the narrative the media had decided on—that the cops and the feds and the governor had screwed up, and nineteen people had lost their lives because of it.

In the end, it had been a veteran city detective who had made the breakthrough, tying Wardell to the killings and enabling the task force to make the arrest. They hadn’t expected to take him alive, so it had been a surprise when Wardell had held up his hands and gone quietly. Thinking about it, it was Banner’s opinion that his surrender had been part of the problem. If he’d fought back, gone down in a hail of bullets the way everyone had expected, it would have been a more satisfying resolution for many. Some of the shortcomings of the investigation might have been forgiven in return for a dramatic conclusion. But the bastard had just put up his hands and turned himself in, like it was all a game. Which only reinforced the belief among the media that the authorities had screwed up, rather than that Wardell had carried out his campaign so effectively. The unspoken question in the news reports and on the talk show monologues was
How hard can it have been?