The Killing Season (8 page)

It was a conversion that must have been done twenty or thirty years before, and on a tight budget. The farmhouse itself was ramshackle, with a roof that buckled in places. White paint peeled from every wall. There was an extension on the south end that wasn’t in much better shape: a one-story timber structure that tapered off to a covered deck area. The dog was tied by a length of chain to one of the posts supporting the roof over the deck.

It was a big German shepherd, virtually wolflike in proportions. It had been pacing from side to side, but angled itself toward the interlopers as they opened the car doors. The barking increased in intensity, and the chain stretched tight as the animal strained to get at them.

“He’s starving,” Paxon said, a lilt of sympathy in her voice.

Banner was focused on the spot where the chain had rubbed against the wooden post, noticing that it had worn down an inch deep or more. “Why do I get the feeling he’s visualizing a couple of roast chickens in office wear?” She was glad she had the Glock in her hand. “Come on.”

They headed for the front door, giving the dog a wide berth. Banner kept a wary eye on it as Paxon rapped on the door. She wasn’t a dog person at the best of times—her ­parents had told her that, when she was a toddler, some ­idiot’s rottweiler had gotten off the leash in the middle of the street and had tried to get to her in her stroller. Thankfully, her father had beaten the dog off before it could savage her, receiving a couple of nasty bites for his trouble. Banner had no memory of the incident, but she didn’t doubt it was the reason behind her aversion to canines.

Paxon knocked again, harder. They waited another thirty seconds. Banner shrugged and reached for the handle. It twisted down and the door swung open.

“Unlocked,” Paxon said.

“No,” Banner said slowly. “It was ajar. Right?”

“Of course. My mistake.” Paxon drew her own gun, and they stepped through the doorway and into a hallway. It was warmer than outside, but not by much. There was a stillness, a silence that spoke of uninhabitation. The only sound was the muted barking from outside, which suddenly sounded much farther away than it was.

The hall was narrow, with two closed doors on the right-hand side, a steep flight of stairs to the left, and a glass-­paneled door at the far end that looked like it would lead to a kitchen. A light was burning in the room beyond, visible through the frosted pane.

“
FBI
agents,” Banner called out. “Be advised we are armed.”

There was no response. They advanced down the hall, and Banner noticed there was a slight incline, probably indicative of the house settling. A breeze from the top floor whispered past them, and Banner looked up the flight of stairs to where it ended in a half landing. She was considering ascending the stairs when they heard it.

It was a low, intermittent scratching sound. Quiet and tentative. It was coming from the kitchen.

“What the hell was that?” Paxon whispered.

Banner didn’t answer. She changed direction and moved to the far end of the hall. The carpet was so old and so cheap that she could feel the lines of the floorboards through the soles of her shoes. One of the boards creaked loudly as her hand touched the kitchen door handle, and the scratching stopped. They exchanged a glance, and Paxon raised her gun to cover the door.

Banner let out a tiny breath and pulled the handle.

A dark shape flashed out of the kitchen, glancing off Paxon’s calf. She let out a restrained yelp, and they both turned to see the German shepherd puppy as it scampered the length of the hall and out into the yard.

Paxon let out a nervous laugh and put her free hand over her heart. “Jesus.”

“Look,” Banner said, indicating Paxon’s leg. There was a smear of blood on her right thigh, just below the hem of her skirt.

Paxon looked down, confused. She touched a hand to the crimson stain and withdrew it as though she’d touched something hot. Something told Banner that it was the exact opposite of that. They exchanged another glance and both looked toward the open door to the kitchen.

A sweet, decaying stench emanated from within.

The kitchen was a square, low-ceilinged room. At the far end was a long rectangular window and a wooden back door. Grimy venetian blinds were drawn shut along the length of the window, but anemic gray daylight peeked through here and there where the slats had warped. There was a worktop along the entirety of one wall, from which a wooden service island jutted like a peninsula. There was blood spatter on the worktop, more of it on the cupboard doors above, dark and congealed. A shoeless foot protruded from the other side of the service island.

Banner stopped and let her eyes read the room, confirming there was no immediate danger, nothing important she could miss in her urge to find out who was attached to that foot. When she was satisfied, she approached the service island, gun level on the foot as her line of sight changed to reveal a leg and a body. When she saw the rest, she knew positive identification would be a job for the experts.

She turned at the sound of a stifled noise that was pitched midway between a gasp and a gag. Paxon’s free hand was tight over her mouth. “Jesus Christ,” she said. It came out muffled by her fingers.

“Messy,” Banner agreed, holstering her weapon. “At least we know why the puppy wasn’t hungry.”

She turned back to the body, concentrating on what could be seen below the neckline. The body was that of a Caucasian male, probably of early middle age. He was dressed in plaid pajama pants, no shirt, an open blue terry-cloth robe exposing a pale, lightly haired chest and paunch. He was on his back. Presumably, the Colt .45 lying a foot from his right hand had fired the fatal shot. The postmortem injuries also spoke vividly for themselves.

“Summers?” Paxon asked after a few moments, reluctantly pulling her hand from her lips.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Banner said. “He’s the right age and build, and given that he’s in Summers’s house wearing his pajamas . . .”

“So where does that leave us?”

Banner reached for her phone and thumbed through the recent calls to dial Castle. “At a very definite dead end, I’m afraid.”

15

10:00 p.m.

It didn’t take long to work out why the
FBI
file I’d been given that morning had seemed so condensed. If Donaldson’s file on Wardell had been the CliffsNotes, what Banner and her people had dug up for me was more like the Library of Congress. Thousands of pages of notes from the original sniper case, crime scene pics, interviews with hundreds of witnesses and suspects, police interviews with Wardell. Psych interviews with Wardell. Documents from the trial. Wardell’s Marine Corps record. Medical records. Dental ­records. Everything back to his high school reports.

I worked through the material quickly and methodically, pausing every twenty minutes or so only to glance at the muted television screen. No more killings so far, but that wasn’t unexpected. Wardell, for whatever reason, preferred to kill in the morning. There were deviations, but not many. Most of his kills had taken place before nine a.m.

Sometimes, the faces appearing on the screen would coincide with the people I was reading about in the files or the reports: people like Ed Randall, the governor then and now. John Hatcher, sheriff of Cook County, where Wardell had first struck. Hatcher was the man who’d taken the most credit for catching Wardell but whose actual contribution to closing the case was negligible, from what I’d been reading. Some old scores for Wardell to settle back in Chi-town.

With that in mind, my number-one pick for Wardell’s first specific target was a bust: Detective Adam Stewart, the man who’d broken the case, had succumbed to a heart attack two summers before and had gone to his grave leaving his wife the contribution from the Police Benevolent Association and not much else.

Revenge wasn’t the only factor that made me think Wardell would eventually head back to Chicago. His initial spree had been building in intensity before his capture. It was obvious he’d been working up to something big, even if he himself didn’t know what that something was. Unfinished business would bring him back to Chicago; the profilers were dead right about that. But where I parted company with Quantico was with the timing. I had a strong hunch that Wardell would avoid the Windy City to begin with, and not just because it was where he was expected.

At nine o’ clock in the evening, the news took its first extended break from Wardell coverage to focus on the final week of buildup to the midterm elections. It looked like another longstanding grudge match was approaching its conclusion in Chicago, with Governor Randall in an unexpectedly close race for the mansion. I wondered briefly if the political action might draw Wardell in before deciding it likely wouldn’t make a difference either way.

By ten o’clock in the evening, the desk, the bed, and every other flat square foot of the motel room was covered in paper: files, printouts, maps. I was unaccustomed to having such a wealth of material available, and the sheer volume was both an advantage and a drawback. The immersion of myself in a suspect’s life was a proven way of getting results. Somehow, by tracing a man’s movements, words, and actions, I could begin to get under his skin. Predict what he might do, where he might go.

This target, however, was proving elusive in more ways than one. The more I read about Wardell—be it first-, second-, or thirdhand—the more I felt the essence of the man shift, contort, slip from my grasp. The one constant was my memory of the look in his eyes back in Mosul, the absolute knowledge that he would not and could not stop once he got going.

Raised in suburban Alabama by a single mother, Wardell had been a bright but quiet child, with few friends. As a young man, he’d been a gifted student, outperforming his peers both on the football field and in the classroom. He’d won a scholarship to the University of Alabama at Birmingham but dropped out in his junior year. It wasn’t for lack of ability; his professors reported that he’d just gotten bored. He signed up for the United States Marine Corps in 2004 and volunteered for Force Recon. He excelled on the rifle range and snagged a place at Scout/Sniper School. He passed the Scout Sniper Basic Course with flying colors and quickly proved his mettle in combat operations in Iraq, with twenty confirmed kills. That total included an astonishing head-shot takedown of an
RPG
-armed insurgent at nine hundred yards.

His combat record was excellent—early on, he was touted for the
SEAL
s—but he didn’t socialize much with the other men. They found him distant, aloof. One quote put it more bluntly: “a creepy bastard.” Perhaps that explained why he’d stalled at lance corporal, when his work on the ground ought to have made him a sergeant, or a full corporal at the very least.

His third and final tour had brought him to the banks of the Tigris: to Mosul, the capital of the Nineveh Province of Northern Iraq. And that was where, for the briefest of moments, our paths had crossed.

16

10:12 p.m.

I was running an asset named Muhammad Rassam at the time. He was deep undercover in the insurgency and about to bring me within striking distance of one of the major local al Qaeda franchisees. I was thirty-six hours away from nailing my quarry, maybe less, when Wardell put a bullet in Rassam’s forehead.

We postmortemed the operation afterward and discovered that the catalyst was a pair of ambushes carried out in the space of a week on US patrols. A couple of well-liked men had been killed, and word had reached their unit that Rassam had been the prime mover on the ambushes. I was 90 percent sure Rassam wasn’t the guy. And even if he had been, too bad—he was too valuable to lose. Wardell’s CO had been instructed not to pursue the issue. Wardell had ignored the order and organized himself a little extracurricular hunting trip. We were tipped off, but too late. When I made the scene, Wardell had already executed Rassam and a couple of others from long range. Then he’d moved in and massacred eight members of Rassam’s family and four of his neighbors. I found him putting a bullet into the back of a woman’s head. When he saw me, he dropped his weapon, smiled, and raised his hands, almost mockingly.

I had been a quarter-inch pull away from ending his life right there. I’d like to be able to say it would have been for the dead civilians, but that was only part of it. The other part was the six months of my life Wardell had just wasted.

Cassidy had already been yelling in my ear for a few seconds before I even registered it. “Stand down, back the fuck off, and clear the scene. We do not want to have to explain your presence to JSOC, and we sure as goddamn
fuck
don’t want to have to explain a fucking premeditated blue-on-blue.”

I eased off the trigger as a Humvee pulled up and disgorged a crew of shell-shocked-looking Marines, including a sergeant I took to be Wardell’s CO. I didn’t stick around to answer questions.

And that was it, apart from the hard look that passed between the two of us as I cut my losses and left the Marines to clear up the mess their boy had made. Or so I’d thought.

17

10:22 p.m.

I picked up the rest of the thread from the postverdict Wardell biographies that had appeared in the national papers.

The massacre went down on the books as accidental. Wardell was quietly sent home and dishonorably discharged. The next anybody heard from him was when a
SWAT
team dragged him out of his warehouse hideout and he was revealed as the clinically accurate serial killer who’d been terrorizing Chicago over a four-week period.

Nothing seemed to shake Wardell out of his cool detachment: not trial on multiple counts of first-degree murder, not even the resulting death sentence. In all of the
TV
footage and news pictures, he wore that same knowing smirk, that same faraway look in his gray-blue eyes. He looked like he knew something you didn’t.

The defense team tried the obvious, of course, playing up the highlights of his military career and glossing over the dishonorable discharge. They tried painting him as a poor Southern hick who’d been scarred by his experiences in that hellish desert conflict and just didn’t know any better. Tried to convince everybody he was just another victim of
PTSD
who’d simply snapped one day.