The Killing Season Read online

  “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?

  “How about you?” Blake asked after a minute. “Were you involved?”

  Banner shook her head. “Agent Castle worked the case.”

  Blake looked away from her and watched the road. “He doesn’t seem to relish the thought of another go-round.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “You don’t like him.” An observation, not a question.

  “He’s an excellent agent,” she said, realizing immediately that by evading Blake’s point she’d merely confirmed it.

  More silence. Banner used it to think about why she didn’t like Castle, or more accurately, why he didn’t like her. It all went back to Markow, last year. What had happened there hadn’t been her fault; she was sure of it, but Castle disagreed. Another four miles passed. It was Blake who spoke first this time.

  “I don’t get how this happens.”

  Banner looked at him, waiting for him to continue.

  “How he escapes, I mean. Only two guards in the van, pretty minimal security, really.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” Banner agreed.

  “Which leaves only two options.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Somebody screwed up, or somebody was paid to screw up.”

  “Any bets?”

  Banner grimaced. The answer to the question was obvious, but she knew he was more interested in how candid she’d be than her opinion itself. “Those Russians knew exactly where to be.”

  “I agree. But knowing how it happened doesn’t exactly help us. Just like knowing where to be didn’t help the Russians in the end.”

  That made Banner consider an angle she’d overlooked. “What do you think their boss will do about this?”

  “Korakovski?” Blake shrugged. “I doubt it registers as more than an inconvenience. He wanted Mitchell dead; mission accomplished. Unlike the old-time Mafia, these guys are not noted for their sentimentality.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a respect thing, though? Wouldn’t he want some kind of payback for his men?”

  “Maybe if we were talking about a rival outfit, but we’re not. Wardell’s a force of nature they happened to run afoul of. An unforeseeable consequence. Like . . . bad weather. No insult taken.”

  “Bad weather,” she repeated, thinking that was exactly what was ahead of them, literally and figuratively.

  There was another lull in conversation. That’s what it was now, a conversation. Progress, but she still didn’t know anything new about Blake, other than that he’d spent time out of the country and seemed familiar with the group psychology of the Russian Mafia.

  “You ‘find people who don’t want to be found,’” she said, giving the quote a singsong inflection.

  “That’s what would be on the business cards. If I had any.”

  “Been doing it long?”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Have you always worked for yourself, or did you start out someplace else? The Agency, perhaps?” It was a shot in the dark, and she didn’t hold out much hope that it was on target. Banner had met and worked with a number of CIA operatives, and Blake didn’t fit the profile.

  Blake smiled and shook his head, as though brushing off an unintended slight. He took a pair of sunglasses from inside his coat and put them on. Banner wondered if his intention was to shut out the glare from the road, or something else.

  When he didn’t answer, she probed further. “Is the money good?”

  Blake took in a long breath through his nostrils, as though giving the question great thought. Finally he nodded. “Depend­ing on the client.”

  “And who are your clients?”

  “Anybody who wants somebody found.”

  She glanced away from the road to give him a sarcastic look.

  He tilted his head in mild apology. “Sometimes it’s police, or government. Sometimes big companies. Sometimes individual people.”

  “Individual rich people,” she corrected.

  “I do some pro bono. It’s not just about the money.”

  “Then what? The challenge?”

  “Yeah. Among other things.”

  The first roadblock came into view ahead of them, and as though choreographed, they finally hit the rain they’d been chasing. It was fairly light, but quickly misted the windshield. Time up. Banner was frustrated at her lack of progress: She still knew next to nothing about this guy. Least of all, whether she could trust him. She flicked the wipers onto intermittent and slowed as they approached the county police units blocking the road, reaching into her jacket for her identification.

  “In that case,” she said, nodding at the Wardell
file, “you’re going to enjoy yourself on this case.”

  10

  12:41 p.m.

  My first thought was that the kill scene was just about perfect for the purpose for which it had been selected.

  I surveyed the parking lot of the strip mall. It was square, surrounded by trees on two sides, the highway on the third side, the cluster of modestly proportioned stores lined up on the fourth. Although the lot was packed full of cars—every one of them now held temporarily hostage by the authorities—it was effectively a wide-open space. A person standing anywhere in the lot, even between two cars, would be completely exposed from the chest up. The orderly grid of parked vehicles dictated movement as well, made a ­pedestrian’s motion predictable by limiting it to the aisles and spaces in between. The trees provided excellent cover for a man patiently selecting and acquiring a target, as well as for his subsequent escape. They also acted as an effective windbreak, not that the wind would have posed a professional like Wardell any problem.

  Yes, it was a virtually perfect small-town killing ground, suggesting that this was a case of a random victim selected for his presence in a specific location, rather than a random location to kill a specific victim. In my mind, the information I’d absorbed from the file had already begun coalescing into the beginnings of a theory, a prediction of events to come. This development didn’t directly contradict that line of thought, but it didn’t exactly support it either. I reminded myself to concentrate on the present. The big picture would take care of itself in time.

  The entire parking lot was sealed off right up to the tree line and the road and up to the storefronts on the far side. Banner flashed her identification at a female cop manning the perimeter. The cop gave us a mildly resentful glare but stepped aside, and we ducked under the yellow tape. Clearly, the Bureau had already reassigned the locals to guard detail.

  “I didn’t even know we had a Cairo in Illinois,” she remarked, saying it like the Egyptian capital.

  “Care-oh,” I corrected. “This one’s pronounced differently.”

  “He’s right,” the female cop said, keeping her back to us.

  “How the hell did you know that?” Banner said.

  I shrugged. It was just one of those things I happened to know. I’d worked in the Egyptian Cairo a few years before, and I found it difficult to imagine two places more different.

  “Care-oh,” Banner repeated thoughtfully.

  We began crossing the lot, moving roughly diagonally in a staircase pattern dictated by the parked vehicles. Every bay was full, some cars had taken impromptu spaces on grass verges. The rain was so light that it was more like mist. I glanced side to side as we walked, taking in the scene.

  Police cars lined the highway bordering the lot. There was a large crowd gathered outside the row of stores, as close to the tape as they could get. It comprised about equal parts civilian gawkers and uniformed workers from the stores smoking cigarettes. I wondered if the stores had been evacuated, or if this level of excitement triggered a de facto town holiday. The audience was crowded behind a barrier at the small staff parking area, below a number of big red signs offer­ing grave warnings about unauthorized parking. A burly cop stood in the one vacant staff bay, keeping a close eye on the crowd, as though he expected them to surge forward at any moment.

  Within the taped-off area, the focus of activity seemed to be a spot near the entrance to a supermarket. Suits and uniforms were crowded around something on the ground. Close by, an enormous blue and gray FBI mobile command center truck was taking up the entire delivery bay. Banner was making a beeline for the area.

  She moved surely through the glass and aluminum maze, not once glancing behind to check whether I was following. One of the news helicopters hovering a couple hundred feet above adjusted its insectlike gaze to follow the two new ­figures advancing across the lot. I turned my face downward, away from the cameras, grimacing as the downdraft created its own windchill, unfettered by the trees.

  A dark-suited agent greeted us as we reached the crowd of cops and feds. He checked Banner’s ID again and eyed me suspiciously when she said, “He’s with me.” A gap in the outer ring of people opened up, and we stepped through it into the core crime scene. There was a smaller ring of people within. I saw Castle, another agent, and a couple of crime scene techs in blue jackets. They were grouped around the first victim. Grimly, I acknowledged to myself that this was exactly how I was thinking of this one: only the first.

  It was the corpse of a big man. He was wearing tight tan chinos, a brown shirt, and a baseball cap that had toppled off his head, either as he fell or on impact with the ground. He was lying faceup, eyes staring with disinterest at the overcast sky, two entrance wounds in his upper body. One of them, evidently the fatal one, had drilled dead center through the breast pocket on the left side of the shirt. Because of the way the man had fallen, the scene didn’t look too bloody. I knew that if the body was rolled over, a much bigger mess would be evident. Big, fist-sized exit wounds would be punched through the victim’s back.

  One of the crime scene guys noticed my stare, read my thoughts: “What you’d expect: high-velocity rifle round. Looks like a 7.62 NATO, or similar. Lot of damage. The first shot wasn’t immediately fatal, but it probably would have been in a couple of minutes.”

  “Because of the blood loss.”

  “That or hydrostatic shock,” he agreed. “You catch one of these suckers, you ain’t coming back.”

  Banner had gone straight to the body and crouched down beside it. She examined the wounds first, then the face, then did a quick survey of the body.

  “Have we ID’d him yet?” she asked nobody in particular.

  The agent standing beside Castle answered her. “Terry Daniels, forty-four years old, wife and four kids.”

  “Any doubt whatsoever this is our boy?”

  Castle shook his head in response to Banner’s question. “We’ve shut everything down within a thirty-mile radius. Local cops, county sheriff’s department, and our guys are all over the area.” He looked down at the body and shook his head again. “Of course, if he has a vehicle, all of that came about an hour too late. But if he’s on foot, he might still be inside the net.”

  I was busy examining the two gunshot wounds. If it was Wardell, this was a first. I gestured at the victim. “Two shots this time.”

  Castle shrugged. “Maybe he’s getting rusty.”

  “I knew there had to be some good news,” Banner said.

  I shook my head, thinking about the nineteen perfect kills the first time around. Nineteen shots, nineteen kills—an outstanding ratio, even for a Marine Corps sniper. I’d only scratched the surface of the psych profiling, but that statistic told me all I needed to know about Wardell’s likely reaction. “It’s not good news. Now he has something to prove.”

  “I’m so glad we invited you along,” Castle said dryly.

  I ignored him, my mind suddenly a few thousand miles and a few years away. Wardell being led away, throwing a look back in my direction, a look that said I’ll be seein’ you. A man who settled his scores.

  “This is a warm-up,” I said. “He’ll move on to specific hits soon. His enemies. People who he thinks have wronged him.”

  Banner was still crouched next to the body. Her eyes flicked up to me, and for the first time I heard irritation in her voice. “Were you paying attention to the file? That’s completely inconsistent with the established MO.”

  “It’s not inconsistent at all,” I said. “And the conditions on the ground have changed. He’s a soldier. Soldiers adapt.”

  “Wardell’s an indiscriminate killer,” Castle said. “We won’t catch him with who; we have to think about where. Maybe you need a little more time to catch up, Blake. I’m sure we can find you someplace quiet to study.”

  I glanced at the body again. “The last thing Wardell is,” I said, “is indis
criminate. You believe that, you’re making a big mistake.”

  Castle took a step forward. “Excuse me?”

  Banner sighed and stood up, smoothing the front of her skirt down and subtly moving between us. “So what do you think?” she asked me. “Is he still in the area?”

  I looked at the corpse again. It partially obscured the phrase no parking, painted on the ground in white foot-high letters. “I don’t know,” I said slowly, thinking. I knew I was missing something, something potentially important.

  Castle was looking at me with open contempt. “Wonderful.”

  “So for now,” Banner said, “we focus on the thirty-mile radius.”

  “All we can do,” Castle agreed. “We’re looking in every backseat and trunk of every vehicle leaving the area. No ­reports of any stolen cars anywhere in the vicinity this morning. We’ve got people making house-to-house inquiries, roadblocks, air support. In the meantime, if anyone has any idea how we get the media to not notice a fucking state-wide manhunt, I’m all ears.”

  That was when I realized what was wrong. It was right there in front of me, painted in white foot-high letters.

  “Has anybody talked to the stores?”

  “You mean for witnesses?” the young agent asked.

  I shook my head. “About their employees. Did anybody not show up for work today?”

  Castle was losing patience. “I think they might have a little more on their minds than one of the bag packers taking a personal day. Have you seen those people?” He waved a hand in the direction of the crowd. “It’s like the goddamn circus is in town.”

  “I’ve seen them,” I said. “And they’re standing over by the staff-only bays, right by what is literally the only empty space in this lot.”