The Killing Season (20 page)

He pushed the glass door outward and stepped out into the street. He knew Suzie would already be on her way to the phone to call the cops, but it didn’t matter. They’d be too late. His newest car was parked around the corner, and the guns were in the trunk. If he concentrated, he could hear them singing to him.

41

12:16 p.m.

“It’s past noon,” Banner said, consulting the time display on her phone. She had gone with a different look today: Her hair was down, and she was looking better than anyone had a right to in a dark blue pantsuit.

“It’s nothing to get our hopes up about,” I said.

“I know,” she agreed. “You think he’s actually going for Hatcher, or is it just another misdirect?”

I thought about it. “It’s interesting that we came up with the target before he called it in. Part of me thinks that makes it more likely.”

“And the other part?”

I shrugged. “Still thinking.”

“If he isn’t gunning for Hatcher, then who? He’s not going to take a day off, is he?”

I shook my head. No rest for the wicked.

We’d stopped off in Rapid City on the way out to John Hatcher’s place. Castle was leading the advance guard, and there didn’t seem to be much else we could do in the meantime with no other leads, so we’d decided to stop on the way to catch a break and something to eat. And to talk about the coming night, of course. We were sitting in Banner’s car, parked on Main Street. Groups of people passed us in both directions, a few carrying groceries, most just looking for somewhere to have a quiet Sunday lunch.

We were both thinking about the same thing: Wardell’s telephone call to the reporter. Earlier on, Castle had e-mailed Banner the sound clip, and we’d listened to it as I drove. It had been him, all right, and once again he’d backed up his credentials with inside knowledge of the most recent killing. But something about the call niggled at me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was as though something was missing. Or maybe the something missing was the lack of a recording of the earlier call to match it against.

Banner had spoken to the agent who’d interviewed Whitford—the reporter—directly afterward, and apparently Whitford had been unsure himself at first. The voice had sounded a little different from the first time around, and he’d assumed it was a crank. “But then,” Whitford had said, “he knew all the details. Just like before. So I guess it was him, all right.”

The most up-to-date voice-recognition software and my own instincts had backed that conclusion to the hilt. It was Wardell, all right. But it didn’t necessarily follow that it had been Wardell the first time around. That time Whitford had blindly answered an anonymous incoming call and had no cause to record it.

But if the first call hadn’t been Wardell, how did he know so much about the case? The way I saw it, there could be only two explanations. The first was that someone was working alongside Wardell. Someone who wasn’t yet on our radar, for whatever reason. The second explanation was less palatable: The call had come from someone who was working alongside us, either in the Bureau or the police. But why? The questions went in circles, like the current flowing around an incomplete circuit. I just needed one last connection to turn the lights on.

“The favorite color thing,” Banner said. “What was that about? Some kind of coded message?”

“Could be. Or maybe he’s just trying to confuse us. He knows we’ll pore over everything he says for hidden meaning.”

“Castle said that.” She nodded. “Wardell knows we’re waiting for him this time. He needs us to be distracted.”

At the mention of his name, I thought about how Castle’s attitude to me had softened a little after the Nolan killing. He’d adjusted to Wardell’s new MO—that of targeted as well as random killings—faster than I would have expected. I still detected a suppressed resentment in his interactions with Banner, though. Which was why I hadn’t been surprised when she suggested I tag along with her for the trip to Rapid.

“He seems threatened,” I said.

“By Wardell?”

“By you.”

She grimaced, aiming for a puzzled look, but I could tell she knew what I was getting at.

“You’re what,” I said, “fifteen years younger than him? One rung below him on the ladder. You’ll have his job pretty soon.”

She sighed and shook her head.

“I’m wrong?”

She gazed through the windshield at the groups of pedes­tri­ans and the light traffic on Main Street for a minute; then she turned back to face me. “Blake, do you know the name of the first female director of the
FBI
?”

I thought about it for a second. “I don’t believe there’s been one.”

She nodded. “Do you know the name of the first female assistant director?”

“Has there been one?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said after a second. “You’re not going to be satisfied with Castle’s job.”

She smiled. “I have a plan, Blake. Nailing Wardell will put me ahead of that plan by five years. And from what I’ve seen so far, sticking close to you is the best way to get close to Wardell.”

“So it’s not just my looks and personality, then?”

Banner batted her eyelids exaggeratedly and pouted. “Sorry, Blake. I’m only interested in you for your mind.”

“Well, my mind does better on a full stomach,” I said, opening the car door. “Where do you want to eat?”

“Anyplace,” she said, glancing up at the black clouds rolling in from the west. “As long as it’s inside.”

We got out of the car and walked east along Main Street. We passed a diner that was empty apart from one old guy by the window. There was a sign in the door advertising a Halloween special: pumpkin pie, naturally. I liked the look of the place. Call me antisocial, but I tend to gravitate toward quieter places: quicker service, less background chatter, space to think. It’s also a lot easier to keep an eye on the other clientele. I waved a hand at the door. “How about here?”

Banner said, “Actually, I feel more like Italian. What about there?” She pointed at a pizzeria across the main street. “We can split a large Quattro Stagioni.” Her pronunciation was flawless, and I wondered if she had Italian heritage—it would certainly fit with her dark, almost black hair and slightly olive skin tone. Maybe I’d ask her over lunch. We headed for the crosswalk. The street was busy with shoppers and fellow lunchers. People cast nervous glances at the darkening sky and hurried to their destinations.

As we crossed the street, the smell from the pizzeria wafted out to meet us, mingling appetizingly with the ozone smell of the coming storm, and I realized I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since a sandwich the previous night.

“Maybe I’ll have a large to myself,” I said.

Banner turned her head, smiling. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her features blanked as she flinched at the crack of the first shot.

42

12:27 p.m.

When I replayed those first couple of seconds in my head later, I realized that the first two victims were already dead before we even knew what was happening. Whether it was tiredness or hunger or the smile of an attractive woman, there was no excuse—my head was out of the game. For all my healthy skepticism, for all my warnings to others that we shouldn’t take anything for granted, I’d let my attention slip, and I was no more prepared than any of the victims on that cold November noon.

My eyes flashed across the scene, taking in images that seemed somehow tinted and unreal, as though from a dream or a memory. A woman in a leather jacket and a navy blue T-shirt lay sprawled halfway across the middle of the road, blood pulsing and pumping from a hole in her skull like water from a burst pipe. Fifty yards up the street, a man in a jean jacket clutched at a ragged wound in his chest and toppled forward, cracking his face on the sidewalk. The flesh-muffled sound of his nose audibly shattering broke the spell.

Our shared moment of paralysis finally over, Banner and I reacted more or less simultaneously—me with actions, her with words. As she yelled, “Gun! Everybody get down!” I flattened my hand against her back and pushed her down behind the wheel well of a Chevy Suburban that was parked curbside.

I scanned the rooftops, tried to pick out ledges and fire ­escapes and open windows and other likely offensive ­positions. Off to our right, a blonde woman in a sky-blue coat who’d been screaming and running suddenly stopped doing either and plunged to the ground, the back of her head missing. Banner had her gun out, but she was holding it aimlessly, her mouth half open as she watched the horror unfold. I tried to focus on the rooftops again. It was no goddamn good. The bastard was taking out a fresh victim every couple of seconds, and even if I could make his position, it would do about as much good as air con in hell.

“Shit,” Banner hissed through clenched teeth, her face a mirror of the frustration and powerlessness I felt. Ten feet from where we crouched, an old man wearing tan slacks and a blue checkered shirt stepped out of the doorway of the pizzeria, his mouth open as if he was about to start asking somebody what the commotion was about.

I yelled, “Get d—” But that was as far as I got before a deep red rose blossomed in the center of the old man’s chest. He staggered a couple of steps toward us and fell, twisting and landing on his back, halfway across the sidewalk. Without thinking, I ran toward him, crouching. From somewhere far off, I heard Banner yelling something at me. I heard tires squeal and horns blare. I heard another crack as someone else’s life ended with no explanation. Some part of my brain wondered if I’d hear the shot when it was my turn.

The old man was holding his chest, blood spraying from between his fingers. He was making wheezing noises. Blood spatter blew from his lips. I went into autopilot. Battlefield medicine, it hadn’t been so long.

One of the crowd stampeding by knocked over a trash can, spewing detritus over me and the old man. I saw the discarded plastic bag from a Subway sandwich. I ripped it down the middle, rolled the old man onto his side and forced his hands from his chest wound. I spread the plastic over the hole in his chest. If the round had gone through a lung, it would stop air being sucked into the wound and hastening the development of the injury. When my right hand found the exit hole in his back, I realized I was utterly wasting my time.

“You’re going to be okay,” I yelled into the old man’s ear, trying to make up with volume what I lacked in conviction. The old guy had a fist-sized hole punched through him; no way in hell he was going to make it. He coughed a couple more times, and his brown eyes searched the sky, alighted briefly on my face, and then focused on something both closer and an eternity away.

I let his body slip from my bloody hands and scrabbled back to the cover of the Suburban. Banner was pointing up at the roof of a brown brick building four blocks away. “There,” she said, almost quietly.

It was too far to make out a distinct figure, but I saw the muzzle flash, heard the crack a second later. A girl of no more than thirteen, wearing a translucent blue raincoat, lay on her back across the street from us, dead in the imagined shelter of a shoe-store awning.

Banner took aim at the spot where we’d seen the muzzle flash and fired evenly spaced shots from her Glock until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. It was no frenzied volley: Her composure was perfect, her two-handed grip textbook. It didn’t matter. From this range, she might as well have been trying to take him out with negative thoughts.

She dropped down and reached to her belt for another clip. But she didn’t get up to fire again. We just waited there, behind the Suburban, counting heartbeats. When it felt like a couple of eternities had passed since the last shot, I turned my head to her and opened my mouth to say something, I don’t know what. Banner was looking across the street at the girl in the blue raincoat. A single tear ran down the plane of her cheek and disappeared under her jawbone.

I reached for her shoulder, and a teardrop hit the back of my hand. And then another and another. They pattered off the awning above us and rattled on the metal of car roofs and soaked my hair and began to stream from gutters, and at some point I realized the tears were not tears at all, but raindrops.

43

11:37 p.m.

“Do you have a message for the killer, Agent Castle?”

Castle’s eyes narrowed as he looked back at the reporter. He seemed unsure of how to respond. As though the question were intended to catch him out, somehow. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Governor Randall leaned over the microphone. Randall had lost some weight since his television appearances during the first Wardell case. He’d stopped dyeing his hair too. But he was still an imposing presence—a six-foot-four African-American with a deep, commanding voice.

“I have a message for him,” Randall said, fixing the camera with a resolute stare as though speaking directly to his subject. “We’re going to catch you soon, Mr. Wardell. You’re not safe anywhere.”

“Governor—”A voice rang out from the assembled crowd, but Randall waved it off.

“That’s all for just now,” he said, turning away.

Castle nodded. “You heard the man. We’ll keep you posted.”

The screen cut back to the studio pundits, and I reached for the remote and killed it. The press camp had been set up in a big marquee about half a mile from Hatcher’s house. Castle would be heading out to the car that was waiting to bring him back out to us even now. Randall would be headed in the other direction—back to his home state following an unscheduled, but politically valuable, detour in his campaign schedule. I wondered how it would play to the voters back in Chicago. Banner was shaking her head, a wry smile on her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Governor,” she said, her brown eyes lingering on the darkened screen. She looked up at me. “What do you think, Blake?”

We were in Hatcher’s study. I recognized it from the author photo on the back of his book. The walls were lined with books that looked as though they had been chosen for the color of their spines. I looked back at Banner, then beyond her and through the window at the lake. The light from the helicopter searchlights made it sparkle in the dark with the tiny impacts of a million raindrops. The storm had been building in intensity throughout the day and into the evening and showed no signs of abating. The weather made our job tougher, but if we were lucky, it might cause a few problems for Wardell, too.