The Killing Season (9 page)

Nobody bought it. Because Wardell was a little too clever for his own good. He liked to talk, to boast. And when you heard him talk, two things came across: He certainly wasn’t dumb, and maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t even crazy. Not that kind of crazy anyway. Reading the psych reports from the court case—prosecution mostly but even some from the defense—I got the sense that they were all dancing around one unscientific, unsubstantiated, but unavoidable conclusion: Caleb Wardell was just plain bad. He hadn’t been scarred by the war; he’d sought out the war because he wanted to kill people, and when his war was over, he’d brought it home, because he wanted to keep killing people.

In all of the interviews and court transcripts, I could find only one instance of Wardell losing his cool.

His father, who’d abandoned the family when Wardell was three months old, had crawled out from under whichever rock he’d been hiding when the story broke about his infamous son. Before, during, and after the trial, Wardell Senior busied himself giving out interviews to anybody with a checkbook. Literally never having known his child hadn’t seemed to prove a barrier, either to him or to the numerous news outlets that took him up on the offer. The funny thing? He seemed almost proud. Like his long-lost kid had won an Oscar, or a gold medal at the Olympics.

When one of the prison shrinks had broached the topic, asked him about his relationship with his father, Wardell had snapped for real. Maybe for the first time. He’d leapt over the table and attempted to throttle the shrink with the link chain on his cuffs. It took four guards to separate them, by which time the shrink was unconscious. The whole time, he kept repeating a five-word phrase. Not yelling or screaming, just in a conversational tone that jarred with his actions.

I don’t have a father.

Throughout the whole thing—the month-long reign of terror, the arrest, the trial, the conviction, the sentencing, it was the one time Wardell had acted in a way that could be termed as out of control.

I was thinking about that when my cell rang. The display screen told me the caller was Banner. The way her voice
sounded when she asked if it was me told me something was new.

“What is it?”

“We found Sandra Veldon.”

“Her body?”

“She’s alive.”

“Alive?”

“Yeah, but maybe only thanks to you. They found the Ford parked in a truck stop over the Kentucky state line. Veldon was in the trunk, bound, gagged, and terrified. It was Wardell, all right. She said he wanted her to pass on a message. I guess he was gambling we’d find her before she died of thirst or exposure.”

“A message?”

“He told her to tell everybody: ‘Killing season’s open.’”

I paused. “Shit.”

“I know,” Banner agreed. “The delivery guy definitely wasn’t a one-off.”

“Trail?”

There was a pause at the other end of the line, and I could tell she was thinking it over. “Actually yes, a surprisingly clear one. The convenience store at the truck stop has secur­ity video of him picking up a few supplies. Some food and drink and some clothes. Including—get this—a lime-green T-shirt. Forty-five minutes later, a Greyhound driver bound for Chicago remembers a guy in a lime-green shirt boarding his bus at the station a couple of miles down the road.”

I sighed. “Too obvious.”

“That’s what I thought,” Banner said. “It’s a bluff.”

“And what does Castle think?” I asked carefully.

She was equally careful in her reply. “Castle thinks it’s a good lead. He’s making sure we follow up on everything, so
we’re looking at the possibility that it was him. God knows we need to cross the T’s and dot the I’s on this one.”

“Media giving you a hard time already?” It was a rhetori­cal question, since I’d had the television on the whole time. You didn’t need sound to catch the outrage over the attempted news blackout.

Banner laughed dryly. “You’d think we’d shot that poor guy ourselves. Jesus. It was a stupid fucking move though. A case like this, we need to keep the press on our side.”

I didn’t say anything, quietly grateful that of all the difficulties I encounter in my line of work, having to give a damn what the public thinks isn’t one of them.

“You hear about Paul Summers?” Banner asked.

“I saw that. News is saying it’s a suspected suicide.”

“That’s the way it looked,” she said.

“Doesn’t mean anything. It’s not too difficult to make it look that way.”

Banner cleared her throat at that and started to say something, then changed her mind. “So what do you think about Chicago?” she said after a few seconds. Her voice sounded casual enough, but I could tell she was hoping for something. Maybe just that I was thinking along the same lines she was.

“I think that at this moment, he could be anywhere
but
headed to Chicago,” I said. “Assuming he did take a bus, what are the other options?”

There was a pause as she consulted something: a printout maybe. I pictured her holding the phone between her neck and shoulder.

“Lucky for us, it’s a quiet station. Just a rural feeder site. In the two hours after he was caught on tape, we’ve got a half-dozen buses departing. Three for Chicago, one for Kansas City, one for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and one for St. Louis.” She paused, waiting for a response. “You still there?”

I had crossed the room to the bed, swept a pile of papers onto the ground to clear space for one of the maps. “Yeah, just a second.”

I took the lid off a red Sharpie with my teeth and spat it on the floor, started drawing lines and dots on the map. I consulted my watch. “What time did the Cedar Rapids bus leave?”

A pause while she checked. “Eleven forty.”

I looked from the map to the screen of my laptop. “He’s in Iowa.”

“Cedar Rapids?”

“No. Not anymore. Say . . . Des Moines by now. No—someplace smaller, but nearby. Indianola, Fort Dodge maybe. He’ll stay there tonight, rest up, kill somebody in the morning before he moves on.”

Banner didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I wondered if she was deciding whether to be impressed or to hang up.

“Castle thinks it’s a double bluff. He thinks Wardell’s heading back to his old hunting ground,” she said.

“Castle’s looking in the wrong place.”

“The guys at Quantico agree with him. They say he’ll want to revisit the scene of past glories. They’re pretty sure about it.”

My eyes were drawn to my watch again. The second hand marched onward, implacable. A new day was coming, as surely and as inexorably as a 7.62
NATO
round.

“Maybe they’re right, but first he’s going to take care of some business, and Iowa’s on the way.”

“On the way to where?”

I drew another line right to left, across the Iowa state line. I circled the town of Lincoln. “Nebraska.”

Banner sounded unconvinced. “What kind of business?”

“Family business.”

18

10:33 p.m.

The father. He was going to kill his father first.

Wardell’s head start was twelve hours and growing. If I wanted to have a prayer of intercepting him in time, I’d have to drive through the night. I didn’t bother to clear up, just snapped my laptop closed and slid it into its leather case as I left the room. A minute and a half later, I was settling the bill with a bemused clerk at the front desk.

“Funny time to check out,” she commented. She took the cash and looked at the bills with open suspicion.

“Turns out I’m not tired.”

As I pushed the exit door open, the chill in the air caught me by surprise after a day confined in a slightly overheated hotel room. I breathed cold air in through my nostrils, letting it wake me up a little, bring me back to the present. I’d left the car back in Chicago, so the first order of business was to find a replacement.

Banner had listened. I gave her that. But in the end, I hadn’t been able to convince her. Her final words came back to me as I stepped out into the night:

I can’t just toss everything else out of the window to focus on a hunch.

But I can
, I’d said after a beat.
It’s what I’m here for.

The motel parking lot was an unevenly patched square of asphalt, about fifty yards on a side. It was half full, evidently oversized for the hotel’s occupancy, and lit by the yellow glare of sodium lights. I was halfway across before I noticed the guy in the black coat with the beanie hat shading his eyes.

He was at the far side of the lot, leaning against the short wall that marked the hotel’s property off from the highway, right beside the entrance.

A number of warning signs lit up for me: his demeanor, the attempt to hide his face, the fact I could see he was concealing something inside his jacket. But it was his position that really made me alert. Because, unless I wanted to turn around and walk back into the hotel, the only way I could leave this lot was to pass within a couple of feet of this guy. And before I got to him, I’d have to pass between two high-sided vehicles: a minivan and a chunky
SUV
.

The guy in the beanie stayed put as I paused midstride. He didn’t look up. I kept watching him—stared at him for twenty seconds. I caught the slightest hint of a head movement, as though he’d glanced to his left. That meant someone was behind the parked van. Possibly more than one someone.

I understood the scenario. It was something I ought to have expected: a sudden, violent event that had disturbed the small-town ennui and gotten everyone excited, quickening the pulses of the local tough guys. Put that together with an influx of journalists with expensive phones and iPads and minds on other things, and you have the perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure.

I considered my options. I knew one thing for sure: If I carried on between the two parked vehicles toward the exit, two, maybe three people would attempt to mug me. The smart thing to do would be to walk back inside the hotel and either find another way out or call the police.

I didn’t have time to do the smart thing.

I glanced around to check there was no one else lurking around, then started walking, quickening my pace and aiming directly for the guy in the beanie. He stiffened slightly but didn’t look up. I rolled my shoulders as I walked, limbering up. As I reached the spot between the minivan and the
SUV
, the guy finally looked up at me, jutting his chin in my direction defiantly.

“Give me the bag and your wallet.”

I didn’t break stride. I could feel the weight of the Beretta where it was strapped across my chest. I resisted the tempta­tion—I knew taking it out would mean having to use it. I tightened my grip on the handle of the leather laptop bag.

The guy blinked as I closed the gap between us, obviously unsure as to why I hadn’t stopped. “Give me the fucking bag,” he repeated, angry now. I kept coming and he opened his coat, pulling out a baseball bat. The minivan was parked six inches farther from the wall than the
SUV
, giving me a good idea of the direction from which the first attack would come. As I drew level with its rear fender, I brought the laptop case up to shield the right side of my head. Another bat swung from behind the van, slammed into the padded leather. The case stopped it easily; whoever it was hadn’t overcommitted to the swing. It didn’t help them. The point of impact allowed me to triangulate the position of the assailant, so that the sole of my right foot was planted square in his solar plexus before the bat had stopped moving on the deflection. The connection was solid. I felt the kick go deep into a fleshy midsection. I didn’t bother looking at the guy I’d just incapacitated. I was too busy with the next guy. Not the guy in the beanie, front-row-center, but the third guy, coming at me from left field.

This was a wiry younger man with a blond buzz cut. He was almost albino-blond, a blade in his left hand. That was annoying: I hate fighting southpaws. He looked a little surprised: The three of them had obviously worked out a game plan that was predicated on me being hit in the face by the bat first. I’d messed that up, and now I was going to take full advantage of the two seconds of confusion I’d caused.

I gripped the handle of the laptop bag with both hands and slammed it against the albino’s head so hard that the handle snapped and the zipper broke open. Albino lurched backward, stunned but not down. The padding on the case had worked against me this time, cushioning the blow.

Beanie was coming for me now, a little hesitantly after seeing what I’d just done to his buddies, but I gave him credit for trying anyway. I reached between the zippers, gripped the hard edge of the laptop itself, and let the busted case slide off it, like some rectangular reptile shedding its skin. I stole a glance at the first one I’d hit. He was a balding fat guy, on his knees, trying to force some air into ­oxygen-starved lungs, the bat by his side. Beanie tried a couple of jabs with his own bat, using it like a spear, trying to keep some distance. I dodged the jabs easily and got in closer. Too late, he swung at me one-handed. I leaned in to the swing, caught his forearm under my left arm, and jerked my whole body back. He let out a high-pitched scream as his radius and ulna snapped like firewood.

I knew I’d left the albino unattended for too long. I released the beanie guy and spun, holding the laptop up to cover my midsection. I was just in time: The point of his blade caught the laptop and scored a trench in the plastic casing, nearly amputating two of my fingers as it slid off the side.

I heard a scuff behind me as the beanie guy made a halfhearted follow-up. I turned my body sideways and kicked him hard in the groin. Not exactly subtle, but put together with the broken arm, it would be more than sufficient to discourage him from another try.

The albino was coming for me again, jabbing with the knife. He knew how to use it—wasn’t extending too far, using his right hand to feint effectively.

I stepped back from two fast swipes of the blade and used the laptop to block a quick stab. The point of the blade caught it straight-on this time and penetrated, the tip of the blade going through and coming out the other side. I wasted a moment being glad I always worked off a flash drive, then punched the albino hard in the face while he was still in range.