The Killing Season

by Mason Cross

  “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 SEALs—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 igno
red 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.

  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, swe
pt 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.