The Killing Season

by Mason Cross

  I made a circuit of the park, looking for potential positions that Wardell might have chosen—street level as well as above. It was a good site, but no better than Central Avenue had been.

  A green sedan pulled out of one of the parking bays at the side of the road ahead of me, and I steered the Cadillac into the gap. I got out and made a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, surveying the park without any of the obstructions you get inside a vehicle.

  Damn it.

  I needed more time. And, unusually, I needed more people. More often than not, in my experience, other people get in the way. But in this situation, more people could be useful; they could be in multiple places. I spent a second wondering if I should have tried harder to persuade Banner to join me. She’d seemed a little more receptive to my methods than her colleagues. Then I dismissed the idea. She’d never have gone for it. Not yet, not while I was an untested resource. If she was going to trust me, I’d have to be right about this.

  I scanned the line of rooftops again. It was possible that Wardell might use a position nearer to the ground, but I was betting on a rooftop or a high window. The statistics were on the side of this probability: Thirteen of Wardell’s nineteen kills the first time around had been from an elevated position.

  I glanced at my watch: 8:55. Wardell was going to strike soon, within the next hour for sure, and probably sooner rather than later. It was going to be soon, and it was going to be from an elevated position, and it was going to be here, in this town, in one of two locations. But which one?

  The squeal of tires and the sound of a powerful engine accelerating told me I’d picked wrong even before I heard the siren scream to life. Five seconds later, the police cruiser streamed past on the opposite side of the park, not having to slow much to negotiate the traffic. It kept going, headed east. Headed in the direction of Central Avenue.

  Damn it.

  20

  8:50 a.m.

  Wardell took a deep breath of the chill morning air, feeling it invigorate him. He held it, then breathed it out through his nostrils, making a miniature cloud that rose heavenward. Then he turned his eyes down to watch the commuters below him on Central Avenue, scurrying like ants to their meaningless destinations.

  In the early days of his first killing spree, the reporters had clambered over one another to be the first to come up with the nickname that stuck. “Sudden Death,” “One Shot,” “The OSOK Killer”—for “one shot, one kill.” Wardell hadn’t paid undue attention to the media coverage, but when they settled on the boringly prosaic “The Chicago Sniper,” he couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Accurate, yes. But not exactly up there with the Night Stalker or Jack the Ripper.

  His personal favorite from those early candidates had been “The Rush Hour Killer.” He’d always liked that one. It wasn’t strictly accurate, but close enough—since the majority of his kills were carried out between seven and nine a.m., and so it followed that many of his victims were commuters. To start with, that hadn’t been a conscious choice. He’d always been an early riser; one of the philosophies impressed upon him by his mother was that if there was a job to be done, it was best to get it done first thing.

  As the kills mounted up, however, Wardell decided that rush hour was actually the best time of day to strike for maximum effect. After all, what was more routine, more predictable in your average dead-eyed citizen’s life than the daily commute, the morning rat race? Wardell’s morning kills smashed that soulless routine like an express train hitting a stray animal. He closed his eyes and replayed some of his favorites in his head: the legal secretary he’d picked off through the window of the seven forty out of LaSalle Street Station, the cyclist cut down in front of Madison Plaza, the articulated truck driver he’d blown away on the 290. They’d all been on their way somewhere, all taken it entirely for granted that they’d get there. And Wardell, like a wrathful god, had punished them for their complacency, rerouted them to the afterlife with the squeeze of a trigger. A couple of weeks in, nobody took the morning commute for granted.

  By the time his body count reached double figures, Wardell had begun to realize that he relished the effect his work had on the populace at large as much as, perhaps even more than, he did the shootings themselves. The fear, the hysteria, the mass panic . . . knowing that it was all down to him had an effect that was better than the most potent drug ever concocted.

  But Wardell had been wary of becoming complacent and hidebound by routine himself, so he had mixed things up with targets selected at other times of day: the executive sitting by the picture window in Paperino’s halfway through a business lunch, the teenage girl working the night shift at the McDonald’s drive-through window, the two evening joggers in McKinley Park. He didn’t want people to think they were safe merely because they’d managed to make it to the office, or because morning rush hour had come and gone.

  But still, he liked to kill in the morning best of all.

  And this was an important morning for him. He wanted to get on the road as quickly as possible, but first he had yesterday’s mistake to atone for. A session of target practice before he moved on to greater things. He’d been building up to something special before; if he could surmount the next hurdle, he could do it again. To require more than one shot this time, or—he barely dared consider this—to actually miss, would be shameful. In that event, he questioned whether he’d be able to carry on at all. Better to quit than to limp along like an athlete past his prime, a shadow of his former self. Wardell took pride in his work. He could never understand why pride was one of the cardinal sins, but then there were many things about mainstream morality that he didn’t understand, or care to try.

  Make or break time, then. One shot, one kill.

  The town in which he found himself this morning had a motto that seemed appropriate. He’d seen it emblazoned in a font imitating handwriting on the sign at the city limits: Fort Dodge, Frontier of the Future.

  He was crouched on the roof of the county courthouse, the H&K PSG1 at his side, leaning against the parapet. He breathed another cloud out and looked down at the busy little worker ants, wondering which one to choose.

  There was no point in making things easy on himself, so he’d deliberately picked a challenging setup. The rooftop was fifty feet up and overlooked the town’s main thoroughfare. The wind was kicking up, which would take adjustment, and the temperature was hovering around freezing, meaning thermals were unpredictable. He could make the task easier or tougher by choosing between a stationary or moving target.

  In purely practical terms, a backup man would have been an asset in this situation. It was one of the reasons modern snipers always worked in pairs: one to relay reconnaissance, one to pull the trigger. The shot itself was a task that required perfect concentration, and that meant it was vital to have somebody watching your back.

  There was another reason, however, but not one they’d necessarily admit to in the Marine Corps Sniper School. A sniper’s work, put objectively, was murder. A two-man team divided that psychological burden. Needless to say, this was not something for which Wardell felt a particular need. Working alone was one of the best things about going into the murder business for himself.

  Time to decide. During his reflection, Wardell had been observing a number of potential targets. There was the cop directing the traffic at an intersection where the lights were out. That would send a message all right.

  Or there was the group of three smokers taking an early break outside of a funeral home—he wondered if that was too obvious. Too laden with irony, perhaps? Wardell swept the telescopic sight slowly up Central Avenue. Nobody else jumped out, just hundreds of indistinguishable insects scuttling along, oblivious to his gaze. Perhaps it was time to play one of his little games of chance, like picking the first person he saw wearing pink. Or the first person holding a cell phone in his left hand.

  But wait—there he was, h
is target. Too good to pass up. The man in question had just passed through the intersection with the broken light, traveling on a motor scooter. A moving target, sufficiently difficult to prove his mettle. But what made this moving target perfect was the clerical collar visible below the strap of his helmet. A priest. That would have more of an impact even than shooting the cop; it would demonstrate that he wasn’t fucking around.

  Wardell got comfortable, rested the rifle on the parapet. His movements were so smooth and natural that the pigeons didn’t scatter, just shuffled along for him. He ranged the man of God, leading the target a little to allow for the forward direction of travel. He was moving down the street at a cautious twenty miles an hour, slowed by the other traffic. Wardell placed the illuminated reticle of the telescopic sight in the triangle of opportunity: the zone defined by the pros­pective victim’s head and shoulders.

  He had the visor of the priest’s helmet locked dead center, his left arm letting the barrel of the rifle come down incrementally to track the forward movement. He breathed in. Let all conscious thought drift away and pressed hold, pressed hold.

  His subconscious was working overtime, which perhaps explained why he adjusted his aim down a fraction just before he squeezed the trigger through the final degree of travel.

  Six hundred yards away, the 7.62 NATO round found the inch-wide white square on the priest’s dog collar, passing through it and entering his throat at the Adam’s apple before exiting at the other side, taking a portion of spine and most of the back of the priest’s neck with it.

  The pigeons took flight, startled by the shot. Wardell closed his eyes and let the breath out. Another perfect wisp of cloud, a kindred echo of the gun smoke. Off to his right, he heard the spent cartridge clink across the rooftop, a good twenty feet away. A military-spec weapon wouldn’t have done that—too difficult to sanitize the position. Even though he no longer had to worry about forensics or fingerprints, this irritated him. It was . . . untidy.

  He took his eye from the telescopic sight and watched as the moped carried on for three or four car lengths before the priest’s body realized it was dead and shifted, tipping the scooter sideways between traffic lanes.

  Wardell kept watching, hoping that the priest wouldn’t be run over—that would muddy the issue.

  He was in luck. A taxicab squealed to a halt three feet from crushing the priest’s head like a melon. Bystanders rushed to help. Wardell’s mouth creased into an anticipatory grin. Here it came.

  He was too far away to make out the exact words contained in the shouts and screams, but he knew the gist: It was evident in the way the Good Samaritans scattered, the way their heads snapped around, looking for danger. He watched the ripple of terror move from the epicenter, the pedestrians reacting, disbelieving, then pushing for the imagined shelter of the storefronts and awnings. He always allowed himself this when there was an audience. No more than fifteen or twenty seconds, that was enough. Any more time spent savoring the scene would be an unacceptable risk. He would have to get moving, clear the kill zone before the authorities could muster a response.

  An urge was building, one he had to fight to repress. He wanted more. He wanted to take out some of those screaming witnesses as they fled—three, four, five, a dozen. Ride the wave of panic like a surfer on a bloody tide.

  That would come, but not yet. First things first. He allowed himself a moment longer to savor the scent of fear like the bouquet of a fine wine, then turned and moved quickly toward the door to the stairwell without a backward glance.

  21

  9:01 a.m.

  “Trust me, Agent Banner. We’ve got this covered.” Banner removed the phone from the crook of her neck, getting ready to hang up. She rolled her eyes at the cockiness dripping from every syllable uttered by the junior agent on the other end of the phone. Jesus, he sounded about fourteen. More and more of them seemed like kids these days. Banner herself was only in her midthirties, but if there had been a transition period from green rookie to seasoned veteran, she’d been too busy to notice it happening.

  “I’ll quote you on that, okay, Wyacek?”

  “Quote me on it? You can take it to the bank.”

  Banner terminated the call without further comment and let her gaze drift back up to the map of the greater metropolitan area, mentally circling the three additional potential strike zones Wyacek had just informed her were under surveillance. Which was not, as she well knew, the same thing as “covered.”

  She was starting to get the feeling she was on the wrong team.

  Castle had seniority, so focusing on Chicago was his call. Would she have made the same decision in his position? Difficult to say. If Wardell was caged early enough, she might get to find out, because she’d be in with a shot of primary on the next high-profile manhunt. Then she’d be the one walking that tightrope: trying to reconcile an open mind and a flexible approach with the hard political necessity of running things by the book.

  Certainly, she understood Castle’s reasoning. Right now the trail pointed here, to Chicago. And the BS guys at Quantico agreed it was the most likely destination for Wardell. He’d want to return to the old hunting ground, revisit the scene of past glories. They loved those two phrases, kept using them.

  In all, the task force had two dozen priority strike zones under tight surveillance. Parks were closed. Schools were operating under code blue conditions, which meant no outside activities. High-sided vehicles had been commandeered to shield citizens filling up at gas stations.

  Chicago was the top priority, but not the only one. Police departments were on alert in the major population clusters in Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, and Indiana—every state border­ing Illinois. All bases covered, with the most resources ­focused on the most likely scenario. The way it should be.

  So why did she feel like she was in the wrong place?

  Blake’s theory was plausible enough, but hardly a dead certainty. Somehow he’d come to the conclusion that Wardell would go after his father, who was based in Lincoln, Nebraska, the last anybody heard. The FBI’s own profilers had considered this too, of course. Family members were generally the first group you looked at when tracking a fugitive—either as potential collaborators or potential victims—but the boys and girls at Quantico had concluded that in this particular instance, it was a low-priority lead.

  Calling Wardell’s father “family” was stretching the point, in any case. He’d had no contact with his son for the entirety of his life, showing an interest only when Caleb became a celebrity killer. Wardell himself had disavowed the idea that he had a father in the psych transcript Blake had mentioned.

  Blake seemed to think that the outburst made the father the priority target. The shrinks disagreed, as did Castle. They thought Wardell would most likely stick to random targets. After all, there was no compelling reason for him to get personal all of a sudden. In fact, the concern was that he’d get less discriminating, go for a greater number and frequency of kills now he had literally nothing to lose.

  Intellectually, Banner found herself agreeing with their assessment. Wardell’s father was a possibility, but not a probability. Not with the facts they were working with. But, because it wasn’t an avenue that could be dismissed out of hand, the local police had been asked to put the father in protective custody, and two agents—Gorman and Anderson—had been dispatched to Lincoln.

  Blake was probably wrong about the father. And even if he was right, she was at a loss to explain his conviction that Wardell’s next kill would be in Fort Dodge—one specific speck on the map in a potential search radius that had reached five hundred thousand square miles and was growing exponentially by the hour. How in the hell could he possibly be so sure?

  Sure. That was the word for it, she realized. Banner thought back to the telephone conversation minutes before, to Wyacek’s misplaced, exuberant cockiness, and realized that this was the difference. When Blake sp
oke, he hadn’t betrayed one iota of doubt, but he hadn’t sounded cocky either. That was it: The man just sounded so damn sure of himself that he’d convinced her, against her better instincts. Convinced her that where she really ought to be was in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The middle of nowhere, instead of the apparent middle of the action. Goddamn Blake and his certainty.

  The FBI was the world’s largest, best-resourced law-­enforcement agency. But even so, it had its limits. Too many limits, according to vocal members of the old guard like Dave Edwards, who remembered fondly the days before counterterrorism concerns had eaten into their budget.

  With a search radius that big, and with a clearly defined high-danger area, they simply couldn’t spare the bodies to cover Fort Dodge as well. So Blake would have to cover it on his own.

  Enough. She had a job to do. She mentally ranked the top slots on her current list of responsibilities. Besides the fixed surveillance locations, they had rapid-response teams dotted throughout the city, all reporting to her. She was also in touch with the people pounding the sidewalks in the warehouse district, where Wardell had made his hideout the first time around.

  Thankfully, one problem she didn’t have to deal with was reporters. Castle had been quick to learn the lessons of the botched media blackout. He was currently delivering a briefing in the press room on the third floor, along with the mayor and the police commissioner. The new policy was a complete one eighty: to be as open and up-front as was feas­ible. That meant they were admitting that the focus of the manhunt was on Chicago and advising caution to all citizens. The usual advice: Keep calm; keep vigilant; go about your usual day; don’t panic.

  Who knew? People might actually listen for a change. It wasn’t like they could hide the focus of their attentions, in any case. Banner hadn’t seen this many cops on the street since the Bulls’ last NBA championship party in ninety-eight.