The Killing Season

by Mason Cross

  The media attention brought with it a host of disadvantages, but also a select few advantages. Like, for example, the blanket helicopter surveillance of the city. She hoped that would plug the gaps in their own coverage. Perhaps it would even make up for the flood of crank and dead-end calls they would now have to wade through.

  Assuming Wardell was here—and not in Iowa—she had a sinking feeling in her gut that they weren’t going to stop him this early. For all that everyone was talking about nabbing him as soon as he showed his face, deep down everyone knew this operation was more about being ready to go after him when he did strike. If they got him before he killed, it would be great. If not, the idea was they’d be ready to bring him down as soon after the next kill as possible.

  And so everyone was holding their breath, waiting for the next one. For the first time this morning, Banner allowed her gaze to linger on the wall clock. It wouldn’t be long now.

  She had a photograph on her desk in a plain wooden frame. It showed her daughter in a pink coat and matching hat and gloves, building a snowman in the backyard of their old place. It was a couple of years out of date and Annie was still five years old in the picture, but Banner preferred not to update it. It reminded her of happier times. She put her hand on her cell phone to call her sister to check in. Maybe she’d suggest that she bring Annie out of school by the back door today. Keep calm; keep vigilant; go about your usual day; don’t panic.

  The phone started to ring as she touched it. Although she hadn’t saved the number yet, she recognized the last three digits of the cell number Blake had given her. She hit the button to pick up.

  “Where are you?”

  There was a pause. When Blake spoke, the sound of his voice told her everything she needed to know in two brief words. “Fort Dodge.”

  She closed her eyes. She could hear sirens over street noise in the background. “What happened?”

  “I just got to the scene. Looks like one fatality, passersby are saying it was a priest.” There was a pause and Banner got the sense that something had caught Blake’s attention.

  “So you were right,” she said, wondering if he’d take the opportunity to say “I told you so.”

  “Not right enough,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

  The line went dead. And then a dozen more came to life. Desk phones chirruped, cells joined them in a discordant symphony of ringtones and snippets of pop songs.

  Banner picked up her own phone, trying to ignore the feeling of illicit relief that today Annie would be able to leave school by the front entrance after all.

  22

  9:07 a.m.

  I hung up on Banner, not waiting for an acknowledgment, and watched as the thin man I’d briefly locked eye contact with turned and melted into the crowd on the opposite side of the street.

  The man was around six feet, about a hundred and sixty pounds. Widow’s peak, rounded glasses. He’d been dressed for the office: dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie, dark overcoat. Because it was rush hour, there were half a dozen men dressed just like him within spitting distance. But this one looked out of place.

  I checked my watch again: 9:07. Twelve minutes since I’d heard the first police siren, so probably thirteen or fourteen minutes since the shooting itself. There were a lot of cops here already, more than you’d think they’d even have on the payroll in a town this size. They hadn’t yet had sufficient time to set up a fixed perimeter. Some were crowded around the priest’s body, shielding it from rubberneckers; the rest were trying to move the crowds back. When I had arrived, people were still trying to distance themselves from the scene, get away from danger. It hadn’t taken long for that impulse to wear off.

  The faces in the crowd were pretty uniform in their degrees of animation, if nothing else: shock, fear, bewilderment, curiosity, excitement. That was why the thin man had stood out. Among a sea of emotion, his was literally the only impassive face on the street. That and the very specific way in which he had surveyed the kill scene. It was hard to describe, but he had seemed to be watching with a professional eye. He looked unsurprised, or at least entirely unrattled. Maybe it was noticeable to me because I was doing the same thing. In fact, going by the thin man’s demeanor and clothing, I might have made him for a federal agent. But if that was the case, why had he avoided my eyes, then furtively disappeared into the crowd?

  If I had wanted to follow the thin man, I wouldn’t have been able to. The police presence in the middle of the street that separated us was as good as a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence. Instead, I took a step back, turned my attention away from the killing zone. A quarter of an hour since the shooting, and Wardell would most likely be out of town already.

  I surveyed the area again. The buildings were the same, the climate was the same, but it seemed an entirely different place to the one I had passed through less than half an hour before. It was almost like some dark magic trick, the way one madman and one half-ounce piece of copper-jacketed lead could utterly transform a place so quickly and so profoundly. I’d seen it before, seen terror used as a weapon, the ripple effect often more damaging than the original incident.

  My eyes scanned the rooftops and high windows again, looking for . . . what? A trace, I supposed. Evidence of the magician’s passing. I found what I was looking for on the roof of the county courthouse. Or rather, I found an absence of something: birds. When I’d passed through earlier, the parapet had been lined with pigeons. Perhaps that had made me subconsciously discount the spot, but that had been stupid.

  There were still birds on the other buildings, but none on the parapet of the county courthouse roof. None at all.

  I jogged down the street, keeping my eyes peeled for Wardell, though I knew he’d be long gone. I took the courthouse steps at a run. The foyer was a big, wide space with a marble floor. There was an older woman at the reception desk. I spoke before she could greet me: “You see anybody come by here in the last twenty minutes? Around my height, maybe carrying a long bag or a package?”

  The receptionist opened her mouth as if to challenge me, thought again and then shook her head. “Nobody’s come by here. What’s going on out there?”

  I ignored the question. “Have you got a back exit?”

  The woman pointed to one of the corridors leading off the foyer. The corridor led back through the big old building, through a series of doors to a black metal fire door with a push bar. I ignored the sign warning of an alarm and pushed the door outward. No alarm sounded. The door opened on a slender alley. I glanced side to side, saw no one and no traces of anyone. I stepped back and examined the doorframe. A cable ran from one of the hinges to a box on the wall. Midway, the cable had been severed. There was a flight of stairs opposite the fire door. I closed the door and climbed the stairs. Thirty seconds later, they brought me out on the roof of the courthouse.

  A confusion of pigeons scattered as I paced across the flat roof to the parapet, which gave me an eagle’s-eye view of Central Avenue. In the dead center of my field of vision was the spot where the police had set up shop around the body. Something glittered in the cold sunlight, twenty feet to my right. I walked to where the flat roof met the brick of the parapet on the other side of the building and went down on one knee. A spent .762 cartridge. Only one this time.

  “Police! Get down on the fucking ground now.”

  I winced at the sudden bark from behind me. I stayed down and put my hands around the back of my head. Slowly.

  23

  10:49 a.m.

  I sat back in the chair and drummed my hands on the tops of my thighs, staring up at the ceiling tiles again. There were fifty-eight of them. Three of those looked like they’d been replaced fairly recently; they were the same make as the rest, but not as yellowed by age and cigarette smoke. There was a clock on the wall, imprisoned behind a square wire cage. The little hand was approaching the eleven. I sighed in frustration and
summoned up a mental map. Two hours. Depending on his mode of transport, Wardell might already be in Nebraska. Might be getting ready to take his father out already.

  The door opened and Smith entered, the older of the two detectives who’d questioned me. He wore the resigned expression of one who’d just had confirmation that an unlikely long shot was not going to pan out.

  “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you,” he said, holding up the key to my cuffs between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Don’t you mean I’m lucky you didn’t shoot me, past tense?” That thought had crossed my mind on the rooftop. I’d been grateful the officers had followed correct procedure and waited to ascertain that I wasn’t a threat.

  Smith ignored my correction, just roughly unlocked the cuffs when I presented my hands across the table.

  “I take it you got ahold of Agent Banner,” I said.

  Smith nodded grudgingly. “And instead of keeping the only suspect in custody, we’re to let him go and extend him all cooperation. God bless the FBI.”

  “Come on, Detective. You know who did this. I was never a viable suspect.”

  “Maybe not, but you sure as hell were a complication we didn’t need.”

  I pushed my chair back, got up, and perched on the desk. I saw Smith bristle at this and pretended I hadn’t noticed. I glanced up at the clock. “So now that we’re on the same team, how about an update on the investigation?”

  Smith opened his mouth and, although I couldn’t quite predict what he was about to say, I knew it would be likely to contain, as Paul Simon once said, words I never heard in the Bible. But then he reconsidered.

  “Victim’s name was Father David Leary. Killed instantly by a single through-and-through gunshot wound to the throat. No autopsy or ballistics results yet, of course, but the damage is consistent with a 7.62 NATO round.” He spoke quickly and in a flat monotone, as if reciting an over-familiar recipe. Exactly as though he were briefing a disliked journalist. “They pulled a good thumbprint off of the cartridge you were kind enough to locate for us on the roof of the courthouse, and it’s a match for Caleb Wardell. Amazing how quickly you can get a print back, depending on who’s waiting on the results.”

  “So they’re here already.”

  “The feds?” He said it like it was a different four-letter word. “All over it. Might have been handy if we’d had them this morning, instead of now.”

  “It looked like he was headed for Chicago.”

  “So why were you here?”

  “I had a hunch; the man in charge disagreed. Any witnesses? Anyone see the shooter?”

  Smith turned his back, walked four paces, and opened the reinforced door of the interview room, holding it wide. “We’re done, Mr. Blake.”

  “We’re working the same case, Detective Smith.”

  That did it. Smith’s face creased and turned the color of a raspberry. “You listen to me, asshole. We aren’t working the same case. Because, as of twenty minutes ago, I’m not working the case. All I know is you and your FBI buddies let a killer run free in my town, and now we have to clean up your mess. Everything’s ‘You don’t need to know.’ Now, if you knew there was a threat, then why in the hell didn’t you contact the department?”

  “Would you have listened to me? Would you have known where to look?”

  That stopped Smith in his tracks. He changed tack: “We ran your prints too. Know what we came up with?”

  As a matter of fact, I did know. That’s why I’d been relaxed about providing them. I said nothing.

  “A big capital-letter fuck-you from Homeland Security, that’s what. Just who in the hell are you, Blake?”

  24

  11:13 a.m.

  “‘You don’t need to know,’” Banner repeated, unable to keep the grin out of her voice. “You actually said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  “He managed to restrain himself.”

  “Impressive.”

  “So how come you’re not down here already?” Blake said.

  “I’m not coming. The field team’s taking care of the investigation of this shooting, but . . .”

  “But that’s just confirming what you already know.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “This is not a routine manhunt. We’re not trying to identify a suspect, just catch up with him. We’re focusing on his next move now. By sunup tomorrow, we need to be where he’s going, not where he’s been.”

  “He’s probably in Nebraska already,” Blake said.

  There was a pause. “I think that’s a possibility,” Banner said, a little bit of emphasis on the “I.”

  “Castle’s still not going for it?”

  “It’s not that. We got a lead on Wardell’s mode of transport: Somebody called in to report a man Wardell’s height leave the courthouse by the front entrance just after the shooting. He was carrying a long bag. We got a separate call from a news vendor who spotted him five minutes later, a few blocks away. Same description, same bag—he got into a red van parked on Fifth Avenue South and took off east.”

  “East?”

  “I know. It doesn’t fit,” she said. “That street turns into Route 20 farther along. We found a security camera in a gas station on the edge of town that covers a little of the road—a red Ford E-Series van passed by about four minutes after the second witness would have seen him. And before you ask, it was a cheap camera, so we didn’t get a sniff of the license plate.” She paused and gave him a moment to let it sink in. “That’s what doesn’t fit. If he was headed for Nebraska, he’d have been going south and west.”

  Blake was silent for a moment as he absorbed the information. The front entrance: That didn’t chime with what he knew. Could the receptionist at the courthouse have missed him?

  “Maybe he knew he was being observed,” he said. “He’s trying a misdirect again, like with the green T-shirt. You get names on those eyewitnesses?”

  “Our people out there just got done questioning the news vendor. He couldn’t give us much more than what I told you, but he was consistent on the details. The first caller didn’t leave a name, used a pay phone.”

  “So that could have been anybody, even Wardell himself.”

  “Possible. But the details were consistent with the news vendor, and the timings match up perfectly with the first sighting and the security video too.”

  “Did you bring Wardell’s father in?”

  Banner put her hand on the APB in front of her. It displayed a two-year-old color photograph of Wardell’s father. Inside the investigation, they’d been referring to him as Wardell Senior, but that wasn’t really his name. Wardell was the mother’s name; this guy answered to Edward Allen Nolan, Eddie to anyone acquainted with him. It was the most recent image they could get ahold of—the man didn’t appear to have any family or close friends—and was culled from one of the last interviews he had given before the residual interest in the Chicago Sniper case dropped to a background hum.

  The photograph showed a man who looked almost nothing like his son. He was overweight, unshaven, and unkempt. But the scruffy hair was the same dirty blond, the eyes the same cruel shade of blue. The picture showed a porch in the sun, a neglected front yard in the background. Nolan was sitting in a lawn chair on the porch, a hunting rifle across his lap. Banner wondered briefly if that had been the photo­grapher’s idea or Nolan’s. Either way, it showed some nerve.

  “We can’t find him,” Banner said in answer to Blake’s question. “Nobody can. Lincoln PD visited his apartment last night, no answer. Two of our guys went out there today; the super let them in. The place is cleared out—his rent is up to date, but it looks like he hasn’t been there in at least two weeks.”

  “Two weeks,” Blake repeated. “Before any of this happened.”

  “Do you think . . . ?”

  “Th
at there’s a connection?” Blake finished. “No. I doubt it. But we need to find him.”

  “We’re working on it,” Banner said.

  “I’m going to head out there now.”

  “What about the red van?” Banner asked, feeling like she was saying it only to play devil’s advocate.

  “He’s going after Eddie Nolan,” Blake said. “Either I’ll find him, or Wardell will. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  Banner replaced the handset on the cradle and looked at the Nolan APB again. She drummed her fingertips on the sheet of paper, then slammed her hand down as she made her mind up. She got up from her desk, exited her open office door, and walked the twelve paces across the open plan to Castle’s office. It was a glass-walled cubicle, like Banner’s office but a little bigger.

  The blinds were shut tight. She knocked on the door sharply and entered, not waiting to be asked. Castle was on the phone, his chair facing away from his desk at the window. His head jerked around as he heard Banner’s ­entrance. Banner found that a literal open-door policy worked well for her: It relaxed people and encouraged a free flow of information. Castle, by contrast, was the kind of guy who expected you to knock and wait; so Banner was mildly surprised that he didn’t look irritated when she walked in. Instead, he looked preoccupied. He swiveled back to face the desk, nodded at Banner, and held up a finger: Just a minute.

  “Yes, sir,” Castle said once, then again after a pause. His mouth stayed half open each time, as though he was trying to get a word in edgeways. Donaldson, Banner surmised. It had to be, because Banner couldn’t think of anyone else in the world Castle wouldn’t talk over to get his point across.

  “Sir, with respect—” he began, and was cut off. His mouth closed as he realized he wasn’t going to get to say his piece. “Understood.” Castle hung up and raised his eyebrows at Banner. “The SAC,” he said unnecessarily.