The Killing Season

by Mason Cross

  “Hey,” she said.

  Blake opened his mouth to say something, but was cut off by her cell phone ringing. Both of them cleared their throats and sat up straight. Banner got up and walked across to the table where she’d left the phone and checked the display. It was Donaldson, and she knew whatever it was, it wouldn’t be welcome news. She hit the button and said her name.

  “Banner, it’s Donaldson.” There was a pause. Something in his voice that she didn’t like. “I know Edwards has recom­mended you take a couple of days . . .”

  “What’s wrong? Is it Castle?”

  There was another pause that confirmed what she was about to hear.

  “Castle went into cardiac arrest forty minutes ago. He died on the table.”

  “God . . .”

  “Banner, this doesn’t change anything. I don’t want you—”

  She swallowed. “It’s okay. I won’t do anything stupid. Thanks for letting me know.”

  There was another pause, a different kind of pause, and she could tell he was weighing up whether to say more. Eventually he just said, “Bad situation, Banner. Take it easy and we’ll talk soon.”

  Banner hung up. Blake was staring at her.

  “I’m sorry. He was a good man.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, turned to look out the window at the lights of the city and the black void of Lake Michigan beyond. She said the name quietly, so quietly that Blake had to ask her to repeat it.

  “Eric Markow,” she said again. “You know who he is?”

  Blake thought about it for a second. “The guy who kidnapped Ashley Greenwood.”

  “The guy who murdered Ashley Greenwood,” she corrected.

  It had been the big news story of last year, the biggest to hit Chicago since Caleb Wardell, in fact. A photogenic millionaire heiress abducted and ransomed for two million dollars. The father paid up, but Greenwood wasn’t released. The FBI tracked them down, but Markow had already killed her, cutting her throat. He blew his brains out when he knew he was cornered.

  “You worked the case,” Blake said. “I remember Donaldson mentioning it in the briefing.”

  “You asked me why Castle doesn’t—didn’t—like me. Markow’s the reason.”

  Blake didn’t say anything, just let her talk. Banner’s throat dried up as she remembered that rain-soaked night. It was the first time she’d spoken about it out loud to anyone, other than in the dry, official context of a formal report.

  “He was running the task force on the kidnapping. Castle was, I mean. We supervised the drop of the ransom. Markow was pretty clever about it, very well organized. He led us a merry chase through the city. My job was to tail the father as he made the trade, but not to be seen.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Greenwood was eventually instructed to get on the last carriage of a train at the station on Ninety-Fifth Street, leave the bag, and step off right as the doors closed. He was supposed to get the location of his daughter after that—instead, nothing. Castle thinks Markow made me. He’d said no cops.”

  “What do you think?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t see me. The inquiry confirmed that later on, but it wasn’t good enough for Castle. Either Markow changed his mind and wanted more money, or something went wrong. We nailed him a couple of weeks later. I got a big promotion out of it. But of course we were too late for Ashley Greenwood.” She swallowed and blinked a tear out of her eye. “Too late,” she said again, thinking about the present now.

  “We’ll get him, Banner,” Blake said quietly.

  “You sound so sure.”

  “I am sure. We’ll do whatever it takes to run Wardell down.”

  “You mean you will. You’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “I will.”

  Banner tossed the phone on the coffee table and sat down on the couch, next to him. “Why are you still here? You’re not getting paid. You can just walk away. Why put yourself in harm’s way for no reward?”

  “I can’t for the same reason he can’t.”

  Banner watched him, but he avoided her eyes. Hiding something? Still?

  “You prefer it this way, don’t you? No rules, no pro­cedure. You don’t understand what it’s like for—”

  “I understand rules fine. I understand why they have to be there. And when they have to be broken.”

  There was another long pause, but neither of them looked away this time. As though impelled by magnetic attraction, their faces had moved closer together, their lips almost touching now.

  “Blake . . .”

  He pulled back from her at the last second. “This is a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not here to stay. I’ve seen this one before: We get close, things happen, then we stop the bad guy and I’m gone before the dust settles.”

  Banner said nothing for a second, then smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Promise?”

  Blake blinked.

  “I’m not looking for a lifelong commitment, Blake. I’m not searching for a new father for my daughter, and if I were, no offense, but . . .”

  “None taken.”

  “I need to keep my real life separate. I need to keep Annie away from . . . all of this.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I just want . . .”

  “Want?” Blake whispered.

  “To break the rules.”

  Their lips met, and Banner felt an electric jolt go through her body as Blake pulled her close. They kept kissing as their hands explored up and down and around. After a minute Banner broke the kiss and opened her eyes. She tugged Blake’s shirt up and he raised his arms to let her haul it over his head. The long white scar caught her eye again. She put the tip of her middle finger on the raised tissue, traced it from his upper chest down to where it disappeared beneath his belt. Her eyes moved up and met his. He didn’t say anything. If she’d expected an explanation for the scar, she should have known better by now. She pulled her own T-shirt over her head, and Blake moved in again, hands around her ribs, picking her up and pushing her gently but firmly back on the couch.

  63

  11:57 p.m.

  The needle hovered around a safe sixty. The dashboard clock clicked up another digit closer to midnight. Wardell gazed ahead and watched as the broken white lines marking each lane were swallowed up by the hood of his car. He wondered how many of those lines there were between here and Chicago. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, maybe.

  He’d make the Chicago metropolitan area by dawn if he didn’t stop. And he wasn’t going to stop. No more sleep. Never again. He ought to have been exhausted. Instead he felt reinvigorated, utterly alive.

  He’d come to a decision after the call to Whitford. Detective Stewart was dead, leaving just one name from his original list. In a perfect world, he’d have liked to go ahead with it, but he had come to realize that that name did not fit the wider plan anymore. He wanted to engage Banner and Blake, to beat them before he killed them. To ensure that could happen, he’d found a new name to replace the old one.

  He let his right hand slip from the steering wheel and fall to rest on top of the cheap notebook he’d laid on the passenger seat. It contained all the intel he’d need for the next twenty-four hours.

  DAY SIX

  64

  6:07 a.m.

  Mike Whitford opened his eyes. Sluggishly, he came to, realizing that he’d dozed off on the living room couch, still holding his coffee-stained Boston Celtics mug. He’d been working on the latest Wardell story through the night, and it looked like the Irish influence in the coffee had momentarily won the battle against the caffeine. Although it was tech­nically morning, it was still pitch black outside. The story was pretty much ready to go, pending a few important details. Not bad, considering Wardell hadn’t yet been back in touc
h to give him the details of his next hit.

  He supposed that a layman might be surprised by that. That you could write most of a story about a planned event that had yet to happen and for which you had none of the ­details. But that was the way it worked: A story like this, direct contact with a celebrity killer, it was all about atmosphere, setting the scene. Whitford could make up the quotes out of whole cloth. All he needed to do was plug in the details as soon as they were made available to him. Whenever that was.

  That Wardell hadn’t gotten back in touch yet really surprised him. He reached for the laptop and opened up the Hushmail account he’d created to send Wardell the information he’d requested. He’d chosen Hushmail for the strong encryption it offered, and picked an utterly anonymous alias—jim23456@hushmail.com—from which to send the documents. In the unlikely event that Wardell’s own anony­mous webmail account was discovered, there’d be nothing leading back to him. Just to be on the safe side, he’d dispose of the laptop as soon as he could. He clicked on his in-box and saw for the hundredth time a pristine screen, unsullied even by spam.

  Maybe Wardell had forgotten about him. Or maybe his e-mail to Wardell hadn’t sent right. For the fifteenth time he clicked on Sent Items. There it was, just as it had been the fourteen previous times: a single e-mail with a modest attachment size sent to the Gmail address Wardell had provided him with. The phone at the office was on a redirect to his cell phone, and he’d bought a second throwaway cell after Wardell’s call, the number of which he’d provided in the e-mail. He’d dispose of that too, of course. He had to admit that a part of him was enjoying the clandestine precautions he’d been forced to take as soon as he’d crossed the line and journeyed far beyond a breach of journalistic ethics.

  And there was absolutely no mistake about that, about crossing the line. The line was now a distant memory left at the border of a far-off country. Sending that e-mail was obstruction of justice at the very least, possibly even conspiracy to commit murder, depending on how a prosecuting attorney was feeling. And that went way beyond career-­ending. It meant heavy jail time became something of a best-case scenario.

  An icy sweat broke out on his brow. Whitford scrunched his eyes shut as though that action could pinch off the perspir­ation and the feeling that came with it, like closing a valve. He reached for the bottle of Scotch and took a good long slug. It did the trick, burned off the sharp edge of anxiety.

  But there was nothing to worry about, really. It wasn’t like Wardell would be sticking around to update people on his contact details. Whitford had a hunch Wardell wouldn’t be doing much of anything twenty-four hours from now. It was election day, and that meant Wardell was most likely going for a big political target. Probably one of the candidates for congress or the governorship. And if Whitford was thinking it, then the cops and the FBI were thinking it too. Whitford got the feeling—maybe from tracking events with a professional eye, maybe from the steely undertone in Wardell’s voice that last time—that tonight was going to be the big finish. That had to be why he’d contacted Whitford again, right? To advertise the big finale. When you came right down to it, Wardell fucking needed him.

  So where the hell was his e-mail? Why the fuck wasn’t he calling?

  Whitford hit refresh on his e-mail screen again. Checked his phone. Checked the throwaway cell. Each was as empty as his Celtics mug. He tucked the new cell phone into the pocket of his sweatpants and got up on rubbery legs. He lifted the mug from the arm of the couch and pointed himself at the kitchen. He’d make another coffee. By the time he got back, Wardell would have called. Or e-mailed. For certain.

  He reached for the light switch. His fingers made it halfway before they were frozen by a single-syllable utterance.

  “Don’t.”

  Whitford didn’t drop the mug. He felt a nanosecond of inane self-congratulation for that. There was a man standing in his kitchen. And not just any man. He knew that without having to turn the light on. All of a sudden, Whitford’s mouth seemed drier than the inside of a toaster oven.

  “Mr. Wardell?”

  “My, haven’t we become formal.”

  “I thought . . .”

  “I know, partner. But isn’t a home visit so much more . . . personal?”

  Whitford cleared his throat and swallowed. The saliva tasted like copper.

  “I did what you asked me to,” he said. When Wardell said nothing, Whitford felt the urge to keep talking, to fill the terrible silence. “As I said in the e-mail, it was kind of a tall order. Gathering intel on a federal agent is difficult enough, but with this other guy, this . . . Blake, I got—”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  Whitford cleared his throat again. “That’s right, and I’m sorry. His name was mentioned in relation to some Russian thing a year ago, but the details have been wiped, if it was even the same Blake. There’s a driver’s license, but the ­address is a dead end—looks like a virtual office in New York. Other than that, there’s no record of him anywhere: no social security number, no criminal record, no nothing. This guy’s a ghost.”

  Wardell kept staring at him unblinking.

  Whitford thought about continuing to talk, then decided against it.

  Finally, Wardell spoke. “I’m disappointed, Mike.”

  Whitford opened his mouth to apologize again, but this time his voice failed him, his lips mouthing the words as though somebody had hit the mute button. Wardell smiled.

  “I’m disappointed,” he repeated, “but I’m not exactly surprised. Don’t worry about it. I can make sure he’ll be there tonight.”

  A surge of relief engulfed Whitford. Five seconds before, he’d been absolutely convinced he was going to die. Like the incorrigible optimist he was, Whitford switched from terror to hope with nothing in between. What did Wardell mean by the last thing he’d said, about making sure Blake would be there tonight?

  Whitford’s lips pulled back across his teeth in an uneasy smile that was a little too wide. “So, I still came through for you, right? On Banner? There wasn’t a lot of background on her either, but you got what there is. I guarantee it.”

  Wardell seemed to think about it, nodded slowly. “It was enough. The Times article was particularly interesting.”

  “Great, great,” Whitford said, not bothering to mention that this had been by far the easiest piece of information to find. The real work had been getting things like her address and unlisted phone number. “So . . . you’re still going to help me out now?”

  Wardell took a step forward. “Help you out? Oh yes.”

  “Great . . . Do you, uh, do you want to do the interview in here? We can sit down in the living room if you’d prefer.”

  Wardell had taken three more languid steps forward in the time Whitford had been speaking. They were now within touching distance.

  “Here’s fine,” he said, putting a hand on the kitchen worktop where Whitford was standing.

  “It is?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  Whitford didn’t like the sound of that. But of course it was far, far too late. Wardell’s hand brushed against his leg and came back up with some kind of hunting knife. As Whitford was still thinking about moving, Wardell slammed the knife up to the hilt in his chest. The last thing he heard was a sound like somebody punching a watermelon, and then everything went away.

  65

  6:14 a.m.

  Wardell let go of the handle of the bowie knife and let Whitford’s body drop to the tiled floor like a sack of hate mail. It landed awkwardly on its side. A little blood trickled from the wound, but not much. A hard stab directly to the heart like that killed instantly, stopping the heart in the most direct way possible, limiting blood loss.

  “No muss, no fuss,” Wardell said mildly as he regarded the dead man’s wide-open eyes. A cheap cell phone lay on the floor beside the body. Wardell supposed it was Whitford’s throwaway
. He picked it up, removed the battery, then put both in his pocket. A phone would come in handy for later. Then he drew the knife out carefully and carried it to the sink to wash the blood off.

  The killing hadn’t been strictly vital, he supposed, but it tied up a loose end. He didn’t need Whitford or the media anymore. And besides, it would not hurt to have gotten in a little more practice on killing up close and personal.

  He had a feeling that was the way it was going to be with Blake.

  66

  6:16 a.m.

  Darkness. And Carol’s voice. Gently teasing.

  “Anything you don’t know, Blake?”

  Carol couldn’t be asking that. Carol was gone.

  I opened my eyes and the light burned into me. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

  The midday sun beat down relentlessly from an azure-blue sky, but somehow I was shivering as though in the midst of the longest winter. I’d never felt so cold in my life. And then I realized, with the twisted logic of dreams, that I was cold because someone was blocking out the sun. The silhouette of a man towered over me, and though it was impossible to discern the features or even the type of clothes, I knew it was him: Murphy. And I knew exactly what he was going to say.

  “Sorry, hoss. You know this is nothin’ personal.”

  And then something shifted and the low, earthy chuckle began and I realized I’d been wrong. It wasn’t Murphy at all, not anymore. It was Wardell. The chuckle rattled itself out.