The Killing Season (10 page)
He shook it off and came at me again, aiming at my fingers, around the edge of the laptop. I faked as if to fall back and then went on the offensive, slamming the hard corner of the laptop into the nerve cluster in his left shoulder. It worked: He dropped the knife and his arm hung limp. I blocked a wild right hook and jabbed the laptop into his face, catching him right across the bridge of the nose. His working arm came up to cover his face, and I swung the laptop as hard as I could from the opposite side. The casing shattered across the left side of his head, the screen ripped free of its hinges, and the albino went down like a rag doll.
I turned my attention to the other two men and saw that they were already across the road and running. I looked down at myself, examining my arms and center mass for injuries I might not have felt in the heat of combat, but found nothing. My computer, alas, was another story.
I dropped the remains of it next to the unconscious albino and walked away quickly. I didn’t have the time to waste on this situation, but something was niggling at me, and it wasn’t just the loss of my computer. I’d beaten off an attack by three armed thugs in less than a minute, but that was the problem: It shouldn’t have taken me that long. The albino had displayed skills, discipline. Either he was made of sterner stuff than your usual street tough, or I was getting rusty.
It was a question for another time, though. I had a far more pressing concern, and he’d be resting up already, getting ready for a new morning. Less than ten hours until first light and six hundred miles to go.
8:32 a.m.
As soon as I passed the legend that read
Welcome to Fort Dodge, Iowa
, I knew I was in the right place. I didn’t know why, exactly, but the moment the white wooden sign appeared in my high beams was when a strong hunch transmogrified into something like a hard certainty. The process of predicting how far and in which direction Wardell might have traveled had been a combination of solid theory and intuition, but I was at a loss to explain quite how I
knew
my quarry was in this town.
Once I’d decided where Wardell was headed, it had simply been a matter of plotting a likely route and taking into account a number of factors: like the assumption that he had indeed taken the Cedar Rapids bus and whether he’d kept using public transportation or found a car, either by hitchhiking or stealing one. Wardell wouldn’t rush. If I was right about his eventual destination being Lincoln, Nebraska, then it was a little too far to make the journey in one day. He could make it most of the way across the state before nightfall, but he’d want to get some sleep, having been awake for nearly two days straight.
Des Moines had sounded good at first, but it was too big a city. Wardell would know that the cops would be on alert in major population centers in any of the states bordering Illinois. That probably wouldn’t bother him under normal circumstances, but he was tired and I guessed he’d want to rest in relative safety on the first night. Looking at the other midsized towns he could have reached in the same time frame, I had decided on Fort Dodge. It was small enough, at a population of twenty-five thousand, but at the same time large enough to provide a choice of kill zones and cover to slip away.
So there it was: Fort Dodge. Had to be. When you laid it out like that, it was almost like a simple mathematical equation. Or perhaps that was all just bullshit. Perhaps it was just a plausible-sounding way of justifying an informed hunch. I often wonder about that. If I’m superstitious at all, it’s about the process. I never want to analyze it too closely.
I shifted my mind away from the unknowns to the knowns. If Wardell was keeping to his established MO, he’d want to rise early and kill again before he resumed his journey. I was almost certain of this for two reasons: one, his message about ‘killing season’ being open, together with his contacting the media, said that he meant business—he wouldn’t want to let up on the pressure. Two, he’d screwed up on yesterday’s shooting, requiring more than one shot for the first time in his career. He’d want to strike again quickly, to prove that it had been a one-off. In fact, I had worried that Wardell might not want to wait for the morning, might act sooner. If that had happened, at least it would have confirmed his direction of travel. But it hadn’t, so here I was, in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
But where to look in Fort Dodge? That was the question I’d been mulling over while I made the long drive north. Finding a vehicle had proved slightly more difficult than expected, since Cairo had not counted a car rental company among its amenities. I’d found a place in the next town that was almost out of stock, and settled for the one thing they had left: a silver Cadillac
DTS
luxury sedan. It had a 4.6 liter V8 engine, leather seating, and a moonroof, whatever that was. Yes, I’d settled for it the way Arthur Miller settled for Marilyn Monroe.
I’d driven through the night, made Fort Dodge a little before seven in the morning. It was a busy town, nestled in the gently rolling hills of the Des Moines River Valley, about ninety miles northwest of Des Moines itself. From here, it was another hundred and sixty miles to the Nebraska state line, assuming you took the most direct route to Lincoln.
There were a few major hotels and plenty of smaller places where one could check in unobtrusively. It would take a man working alone a full day to check them all, and that would be operating on the shaky assumption that Wardell would even use a hotel. He was a Marine Corps Scout Sniper who’d endured three deployments in Iraq and five years in the United States Supermax Prison at Marion, so I guessed he was used to forgoing home comforts. I made a round of the big hotels and a handful of the smaller guest houses anyway—just to cross the T’s, as Banner had said. As I’d expected, I came up with nothing.
So I cruised the predawn streets, looking for nondescript cars parked alone in empty malls and office parking lots, cars that might have out-of-state plates or contain a sleeping occupant. Nothing. Clearly, this wasn’t one of those jobs that would be resolved through dumb luck.
As the first light of dawn began to creep hesitantly over the eastern horizon, the sun glinting off the frontage of a place called the Red Ball Café caught my eye. I parked outside and bought a newspaper, as well as a black coffee and a donut to raise my blood sugar. I took them out to the car and scanned the headline story on Wardell in twenty seconds, lacking the luxury of more time to waste on it.
I once read that you’ll find at least five mistakes in any given news story if you know enough about the subject. From a cursory glance, the
Des Moines
Register
was way ahead of the curve in terms of inaccuracy. They had the broadest details right, but everything else was a mix of rumor, speculation, and good old-fashioned sensationalism. For all that, though, the media was doing exactly the same thing I was: waiting for the next one.
I discarded the paper on the passenger seat and unfolded the map I’d bought from a gas station on the edge of town. In my head I went over the top three kill zones I’d identified.
On the face of it, the most likely option was a mall on the eastern edge of town, one that offered near-identical conditions to the shooting Wardell had carried out the previous morning. Another large open space offering a choice of unsuspecting targets, again providing plenty of cover and a choice of exfiltration routes.
Then there were a couple of spots in the center of town: Central Avenue would offer the single greatest amount of targets during rush hour and had a certain symbolic value: the beating heart of a small heartland city.
Five minutes’ walk away, City Square Park provided almost as many targets. It wasn’t the biggest of the city’s parks, but it would provide more viable positions from which to take the shot than any of the others.
I juggled the possibilities in my head as I sat in the parking bay outside the Red Ball, sipping the coffee and watching the morning traffic picking up. I’d developed a feel for the place in the last couple of hours; I guessed I knew the town about as well as a rookie cabdriver would. And even with the morning traffic approaching its zenith, the place was compact enough to be easily navigable. The three potential kill zones were all within easy reach of my current position. The mall was half a mile away. I estimated I could make Central Avenue in four minutes. City Square Park in seven. The only problem? I couldn’t be in all three places at once.
I eliminated the mall first. It was an ideal setup, and it was what Wardell had done yesterday; but that was why I found it so easy to discount. Five years before, Wardell had been scrupulously varied in his choice of both locations and victims.
Down to two strong possibilities, then: Central Avenue or the park. I drained the last of the coffee, keyed the ignition, and pointed the Cadillac south, toward the center of town.
Exactly four minutes later, I was headed west along Central. Full daylight had taken its time to arrive. Maybe it was as reluctant as anybody else to begin a cold day in late October. Rush hour was in full swing, which in a town this size, wasn’t saying much.
I covered the length of the town’s main street with relative ease, stopping only at a broken signal when instructed to by a traffic cop. As I waited for my stream of traffic to be granted permission to move on, I scanned the roofline on either side of the street. Nothing more threatening than pigeons. The big clock on the county courthouse at the top of the street was ten minutes slow. I peered up at the bird-festooned parapet on the roof of the building. It would make a dramatic vantage point for a shooting, albeit with some logistical drawbacks. Then again, it didn’t offer any intrinsic advantage over the open window on the sixth floor of the office building across the street, or indeed, the small park at the other end.
I took a right at the cross street after the courthouse, then zigged a left and zagged a right, to bring the car out on the east side of City Square Park.
The park was the width of two blocks. Commuters crisscrossed the green space, heading for offices and stores and schools and the big public library building. The square was flanked on all four sides by six-story buildings, all uniform and all with accessible-looking flat roofs. The sun had not yet risen above the level of the surrounding buildings, meaning the park was entirely in shadow and a gunman could aim from any of the overlooking rooftops without having to face into any glare.
I scanned the skyline. I saw nothing, but then I hadn’t really expected to. Wardell was hardly likely to be perched on a parapet with his legs dangling, rifle in one hand, latte in the other as he picked out his next target. They drum that kind of behavior out of you at the sniper academy.
I spotted a couple of open windows here as well, despite the fact the temperature was just a hair above freezing. It meant nothing. Although I’ve never worked in an office, I’ve visited a lot of them in my time. While waiting for appointments, I liked to kill time by making observations in the manner of a visitor to a strange land. Observations like the fact that people who work in offices don’t pay the utility bills, so when the heating is on a little too high, they just open a window rather than turning it down.
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.