“I do some pro bono. It’s not just about the money.”
“Then what? The challenge?”
“Yeah. Among other things.”
The first roadblock came into view ahead of them, and as though choreographed, they finally hit the rain they’d been chasing. It was fairly light, but quickly misted the windshield. Time up. Banner was frustrated at her lack of progress: She still knew next to nothing about this guy. Least of all, whether she could trust him. She flicked the wipers onto intermittent and slowed as they approached the county police units blocking the road, reaching into her jacket for her identification.
“In that case,” she said, nodding at the Wardell file, “you’re going to enjoy yourself on this case.”
10
My first thought was that the kill scene was just about perfect for the purpose for which it had been selected.
I surveyed the parking lot of the strip mall. It was square, surrounded by trees on two sides, the highway on the third side, the cluster of modestly proportioned stores lined up on the fourth. Although the lot was packed full of cars — every one of them now held temporarily hostage by the authorities — it was effectively a wide-open space. A person standing anywhere in the lot, even between two cars, would be completely exposed from the chest up. The orderly grid of parked vehicles dictated movement as well, made a pedestrian’s motion predictable by limiting it to the aisles and spaces in between. The trees provided excellent cover for a man patiently selecting and acquiring a target, as well as for his subsequent escape. They also acted as an effective windbreak, not that the wind would have posed a professional like Wardell any problem.
Yes, it was a virtually perfect small-town killing ground, suggesting that this was a case of a random victim selected for his presence in a specific location, rather than a random location to kill a specific victim. In my mind, the information I’d absorbed from the file had already begun coalescing into the beginnings of a theory, a prediction of events to come. This development didn’t directly contradict that line of thought, but it didn’t exactly support it either. I reminded myself to concentrate on the present. The big picture would take care of itself in time.
The entire parking lot was sealed off right up to the tree line and the road and up to the storefronts on the far side. Banner flashed her identification at a female cop manning the perimeter. The cop gave us a mildly resentful glare but stepped aside, and we ducked under the yellow tape. Clearly, the Bureau had already reassigned the locals to guard detail.
“I didn’t even know we had a Cairo in Illinois,” she remarked, saying it like the Egyptian capital.
“Care-oh,” I corrected. “This one’s pronounced differently.”
“He’s right,” the female cop said, keeping her back to us.
“How the hell did you know that?” Banner said.
I shrugged. It was just one of those things I happened to know. I’d worked in the Egyptian Cairo a few years before, and I found it difficult to imagine two places more different.
“Care-oh,” Banner repeated thoughtfully.
We began crossing the lot, moving roughly diagonally in a staircase pattern dictated by the parked vehicles. Every bay was full, some cars had taken impromptu spaces on grass verges. The rain was so light that it was more like mist. I glanced side to side as we walked, taking in the scene.
Police cars lined the highway bordering the lot. There was a large crowd gathered outside the row of stores, as close to the tape as they could get. It comprised about equal parts civilian gawkers and uniformed workers from the stores smoking cigarettes. I wondered if the stores had been evacuated, or if this level of excitement triggered a de facto town holiday. The audience was crowded behind a barrier at the small staff parking area, below a number of big red signs offering grave warnings about unauthorized parking. A burly cop stood in the one vacant staff bay, keeping a close eye on the crowd, as though he expected them to surge forward at any moment.
Within the taped-off area, the focus of activity seemed to be a spot near the entrance to a supermarket. Suits and uniforms were crowded around something on the ground. Close by, an enormous blue and gray FBI mobile command center truck was taking up the entire delivery bay. Banner was making a beeline for the area.
She moved surely through the glass and aluminum maze, not once glancing behind to check whether I was following. One of the news helicopters hovering a couple hundred feet above adjusted its insectlike gaze to follow the two new figures advancing across the lot. I turned my face downward, away from the cameras, grimacing as the downdraft created its own windchill, unfettered by the trees.
A dark-suited agent greeted us as we reached the crowd of cops and feds. He checked Banner’s ID again and eyed me suspiciously when she said, “He’s with me.” A gap in the outer ring of people opened up, and we stepped through it into the core crime scene. There was a smaller ring of people within. I saw Castle, another agent, and a couple of crime scene techs in blue jackets. They were grouped around the first victim. Grimly, I acknowledged to myself that this was exactly how I was thinking of this one: only the first.
It was the corpse of a big man. He was wearing tight tan chinos, a brown shirt, and a baseball cap that had toppled off his head, either as he fell or on impact with the ground. He was lying faceup, eyes staring with disinterest at the overcast sky, two entrance wounds in his upper body. One of them, evidently the fatal one, had drilled dead center through the breast pocket on the left side of the shirt. Because of the way the man had fallen, the scene didn’t look too bloody. I knew that if the body was rolled over, a much bigger mess would be evident. Big, fist-sized exit wounds would be punched through the victim’s back.
One of the crime scene guys noticed my stare, read my thoughts: “What you’d expect: high-velocity rifle round. Looks like a 7.62 NATO, or similar. Lot of damage. The first shot wasn’t immediately fatal, but it probably would have been in a couple of minutes.”
“Because of the blood loss.”
“That or hydrostatic shock,” he agreed. “You catch one of these suckers, you ain’t coming back.”
Banner had gone straight to the body and crouched down beside it. She examined the wounds first, then the face, then did a quick survey of the body.
“Have we ID’d him yet?” she asked nobody in particular.
The agent standing beside Castle answered her. “Terry Daniels, forty-four years old, wife and four kids.”
“Any doubt whatsoever this is our boy?”
Castle shook his head in response to Banner’s question. “We’ve shut everything down within a thirty-mile radius. Local cops, county sheriff’s department, and our guys are all over the area.” He looked down at the body and shook his head again. “Of course, if he has a vehicle, all of that came about an hour too late. But if he’s on foot, he might still be inside the net.”
I was busy examining the two gunshot wounds. If it was Wardell, this was a first. I gestured at the victim. “Two shots this time.”
Castle shrugged. “Maybe he’s getting rusty.”
“I knew there had to be some good news,” Banner said.
I shook my head, thinking about the nineteen perfect kills the first time around. Nineteen shots, nineteen kills — an outstanding ratio, even for a Marine Corps sniper. I’d only scratched the surface of the psych profiling, but that statistic told me all I needed to know about Wardell’s likely reaction. “It’s not good news. Now he has something to prove.”
“I’m so glad we invited you along,” Castle said dryly.
I ignored him, my mind suddenly a few thousand miles and a few years away. Wardell being led away, throwing a look back in my direction, a look that said I’ll be seein’ you. A man who settled his scores.