I worked through the material quickly and methodically, pausing every twenty minutes or so only to glance at the muted television screen. No more killings so far, but that wasn’t unexpected. Wardell, for whatever reason, preferred to kill in the morning. There were deviations, but not many. Most of his kills had taken place before nine a.m.
Sometimes, the faces appearing on the screen would coincide with the people I was reading about in the files or the reports: people like Ed Randall, the governor then and now. John Hatcher, sheriff of Cook County, where Wardell had first struck. Hatcher was the man who’d taken the most credit for catching Wardell but whose actual contribution to closing the case was negligible, from what I’d been reading. Some old scores for Wardell to settle back in Chi-town.
With that in mind, my number-one pick for Wardell’s first specific target was a bust: Detective Adam Stewart, the man who’d broken the case, had succumbed to a heart attack two summers before and had gone to his grave leaving his wife the contribution from the Police Benevolent Association and not much else.
Revenge wasn’t the only factor that made me think Wardell would eventually head back to Chicago. His initial spree had been building in intensity before his capture. It was obvious he’d been working up to something big, even if he himself didn’t know what that something was. Unfinished business would bring him back to Chicago; the profilers were dead right about that. But where I parted company with Quantico was with the timing. I had a strong hunch that Wardell would avoid the Windy City to begin with, and not just because it was where he was expected.
At nine o’ clock in the evening, the news took its first extended break from Wardell coverage to focus on the final week of buildup to the midterm elections. It looked like another longstanding grudge match was approaching its conclusion in Chicago, with Governor Randall in an unexpectedly close race for the mansion. I wondered briefly if the political action might draw Wardell in before deciding it likely wouldn’t make a difference either way.
By ten o’clock in the evening, the desk, the bed, and every other flat square foot of the motel room was covered in paper: files, printouts, maps. I was unaccustomed to having such a wealth of material available, and the sheer volume was both an advantage and a drawback. The immersion of myself in a suspect’s life was a proven way of getting results. Somehow, by tracing a man’s movements, words, and actions, I could begin to get under his skin. Predict what he might do, where he might go.
This target, however, was proving elusive in more ways than one. The more I read about Wardell — be it first-, second-, or thirdhand — the more I felt the essence of the man shift, contort, slip from my grasp. The one constant was my memory of the look in his eyes back in Mosul, the absolute knowledge that he would not and could not stop once he got going.
Raised in suburban Alabama by a single mother, Wardell had been a bright but quiet child, with few friends. As a young man, he’d been a gifted student, outperforming his peers both on the football field and in the classroom. He’d won a scholarship to the University of Alabama at Birmingham but dropped out in his junior year. It wasn’t for lack of ability; his professors reported that he’d just gotten bored. He signed up for the United States Marine Corps in 2004 and volunteered for Force Recon. He excelled on the rifle range and snagged a place at Scout/Sniper School. He passed the Scout Sniper Basic Course with flying colors and quickly proved his mettle in combat operations in Iraq, with twenty confirmed kills. That total included an astonishing head-shot takedown of an RPG-armed insurgent at nine hundred yards.
His combat record was excellent — early on, he was touted for the SEALs — but he didn’t socialize much with the other men. They found him distant, aloof. One quote put it more bluntly: “a creepy bastard.” Perhaps that explained why he’d stalled at lance corporal, when his work on the ground ought to have made him a sergeant, or a full corporal at the very least.
His third and final tour had brought him to the banks of the Tigris: to Mosul, the capital of the Nineveh Province of Northern Iraq. And that was where, for the briefest of moments, our paths had crossed.
16
I was running an asset named Muhammad Rassam at the time. He was deep undercover in the insurgency and about to bring me within striking distance of one of the major local al Qaeda franchisees. I was thirty-six hours away from nailing my quarry, maybe less, when Wardell put a bullet in Rassam’s forehead.
We postmortemed the operation afterward and discovered that the catalyst was a pair of ambushes carried out in the space of a week on US patrols. A couple of well-liked men had been killed, and word had reached their unit that Rassam had been the prime mover on the ambushes. I was 90 percent sure Rassam wasn’t the guy. And even if he had been, too bad — he was too valuable to lose. Wardell’s CO had been instructed not to pursue the issue. Wardell had ignored the order and organized himself a little extracurricular hunting trip. We were tipped off, but too late. When I made the scene, Wardell had already executed Rassam and a couple of others from long range. Then he’d moved in and massacred eight members of Rassam’s family and four of his neighbors. I found him putting a bullet into the back of a woman’s head. When he saw me, he dropped his weapon, smiled, and raised his hands, almost mockingly.
I had been a quarter-inch pull away from ending his life right there. I’d like to be able to say it would have been for the dead civilians, but that was only part of it. The other part was the six months of my life Wardell had just wasted.
Cassidy had already been yelling in my ear for a few seconds before I even registered it. “Stand down, back the fuck off, and clear the scene. We do not want to have to explain your presence to JSOC, and we sure as goddamn fuck don’t want to have to explain a fucking premeditated blue-on-blue.”
I eased off the trigger as a Humvee pulled up and disgorged a crew of shell-shocked-looking Marines, including a sergeant I took to be Wardell’s CO. I didn’t stick around to answer questions.
And that was it, apart from the hard look that passed between the two of us as I cut my losses and left the Marines to clear up the mess their boy had made. Or so I’d thought.
17
I picked up the rest of the thread from the postverdict Wardell biographies that had appeared in the national papers.
The massacre went down on the books as accidental. Wardell was quietly sent home and dishonorably discharged. The next anybody heard from him was when a SWAT team dragged him out of his warehouse hideout and he was revealed as the clinically accurate serial killer who’d been terrorizing Chicago over a four-week period.
Nothing seemed to shake Wardell out of his cool detachment: not trial on multiple counts of first-degree murder, not even the resulting death sentence. In all of the TV footage and news pictures, he wore that same knowing smirk, that same faraway look in his gray-blue eyes. He looked like he knew something you didn’t.
The defense team tried the obvious, of course, playing up the highlights of his military career and glossing over the dishonorable discharge. They tried painting him as a poor Southern hick who’d been scarred by his experiences in that hellish desert conflict and just didn’t know any better. Tried to convince everybody he was just another victim of PTSD who’d simply snapped one day.