Nobody bought it. Because Wardell was a little too clever for his own good. He liked to talk, to boast. And when you heard him talk, two things came across: He certainly wasn’t dumb, and maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t even crazy. Not that kind of crazy anyway. Reading the psych reports from the court case — prosecution mostly but even some from the defense — I got the sense that they were all dancing around one unscientific, unsubstantiated, but unavoidable conclusion: Caleb Wardell was just plain bad. He hadn’t been scarred by the war; he’d sought out the war because he wanted to kill people, and when his war was over, he’d brought it home, because he wanted to keep killing people.
In all of the interviews and court transcripts, I could find only one instance of Wardell losing his cool.
His father, who’d abandoned the family when Wardell was three months old, had crawled out from under whichever rock he’d been hiding when the story broke about his infamous son. Before, during, and after the trial, Wardell Senior busied himself giving out interviews to anybody with a checkbook. Literally never having known his child hadn’t seemed to prove a barrier, either to him or to the numerous news outlets that took him up on the offer. The funny thing? He seemed almost proud. Like his long-lost kid had won an Oscar, or a gold medal at the Olympics.
When one of the prison shrinks had broached the topic, asked him about his relationship with his father, Wardell had snapped for real. Maybe for the first time. He’d leapt over the table and attempted to throttle the shrink with the link chain on his cuffs. It took four guards to separate them, by which time the shrink was unconscious. The whole time, he kept repeating a five-word phrase. Not yelling or screaming, just in a conversational tone that jarred with his actions.
I don’t have a father.
Throughout the whole thing — the month-long reign of terror, the arrest, the trial, the conviction, the sentencing, it was the one time Wardell had acted in a way that could be termed as out of control.
I was thinking about that when my cell rang. The display screen told me the caller was Banner. The way her voice sounded when she asked if it was me told me something was new.
“What is it?”
“We found Sandra Veldon.”
“Her body?”
“She’s alive.”
“Alive?”
“Yeah, but maybe only thanks to you. They found the Ford parked in a truck stop over the Kentucky state line. Veldon was in the trunk, bound, gagged, and terrified. It was Wardell, all right. She said he wanted her to pass on a message. I guess he was gambling we’d find her before she died of thirst or exposure.”
“A message?”
“He told her to tell everybody: ‘Killing season’s open.’”
I paused. “Shit.”
“I know,” Banner agreed. “The delivery guy definitely wasn’t a one-off.”
“Trail?”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, and I could tell she was thinking it over. “Actually yes, a surprisingly clear one. The convenience store at the truck stop has security video of him picking up a few supplies. Some food and drink and some clothes. Including — get this — a lime-green T-shirt. Forty-five minutes later, a Greyhound driver bound for Chicago remembers a guy in a lime-green shirt boarding his bus at the station a couple of miles down the road.”
I sighed. “Too obvious.”
“That’s what I thought,” Banner said. “It’s a bluff.”
“And what does Castle think?” I asked carefully.
She was equally careful in her reply. “Castle thinks it’s a good lead. He’s making sure we follow up on everything, so we’re looking at the possibility that it was him. God knows we need to cross the T’s and dot the I’s on this one.”
“Media giving you a hard time already?” It was a rhetorical question, since I’d had the television on the whole time. You didn’t need sound to catch the outrage over the attempted news blackout.
Banner laughed dryly. “You’d think we’d shot that poor guy ourselves. Jesus. It was a stupid fucking move though. A case like this, we need to keep the press on our side.”
I didn’t say anything, quietly grateful that of all the difficulties I encounter in my line of work, having to give a damn what the public thinks isn’t one of them.
“You hear about Paul Summers?” Banner asked.
“I saw that. News is saying it’s a suspected suicide.”
“That’s the way it looked,” she said.
“Doesn’t mean anything. It’s not too difficult to make it look that way.”
Banner cleared her throat at that and started to say something, then changed her mind. “So what do you think about Chicago?” she said after a few seconds. Her voice sounded casual enough, but I could tell she was hoping for something. Maybe just that I was thinking along the same lines she was.
“I think that at this moment, he could be anywhere but headed to Chicago,” I said. “Assuming he did take a bus, what are the other options?”
There was a pause as she consulted something: a printout maybe. I pictured her holding the phone between her neck and shoulder.
“Lucky for us, it’s a quiet station. Just a rural feeder site. In the two hours after he was caught on tape, we’ve got a half-dozen buses departing. Three for Chicago, one for Kansas City, one for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and one for St. Louis.” She paused, waiting for a response. “You still there?”
I had crossed the room to the bed, swept a pile of papers onto the ground to clear space for one of the maps. “Yeah, just a second.”
I took the lid off a red Sharpie with my teeth and spat it on the floor, started drawing lines and dots on the map. I consulted my watch. “What time did the Cedar Rapids bus leave?”
A pause while she checked. “Eleven forty.”
I looked from the map to the screen of my laptop. “He’s in Iowa.”
“Cedar Rapids?”
“No. Not anymore. Say… Des Moines by now. No — someplace smaller, but nearby. Indianola, Fort Dodge maybe. He’ll stay there tonight, rest up, kill somebody in the morning before he moves on.”
Banner didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I wondered if she was deciding whether to be impressed or to hang up.
“Castle thinks it’s a double bluff. He thinks Wardell’s heading back to his old hunting ground,” she said.
“Castle’s looking in the wrong place.”
“The guys at Quantico agree with him. They say he’ll want to revisit the scene of past glories. They’re pretty sure about it.”
My eyes were drawn to my watch again. The second hand marched onward, implacable. A new day was coming, as surely and as inexorably as a 7.62 NATO round.
“Maybe they’re right, but first he’s going to take care of some business, and Iowa’s on the way.”
“On the way to where?”
I drew another line right to left, across the Iowa state line. I circled the town of Lincoln. “Nebraska.”
Banner sounded unconvinced. “What kind of business?”
“Family business.”
18
The father. He was going to kill his father first.
Wardell’s head start was twelve hours and growing. If I wanted to have a prayer of intercepting him in time, I’d have to drive through the night. I didn’t bother to clear up, just snapped my laptop closed and slid it into its leather case as I left the room. A minute and a half later, I was settling the bill with a bemused clerk at the front desk.