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.
DAY TWO
19
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.