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
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.
But Wardell had been wary of becoming complacent and hidebound by routine himself, so he had mixed things up with targets selected at other times of day: the executive sitting by the picture window in Paperino’s halfway through a business lunch, the teenage girl working the night shift at the McDonald’s drive-through window, the two evening joggers in McKinley Park. He didn’t want people to think they were safe merely because they’d managed to make it to the office, or because morning rush hour had come and gone.
But still, he liked to kill in the morning best of all.
And this was an important morning for him. He wanted to get on the road as quickly as possible, but first he had yesterday’s mistake to atone for. A session of target practice before he moved on to greater things. He’d been building up to something special before; if he could surmount the next hurdle, he could do it again. To require more than one shot this time, or — he barely dared consider this — to actually miss, would be shameful. In that event, he questioned whether he’d be able to carry on at all. Better to quit than to limp along like an athlete past his prime, a shadow of his former self. Wardell took pride in his work. He could never understand why pride was one of the cardinal sins, but then there were many things about mainstream morality that he didn’t understand, or care to try.