“So much for one shot, one kill,” Banner said to no one in particular.
“The kill probably was the first shot,” Castle said. “But he’s upping the tempo, no question.”
Banner looked around the sparsely furnished cabin, every piece of furniture and decoration entirely beyond repair. She knew the team would have gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb already and knew that it had likely yielded zilch in the way of intelligence on Wardell.
“The father was the only person close to a relative we knew about,” Banner said. “So where the hell is he going now?”
Castle was looking down at the body as though he were a Roman priest attempting to read the entrails of a fresh sacrifice. He breathed a long sigh out of his nose. “Blake.” He said the word like it was an admission of defeat. “We need to talk to Blake about where the hell this bastard is going.”
There was a cough from behind them and the two of them turned. Blake’s hair was disheveled, his white shirt streaked with dirt, and there was a cut beneath his left eye. “I’m afraid, Agent Castle,” he said, “that your guess is as good as mine.”
36
The three of them were hunched over a large map of the Midwestern states on a small table inside the mobile command center. Blake sipped his third cup of hot black coffee as he indicated points on the map.
“We don’t have any more than a day until he kills again,” he said. “Probably much less, in fact. So given that he has to keep under the radar, we’ll say a five-hundred-mile radius, max.”
“Less,” Castle said, cradling his chin between the thumb and index finger of his left hand as he considered this. “He’s got to dump your rental ASAP and find another vehicle. Did you get the optional insurance, by the way?”
“Always.”
Banner smiled. There had been no apology from Castle and certainly no gesture of contrition, but he had quietly dropped his open animosity for Blake. Whether he liked it or not, he had to work with the guy if he wanted to nail Wardell. And he wanted that badly; they all did.
“Say three hundred, then,” she said. “What does that give us? We’re looking at towns and cities again, since the next one’s got to be random. He’s out of personal targets.”
“Maybe,” Blake said. He reached for a pencil, guesstimated a three hundred mile to scale line stretching out north from Allanton, and drew a near-perfect circle on the map. Banner and Castle inclined their heads to look at what that gave them.
“Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota,” Castle recited, “or he could double back to Iowa.”
“He might want to rest up,” Banner suggested. “The nearest big town is Denver.”
“Kansas City is almost as close in the other direction,” Castle pointed out.
Blake was shaking his head. “Things changed today,” he said.
“You mean because you almost got him?” Castle asked.
“It wasn’t that close,” Blake said. “I was just trying to get out of that situation in one piece. I meant it changed because he’s taken out his first predetermined target. Maybe his only predetermined target. And, thanks to Daddy, he seems to have inherited an arsenal. He’s ready to kick things up a notch.”
Banner tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. She didn’t like to think about what the next notch would be to a guy like Wardell. “Meaning?” she asked after a moment.
“I don’t know,” Blake said.
“You’re right,” Castle said after a moment. “Serial killers tend not to keep to their initial pace. They escalate. A lot of the time, that’s why we catch them. More than likely, his next move is going to be something big.”
“Or someone big,” Banner said. This chimed with what she’d read in the psych reports. Wardell had never confirmed it, but the shrinks agreed he was working up to a single episode of killing on an unprecedented scale. Something with a lot of people in a confined space. A baseball game or rock concert had been suggested, but it could just as easily have been a hospital or a shopping mall. Wardell hadn’t sketched out his plans or written a journal, so there was no way to be sure. That was the challenge about protecting a big city — lots of places with lots of people.
Blake nodded in agreement. “Let’s hope we’re not there yet. If he sticks with random, we’re back to a guessing game. But if we can find a specific target he might want to hit within this circle — or even outside — we could make a guess at his direction at least.”
Castle repeated the names of the states that fell within Blake’s circle. Banner furrowed her brow in concentration. Nothing stood out. “What towns do we have in those states?” she said, then started picking them out on the map. “Lincoln, Omaha, Wichita, Topeka…”
“Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder…” Castle continued, looking west.
Blake picked up the baton and headed north. “Cheyenne, Rapid City, Sioux Falls…”
“Wait,” Banner exclaimed. The two men stopped, looked up at her, faces questioning. “Rapid City, South Dakota,” she said. “Something about Rapid City in the case notes.”
Blake snapped his fingers. “Of course. Hatcher.”
“John Hatcher?” Castle prompted. “The sheriff?”
Banner nodded. Hatcher had been the newly promoted sheriff of Chicago’s Cook County, barely two weeks on the job when Wardell had made his first kill. As the senior law-enforcement representative in the county where Wardell’s first two victims had fallen, he’d been heavily involved on the multiagency task force during the first go-round and hadn’t been shy with the media. Hatcher had a weird mix of charisma and abrasiveness, which had worked to his advantage during the frequent press conferences. His prickliness and instinctive way with a sound bite had marked him out as a no-bullshit man of action, especially when contrasted with the more reserved FBI agents, including Steve Castle.
It was an entirely false impression. Away from the cameras, he’d contributed little to the case beyond getting people’s backs up. But he’d been the only one to come out at the other end with a genuine career boost. It had helped, of course, that it had been one of the detectives on Hatcher’s Special Investigations Division who had made the crucial breakthrough. But Hatcher wasn’t slow in taking as much credit for his subordinate’s actions as he possibly could.
“What about him?” Castle said.
“He retired,” Banner replied. “Departmental regs wouldn’t allow him to write a book about the case — you know, How I Caught the Chicago Sniper, something like that — so he quit.”
Blake nodded. “He did the book. I skimmed it: It was one of those quickie cut-and-paste jobs thrown together in a weekend by a ghost writer. There was nothing new in the book itself, but the ‘about the author’ bit said he was now living in Rapid City, South Dakota.” He paused and narrowed his eyes, and Banner could tell he was running this new variable through the system, looking at what new scenarios it threw up. He looked back at her and said, “Good job, Banner. You’ve given us the one personal target Wardell could hit in this search radius.”
To Banner’s irritation, she felt herself begin to flush at Blake’s approval. She suppressed the smile and looked skeptical. “It’s just a possibility. We can’t be sure he knows about Hatcher, or that he’d consider him a target. Like you said, if he hits a random victim, we’re back to square one.”
“But we can’t do anything about that,” Castle said. “No more than we’re already doing, anyway. This gives us somewhere to focus. Doesn’t mean we have to bet everything on it.”