We were in Hatcher’s study. I recognized it from the author photo on the back of his book. The walls were lined with books that looked as though they had been chosen for the color of their spines. I looked back at Banner, then beyond her and through the window at the lake. The light from the helicopter searchlights made it sparkle in the dark with the tiny impacts of a million raindrops. The storm had been building in intensity throughout the day and into the evening and showed no signs of abating. The weather made our job tougher, but if we were lucky, it might cause a few problems for Wardell, too.
“I think the governor’s right,” I said. “We’ll get him. And Wardell knows that as well as anyone. You kill on a stage like this and there’s no disappearing act afterward.”
“But…” Banner prompted, sensing what I hadn’t said.
“But he’ll keep going until it’s over. Just a matter of how many more people he can kill before we get him.”
“Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “It was bad today, Blake.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do. Then I said, “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she answered. Too quickly.
Banner had mentioned having a young daughter earlier. As she looked out into the night, I knew she was thinking about the young girl in the translucent blue raincoat. She’d been twelve, a little younger than my estimate. I thought again about not pulling the trigger in Mosul, about how such a tiny physical action could result in so much death. The Buddhists believe if you save a life, you’re responsible for that life from that day forward. I guess that applied to sparing a life too; and I felt the weight of that responsibility grow with every new body.
Wherever the multiple shootings in Rapid City had been reported, the adjective “senseless” headed up the trail with grim inevitability. And they were senseless, in the moral sense. Utterly so. But despite that, the atrocity had accomplished exactly what Wardell had intended it to: He’d demonstrated how powerless we were — to us and to the world. If it was intended to unnerve us for the job of protecting Hatcher, it was working. He’d made a point of telegraphing it in code, like a cocky pool shark calling his next bank shot.
The color blue. The number six.
The last question of his telephone call to Whitford. The last question to the waitress he’d terrified in Rapid City. He’d made a point of doing that, so those particular details would be remembered and commented upon and analyzed for meaning. And then he’d gone out and calmly killed exactly six people, chosen for no other reason than because they were all wearing the color blue. It sent a message. It said, “I control the rules of this game.”
And now here we were, in place for the next move in Wardell’s bloody game. I wasn’t worried about a misdirect anymore. He wasn’t interested in giving himself a handicap. He was far too arrogant for that. His play with the waitress was evidence of that: She’d called the cops as soon as he’d walked out of the diner. She’d been far too late to prevent the slaughter on Main Street, but her account of the experience meant we now had an up-to-date, detailed description of his appearance, purely because he’d wanted to show off. But if my instinct about his arrogance was right, then what did that say about the red van?
The door opened and Castle walked in, his hair soaked. He was loosening his tie with his right hand. “How was it?” he asked.
“Fine,” I told him, which was the truth. From the perspective of catching our man, it was neither a positive nor a negative. It was just something he’d needed to get out of the way. I understood the need for regular media briefings, but I also completely understood Castle’s loathing for them.
“Not bad, Castle,” Banner agreed. “You’re almost starting to look like you’re not in the tenth circle of hell every time somebody points a camera at you.”
Castle allowed himself a brief but genuine smile, and I found myself starting to like him a little for it. It vanished from his face as the door opened and a tall female agent entered, her hands filled with three Kevlar vests. “Sir?” she said, as though offering canapés at a drinks reception.
Castle stripped off his jacket and lifted one of the vests. Banner and I followed suit. I looped the straps through the buckles and fixed the Velcro tabs, feeling the weight settle on my upper body.
“Back in the city,” Banner remarked as the agent who’d brought the vests disappeared back into the corridor, “Wardell chose head shots around eighty percent of the time.”
“Thanks for the statistic,” Castle said.
“Any trace of him so far?” I asked.
Castle shook his head. “We know he’s in the area, of course, but it’s a big area and there’s a shitload of trees out there. Our search helicopters would have their work cut out for them even without this goddamn rain. Rapid City is shut down. Half the state is shut down.”
I believed him. Banner and I had driven up to the house following the shootings, and the roads leading out of the town toward the Black Hills had been utterly empty. It was eerie, like the town and its surrounds had been evacuated before an imminent nuclear meltdown.
Castle continued. “The only road in here is blocked at the highway, and we’ve got surveillance every quarter mile up to the house. For all the good that’ll do us.”
“It pays to cover the bases,” I said.
Like Castle, I doubted Wardell would use the road, not when there was an infinite variety of off-road approaches. The house was built on a plateau midway up a steep incline into the hills, and it faced onto the lake. There were thick woods on the other three sides, encroaching to within a hundred yards of the building — Hatcher had picked an interesting location in which to build his home, given how the profits that enabled it were generated. It was an ideal spot from the point of view of any attacking force. I wondered if any of the multitude of shrinks currently drawing network television consultancy fees had noticed this and what conclusions they might have drawn.
The advantage we had was manpower, and for the first time we had been able to focus that resource on a clearly defined area, one that we could be reasonably certain was the right one. Had we been resisting an attack from an army, we’d have prepared differently — laying fortifications, barricading the doors, arranging a ring of men around the three land-facing sides of the house, patrolling the front with gunboats. But none of that would do any good against a sniper intent on taking out a specific target.
There was a strange atmosphere about the house as the agents on Castle’s task force carried out their duties, one that either hadn’t been present until tonight, or that I hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t the usual tension that saturated the preparations for a big event, it was more like the vibe in the locker room of a world champion sports team that finds itself losing badly going into the second half and not knowing quite why. The storm and the claustrophobia of the woods didn’t help. Maybe it was the sheer number of kills Wardell had racked up in less than four days, but it seemed like everyone was having to make a conscious effort to remember that they were engaged in a manhunt, not a siege.
The task force had focused on making life difficult for Wardell by boarding up the windows and stationing tactical teams throughout the woods around a half-mile radius. A couple of helicopters circled the lake, casting search beams on the choppy waters as small motorboats swept across the surface. We were about as well prepared as it was possible to be, and now we were going to discover just how good Caleb Wardell was.