A harassed campaign worker in short sleeves led us across the marble floor of the impressive atrium, already filling up for the evening’s event. The atrium acted as the focal point of the building, all seventeen floors of government offices layered around the open space beneath an immense glass-paneled ceiling. Although I was glad the governor’s rally would be taking place inside, and theoretically under more controllable conditions, I wondered about those open balconies on each floor. Seventeen floors, thousands of feet of open space. All of a sudden, I felt more exposed than any time I could remember.
We rode up to the fifteenth floor in one of the glass elevators. The campaign worker led us to the governor’s office, knocked briskly on the door, opened it, and then shooed us in, not entering himself. My first thought on entering was that Governor Ed Randall looked like a pale shadow of his former self. Watching the press conference the other day, I had noticed he’d lost weight, but the difference was more dramatic away from the cameras.
Randall had been a first-term governor at the time of Wardell’s original spree, and he’d appeared with some regularity in the news reports from that time. In common with others who had found brief national fame during that heated four-week span, he was a larger-than-life figure. He’d spoken in a deep baritone and had favored Armani suits and expensive hair dye, judging by the way that his convincingly jet-black hair belied his sixty years.
Unlike John Hatcher, Randall had avoided grandstanding or issuing direct threats to the killer at press conferences, but had instead struck a balance between caution and reassurance, facing up to the situation with quiet resolve rather than macho posturing.
I found it impossible to reconcile these images of Randall with the slighter, smaller, grayer man who sat behind the desk in front of us. For a moment I wondered if there had been a mix-up, but then he opened his mouth to greet us and the low, mellifluous voice familiar from the news broadcasts set me straight.
“Good evening, Agent Banner, Mr. Blake. I hear this is important.”
Banner took his outstretched hand and shook it. I did likewise. The skin felt papery, the bones beneath fragile.
“Life or death,” Banner confirmed as we sat down on the opposite side of the desk.
Randall smiled. “Important enough to lie your ass off to as many people as it took to get you this meeting.”
I looked at Banner. She opened her mouth to say one thing, changed her mind and then said simply: “Yes.”
Randall nodded. “I called your boss, Walt Donaldson. Asked him what he knew about this agent who was so desperate to see me. He didn’t know a damn thing about it.”
Banner swallowed. “Then why keep the meeting?”
“I knew I was going to spend eighteen hours straight shaking hands and figured I’d be ready for a break right about now.”
“Seriously?”
Randall leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I’ve been hearing a lot about Caleb Wardell this week. A lot of people are fretting I’m going to be next on his list. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to that sounded like she knew what she was talking about.”
I leaned forward. “Wardell’s coming back to Chicago. He may be here already. I think he’s planning one last hit.”
“And, it being election day, you think it’s going to be me.”
“Your prior involvement with the original case makes you the most likely high-profile target, sir,” I said. “And it’s possible he could have interpreted your comments at the press conference as a challenge.”
Randall raised an eyebrow and seemed to slump back into his chair. He looked tired, beat. For his sake, I hoped this wasn’t the body language he employed for his television spots. “Maybe that makes me less likely. Have you considered that? This boy has a habit of throwing curveballs. Particularly lately.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Curveballs. Sometimes he hits an entirely random target; sometimes he goes for exactly the person we expected him to. He’s got the task force chasing their tails.”
“But not you, as I understand it,” Randall said, his eyes flicking to Banner. I realized she’d been talking me up during the phone calls she’d made to secure this appointment.
“Blake has been consistently ahead of the game,” she said. “If his advice had been followed from the beginning, I believe we would have Wardell back in custody.”
“Is that true?” he said, the dark brown eyes swiveling back to me.
“More or less.”
Randall sighed and brought his elbows onto the desk, clasping his fingers. “So what is it you want me to do?”
“We’d like you to consider scaling down your event tonight,” Banner said.
Randall’s face stayed impassive, but there was a glint of amusement in his eye. “Agent Banner, please, it’s not an event. It’s a victory party.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “But can you celebrate in a less-open space? Close friends and family?”
“Out of the question.”
“You’re too exposed out there,” I said.
“We have security on every floor. Extra security.”
“You have thousands of feet of open balcony overlooking that atrium. Hundreds of people in the crowd. You’re going to be the only person standing in the center of a well-lit stage. They can’t guarantee your safety under those conditions, no matter what your security people are saying.”
He considered this, made a reluctant concession: “My people have raised the idea of bulletproof glass at the podium.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Unless he has armor-piercing rounds.”
Randall grumbled. “Why don’t you just load me into a giant bulletproof hamster ball, roll me on there?”
“Or why don’t you just scale down the event?”
Randall said nothing, looked to Banner for support and found none. I pressed the point. “If Wardell is gunning for you, and if you make it this easy for him, there’s nothing we can do.”
Randall was quiet for a few moments, his mouth half open as he considered what he was going to say. When he finally spoke, it took us both by surprise.
“Has either of you ever had cancer?”
Banner and I exchanged a puzzled glance. It seemed like a non sequitur for the second before I realized why his appearance was so different from before.
“No. Don’t answer that. I can tell you haven’t. You’re both too young, and more important, you look it. Anyway, I’d have to say I don’t recommend it. I was diagnosed the day after we caught that little bastard Wardell. Stomach cancer. I went through eighteen months of chemotherapy before I got the all clear. I underwent four major procedures. They removed several feet of my large intestine. The docs said I had about a fifty-fifty chance, back when they originally found it. I’d ignored the warning signs for a while, and so I’d let the tumor get to be the size of a tennis ball. I gave it a name. Do you want to know what I called my tumor?”
“Wardell,” I said after a moment.
“Very good, Blake. I called my tumor Caleb Wardell. I thought it was appropriate, with the timing and all. Because that’s what he is, you know. A cancer. An ugly little malignant mass of tissue that gets a foothold in a basically healthy place and just keeps on spreading. It’s been a few years since he was on the loose the first time, and every time I see a documentary on the son of a bitch, I always take a look. Can’t help myself. They all focus on the bottom line: nineteen kills, nineteen shots. But the worst of it is that isn’t close to the sum of the damage he caused. The killings, the fear, it infected the whole damn city. People were afraid to go outside, to let their kids play, to fill their gas tanks. He made people in this city afraid, and we had to hold our hands up and tell them they were right to be afraid. That they were right to hide indoors. Right to think that we couldn’t do enough to protect them.” He punctuated each “right” by slamming his hand on the desk blotter. “And this time it’s even worse, because it’s not just one city. It’s America. People are scared out there, and the fear is spreading from state to state every time he makes another kill. He’s a cancer. We fought him into remission last time, but he’s come back more aggressively.