The desk was mostly clear, with only a couple of papers, an expensive fountain pen, and a folded copy of today’s Chicago Tribune. There was also a vintage baseball sitting on a little slate plinth, the indecipherable name of some now-retired ball player scrawled across it in Magic Marker.
After another ten seconds of uneasy silence, Edwards spoke. “We thought it was only fair to ensure you received the full payment we’d agreed upon. Despite the ah… problems that were encountered.”
“Very generous of you,” I said.
“But that’s all in the past now. And I’m not going to sit here and say we could have done it without you. You helped us get our man, and that’s exactly what you said you’d do.”
“That’s right. And I got him despite your best efforts.”
That didn’t leave him much option but to willfully misinterpret me, and he didn’t disappoint. “Now, come on, Blake,” he said, the smile still in place. “That’s just not fair. You know we have to play it by the book. We just don’t have the luxury of going off the reservation like you do. Even when it does get results.” He kept talking, carrying on in this vein for another minute, talking to fill the silence. I tuned out and looked beyond him at the gray late-afternoon sky. The clouds were pregnant with snow. It looked like the weather forecasts were on the money. When Edwards finally ran out of platitudes about working within the rules, I looked back at him, nodding at the Tribune. The headline was about the reelected governor’s announcement that he had terminal cancer. The sidebar was House Votes to Increase Appropriations to DOJ.
“I gather election season went well,” I said.
He looked down at the paper and shrugged. “I guess you could say that. Looks like thinking is finally turning back our way.”
“How so?”
“Well, spending on law enforcement, of course. And I mean real law enforcement, not this terrorist crap. For the last decade, all the money’s been going to hunt down fruitcake jihadists in caves in Pakistan. Meanwhile, we’ve taken our eye off the ball back home. The country’s been going to hell.”
The way he was speaking now was in marked contrast to his prevarications only a moment before. He sounded confident, authoritative, on comfortable ground.
“You really think it’s going to hell?” I asked.
He widened the grin and this time it looked quite genuine. “How can you even doubt it? Look at Wardell, at what just one man like that can do.”
“Look at Wardell,” I repeated slowly, as though considering it for the first time.
“We’ve seen real cuts in genuine law-enforcement budgets — local and state cops, prosecutors, the Bureau — since the early nineties. Now a lot of people who ought to know better think this is just fine. And why not? Crime rates are down. They’ve been falling since ninety-one. It’s like the way they cut military spending to the bone after the Berlin Wall came down.”
“The peace dividend?”
“Exactly.” Edwards pointed at me, delighted. I realized he wasn’t just on comfortable ground. This was a kind of religious fervor. “Well, this is more like… more like a ‘safety dividend,’ I suppose. Crime’s falling, so we don’t need as many cops, so why not spend the money on schools, hospitals, tax cuts, whatever.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“No.” He almost yelled the word, slapping the desk.
“No?”
“No. Because here’s what nobody seems to be thinking about, Blake: What if it isn’t a decline? What if the fall in crime rates is just a blip?”
I furrowed my brow as though concentrating on keeping up with him. “You’re worried about a sudden upswing, that we’d be caught with our pants down.”
Edwards nodded vigorously. If he was suspicious about the fact that I’d suddenly become such a receptive listener, he didn’t show it. “Exactly. Read the runes, Blake. The economy’s in the toilet; unemployment’s rising. It’s a damn tinderbox out there. The right spark and the whole damn country goes up in flames. And we won’t have the manpower to put it out.”
“I see where you’re going. We needed a wake-up call. As a country, I mean.”
“Bingo.”
“And you decided Caleb Wardell would be the perfect candidate to make that call.”
Edwards’s mouth hung half open for a second, on its way to another approving affirmative. His mouth twisted into the beginnings of several other words before he settled on a simple, “What?”
I leaned forward in the chair and put my elbows on the desk. “I underestimated you, Edwards. When I worked out what was happening, I thought it had to be Donaldson who was behind this.”
Edwards tried a bemused smile on for size. It didn’t match the look in his eyes.
I continued. “From almost the beginning I knew there was something else going on. It just took me a while to figure it out. Some of that was because the motive was obscured by Wardell’s random killings, but some of it was because the motive was so goddamn insane to begin with.”
“I… I don’t…”
“I was trying to see a pattern in the victims. A pattern in the predictable victims. I thought that would give me a motive. If I could identify a specific target that someone could know Wardell would pick, then that would give me the motive and the motive would give me the mastermind. It got me running in circles looking for something that wasn’t there. And then I realized I was looking at it the wrong way: Wardell wasn’t released to kill anyone specific, but just to kill anyone. It was Banner who made me see it. It was impossible to predict exactly who he’d kill. The one thing someone could predict was the basic fact that Wardell would kill, and do it in a way that attracted mass media attention.”
“Now, hold on a second, Blake.”
“You wanted to reverse the trend. The decline in spending. Lobbying was getting you there, but too slowly. You needed a nudge. A big media event to push it over the edge, right around election time. Like the way Hoover used Dillinger and the Lindbergh kidnapping to justify the War on Crime back in the thirties. The Markow kidnap, the ransom drop that went mysteriously wrong — that was you too, right?”
I stopped for breath and waited for Edwards to say something: confirmation, or more likely more denials. He just sat there looking back at me. The oleaginous grin banished at last. I decided to play my hole card to shake him up. It didn’t seem like much. Just two words.
“Martin Bryce,” I said.
It worked. Edwards flinched in his chair as though I’d touched a live wire to the metal armrests. He moistened his lips and opened his mouth, but nothing issued forth.
“Yeah, I know about Bryce,” I continued. “Or ‘John Edgar,’ as you were calling him lately. It was Bryce who approached Korakovski and told him which transport to ambush and how. Then he bribed Paul Summers to switch Wardell to the transport Korakovski’s men were going to hit. Then he killed Summers to cover his tracks. It was a nice plan, I have to admit. It never occurred to anyone to question the timing of Caleb Wardell’s escape because from the outside it looked entirely coincidental.”
Edwards had given up on denials. He just looked utterly bewildered. “How did you…?”
“It was the only way it could have happened,” I said. “Bryce was there in Fort Dodge and in Nebraska. He was there at Hatcher’s place. He was always one step ahead of me and two ahead of the task force. Which means you must have found a way of tagging Wardell after you broke him out. Something on his clothes wouldn’t have worked, because you knew he’d ditch them, so I’m betting the rifle was bugged. How am I doing?”