Free The Killing Season by Mason Cross Page B

hot. Something told Banner that it was the exact opposite of that. They exchanged another glance and both looked toward the open door to the kitchen.
    A sweet, decaying stench emanated from within.
    The kitchen was a square, low-ceilinged room. At the far end was a long rectangular window and a wooden back door. Grimy venetian blinds were drawn shut along the length of the window, but anemic gray daylight peeked through here and there where the slats had warped. There was a worktop along the entirety of one wall, from which a wooden service island jutted like a peninsula. There was blood spatter on the worktop, more of it on the cupboard doors above, dark and congealed. A shoeless foot protruded from the other side of the service island.
    Banner stopped and let her eyes read the room, confirming there was no immediate danger, nothing important she could miss in her urge to find out who was attached to that foot. When she was satisfied, she approached the service island, gun level on the foot as her line of sight changed to reveal a leg and a body. When she saw the rest, she knew positive identification would be a job for the experts.
    She turned at the sound of a stifled noise that was pitched midway between a gasp and a gag. Paxon’s free hand was tight over her mouth. “Jesus Christ,” she said. It came out muffled by her fingers.
    “Messy,” Banner agreed, holstering her weapon. “At least we know why the puppy wasn’t hungry.”
    She turned back to the body, concentrating on what could be seen below the neckline. The body was that of a Caucasian male, probably of early middle age. He was dressed in plaid pajama pants, no shirt, an open blue terry-cloth robe exposing a pale, lightly haired chest and paunch. He was on his back. Presumably, the Colt .45 lying a foot from his right hand had fired the fatal shot. The postmortem injuries also spoke vividly for themselves.
    “Summers?” Paxon asked after a few moments, reluctantly pulling her hand from her lips.
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” Banner said. “He’s the right age and build, and given that he’s in Summers’s house wearing his pajamas . . .”
    “So where does that leave us?”
    Banner reached for her phone and thumbed through the recent calls to dial Castle. “At a very definite dead end, I’m afraid.”
     
    15
     
    10:00 p.m.
     
    It didn’t take long to work out why the FBI file I’d been given that morning had seemed so condensed. If Donaldson’s file on Wardell had been the CliffsNotes, what Banner and her people had dug up for me was more like the Library of Congress. Thousands of pages of notes from the original sniper case, crime scene pics, interviews with hundreds of witnesses and suspects, police interviews with Wardell. Psych interviews with Wardell. Documents from the trial. Wardell’s Marine Corps record. Medical records. Dental ­records. Everything back to his high school reports.
    I worked through the material quickly and methodically, pausing every twenty minutes or so only to glance at the muted television screen. No more killings so far, but that wasn’t unexpected. Wardell, for whatever reason, preferred to kill in the morning. There were deviations, but not many. Most of his kills had taken place before nine a.m.
    Sometimes, the faces appearing on the screen would coincide with the people I was reading about in the files or the reports: people like Ed Randall, the governor then and now. John Hatcher, sheriff of Cook County, where Wardell had first struck. Hatcher was the man who’d taken the most credit for catching Wardell but whose actual contribution to closing the case was negligible, from what I’d been reading. Some old scores for Wardell to settle back in Chi-town.
    With that in mind, my number-one pick for Wardell’s first specific target was a bust: Detective Adam Stewart, the man who’d broken the case, had succumbed to a heart attack two summers before and had gone to his grave leaving his wife the