The Killing Season by Mason Cross

could make it most of the way across the state before nightfall, but he’d want to get some sleep, having been awake for nearly two days straight.
    Des Moines had sounded good at first, but it was too big a city. Wardell would know that the cops would be on alert in major population centers in any of the states bordering Illinois. That probably wouldn’t bother him under normal circumstances, but he was tired and I guessed he’d want to rest in relative safety on the first night. Looking at the other midsized towns he could have reached in the same time frame, I had decided on Fort Dodge. It was small enough, at a population of twenty-five thousand, but at the same time large enough to provide a choice of kill zones and cover to slip away.
    So there it was: Fort Dodge. Had to be. When you laid it out like that, it was almost like a simple mathematical equation. Or perhaps that was all just bullshit. Perhaps it was just a plausible-sounding way of justifying an informed hunch. I often wonder about that. If I’m superstitious at all, it’s about the process. I never want to analyze it too closely.
    I shifted my mind away from the unknowns to the knowns. If Wardell was keeping to his established MO, he’d want to rise early and kill again before he resumed his journey. I was almost certain of this for two reasons: one, his message about ‘killing season’ being open, together with his contacting the media, said that he meant business—he wouldn’t want to let up on the pressure. Two, he’d screwed up on yesterday’s shooting, requiring more than one shot for the first time in his career. He’d want to strike again quickly, to prove that it had been a one-off. In fact, I had worried that Wardell might not want to wait for the morning, might act sooner. If that had happened, at least it would have confirmed his direction of travel. But it hadn’t, so here I was, in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
    But where to look in Fort Dodge? That was the question I’d been mulling over while I made the long drive north. Finding a vehicle had proved slightly more difficult than expected, since Cairo had not counted a car rental company among its amenities. I’d found a place in the next town that was almost out of stock, and settled for the one thing they had left: a silver Cadillac DTS luxury sedan. It had a 4.6 liter V8 engine, leather seating, and a moonroof, whatever that was. Yes, I’d settled for it the way Arthur Miller settled for Marilyn Monroe.
    I’d driven through the night, made Fort Dodge a little before seven in the morning. It was a busy town, ­nestled in the gently rolling hills of the Des Moines River Valley, about ninety miles northwest of Des Moines itself. From here, it was another hundred and sixty miles to the Nebraska state line, assuming you took the most direct route to Lincoln.
    There were a few major hotels and plenty of smaller places where one could check in unobtrusively. It would take a man working alone a full day to check them all, and that would be operating on the shaky assumption that Wardell would even use a hotel. He was a Marine Corps Scout Sniper who’d endured three deployments in Iraq and five years in the United States Supermax Prison at Marion, so I guessed he was used to forgoing home comforts. I made a round of the big hotels and a handful of the smaller guest houses anyway—just to cross the T’s, as Banner had said. As I’d expected, I came up with nothing.
    So I cruised the predawn streets, looking for nondescript cars parked alone in empty malls and office parking lots, cars that might have out-of-state plates or contain a sleeping occupant. Nothing. Clearly, this wasn’t one of those jobs that would be resolved through dumb luck.
    As the first light of dawn began to creep hesitantly over the eastern horizon, the sun glinting off the frontage of a place called the Red Ball Café caught my eye. I parked outside and bought a newspaper, as well as a black coffee and a donut to raise my