Extreme Prey Page 18

  —

  LUCAS ATE A QUIET BREAKFAST of pancakes and sausage, read the Press-Citizen’s account of Palmer’s murder—known to have controversial views of Jewish culture and life—got his truck, and drove back to Hills and stopped at the school where Lawrence worked as a volunteer. After explaining to the principal what he was doing, and who he was working with, he asked about the night Likely was murdered.

  The principal made a call to Bell Wood to verify Lucas’s identity, got the okay to talk, and then told Lucas, “I was there and so was Grace. It was a meeting for the parents of prospective kindergartners. She was there the whole time. I talked to her before we started, I talked to her during it, and after we finished. Basically, she was there from six to ten o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” Lucas said, and it surprised him a bit that he felt something like relief. He drove past Lawrence’s house on the way back out of town: she may have blown up that dairy, he thought, but she hadn’t killed Likely.

  An Iowa City cop car was parked outside Anson Palmer’s house and a sleepy young cop told him that the state crime-scene crew had left, as had the Iowa City detectives who were investigating the homicide; Palmer’s body was at the medical examiner’s for the autopsy. “We’re keeping an eye on the place until the investigators are sure they don’t need it anymore. Then we’ll turn it over to the heirs, I guess.”

  He’d been told that a computer guy was coming over, along with one of the city detectives. “Should be here any minute.”

  —

  THEY WERE.

  The detective introduced himself as Russell Monroe and the computer jock as Jim Whalen. Monroe was a tall, fleshy blond in a decent suit but a too-wide tie and heavy shoes, the kind you used to kick people with in a fight. Whalen was a white-haired older man in jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, who might have been a digitally recycled TV repairman. He was carrying a leather tool case the size of a child’s lunch box. “We’ve been talking with Bell Wood and we’re fine with you going over the place, as long as we get what you get,” Monroe told Lucas. “If you get anything.”

  “I’m just trying to solve a problem,” Lucas said. “If somebody else solves it first, I’m fine with that.”

  “We heard that you think somebody might try to hit Mrs. Bowden. Is that right?” Monroe asked, as he unlocked Palmer’s front door.

  “We don’t know the exact situation, but it’s worrisome,” Lucas said.

  “Why don’t you tell her to go somewhere else until it’s settled?” Monroe asked.

  “Tried that, but she’s a stubborn woman. She’s got it in her head that the people of Iowa will be insulted if she doesn’t show up for the state fair.”

  “That’s silly,” Monroe said.

  “Well, I’ve been told that she doesn’t worry that all the people will be insulted . . . but the Iowa caucuses could be a close-run thing and a couple extra percentage points going to Henderson could make a difference.”

  “Okay, so maybe two percent of the Iowa population would be insulted if she didn’t go to the fair,” Monroe conceded. They pushed through the door, and Monroe said to Whalen, “The home office is through the living room on the left.”

  —

  LUCAS AND MONROE followed Whalen into the home office, which included a desk made out of two-by-twelve boards laid over four two-drawer filing cabinets, with an old-style tower computer sitting in the middle of it. Whalen thumbed through a scratch pad on Palmer’s desk, turned it over and looked at the back, checked the first and last pages of a calendar, opened both drawers on the filing cabinets on either side of the leg-hole under the desk. No poorly hidden password.

  “Probably something easy to remember and he never wrote it down,” Whalen said. To Monroe: “You didn’t find anything in his wallet or cell phone?”

  “Nothing that looked like a password,” Monroe said.

  “Did his phone have a password?”

  “Nope.”

  “Gonna have to do this the hard way, I guess,” he said. He turned the computer on. “Machine’s so old it might not even have password capability.”

  “Really?” Monroe asked.

  “No, not really.”

  “How long’s this gonna take?” Lucas asked.

  Whalen was taking a USB thumb drive from his tool kit. “Mmm, probably . . . eight to ten minutes.”

  Lucas and Monroe looked at each other, and Monroe said to Whalen, “Hell, I thought you were going to call up the CIA or something.”

  —

  WHILE WHALEN WORKED with the computer, Lucas pulled the drawers on the file cabinets and began thumbing through the folders inside. He found careful files for Vanguard Investments, Wells Fargo, income tax statements, appliance warranties. One drawer was full of bills marked Paid.

  The bills went back years. The phone bills listed long-distance calls, but no local calls. Lucas gave a clutch of the bills to Monroe and said, “If you guys have a clerk who could run down these numbers . . . we’re trying to figure out who he might have been talking to. We need to get his local calls, too.”

  “He’s with Verizon, Vernon’s already on it.”

  “Vernon?”

  “Ed Vernon, he’s the other guy on the case,” Monroe said.

  “I’d like to see the names he comes up with . . .”

  “Sure.”

  —

  “MY WORK HERE IS DONE,” Whalen announced. “His password is Zarathustra.”

  “What the fuck is that?” Monroe asked.

  “Fuck if I know,” Whalen said. “If only we had some easily accessed, widely distributed source of information that we could tap into . . . Oh, wait! We have the Internet.” He rattled a few computer keys, brought up a Wikipedia entry, peered at the screen, and said, “It’s part of a title of a book by Nietzsche.”

  “Shit,” Monroe said. “I gotta read Nietzsche?”

  “It’s only a password, not a clue,” Whalen said. To Lucas: “Anyway, it’s all there. What do you want?”

  “I need to sift through it. Get the e-mail up, if you can. I’ll look at that first.”

  Whalen rattled a few more keys, stood up, and said, “Good luck. He has six thousand in-box e-mails, and twenty-two hundred replies.”

  “Better you than me,” Monroe said to Lucas. He looked around the room, back at the list of e-mails on the screen, the tip of the iceberg, and then said, “Tell you what. I wouldn’t do this with any other civilian, but I’m going to leave you here. I gotta talk to a woman about an assault. When you’re ready to go, give me a call, leave the key under the downspout by the porch, and I’ll come back and lock up.”

  “See ya,” Lucas said. He dragged a chair in from the kitchen—Palmer’s office chair was still being processed—and settled in to read for a while.

  —

  ONE OF PALMER’S file cabinet drawers included a stock of office supplies, and Lucas requisitioned a yellow legal pad on which to make notes. He began with the outgoing mail, noting the names of the correspondents. The first thing he noticed was that most of the people with whom Palmer had been talking were not PPPI members from Iowa City—they were mostly people who wanted to discuss his views on Jews: a sprawling web of anti-Semites that reached across North America and Europe.

  Rather than note names, he realized he’d have to actually read the subject lines, and often part of the messages, to separate out the PPPI people. He’d begun doing that when Robertson called: “Hey, man, we’re partners again. What do you want me to do?”

  Lucas explained his theory that the killer was probably from the Iowa City area, and an intimate of both Palmer and Likely. “I’ve hit them all, but you need to hit them again. Be unpleasant. Suggest that they know more than they’re telling. Push them around.”

  “I can do that,” Robertson said. “We’ve got two more guys coming this afternoon, we oughta
get dinner together and work everything out.”

  “Call me when they get here, we’ll meet downtown,” Lucas said.

  “Sounds good.”

  —

  LUCAS WENT BACK to the e-mails. After an hour of work, he had noted on the legal pad the names of thirty-one people involved with the PPPI, most of them already on the list he’d gotten from Lawrence. He found a few more by Googling their names, but there wasn’t much you could do with a name like Gregory Wilson—87,200,000 Google results.

  When he was finished, he’d gotten the most PPPI hits on the names of Grace Lawrence and Joseph Likely. Of the thirty-one names he’d uncovered, there’d been only a single contact with twelve of them, and all twelve had been recipients of an old press release about an upcoming party “convention” in Cedar Rapids. Eight hadn’t bothered to reply, while the four replies were perfunctory: I’ll be there, or I won’t.

  Of the nineteen with more than one hit, other than Lawrence and Likely, twelve had more than six contacts, and one had thirty. The killer, he thought, was very likely on that list of nineteen. He’d already talked to five of them, including Marlys Purdy, one of nine women on the list, and Robertson had talked to six more.

  Lucas kicked back in his chair, and thought, Let’s go to Sherlock Holmes. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever was left, however improbable, must be the truth. Or something like that.

  There were only three logical possibilities:

  (1) The killings were carried out by one person he hadn’t found yet.

  (2) The killings were carried out by conspirators who were talking to each other, which meant that he may have wrongly eliminated somebody as a suspect because that person couldn’t have carried out both of the murders, but could well have carried out one of them, while another conspirator carried out the other.

  (3) The killings were basically not connected to each other.

  He was reluctant to consider the third possibility. The willingness to commit murder was extremely rare. The possibility that two people who were closely connected should be killed within a day of each other by different people for separate reasons would be more than unusual. He’d never encountered anything like it. (The third murder, of Patricia Baker, he believed to be a consequence of the murder of Joe Likely, so was probably unrelated to the motives for the other two.)

  It was much, much more likely that he simply hadn’t yet located the killer, or that he had spoken to the killer but had eliminated him/her because he/she couldn’t have committed both of them. That could have been his mistake.

  Most probable, he thought, was that he simply hadn’t yet found the killer.

  Then, more reluctantly: Was it possible that there were two killers? Well, yes, of course it was possible—Henderson himself had seen two candidates, the white-haired woman and her gray-eyed son, if the gray-eyed man was the woman’s son.

  The problem with that was, nobody close to the center of the PPPI seemed to fit their descriptions—he’d yet to find a white-haired, chubby older woman with a gray-eyed son, or anyone who knew who they might be, or, at least, who would admit to it.

  —

  HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Grace Lawrence. Lawrence was at the school and answered on the second ring. Lucas explained what he was doing, and asked, “First, I’ve got this new list of names . . . do you have any idea where these people live?”

  He read the names of the people for whom he had no location. Lawrence gave him general locations for several of them, from memory—the towns they lived in, or the towns they lived nearest to, but said that none of them were really closely involved with the machinery of the PPPI, and only a couple of them lived within an hour’s drive of Likely or Palmer. A few she didn’t know at all.

  “Sounds like you’re kind of stuck,” Lawrence said.

  “Well, I’m going to crack Joe Likely’s computer and see what I can find there . . . I can tell you, Grace, I’m right on top of the killer. I just can’t see him yet.”

  “Is Mrs. Bowden still going to the fair?” she asked.

  “At this point, yes. She could change her mind, though.”

  “Then you better find this killer, or change her mind.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Two hours later.

  Grace Lawrence was angry and frightened: she sat in her country kitchen, which smelled of bread and herbs and a glass of dill tops she’d picked early that morning, curling into herself, staring at her half-empty coffee cup. Robertson, the DCI agent, had been rough, threatening, a coarse slap in the face after Davenport’s charming touch.

  He’d been waiting on her stoop when she arrived home from school, and had invited himself in: “C’mon, Grace, you’re not gonna do real fuckin’ well up at Mitchellville, you’re too goddamn old for prison,” Robertson had said. “Talk to me now and maybe we can do something for you. Don’t talk, then fuck ya. If Bowden gets hurt, the feds will probably ship you off to Alderson, and some days, like once a month, they might even let you see some fuckin’ sunlight . . .”

  —

  DAVENPORT HAD BEEN so friendly, both in person and that afternoon on the phone; Robertson had been just the opposite. Now, she realized, Davenport had been nothing more than the good guy in a good-cop/bad-cop hustle. She’d figured that out when the school principal called to tell her about Davenport’s visit, and to ask . . . “Is there something we should know, Grace?”

  The principal even pretended not to know that Lawrence had been involved with the Progressive People’s Party, though of course she had known. Grace had never made a secret of it, though she’d been careful not to preach.

  Lawrence watched Robertson pull away in his state car, walked to a window and watched him disappear around the block. Would they be watching her? Had they somehow bugged her? Davenport had been alone in the bathroom . . .

  She went to the bathroom and looked around, saw nothing unusual. Got down on her knees and looked behind the toilet, searching for a bug. But what would a bug even look like? And why would he put it in a bathroom, where she’d be by herself? Suddenly feeling dopey, she got up, washed her hands, looked at herself in the mirror, and said, “Dummy.”

  —

  SHE WENT OUT and worked in the garden for an hour, pulling weeds. She threw the weeds in a mulch pile out along the back fence line, then got in her car and drove around the town, up one street, down another. The town was small enough that the unfamiliar was obvious, and she looked for lingering cars, unfamiliar faces. Saw none, and set out for Iowa City. Back to the 76 station, where she used the pay phone to call Marlys Purdy.

  “This is the rhubarb woman again. We have a large problem,” she said. “This Davenport man is coordinating a harassment attack on the party. He’s going to find you.”

  “He already did,” Purdy said. “We pulled the wool over his eyes and sent him on his way.”

  “Good. That’s good. I’ve got to warn you, though, they’ve changed their tactics. No more Mister Nice Guy. A state investigator was here and he was very, very threatening. It’s obvious to me what they’re doing—they’re trying to break down resistance. Pretty soon, people will be implicating anyone they can, because they’ll be scared. This man took a picture of me with his cell phone, to show around.”

  Purdy thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “I appreciate the call. You sit tight, deny everything. We will figure out how to reach this Davenport person, and . . . Say, do you have his phone number? Did he leave it with you?”

  “Yes, he did. He left me a card,” Lawrence said.

  “Okay. Give me the number,” Marlys said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I had an idea pop into my head. Best not to talk about it on a telephone.”

  —

  LAWRENCE WENT BACK to her house, and her garden, picked a butternut squash for dinn
er, then simply sat down among the vines and began to weep. She was frightened, she was appalled by the unfairness of it. After all this time, after all these years of being a good and decent person, trying to make amends for the accident at Lennett Valley.

  She didn’t think of Anson Palmer at all. He’d gotten what was coming to him.

  —

  AT THREE O’CLOCK Lucas left Anson Palmer’s house with a list of names and a list of local calls he’d made in the past two months. He’d made a couple of dozen calls to Joe Likely in the past two months and a few to Grace Lawrence. The calls were usually only a couple of minutes long. He’d made a couple other short calls to local PPPI members; that’d have to be checked.

  —

  FROM PALMER’S HOUSE, he headed south to Mount Pleasant and Likely’s place, where he would hook up with Robertson, who had a key to the house. He found Robertson waiting for him with another investigator named Tom Robb, who would join them in interviewing PPPI members. Robertson and Robb were eating sack lunches.

  “How’d it go with Lawrence?” Lucas asked.

  “I scared her,” Robertson said. “I took a picture of her with my cell phone, told her we were going to put it on our network.”

  “You got a network?”

  “Yeah. It’s called the Internet,” Robertson said. “You want a dill pickle? I don’t do pickles.”

  “Sure, I’ll take a pickle . . .”

  —

  ROBERTSON GAVE THE HOUSE KEY to Lucas and he and Robb left to continue interviewing party members. Lucas ate the pickle and began combing through Likely’s file cabinets. The house pushed against him as he worked: it hadn’t yet been cleaned, and the blood on the floor added a hostile stink to the place; and the ghosts of recent death hovered around, in the small reminders of an unfinished life: dull pencils tossed next to a pencil sharpener, food-encrusted plates in the kitchen, a coffee cup with a quarter-inch of coffee in it, sitting on a bookshelf.