Extreme Prey Read online

  On any normal day, Marlys and Cole went to bed between nine and ten o’clock and got up with first light, but that night they sat in front of the TV, waiting for KCCI in Des Moines to come up on the satellite. The shooting led the news, with a live report from Grinnell. The report said that an agent of the Division of Criminal Investigation had been shot in an ambush at a farm home east of Grinnell, but didn’t name the agent.

  A severe-looking guy in a brown suit, whose name was Pole, came up and said it was a tragedy, that they would get the shooter whatever the cost. “This was an attempt at cold-blooded murder and we have ordered every available law enforcement officer to the scene.”

  “Shit, I got the wrong guy,” Cole said, leaning toward the TV. “It was the right truck, a black Benz, he got out of the driver’s side . . .” Cole felt nothing in particular about the shooting. It was just something he’d done.

  Marlys looked over at her son and asked, “What does it mean that they ordered every available law enforcement officer to the scene?”

  Cole thought about it for a minute, then said, “It’s bullshit. I don’t even know why you’d say something like that. If they said, ‘We ordered every available law enforcement officer to the Purdy farm,’ then it’d make some sense.”

  “Well, even if it was the wrong man, it should keep Davenport out of our hair for a while. All we have to do is make it through tomorrow.”

  “You know, we could load up and go tonight. Check into a motel . . .”

  Marlys turned back to the television: “Let’s stick with the program. One more day.”

  “Davenport might have seen my truck. Or maybe it was the other guy, but one of them did. I’ll move it out behind the cornfield, in case he shows up here,” Cole said.

  “Not a bad idea. Don’t do it until tomorrow, after Jesse leaves for the farmers’ market. Davenport won’t be here tonight, they’ll be investigating the shooting scene tomorrow.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From watching CSI reruns,” Marlys said. “You say you didn’t leave anything behind, but they don’t know that and they’ll be going over that field inch by inch tomorrow. That’ll take time. All we need is one more day. All you have to do is stay out of sight.”

  “I can do that.”

  —

  COVERAGE OF THE SHOOTING took up the first ten minutes of the newscast and then moved on to the killing of Anson Palmer in Iowa City, which Marlys hadn’t heard about.

  “What? What in God’s name has happened?” she blurted.

  “Don’t know . . .”

  They watched the news report on Palmer, and the weather, then during the sports, Marlys said, “Grace. I betcha Grace killed him, or one of her bomber pals. They don’t like the idea of him talking to me about Lennett Valley. I told Grace about that.”

  “What if she doesn’t like the idea of us knowing?” Cole asked.

  Marlys considered that, then said, “I don’t think she’d come after us. But keep your gun handy.”

  “One more day,” Cole said. “All day tomorrow, I’m gonna be itchin’ like I got poison ivy.”

  —

  WHEN THE NEWS WAS DONE, and they’d turned off the TV, Marlys said to Cole, “One thing we’ve never talked about is what Jesse might do if Davenport and a bunch of cops come down on us. Jesse’s seen you working in the barn, getting ready.”

  “You think he might give us up?” Cole asked.

  “He might think he’s doing us a favor, protecting us from ourselves,” Marlys said.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “I know, but what can we do about it?” Marlys asked. “I’m not going to do something that would hurt him.”

  Cole stared at the blank-screen TV for a moment, then said to Marlys, “I know how to handle Jesse . . . but I’d have to get going.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  He told her, and she thought about it, then said, “It’s mean, but it could work.”

  —

  JESSE HAD BEEN DRINKING about every night—not a lot to do in town if you didn’t drink—and Cole found him, a little after eleven o’clock, in Gabbert’s Bar and Grill, chalking up a cue tip while waiting his turn at the coin-op pool table.

  “What’re you doing up this late?” Jesse asked, when Cole slouched over with his beer.

  Cole didn’t answer, took a tug at the bottle, shrugged, and his eyes flicked away.

  Jesse looked at him with curiosity: “Had a fight with Ma?”

  “No.” Cole turned to his brother and said, “I don’t want you to get in no trouble.”

  “What?” Jesse asked. “What happened?”

  “I was talking to Charlie Watts. He said Clark Berg was over to Russo’s with a couple of other guys, Stout and Merritt, and they were going over to Willie’s and see if she’d pull a train.”

  Jesse stared at him for a moment, then said, “Sonofabitch,” and put the pool cue he was holding back on the wall rack.

  “I thought you ought to know, because, you know, Caralee’s in the next bedroom over,” Cole said. “If she really does pull a train, it’ll get noisy, and with Caralee right there . . . I don’t know that Willie would do that, you’d know better than me.”

  “I know that bitch would fuck Merritt if she had a chance, and she’s already fuckin’ Berg,” Jesse said. “There’s no way she can do it around Caralee. No way that’s gonna happen.”

  Jesse went steaming out of the bar and Cole followed, calling, “Don’t do nothin’ crazy, Jesse,” and Jesse got in his truck and roared away. Cole went back into the bar, to the bartender, and said, “Gotta use your phone, Jim.”

  The bartender pulled a phone out from under the bar and Cole called the cops: “He doesn’t have a gun or anything, but he’s drunk, and there’s gonna be a hell of a fight. I don’t want nobody to get hurt. Naw, I’m not gonna give you my name, but you better get somebody over there in a hurry.”

  —

  JESSE WAS FLYING BLIND. He knew he was drunk, at least a little, but the idea of his daughter listening . . . he was flying blind. When he got to Willie’s place, his old apartment, there were a few trucks in the small parking lot, but none that he recognized as belonging to Berg, Stout, or Merritt.

  He parked and jogged around to the front door, twice stumbling over his own feet. There was a security pad there, but it didn’t work and he pushed the door open, jogged up the stairs and down the hall to the apartment. He banged on the door, and a few seconds later, heard Willie: “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me. Jesse.”

  “Get the fuck away from here,” she screamed.

  “Open the door, goddamnit, or I’ll kick the fuckin’ thing down,” Jesse yelled.

  “I’m calling the cops.”

  Two seconds later, he heard footsteps on the stairs, more than one guy. Berg, Stout, and Merritt, he thought, and he turned to face them.

  Two cops came around the corner. In the back of his drunk mind, Jesse thought, Jesus, that was quick.

  —

  COLE WALKED OUT to his truck, took his time driving over to Willie’s place. When he was a block away, he saw two cops leading Jesse, handcuffed, to a cop car. Willie was at the front door of the apartment house, screaming at all of them. A few neighbors had come out on their lawns to watch. Willie, Jesse, and the cops were all caught in the high-beam headlights of the two cop cars, like people on a stage. Cole hung back: he didn’t want the cops—or Jesse or Willie—to pick him out. When the cops got Jesse to the first car, one of them gave him a straw to blow on.

  Drunk driving test.

  The cop checked the straw, talked some more to Jesse, and then put him in the backseat. Then both cops went to talk with Willie, and Caralee came out of the house and took hold of her mother’s leg. One of the cops patted her on the head, and they went back to their cars and d
rove off.

  Perfect.

  —

  COLE CALLED MARLYS and said, “The cops got him. He’s fine, he’s not hurt. Willie had that restraining order, so that’ll be one thing, and then I think they got him for drunk driving. They did a blow test right out front of the apartment, that’ll be another. With us not answering the phone and nobody to bail him out, he’ll be in there for a couple days anyway. And with the paper not coming out until Thursday, nobody’ll know until then that he was busted.”

  “Feel bad about it, though,” Marlys said. “He’s gonna miss the market tomorrow. Those vegetables gonna go bad.”

  “I feel bad, too, but he’s safe and out of the way. I can call John Pugh early tomorrow morning. He’ll be running his stand somewhere, I’ll see if he’ll take our produce with him,” Cole said. “I’m on my way back. Got to get going early tomorrow. We got a lot to do.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  At the Grinnell hospital the next morning, Lucas was told that Robertson had been transferred to a medical center in Des Moines two hours earlier, that he was conscious and responding, that his outlook was better, but he was not yet safe. He could move his hands and feet when asked to do so, which meant that there was no unexpected spinal involvement.

  That was mostly good news. After leaving the hospital, he drove out to the Burton place, where he found seven law enforcement vehicles parked in the yard, from various jurisdictions, including a state car driven by Randy Ford. A deputy told Lucas that Ford was out in the cornfield with a half dozen other cops, including two state crime-scene people, looking for anything that might point them at the shooter. As far as the deputy knew, they hadn’t found anything yet.

  Lucas kept a travel pack in the back of his truck, with equipment and clothing he might need but wouldn’t normally wear. The pack included jeans, a canvas shirt, and hiking boots, which he’d put on when he got up. Now he tramped across the road from the Burton farm and down through the field, following the path they’d found the previous night. The morning was still cool, with the sweet smell of corn everywhere. He caught up with the search crew about two-thirds of the way down to where the truck had been parked.

  They’d found absolutely nothing.

  Ford came over, wearing a blue DEA ball cap, shook his head, and said, “You think the guy might belong to some nut group, and I’m thinking, they might be paramilitary or something. He knew what he was doing. Pulled you in, was set up in exactly the right spot for the shot, was gone before anybody could get here, didn’t leave as much as a matchstick behind. Even if he had, I suspect he’d have been wearing gloves.”

  “Has anybody been down to the truck site?”

  “Yeah. We started that right away,” Ford said. “We did get a foot-long tread imprint, so if we ever find the truck, we’ll be able to figure out if it’s the same kind of tire.”

  “If we get to that point, we’ll already know who it is,” Lucas said.

  “I’m thinking about trial evidence,” Ford said.

  —

  THE SEARCH CREW was literally going through the field inch by inch, and Lucas joined them, moving each of the hundreds of corn plants along the shooter’s flight path, looking for anything that might hold DNA or a fingerprint: a scrap of paper, a rifle shell, a wad of gum. Lucas would prefer a fingerprint to DNA, because there’d be some prospect of sending it to the FBI and getting an answer back the same day.

  At ten o’clock they emerged onto the side road. After minutely inspecting the roadside ditch, they crossed the road to where two more cops and a crime-scene investigator were finishing a hands-and-knees search around the truck site.

  They all wound up walking together back to the Burton place, on the shoulder of the road, and Ford said, “If your theory is right and these people are going after Bowden, and maybe at the state fair, you’ve got about twenty-six hours from right now to find them.”

  “Getting tight,” Lucas admitted.

  —

  AT THE BURTON PLACE, they stopped in for a glass of water, and Sandra Burton asked, “If you interviewed everybody in the party, how come you never came to me? I was pretty active in it, back in the eighties.”

  “The list is more current than that,” Lucas said, propping his butt against the kitchen sink. The sink gave off the faint sulfury smell of well water, although the glass of water she’d given him tasted fine. “The problem is, the list still has about a hundred names on it that we haven’t gotten to. We haven’t been able to dig into anybody, because there’re simply too many and we don’t have the time. We’ve been focusing on the Iowa City area. We have three murders and the two dead men are pretty closely linked. We think the third murder was committed to eliminate a witness that the killers didn’t know would be there.”

  “You want me to look at that list? I might have some ideas,” Burton said.

  “Sure. That’d be great,” Lucas said.

  Lucas went out to the truck and got the list, returned to the kitchen and handed it to Burton. She scanned it for a moment, smiled once, and said, “Gosh, I’d forgotten some of these people. Are they all still with the party?”

  “That’s what Grace Lawrence tells us, and so far, everybody we’ve talked to admits to being a member,” Lucas said.

  “Grace Lawrence,” Burton mused. “She was a crazy one. Her and that girlfriend of hers, Betsy—what was Betsy’s name?”

  She scanned the list again, and then said, “Betsy’s not here. She was a member, though. I mean, she joined after some of the people on this list.”

  “Huh. You think Grace might have left her off deliberately?” Lucas asked.

  “What do I know?” Burton asked. “Grace and Betsy hung out a lot, for a long time. We might have thought they were gay, except they kept coming around with these mountain-man boyfriends.”

  “What does that mean?” Lucas asked. “Mountain man?”

  “Oh, you know. Rural hippies,” Burton said. “They lived on a farm outside of Hills.”

  “Grace still lives in Hills,” Lucas said.

  “I think I heard that,” Burton said. “Anyway, she and Betsy were these latter-day hippies, peasant blouses over their perky little boobies and hair down to the cracks of their asses, guys had beards, and you’d go to a party at their place and the guys would be sharpening chain saws in the living room. Like they just happened to need to sharpen the saws during the party. My first husband, who was an actual farmer, you know, he used to laugh at them. Bunch of posers.”

  “You didn’t get along,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, I got along well enough with Grace and Betsy,” Burton said. “Damnit it, what was Betsy’s last name? Something unusual—it’s right on the tip of my tongue. I know one of the guys was named Harrison. Same as Harrison Ford. We went to see Return of the Jedi with them, when that movie came out.”

  “You say Grace was crazy?” Lucas asked.

  “She was always giving speeches about direct action. How we had to go to direct action. Direct action was never defined, but you know, we all had the feeling it was more than singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

  “If I get a chance, I’ll ask her about it,” Lucas said.

  Burton: “Instead of that huge list, you should get the names of the people who’d go to the meetings at Joe Likely’s place. That’s the real core of the party, what’s left of it.”

  “What meetings?” Lucas asked.

  “They have quarterly meetings at Joe’s place,” Burton said. “I used to get e-mails for them, but I didn’t go to the meetings anymore. Always the same thing, we gotta do this or that, and they never do this or that. I think the last one . . . let me check.” She led the way out of the kitchen to the front parlor, where an iMac sat on a repurposed dining table. She brought the computer up and went to her e-mail, scanned through it, said, “I never delete anything, I’ve got like fifteen million e-mails . . .” and the
n, “Here it is. June fourteenth. That was the last meeting.”

  “Two months ago.”

  “Yes. The next meeting would have been in September. If you can get a list of names at the last meeting, you’d have the real hard-core members. They’d all be close to Joe and Anson Palmer. Anson went to all of the meetings—they were the only people who’d talk to him.”

  “Huh. A list like that could be helpful,” Lucas said.

  —

  THEY CHATTED for a few more minutes, Lucas learned nothing more, gave her a card with a phone number, then went out to his truck and fired it up. Sat for a moment, then called Bell Wood. “What’s up?” Wood asked.

  “I heard Robertson was moved. You got any more news?”

  “Yeah, we talk to his partner every half hour or so,” Wood said. “He says Jerry’s pretty much out of it, because of the pain medication, but when he does come around, he’s coherent enough. He knows he was shot, he knows you were with him, doesn’t remember anything after he went down except that he kept getting gravel in his mouth.”

  “Then he’ll make it,” Lucas said.

  “Remains to be seen. One thing, he was shot with a solid core slug, like military ammo. That isn’t the most common thing. If he’d been shot with a hunting bullet, he’d be in a lot worse shape, getting hit in the lung like he was.”

  “Anything on the DNA from Grace Lawrence?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, I should have called you before this. We got it back a couple of hours ago, but with Jerry being shot and all, we weren’t thinking about it. Not her. No way. And nobody related to her.”

  “Damnit.”

  “Yeah. Too bad. I had hopes,” Wood said.

  “One additional thing on that dairy bomb deal,” Lucas said. “I talked to Sandra Burton a few minutes ago, and she said Grace was a little crazy back then, always calling for direct action. She also had a girlfriend named Betsy and the two of them lived with what this woman called ‘mountain-man boyfriends.’ She said the two women, Grace and Betsy, had hair down to the cracks of their asses and wore peasant blouses over their perky little boobies—her words, not mine—and the two guys had beards. Mountain-man beards. They lived on a farm outside of Hills.”