Extreme Prey: A Novel Part 23

"Roll her," Ford said. They got her untangled from the table, still stunned by the blow to the head, and Ford cuffed her hands behind her back. He asked Lucas, "You okay?"

"Yeah. Shot me right in the heart," Lucas said.

He peeled off the hunting s.h.i.+rt, then the bulletproof vest beneath it, and pulled up the thin white T-s.h.i.+rt under the vest. A red spot the size of his palm was blooming to the left of his heart.

"That's gonna make a mark," Ford said.

"I've been more bruised up and cut up in a week in Iowa than in ten years in Minnesota," Lucas said, touching his black eye, and the cuts beside it. He still had tape on the gla.s.s cuts on the other side. Then, "Let's get her up."

They got Lawrence sitting in a chair, still dazed, and Lucas brought the table upright, and his own chair. Ford said to Lawrence, "You have the right to remain silent . . ."

Lucas watched Lawrence's face as Ford read her rights, saw her eyes clearing out. When he'd finished with the rights, Ford asked her if she understood what he'd read. She nodded and Ford said, "I'm placing you under arrest for attempted murder."

Lucas said to Ford, "Why don't you go outside and call this in-see what Bell Wood wants us to do."

"Good idea," Ford said, and he might as well have winked at Lucas as he stepped away. And to Lawrence: "Hey, Miz Lawrence? You're gonna need a new door."

- WHEN HE WAS GONE, Lucas said to Lawrence, "I'm not recording this and I'm not a cop."

"You're a lying a.s.shole fascist," she said. Her head was down, her teeth clenched.

"I can't arrest you, I can't do anything to you, Grace. But-I don't care about the dairy that you and Betsy blew up, I don't care too much about the fact that you tried to murder me, since you didn't get it done," Lucas said. "What I care about is, you're part of a conspiracy to kill Michaela Bowden. I need to stop that. Here's the thing-Ford's gonna get you for attempted murder or aggravated a.s.sault, which means you're going to do time. How much time you do, though, depends on whether you cooperate now. We can always reduce the charge if you cooperate, if you just tell me-"

"f.u.c.k you," she said. "You . . . you kept coming back to me, and I got you your boxes, and then you tried to s.e.xually a.s.sault me, which is why you kept coming back, and why I shot you . . ."

Lucas said, "That's not bad-but n.o.body'll believe you. I came here with Ford. He was right outside the door the whole time, listening. To get back to the dairy bombing-there's menstrual fluid on the motel sheets, along with some s.e.m.e.n. When we grab Betsy and Harrison-we know where they are, by the way-the DNA will match, and one of them will give up you and your boyfriend to get a reduced sentence for themselves. Looked at from the other direction, you could give up Betsy and Harrison and your ex-boyfriend, and cut a whole lot of years off your own sentence. We need to know who's hunting Bowden. That'll also give us the sniper who shot Robertson."

"f.u.c.k Robertson," she snarled. "If there'd been a witness here, I'd have sued you for a million dollars for what that fascist f.a.ggot did to me."

"I don't think you want to spend time around any kind of court, Grace," Lucas said.

He sat there looking at her for a moment, and she suddenly began to cry, her shoulders shaking against the cuffs behind her back. "My house . . . my garden . . ."

"Shouldn't have shot me," Lucas said. "I suspect you're the one who killed Anson Palmer, too, so we're going to look for any piece of DNA we can find there."

"f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you . . ."

"Give me the G.o.dd.a.m.n names, Grace," Lucas said. "C'mon. Please. Talk to me. Save yourself."

"f.u.c.k you."

- FORD CAME BACK, looked at Lucas, asked, "Get a name?"

"Not unless it's 'f.u.c.k you,'" Lucas said.

- THEY MOVED a few feet away, past the doorway to the kitchen, where they could watch Lawrence as she sat behind the table on a wooden chair. Ford said quietly, "We've got the Johnson County sheriff on the way and we'll get a crime-scene crew here quick enough. Since she shot you and this is a crime scene, we can tear the place apart. We won't need a search warrant. If you want to take a look around . . ."

"I want to take a look at her computer, for sure. It may be pa.s.sword-protected-if we could get that computer guy down here from Iowa City, he cracked Anson Palmer's pa.s.sword in about five minutes."

"I'll call him. You okay?"

"Yeah. Almost peed my pants when she came up with that old revolver-thought it might be a .357. That wouldn't have been good."

"No kiddin'. We'd be sc.r.a.ping your kidneys off the back of that vest."

- THE SHERIFF'S DEPUTIES came in with lights and sirens and Ford went out to meet them. Lucas stepped over to Lawrence and said, "I'm not gonna plead with you anymore, but I'm curious about one thing. What were you going to do with my body?"

She looked up and said, "I hadn't worked that out." She thought for a moment, then said, "I would have waited until night. I've got a wheelbarrow and I would have had your car and keys. I know a place where I could have parked you by the river. They wouldn't have found you for a week."

"How would you have gotten home?" Lucas asked.

She thought about that for a bit, then said, "Bicycle. I would have thrown my bike in the back of the car."

- THE BACK DOOR, what was left of it, sc.r.a.ped open again, and they could hear boot steps on the stoop, and Lucas said, "This is it, Grace. Who's going after Bowden? Give me something that'll give you a break."

She shook her head. "f.u.c.k you."

- THE COPS TOOK her out, and on the way she cried out again, "My house," and then she was gone. With the silence settling on him, Lucas looked around the sweet-smelling kitchen, the kitchen that smelled of fresh bread and lettuce, and thought about all those "f.u.c.k yous." She hadn't, he realized, ever denied knowing about the conspiracy pointed at Bowden. She'd simply said, "f.u.c.k you." And that, Lucas thought, meant that she knew something.

That he'd stepped on one end of the conspiracy thread.

- THE COMPUTER GUY from Iowa City arrived an hour later, looked at Lawrence's computer and cracked the pa.s.sword five minutes later.

"Must have sky-high rates if you only get paid for five minutes at a time," Lucas said, as the other man packed up his little tool kit.

"My rates are only middling," the guy said. "But I charge day rates, like photographers. Use me for six hours, day rate. Use me for five minutes, day rate."

"Ah. What happens when somebody refuses to pay a day rate?"

The guy smiled and said, "They don't do that, you know, if they want to stay online."

- WHEN LUCAS FIRST GOT a list of the members.h.i.+p from Lawrence, she'd plugged in a thumb drive that she kept in an office supply box on the table. He thought he'd look at it first: plugged in the drive, found the members.h.i.+p list and a hundred files of new releases and PPPI position papers. He scanned them quickly; not much of interest in the position papers, but a quick look at the members.h.i.+p list turned up, to his surprise, Betsy Skira's name, address, e-mail, and phone number. He checked Lawrence's e-mail and found two e-mails to Skira. Neither involved the PPPI-they were merely e-mail visits, plans to get together for lunch.

Skira hadn't been on the list that she'd given him. Lawrence had tried to keep her friend out of any investigation. She hadn't done it while Lucas was watching her print it, though, so she must have done it earlier. Anson Palmer, Lucas thought, had called her to warn her that he was coming.

Lucas set the thumb drive aside and went through Lawrence's e-mail, looking for correspondence involving the June meeting at Likely's house. There was lots of it, but all but two e-mails about the meeting were outgoing, routine notices of time and place.

Of the incoming two, George Spate said he wouldn't be able to attend, because of medical problems. Lucas checked Robertson's interviews, and found Spate's name, but he hadn't yet been interviewed. He lived in the town of Fairfax, a few miles outside Cedar Rapids, and about a half hour away. The other one, a Marcia Boone, lived in New Sharon, a little less than an hour and a half away. Robertson had talked to her.

Lucas called Spate, but there was no answer. Boone, on the other hand, picked up on the first ring. Lucas identified himself and Boone blurted, "I felt so bad about Jerry. I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the news."

"We think he's going to be all right," Lucas said. "Listen, we need some help in finding the sniper who shot him. Did you go to a meeting at Joe Likely's place in June?"

"Yes, I did," she said. "I went every three months. Why?"

"We really need the names of the people who went," Lucas said. "Do you remember who was there?"

"Same people who were there every time," she said. "Although, quite a few people have dropped out. More would have come in September, for the annual barbecue."

"Who are those people?" Lucas asked. "Could you give me their names?"

"Well, I guess . . ."

- SHE GAVE HIM twelve names. Scanning down the list, Lucas figured that he and Robertson and the others had interviewed all but three of them, because most of the people on the list lived around Iowa City and Mount Pleasant. Of the people on the list, he knew that Grace Lawrence hadn't killed Likely, because she'd been at the school, and Marlys Purdy hadn't killed Anson Palmer, because neither she nor her son would have had time to commit the murder and get home before Lucas arrived to interview her.

But then . . . He scratched his forehead.

If there were two killers-and he now knew that Lawrence could kill-then Purdy, or for that matter, any one of the people who didn't live too far from Likely's, could have been the killer. He went to his map of Iowa, where he'd plotted the PPPI member locations, and drew a circle around those who could have killed Likely between the time Lucas had left and the probable killers had left.

The circle made him grin, but not a happy grin: it included almost everyone.

But he'd missed something. There was something in the papers or on the computer that should have given him a name, or at least an idea. He'd seen it, but it hadn't registered, except subconsciously. What was it?

He dug at it, but nothing came up. Lucas looked at his watch: 4:45.

- FORD CAME BACK: "We need a quick statement and to start processing the place."

"The statement's gotta be quick," Lucas said, checking his watch again. Now 4:48. Time was slipping away. There were, what, seventeen hours before Bowden started walking down the street at the state fair?

No time.

TWENTY-THREE.

Unable to think of anything better to do, Lucas left Hills and headed north and a bit east to the town of West Branch. He wanted to look at Gloria Whitehead, one of the three people, and the only woman, who'd been at the June meeting at Likely's and who had not yet been interviewed. He let the truck's nav system get him there, while he picked at his subconscious, trying to think what he might have seen, and missed, at Lawrence's house.

A half hour after leaving Hills, he was pa.s.sing a bunch of signs advertising Herbert Hoover's birthplace, which was apparently in West Branch. Even if he had time, he wouldn't have stopped: his interest in Herbert Hoover couldn't be characterized as minuscule, because it wasn't that large, though West Branch itself seemed pleasant enough.

Gloria Whitehead lived in an older, neatly kept two-story white house on North Fifth Street, almost a duplicate of Lawrence's house in Hills.

He parked in the shade of a curbside maple tree and walked up the front sidewalk to Whitehead's house, stopped to wipe off the sheen of sweat that had instantly appeared on his forehead-n.o.body likes to talk to a sweaty stranger-and climbed up on the porch and knocked on the screen door. The interior door was open wide and a woman called, "Coming . . ."

She took her time, clumping through the house, and when she got to the door, a dishcloth in her hands, Lucas asked, "Miz Whitehead?"

"Yes?" Whitehead was a plump middle-aged woman with curly white hair, rimless gla.s.ses, and a friendly smile, almost precisely as described by Elmer Henderson.

Lucas explained his mission, asked if she could add to the list of people who'd been at Likely's meeting in June. She checked his list, then shook her head. "That's about it, I think that's everybody," she said. "I'm sorry I couldn't help."

"That's okay," Lucas said. "Had to check."

He walked back to the truck, called Neil Mitford. "Where are you?"

"On the bus. Half hour west of Des Moines," Mitford said.

"Is the governor with you? I need to talk to him," Lucas said.

"Yeah, he's right here. Hang on."

Henderson came up a few seconds later: "What's up?"

"This middle-aged woman you saw, with the curly white hair . . . she didn't have an artificial leg, did she?"

"What? An artificial leg?"

"Yeah, you know. A prosthetic. Plastic," Lucas said.

"I probably would have mentioned that if she had," Henderson said, after a long pause.

"Yeah, I thought you probably would have," Lucas said. "Sorry to have bothered you, Governor."

He hung up and pulled away from the curb. As he did, he saw Whitehead standing by the door, watching him go. He twiddled his fingers at her, and she lifted a hand, and he drove to the end of the block.

Where his subconscious poked him.

- A COUPLE OF YEARS EARLIER he'd broken a case in which a man was mistakenly identified by several different people as a person of interest. He'd found the right man, a serial killer, by showing a photo of the wrong man to a group of people in a grocery store, and asking, "Who do you know who looks like this?"

He thought for a moment, then turned around and drove back to Whitehead's house, stopped, walked to the door, and knocked again.

"Coming . . ." Whitehead clumped back to the door and said, "Hi, again."

"Hi. Listen, this is going to sound strange, but was there anybody at the Likely meeting who looks like you?" Lucas asked.

"You mean, with a fake leg?"

"No, no, no . . ." Lucas was a little embarra.s.sed, without knowing why, since she wasn't. "I mean, a woman with curly white hair, about your build, about your age."

"Well, Marlys Purdy, of course. I thought you'd interviewed her," Whitehead said.

"I thought . . . I mean, she has brown hair."

"You've got the wrong Purdy, then," Whitehead said. "Marlys's hair is as white as a snowflake. From the waist up, we look like twins."

"Really," Lucas said. "You don't know if she has children, do you?"

"She has two grown boys. I have a couple of grown girls and we joked about getting them together."

Lucas said, "Really," again, and then, "Miz Whitehead, please don't tell anyone about our conversation. It's really important to keep it to yourself."

"I can do that, at least for a while," she said. "How long do I have to keep my mouth shut?"

"Let's say a week," Lucas suggested.