Extreme Prey (17 page)

S
ometime during the night, Lucas, in a half-waking, half-dream state, thought about/dreamed about
connections
, and woke the next morning thinking about the web that connected the Joseph Likely and the Anson Palmer killings.

C
onnections.

All kinds of connections, in time and space and in personal relationships.

He’d realized the day before that the people he’d interviewed that afternoon couldn’t have killed Anson Palmer, because they wouldn’t have had
time
to drive home afterward. Didn’t matter about motive or personal feelings or any of that, because they were physically disconnected by distance.

The times between Lucas’s visits to Likely and to Palmer, and their murders, were very short.

Connections
also involved personal aspects. Tom and Mary Moller, the What Cheer couple who’d turned him on to Marlys Purdy, said that they hadn’t talked to Purdy in years. Lucas could probably check that if he wished to, but, basically, he believed
them: that meant that the personal connection between them and Purdy was tenuous. They didn’t talk, didn’t run into each other in town, didn’t visit, didn’t maintain a tight, intimate relationship.

The same would be true of the Mollers and Likely and Palmer—they’d never run into each other, unless they intended to, didn’t chat, wouldn’t know much about their respective psychological makeups. Wouldn’t have a feel for whether their counterparts were really trustworthy.

—

THAT WOULDN’T WORK
for the killer, Lucas thought. The killer or killers would have fairly intimate ties with their victims: there should be phone calls, e-mails, traces of face-to-face encounters between them.

If Joseph Likely’s murder was tied into Lucas’s interview with Likely, and he thought it was, then somebody had found out about the interview almost immediately after it happened and had quickly acted on that. How had they learned about the interview? Probably because Likely told them, or Likely had told someone who’d immediately passed the word along.

The killer had seen some kind of risk in Likely, and so eliminated him . . . had gotten the word, thought it over, planned the killing, and carried it out, all within a few hours. Conversely, Likely probably hadn’t seen the risk and had considered the killer a friend, someone he trusted. He’d let the killer in the house, hadn’t tried to defend himself, probably hadn’t even seen the murder coming.

The same thing applied to Anson Palmer. Somebody had seen a risk in Palmer and had moved quickly and decisively to eliminate
him after Lucas’s visit. How had they learned about that visit? Probably because Palmer had told them. Palmer, like Likely, had let the killer in the house, hadn’t tried to defend himself.

The killer was somebody near the core of the PPPI, and, Lucas suspected, probably lived close enough to Likely and Palmer that he/she encountered them frequently and had some degree of intimacy with them both. Someone that Palmer and Likely would both confide in.

That mostly applied to people who lived around Iowa City.

Again, he thought about Grace Lawrence. But
time and distance
: Lawrence said she’d been at a school activity the night Likely was killed that would have totally covered the time between Lucas’s visit and the murders. She couldn’t have done it . . . if she were telling the truth.

He could check that and would. Once he’d eliminated the people who couldn’t have done the murders, he’d be close to the one who did.

—

BELL WOOD CALLED
while he was shaving:

“Jesus, you really set off a shit-storm this morning,” he said. He sounded amused. “The director sent out a memo to everyone yesterday afternoon, telling us that we weren’t cooperating with you, no way, no how. This morning I get a clarifying memo saying we
are
cooperating with you, in every way possible. The rumor is, he got his ass handed to him by the governor, in person.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas lied, “but I’m happy I’m working with you guys again.”

“Shoot, you’re not working with
us
, we’re working with
you
,” Wood said. “Robertson got the word, he’ll be calling. The question is, what do you want us to do?”

Lucas told him about his calculation of the night before and his conclusion that the killer was tied tightly to the small core of PPPI members between Iowa City and Mount Pleasant. “That includes Grace Lawrence, who lives in between the two places. Speaking of Grace, what’s happening with the DNA analysis on her hair?”

“Under way. Pissed off some lab people because there’s a hell of a backlog and we jumped the line,” Wood said. “But we’re working it around the clock. We should have something back the day after tomorrow, roughly seventy-two hours after it came through the door.”

“Great. Anyway, my feeling is that we should forget about that whole long membership list—most of them aren’t all that active—and focus on Iowa City. It’d be good if we could pull your other guys in here and make multiple visits to the people we know. Ask the same questions over and over. Put on the squeeze. Sweat them.”

“I’ll talk to Robertson right now and we’ll have two more investigators there this afternoon,” Wood said.

“Somebody said we’d have four more . . .”

“That was before the bureaucratic shit hit the fan,” Wood said. “The director is showing that he still has some clout in this and has decided that four total should be enough . . . that’s counting you.”

“Figures,” Lucas grumbled. “All right. I want to spend some time at the two crime scenes we have. I need access to Likely’s and
Palmer’s telephones and e-mail. I might need somebody to break passwords and get me into hard drives.”

“Okay. I’ll check around about the computer, the Iowa City cops should know somebody who could handle that. Can’t send one of our own computer people without inflaming the red-ass.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said.

“I will—and listen. From what I’m hearing around here, the governor was almost on his knees, pleading with Bowden to go to the fair. He doesn’t want her people telling the media that she’s skipping the fair because she’s been told she might be assassinated,” Wood said. “The gov would consider that a blot on the whole state. He supposedly told Bowden that he could guarantee her safety. Half the highway patrol will be there and they’re talking about shortening the candidate walk . . . Anyway, she’s going to the fair.”

—

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.”