Extreme Prey (20 page)

Staying focused on the spot, he led the sheriff and his deputies across the road, spread in a long skirmish line. Everyone had a powerful LED flashlight, three deputies had shotguns, one had a rifle. They found the sniper’s nest in a minute. The sheriff didn’t want to let anyone get right on it, not until they could set up a
formal crime-scene perimeter, but they spent a few minutes looking for an expended shell, and for blood, but found neither.

Lucas could see where the sniper had run through the field, knocking down or breaking some of the closely spaced cornstalks, and one of the deputies got a roll of blue tape and they marked out the trail as they followed it through the corn to a creek, and then along the creek to a side road. The trail disappeared at the road, but one of the deputies walked across the road, down into the roadside ditch and up the other side, and found vehicle-crushed weeds behind a stand of creek-side trees.

“Parked here, walked back to his spot, and waited. He knew you were coming, and he probably knew what your truck looked like,” the sheriff said. “Shot the guy who got out of the driver’s side. Thought he shot you.”

—

THEY WALKED BACK
through the field, staying clear of the sniper’s path. The sheriff said, “We’ll be back in daylight, we’ll go over every inch of it. In the meantime, we’ll talk to the neighbors, see if anybody saw a vehicle back there.”

—

BACK AT BURTON’S HOUSE
, Sandra Burton said her husband and his partner were truckers on a West Coast run, out on I-80, and wouldn’t be back for three to five days, depending on their loads and destinations. They had three daughters, no sons. The daughters were all grown, two moved away, one living in Grinnell.

She’d been a member of the PPPI since the eighties, she said,
but had had little direct contact with other members for a long time.

“Don never was a member. In fact, he was never a farmer. He’s my second husband. My first husband
was
a farmer, until we lost the farm. That’s when I got involved in the PPPI, but after, you know, twenty years, it started to seem pointless.”

“Why pointless?”

She shrugged and said, “Farmers, the ones that survived, were getting rich when the Chinese came online, and the fire died out. I wasn’t going to get the old farm back no matter what I did. Me’n Don have a quarter section here, a hundred and sixty acres, we rent it out, but we only paid two hundred and forty thousand for it back in the nineties. Now, it might be worth a million-five. So, I don’t feel like I got that much of a complaint anymore. But there are some people who never did get back—like my ex-husband. He’s still working in Des Moines, at the air-conditioner factory.”

—

THE SHERIFF SENT
his deputies to knock on doors and Lucas showed his list of names to Burton, who recognized many of them. “I haven’t seen any of them in years, though, you know, I’m still on some e-mail lists. We had a PPPI party here one summer, oh, a long time ago. A lot of people came—I couldn’t tell you who they all were.”

“But a lot of the people on the list knew where you lived. Had seen the place,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but the garage is new, that’s only five or six years old. You said he mentioned the garage, and they wouldn’t know about that.”

“He’d cruised the place, setting it up,” Lucas said. “He might already have been in the field when he called. He might have been looking at it.”

—

BELL WOOD AND ANOTHER MAN
were getting out of an SUV when Lucas got back to the hospital. Lucas went to shake hands and Wood introduced the other man as Anthony Pole, head of the DCI. Pole was a blocky, crew-cut man in a brown suit, with tortoiseshell glasses, and he wasn’t interested in shaking hands. He snarled, “I knew having you interfere was a bad idea. Now you got one of our guys shot.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Lucas said.

“What!” Pole started to move at Lucas, but saw something in Lucas’s eyes that made him take a step back. Bell Wood got between them and Lucas growled, “Stay away from me, asshole.”

He brushed by Pole and went into the hospital, where he saw the nurse practitioner who’d patched up his face. “What do you hear?”

“They’re still working on him. We took in a couple of Pepsis a few minutes ago, for the surgeons. They said they’re gonna be a while. I think he’s going to make it, the way they were talking. Unless, you know, he has a stroke. I think that’s the big danger now.”

—

LUCAS LEFT
the emergency suite and found an empty conference room, shut the door, got on the phone to Mitford, told him about the shooting, asked him to pass the word on to Henderson and to Bowden’s people, then called Weather to tell her.

“You should come home—this really isn’t your business anymore,” she said.

“Can’t now. Not with Robertson down,” Lucas said.

“How bad are your cuts?” she asked.

“Nothing. Little dings,” Lucas said. Weather did plastic surgery. “No scars, you won’t have to get involved.”

“Lucas . . .”

“I’ll call you again tonight.”

—

ROBERTSON WAS IN
the operating room for three and a half hours. Lucas sat in a corner of the emergency area, doodling on his legal pad, trying to think how they could have been set up. Somebody he talked to must have done it, or somehow enabled it, either consciously or not: the shooter had his phone number. He’d given his card and phone number to twenty people and somebody must have passed it on. He had a good ear for voices and he hadn’t recognized the caller who sent him to the Burton place.

He kept coming back to Grace Lawrence. He’d spoken to her several times now, and she was close to the center of the whole PPPI group. In fact, she
was
the center, now that Likely had been killed. He knew two things for sure about Lawrence: (1) she wasn’t the woman Henderson had spoken to, who’d set off the whole investigation, and (2) she hadn’t killed Likely. Those two things seemed to take her out of the loop.

Of course, he thought, she could be guiding the other group, the shooters; she could have sent them to Likely’s place, and then to Anson Palmer’s. Or she could have sent them to Likely’s, while
she took care of Palmer herself. She could be the ringmaster in the whole conspiracy.

He’d have to think about that, when he had time. She’d seemed far too mellow for a killer, a leftover hippie working her garden and volunteering at the elementary school. The school principal said she’d been volunteering for years, so it wasn’t an act.

—

BELL WOOD CAME OVER,
a big bluff man with a mustache and a gap between his two square front teeth; he wore round gold-rimmed glasses like Teddy Roosevelt. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and nudged the leg of Lucas’s chair. “Sorry about Pole. He can be an asshole.”

“I picked up on that,” Lucas said, looking up. “You in decent shape with him?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m just a cop. If you’re just a cop, he won’t fuck with you too much. He’s more engaged with the politics of it all.”

“I feel pretty bad about Robertson,” Lucas said. “They shot him because they thought he was me.”

“Can’t feel bad about not getting shot,” Wood said. “Shit just happens.”

—

ROBERTSON CAME OUT
of the operating room after eleven o’clock and was taken to an intensive care unit. “We’ll keep him here until we’re sure he’s stable, then we’ll move him to Mercy in Des Moines,” the lead surgeon told the waiting cops. “He’s obviously in critical condition, but unless we have some new event—we’re most
concerned about blood clots resulting in a stroke—we think he’ll make it. If he’d gotten here five minutes later, he would have died.”

He wouldn’t be talking for a while, the surgeon said—they’d need to keep him sedated. When Robertson was plugged into the ICU, Lucas said good-bye to Bell Wood and told the sheriff he’d like to watch the site search the next morning.

The sheriff said he’d be welcome, and when Lucas walked out, he found two TV vans waiting outside, and saw Pole talking to one of the reporters, under the lights. Lucas went by without looking at any of them. He’d checked out of the hotel that morning, so he had his clothes with him, and went to find a room.

He’d begun to settle into a Comfort Inn when he took a late call from Governor Henderson. “I spoke to Bowden. She spoke to some guy named Pole . . .”

“He’s the DCI director. He’s here in Grinnell because of the shooting,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. Well, he told her that she should go ahead and do the walk at the fair, but plan to cut it down to four blocks. He says there’s a stretch where there’s no long sight lines that she could be shot from—they’ll have it all covered. It’s not the whole traditional parade-route walk, but it’s long enough that they can do all the media shots.”

“Not a good idea,” Lucas said.

“I agree, but that’s what she’s going to do. This Pole guy told her that he holds you responsible for the shooting of his agent.”

“Right.”

“Wanna know what she said?” Henderson asked.

“Sure.”

“She said, and I quote, ‘You’d probably be better off holding the sniper responsible, don’t you think? I certainly would.’”

“Good for her,” Lucas said.

“But this short-walk thing . . . I dunno.”

“Better than a long one,” Lucas said.

“I guess. I’ll be right behind her,” Henderson said. “If she called it off, that’d give cover for the rest of us to call it off. But if she goes, I gotta go.”

“That’s, uh . . .”

“Stupid, I know. You wouldn’t have a spare bulletproof vest in your truck, would you? And maybe a helmet?”

“No, I . . . Goddamnit, I gotta get these guys,” Lucas said. “I don’t think anyone else will.”

“That’s why I called you in the first place,” Henderson said. “I don’t think they will, either. But I think you will.”

O
n 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 drove 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.”