Extreme Prey (23 page)

“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.

U
nable 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 passing 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—nobody 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 glasses, 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 embarrassed, 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.

“I can do that,” Whitehead said.

Lucas started down the steps, then turned back. “Uh, Miz Whitehead . . . have you ever seen her sons?”

“Yes. Several times. Since they were small.”

“Does one of them have distinctive gray eyes?”

“That’d be Cole,” she said.

—

BACK IN HIS TRUCK,
his subconscious poked him again. That thing about Skira being on Lawrence’s computer list, but not on the printed one. That’s what he’d seen, but not recognized—and he’d not recognized the implications of that.

Purdy hadn’t been on the printed one, either—he’d found her by talking to the couple in What Cheer. He got the original list out
and checked it. As he thought, Purdy was missing. The list was alphabetized, and the name above where Purdy’s would have been was numbered 66, and the next one down was 68.

Lawrence had edited the paper list before she’d given it to him and had eliminated Purdy. He checked the point on the list where Skira should have been and found the numbers skipped again, from 77 to 79.

Lawrence had time to edit but not to renumber. He checked the rest of the list for skipped numbers and found none.

“Got her,” he said aloud.

He called Ford: “I think I got our woman. The white-haired lady.”

“Who is it?

“She’s named Marlys Purdy and she lives in . . . uh, let me look . . . Pella. Not right in Pella, but a few miles out of town. I suspect our sniper is one of her sons, named Cole.”

Lucas explained about the white hair and the change of hair color, and Ford said, “Okay, you maybe got her. I can’t leave here yet, but I’ll call Bell and get him to ship somebody out there. I assume you’re going?”

“Yes. Right now.”

—

LUCAS TOOK THE TRUCK
out to I-80 and headed west.

Fuckin’ Purdy.

He was about eighty-seven percent sure she was the right one—Pella was right where Kidd had thought the e-mails to Henderson might have come from—but the hair had fooled him: straight and
brown instead of white and curly, but how long, in this day and age, did it take to go from one to the other? Two hours in a beauty parlor? That much?

He’d been chumped: Lawrence had probably told her that he was coming and about his description of the woman they were hunting.

He was ten miles down the road when Bell Wood called. “I’m coming myself and bringing another guy. I’ve never shot anyone, and what the hell, this might be my chance.”

“Happy to have you.”

Wood told Lucas to follow his nav system into Pella. “It should bring you right down Main Street. When you get to Franklin, take a right for a block. On the corner of Franklin and First, you’ll see a windmill. I’ll meet you at the windmill.”

“The windmill.”

“Yeah. Great big full-sized windmill. There are some restaurants around there, and I missed lunch and now I’m going to miss dinner. Call me when you get close, and I’ll be standing under the windmill.”

—

THE RUN FROM WEST BRANCH
to Pella took ninety minutes. As soon as Lucas saw the Main Street sign, he called Wood and said, “I’m coming down Main.”

“We’re on First, getting a Coke. We’ll be at the mill in one minute.”

Lucas was three minutes away, and when he saw the windmill looming above the street, he saw Wood and another man standing on the corner, hot dogs in one hand, cups of Coke in the other. He
pulled into a parking space and got out. Wood came over, put the Coke on the hood of the truck, and shook hands. “Been a while,” he said. Wood introduced the other man as Sam Greer.

Greer, a tall, thin man who looked like he might run marathons, shook hands and said, “Your reputation precedes you.”

“Well, hell, nothing I can do about that,” Lucas said. “I’m in a rush, here, guys, but I need a couple of hot dogs and we gotta talk about how we’re gonna do this. If this is the sniper . . .”

“Well, we got the hot dog place,” Wood said. “I brought a rifle and some gear for you, in case you didn’t have it.”

“I used to have a .45,” Lucas said. “The Grinnell cops have it now. I haven’t had time to get it back.”

“We gotcha covered, then,” Wood said.

—

THEY GOT MORE HOT DOGS
and more Cokes, and talked about how they’d get to the Purdy property. Wood hadn’t had time to file for a search warrant, so they’d have to feel their way forward when they got to the farm. “If we think her son was the sniper, we’re investigating, not searching,” Wood said.

Lucas suggested that they begin by touching base with a neighbor, to ask about the gray-eyed son. “The one I saw was distinctly not gray-eyed.”

—

THE SUN WAS STILL
as much as an hour above the horizon, Lucas thought, as they trucked out toward the Purdy place, Lucas in the lead, Wood riding shotgun, Greer following in the state car.

They came over the top of a hill and Lucas said, “That’s the Purdy place, straight ahead, above the turn.” They were coming up to another house as he said it, and Lucas said, “I thought we could ask here.”

They passed a mailbox that said “Souther,” with a wooden sheep mounted above it, and turned down the long driveway.

A woman was crossing the drive, carrying a couple of buckets. When she saw them coming, she stopped, looked at them for a second, then hurried to the side of the driveway, put the buckets down, and ran into the house.

“Wonder what that was about?” Wood asked.

“Don’t know, but you might want to be ready,” Lucas said.

Wood slipped his pistol out of its holster, rolled his window down, and sat with the gun in his lap as Lucas pulled into the side yard, Greer behind them.

Then a man came out of the house, wearing coveralls and a Fender hat, and walked over to them. “Looks friendly enough,” Wood said.

Lucas got out of the truck and the man nodded and asked, “Who’re you guys?”

Lucas said, “We’re with the state Division of Criminal Investigation.”

Wood and Greer got out, Wood’s gun back in its holster, and Wood said, “I hope we didn’t startle your wife.”

“She’s shy,” Souther said. “I mean,
really
shy. Anyway, what’s up?”

Wood told Souther about the investigation, and as he did, the woman eased out of the house, and Souther held a finger up to
Wood, stopping him for a moment, and Souther called, “It’s okay, Janette. These folks are police officers.”

She drifted over, not looking at them, and Souther said, “So go on . . .”

Wood finished telling him about the investigation, and then Lucas said, “We think we need to talk to the Purdys. Marlys Purdy was described to us as a little heavy with white curly hair, which is right, but I saw her son, and he has blue eyes. The man we’re looking for was described as having very distinctive gray eyes . . . think it might be another son.”

From behind them, Janette Souther said, “Cole.”

Souther glanced at her and said, “There are two sons and that sure sounds like him—Cole Purdy. You hardly ever see Cole without his gun, not when he’s walking around on their land over there. You hear him shooting all the time. He’s not a bad guy, not that I’ve seen. All the Purdys work hard. They’re good neighbors.”

“Have you seen them today?” Greer asked.

“I haven’t,” Souther said.

Janette Souther said, looking away from them all, as though she were talking to a pasture, “I saw them go. Cole and Marlys in her truck.”

“White truck?” Lucas asked.

“No, it’s blue. Cole has a white truck, though,” Janette Souther said.

“When did they leave?” Wood asked.

“An hour ago.” Now she was looking at her feet. Then, “Jesse Purdy is in jail.”

Souther looked at his wife again and asked, “What? In jail?”

She nodded. “Amy told me.”

Souther turned back to Lucas, Wood, and Greer and said, “Amy’s the mail lady. She knows everything.”

Wood asked, “In jail in Pella? Does Pella have a jail?”

“A small one,” Souther said. “Mostly for overnights.”

Lucas said to Janette, “You’re saying they’re not home, Marlys and Cole, and Jesse, the blue-eyed one, is in jail in Pella.”

She said, “Yes.”

Wood said to Lucas, “Let’s run back into town, see what he has to say.”

Lucas nodded and asked Souther, “Do you have a phone? If you see them come back, could you call? We’re a little worried about Cole and his gun.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Souther said, as he slipped his phone out of his pocket. “Cole is . . . not quite right. He was in the National Guard and got sent to Iraq, and as I understand it, he was nearby when a couple of bombs went off—you know, those devices, whatever they call them.”

“Improvised Explosive Devices—IEDs,” Wood said. Wood was a major in the National Guard and had done a year in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. “I hate to hear that—that he’s hurt.”

“Yeah, that’s it, IEDs,” Souther said. “Anyway, he’s had some trouble ever since, with”—he waved his fingers at his brain—“his brain, I guess. I don’t know whether it’s physical or psychological, but he’s had his problems. Probably find out more from the VA.”

“We’ll check,” Wood said.

Souther and Lucas traded phone numbers and names. Lucas
cocked an eyebrow and asked, “David Souther? You’re not the poet, are you?”

Souther, surprised but pleased, asked, “How’d you know?”

“I got about three of your books, man,” Lucas said. “I collect poetry books. University of Chicago Press, right?”

“That’s right. Jeez, I never met anyone before, you know, who wasn’t on the poetry scene, who heard of me.”

“Well, now you have,” Lucas said. “‘Bobcats.’ That’s a great poem there. That’s probably my favorite. And ‘Winter Water.’”

—