Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  Click.

  Lucas walked away, because he had no choice. He had learned one thing: she wasn’t the woman Henderson had seen; she was as tall and thin as a stork.

  —

  AT THE THIRD HOUSE, another woman answered the door, but he wasn’t looking for a woman, he was looking for a man named Lance R. Mitchell. The woman who answered said she was Mitchell’s partner, which Lucas took to mean that they weren’t married. She said, “Oh, for cripes sakes. Lance isn’t a member of the PPPI. Those people are crazy.”

  “Can you tell me when he’ll be home?” Lucas asked.

  “His last seminar ends at five, he’ll be home at twenty after,” she said. “If you come back, you’ll be wasting your time.”

  “He’s a student?”

  “No, he’s a professor. Well, an adjunct professor.”

  —

  AT THE FOURTH HOUSE, he was told that Toby Hopkins had moved.

  —

  AT THE FIFTH, Barry Wright told him that he really didn’t know many of the party members by both first and last name, and he hadn’t been a member long enough to know who had kids and who didn’t. “I have to tell you, I’m really not happy with the idea of cooperating with an intelligence-gathering op.”

  “We’re not an intelligence-gathering operation, we’re looking for a woman who might present a real danger to Mrs. Bowden,” Lucas said.

  “Well, whatever you get from me will go into a file, won’t it? That file will be shared all over the government intelligence agencies. Next thing I know, I’m on the no-fly list.”

  Lucas was getting pissed: “You overestimate your importance. I’m a guy from Minnesota, trying to find a woman who belongs to the PPPI.”

  Wright was chewing on a stalk of celery and he didn’t stop chewing while talking. “Well, whether or not you’re telling the truth, that’s what you’d say. I have to tell you, you’ve got the odor of federal intelligence about you.”

  “I was a cop in Minnesota, but I’m not even that anymore,” Lucas said.

  “A cop from Minnesota? In that suit? You need a better act, man.”

  Wright shut the door.

  —

  NOBODY ANSWERED at the sixth house.

  —

  At THE SEVENTH HOUSE, Cheryl Lane never gave him a chance to speak. She answered the door and said, “A friend of mine said you’d come snooping around. I don’t believe anything about your story and so as soon as I saw your Mercedes stop outside, I called nine-one-one and reported you. The police will have a car here in a minute.”

  “Reported me for what?” Lucas asked.

  “Prowling. What right do you have to come to my door and demand information?”

  “Miz Lane, I haven’t even had a chance to open my mouth . . .”

  At that moment, a police car turned the corner a block away, and she said, looking over his shoulder, “Here they come. You’re in trouble now, boy.”

  Lucas looked, then stepped back and called Bell Wood on his cell phone. Wood picked up and Lucas gave him a ten-second summary of the problem, and Wood laughed and said, “Don’t run. You’ll only look even more guilty. They might shoot you in the back.”

  “Can you help me out?” Lucas asked.

  “Help’s on the way, babe. I got the Iowa City chief on speed dial.”

  The cop car pulled up behind Lucas’s truck and two cops got out and headed across the lawn to Lane’s doorstep. She stepped out on the stoop with her arms crossed.

  The younger of the two cops, who had a Ranger-style haircut, almost shaved on the side, a half-inch long on top, looked at Lucas and said, “Come down from there.” He had his hand on his pistol and had flipped off the retainer strap.

  Lucas stepped down and said, “You’ll be getting a call from the Division of Criminal Investigation in the next couple of minutes.”

  “Yeah, right. Assume the position. On the porch railing,” the younger cop said.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

  He turned and put his hands on the railing, and from above them, Lane said, “I believe his story is all a ruse. He’s looking for women home alone. When he saw you coming, he called one of his accessories.”

  The younger of the two cops was giving Lucas a thorough rub, and then the older cop went to his phone, and a few seconds later said, “Knock it off, Rob.”

  “What?” The younger cop had a hand in Lucas’s crotch and didn’t stop.

  “I said, KNOCK IT OFF.”

  “What’re you talking about?” the younger cop asked, turning to his partner.

  “It’s the chief. One of the top people in the Division of Criminal Investigation called and said not to mess with this guy.”

  “You sure it’s him they’re talking about?”

  The older cop held the phone out: “Here. It’s the chief. Tell him you think he’s full of shit.”

  “No, that’s okay,” the younger cop said.

  “No, you talk to him,” the older cop said. He spoke into the phone again. “Hey, Chief, Bud thinks you’re full of shit about this, so I’m going to let you talk to him. Yeah. I’m giving him the phone now.”

  The older cop gave Bud the phone, and that got straightened out and Lane disappeared inside the house and the older cop asked Lucas, “You really think somebody’s going to try to shoot Bowden?”

  “I’m not sure what to think,” Lucas said. “But that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Jesus. Well, good luck, man. Sorry about all of this,” he said.

  Lucas nodded at him and said to the younger cop, “If you think that haircut makes you look like a Ranger, it doesn’t. It makes you look like a fuckin’ whorehouse doorknob.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you, too,” the younger cop said.

  The older cop said, “Whorehouse doorknob? That’s good. I’ll have to remember that.”

  —

  THERE WAS NO RESPONSE at the eighth house, so Lucas circled back to the third house, Lance Mitchell’s, where Mitchell was unloading a sack of groceries in the driveway. His partner came out to listen in, as Lucas explained what he was doing.

  “Wait a minute—you’re telling me that Joe Likely was murdered?” Mitchell asked.

  “Yes, last night, along with his girlfriend,” Lucas said.

  “Aw, shit.” Mitchell put the sack of groceries down on the driveway. “Aw, goddamnit.” He looked at his partner and said, “There goes the book.”

  Lucas: “What book?”

  Mitchell said, “Look, uh, Luke, I’d actually give you whatever I know, but I don’t know much about the general membership. I know about five people in the PPPI—I’m doing a book on radical Midwestern farm organizations and that’s the only reason I’m on the membership list. To get access. I only talk to the leadership and the real activists. I don’t know about children or anything. I’d help if I could, I’m a Democrat and a Bowden supporter.”

  “You don’t have any membership lists or anything?”

  “No, but I could print out my manuscript for you, what there is of it,” he said. “Probably seventy pages. There are some names in there. If you’ve been pushing this, you’ll already know most of them.”

  “If you could do that, I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said.

  “Come on in.”

  As they were going in, Mitchell’s partner said to him, “You know, this isn’t the end of the book. You lose Likely as a source, but you gain a murder. A double murder. You were worried that the book was a little . . . dull. This could fix that. You could open with it. Or bookend it—open and close.”

  Mitchell slapped his forehead. “You’re right! I hadn’t thought of that. Open and close!”

  “If it bleeds, it leads,” she said.

  Yeah, that’s really great, Lucas thought, as he followed them inside.

  —


  THAT EVENING, before going back to the no-response houses, Lucas skimmed Mitchell’s manuscript. He noted three names that weren’t on the PPPI membership list he’d gotten from Grace Lawrence, but that had a relationship with the party.

  The most interesting part of the manuscript was the interview with Lawrence, who, when asked about the use of violence by radical members of the various farm movements, had asked, in return, “Do you think violence would be illegitimate if used, say, against Adolf Hitler? We were engaged in warfare against the ruling plutocracy, and I’m sad to say that, all in all, we lost.”

  From Mitchell’s manuscript:

  Ms. Lawrence was involved in the protests around the Lennett Valley Dairy controversy. She had been injured in a hiking accident a few days before the dairy was bombed, killing three people, and was not there when the bomb was detonated.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, maybe I could have helped in some way. I was horrified by what happened. Our protests had been largely peaceful, except when the police would intervene with their fascist military tactics, beating innocent, non-resisting protesters. Although I had nothing to do with the bomb—never would have had anything to do with a bomb—I understand the motives of the people who built it. I have to say, even after all these years, that the real tragedy was not that people died, but that they were the wrong people.”

  Ms. Lawrence said that from the present perspective, the bombing was both the peak of the farm protest movement and the beginning of the end. “That’s the other tragedy. Farm families are peace-loving people. When that bomb went off, they began to withdraw from the protest movement. The bomb was an isolated incident, of no real importance when compared to the overall disaster of the economic collapse. It was apparently intended to galvanize the movement, but it had exactly the opposite effect: it killed it.”

  Lucas felt a tingle when he read the quote, because it suggested that some people were legitimate targets for terrorism, which was not an ordinary way of thinking; and Lawrence in some way thought the deaths of three people were “of no real importance.” He closed his eyes and remembered the woman’s face, and her garden, and a feeling of hippie coquettishness, and couldn’t put that together with her comments. Had she fooled them, and had it been deliberate?

  He went to his laptop and entered “Lennett Valley Dairy bomb” and found nothing but short references to stories in the Des Moines Register and other Iowa newspapers, but there were no links—he couldn’t get at the stories themselves.

  He sent an e-mail to Bell Wood, asking if he could call the Register and get the story e-mailed back to him, if it were available electronically.

  Grace Lawrence.

  Huh. Did she have children? Sons?

  He went to Google Images, searching for Grace Lawrence, and found hundreds of Grace Lawrences. He scanned the images, and on the second page, toward the bottom, found a picture of his Grace Lawrence, a few years younger, with two other women, standing in a school gymnasium, getting citizenship awards.

  He called Neil Mitford, who answered on the second ring: “Find them?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to send you a photo, by e-mail. Right now. I want you to stick it in front of the governor’s nose. Ask him if this is the woman who spoke to him.”

  “Send it.”

  Lucas sent it; four or five minutes later, he got an answer: “No. That’s definitely not her. Not even close.”

  —

  HE HAD TWO MORE HOUSES to check on his Iowa City list. The first was still unoccupied, no lights, no sign of life, several bills and an advertising circular in the mailbox. Maybe on vacation. Or could be out stalking Bowden—no way to tell.

  His last stop was with a Bert Hughes, who told Lucas that he hadn’t been to a meeting in a few years and that he’d softened his earlier radicalism. “My folks were farmers and they had a terrible time back in the eighties. They didn’t lose the farm, but they could have, and that would have killed them. They’re all right now,” he said. “I’ve decided that in a country this big, you’re never going to get one big political lurch that will solve everything. The only way to move it is by working with the established organizations, so I’m a regular Democrat now.”

  “If you knew who this woman was, and her son, you’d give it to me?”

  “Yeah. Though I might feel a little bad about it,” Hughes said. “But I’ll be working for Bowden, and I sure don’t want anything to happen to her.”

  “What if Henderson gets the nomination?” Lucas asked.

  “I’d love that! He’s better than Bowden on the issues, but I don’t see him getting the nomination. To get back to this woman, though, have you talked with Anson Palmer?”

  “Yes. This morning,” Lucas said.

  “And he didn’t know her?” Hughes asked.

  “No. He says he doesn’t.”

  “Then she’s not a member of the PPPI. Anson was there at the creation and he’s been to every meeting and every action. He’s an old backslapper and gossip—he knows everybody. It’s just that he’s cracked on the whole Jewish thing.”

  —

  AT THE HOTEL, Lucas called Robertson, who was nearly back home to Des Moines after hitting PPPI members who lived along I-80. He’d gotten nothing from the seven people he’d contacted. “I’m beginning to wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said. “Most of these people say they haven’t been active in years. One of them who went to a meeting last year says there were only ten people there. Somebody brought in a couple of pies, and there was enough for everyone.”

  “Yeah, but Likely got murdered,” Lucas said.

  “If it turns out that it’s unrelated—Ford thinks it is—then the PPPI is a wild-goose chase. Maybe we should be looking at other geese.”

  “I can’t believe it’s unrelated—but I worry about the possibility,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, we pissed away a whole day.”

  —

  THAT NIGHT IN THE MOTEL, after talking with Weather, he lay on the bed, watching a ball game, and thought about the day. Despite the frustration, he was enjoying the hunt, he realized. Operating without a badge was annoying, though, and even more annoying was operating without bureaucratic backup: there was no clerk or assistant to call, to demand that research be done. He was living off crumbs from the Iowa agencies, and if he got annoying, they might just tell him to fuck off.

  They’d live to regret it, though, he thought. The more he worked around the PPPI, the more he got the feeling that he was onto something. People were lying to him, misdirecting him. He couldn’t exactly put a finger on why he thought that, but he’d learned the hard way not to ignore even unsupported intuition.

  Maybe he’d circle back to Anson Palmer in the morning, he thought. Put some pressure on him. See if he squeaked.

  He drank a caffeine-free Diet Coke and went to bed.

  FOURTEEN

  At eight o’clock the next morning, about an hour before Lucas planned to get up, Bell Wood called from Des Moines.

  “Why are you dredging up the Lennett Valley Dairy bomb?” he asked.

  Lucas explained about the manuscript fragment he’d read the night before, and the odd vibration he’d gotten from Grace Lawrence’s comment.

  “How old is Lawrence?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’d guess early sixties. Why?”

  “I really don’t have to send you that article on Lennett Valley—I can tell you what happened myself. In detail.”

  He did. The Lennett Valley Dairy had been foreclosed in 1987 after a long struggle to make mortgage payments.

  “A particularly brutal case, for a lot of people. Not only were three people killed, a whole bunch of people, all from that area, were ruined financially,” Wood said. “The dairy was set up as a small corporation with all the stock locally owned. The corporation had borrowed money to get the dairy going, during the g
ood days, but then the recession came and prices went to hell. They got behind in payments to the Lennett Valley bank, so the bank restructured the loan, basically lowering the payments but stretching them out longer than was normally allowed. Part of the deal was that the bank would get to audit the dairy’s progress, and if it looked like the dairy was faltering, they could call the loan at any time. Well, the dairy looked like it was digging itself out of that hole, when the bank failed.”

  “The bank.”

  Wood explained that when a bank fails, its assets are usually taken over by another bank, as directed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The failed bank’s stockholders are wiped out—and the new bank has no responsibility for the old bank’s debts.

  “The new bank came out of Council Bluffs, and it called the loan on the dairy. The dairy didn’t have the money to pay the loan, so the bank foreclosed, as they had the legal right to. Wiped out the dairy’s stockholders, too, some of the same people who were wiped out as the bank’s shareholders.”

  The dairy operators made an argument that the dairy was only a year or so from becoming very profitable, but the new bank didn’t want to hear it, Wood said. “The dairy wasn’t very old, and had a lot of equipment and young stock, cows, and any money the bank got was pure profit. Anyway, they foreclosed and scheduled a land and equipment sale. A whole bunch of people showed up for the sale, including quite a few protesters, because the whole thing was so unfair. Partway through the auction, a bomb exploded in the barn. Three people were killed, all from the same family, a father and his two sons. We never identified the bombers. The whole thing plagues us to this day.”

  “And that made you wonder about Grace Lawrence?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. There’s a motel in Amazing Grace, the town, not the song, which isn’t far from Lennett Valley, maybe fifteen miles. Two unknown couples checked in there, two rooms, one couple in each room, paid cash. The motel owner said they looked scruffy—the men both had beards and the women had long hippie hair, no makeup. They weren’t local and they weren’t apparently in Amazing Grace for anything in particular. The night before the auction, they were out late—the owner lived in the motel and said they came back at four o’clock in the morning. There’s nothing open at four o’clock in the morning in Amazing Grace, or anywhere close. They left the next morning before eight o’clock and were never seen again. Never could track any of the names they checked in with.”