Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas worked through it, and when he was finished, without finding anything of interest—Likely apparently did most of his work on his missing computer—he headed back to Iowa City to meet with Robertson, Robb, and the last of the two new investigators assigned to the case. Halfway there, he took an incoming call from an unknown number.

  “Officer Davenport?” A male voice; more young than old.

  “Lucas Davenport, yes. Who is this?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’m a member of the Progressive People’s Party. Or, I was, but I quit. Anyway, the party people have been talking about you and I got your phone number from one of them. I know the people you’re looking for. This white-haired lady.”

  “Hang on, I’m going to pull over so I can write this down,” Lucas said. He did that, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway. When he’d stopped, he said, “It’d be really good if we could get your name.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t be involved. My parents . . . Anyway, I can’t. But. The woman you’re looking for is named Sandra Burton. She has two sons and both of them have those gray eyes you’re looking for. The other thing is, they told me they had a project that they wanted help with. This was the last time I saw them . . . They said they were keeping track of Mrs. Bowden so they’d know where she hadn’t been, and those might be soft spots in her vote, places that Governor Henderson could exploit. That seemed pretty weak to me. They were acting funny, so I said I had to concentrate on my classes. Anyway, they sound like the people you’re looking for.”

  “Sandra Burton. Is there a Mr. Burton?”

  “Yeah, he’s a truck driver, he’s gone most of the time. His name is Don. Anyway, it’s kinda hard to find their place, it’s out in the country. If you start exactly at the corner of E Street and Sixth Avenue in Grinnell, and then go exactly six-point-one miles on your car odometer from that corner out Sixth Avenue East—that turns into Highway 6. They’re on the north side of the road in a white house with a four-car red garage on the left side of the house.”

  Lucas repeated the directions, and said, “I appreciate all of this, but please—we really need your name.”

  “Can’t do that. I don’t want to get in trouble with my dad. You got the directions. Good-bye.”

  —

  LUCAS THOUGHT he remembered a Burton on his list of e-mails sent or received by Anson Palmer. He checked, and found an e-mail from Palmer to Burton, but it was short, a few lines about an upcoming event in Iowa City sponsored by another group called Left Coast. Lucas hadn’t heard of Left Coast and didn’t have time to do the research. There was no Burton on Grace Lawrence’s list of members. The Burton residence was reasonably close to the line of towns from which e-mails had been sent to Henderson.

  Lucas dug an iPad out of the seatback pocket, found that he had a good cell connection, and called up a map of Iowa. From where he was, the fastest route to Grinnell was through Iowa City, and then west along I-80. A map of Grinnell showed E Street and Sixth Avenue intersecting near Grinnell College—probably the “classes” that the caller had referred to. The Burton place would be about an hour from Iowa City, running just at the speed limit. For somebody who knew the roads and the habits of the highway patrol, probably less than an hour.

  —

  LUCAS TOSSED THE IPAD on the backseat, pulled onto the highway, called Robertson and told him about the phone call.

  “I want to go there right now and I’d like you or Robb to come with me, because you guys got the badges,” Lucas said. “If I pick you up in Iowa City, we’d get there before dark.”

  “I’m coming—Robb’s got an interview at seven o’clock,” Robertson said. “This could be a break.”

  “Pick you up in half an hour in front of the hotel,” Lucas said.

  —

  ROBERTSON WAS WAITING when Lucas arrived. “Grinnell’s an hour from here, or less, so we should be good on daylight,” he said, when he got in the truck. He adjusted the bucket seat to his long legs and added, “Nice ride.”

  “We gotta be careful when we get there,” Lucas said. “They don’t know we’re coming, but if they’re as goofy as we think they might be . . . The other possibility is, we’re being set up.”

  “Huh. Why would you think that?”

  “Because in my experience, tips like this don’t fall on your head, not unless the guy wants something. This guy didn’t want anything. Wouldn’t even tell me who he is.”

  “What do we do about that?” Robertson asked.

  “I’m open to ideas,” Lucas said.

  “Do you have phone numbers for the Burtons?”

  “Can’t your DCI guys get them? I know where she lives . . .”

  Three minutes later, they had two cell phone numbers, one for a Donald Burton, one for a Sandra. “Watch this,” Robertson said.

  He put his phone on speaker and dialed the number for Donald Burton. Burton picked it up immediately: “Yeah?”

  Robertson: “Don! This is Chick Weber from State . . . Is this my boy Don Burton who once fought three strippers in the parking lot outside Iowa Bush Country and lost?”

  Burton: “Hey, Chick, that sounds like me, but you got the wrong guy.”

  “Ah, hell. Sorry to bother you, man. I’m going on Internet searches and I thought I had my guy. Say, what’s that buzzing sound? You in a plane?”

  “I wish. I’m in an eighteen-wheeler going into Shaky Town,” Burton said.

  “Well, take it easy,” Robertson said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  He rang off and Lucas said, “Sounded like a truck to me—I think Shaky Town is L.A.”

  “Which means we’re calling Sandra and her gang,” Robertson said.

  He dialed Sandra Burton’s number. She picked up and they could barely hear her over the background noise, and then the noise quit, and she said, “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’m out mowing the lawn.”

  “Okay. I think I might have the wrong number. I’m trying to get Don Burton about picking up a load in L.A.”

  “That’s my husband,” she said. “I can give you that number.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Burton gave Robertson the number, he thanked her, and rang off. “What do you think?” he asked Lucas.

  “If we’re being set up, I don’t think the Burtons are doing it. If they’re the ones . . . I don’t know. I still don’t like the idea of a tip like this, coming out of nowhere, falling on my head. But we gotta check.”

  “I’m with you,” Robertson said. “This could be a big deal. You got a weapon?”

  “In the back. Bell Wood got me a carry permit, so I’m legal,” Lucas said.

  “Might want to get it out, then, before we get there.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “In fact, when we get to Grinnell, I might want to run into a McDonald’s and get a sandwich. I’m starving to death. I can gun-up then.”

  —

  LUCAS AND ROBERTSON hadn’t had any real chance for casual conversation, and when they got out of town, Robertson asked about the BCA, the salaries and retirement. “You quit there, right? Bell told me that you don’t get along with bureaucrats all that well.”

  “Not exactly right,” Lucas said. “Bureaucrats have their uses and a good bureaucrat is worth his weight in gold. The particular one I ran into, though, wasn’t a good one. His idea of his job was to make the empire bigger, and not get in trouble. Not necessarily to get anything done, unless it’s convenient and noncontroversial. The last straw was when we got in a fight over an assignment to investigate a noncrime on behalf of a particularly stupid state senator.”

  “Not good. I’m interested because I’ve been with the DCI for three years and I’ve done pretty well. Our organization is flat, though—not much vertical rise. I could be there for thirty years and not move up much,” Robertson said. “I’m looking around to see what else is
out there. I like the Twin Cities. I’d move there in a minute.”

  “Cold up there,” Lucas said. “Though I like it.”

  “I was born and raised in Okoboji. How much colder is Minneapolis than that?”

  “Not much,” Lucas said. “Tell you what: the bureaucrat that I ran into isn’t long for the political world. Henderson will fire his ass right after the next elections, a year from November. If you came in as a new agent, you wouldn’t be dealing with him anyway. A year from now, he’s outa there and maybe sooner than that.”

  “You’re not a candidate for the job? You’re supposed to be asshole buddies with Henderson.”

  “I’m not interested in administration,” Lucas said. “I’m not good at it, either.”

  “Bell said you’re rich, that you’ve shot a whole bunch of people, and that you live for the hunt,” Robertson said.

  Lucas glanced at him and said, with a grin, “Bell is sometimes too social . . . if you know what I mean.”

  “He talks too much,” Robertson said.

  “But he’s a good guy,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, he is,” Robertson said. He leaned back in the seat and put his feet up on the dash, caught himself and said, “Whoops. Sorry about that.”

  “Not a problem, put them back up there,” Lucas said. “I like those shoes. Where’d you get them?”

  “Vegas . . .” They talked about fashion for a while, then Robertson asked, “You’re straight, right? You seem really straight.”

  “Yeah, of course. Straight guys can’t talk about fashion? Clothes? Shoes?” Lucas said.

  “Of course. FYI, I’m as gay as a fuckin’ Christmas tree,” Robertson said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What? I don’t seem gay?” Robertson asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Lucas said. “Maybe the turned-up jean cuffs should have been a clue.”

  Robertson laughed and said, “Or tan shoes with blue jeans.”

  “I wear cordovan shoes with navy suits all the time,” Lucas said.

  “There you go. I totally approve. But you know what the British say, ‘No brown in town.’”

  “That’s why we threw their asses out of here in 1776,” Lucas said. “Not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned.”

  —

  THEY BULLSHITTED THEIR WAY down the highway to Grinnell, which was a few miles north of I-80, and when they turned off, Robertson retrieved Lucas’s iPad from the backseat, did a search for fast-food restaurants, and said, “Subway, McDonald’s, and Jimmy John’s, all on the way.”

  “Jimmy John’s. Had a good one over in Ames.”

  They made the turn onto Highway 6, made a quick stop at Jimmy John’s. Lucas got his .45 and a holster out of the back, pulled his shirt out over his slacks to cover the gun, then took the passenger seat so he could eat while Robertson drove.

  “Your guy said it was six-point-one miles from the turn . . . Got about five miles to go,” Robertson said, as they left town, heading east on Highway 6.

  “Drive slow. I want to enjoy the sandwich,” Lucas said.

  Lucas could see the sun in the right wing mirror. Twenty minutes or a half hour to sunset, he thought. Plenty of time before it got dark.

  NINETEEN

  Highway 6 was flat, heavily patched, and nearly dead straight as it ran east between cornfields and farmhouses. The air was clear and soft with humidity from the frequent rains, with occasional creeks trickling under the highway to the south, and islands of trees, elms and cottonwoods and box elders, sometimes woodlots but mostly windbreaks, dotting the landscape.

  Robertson kept his eye on the odometer as Lucas finished the sandwich. At six miles he slowed and they spotted the red four-door garage and the two-story white house. A weathered white barn with a sagging ridgeline sat in back, with weeds growing up around it. A car was parked outside the house, and there were lights on, so most likely there was somebody home.

  “How do you want to do it?” Robertson asked. There was no traffic behind them, and he’d slowed, then stopped the truck in the middle of the highway.

  “Your state. I’m not as comfortable on farms as I am in the city,” Lucas said.

  “All right. On houses like this, people are gonna use the side doors, not the front doors so much,” Robertson said. “I’ll crowd the side door with the car, one of us stays behind it, the other one knocks, until we see what the situation is.”

  “Sounds right,” Lucas said. “Who knocks?”

  “I do. I’ve got the badge. There’s a good chance we won’t have to knock at all,” Robertson said. “If there’s somebody home, they’ll probably come to the door to see who we are. If that happens, I’ll pull them out into the yard.”

  Lucas nodded. Robertson was doing it the way he would have. “Watch for dogs,” Lucas said.

  —

  COLE PURDY WAS INVISIBLE in the cornfield.

  He’d arrived an hour earlier, after parking his truck off a side road to the east, behind trees that had grown up along a creek. He’d counted his paces after leaving the truck and jumping a fence into the cornfield and figured he was about three-quarters of a mile from the truck.

  He wouldn’t have to worry about concealment when he was running back to the vehicle, because it was corn all the way, twenty-inch rows with the stalks probably averaging ten or eleven feet in height. It was easier to see somebody in a rain forest than in a mature cornfield. He figured it would take about ten minutes to get back, carrying his bag and the rifle.

  The rifle was a new one—new to him, anyway—purchased six months earlier at a Missouri gun show, a Colt in 5.56 NATO, shooting military ammo and equipped with an Aimpoint Pro red-dot optic. He’d picked it up back when they’d thought they might shoot Bowden. He’d hidden the gun carefully, had never let anyone see him shoot it, not even Jesse. Deep in the woods, he’d sighted it in dead-on at fifty yards, a bit high at a hundred, dead-on again at one-fifty, a bit low at two hundred yards—but none of the lows or highs would take the slug out of the kill zone. Here, he’d be shooting at fifty to sixty yards, depending on where Davenport put his vehicle, and with the two-minute-of-angle red dot, accuracy shouldn’t be a problem.

  He’d taken some granola bars with him, because that seemed to be the thing to do, along with a couple of bottles of water. He was wearing the full bow-hunter camouflage, including a face net to keep the bugs off.

  He settled into a screen of low weeds right next to the edge of the corn. His mother had seen Davenport’s truck, a black Mercedes-Benz.

  Not something you often see pulling into random Iowa farmyards.

  As the sun dropped down to the horizon, he saw a black SUV coming in from the west, slowing. Then it stopped in the middle of the highway, and despite his sense that he was cool, even calm, he felt a clutch at his heart. What were they doing? Did they know he was there?

  —

  “ALL SET?” Robertson asked.

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  The farmhouse’s side door was on the left side of the house as they looked at it, across the driveway from the garage. A line of flagstones ran from the bottom of the stoop to the driveway, and Robertson turned down the drive and put the truck close enough to the edge of the driveway that Lucas would be stepping out on the flagstone.

  They both popped their doors before the truck was fully stopped. Lucas got out a half-second before Robertson, turning to shut the door and to step to the back of the truck, where he’d be out of the line of fire if somebody came to the door with a gun. Simply by chance, he was looking toward the cornfield when he got out of the truck, and he saw the orange wink of the muzzle flash when Cole Purdy pulled the trigger.

  A split second later, he heard the blast from the shot and Robertson cried out and went down. Lucas leaped backward, trying to get behind the truck, when a second shot knocked the wing mir
ror off the passenger side of the truck, glass flying everywhere, and he felt a stinging in his cheek, then he fell on his ass, behind the truck, rolled back to his feet, crouching. He was behind the hood, his gun already coming up, his eyes fixed on the spot where he’d seen the muzzle flash. He unloaded the .45 as quickly as he could with rough accuracy: he had no illusions about hitting anything at fifty yards, but it should keep the shooter occupied.

  The gun locked open and he slammed another magazine in. As he did it, he either saw or imagined he saw a ripple moving through the cornfield and fired four more shots at it, then stopped, crouched, and stepped sideways across the nose of the truck, saw Robertson facedown in the driveway gravel. He was alive, pushing up with his hands, getting nowhere.

  Lucas took the chance, jumped into the open, grabbed Robertson by his shirt collar, and dragged him behind the truck, and then heard another bang! coming from behind him, jerked around and nearly shot the woman who’d just let the screen door slam shut.

  She was middle-aged, wearing a dress and an apron, but with nothing like kinky white hair. She had dark blond hair to the middle of her back and her mouth was open, and she was shouting something as the .45’s front sight crossed the line of her eyes, but Lucas couldn’t make it out immediately, what she was screaming, and fought the automatic trigger pull, and then realized what she was saying was, “Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!”

  Her hands were up and empty: no gun there.

  He turned and looked back toward the cornfield, saw no movement, and the woman was screaming at him, “What happened? What did you do?”

  Robertson was at Lucas’s feet, looking up to him, seemed to be choking, and Lucas shouted at the woman, “Is there a hospital?”

  She shouted back, “Yes, yes, in town . . .”

  They were shouting, five feet apart. Lucas: “Help me, get the truck door.”