Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  “Damnit, Lucas, that’s them! They’re the bombers,” Wood said. “That’s exactly how the motel guy described them. We got DNA from the wrong woman.”

  “I don’t know. Could be,” Lucas said.

  “Give me a number for Burton. We need to know who this Betsy is.”

  Lucas gave him Burton’s phone number and address, and added, “One of the boyfriends was named Harrison. That’s the first name. You might go back and look at arrest records from farm protests at the time. They were apparently pretty big in them.”

  “I will do that,” Wood said.

  —

  LUCAS WENT BACK to the motel where he’d spent the night and asked to check back in. They said the room wasn’t ready yet, but he said that since he was the only one who’d stayed there, he was happy to check back in just as if he’d never left, damp towels and all. The motel manager saw the wisdom in that, and five minutes later Lucas was spreading across the second bed all the paper he’d collected during the investigation.

  And started drawing on his legal pad.

  —

  THE DRAWINGS wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, but Lucas used them to try to integrate geographic information with time data, of who knew what, and when they knew it, and how that might lead to a murder. At noon he went out for Diet Cokes and mini-doughnuts and an Iowa road map.

  He simply couldn’t put together the information from Kidd, concerning the probable location of the people who sent the messages to Henderson, with the timing of the killings well to the east, around Iowa City. He concluded that Likely and Palmer were on the edge of the conspiracy. They’d either been told about it or had guessed it after talking to Lucas, had refused to cooperate or had threatened to give it up, and had to be killed as a result.

  It was probable, he thought, that Palmer and Likely were killed by different members of the conspiracy—if there were two killers, rather than one (or even one with a murderous son, as long as the son was in the same location as the mother), then the time problems became irrelevant. He knew that Lawrence couldn’t have killed Likely, but she certainly could have killed Palmer.

  If, of course, she’d killed anyone at all. He was leaning in her direction because she’d been fairly close to both Likely and Palmer, and Robertson had been shot shortly after he’d spoken to her.

  —

  WAS IT POSSIBLE, he wondered, as he got up and stretched his legs, that Robertson really was the target of the sniper? He thought about that, but that was another difficult proposition to accept: the first shot had come almost immediately after Robertson had gotten out of the truck. The sniper, in the dying light of day, would hardly have had time to figure out which large sport-coated cop was which, and had shot the one getting out of the driver’s side of Lucas’s truck.

  How did they know it was Lucas’s truck? Because somebody had seen it and had either passed the word along or acted on it directly. And Lucas had been the one the sniper called—he’d have had no reason to think that Robertson would be in the truck. Lawrence, even if traumatized by Robertson’s tough-guy interrogation, wouldn’t have known.

  No. Lucas had been the target.

  —

  HE WAS WORKING through it when Neil Mitford called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where are you?” Mitford asked.

  “Grinnell.”

  “Good. We’re headed for Des Moines. The hotel is fifty-two minutes from you, or, given the way you drive, forty-five minutes. Bowden is across the street and Gardner is five minutes away. We’d like you to attend a briefing for all the campaigns, by the Iowa campaign security team.”

  “Man, I really don’t have a lot of time to fuck around.”

  “You’re not fucking around. Tomorrow’s D-Day,” Mitford said. “We need to make sure that all our shit is coordinated, and I need the Iowa security people to see your face.”

  “All right, I get that. What time?” Lucas asked.

  “Ten o’clock tonight.”

  —

  LUCAS WENT BACK to his paper. Bell Wood called: “Betsy Rose Skira and Harrison John Williams the Third.”

  “How’d you find them?”

  “After telling everybody to search every known radical database, I decided to run Betsy and Harrison as a unit through the vital records. They got married in ’91, moved to Cedar Rapids, divorced in ’97. Betsy changed her name back to Skira and remarried in 2000. Harrison Williams is still single as far as we know—nothing in the records about another marriage, but he could have gotten married again in Vegas or something. Skira’s still in Cedar Rapids, Williams is in Stone City, which is a tiny place northeast of Cedar Rapids.”

  “Not so close to Iowa City,” Lucas said, as he wrote the names on his drawing charts.

  “An hour or so, I suppose. Not right on top of it, though,” Wood said.

  “Randy Ford is still around here somewhere, right?”

  “Yeah. He should still be out at Sandra Burton’s place,” Wood said.

  “Listen, I got this idea . . .”

  Lucas outlined the idea and there was a moment’s silence, then Wood laughed and said, “Man, I got a feeling that the lawyers might have a problem or two or eight with that.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause we’re tricking her, we’re leading her along, we’re setting her up . . .”

  “Bell?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not a cop. You told me so yourself,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You won’t need anything I get from her, to get her, or Skira, or Harrison, or the fourth guy, on the dairy bombing. I won’t record anything, so it can’t be thrown out. Everything you’d use against her, you’ve already got. What I’d be getting from her goes only to the conspiracy against Bowden. All I want to do is break the conspiracy, and I don’t care if we get her on that, because you’ll have her on the dairy bombing . . . if she did it.”

  “Well, hell . . . go for it. But Jesus, be careful.”

  —

  “OH, BOY,” Ford said, when Lucas found him at Burton’s. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “Yup. I want you to witness the phone call and hear what she has to say to me,” Lucas said. “Come on out to the truck, I’ll put it on speaker and tell her I’m driving.”

  —

  LUCAS CALLED LAWRENCE. She said, not bothering to say hello, “Lucas! I had nothing to do with that Robertson shooting. I didn’t know where he was going, I had no idea.”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  “Lucas, this is Iowa,” Lawrence said. “We have about one murder a week in the whole state. It’s all over the news. It’s on every fifteen minutes. State investigators don’t get sniped in Iowa.”

  “Okay. Listen, are you at home?” Lucas asked.

  “No, I’m at a supermarket in Iowa City,” she said.

  “I need you to take a look at some of your older records. You know, whatever you have. I’m looking for a Betsy Skira and a Harrison Williams. Do you know them?”

  There was a crashing sound at the other end of the call, and Lucas said, “Hello? Hello?”

  Lawrence: “Sorry, I fumbled the phone. Who’d you say?”

  “Betsy Skira and a Harrison Williams. I got a tip from a party member that I should take a close look at them. Skira fits the description of the woman we’re looking for, and they may have been involved in some violence in the past, too.”

  “I remember Betsy. I think she lives up in Waterloo. Or Cedar Rapids, it might be Cedar Rapids,” Lawrence said.

  “I can’t find her online, she may have gotten married or something,” Lucas said. “I need anything you’ve got on her.”

  “What kind of violence was she involved in?” Lawrence asked. “I don’t remember anything like that, or anybody saying anything.” />
  “There was some kind of bombing here, a long time ago,” Lucas said. “People got killed. My . . . source . . . tells me that Skira might have been involved. The bombers apparently stayed in a motel in a place called Amazing Grace and the state investigators still have the sheets from the motel beds. That means they’ll have DNA. If Skira’s in on this Bowden thing, I can use that threat of the DNA to break the conspiracy down. I’ll tell her that if she doesn’t cough up what she knows, I’ll talk to the DCI about the sheets.”

  “Oh my God, I remember that bombing,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know if I’d have anything on Betsy Skira. When I got the secretary’s job, I got about ten boxes of records that I’ve never looked at. There could be something in there.”

  “You gotta go home and look,” Lucas said. “This could be a really big deal. Skira, Williams . . . if there’s anything there, it could help.”

  “It could take a day or two to go through that stuff . . . unless you want to come down and help.”

  “I’m getting short on time. The fair walk is tomorrow,” Lucas said.

  “Then I might not be able—”

  “Listen, I’m on the road right now,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, we need to do this. I can be there in an hour. You get that stuff out, we’ll rip through it. We’re running out of time, I need to get to Skira.”

  Lucas got off the phone and Ford said, “Well, she bit. Sorta.”

  “Yeah.” Lucas looked at his watch. “We gotta roll. Time is getting short.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ford had lights on his car, so he led the way back to Lawrence’s house in Hills, rolling down I-80 at a hundred-plus, then south on Highway 218, through the sea of beans and corn. Lucas had read somewhere that the acreage of beans, corn, and wheat planted in the American Midwest and plains states was greater than the area of France and Great Britain put together. Iowa was right in the heart of that, and after a week driving around the state, he was a believer.

  At Hills, they got off 218 and rodeoed at the Casey’s General Store, around to the side, a bit out of sight. Lucas got a pullover nylon rain shell out of the travel pack in the back of the truck and pulled it over his head.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Like a fuckin’ moron,” Ford said. The sun was beating down on the side of his face and he was sweating behind his silvered aviators. “It’s eighty-eight degrees out here.”

  “Ah, shit. She’s no dummy, either,” Lucas said. “I got that hunting shirt . . .”

  Lucas dug out the wrinkled olive-drab hunting shirt, pulled it on. “How about now?”

  “Still look like a fuckin’ moron, but you could say you’ve been working in a cornfield . . . she might buy that.”

  “I was working in a cornfield,” Lucas said.

  “Then she might buy it. Maybe. If you get lucky,” Ford said.

  “Fuck it,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  —

  HILLS COULDN’T have been as much as a mile square, with a few hundred people living there. Lucas pulled into Lawrence’s house a minute and a half after leaving Casey’s. He climbed out, pulled the shirt down, got his yellow pad. He was wearing sunglasses and left them on, to hide his eyes. He planned to lie a lot.

  —

  LAWRENCE MET HIM at the screen door, pushing it open, then closing both the screen and the interior door behind him. She said, “I’ve got the boxes in the dining room, but I haven’t found anything about a Betsy.”

  “At least it’s cool in here,” Lucas said. “I spent the whole goddamn morning crawling through a cornfield and didn’t find a single thing.”

  “What happened out there?”

  They stood in the kitchen for a moment and he recounted the ambush. “That’s awful,” she said, a hand at her throat. “Let me tell you something, privately, though. Robertson was terrible to me. Terrible and mean. I thought . . . he might hit me. He’s a bully. The point is—did he go to another house after me? Could somebody he bullied, maybe followed him with a gun?”

  “No. The shooter was after me, not after Robertson,” Lucas said. “Anyway, let’s go look at those files.”

  —

  SHE’D PILED ten or twelve banker’s boxes on the living room floor, still with dust on the lids. “They were stored down in the basement. Almost killed me getting them all up here.”

  Lucas put a box on the dining room table, popped the top, and found a pile of political leaflets and press statements along with printing bills and other miscellaneous paper. “Doesn’t look promising,” he said.

  He put two more boxes on the table and pulled the lids off. The boxes left an imprint of dust on the front of his shirt, and he brushed it off with his fingers. “About wrecked this shirt out in the corn. I must smell like a locker room.”

  “A little sweaty,” she said. She took a chair behind the table and said, “What about this Betsy person? The PPPI has never advocated any kind of violence.”

  Lucas had taken a chair across from her and pulled a stack of paper out of the banker’s box. “We think she might have had her own group, inside the PPPI,” Lucas said. He thumbed through some of the papers, then looked up at her and added, “I’ve got to talk to my boys at the DCI yet, but I think there’s a good chance she did that dairy bomb, whatever that was. I don’t actually give a shit about the dairy bomb, so before I talk to the DCI people, I thought I’d try to run her down and make a side deal with her—I won’t ask about the bomb if she talks to me about the Bowden conspiracy. If she doesn’t give me something on that, screw her, she goes down for the bomb. If she’s a bomber.”

  “What if she’s not?” Lawrence asked.

  Lucas shrugged. “Then she’s not and I’ve wasted some time that I don’t have to waste. But if she is . . . she’s looking at life without parole. With that as a crowbar, we should be able to get anything out of her that we want. You know, offer her a manslaughter deal with a few years inside if she talks, or life in prison if she doesn’t.”

  “That’s really . . . brutal.”

  “Not as brutal as a bomb,” Lucas said. He looked at the paper in his hands. “Man, this looks like junk. We need only member lists. Do any of the boxes have like lists of members . . . ?”

  —

  HE TURNED BACK to look at her as the old revolver came up from behind the table and the thought flashed through Lucas’s mind that he might have really, really screwed up. She said, “I’m sorry,” and shot him in the chest.

  She shouldn’t have said anything, because by the time she pulled the trigger, Lucas already had the edge of the table in his hands. The muzzle blast, confined in the small room, was terrific, and so was the impact of the bullet, but he hung on to the table and lifted it up and threw it at her, and she and her chair toppled over behind the table.

  She was on her butt, legs under the table, still with the pistol in her hand, when he cleared the table and punched her in the forehead and she went flat. The door behind them exploded open and Ford was there, pistol in his hand, and Lucas stepped on her gun hand with his hiking boot and she yelped when he twisted the gun loose.

  “Roll her,” Ford said. They got her untangled from the table, still stunned by the blow to the head, and Ford cuffed her hands behind her back. He asked Lucas, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Shot me right in the heart,” Lucas said.

  He peeled off the hunting shirt, then the bulletproof vest beneath it, and pulled up the thin white T-shirt under the vest. A red spot the size of his palm was blooming to the left of his heart.

  “That’s gonna make a mark,” Ford said.

  “I’ve been more bruised up and cut up in a week in Iowa than in ten years in Minnesota,” Lucas said, touching his black eye, and the cuts beside it. He still had tape on the glass cuts on the other side. Then, “Let’s get her up.”

  They got Lawrence sitting in a chair
, still dazed, and Lucas brought the table upright, and his own chair. Ford said to Lawrence, “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  Lucas watched Lawrence’s face as Ford read her rights, saw her eyes clearing out. When he’d finished with the rights, Ford asked her if she understood what he’d read. She nodded and Ford said, “I’m placing you under arrest for attempted murder.”

  Lucas said to Ford, “Why don’t you go outside and call this in—see what Bell Wood wants us to do.”

  “Good idea,” Ford said, and he might as well have winked at Lucas as he stepped away. And to Lawrence: “Hey, Miz Lawrence? You’re gonna need a new door.”

  —

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Lucas said to Lawrence, “I’m not recording this and I’m not a cop.”

  “You’re a lying asshole fascist,” she said. Her head was down, her teeth clenched.

  “I can’t arrest you, I can’t do anything to you, Grace. But—I don’t care about the dairy that you and Betsy blew up, I don’t care too much about the fact that you tried to murder me, since you didn’t get it done,” Lucas said. “What I care about is, you’re part of a conspiracy to kill Michaela Bowden. I need to stop that. Here’s the thing—Ford’s gonna get you for attempted murder or aggravated assault, which means you’re going to do time. How much time you do, though, depends on whether you cooperate now. We can always reduce the charge if you cooperate, if you just tell me—”

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You . . . you kept coming back to me, and I got you your boxes, and then you tried to sexually assault me, which is why you kept coming back, and why I shot you . . .”

  Lucas said, “That’s not bad—but nobody’ll believe you. I came here with Ford. He was right outside the door the whole time, listening. To get back to the dairy bombing—there’s menstrual fluid on the motel sheets, along with some semen. When we grab Betsy and Harrison—we know where they are, by the way—the DNA will match, and one of them will give up you and your boyfriend to get a reduced sentence for themselves. Looked at from the other direction, you could give up Betsy and Harrison and your ex-boyfriend, and cut a whole lot of years off your own sentence. We need to know who’s hunting Bowden. That’ll also give us the sniper who shot Robertson.”