“Did you tell them that we’re not up to anything?” Marlys asked.
“No, because then I’d be admitting that I knew who you were,” Likely said. “You’re
not
up to anything, are you?”
“Of course not,” Marlys said.
Cole stopped prowling for a moment, looked at Likely. “Is there somebody else here? A dog? I thought I heard . . . There was a noise.”
Likely shook his head. “Nope. Nobody else.”
Cole said, “Huh,” and then, waving a hand at the photographs, asked Likely, “Are these folks your ancestors?”
“Yup. All the way back to my great-great-grandfather. He came over from Aberdeenshire in Scotland,” Likely said, turning to look at the photos. When he turned back, Marlys nodded at Cole.
“Long time ago,” Marlys said. “Did he come right straight to Iowa?”
Likely opened his mouth to reply, as Cole pulled the gun and in a single movement, shot Likely in the back of the head. The gunshot was as loud as a hard hand clap, nothing that could be heard outside the house. They all flinched, including Caralee and Likely, who said, “Wut?” and struggled to get to his feet. Cole shot him again,
Whap!
and Likely sat down again and said, “No! No!” Cole shot him a third time,
Whap!
and Likely rolled forward out of his chair and landed facedown on the carpet.
“That got him,” Cole said.
“You sure?” Marlys asked. Caralee looked down at the body and whimpered.
“I can make sure,” Cole said. He stepped over to Likely’s body and
Whap!
shot him in the temple.
“Put on the gloves,” Marlys said. She was holding Caralee over her shoulder and half-turned so the girl couldn’t see the body. Cole
took the kitchen gloves from his hip pocket and was pulling them on when they heard a distinct
clunk
from the kitchen area.
“There it is again,” Cole said. “I knew it—there’s somebody in there.”
Cole had his gloves most of the way on and made a fist and punched open the door between the living room and the kitchen, where they found an elderly woman trying to work the bolt on the back door. She turned and looked at them in fear and said, “No, no, no.”
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Marlys asked.
The woman shrank away from Cole, her back against the door, and she said, “I’m a friend of Joe’s. Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, for God’s sake, I gotta take care of Pam.”
“What are you doing here?” Marlys asked again.
“Joe asked me to listen in . . . He said he might want a witness,” the woman said.
“A witness for what?” Marlys asked.
“He was afraid that you were planning to shoot Mike Bowden, he thought you might tell him that. He wanted a witness . . .”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” Marlys said, and, “I’m so sorry.”
She nodded at Cole and Cole snapped the gun up and shot the woman twice in the forehead,
Whap! Whap!
the shots spaced so closely together they sounded like one.
The woman said “Oh!” and slid down the door, then toppled over on her side.
“Make sure,” Marlys said.
Cole shot her twice more in the head. Then he and Marlys
turned to the living room, at the sound of movement. Cole led the way back to the door, where they found Likely crawling toward them, his head up, streams of blood running through his hair and down his face and neck, his face like a grotesque Halloween mask.
“Well, Jesus,” Cole said, and he stepped over to Likely and shot him three more times in the top of the head, and then the gun locked open, out of ammo. Likely went flat on the floor. They stood around looking at the body, to see if he’d move again, but he was finished.
Marlys went back to the kitchen to check on the woman; she was dead as well.
“Didn’t exactly go the way you said it would,” she said, giving Cole a look.
“They’re dead now,” Cole said, as he reloaded with a fresh magazine. He couldn’t stop looking at Likely. He’d learned something valuable here: the .22s were quiet, but they might not get the job done.
—
COLE STARTED PICKING UP
the brass from the pistol. Marlys put Caralee down in a corner of the living room, pushed a couple of wooden chairs over to corral her there, went back to Likely’s body and pulled the wallet out of his back pocket with her gloved hands. Forty-two dollars. The old woman had an additional thirty dollars in her purse. Marlys went into the home office and took Likely’s laptop computer, which he’d used for party business, and all the associated electronic equipment, including a printer.
“He keeps party stuff on this, and maybe membership lists,” she told Cole. “We don’t want them to know that we took the computer, so we need to trash the place.”
Cole tore the office apart, found nothing more, then went through Likely’s bedroom, tipping over the bed to look under the mattress. Nothing there. He emptied all the drawers from the bureau, found nothing of value but a gold pocket watch, which they took.
“Can’t leave it because a crook would take it, but we can’t keep it, because it’s evidence. We’ll get out in the country and toss it,” Marlys said.
Caralee was trying to get past the legs of the blocking chairs, as Marlys watched Cole tear up the place, so she went and sat in one of the chairs, patted Caralee on the head, and said to Cole, “You know where men hide stuff? Where they keep their tools.”
She was right. Cole went down into the basement and tossed Likely’s workbench and found a steel box for a socket wrench set at the back of a drawer, where it shouldn’t have been. He popped the lid and found a neat stack of twenties, fifties, and hundreds, twenty-two hundred dollars in all.
“Got it,” he said, climbing the stairs. He showed the roll to Marlys, who’d moved into the kitchen with Caralee. She took the money and said, “Let’s go.”
The neighborhood was asleep when they pulled out. Two minutes later they were at Cole’s truck, and as Cole got out of Marlys’s vehicle, she said, “We did good tonight. Now we know we can do Bowden. We got the steel for it.”
Cole nodded, and got in his truck, and they headed cross-county
in their two-truck caravan. Marlys threw Likely’s watch in a cattail swamp halfway back to Pella, and Cole called her to say, “We need to find a place to dump the computer equipment. If they find that on us, we’re screwed.”
“Bury it out back tomorrow. We have to keep an eye out for that Davenport fella,” Marlys said. “You need to start cutting that pipe and grinding that cap.”
“I can do that,” Cole said. “Start tomorrow morning. Gotta keep Jesse out of the barn, though. Cutting the pipe’s no problem, but grinding that cap’s gonna take time, and it’s gonna make some noise. He’ll wonder about it.”
“He’s got a farmers’ market in Oskaloosa tomorrow, if he’s not too drunk to get up.”
“Don’t care how drunk he is—kick his ass out of bed, Mom,” Cole said. “We need him out of the way—not much time now.”
“We’ll handle Jesse when we get home,” Marlys said, and she rang off.
From the backseat, Caralee, hearing her father’s name, said, “Daddy.”
“That’s right, baby,” Marlys said over her shoulder. “Let’s go talk to Daddy.”
L
ucas called Alice Green and told her about the chase and that Bowden would be calling the governor later. “They may ask about whether I’m a psycho,” Lucas said. “Tell them, ‘No.’”
“I’ll have to think about it,” Green said. “At the very least, I’ll tell them that you’re
our
psycho.”
“Thanks for that,” Lucas said.
He made it to Iowa City late, checked into the Sheraton room that the campaign had reserved for him, called room service and Weather, in that order, and talked to her until the food arrived.
“Off the top of my head,” Weather said, “I’d say that your description—older woman, a son with distinctive gray eyes, with those particular kinds of weird extreme political views—would be enough to give them away, at least if you asked the right people. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people knew them, including everybody in those political groups. That Likely man may have been lying to you.”
“I’ve thought about that, but I don’t know what to do about it,” Lucas said. “This whole chase, tonight, has everybody on edge, so
maybe something’ll get done. I’ll talk to Bell Wood tomorrow, see if he can get his Iowa guys moving on it.”
He told her about Wood and his promise to get a carry permit for Lucas. Weather approved of the gun; she had no illusions about Lucas’s work.
When the food arrived, he said good-bye, ate the cheeseburger and fries, got his laptop out and tried browsing the political groups he knew about, looking for membership lists. That got him nowhere—all three groups had formed, and then faltered, before the Internet had gotten big. He found a few references and some position papers, but all were unsigned, except for a couple of anti-cop screeds by Dave Leonard. Leonard was out of it—he wouldn’t be chasing after Bowden for a couple of weeks, at least not in person, anyway, not with a full set of cracked ribs.
Unable to sleep, Lucas put his shoes back on and went out for a walk in the Iowa City mall. The night was cool and felt damp, with a line of scattered thunderstorms having passed through.
He left the mall for a couple of streets, window-shopping, found himself in front of the Old Capitol, in which—up under the dome, maybe? Was that even possible?—a Minnesota football tackle and long-lost friend named Hymen Scholls had impregnated a young Iowa coed. They’d later gotten married and, the last Lucas heard, still were. Didn’t know what to make of that.
—
IN THE MORNING
he found a FedEx envelope on the floor by the door, opened it, and found his carry permit; he put it in his wallet. He was in the shower when his phone rang, and then rang again,
and then rang a third time. When he got out, he picked up the phone and saw Bell Wood’s name on all three calls. He called him back and Wood said, “Lucas?”
“Yeah, I got the permit. Thanks,” Lucas said.
“Holy shit, man, you know the cops are looking for you?” Wood sounded excited.
“What?”
“You talked to that Joseph Likely guy yesterday?”
“Yeah, yesterday afternoon. What’d he tell the cops?” Lucas asked.
“He didn’t tell them anything,” Wood said. “Somebody went into his house last night and executed him and his girlfriend. Shot them in the head. The Mount Pleasant cops found them this morning after a tip, and a neighbor gave them your name. Said they never saw Likely after seeing you leave.”
“Aw, Jesus. Give me a number, I’ll call them and head down there,” Lucas said.
“We’ve got two guys on the way, right now, along with the crime-scene unit. The Mount Pleasant cops made sure Likely and his friend were dead, then sealed the scene and called us. I’ll call everybody and tell them you’re on the way.”
“Bell, you know what this is, right? These are the guys I’m looking for,” Lucas said. “They’re gonna try to hit Mrs. Bowden, and Likely lied to me when he said he didn’t know who they were. He knew and he called them, maybe to tell them not to do it, and they decided he was a risk, and came over and killed him. You gotta look at his cell phone, see who he called.”
“I’ll do that from here . . .” Wood gave Lucas the names of the
two investigators on the way to Mount Pleasant, and promised to call again if anything came up before Lucas got there. Lucas called Neil Mitford, Henderson’s weasel, and told him what had happened.
“Oh, my God. Elmer was right,” Mitford said. “These people are gonna try to kill Bowden.”
“Yes. It’s out in the open now,” Lucas said. “Listen, tell Elmer about this. I’ll call Bowden’s security people. I’m going back to Mount Pleasant.”
“Don’t get yourself busted,” Mitford said.
“I’ll try,” Lucas said.
—
DAN JUBEK,
Bowden’s head of security, was as astonished as Mitford. “What would you do, if you were me?” he asked.
“I’d get her out of town. I’m not sure that would be enough, but it might be, depending on how mobile these guys are,” Lucas said.
“Probably not gonna happen,” Jubek said.
“If she won’t go, you could suggest that she jumble up her schedule, and then not post the new days and times on her website—so nobody would know but the locals, wherever she’s going, and then, not until the last minute. I don’t think these people are real sophisticated. If she does that, they might have a harder time setting something up.”
“I’ll tell her that,” Jubek said. “Jesus, Lucas, find these assholes, huh?”
—
LUCAS GOT
a couple of bagels with cream cheese, in a bag, and a Diet Coke before he left Iowa City, and ate on the way to Mount Pleasant. When he got there, he found five cop cars and a van parked outside Likely’s house—a city car, two sheriff’s cars, two Division of Criminal Investigation cars, plus the van from the DCI’s crime-scene unit. Neighbors were standing around on porches and lawns along the street, looking toward Likely’s house, when Lucas pulled to the curb.
A uniformed cop was peering at him, so Lucas checked the phone numbers given him by Bell Wood, called the lead investigator, Randy Ford, and identified himself. “I’m parked down the street, but you’ve got a guy in the yard keeping people away.”
“I’ll be right out,” Ford said. “C’mon over.”
Not a good time to use the carry permit, Lucas thought. He got out of the truck and walked twenty yards down to the cop and said, before the cop could ask, “Randy Ford’s coming out to see me.”
The cop nodded and said, “Okay . . .” and looked back at the door, where a thin, white-haired man had stepped out on the porch, still talking to somebody inside the house. “That’s Randy.”
“Tough scene inside?” Lucas asked.
The cop frowned. “You media?”
“No. I’m an . . . investigator . . . from Minnesota, looking into a threat against Michaela Bowden. I talked to Likely yesterday.”
The cop ticked a finger at him: “Davenport, right? Like the city.”
“That’s me.”
Ford was walking over, stuck out a hand and said, “Glad you could stop by.” Ford was a short, thin man, wearing tan slacks and a blue short-sleeved dress shirt; he had the knobby, shiny-skinned look of a college wrestler in one of the lower weight classes.
“I got the feeling it was either that or run for the border,” Lucas said, as they shook.
“We do need to talk to you about that,” Ford said. “What time did you leave here last night?”
Lucas gave him a timeline, from the first moment he’d seen Likely through his trip to Burlington, the return to Mount Pleasant, the drive to Davenport, the chase in Davenport, and the night in Iowa City.
“What you’re saying is, your only alibi for last night between ten and eleven is two presidential candidates and their campaign security staffs, a bunch of city cops in Davenport, and the hotel people in Iowa City. Plus you’re a personal friend of Bell Wood and that fuckin’ Flowers, and they’ll vouch for you.”
“That’s about it,” Lucas said.
“Good enough for me,” Ford said. “C’mon, take a look at this. You’ve probably seen a lot more of them than I have.”
—
LUCAS HAD,
but it was never a pleasure. The crime-scene crew was working the house and had marked a walking path through the rooms with masking tape. Likely, gray-faced and cold, was lying facedown at the end of a blood trail across his living room carpet; his mouth was open, as though he were trying to bite into the fabric.
“Looking at the holes in his scalp, we think he was shot with a .22 or possibly a .17, but a .17 is unlikely. We haven’t been able to find any neighbors who heard any shots, but it’s been hot and doors are closed and air conditioners are running, so they wouldn’t, unless they were outside. We haven’t finished processing, so the bodies are right where they fell. We’ll need a medical examiner to tell us for sure, but it looks to me like Likely was shot at least six or seven times, and three different places in his head. Mrs. Baker, that’s his friend, she’s in the kitchen, she was shot three times in the head.”
“You find any shells?”
“No. But that many shots . . . probably an automatic, unless it was a rifle, but that’s unlikely. We think they probably picked up the shells, then tossed the house.”
Lucas took a long, close look at Likely, then followed Ford into the kitchen, where the other investigator, Jerome Robertson, was sitting in a canvas folding chair, making notes on the scene. A woman was kneeling next to the body, her nose about an inch from Baker’s shoulder.
Ford asked, “What?”
The woman looked up and said, “She fell on a cartridge casing. Found it one second ago—it’s a .22, all right.”
“Good,” Ford said. “That’s something.”
“Not much,” she said. “No print—whoever loaded it cleaned it up first.”
“Any prints anywhere?” Lucas asked.
“Millions of them,” the woman said. “Whoever killed Mr. Likely also took his wallet out of his hip pocket—we think—and
took the money out of it and then dropped it back on the floor. I can see the outline of a finger, because the outline is made with a trace of powder. There’re no papillary ridges inside the outline. I’m thinking they wore rubber gloves.”
“They came prepared,” Ford said.
“I think so,” the woman said. “I looked around and didn’t find any rubber gloves here, or boxes for them.”
Ford introduced Lucas to Robertson, who said, “We don’t have a single exit wound, so I’m thinking, low-power, solid-lead .22s. We’ll get some intact slugs from inside their skulls. And we’ve got the shell, now. Katie can see the firing pin impression, so we’ll get a decent tool mark.”
“Gotta hope they didn’t throw the gun in the river,” Ford said.
Ford and Robertson gave Lucas a quick verbal overview of what they’d found—Likely and Patricia Baker were probably killed sometime between ten and eleven o’clock by persons driving a dark pickup of unknown make, but American. They’d gotten that information from neighbors.
One of the neighbors got off work at a pizza parlor at ten o’clock. He hadn’t stopped anywhere, and so had gotten home around five or six minutes after ten. He’d seen the unfamiliar pickup, but hadn’t paid any real attention to it. Another neighbor had hurried off to a convenience store for cigarettes and was sure that no pickup had been parked at Likely’s. He’d been hurrying because the store closed at eleven and he’d barely made it in time.
“So they were here sometime before ten, but we don’t know how long before, and they were gone before eleven,” Robertson said. Robertson was sartorially distinct from his partner, wearing a
blue-striped Façonnable long-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slender jeans with the cuffs rolled up a half inch, and tan lace-up shoes; Lucas envied him the shoes. “We have a call on Likely’s phone, to Baker, at nine o’clock, so he was alive then.”
“I was told somebody got a tip about the killings,” Lucas said.
“Not about the killings, exactly,” Ford said. “Baker lived with a friend named Pamela Carney. They share a house a couple of blocks from here. Baker and Likely had a sexual relationship, but Baker never stayed the night. Miz Carney is old and doesn’t get around so well, she depended on Baker for help getting in and out of the shower and so on. When Baker hadn’t gotten back by this morning and didn’t answer her cell phone, she called the Mount Pleasant cops and asked them to check over here. One of their cops came around and looked in the back door and saw Baker on the floor. That set it all off.”
“Do you know if Bell checked Likely’s cell phone for calls?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, he did, and we have a list, but there was only one after you left, and that was the nine o’clock call to Baker,” Ford said. “He apparently asked her to come over. Call only lasted for twenty-three seconds.”
“Do you know if Baker or Miz . . . Carney? . . . were involved in this Progressive People’s Party of Likely’s?”
“Don’t know yet,” Robertson said. “We do have one really weird thing, though.” He looked back to the crime-scene tech. “Katie, tell him about the chairs.”
The woman was still squatting next to Baker’s body. She looked up and said, “There were a couple of wooden chairs shoved into a
corner of the living room. Like when you’re trying to temporarily pen up a pet, or a child. A toddler. I took a close look and I could see small fingerprints down the legs, about where a toddler would take hold of them. I pulled the prints, but . . . I have no idea what it means.”
“One of the neighbors the locals talked to said they’d never seen a toddler here,” Robertson said. “I don’t know what it means, either, but it’s weird.”
Ford: “It’s like a cold-blooded assassin couldn’t get last-minute child care.”
—
LUCAS ASKED PERMISSION
to walk through the scene and Ford and Robertson left him to do it. He spent five minutes looking at the living room, and at Likely’s body, and the chairs in the corner, trying to imagine exactly what had happened there.
When he was satisfied, he went to look at the front and back doors, which were intact and unmarked. Returning to the living room, he got down on the floor and looked carefully at Likely’s face and his hands. He spent a few more minutes looking at Baker’s body, then followed the tape trail through the house, up into the bedrooms, down into the basement.
When he came back up the stairs, Ford asked, “What do you think?”