“For Christ’s sakes, Mom, what are you guys doing?” Jesse asked. “You
can’t
go throwing rocks at politicians. Not in Iowa. They catch him, they’ll put his ass in prison. I don’t think Cole would do real good in prison.”
“You don’t think I’m worried? That’s why I’m telling you this,” Marlys said. “Cole’s gone over to the golf course. He’ll stay there until it’s dark, and he’ll work there tomorrow until we know whether this guy is going to show up or not.”
“Ah, God, I knew your politics would get us in trouble, sooner or later,” Jesse said.
“Look, I’m not asking you to go along with hiding him—let the guy see you, and I’ll do all the lyin’ from there.”
Jesse looked her over for a moment, then said, “Yeah. You’re good at it.”
—
JESSE HAD
an early farmers’ market in Cedar Rapids the next day, taking in a couple hundred ears of perfect sweet corn, which had to be picked and cleaned up. He got gunnysacks out of the shed and walked down to the cornfield and started picking.
He kept an old mattress in the back of his truck for corn deliveries, to keep the ears from bruising as he drove up to I-80 on the back roads, and had just dropped the second sack on the mattress when a black Mercedes SUV nosed into the driveway. Jesse stood watching it, and the truck pulled up to him and a tough-looking
dark-haired guy ran the window down and asked, “Is this the Purdy place?”
Jesse said, “Yeah. Who’re you?”
“I’m looking for Marlys Purdy.”
“That’s my mom,” Jesse said. “She’s in the house.” He tipped his head toward the side door.
—
LUCAS LOOKED AT JESSE,
taking in the blue eyes and the short hair, which, though short, was ragged, and hadn’t been recently cut. Not the guy who ran from him in Davenport—and his truck wasn’t the truck they’d seen. “We’re looking for some people who’ve been talking with Governor Henderson . . .”
“Don’t know nothing about politics, but Mom does,” the man said. “I think she’s for Bowden. Or maybe Henderson. One of them. I just sell the corn around here. You better talk to her.”
As he said it, he was backing away from Lucas’s Mercedes, the last gunnysack in his hands. Lucas said, “Okay,” and got out of the truck as Jesse walked down the slope to the sweet corn field.
—
LIKE MOST OF
the other members of the PPPI, Marlys Purdy didn’t like cops and wasn’t afraid to say so. “What I want to know is, where were the cops when the banks were robbing us of our farms? How come Wall Street is making billions and not a single big-time banker went to prison after they tore down the whole damn economy in ’08? Have you even read
The Big Short
? Where were you cops then? That’s what I want to know.”
“That would be worth knowing,” Lucas said, “but that’s not what I’m looking into. I’m trying to find a woman who has made some implicit threats aimed at Mrs. Bowden and may be involved in the murder of Joseph Likely.”
Something seemed to retract in her eyes, and she said, “Joe Likely? Joe Likely was murdered?”
“And his girlfriend with him,” Lucas said.
They’d been standing in the kitchen, where the eyeglasses-free Purdy had been washing apples. Now she took a chair and said, “I haven’t seen him for a while, but the last time I did, he was happy, he didn’t seem threatened. If he felt threatened, I think he would have told us.”
“Was there anybody who you think might have been . . . angry with him? Or opposed to him? Anybody who might have confided in him and then decided they’d made a mistake?”
She shook her head. “Nothing like that. The PPPI doesn’t hurt people.”
“What about Anson Palmer?” Lucas asked.
“Anson wouldn’t hurt anyone. I promise you that.”
“He seems a little . . . off balance.”
“You mean because of the Jew thing? His book?”
“That, and his general attitude toward police. It’s like he’s almost eager to get up in their faces . . . I’m not a cop anymore, but he got up in mine, because I used to be,” Lucas said.
“He’s got his reasons,” Marlys said. She massaged her forehead with her fingers, and Lucas took in the brown hair with the white streaks. Her hair was shortish, but not the curly white lamb-like hair described by Henderson. She said, “I hate to give up anybody
who’s done good work, but I don’t want anything to happen to Mike Bowden, either. Have you ever heard of a group called Prairie Storm?”
“As a matter of fact, I have—I ran into their leader the other day, over in Atlantic.” He touched his black eye, which was still tender.
“Really? He did that? Did you get back at him?” Marlys asked.
“I handled it,” Lucas said. “He won’t be breathing easy for a couple of months.”
“You beat him up?”
“I defended myself,” Lucas said.
She took him in, a moment of silent appraisal, then she said, “I believe that. I don’t intend to be rude, Mr. Davenport, but you look kinda mean.”
—
LUCAS LEFT TEN MINUTES
later. Marlys Purdy fit the bill in some ways, and in more ways, did not. He was thinking about checking her with the neighbors, when Bell Wood called.
“I haven’t found them,” he said, without saying hello. “I’m down in the town of Pella, heading your way.”
“You might want to turn around,” Wood said. “Your friends on the Iowa City police force called. Somebody murdered a guy named Anson Palmer.”
L
ucas was starting to feel like a yo-yo, and Iowa City was the finger.
When he got back, off I-80, he threaded his way through town to Anson Palmer’s house and found a half-dozen cop cars coagulated in the street outside. Randy Ford’s state sedan was among them.
He had Ford’s number on his cell phone, called it, and Ford said, “Yeah?”
“I’m outside.”
“Come on in,” Ford said.
—
FORD WAS STANDING
in Palmer’s living room, looking disgusted. “I don’t know,” he said, when Lucas appeared in the doorway. “It’s like amateur night at the slaughterhouse, but we can’t find the goddamn amateur who’s doing the killing.”
“You’re sure it’s a murder . . .”
“Unless he hit himself on the head about three times with a
rock, and after crushing his own skull, put the rock in a sink, washed it, and then tied a plastic bag around his head.”
“Okay. When do you think it happened?”
One of the crime-scene people said, “No scientific estimate, but looking at the blood when we got here . . . we’re thinking maybe between one and two o’clock, give or take.”
—
LUCAS WENT TO LOOK.
Two crime-scene technicians were working Palmer’s office, collecting samples of everything the killer might have touched. One of them was working over a visitor’s chair with tape, pulling off any residue.
Lucas had once gone to a murder scene at a fishing cabin in northern Minnesota where a man had been beaten to death with a souvenir cribbage board, which had been shaped like a short canoe paddle. The heavy oaken board had been swung edge-on, like an ax, a half-dozen times, and the victim’s skull had been crushed.
Anson Palmer was lying facedown in his home office, his head cocked back, propped against the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. His bladder had released as he was dying, and the room still stank of urine. His head was wrapped with a transparent plastic bag, but was misshapen in the same way the cribbage-board victim’s had been. The bag had been tied around his neck and a pint of blood had collected below his chin.
No sign of a weapon near the body.
“You said he was hit with a rock?”
“We think so,” Ford said. “There’s a rock in the kitchen sink, it’s been washed with soap. But some of the victim’s hair, with a
couple flakes of scalp, were caught in the sink drainer. The killer didn’t notice.”
Lucas went to look. The bun-shaped chunk of speckled granite was a bit larger than a baseball, but smaller than a softball, and had a laser-cut slogan carved in the surface:
Molon Labe.
“Come and take it,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, I looked it up on the Internet, it’s pretty famous,” Ford said. “A lot of the pro-gun guys use it and radical political groups. The Texans used it during the Texas revolution. The Greeks supposedly said that to the Persians before a battle when the Persians told them to surrender.”
“I knew about the gun guys and the Greeks,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know about the Texans. You think the rock belonged to Palmer?”
“Yeah, it did. There’s a picture of him with another guy, that was taken in the office, looks like a few years ago, and you can see the rock on his desk.”
Lucas went back and looked at the body again. “You know where the plastic bag came from?”
One of the techs said, “We think it’s a plastic bag from a dry cleaner. There’s a sport coat hanging from a doorknob in the living room, and the hanger’s from a dry cleaner, but there’s no bag around it.”
“Then the killer didn’t bring it with him.”
“We don’t think so—we’re thinking that the murder was spontaneous—an argument, weapon of opportunity, whacks him on the head when he’s not looking,” Ford said.
Lucas agreed, but added, “Whack a guy a few times with a rock,
you turn his head to mush . . . It takes a cold guy to find a bag to wrap around his head to finish the job, and then go wash the rock.”
“Nobody said he was a sweetheart,” Ford said.
“Makes me think it was a spontaneous use of the weapon, but the killer might have come here thinking about the possibility of killing him. With a really hot spontaneous murder, there’s usually more . . . trashing of the place. Evidence of a fight or an argument. The killer leaves some blood around, the victim has a little bit of a chance to fight. This guy killed Palmer and then took some time to tidy up. Not rushed, not frightened, not panicked. Cold.”
“Like Joseph Likely and his girlfriend,” Ford said. “That was cold.”
“Yeah, but why not bring the gun with you?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe you already threw it in a river?” Ford suggested. “Or maybe because it didn’t work so well the first time.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you were thinking you wouldn’t need it again, so you didn’t bring it,” Lucas said. “Anybody talk to the Bowden people about this?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ford said. “You’re basically the guy talking about Bowden—the rest of us are not so sure it’s all connected.”
“Well, it is,” Lucas said. And after a minute, “Talk to all the neighbors?”
“Yeah. There was a red truck parked across the street and down the block from Palmer’s, for maybe an hour and a half. A woman on the next street up saw a man getting in and out of the truck, but we’ve got no real description. Might have been wearing a blue uniform shirt, like a repairman or something, but maybe it was just a
short-sleeved shirt. Probably brown hair. Haven’t found anybody yet who knows who it might be. A woman at the other end of the block saw two unfamiliar women on the street, looked Hispanic or maybe Filipino, but they were carrying pamphlets and she thought they may have been religious people. Nobody seen going in or out of Palmer’s.”
—
LUCAS SPENT
another fifteen minutes looking at the murder scene—he’d found the longer you looked, the more likely it was that you’d pick up some small thing that would become more interesting as you got deeper into the investigation. Not this time: it was what it was. Pick up the stone, whack, whack, whack. Game over.
A cold mind, but you couldn’t see a mind.
After fifteen minutes, he’d seen enough.
—
LUCAS ASKED FORD
to send him whatever he could, said good-bye, went out to his truck and called Mitford, told him about the second murder, and then called Bowden’s security guy, Jubek. That done, he went off to find some dinner and check back into the Sheraton. As he ate, he thought about Grace Lawrence: a possible bomber, the possible creator or accessory in a murder that took planning and efficient execution. A cold mind.
The problem was, he had no idea what could have caused Lawrence to have gone after Palmer, and Lawrence in no way
resembled the woman that Henderson had spoken to. When they were talking, Lawrence had mentioned that she worked at the elementary school as a volunteer, “sometimes I think because I never had kids of my own.”
If she were telling the truth about that, there’d be no gray-eyed country son.
He tucked her away in the back of his mind, in case the DNA from the dairy bombing came back with a match.
—
HE ALSO THOUGHT
of the people he’d interviewed that afternoon: they could be ruled out of the Palmer murder, simply because they wouldn’t have had time to drive back home after the killing, before talking to him. Those he’d interviewed late in the afternoon might have had time to drive back—barely—but he didn’t believe they could have been involved. The number of people who could murder someone, and then have a cop unexpectedly arrive at the house, and still show no signs of stress or agitation, would be vanishingly rare. That would take a kind of psychosis that would show in other ways, and he would have sensed it.
He hadn’t.
Still, they’d all been members of the PPPI and the party was connected to the two murders, and so was whoever was stalking Bowden.
He finished dinner, drove to the hotel, and checked in. He had been in the room long enough to wash his face when the phone rang.
—
RANDY FORD CALLING.
“Davenport,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”
Ford said, “Lucas, this is really embarrassing . . .”
“What?”
“The director called because he wanted to know about the two murders,” Ford said. “When I told him about you coming by the scene, he hit the roof.”
“Aw, shit.”
“Yeah. He’s told me that you can’t be involved,” Ford said. “Told me to keep you away from the scenes and I’m not allowed to give you any reports.”
“Gives me an ice cream headache,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, well, I told him he’s making a bad call and he reamed me a new one. So . . . now you know.”
“I’m out.”
“You’re out of the police picture,” Ford said. “There’s nothing to keep you from asking questions on your own. If you do that, I hope you’ll call me up if you find anything.”
“I will,” Lucas said. “This doesn’t make it easier, though.”
“I know, but that’s the way it is. Call me if you get anything.”
—
LUCAS CALLED NEIL MITFORD,
who didn’t seem impressed by the fact that Lucas had been kicked out of the police case. “They’ll change their minds. You be thinking about what you should be doing next.”
“Neil, this is exactly the kind of bureaucratic bullshit that pushed me out of the BCA,” Lucas said. “It’s a guy protecting his territory. Actually it’s not even as bad as the BCA deal. I kind of understand why the Iowa guys wouldn’t want an outsider sticking his nose in, especially a civilian.”
“You think about your next move,” Mitford repeated. “Assume you’ll have full police cooperation. I’ll talk to the governor about this Anson Palmer guy and we’ll figure out what
we
want to do next.”
—
LUCAS TALKED TO WEATHER,
told her that he might be on the way home. When he got off the phone, he looked at his watch: he had enough time to walk down to a bookstore he’d passed on the street and pick up something to read. He did that, found a Joseph Kanon spy novel, propped some hotel pillows behind his back, and settled down to read until bedtime.
Took a call from an unrecognized number at eleven o’clock. A man asked, “Davenport?”
“Yes?”
“Hold for Mike Bowden.”
Bowden came up a few seconds later: “I’ve been briefed on the second murder and your investigation. I understand that you had already interviewed the dead man, Mr. Palmer.”
“Yes. Twice. He was killed probably four or five hours after I last talked to him,” Lucas said.
“Then you must be close to the main thread of this conspiracy, if there is a conspiracy,” she said.
“I think so, but I haven’t gotten very far with it,” Lucas said.
“Keep pushing—the police will cooperate,” Bowden said.
“I was told otherwise, about an hour ago.”
“The director of the Division of Criminal Investigation is having a conversation with the governor of Iowa right now, and his mind is being changed about that,” Bowden said, her voice cool and undramatic. “I spoke to the governor, and as he put it, ‘Who in God’s name wouldn’t take all the help he could get if one of the presidential candidates is threatened?’ He seemed quite perturbed.”
“I’m starting to feel squeezed by all you big-time politicians,” Lucas said.
“Can’t help you there. I’m a squeezer myself and I don’t much identify with the squeezed,” Bowden said. “Get back to work tomorrow. Or even tonight, if you have something to do.”
He didn’t, so he went to bed.
Feeling squeezed.