“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.”
F
ord 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.”
“Fuck Robertson,” she snarled. “If there’d been a witness here, I’d have sued you for a million dollars for what that fascist faggot did to me.”
“I don’t think you want to spend time around any kind of court, Grace,” Lucas said.
He sat there looking at her for a moment, and she suddenly began to cry, her shoulders shaking against the cuffs behind her back. “My house . . . my garden . . .”
“Shouldn’t have shot me,” Lucas said. “I suspect you’re the one who killed Anson Palmer, too, so we’re going to look for any piece of DNA we can find there.”
“Fuck you, fuck you . . .”
“Give me the goddamn names, Grace,” Lucas said. “C’mon. Please. Talk to me. Save yourself.”
“Fuck you.”
—
FORD CAME BACK,
looked at Lucas, asked, “Get a name?”
“Not unless it’s ‘Fuck you,’” Lucas said.
—
THEY MOVED
a few feet away, past the doorway to the kitchen, where they could watch Lawrence as she sat behind the table on a wooden chair. Ford said quietly, “We’ve got the Johnson County
sheriff on the way and we’ll get a crime-scene crew here quick enough. Since she shot you and this is a crime scene, we can tear the place apart. We won’t need a search warrant. If you want to take a look around . . .”
“I want to take a look at her computer, for sure. It may be password-protected—if we could get that computer guy down here from Iowa City, he cracked Anson Palmer’s password in about five minutes.”
“I’ll call him. You okay?”
“Yeah. Almost peed my pants when she came up with that old revolver—thought it might be a .357. That wouldn’t have been good.”
“No kiddin’. We’d be scraping your kidneys off the back of that vest.”
—
THE SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES
came in with lights and sirens and Ford went out to meet them. Lucas stepped over to Lawrence and said, “I’m not gonna plead with you anymore, but I’m curious about one thing. What were you going to do with my body?”
She looked up and said, “I hadn’t worked that out.” She thought for a moment, then said, “I would have waited until night. I’ve got a wheelbarrow and I would have had your car and keys. I know a place where I could have parked you by the river. They wouldn’t have found you for a week.”
“How would you have gotten home?” Lucas asked.
She thought about that for a bit, then said, “Bicycle. I would have thrown my bike in the back of the car.”
—
THE BACK DOOR,
what was left of it, scraped open again, and they could hear boot steps on the stoop, and Lucas said, “This is it, Grace. Who’s going after Bowden? Give me something that’ll give you a break.”
She shook her head. “Fuck you.”
—
THE COPS TOOK
her out, and on the way she cried out again, “My house,” and then she was gone. With the silence settling on him, Lucas looked around the sweet-smelling kitchen, the kitchen that smelled of fresh bread and lettuce, and thought about all those “fuck yous.” She hadn’t, he realized, ever denied knowing about the conspiracy pointed at Bowden. She’d simply said, “Fuck you.” And that, Lucas thought, meant that she knew something.
That he’d stepped on one end of the conspiracy thread.
—
THE COMPUTER GUY
from Iowa City arrived an hour later, looked at Lawrence’s computer and cracked the password five minutes later.
“Must have sky-high rates if you only get paid for five minutes at a time,” Lucas said, as the other man packed up his little tool kit.
“My rates are only middling,” the guy said. “But I charge day rates, like photographers. Use me for six hours, day rate. Use me for five minutes, day rate.”
“Ah. What happens when somebody refuses to pay a day rate?”
The guy smiled and said, “They don’t do that, you know, if they want to stay online.”
—
WHEN LUCAS FIRST GOT
a list of the membership from Lawrence, she’d plugged in a thumb drive that she kept in an office supply box on the table. He thought he’d look at it first: plugged in the drive, found the membership list and a hundred files of new releases and PPPI position papers. He scanned them quickly; not much of interest in the position papers, but a quick look at the membership list turned up, to his surprise, Betsy Skira’s name, address, e-mail, and phone number. He checked Lawrence’s e-mail and found two e-mails to Skira. Neither involved the PPPI—they were merely e-mail visits, plans to get together for lunch.
Skira hadn’t been on the list that she’d given him. Lawrence had tried to keep her friend out of any investigation. She hadn’t done it while Lucas was watching her print it, though, so she must have done it earlier. Anson Palmer, Lucas thought, had called her to warn her that he was coming.
Lucas set the thumb drive aside and went through Lawrence’s e-mail, looking for correspondence involving the June meeting at Likely’s house. There was lots of it, but all but two e-mails about the meeting were outgoing, routine notices of time and place.
Of the incoming two, George Spate said he wouldn’t be able to attend, because of medical problems. Lucas checked Robertson’s interviews, and found Spate’s name, but he hadn’t yet been interviewed. He lived in the town of Fairfax, a few miles outside Cedar Rapids, and about a half hour away. The other one, a Marcia
Boone, lived in New Sharon, a little less than an hour and a half away. Robertson had talked to her.
Lucas called Spate, but there was no answer. Boone, on the other hand, picked up on the first ring. Lucas identified himself and Boone blurted, “I felt so bad about Jerry. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it on the news.”