“Let’s get the tarp down, bundle up the dirt,” Marlys said. “I’ll get the paint.”
They checked for vehicles, and then, as Cole pulled the tarp down and over the waste dirt, Marlys pulled the three poles out of the ground and lay them next to the building.
Cole started back to the truck with the dirt. After a last check around, Marlys pried the lid off the paint can, walked into the street, checked herself, and then poured the paint on the pavement.
She strolled back to the curb, picked up the rods next to the building, and carried them with her. Cole was already in the truck.
“All set,” she said. “You check the pin?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. It’s a half-inch below the dirt line, but the dirt’s soft. No problem getting at it.”
—
WHEN THEY’D CAUGHT
their breath, Cole eased the truck out of the machinery grounds, and they rolled slowly back to the animal barns. They stopped there for a moment and looked around. Nobody in sight. Cole walked around to the back, where a pale green telephone junction box sat next to the perimeter fence. The lid was down, but loose; he lifted it, looked around again, and slipped the pistol under the lid and pushed the lid back down.
A minute later he was back at the truck, and a minute after that they were through the gate. They’d be back at nine o’clock, on foot.
Set to go.
L
ucas drove back to Des Moines. He needed at least a few hours of sleep: the next day was going to be intense, no matter what happened. He had a secret stash of amphetamines in the truck, but sleep would be better. Might pop a pill in the morning.
Lucas was barreling through the night on cruise control when Mitford called at one o’clock and asked, “Anything happen?”
“The Iowa cops will eventually get Betsy Skira for that dairy bombing, but she doesn’t know anything about Purdy,” Lucas said.
“All right. I’m going to bed. There are no hotel rooms left in Des Moines, ’cause of the fair, but we’ve got one here for you, if you want it.”
“Absolutely. I’ll be there in an hour.”
—
LUCAS GOT TO THE HOTEL
at two o’clock, took a fast hot shower and fell into bed, his phone alarm set for six-thirty. At six-thirty-one he was on his feet, in and out of the shower, shaved and dressed in fifteen minutes. As he was scooping change and keys off the
nightstand, he noticed he still had the two steel nuts he’d picked up in the Purdys’ barn workshop. “Shit,” he said aloud, “I’m a shoplifter.” But they felt like good-luck tokens now, and he dropped them in his pocket. Maybe he could ask Cole Purdy about them, in person.
He was out of the hotel before seven with a can of Diet Coke in his hand, feeling a little fuzzy. The day would be too hot for the work shirt he’d worn to hide the bulletproof vest when he’d gone to see Grace Lawrence, so he’d pulled on a heavy-weight Duluth Trading long-tail T-shirt, worn loose, to hide the .45; and jeans and running shoes, and a ball cap.
He popped the back hatch on the truck, dug his stash of amphetamines out from under the spare, popped one. The fuzziness had cleared by the time he turned into the north parking lot at the fairgrounds.
—
THE SUN WAS STILL LOW
but bright, not a cloud in the sky, and the parking lot was rapidly filling up, Chevys and Fords, long streams of Iowans headed for the gate. Lucas fell in with them, slipping on a pair of sunglasses.
He fit in the crowd like a pea in a pod, he thought: the basic difference between Minnesotans and Iowans was a line on a map. Other than that, they were the same bunch, except, of course, for the physical and spiritual superiority of the Minnesota Gophers over the Iowa Hawkeyes, in all ways, and forever. Between the Hawks and the Badgers . . . they’d have to work that out themselves.
When he got to the gate he found himself looking at a metal detector, and remembered the gun. Greer had planned to arrive early and Lucas called him: “I got a .45 and I’m looking at a metal detector.”
“Where are you?”
“North parking lot gate,” Lucas said.
“Give me five minutes.”
A few minutes later Greer arrived, driving a green-and-yellow John Deere Gator, newer but otherwise identical to the Gator at the Purdys’ place. Greer walked out through the gate and said, “Before we go through . . . I got a vest for you, if you want it, but you’ll need a different shirt.”
Lucas said, “Nah, too hot.”
“If you say so, dude.”
Greer showed his badge to the guard at the gate and they walked around the metal detector. As they did it, Lucas noticed the large printer-paper color photos of Marlys and Cole that Bell Wood had taken from the Purdys’ place hanging on the glass wall of the gate. Marlys Purdy’s hair looked fake in the Photoshopped reproduction, and maybe a bit too long, but nobody would have any trouble recognizing her.
“Did a good job on that,” Lucas said.
Greer yawned. “Yeah, they did.”
“You get any sleep? What happened last night?”
“I read Betsy her rights, she refused to talk. I took a hike. I probably got back here ten minutes after you.”
“She did it.”
“Yeah, but it’s all on the DNA now. If we get a match, she falls. If we don’t, she walks.”
—
AS THEY RODE
the Gator into the fairgrounds Greer asked, “What do you want to do?”
“Walk the route that Bowden will take,” Lucas said. “And I want to tour the whole place.”
Greer looked at his watch: “You got about two and a half hours. You’ll need all of it, if you’re planning to do a tour.”
They drove past the racetrack and stage to the edge of the grandstand and Lucas said, “Why don’t you drop me off here? I need to walk it.”
Greer pulled over and stopped, produced a map of the fairgrounds and a Sharpie, drew a line down a street called Grand Avenue/Concourse, and said, “That’s where Bowden will walk. They’ll park the bus over in a handicapped lot by Gate Eleven and head right over to the walking route, which is less than a block. Nobody except law enforcement knows where the buses will be, and the area’s roped off and sterilized. The announced time for the walk is ten a.m., but they won’t start until ten-thirty. We’re hoping that the Purdys will be in the crowd right at the announced time, so we’ll have a half hour to pick them out. During the march, Gardner will lead with a band and a bunch of his people—they all have bands—and Bowden will be the middle, Henderson bringing up the rear. It’ll be quick: most of it’s for the benefit of the TV cameras, not really to shake a lot of hands.”
“Good.”
Greer went back to the Gator’s storage compartment and produced a radio handset, about the length of an iPhone 6 but
narrower and thicker, and a plastic folder a bit smaller than a passport. “The alert call is three loud beeps and it’ll vibrate. You’re on the general emergency channel. The red button is the alert signal—press it if you want everybody to shut up and listen to what you have to say—that’s the three beeps button, but you only have to press it once. The rest is obvious. Press the big button to transmit and know that everybody will hear you.”
“Got it. Thanks,” Lucas said, taking the radio.
“Last thing,” Greer said. He handed Lucas the plastic folder. “Bell says if you run into our beloved director, for God’s sakes don’t let him see this. It’s one of our IDs. We took your photo off the Net. You are not deputized or anything else, but if a cop braces you about the gun, show him the ID and the handset. If he’s still not happy, call me and I’ll be there in one minute.”
“I feel almost like an Iowan,” Lucas said.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Try to control yourself. You got a
lot
of work to do before you get to that place,” Greer said. “And listen—call me for anything. Call me if you get a rock in your shoe.”
“What about Robertson? You hear any more?”
Greer brightened. “Yeah. He’s talking. Mostly about how much he hurts, but he’s talking and he’s coherent and the docs are happy.”
—
LUCAS CLIMBED OUT
of the Gator and slapped it on the back bed, and Greer took off.
Lucas had been to the Minnesota State Fair six times in his adult life, three times as a uniformed Minneapolis cop and, years later, three more times at the insistence of his adoptive daughter, Letty,
who brought along three hot female friends in skimpy clothing who ignored Dad. Now, as he walked past the hulking grandstand and through the midway rides, it all began to come back: he really didn’t like state fairs.
Small, out-of-the-way county fairs were okay, with their traveling carny shows that might have been taken from a Stephen King short story, and their weird, idiosyncratic events like speed chain saw sculpture—one minute to do a four-foot bear—and snowmobile water-skipping. A big institutional fair was just that: institutional. Sure, deep-fried ice cream bars might be a good idea, but after you’ve eaten a few, then what?
—
AS HE PROBED
the midway, circling around the rides and the games, he looked at faces. Iowans, on the whole, were probably not any heavier than Minnesotans, but there were a lot of heavy people around and a lot of tall guys. Marlys Purdy would be hard to find in a crowd simply because she was short. As the crowds grew thicker, she’d be submerged in moving flesh. Cole would be easier to spot because he was six feet tall and thin, and would stand out in the crush.
Lucas approved of posting the photos at the gates, but had little faith in the idea that a guard would spot the mother and son. The most he could hope for, he thought, other than a lucky identification, was that they were still outside the fairgrounds, that the photos would warn them away, and they wouldn’t try to come inside, so Bowden would be safe. They could always catch the Purdys later.
But they probably knew they were being hunted. If they were the ones who’d killed Joe Likely, they’d have known about Lucas for several days. Even if they’d only known about him since Lucas first talked to Marlys, they would still have been warned. The fact that they’d sent Jesse to jail suggested that they knew that they were going to be identified, and would be prepared for it.
So either they were already inside, or they had a plan to get through the gates. Any reasonable plan, Lucas thought, as he peered at a teenage boy who was tall and thin but wasn’t Cole, would probably work.
Lucas had come out of the midway and was crossing the Concourse when the radio in his pocket vibrated and he pulled it out and put the speaker to his ear and a female voice, a little breathless, said, “Possible identification of Cole Purdy walking toward Gate Fourteen, about to enter midway. I’m in pursuit with John Allen. We will stay in touch until we get more people here . . .”
Another woman’s voice came up and said that cops were being routed to the area. Lucas pulled the map out of his back pocket and after a few seconds, spotted gates fourteen and fifteen back the way he’d just come. He turned and ran back that way, the radio in his hand. He was maybe three hundred yards away, he thought, a minute or more, having to circle and dodge his way through the crowd pouring in the opposite direction.
The radio buzzed again and he put it to his ear and heard the woman say, “He’s right there by the ticket booth, see him? Green long-sleeved shirt and cutoffs . . .”
Another voice. “We got him, okay. We see you and John, we’re coming in.”
“We’ll move on him now,” the woman said.
“Careful . . .”
—
LUCAS ARRIVED
a minute later to find a circle of people around two plainclothes cops and two highway patrolmen, all focused on a thin, long-haired man who was leaning with his hands against the side of a ticket booth while the cops looked through his wallet. He resembled Cole, Lucas thought, but his eyes were brown, and his nose too big.
The man next to him, who was carrying a soft drink cup the size of a bucket, said, “For a minute I thought it was a terrorist attack.”
Lucas started to back away as the thin man argued with the cops; Greer was pulling up in his green-and-yellow John Deere Gator and he’d know the man wasn’t Cole. A good-looking blonde bumped into Lucas’s holstered gun as he tried to extricate himself from the crowd; he glanced down at her and saw in her eyes that she knew what it was, and he grinned, held up the handset, and whispered, “Cop.”
And she apparently saw
that
in his eyes, and nodded and said, “Good,” and, “What’s going on?”
“We’re looking for a guy, but that’s not the guy.”
Then he was in the open again, and having been prompted by the good-looking blonde, noticed that he was surrounded by good-looking blondes: they were everywhere. So many blondes, so little time on earth . . .
He headed back up the midway. At the end of it, he looked
down to his right. That was the Concourse. He’d have to walk down that later, anyway, so he turned to his left and followed a much less-crowded street past a miscellany of buildings, and at the end, looked past a gate and over an extensive campground.
The Purdys could have spent the night there, he thought, and have gone through the gate as soon as they opened, with a crowd of other early birds. He had to remember that they came to the fair in most years, according to Jesse, so they’d know the place well . . .
He got close enough to the gate to see the pictures of the Purdys posted on the glass walls, then turned and wandered back the way he came, took the first left, walked under a cable car, past a big barn-like building with a red dome, then stopped to watch some people throwing horseshoes at a horseshoe court. Hadn’t seen anyone playing horseshoes in years; maybe decades.
He was still watching when he felt somebody watching him and turned to see two cops ambling up, but ambling with purpose. He held up the handset and they stepped over and one of them asked, “Who you with?”
Lucas handed him the DCI identification folder, and the cop glanced at it and handed it back and said, “Saw the bump under your shirt.”
“I figured,” Lucas said.
“I understand there was some excitement over at the midway,” the cop said.
“Wasn’t him,” Lucas said. “Resembled him, but wasn’t him.”
The other cop looked around and then said, “You know what? Not one guy in a hundred looks like him. But there are going to be
a hundred thousand people here today, maybe more. Half of them will be male. If it’s one in a hundred, that’s five hundred guys who’ll look like him. How in the heck are we supposed to pick him out?”
The first cop said, “He’ll be the only one shooting Mrs. Bowden.”
Lucas had to laugh, bumped the cop with his elbow, and said, “I didn’t hear that.”
The other cop was now looking at the horseshoe court, and said, “You know, I could see
playing
horseshoes, but I’ll be damned if I could see
practicing
horseshoes.”
—
LUCAS SAID GOOD-BYE
to the cops, worked his way past Grandfather’s Barn and, fifteen minutes later, walked through the swine barn, which was on the far south edge of the fairgrounds. The swine were looking pretty good, in their maze of pens, all freshly washed and odor-free, some with curly tails, some without, some cheerful, some not, most of them asleep. From there he walked through the cattle barn, watched a woman giving a shower to a steer in a dedicated cow shower; he hadn’t seen that before, and found it interesting. He’d heard rumors that in Texas they actually shaved their cattle before showing them at the state fair. He wasn’t sure about the credibility of the report, but it sounded like something Texans might do.