—
As he left the cattle barn he checked his watch. Nine o’clock. He skipped the sheep barn, but spent a few minutes with the
horses, and then moved on, past some kind of auctioneering contest, through a lot of machinery, and back to the main drag, where the candidates would be doing their campaign walks. The street was crowded: more crowded than he’d ever seen a street in New York City. When the candidate-walk started, they’d push everybody off the street, which meant that the sides of the street would be packed, virtually impassable. Yet, looking both ways, he could see cops almost everywhere.
The Purdys were crazy if they thought they could penetrate that. But the Purdys weren’t crazy, not in the sense of being stupid. Still, they wouldn’t be able to move without being spotted . . .
Unless, he thought suddenly, they didn’t look like the Purdys anymore. He turned and looked at the mass of humanity with new eyes. If they didn’t look like the Purdys . . . Somebody had mentioned the possibility of disguises the night before, but that had seemed far-fetched; now, not so much.
—
HIS PHONE RANG.
He checked the screen and saw that Greer was calling.
“What’s up?”
“You anywhere near the Varied Industries building?” Greer asked.
“Let me look at my map . . .” He checked, found the building on the map, turned around and looked right at it. “Yeah—in fact, I’m out front.”
“Go straight through it to the back, to the Fabrics and Threads Department. I’ll be waiting in the door.”
“On the way,” Lucas said.
The Varied Industries building was full of . . . varied industries. Hot tubs, docks, bundles of socks, microwaves and blenders, barbecue grills and canoe paddles. And it was as crowded as everyplace else. Lucas plodded through the aisles, spotted Greer talking to a uniformed cop. Greer broke away when he saw Lucas.
“We found out that Marlys Purdy has exhibited her quilts here, in other years, and thought we should check,” he said. “We wondered if anyone has seen her. No luck so far . . .”
“And?”
“Wanted you to take a look,” Greer said.
Lucas followed him into the Fabrics and Threads Department . . . which was full of Marlys Purdys. He could see eight or ten of them from the doorway, slightly plump white-haired women with glasses.
“Ah, Jesus.” He remembered the question asked by the cop at the horseshoe courts. How do you spot one in five hundred? With all these Marlys Purdys, it could be one in a thousand, or two thousand . . .
Greer said, “Yeah.”
“It’s worse than you think,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for Marlys Purdy and Cole Purdy and I got to thinking, would they really walk in here, knowing that a lot of people might be looking for them? Really? After seeing their pictures at the gates?”
“You think . . .”
“Yeah. They might not look like the Purdys anymore. And we got no idea what they do look like.”
—
THE PURDYS HAD WALKED
through the back gate, by the horse barn, a few minutes after Lucas left it. The truck was six blocks away, tucked among non-fair-going vehicles in a corporate parking lot. They’d come in separately and they no longer looked like the Purdys.
Marlys was wearing a pink dress she’d made herself, with a pink sailor hat with a pink breast-cancer ribbon pinned to it. She also wore a white satin sash over the dress, with the words “Race for the Cure.”
She was carrying Caralee and a baby bag; as she came up to the gate, she knocked her hat off, apparently accidentally, and bent to pick it up. The guard at the gate saw a pink bald head. He didn’t look a second time and she went through.
Cole was wearing his National Guard fatigues, with his OCP patrol cap. The cap was pulled down over his forehead; the hair on the sides of his head was an eighth of an inch long; white sidewalls. The ticket taker waved him through. A few steps onto the fairgrounds, a heavyset man looked at him, held up a hand, and said, “Thank you for your service.”
“Sure. Thank
you
,” Cole said.
Marlys led the way to the 4-H building, where they could find a place to sit, and where they were unlikely to run into anyone who knew them—neither of them knew anybody in 4-H. When they got there, Marlys went into the ladies’ room to change Caralee’s diaper, and Cole went out back to the phone junction box by the
barns, lifted the cover, and took out the 9mm he’d left there the night before. It was in a belt-clip holster, and he pushed it under his waistband and walked back to the 4-H center to wait.
“Forty-five minutes,” he said to Marlys, when he got back.
She nodded, but said nothing. Caralee was on her lap, working on her sippy cup full of apple juice. Marlys stared out over the room for a long time, then said to Cole, “This is a great and bold thing. This is one of the greatest, boldest things anybody’s ever done.”
Caralee said, “More apple juice.”
—
GREER LISTENED
on his phone for a moment, then said to Lucas, “Bowden’s here.”
“Let’s go walk the street,” Lucas said.
The street was more jammed than ever, lots of cardinal-and-gold colors for the Iowa State Cyclones and black-and-gold for the Iowa Hawkeyes, lots of big guys and blond women. They threaded through, fifteen feet apart, eyes hitting the faces of the people around them. They were moving slow, and the walk took twenty minutes—and Lucas was eye-checked by a dozen cops along the way.
More than ever, he was convinced that the Purdys no longer looked like the Purdys—and he found himself looking hard at every face, and people flinched away from him.
At the far end of the street Greer led the way to the handicapped parking area, where the three campaign buses had been sequestered. Campaign people were all over the lot, and more
were coming in from outside, most of them carrying food. Greer and Lucas checked through the cops, and Lucas spotted Bell Wood talking with a couple of athletic-looking women, whom he assumed were undercover cops.
They went that way, and Wood said, “Hey, guys,” and introduced them to the two women, both DCI agents. Lucas told Wood about his worries: that the Purdys would not look like Purdys.
“Yeah, that idea popped into my head about an hour ago,” Wood said. “We’ve had the patrol checking trucks, and Marlys Purdy’s truck isn’t in any of the parking lots—”
“And they’re checking for Cole’s truck, right?” Lucas asked.
Wood said, “Ah. Forgot to tell you. We’ve had the sheriff out there checking on the Purdys’ place. They must’ve taken it seriously, because they found Cole’s truck parked in the cornfield—I mean,
in
the corn. They hid it before they left.”
Lucas took off his ball cap and wiped his forehead. “Jesus, it’s hot.”
—
LUCAS LEFT WOOD
and went to Henderson’s bus, where the top people were sitting in maximum air-conditioning. One of Henderson’s security guys let him through, and Lucas climbed on the bus and took an empty seat in a cluster of people that included Henderson, Mitford, Alice Green, and a couple of other aides. Henderson asked, “No luck so far?”
“Not so far,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch again. Fifteen minutes to ten. “There’s no sign of their truck. If they don’t have
an inside source, they’ll think the walk starts at ten o’clock, so that’s when every cop and his brother will be going through the crowd, looking for them. It’s a zoo out there.”
“You could be wrong—they might not be here at all,” Henderson said.
“I believe they are,” Lucas said. “It’s possible that they have no idea of what’s waiting for them. How much security there is. When the Iowa guys said there’d be a cop every six feet, they weren’t kidding.” He scratched his forehead, then added, “Then again, we’ve got to remember that the Purdys come to the fair almost every year, so they know this place like the backs of their hands. They’ve probably even seen the candidate walk before.”
“Bottom line, we have no fuckin’ idea of what’s going to happen,” Mitford said.
“I’m going back out there,” Lucas said.
—
HE LEFT THE BUS
and started toward the line of cops at the access, when he heard a man calling his name: “Lucas! Lucas!”
He turned and saw Norm Clay, Bowden’s weasel, hurrying toward him. When he came up, Clay asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t think Mrs. Bowden should walk,” Lucas said.
“I told her that one minute ago, but she’s going to do it,” he said. “She’s got her guts up, and she’s going ahead.”
“Huge crowd out there,” Lucas said, looking down toward the street. “Lotsa cops . . . man, I don’t know.”
“Come on over to the bus and talk a minute,” Clay said.
Lucas followed him to the Bowden bus and climbed aboard. The end of the bus had been partitioned off, and Clay knocked once on a cardboard door, stuck his head in when a woman called, “Come,” and said, “I got Davenport.”
Clay waved a finger at Lucas and led the way through the door. Bowden was sitting on a stool, being worked on by a makeup artist. She said to Lucas, “If you tell anyone about a makeup artist, and I’m elected president, I’ll have the CIA kill you.”
Lucas didn’t smile. He blurted: “Ma’am, don’t do it. There’s a mob out there.”
“And a million cops. Half the mob is cops.”
“The Purdys aren’t totally stupid. I have to think that they’re up to something,” Lucas said.
“Well. You’ve got a half hour,” Bowden said. “I have to say, I only think it’s fifty-fifty that they’re out there. If they are, it’s about ninety percent that the police get them before they have a chance to get close. If they get close, it’s about ninety percent that the police get them before they get to me. So what’s that? A tiny chance that they get me? I’ll take that. I take that every day.”
—
CARALEE WAS BEING
a pain in the ass. She’d been held, and penned up in the truck, for much of the past eighteen hours, and hadn’t been in her bed for more than twenty-four. She’d gotten whiny, and then overactive, and every time she was put down, she’d wait until Cole and Marlys were not paying attention, and then she’d take off and they’d have to chase her down.
Cole caught her after the break for freedom and carried her back to Marlys, who was packing up the baby bag.
“Five minutes to ten,” he said. “We have to go.”
Marlys didn’t look at him, her marble-blue eyes now locked into the thousand-yard stare. “The biggest thing in the world,” she said. “The biggest, boldest thing in the world.”
L
ucas walked out to the street thinking,
Okay, what would they do?
As he looked to the east down the Concourse, the grandstand for musical shows and the racetrack was on his left, on the north side of the street. A Kennedy-style assassination would put a sharpshooter up on the grandstand with a rifle. From there, anyone on the street would be a sitting duck.
But the grandstand, he’d been told, was crawling with cops, both in uniform and plainclothes. Not only that, Wood had told him that all the grandstand cops were highway patrolmen who actually knew each other. There’d be no fake cops up there, and there’d be nobody up there
but
cops.
In addition to the grandstand, there were several other buildings on the left side of the street. All of that meant that most people standing on the left side would have their backs to a wall. They might be able to attack Bowden from there, but there’d be no escape. And for practical purposes, the crowd there would be thinner, and the Purdys would be easier to spot, even in disguise.
On the right, south side of the street, there was one large
structure, the Varied Industries building, and several smaller ones, but there was much more room for a crowd. In addition, most of the fairgrounds were on that side of the street, and anyone running away would have lots of space to run.
If the Purdys were there, Lucas thought, they’d be on the right side of the street. Unless, of course, they weren’t . . . if they had a plan nobody had thought of.
A bomb? Were they that crazy, crazy enough to set off a bomb in a crowd this dense? Wood had said that bomb-sniffing dogs would be working the crowd, but what if Cole Purdy had a hand grenade, smuggled back from Iraq? He would stand way back in the crowd, never even get close to the sidewalk, lob it like a baseball.
Lucas got on the phone to Wood: “Bell? Listen, Cole Purdy was in Iraq. What if he brought back a hand grenade?”
“I don’t know what we’d do,” Wood said. “See him first, is the only thing I can think of. We gotta see him first.”
“If that was the play, then we should be looking for a tall thin guy who hangs back from the crowd, but rushes forward as Mrs. Bowden’s about to pass,” Lucas said. “He’d need some room to throw it.”
“The Army says the lethal radius for a grenade is about five meters, which is . . . sixteen feet or so,” Wood said. “Wounding radius is fifteen meters, which is about fifty feet. Mrs. Bowden will be surrounded by a lot of people . . . I don’t know. Sounds unlikely. I’ll tell you what, I’ll call Jesse and ask if there’s been any hint of a grenade.”
“Call me back.”
—
THE CROWD WAS GETTING
thick on the sidewalks, but cops held them on the curbs. Lucas got off the street and moved back into the crowd. The going was slow but he stayed with it, checking every face. More people were flowing into the walking route behind him, though, so he was already missing many of them.
He saw Greer, going by in the green-and-yellow Gator, another man standing in the back, braced against the motion of the vehicle, scanning the crowd. Greer spotted Lucas and shook his head.
They moved on, in opposite directions. The sidewalk was now so crowded that Lucas had to physically squeeze past people, some of whom didn’t want to lose their places.
One large man said, “Hey, take it easy, bud.” Lucas looked him in the eyes and the guy asked, “Cop?”
He wasn’t Cole Purdy and Lucas nodded and went on.
—
TOOK A PHONE CALL
from Bell Wood: “Jesse says there’s never been a hint of a hand grenade and it’s been years since Cole got back. He thinks he would have known if there was one. I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Breathing a little easier,” Lucas said.
He moved on, got to the Varied Industries building door, went inside, walked the aisles for five minutes. The aisles were nearly as crowded as the sidewalks outside, people poking at racks of sale clothing and piles of Tupperware, checking out billiard and shuffleboard tables, considering offers to take thirty percent off the
price of a new roof, demonstrations of every kind of hot tub known to Iowans, displays for several colleges and universities, with loan offers to help you go to them . . .
Lucas took another phone call from Wood. “The Des Moines cops found Marlys Purdy’s truck. It’s in a parking lot six or eight blocks from here, nobody around. They had a judge on call, for a search warrant. They popped the door and found the .357 under the front seat.”
“They’re here, then,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what the gun means, though,” Wood said. “Why wouldn’t they take it with them?”
“It means that we don’t know what’s going on, Bell.”
“Gonna be goddamned embarrassing if they
are
planning to throw a cream pie at Bowden,” Wood said. “After all this.”
“Yeah, especially if a cop shoots them to death for doing it,” Lucas said.
—
AS LUCAS SPOKE
to Wood, Marlys was using the burner phone to talk to Cole. “Davenport’s here. Here in the building. I saw him walking down the aisles.”
“We knew he probably would be,” Cole said. “You’ve got to stay out of sight.”
“There’s no way to stay out of sight,” she said. “What I need is to stay out of
his
sight. I’ve got the baby up by my face, so he can’t see much of my face. He’s tall, I can see the top of his head, I’m trailing him through the building. Anyway, he’s here.”
“If you can stay with him, keep calling me. I need to know
where he is,” Cole said. “I need to know if he leaves the building, and if he does, which way he goes.”
“I’ll call,” she said. “Do you see the candidates?”
“Nothing yet. They might have lied about when they were going to march,” Cole said.
“All right. Let me know when you see them, I’ll let you know which way Davenport goes,” she said.
Marlys was weighed down by Caralee and the baby bag, but followed Lucas until he went out the door, and then turned right. She called Cole back and said, “He’s headed east on the Concourse, following the sidewalk.”
“Okay. I’m still down with the machinery.”
When Marlys got off the phone, she realized that Caralee needed another diaper change. Too much apple juice. She carried her to the women’s restroom, changed the diaper. Women were walking in and out, including a woman Marlys recognized from the quilt shows, but the woman looked right through her, blank-faced: the cancer disguise was working.
Still, best that she get totally out of sight, if she could. Not much longer. The handicapped toilet booth was empty, down the way . . .
She said to Caralee, “C’mon. Grandma needs the potty.”
Caralee, stoned on sugar, smiled and nodded.
—
LUCAS LEFT
the Varied Industries building, took a right outside the door, and continued up the street, searching the crowd.
Something had changed. He remembered the moment when
he’d seen Whitehead, the woman who looked like Marlys Purdy, and it had prodded his unconscious mind with an idea. He’d tracked the idea down in his own head, and it had turned into something.
Now he was struck by the same feeling: he’d seen or heard something important, in the street, in the last minute or so, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He cast his mind back, trying to track it down. Had he seen something in the building he’d just left? He turned and looked back at it, but it didn’t seem right. It wasn’t in the building . . . Where was it? And it wasn’t a face . . . So what was it?
Wasn’t the phone calls from Wood. Nothing about a grenade. Was it Greer? Something to do with Greer? Why would it be Greer?
He looked at his watch: ten-twenty. The march would be starting in ten minutes. He was at the end of the route, had seen nothing. He turned back, thought about walking down the other side of the street, but that felt wrong.
The radio in his pocket vibrated, and a man’s voice said, “I think we’ve got Cole Purdy. He’s over at the Riley Stage. We need some guys to start moving in that direction,
now
.”
There was more radio chatter, but from his morning tour, Lucas knew where the Riley Stage was, and it wasn’t far, maybe a hundred yards away. He began jogging in that direction, saw a uniformed cop doing the same thing. Fifty yards out, he slowed, saw the uniformed cop doing the same thing and then another cop closing from farther down south.
Another vibration from the radio and the man said, “We’re moving in now.”
There was some kind of presentation going on at the stage, with some kids facing a sparse crowd in a semicircle of seats. As he closed in, Lucas picked out the three cops who were moving in: and saw the target.
Could be Cole Purdy, he thought, but if it was, Marlys was somewhere else.
The target wasn’t looking in his direction and he started jogging again, and then as the three cops moved swiftly to get on top of the targeted man, Lucas broke into a full run.
Five seconds later he joined what was now a small crowd of cops surrounding a tall, thin man with long hair, wearing an olive-colored long-sleeved canvas shirt.
“Not him,” Lucas said to the cops.
One of the cops asked, “Who are you?”
“Davenport—working with Bell Wood,” Lucas said.
“Sure it’s not him?” one of the cops asked.
Lucas took another long look at the scared tall man, who said, “Whoever it is, it’s not me. My daughter’s supposed to go up there for the 4-H awards.”
Lucas said, “He looks like him, even the shirt’s right—but it’s not him. Goddamnit. He’s in exactly the right place, too. This is where Purdy should be.”
The lead cop got on a radio and talked to Wood, who told them that Lucas would know Purdy, and other cops looked at the tall man’s driver’s license, which had a good photo and an address near Sioux City. A minute later, the lead cop was apologizing and giving a perfunctory explanation for the stop.
Lucas listened for a minute, then wandered out of the stage area. There were all kinds of cops along the street, so he decided to walk behind the Varied Industries building, which would take him along a line parallel to the street but a hundred yards or so south of it.
—
COLE PURDY WAS
at the machinery grounds. There were trees around the stage area, but he had a clear view of it when the commotion started, men running toward the back of the seating area.
They gathered around somebody in a seat, a whole bunch of them, and then he saw Davenport join them. Cole stepped behind a John Deere windrower to watch; Davenport said something to the group, and the group suddenly loosened.
Cole got on the phone to Marlys. “Davenport’s over by that stage. They thought they caught me, the guy looks just like what I used to look like,” Cole said.
“Be careful,” Marlys said. “I’m in the diaper-changing room. I keep going in and out. Have they started marching yet?”
“Not yet. I don’t know what’s holding them up. Maybe we should call it off—”
“No! No! We’re right there, and they
will
march. You be ready.”
“I’m ready,” Cole said. Then Lucas started walking toward him. “Gotta go.”
Cole peeked around the windrower and saw Davenport getting closer. He touched the pistol at his hip, but he really didn’t want to get in a shoot-out five minutes before they went after Bowden.
That wouldn’t work. And Davenport was wearing a loose T-shirt, and Cole had a feeling that it
would
be a shoot-out, not just a one-way bullet . . .
Better to walk away. Now.
—
LUCAS WAS LOOKING
at the John Deere vehicles on the machinery grounds and was again prodded by the feeling that he’d seen something and missed it. Greer had gone by on John Deere equipment, they’d seen John Deere equipment in the Purdys’ barn . . .
As he watched, a soldier in fatigues stepped out from behind one of the machines and walked away. Lucas fixed on him. The way he was walking, that self-consciousness . . . The soldier glanced back at him, then kept moving, and Lucas
knew
.
He put the radio to his face, squeezed the alarm button three times, and said, “This is Davenport. I’ve got Cole Purdy. I’m ninety-nine percent. He’s south of all that machinery stuff, the plows and stuff, at the back of the Varied Industries building, and he’s walking south. He’s dressed as a soldier in camo fatigues and an army hat. I’m a hundred yards behind him and we’re walking toward the barns, if we’ve got anybody down there.”
Cole glanced back and saw Davenport on the radio and fixed on him, and then
he
knew, and he started running. If he could get down to the barns, he might get lost in the crowds and the pens . . .
Lucas saw Cole break into a run, and he ran after him, shouting into the radio, “He’s running . . . He’s running . . . He’s going around— Ah shit, I don’t know what it is, it’s that big brown
building with that dome thing, it’s down by that zip line, the west side of the barns . . .”
—
COLE PUSHED THE SPEED DIAL
button on his phone, about the only luxury the phone had, and when Marlys came up, he shouted, “Davenport spotted me, I’m running, I’m running . . .”
He dropped the phone in a cargo pocket, yanked the jacket open and pulled the pistol out of its holster and shoved it into his belt line, with his hand over it. Davenport had been calling somebody on a phone or radio . . . had to be ready.
He glanced back as he was about to turn a corner behind the exhibition center, saw Davenport, still a hundred yards back, or more. Cole was naturally faster than Davenport, but he was wearing combat boots. He hadn’t thought about the possibility of having to run . . .
He turned the corner and two cops were
right there
, running toward him, thirty feet away and closing fast. Neither had a gun in his hand and when they saw him they both reached for their holsters . . .
Too late! Too late!
Cole yanked the 9 out of his waistband and shot them both. Fearing that they were wearing bulletproof vests under their uniform shirts, he shot them in the legs, one-two, one after another, the second shot from no more than five feet, and they went down screaming and he jumped over the cop on the left and kept going . . .