Extreme Prey (21 page)

A
t the Grinnell hospital the next morning, Lucas was told that Robertson had been transferred to a medical center in Des Moines two hours earlier, that he was conscious and responding, that his outlook was better, but he was not yet safe. He could move his hands and feet when asked to do so, which meant that there was no unexpected spinal involvement.

That was mostly good news. After leaving the hospital, he drove out to the Burton place, where he found seven law enforcement vehicles parked in the yard, from various jurisdictions, including a state car driven by Randy Ford. A deputy told Lucas that Ford was out in the cornfield with a half dozen other cops, including two state crime-scene people, looking for anything that might point them at the shooter. As far as the deputy knew, they hadn’t found anything yet.

Lucas kept a travel pack in the back of his truck, with equipment and clothing he might need but wouldn’t normally wear. The pack included jeans, a canvas shirt, and hiking boots, which he’d put on when he got up. Now he tramped across the road from the Burton farm and down through the field, following the path
they’d found the previous night. The morning was still cool, with the sweet smell of corn everywhere. He caught up with the search crew about two-thirds of the way down to where the truck had been parked.

They’d found absolutely nothing.

Ford came over, wearing a blue DEA ball cap, shook his head, and said, “You think the guy might belong to some nut group, and I’m thinking, they might be paramilitary or something. He knew what he was doing. Pulled you in, was set up in exactly the right spot for the shot, was gone before anybody could get here, didn’t leave as much as a matchstick behind. Even if he had, I suspect he’d have been wearing gloves.”

“Has anybody been down to the truck site?”

“Yeah. We started that right away,” Ford said. “We did get a foot-long tread imprint, so if we ever find the truck, we’ll be able to figure out if it’s the same kind of tire.”

“If we get to that point, we’ll already know who it is,” Lucas said.

“I’m thinking about trial evidence,” Ford said.

—

THE SEARCH CREW
was literally going through the field inch by inch, and Lucas joined them, moving each of the hundreds of corn plants along the shooter’s flight path, looking for anything that might hold DNA or a fingerprint: a scrap of paper, a rifle shell, a wad of gum. Lucas would prefer a fingerprint to DNA, because there’d be some prospect of sending it to the FBI and getting an answer back the same day.

At ten o’clock they emerged onto the side road. After minutely inspecting the roadside ditch, they crossed the road to where two more cops and a crime-scene investigator were finishing a hands-and-knees search around the truck site.

They all wound up walking together back to the Burton place, on the shoulder of the road, and Ford said, “If your theory is right and these people are going after Bowden, and maybe at the state fair, you’ve got about twenty-six hours from right now to find them.”

“Getting tight,” Lucas admitted.

—

AT THE BURTON PLACE,
they stopped in for a glass of water, and Sandra Burton asked, “If you interviewed everybody in the party, how come you never came to me? I was pretty active in it, back in the eighties.”

“The list is more current than that,” Lucas said, propping his butt against the kitchen sink. The sink gave off the faint sulfury smell of well water, although the glass of water she’d given him tasted fine. “The problem is, the list still has about a hundred names on it that we haven’t gotten to. We haven’t been able to dig into anybody, because there’re simply too many and we don’t have the time. We’ve been focusing on the Iowa City area. We have three murders and the two dead men are pretty closely linked. We think the third murder was committed to eliminate a witness that the killers didn’t know would be there.”

“You want me to look at that list? I might have some ideas,” Burton said.

“Sure. That’d be great,” Lucas said.

Lucas went out to the truck and got the list, returned to the kitchen and handed it to Burton. She scanned it for a moment, smiled once, and said, “Gosh, I’d forgotten some of these people. Are they all still with the party?”

“That’s what Grace Lawrence tells us, and so far, everybody we’ve talked to admits to being a member,” Lucas said.

“Grace Lawrence,” Burton mused. “She was a crazy one. Her and that girlfriend of hers, Betsy—what was Betsy’s name?”

She scanned the list again, and then said, “Betsy’s not here. She was a member, though. I mean, she joined
after
some of the people on this list.”

“Huh. You think Grace might have left her off deliberately?” Lucas asked.

“What do I know?” Burton asked. “Grace and Betsy hung out a lot, for a long time. We might have thought they were gay, except they kept coming around with these mountain-man boyfriends.”

“What does that mean?” Lucas asked. “Mountain man?”

“Oh, you know. Rural hippies,” Burton said. “They lived on a farm outside of Hills.”

“Grace still lives in Hills,” Lucas said.

“I think I heard that,” Burton said. “Anyway, she and Betsy were these latter-day hippies, peasant blouses over their perky little boobies and hair down to the cracks of their asses, guys had beards, and you’d go to a party at their place and the guys would be sharpening chain saws in the living room. Like they just happened to need to sharpen the saws during the party. My first husband, who was an actual farmer, you know, he used to laugh at them. Bunch of posers.”

“You didn’t get along,” Lucas said.

“Oh, I got along well enough with Grace and Betsy,” Burton said. “Damnit it, what was Betsy’s last name? Something unusual—it’s right on the tip of my tongue. I know one of the guys was named Harrison. Same as Harrison Ford. We went to see
Return of the Jedi
with them, when that movie came out.”

“You say Grace was crazy?” Lucas asked.

“She was always giving speeches about direct action. How we had to go to direct action. Direct action was never defined, but you know, we all had the feeling it was more than singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

“If I get a chance, I’ll ask her about it,” Lucas said.

Burton: “Instead of that huge list, you should get the names of the people who’d go to the meetings at Joe Likely’s place. That’s the real core of the party, what’s left of it.”

“What meetings?” Lucas asked.

“They have quarterly meetings at Joe’s place,” Burton said. “I used to get e-mails for them, but I didn’t go to the meetings anymore. Always the same thing, we gotta do this or that, and they never do this or that. I think the last one . . . let me check.” She led the way out of the kitchen to the front parlor, where an iMac sat on a repurposed dining table. She brought the computer up and went to her e-mail, scanned through it, said, “I never delete anything, I’ve got like fifteen million e-mails . . .” and then, “Here it is. June fourteenth. That was the last meeting.”

“Two months ago.”

“Yes. The next meeting would have been in September. If you
can get a list of names at the last meeting, you’d have the real hard-core members. They’d all be close to Joe and Anson Palmer. Anson went to all of the meetings—they were the only people who’d talk to him.”

“Huh. A list like that could be helpful,” Lucas said.

—

THEY CHATTED
for a few more minutes, Lucas learned nothing more, gave her a card with a phone number, then went out to his truck and fired it up. Sat for a moment, then called Bell Wood. “What’s up?” Wood asked.

“I heard Robertson was moved. You got any more news?”

“Yeah, we talk to his partner every half hour or so,” Wood said. “He says Jerry’s pretty much out of it, because of the pain medication, but when he does come around, he’s coherent enough. He knows he was shot, he knows you were with him, doesn’t remember anything after he went down except that he kept getting gravel in his mouth.”

“Then he’ll make it,” Lucas said.

“Remains to be seen. One thing, he was shot with a solid core slug, like military ammo. That isn’t the most common thing. If he’d been shot with a hunting bullet, he’d be in a lot worse shape, getting hit in the lung like he was.”

“Anything on the DNA from Grace Lawrence?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I should have called you before this. We got it back a couple of hours ago, but with Jerry being shot and all, we weren’t thinking about it. Not her. No way. And nobody related to her.”

“Damnit.”

“Yeah. Too bad. I had hopes,” Wood said.

“One additional thing on that dairy bomb deal,” Lucas said. “I talked to Sandra Burton a few minutes ago, and she said Grace was a little crazy back then, always calling for direct action. She also had a girlfriend named Betsy and the two of them lived with what this woman called ‘mountain-man boyfriends.’ She said the two women, Grace and Betsy, had hair down to the cracks of their asses and wore peasant blouses over their perky little boobies—her words, not mine—and the two guys had beards. Mountain-man beards. They lived on a farm outside of Hills.”

“Damnit, Lucas, that’s them! They’re the bombers,” Wood said. “That’s exactly how the motel guy described them. We got DNA from the wrong woman.”

“I don’t know. Could be,” Lucas said.

“Give me a number for Burton. We need to know who this Betsy is.”

Lucas gave him Burton’s phone number and address, and added, “One of the boyfriends was named Harrison. That’s the first name. You might go back and look at arrest records from farm protests at the time. They were apparently pretty big in them.”

“I will do that,” Wood said.

—

LUCAS WENT BACK
to the motel where he’d spent the night and asked to check back in. They said the room wasn’t ready yet, but he said that since he was the only one who’d stayed there, he was
happy to check back in just as if he’d never left, damp towels and all. The motel manager saw the wisdom in that, and five minutes later Lucas was spreading across the second bed all the paper he’d collected during the investigation.

And started drawing on his legal pad.

—

THE DRAWINGS
wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, but Lucas used them to try to integrate geographic information with time data, of who knew what, and when they knew it, and how that might lead to a murder. At noon he went out for Diet Cokes and mini-doughnuts and an Iowa road map.

He simply couldn’t put together the information from Kidd, concerning the probable location of the people who sent the messages to Henderson, with the timing of the killings well to the east, around Iowa City. He concluded that Likely and Palmer were on the edge of the conspiracy. They’d either been told about it or had guessed it after talking to Lucas, had refused to cooperate or had threatened to give it up, and had to be killed as a result.

It was probable, he thought, that Palmer and Likely were killed by different members of the conspiracy—if there were two killers, rather than one (or even one with a murderous son, as long as the son was in the same location as the mother), then the time problems became irrelevant. He knew that Lawrence couldn’t have killed Likely, but she certainly could have killed Palmer.

If, of course, she’d killed anyone at all. He was leaning in her direction because she’d been fairly close to both Likely and
Palmer, and Robertson had been shot shortly after he’d spoken to her.

—

WAS IT POSSIBLE,
he wondered, as he got up and stretched his legs, that Robertson really
was
the target of the sniper? He thought about that, but that was another difficult proposition to accept: the first shot had come almost immediately after Robertson had gotten out of the truck. The sniper, in the dying light of day, would hardly have had time to figure out which large sport-coated cop was which, and had shot the one getting out of the driver’s side of Lucas’s truck.

How did they know it was Lucas’s truck? Because somebody had seen it and had either passed the word along or acted on it directly. And Lucas had been the one the sniper called—he’d have had no reason to think that Robertson would be in the truck. Lawrence, even if traumatized by Robertson’s tough-guy interrogation, wouldn’t have known.

No. Lucas had been the target.

—

HE WAS WORKING
through it when Neil Mitford called.

“Yeah?”

“Where are you?” Mitford asked.

“Grinnell.”

“Good. We’re headed for Des Moines. The hotel is fifty-two minutes from you, or, given the way you drive, forty-five minutes.
Bowden is across the street and Gardner is five minutes away. We’d like you to attend a briefing for all the campaigns, by the Iowa campaign security team.”

“Man, I really don’t have a lot of time to fuck around.”

“You’re not fucking around. Tomorrow’s D-Day,” Mitford said. “We need to make sure that all our shit is coordinated, and I need the Iowa security people to see your face.”

“All right, I get that. What time?” Lucas asked.

“Ten o’clock tonight.”

—

LUCAS WENT BACK
to his paper. Bell Wood called: “Betsy Rose Skira and Harrison John Williams the Third.”

“How’d you find them?”

“After telling everybody to search every known radical database, I decided to run Betsy
and
Harrison as a unit through the vital records. They got married in ’91, moved to Cedar Rapids, divorced in ’97. Betsy changed her name back to Skira and remarried in 2000. Harrison Williams is still single as far as we know—nothing in the records about another marriage, but he could have gotten married again in Vegas or something. Skira’s still in Cedar Rapids, Williams is in Stone City, which is a tiny place northeast of Cedar Rapids.”

“Not so close to Iowa City,” Lucas said, as he wrote the names on his drawing charts.

“An hour or so, I suppose. Not right on top of it, though,” Wood said.

“Randy Ford is still around here somewhere, right?”

“Yeah. He should still be out at Sandra Burton’s place,” Wood said.