Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  “Caralee. What’d you think?”

  “She ain’t here. She’s supposed to be with you,” Jesse said.

  “I dropped her off with Marlys this afternoon,” Willie said. “What’re you doing here? Who are these assholes?”

  “These assholes are cops,” Jesse said. “They’re investigating that you filed false charges against me yesterday and they’re gonna put your whorin’ ass in jail.”

  “What?”

  “No, no,” Wood said. “We’re trying to talk to Mrs. Purdy, is all.”

  “What’d she do?” Willie asked.

  “As far as we know, nothing,” Wood said. “You say your daughter is with her?”

  “I had to do some shopping,” Willie said, her voice sliding from a shout to a whine.

  “Yeah, she was over suckin’ Berg’s dick again,” Jesse said, loud enough for her to hear, but with a confidential tone, as though he were talking privately to the cops.

  “Was not,” Willie said, starting toward them. “I want my daughter.”

  Jesse continued, with the confidential tone: “Tell the truth, she could suck a golf ball through a water hose . . . the only reason I married her.”

  Willie screamed, “You fucker,” and had her fingernails out, and Greer and Wood got between them and said, “Hold it, hold it . . .”

  “I want my baby . . .”

  “She’s not here,” Wood said. “We’ve been all through the house. And we got Jesse out of the jail, so we know he doesn’t have her. She’s probably riding around with her grandma. Maybe you ought to check back later. By phone.”

  —

  AFTER SOME MORE SCREAMING, Willie left.

  “I like the way you handled that, Jesse,” Greer said. “Classy.”

  “I lose my shit when I get around her,” he said.

  —

  LUCAS ASKED WOOD, “You want to call Marlys or should I?”

  “I’ll call,” Wood said.

  They’d gotten the phone numbers from Jesse, and Wood punched in Marlys’s number. They waited for a few seconds, as it started to ring, and then, in the quiet of the side yard, they heard a phone ringing in the house.

  “Sonofabitch,” Jesse said.

  He led the way into the house. The phone had gone to an answering service, so Wood dialed it again. They found two cell phones sitting side by side in a china cabinet.

  “Now I’m worried,” Jesse said. “That phone is usually welded to Mom’s hand. And she left it behind on purpose. That’s . . .”

  He didn’t finish, so Lucas did it for him: “That’s not good, number two.”

  —

  AFTER SOME MORE DISCUSSION, Lucas told Jesse, “We ought to take you back to jail, but we don’t have time. If you’ve got some way to warn your mother or brother that we’re coming for them, don’t do it or you’ll be right there in prison with them.”

  “They’re not doing nothing,” Jesse insisted.

  “That’s what we all hope,” Lucas said. “We can’t take the chance, though. So you keep your mouth shut. If they come back tonight, tell them to call me. Tell them that’s the safest thing they can do, because tomorrow, we’re gonna have a bunch of Neanderthal highway patrolmen hunting them down. The shoot-first, ask-questions-later guys. Your mom needs to call me.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Jesse said. “I’ll sit right there in the kitchen until they show up.”

  “Something else,” Lucas said. “Whatever happens, if you don’t show up for that court date and get me my five hundred dollars back, I’ll take it out of your ass.”

  They left Jesse standing under the yard light and drove back to the Southers’ place, where Lucas picked up his car.

  Checking his watch, he realized they’d be a little late getting to the meeting that night.

  “Listen,” Wood said, “Marlys and Cole know the fair, they left their phones behind, and they’re carrying a .357. That’s all bad. On the other hand, the gun’s a piece of junk and he could have taken a better one with him, and they’ve got a child with them. That’s all good. Given all that, what are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “The phones . . . That worries me more than the gun. It’s like they didn’t want to be tracked and thought they might be. They’re working on something and they know we might be coming for them.”

  “Maybe they’re gonna like hit Bowden in the face with a cream pie, or something,” Greer said.

  Wood and Lucas frowned at him, and Greer muttered, “Okay. Sorry about that.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Embassy Suites in Des Moines was of the architectural style known as 20th Century Hotel Unremarkable, a large beige building apparently designed not to piss anybody off, except maybe the local aesthetes.

  Lucas skipped the valet and left his car in the parking lot across Locust Street. Crossing the street, he could smell the river to his right, and see a gold dome a few blocks down to his left, well lit, which he assumed was the Iowa Capitol; he would forget to confirm that with anyone.

  Running late, he’d called Mitford, and was met in the hotel lobby by Alice Green. She was wearing a subdued olive-gray knit pantsuit that vibrated with her hair and eyes, and low-heeled black leather boots, which, if some shit needed kicking, could get the job done.

  She flashed her smile at him when she came through, then killed it and asked, “What happened to your face? Again?”

  “The shooter hit the wing mirror on the side of the truck with his second shot,” Lucas said. “I picked up a couple pieces of mirror.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it,” she said. “By the way, we get half-hour updates from the state guys. Robertson’s going to make it, but he’s lost a chunk of his lung.”

  “Two inches to the right and he’d be dead or a quadriplegic,” Lucas said. “Bad things happen when you’re shot.”

  As they talked, she led him through the hotel atrium, back to a compact meeting room with security people hanging around to keep the riffraff out. Henderson was already there—he was staying in the hotel—and Bowden was expected at any moment, and would be coming in through the back, along with the Gardner campaign crew.

  —

  TWENTY PEOPLE WERE SITTING in a cluster of chairs in the meeting room; Henderson and Mitford were standing in a corner, isolated from the main group, and both were talking on their cell phones. Most of the people in the room seemed to be security officers of one kind or another, and Lucas saw Pole, the DCI director, as Pole spotted him and scowled.

  Bowden came into the room in a rush, shook hands with a couple of people that Lucas didn’t know, then walked over to Henderson, who got off the phone to shake her hand. Bowden looked tired, Lucas thought, the first time he’d seen that in her. Gardner arrived a minute later and the politicians and their aides milled around for a moment and pretended to like each other, then another man whom Lucas didn’t recognize—he turned out to be the governor of Iowa—stood up and said, “All right, folks, let’s get this going. Al Brown, why don’t you lead off?”

  As Bowden, Henderson, and the others found chairs, a tall man in a champagne-colored suit got to his feet, looked around at the group through his scholarly gold-rimmed glasses, wiped his extra-high forehead, and said, “I think I’ve met most of you, and for the rest, I’m Al Brown, and I head up the Iowa campaign security group. Again, as most of you know, a DCI agent was shot last night by a person or persons who may pose a threat to the candidates. I spoke to one of our senior agents, Bell Wood—Bell, raise your hand, thanks—who tells me that the shooter may have been identified, and that one of the persons involved in that identification, a security agent for Governor Henderson, may be here in the room. Is Lucas Davenport here?”

  Lucas raised his hand, and Brown asked, “What have you got for us?”

  Lucas stood up and said, “Bell a
nd another DCI agent, Sam Greer, and I interviewed a man named Jesse Purdy at his home near Pella this evening. We believe that his mother, Marlys Purdy, and his brother, Cole Purdy, may have been involved in at least one and possibly three murders, and probably in the sniper shooting of Jerry Robertson last night.”

  He went on to tell them of the interview with Jesse Purdy, and about the .357 Magnum that Cole Purdy was probably carrying. He also told them that Jesse said all of Cole’s rifles were in the gun safe. “Jesse Purdy confirmed that his mother and brother have developed a serious animus toward Mrs. Bowden and we fear that they might try to shoot her. We’re puzzled about the rifle—why it was still there if it was used to shoot Jerry Robertson—but I think it’s possible that Cole Purdy has another rifle unknown to Jesse that he could safely shoot, and then abandon, that couldn’t be traced to him. It seemed to Jesse that Cole deliberately led him into a confrontation with his ex-wife, so that he’d be put in jail, and be out of the way, before they moved . . .”

  Brown asked, “You don’t believe Jesse Purdy was involved?”

  “I don’t believe he is. He was quite open with us this evening,” Lucas said. “That’s just a first impression. He provided photos of his mother and brother, which Bell is having reproduced.”

  Wood spoke up: “We’re having a Photoshop guy update them. He’s giving Mrs. Purdy straight brown hair instead of her white hair.”

  Brown said to the group at large, “Bell says he’ll have those by dawn tomorrow, a couple thousand of them, and we’ll have them plastered all over the fair before the gates open.”

  Bowden said, “Lucas, I’m desperately sorry about Mr. Robertson and about your face, for that matter . . .”

  A ripple of laughter went through the crowd, and Lucas interjected, “I actually thought it gave me a Hollywood glow.”

  Bowden gave him her Number 2 tolerant smile and continued, “. . . but what I really need is your best guess as to what the Purdys are planning. If it is the Purdys, and if they’re planning anything.”

  Lucas thought for a moment and then said, “You know, I don’t have any idea. I thought probably he’d take a long-distance shot, if he could. We’ve seen paper targets that suggest he’s a decent marksman, and if he’s the one who shot Jerry, we know he’s willing to kill. But I’ve been told about the security group’s plans for tomorrow and I can’t see how anybody with a long gun could get anywhere close to your walking route. If Cole can get in the parade route crowd, close enough to rush you . . . that .357 is a killer. His brother says it’s wildly inaccurate, but you don’t have to be accurate at six inches or two feet. The .357 was originally developed for the highway patrol, to punch through car doors and windshields and to put people down for good with one shot. On the other hand, we know that Cole had the option to use two other modern semiautos if he wanted them, and they’re still in his gun locker. Jesse doesn’t believe either his mother or his brother is suicidal. You add that up, and it’s all very confusing. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  A cop in the crowd asked, “Is it possible that the fair is a decoy? That they’re planning to attack at a different place altogether?”

  Wood said, “Lucas and I have talked about that. It’s possible, but Mrs. Bowden has been focusing on small venues these past couple of weeks. Almost any place she’s been, a shooter would get caught in a hurry. You don’t ‘get away’ out in the countryside, not that easily. We thought they’d probably want to use the fair, with a hundred thousand people rolling through it, as cover to come and go. Then, they disappeared last night and Mrs. Bowden’s supposed to walk tomorrow . . . My feeling is that they’re out there, at the fair.”

  Lucas and Wood answered a couple of additional questions, then Brown came back in and described the security precautions that the Iowa cops were taking. “. . . literally have a highway patrolman every six feet, facing the crowd. Plainclothes guys walking through it, pacing the candidates. The candidates’ own security people will be walking with them, so I don’t think the idea that she might be rushed would be a viable one. Before the walk starts, we will look at every square inch of every structure where they could get high enough to shoot her and then we will shut down access to those places.”

  “You’re telling me that it’ll be safe,” Bowden said.

  “I can’t make any guarantees,” Brown said. “I think you’ll be safe, but we have to assume that these people are not dummies. They may understand what they’ll be facing and have plans of their own. Of course, they may be dummies and we’ll take them down two minutes after the gates open tomorrow.”

  “That would be helpful,” she said.

  “Still, I wish you wouldn’t do the walk,” Brown said. “If you went to Sioux City instead of the fair, I’d be a lot happier.”

  The Iowa governor stood up and said, “C’mon, guys, we need optimists here. I feel that with the precautions we’ve taken, Mrs. Bowden will be perfectly safe.”

  —

  A COUPLE MORE COPS talked about the details of the security ring, and then Bowden said, “This just isn’t a matter of my personal safety—it’s a kind of test. Do I have the guts to go out there and face some unknown peril, or do I shrink away from it? I don’t think the major candidates themselves would blame me for not walking, but there are many, many people in both parties who dislike me and wouldn’t hesitate to suggest that I was a coward. That’s the reality of it. Unless some new information comes up, I’ll walk tomorrow.”

  That set off a round of muttering and cross-conversation, and Henderson stood up to roll out a few clichés about bravery, as did Gardner, and then Pole stood up and said, “We’ll do our best tomorrow and that will be more than good enough. You’ll be fine. I have to say, I don’t give a whole lot of credence to our more excitable . . . consultants.”

  —

  AS PEOPLE BEGAN TO STAND and move around and out of the room, Norm Clay, Bowden’s ranking weasel, came over and said to Lucas, “Mrs. Bowden’s going out the back. She’d appreciate a moment of your time.”

  Lucas nodded and followed him down a hall, to a cluster of Bowden’s people. Bowden saw Lucas coming and stepped away from them and said, “I’m disappointed that you haven’t caught them yet.”

  “Trying hard,” Lucas said.

  “Try harder,” she said. She reached out and touched the bandages on his face, then pulled her hand back. “I had a rather long talk with Elmer about you and he says that if these people, these Purdys, are out there doing something sneaky, you’re the one who’ll break them down. So, Lucas—I’m counting on you.”

  He couldn’t think of what else to say, so he nodded and said, “Okay.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Bell Wood was waiting in the hall outside the meeting room, and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, you’re planning to hand out all those Purdy photos, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much point in my milling around the fairgrounds all night, looking at faces. There’ll already be a hundred guys doing that,” Lucas said. “But Lawrence deleted two people from her party list. If she’s part of the conspiracy with Purdy, then maybe that Skira woman is, too. I was thinking I might run back to Cedar Rapids, knock on her door.”

  Wood looked at his watch and said, “It’ll be midnight before you get there.”

  “So she’ll probably be home,” Lucas said, “unless she’s going to the fair, too.”

  “Let me see if Greer can go with you,” Wood said.

  “That’d be good,” Lucas said.

  “And not to put too fine a point on it, my boy, I get the feeling that the candidate sort of likes your looks. Am I wrong?”

  “Ah, Jesus, Bell . . .” Lucas shook his head. “Man . . .”

  “Just sayin’.”

  —

  GREER WAS WILLING to go. He offered to lead the way, as Robertson had a few da
ys earlier, because he had lights and sirens. Wood said he’d nail down an address for them, and Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they went.

  Greer had a heavy foot, and pushed the state car up over a hundred and held it there, flashing through the night, overtaking cars and trucks. Forty minutes out, Greer’s taillights flared, and he roared into a rest stop, Lucas right behind.

  Something had happened?

  Greer slowed but kept rolling until a parked cop car turned on its flashers. Greer pulled up beside it and Lucas stopped behind him. A sheriff’s deputy hopped out of the car and ran around to Lucas’s driver’s-side window and handed him a plastic bag and said, “Bell Wood said you might need this.”

  His .45.

  “Thank you.”

  Greer hauled ass with Lucas right behind him, but now with his pistol on the seat beside him, riding . . . shotgun.

  —

  WOOD CALLED fifteen minutes later with an address for Skira: “It’s Betsy Jacoby now. Betsy and Stan.”

  They took I-80 all the way to Iowa City, then turned north on I-380 to Cedar Rapids. Lucas took the lead when they got there, having punched the address into his nav system while they waited at a stoplight.

  Skira lived in a brown-shingled bungalow-style house on Bever Avenue, on the southeast side of town. There were still two lights on in the house when they arrived, and they parked at the curb.

  Greer got out and said, “Fuckin’ people don’t know how to spell beaver,” and, “A Cedar Rapids cop’s gonna be here in a minute.”

  Lucas took the time to dig out his carry holster, clipped it to his belt, and slipped the .45 into it. Felt good.

  Two or three minutes later a Cedar Rapids black-and-white slipped into the curb, and a uniformed sergeant got out. Greer went over to identify himself and to shake hands. He introduced Lucas as a consultant; they shook and the cop said, “Mark Soper. We got a problem here, or what? You want more guys?”

  “I think we’re fine,” Greer said. “We mostly wanted a uniform so we don’t scare the shit out of these people when we start knocking on the door.”