SIXTEEN
Lucas was starting to feel like a yo-yo, and Iowa City was the finger.
When he got back, off I-80, he threaded his way through town to Anson Palmer’s house and found a half-dozen cop cars coagulated in the street outside. Randy Ford’s state sedan was among them.
He had Ford’s number on his cell phone, called it, and Ford said, “Yeah?”
“I’m outside.”
“Come on in,” Ford said.
—
FORD WAS STANDING in Palmer’s living room, looking disgusted. “I don’t know,” he said, when Lucas appeared in the doorway. “It’s like amateur night at the slaughterhouse, but we can’t find the goddamn amateur who’s doing the killing.”
“You’re sure it’s a murder . . .”
“Unless he hit himself on the head about three times with a rock, and after crushing his own skull, put the rock in a sink, washed it, and then tied a plastic bag around his head.”
“Okay. When do you think it happened?”
One of the crime-scene people said, “No scientific estimate, but looking at the blood when we got here . . . we’re thinking maybe between one and two o’clock, give or take.”
—
LUCAS WENT TO LOOK. Two crime-scene technicians were working Palmer’s office, collecting samples of everything the killer might have touched. One of them was working over a visitor’s chair with tape, pulling off any residue.
Lucas had once gone to a murder scene at a fishing cabin in northern Minnesota where a man had been beaten to death with a souvenir cribbage board, which had been shaped like a short canoe paddle. The heavy oaken board had been swung edge-on, like an ax, a half-dozen times, and the victim’s skull had been crushed.
Anson Palmer was lying facedown in his home office, his head cocked back, propped against the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. His bladder had released as he was dying, and the room still stank of urine. His head was wrapped with a transparent plastic bag, but was misshapen in the same way the cribbage-board victim’s had been. The bag had been tied around his neck and a pint of blood had collected below his chin.
No sign of a weapon near the body.
“You said he was hit with a rock?”
“We think so,” Ford said. “There’s a rock in the kitchen sink, it’s been washed with soap. But some of the victim’s hair, with a couple flakes of scalp, were caught in the sink drainer. The killer didn’t notice.”
Lucas went to look. The bun-shaped chunk of speckled granite was a bit larger than a baseball, but smaller than a softball, and had a laser-cut slogan carved in the surface: Molon Labe.
“Come and take it,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, I looked it up on the Internet, it’s pretty famous,” Ford said. “A lot of the pro-gun guys use it and radical political groups. The Texans used it during the Texas revolution. The Greeks supposedly said that to the Persians before a battle when the Persians told them to surrender.”
“I knew about the gun guys and the Greeks,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know about the Texans. You think the rock belonged to Palmer?”
“Yeah, it did. There’s a picture of him with another guy, that was taken in the office, looks like a few years ago, and you can see the rock on his desk.”
Lucas went back and looked at the body again. “You know where the plastic bag came from?”
One of the techs said, “We think it’s a plastic bag from a dry cleaner. There’s a sport coat hanging from a doorknob in the living room, and the hanger’s from a dry cleaner, but there’s no bag around it.”
“Then the killer didn’t bring it with him.”
“We don’t think so—we’re thinking that the murder was spontaneous—an argument, weapon of opportunity, whacks him on the head when he’s not looking,” Ford said.
Lucas agreed, but added, “Whack a guy a few times with a rock, you turn his head to mush . . . It takes a cold guy to find a bag to wrap around his head to finish the job, and then go wash the rock.”
“Nobody said he was a sweetheart,” Ford said.
“Makes me think it was a spontaneous use of the weapon, but the killer might have come here thinking about the possibility of killing him. With a really hot spontaneous murder, there’s usually more . . . trashing of the place. Evidence of a fight or an argument. The killer leaves some blood around, the victim has a little bit of a chance to fight. This guy killed Palmer and then took some time to tidy up. Not rushed, not frightened, not panicked. Cold.”
“Like Joseph Likely and his girlfriend,” Ford said. “That was cold.”
“Yeah, but why not bring the gun with you?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe you already threw it in a river?” Ford suggested. “Or maybe because it didn’t work so well the first time.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you were thinking you wouldn’t need it again, so you didn’t bring it,” Lucas said. “Anybody talk to the Bowden people about this?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ford said. “You’re basically the guy talking about Bowden—the rest of us are not so sure it’s all connected.”
“Well, it is,” Lucas said. And after a minute, “Talk to all the neighbors?”
“Yeah. There was a red truck parked across the street and down the block from Palmer’s, for maybe an hour and a half. A woman on the next street up saw a man getting in and out of the truck, but we’ve got no real description. Might have been wearing a blue uniform shirt, like a repairman or something, but maybe it was just a short-sleeved shirt. Probably brown hair. Haven’t found anybody yet who knows who it might be. A woman at the other end of the block saw two unfamiliar women on the street, looked Hispanic or maybe Filipino, but they were carrying pamphlets and she thought they may have been religious people. Nobody seen going in or out of Palmer’s.”
—
LUCAS SPENT another fifteen minutes looking at the murder scene—he’d found the longer you looked, the more likely it was that you’d pick up some small thing that would become more interesting as you got deeper into the investigation. Not this time: it was what it was. Pick up the stone, whack, whack, whack. Game over.
A cold mind, but you couldn’t see a mind.
After fifteen minutes, he’d seen enough.
—
LUCAS ASKED FORD to send him whatever he could, said good-bye, went out to his truck and called Mitford, told him about the second murder, and then called Bowden’s security guy, Jubek. That done, he went off to find some dinner and check back into the Sheraton. As he ate, he thought about Grace Lawrence: a possible bomber, the possible creator or accessory in a murder that took planning and efficient execution. A cold mind.
The problem was, he had no idea what could have caused Lawrence to have gone after Palmer, and Lawrence in no way resembled the woman that Henderson had spoken to. When they were talking, Lawrence had mentioned that she worked at the elementary school as a volunteer, “sometimes I think because I never had kids of my own.”
If she were telling the truth about that, there’d be no gray-eyed country son.
He tucked her away in the back of his mind, in case the DNA from the dairy bombing came back with a match.
—
HE ALSO THOUGHT of the people he’d interviewed that afternoon: they could be ruled out of the Palmer murder, simply because they wouldn’t have had time to drive back home after the killing, before talking to him. Those he’d interviewed late in the afternoon might have had time to drive back—barely—but he didn’t believe they could have been involved. The number of people who could murder someone, and then have a cop unexpectedly arrive at the house, and still show no signs of stress or agitation, would be vanishingly rare. That would take a kind of psychosis that would show in other ways, and he would have sensed it.
He hadn’t.
Still, they’d all been members of the PPPI and the party was conne
cted to the two murders, and so was whoever was stalking Bowden.
He finished dinner, drove to the hotel, and checked in. He had been in the room long enough to wash his face when the phone rang.
—
RANDY FORD CALLING.
“Davenport,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”
Ford said, “Lucas, this is really embarrassing . . .”
“What?”
“The director called because he wanted to know about the two murders,” Ford said. “When I told him about you coming by the scene, he hit the roof.”
“Aw, shit.”
“Yeah. He’s told me that you can’t be involved,” Ford said. “Told me to keep you away from the scenes and I’m not allowed to give you any reports.”
“Gives me an ice cream headache,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, well, I told him he’s making a bad call and he reamed me a new one. So . . . now you know.”
“I’m out.”
“You’re out of the police picture,” Ford said. “There’s nothing to keep you from asking questions on your own. If you do that, I hope you’ll call me up if you find anything.”
“I will,” Lucas said. “This doesn’t make it easier, though.”
“I know, but that’s the way it is. Call me if you get anything.”
—
LUCAS CALLED NEIL MITFORD, who didn’t seem impressed by the fact that Lucas had been kicked out of the police case. “They’ll change their minds. You be thinking about what you should be doing next.”
“Neil, this is exactly the kind of bureaucratic bullshit that pushed me out of the BCA,” Lucas said. “It’s a guy protecting his territory. Actually it’s not even as bad as the BCA deal. I kind of understand why the Iowa guys wouldn’t want an outsider sticking his nose in, especially a civilian.”
“You think about your next move,” Mitford repeated. “Assume you’ll have full police cooperation. I’ll talk to the governor about this Anson Palmer guy and we’ll figure out what we want to do next.”
—
LUCAS TALKED TO WEATHER, told her that he might be on the way home. When he got off the phone, he looked at his watch: he had enough time to walk down to a bookstore he’d passed on the street and pick up something to read. He did that, found a Joseph Kanon spy novel, propped some hotel pillows behind his back, and settled down to read until bedtime.
Took a call from an unrecognized number at eleven o’clock. A man asked, “Davenport?”
“Yes?”
“Hold for Mike Bowden.”
Bowden came up a few seconds later: “I’ve been briefed on the second murder and your investigation. I understand that you had already interviewed the dead man, Mr. Palmer.”
“Yes. Twice. He was killed probably four or five hours after I last talked to him,” Lucas said.
“Then you must be close to the main thread of this conspiracy, if there is a conspiracy,” she said.
“I think so, but I haven’t gotten very far with it,” Lucas said.
“Keep pushing—the police will cooperate,” Bowden said.
“I was told otherwise, about an hour ago.”
“The director of the Division of Criminal Investigation is having a conversation with the governor of Iowa right now, and his mind is being changed about that,” Bowden said, her voice cool and undramatic. “I spoke to the governor, and as he put it, ‘Who in God’s name wouldn’t take all the help he could get if one of the presidential candidates is threatened?’ He seemed quite perturbed.”
“I’m starting to feel squeezed by all you big-time politicians,” Lucas said.
“Can’t help you there. I’m a squeezer myself and I don’t much identify with the squeezed,” Bowden said. “Get back to work tomorrow. Or even tonight, if you have something to do.”
He didn’t, so he went to bed.
Feeling squeezed.
SEVENTEEN
Sometime during the night, Lucas, in a half-waking, half-dream state, thought about/dreamed about connections, and woke the next morning thinking about the web that connected the Joseph Likely and the Anson Palmer killings.
Connections.
All kinds of connections, in time and space and in personal relationships.
He’d realized the day before that the people he’d interviewed that afternoon couldn’t have killed Anson Palmer, because they wouldn’t have had time to drive home afterward. Didn’t matter about motive or personal feelings or any of that, because they were physically disconnected by distance.
The times between Lucas’s visits to Likely and to Palmer, and their murders, were very short.
Connections also involved personal aspects. Tom and Mary Moller, the What Cheer couple who’d turned him on to Marlys Purdy, said that they hadn’t talked to Purdy in years. Lucas could probably check that if he wished to, but, basically, he believed them: that meant that the personal connection between them and Purdy was tenuous. They didn’t talk, didn’t run into each other in town, didn’t visit, didn’t maintain a tight, intimate relationship.
The same would be true of the Mollers and Likely and Palmer—they’d never run into each other, unless they intended to, didn’t chat, wouldn’t know much about their respective psychological makeups. Wouldn’t have a feel for whether their counterparts were really trustworthy.
—
THAT WOULDN’T WORK for the killer, Lucas thought. The killer or killers would have fairly intimate ties with their victims: there should be phone calls, e-mails, traces of face-to-face encounters between them.
If Joseph Likely’s murder was tied into Lucas’s interview with Likely, and he thought it was, then somebody had found out about the interview almost immediately after it happened and had quickly acted on that. How had they learned about the interview? Probably because Likely told them, or Likely had told someone who’d immediately passed the word along.
The killer had seen some kind of risk in Likely, and so eliminated him . . . had gotten the word, thought it over, planned the killing, and carried it out, all within a few hours. Conversely, Likely probably hadn’t seen the risk and had considered the killer a friend, someone he trusted. He’d let the killer in the house, hadn’t tried to defend himself, probably hadn’t even seen the murder coming.
The same thing applied to Anson Palmer. Somebody had seen a risk in Palmer and had moved quickly and decisively to eliminate him after Lucas’s visit. How had they learned about that visit? Probably because Palmer had told them. Palmer, like Likely, had let the killer in the house, hadn’t tried to defend himself.
The killer was somebody near the core of the PPPI, and, Lucas suspected, probably lived close enough to Likely and Palmer that he/she encountered them frequently and had some degree of intimacy with them both. Someone that Palmer and Likely would both confide in.
That mostly applied to people who lived around Iowa City.
Again, he thought about Grace Lawrence. But time and distance: Lawrence said she’d been at a school activity the night Likely was killed that would have totally covered the time between Lucas’s visit and the murders. She couldn’t have done it . . . if she were telling the truth.
He could check that and would. Once he’d eliminated the people who couldn’t have done the murders, he’d be close to the one who did.
—
BELL WOOD CALLED while he was shaving:
“Jesus, you really set off a shit-storm this morning,” he said. He sounded amused. “The director sent out a memo to everyone yesterday afternoon, telling us that we weren’t cooperating with you, no way, no how. This morning I get a clarifying memo saying we are cooperating with you, in every way possible. The rumor is, he got his ass handed to him by the governor, in person.”
“I don’t know,” Lucas lied, “but I’m happy I’m working with you guys again.”
“Shoot, you’re not wor
king with us, we’re working with you,” Wood said. “Robertson got the word, he’ll be calling. The question is, what do you want us to do?”
Lucas told him about his calculation of the night before and his conclusion that the killer was tied tightly to the small core of PPPI members between Iowa City and Mount Pleasant. “That includes Grace Lawrence, who lives in between the two places. Speaking of Grace, what’s happening with the DNA analysis on her hair?”
“Under way. Pissed off some lab people because there’s a hell of a backlog and we jumped the line,” Wood said. “But we’re working it around the clock. We should have something back the day after tomorrow, roughly seventy-two hours after it came through the door.”
“Great. Anyway, my feeling is that we should forget about that whole long membership list—most of them aren’t all that active—and focus on Iowa City. It’d be good if we could pull your other guys in here and make multiple visits to the people we know. Ask the same questions over and over. Put on the squeeze. Sweat them.”
“I’ll talk to Robertson right now and we’ll have two more investigators there this afternoon,” Wood said.
“Somebody said we’d have four more . . .”
“That was before the bureaucratic shit hit the fan,” Wood said. “The director is showing that he still has some clout in this and has decided that four total should be enough . . . that’s counting you.”
“Figures,” Lucas grumbled. “All right. I want to spend some time at the two crime scenes we have. I need access to Likely’s and Palmer’s telephones and e-mail. I might need somebody to break passwords and get me into hard drives.”
“Okay. I’ll check around about the computer, the Iowa City cops should know somebody who could handle that. Can’t send one of our own computer people without inflaming the red-ass.”
“Stay in touch,” Lucas said.
“I will—and listen. From what I’m hearing around here, the governor was almost on his knees, pleading with Bowden to go to the fair. He doesn’t want her people telling the media that she’s skipping the fair because she’s been told she might be assassinated,” Wood said. “The gov would consider that a blot on the whole state. He supposedly told Bowden that he could guarantee her safety. Half the highway patrol will be there and they’re talking about shortening the candidate walk . . . Anyway, she’s going to the fair.”