There wasn’t much space under the table, but nobody was looking, and Marlys pulled the pink dress over her head and pulled on the shorts and blue blouse. All she had to cover her head was the giveaway pink hat but that was better than the baldness, and she pulled it back on, got Caralee and the baby bag, and said, “Let’s go home.”
Out from under the table, she could hear sirens shrieking and people screaming and she wanted in the worst way to know that Bowden was dead, but nobody in the panic-swept building seemed to be doing anything but screaming and running, and she expected that nobody actually yet knew what had happened, let alone the results. She shouldered her way toward the west end of the building, but the mob was so thick that she took a left and pushed back to the quilting area. On the way, she went past a stack of gold University of Iowa ball caps, snatched one off the pile, put it on her head, and threw the pink sailor hat under a table.
Cole, she thought, was probably dead; or at least taken prisoner. When they’d identified him, they’d be coming after her. There was almost no reason to run, she thought, but she ran anyway, purely from instinct to get away.
If she could get back to the truck . . . well, then what?
In the quilts room, she saw a half-dozen women that she knew, crouching behind a heavy table they’d overturned, their white-haired heads poking over the top, looking out through the room entrance toward the front of the building, where the bomb had exploded.
She hurried toward them, said to the nicest one of the women, “Jeanine, please . . . could you hold Caralee for just a minute? My son was out there somewhere, I have to look for my son . . . I’ll be right back.”
“Then I got her, go, go,” Jeanine said.
“Here’s the baby bag . . .” Marlys dropped the bag next to Jeanine, who took Caralee around the waist, and Marlys bent and kissed the girl and said, “Grandma loves you.”
She turned and ran out of the building.
—
LUCAS, BELL WOOD, and the other cops spread out and ran toward the south end of the fairgrounds, back to the area of the animal barns. They swept through them and to the gates, not knowing that Purdy was behind them, not in front of them. More cops joined them, looking for the lady in pink.
They got to the fence, no sign of her; now every cop on the fairgrounds had her description.
“She’s hiding someplace,” Wood told Lucas. “Matter of time, now. It’s a snake hunt.”
“No bald women go out the gates, and . . . hell, I don’t know what else,” Lucas said.
They’d just come out of the front of the cattle barn, after talking to a guard at the south gate and then walking through the swine and cattle barns. Wood stopped talking for a moment, looking at a heavyset woman jogging past the cultural center, and then he said, “That’s her. I think that’s her. In the shorts and blue shirt and gold hat. She runs like Purdy . . .”
“No kid,” Lucas said. Then he shouted, loud as he could, “Marlys!”
Purdy jerked her head around and looked at them.
“That’s her!” Wood said.
They sprinted after her, Lucas outrunning Wood, who was talking into his radio.
—
MARLYS HEARD HER NAME, and couldn’t help it, jerked her head around, saw the two men looking at her, knew she’d given herself away. She cut left around the end of the Cultural Center. She’d been headed for the campgrounds, where she’d hoped to get lost. Wouldn’t get there, now. She continued along the Cultural Center, a three-story tan building with lots of glass and curving sides. She’d never outrun the two cops; she had to hide, but not in an obvious way. Not in the Cultural Center, where they’d be sure to look.
She ran past open doors and around the far corner of the building, and then down the side, and peeked back toward the cattle barn in time to see Lucas disappear behind the other side of the Cultural Center, followed by Wood, who was still on the radio, calling for help.
As soon as Wood went behind the far side of the building, she began jogging again, almost on a line back to the blast area, where she had the inspiration: there’d be hurt people going out, maybe she could become one of them, smear some blood on her chest and arms . . .
Her chest felt like it was full of ice, from the running, she was dragging in each breath, and she ran past a stage and onto Pella Plaza, when she encountered Ricky Vincent.
—
THE THING ABOUT RICKY VINCENT was this: he’d been a Des Moines cop for four years, and though he’d taken his pistol out of his holster a few times, he’d never fired it. The fact that he’d actually drawn his gun made his partners nervous, because he’d never really had to.
Vincent, they suspected, wanted to kill someone, to see how it felt.
They were right.
Vincent was working the fair on his day off, and he’d missed the action down by the horse barn, when the two cops had been shot by Cole Purdy. He’d already had a half-dozen waking fantasies that placed him on that spot, and in which he’d shot Cole three times, clean through the heart.
His disappointment became even more intense when he heard the shooting that had killed Purdy. He’d run that way, but was too late to do anything but stand around and look at the body, thumbs hooked over his gun belt for the people filming with their iPhones. Like he’d been there . . .
Then the guy from Minnesota started screaming at them and had roared away in the Gator, and they hadn’t been able to make out what he’d been shouting until somebody got to them on the radio, and seconds later, the bomb went. He and the other cops ran toward the bombing scene, and a few minutes later the state cop, Bell Wood, had called for help, looking for the woman in pink. Vincent had run around behind the Varied Industries building, too late again. He could see a line of cops running into the barns all the way to the south.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do, then started drifting back toward the bomb scene, where he’d already been told he wasn’t really needed—but the bomb scene might get him on television. He’d been on television twice before, and liked it, and this particular scene would go everywhere in the world. He could be on TV in France, in Russia. Hell, even China.
Then Wood was calling again. Purdy had changed to white shorts and a blue top, he said, and was running around behind the Cultural Center, but they’d lost sight of her.
Vincent started running that way.
He and Purdy collided at Pella Plaza.
He saw her coming, a half-jog, out of breath, hat askew, showing the bald side of her head.
Vincent drew his gun, dropped into the approved stance, and shouted, “Purdy! Purdy!”
Marlys Purdy skidded to a stop thirty feet away, threw her hands up, and shouted at him, “I give up. I give up.”
Vincent thought, Bullshit, and shot her three times before she fell down.
—
WOOD AND LUCAS PUSHED through a gathering crowd to find a uniformed cop standing over a dying Marlys Purdy. The cop looked at Wood and said, “I yelled at her to stop, but she threw up her hands and I thought she’d thrown something at me . . . I was thinking another bomb or a grenade or something.”
A half-dozen people were filming the scene with their iPhones, getting it all down, the cop posed there for the iPhone cameras, his pistol pointing in the air, Lucas kneeling beside Purdy.
Her eyes were still clear and she recognized Lucas and he said, “We’ve got an ambulance coming.”
She asked, bubbling blood, “Bowden?”
Lucas said, “Wasn’t hurt. A lot of other people are dead.”
Marlys Purdy closed her eyes, sighed, her head fell to the side, and she died.
THIRTY-ONE
Lucas stood up and looked at the cop who was posing with his pistol, and said, “Put the fuckin’ gun away, dumbass.”
Wood nodded at the cop and said, “Put it away.”
Somebody in the crowd called out, “She said, ‘I give up, I give up,’ and she held up her hands and you could see she didn’t have anything in them. He shot her anyway. Pure murder.”
Wood said, “Let’s not go there . . .”
Vincent pointed his finger at the man who’d called out, “You keep talkin’ that way and you’ll find your ass in jail.”
“No, he won’t! No, he won’t!” Wood said, speaking to the gathering crowd. More quietly to the cop: “Put the goddamn gun away. Now!”
Vincent put the gun away and Lucas said to Wood, “You better stay and handle this or he’ll shoot somebody else. It could get ugly if there are any iPhone movies. Get somebody pleasant to ask the crowd about it, and get something to cover Purdy. I’m going to run around to the other side of the building.”
—
LUCAS JOGGED AROUND to the site of the bombing.
There were ambulances, but nowhere near enough of them, and he saw three people being loaded into a single ambulance, and a man bleeding heavily from a leg wound loaded into a private SUV. An enormously fat man—maybe five hundred pounds—was lying on the ground next to his overturned wheelchair. A Mercedes Sprinter van had been backed up next to him, plenty of space inside, but the people on the ground couldn’t pick him up. When they tried to lift him by his clothes, the clothes ripped; when they tried to pick him up by his limbs, he screamed with pain, not from his chest and facial wounds, but from the stress on his skin. One man came running with a plastic tarp, which they tried to get beneath him: Lucas moved on before he saw how that worked out.
There was a burst of screaming from the far end of the street and when Lucas looked that way, he saw dozens and maybe hundreds of people running. Then, just as suddenly, the running mob slowed, and turned, and nothing happened.
Across the street a dozen wounded people were still lying on the roadway and along the curb, bleeding, covered with cloths and jackets, next to a dead man with a wadded-up T-shirt covering his face. He had a hole in his chest the size of Lucas’s fist; the hole was no longer pumping blood.
And everywhere, people making movies with iPhones.
“Lucas! Lucas!” A woman’s voice, and he turned and saw Bowden hunched over the body of a woman. Henderson was kneeling next to the woman, and when Lucas jogged up, she said, “She’s pregnant, we’ve got to get her on an ambulance, but . . .”
Henderson had stripped off his suit coat and asked Mitford for his, and they used the two jackets to make a kind of hammock, and the four of them moved the woman onto it, and then, with each of them holding a corner of the improvised sling, they ran her to the nearest ambulance. The ambulance was nearly full, but when the attendant saw that it was Bowden helping with the woman, they simply loaded her on top of another body and a moment later rolled away.
When the ambulance moved, they saw a dead cop lying on the edge of the street, what was left of his face covered with a dark blue shirt.
Bowden gripped Lucas’s arm and said, “I did this. If I hadn’t come, they wouldn’t have set off the bomb.”
Lucas shook his head: “You can’t know that. They were crazy. The woman who set off the bomb sacrificed her own son. You’re not responsible for crazies.”
“Where is she?” Henderson asked. The governor’s shirt and Bowden’s blouse were soaked with blood.
“She’s dead,” Lucas said.
Henderson nodded and Bowden said, “Good.”
“Maybe not so good, hard to tell,” Lucas said. “The guy who shot her, a Des Moines uniform, pretty much executed her. People in the crowd said she was empty-handed and trying to give up when he shot her.”
Bowden looked around at the chaos and said, “Liberal as I am, I can’t say I feel that bad about it.”
—
IT TOOK NEARLY an hour to move the last of the wounded out of the fairgrounds. There were twelve dead, forty-four wounded, with the wounds varying from grievous and disfiguring lacerations to minor cuts. Twelve of the injured had been hurt by other fairgoers in the stampede that followed the blast of the Purdys’ bomb. One of the trampled was among the dead. Other dead included two TV people, two members of the band that had been hired to lead Bowden’s party, the cop, three people who’d been standing next to or leaning on the fake fire hydrant, and three people who’d been standing across the street.
None of the cops shot by Cole Purdy died. The one who’d been shot through the right femoral artery had nearly bled out, but in the end, a fast transfusion and emergency surgery had saved him.
—
AFTER THE WOUNDED were gone, the arguments began, about who was to blame. Almost no one blamed Bowden, who had retreated to her bus, as had Henderson, who’d gone to his own bus. Two hours after the explosion, the most noticeable people in the street were police photographers, documenting the scene, and bomb-squad members, who were looking for pieces of the bomb, for a reconstruction. The fairgrounds was mostly deserted, except for cops and people who were related to the dead and wounded, who’d been gathered in the Varied Industries building for police interviews.
Three hours after the explosion, an FBI anti-terrorism squad showed up.
—
LUCAS FOUND BELL WOOD a hundred yards down the street, sitting on the curb. Wood looked like he’d been painted with blood, which was now deepening to a cold umber color. Lucas realized that he looked the same way, and that his fingers were sticking together from the blood smeared between them.
Wood was eating a Wiener schnitzel on a stick.
“Where’d you get that?” Lucas asked.
Wood pointed down the street: “The Wiener-schnitzel-on-a-stick place. They’re giving them away free. Bring me a beer.”
“You sure? There’re still a lot of cameras around.”
“Fuck ’em,” Wood said.
Lucas walked down to the Wiener schnitzel stand, was given a handful of wet napkins to clean his hands, and as he waited for the food, realized how quiet everything had become. No sirens anymore, no ever-present fair music.
He walked back to Wood with a Wiener schnitzel on a stick and two Diet Cokes. He sat on the curb next to Wood, handed him a Diet Coke, and said, “For your own good.”
“Fuck you very much,” Wood said. “But I suppose you’re right.”
At that moment the DCI director, Pole, walked up and sat on the curb on the other side of Wood. He was wearing a brown suit and a tan shirt, all speckled with blood.
“Well, I’m fucked,” Pole said. “If I had any sense, I’d be halfway to the Mexican border by now.”
“What’s gonna happen?” Bell asked.
“We’re about to go through the mother of all cluster-fucks and the DCI is gonna be right in the middle of it. Our guys were supposed to provide the security for Mrs. Bowden and she almost got her tits blown off.”
“I’ve thought of all that,” Wood said.
Lucas said, “One of the first questions they’re going to ask is, ‘Why didn’t we think of a bomb before it went off?’ The answer is, ‘We did.’”
Wood: “We did?”
“Yes. We had bomb-sniffing dogs here, but they didn’t find a bomb, and the bomb was so cleverly made, by a brain-injured ex-military guy who had experience with IEDs, that there was no way we could have predicted this. When I say ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ The DCI.”
“Not gonna save my ass,” Pole said, the gloom thick in his voice.
“Probably not,” Lucas agreed. “If you want to go down fighting, the first thing I’d do is make a hero out of Sam Greer.”
“What’d he do?” Pole asked.
“Shot Cole Purdy to death. Heard police calls that Purdy was coming his way and had already shot three police officers. Sam met him head-on and killed him before he could do more harm. It was like the O.K. Corral.”
Pole thought about that for a moment, then said, “That’s s
omething.”
Lucas said, “Bell, here, was in close pursuit of Marlys Purdy when she was shot to death. He’d hoped to capture her alive so that she could testify about her motives and any accessories she might have had.”
“Really? That’s what I hoped?” Wood asked.
“That’s what I’d say,” Lucas said. “I’d also point out, if I were you guys, that it was a team led by Bell Wood and Sam Greer that turned up the Purdys in the first place and actually prevented the assassination of Mrs. Bowden. And other DCI agents, investigating the group to which Mrs. Purdy belonged, may have solved the Lennett Valley Dairy bombing.”
Pole took his cell phone out of his pocket, looked at the screen. “Another woman died. That’s thirteen. She was standing across the street. They think two more aren’t gonna make it.” Pole had started to cry, tears running down his cheeks, and said, “This is so fucked up.”
“Yes, it is,” Lucas said. “You should go get a Wiener schnitzel on a stick, and then find a TV camera to talk to.”
Pole asked Lucas, “What about you? You were with Bell and Sam last night.”
Lucas shrugged and said, “Nothing about me. I don’t need the publicity. Hey—I’m not even a cop.”
Pole stood up, wiped his face, and said, “Gotta go find a fuckin’ TV camera. Just unreal. Just fuckin’ unreal. Thirteen people dead and I gotta find a TV camera to talk to.”
He walked away, and when he was gone up the street, Lucas said, “That wasn’t so bad. He sounded almost human.”
“Fuck him,” Wood said, throwing his empty Wiener schnitzel stick into the street. “He’s an asshole.”
—
LUCAS SPENT PART of the remaining summer and early fall working on his cabin, but felt like half of his life was spent in Iowa. There were hearings, both legislative and judicial, and investigations that he didn’t even know about until the results were published.