Likely, though, was supposedly a committed pacifist, and his group, the Progressive People’s Party of Iowa, had always been of the nonviolent drop-and-drag type, more of a pain in the ass for cops than an active challenge.
Leonard, on the other hand, had done three years at Anamosa State Penitentiary for aggravated assault after trying to break up a foreclosure auction with a baseball bat. Before forming his Prairie Storm group, in the mid-1980s, he’d done two short prison terms for assault and armed robbery, and after the three-year term had been arrested twice more for assault and acquitted once on a burglary charge. To Lucas’s eye, he looked like a criminal who’d moved himself into politics.
His group, Prairie Storm, had been involved in violent incidents at foreclosure auctions, loan companies, and banks.
Clark Alfred’s anti-war group had started out protesting the Vietnam War, had gotten involved in populist politics after the farm crash of the eighties, had short, local revivals during the first and second Gulf wars. At the moment, it seemed to have only one member: Alfred himself. Alfred, according to Wood’s information, was ninety-four years old.
After a moment’s consideration, Lucas decided to look at Leonard first, and then Likely. Given his age and history, Alfred didn’t seem like much of a candidate for a violent conspiracy.
—
WHEN EVERYBODY WAS OFF their respective phones, Henderson asked Lucas, “You got them yet?”
“No, but I’ve got some things to work with,” Lucas said. He gave them a quick recap of the information he’d scraped up, then said, “I’m going to Atlantic first, then over to Mount Pleasant. I’ll need your travel schedule and some phone numbers, to stay in touch.”
“We’re going down to Des Moines for a picnic with Catholic Social Services and a cocktail party for possible donors, and then to Iowa City,” Mitford said. “We’ve got a private event there tonight, then a rally tomorrow morning. Then we go to Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls. That’s the University of Iowa, Kirkwood Community College, University of Northern Iowa, all tomorrow.”
“Hitting a lot of colleges,” Lucas said.
“I’m a lefty,” Henderson said. “If a lefty needs a crowd, he goes to colleges.”
“If you’re going to Mount Pleasant this afternoon, that’s close to Iowa City. If you want a room in Iowa City, call me and I’ll have our travel planner get one for you,” Mitford said to Lucas.
“Thanks. Right now . . . do you know where Bowden is?”
“She’s in Chicago right now, a fast day trip to talk to her money people this morning. She flies to Burlington, that’s here in Iowa, this afternoon, for a speech, then she heads up to Davenport by car,” Mitford said. “She has a fund-raiser on a riverboat out of Davenport at five o’clock and will be back in town for a speech at six-thirty.”
“Where exactly is Burlington?” Lucas asked.
“On the Mississippi, down in the southeast corner of the state,” Mitford said. “As a matter of fact, it’s only about thirty-two miles from Mount Pleasant and about forty minutes by campaign bus. You could probably drive it in twenty-five.”
“Really? You know that off the top of your head?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, really,” Mitford said. “I have a map of Iowa, with all the mileages and travel times, tattooed on my chest and stomach. That little teeny bit of the state that dangles down to Keokuk? That’s on my dick.”
Henderson said, “Jesus, Neil,” and tipped his head toward Green.
“That’s all right,” Green said. “It’s only a little teeny bit.”
The governor smiled and turned back to Lucas. “You’re going to talk with Bowden?”
“Well, with her weasel, anyway, if you can get your weasel to set it up,” Lucas said.
Henderson nodded at Mitford, who said, “I think of myself more as a wolverine.”
“A wolverine’s a weasel,” Green said.
“Yeah, but it’s the biggest, meanest one,” Mitford said. To Lucas: “I’ll call Norm, tell him you’re coming.”
—
A WOMAN WITH A CLIPBOARD hustled into the room and said, “Governor, I know it’s not on the schedule, but a WHO van’s outside, they’d like one minute with you, if you could. Jack Gardner says you’re an unrealistic dreamer and that Congress wouldn’t pass any of your policies—”
“One minute? I’ve got one minute,” Henderson said.
They all drifted through the motel to the parking lot, where a TV cameraman was pointing his camera at the HENDERSON banner on the side of the campaign bus. The woman with the clipboard stopped Henderson before he got to the cameras, opened a lunch box and took out a powder puff, dabbed at his nose and the thin rings under his eyes, did a final touch-up with a tissue, and said, “Go.”
—
WHILE THEY WAITED for the governor to finish with the camera and get on the bus, Lucas took Green aside. “Is it possible that there’s somebody on Bowden’s bus who might be a problem? Anybody I should be worried about?”
“I doubt it. They’re thoroughly vetted. I talked to the Secret Service campaign liaison guy in Washington, an old friend of mine, had him run all the names in depth. That’s us, Bowden’s and Gardner’s campaigns. Everybody seems to be clean, a few pot busts, a couple of cocaines, four DWIs. Most of the bus people are political, but more on the technical side of things, rather than, you know, policy.”
“Not nuts, then,” Lucas said.
“No. There are a few crazies around, but not on the buses. Why are you worried about the buses?”
“If there was somebody feeding information, or support, or money, or whatever, to these stalkers, if there are stalkers, I need to know who I should look at,” Lucas said. “It’s like Neil—Neil wouldn’t betray Henderson, they’re joined at the hip, but he knows everything about Bowden, too. Where she’s going, what time she’s going there . . . That’d be pretty useful if you were planning an attack.”
“Most of that you could find out on her website,” Green said. “You wouldn’t need Neil to tell you.”
Lucas grinned and rubbed his nose. “Okay. I’m the new guy. I didn’t think of that. The website gets updated every day?”
“Not just every day, but every hour,” Green said. “We’ve got a Web tech on the bus with us. Bowden does, too. Right now, our guy is posting to people in Des Moines that we’ll be fifteen minutes late.”
“And Bowden does the same thing?”
“Sure. Minute-by-minute,” Green said.
“Okay . . . so if you know all this stuff, where’s the most uncontrolled spot Bowden will be in the next couple of weeks? Or the governor?”
“That’s easy—the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines,” Green said. “Every candidate goes there. It’s the major event of the summer, as far as the campaigns go. There’s between ninety and a hundred and ten thousand people going through the fair every day. There are no effective security controls, as far as I can tell.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“All right. That gives me a deadline,” Lucas said.
“But—this is all just a feeling on Elmer’s part,” Green said. “That something’s wrong. I kind of agree with him, but when I was with the Secret Service, we dealt with all kinds of perceived threats and virtually none of them were real. Or realistic. Mostly they were goofs who wanted some attention.”
“And got it.”
“Yes, but the critical thing was, they’d never be a real threat to the president,” Green said. “They just didn’t have the planning ability, the . . . foresight . . . to be a real threat.”
—
LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT THAT as the bus pulled out of the parking lot. He thought Green was interested in what he was doing, but protecting Bowden wasn’t part of her job description. While he’d told her of Elle Kruger’s psychological analysis of the e-mails, he had th
e feeling that she hadn’t taken that as seriously as he had—because Elle was a nun, and Green didn’t know her. Where did a nun get off peddling advice on possible psychotic assassins?
But Lucas did know Elle Kruger and she’d left him with a bad feeling about the whole situation. Somebody, he thought, was stalking Bowden. Whether or not they’d pull the trigger on her was another matter. The problem was to get to them, before they had the chance to act, before they had to make that final decision.
—
AFTER SEEING THE BUS OFF, Lucas went back to his motel, used the Wi-Fi to send a short note to Weather, who was probably in an operating room and wouldn’t see it until the afternoon. He found another short e-mail from Bell Wood that asked, “Do you know where you’re staying tonight?”
Lucas sent back: “Don’t know for sure, but probably in Iowa City, with Henderson’s campaign crew.”
With the e-mail out of the way, he got cleaned up, went out to the car, and at nine o’clock headed south and west.
SIX
From Ames to Atlantic was a two-hour drive—a skim across the north side of the Des Moines metro area, then west on I-80, cutting the edges of a succession of small towns, with more endless acres of dark green corn and beans sprawling across the rolling prairie. Lucas stopped once, to buy gas and fill the cooler with Diet Cokes. He was at the gas station, scraping bugs off the windshield, when Mitford called.
“You’re good to talk to Norm Clay this afternoon. Best to do it in Burlington, because after that you’d have to chase them up to Davenport. You don’t want to get stuck on that boat ride.” He gave Lucas a phone number and said, “Good luck.”
—
ATLANTIC WAS ten or twelve minutes south of I-80, a neatly kept town of a few thousand people, Lucas supposed, a service satellite for the surrounding farm country. He did a quick run through the business district to get a sense of the place—it looked like a lot of small towns in the Midwestern countryside, harkening back to the late nineteenth to middle twentieth century, brick, concrete block, low and sprawling—and then punched Leonard’s address into his nav system. The nav took him to a trailer park east of the business district. Leonard lived in a dilapidated beige single-wide, with a dusty Jeep Patriot sitting in front of the stoop.
Lucas got out of the Benz, looked around, saw no one, climbed the stoop, heard a television playing, and knocked on the screen door. A moment later a heavyset, sleepy-eyed woman in a quilted housecoat opened the inside door, looked at him through the screen, and asked, “You the police?”
“No. Should I be?” The odor of toast and eggs filtered through the screen, and reminded Lucas that he was hungry.
She said, “I dunno. If you’re the police, you gotta say so.”
“I’m not the police. I work for Governor Henderson. I want to talk politics with Mr. Leonard. You know, the Prairie Storm thing,” Lucas said.
She blinked, then looked past him at the Benz. “I guess you’re not the cops, unless the cops inherited a lot of money. Not much going on with Prairie Storm, not anymore. Anyway, Dave’s not here. He’s usually down at Winn’s this time of day.”
“What’s Winn’s?” Lucas asked.
“Bar. Roadhouse out 83, ’bout a mile past the Mormon church.”
—
LUCAS THANKED HER, prompted her for better directions to the bar—“Go straight out to 83 and hook a left, it’s three or four miles out there, look for the eyesore.”
He checked the car clock: not yet eleven in the morning. Five minutes later, he was looking at Winn’s, a low rambling place that was a few asbestos shingles short of a full set of siding, that might once have been a motel, and maybe still rented out a few rooms. A yellow plastic roller-sign in the gravel parking lot said “Happy Hour, 4–6” and in smaller letters, “Free First D ink For Ladies.”
A dive, Lucas thought. Not a dive-themed bar, but the real thing, and as the woman had said, a genuine eyesore. He took a moment to hope that “D ink” was simply “Drink” with a missing letter.
He got out of the truck and went inside.
—
THE PLACE WAS DARK and smelled like spilled beer and microwaved cheese and beans and was smaller than it had seemed from the outside. A bartender was watching a rerun of a Cubs game on a TV hung in a corner, next to a stuffed deer head, and a dozen guys were scattered around the interior in booths, one, two, and three at a booth. A few were drinking coffee and eating microwave tacos, the rest were looking at beers. A coin-op pool table sat at the back, but nobody was playing. The customers all wore work clothes, T-shirts and jeans and boots and baseball caps. The bartender took in Lucas’s suit as he walked up to the bar and asked, “You lost?”
“Not if this is Winn’s,” Lucas said.
“Then you’re not lost,” the bartender said. “What can I do you for?”
“I was told that Dave Leonard might be here,” Lucas said.
“Why you looking for Dave?”
“I’m doing some campaign research for Governor Henderson and I was hoping Mr. Leonard could help me out,” Lucas said.
A man in a booth said, “I’m Dave Leonard.”
—
LEONARD WAS A THICK, dark-haired man, Lucas’s height but heavier, both in the arms and the gut. He was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and yellow work boots. The scars around his pale, suspicious eyes and a withered nose made him into a brawler.
He was sitting in a booth across from two other men, one tall and thin in matching gray work shirt and pants, with a clump of brown hair on top of his head, while the sides were shaved bare; and the other shorter and fat, wearing an orange sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves that said, on the chest, “Party Patrol.” A mostly empty pitcher of beer sat in the middle of the table.
“Who told you I was here?” Leonard asked. He slurred some of the words, and Lucas realized he’d been drinking for a while.
“Guy in town,” Lucas said. None of the men had gray eyes. “I’d like to talk to you privately, if I could.”
“About what?”
“Prairie Storm . . . and some people who might belong to it,” Lucas said.
“You smell like a cop,” Leonard said. “Not a campaign aide.”
“Used to be a cop, but I quit,” Lucas said. “You got a minute?”
Leonard looked at the other two men, then said, “These guys are my friends. We can talk right here.”
“Okay.” Lucas dragged a chair over from a nearby table, sat down at the end of the booth, and looked at Leonard. “Governor Henderson has gotten letters from anonymous people down here in Iowa that seem to threaten Mrs. Bowden. We’re taking them seriously. We’re looking for an older woman and a younger guy, who might be a family, mother and son. The only thing I can tell you is that the son has pretty distinctive gray eyes. I have a photo . . .”
Lucas began fishing his cell phone out of his pocket, but Leonard broke in to say, “You’re not a cop anymore, but you’re doing cop work. Investigating.”
“Well, I’m checking on these people, to see if they’re serious and we need to be worried, or if they’re bullshitters and we don’t need to worry,” Lucas said.
“What does that have to do with me?” Leonard asked.
“The letters use certain kinds of language and talk about certain kinds of political positions that are like the ones in Prairie Storm literature. We’re not suggesting that you have anything to do with it, but we thought you might know these people,” Lucas said. He scanned the few pictures he had saved in his cell phone, found the one taken by Alice Green, and turned it to Leonard. “This is one of the guys . . . not too good a picture.”
Leonard glanced at it, for no more than a fraction of a second, and said, “Never seen him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
Lucas peered at him for a moment, then said, “Look, you??
?ve got to take this seriously, man. If anything were to happen to one of the candidates and it turned out the shooter was a member of Prairie Storm . . . you could find yourself in big trouble, even if you had nothing to do with it.”
“That sounds like a threat,” Leonard drawled.
“Not a threat, it’s the reality of a bad situation,” Lucas said.
“We don’t much take to threats,” Leonard said.
He’d included his two friends with the “We,” but neither the thin man nor the fat man looked like they were much interested in a fight.
“Look, I don’t want a hassle, I’m just trying to track down these two—”
“For what? For saying what they think?” Leonard asked.
“I don’t care what they think, but I’d like to find out what they mean when they talk about, you know, ‘What if something happened to Mrs. Bowden.’ If it’s nothing but thinking and talking, they’re welcome to it.”
“Yeah, you’re shuttin’ them up, is what you’re doing. Shuttin’ them up, that’s what you’re all about.”
Lucas pushed away from the table. “All right, you don’t want to talk. You don’t have to. You may regret it later.”
“Tell you what,” Leonard said. “What if I kicked your ass? Cops have given me years and years of shit and you’re an ex-cop, so I kick your ass, it makes me feel good, and nothing you can do about it, ’cause you’re an ex.”
“Nothing I can do except fight back,” Lucas said. “I promise you, you don’t want that.”
“You that tough?” Leonard started to slide out of the booth.
“I’m tough and you’re drunk,” Lucas said. He shoved the chair over to block Leonard’s way out of the booth. “And I’m working with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. You take a swing at me, they’ll be around to talk to you.”
“If they can find me,” Leonard said. He tried to kick the chair aside.