When the food arrived, he said good-bye, ate the cheeseburger and fries, got his laptop out and tried browsing the political groups he knew about, looking for membership lists. That got him nowhere—all three groups had formed, and then faltered, before the Internet had gotten big. He found a few references and some position papers, but all were unsigned, except for a couple of anti-cop screeds by Dave Leonard. Leonard was out of it—he wouldn’t be chasing after Bowden for a couple of weeks, at least not in person, anyway, not with a full set of cracked ribs.
Unable to sleep, Lucas put his shoes back on and went out for a walk in the Iowa City mall. The night was cool and felt damp, with a line of scattered thunderstorms having passed through.
He left the mall for a couple of streets, window-shopping, found himself in front of the Old Capitol, in which—up under the dome, maybe? Was that even possible?—a Minnesota football tackle and long-lost friend named Hymen Scholls had impregnated a young Iowa coed. They’d later gotten married and, the last Lucas heard, still were. Didn’t know what to make of that.
—
IN THE MORNING he found a FedEx envelope on the floor by the door, opened it, and found his carry permit; he put it in his wallet. He was in the shower when his phone rang, and then rang again, and then rang a third time. When he got out, he picked up the phone and saw Bell Wood’s name on all three calls. He called him back and Wood said, “Lucas?”
“Yeah, I got the permit. Thanks,” Lucas said.
“Holy shit, man, you know the cops are looking for you?” Wood sounded excited.
“What?”
“You talked to that Joseph Likely guy yesterday?”
“Yeah, yesterday afternoon. What’d he tell the cops?” Lucas asked.
“He didn’t tell them anything,” Wood said. “Somebody went into his house last night and executed him and his girlfriend. Shot them in the head. The Mount Pleasant cops found them this morning after a tip, and a neighbor gave them your name. Said they never saw Likely after seeing you leave.”
“Aw, Jesus. Give me a number, I’ll call them and head down there,” Lucas said.
“We’ve got two guys on the way, right now, along with the crime-scene unit. The Mount Pleasant cops made sure Likely and his friend were dead, then sealed the scene and called us. I’ll call everybody and tell them you’re on the way.”
“Bell, you know what this is, right? These are the guys I’m looking for,” Lucas said. “They’re gonna try to hit Mrs. Bowden, and Likely lied to me when he said he didn’t know who they were. He knew and he called them, maybe to tell them not to do it, and they decided he was a risk, and came over and killed him. You gotta look at his cell phone, see who he called.”
“I’ll do that from here . . .” Wood gave Lucas the names of the two investigators on the way to Mount Pleasant, and promised to call again if anything came up before Lucas got there. Lucas called Neil Mitford, Henderson’s weasel, and told him what had happened.
“Oh, my God. Elmer was right,” Mitford said. “These people are gonna try to kill Bowden.”
“Yes. It’s out in the open now,” Lucas said. “Listen, tell Elmer about this. I’ll call Bowden’s security people. I’m going back to Mount Pleasant.”
“Don’t get yourself busted,” Mitford said.
“I’ll try,” Lucas said.
—
DAN JUBEK, Bowden’s head of security, was as astonished as Mitford. “What would you do, if you were me?” he asked.
“I’d get her out of town. I’m not sure that would be enough, but it might be, depending on how mobile these guys are,” Lucas said.
“Probably not gonna happen,” Jubek said.
“If she won’t go, you could suggest that she jumble up her schedule, and then not post the new days and times on her website—so nobody would know but the locals, wherever she’s going, and then, not until the last minute. I don’t think these people are real sophisticated. If she does that, they might have a harder time setting something up.”
“I’ll tell her that,” Jubek said. “Jesus, Lucas, find these assholes, huh?”
—
LUCAS GOT a couple of bagels with cream cheese, in a bag, and a Diet Coke before he left Iowa City, and ate on the way to Mount Pleasant. When he got there, he found five cop cars and a van parked outside Likely’s house—a city car, two sheriff’s cars, two Division of Criminal Investigation cars, plus the van from the DCI’s crime-scene unit. Neighbors were standing around on porches and lawns along the street, looking toward Likely’s house, when Lucas pulled to the curb.
A uniformed cop was peering at him, so Lucas checked the phone numbers given him by Bell Wood, called the lead investigator, Randy Ford, and identified himself. “I’m parked down the street, but you’ve got a guy in the yard keeping people away.”
“I’ll be right out,” Ford said. “C’mon over.”
Not a good time to use the carry permit, Lucas thought. He got out of the truck and walked twenty yards down to the cop and said, before the cop could ask, “Randy Ford’s coming out to see me.”
The cop nodded and said, “Okay . . .” and looked back at the door, where a thin, white-haired man had stepped out on the porch, still talking to somebody inside the house. “That’s Randy.”
“Tough scene inside?” Lucas asked.
The cop frowned. “You media?”
“No. I’m an . . . investigator . . . from Minnesota, looking into a threat against Michaela Bowden. I talked to Likely yesterday.”
The cop ticked a finger at him: “Davenport, right? Like the city.”
“That’s me.”
Ford was walking over, stuck out a hand and said, “Glad you could stop by.” Ford was a short, thin man, wearing tan slacks and a blue short-sleeved dress shirt; he had the knobby, shiny-skinned look of a college wrestler in one of the lower weight classes.
“I got the feeling it was either that or run for the border,” Lucas said, as they shook.
“We do need to talk to you about that,” Ford said. “What time did you leave here last night?”
Lucas gave him a timeline, from the first moment he’d seen Likely through his trip to Burlington, the return to Mount Pleasant, the drive to Davenport, the chase in Davenport, and the night in Iowa City.
“What you’re saying is, your only alibi for last night between ten and eleven is two presidential candidates and their campaign security staffs, a bunch of city cops in Davenport, and the hotel people in Iowa City. Plus you’re a personal friend of Bell Wood and that fuckin’ Flowers, and they’ll vouch for you.”
“That’s about it,” Lucas said.
“Good enough for me,” Ford said. “C’mon, take a look at this. You’ve probably seen a lot more of them than I have.”
—
LUCAS HAD, but it was never a pleasure. The crime-scene crew was working the house and had marked a walking path through the rooms with masking tape. Likely, gray-faced and cold, was lying facedown at the end of a blood trail across his living room carpet; his mouth was open, as though he were trying to bite into the fabric.
“Looking at the holes in his scalp, we think he was shot with a .22 or possibly a .17, but a .17 is unlikely. We haven’t been able to find any neighbors who heard any shots, but it’s been hot and doors are closed and air conditioners are running, so they wouldn’t, unless they were outside. We haven’t finished processing, so the bodies are right where they fell. We’ll need a medical examiner to tell us for sure, but it looks to me like Likely was shot at least six or seven times, and three different places in his head. Mrs. Baker, that’s his friend, she’s in the kitchen, she was shot three times in the head.”
“You find any shells?”
“No. But that many shots . . . probably an automatic, unless it was a rifle, but that’s unlikely. We think they probably picked up the shells, then tossed the ho
use.”
Lucas took a long, close look at Likely, then followed Ford into the kitchen, where the other investigator, Jerome Robertson, was sitting in a canvas folding chair, making notes on the scene. A woman was kneeling next to the body, her nose about an inch from Baker’s shoulder.
Ford asked, “What?”
The woman looked up and said, “She fell on a cartridge casing. Found it one second ago—it’s a .22, all right.”
“Good,” Ford said. “That’s something.”
“Not much,” she said. “No print—whoever loaded it cleaned it up first.”
“Any prints anywhere?” Lucas asked.
“Millions of them,” the woman said. “Whoever killed Mr. Likely also took his wallet out of his hip pocket—we think—and took the money out of it and then dropped it back on the floor. I can see the outline of a finger, because the outline is made with a trace of powder. There’re no papillary ridges inside the outline. I’m thinking they wore rubber gloves.”
“They came prepared,” Ford said.
“I think so,” the woman said. “I looked around and didn’t find any rubber gloves here, or boxes for them.”
Ford introduced Lucas to Robertson, who said, “We don’t have a single exit wound, so I’m thinking, low-power, solid-lead .22s. We’ll get some intact slugs from inside their skulls. And we’ve got the shell, now. Katie can see the firing pin impression, so we’ll get a decent tool mark.”
“Gotta hope they didn’t throw the gun in the river,” Ford said.
Ford and Robertson gave Lucas a quick verbal overview of what they’d found—Likely and Patricia Baker were probably killed sometime between ten and eleven o’clock by persons driving a dark pickup of unknown make, but American. They’d gotten that information from neighbors.
One of the neighbors got off work at a pizza parlor at ten o’clock. He hadn’t stopped anywhere, and so had gotten home around five or six minutes after ten. He’d seen the unfamiliar pickup, but hadn’t paid any real attention to it. Another neighbor had hurried off to a convenience store for cigarettes and was sure that no pickup had been parked at Likely’s. He’d been hurrying because the store closed at eleven and he’d barely made it in time.
“So they were here sometime before ten, but we don’t know how long before, and they were gone before eleven,” Robertson said. Robertson was sartorially distinct from his partner, wearing a blue-striped Façonnable long-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slender jeans with the cuffs rolled up a half inch, and tan lace-up shoes; Lucas envied him the shoes. “We have a call on Likely’s phone, to Baker, at nine o’clock, so he was alive then.”
“I was told somebody got a tip about the killings,” Lucas said.
“Not about the killings, exactly,” Ford said. “Baker lived with a friend named Pamela Carney. They share a house a couple of blocks from here. Baker and Likely had a sexual relationship, but Baker never stayed the night. Miz Carney is old and doesn’t get around so well, she depended on Baker for help getting in and out of the shower and so on. When Baker hadn’t gotten back by this morning and didn’t answer her cell phone, she called the Mount Pleasant cops and asked them to check over here. One of their cops came around and looked in the back door and saw Baker on the floor. That set it all off.”
“Do you know if Bell checked Likely’s cell phone for calls?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, he did, and we have a list, but there was only one after you left, and that was the nine o’clock call to Baker,” Ford said. “He apparently asked her to come over. Call only lasted for twenty-three seconds.”
“Do you know if Baker or Miz . . . Carney? . . . were involved in this Progressive People’s Party of Likely’s?”
“Don’t know yet,” Robertson said. “We do have one really weird thing, though.” He looked back to the crime-scene tech. “Katie, tell him about the chairs.”
The woman was still squatting next to Baker’s body. She looked up and said, “There were a couple of wooden chairs shoved into a corner of the living room. Like when you’re trying to temporarily pen up a pet, or a child. A toddler. I took a close look and I could see small fingerprints down the legs, about where a toddler would take hold of them. I pulled the prints, but . . . I have no idea what it means.”
“One of the neighbors the locals talked to said they’d never seen a toddler here,” Robertson said. “I don’t know what it means, either, but it’s weird.”
Ford: “It’s like a cold-blooded assassin couldn’t get last-minute child care.”
—
LUCAS ASKED PERMISSION to walk through the scene and Ford and Robertson left him to do it. He spent five minutes looking at the living room, and at Likely’s body, and the chairs in the corner, trying to imagine exactly what had happened there.
When he was satisfied, he went to look at the front and back doors, which were intact and unmarked. Returning to the living room, he got down on the floor and looked carefully at Likely’s face and his hands. He spent a few more minutes looking at Baker’s body, then followed the tape trail through the house, up into the bedrooms, down into the basement.
When he came back up the stairs, Ford asked, “What do you think?”
Lucas shrugged. “Same as you do, I guess. I think Likely knew the people who killed him and didn’t expect them to kill him. They were friends and he let them in the house—the doors are intact. He’d spent yesterday canoeing on the Iowa River and loaded a canoe up on the roof of his car, and got it back off, all by himself. So he was a tough old bird, and strong—but his hands and face are clean. No fight or defensive wounds on his hands, no fight marks on his face as far as I can see it. It looks to me like he was sitting in his chair and somebody stepped up behind him and shot him in the head and didn’t do a very good job with it, so they continued to shoot him until he went down, which is that big blotch of blood in front of his chair. That’s where his head landed.
“Then, they went into the kitchen and shot Baker. She saw it coming, they shot her right in the forehead, then shot her some more to make sure she was dead. She didn’t resist, she has no other wounds, either. Likely wasn’t dead. He pulled himself together, probably dying but not quite gone, and crawled toward the kitchen door, where they saw him and finished him off. Whoever did the shooting had never done it before, and didn’t really know what he was doing . . .”
“Brutal,” Ford said. “Why didn’t the killer run as soon as he shot him? I mean, assuming that he ransacked the place afterwards.”
“It was definitely afterwards,” Lucas said. “There are clean papers on top of blood spatter. They—I think it was more than one person—didn’t run because they needed something in the house and didn’t know where it was. He might have hidden it, hoping to keep it away from the police raid he thought was inevitable. He was paranoid—he thought he was being watched, and that the police would eventually come after him for political crimes.”
“Why more than one person?” Ford asked.
“Because it looks to me like he didn’t see the bullets coming and they are all in the back of his head, or the side toward the back. I think he was talking to somebody else when he was shot. The second person distracted him so the shooter could get close.”
“Okay,” Ford said.
“What were they looking for?” Robertson asked.
“I suspect it was a journal, or a list, or something, that identified the various members of the Progressive People’s Party,” Lucas said. “They didn’t want to be found on that list.”
“Probably not a paper list,” Ford said.
“Why not?” Lucas asked.
“Because Likely had an Internet hookup, with Wi-Fi, behind the TV. We asked Miz Carney if he had a computer and she said yes, he had a laptop, kept it in the home office, and a printer, too. Nothing there—but when we actually looked at a lot of the paper in his files, it was printed on an ink-jet prin
ter. They took all that. All the computer gear. If he was keeping a list, that’s where it probably was.”
“Okay, so . . . shit, I don’t know why they took the place apart, then,” Lucas said. “Maybe they thought there was more.”
“They didn’t take the paper files,” Robertson said.
“Maybe it was somebody looking for money and nothing else,” Ford said. “Maybe they took the computer stuff so they could sell it.”
“They may have torn the place up so we’d think they were looking for money, but these are the people gunning for Bowden,” Lucas said. He looked around the kitchen, with the woman’s body frozen in death. “This is a hell of a lot bigger than a couple of murders for pocket money.”
—
FORD WASN’T SURE of that, though Robertson agreed with Lucas. Lucas and Robertson walked two blocks down the street and around the corner to talk with Pamela Carney, a white-haired, wrinkled-face old lady they found huddled in an easy chair next to a walker and, despite the heat, wrapped in a shawl. Her sister was with her.
She was not a member of the Progressive People’s Party, nor was Baker, she said. “She and Joe were fuck-buddies,” she said.
Her sister was shocked: “Pam!”
“Well, they were,” Carney said. “They didn’t socialize, or anything, but once a week, old Joe would pop a Viagra and call her up and she’d go over and they’d jump in bed and when they were done, she’d jump right back out. That’s why I knew something was wrong when she didn’t come home last night.”
“We need to find out who’s in this political party,” Lucas said. “Any ideas?”
“I only know what Pat would tell me, and that wasn’t much. She thought Joe was a little goofy when it came to politics, but a nice man otherwise,” Carney said. “She did tell me about one old man who was sort of a joke with everybody. I don’t know his name, but he lives in Iowa City. He’s written a book that’s three thousand pages long. That’s what Joe told Pat. Joe said he’s been to every publisher in Iowa City and is always sending his manuscript out to New York or Los Angeles, but nobody wants it because it’s crazy. It’s all about how the Jews are in league with the devil. As I understand, he goes back years with the party.”