Extreme Prey: A Novel Part 25

- THE COP DIDN'T HAVE the authority to release Jesse on his own, and when he tried to call the chief, the chief's wife said he was out running and didn't have a phone. He'd be back in fifteen minutes, if he didn't have a heart attack.

"I'd like to move before it gets dark," Lucas said to Wood. And to the cop, "If you can't release him on his own, could I bail him out?"

The cop brightened and said, "Yeah, I can do that. Five hundred dollars."

"Take a check?" Lucas asked.

- FIVE MINUTES LATER they were on the street, and one minute after that, on the way to the Purdy farm, Jesse and Wood riding in Jesse's truck, Lucas following, Greer trailing. They turned off again at the Souther place, and when Souther came out, shadowed by his wife, Wood told them, "We need to leave Lucas's truck for a few minutes."

Souther nodded, and said to Jesse, "Hey, Jesse. Hope this is nothing."

"Yeah, man."

They armored up: SWAT-quality neck-high vests with crotch guards, .223 rifles for all three of the cops.

Jesse: "I don't think you need-"

Wood: "Jesse, you might be an all-right guy, but somebody sniped and almost killed one of my agents last night and tried to shoot Lucas here. We can't take the chance."

Jesse went pale under his farmer tan. "Oh, Jesus . . ."

- JESSE LED THE WAY to the farm in his truck, Wood riding with him, Lucas and Greer in the state car. Lucas's truck was left behind, because Marlys Purdy had seen it.

The trip down to the house took only a minute. There was a light on in the kitchen area, but Jesse told Wood that the light was always on. "I don't think they're back yet. It's getting dark and Mom always turns the lights on early."

They pulled up to the side of the house, and Jesse got out first, followed by Wood, who left his rifle in the truck and carried a Glock in his hand, while Lucas and Greer carried the long guns, ready to go. Jesse tried the door, found it locked-"If they were here, it wouldn't be."

He unlocked the door and they followed him in, Jesse calling, "Ma? Cole? You here?"

No answer, and the silence had the kind of thick texture that meant that n.o.body was around. Lucas relaxed an inch and clicked the safety on the rifle, and then Jesse said, "Come on up here. I wanna check something."

He led the way up a narrow stairway to the second floor, and down a short hallway past a bathroom, and pushed a bedroom door open, and looked in. n.o.body home. The room was furnished with a bed, a side table, a chest of drawers, and a gun safe. The safe was locked, but Jesse picked up one leg of the side table and sc.r.a.ped out a bra.s.s-colored key, and unlocked the safe.

Inside were a Bushmaster .223 with a thirty-round mag, a Ruger .22, a modern muzzle-loading rifle that looked like it could shoot a brick, and three shotguns. They could see a stack of ammo boxes on the interior shelves, and the b.u.t.ts of two pistols, both automatic, and one empty pistol slot.

"All his rifles and shotguns are here, I think," Jesse said, with obvious relief. He touched the empty slot. "This is an old revolver that he keeps in his truck. He's got a carry permit, but he doesn't carry it much, says it's a pain in the a.s.s."

"What kind of revolver?" Wood asked. "Make and caliber?"

"It's a Smith, a .357. But really old."

"That's not good," Lucas said, thinking of that moment when Grace Lawrence brought the revolver up, and shot him. A .357 would have scrambled his guts, vest or no vest.

Wood said, "Jerry was shot with a .223-they recovered a core. I've got to get a bag out of the car and wrap that rifle, take it with me."

Greer bent toward the safe, then squatted, looking at the trigger guard on the .223. "There's dust on the action and the trigger-I don't think it's been shot in the last couple of days."

"Got to take it anyway," Wood said.

- JESSE LED THEM to his own room. He had guns himself, he said, and they should check them: but they were all there, in his bedroom closet, another muzzle-loading rifle and two shotguns.

"Don't have any regular bolt-action deer rifles?" Lucas asked. That was what he most feared: a high-velocity hunting rifle, a .243 or larger.

"Not legal in Iowa," Jesse said. "I mean, they're legal to have, but you can't shoot deer with them. Gotta use a muzzle-loader or a slug gun."

"And Cole doesn't have one, for target practice or shooting around or out-of-state hunting trips?"

"Nope. Anything you can do with a big-caliber rifle, you can do with a muzzle-loader," Jesse said.

Except long-distance sniping, Lucas thought.

- JESSE OPENED UP the Purdys' home computer for them. "She doesn't have a laptop?" Lucas asked.

"She does, but she carries it around with her," Jesse said. "This thing's mostly for me and Cole, messing around on the Internet."

"Is the laptop an Apple or PC?" Lucas asked.

"Apple. MacBook," Jesse said.

Lucas glanced at Wood, and gave him a small nod. That fit.

- LUCAS WANTED TO TAKE a look at the barn. They all stripped off their combat gear and stowed it in the trunk of the car, and while Wood got a big evidence bag out of the trunk and went to wrap up the Bushmaster .223, Lucas and Greer got flashlights and walked back to the barn. Jesse turned on the barn lights from inside the house.

Jesse told them that they hadn't raised animals and the barn was mostly for machinery, with a workshop for repair work. Inside they found an older compact John Deere utility tractor, along with an older Deere Gator with a towable cart, and a heavy-duty lawn mower, all in the signature dark corn-green-and-yellow John Deere colors. All of it was bathed in the scent of gasoline and oil.

There was a loft, and they climbed the stairs up to it and found a metal- and woodworking shop. The floor was speckled with sawdust and metal grindings, and marked with a fresh overspray of green and yellow paint. "Looks like they've been refinis.h.i.+ng one of the Deeres," Greer said, scuffing up the overspray with the toe of a boot.

"Yeah." A band saw and table saw stood on one side of a long workbench, and a drill press on the other side. A router lay on a side bench, next to a welder, and a handful of half-inch-thread hex nuts. Lucas picked up two of them and rattled them like dice.

A pegboard wall held drills, hammers, pliers, and wrenches, along with a number of tools that Lucas couldn't identify. "Pretty good shop," Lucas said.

"Like a lot of farm shops. Smells good," Greer said.

"Yeah, it does." There was good light over the workbench area, but the corners were dimmer; they shone their flashlights around, probing the edges of the barn.

"See anything interesting?" Greer asked.

"Nothing." Lucas started pulling open drawers in the workbench and found a bunch of paper targets, used; the holes had been punched with a .22. Depending on how they'd been hung, the holes could have been made by a little .22 or a much more powerful .223, the standard American a.s.sault-rifle caliber. Cole Purdy had both in his gun safe. The shooting distances weren't marked on the targets, but whoever was shooting had kept the groups the size of a silver dollar. The groups were consistently tight, which meant that the shooter was good, but the gun might not have been; again, depending on distance.

Lucas said that, and Greer said, "But they're old targets. The paper is ready to fall apart."

Lucas nodded. "Let's go."

- THEY WENT BACK DOWN the stairs and out of the barn, where they found Jesse and Wood in the side yard, talking under the sodium-vapor yard light. Wood said, "Not much in that computer. Cole and Jesse don't use it much and there was hardly anything in e-mail or doc.u.ments. Nothing interesting. I did get some pictures of Marlys and Cole, taken in May or June. I sent them on to my office, we can print them there. I'll get copies out to every cop and security guard at the fair."

"Good." Lucas turned to Jesse. "Do you guys go to the state fair?"

"Sure, most years."

"Then your mom and Cole would be familiar with the fairgrounds."

"Sure. We compete in some of the vegetable compet.i.tions-you know, best onions, and like that," Jesse said. "We weren't planning to go this year. We've all been pretty busy."

"Think they might have gone anyway?" Greer asked.

"Why go in the middle of the night?" Jesse asked.

Lucas shrugged. "I don't know." He still had the hex nuts he'd picked up in the barn, and rattled them nervously in his fist. "But that missing .357 makes me nervous."

"I'll tell you something about that gun," Jesse said. "Cole bought it at an estate sale, some old farmer over by New Sharon. Paid fifteen dollars. It'd been in a drawer for about fifty years, I think. Sh.e.l.ls were corroded up inside the cylinder, I was worried Cole was gonna kill himself, prying 'em out of there. But he got them out and polished everything up and oiled it and all. When it was all done, it looked like it was perfect-but you couldn't put five shots in a dinner plate at ten feet. I saw him try to do it and he couldn't. That gun shoots about the way Willie f.u.c.ks. All over the place, and not very good."

"Who's Willie again?" Lucas asked.

"My wife."

- THEY TALKED for a while longer and Jesse told them that he thought that Marlys and Cole, if they were doing anything connected to Michaela Bowden, it was probably leafleting or trying to organize a protest by the PPPI, whom he called "a bunch of old farts."

They were heading toward Greer's car when a battered Toyota pulled into the driveway behind it.

"Ah, s.h.i.+t," Jesse said. "It's Willie."

A chunky young blond woman got out of the car and half-shouted at Jesse, "I ain't talking to you."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n good thing after you screwed me over last night," he half-shouted back. "What the f.u.c.k you want, anyway?"

"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 a.s.sholes?"

"These a.s.sholes are cops," Jesse said. "They're investigating that you filed false charges against me yesterday and they're gonna put your whorin' a.s.s 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 d.i.c.k 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 f.u.c.ker," 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. "Cla.s.sy."

"I lose my s.h.i.+t 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.

"Sonofab.i.t.c.h," 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 a.s.s."

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."