Extreme Prey: A Novel Part 29

Unless, he thought suddenly, they didn't look like the Purdys anymore. He turned and looked at the ma.s.s of humanity with new eyes. If they didn't look like the Purdys . . . Somebody had mentioned the possibility of disguises the night before, but that had seemed far-fetched; now, not so much.

- HIS PHONE RANG. He checked the screen and saw that Greer was calling.

"What's up?"

"You anywhere near the Varied Industries building?" Greer asked.

"Let me look at my map . . ." He checked, found the building on the map, turned around and looked right at it. "Yeah-in fact, I'm out front."

"Go straight through it to the back, to the Fabrics and Threads Department. I'll be waiting in the door."

"On the way," Lucas said.

The Varied Industries building was full of . . . varied industries. Hot tubs, docks, bundles of socks, microwaves and blenders, barbecue grills and canoe paddles. And it was as crowded as everyplace else. Lucas plodded through the aisles, spotted Greer talking to a uniformed cop. Greer broke away when he saw Lucas.

"We found out that Marlys Purdy has exhibited her quilts here, in other years, and thought we should check," he said. "We wondered if anyone has seen her. No luck so far . . ."

"And?"

"Wanted you to take a look," Greer said.

Lucas followed him into the Fabrics and Threads Department . . . which was full of Marlys Purdys. He could see eight or ten of them from the doorway, slightly plump white-haired women with gla.s.ses.

"Ah, Jesus." He remembered the question asked by the cop at the horseshoe courts. How do you spot one in five hundred? With all these Marlys Purdys, it could be one in a thousand, or two thousand . . .

Greer said, "Yeah."

"It's worse than you think," Lucas said. "We're looking for Marlys Purdy and Cole Purdy and I got to thinking, would they really walk in here, knowing that a lot of people might be looking for them? Really? After seeing their pictures at the gates?"

"You think . . ."

"Yeah. They might not look like the Purdys anymore. And we got no idea what they do look like."

- THE PURDYS HAD WALKED through the back gate, by the horse barn, a few minutes after Lucas left it. The truck was six blocks away, tucked among non-fair-going vehicles in a corporate parking lot. They'd come in separately and they no longer looked like the Purdys.

Marlys was wearing a pink dress she'd made herself, with a pink sailor hat with a pink breast-cancer ribbon pinned to it. She also wore a white satin sash over the dress, with the words "Race for the Cure."

She was carrying Caralee and a baby bag; as she came up to the gate, she knocked her hat off, apparently accidentally, and bent to pick it up. The guard at the gate saw a pink bald head. He didn't look a second time and she went through.

Cole was wearing his National Guard fatigues, with his OCP patrol cap. The cap was pulled down over his forehead; the hair on the sides of his head was an eighth of an inch long; white sidewalls. The ticket taker waved him through. A few steps onto the fairgrounds, a heavyset man looked at him, held up a hand, and said, "Thank you for your service."

"Sure. Thank you," Cole said.

Marlys led the way to the 4-H building, where they could find a place to sit, and where they were unlikely to run into anyone who knew them-neither of them knew anybody in 4-H. When they got there, Marlys went into the ladies' room to change Caralee's diaper, and Cole went out back to the phone junction box by the barns, lifted the cover, and took out the 9mm he'd left there the night before. It was in a belt-clip holster, and he pushed it under his waistband and walked back to the 4-H center to wait.

"Forty-five minutes," he said to Marlys, when he got back.

She nodded, but said nothing. Caralee was on her lap, working on her sippy cup full of apple juice. Marlys stared out over the room for a long time, then said to Cole, "This is a great and bold thing. This is one of the greatest, boldest things anybody's ever done."

Caralee said, "More apple juice."

- GREER LISTENED on his phone for a moment, then said to Lucas, "Bowden's here."

"Let's go walk the street," Lucas said.

The street was more jammed than ever, lots of cardinal-and-gold colors for the Iowa State Cyclones and black-and-gold for the Iowa Hawkeyes, lots of big guys and blond women. They threaded through, fifteen feet apart, eyes. .h.i.tting the faces of the people around them. They were moving slow, and the walk took twenty minutes-and Lucas was eye-checked by a dozen cops along the way.

More than ever, he was convinced that the Purdys no longer looked like the Purdys-and he found himself looking hard at every face, and people flinched away from him.

At the far end of the street Greer led the way to the handicapped parking area, where the three campaign buses had been sequestered. Campaign people were all over the lot, and more were coming in from outside, most of them carrying food. Greer and Lucas checked through the cops, and Lucas spotted Bell Wood talking with a couple of athletic-looking women, whom he a.s.sumed were undercover cops.

They went that way, and Wood said, "Hey, guys," and introduced them to the two women, both DCI agents. Lucas told Wood about his worries: that the Purdys would not look like Purdys.

"Yeah, that idea popped into my head about an hour ago," Wood said. "We've had the patrol checking trucks, and Marlys Purdy's truck isn't in any of the parking lots-"

"And they're checking for Cole's truck, right?" Lucas asked.

Wood said, "Ah. Forgot to tell you. We've had the sheriff out there checking on the Purdys' place. They must've taken it seriously, because they found Cole's truck parked in the cornfield-I mean, in the corn. They hid it before they left."

Lucas took off his ball cap and wiped his forehead. "Jesus, it's hot."

- LUCAS LEFT WOOD and went to Henderson's bus, where the top people were sitting in maximum air-conditioning. One of Henderson's security guys let him through, and Lucas climbed on the bus and took an empty seat in a cl.u.s.ter of people that included Henderson, Mitford, Alice Green, and a couple of other aides. Henderson asked, "No luck so far?"

"Not so far," Lucas said. He looked at his watch again. Fifteen minutes to ten. "There's no sign of their truck. If they don't have an inside source, they'll think the walk starts at ten o'clock, so that's when every cop and his brother will be going through the crowd, looking for them. It's a zoo out there."

"You could be wrong-they might not be here at all," Henderson said.

"I believe they are," Lucas said. "It's possible that they have no idea of what's waiting for them. How much security there is. When the Iowa guys said there'd be a cop every six feet, they weren't kidding." He scratched his forehead, then added, "Then again, we've got to remember that the Purdys come to the fair almost every year, so they know this place like the backs of their hands. They've probably even seen the candidate walk before."

"Bottom line, we have no f.u.c.kin' idea of what's going to happen," Mitford said.

"I'm going back out there," Lucas said.

- HE LEFT THE BUS and started toward the line of cops at the access, when he heard a man calling his name: "Lucas! Lucas!"

He turned and saw Norm Clay, Bowden's weasel, hurrying toward him. When he came up, Clay asked, "What do you think?"

"I don't think Mrs. Bowden should walk," Lucas said.

"I told her that one minute ago, but she's going to do it," he said. "She's got her guts up, and she's going ahead."

"Huge crowd out there," Lucas said, looking down toward the street. "Lotsa cops . . . man, I don't know."

"Come on over to the bus and talk a minute," Clay said.

Lucas followed him to the Bowden bus and climbed aboard. The end of the bus had been part.i.tioned off, and Clay knocked once on a cardboard door, stuck his head in when a woman called, "Come," and said, "I got Davenport."

Clay waved a finger at Lucas and led the way through the door. Bowden was sitting on a stool, being worked on by a makeup artist. She said to Lucas, "If you tell anyone about a makeup artist, and I'm elected president, I'll have the CIA kill you."

Lucas didn't smile. He blurted: "Ma'am, don't do it. There's a mob out there."

"And a million cops. Half the mob is cops."

"The Purdys aren't totally stupid. I have to think that they're up to something," Lucas said.

"Well. You've got a half hour," Bowden said. "I have to say, I only think it's fifty-fifty that they're out there. If they are, it's about ninety percent that the police get them before they have a chance to get close. If they get close, it's about ninety percent that the police get them before they get to me. So what's that? A tiny chance that they get me? I'll take that. I take that every day."

- CARALEE WAS BEING a pain in the a.s.s. She'd been held, and penned up in the truck, for much of the past eighteen hours, and hadn't been in her bed for more than twenty-four. She'd gotten whiny, and then overactive, and every time she was put down, she'd wait until Cole and Marlys were not paying attention, and then she'd take off and they'd have to chase her down.

Cole caught her after the break for freedom and carried her back to Marlys, who was packing up the baby bag.

"Five minutes to ten," he said. "We have to go."

Marlys didn't look at him, her marble-blue eyes now locked into the thousand-yard stare. "The biggest thing in the world," she said. "The biggest, boldest thing in the world."

TWENTY-NINE.

Lucas walked out to the street thinking, Okay, what would they do?

As he looked to the east down the Concourse, the grandstand for musical shows and the racetrack was on his left, on the north side of the street. A Kennedy-style a.s.sa.s.sination would put a sharpshooter up on the grandstand with a rifle. From there, anyone on the street would be a sitting duck.

But the grandstand, he'd been told, was crawling with cops, both in uniform and plainclothes. Not only that, Wood had told him that all the grandstand cops were highway patrolmen who actually knew each other. There'd be no fake cops up there, and there'd be n.o.body up there but cops.

In addition to the grandstand, there were several other buildings on the left side of the street. All of that meant that most people standing on the left side would have their backs to a wall. They might be able to attack Bowden from there, but there'd be no escape. And for practical purposes, the crowd there would be thinner, and the Purdys would be easier to spot, even in disguise.

On the right, south side of the street, there was one large structure, the Varied Industries building, and several smaller ones, but there was much more room for a crowd. In addition, most of the fairgrounds were on that side of the street, and anyone running away would have lots of s.p.a.ce to run.

If the Purdys were there, Lucas thought, they'd be on the right side of the street. Unless, of course, they weren't . . . if they had a plan n.o.body had thought of.

A bomb? Were they that crazy, crazy enough to set off a bomb in a crowd this dense? Wood had said that bomb-sniffing dogs would be working the crowd, but what if Cole Purdy had a hand grenade, smuggled back from Iraq? He would stand way back in the crowd, never even get close to the sidewalk, lob it like a baseball.

Lucas got on the phone to Wood: "Bell? Listen, Cole Purdy was in Iraq. What if he brought back a hand grenade?"

"I don't know what we'd do," Wood said. "See him first, is the only thing I can think of. We gotta see him first."

"If that was the play, then we should be looking for a tall thin guy who hangs back from the crowd, but rushes forward as Mrs. Bowden's about to pa.s.s," Lucas said. "He'd need some room to throw it."

"The Army says the lethal radius for a grenade is about five meters, which is . . . sixteen feet or so," Wood said. "Wounding radius is fifteen meters, which is about fifty feet. Mrs. Bowden will be surrounded by a lot of people . . . I don't know. Sounds unlikely. I'll tell you what, I'll call Jesse and ask if there's been any hint of a grenade."

"Call me back."

- THE CROWD WAS GETTING thick on the sidewalks, but cops held them on the curbs. Lucas got off the street and moved back into the crowd. The going was slow but he stayed with it, checking every face. More people were flowing into the walking route behind him, though, so he was already missing many of them.

He saw Greer, going by in the green-and-yellow Gator, another man standing in the back, braced against the motion of the vehicle, scanning the crowd. Greer spotted Lucas and shook his head.

They moved on, in opposite directions. The sidewalk was now so crowded that Lucas had to physically squeeze past people, some of whom didn't want to lose their places.

One large man said, "Hey, take it easy, bud." Lucas looked him in the eyes and the guy asked, "Cop?"

He wasn't Cole Purdy and Lucas nodded and went on.

- TOOK A PHONE CALL from Bell Wood: "Jesse says there's never been a hint of a hand grenade and it's been years since Cole got back. He thinks he would have known if there was one. I think he's telling the truth."

"Breathing a little easier," Lucas said.

He moved on, got to the Varied Industries building door, went inside, walked the aisles for five minutes. The aisles were nearly as crowded as the sidewalks outside, people poking at racks of sale clothing and piles of Tupperware, checking out billiard and shuffleboard tables, considering offers to take thirty percent off the price of a new roof, demonstrations of every kind of hot tub known to Iowans, displays for several colleges and universities, with loan offers to help you go to them . . .

Lucas took another phone call from Wood. "The Des Moines cops found Marlys Purdy's truck. It's in a parking lot six or eight blocks from here, n.o.body around. They had a judge on call, for a search warrant. They popped the door and found the .357 under the front seat."

"They're here, then," Lucas said.

"Yeah. I don't know what the gun means, though," Wood said. "Why wouldn't they take it with them?"

"It means that we don't know what's going on, Bell."

"Gonna be G.o.dd.a.m.ned embarra.s.sing if they are planning to throw a cream pie at Bowden," Wood said. "After all this."

"Yeah, especially if a cop shoots them to death for doing it," Lucas said.

- AS LUCAS SPOKE to Wood, Marlys was using the burner phone to talk to Cole. "Davenport's here. Here in the building. I saw him walking down the aisles."

"We knew he probably would be," Cole said. "You've got to stay out of sight."

"There's no way to stay out of sight," she said. "What I need is to stay out of his sight. I've got the baby up by my face, so he can't see much of my face. He's tall, I can see the top of his head, I'm trailing him through the building. Anyway, he's here."

"If you can stay with him, keep calling me. I need to know where he is," Cole said. "I need to know if he leaves the building, and if he does, which way he goes."

"I'll call," she said. "Do you see the candidates?"

"Nothing yet. They might have lied about when they were going to march," Cole said.

"All right. Let me know when you see them, I'll let you know which way Davenport goes," she said.

Marlys was weighed down by Caralee and the baby bag, but followed Lucas until he went out the door, and then turned right. She called Cole back and said, "He's headed east on the Concourse, following the sidewalk."

"Okay. I'm still down with the machinery."

When Marlys got off the phone, she realized that Caralee needed another diaper change. Too much apple juice. She carried her to the women's restroom, changed the diaper. Women were walking in and out, including a woman Marlys recognized from the quilt shows, but the woman looked right through her, blank-faced: the cancer disguise was working.

Still, best that she get totally out of sight, if she could. Not much longer. The handicapped toilet booth was empty, down the way . . .