Extreme Prey: A Novel Part 3

"Would that be 'Why does the governor have his hand on that girl's a.s.s?'" Mitford asked.

Lucas and Green turned to look.

Sure enough.

"He's completely unaware of it and she loves it," Mitford marveled. "If I did that, I'd be imprisoned for aggravated lubricity."

The governor took his hand off the girl's a.s.s and continued talking to her enthusiastically about something they couldn't hear. "He really doesn't know," Green said.

"He can't do that-we've got to get him trained," Mitford said. "Maybe we could get one of those electric dog collars and every time he does it, we spark him up. 'Cause that's not gonna work once the voting starts. Once the TV gets heavy, and they start looking for it."

They watched for a moment as the governor kept working the remaining crowd, then Green turned back to Lucas and said, "That wasn't my question. My question is, since you aren't a cop anymore, where are you going to start on this? You've got no resources. You got nothin'."

THREE.

Kidd was standing on a golf driving range in St. Paul, a five-iron on his shoulder, looking down the range to where his ball was happily slicing hard to the right.

"Holy cats, that's the biggest slice I've ever seen," said his wife, Lauren, the possibly retired jewel thief. She was giving him a lesson.

"Can't really be the biggest one," Kidd ventured.

But it was big.

"Yes, it is. Because you're so strong and you've got those fast hands, and because you're leading with your right elbow. You can't do that, lead with the elbow, the ball rolls right off the face of your club . . ." Lauren was a scratch golfer and had won the club's women's championship the last three years running.

Kidd's phone rang. He stepped back from the pile of practice b.a.l.l.s, pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket and looked at it. "It's Lucas," he said to Lauren. He poked Answer. "Yeah?"

Lucas was sitting on a bench next to the pond in Ames, facing what might have been a mid-lake sculpture. He was uncertain about that. "I'm working for Governor Henderson down in Iowa," he said. "He's gotten some questionable e-mails that I'd like you to look at. I need to know where they come from, who sent them, everything you can tell me about them."

"Do I get paid?" Kidd asked. A golf shop guy had driven up in a cart and was walking toward them.

"Of course not. Nor will you ever get any credit for helping out," Lucas said.

"All right, send them to me," Kidd said. "Put a note on them that tells me what it's all about. I'll take a look and call you back tonight."

Lucas rang off and the golf shop guy said, "Uh, Mr. Kidd, some of the members have asked me to talk to you about our dress code. You're not allowed to wear jeans and you need to wear a shirt with a collar."

"Are you kiddin' me?" Kidd asked. He looked down at his T-shirt and jeans; the T-shirt had only the smallest of tears and the jeans, only a few flecks of dried paint. He handed the five-iron to Lauren. "That's it. I'm outa here. f.u.c.k a bunch of golf. And country clubs."

Lauren said to the golf shop guy, as Kidd stalked away, "Thanks a lot, d.i.c.k. It only took me four years to get him out here."

"Uh, my name's Ralph."

"Yes, I know," Lauren said, as she went after Kidd.

- THE E-MAIL FROM DAVENPORT was waiting when Kidd and Lauren got back to their condo. Their son was still at band camp, so Kidd pulled up the e-mails and the note: Kidd: These are copies of e-mails sent to the governor's campaign site. Elmer thinks there are some pretty serious implications in the letters-not threats, exactly, but a suggestion that he should move to the center in case "something happens" to Bowden, so he'd have a better chance at election. He's also had two different people (who may be related) approach him at election rallies, and tell him more or less the same thing, in the same words. Elmer's informed Bowden's people of all this, but they apparently haven't done much. He's worried and asked me to look into it. Can you dig anything out of these things?

-Lucas.

The forwarded e-mails were tight and well-edited, and while the sentences made sense, the overall content was confusing. Most of the complaints embedded in the e-mails seemed to refer to the Midwestern farming crisis of the mid-1980s, now thirty years in the past. That crisis was tangled up with the Internet market bust of 19992000, and the 2008 housing crisis. "Inequality" was often cited, the cost of medical insurance, the lack of prosecution of bankers implicated in the economic crises, the loss of American values, along with rising rates of murder and rape and the Jewish influence on American culture, through the Jews' "control" of the banks and the media.

Lauren read the e-mails over Kidd's shoulder and when they'd both finished, he asked, "What do you think?"

"I can see why Henderson's worried," she said. "These people are nuts. That whole 'Jew banker' thing, the 'Jew media.' I mean, who uses 'Jew' that way, as an adjective, instead of 'Jewish'? Whoever wrote that has been listening to some far-out s.h.i.t."

"Yeah," Kidd said. "The question is, is it right-wing or left-wing? They don't like corporations, banks, the Fed, or the one-percent, but they also don't like government regulation, Jews, immigrants, abortion, or gay marriage."

"That's why I said the writer's nuts. It's a mash-up of all the various hates," Lauren said. "You gonna be able to figure out anything?"

"I'll have to go deep. I can probably tell him where the e-mails were sent from and if they were all sent from the same machine," Kidd said. "If I can get into that Google text-matching program, I might be able to tell him who wrote them."

"I've heard you say that Google's got really good protection," Lauren said.

"They do, for some value of 'good.' A teeny hack won't get in there, but I can," Kidd said. "Probably."

- KIDD HAD BEEN HACKING computers forever. He had access to so many systems that a few knowledgeable people thought he might actually control the world, and the NSA had been trying to find him for fifteen years. Lucas didn't know that. Lucas did know, or at least believe, that Lauren was a professional jewel thief, though he hadn't the slightest shred of evidence to prove it.

Kidd and Davenport had been jocks at the University of Minnesota at the same time. Kidd had been a wrestler who became locally famous-and lost his scholarship at the same time-when he pushed the head of an abusive wrestling coach through two iron uprights in a field house railing. The fire department had to be called to free the man. Although he lost his athletic scholarship, he was almost instantly offered a full ride by the computer sciences department, which he took.

And never looked back.

"Are you going to get us in trouble?" Lauren asked.

"No," he said.

"Really no? For some value of 'no'?"

"If those schnooks at Google catch me, I deserve everything I get."

- SISTER MARY JOSEPH, whose civilian name was Elle Kruger, was in her office at St. Mary's University when Lucas's e-mail arrived. A friend of Lucas's since early childhood, she had a PhD in psychology and had consulted on a number of Lucas's criminal cases.

She read through the e-mails sent by Lucas, sighed and kicked back in her chair. The anger that was coursing through America deeply worried her. Although she was too young to remember the beginnings of the civil rights, antiVietnam War, and feminist movements, she was also a student of history. Her sense was that as bad as things had been in the sixties, people of goodwill still dominated.

The civil rights and feminist movements had been about gender equality and freedom; and the anti-war movement about the blind stupidity among certain parts of the political cla.s.s that wound up killing sixty thousand Americans, mostly young draftees, and wounding another hundred and fifty thousand, to say nothing of a million or more Vietnamese. The leaders of all those protest movements had been optimists, trying to pull people together.

Now the echoes of those movements seemed mostly about hate-about hating your opponents, on either side of any of the questions.

The forwarded e-mails she'd gotten from Lucas were a reflection of that.

Hating was one thing, action was something else. There were any number of gun lovers who never in their lives would pull the trigger on another human being, and maybe not even an animal; they were simply living in a fantasy world that was captured by the physical reality of a gun, the implicit power of a bullet.

The e-mails from whoever had sent them to Henderson, though, contained a disquieting thread. The bitterness was too thick and unleavened, the anger too sharp and unrelenting.

She picked up her phone and called Lucas, who was sitting in his motel room, eating a Jimmy John's sub and had signed on to his bank's investment site to see how much shirt he had left.

Quite a lot, as it happened.

- LUCAS'S PHONE RANG. He glanced at the screen, clicked Answer, and asked, "Get a chance to read them yet?"

"Yes. You know how in the past we've talked about 'trigger' moments?" Elle asked. "About how a deranged person will progress through a series of stages and finally arrive at the trigger moment?"

"Yeah. Sometimes they don't pull the trigger and the whole issue goes away and maybe n.o.body ever knows about it. Sometimes they do pull the trigger."

"Reading the letters, it seems apparent to me that the writer has gone through a series of these stages and is close to the trigger moment," Elle said. "Whether or not she pulls the trigger is another question. I believe she's capable of it."

"She?"

"Almost certainly. I can't give you chapter and verse, but I sense that the writer is a woman."

Lucas said, "The governor told me that one of the people who approached him is a middle-aged woman, that the other was male, and younger, and that there was a physical similarity between them, like a mother and son."

"Family members-that works for me," Elle said. "Family members can devolve into something like a cult, with a cult leader and obedient followers. This is usually driven by severe disappointments and failures that are often not the fault of the victims."

"Give me an example," Lucas said.

"Well, using a woman as the leader, as the case here might be . . . suppose you have a divorced mother whose children are badly injured in a school bus accident," Elle said. "She is abruptly thrust into the role of a full-time caregiver, which might badly affect her ability to earn a decent living. The children are thrust into roles of helpless dependents, who would be a burden on anyone . . . I'm talking about friends who might be expected to help, but the problem is so deep and intractable that people turn away from them. The whole family is driven closer and closer by their misfortune. You wind up with an embittered mother with her hopelessly devoted and psychologically and physically dependent children."

"That's what you get when the mother kills the kids," Lucas suggested.

"Yes, that can happen when the anger is turned inward," Elle said. "It can also turn outward. The form it takes depends on the intellect and emotional status of the leader. It can be quite diffuse, as in this case, where the leader wants to change the whole way the world works. It can also be quite specific-the leader gets a gun and kills the person who caused the accident, or the insurance agent who wouldn't pay her what she thought she deserved. Or even the doctor who treated the kids who never entirely recovered."

"What do I look for? 'Embittered mother' won't help much."

"I probably can't give you any more, other than to tell you to take these things very seriously. She's out there and she's angry and she seems ready to act. She's smart, but not brilliant-she's accepted a specific but limited ideology as the source of answers to her problem," Elle said. "She's smart enough to hold these ideals, but not smart enough to see through them. She could be a teacher of some kind, but probably not a lawyer or a minister or a cop or a reporter. She's not cynical and she's not really a skeptic, either. She doesn't have a lot of experience with nuances, or with situations in which there are no good answers. She believes in good and evil, and good actions and evil actions, with a sharp dividing line between them. If she were to do something to Bowden . . . I really hate to even consider that idea . . . she'd think it was a positive good. Not evil in any way. She no longer thinks of Bowden as a human being-she sees her as a mannequin being manipulated by sinister corporate and governmental powers."

"She's crazy."

Elle smiled at the phone. Lucas tended to cut through a lot of theory. "That would be my professional a.s.sessment. Yes."

- KIDD CALLED BACK late that night.

Lucas had gone to bed, after his evening chat with Weather, when the phone rang again and he groped for it in the dark.

"Sorry it took so long, but I had to do some sneaking around to get the software tools I needed," Kidd said.

"You find out anything?" Lucas asked.

"Couple things. The messages were all sent from coffee shops, all during the early evening, from Des Moines, Oskaloosa, and Ottumwa," Kidd said. "If you look at a map of Iowa, you'll see that's almost a cl.u.s.ter with Oskaloosa in the center-"

"Wait, wait, let me call this up on the iPad." Kidd waited while Lucas got a map up, and located the three cities. "They're almost in a line. A diagonal line down a highway."

"Yeah. The distance from Des Moines, on the northwest, to Ottumwa, on the southeast, is seventy-five miles in a straight line, with Oskaloosa roughly in the middle. The guy-"

"Probably a woman," Lucas interrupted.

"Okay. I'd be interested to know why you think that," Kidd said. "Anyway, she seems to have this basic Internet security idea that she shouldn't send the e-mail from any one place. She's not just running out to the local Wi-Fi hub and sending it. That suggests to me that none of those places are her home, but that her home is nearby."

"Another possibility," Lucas said, "is that she doesn't have an Internet connection at home and she sent the messages from wherever it was convenient. Wherever she was pa.s.sing through."

"That's another possibility, though she does own a laptop and uses it consistently, which would suggest an Internet connection."

"Okay. Go ahead."

"I can tell you that she composes the e-mail carefully, on an Apple brand laptop using an older version of Word for Mac. When she's finished, she copies out the message and pastes it into her e-mail program. I can't get a positive identifier on a specific machine."

"Still, Apple laptop and Word, that's all a help," Lucas said.

"There's more," said Kidd.

"All right."

"Here we may be slipping into something that stick-in-the-mud prosecutors might characterize as illegal . . ."

"I'm not a stick-in-the-mud prosecutor. I'm not even a cop."

"Okay. Google is developing a text identification program that will allow them to look at messages streaming through Google mail and other places, and match texts with a high degree of accuracy," Kidd said. "Ultimately, they hope that if John Doe is a gun nut and a chess player and a boat owner, they'll be able to pick out every time he sends a message to any website, from any computer, anywhere, anytime, and quickly paste in advertis.e.m.e.nts for guns, chess sets, and boats."

"Gotta love that," Lucas said. "It's the American way."

"Yeah, well, I . . . borrowed their program for a while this evening and ran it against the e-mails you sent me. I didn't come up with a name, but I did come up with a group of organizations this woman may belong to. They're scattered all over the Midwest and the plains states-farm country-and use her ideological language," Kidd said. "Three of them are in Iowa and it seems likely that they overlap. There's the Progressive People's Party of Iowa, the Isaac Alfred Patriot League, and a group called Prairie Storm. I couldn't find a membership list for any of them, but I've got contacts for all three. They're small organizations, they hit their peak back in the eighties and early nineties."

"Who's Isaac Alfred?"

"He was a kid from Mason City who applied for a religious exemption from the Vietnam War, but was denied the exemption by the draft board. He was drafted and sent to Vietnam as a company clerk, where he was in constant trouble for talking up war resistance. Shortly before the Army was going to arrest him and ship him home, he was killed in a rocket attack on his base. The group was started by his father. That was basically an anti-war group that evolved into a more general populist political-action organization, then got weird and sort of petered out."

"Kidd, I owe you," Lucas said. "If you could put the names and contacts in an e-mail and ship it to me, I'd owe you more."

"I'll collect someday," Kidd said.

"I suspect you will," Lucas said. "Call me if you think of anything new."

Just before he went to sleep, Lucas thought of Alice Green, when she'd said, "You got nothin'."