“Let’s get this over with,” Clyde said. “Where is he?”
Tick jerked his head back toward the house. Clyde gave the dog one last warning glare and then climbed up onto the screened-in porch.
Buck Chandler was fast asleep on the living-room recliner, illuminated by the light from the tube, which was showing a baseball game on the West Coast.
Buck had been an intermittently brilliant quarterback in high school and had been demoted to tight end when he’d matriculated at EIU and joined the Twisters, which was a much easier team to join back in his era. He and Tick Henry had scored quite a few touchdowns between them; in 1961 the Twisters had actually beaten both Iowa and Iowa State in the same year, which had not happened since and would probably never happen again.
After graduation he had done a stint in the military, then came home and knocked around town for a while, selling cars and insurance, and eventually became the Voice of the Twisters, announcing all the football and basketball games on the local 250-watt AM station. As a youth Clyde had listened to these broadcasts every Saturday afternoon while raking leaves or shoveling snow. But a few years ago the rights to broadcast the Twisters games had been bought up by a big media company out of Aurora, Illinois, and Buck Chandler had lost his job and his identity. He and Grace had eventually got into the real-estate thing. Grace had passed the realtor’s exam immediately. Buck had taken six runs at it. When Clyde had gotten around to buying some real estate, he had sought out the Chandlers to act as brokers, not because they were the best company but because he felt sorry for Buck.
And now Grace was off in Seattle making a new life, and Buck was passed out in a recliner in Tick Henry’s living room, reeking of whiskey.
Clyde unfolded the divorce papers and put them on Buck’s chest.
“Hope you’re proud of yourself,” Tick Henry said.
Clyde walked back to his unit, backed out into the highway, and departed. He had not even made it to the next section-line road before the dispatcher had called him up to inform him that Tick Henry had called the sheriff’s department to complain that a deputy had threatened to shoot his dog.
“Threatened nothing. I promised to,” Clyde said.
“Did you serve the papers?” the dispatcher said. She was a shirttail relative of Mullowney’s, implacably hostile.
“I did,” Clyde said. The dispatcher did not respond. Various deputies had been trying to serve those papers on Buck Chandler for six weeks. Clyde Banks, the Summonater, had, for the umpteenth time, come through where others had failed.
twenty-four
AUGUST
AUGUST 1 was not a good day for James Gabor Millikan. Saddam Hussein was marching into Kuwait. Millikan was being clobbered. All of the geopolitical brilliance he had expended in the service of his country was for naught. First he had been tripped up internally by a GS-11 who should have been shot for disrupting the elegance of his carefully laid out policy scenario, and then externally by the imbecilic actions of Saddam Hussein, who had not played the role he should have played.
Millikan carried a heavy burden, that of omniscience—and he carried it gracefully, most of the time. He always had known what was best. He always had known that God had intended for him to be the mind behind the throne, the man who would actually have the ideas, who would save the country but who would selflessly not claim credit. It was a tough role, but one he savored. Now his classic geopolitical formula to bring peace to the Middle East, to block the Iranians, to foil what was left of the Soviets—all of this was unraveling. And worst of all, as he set up the President’s schedule for his vacation in Kennebunkport, he had to include the bottom-fish analyst who had done so much to upset his plans and his timing. As he sat at his keyboard looking out of his office in the Old Executive Office Building toward the White House, he was bitter.
Millikan was not a Saddam Hussein enthusiast. It could be truly said that except for some colleagues at St. Antony’s and Harvard, he was an enthusiast for no human being except himself. Millikan wanted to achieve in foreign relations the elegant perfection that mathematicians achieved in calculating the digits of pi. He did not deal in terms of individual human beings; he did not, in the long term, believe that human beings, or what they thought, had anything more to do with the carrying out of state policy than had the ants and their little universes in affecting individual human life. He saw a large and imposing calculus dominating the affairs of state, and he saw himself as the Newton to apply that calculus to manipulate international affairs.
As he laid out the national-security arrangements for the President’s vacation, he knew that his Middle-Eastern scenario had failed. The question now was how to change policies in midstream without getting wet, how to find someone to blame for the debacle. But he had to remind himself that it was not his debacle: it was the failure of a man for whom he had contempt, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his total inability to move. Bush had scuttled the chance to take advantage of the Gorbachev opening, and Millikan felt deeply each and every one of the knives deftly shoved into his back by George Shultz’s people.
While he was staging the normal-seeming vacation of the President at the Maine compound, he had tasked his assistant, Richard Dellinger, to go back through his collected, classified memos to remove any record of his appearing to be too pro-Iraq, a difficult task, given the fact that he had been one of the foremost proponents of Baghdad. But Millikan knew his Orwell.
In the face of the fact that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, that the administration had already cut both open- and back-channel communications with the PLO, that he had already lost whatever leverage he had on the Hill, it was apparent that he had to do something to maintain his high ground. Gnawing at the back of his mind was the knowledge that Hennessey had a dossier on him a foot thick, that Hennessey could nail him anytime he wanted by throwing him to the wolves of the Democratically-controlled congressional committees, that he could spread rumors that would make him out to be the long-sought Big Mole in the national-security network, that Hennessey had, as the result of his shocking, unprecedented, and possibly illegal lateral jump to the FBI, become the heir of all the secret photos that J. Edgar Hoover had assembled on the Harvard boys and all the Oxford types. He had to find some way to short-circuit Hennessey, get back on top of the curve on Iraq, convince the President that he was really serving well. He needed a hook.
As he gazed over the top of his workstation out the window at the White House, it suddenly struck him what his salvation would be. How he could simultaneously outflank Hennessey, impress the President, and grab the next-best issue of the war—the public fear of the Iraqis’ poison gas and bacteriological-warfare capabilities, soon to be widely publicized by the scare-mongering press.
It was at moments like this that Millikan always felt a certain sense of satisfaction and renewed self-esteem. He drafted a National Security Council Decision Directive setting up an interagency task force to include Hennessey from the FBI, Spector and Vandeventer from the Agency, some of the folks from the chemicals branch at NSA and the Pentagon, and some of the germ people from the NSF. They would start work immediately, in Kennebunkport. He typed it up for that morning’s meeting. He knew that it would be approved without question. If American boys were going to die, the administration had better look as if it at least knew there was a danger. If they died, Millikan looked good, because he’d been on top of it from the beginning. If they didn’t die, Millikan looked good, because his task force could claim the credit.
twenty-five
“WE HAVE a report of a bloody horse on the south Boundary Avenue extension,” said the dispatcher’s voice. Clyde was slumbering so deeply that, when he woke up, he was not sure whether he had heard it correctly. Surely she had said “runaway” and not “bloody.”
He had stayed up late listening to the dumbfounding news of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on his transistor radio, which was still squawking away on the dashboard. The news reports, his own dreams, and the words of the dis
patcher must have got all mixed up in his sleepy head.
“It’s in the vicinity of the vet lab,” she continued. “Sounds like it might be another case of you-know-what. All units respond.”
“All units?” Clyde said aloud, staring at the ceiling of his unit. He was only talking to himself. At the moment “all units” amounted to three Forks County sheriff’s deputies.
When Tab Templeton had materialized before the gates of Nishnabotna Meat like a biblical apparition, liquored up and swinging an ax handle, a single deputy—Clyde—had been dispatched to deal with the problem. If Charles Manson, Abu Nidal, and a pack of rabid wolves had been sighted on Lincoln Way, the Forks County sheriff might have found the situation sufficiently grave to merit the dispatch of two deputies. And now they were sending three after a horse.
Deputy Hal Karst came on the radio, not bothering to disguise the fact that he’d been laughing. “We gonna just grab that horse by the reins, or actually rassle it to the ground?”
No answer. The dispatcher was flummoxed.
Hal Karst continued. He was in his late forties, the oldest deputy on the force, and he didn’t care what the dispatcher or Mullowney or anyone else thought of him. “You want us to rassle it, Clyde can take point, and me and Jim’ll help. But if you just want us to grab the reins, I can handle that all by my lonesome, and Clyde and Jim can go back to sleep.” Hal was an old farm boy and still kept horses of his own.
“Hal, go after the horse,” the dispatcher said, sounding more than a bit frosted. “Clyde and Jim, you are to throw a dragnet over the area.”
Clyde jackknifed to a sitting position and hollered, “A dragnet?” He snatched the microphone with one hand, killing the little transistor radio with the other. “Did you say dragnet, Theresa?” He did a poor job of concealing the grin in his voice. He had never heard this word actually used in an official context. Then he got himself under control and didn’t say anything more. They were recording his transmissions, and if he got overly lippy, they could play it on the radio and TV and make him look like a bad deputy.
“Sheriff’s standing orders,” Theresa shot back, “in the event of another mutilation case.”
“Oh, shit,” Clyde said to himself. So it really was a bloody horse.
Deputy Jim Green came on the horn for the first time. “Which one of us gets to be Joe Friday?”
“That’s enough horsing around!” Theresa said. “Clyde, you handle the northern end. Jim, you come in from the south. Converge on the vet lab. Report anything unusual.”
Clyde was several miles north of town, in the hilly, sparsely wooded country between Palisades State Park and Lake Pla-Mor. He pulled out onto the road and accelerated south, wiping fog from the inside of the windshield with one hand, then groping for the switches that turned the lights. He would have been justified in using the siren, but the farmers didn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night and always complained.
On second thought he went ahead and turned the siren on. When they complained, they’d blame it on Mullowney.
And Mullowney would call them back very respectfully, or (since this was an election year) perhaps even stop by their house personally in his unit, pausing in their driveway to pop a mint into his mouth so that they would not smell the alcohol on his breath. He would enter their house, taking his Smokey Bear hat off respectfully, and accept the proffered coffee and pie only with the greatest reluctance, and would apologize to them deeply for the disturbance caused by the nocturnal sirens; but, he would say, a bit of noise in the night was a small price to pay, and all the citizens of Forks County must be ready to make small sacrifices, playing their own little parts in the War on Satan.
Kevin Mullowney had declared War on Satan only yesterday. The Times-Dispatch had carried his news release on the front page, unedited except that they had corrected all the spelling and grammatical errors that had slipped past Mullowney’s typist (his third cousin once removed). When the sheriff became aware of the invasion of Kuwait, he would be chagrined, for it would surely drive the War on Satan back to the second page for the next week at least.
The news release had been accompanied by a large photograph of Kevin Mullowney paying a surprise visit to a head shop in campustown, where he inspected a rock-band poster emblazoned with a pentagram. One of Mullowney’s flunkies held the poster up between the sheriff and the owner of the store—a sallow, bearded fellow with an earring. Mullowney had both index fingers in action, a sure sign that he had roused himself to action; with one he was tracing the pentagram on the poster, and with the other he was pointing at the chest of the owner, nearly prodding him in the sternum. The owner was blinking when the flash went off, and his eyes were neither open nor closed but somewhere in between, giving him an alarmingly moronic, possibly drug-addled appearance.
The War on Satan was, of course, actually a counterattack—a purely defensive measure. Forks County had (Mullowney explained) been infiltrated silently over a period of years, and only recently had the local satanist contingent felt confident enough to come into the open. They had announced their presence by initiating a campaign of cattle mutilation.
The first attack had been a couple of weeks earlier. A heifer had been found missing by its owner, who had discovered a hole cut in his fence and followed a trail of blood down into a creek bottom where the victim had concealed herself. Some mysterious runes had been carved into her flanks.
The second incident had been about a week later. A horse had been led from a stable at a local riding school, through a gate that had been cut open, down to the woods along the riverbank, and had had an upside-down, five-pointed star carved into its shoulder. This second incident demonstrated a pattern even Kevin Mullowney could not fail to notice, and the War on Satan had been launched as soon as he had sobered himself up enough to dictate the manifesto to his typist.
Now perhaps the mutilators had struck again, probably at the vet lab—a federal installation, tied to EIU’s Vet Med College. This made sense; the vet lab had lots of livestock and, being a government operation, tended not to supervise them as carefully as farmers would. It was exactly where Clyde would go if he wanted to mutilate some animals without being caught.
Deputy Karst came on the horn. “I’m in the area and I see tracks,” he said. “I’m along the eastern edge of the Dhont farm. I’ll tie it up to a fence or something, then return to my unit and notify you so’s you can send out a veterinarian.”
Clyde went straight down Boundary Avenue, along the western edge of Wapsipinicon. The northern stretch passed along nice neighborhoods, where, he hoped, many influential constituents were erupting from their beds as his unit screamed past, and concluding that Sheriff Mullowney’s War on Satan was sheer madness.
A mile south of Lincoln Way was Garrison Road, which formed the southern border of the city; everything south was farmland. But instead of the wall of corn that usually marked such boundaries around here, the south side of Garrison Road was a motley spectacle of peculiar and outlandish crops planted in small patches and individual rows, and greenhouses of various types: some traditional ones built of glass, others just poly film stretched over improvised frameworks. These were the EIU College of Agriculture experimental farms, and they stretched for another mile south to the next section-line road. Beyond that was the National Veterinary Pathology Laboratory and Quarantine Center, in the vicinity of which the bloody horse had been sighted. Hal Karst was probably traipsing around that area right now, proffering odds and ends of his sack breakfast to the terrified critter.
If Clyde were a satanist, and had just finished mutilating a horse at the vet lab, he would make his escape northward across the experimental farms, which were unpopulated, poorly fenced, and never patrolled. Clyde checked around the area for the injured horse but, finding nothing, returned to the vet lab.
The gates there were well secured—there was a guardhouse, manned only during the daytime, and to get in at night, you had to shove a magnetic card into a little bo
x that would raise the gate for you. A closed-circuit TV camera recorded all comings and goings. This was of little interest to Clyde. But the perimeter of the vet lab was almost two miles in length. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, but much of it was so dark and so remote that anyone with a pair of bolt cutters could get through it at will.
Three sides of the vet lab were bounded by highways of greater or lesser importance, but the southern border was formed by the main line of the Denver–Platte–Des Moines Railroad. If Clyde were a satanist, he would turn off Boundary Avenue onto the dirt track that ran along the railway siding, drive down that track until he was well away from the road, and cut the fence there. It was where all the teenaged boys went to drink beer and smoke marijuana.
As soon as he pulled off Boundary onto the track, he saw recent-looking tire marks in the dirt and stopped the unit where it was so that he would not destroy the evidence. He plucked his nightstick, Excalibur, from its mount on the dashboard and, after some dithering, decided to leave the shotgun where it was. He turned on the spotlight and shone it down the track, then proceeded on foot.
Sure enough, there was a fresh cut in the fence about a hundred yards in from the road. It was high and wide enough for a horse. The mutilators had apparently gone into the vet lab, selected their victim, led it out through this opening, and cut it up there; the ground in front of the fence cut was all churned up with horse and human footprints, and sprinkled with blood. Tomorrow around ten o’clock, when Sheriff Mullowney had recovered from the night’s drinking sufficiently to stand erect, this was where he would come to be photographed by the Times-Dispatch and videotaped by the TV crews from Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. He would squat to examine the footprints, point significantly at patches of blood, and finger the cut ends of the fence wires attentively.
Clearly, the perpetrators had come in a vehicle; clearly, they were long gone. Clyde trudged back to the unit and got on the horn. “Got a pretty good crime scene along the railway cut, just off Boundary,” he announced. Then he got a roll of yellow crime-scene tape out of the bumper and strung it around the area.
The Cobweb Page 21
