Clyde came into the sheriff’s department at four in the afternoon and saw the report coming in on the wire. He tore it off and read through it three times carefully. It had originated from a South Dakota Highway Patrol base in the western part of that state. Last night a trooper, westbound on I-90, had pulled through a rest area at four in the morning and noticed a car with Idaho plates stopped in the parking lot, one occupant asleep in the passenger seat, which had been reclined. This was technically illegal, but the highway patrol was in the habit of looking the other way; in that part of the country, where towns and motels were few and far between, it was a common practice for long-haul truckers to park their rigs in the rest areas of the interstate at night and to sleep there.
Several hours later another trooper had noticed the same car in the same place with the same person in it. It was midmorning, the outside temperature was already eighty-five, the sun was blasting in through the windows of the car, yet this motorist was still sound asleep with a blanket over him. He did not respond to knocking on the window. The trooper Slim Jimmed the door open. Although this was not explicitly stated in the report, Clyde knew that when the trooper had opened the door of that car, he had taken a deep breath and held it, and perhaps stepped back away from the vehicle for a few moments to let the first roiling wave of stench dissipate. If Clyde had been there, he would have opened both doors of Kevin Vandeventer’s car so that the South Dakota wind could blow through it.
Vandeventer had been dead since about three in the morning. The local coroner’s report stated that his neck had been broken by someone who had done a very neat job of it. There was no physical evidence anywhere—and if it had been done in the men’s room, there never would be, because it had been thoroughly scrubbed and sterilized by the custodial service at eight in the morning.
The state patrol kept records of which trucks passed through its weigh stations at which times. From these it was possible to draw some inferences about which trucks had been in the vicinity of that rest area at the time of the murder. They were still trying to track down the truckers in question by telephone and radio, interviewing them when they stopped at other weigh stations along I-90 in Wyoming and Montana. So far none of them had seen anything, except for one insomniac who had seen headlight beams sweep across the walls of his sleeper cab at about three in the morning. He had looked out the window to see a car in the final stages of making an illegal U-turn in the median strip of the interstate. He could not remember any details about the car, which had taken off eastbound. Headed for Iowa.
The troopers had found tracks in the grass of the median strip that corresponded to this report. But the ground was hard and dry, and no useful impressions had been made in the dirt. A couple of speeding tickets had been issued to eastbound vehicles on I-90 during the wee hours of the morning, and these drivers were being interviewed. But Clyde knew that these leads would not amount to anything. If he were an Iraqi secret agent on hostile territory during wartime, and he had just broken a man’s neck with his bare hands out in the middle of nowhere and was driving back to his safe house 650 miles away, he would be sure to observe posted speed limits.
It was a thirteen-hour drive from there to Wapsipinicon if you drove at exactly the speed limit and never stopped at all, which was impossible. Clyde figured that fifteen or sixteen hours was more realistic. They would come east on I-80 from Des Moines, head northeast on I-45 for a short distance, and then, most likely, take the University Avenue exit, which would bring them due north into the center of Wapsipinicon.
At six o’clock in the evening Clyde drove into Wapsipinicon and headed south of town on University Avenue, then took that several miles down to the cloverleaf where it intersected I-45. The geometry of the intersection was such that northbound traffic on I-45 had to make a 315-degree right turn, nearly a complete circle, in order to head north on University. People ran off the road there all the time, especially during the winter; before Twisters games a few RVs always rolled over into the ditch as they tried to negotiate the turn in too much of a hurry. It was posted at twenty miles per hour and festooned with signs prophesying doom to speeders.
Clyde knew it well. He parked his unit where he would have a clear view of all traffic on the ramp. Then he made himself comfortable and waited. A car or truck swung round the ramp every few minutes and headed north into town.
At 6:47 by his dashboard clock one such car happened to catch his eye. It was a maroon Bronco, a couple of years old. It had dark-tinted windows, which was a bit out of the ordinary, but still common around the university, being apparently some kind of status symbol among hot-rodders and party animals. But what really caught Clyde’s eye was that the front of the Bronco—its bumper, grille, hood, and windshield—were encrusted with the smashed and dried remains of insects. This was obvious and incontrovertible proof that this vehicle had just been driven for several hundreds of miles at high speed across the plains.