“No, sir.”
Dr. Folkes was in the midst of transferring the sausages onto a marred plastic dinner plate decorated with large daisies. He stopped and peered at Clyde. “How’s that? I said I’d vote for you. What do you want me to do? Go out and distribute campaign literature for you? I’ve already spent enough time pulling your bumper stickers out of my chainwheel.”
“When I knocked on your door, you told me that you never got any peace in the evening. That makes me wonder whether you are having any problems that might be of interest to the sheriff’s department. So even if I have your vote, I can’t honestly say I’m satisfied until I’ve—”
“Oh, shit, no, it’s nothing like that,” Dr. Folkes said. Laughing, he turned his back on Clyde and carried his plate into the dining room. Clyde followed him there. “It’s the goddamn phone calls, Mr. Banks.”
“Prank calls?”
“I wish they were. No, it’s work related. And it’s nothing that you can help with. But thank you for making the offer.”
“What’s your line of work there at the university?” Clyde said, trying to sound conversational.
“I’m a microbiologist,” Dr. Folkes said through a mouthful of sausage. “I study things that are yucky.”
“Yucky?”
“Most of the time when people ask what I do, they don’t really want to know. They are just being polite. If I really tell them, they get uncomfortable. Since I suspect that all you really want is to extricate yourself from this conversation and move on to the next house, I’m giving you an easy out.” He looked at Clyde expectantly.
“Cop work is like that,” Clyde said after a thoughtful pause. “Lots of high-speed road accidents. Farmers caught in grain augers and such.”
Dr. Folkes nodded enthusiastically, seeming to find this analogy insightful.
“So I wouldn’t say that I am easily grossed out,” Clyde continued.
“Well, then, what I do is study a particular genus of bacterium called Clostridium, of which the best known is C. botulinum—the manufacturer of botulin toxin.”
“People ever bring you tainted soup?”
“All the time. Most of it isn’t tainted at all—just old. And the tainted stuff isn’t always tainted with C. botulinum. But I have acquired some interesting strains that way, yes.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Mostly freeze ’em. But I grow some of it.”
“Pardon?”
“I grow it,” Dr. Folkes said, mildly irritated. “Come here.” He wadded up his napkin and threw it onto the table, then jumped to his feet, wheeled, and strode back through the kitchen to a door. The door opened onto a narrow, steep stairway descending into a dark basement. Dr. Folkes stomped down into darkness, his hand flailing above his head until it caught a length of twine strung through a line of screw eyes. Bluish light flickered from down below and then exploded as several long fluorescent fixtures came to life. Clyde followed him down the nearly vertical steps, hunching to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. The hospital smell became much stronger.
The basement was perhaps half the size of the house. One wall was bulging inward as the foundation wall gave way to the pressure of the soil and was being held at bay by a few massive timbers propped against it and anchored to the floor. An antique toilet was fixed to another wall, a rust-streaked porcelain tank above it with a cobwebbed pull chain dangling. In one corner, next to an ancient, stained laundry tub, was a heavy workbench made from a particleboard door set up on four-by-four legs. The workbench held a plethora of laboratory glassware, some of which was upside down on a rack of dowels, drying out, the rest containing fluids that were either transparent or muddy brown. Larger jugs sat on the floor underneath, containing what Clyde took to be bulk raw materials.
The most prominent object was a five-gallon glass carboy in the middle of the workbench, filled to the shoulder with brown fluid veiled with yellow foam. Dr. Folkes was already there, eyeing it carefully. He waited until Clyde was standing right in front of it and allowed him to have a gander.
“See, now, right there,” he said, “is enough botulin toxin to kill everyone in the state of Iowa.”
Clyde stepped back a pace. “Are you joking?”
“When I’m joking, Mr. Banks, I try to say things that are actually funny.”
“Well, isn’t it dangerous to have it here?”
“Let me put it this way,” Dr. Folkes said in a tired tone of voice, as if he were running through this explanation for the thousandth time. He went over to a Peg-Board where numerous tools were hanging, neatly arranged, and selected a clawhammer. “This hammer right here could kill everyone in the state of Iowa—if you went around and bashed their heads in with it. True?”
“Theoretically.”