It was two o’clock in the morning of Clyde’s night off. But he was in uniform anyway and brandishing an unfamiliar weapon: a metal detector. He had borrowed the implement from the frugal Ebenezer, who occasionally used it to seek lost treasure in the mud-covered floodplains of the local rivers after seasonal floods. When he had explained the nature of the night’s errand, Ebenezer had even offered to sleep over at his house and keep an eye on Maggie. As Clyde stalked up and down the warehouse floor of Byproducts Unlimited in a bobbing pool of yellow light, he could not help wondering whether Maggie was awake, and what she would think when the gaunt, spectral face of Ebenezer swam into view above her crib.
Clyde was accompanied by one Chris, an edgy, chain-smoking, thirtyish rent-a-cop who had been deputized to hold Clyde’s big black cop flashlight. In more blessed circumstances Clyde might have been annoyed to find himself wrapped in a moving cloud of acrid tobacco smoke, but there he was glad of anything that might deaden his sense of smell.
The warehouse adjoined the rendering floor on one side and the loading dock on the other. It was divided into long aisles by stacks of wooden cargo pallets, each pallet occupied by bulging plastic sacks stenciled with the legend “MegaPro: Packed with Pride at Byproducts Unlimited.” For as long as Clyde could remember, Byproducts Unlimited had been a part of the landscape, its fleet of ramshackle box trucks careening down gravel farm roads with the stiff legs of dead livestock poking out the top. The animals’ fat ended up in drums, destined for restaurants, and their protein ended up as MegaPro powder, used to make dog food and other delicacies.
The rent-a-cop dropped Clyde’s flashlight while trying to light another cigarette, his hands gone clumsy with the October chill. He cursed, picked it up, apologized. Clyde said nothing, just moved on to the next pallet and scanned each sack in turn with the big disk of the metal detector.
The rent-a-cop had reason to be jumpy. His company had been hired on short notice a few days ago, when Byproducts found evidence of a breakin at one of their back doors. It seemed that these breakins might actually have been going on for as long as a few weeks. Nothing important had been stolen, though, despite the fact that tools and VCRs and TV sets were lying out in plain sight in the company’s workshops and offices. Tire tracks were noted in the dirt behind the building.
In a seemingly unrelated development, early-morning fishermen noticed a large, persistent gasoline slick near the end of a public pier up at Lake Pla-Mor. A diver was sent down and came up with the news that a black van rested on the bottom, fifty feet beneath the surface. The van was hauled out and examined, not only by local detectives but by some FBI people who drove out from Chicago. It was suspiciously free of useful evidence. Some prints were lifted from the driver’s-side door, which had been found hanging open; they matched the prints of the oft-arrested, oft-fingerprinted Tab Templeton, who was still missing.
The tires of the van were examined and found to match the tracks behind Byproducts Unlimited. They also matched the tracks that Clyde had discovered at the site of the mutilation of Sweet Corn, the government horse. Sheriff Mullowney was photographed and videotaped standing proudly by the dripping, sludge-filled hulk of the Satan Van. He had wasted no time declaring that the War on Satan was over and won.
Clyde had examined the van himself. He had opened the driver’s-side door and put his hands in the places where Tab’s handprints were found. He had leaned against it, as if trying to push it forward, and satisfied himself that Tab had made those prints while shoving the van down the pier. This all made sense to a point; if Clyde wanted a large vehicle moved without using its engine, Tab would be the first and last candidate for the job. Rumors continued to circulate that Tab’s skeleton had been found near the scuttled van, picked to the bone by the walleyed pike with which Lake Pla-Mor was stocked. But Clyde knew that Tab had been hired to sink that van, and that, if he was dead, he was dead for some other reason.
A handyman had discovered a nest of empty Night Train Express bottles and Twinkies wrappers in an unused janitor’s closet at Byproducts Unlimited. Tab’s fingerprints were all over the place. Sheriff Mullowney, eager to wrap up this case with a ribbon and a bow before Election Day, had set up a crisis headquarters on the riverbank out back—a borrowed RV with a large coffeemaker and donated pastries, patched into Byproducts by long, thick extension cords—and begun dragging the river day and night, hoping to find Tab’s corpse.
It was three-thirty in the morning before Clyde found anything. Chris the rent-a-cop, asleep on his feet, was startled once more by the squeal of the metal detector and swung the light around to see that Clyde had it pressed up against one of the MegaPro sacks.