Cassie’s brow wrinkled up again. “The polygraph guy didn’t grope you, did he?”
“Nah.” Betsy said. She could have said a lot more, but she was pretty sure her voice would quaver. Cassie, having finished with a clinical examination of Betsy’s breast and arm, now zeroed in on her face. “I’m getting you a beer, Idaho,” she said. “Gotta get you to open up a little.”
“No, thanks,” Betsy said. “I don’t care for beer, thank you.”
“Then you take your shower and I’ll fix you something and you’ll never know it has booze in it. That’s what you need.” Cassie finished, pulled her tights back up, and paused in the doorway. “You a Mormon, ain’t you? I just figured that out. I always heard that the Agency was full of Mormons.”
“Yep,” Betsy said. “Born and raised.”
“Then let’s just say I’m going to fix you a drink, Ida, and it’ll be your job to drink it and my job to knowwhat it’s made of. Fair?”
Betsy was not very good at turning people down, especially articulate people with strong personalities. “Yes,” she said.
Cassie smiled, pivoted on the ball of one foot, reached out with a pointed toe, and triggered the flush lever. “One more immortal soul,” she said, “down the toilet. See you in a few, Ida.”
Chapter Five
It all looked real easy once Clyde got all the maps spread out on the basement floor.
The floor of his actual house would not have been a good place for them because the Big Boss had gone into a kind of nesting overdrive where even leaving a little piece of food on the floor set her off. Spreading out a couple hundred square feet of maps would have been spouse abuse—always the furthest thing from Clyde’s mind.
So instead he went to the apartment building that Buck Chandler had just sold him. It was located on North Seventh Street in Nishnabotna, several blocks west of Central Avenue, not far from the freightyard and about half an inch above the mean water table. He had thrown his big push broom into the backof his truck on the way down there, and so he started by pushing all the old dust, bent nails, and hunks ofshattered drywall back into the corners of the basement. There were also a lot of cigarette ash andbroken beer bottles left over from teenagers breaking in and partying in the basement.
Clyde took his very large-scale maps of Forks County and placed them edge to edge on the basement floor until the entire county was laid out in front of him, minus two square places where Marie O’Connor had been temporarily out of maps. The scale of the maps was so large that a mile on the ground worked out to almost a foot on paper. Consequently, Clyde’s new strategic map of Forks County, fully assembled, was about twenty feet square.
He untied the thick braided laces of his high-top steel-toed boots, unhooked the laces from the many brass hooks that marched up his ankles and shins, wrestled the boots off his feet, and left them sitting on the floor. Then he stepped onto the map of Forks County. His socks had got damp from perspiration, and wherever he went, he left moist, wrinkled, footprint-sized patches on the map. All the tiny little blacks quares that represented houses were spread out around him like pepper spilled across a table.
In order to see much, Clyde had to get down on his hands and knees. The lightbulb sockets screwed onto the joists above his head were all empty. The basement had half a dozen small windows near the ceiling, which were barely above ground level.
The job that was ahead of Clyde did not look like such a big deal from there. Most of Forks County was empty, save for farm buildings spread miles apart. He could see now that he would have to resist the tendency to fritter away all his time out in the middle of nowhere, covering lots of territory but not drumming up that many actual votes. All the population, hence all the votes, were centered in the twin cities of Wapsipinicon and Nishnabotna.
Which was kind of ironic, because the cities had their own police forces. They didn’t pay much attention to sheriff-related matters. It was the farmers out around the edges of the county who really needed to get rid of Kevin Mullowney and replace him with a person like Clyde.
But that was neither here nor there. For Clyde, here was Nishnabotna (population thirty-two thousand) and there was Wapsipinicon (population twenty-one thousand, plus about twenty-five thousand students at Eastern Iowa University).