After his big encounter with The Heavyweight, which put kind of an ominous spin on the overall decision to launch his campaign, Clyde decided he had had a little bit too much of the Big City for the time being and that he would begin out in the hinterlands of Forks County. Somehow he reasoned that it would be easier there. He could go way out past Palisades State Park to the northwest corner of the county and start visiting farmhouses one at a time, out there in that flat territory on the west side of the Wapsipinicon, where two thousand acres was considered to be a small farm.
Another advantage: this would put him as far as possible from Lake Pla-Mor. Recent events there had given Clyde’s opponent, Kevin Mullowney, some ammunition. Mullowney had been bruiting it about Forks County that Clyde’s recent three A.M. rowboat recovery had been botched so miserably as to suggest that Clyde might be UNFIT TO BE SHERIFF.
The rowboat had been collected from the beach where Clyde had left it by the manager of the university boathouse, who towed it back, hauled it up on the ramp, and, with the help of a couple of strong rowers, turned it over to dump out all the rainwater that had collected in the bottom. Other debris had tumbledout, too: a few handfuls of gravel and some shards of a broken bottle. Fearing that bare foot boaters might cut their feet, the manager had swept all of it up and dumped it into the garbage can.
Two days later the missing oar had been noticed floating along with the great spinning whorl of flotsam and jetsam that always formed at the spillway. From time to time the Corps of Engineers would come along and rake all this unsightly debris away and haul it to the dump. The oar, clearly stenciled as EIU property, was plucked out by a diligent employee and eventually found its way back to the boathouse. It was an old splintered wooden oar, rough and creviced at the tip. Someone at the boathouse noticed that clumps of black hair were wedged into the cracks. Upon further analysis some shreds of human scalp were found in there, too.
Everyone knew instinctively where the body was. It was in the Rotary—the horizontal vortex that formed where the Nishnabotna River struck the face of the dam and curled under. The Rotary was marked with red buoys and lurid danger signs for half a mile upstream, but every year it seemed to claim another clueless high-school student or drunken frat boy. Once a body got into the Rotary, it could spin round and round for weeks before it was spat out, all decomposed and bloated and chewed up by the gar and carp and pike that lived in the lake.
The garbage can at the boathouse was emptied out and its contents personally inspected by Sheriff Mullowney himself, who worked best under the clinical illumination of television lights. The gravel from the bottom of the rowboat looked as if it had come from a public boat ramp way up at the northern end of the lake. The shards of glass did not come from a liquor bottle; they were quartz laboratory glassware. And there was a key chain in there, too, consisting of a car key, a house key, and an office-door key from the university, on a simple split ring. The office key was found to fit a laboratory door in theS inzheimer Biochemistry Wing of the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center. The office was that of one Marwan Habibi, who had not been seen for two weeks.
Clyde Banks knew perfectly well that he hadn’t done anything wrong—even if he had noticed the keychain in the boat, it wouldn’t have given him reason to suspect a murder had happened. But Sheriff Mullowney seemed to have convinced every working journalist in eastern Iowa that Deputy Clyde Banks had blown an opportunity to break a probable murder case.
This, more than anything, had given Clyde the impetus to get started on his campaign. And for some reason it felt less embarrassing to do it out here, in the rural northwest corner of the county. If he started in some built-up area where the houses were close together, he would be seen making his way down the block. People sitting out on their front porches enjoying the spring breezes, people out mowing their lawns or playing basketball in the driveways, would watch him coming their way, hitting one house after another, and wonder what on earth he was doing. Word would get around.