“I’m calling an ambulance,” Clyde said. He went over and picked up the phone. It was dead.
“Didn’t pay my bill,” Mr. Frost said. “Paid all my money to the alimony.”
“Then we have to get you to a hospital,” Clyde said. “Come on.”
He went over and picked up Mr. Frost in a fireman’s carry, slinging the old man over his shoulders like a bag of charcoal briquettes, and carried him out to the station wagon. Mr. Frost had gone limp, so Clyde buckled him in to keep him upright. Then he started the engine and punched the gas and sent the Murder Car chortling through deep gravel onto the road, southbound.
The next farmhouse was just half a mile down the road, but Clyde figured that he could get to the hospital faster than he could call up an ambulance and have them come out there, so he just drove into Wapsipinicon at about a hundred miles per hour, noting with professional embarrassment that no sheriff cars even noticed this breach of posted speed limits.
He came into town on U.S. 30, which was known as Lincoln Way in populated areas, passed the main campus on the left, then the mile-wide parking lot of the Events Center, with the auditorium and then Twister Stadium and then the coliseum rising out of the asphalt, past the Twister’s outdoor and indoor practice fields, then hung a screaming left onto Knapp Avenue and went up about half a dozen blocks and pulled into the medical center, following the red signs to the emergency room at Methodist Hospital, which was so brand-new and so good that it was not called an emergency room but a trauma center. Clyde could find the trauma center with his eyes closed; he went there all the time, on business.
He did not feel it would be decent to leave the grounds until he knew how things turned out with Mr. Frost. But he also knew from experience that drinking foul, watery coffee in the hospital cafeteria was not a good way to kill time, and so, after a decent interval had passed, he parked the wagon in the visitor lot and went for a stroll.
A few moments’ walk took him down into the greenbelt along the Wapsipinicon. A bike path ran along the bank, with occasional bizarre-looking suspension bridges (engineering-student projects) over to the EIU campus on the opposite side. Clyde strolled across one of these and soon found himself on the sculptured quadrangle of the two-year-old marble-sheathed Henry Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center, the House That Larsen Built. It was a campus within a campus, free from the unwashed mobs of undergraduates who thronged the rest of the university’s twenty-five hundred acres, populated mostly by foreigners with stratospheric IQs. Clyde sat down on a bench that said it had been donated by the government of Nigeria and watched them coming and going in their dashikis and saris and turbans and white lab coats, and wondered whether Frank Frost was still alive, and if he was, whether he had any idea that a place like this existed just a few minutes’ drive away from the run-down farm where he had chosen to seclude himself from the world.
Clyde sat on that bench for fifteen minutes, watching the foreign students come and go, and thinking not about Frank Frost but about the missing Marwan Habibi.
He stood up, stretched, then ambled into the main entrance of the Scheidelmann. He dawdled around the giant electric globe for a few minutes, looking at the electric pins thrust into so many exotic parts of it, every one of them a place where Eastern Iowa University had somehow got itself tangled up with some other nation’s government and laws. He consulted a map on the wall and made his way into the Sinzheimer Wing, then up to the third floor, to door 304, which had been sealed off with yellow crime-scene tape.
“Can I help you?” said a voice. An American voice. Clyde looked up, startled, to see a young man standing there, holding an unopened can of Coke and a small bag of chips. He was about Clyde’s height but probably forty or fifty pounds lighter. He had large pale-blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair and a history of acne that was not entirely history. He had an alert, birdlike look about him.
“Pardon?” Clyde said.
“You’ve been standing here for ten minutes,” the man said. “I’m Kevin Vandeventer. That’s my lab right there.” He nodded at the adjoining room.
“Clyde Banks,” Clyde said, and shook Kevin Vandeventer’s hand. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Deputy county sheriff and candidate for sheriff.”
“Oh. So you’re here on the investigation.”
Clyde remembered something. “You talked to the Wapsipinicon detectives already, didn’t you?” Clyde had read the report of Vandeventer’s interview during his recent efforts to play catch-up and not look like a complete idiot.