Attached to each light was an apparatus that consisted of a little electronic box with a long, narrow tube sticking out of it in each direction, pointing down the street. Recessed way back in each tube was a photocell. The photocell stared up the tube, looking at the street with tunnel vision.
Emergency vehicles all had strobe lights tuned to flash at a particular frequency. When the photocell noticed such a light, it would trip the stoplight and make it turn green. This was how emergency vehicles were able to scream up and down the length of Lincoln Way even at rush hour without ever encountering a red light.
Whenever Clyde saw lights beginning to turn red on Lincoln Way in the middle of the night, he would reach down and wrap his fingers around the knob that controlled the station wagon’s headlights. He would jerk the knob back and forth several times, rapidly flashing the headlights, and as if by magic, lights would turn green, in chain reaction, all the way down the length of Lincoln Way, all the way (he imagined) to the East Coast, and he would glide by in the big station wagon, glancing at the interlopers stopped at the cross streets, glaring at him suspiciously.
Once he found himself stopped at a red light anyway, because he was thinking so hard about Marwan Habibi that he had forgotten to flash the lights. He glanced at the cross street to see who the hell was out at three o’clock in the morning, screwing up the preordained behavior of the traffic lights. It was a powerful, jacked-up Trans Am belonging to one Mark McCarthy, a misdemeanor specialist whom Clyde had arrested on several occasions. The Trans Am was departing an especially inexpensive neighborhood of Nishnabotna, where he was known to live, from time to time, with his common-law wife and occasional children.
Someone—or something—was definitely in the passenger seat next to Mark McCarthy. But Clyde was unable to tell who, or what, it was until McCarthy pulled forward and made a left turn directly in front of him. Looking in through the windows of McCarthy’s Trans Am at close range, Clyde was clearly able to make out a pale-pink baby seat with an infant strapped in it, wrapped in its fuzzy blanket sleeper, sucking on a fresh bottle.
The key witness was Vandeventer, who had seen Marwan Habibi carried out of the lab early on the same night he had been murdered (the same night that the rowboat had been stolen). Vandeventer had got a good look at Marwan and was sure that his skull had been intact at that point—and, indeed, there could be little doubt of this, because the damage observed by Barney Klopf during the autopsy had been severe, and obvious even to Barney, a notorious abuser of pharmaceutical substances.
Vandeventer had ID’d the other Arab students who had been present at the party in Lab 304, and all of them had been interviewed—but their words were taken with a grain of salt, because all of them were suspects. The students agreed that after leaving Lab 304 they had proceeded to a house, where Habibi had woken up and continued with the celebration.
Fingerprints were lifted from the rowboat and the fatal oar and matched with those of one Sayed Ashrawi, who was one of the students ID’d by Vandeventer. Further interviews with the other students established that, at about one o’clock in the morning, Ashrawi had volunteered to take Marwan Habibi home—he was relatively sober, the designated driver of the bunch, and Habibi had once again lapsed into incoherence. After that neither Ashrawi nor Habibi had been seen until eight o’clock the next morning, when Ashrawi had shown up for a meeting of a local Islamic students’ group. But a look at Ashrawi’s credit-card statement showed that he had purchased gasoline at an Exxon near Lake Pla-Mor at five in the morning.
All of the other students had alibis. Ashrawi was arrested and even now languished in the Forks County Jail, refusing to eat the unclean jailhouse food and praying to Mecca five times a day as the other inmates flung curses at him.
Clyde didn’t dare say so in public, but he was pretty sure that Ashrawi was an innocent man.
Chapter Thirteen
Saving a hundred million lives, or at least believing that he had done so, was not half-bad for a man who had begun life in a bootlegger’s hut in the hills of McCurtain County, Oklahoma. Arthur Larsen’s father had taught him one lesson and one lesson only: how to dodge. How to circumvent the bizarre and meaningless hurdles that were constantly thrown in one’s path by Authority. And, where dodging wasn’t possible, how to jump through the unavoidable hoops with the absolute minimum of effort.