Clyde backed his unit up to the animal. There was some cop baggage in the trunk, which he moved to the backseat. He hoisted the buck’s head so that it rested on the rear bumper, one antler now scraping on the pavement while the other stuck out into space. He raised one foot and stomped hard on the antler. It snapped off near the base and clattered into the trunk. Clyde flung it into the ditch. Then he repeated the process with the other antler.
Clyde was able to heave the buck’s center of mass over the lip of the trunk with a couple of great leg thrusts. After that it was just a question of arranging its extremities in such a way that he could get the lid closed.
The sun was just coming up when he backed into the driveway. He sneaked into the garage through the side door and hit the button for the opener, praying it wouldn’t wake up Desiree and the baby. He backed the unit into the garage and closed the door, then turned on all the lights.
He had a dirty old nylon rope among his tools, which he threw over one of the bare joists of the garage. He popped the trunk of the unit and tied a noose around the neck of the dead buck. He put on some leatherwork gloves to protect his hands, then took up the loose end of the rope and put a couple of turns around the trailer hitch on his pickup truck, which was parked parallel with the unit. With the nylon rope wrapped around his leather gloves he pulled and pulled until the entire body of the buck lifted free of the unit’s trunk and swung out across the garage like a venison pendulum, knocking over several bicycles like dominoes. The joists creaked. The buck swung back and thudded into the back of the unit.
He went out into the backyard and got Maggie’s wading pool, which was made of stiff pink plastic decorated with off-brand cartoon characters. He rolled the pool in through the side door and centered it beneath the dangling hooves of the buck. Then he stole into the kitchen, selected the longest knife in Desiree’s set, and ran it through the electric sharpener on the back of the can opener once or twice.
Clyde gutted the buck as Ebenezer had taught him, letting the blood gush into the wading pool and the guts tumble in after it. Some blood splashed onto his uniform, but this was hardly out of the ordinary; truly violent crime was rare hereabouts, but large dead animals on the highways were ubiquitous.
He placed a phone call to Ebenezer, who was already up preparing for his daily auroral golfing trip with John Stonefield. Clyde knew that his grandfather would not be happy to have his golf trip preempted by this job; but he knew just as well that Ebenezer would not utter a word of complaint nor hold it against him. Within fifteen minutes Ebenezer pulled into Clyde’s driveway and entered the garage carrying an old toolbox where he stored all of his butchering knives, and under the other arm a long white roll of butcherpaper. He set about dismembering the buck and cutting the flesh from its bones while Clyde began to clean the hair, and traces of blood, from the trunk of the unit. The two men worked for an hour and a half on their respective jobs, standing some eight feet apart in the quiet of the garage, and exchanged very few words during that time. Ebenezer was occupied with whatever dark thoughts occupied Ebenezer. Clyde was thinking about Marwan Habibi and his apparent murderer, Sayed Ashrawi.
The business in Lab 304 stank to high heaven. Clyde simply could not bring himself to believe that Marwan Habibi had really passed out from alcohol and been carried out of that laboratory alive, come awake at someone else’s house for some more partying, and then been murdered in the boat by an oar-wielding Sayed Ashrawi.
Vandeventer insisted that Marwan’s skull had been intact when he had been carried out of the lab. And Vandeventer was a scientist who had seen Marwan from a few feet away, in good light. There could be no doubt of this.
There were no gaping holes in the story as Mullowney and the Wapsipinicon detectives had pieced it together. But there were oddities. Why had the students left door 304 open that night? If you’re drinking grape-flavored grain alcohol in the lab and one of your buddies has passed out from it, don’t you want to hide that?
Why had one of them spoken in English as they’d carried Marwan out of the lab?
But the big question, which came close to being a smoking gun as far as Clyde was concerned, was, Why had Sayed Ashrawi, after committing the murder, gone to an Exxon station at five in the morning and used his credit card to buy $6.20 worth of gas?
If you’ve just committed a murder and the tank of your getaway car is empty, then you have no choice but to buy gasoline—but you pay for it with cash so it can’t be traced.
Ashrawi had bought only 5.2 gallons—not enough to fill the tank of his car. Why had he bothered to get gas if his tank wasn’t empty? Pretty stupid behavior for a graduate student.