Maybe he couldn’t afford to fill it up. But if he was using a credit card, did it really matter? The next day he had gone out and charged a new VCR at Wal-Mart, so it wasn’t as if he were bumping up against his credit limit. This was another noteworthy detail—usually foreign students began buying VCRs and other major appliances just before they graduated and headed for home.
Clyde had another theory: Marwan had died right there in his own laboratory. The other students wanted to conceal that fact, for some motive that Clyde hadn’t worked out yet. They needed to carry Marwan’s body out of the place somehow, which was impossible without attracting suspicion—the place had security guards and cameras by all the doors. So they had convened at the lab and thrown a fake party, leaving the door open so that their neighbor, Kevin Vandeventer, would know about it. They had carried out the corpse, throwing in some patter in English, again for Vandeventer’s consumption. They had brought a supply of latex surgical gloves with them. They had gone to the lake and stolen the boat, making sure that only Ashrawi’s fingerprints showed up on it. They had crushed the dead man’s skull with the oar, put the rocks in his pockets, thrown him out of the boat, and then bought gasoline with Ashrawi’s credit card just to leave a neon-lit trail straight to him and him alone.
In other words, they were sacrificing Ashrawi to keep the rest of the group out of trouble, so that they could stay in Forks County and keep doing whatever the hell they were doing.
The big hole in Clyde’s theory, which Mullowney would not hesitate to point out should Clyde be rash enough to speak it aloud, was that it was impossible unless Sayed Ashrawi had agreed to the whole plan and served as an accomplice in his own framing. And what kind of a person would do that?
Desiree came down, her white flannel nightie looking out of place in the garage and even more so in the presence of the butchering operation. She noticed, but did not bat an eye at, the wading pool. Clyde was watching her face at this moment because he feared that by using the pool he might have crossed one of the mysterious boundaries separating proper from improper behavior, so invisible to him and so obvious to her. But she wandered up, sweetly unsteady from just having awakened, leaned against him and gave him a kiss, came away with buck hair on her nightie and a glow in her eyes, and Clyde’s heart swelled and ached with maniac love. She brought them coffee and promised them breakfast. Ebenezer, weighing the cut and wrapped cuts of venison in heaps on their bathroom scale, announced that he had removed 180 pounds of meat from the animal and selected perhaps a quarter of it for his own Deepfreeze. He declined breakfast, perhaps having absorbed enough of the buck’s substance through his own pores to give him a morning’s nourishment, then took off for the golf course in hopes of catching up with John Stonefield on the back nine.
Clyde got the unit back to the sheriff’s department in time for the end of his shift, filed his report on the accident, then drove home and began to work on the problem of the wading pool. Maggie was awake now, and he was very glad to see her.
Chapter Seventeen
“We’re going to the Jersey shore!” Cassie said one Wednesday in mid-June. “Clear your calendar for the weekend, lady.”
Betsy had to admit that, even with her constitution, the fourteen-hour days were catching up with her. “Why not the Eastern Shore? Why go all the way to Jersey?” she said.
“Because one of the people we’re going with has a family place there—in Wildwood. And I’ve got four other people coming. Nobody with less than Top Secret Code Word clearance, all of them able to have a good time without talking about their work—or our work. You’ve got no option. We’re getting up at six Saturday morning and heading up to Jersey.”
Betsy was impressed—her roommate was going to get up at six in the morning. She had a very good rest of the week—not only did she have the beach weekend to look forward to, but things were actually beginning to change at work, too. The oil tanker of policy had begun a slow change of course, and Betsy, keeping watch on its decks, could sense it from subtle shifts in the wind. On Thursday morning word spread through the intel community that next week State would block five hundred million dollars in loan guarantees because Ag had been forced to admit that irregularities—including kickbacks to USG personnel—had occurred, and that previous grants had not gone to sugar, rice, and corn. Betsy got to savor that for a few minutes, imagining what kind of a mood Millikan must be in this morning. But the rest of Thursday was consumed by meetings, and one sensitizing session on understanding women employees.