“Sheriff’s standing orders,” Theresa shot back, “in the event of another mutilation case.”
“Oh, shit,” Clyde said to himself. So it really was a bloody horse.
Deputy Jim Green came on the horn for the first time. “Which one of us gets to be Joe Friday?”
“That’s enough horsing around!” Theresa said. “Clyde, you handle the northern end. Jim, you come in from the south. Converge on the vet lab. Report anything unusual.”
Clyde was several miles north of town, in the hilly, sparsely wooded country between Palisades State Park and Lake Pla-Mor. He pulled out onto the road and accelerated south, wiping fog from the inside of the windshield with one hand, then groping for the switches that turned the lights. He would have been justified in using the siren, but the farmers didn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night and always complained.
On second thought he went ahead and turned the siren on. When they complained, they’d blame it on Mullowney.
And Mullowney would call them back very respectfully, or (since this was an election year) perhaps even stop by their house personally in his unit, pausing in their driveway to pop a mint into his mouth so that they would not smell the alcohol on his breath. He would enter their house, taking his Smokey Bear hat off respectfully, and accept the proffered coffee and pie only with the greatest reluctance, and would apologize to them deeply for the disturbance caused by the nocturnal sirens; but, he would say, a bit of noise in the night was a small price to pay, and all the citizens of Forks County must be ready to make small sacrifices, playing their own little parts in the War on Satan.
Kevin Mullowney had declared War on Satan only yesterday. The Times-Dispatch had carried his news release on the front page, unedited except that they had corrected all the spelling and grammatical errors that had slipped past Mullowney’s typist (his third cousin once removed). When the sheriff became aware of the invasion of Kuwait, he would be chagrined, for it would surely drive the War on Satan back to the second page for the next week at least.
The news release had been accompanied by a large photograph of Kevin Mullowney paying a surprise visit to a head shop in campustown, where he inspected a rock-band poster emblazoned with a pentagram. One of Mullowney’s flunkies held the poster up between the sheriff and the owner of the store—a sallow, bearded fellow with an earring. Mullowney had both index fingers in action, a sure sign that he had roused himself to action; with one he was tracing the pentagram on the poster, and with the other he was pointing at the chest of the owner, nearly prodding him in the sternum. The owner was blinking when the flash went off, and his eyes were neither open nor closed but somewhere in between, giving him an alarmingly moronic, possibly drug-addled appearance.
The War on Satan was, of course, actually a counterattack—a purely defensive measure. Forks County had (Mullowney explained) been infiltrated silently over a period of years, and only recently had the local satanist contingent felt confident enough to come into the open. They had announced their presence by initiating a campaign of cattle mutilation.
The first attack had been a couple of weeks earlier. A heifer had been found missing by its owner, who had discovered a hole cut in his fence and followed a trail of blood down into a creek bottom where the victim had concealed herself. Some mysterious runes had been carved into her flanks.
The second incident had been about a week later. A horse had been led from a stable at a local riding school, through a gate that had been cut open, down to the woods along the riverbank, and had had an upside-down, five-pointed star carved into its shoulder. This second incident demonstrated a pattern even Kevin Mullowney could not fail to notice, and the War on Satan had been launched as soon as he had sobered himself up enough to dictate the manifesto to his typist.
Now perhaps the mutilators had struck again, probably at the vet lab—a federal installation, tied to EIU’s Vet Med College. This made sense; the vet lab had lots of livestock and, being a government operation, tended not to supervise them as carefully as farmers would. It was exactly where Clyde would go if he wanted to mutilate some animals without being caught.
Deputy Karst came on the horn. “I’m in the area and I see tracks,” he said. “I’m along the eastern edge of the Dhont farm. I’ll tie it up to a fence or something, then return to my unit and notify you so’s you can send out a veterinarian.”