Clyde went straight down Boundary Avenue, along the western edge of Wapsipinicon. The northern stretch passed along nice neighborhoods, where, he hoped, many influential constituents were erupting from their beds as his unit screamed past, and concluding that Sheriff Mullowney’s War on Satan was sheer madness.
A mile south of Lincoln Way was Garrison Road, which formed the southern border of the city; everything south was farmland. But instead of the wall of corn that usually marked such boundaries around here, the south side of Garrison Road was a motley spectacle of peculiar and outlandish crops planted in small patches and individual rows, and greenhouses of various types: some traditional ones built of glass, others just poly film stretched over improvised frameworks. These were the EIU College of Agriculture experimental farms, and they stretched for another mile south to the next section-line road. Beyond that was the National Veterinary Pathology Laboratory and Quarantine Center, in the vicinity of which the bloody horse had been sighted. Hal Karst was probably traipsing around that area right now, proffering odds and ends of his sack breakfast to the terrified critter.
If Clyde were a satanist, and had just finished mutilating a horse at the vet lab, he would make his escape northward across the experimental farms, which were unpopulated, poorly fenced, and never patrolled. Clyde checked around the area for the injured horse but, finding nothing, returned to the vet lab.
The gates there were well secured—there was a guardhouse, manned only during the daytime, and to get in at night, you had to shove a magnetic card into a little box that would raise the gate for you. A closed-circuit TV camera recorded all comings and goings. This was of little interest to Clyde. But the perimeter of the vet lab was almost two miles in length. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, but much of it was so dark and so remote that anyone with a pair of bolt cutters could get through it at will.
Three sides of the vet lab were bounded by highways of greater or lesser importance, but the southern border was formed by the main line of the Denver-Platte-Des Moines Railroad. If Clyde were a satanist, he would turn off Boundary Avenue onto the dirt track that ran along the railway siding, drive down that track until he was well away from the road, and cut the fence there. It was where all the teenaged boys went to drink beer and smoke marijuana.
As soon as he pulled off Boundary onto the track, he saw recent-looking tire marks in the dirt and stopped the unit where it was so that he would not destroy the evidence. He plucked his nightstick, Excalibur, from its mount on the dashboard and, after some dithering, decided to leave the shotgun where it was. He turned on the spotlight and shone it down the track, then proceeded on foot.
Sure enough, there was a fresh cut in the fence about a hundred yards in from the road. It was high and wide enough for a horse. The mutilators had apparently gone into the vet lab, selected their victim, led it out through this opening, and cut it up there; the ground in front of the fence cut was all churned up with horse and human footprints, and sprinkled with blood. Tomorrow around ten o’clock, when Sheriff Mullowney had recovered from the night’s drinking sufficiently to stand erect, this was where he would come to be photographed by the Times-Dispatch and videotaped by the TV crews from Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. He would squat to examine the footprints, point significantly at patches of blood, and finger the cut ends of the fence wires attentively.
Clearly, the perpetrators had come in a vehicle; clearly, they were long gone. Clyde trudged back to the unit and got on the horn. “Got a pretty good crime scene along the railway cut, just off Boundary,” he announced. Then he got a roll of yellow crime-scene tape out of the bumper and strung it around the area.
As he returned to the unit, he could hear radio traffic on the PA speaker. Deputy Jim Green and the dispatcher were discussing the whereabouts of Deputy Karst. He had left his unit by the Dhont farm a good half hour ago and not reported in yet.