“Too late,” Berry said. “You knocked on it while I was out. Left me a brochure. Anyway, as I said, your report was an exceptionally thorough account of some exceptionally conscientious police work. So I don’t have as many loose ends to tie up as I normally would. But there’s always something.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a copy of Clyde’s report.
There was something that startled Clyde about seeing a copy of his work coming out of the briefcase of a federal agent. His shock was redoubled when Berry began to page through it, and Clyde saw that it had been marked up and highlighted. Questions had been scrawled in the margins, and though Clyde could not read them, he could distinguish two or three different hands. Yet there was only one person in the local FBI office, and Clyde was talking to him.
“First of all, let me express my condolences about your friend and colleague Hal Karst.”
“I appreciate that.”
“He sounds like a fine fellow. Wish I’d had the opportunity to know him.”
“Hal was a good one,” Clyde said.
“I don’t really imagine you want to talk about it with me,” Berry said, “and I apologize for raising a difficult subject, but I thought I ought to say something.”
“No offense taken,” Clyde said.
“This fucking shit sucks shit!” shouted one of the prisoners from the cellblock.
“Okay, down to business,” Berry said without batting an eye. “There are a few big institutions down in that part of the county—the high-tech park, the Vet Med College, and the Federal Veterinary Pathology Labs. Before you went to the scene of the incident, you visited all three of those places. Why did you do that?”
“I’d read the reports on the first two mutilation incidents,” Clyde said. “They were well organized, so I thought I’d swing through the logical escape routes and look for any unusual vehicles.”
“But you didn’t see any.”
“None that I knew to be unusual.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Oh, if I’d seen a van or something stopped in one of those lots with its engine running, pointed at the exit, and the windows steamed up, that would have caught my attention.”
“But instead all you saw were the kinds of cars you’d expect to see in such places.”
“I hit each one with my spotlight. Didn’t see anyone sitting in any of those cars. No steamed-up windows. Nothing that stuck out.”
“No black van?”
“Nope,” Clyde said.
A cow had been mutilated two nights ago in Cedar County, half an hour’s drive away, and a black or navy-blue van had been sighted in the vicinity. Sheriff Mullowney had wasted no time in proclaiming that the War on Satan had already forced the evildoers to take their business out of Mullowney’s jurisdiction.
The van had left no tire tracks in Cedar County. But the tracks left along the railway siding on the night of Sweet Corn’s mutilation had been identified, and it was a type of tire that might commonly be found on avan.
Those tracks suggested that the van, or whatever it was, had turned south on Boundary after leaving the scene of the incident; in other words, it had headed away from Wapsipinicon, probably to limit the chances of being noticed by someone like Clyde. Deputy Jim Green, heading north on Boundary, hadn’t passed any vehicles at all coming his way; but he had seen one turning off Boundary onto a section-line road ahead of him and heading off to the east. That road led to a junction with New 30 and Interstate 45 some four and a half miles distant. Once reaching the interstate, the vehicle could easily have fled north toward Rochester or south toward St. Louis, or just turned back into Nishnabotna a few miles to the north and made its way back to wherever the satanists lived.
So it seemed quite clear that there had been one vehicle, a dark van; that it had been right there along the railway siding; and that Clyde’s probe of the nearby parking lots, while not a wholly bad idea, had been a waste of time. It was funny, then, that Berry kept asking about it. “What would you consider to be an unusual vehicle in those locations—setting aside the obvious things?”
“There’s janitors who work those buildings at night. I sort of recognize their cars. Other than that the only thing you’d see would be the grad students’ cars. Sometimes high-school kids will go there to make out or smoke dope—you can tell them right away because they park in the far corner of the lot and the cars are different.”
“Different how?”
“Either it’ll be a hot rod, or else a nice car someone borrowed from Dad. Whereas the classic grad-student car is a ten-year-old import station wagon.”
“Why?”
“Because most of the grad students are foreign, and most of them have families.”
“And you commonly see such cars there at night.”
“All the time. They work on these research projects in the labs and have to be there at odd hours.”