Crack-Up by Eric Christopherson Read Free Book Online

the officer bent down on one knee to slip her locksmithing tools into place.   “You’re ex-Secret Service, they tell me.   The one who took the bullet for President Cooper?”
    “Yup.   End of one career, start of another.”   I shrugged the cartilage loose in my bad shoulder.
    “I hear you’re doing alright.”   Officer Huntington used her straight pick to raise the lock’s tumbler pins, keeping the pins open with her tension tool.   “First thing I did,” she said, “while waiting on you, was peek through the garage door windows.   There’s a dark blue BMW sedan in there—cheaper model than yours, and earlier, late 90's—but another car’s missing, based on DMV records, not to mention the oil drops on the floor.”
    “A black 2006 Ferrari Maranello F550.”
    “Correct.”   She whistled again.   “Sweet machine.”
    “You ring the doorbell a few times?”
    She nodded.   “For ten minutes, on and off.   Got no answer.   Didn’t hear a thing inside the house either, or see anything.   The curtains are all drawn.   Upstairs too.”
    “All of them?”
    “All of them.”   A minute later, I heard a click announcing the door was unlocked.   She stood.   “You carrying?”
    “No.”
    “Stay here, then.   Let me clear it.”
    With her gun holstered, Officer Huntington twisted open the front door and stepped inside, calling out, “Police!”
    From the front steps, I felt air conditioning gush through the open doorway.   I heard Huntington announcing herself repeatedly from various parts of the house.   Soon she was back.
    “All clear,” Officer Huntington said.
    “No body, I guess?”
    “Not out in the open, anyway.”
    “What’s it like in there?”
    “A little underfurnished, you ask me.   But no obvious sign of a struggle, or an accident.   C’mon, let’s take a closer look.”
    The drawn curtains made the atmosphere inside dismal.   We threw them open and flicked lots of light switches as we moved counter-clockwise through the ground floor rooms.
    The living room furniture was casual and contemporary, yet the space as a whole felt cold and austere.   There were too few pieces of furniture, too few pictures on the walls, and not a dust bunny in captivity.
    “He just move in?” Huntington said.
    “Company records say he’s lived here for two years.”
    “Who is this guy, anyway?”
    “Chief Technology Officer for Helms Technology.   Holds a doctorate from MIT in applied math and theoretical physics.   Does research in computer science and software engineering.”
    “Nerd, huh?”
    I shrugged.   In a framed photo on the mantelpiece, I recognized Jeremy.   By now I recollected meeting the missing man, once, the year before at Helms Technology.   Jeremy had consulted with me and my staff on a new, biometric iris reading device.
    Jeremy was a short, round man with dark, Victorian era mutton chops and narrow eyeglasses of rectangular steel.   The woman seated beside him in the photograph, a redhead with sharp, bird-like features, had to be his ex-wife, Vanessa, for in Jeremy’s lap sat a chubby little girl in a puffy pink dress, surely their daughter, Pamela.   It’d been three plus years since the Cranes’ divorce decree, I’d learned, yet here stood this photo of the family intact.
    The kitchen proved an abrupt change from the other rooms.   Neither austere, nor orderly, it was fully loaded with plates and silverware and cooking utensils and so on, and the contents of all the drawers had, strangely, been dumped onto the countertops.   Among the ladles and spoons and spatulas, I recognized several tools that only a cooking aficionado would purchase.   An apple corer, an egg piercer, a potato ricer.
    “What’s this?” I said, holding up a black, J-shaped blade with ragged edges and a long handle.
    “Corn grater,” she said, sifting nearby.   “Hardcore toys we’ve got here.   Bet this guy beats off to Julia Child re-runs.”
    “What’s all this