Crack-Up by Eric Christopherson Read Free Book Online Page A

stuff doing on the countertops?”
    “He seems meticulous.   Maybe he was doing inventory.”
    “When he was suddenly called away?”
    She shrugged.   “Maybe.”
    Just inside the walk-in food pantry, I found hanging on a wall hook a set of keys with BMW auto insignia.   I snatched them.
    A side door led from the kitchen into the garage.   “Without a warrant,” Huntington said, “we can only search the trunk.”
    I nodded.   “Where his body might fit.”
    The trunk turned up empty.   We turned to the garage itself, which was clean and uncluttered.   Not a storage box in sight.
    In a back corner was a strange piece of machinery resting on two sawhorses.   Its length and width matched the bed of a small pick-up truck.   A conveyor belt ran down the middle, and in the center was a boxy steel chamber with a hazardous materials warning label on the side.   Etched into the steel was the name of the machine: the JS1960 Food Irradiator.   There was a dial to control temperature and another to control levels of—.
    “Gamma radiation!” said Huntington , reading along with me.   “What the hell is this?”
    “He must put his groceries in there, to kill the bacteria that spoils food prematurely, or makes you sick.   Like E-Coli.”
    “May need a license for that.   I’ll have to look this up.”
    “Never heard of an individual owning one of these before.”
    “What do they cost?” she said.
    “Don’t know.   But more than his Ferrari, I’d wager.”
    We found Jeremy’s combination fax/telephone/answering machine on a small oak table in the den, beside his Lazyboy recliner.   Six new messages awaited him.   The most recent message was from me, asking him to call my cell phone number as soon as he got home.   The other five were all “Where are you?” calls from various members of Helms Technology, including one from John Helms himself.   They all had problems for Jeremy to solve.
    Four old phone messages were stored in the machine’s memory.   One was from Jeremy’s ex-wife, I guessed, informing Jeremy in a bitchy way that he’d forgotten his daughter’s birthday.   Two other calls were from electronic-voiced phone solicitors, selling what—I don't remember.   The last call was anybody’s guess.
    “What are you waiting for, Jeremy?” said an unidentified caller, a male with a tinny, accusing voice.   “You know what has to happen.   Do it!   Just do it!   Get it over with!”   Click .
    “Could be something there,” Huntington said.   “Play it again.”   This time, she transcribed the call in her notepad.
    Upstairs, we found Jeremy’s home office.   We were both staring at a white flat-screen computer monitor when Huntington said, “Can't.   Need a warrant first.”   On the desktop by the monitor sat a little tin full of gray pumice stones.   “Look at those,” she said, pointing.   “That’s kind of queer.”
    “Not at all.   Computer jocks spend so much time at their keyboards, they get calluses on their fingertips, which slows up their keying, so they use pumice to sand them down.”
    Inside the master bedroom, I told the officer I had to use the toilet.   But my true purpose was to peek inside Jeremy’s medicine cabinet without waiting for the cops to obtain a warrant.   Any health problems, I was thinking, might help explain Jeremy’s sudden disappearance.   Quietly, I opened the mirrored door to Jeremy’s medicine cabinet.   There was a stack of Nexium pill packages, which meant that Jeremy had a stomach problem, acid reflux, and I thought maybe a weak stomach had spurred his interest in cooking and food irradiation.
    I picked up a medium-size bottle of tablets.   It was prescription medicine called Olanzapine.   I knew that to be the brand name for the drug, Zxprexa, and I knew all about the drug’s medical uses, and this knowledge left me feeling suspicious and uneasy all evening and once again questioning my own sanity.
    I had dinner that