Crack-Up (7 page)

The headquarters of my firm were conveniently located within half a mile of my townhouse in a converted brick warehouse down by the
Potomac River
.
 
A boardwalk, just outside the window of our conference room on the first floor, connected us to a cluster of restaurants and other office buildings.
 
Five or ten minutes into the meeting, I noticed from my seat a man on the boardwalk peering in at us.

He stood alone, leaning a bit against the railing that faced the water.
 
He was tall and stood out sharply, dressed, not in a business suit, or touristy apparel, but in denim overalls, his thumbs hooked beneath the shoulder straps.
 
His cotton shirt was checkered red and white, and his black cowboy hat was mashed on top, comically misshapen.

He’s a farmer
, I guessed.
 
But why is he here?
 
And why is he staring in at us?
 
And so intently
?

I was about to point him out to the others when I sensed something familiar about him—though it wasn’t the farmer's face, half hidden by hat shade.

Suddenly, I put it all together: the man’s build, his clothes, his hat—Especially that hat!—even his stance.
 
I’d seen it all before, in an old photograph of my father.
 
Of which there weren’t many.
 
For my father had disappeared decades earlier.

I found myself rising from my seat and rapidly circling our horseshoe-shaped conference table, the group discussion wading by my ears without meaning.
 
I was consumed with chasing a ghost.

I raced outside to the boardwalk.
 
The ghost fled, in a most conventional way, on foot, at a brisk walk, but I aimed to chase it down.
 
I aimed to until I heard a familiar voice barking at me from somewhere nearby, calling my name over and over again.

My eyes located Henry Mercer, the vice president of my firm, standing at a newly opened window inside our conference room.
 
The others in the staff meeting were on their feet too, pressed to the glass, staring at me in wonder.

Chapter 6

For a long time, I just stood there, frozen on the boardwalk, with a dozen pairs of eyes gawking at me through the window, with the farmer—or ghost of my father—receding, receding.
 
I felt foolish.
 
I began to wonder how to explain my odd behavior once back inside.
 
And the moment began to feel much too like the first throes of my first psychosis, twenty-two years earlier, in the days before I’d stopped bothering to explain my odd behavior to others, before I’d stopped believing my odd behavior odd.

I went back inside the building and told my employees that I’d seen the farmer groping a female passerby and that I’d raced outside to run him off.
 
I told myself a different falsehood—as it soon turned out—that a poor night’s sleep, mixed with anxiety over the attempted murder of one of my clients, had temporarily thrown my judgement out the window, so to speak.

I did briefly consider phoning my psychiatrist, Doctor Shields.
 
And if I had, perhaps the worst of my story would never have happened.
 
But my recently rescheduled appointment with him was for the very next day anyway, so I simply went about my business . . .

Jeremy Crane lived within a short commute of Helms Technology in
Reston
,
Virginia
.
 
I’d lived in
Reston
myself years earlier, back when I was still new to the Secret Service.
 
During winters, I’d often take my dates—including my first two wives—to an outdoor skating rink in the center of town, then thaw out in a cozy bar overlooking the ice.

Minutes before sunset, I turned onto Jeremy’s cul-de-sac, locating his post-modern brick colonial by the presence of a
Reston
police cruiser parked in the driveway.
 
The pony-tailed cop sitting inside, idling her engine for air-conditioning, hopped out to greet me once I pulled to a stop behind her.

“Nice wheels,” she said, shaking hands.
 
Her name—I had to look it up—was Pam Huntington, and she turned out to be a gear head and spent ten minutes admiring my Beemer.
 
I even had to pop the hood for her.
 
Meanwhile, it was muggy enough outside to make a flagpole go limp.
 
She whistled when I told her the sticker price and then said, “Okay, let’s break into the house.”

At the front door, 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 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.