For a long time, I just stood there, frozen on the boardwalk, with so many 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. I told my employees that I’d seen the farmer groping a female passerby and that I’d raced outside to run him off.

I considered 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 in the Secret Service.

Just 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.

“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 five minutes admiring my Beemer. I even had to pop the hood for her. Meanwhile, it was muggy enough outside to make a flagpole limp. She whistled when I told her the sticker price 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.

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 blue BMW sedan in there—early model, late aughts—but another car’s missing, based on DMV records, not to mention the oil drops on the floor.”

“A black 2016 Ferrari Maranello F550.”

“Correct.” She whistled again. “Sweet machine.”

“You ring the doorbell a few times?”

She nodded. “No answer. Didn’t hear a thing inside the house either, or see anything. The curtains are all drawn. Upstairs too.”

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,” she said.

“No body, I guess?”

“Not out in the open, anyway.”

“What’s it like in there?”

“A little under-furnished, you ask me. But no obvious sign of a struggle. C’mon, let’s take a closer look.”

The drawn curtains made the atmosphere inside dismal. We threw them open and flicked on lots of light switches as we moved 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?”

“More like King of the Nerds.”

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.

He was a short, round man with dark, Victorian era mutton chops and narrow eyeglasses. The woman beside him in the photo, a redhead with sharp, bird-like features, had to be his ex-wife, Vanessa, and in Jeremy’s lap sat a chubby little girl in a puffy pink dress, surely their daughter, Pamela. It’d been 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 held 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, or taken, 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.

I shrugged. We found Jeremy’s Ooma machine on a small oak table in the den, beside his 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 laptop computer when Huntington said, “Can’t. Need a warrant first.” On the desktop by the computer sat a little tin full of gray pumice stones. “That’s weird,” she said, pointing.

“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 the medicine cabinet. There was a stack of Nexium pill packages, which meant that Jeremy had acid reflux, and I thought maybe a weak stomach had spurred his interest in cooking and food irradiation.

I picked up a bottle of tablets. It turned out to be 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 night at Sally Anne Bilchik’s former place of employment, Treviso’s Italian restaurant in Georgetown. I arrived to find Keisha Fallon waiting for me in a secluded booth near the back wall. She was nibbling at a plate of antipasto and drinking from a carafe of rosé. The alcohol meant that Keisha had completed her interviews with Sally Anne’s co-workers.

The interviews were standard procedure. I studied the disturbed individuals who threatened my clients. Over the years, I’d collected thousands of their written letters and emails, the contents of their mailed packages, photos and videos of their various crimes and obsessions, and records of the bizarre things they’d said or done. It was all shipped to a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland, sorted in file cabinets, put on display shelves, hung on the walls, and analyzed. (I’d taken Sarah there one day. She’d suggested I rent the space out for Halloween parties.)

We ordered and the waiter left. I summarized my search for Jeremy Crane, finishing with the medicine cabinet’s contents. “The drug I found treats a range of psychotic mental disorders, so we can’t be sure that Jeremy is schizophrenic, but most people who take Olanzapine are.”

Keisha nibbled on a breadstick. “Strange coincidence, huh? First Sally, now Jeremy.”

She didn’t know about me, of course, or the possibility that a man with a feverish mind had beheld nothing more in Jeremy Crane’s medicine cabinet than a bottle of aspirin.

“It’s nothing, Keisha. One in every hundred people is schizophrenic. That’s a lot, if you think about it. If you live in a city, you pass by them every day, on the street. Work for a big company, you’ll have schizophrenic co-workers. Take a crowded commercial jetliner, there will be two or three schizophrenics aboard, statistically speaking.”

“Guess you’re right,” she said, tooth-picking an olive.

“Of course I am. But it doesn’t matter. Because this particular coincidence has my intestines twisted into balloon animals. Tomorrow, I’m going to see Sally Anne Bilchik. Now tell me what you’ve just learned about her.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Seven