Turbo Twenty-Three (Stephanie Plum #23)(15)

“No. The truck was loaded Monday morning. Half the truck was filled with pints of assorted flavors. The other half was filled with Bogart Bars. It should have left in the early afternoon, but the driver got sick and couldn’t make his run, so the truck sat at the loading dock. It’s speculated that the driver was poisoned. He’s okay now, but he went down fast with food-poisoning symptoms. When the night guard made his first run at nine o’clock, someone took off with the truck.”

“Virgil?”

“Don’t know. Virgil is in the wind. Morelli will know more. He’ll have access to CSI reports. My job isn’t to solve the crime. My job is to make sure the crimes don’t continue.”

“Yes, but don’t you need to solve the crime to do this?”

“It’s not clear if this murder relates to the other crimes.” Ranger pointed at three pipes with valves and dials on the far wall. “The cream gets pumped out of tanker trucks into refrigerated silos on the outside of the building. The silos empty into the pipes you see on the wall, and the cream flows into the pasteurization vat. After pasteurization it gets pumped through a homogenizer and then through a plate cooler and finally into another vat to be further cooled for storage. After that it’s flash frozen to the consistency of soft-serve.”

“What about the different flavors? And how does it get to be a Bogart Bar?”

“For the most part the flavors are added during the first cooling process. Bogart Bars have their own line. I’ll walk you down to it. There’s also a line that packages the ice cream. You’ll see all that in action tomorrow.”

The Bogart Bar line stretched almost the length of the room. Even without the machines running, the process was pretty clear. The soft ice cream was extruded into molds, and the molds were moved into a stainless steel box with a dial on the outside.

“The freezer, right?” I said.

“Right. The ice cream is flash frozen into bars. The bars move through the system to the chocolate machine where they’re entirely encased in liquid chocolate. Excess chocolate drains off, the bars pass through the machine that covers them with nuts, and then they’re frozen again.”

I was standing next to the chocolate machine. “How does the chocolate get into this big contraption?” I asked Ranger.

“There’s a ladder on the other side. The machine is sealed while it’s running, but there’s a hatch on the top for adding ingredients. And the entire lid can come off for cleaning.”

“It seems to me that dunking someone in here would be at least a two-man job.”

Ranger nodded. “And it would be messy.”

“So maybe the dead man was chocolate coated somewhere else?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Like at a rival ice cream baron’s plant?”

“I haven’t seen Morris’s setup, but I doubt he would contaminate his own chocolate vat by dumping a dead man in it.”

“Good point. So maybe Harry Bogart didn’t need to scour his whole plant.”

“He had no way of knowing if any of the equipment had been compromised.” Ranger pointed to the row of offices. “Bogart has the large corner office. He also has offices elsewhere in the building. The deceased was four offices down from Bogart. The test kitchen is in the double office at the far end. There are more offices and storage in a separate wing. The main entrance and reception area are also in that wing.”

“So you’re thinking that Zigler, the human resources guy, was shot and frozen someplace off-site. Then he would have been chocolate covered and sprinkled with nuts and put back in a freezer.”

“Correct.”

“The killer has a really big freezer.”

“The deceased was five feet ten inches. There are some home chest freezers that could hold him, but it’s more likely the killer had access to a commercial freezer.”

“The killer also had access to the freezer truck.”

“Everyone had access to the freezer truck. It was sitting at the loading dock, plugged into electric with the freezer unit running.”

“I imagine you’re suggesting he install a gated, razor-wire fence.”

“Razor wire would be an option, but the area around the loading dock should definitely be fenced and gated. And he needs security cameras not only for security but also for liability.”

“And he’s willing to spend the money?”

“Apparently. He’s resisted in the past because he’s been afraid it would tarnish the innocent image of his ice cream.”

I was all in favor of keeping the image of ice cream innocent. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed for me when the head of human resources for Bogart Ice Cream was murdered and covered in chocolate. As much as I wanted to wipe the image of the dead man from my mind, I also wanted to find the person who killed him. Murder is ugly. And this murder felt especially ugly to me. It felt personal. I was there when Arnold Zigler fell out of the truck and crashed to the ground. I saw him covered in chocolate and nuts, and I didn’t like it. The more I thought about it the angrier I got. It was disrespectful to Arnold Zigler, and I know this is shallow, but some immoral creep had ruined a childhood treasure for me. Bogart Bars were now tied to a vision of a grisly murder.

The human resources office had yellow crime scene tape stuck to the locked door. Ranger peeled the tape off and used a slim lock pick to open the door.