Free Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) by Shelley Singer

food factory is like a thumb nail on a thumb.”
    A very pristine thumb nail. “Do you make the little pills here?”
    He shook his head. “We send them out to be pressed and bottled. Of course, powders are the coming thing, bigger than pills.”
    “It doesn’t look like you’re working on anything right now.”
    He turned out the light and relocked the door as we left. “You’re right. I don’t get much time in there anymore. We’re just keeping the old product line on an even keel these days. I’ve even sent some work out to consulting labs. I’ve become a manager.” He sighed.
    We were walking down the hall again, past some unmarked doors. “Offices,” he explained. The idea of offices clearly bored him.
    “Which one is Noah’s?”
    He pushed open a door and showed me a room that looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
    “I’m afraid his office won’t help you much,” Durell said. “He hasn’t used it in months.”
    “I’d like to take a look, if it’s okay with you.”
    “Sure, go ahead.”
    The desk was empty. The file cabinet was full of purchase orders.
    We walked on. “So,” I said, “he hasn’t been around in months? Since he started work on the arks?”
    Durell did a half-grin. “We’ve had a few meetings. He’s been coming by every couple of weeks to look through his mail.” We stopped in front of a swinging double door. He pushed in and we entered what looked like the guts of the business, a series of big, interconnected rooms stuffed with conveyor belts and machinery.
    “This first room, here,” he said, “is where we make our flavored rice nectars. It starts out right over there, with those boilers and kettles. First you boil the rice and then it goes into that big blender over there…” He pointed at something that looked like a large industrial vacuum cleaner. “That breaks down one of the chains of the carbohydrates and liquefies it. Then it goes back into a kettle and the starter’s pumped in. See what we’re doing here is making the first stage of sake. It’s fermented, but it’s nonalcoholic. It’s called amazake. I tell you, those Asians… anyway, that breaks down more of the carbohydrates, makes it sweet— just from what’s in the grain.” He pointed to two huge vats. “It goes and sits in those overnight. It’s agitated and temperature-regulated. Then it’s pasteurized, and the bran gets sieved out over there.” I had begun to drift into a fantasy of Noah’s body being disposed of in these vats, cooked, packaged, run along a conveyor belt… “Then it gets pumped over to that tank, where the flavoring is added— we did some apricot yesterday— and then it gets pumped over to that big fellow over there.”
    I snapped myself back to attention to look at his “carousel filler,” a collection of funnels where the glop was dropped into the bottles, plastic ones, which were then machine-capped. A conveyor belt took the little soldiers over to another work area, where the still-hot nectar was dropped into a cold water bath.
    “After that,” he said, “we put the labels on and put the whole batch in one of those refrigerators over there.” I followed him along the conveyor-belt trail to another machine. “Here’s where we slap the labels on,” he said. He reached into a carton, pulled out a roll of labels and tore one off, backing and all. “Souvenir?” he smiled. It was the label for Yellow Brick Farms’ Apricot-flavored Rice Nectar. Pretty. A rosy-cheeked, slightly Asian-looking farm girl holding a bushel basket full of apricots. I hate apricots. I thanked him and pocketed the piece of paper.
    He pointed through a door to another room. “We do the dried fruits in there. Want to have a look at that?”
    “Thanks a lot,” I said, “but I have a few more things I wanted to talk to you about.” He looked disappointed. “You sound like you really miss Noah’s presence around here.”
    “Sure I do. We’re a good team. Oh, I can