Lisa Scottoline - Save Me

“Thanks, but I’ve driven a long way. Does she have an assistant, or someone else I can talk to?”

“No, Trish handles all press relations personally.”

Rose tried another tack. “Can I speak with someone in production, perhaps a supervisor on the line? I’d love to speak with someone who’d give me the inside track.”

“Sorry, that’s not our policy, and it’s Group Day today, so there’s no admittance to the plant if you’re not with a group. Now, would you like to make an appointment for next week? May I take your phone number and she’ll get back to you?”

“No thanks, that’s past my deadline.” Rose wanted to get out while the getting was good. “I’ll call again. Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you,” the receptionist said, and Rose turned and headed for the door. She hit the sidewalk, breathed in the cooked potato aromas, and walked to the car, preoccupied. She wasn’t sure what to do next, but she still wanted to know about Mojo and Bill Gigot’s accident. The company would probably have had to file all sorts of accident reports, but she didn’t know how to get them. Being a fake reporter could only take her so far.

“Line up, Jake!” one of the teachers shouted to the mob of kids. “Guys, come on! Behave, here we go!”

Rose threaded her way through the excited children as the teachers and moms wrangled them like runaway calves. A team of Homestead employees helped corral them for the factory tour.

“Excuse me,” one of the employees called to Rose. “Aren’t you with Holy Redeemer? You’re all signed in and your group is leaving now!”

“Me?” Rose answered, then caught herself. She couldn’t get into the factory otherwise, and she wanted to learn more about the loading dock area, where Bill Gigot had been killed. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

Rose was herded through a crowded gift shop that contained Homestead snacks, T-shirts, baseball caps, key chains, cookbooks, and stuffed-toy potato chips. The store narrowed like a funnel at the back, into a hallway that reverberated with the noise of excited kids.

“The theater is this way!” called out a ponytailed Homestead employee. “We’re gonna see a movie!”

Rose had no choice but to go with the flow, though the last thing she needed was to watch a corporate video with talking potato chips. Luckily, it lasted only twelve minutes, which was the average attention span of a six-year-old and a mom trying to solve a murder.

“Follow me, I’m Linda!” the ponytailed employee called out, and the group was herded down one hallway and another. The kids giggled, pointed, and pushed each other, and Rose decided there was a special place in heaven reserved for teachers and moms who chaperoned on field trips.

“First, the pretzel factory, then the potato chip factory!” Linda called out, taking them into a wide hallway that had floor-to-ceiling plastic windows, providing a complete view onto the factory floor, two stories below. The Holy Redeemer group merged with two other school groups already there, and Rose breathed easier, since all the moms would think she was with one of the other groups.

Linda started her spiel. “So, Homestead Snacks started with the Allen family and today it’s a multi-national food producer, which owns seventy-five hundred acres of land in Reesburgh, including the Reesburgh Motor Inn, Reesburgh Visitor Center, the Potato Museum, and other things.”

Seventy-five hundred acres? Rose looked over at Linda, amazed. That was practically the whole county.

“Homestead employs almost four thousand people in its Reesburgh headquarters, and many more in its thirty-five branches throughout the Mid-Atlantic states.” Linda gestured to the window. “Here you see the first step of our pretzel baking, which is when the dough goes into the kneader, gets mixed up, and is extruded, which means pushed through…”

Rose tuned her out, eyeing the factory floor, below. It was a large, well-lit space, filled with huge lines of stainless steel equipment. The walls were white cinderblock, and the floor a dull red industrial tile. Oddly, there were only six employees, performing various tasks in their yellow jumpsuits, earplugs, and hairnets.

Linda asked, “Any questions before we move on?”

Rose caught her eye. “You have so many employees, but there are only six for this whole pretzel operation. Is that typical?”

“Good question!” Linda answered, officially perky. “Most of our employees are route drivers, and we have a fleet of one thousand trucks and vans on the road. And the machinery does all the baking, so our employees don’t have to slave away in those hot temperatures. Also, you’re seeing only a third of our plant employees at any one time, because we work around the clock, on three shifts; 6-2, 2-10, and the night shift, 10-6.”

Rose wondered how many people would have seen what happened the night Bill Gigot was killed. “Do the same number of employees work on each shift?”

“No, many fewer work the night shift. Now, let’s go!” Linda shuttled them to another window that showed superwide belts of uncooked pretzels moving slowly into a large oven.

“What are those things?” asked a little boy with glasses, pointing to red hoses that came from the production machines.

“Those are wires. Now, before we see the potato chips, we have a few offices to pass and we’ll go by them quickly. Here’s the office of our Quality Assurance Manager.” Linda pointed through the window at an older woman in a hairnet and labcoat. “That lady eats potato chips five times a day. Who wants her job?” The kids hollered, and Linda hustled them ahead. “This is the office of our Director of Safety. As you see, all of our employees wear hairnets and earplugs, and there’s even hairnets for beards!”

The kids erupted into laughter, but Rose was thinking that it was Mojo’s former office, a small box of white cinderblock with a cluttered desk. No one was inside. She asked, “Does the Director of Safety make rounds at night, to check on things?”

“I’m sure he does.” Linda smiled in a pat way that let Rose know her welcome was wearing thin. “Now, let’s move along to our packing operation and warehouse.” She ushered them past the office that read DIRECTOR OF SECURITY and onto a second-floor deck, which overlooked an expanse of floor-to-ceiling Homestead boxes.

“See all these boxes?” Linda took her place at the window. “They go for blocks and blocks! All these boxes will get shipped out tomorrow, not only all over the United States, but to Latin America, Mexico, Jamaica, and the Caribbean, too. You see that number on the side of the box? We know where every ingredient in the pretzels came from, where we bought the yeast, flour, salt, and malt, following strict FDA regulations.”

“I have a question.” Rose raised a hand. Julie had said that Bill Gigot worked in the peanut building, whatever that meant. “Is there a peanut building here, that’s separate? My older son has mild peanut allergies, and I understand you make peanut butter crackers.”

Another mother nodded. “My son has a peanut allergy, too. Very severe. We have to watch everything, or he goes into anaphylactic shock. He and another child have to eat alone at school, in the classroom. If they even breathe peanut butter, they could die.”

A third mother added, “My daughter has a gluten allergy. It’s a lot of trouble, but at least it’s not lethal.” The rest of the mothers started talking about their kids with soy and other allergies, and Linda raised her hand to get a word in edgewise.

“To answer your question, we do not use any peanuts in the preparation of our products, and they’re all peanut-safe. We provide an extensive list of which of our products are allergen-free, soy-free, and gluten-free, and we also make kosher products, which are certified under kosher laws.”