“He’s coming this way,” Pete said, motioning to his friends to back away. The three of them ducked around to the other side of the car pile, trying to stay out of sight.
“He probably wants to get into Juliet’s car — just like we do,” Jupe said.
Suddenly they heard a bottle break followed by a sharp crackling sound. Pete didn’t look out again until he smelled the smoke. When he looked, he saw Mr. Sweetness tossing a second Molotov cocktail into Juliet’s car.
“He’s destroying the evidence!” Pete said frantically.
“So that’s it,” Jupe said. “He doesn’t want what’s in the car. He just wants to make sure we don’t get it!”
“If there’s still gas in the tank, that car will go off like a skyrocket!” Pete said.
As soon as the flames took hold, Mr. Sweetness ran for his Porsche at the entrance of the junkyard. Pete started to follow, but Bob and Jupe held him back.
“Never mind him,” Bob said, grabbing Pete’s arm forcefully. “We’ve got to get into that trunk!”
“Quick, before Juliet’s car burns up!” Jupe added.
“Explodes, you mean!” Bob said.
Pete took one look at Juliet’s flaming car and flew into action. He raced around the junkyard, looking in open car trunks and digging through piles. Finally he found what he needed — an old crowbar. Then he rushed to Juliet’s bombed-out Mustang. The flames had already eaten away most of the interior and were working their way toward the back — where the gas tank was.
Sweat flew off Pete’s forehead as he applied the crowbar to the trunk, all the while keeping an eye on the flames. Finally the trunk lid gave up and sprang open.
“Got it!” Pete called triumphantly as he reached inside and pulled out a soft brown leather briefcase. He waved it in the air for Jupe and Bob to see. “Let’s get out of here before this thing blows!” he cried.
Jupe smiled. “Being very familiar with the rules and regulations of junkyards, I know for a fact that gas tanks of wrecked cars are drained,” he said to Bob. “The car’s not going to blow up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Pete asked, giving Jupe an exasperated glare.
“I knew by the time I’d convinced you it was really safe, the car would have burned up,” Jupe said. “You work better when your raw instincts take over.”
“Thanks a lot.” Pete groaned.
After calling an ambulance, Jupe, Bob, and Pete hung around to make certain that Dick Miller was going to be all right.
“I always heard you guys were detectives,” Dick Miller said. “But I didn’t know you investigated bombers and stuff like that.”
“It’s not always this rough,” Jupe said with an apologetic smile.
Then they hurried to Big Barney’s mansion, where Juliet and Kelly were waiting for them. Big Barney himself was out and not expected home until late.
“Did you find anything?” the two anxious girls said at once as they opened the front door.
Jupe merely held up the briefcase as evidence of the morning’s adventure.
Juliet smiled and led the way into the living room, where Jupe laid the briefcase down on the glass coffee table. Eagerly she unzipped the front compartment and pulled out her blue morocco-leather appointment book. She turned to the page that listed her plans for that fateful Friday — the day of her accident, the day that was so blank in her memory.
“Here it is,” she said, breathing quickly.
She stared at the page for a minute and then shook her head. “All it says for the whole day is R&D.”
“That’s Research and Development, Pandro Mishkin’s department, isn’t it?” Jupe said. “Why would you have been meeting with him?”
“I was spending a whole day in each department, to learn the business,” Juliet said. “But I don’t remember anything more.”
“Maybe you will when you see what else is inside the briefcase,” Jupe urged.
Juliet opened the back leather flap and found a three-ring binder with about two hundred xeroxed pages in it. She took it out and flipped through the pages for a few minutes, then dropped it and shrugged. “I don’t recognize this material,” she said. It was clear that she had been counting on getting her memory of the accident back when the briefcase was found. She was terribly disappointed.
“Do you mind if I have a look?” Jupe said. He picked up the notebook. Pandro Mishkin’s name was stamped on the first page. Quickly Jupe scanned the report.
After reading silently for a few minutes, Jupe looked up and addressed the room.
“I believe I can now reconstruct much of what must have happened two Fridays ago, the night of Juliet’s accident,” he began. “This is Pandro Mishkin’s copy of a report about a food additive called Multisorbitane. It was invented by Don Dellasandro several years ago. In the summary it says that Multisorbitane, as a food enhancer, makes foods taste remarkably better and more intense — but there’s a catch. It makes food so good, in fact, it’s nearly addicting.”
“Is that the catch?” Bob asked.
“Surprisingly, it isn’t,” Jupe said. “The FDA — the Federal Food and Drug Administration — tested Multisorbitane, as it must test all new drugs and products of this nature. But it denied Don Dellasandro permission to market Multisorbitane because it found strong evidence that it might be a carcinogen.”
“A what?” asked Pete.
“It could cause cancer,” Bob explained.
Jupe cleared his throat and continued. “We know that you met with Pandro Mishkin on the Friday of your accident. And we know that you have his copy of this incriminating report in your possession. Now we move from what we know,” he said, tapping the report, “to what we think we know. I suspect that you discovered this report, perhaps by accident, sometime during your visit to Mishkin’s office. Considering the time of your accident, I’d say it was late in the day when you found it. And when you did, I think it upset you quite a bit,” Jupe said.
Jupe was pacing now, going into high gear. “I think it upset you so much that you took it from Pandro Mishkin’s office and fled. He probably chased you to get it back. And when you left the Chicken Coop Corp. building in your car, I think that Pandro Mishkin followed you. In short, I believe it was he who was driving the car that left the second set of tracks at the scene of your accident.”
“Time out,” Pete said. “Why did this report upset Juliet so much?”
“Yes, that is the key question, isn’t it?” Jupe said, smiling knowingly. “It upset her because she knew, or suspected, as I do, that Multisorbitane is a key ingredient in a delicious new product called Drippin Chicken!”
Jupe let them all digest that idea for a moment and then he began again. “You discovered the horrible fact that someone—maybe Pandro, maybe Dellasandro, maybe even your father — was knowingly and quite cold-bloodedly putting this poison into Drippin’ Chicken., Of course the effects of the Multisorbitane wouldn’t show up for years. But slowly, over a period of time, millions of people who had regularly eaten this carcinogen would begin to get cancer. No one would realize the danger until it was too late.”
Juliet’s mouth was trembling. “My father wouldn’t do something like
