The Oxygen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  I wondered if Rose noticed that I hadn’t pushed the button for my floor, three above hers. Now alone in the elevator, I pushed L for lobby. I didn’t know if Matt was in our room, and I didn’t want to know, until I’d done one more errand, even though it was already past daylight.

  On the street again, I rewrapped my old-fashioned, plain wool scarf around my neck and headed north to Lori’s building on West Forty-eighth. Matt had told me Lori was going to spend another night with her friend in Queens. I had no intention of going up in her elevator, but I wanted another look around the outside area, without Lori, and without a uniformed sentry.

  Rounding the corner from Eighth Avenue, I could see that there was no cop outside. I walked up the street, nearly as deserted as on Sunday morning since there were few theatrical performances on Monday evenings. I surveyed the building. When I got to the alley, I slipped in.

  And someone else slipped out, knocking me into the brick wall. No apology, no ’scuse me. Whoever had been in the alley didn’t want to share it with me. I caught only a shadowy glimpse of the person, the impression of someone tall and not too heavy. He or she had been close enough to leave a scent. Not the odor you’d expect from an alley dweller, however, but a fruity perfume. A woman? If so, a lady who worked out. I rubbed my shoulder where it had been smashed against the wall.

  No time for nursing wounds, however. I had work to do.

  I fished around in my purse for the small flashlight I always carried and tracked the edge of the alley closest to the building. Where the police might have missed a centimeter or two, I told myself. In my daydreams I saw a piece of incontrovertible evidence pointing toward the killer. A piece of his jacket with his name stenciled at the neck, the way we used to identify our lab coats. A gun or a knife (so what if Amber wasn’t shot or stabbed) with fingerprints matching a known killer of young women. A date book or a cell phone with fingerprints the same as above.

  That was my imagination. In reality, all I saw was several bits of bright tinfoil, in red, gold, and green. From wrapping paper? This is dumb, I told myself, stuffing one tiny red scrap into an outside pocket of my purse. Maybe just not to leave empty-handed.

  Or maybe I needed something to fill that empty spot where Karla’s letter had been.

  Matt and I sat in our tiny hotel room, in what had become our conversation positions: Matt partly on the windowsill, partly on the heating and cooling unit, me on the bed. It was dark, and I could see into an office across West Forty-fifth Street where what appeared to be a holiday party was going on. Trays of food, bottles of wine or champagne, and everyone wearing red Santa hats. I had a flash of nostalgia as I remembered parties from my lab life around this time of year, when the chemists from the next building would whip up a nameless pink brew with a “secret” ingredient that we suspected was denatured alcohol. Old Rad (for radiation) Lab, it was called, and drink at your own risk was the operative greeting.

  “We’re all set,” Matt said, magnanimously including himself in the problem that needed to be settled in the first place.

  I took a breath that seemed to start at my feet and flow smoothly through my body. It was as if I’d been holding my breath for the whole day, and now pure oxygen was free to move around inside me. My stomach muscles, sore from tension, relaxed. This must be what it feels like to hear a not-guilty verdict, I thought. Even though I am guilty.

  “Do I want to know what you had to go through to make this go away?” I asked Matt.

  “You do, but you’re not going to.” Matt seemed calm, so I guessed he hadn’t had to sell his soul, at least.

  “I understand.” I figured Matt didn’t quite trust me not to do something like this again if I thought there was a simple procedure to get me off the hook.

  I had so many questions for him. Was the Tina Miller Agency going to get its letter back? Matt had taken it from me in the bookstore café. I wished I’d made a photocopy, although I realized that went against my firm purpose of amending my life. I was dying to know if the police would tell Tina it had been stolen, and who stole it.

  Chasing all my unanswered questions for Matt around my brain, I wasn’t ready for one from him.

  “Would you be willing to talk to Buzz about ozone?” Matt asked.

  I blinked hard and stared at him. “Ozone? Me? I . . . talk to Buzz? Your cop friend?” I couldn’t have stuttered more if my lips had been swollen from some bad calamari at Zio Giovanni’s.

  Matt laughed and slapped his thigh. “I thought that would get you. Only because I know you, I’m taking that as a yes.”

  After what I’d put him through, he deserved a “gotcha” moment. He’d not only kept me from a trip upstate to Sing Sing, he’d gotten me a gig doing what I love to do: talk science to an audience who cared—or, at least, needed to know.

  “How did you manage that?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, well, as I told you, I had some news about Amber’s case. A couple of things. First, it’s looking like Amber was involved in some kind of blackmailing scheme. Buzz might tell us more, but it’s kind of simple, really. Instead of reporting back to the PI agency with her photos or what-have-you, Amber turned around and blackmailed the people she caught.”

  “Wouldn’t the agency get suspicious, unless they were in on it?”

  “Not if she spread things out, I guess, and chose her victims wisely. It’s not clear yet how clean the agency is.”

  I pictured Tina Miller behind her desk. She seemed no-nonsense, honestly working hard to make her business successful. So she ran a very clean agency, was my guess, but I didn’t want to dwell on that phase of the case.

  Matt continued. “The second thing is that the uniforms found a letter when they searched Amber’s apartment that could have something to do with ozone. They need some help deciphering what Lori’s video is all about and what Amber may have learned. They’re not about to ask Lori because . . . well, she’s not completely ruled out, since it was her loft and all.” He waved his hand. “Not that’s she’s a viable suspect.”

  “No, no, but she might not know all the technical details of what Amber could have uncovered.”

  “Exactly. So I told Buzz about the work you do for the Revere PD, and he thought it was a good idea to talk to you.”

  “Really? The NYPD?”

  “You act as though it’s a promotion.”

  “No, I—”

  “Just because they’re about thirty-nine thousand times bigger?”

  I leaned over and kissed him. “They don’t have you.”

  The revelers in the office across the street were toasting each other. I thought I also saw a couple by the water cooler in an extra-long mistletoe embrace. I wished I’d brought mistletoe for our room, but it turned out we didn’t need it.

  CHAPTER ELEEN

  I fingered the NYPD VISITOR badge dangling at my waist and wondered if I could keep it as a souvenir. Yesterday, as a potential felon, I’d dreaded the idea of facing the NYPD; today, as a science teacher, I relished it. Matt and I sat at Buzz Arnold’s desk in his precinct house. I guessed Matt gained a new appreciation for his semiprivate office at the Revere PD. Buzz’s desk was one of six in a room meant to hold three comfortably.

  A young woman who appeared to serve as secretary sat by the door at a gray metal desk, much like the government-issue furniture I’d written my lab reports on for decades. She wore a nubby yellow-green sweater with a strangely skewed collar. The buttons started just above her left armpit, ran across her throat, and ended close to the right shoulder. The sweater was open most of the way, causing the buttonhole placket to drape to her chest. Studying New York fashion for a few days, I’d come to the conclusion that symmetry was out this year.

  Buzz, short and stocky, looked enough like Matt to be his brother, except for his haircut, which I supposed had given rise to his nickname.

  I was introduced to several other nicknames—a Flip, a Bones (not a skinny man, leading me to all kinds of gruesome images of how he earned the soubr
iquet), and a CJ—and one plain Greg, all of whom continued to work on phones, computers, and fax machines in the busy office area. From the position of our chairs, Matt and I could as well have been meeting with Flip or Bones, so close were we to their desks.

  The precinct’s general run-down condition—peeling paint, battered furniture, scratched linoleum floor—matched that of Matt’s RPD building, but his department had recently qualified for a Massachusetts state grant for physical improvements. I thought this precinct would qualify if New York had such a program.

  “Dr. Lamerino. Very pleased to meet you,” Buzz said. Meetcha. I wondered if the stereotypical New York accent was for the benefit of visitors. I knew Buzz was originally from Revere.

  “It’s Gloria, please. And thank you for inviting me.” For not arresting me.

  “Yeah, I’m hoping you can fill me in on this ozone-oxygen thing. I figure I should find out about this stuff before I have to drag a tank of it around with me, huh?” Buzz paused to laugh at his remark. “So, start from the beginning, okay?”

  Music to my ears, in whatever accent.

  There was no desk in our hotel room, and the tiny nightstand didn’t have space for anything as big as letterhead stationery, so I’d stopped at a big Duane Reade drugstore after dinner and picked up a pad of paper and a package of markers.

  I had to decide how much I could get away with as a tutorial on oxygen. When I was in school, the atomic weight of oxygen was used as a standard of comparison for each of the other elements. Now the carbon-12 isotope was used. I didn’t think Buzz would care about standards set by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, though, so I skipped instead to a few basic properties of oxygen.

  Buzz had pulled a flat slide-out panel from his desk to give me a writing surface. I flexed my fingers and started with an 8.

  “Oxygen is number eight in the periodic table.” I tried to keep the textbook sound out of my voice. Hard as it was to acknowledge, I realized no one in the NYPD came to work in the morning looking forward to a science lesson. “It’s a gaseous element, colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and forms about twenty percent of our atmosphere.” I wrote 20% and paused. “I don’t want to repeat things you already know. Is this sounding familiar? From high school chemistry, maybe?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I mean no, no, but go on.”

  “What we care about here is one particular form of oxygen, called ozone, which is really just three oxygen atoms connected like this.”

  I drew a picture of the ozone molecule, using a traditional ball-and-stick approach. I uttered a silent apology to my scientist friends who spent their lives trying to introduce newer, holistic models, which were more accurate but not as easy to sketch.

  “The black circles represent oxygen atoms.”

  “Got it.”

  “Unlike oxygen alone, ozone has a strong and irritating odor—the word ‘ozone’ comes from a Greek word meaning to smell—and ozone is corrosive and toxic.”

  “Not good. So why do we care if it’s depleted, as they say?”

  “Here’s the funny thing about ozone. It’s not good if we’re breathing it in down here at ground level, but up there”—I pointed in the general direction of the stratosphere—“it acts like a shield protecting us from ultraviolet light from the sun. Also, up there it occurs naturally. Down here, we have to make it. Any kind of electrical discharge in the air will turn some of the oxygen to ozone.”

  “Like lightning?”

  “Yes, lightning produces ozone, and so does a discharge from arc welding. For the arc welder, she or he is close to the source of the ozone and likely to breathe in harmful amounts unless proper ventilation and safeguards are used.”

  “Got it.”

  “Which is why welding is one of the industries Lori is going after in her documentary,” I said. “If the workers aren’t protected properly, they’re subject to respiratory diseases that can even be fatal. There are regulatory guidelines from OSHA that companies may or may not pay attention to.”

  “Why wouldn’t they pay attention?” Buzz asked, then immediately hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Never mind. Stupid question. Let me count the ways companies can get around laws of any kind.”

  “Right. This is not that different from any other abuse of workers or the environment. Lori hopes to target companies that don’t have safeguards in place, or ones that pay off an inspector, or . . . well, I’m sure you know this end of it better than I do.”

  “Okay, this is getting clearer,” Buzz said. “But check this out. See that?” He waved in the direction of a device, less than a foot wide, mounted near the ceiling, in a corner of the room. “They tell me it’s an ozone generator to purify the air. It was put in a while back when some of us were still smoking, and there was also this mold buildup in the building. We still keep it there, because, you know, we don’t attract the most hygiene-conscious individuals.”

  Matt laughed, apparently reminding Buzz of his presence.

  Buzz pointed an invisible gun at Matt. “Present company excluded, huh, Mattie?”

  Mattie? This was the week for new nicknames. First honey, then Mattie.

  “You bet,” Matt said.

  “That baby cost more than a new Beretta, with ammo.” He turned and pointed to another metal box mounted on the ceiling a few feet away. “Okay, now see that? We have a second unit to make sure there’s not too much ozone coming from the first unit. See what I’m talking about? Now you tell me, this ozone, if we need to monitor it, why are we pumping it in, in the first place?”

  “It’s a tricky balance.”

  “Like a lot of things, huh?”

  Oh-oh. Was this a warning to me that I’d better keep my distance from police work? I was being overly sensitive to the close call I’d had over Karla’s letter. I needed to focus on the lesson.

  “Let me sketch out how ozone cleans the air,” I said, “which is what the first unit does.”

  I looked around the office area. In a flight of fancy I thought I might have the attention of Flip and Bones and all the other officers present, but in fact they’d all moved out of the room. I hoped it was just coffee break time and nothing I’d said. In my dreams I was standing at an easel, lecturing to the squad, using the little laser pointer that was another staple of my purse, taking the place of lipstick and powder.

  I needed to be satisfied with my audience of two.

  “Because of its chemical structure, a single atom of oxygen is unstable—that means it wants to combine with something else. It’s almost always found in pairs, what we call a diatomic form, where it’s more stable.

  “So ozone, with three atoms, is also not very stable. It wants to return to the paired state by giving up an oxygen atom. That’s the property that makes it a good disinfectant: It’s called oxidizing. It kills undesirable microorganisms in water or air. Think of it as burning up the foreign particle.”

  Buzz nudged the pad closer to me. “Show me.”

  One of my favorite requests from a student. I drew an irregular shape next to one of the ozone atoms.

  “Suppose this is a dust atom,” I said, “or a particle of smoke.” I drew an arrow from the ozone atom over to the pollutant atom. “The ozone molecule wants to be stable, to go back to being just diatomic oxygen, so at the first opportunity, it joins the pollutant atom, and they essentially destroy each other, and that leaves just the diatomic oxygen molecule, which is stable and pure and—”

  “Thus you have rid the air of the smoke or dust particle,” Buzz said.

  I loved when my students interrupted me with the right answer. “See how easy that was? You can see how great ozone is as a disinfectant. Better than other cleansers or treatment options, like bleach, because the ozone molecule essentially vanishes without a trace.”

  “Why didn’t my high school chemistry teacher explain it this way?” Buzz asked.

  “She probably did,” Matt said. “Only you had your mind on other things.”

&n
bsp; Buzz took out his invisible gun again. “Right you are, Mattie. Hey, Gloria, I think I have just the right Yogi quote for you.” He threw back his shoulders. A baseball stance? I wouldn’t know. “ ‘You can observe a lot just by watching.’ ”

  I laughed, warming up to Yogi Berra, though not ready to put him in the class of the great philosophers of physics. I made a mental note to have a Heisenberg quote ready for the next time I met Buzz.

  “Just to finish up,” I said, after a decent interval, but not about to abandon my lesson. “What that first unit up there does is generate ozone, through some application of high voltage. But you have to monitor just how much ozone you produce—”

  Buzz held up his hand. “You don’t want to produce more ozone than you can use—say there’s not as much dust in the room as you thought—and have it lingering in the air, breathing it in.”

  I smiled at Buzz and Matt. “My work here is done,” I said.

  “So I get an A, teach?”

  “She’s an easy grader,” Matt said.

  “Okay, let’s see if we can relate this to your niece’s project, Mattie. She’s basically looking for companies that aren’t following the guidelines for how much ozone can be in the air down here, right?”

  “As I understand it, she’s working both ends of the problem,” Matt said. “The down here part and the up there part.” He put quote marks in the air around the two parts. Then he made a gesture to me to continue his thought.

  “Eventually Lori will produce a video on CFCs and the depletion of the ozone layer.” I pointed up there.

  Buzz sat back, put his hands behind his head, and frowned at me, as if I’d tricked him and he might now have to give back the excellent grade I’d awarded him.

  “We can do that another time,” I said.

  It might have been my imagination, but as soon as I put my pad and pen away, the other detectives wandered back into the room.