Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  MC had taken advantage of a middle-of-the-night phone call that kept her mother busy for a few minutes. Probably Aunt G, since the call came in on the family’s private line. She’d slipped down the back stairs and out of the house.

  MC needed to see her emails, and her parents, the last of the Luddites, had no home computer. Anyway, there was no need to upset her family. They were only trying to protect her.

  But MC needed action. No more reminiscing in her old bedroom, with its overabundance of nostalgia. Enough staring at the walls that still held her Duran Duran posters. Her mother had turned Robert’s room into a sewing area and John’s into a den for her father, but had left MC’s nest nearly intact.

  “My boys have their own bedrooms, in our same zip code,” Rose had said. “My daughter needs a place to come home to.”

  Often enough over the years MC had heard how she still looked like a teenager—small-boned, thin face with a boyish haircut. And flat-chested, MC thought with a grimace. She was sure that was the impression she gave tonight, in her latex pants and her nephew William’s shocking blue helmet. MC refrained from curb-jumping; still she knew that if a sleepless Revere resident happened to look out his window, he might think she was a late-night runaway kid tearing through the streets.

  She zipped around the corner of Revere Street and Broadway, sailing past Oxford Park and Pomona Street, where her best girlfriends had lived. Annie, Claire, Valery, Joanie. She remembered how they would all give up potato chips and candy for Lent, then eat double helpings of rubbery packaged cupcakes.

  MC needed to be in her own apartment, to maintain a semblance of independence, even though her landlords were also her parents. And she couldn’t wait another minute to check her email messages for the misdelivered memo, or whatever, that Wayne allegedly crossed the country to warn her about.

  She took a deep breath, relaxing her tight hold on the handlebars. At least it wasn’t Jake who’d followed her from Texas. MC touched her cheek. It wasn’t as though Jake had bruised her or anything. Except her ego. And it was only once or twice that he’d slapped her. Lightly. Still it killed her to lie to Aunt G. She should have told her the truth, but it was too embarrassing. A smart girl from a loving family, salutatorian of her class, a graduate degree in chemical engineering, a great career, and she’d let some jerk knock her around. Maaaaa would never have stood for that, nor Aunt G.

  She remembered wonderful summers in California when she was little. Aunt G had always treated her like a grown-up, introduced her to scientists and engineers and programmers. Dr. Karen this, and Dr. Annmarie that. A little too obvious—they might as well have worn signs saying FEMALE SCIENTIST ROLE MODELS, but MC had loved it. Especially an all-nighter one time with Dr. Marcia, who’d let her help change spectrometer plates every half hour through the night, and write the data on gray graph paper with blue lines.

  MC slammed her fist against the handlebar. Damn. All those strong women in her life, plus the gentlest of fathers and brothers, and she’d let them all down. For a loser. Maybe living near her family again would give her a new start, get her out of the depression she couldn’t shake. She was ninety percent of the way to being over Jake, ninety percent toward chalking it up as a temporary lapse in judgment.

  She pushed ahead on William’s bike, deliberately overworking her calf muscles until they ached.

  Wayne Gallen had said the email was incriminating. To whom? She hadn’t looked at her computer since her return. Once she got serious with her computer, she reasoned, she’d have to look for a job, and she wasn’t ready for that. Life Plans was too big a category to handle, but now she was curious about what could have driven Wayne across the country. He’d refused to give her details.

  MC slowed down to make the turn onto Tuttle Street. Her plan was to ride the entire length of the one-way street to check for strange cars before doubling back and turning into the mortuary driveway. As if she’d know an enemy car from a friendly one. Or a stranger from a Tuttle Street resident. She hadn’t lived in the neighborhood long enough to tell the difference.

  As she cruised by a new sedan in the shadow of a tree, she had the impression that there was a person, maybe two, slumped in the front seat. She tensed, then let out a long breath. Her loud whoosh cut through the still fall air. Probably a couple of teenagers making out. She knew what that was like.

  But the sedan seemed out of place—the nicest car by far, among the old hatchbacks and pickups parked in the driveways. To play it safe, MC rode through the backyards on her return up the street. If someone were checking everyone who came by, he’d think she was a guy who disappeared into a house at the end of the street. She half rode, half walked the bike around the lawns and vegetable gardens, ending up at the storm door at the rear of the mortuary.

  MC’s hands were clammy, her breath quick, as she dug out her key. She felt as though her body were on alert, sniffing out danger. Like when she heard Jake come through the front door after a few beers with his pals. This time she was in control, she reminded herself. Jake was half a continent away. So why was every hair on her sweaty neck bristling?

  She’d stuck a small flashlight in her waistband and used it now to make her way around the mortuary parlors, mercifully empty of laid-out corpses, to the stairway to the upper floors. Quieter than the elevator, just in case …

  MC entered her third-floor apartment, keeping the flashlight beam low. She looked out the window, saw the sedan still parked under the tree. No sign of life in the vehicle, however. She must have been mistaken the first time.

  Still, she drew her curtains and turned her computer monitor away from the windows. She’d soon find out what Wayne Gallen was talking about, if anything. She had a suspicion that he’d made up the story about the buckyball memo—that really he was simply hot for her, and with Jake out of the picture, saw an opportunity to make his move. Still, it was a long way to come on the off chance … actually, not a chance.

  Wayne could be sweet, but he was way too slow for her. He talked slow, walked slow, thought slow. Drove her crazy by constantly caressing that 1890s mustache, rolling the thin curve of red hair between his fingers. Also, to tell the truth, Wayne was kind of creepy. He did little things for her—brought her a bag of corn chips from the vending machine, wiped off her windshield on a rainy day, helped her out at the copy machine if she was overloaded. You couldn’t fault a guy for behaving like that, but something about the way he looked at her made her uncomfortable. She’d found herself not wanting to be in the lab when it was just the two of them working late.

  MC took a long, cold drink from a bottle of water she’d taken from her neglected, smelly fridge, and maneuvered around a nest of wires to hook up her system. She welcomed the familiar popping sounds as her computer booted up.

  CONNECT. CONTACTING HOST. SENDING LOGIN INFORMATION.

  MC got up and cracked a window to get rid of the odor let loose when she opened her refrigerator. As soon as she straightened out this memo business, she’d clean up her act and go grocery shopping like a normal woman. Watch Friends reruns on TV. Have real friends over for dinner.

  RECEIVING MESSAGE 1 OF 25. 2. 3 …

  She read quickly.

  YOU’VE WON A MERCEDES!

  Delete.

  SEE HEATHER UNZIP!

  Delete.

  MEET SINGLES LIKE YOU!

  Hmm. Maybe I should give this a try. Delete.

  Once she’d cleared the spam, MC scanned the list of To/From, mostly messages from human resources. As if she hadn’t filled out enough forms before terminating her employment at the oil company and the university. A few posts from students in her night class, mostly ones who had Incompletes to work out. She focused on several items from Alex Simpson, the university buckyball project leader, opened each one, read through routine memos on purchases, deadline changes, maintenance schedules, and visiting dignitaries (read venture capitalists with deep pockets).

  The communications on grant money were also innocuous. MC already
knew the team was forging partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. CRADAs, they were called. Cooperative Research and Development Agreements.

  Subject: CRADA milestones

  Subject: Tracking sheet for first quarter

  Subject: New account numbers

  MC sighed. Boring. A reminder of what was waiting for her when she attached herself to another job.

  Subject: CRADA personnel

  Subject: Interviews with new hires

  Subject: Capital equipment budget

  Then, finally an intriguing subject line. She opened the message.

  From: Alexsimpson@hpbp.edu

  To: galig@hpbp.edu

  Subject: Millions of $ in the offing!

  This one sounded like a spam tag line, but the sender was Alex Simpson, so MC opened it.

  We’ve got them hooked. The idea of smart medicines is too good for them to resist. We’ll plug the cancer vaccines first. I’m thinking $100 million in funding to start …

  MC thought of Alex Simpson, a slick chameleon with as many faces as the number of venture capitalists on his list. He’d don an Italian silk suit for a New York CEO, a cowboy hat and a swagger for a wealthy Oklahoma rancher. He had every restaurant in town on hold until he discovered the favorite cuisine of a moneyed visitor. A Texas accent came and went, as swiftly as the airplanes that carried his potential benefactors. Alex was a master imitator, especially when it suited his purposes.

  MC reread the message, hated the offensive tone, as if there weren’t human patients at the end of this drug research project. She remembered the promises made in the journal ads. “Smart medicine” meant drugs that go straight to a tumor or diseased organ. KNOCK OUT THE BAD CELLS WHERE THEY LIVE, said the headlines, WHILE LEAVING HEALTHY CELLS ALONE. She’d had enough lab experience to understand the possibilities were there, but she was enough of a realist to know how long it would be before the miracle prescriptions would be in local drugstores. Still, there was nothing new or incriminating in Simpson’s message. Just the usual hype.

  Another subject line, dated the week she left Houston, caught her eye.

  From: Alexsimpson@hpbp.edu

  To: galig@hpbp.edu

  Subject: Trouble

  MC read carefully.

  There’s good news and bad news. Our contact sees no problem delivering the package, but one unfortunate outcome-the bute that’s not bute-might bring trouble.

  “Unfortunate outcome.” “Trouble.” Could be trigger words for something confidential. Or not. “Package” meant illegal drugs in a lot of the movies she’d seen. And there was that movie with Gene Hackman where Tommy Lee Jones was the package.

  MC tapped her fingers on the keyboard, lightly, not pressing them down. Making that almost musical sound she liked. “Bute that’s not bute.” She thought about butane, butyl. Nothing she’d ever worked with. It could even be a misspelling, for all she knew.

  If it hadn’t been for Wayne Gallen’s so-called warning, this note wouldn’t be the least bit suspicious. She wished Wayne were around. This time she’d force him to give her details.

  MC sighed deeply. What a life. Four in the morning and she was sitting on a hand-me-down rocker above a mortuary. Moreover, she now had to ride her nephew’s bike across town to get back to her parents’ house before they knew she was missing. She’d just waltz down to breakfast in a couple of hours, as if she’d been tucked in all night with the old panda that Robert won for her at Skeeball before the wrecking balls destroyed the amusements on the boulevard.

  MC felt the frustration in her jaws, behind her eyes, in the joints of her fingers. She was no wiser than before this wacky bicycle trip, except she’d found an email about some vague “trouble.”

  She felt younger than William, but older than Mrs. Cataldo, her retired chemistry teacher.

  She got up and headed for the door.

  For good measure, she looked out the window one more time. The sedan was still there. This time she saw the tiny glow of a cigarette in the front seat.

  Her throat constricted, suddenly dry after almost thirty-two ounces of water.

  Come off it, she told herself. No one is watching you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Matt and I entered the North Shore Clinic and signed in. We took seats on thinly upholstered chairs, a pattern of greens and blues not found in nature, two of a long line that had been welded together and bolted to the floor, as if an outpatient might be tempted to walk home with a few for her dining room. I tried to keep my breathing shallow, lest I absorb a sickness or an inappropriate medicine, simply by inhaling one of the unpleasant odors that surrounded us. I wished Matt hadn’t chosen to see Dr. Abeles during his shift at the clinic, but I figured he preferred being in Everett, his hometown, a few miles from Revere. I felt almost as uncomfortable in a regular doctor’s office anyway.

  The waiting room was full, serving a long list of doctors with different combinations of letters after their names. No one looked especially ill, but I felt sorry for each and every one.

  Matt twisted his body and leaned across the shiny metal connector between our chairs. He stroked my hand. “Everything’s going to be fine, Gloria.”

  An observer would have assumed I was the patient, not Matt; that I was the one waiting for a needle to be inserted into the wall of my rectum.

  “Did you make a list of your symptoms?” I asked Matt, suddenly recalling a piece I’d read on-line. “You know, frequent urination could be caused by a benign prostatic hyperplasia.” I nearly tripped over the words, so much more complicated than phrases like “nuclear magnetic resonance,” or “the alpha particle tunneling effect.”

  Matt smiled. “You’ve been doing research. On-line I suppose.”

  I nodded. I’d spent hours searching out information from the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, the National Cancer Institute, and the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide. Any site that seemed reputable. I read comparisons between the side effects of surgery and radiation therapy and tried not to retain the fact that 31,500 men would die of prostate cancer this year.

  I’d checked out sites for the latest in hard-science news, objectively, with no hidden agenda. But now, searching the health sites, I had a different approach. I looked for good news only. Unlike other cancers, I read, a man is more likely to die with prostate cancer than of it. On average, an American male has about a thirty percent risk of having prostate cancer in his lifetime, but only about a three percent risk of dying of the disease.

  Whew.

  But statistics have never given me long-lasting comfort. In that three percent was someone’s husband, someone’s brother, a teacher, a cop.

  “Dr. Abeles is ready for you.”

  Matt let go of my hand and answered the call, the high-pitched voice of a woman whose short peachy smock was strewn with lavender smiley faces, a nice complement to the receptionist whose white smock had an arrangement of unidentifiable pastel animals in human clothing. My mind wandered to the possibility of a new market: grown-up designs for hospital workers’ uniforms.

  The book I’d brought along was another sign of my shift in interest to the life sciences. I’d picked up a new biography of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin. Not the best choice, since Franklin died of ovarian cancer at thirty-seven, but I’d heard that the book shed light on Franklin’s role in the history-making double-helix model of DNA. The burning question: Did Watson and Crick take advantage of the low status of women at that time and steal her research? For a few minutes, the ongoing debate between methodology (Franklin) and intuition (Watson) kept my mind off the tiny biopsy gun I’d read about, and which Matt was now facing, with only a local anesthetic between him and severe discomfort.

  Matt appeared after about a half hour, about twenty-five pages into the Franklin-Watson controversy. Just in time, since I was becoming upset again, this time at the conditions at Cambridge University in the 1950s—only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Rosalind Fr
anklin’s colleagues went to men-only pubs to brainstorm the direction of the next day’s work.

  “All set,” Matt said, doing a good job of smiling. For my benefit, I was sure. “We’ll know in about three days.”

  Three days—not long at all. Unless you’re waiting for a medical report.

  Dinner at home was interrupted by several phone calls, all asking how Matt’s procedure went. George Berger phoned from the station, plus Rose, Andrea Cabrini—a Charger Street lab technician and my latest attempt at making a friend—and Matt’s sister Jean, who was still in denial that Matt and I lived together.

  “Is Matt there?” she always asked immediately when I answered the phone. No “Hi, Gloria,” or any other gesture toward politeness. I’d tried different responses, from “One moment please,” in a detached, telephone-operator-like tone, to “Oh, Jean, it’s me, Gloria. How nice to hear from you.” The latter usually annoyed her.

  Matt thought Jean’s aversion to me had nothing to do with me personally, but rather with her devotion to Teresa, his first wife.