Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  “They were like sisters,” he’d tell me after each rebuff.

  This, of course, only increased my feeling of inadequacy as potential sister material. I’d thought of buttering up her children, but I knew I’d feel guilty playing on the tension between teenagers and their mother.

  Elaine Cody was the last to call, her time zone being three hours behind. Elaine and I had held each other’s hands through many such trials during our thirty-year friendship in Berkeley, and we continued now to be close, if three thousand miles apart.

  “If you need me, I’m there …” I heard the snap of her fingers “ … in a minute. I know you have Rose and all your Boston friends.”

  We both laughed. Elaine knew that “all my Boston friends,” like all my California friends, could fit into one curtained-off space at the North Shore Clinic. I’d never been very social as an adult, blaming my retreat into graduate work on the death of my fiancé, Al Gravese, right after I finished college. It seemed easier to never again get close enough to anyone you’d miss when they left. Between Elaine’s almost yearly change of significant other, and Rose’s extended family, I was happy enough, and busy enough, with a couple of friends on each coast.

  We hung up after Elaine extracted a promise from me that I’d tell her if I needed her to come to Revere.

  I looked across the table, past the large bowl of salad, the linguini in reheated clam sauce, and the bottles of mineral water, to where Matt buttered a thick slice of Italian bread, apparently comfortable on the tubular pillow we’d added to his chair. I couldn’t recall making a different decision about letting people into my life, but there he was.

  “You look taller,” I said, my first attempt at lightening the mood.

  He threw back his shoulders and smiled. “Do you like me taller?”

  Not fair to give me that look when he couldn’t follow through.

  For the next couple of hours, it seemed nothing could distract me from the image of Matt’s tissue samples on the way to a pathology lab for diagnosis. I hoped the pathologist was more than twenty years old, which was my estimated age of many professionals I’d dealt with recently.

  I’d insisted on throwing all the clothes we wore to the clinic into the wash, as if the sign-in pencil-on-a-string, the doorknobs, and the ugly green chairs were all highly contaminated. The late-night sounds of the washing machine soothed me. Swishing soap, clean rinse water pouring into the tub—Matt’s system cleansed by a new miracle drug.

  George Berger called a second time, close to midnight. Unlike Jean, Berger always greeted me before asking for his partner. I gave Matt the phone, slipped a notebook and pencil onto Matt’s lap, and hung on his shoulder to read his scribble.

  “A DOA?” he said into the mouthpiece.

  Nina Martin, he wrote.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Rumney, he wrote. The old Rumney Salt Marsh, former home to mutant insect life and multiple tons of North Shore trash. A few years ago, before the marsh restoration project, a body would never have been noticed amid the discarded shopping carts and refrigerator-size boxes.

  “Hmm,” Matt said to Berger. I drummed my fingers on the back of his chair.

  “The Galiganis?” he asked. An alert. More drumming.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  GSW, he wrote. Gunshot wounds.

  “Evidence?” he asked.

  2 BT on vic, he wrote. Two blood types found on the victim. I was pretty good at Matt’s special combination of police code and his own shorthand.

  PI, he wrote. Principal Investigator? No; wrong context. That was for grant proposals. This must be a Private Investigator, I guessed.

  “Whoa,” Matt said.

  FDA, he wrote. The Food and Drug Administration? The people who put the purple stamps on rump roasts?

  “Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Berger,” he said.

  “Who’s Nina Martin and how is a private investigator from the FDA connected to the Galiganis?” This from me before the telephone receiver hit the cradle.

  Matt made a slow down motion. “Martin was a PI; she had two business cards in her wallet, one for the local FDA office, and one for the Galigani Mortuary, plus a list of names and numbers they’re still tracing.”

  “Hmm.” This time from me.

  I settled back on my chair and folded my hands in my lap. Ready for information.

  Only when Matt grimaced as he shifted in his chair did I remember his tender bottom. I also remembered to worry about his test results, but pushed that aside. I got his pillow and patted his bald spot. That would have to do for now.

  I spread my palms, waiting. “Not to rush you,” I said.

  Matt gave me a silly smile, cleared his throat. It was the yes, boss expression he’d recently adopted.

  “An engineer from the EPA was with the MTA people out at the marsh. They’re the ones who found her,” Matt said.

  First the FDA, now the Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Too many agencies, but it made sense, once I thought about it.

  The EPA was needed on the marsh restoration project. An unfinished leg of highway, constructed in the 1960s and called “the expressway to nowhere” for years, had been removed, opening the clogged arteries of the marsh to seawater, and providing the ideal laboratory for wetlands study.

  The MTA was connected to Boston’s Big Dig, the multiyear, multibillion-dollar construction of an underground expressway, under the heart of the city, and said to be the largest construction project in US history.

  The link: Roadbed gravel from the restoration of Rumney Marsh—I thought I’d read two hundred thousand cubic yards of it—was being recycled to Big Dig sites.

  Matt tapped his notebook on his knee. “They found a female Hispanic, early thirties, multiple gunshot wounds. Fingerprints came back as a PI. Real name Nina Martin, though she had a couple of different IDs on her. Probably dumped there, though it’s hard to tell whether or not the marsh is the crime scene.”

  “More than one ID? I didn’t know PIs went undercover.”

  “Sure, they do it all the time. Claim to be someone else to get information. They don’t usually go deep, though, except for the brave ones.”

  Or the dead ones, I thought. “What do you make of the Galigani connection?”

  Matt frowned. “You won’t like this. She’s from Houston, and MC’s name was written on the back of the Galigani Mortuary card.”

  I sat up, on alert, my senses suddenly sharpened. Our Fernwood Avenue home was much farther away from a main street than my mortuary apartment had been; at midnight, the only sounds were from inside the house. A zipper clacked against the drum of our dryer; my computer hard drive hummed, always at the ready; a soft saxophone tune emanated from the speakers in our living room.

  The loudest sounds were of links connecting, in my mind. A murdered private detective from Houston. Did Jake send a PI to snoop on MC? I couldn’t entertain the thought that MC herself had done anything wrong, something worth an investigation, not for a nanosecond. But Jake was a different story. Maybe into drugs?

  “The FDA investigates drugs, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but not the street kind; that would be DEA. Are you thinking of the ex-boyfriend?”

  I nodded. “Or that the people supposedly coming after MC are into drugs.”

  “Or the FDA number is completely unrelated. Another case entirely that Martin was working on.”

  “Or Wayne Gallen hired the PI to follow MC around.” He was still “at-large” so to speak, in that no one had seen him since he was released from the RPD on Tuesday night. Too confusing right now. “What else do we know?”

  Matt skipped over the “we,” having adjusted beautifully to my status as his almost-partner. “Two blood types, one hers. So it’s possible we’re looking for a wounded killer. Stands to reason, as a PI she would have a firearm and some training in self-defense, and probably got in a shot or two. The word is out at hospitals and clinics.�
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  “Is Berger handling the case?”

  Matt twisted his wrist in a half-and-half motion. “For now, but you can bet Houston PD will be all over this, and the FDA, too, if she was connected to them at all.”

  “But it’s our jurisdiction, isn’t it, if she was murdered here?”

  “Yes and no. If they think she was killed while on a job out of Houston, they’re going to want in on it. Lots of places, cops and PIs work together. She wasn’t just an ordinary citizen touring Revere.”

  “Maybe she was. On vacation, I mean.” Not that I believed it.

  “You don’t believe that,” Matt said. My soul mate.

  “Someone should find out who hired her and why.” Gloria, the master detective.

  Matt nodded. “For now Berger is working this, and I can probably get on board by tomorrow.”

  I frowned.

  “What?” he asked. “I’m not going to sit around here and wait.”

  I’d gotten used to equating DOAs with consulting contracts for me, formal or informal. It was taking less and less time to move from “a person has been murdered” to “let’s solve this puzzle.” I wasn’t sure this was a good thing, but if there was a chance that Nina Martin was linked to any of the Galiganis, I’d have to put off examining my conscience until after I investigated.

  I looked at Matt and smiled. “Well, I’m going to not wait with you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MC wanted to stay in bed forever. She’d slept badly, waking up often, each time fighting back tears at the image of the young woman’s body on the morgue table.

  MC had liked Mary Roderick, or Nina Martin, or whatever her real name was. She was older than MC’s other students, and seemed to really connect with her. She’d told MC her birth name was Maria Rodriguez, that she’d changed it to Roderick to sound more American, even though she loved her Mexican family and sent them money whenever she could. MC thought of Mary/ Maria/Nina’s familiar Houston Oilers cap, barely covering her wild, jet-black hair, and how her sparkling dark eyes brought life to the old, badly maintained classroom at Houston Poly.

  The police had asked MC to make a secondary ID, since her name was on the Galigani Mortuary card. MC had wanted to go down there anyway. She had to be sure it was really Mary. Maria. Nina. They were saying that the woman must have enrolled in MC’s class as part of an undercover job, that she was a private detective, and maybe even worked for the FDA. Very unsettling, when you thought you’d been close to someone, to find out you didn’t even know who they really were. Like with Jake, she thought, in some ways.

  MC flipped over onto her back and blew out a breath so harsh it hurt her cheeks. I’m a Galigani, she told herself. I grew up around dead bodies; I am not freaked out by death. An image came to her mind—her father in the prep room downstairs, inserting thin brass wires into the jaws of an old man, to bring his teeth together; shaping his mouth with cotton into a slight smile. She’d been fascinated watching him, not frightened at all.

  She’d gotten used to the sound of the hearse in the middle of the night, and the nasty odors that her mother tried valiantly to cover up. I couldn’t have hated them too much, MC thought, since I chose a field with its own pukey smells. She remembered sneaking down to the prep room whenever she could while her father was working on a body. She’d watch him cutting, sewing, stuffing, painting, and weighing things she couldn’t identify at the time.

  But none of those bodies was real to her. She realized later that her parents deliberately kept her from the basement when she’d known the deceased.

  This woman, Nina Martin, had been her student, or at least pretended to be her student, and was way too young to die.

  The class MC taught was almost a throwaway at Houston Poly, basic chemistry for liberal arts majors. Most of the students couldn’t care less about science, choosing the class for convenience—they needed a science class to graduate, and this one happened to be on a night when they were free.

  But Nina, a pre-law student—or so she’d said—had been so conscientious, seeming truly turned on by state-of-the-art chemistry, especially nanotechnology.

  MC pushed herself into an upright position on her bed, Aunt G’s bed, really, except that MC had added a little color to the décor, splashing some blue and purple floral pillows here and there over Aunt G’s stark bed linens. It was time to move off these pillows. She pulled off her favorite stretch-pants-cum-pajamas, shook out a pair of chinos from a basket in the corner, and selected a white shirt she had actually ironed. This was the best the RPD was going to get. She was due at the police station, to talk about Nina, though she couldn’t imagine what she could tell them. She’d racked her brain already trying to figure what Nina was doing in Revere in the first place.

  She remembered the day Nina had approached her, early in the semester.

  “I’d love to do some extra research, since there’s so much going on, right here,” Nina had said, sweeping her arm, as fluid as a ballerina’s, in the direction of the windowless research facility, the ugliest building on the campus. “I’m especially interested in Buckminster Fuller, and that new molecule named after him—the, uh, what’s it called?”

  “Buckminsterfullerene—buckyball!”

  “Right! I read that buckyballs started the whole carbon nanotech thing. Do you know anyone doing that kind of stuff?”

  So MC had put Nina Martin in touch with carbon researcher Wayne Gallen and the nanotechnology team.

  And now Nina was dead, and Wayne was MIA. And Wayne had told her “they” were after her. Did “they” murder Nina? MC shuddered, then peeked out her bedroom window, a habit she couldn’t shake, even in the middle of the day, ever since she’d first spotted the stalker. That is, Wayne. But maybe not Wayne. Well, at least she hadn’t seen the creepy-looking car for a while.

  Nina was probably the real target all along, and now I’m safe, she thought.

  Maybe one of these days she’d actually enter her house from the front.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rose, the unofficial historian of Revere, had Rumney Marsh stories at her fingertips, literally. She held her hand up and drew a map in the air. The middle finger of her right hand was Route 107, also called the Lynn Marsh Road, which split the marsh (the palm of her hand) in two. She pushed her hand closer to me, as if she were asking me to read her future.

  “They used to call this the Old Salem Turnpike,” she told me. “Remember how they’d find wrecked cars there with their motors running?” She used the fingers of her left hand as cars. “Oh, no, that’s right. You weren’t home then.”

  To Rose, Revere had always been my home, my three decades in California a mere blip in my life. An anomaly, like a summer vacation that stretched out too long or a forced confinement that was finally over. Often, I agreed with her.

  We sat on Rose’s porch, a mass of white wicker and leafy green plants, screened- and storm-windowed-in. We were waiting for MC to come by after her interview with Matt and George Berger. It had started to drizzle, which Rose hated, but I loved. I felt I was due thirty years of greater-than-normal rainfall once I returned to the East Coast. Easier on the eyes than the almost daily, unfiltered California sun; and setting a perfect mood for the hot coffees we drank. The smell of split pea soup from Rose’s Crock-Pot, a few feet away, also said “rainy New England fall day” to me.

  I tried to get Rose back on track. “Do you know why the dead woman was carrying your business card?” I asked her.

  “Well, apparently she was MC’s student in that night class. Of course, MC had no idea she was an undercover investigator.” Rose took a sip of coffee. “I was telling you about all these stories in the Journal, about the marsh—John covered a couple of them when he was just starting out. The thieves would steal sports cars from Lynn, Saugus, Everett, you name it, and have demolition derbies out in the marsh, on that unfinished road that went nowhere.” She wiggled her right pinkie, west of 107, from her point of view. “And then they’d just abandon the v
ehicles, motors running and all. Some of the cars were from as far away as Boston.”

  Rose laughed, always enjoying her own stories as if she were hearing them all for the first time herself. I smiled at her depiction of Boston, about eight miles from Revere, as “far away.” By West Coast standards, that could be a quick jaunt to the nearest supermarket.

  “How interesting,” I said. “So, do you think this Nina Martin could have been coming to Revere to visit MC?”

  Rose shrugged. “That could be it. But MC doesn’t think so; she thinks the woman would have given her some notice, not just showed up. I guess they’re looking into other relatives or—who knows. She was undercover, after all.” She pulled up the collar of her rust-colored coat-sweater—perfectly matching the highlights in her hair—whether because of a chill or as an illustration of clandestine work, I couldn’t tell.

  More significant was Rose’s nonchalance about a dead Texan in her hometown, a few days after a live Texan had scared her daughter enough to make a 911 call.

  Either Rose was avoiding an unpleasant possibility, or I was paranoid about MC’s safety.

  “That’s the second time this week I’ve been in the police station,” MC said. She rolled her shoulders counterclockwise and back, and rotated her neck from side to side, as if to undo the stress of the meetings. She sat on the small wicker footstool at her mother’s feet, the one I was sure would crack under my weight, but seemed not to be aware MC had landed. She looked very young, very vulnerable.

  I remembered summer visits from MC, the first when she was just past her tenth birthday, her first solo plane trip. I loved taking her to the lab—she’d squealed in delight at the Berkeley University Lab cap I’d bought her, with B-U-L in bright yellow letters. We cooked macaroni and cheese for dinner, got take-out pizza, stayed up as long as she wanted to, and rode in my Jeep to San Francisco and Santa Cruz to do what I desperately hoped were “kid activities.”

  “My daughter’s giving you competition, Gloria, with all the time she’s spending with the RPD.” Rose moved a few strands of MC’s short, deep brown hair from one side to the other. “I don’t understand the crooked parts girls wear these days,” she said, with a seriousness that made it sound like a metaphor for life.