Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  Rose recited this anecdote with more pride than usual.

  “MC will be fine, Rose. She’ll find an interesting job, settle down. She’s very strong, and she’ll get through all this.” I felt I was simply articulating the point of Rose’s story.

  Rose nodded. “Even when we moved here she’d still go to the mortuary after school sometimes and beg her father to show her ‘something smelly,’ she’d say.” Rose glanced around at the objects of art on her porch, and I wondered what she saw, if not ray optics. Colors, and shapes, I thought. Memories, too, probably. “John—our top-notch journalist—was never, never interested in what went on down there, but I was amazed when MC didn’t follow Frank and Robert into the business.”

  “Well, she just chose a different smelly profession,” I said.

  “And maybe journalism has its own smells,” she said, with her delightful laugh.

  MC stopped by before I left Rose’s. I had a couple of minutes with her while Rose prepared a new pot of coffee.

  “I’m so sorry I forgot about our date last night. Matt came home with his test results, and—”

  MC shook her head. “Not to worry, Aunt G, I know you have a lot on your mind. I really hope Matt will be fine, and I bet he will be.” She lowered her eyes. “And anyway, I had some company. I’m sure my mother told you.”

  I nodded. I paused for a moment, then decided I had to ask. “MC, did you tell Jake he could stop in Revere to visit you?”

  “He was on his way back from the New Hampshire Equestrian Expo, and he stopped by, that’s all,” she told me, a hint of defensiveness in her voice.

  I knew what computer expos and scientific-equipment expos were like, but I had a hard time imagining an expo or a demo about horses. Were they on display in booths? Did the booths have giveaways like the pens and periodic-table coasters given out at science expos? I must have given a visible sign of confusion, because MC went on to clarify.

  “They have seminars on all kinds of topics, like rider conditioning, breeding, different styles of saddles, equine medicines, that kind of thing. Jake’s a specialist in composting and manure management techniques. His chemistry comes in handy for his hobby that way.”

  I didn’t think I wanted to know more details, and besides, MC had not answered my question. “I’m asking if you agreed to a visit.”

  MC looked sheepish. “Well, I thought I’d told him no.”

  I guessed MC had said something like “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” which Jake would take as eighty percent no, twenty percent yes; well worth a shot.

  I knew how that worked.

  My fiancé, Al Gravese, had never physically battered me, but he’d pressed his will on me in such a way that I did what he wanted—even when I thought I’d insisted otherwise.

  “Wanna go play cards with Mike and Angie tonight?” he’d ask, in his peculiar uneducated accent, phoning me in the middle of the day.

  “I’d rather go to the movies,” I’d answer.

  “Angie likes you a lot.”

  “I don’t like poker. I don’t know how to play well. I might go to a movie with Gracie instead.” Might. There was that eighty-twenty.

  “You don’t want to go to a movie with that stunata. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock. You’ll have a good time.”

  Having had the same kind of subtly coercive relationship with my mother, who told me what my favorite color was, I’d been ripe for the picking by Al Gravese. I shook away the memory.

  “MC, it’s none of my business,” I said. “But—”

  “You’re right, Aunt G. It isn’t.” MC stood and walked away.

  I thought I heard a weak, “I’m sorry.”

  I was distraught over the first tension, ever, between MC and me. I was convinced her mood had to do with more than a drop-in from her ex-boyfriend. Nina Martin’s murder, for one thing. Two murders, really, if you counted that of the hit man. And too many Texans making life miserable for MC.

  I had to go to work.

  Back at my computer, with Matt at the office—for a couple of hours only, he promised—I started to tabulate the information I had, but the table quickly degenerated into just a string of events. Wayne Gallen shows up; Nina Martin shows up, dead; Rusty Forman shows up, dead; Jake Powers shows up. Wayne is now missing. Was that reason enough to blame Wayne for Nina’s murder? Was he connected to Rusty Forman?

  The string method got me nowhere. I opened a computer drawing program and doodled with a new pattern. A star, with MC at the center, and spokes for Wayne, Nina, Rusty, Jake. All Houstonites, I noted, if that was a word. The design looked western, like something out of a Lone Star State Chamber of Commerce brochure.

  Were all these Texans in Revere specifically to see MC? It seemed to have started with Wayne, who said he’d come to warn MC of a threat from Alex Simpson, the buckyball researcher. Jake appeared to be seeking only MC’s affection, but I didn’t believe in pure motives.

  I added a spoke with a question mark, to indicate the possible AS and the bad guys who were after MC, the ones who allegedly sped off when Wayne showed up. As far as I knew, Alex Simpson had never been seen in Revere, but I left his initials on the chart anyway.

  Nina had a Galigani business card in her pocket but had made no attempt to contact MC. Murdered before contacting? I wrote. I still hadn’t heard what leads the list of telephone numbers in Nina’s pocket had brought. I made a note to check on it with Matt. It was tough doing police work when you weren’t a cop. If I were a cop in Houston, for example, I could knock on Alex Simpson’s door and ask him to explain every email he wrote this year. If I had any authority at all, I could phone the local FDA office and get an interview with whoever Nina’s contact was. I could open her office files and find out who hired her in the first place.

  I knew the real cops probably considered the cases closed, but not me. Nina Martin enrolled in MC’s class for a reason, and that reason could be connected to her murder. In my mind, therefore, MC was still vulnerable.

  The days were getting shorter, and even at four in the afternoon, the light was fading. I switched on a new halogen floor lamp, one of the few items I’d purchased for the Fernwood Avenue home. I’d fixed up one of the extra bedrooms with my computer desk and file cabinets, not bothering to change the bold paisley area rug that hid most of the hardwood floor. I thought how we buy things with the idea that we’ll live long enough to use them, that they will “die,” or wear out, before we do. We don’t plan on our lives being interrupted by disasters. Or by a Stage-II cancer.

  I swallowed hard, and went back to work on my star.

  Only Rusty’s motive for traveling across the country seemed clear: To murder Nina. But if Wayne was right, Rusty might also have had MC on his list, and whoever hired him would still be after her.

  I tapped my keyboard. Why was all this happening in Revere? Was it just because MC had returned to Revere, or was there something else going on in Revere, even before MC got back?

  I looked at my star. Probably because I was thinking of the Wild West, I’d drawn little filled-in circles at the ends of the spokes, like the rivets on a western shirt, or the logo for some Bar Star Ranch. All at once the circles looked like atoms. Carbon atoms. Buckyballs. Not sixty atoms like a real buckyball molecule, but close enough. Except for Rusty Forman, all the Texans had buckyballs in common.

  Now it was easy. Where were the buckyballs in Revere? I asked myself. At the Charger Street lab. And who at the Charger Street lab had been trying to break into this star? I smiled at my cleverness. Lorna Frederick, I answered. Lorna Frederick, who kept calling MC for an interview.

  It made so much sense to me, I picked up the phone to share my insight with the real police.

  “I have something,” I said to Matt.

  “Lorna Frederick,” he said.

  I dropped my shoulders, slumped in my chair, swept by a mixture of disappointment at not being first and excitement at the verification of my star calculation.

  “Right.”
Too weak, I knew, but I couldn’t take it back.

  I heard the wonderful Matt-laugh. “You don’t like sharing the triumph?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Isn’t there something like this in science, where two people in different parts of the world invent the same thing at the same time?”

  I resisted the temptation to explain the difference between scientific discovery and technological invention.

  “Lorna Frederick was on Nina’s telephone list?” I asked.

  “Right. Only one of many, but for some strange reason, I thought I’d take this one to follow up on. I’m going out to Charger Street in the morning. Interested in a consulting job?”

  “Does Revere have a beach?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That evening Matt and I took a walk along Revere Beach Boulevard. I loved the shapes of the pavilion and bandstand rooftops, some trapezoidal, others with a parabolic cross-section. They were a deep green color during the day, and darkened as the light faded. Beautiful geometric patterns emerged, sandwiched between the gray sky above the ocean and the now almost completely barren trees on the road in front.

  The old-fashioned streetlights came on as we strolled from Revere Street to Beach Street. We were surprised at the low traffic flow along the boulevard.

  “Everyone’s home watching Monday Night Football,” Matt said.

  “Finally, a redeeming feature,” I said.

  An amiable laugh. Matt cared as little as I did about organized sports, denying that it was because he didn’t make the team in high school. When the debating coach gets as much stipend and attention as the soccer coach, maybe our educational system won’t be an embarrassment, was our sweeping, collective opinion. All the world’s problems had simple solutions on a stroll by the ocean.

  The evening was peaceful, the weather mild, and we agreed to keep our conversation equally serene. No talk of disease, diagnosis, or treatment, though I’d revisited all my health-related bookmarks. No talk of buckyballs, though I’d given myself a crash course from Internet sources, to update myself. Not even a strategy session on our next day’s meeting with Lorna Frederick.

  We cut down a side street to Ocean Avenue, which ran behind the boulevard, where we’d parked Matt’s Camry. We’d covered about a mile and a quarter in all. I wanted to stretch out distance and time, to keep my senses full of the salt-air smells and the sound of the surf, to block out the real-life space-time coordinates that would throw us back into the universe of murder and disease—both too close to home.

  Matt started the car, rolled into the northbound lane. “We’ve got some challenges ahead,” he said, as if he’d been in touch with my soul. “And, lucky us, we get to work on them together.”

  “Lucky us,” I said. Lucky me.

  I thought I’d walked into a catalog for horse owners—Lorna Frederick’s office was teeming with images of horses. Posters of horses; horse sculptures; horse designs on her wastebasket, pencil holder, and lamp shade; photographs of herself with horses and on horses. In one framed snapshot, Lorna, who looked about thirty-five or forty—too old to be jumping over fences in my opinion—was wearing a fitted black jacket and helmet and white pants. I was sure there was a special name for the pants. The word “jodhpurs” came to mind, but that might be those bright, silk outfits that racing jockeys wore, I thought.

  Lorna, in person, wore a striking blue knit dress, utterly out of sync with the ranch-like atmosphere of her office. Over her shoulders she’d hung a shawl, or a stole, or at least a large piece of fabric in blues and purples. When she stood to greet us, the beaded fringes on the ends clanked against her telephone. I’d seen such arrays on models in magazine ads, but never on anyone I knew, and certainly not on anyone working in a laboratory. It looked as practical as a prom dress at a rodeo. But what did I know about rodeos? I asked myself. Amazing how I was being carried away lately by images of the Wild West. Texas, big as it was, was forcing its way into my world.

  I found myself wishing we could arrest Lorna for fashion violation, to get her outfit off the streets. But in the less-than-perfect world Matt and I were in, we introduced ourselves and began the slow process of gleaning information.

  “Sit down. Make yourselves comfortable,” Lorna said from behind her desk, with a flare to match her outfit. Her face was pinched together vertically, too small for her body; her light hair, many shades of blond, was short and curled unnaturally at the edges. “It’s not every day I get a visit from Revere’s finest. My secretary neglected to say what brings you here, but you are welcome to my humble office.”

  Humble, indeed.

  Matt, in the brown suit he wore every Tuesday, nodded his thanks and pointed to the display case of ribbons on the wall behind her desk. Blue, red, yellow, white, all with gold letters spelling something I couldn’t make out. I’d seen the raw materials when I’d reluctantly accompanied Rose to a party-supply store one time, and wondered how you could tell which ones were legitimate.

  “Very impressive,” Matt said. There was no way Lorna could know that the police detective in front of her was afraid of large animals, horses in particular. I’d found this out through George Berger. Matt and I had sat with him and his wife at a department party, and he’d related an anecdote about how the rookie Matt Gennaro had refused to mount a police horse for a Veteran’s Day parade. He’d been able to make a deal with his captain, that he’d close at least three cold cases that week if they’d let him off parade duty. He’d closed four. Matt held a smug smile through the telling of the story.

  “It’s department legend,” Berger said, when I asked him how he knew this, since he was much younger and couldn’t have known Matt in his early years with RPD.

  Lorna sat down and picked up a photo from her desk, herself on a speckled gray-and-black horse. “This is Degas, my Appaloosa, one of my favorites. He’s won me one ribbon after another. Not many people realize Edgar Degas painted and sculpted horses as well as ballerinas.” Lorna leaned back, steepled her fingers. “I’ve been a horsewoman since I was eight years old. Cleaned stalls in exchange for lessons, and now I own more horses than my first instructor at Sunset Ranch did.”

  How nice for you, I thought.

  “Impressive,” Matt said again, as if he had limited vocabulary when it came to equestrian prowess.

  My eyes strayed to a large whiteboard on the side wall, its tray filled with erasers and thick markers in as many colors as the ribbons Lorna had won. I could tell she had left real science and engineering far behind. The board was filled with organizational charts, budget items with dollar amounts, timelines, and acronyms for funding sponsors. My eyes landed on DoD. Leave it to the Department of Defense to use a lowercase O, so that every scientist had to tell her or his editors it wasn’t a typo. DOE, DARPA, NRC. The Department of Energy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A few nongovernment names, some of which were pharmaceutical companies I recognized, were on the board also, with question marks next to them. Not committed, I assumed. There wasn’t an equation or a force diagram in sight.

  “Interesting that you didn’t choose horse-raising as a career,” Matt said.

  I wondered if horses were actually raised, like children, or chickens and sheep. My mind wandered in search of a more appropriate word, but neither Matt nor Lorna seemed hampered by the word choice. Lorna told us how her father, a rancher, had convinced her that the best strategy was for her to get an education in a field where she could make enough money to afford the luxury of competitive riding.

  “No money in these competitions?” Matt asked, glancing at the showcase, as if to ask the worth of dozens of satiny ribbons.

  Lorna shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, almost losing her scarf/shawl. “Not much, at least not in the local shows. There’s decent money in the bigger jumping competitions, sometimes as much as a hundred thousand dollars, but that would be split up among the top placings. Canada has a famous event, maybe close to a half million
in prizes, but on the average it’s much less than that. Most people are in it for the sport.” She smiled, leaned forward, sharing a secret. “Well, for ego, too, I admit. You’re always competing for points, which you accumulate toward yearend awards, at a big ceremony.” Lorna opened her arms wide, to signify how big, again almost losing her wrap.

  Matt nodded, relaxed. I knew he was gearing up, letting Lorna get comfortable. “But you have to make a living somehow,” he said, giving a palms-up. Compatriots, both just doing a job. I sat in my navy blue business casual, waiting for a piece of the action. So far, I hadn’t done much but smile and nod in appropriate places.

  “Right,” Lorna said, “so, I came East to study engineering.”

  “East from … ?” Matt asked.

  “Galveston,” Lorna said, raising the hairs on the back of my head. I wished I knew the distance from Galveston to Houston. In a state the size of Texas, it might be the same as Revere to Portland, Maine, but, still, here was another Texan in Revere. Lorna seemed to enjoy giving her bio. “I majored in chemistry at BU, got involved in materials research when I came here to Charger Street as a summer intern. I came back after I graduated, and I’ve been here ever since. Do I have to tell you how many years?” This last was said in a coy, flirting way that did not become her.

  Matt smiled and gave a page of his notebook a casual flip. “Do you know a Nina Martin?”

  I smiled, recognizing Matt’s style—chat for a few minutes, let them direct the conversation, then hit them with a quick yes-or-no, black-or-white, do-you-or-don’t-you question.

  Lorna seemed as taken aback as he’d intended. She cleared her throat and then frowned, as if in confusion, but to my mind, it was a cover-up in advance of a lie.