Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  “Nina … Martin? No.” Lorna might have been trying to pronounce a foreign phrase. She licked her lips, rubbed her forehead. Matt kept his eyes locked on her. She fumbled with paper clips in a bowl on her desk. “Oh, wait, I did see something on the news. The woman they found in the marsh?”

  Matt nodded. I knew he wouldn’t say anything just yet. From the interview handbook, I imagined: Create an awkward silence, hope the suspect will fill it. Not that Lorna Frederick was an official suspect, except for all the connections I’d made on my computer-generated star.

  Lorna obliged with stuttering remarks. “Terrible thing. Poor woman.” She shook her head in tsk-tsk sympathy. “What makes you ask if I knew her? Is that what brings you here?”

  “Do you have any connections with the buckyball team in Houston?” The Don’t Answer Her Question; Ask Another One trick, a polite form of “I’ll ask the questions here.” I was proud of Matt’s glib mention of nanotechnology.

  “Yes, I know the people from the program out there, of course. You know how it is with research these days, share and share—”

  “Can you think of any reason Nina Martin would be carrying around your telephone number?” Matt asked, cutting in.

  Poor Lorna. In the last few minutes she’d straightened out two metal paper clips. Good-bye steepled fingers.

  “Well, no. I … uh … She had my phone number? I suppose it could have been a permutation or something.” Lorna sat up straight again, as if an idea had suddenly come to her. “Or maybe someone referred her to me. I’m responsible for recruiting people to the project. That must be it.”

  “Would you mind telling me where you were last Friday, Ms. Frederick?”

  His voice so sweet, the detective might have been asking her out for coffee. Which reminded me to look for signs of Lorna’s family life. She had so many rings on her fingers—I counted three on each hand, including an enormous silver/turquoise number that must have made it impossible for her to bend that knuckle—I couldn’t tell if a wedding ring was among them. I saw only one photo that didn’t include horses—Lorna with two men I recognized as local politicians.

  Lorna hadn’t misinterpreted Matt’s question as anything but what it was—a request for an alibi. Her face lost its color; she put her hands on her desk and rolled back in her chair, as if to push herself away from the topic. She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes; I thought she might cry. Then, in the next minute, her eyes widened. I imagined her mind churning, angry that Matt had not been open with her from the beginning. Her nostrils flared, as I imagined her Appaloosa’s might. She stood and folded her arms across her chest.

  “I rode my horse until ten or ten-thirty, then went home to bed.” She cleared her throat, ready to deliver an unpleasant message to an underling. “And now I’m going to ask you to leave.”

  Matt nodded and closed his notebook, giving no sign he’d noticed her new hostility. “Of course,” he said.

  The interview was over, and I hadn’t done a thing to earn my consultant status. I had to get a word in. “If you have another moment—before we leave, I’d just like to get a sense of what you do here as project director. Does that mean you have responsibility for funding, or do you also set the research agenda?”

  Lorna glared at me, picked up a brochure from a pile on her side table, and handed it to me. “Everything you need to know is in here. Now, I have an important meeting.” Unlike this one, was the implication. She swept her arm toward the door. “So if you will kindly leave?”

  We did.

  For now, I thought.

  “What did you think?” Matt asked, starting our traditional post-interview debriefing. We were in his Camry, headed for lunch at Russo’s on Broadway. In my mind, I’d already ordered the specialty of the house, eggplant parmigiana.

  “She seemed too tall for horse-riding,” I said, only half teasing. I realized I was probably influenced by photos I’d seen of jockeys, who seemed not much bigger than Rose.

  Matt laughed. “What do we know from this interview? Friendly with the mayor and Councilman Vega, for one.”

  “I saw that. Windowless, inside office, not far up the ladder.”

  “Still, able to maintain a pretty expensive hobby,” Matt said.

  “More like an obsession.”

  For a moment I wished I had a passion like Lorna’s for horses. I tried to imagine myself committed in that way to a sport, or to a craft, like the quilt-making craze I’d noticed among women I’d worked with in California. Rose’s current interest was in making glass beads for jewelry and decorative lamps. I’d resisted invitations to join her. Did reading science magazines and biographies count as the hobby Rose insisted I needed? I’d have to pursue that thought another time.

  “If she didn’t know Nina Martin, she definitely knew something she didn’t want to share,” Matt said, still on the debriefing track.

  “I wish I could have learned more about her work. I’ll do some checking.”

  “Notice anything about her alibi?”

  A quiz, I sensed, and concentrated on remembering the exact words Lorna had used. “Nothing unusual, just that she didn’t give any names.”

  Matt waited, giving me more time to come up with the right answer, I guessed. “That’s it?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’re going to have to tell me,” I said.

  “I asked her what she was doing on Friday. What would you have answered, in her place?”

  “Aha.” I got his point. “I would have started with being at work, during the day, but Lorna went right to the evening and nighttime hours.”

  “The report says Martin probably died sometime late Friday night. Of course, it could be nothing.”

  “But it’s interesting.” I loved how police minds worked. Maybe that was a hobby.

  Matt glanced over at my lap, where I held the brochure Lorna had thrust at me.

  “Think you’ll get anything from that?” he asked.

  “Count on it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My desk had become a repository of brochures. I’d sent away for paper literature from several pharmaceutical companies, to give myself a break from reading long pages of text on my computer monitor. They all made promises, giving sweeping assurances of a better, cancer-free life for all. Strange how all avenues of thought seemed to lead to Matt’s disease.

  I read about “smart medicines” that ignore healthy cells and go straight to the cancer cells; vaccines made from a patient’s own tumors, to “strike cancer right where it lives”; “small-molecule medicines” that disrupt the signal pathways of cancer cell receptors. All of these miracle cures involved drug delivery systems made possible with nanotechnology, the wave of the future; all designed to zero in on disease, to give families hope. So why wasn’t I feeling hopeful?

  I opened the pamphlet from Lorna Frederick, a typical threefold affair, with bullets and clip art highlighting the research agenda. It was hard to distinguish the Charger Street lab brochure from those of commercial enterprises. The lab program had several joint projects with pharmaceutical companies, as I’d noticed on Lorna’s whiteboard.

  I figured pharmaceutical companies had always promised utopia, but this was a new twist for research laboratories, at least in my experience. In my graduate school days, I was funded by the department I studied and worked in, not by a private, profit-making industry. I worked at my own pace, my only goal to satisfy my dissertation committee and myself. Charger Street scientists, it seemed, didn’t have that luxury.

  The more I read, the more annoyed I became. This brochure is a funding tool, I reminded myself, meant to draw industrial partners into the work of research, to speed up the technology transfer process. A good thing. But what were the consequences for “pure research”? I wondered how scientists could remain objective with someone standing outside the doors of the lab, waiting not just for data, but for a certain kind of data. The it’s a go kind of data. It seemed to me the perfect environment to encourage fraud. If my
entire budget would stand or fall based on the results of one clinical trial, one set of curves, I might be tempted to skew the data, just a little, just enough to keep my research alive. For the greater good, and all.

  If I’d been looking for a reason to justify the fraudulent actions of some scientists, there it was.

  I realized what I was most annoyed at was my own ambivalence. I wanted a drug on the market that would completely cure Matt’s cancer, but I didn’t want science to get dirty producing it.

  I hadn’t slept well for several nights, and as a result, I dozed off in the middle of an article about tomatoes in a journal from a cancer treatment center. Tomato sauce, it said, if eaten regularly, can reduce the risk of prostate cancer. Tomatoes contain lycopene, which gives them their bright red color, and works as an antioxidant in the body. Tomato sauce—the staple of Matt’s youth, and mine.

  Matt woke me up, coming through the front door, laden with his heavy briefcase and a bag of groceries. He looked to me like he also needed a nap, but I couldn’t be sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, as if I could see the cancer cells marching across his lower body, making him tired.

  Matt looked at the loose pages of the journal article on my lap.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “Yes, you need to eat more cooked tomatoes.”

  He reached into the grocery bag and pulled out a cluster of deep red tomatoes.

  “Lycopene!” I said.

  We laughed, but we both knew it was time to get serious about treatment. We’d gone through the options for a Stage-II diagnosis, the first of which was called “watchful waiting,” to see if symptoms recurred. For Matt, the primary symptom had been a burning in his urinary tract. We’d read that patients with a low Gleason score have a very small risk of dying of their cancer within fifteen years if their cancer is never treated. Not good enough. Waiting was not high on my list of preferred responses, nor on Matt’s.

  With a backdrop of a harvest moon outside our bay window, we sat on our couch and talked about excision of the prostate by irradiation; about the retropubic approach as opposed to the perineal approach to radical prostatectomy; about external and internal radiation therapy.

  “I’m getting a lot of solicitations to be part of clinical trials,” Matt told me. “I can be a subject for ultrasound surgery or hormone therapy.” He pounded his chest. “I’m classified as an OHM, otherwise healthy male.”

  He smiled; I didn’t. Matt, subjected to experimental drugs? For one who loved empiricism, I was surprisingly against it in this case.

  “How soon do we need to decide?” I asked him.

  He pulled me closer. “See, it’s that ‘we’ that makes all the difference. If I could only get you to use that pronoun when you talk about our house.”

  “You’re right. When do we leave our house and go to talk to our doctor?”

  “By the end of the week. Which reminds me, Gloria. There’s something else you’re not going to want to hear.”

  My heart sank. What next, Stage III? Had Matt been to the doctor without me? Had more symptoms crept in? The look on my face must have caused Matt to regret his facetiousness, and he rushed to clarify.

  “Jean wants to come up over the weekend. She’s … worried, I guess, and would like to see me.”

  A visit from Matt’s sister. That’s all it was. I was at once relieved that there was no bad medical news, and chagrined that Matt felt he had to apologize for having his own sister as our guest for a couple of days.

  “Of course she should see you, Matt. I wish I’d thought of inviting her myself.”

  I’d last seen Jean at a barbecue at her Cape Cod home over Labor Day weekend. She hadn’t bothered to tell me that about fifty clients from her thriving real estate business would also be there, and dressed as if for a wedding. I showed up in beach casual, with a windbreaker over my khakis, carrying a small casserole (for the party of five I expected) that could hardly compete with the catered crab cake dinner. Matt tucked the dish away in the refrigerator, and seemed comfortable in his beach clothes, even joking about the miscommunication. I was less inclined to give Jean the benefit of the doubt. Let’s embarrass that old girlfriend of my brother’s, I imagined her thinking.

  None of this meant I shouldn’t have thought to invite Jean to visit her brother, and I apologized again to Matt.

  He patted my hand. “Not a problem. She’ll be here for dinner on Friday, and stay over one night. Petey and Alysse won’t be coming; they’ll be staying with some friends in Dennisport.”

  While I wasn’t crazy about Matt’s teenage niece and nephew, in some way, the children provided a buffer between their mother and me. They seemed to enjoy the science “toys” I gave them, bestowing an evaluation of cool, when I demonstrated both transverse and longitudinal wave propagation with a Slinky.

  The children’s father had died in a boating accident soon after Matt lost his wife. I had to give Jean credit for successful parenting, and for not turning her offspring against me. Or maybe they were simply being teenagers, taking the opposite view of their mother toward their uncle’s girlfriend.

  My second favorite Jean interaction was the time she and Alysse and Petey came for dinner in my old mortuary apartment. I’d cooked a leg of lamb, with all the trimmings my Betty Crocker cookbook suggested. Petey was allergic to nuts, I learned, including the almonds I’d liberally tossed into the green bean casserole; Alysse had become a vegetarian the day before; and Jean had started a diet that morning, partaking of only two lettuce leaves and a few carrot sticks.

  “Whose turn to cook this weekend?” I asked Matt.

  “Mine,” he said, quick as a cake mix.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MC stepped out of the shower, onto the newly re-tiled floor of the health club locker room. She rolled on deodorant, pulled on her sweats, fluffed out her hair, tried not to breathe the heavy hair spray residue in the air. She’d finally found a good personal trainer, Rick Gong, at the Windside Health Club in Winthrop, and she was making progress getting back in shape after a lazy, lazy month or two, letting her mother pamper her. Mom—Ma—was amused, reminding MC that she and her father managed to keep fit without spending a lot of money on monthly dues, or hours and hours on special machines.

  “It’s a different era,” MC had told her parents.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said her father.

  “There was nothing wrong with the old era,” said her mother.

  MC knew her mother was disappointed that she’d hooked up with Jake again, probably afraid MC would head back to Houston—not that MC had promised Jake anything the other night. Just not to shut him out completely. How her mother found out about Jake’s alcohol problem and his temper, she’d never know. She was sure Aunt G wouldn’t have told, if only not to upset her best friend. Mother’s intuition, she guessed, and wondered if she’d ever experience it. She rubbed her stomach, as if that were where the feeling would lie.

  Maybe things would work out, and one day her mother would get to meet Jake and feel his warmth and charm. It wasn’t that hard to imagine Jake at a family meal, telling stories the way her father often did. But not right away. He had a lot to prove first.

  She walked toward her silver Nissan in the parking lot, taking long strides as Rick had suggested. Much as she loved Girls’ Night Out with Mom and Aunt G, she was glad it had been canceled tonight—she’d needed to start this new gym program. It was time to make a comeback, physically at least.

  The Nissan’s Texas plates, with the state flag waving in the top right corner, stood out even at a distance. Another thing she’d have to take care of soon. She nearly tripped on a crack in the asphalt; she hated that it got dark so early these days. There were few cars in the Windside lot at six-forty-five, and she pictured every other woman her age eating pot roast at a polished dining room table, with a Hallmark husband, and two well-behaved little kids, a boy and a girl.

  Or, as Aunt G would say, picture a woman with a lab of her own, m
aking a difference through science and engineering. She smiled at the sound of Aunt G’s voice in her head. She couldn’t believe how rude she’d been, when Aunt G was only trying to help. She’d call her tonight and beg forgiveness. She’d chalk it up to stress, which was totally true. She’d set a new date to look at the emails, and maybe even cook dinner for Aunt G and Matt for a change. Wayne stalking her, Mary/Nina murdered, Jake showing up. Aunt G would understand and forgive her.

  She dug her keys out of the new Red Sox duffel bag Robert had given her to welcome her home.

  “Time to forget those Astros,” he’d said.

  She thought of Robert coming to her rescue the other night, though it turned out to be unnecessary, and uttered a long-distance thank-you to her family. Sure, they could be overbearing at times, but all in all she knew they loved her and wanted the best for her. If only she knew what that was. Uh-oh. More stress.

  MC took a deep breath of cool, salty air. Maybe she’d get an apartment here in Winthrop once she had a job. It was on the ocean—she’d never leave the ocean again—adjacent to Revere on the south side, but had no Galiganis. Close, but not too close. MC punched the remote, opened her car door, and tossed her duffel bag over to the passenger seat.

  Her heart skipped when she heard a shuffling noise. When nothing threatening appeared, she imagined there’d been an animal in the clump of trees near her car. She started to climb into the Nissan—except a hand grabbed her left arm and held her tight.

  She gasped and winced in pain. She tried to kick, but she was locked in place, her legs pressed against the bottom edge of the car. Whoever it was reached down and pushed the button to unlock the other doors. Then he opened the back door and pushed her onto the backseat.

  “Shhh,” she heard. “It’s just me, MC.” A familiar voice.

  Wayne Gallen slipped in beside her, and grabbed her arm again.

  “Wayne!” MC’s heart still beat wildly; she looked in confusion at Wayne’s grip.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you, MC,” he said. He let go of her arm, and patted it gently where he’d held it, as if to restore her body to normal. Wayne Gallen was Texas born and bred, and in his pronounced drawl, MC sounded like Eee-em Say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just didn’t want you to shout out my name or anything.”