Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  It seemed to take forever, though I knew if we clocked it, no more than fifteen seconds would have passed. How quickly we adjust our level of patience to the speed of the digital era, I thought—by the time we get to MC’s children’s generation, even the Polaroid camera will be in the Smithsonian, if it wasn’t there already.

  MC scanned through to two emails from Mary Roderick, Nina Martin’s undercover name. As MC suspected, the correspondence had to do only with the private investigator’s term paper for MC’s class. She read the first one aloud.

  Thanks so much for extending the deadline for my research paper, Ms. Galigani. Dr. Gallen has given me some new references that I want to check out. MR

  “Dr. Gallen. Ugh,” MC said, giving a shudder. She wiped her hand across her mouth and took a drink of water from a bottle on the desk.

  We double-clicked on the second email, dated a couple of days later, and I read aloud this time.

  Just to let you know that I left the paper in your office this morning. :=) MR

  “A smiley face and all.” MC choked up, biting back a swell of tears. I swallowed, feeling the tragedy myself, though I hadn’t known the woman. Playing on the keyboard one day, and the next, the police are dragging your body from a marshy grave.

  “Well, see, there’s no hint that she was headed for Revere,” MC said.

  “I wonder why she was so conscientious about her homework if her entire student persona was simply an undercover identity,” I said. “It’s not as if she really needed a grade.”

  “Not to arouse suspicion,” Matt said, from the rocker, apparently awake enough to hear our conversation. I’d noticed he’d been going in and out of a light sleep while we worked. “Undercovers are nothing if not thorough. She probably had a secretary write the paper for her.”

  MC groaned. “That’s annoying.”

  “Why can’t we just find out who hired her to take MC’s class?” I asked, straining my neck to make eye contact with Matt. “And then ask the FDA if she was working on anything for them.”

  “No one at the FDA admits to knowing anything about a case with a Houston PI. Not their procedure to work with civilians, they said.”

  “What about the card in Nina’s pocket?”

  Matt shrugged. “Nothing they know about. They’re saying she probably met someone in a bar and the guy happened to work for the FDA and gave her his card. There wasn’t a particular person’s number on it, just the general FDA switchboard number.”

  “If it was a bar pickup, wouldn’t the guy put his own extension? Or give his home number?”

  Matt shrugged, as if to ask, What did he know about bar pickups? “FDA offered to give us their telephone directory in case any of the other people on Nina’s list are their inspectors.”

  “So the lack of interagency cooperation in the US is not a myth?” MC asked.

  “Afraid not. What we might get, though, is something from the Houston PD. They promised to give us transcripts of any interviews.”

  “I wonder if Wayne Gallen knows about any of this, if it has anything to do with why he thinks MC is in danger.”

  “I’m in danger from Wayne Gallen himself,” MC said, going through the hands-in-sleeves routine.

  I looked to Matt for assurance that the PFA would be in effect soon, but he’d fallen asleep again.

  MC scrolled up and down her email list. “Here’s the only one from Alex that has a reference that’s even the slightest bit mysterious.”

  I peered at the monitor.

  From: Alexsimpson@hpbp.edu

  To: galig@hpbp.edu

  Subject: Trouble

  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.

  Hardly that mysterious. Who doesn’t have research troubles?

  “The only strange word is ‘bute.’ Another Texas word?” I asked.

  MC laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “Is it a chemical term?”

  MC tapped her fingers together. “Maybe short for butane or butyl, but I’ve never heard it used that way.”

  I pointed to the To line. “It’s even addressed to you.”

  MC screwed up her mouth and moved her lips as if she were literally chewing on the matter. “Ah,” she said, giving me a thumbs-up. “It must have been meant for Wayne Gallen. See, the first three letters are the same. I had a mailbox at Houston Poly. If Alex wasn’t paying attention and just hit a return after the gal and then clicked on send, it would come to me. I’d be first alphabetically.”

  “Then later he might be looking at his sent mail and realized what he’d done. Good call, MC.”

  “Well, at least we know why I received it, maybe. We still don’t know what it means.”

  “Maybe we should just hit reply and ask Alex what he meant.”

  MC’s eyes widened. “You don’t want to mess with this guy. He’s so two-faced. He’d always make fun of people, like two minutes after they gave him a million dollars.”

  “Not very nice.”

  “‘Well, sure, y’all,’ he’d say. ‘Ah will be happy to give you some of mah millions for your most wah-thy research.’ That was Alex. He did a pretty good Texas accent, even though he was from the Midwest. He thought the staff was laughing with him, but mostly it was at him.”

  “How did you get to know Alex so well?”

  “Supposedly I was interning, sort of, to learn some research techniques from his group, since I’d been in the field for so long.”

  “So you don’t want to hit reply?”

  MC shook her head, apparently not enjoying my teasing. “No, Aunt G.”

  “I was just kidding anyway.”

  A quick search of the Internet got us to the Isle of Bute, off Scotland, and Bute County, North Carolina.

  I heard Matt’s light snore. I studied the fleshy, gentle face of my—my what? POSSLQ? Person-of-the-Opposite-Sex-Sharing-Living-Quarters was what the IRS dubbed it a few years ago. As if it mattered right now, I wondered if there were a more up-to-date term. “Partner” sounded like a same-sex arrangement or a business relationship. “Boyfriend” seemed misleading, conjuring up images of sixteen-year-olds.

  MC caught my gaze.

  “He’ll be fine, Aunt G,” she said, and reached over to hug me.

  I hoped so.

  Before we left the mortuary building, Matt, who claimed to be completely refreshed from his time-out, checked all the downstairs’ windows. I knew MC was locked in on the third floor, her alarm set, but as we pulled away, I had an unsettled feeling. I scoured the area for Dr. Wayne Gallen, whom I’d still never met.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Andrea Cabrini took me through a labyrinth of no-frills, uncarpeted, unadorned corridors at the Charger Street lab. As we rounded a corner and entered the area where her cubicle was, I snagged my purse in a nest of wires and coax cables that hung from the ceiling.

  “I’ll bet you don’t miss all this,” she said.

  “Actually, I do,” I said. I unsnarled my purse and brushed a mist of off-white plaster from the strap.

  She gave me a strange look. Wait until you’re retired, I thought.

  Unlike medical facilities, which made me nervous, hard-science laboratories always gave me a thrill. I loved the buzzing and humming of motors and power supplies, the permanence of the oversized, marble-patterned log books on the benches, and even the smell of burning electrical insulation—a sign of something gone wrong. As we passed offices and machine shops, I saw piles of boxes yet to be opened. I pictured new optics nestled in Styrofoam molds, a special software package with a three-inch-thick manual, or a tiny chip that would make a big difference on a technician’s chassis.

  Andrea’s cubicle, located in a corner of a large electronics shop room, had some of my favorite posters. One featured Albert Einstein on a bicycle riding through a Southern California campus; another was a collage of the great inventors of the twentieth cen
tury—Thomas Edison, William Shockley, the Wright brothers, Philo T. Farnsworth, Guglielmo Marconi. Today I’d brought her two additions to her décor, posters I’d found and bought on-line.

  “For balanced gender representation,” I said.

  Andrea seemed pleased by the new prints—one of Hedy Lamar, 1930s actress and co-inventor of a torpedo guidance system that was two decades before its time; and the other of Mary Brush, who received a patent for the corset in 1825, one of the first women to receive a patent in any field.

  Andrea sucked in her breath and waved her hands as if she were tying an elaborate system of boned fabric onto her ample midsection. “They don’t make corsets big enough for me,” she said with a shy smile.

  “Be glad,” I said.

  Andrea, in her usual wide black pants and colorful tunic, took a seat on a rickety metal stool by her raised bench, leaving me to sit below her in the good chair, a government-issue, once-padded, gray metal number with scratched arms. I thought I saw a smidgen of rouge on her round cheeks and wondered idly if she had a lunch date with Peter. He’d finally stopped trying to reinvent me once he met Andrea. I knew there was a double date in our future, but didn’t look forward to it.

  My gesture toward dressing up for the lab visit was an appropriate scatter pin from my “science” collection, which Andrea always enjoyed. Today’s was a mixed-metal montage of transistors, wires, and diodes Rose had brought me from a crafts fair, part of her campaign to lure me into attending one with her.

  “What do you think is the ratio of metals to lace at one of those events?” I’d asked Rose, getting only raised eyebrows in reply.

  Andrea patted the top of a pile of papers stacked on the side of the bench. “From the reference room,” she said. “All you ever wanted to know about the fullerene-related research team.” She sighed, looked up and to the right, as if to connect with a fond dream. “Imagine having a molecule named after you!”

  “And it was named Molecule of the Year, by Science magazine, a few years ago,” I said, as one who kept track of those awards the way Rose knew who won the Oscar for best movie every year.

  Andrea and I played around with cabriniene and lamerinoene for a few minutes, choosing the configurations of our own namesake molecules. I was reminded of my equally amusing “science is fun” session with MC a few days before and realized what I missed more than equipment deliveries was the camaraderie and the injokes of a research team. Who else would have fun thinking up interesting arrangements of atoms?

  We finally got to work and looked through the papers, sifting through grant proposals and monthly reports, all of which had been filed, according to protocol, in the lab’s library collection. I read how a new federal initiative that funneled a large budget into nanotechnology had made it possible for Lorna Frederick’s team to garner an impressive amount of research money, some of it directed to small-molecule therapies—medicines that were able to distinguish healthy cells from diseased ones.

  The proposals started with the thesis that diseases, like cancers or AIDS, should be classified by their molecular composition rather than by their location in the body or their particular symptoms. The nanotech revolution that started with the discovery of buckyballs now gave us hollow tubes that could transport medicines. Nanotubes. I pictured a particular “medicine molecule” finding its way directly to the “disease molecule.”

  By the time Andrea and I were finished, I had nearly filled a yellow-lined pad with notes, references I planned to check on-line, names of researchers who were co-authors or copied on the reports. I was still in the dark about why the deceased PI Nina Martin might have been in Revere with the Galiganis, the FDA, and Lorna Frederick in her pocket, but I was in awe of the possible medicines of the future.

  I arrived home, my briefcase full of nano-notes, to find Matt with a new brochure and notes of his own. External Beam Radiation Therapy. Not a science fiction topic, but Matt’s choice of treatment.

  “I think this is going to be it,” he said, waving the thin pamphlet. He handed me a cup of espresso and the booklet.

  I sat next to him and leafed through pages of glossy color photographs of the linear accelerator that would generate high-energy X rays and focus them on Matt’s body. For many years I’d lived about an hour away from SLAC, the famous linear accelerator at Stanford University in California. To me linear accelerators were the tools of physics—forcing collisions that would break particles apart and reveal their inner structure. Or create little parts that weren’t there before the collision, some said.

  Now I was forced to remember another use of the accelerators, a tradition begun by E. O. Lawrence himself, inventor of the cyclotron. I recalled reading an anecdote about how he often kept the machine running all night to produce enough radioisotopes for California hospitals. Lawrence’s mother was one of the first to benefit, receiving radiation treatments for her uterine cancer. The end of the story made me hopeful—Lawrence’s mother was cured and lived another twenty years, into her eighties.

  “The treatment is five days a week,” Matt said. “It’s outpatient, over seven or eight weeks. They take about fifteen minutes, and it’s painless.”

  I breathed deeply, absorbing the information. “Good. When do we begin?” I tried to make it sound like just another item on the scheduling agenda, still wrestling with the right tone to show Matt support, as opposed to needing it myself.

  “There’s some preliminary work, they call it a simulation, where they pinpoint where the problem is. Check out the centerfold … they’re going to make a Styrofoam cast just for me.” Matt opened the leaflet, still in my hands, to show me the mold that supports the patient’s back, pelvis, and thighs. “I hope they have a big enough piece of material to take care of me. What’s that stuff made of anyway?”

  “I think it’s an extruded polystyrene material. I can check.” Not that I was tense, missing facetious questions.

  “Come here,” Matt said, patting his lap. I hadn’t been able to sit on anyone’s lap since the age of seven. But the gesture did lighten my mood.

  Jean arrived sooner than originally planned, before Matt’s scheduled simulation appointment with Styrofoam. I’d never gotten around to calling her, but I tried to welcome her warmly. I’d set up the guest room with meticulous detail. I cleared out two dresser drawers and half a closet for her two-night stay; I dusted thoroughly, put fresh flowers on the bedside table, and pencils and paper by the phone in case she needed to keep her real estate business going. I plugged a hair dryer into her bathroom socket, fluffed the towels, and installed a night-light. Worthy of a four-star rating, I thought. I quickly learned there were five-star arrangements, and I’d fallen short.

  “I thought you’d have an extra robe,” she said, checking the closet. Strike one, but I rushed to get her one of mine, happily out of the laundry. Too big, she let me know, with a make-do shrug. “And I never use perfumed soap.” She used her thumb and middle finger, her pinky sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle to her knuckles, to pick up the bar. I’d paid more for that one bar of soap than for the six-pack of the grocery-store brand I used myself. Nevertheless, strike two.

  Jean was ten years younger than Matt and slightly taller than both of us, or it might have been her more slender build that made her seem so. Or her towering personality. Otherwise, she had the same dark, Italian, baggy-eyed look, expertly de-emphasized with makeup Rose would have approved of.

  She’d brought photos of her children, even though we’d seen them only a month or so earlier. “We just don’t see you as much anymore, Matty,” she said, her heavy-lidded eyes drifting in my direction. Nasty Gloria, cheating Jean’s children out of their only uncle.

  Matt gave her a brotherly smile. “You’ve always said that, Jean.”

  My hero.

  “Well, you know what I mean, big brother. Delicious dinner. All my favorites,” she said, patting her enviably flat stomach, fully aware that Matt had prepared the meal. I was convinced that if she’d seen
me line the vegetables next to the beef in the ceramic roasting pan, she would have choked on a parsnip fiber.

  Strike three came with coffee after dinner, prompting me to walk off the field.

  “I’m not happy that you’re still working, Matt, with your … health … and all,” Jean said from her post in our best easy chair.

  “Not a problem,” he told her. “The doctors tell me to do what I feel I can do, and stop when I can’t. Pretty simple.”

  “Well, I know this case you’re spending most of your time on involves Gloria’s friend, but your health is more important.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Which friend are you talking about?” Just because you don’t like me doesn’t mean I don’t have lots of friends was my slightly misleading message.

  “The undertaker, of course. Isn’t it her daughter who’s in trouble?”

  Jean made the mortuary business, a great service to society in my admittedly biased opinion, sound sordid.

  I kept my composure, but barely. “The ‘trouble’ is that a young woman has been murdered,” I said. “And your brother is the RPD’s best homicide detective.” Argue with that.

  She sipped the espresso Matt had prepared for her, which she declared the perfect strength. “I thought Matt said he had to rescue a young friend of yours who has some kind of problem.”

  I couldn’t imagine Matt had put it that way. He groaned and shook his head. “Not what I said, Jean.”

  Jean screwed up her nose, crossed her thin legs in a direction away from me. “I knew what you meant. You wouldn’t be out there killing yourself if she weren’t implicated.” A tilt of the head toward me.

  “I’m just doing my job. You should know that.”

  “Well, all I know is, you were always the picture of health, until … recently.”

  In other words, Teresa would never have let him get cancer.