The Nitrogen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  Elaine took a long swallow and continued. “I panicked. I tried to talk to him, to find out who did that to him, but he didn’t answer. I guess he was unconscious. I didn’t know what to do to help him, so I just ran to the phone on a little table and called 911. Maybe I should have done something else. I had no idea how to stop the bleeding. I was so afraid if I touched him I’d make it worse, so I just threw a throw on him—” Here she was able to giggle at the idiosyncrasies of our language and help us all relax a bit.

  “You did just the right thing, Elaine. You probably saved his life,” Dana said. Coming from an EMT and a doctor-to-be, the assurance had to make Elaine feel better. The tables have turned, I thought, with Dana comforting Elaine instead of vice versa.

  I resolved to take a first aid course at the earliest possible opportunity.

  We nearly force-fed Elaine cheese and crackers from the cafeteria. She’d taken aspirin, too, and declared that she was fine. I had the feeling this situation, with Phil in an intensive care unit, was only marginally better for her than not knowing where Phil was.

  Dr. Brandon, the physician in charge of Phil at the moment, approached us. He was gray-haired and soft-spoken, and older than anyone I’d seen in a medical capacity lately. I had a flashback to the bouncing blond ponytail of Trish, Matt’s oncologist in Boston. Youthful energy aside, I preferred at least the appearance of wisdom and experience.

  “He’s sedated,” Dr. Brandon said, taking Elaine’s hand. “He lost a lot of blood, but he’s stable now. I can’t tell you when you’ll be able to talk to him. Your best bet is to go home and stay by the phone. But I’m sure you won’t want to do that.” He gave her a kindly smile. “So I’ll simply tell you the cafeteria is at the end of that hall, and there are more comfortable chairs in a lounge downstairs.”

  “He’s so nice,” Elaine said. “He’s in good hands.” A little slip of pronouns, but Elaine’s grammar was not in the best shape this week, and we all knew what she meant.

  Would I forget Newton’s Laws under similar stress? I hoped I’d never have to find out.

  Matt and I left Dana and Elaine at the trauma center, with a plan for staggering the waiting room watch. We hoped to convince Elaine to go home for a nap, but we knew it wouldn’t happen too soon.

  Once buckled into Dana’s Jeep, I let loose with the tears I’d been holding back. Matt knew immediately what was wrong.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  “I led the killer to that house. Someone followed me to Patel’s, knowing it was a good bet that I was also looking for Phil.” I shivered at the realization that I’d put more people than myself in danger. I was over blaming my mother, Josephine Lamerino, for all my faults, tempting as it was. I let Josephine off the hook. “I’m responsible, Matt. And don’t give me that line about how it was the shooter who hurt Phil, not me.”

  Matt was silent. Suddenly I wanted that comforting line. “Well?” I asked.

  “Okay, you might have led the shooter to Phil. Or he may have found Phil himself. Or Phil may have called him, not knowing he was a shooter. Or a hundred other scenarios. But you’re right, one of them might be that you were followed.”

  “Twice,” I said. “I went there twice. Just in case once wasn’t enough.”

  By two o’clock in the afternoon Matt and I were back at our newsprint pad and charts. We had another event, Phil’s shooting, to account for in our scheme, but not any additional data.

  “How does it feel to be working without access to police files or reports?” I asked him.

  “You mean, do I like being reduced to a kitchen bulletin board?” He put his arms around me. “It’s useful to see how the other half lives,” he said.

  Too bad we didn’t have the luxury of taking the rest of the day off.

  I had many questions and directed them at Matt, my closest law enforcement officer. How soon would the police check the bullet from Phil’s side to see if it matched the one taken from either Patel or Tanisha? (Ballistics was on it, he was sure.) Was it time now to tell the Berkeley PD all the loose ends we’d been working with? (Yes, we were on our way, with full cooperation on both sides, he thought, once we talked to Phil.) What if the PD had the complementary evidence and could pull the whole solution together? (They probably did, and all this would be resolved in time for a glorious wedding.)

  A phone call from Rose took me away from more theorizing, but I knew I’d put her off long enough.

  “Your grandson’s a genius, Rose,” I said. My way of making up for my recent neglect of her.

  “You can skip the schmoozing,” she said.

  I laughed. “As long as you know I tried.”

  “I’m waiting.” I pictured Rose, my diminutive lifelong friend, hands on her hips if she didn’t have to hold a phone, pouting slightly, frustrated that she was out of the loop on what had gone on since I left her neighborhood.

  I summarized our week, with all the background stories. It drained me to talk about the events that took the lives of two people, and to have to tell Rose that we still didn’t know what the prognosis was for Phil.

  “Poor Elaine,” Rose said. “I can’t imagine. You weren’t kidding when you listed those disasters the other day.”

  “No.” In fact, I played them all down, I thought.

  I heard a long whistlelike sound, then maybe the longest silence in Rose’s telephone history.

  “What’s new with you?” I asked.

  Her laugh seemed to let out a breath she’d been holding in. “Well, nothing like you’re going through. But there was a break-in here. I didn’t want to tell you, once I realized something was going on with you, though you took your sweet time telling me. Not that I guessed it would be that big.” Another long whistle.

  “There was an intrusion at the mortuary? Was MC at home?” I felt protective of my old apartment, and even more of Rose’s only daughter, my godchild.

  “MC was there; it was the middle of the night. But they never got upstairs. And the best news is we caught them. Well, the RPD caught them. Even without Matt.” A teasing laugh. “So it’s over for now.”

  I felt completely out of touch with Revere. I didn’t remember ever feeling so disconnected from Rose’s daily life, even in the thirty years we lived a whole country apart. “I’m not getting it, Rose,” I confessed. “What’s over?”

  “The mortuary chain, Bodner and Polk. You do remember that part? That they were trying to put all us independents out of business?”

  “I remember.” Barely.

  “I faxed you the police report about the exploding hearse at O’Neal’s. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember.” Barely. I was flunking my Galigani quiz.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. Ever since all this started—the switched clothes and all?—we beefed up security at our place. George Berger—you do remember Matt’s partner?” A laugh here, as sarcastic as Rose ever got. “He recommended this excellent service. I think they’re ex-wrestlers or boxers. Big, big guys. So when the goons broke in through the basement window, our guys were waiting. It was beautiful. It took about five minutes for the gorillas to give up their bosses. You guessed it. Bodner and Polk.” A pause, and then, “Done.”

  I pictured Rose brushing her palms against each other, as if she herself had taken on and cleaned up a messy situation, though I doubted either Frank or Robert would have let her anywhere near the “gorillas.”

  “Rose, I’m sorry I didn’t get to—”

  “Don’t give it another thought, Gloria. Now that I see what you’ve had to go through, I’m sorry I bothered you in the first place. I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get home.”

  “Indeed I will.”

  “I mean, you have just as much excitement here, right? And Matt probably misses being near his sister. And then there are those earthquakes you have to worry about.”

  Matt’s sister, Jean, lived on Cape Cod, not exactly “near” her brother, by East Coast standards. Finally I realized
what Rose was thinking. Each time I went to California for a visit, she worried that I’d stay there. Not paranoid on her part, since I did have a history of impulsive cross-country moves.

  As for earthquakes, that was another matter. The worst one I’d been in had sent me under the conference table with my boss at the time, while books from the shelves on the wall tumbled over us. No harm to people that day, but the quake, a 5.3, left the physical plant a mess, and we all went home early.

  I couldn’t keep my friend on the hook any longer.

  “Rose, I’ll be home soon.”

  “I know, I know. Just checking.”

  It seemed a long time before I’d be packing, however. The week ahead loomed in front of me, shadowy and unpredictable. I tried to imagine a wedding at the end of it.

  The picture was very fuzzy.

  Matt and I pulled up in front of Patel’s house for the sole purpose of reclaiming Elaine’s car, partly buried under the same trees I’d used for cover the day before.

  I got out of Dana’s Jeep and started toward the Saab, which I was to drive home. I paused at the front driveway and glanced at the door, a few yards away. The graceful branches of large old trees couldn’t minimize the effect of stark black-and-yellow crime scene tape.

  I stood there and looked back at Matt. He got out of the Jeep and walked up to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and led me toward the Saab.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

  Obedient as an electron in a magnetic field, following a predetermined path, I got into the Saab and buckled up.

  I had no intention of breaking through police tape.

  It was much too bright out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  There was good news on Friday evening. Matt took the call as we sat in Elaine’s living room. Phil was not only alive but awake and talking. Not that he’d said much. Phil had told Elaine and Dana, and the police, that he didn’t get a look at who had shot him.

  We also learned that the bullet had grazed past all Phil’s important organs without penetrating them. He would have bled out (Dana’s words, we were told), however, if Elaine hadn’t found him.

  “So it was a TNT,” Matt said to me when he’d hung up.

  “Trinitrotoluene? Why are you back on nitrogen compounds?” I asked him. “Not that I wouldn’t be happy to go into the fascinating history of nitrogen, like the fact that it was first called ‘burnt air,’ as in, air that has no oxygen.”

  Matt put up a halt sign with his hand. “‘Through and through.’ That’s what we call it when a bullet goes straight through a body, leaving both an entrance and an exit wound. TNT, for short.”

  I was sure my idea of what TNT stood for was much more common than Matt’s.

  Elaine met us in the hallway of the hospital, animated and seeming relieved that the worst was over. “The bullets came from outside the house, through the patio door,” Elaine said. “The first one just shattered the glass. The second—” She swallowed. “The alarm went off and made a lot of noise, but Patel apparently hadn’t paid his monitoring service bill, so no one came, and the neighbors didn’t pay attention. They never do. But at least it scared the man with the gun, because he didn’t stay around to try again.”

  That was Elaine in her I-might-as-well-have-been-there storytelling mode.

  An older African American nurse ushered us into Phil’s room, where Dana sat beside him. The nurse, whose name tag said BUNTING, was pleasant, except for reminding us sternly that she planned to return shortly to usher us all back out.

  “Too much traffic for this man,” she said, shaking her head of tight black curls. “Police, fiancee, daughter, friends …”

  Phil was sitting up, forced into an erect posture by stiff wrappings that were partly visible over his blanket. “I’m so sorry to have put you all through this,” he said. “I suppose you think I’m a coward.”

  We shook our heads vigorously. I caught a whiff of food from a tray table that had been pushed to the side. I wondered if the gray and brown lumps on the plate made Phil long for a pizza from Giulio’s, with or without anchovies.

  “I had to hide,” Phil said. “I had no idea who to trust in my own company. I’d been working with a friend outside the company, Rob Driscoll—”

  “That computer geek?” Elaine asked. She turned to us. “He’s a very nice guy,” she explained, “but too brainy, if you know what I mean.”

  I did.

  “Right,” Phil said. “Rob called me Friday and said he’d hacked into Patel’s files and seen some action that shouldn’t have been there. Patel was what we called an ATM. Not your local cash withdrawal machine but an authorized transfer manager. He was the go-to guy if you needed to send something out of the company, say, to another consultant or to a lab.”

  Phil’s attention seemed to drift. I wondered if he was in pain. When he started up again, it sounded more like stream of consciousness.

  “It’s so much more complicated now. We all sit in a windowless room and work on portable hard drives that have to be locked up at night, and we have these metal inserts that we put into computer drive slots to keep anyone from inserting and downloading, and on and on.” Phil eventually found his way back to his recounting of events leading up to this moment. “Evidence was mounting against him. So I faced Patel, to give him one last chance to give himself up.”

  “And that’s when whoever shot Patel found both of you on that Friday evening,” Elaine said.

  Phil nodded and held up his hand, still bandaged, as evidence. But the strips of gauze paled in contrast to the massive wrapping around his torso. I thought I saw streaks of blood on the pad and worked hard at not staring at them. I wondered what kind of matter the bullet had gone TNT, as Matt had put it. I was certain there’d been great trauma to Phil’s body, no matter what the doctor had said about the bullet’s not hitting anything “important.”

  Besides first aid, I needed a course in biology, sadly lacking in my science education. When I was in school, biology was the stepchild science, without a solid theory behind its catalog of data and random bits of information. Rutherford once called it stamp collecting. Now—and during the days of discovering the extent of Matt’s cancer—I wished I’d paid more attention to my one high school freshman class in anatomy.

  “I eventually managed to unlock Patel’s briefcase and get his PDA out of it.” He gave Dana a smile. Evidently they’d already discussed how he took it from her house.

  “What about the duffel bag?” I asked him. “Why would Christopher, or whoever was the shooter, want the duffel bag?”

  Phil shrugged the shoulder on his good side. “I knew there was nothing of value in the duffel bag.”

  “No value as in misinformation, or no value as in gym clothes?” I asked.

  “Gym stuff. Patel was a tennis nut,” Phil said, his voice sad. “Either the shooter didn’t know that or he was really after Tanisha.”

  “Are you getting tired?” Elaine asked. “We don’t have to do this now.”

  “I’m fine for a while,” Phil said. He gave his fiancee a loving look, then said softly, “I missed you.”

  If we hadn’t all been so curious, I’m sure we would have left the two lovebirds alone at that point, but nobody budged. For me, I was willing to let Nurse Bunting decide when Phil had had enough.

  “You got an urgent call on Monday afternoon,” I reminded him.

  “Right. Rob called me on Monday and said he’d broken another password barrier.”

  “And you rushed out to meet him,” I said.

  Rob Driscoll, computer geek, was the strange, urgent voice Ms. Cefalu had been hearing on the phone lately. Somehow, I’d pictured a darker, more shadowy spooklike figure.

  “I got the PDA back from Rob, and you know the rest. Originally I’d just meant to have it in a safe place while I thought about what to do.”

  “And the flight to Hawaii?” Elaine asked.

  “You’d be surprised how easy it is to fake a d
eparture.”

  Surprised and dismayed, I thought.

  “I still don’t get why you had to play spy in the first place,” Dana said. “Isn’t that why we have the FBI and the CIA and the DOE and all those other alphabet orgs?”

  I understood Dana’s question—an amateur had been sent to do the work of a professional. Sort of like me, I thought.

  “Funding sponsors,” I said.

  Phil nodded, his disheveled hair and dark-ringed eyes taking little away from his good looks. “When there’s a problem like this in your company, you don’t necessarily want to alert your funding sponsors. You try to solve it in-house first. You’re competing with a lot of people, and something like this could tip the balance against you.”

  “If you can’t handle your own staff and security, why should we give you big bucks for research?” Elaine added. “Happens all the time in my department.”

  “What’s worse is that, in this case, we’re dealing with national security, not just company secrets. The NNSA has shown interest in our project, for example. The National Nuclear Security Administration. In the wrong hands, this nitrogen molecule could do us a lot of harm, military-wise.”

  “Is that a word? ‘Military-wise’?” Elaine asked. I was glad to see the editor was back in form. “We were this close,” Phil said, illustrating the small gap with his thumb and index finger, “to being able to sell our nitrogen design to a national lab for development. We’d had a couple of briefings with them already. Then I started to see some signs that Patel was not quite straight up.”

  Phil’s voice was fading, his eyelids drooping, and I worried that he was going to drift off to sleep before we had any new information or confirmation of our newsprint theories. “It seems Christopher didn’t take your investigation seriously. Was he in on it?” I asked. Could he be the man with the gun? I meant, but couldn’t bring myself to articulate the thought.

  “I think so. But it’s hard to imagine him a killer. Hell, it’s hard to imagine anyone you know as a killer.”