The Nitrogen Murder (23 page)

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Authors: Camille Minichino

Tags: #California, #Lamerino; Gloria (Fictitious Character), #Missing Persons, #Security Classification (Government Documents), #Weddings, #Women Physicists, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Women Sleuths, #Reference

BOOK: The Nitrogen Murder
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“You know, Patel could also have been uploading, not downloading.
Maybe his only violation was to use a classified computer to upload his PDA calendar with his kids’ birthdays, for God’s sake.”
“He doesn’t have kids.”
“Geez, Chambers, maybe it was his tee times. You can’t be sure he was downloading classified information.”
(Exasperated grunt)
“You’re right, Howard. So, you want me to back off?”
(Sigh)
“Yeah, you get back to work, Chambers. We need you back on the bench. I’ll take it from here.”
The machine went silent, except for the whiny noise of the clutch. The meeting, obviously held before Patel’s murder, appeared to be over.
“Phil might have taped this for his own protection,” Matt said. “Maybe he’d begun to suspect his boss of being in on it.”
“It
being some kind of industrial espionage or even national security violations,” I said.
Aren’t you sorry you didn’t pay more attention to my nitrogen lesson?
I thought, but considered it too flip to say at the moment. “And that’s why he mailed the PDA to me instead of turning it over to his boss.”
“Why not the police?” Elaine asked.
“No context,” Matt said. “If I were the cop who got this, I’d need a long explanation. On its face, there’s nothing but two guys disagreeing about a third.”
“But the third one is dead,” Elaine said.
No one mentioned the “missing” status of the second one.
Matt yawned. As much as I felt we were making progress, I wanted us all to retire for the night.
“I’m not saying Phil made the right choice. But he knew Gloria was investigating.” Matt ticked off the evidence. “She asked him pointed questions at lunch—”
I felt my face flush. “You weren’t there.”
“Did you?”
“Lucky guess,” I said.
“Let’s say it is Phil at the house. He probably saw her the first
time. He’d have to wonder how she got the address and realize she’d accessed the PDA.”
“She could have gotten the address from the police,” Elaine said.
“Not likely,” Matt said, apparently thinking, as I was, that the police were not bending over backward to include us in their investigation, nor to share information. “Then, if he had any doubt, she left the Robert Boyle message.”
“And he might have gotten anchovies the next night,” I said.
Elaine looked bewildered at that, but I didn’t take the time to explain.
“Hmmm, it almost looks as though you’ve been doing the work of a cop,” Matt said.
“I prefer to call it research, acting as a consultant, as usual.”
“You know what this means,” Elaine said, ignoring our banter. Her voice had all the confidence of a moment of enlightenment.
Matt and I gave her similar looks. I, for one, hadn’t begun to see the clear picture Elaine had apparently worked out.
“What
does
it mean, Elaine?” I asked, since she seemed to be waiting to deliver a punch line.
“Phil’s one of the good guys.”
I should have realized how much it would mean to Elaine for Phil to be the guy who was ferreting out a spy, and not be a criminal himself.
I gave her a hug. I heard the faint sound of wedding bells.
All we had to do now was straighten out a few loose ends. It was looking good for Christopher as the murderer, and I looked forward to working out the logic more carefully in a session with Matt.
And to luring Phil out of hiding and down the aisle.
 
Elaine went upstairs shortly after we heard the tape-recorded meeting between Phil and his boss. I heard a soft “Thanks, Gloria” as she left the room. She looked weary beyond words. I sensed
that hearing Phil’s voice had brought her about a microliter more hope than she had the day before.
Matt and I called Patel’s phone number a few more times, to no avail, then agreed that we needed a fresh start before outlining murder scenarios and listing all the questions that still remained to be answered.
William Galigani called long before we’d had enough sleep, however.
“Hey,” William said. “I’m surprised you’re up this early. But I have some stuff to send you.”
I guessed this was a teenager’s version of
you had to wake up anyway to answer the phone.
“What did you find, William?” Words spoken through a wide yawn.
“There’s no games on it,” he said, through boyish chuckles. William’s voice was in the transition stage; I expected any day to mistake his voice for his father’s, as had happened with Rose’s two sons. “And only a few hot chicks.”
“Nice, William.”
“Sorry, don’t tell Grandma, okay?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
And I wouldn’t, though I thought it curious that William was more concerned about Rose’s reaction to his little jokes than his parents’. But William had probably been up half the night working on my project, and he deserved a little fun. At least school was out for the summer and I didn’t have to worry about keeping him from his homework.
“Okay, well, there’s a calculator, and an expense sheet, and then some book downloader, but no books,” William said. “Then there’s some charts, with columns, like the first heading says ‘storage places,’ and there’s amounts, and it says ‘missing materials.’ I think it’s, like, a list of missing chemicals and stuff, plus dates.” The facilities Phil mentioned on the tape, with evidence that Patel was in the neighborhood during the time period of
recorded thefts. “There’s a lotta equations, too, and formulas and reactions. They don’t look that complicated, though.”
“Do you recognize the equations from your chemistry class?”
“Yeah, they’re sort of like TNT and nitroglycerin and ammonium nitrate. Stuff like, you know, we studied this year, except there’s one term that might be off from that. Well, it’s hard to explain, but I’m just sending it all now and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Thanks, William. You’re the man. Is that the right expression?”
“Wow, Aunt Glo, you talk the talk. Call me back if you need anything else, okay? And, oh, I think Grandma is going to be calling you in a few minutes.”
“William, do me one more favor and tell her I’ll call her later. I’m just walking out the door.”
“I get it.”
When we hung up, I had the awful realization of what a bad role model I was to children everywhere.
M
att and I sat in front of coffee and sourdough toast, both of us a little bedraggled. I’d put a load in the washing machine so that at least our clothes would be fresh and unwrinkled. My brow, on the other hand, had felt more furrowed with each day in California. Looking back over the week, I realized our only crisis-free moments with Elaine had been our time in the rush hour traffic from the San Francisco airport to Berkeley
There was still no sign of Elaine from the upstairs quarters, and I hesitated to rattle around in the office, lest I disturb her.
I’d done enough of that.
From William’s assessment, I thought we wouldn’t get much more from Patel’s PDA anyway. Probably the most useful information had been the owner’s address and phone number, which had allowed me to find Phil in the first place.
Also, for my purposes now, the equations themselves weren’t as important as the fact that Patel had downloaded them. I was sure William’s observation about “sort of like ammonium nitrate” but with an unfamiliar term or two had to do with reworking a standard high-explosives equation to accommodate a new, more energetic nitrogen molecule.
For those reasons, I didn’t mind delaying my access to Elaine’s computer.
About one hour and two pots of coffee later, Matt and I were well into the construction of scenarios that would account for
two murders. To make it easier to follow our trains of thought, we wrote on a large piece of newsprint I’d tacked onto the bulletin board in the kitchen.
I’d found the pad in the guest room closet, left over from when Elaine had taken drawing classes through local adult education programs. I thought again how alike Elaine and Rose were, always exploring new subjects, trying different crafts—Rose’s current project was making glass beads.
When I retire,
I’d told them, and myself, but I’d come to realize that people hardly ever take up new interests in retirement.
Except for police work.
My current craft was sketching plausible threads as Matt and I talked about the events of the week. One thread seemed very neat.
Howard Christopher
 
 
Shoots Patel
(to cover up security breaches)
 
 
Follows ambulance
(to finish job and confiscate materials in briefcase and duffel bag)
(disks? printouts? extra PDAs to hold all the equations?)
 
 
Shoots Tanisha Hall
(wrong place, wrong time)
(thinking duffel bag had information, not tennis stuff)
We also managed to account for Phil’s wounded hand. Not from creating our shrimp-wrap hors d’oeuvres, we knew from Dana’s intern friend.
“What if Phil was there at the scene when Patel was shot and got wounded himself?” I asked.
“The timing’s right,” Matt said.
“And it would explain how Phil knew about the briefcase and the duffel bag.” It seemed ages since our word games over the briefcase/duffel-bag mix-up, and I felt vindicated that I hadn’t made a fuss over nothing.
Matt scribbled out a timeline for our first Friday evening, working backward from the pickup call to Dana and Tanisha at about five-forty-five. “By then, the wounded Patel had made it back to his car, driven himself to the wrong hospital, got bandaged up—”
“But Phil probably went straight to the trauma center.” I drew a thick black line that went nowhere but helped me think it out.
“A little tip he’d picked up from his EMT daughter.”
“So Phil was already at the trauma center when Dana and Tanisha pulled up in the ambulance with Patel in the back, though he couldn’t have predicted they’d meet. He must have ducked into a closet when he saw them.”
“Or gone out the side and shot Tanisha.”
I sighed, or rather, whined. “That puts us back to ‘Phil shot Patel.’ I thought we agreed on Christopher.”
“Okay, we’ll save the ‘Phil is a double murderer’ thread for later. For now, we’ll go with ‘hand slashed by Christopher at the crime scene.’” Matt ticked off that question from our list of loose ends. “If only our checkmarks made it so, huh?” he said, always the reality checker.
I’d been asking Matt all week, in one way or another, how he felt about working during his supposed vacation. I asked again, “Are you still all right with this … project?”
He took my hand. “I’ll warn you when I’m going to faint again, okay?”
“Don’t even joke about it.”
I was satisfied with the thread that linked Christopher to Patel’s and Tanisha’s murders. But Matt was not, his tick marks notwithstanding.
“We have a tape,” he said. “We have no authentication so far, from either party.”
“But it must have been Phil who put that envelope in my car. It’s his voice. Elaine recognized it. And it was a live meeting.”
“So you say.”
Of course, Matt was right. I thought about how deeply technology influenced the rules of evidence. On the one hand, digital cameras had time and date stamps so you could always tell when a photo was taken, to the minute, or even the second with some systems. On the other hand, anyone bright enough could alter that information. The audiotape we listened to could have been made up; the PDA material could have been tampered with.
Even by young William Galigani,
I imagined a defense attorney saying.
“And think about it,” Matt continued. “There’s nothing really incriminating on that tape. Just upper management who didn’t want to acknowledge a problem area so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. How common is that?”
Temporarily defeated, I moved on to the second thread. “Julia Strega,” I said, indicating the name at the top of our second column.
Julia Strega
 
 
Steals supplies and meds
(through her EMTs? which ones?
Tanisha??)
 
 
Sells to ??
 
 
Launders $$ through phony pickups and deliveries
It bothered me to list Tanisha’s name as a potentially corrupt EMT, but until we had some reason to believe the evidence was planted, we felt she belonged there.
“This thread’s not so neat,” I said.
Matt tapped his pencil on our list of questions. “We do have one or two leaps and bounds and a few fringe items.”
I had to agree. “The Robin connection, for one—the fact that she had one of Patel’s IDs and that she apparently altered Dana’s incident report.”
Slap
. Something hit the kitchen table while we had our backs to it.
We turned to see Dana as she pointed to an envelope she’d slammed on the table.
“And the fact that Robin and Julia had their heads together over something fishy yesterday, at my house, and the other
enormous
fact that Tanisha had this wad of cash stuck under her mattress.”
Dana looked as bad as we did, only a younger version. Sleep-deprived, on edge, frustrated. Her shorts and top looked as though she’d worn them while she slept—or tossed in her bed.
“I’m so angry,” she said, adding to the emotional inventory I’d concocted for her. “Tanisha. She
did
steal those meds and supplies. She
was
a thief.”
Matt put water on for tea. By now we all knew where Elaine kept the special African teas Dana liked.
Dana sat down and gave us a dramatic rendition of how she’d found Robin and Julia at her house, and how Robin all but threatened her life, sending her into Marne Hall’s arms. All this was a lead-up to how she happened to roll under Tanisha’s bed, which I understood. But she didn’t have a good explanation of why she took the money.
“I’m not going to
use
it,” Dana said, sending a scowl my way when I asked.
“We know that,” Matt said.
“I just wanted to get it out of the house, I guess. In case the cops went back.”
Dana buried her head in her arms on the table. I could hardly
imagine how difficult it would be to find out your good friend was a criminal.
“Could there be another explanation for the cash?” I asked.
“No.” No hesitation. “I remember now, certain things. Like, she’d never want to gossip about the stolen meds, the way me and everybody else did. She’d always change the subject, and God knows she’d gossip about everything else. And she’d be hanging around the pharmacies here and there, and she had a lot of private meetings with Julia that she never talked about. Things like that. Plus, lately she’s had all this extra money so Marne could stay home and take care of Rachel. She said it came from overtime, but she didn’t seem to be putting in much more time than I did. She said she got a raise, too, and now I’ll bet she didn’t.” She pushed the envelope away from her. It slid to the edge of the table and stopped, as if it had some internal sensor that kept it from falling. “Unless you count this as a raise.”
I wasn’t used to sharing my investigative activities with another layperson. I had to struggle even to think of myself as “lay,” especially since George Berger, Matt’s partner at the RPD, had come to accept me as a de facto member of the police team. Still, I welcomed Dana’s input.
I changed my thinking—from Tanisha as victim to Tanisha as scam artist—and edited our newsprint diagram accordingly. I struck out a few question marks in Julia Strega’s column.
 
 
(through her EMTs?
Tanisha
)
We were getting close but still had kilometers to go.
 
“Thanks for speaking up for me, Matt,” Dana said. “I can’t believe you actually went over there, to Tanisha’s house. I suppose cops know all the addresses in the universe.” She smiled, a worshipful
look. “It means so much to me to at least have Marne and Rachel back in my life.”
It was the first I knew about his side trip to the Hall residence. I figured he must have stopped off there one of the times when he had Dana’s Jeep to himself. I decided to leave Dana and Matt alone, hoping that her near adoration of him might calm her enough to help even further with our posted schematics.
I headed up the stairs to retrieve the equations William had sent. I walked past Elaine’s still-closed bedroom door quietly, though I was beginning to think I should wake her, or at least check on her.
In the office, I booted up Elaine’s computer and watched the software icons take their place on Elaine’s tapestry desktop.
“That’s a very famous tapestry,” she’d told me a while ago. “See that lovely unicorn in the middle of the fenced-in area?”
I would have been more impressed if the fantasy animal could have speeded up the start process.
I walked to the window over the driveway and gazed out at a sunny day. Perfect for a BART trip to the newly renovated Ferry Building in San Francisco, for example. Though I’d never get on my knees in the dirt, I loved looking at flower gardens. Elaine had planted a strip about two feet wide of low-lying deep purple flowers along the fence between her yard and her neighbor’s. I gazed at the colorful blossoms on both sides of the driveway And then I noticed …
Not again.
A missing car.
This time it was Elaine’s.
 
I knocked on Elaine’s bedroom door, but I knew there’d be no answer. I shoved it open. Empty I had a good idea where she was.
I pushed the buttons for William’s cell phone, shifting from one foot to the other while I waited for the connection.
“Hey, Aunt Glo. I have caller ID, so I could tell this call was
from California. Cool, huh? Did you get the equations?”
I hadn’t checked. “Yes, thanks a lot, William.” Lying to a minor, again. “I have another question, though, a quick one. When you called this morning you said something like you were surprised to know I’d be awake?”
“Right.”
“How did you know I’d be up in the first place?”
“Oh, your friend Elaine called around seven o’clock California time. So I figured you’d be up, too. She called Grandma first, and then she called me and she asked me for that address from the PDA.”
I was right, but not happy about it.
 
Matt, Dana, and I piled into her Jeep, and she drove us across town to Patel’s Woodland Road home. By now I knew the windy route by heart and could direct her easily.
It wasn’t clear why we decided, with almost no discussion, that we needed to go to the house in Claremont immediately. I realized in retrospect that it was the first Dana had heard that her father might be alive and living at Patel’s, and she naturally would want to see him. For me, I wanted to support Elaine in what must have been an overwhelming need to see and confront her fiance.

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