The Nitrogen Murder (25 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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T
here 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 departure.”
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.”
I shivered a bit as I thought how easy it had been for me to think of
Phil
as a killer.
“I took my concerns to Christopher right away,” Phil continued, “and he told me to look into it, but when I did … well, you heard what he thought about it.”
“Why didn’t you go to the cops?” Dana asked, clearly still shaken from nearly losing her father.
“What could I have done? Given them Patel’s PDA? They
wouldn’t have understood the context,” Phil said. He glanced quickly at Matt. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Matt said. He stood back from the bed. I loved his serene expression and took it to mean he wasn’t hurting. I was glad he’d been in the almost constant company of an EMT on this trip, however.
I looked at my watch. I wondered how long we had before the curfew nurse returned and cut us off. I needed more from Phil, and I didn’t have much time.
“What about the invoices in your house, Phil?” I asked. “From Valley Med.”
Phil looked surprised. I realized he’d been missing in more ways than one. He had no idea of the extent of our investigation. How could he have guessed we’d been rooting around behind his kitchen bulletin board?
He glanced at Matt. “You’re a good detective,” he said.
I supposed it was natural that Phil would think it was the cop among us who’d been pursuing the case. This, in spite of our Robert Boyle/Galileo messages. Old stereotypes died hard.
Matt smiled, wisely letting me decide whether to call Phil on his false assumption. I let it go—he was recovering from a TNT gunshot wound, after all—and Phil continued.
“Well, I was looking for missing special materials, not just nitrogen but other controlled material, to try to trace it to Patel. I searched everywhere, both classified and unclassified Web sites, and I hit on a lot of lists with details of incidents and reports of missing substances, nuclear and nonnuclear. These would be either illegal or hazardous in the wrong hands.”
“And the missing hospital meds came up?”
“You’d be amazed. There’s nitrogen in Viagra, for example. And nitroglycerin. And of course morphine, C
17
H
19
NO
3,
which, coincidentally, I was offered a shot of this afternoon.”
I was impressed that Phil could rattle off the chemical composition of a complicated molecule like morphine. And I’d had
no idea it contained nitrogen. He shifted a bit and his lips tightened. He had to be hurting, I thought.
Elaine put her hand on his forehead and made another offer to let him be. “Phil, are you all right? Do you want us to leave?”
A breeze blew in from the slightly opened window, past a shabby credenza, carrying light perfume from a large basket of flowers from Elaine. I wondered if she’d used her wedding florist. I assumed she and Phil had had a wedding talk during the day. I figured I’d learn the parameters—on/off, postponed/canceled, full throttle/scaled down—when I needed to. Phil looked like he was only one good nap/shower combination and a tux away from walking down the aisle, but I knew there was more to it than that, and not just physically.
“I’m fine,” Phil said. “I’m trying to do this without morphine, and it’s a little rough right now.”
“Miss Emma,” Dana said, getting a smile from her dad.
I was learning a lot—not only the composition of the drug, but one of its street names as well.
“So, with the N atom in there, nitrogen will show up on the missing morphine list. Check your friendly DEA controlled substance list and you’ll see what I mean.”
Dana smoothed her long hair back from her face, making a temporary ponytail, then a bun at the top of her head. It fell back into the original arrangement as soon as she let go. “I’ve been thinking about this, Dad. I know the procedures. These facilities do a daily inventory of controlled substances. It requires a strict accounting, including the signatures of people going off duty and the people coming on duty.”
“I know, sweetheart, but then how do supplies ever go missing in the first place? We know how it’s supposed to work, but—” Phil shrugged the wrong shoulder and winced again.
I felt certain Dana was thinking of how her own friend and partner had managed to find a way to skirt inventory rules.
“They’re supposed to write incident reports,” she said. “I guess
eventually someone did, and that’s how you got to see it on those lists.”
Phil nodded, but weakly He was fading, and I wasn’t finished. I switched topics again.
“The interview with Howard Christopher? Was that the only one you taped?” I asked.
“Yeah, unfortunately. By the time I caught on that he might be involved, it was too late. And even with the interview I gave you, I’m aware I didn’t quite get him to give himself away. I can’t prove he knew about Patel’s downloading to his PDA.”

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