The Carbon Murder (3 page)

Read The Carbon Murder Online

Authors: Camille Minichino

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths

BOOK: The Carbon Murder
4.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Matt nodded and punched in a number.
MC was safe. I relaxed.
Too soon.
“Now I have something to tell you,” Matt said, pulling a sheet of stationery from a brown envelope. I drew a quick breath as I recognized the logo—a thick cross, like the Red Cross symbol, only black and gray. The logo of Dr. Abeles, Matt’s doctor.
“Now, don’t worry,” he said.
Of course not. I could hardly breathe. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re not sure. Abeles says this is inconclusive.” Matt waved the paper as if it were a police report, like the kind he handled every day, perhaps a B&E or a mugging. “I need a biopsy. My blood test showed a prostate-specific antigen, whatever that is, at a borderline high level. And there was some abnormal hardness.” He flicked his wrist toward his groin with his closed fist. Not to be too specific.
I blinked, futilely attempting to block a sudden headache. Frustration pulsed through me in tiny waves. I was frustrated that I had only the vaguest idea of what an antigen was. That I had no idea what a good level of it would be. I knew by heart a long list of physical constants. The fine-structure constant of spectroscopy, 1/137. The main transition line of a helium-neon laser, 6328 Angstroms. The ratio of proton mass to electron mass, 1836. But I didn’t know what quantity of blood protein made the difference between life and death for the man I loved.
Matt seemed to be reading my face. He was the one needing a biopsy. He was the one who had watched his wife of ten years die. He shouldn’t have to worry about me, I thought.
“Look,” he said, showing me the paper he’d received from Dr. Abeles. “See how INCONCLUSIVE is checked off?” The page looked like an inventory sheet, or a to-do list. Not an official medical
report. “It could just be an enlargement of the gland, not cancerous.”
Cancer. He’d put the word out there. I hated hearing “cancer,” or any form of the word. It was better whispered, or referenced indirectly. Like in the old days. When my Uncle Mike got cancer, my mother said, “Mike has …” She left the word unspoken, tilting her head and rolling her eyes up and to the side. Reluctance to utter language she thought vulgar? A prayer to God? Submission to fate?
I felt pain in my shoulders, my arms, my jaw. “Inconclusive” was not an encouraging word, not a much better word than “cancer.” “Inconclusive” was a term reserved for data of the kind I’d dealt with in my physics career. It meant the curve didn’t follow the path of a known equation, or that some outlying points precluded a smoothing algorithm. In a medical report, I wanted yes or no. No, actually. No foreign body. No unhealthy cells. No cancer.
I tried not to show Matt the depth of my panic. “So when is the next test?” A simple question.
“I haven’t scheduled it yet. I didn’t have my calendar with me.”
“Your calendar? What could be more important that you wouldn’t schedule it immediately? It’s a biopsy, right? How long can that take?” I heard my voice rise in pitch, if not in volume. My hands were folded on my lap, my knuckles white.
Matt pulled me to him. “Don’t worry. I almost didn’t tell you, since there’s nothing—”
“Conclusive.” I finished for him. I leaned against his chest, tense, listening to his heart. He was right, I told myself. It could be nothing. Like MC’s alleged stalking.
When the phone rang, I hoped it was good news. Not likely at midnight, however, I thought.
But it was, at least, definite.
“It’s Berger,” Matt said, covering the speaker with his hand as he listened to his partner. “There’s a nine-twenty-one at the Galigani Mortuary.”
I mentally reviewed my code list, and gasped. MC had called in a prowler.
“Everything’s okay,” Matt said, when he hung up. “Uniforms were already arriving for canvas, so they picked up the guy and they have him at the station.”
I grabbed my purse from the hallway table.
Matt gave me a slight teasing smile. “I suppose you want to go down there with me.”
“You drive,” I said.
T
he Revere Police Department was one of the beautiful, old, redbrick buildings in the City Hall complex. It belonged to a different century than that of its modern vehicles—a fleet of shiny, white motorcycles, sedans, vans, and new SUVs, all with red, white, and blue lettering—lined up in the parking lot and along Pleasant Street. Beautiful as this nearly hundred-year-old building was, a plea for a new facility was in the local news at least once a month, and the avowed priority of past and present city officials.
Matt and I passed through the blue foyer and into the main hallway. The photos that lined the wall were as familiar to me as Matt’s stories—Harry, one of the revered horses from the pre–motor vehicle days; young policemen shot in the line of duty; groups of officers in the old uniforms with high helmets like those in English hunting scenes.
Halfway down, where the burnt coffee smell was strongest, George Berger greeted us. Berger was Matt’s junior by about twenty years, but his slow, lumbering gait made him seem older.
“I knew you’d come, too, Gloria,” he said, pulling a photo out of his wallet. Little Cynthia Berger’s deep brown eyes peered at me, her pudgy body and curly dark hair framed by a playroom scene, clearly a backdrop in a mall photo studio. She held a Teddy bear in a choke hold; a giant gold lion lay at her feet. It always amused me when parents gave their children cuddly representations of creatures that would maul them if real.
I forced a smile. “She’s getting so big,” I said, hoping I didn’t
sound like a voice-mail recording, which was close to how I felt. I handed the photo back.
“Oh, no. That’s your copy,” he said.
I managed a happy-sounding thank-you and slipped it into a side compartment of my purse. Matt’s partner had come a long way from the days when he resented my work with the RPD. I was sure his conversion had little to do with my competence, but was instead because I’d led him to believe I loved all children, and his daughter in particular. A misleading presentation of myself, but it had worked. He’d come to accept me as a kind of third partner in special cases.
I looked around for MC.
“Mary Catherine’s doing the paperwork,” Berger said, responding to my questioning gaze. “The guy’s in the Orange Room. We’re running his ID through the system.”
“Jake Powers,” I said, with some confidence.
Berger shook his head, flipped some pages in his notebook. “Nope. Name’s Wayne Gallen. Chemist at Houston Poly. Says he’s a colleague of Mary Catherine. Says he came to warn her about something and that’s why he was skulking around the building.”
“A warning?” I’d often worried about MC’s vulnerability among the drill pipes and rotary bits of her oil company job, but not in a research lab or classroom, and not now that she was home. What kind of danger could a chemical engineer be in, once she was out of fieldwork?
“That’s what he claims,” Berger said, scratching his fleshy chin with his notepad.
In the next few minutes—thanks to Frank’s police scanner—the blue hallway became very crowded with Galiganis in various stages of after-midnight attire. MC’s brother John, a reporter for the
Revere Journal
, in thick maroon sweats. Frank and Robert, father-and-son partners at the mortuary, in business casual, as if they might be picking up a client. Rose and daughter-in-law, Karla, in almost-matching navy pantsuits that they could have worn to a
Civic Club luncheon. Fifteen-year-old William in respectable jeans and a clean sweatshirt, probably a condition of his being allowed to come along. I was still in my Tomasso’s outfit, consisting mostly of black fleece.
I doubted the RPD hosted such a hubbub for a prowler call-in in a normal case. The Galiganis were a key family in the city, their mortuary business and John’s newspaper job bringing them in regular contact with Revere’s infrastructure. The family even had a divorce lawyer in its ranks—Robert’s wife, Karla. Though I liked her, I hoped I’d never need her services.
An inordinate number of uniforms milled around us. I wondered if the phones, radios, and keyboards were always this busy in the early morning hours. With the staff thus occupied, it seemed an excellent time for a felony across town.
MC sat against a wall, the center of attention in her extra-large Texas sweatshirt that dwarfed her tiny body. She’d returned from talking to Wayne Gallen, who was still being held in the Orange Room.
Standing in the farthest of three semicircles around her, I caught only snippets of the chatter.
“I heard a car screech away. Wayne thinks it was
them
, these people who are supposedly after me,” came from MC.
“Did he get into the building? Did he hurt you?” from Rose, distraught, notwithstanding her crisp white blouse.
“Wayne says he didn’t want to lead the others to me, but he thinks he might have done exactly that,” from MC.
“What others?” from John, thankfully not taking notes for the
Journal
.
“Did you hear a noise or something?” from Robert.
“Why was the guy sneaking around?” from Karla. “Are you going to press charges?”
“Who is he again? I didn’t know you taught at Houston Poly,” from someone I couldn’t see.
Non sequiturs
. I couldn’t stand them. I needed a logically laid-out
version of the night’s events. I forced my way to the front, aware that Matt wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. I had a fleeting worry that he might be in a corner somewhere, doubled over in pain.
I scrambled closer to MC. When I brushed past William, the only person in the room shorter than I, I heard him say, “Go, Auntie Glo.” At least someone in the group was relaxed.
I leaned over MC, cross-legged on the seat of a wide gray chair. “Mary Catherine …” I said.
She gave me a frown that I read:
Is this really so serious that you have to use my full name?
“MC,” I said, with a smile meant to calm us both. “Can you start from the beginning? What led you to make the call to the police in the first place?”
She took a deep breath and wrapped her hands in her sleeves. She shivered, as if she were chilled to the bone, in spite of the stuffiness of the area. “I was doing laundry in the basement and I heard a noise at the window.”
My eyes widened, and MC smiled for the first time. She knew I’d be impressed that she’d use the mortuary laundry room, below street level and immediately adjacent to the prep room—and late at night. I had chosen to cart my clothes to a Laundromat every week rather than deal with the eeriness and deathly odors of the Tuttle Street basement even in the light of day.
“And then?”
“Then I heard a car pull away, really loud. Screeching. And I couldn’t tell if the noise at the window was a knocking or a, you know, break-in. And who would be knocking on the basement window of the mortuary at eleven-thirty at night anyway? Plus, with this feeling of being followed lately, I guess I overreacted. I had my cell phone down there with me, so I just called nine-one-one.” MC took a sip of water, slowed her breathing. “Wayne’s not a bad guy. I met him at Houston Poly when I was teaching that night class. He was a great resource for one of my students who needed material for a term paper. I shouldn’t have called the police on him.”
I patted her knee. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Did he say what exactly he’s doing here, following you around?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I know he likes me. He’d never ask me out though, while I was with Jake. But he said he came to warn me that the research guys at HP are after me.” I assumed she meant Houston Poly and not the real HP, the company that made my printer and other peripherals in my home office. “But it’s hard to believe anyone’s on my case. I never did anything to make Alex Simpson or the guys on his team mad at me, as far as I know.”
“Did he give you any details about why they’re after you?”
“Supposedly I have some privileged information that came to me through an email I shouldn’t have gotten. It could be something about the research, maybe a patent? Not that I’m working with them that much, but I’ve had a little interaction through Wayne and this student, Mary Roderick, who’s doing a term paper on buckyballs.”
I’d blocked out the crowd around us until I heard a chorus of “Buckyballs? What are buckyballs?” I thought I also heard “Bocce balls?” and “Bucking broncos?”
Berger’s reappearance prevented me from calling everyone to attention and giving a lecture on buckyballs, starting with the original “Bucky,” F. Buckminster Fuller, and the geodesic dome, and nanoscale technology—one of the hot items in today’s research arena.
“We’re going to let him go,” Berger said. “No priors, no reason to keep him, since you’re not pressing charges. Right, Mary Catherine?” Berger raised his bushy, dark eyebrows in a gesture that offered one more chance for MC to request formal police action.
MC shook her head. “He’s harmless, really.”
For myself, I thought Wayne Gallen ought to be punished simply for upsetting my godchild. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t knock on her door if he had information—I suppressed “a warning”—to give her.
“We should at least check out your email,” I said, swinging my
head from MC to Berger.
Before you let him go
, I meant, but Berger had turned and walked away by then.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” MC said.
I smiled and nodded. She didn’t need to know I’d be nagging her until we had no loose ends.
It took about ten minutes to clear the area outside the station. At one in the morning the breeze from the ocean had taken over, lowering the temperature several degrees. The chill felt more intense after the overheated police station. I suspected the heating system in the old building had only two settings, on high or off completely, with no control in between.
The Galigani clan moved quickly to their cars, but slowly enough for hugs, kisses, and expressions of both relief and concern. Rose had talked her daughter into spending the night with her and Frank on Prospect Avenue, a few blocks from our house, and well across town from the scene of the incident.
Matt, who showed up while we were dispersing, threw his coat over my shoulders as we walked toward his Camry.
My mind was anything but settled. I had the feeling I hadn’t heard the last of Wayne Gallen. Or a few other Texans.
 
Once strapped into the front seat, I mulled over the appropriate time to ask Matt for an account of his whereabouts during our ad hoc interview with MC. But a bigger question came up. Instead of heading home, Matt turned left on Broadway and drove toward Chelsea.
“I think Landano’s is closed,” I said.
Matt smiled. “But they’re probably in there baking the cannoli shells right now. I can flash my badge, and …”
I laughed. “You win. Matt, where are we going?”
“Gallen will be released in about fifteen minutes. We’re going to beat him home.”
“We’re going to Houston?”
“Ha.” Matt hit the steering wheel to indicate
good one
.
“You pulled his address,” I said, then reviewed my own language.
When had I switched from “discovered” or “located” to police jargon like “pulled” an address?
Matt made no reference to my migration to his language. “He’s registered at the Beach Lodge,” he said.
“And you want to make sure he stays home tonight.”
Matt nodded. “Covering all bases. Two guys are standing by outside the station. I offered to take the first shift here, and since this is not likely to turn into a wild ride, I figured I’d save myself the trouble of suggesting that I take you home first.”
I stretched across the seat, my ample bosom straining the fabric of my seat belt, and gave his rough, dark cheek a kiss, a reward for not banishing me from the action. “Good move.”
The gray in Matt’s hair, a pattern that nearly matched my own, caught the light of the streetlamps along Broadway, and eventually the bright signs in the motel parking lot, giving him neon-green highlights. I’d always considered Matt the picture of health, if on the chunky side of the insurance stats. He had a lot of well-paced energy, decent upper body strength for a man his age, good coloring. That he looked tired and pale this evening was all in my mind, I told myself, a reaction to hearing his medical report.
He caught me looking at him and covered my hand with his. “You’re thinking we could do better than a B-rated motel, aren’t you?”
I smiled. The Beach Lodge was a joke among the natives, its name playing a trick on tourists. We’d all seen their brochures that implied an ocean view, whereas in fact the so-called inn was at least two miles from sand and surf. I’d never been inside, but its low rates and dingy exterior didn’t inspire confidence about the amenities within.
The parking lot had few cars, not surprising in the off-season. We parked in a corner, facing the entrance, the Camry’s taillights toward the intersection of two major arteries, the Revere Beach Parkway and Route 1.
I scanned the area. My second stakeout in one evening.

Other books

Black Heart by Holly Black
Here's Looking at You by Mhairi McFarlane
Transcendent by Katelyn Detweiler
La formación de Francia by Isaac Asimov
Way of the Wolf by Bear Grylls
The Blue Girl by Charles De Lint
The Women in the Walls by Amy Lukavics
The Party Line by Sue Orr