The Fluorine Murder (2 page)

"You don't sound lost," Rose said.

"She never does," Matt said.

I had a thought, a way that I could help.
"Would you like me to introduce you to the Charger Street chemists
who've been working on fluorine-based flame suppressants?" I
asked.

My loving husband of The Year of Leather gave
me a vigorous nod. "You know the language, which puts you way ahead
of most of us on the force. And right now we're going on the
assumption that the fires and the murder are related."

"I know the fluorine research team fairly
well," I said. "I attend their seminars now and then. I'm sure
they'll be a big help in figuring this out." Matt raised his
eyebrows and gave me a sad look. "What is it?" I asked.

"You might not be happy to hear this."

It took a few seconds to register. "The Fire
Department thinks the fluorine chemists are racing to the fires so
they can test their formulas?" I could hardly keep my voice
steady.

"Or … " Matt said, completing his sentence
with a shrug.

"Could they be deliberately … ?" Frank was
wide-eyed.

Rose gasped. "You don't think they're …
?"

No one dared say the words in my presence—the
idea that the scientists could be setting fires themselves, to use
in their research. My husband and friends knew my extreme
protectionist attitude, wanting to hold onto the concept that
scientific research was carried out by women and men whose motives
were always pure and altruistic.

"I'm assuming the RFD is investigating, too,"
Rose said.

"The murder is ours," Matt said, not meaning
to sound so callous, I was sure. "They've already interviewed the
Charger Street chemists once." He turned to me. "I have to be
honest, Gloria. The RFD suspects the chemists, but they can't prove
anything."

"Suspects them of what?" I hadn't meant to
raise my voice, but no one seemed surprised.

Matt scratched his head. I could tell it was
bad news. "Everything."

Rose stifled another gasp, turning it into a
cough.

I took a deep breath. It didn't help much.
"So I'm supposed to get evidence against fellow scientists? To show
that they go around setting fires and then experiment on putting
them out? And that they may have killed someone in the
process?"

I took my husband's silence as a "yes."

My three brunch companions left the mental
battlefield and went off on another subject, back to the Galiganis'
son, John, and his newest assignment. I tuned out. I needed to make
some notes on the fluorine researchers at the Lab. No one said I
couldn't try to clear their names. I left the dining room table and
settled myself one room away on a kitchen stool. I heard no
protests.

****

One of the best things about being retired
was that I no longer had the pressure of knowing what was being
done every waking hour in my own field of spectroscopy. Instead of
focusing on one narrow field, I could dabble in every area that
held interest for me, reading books and magazines and attending
seminars across the board in physics and chemistry and even math
departments. It was nice to listen to everyone's problems—not
enough temporal resolution with the new scanning equipment,
unexplained glitches in what should be smooth curves of data, too
many unknowns in a set of equations—and not have to solve them.

It was time to organize my thoughts about the
fluorine group. I was sure their combined expertise would help
identify the guilty party. In my mind they were resources, not
suspects.

I wrote Stan Nolan's name first. He was the
leader of the fluorine research group, nearing retirement and eager
to have one last paper accepted in the Journal of Fluorine
Chemistry. I pictured his thinning gray hair and the same dark
green cardigan I'd seen him in at every meeting.

Peter Barnett and Teresa Verrico were the new
post-docs in the group. The two young people seemed to get along
well, their only rivalry stemming from an ongoing chess game,
played at times in the chemistry department lounge and at times on
line. Peter played up his nerdy reputation by wearing a pocket
protector.

Teresa was the reason I attended so many
chemistry meetings. She'd gotten her degree at the University of
California, like me, and we'd met at a reunion of UC science alums
now residing in Massachusetts. Unlike me, however, Teresa missed
the sunny, even weather of the west coast. I let her moan about the
humidity of a New England summer and helped her buy a snow shovel
for the winter.

Carson Little was the heir apparent to
replace Stan as the group's leader. Not much younger than Stan,
Carson was affectionately called "Little Boy" not only for his
surname and small stature but because he was an avid student of
mid-twentieth century atomic science. Carson's personality was a
match to that of Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, in many ways—he
was volatile, energetic, and unpredictable.

The last member of the team was an on-again
off-again young temp who handled the clerical work for as many
hours per week as the budget (also on-again off-again) allowed.
Danielle Laurent was a French exchange student in environmental
sciences at a Boston college.

I tapped my pen on my notepad. What else did
I know about the fluorine chemists? Romance, I thought. After
seminars I often went out for coffee with Teresa, Peter, and
Carson. I didn't think it strange that Stan and Danielle always
declined, saying they had work to do. They'd go off, Stan in his
long cardigan and Danielle in a sweater that barely reached her
waist. Then a few weeks ago, I was treated to the workings of the
chem department rumor mill.

"May-December," Carson Little had said, with
a wink in their direction. True to his nickname, he mimicked the
sound and gestures of firecrackers going off.

Peter and Teresa laughed and nodded. It
seemed everyone who was anyone knew of the relationship. It was
news to me.

"You mean Stan and Danielle are an item?" I
asked, realizing there must have been a cooler way to say it. I was
also sorry I'd encouraged the banter.

They all nodded. "Nothing wrong with it,"
Teresa said, trying to keep her long, curly hair from dipping into
her cappuccino. "They're uncommitted and they're both adults."

"Barely," Peter responded. "Danielle is
twelve."

"And Stan is one hundred and twelve," Carson
said. "With a thing for French, uh, accents." He grinned.

"And she has a thing for green cardigans,"
Peter said.

"I have cardigans," Carson said.

The jokes and the topic had gone on longer
than I'd been comfortable with, ending with the two men accusing
each other of being jealous of Stan's "luck" and Teresa and me
rolling our eyes.

Rumors and jealousies aside, I couldn't
imagine any of the fluorine group as arsonists, let alone
murderers. But I had to admit that there was no telling what a
dedicated scientist would do if she or he thought it would mean a
breakthrough in the field. Each time I took on a case where
scientists were suspect, I held my breath, hoping the guilt would
fall on someone other than a scientist—the budget director, a
mailroom or cafeteria worker, a personnel rep—anyone but a person
trained in sifting through the mysteries of the universe.

I looked forward to accompanying Matt on the
interviews at the lab and resolved to keep an open mind. I was
ready to return to my brunch companions at Rose's dining room
table, now fully stocked with chocolates and mints, as if the
pastries hadn't qualified as dessert.

The sooner we got going, the sooner I could
help find the true culprits and clear my colleagues.

I sat down and picked up a dark truffle.
"When do we start?" I asked Matt.

"First we're all going to the movies," he
said.

****

"I should have known you'd never take us to
see George Clooney," Rose said.

The four of us sat in front of a low-end
television/VCR combination in a conference room at the Revere
police station. It made sense for Matt to invite Rose and Frank to
the view the latest crime scene video, and not just because they
were our best friends: no two people in the city knew as many of
its citizens as they did. Not only did they run the largest
mortuary in town with their older son, Robert, but they had their
fingers on the legal pulse through his lawyer wife, Karla, and on
anything newsworthy through John, the reporter with a police
scanner. Whatever was left over came to them through their high
school teacher daughter, Mary Catherine. They were up on all stages
in life and death in Revere.

"Maybe Clooney is on this tape," Matt said,
to a chorus of disbelieving chuckles.

The video was home grown. One of the
neighbors across the street from the nursing home had rushed out
with his video camera when he smelled smoke.

"We used to just take pictures of weddings
and things. Now people record any kind of disaster," Rose said.

I caught Matt's eye and we smiled at each
other: Did Rose realize she'd put weddings in the disaster
category?

"And we're throwing everything up on
YouTube," Frank said, tsk-tsking.

"Was the cameraman the one who called in the
fire?" I asked.

Matt shook his head. "We don't know who
called it in. The voice on the dispatcher's tape sounded like a
robot. We're assuming it was one of the would-be firefighters, or
the arsonist, or the murderer."

"All of whom may be the same person," Frank
said.

Matt gave a resigned nod and pushed PLAY on
the remote.

Even on a very low-definition
government-issue television set, the footage on the fire was
startling. Bright red and orange flames shot out from the wooden
structure of the old nursing home. There was no audio, but I was
sure I could hear crackling and popping. It had been a mild night,
without the usual ocean breeze. I wondered if the arsonist had
chosen the evening deliberately, to have more control of the fire,
or if the choice was governed by some other factor. Many offenders,
I knew, committed crimes on dates that had meaning for them, or
followed a mental rhythm that no one else was privy to.

My amateur profiling would get us nowhere. I
focused on the scene before me. I wrote down a few phrases and
thoughts, noting the uniformed nursing home attendants pushing
people in wheelchairs, the crumbling window and doorframes, and a
gathering crowd, some of whom pitched in to help move people away
from the flaming building. The firefighters arrived pretty quickly
and took control of the crowd and the soaring, mesmerizing flames.
It was hard to tell the gender of the hatchet-carrying, masked,
helmeted professionals who ran toward the conflagration.

We all sat back and exhaled deeply as figures
in neon yellow-green stripes worked the scene. We'd been at the
edges of our seats and, apparently, holding our breaths as if we'd
been there at the site of the crackling blaze.

"What are we looking for?" I asked Matt.

"Anything that looks odd. The RFD has already
interviewed everyone they could that night. They always look for
people who are at more than one scene, or just happen to be at a
fire some distance from their own neighborhood. Just treat this
like a regular crime scene. We never know what new pairs of eyes
will catch after the fact."

After only a few years with a homicide
detective, I noted, I hardly blinked at the phrase "regular crime
scene."

Within the first few minutes of viewing, Rose
and Frank ID'd at least six people, including a retired postal
worker who'd just lost his wife to cancer, a brother and sister who
served Communion at St. Anthony's, and the weekend clerk in the
flower shop a block from their mortuary. The trick was to get them
to limit their IDs to a line or two and not give us family history
going back two generations, as they did for deli owners Carol and
George Zollo, before we could stop them.

Something occurred to me after the first
viewing, but I couldn't pin it down. "Can you play the beginning
again?" I asked Matt.

He rewound the tape and this time I watched
only one part of the screen, focusing on the upper right, where I
knew the niggling bit was. I was frustrated as the flames
overloaded the camera, resulting in poor definition of the building
parts and objects on the ground. Nothing was as good as the human
eye as far as being able to adjust to different intensities of
light in real time.

"What are you looking for, Gloria?" Rose
asked.

"Stop," I said, too loudly, causing Rose to
jump. Matt tried to get a good still frame but the picture was
marred by noise and tracking bars. I was surprised that a person
interested enough to take videos still used tape. Matt finally
zeroed in on a decent frame. I pointed to a large, rolling
two-level lab cart I'd seen in passing the first time. The cart was
almost out of range of the camera, but the shape was very familiar
to me. Several pieces of apparatus were piled onto its shelves.

"What is it?" Matt asked.

"There's your unofficial fire extinguishing
equipment," I said.

In a flash, our four heads were angled for
viewing the screen up close. I was grateful that no one pointed out
where lab carts were readily available. In restaurants, I thought,
in desperation.

"Can you tell exactly what's on the cart?"
Matt asked.

I moved my chair still closer to the screen
and squinted, without gaining much in clarity. "It's hard to tell,
but I think we're seeing ordinary testing apparatus—a cone
calorimeter and a smoke density chamber. Maybe a blanket tester,
too. It's the kind of apparatus used by fire safety professionals
to test various kinds of heat response." And you'd never find it in
a restaurant, I thought, my heart sinking.

"What do you think is going on?" Rose asked.
Throughout the viewing, Rose, the ultimate housekeeper, had used
tissues to dust the small conference table that also held the
television system. She'd finished and now wadded up the tissues and
handed them to Frank, who tossed them into a corner wastebasket. It
looked like choreography, forty wedded years in the making.