The Nitrogen Murder (10 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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D
ana plunked down on a comfortable chair in Dr. Ann Barnett’s waiting room. The office was in a modern building by the bay, the decor a welcoming pale green with soft lighting and ferns that were the healthy version of what hung in her house. A big improvement over Julia Strega’s industrial digs. Not for the first time, Dana wished Valley Med would spring for an upgrade to the EMT lounge.
Matt arrived a few minutes after Dana. HAVE A SUPPORTER ACCOMPANY YOU TO THE SESSION, TO BE THERE FOR YOU WHEN THE SESSION IS OVER, the pamphlet said, in deep blue. No one had asked her, “Why Matt, whom you’ve known all of two days?” But she knew everyone was wondering, why not Dad, or Elaine, or one of her EMT friends?
For one thing, Matt was also an ES worker, in a sense, but not another Valley Med employee. His telling her about his own CI when he was a rookie had moved Dana. Matt had been so open, though he’d just met her, and she knew he was sincere, not playing a game to make her feel better.
Also—and she had to admit this was a big factor—in a couple of weeks, Matt would be three thousand miles away, unable to embarrass Dana or remind her of this ordeal.
They greeted each other with a hug, like old friends or father and daughter. Dana inhaled deeply and relaxed as Matt took a seat across from her.
“I’m really glad you could come, Matt. I know you must have a gazillion things to do with Elaine and Gloria.”
Matt crossed one leg over the other. Short legs, Dana noticed, compared to most of the men in her life. “Think about it. Would I rather be helping them choose shades of lipstick?”
“Dana got it.”No, but you could be wine tasting. The famous Napa Valley’s not that far away.”
“I don’t drink alcohol. So, you see, this is a real break for me.”
Dana smiled, grateful he was making this so easy for her.
The waiting room seemed unnaturally quiet. Not just because there were no other patients. It was as if the building were wrapped in a huge emergency kit blanket insulating it from outside noises like traffic or barking dogs. No piped-in music, either, or blaring TV, though there was a small set high in one corner of the room.
Dana drew a long breath. “Can I tell you something?” she asked, almost whispering.
Matt opened his palms.
Anything.
“I wish I’d been able to kill the guy who shot Tanisha.”
“You’d be feeling a lot worse right now, believe me.”
Dana sat back. She knew he was right, that he spoke from experience; she couldn’t figure why she’d even needed to hear it and was amazed she’d expressed herself out loud. She looked around the room as if she might find a device that brought out secret thoughts. She saw only warm landscapes in simple wooden frames, a magazine rack, large lamps with ceramic bases, and the door to the doctor’s office.
“Did you have counseling after your incident?” Dana asked.
Matt shifted in his chair and shrugged his shoulders. “If you could call it that. Internal Affairs ruled it a good shoot; the department shrink asked me if I was okay; I said sure; and my captain said, ‘Okay, then, take a couple of days R&R and we’ll see you on Monday.’”
Dana laughed. “I guess counseling wasn’t a big deal back then. Maybe there’s too much made of it these days.”
“Who knows?” Matt said. “You just work with what you have and do the best you can.”
Dana loved Matt’s honesty She tried to imagine what her dad would have said. She heard his deep, confident voice, lecture-style:
Follow the rules, Dana, they’re for your own good, and you’ll be glad later
. A not-so-subtle difference. Matt wasn’t giving her any guarantees. If she didn’t know before last Friday night that life promised nothing, she knew it now.
Her eyes were tearing up again. It didn’t take much. Dana fished in her purse for a tissue and felt the edge of the ID card she’d found in Robin’s closet. She couldn’t fathom the connections—the Indian gunshot victim, the consulting firm her father worked with, and her roommate. She toyed with showing the card to Matt, but he was a cop, after all, and Dana wasn’t sure she wanted to get the police involved. Even the Massachusetts police. She tried to figure why not. Was she afraid they’d investigate her? And find her small stash and pipe?
Before she had to decide, Dr. Barnett’s secretary appeared at the door and, with a sweeping wave, invited her in.
 
Dana tried to pay attention to Dr. Barnett. The therapist’s pageboy and blue-and-white seersucker suit were from another era, as if she’d had been called forth from a simpler time. The doctor’s questions seemed simple, but to Dana they were complicated.
“Any physical signs of stress?”
How can I tell? I’m on edge most of the time.
“Headaches?”
Yes. But more than usual? I don’t know.
“Changes in sex drive?”
Ha, no way to tell. I haven’t had sex since Scott left.
“Dizziness? Changes in eating habits? Sleeping?”
Yes. No. Maybe.
“Poor concentration? Problems making decisions?”
What else is new?
“Dana? Dana.” Dr. Barnett’s voice was sharp, bringing Dana back into the room.
Dana had no idea how her verbal responses had compared to her mental reactions, but Dr. Barnett’s look said her out-loud answers had been garbled at best.
“Is there anything you’d like to ask me, Dana?”
Dana frowned and tried to focus. She smoothed Robin’s skirt and wished she had a joint, or better yet her pipe, a present from Scott Gorman during happier days. She pictured the swirls of green and orange and purple on the beautiful glass bowl. “I can’t seem to forget,” she said. “I remember every detail, like in slow motion, Tanisha walking toward the building, falling. Then on the ground.”
“You can’t heal what you can’t remember, Dana. So you’re doing well.”
Dr. Barnett sat back and folded her hands on her lap. She seemed pleased with herself, as if she’d just delivered a favorable verdict.
“Okay then I’m on track,” Dana said.
That seemed to be what Dr. Barnett wanted to hear.
Maybe things hadn’t changed all that much since Matt’s early days.
 
“Two down, one to go,” Dana said to Matt as they drove in Dana’s brown-and-cream Jeep to the Berkeley PD.
“This should be easy,” Matt said. “Cops are the good guys.”
Dana turned to see how serious Matt was, and caught his grin.
 
The scene in the Berkeley PD building reminded Dana of a coloring book she’d had as a child. The pages had line drawings of uniformed men and women in working poses. Handcuffing a bad guy, seated behind a high counter answering a phone, tapping
away at a computer terminal, handling a drug-sniffing dog, closing a barred jail-cell door.
No insulating blanket around this building, Dana noted, as the sounds of the busy street outside competed with those within. Phones, pagers, printers, fax machines, clacking keyboards. Dana picked out angry, loud voices and guttural human sounds, like the kind you heard from the homeless on Telegraph Avenue and around the Shattuck BART station. It was expensive to ride the Bay Area Rapid Transit system but cost nothing to sleep in its stairwells.
Matt seemed right at home, leading her up a wide staircase to the offices, and she remembered he’d been here before. She noticed he’d put on a sports coat. Professional courtesy, she figured, but it was a weird shade of blue that looked awful with his maroon polo shirt.
Dana expected a lengthy delay, but a young female uniformed officer was waiting for them at the top of the stairs and ushered them into a long, narrow room.
Even the walls in this room are busy
, Dana thought. They were covered with maps and flyers and pushpins, not limited to the framed bulletin boards.
Inspector Russell, whom Dana recognized from Matt’s description, sat at the end of the room behind a desk that was too small for his tall frame. His feet stuck out past the edge of the desk, into the area where Dana and Matt would be sitting. He pulled at the sleeves of his sports coat, slightly too short, and drew in his legs as they approached. If med schools rejected her, Dana decided, she’d investigate a career in personal shopping for cops.
Quick handshakes all around, and Russell got down to business. He put on half-glasses like Julia’s, minus the comment about getting old, and lowered his head to a sheaf of papers in front of him. Dana thought she’d never seen a pointier chin.
“I have your statement from last Friday evening, Ms. Chambers. At that time you indicated that your partner, Tanisha Hall, was not a drug user.” Dana gulped. She remembered the question,
remembered deciding that a toke now and then, and a pipe at parties, did not constitute “drug use.”
“That’s correct,” she told Russell, clutching her purse to keep from wringing her hands.
“Well, that’s what I thought you said.” Russell leaned back in the chair until it hit the wall behind him. His head landed next to a poster on crime prevention. Bold letters and bullets shouted safety tips and information on burglar alarms, senior safety, holiday safety, personal security, domestic violence … the rest were hidden behind Russell’s broad shoulders. “But see here,” he said, holding up a fax, “this report you submitted to your supervisor says different.”
Dana shrank back, feeling her stomach clutch; Matt shifted closer to Russell’s desk and made a motion to view the fax. He looked more like her lawyer than a friend, and Dana wondered if she did need an attorney. She thought of the countless
Law & Order
reruns she’d seen and how “lawyering up” was a big deal.
Matt put Dana’s report on the table between them, so Dana could see the copy of what she’d given to Julia only a couple of hours ago. Dana remembered downloading the form from Valley Med’s Web site and filling in the blanks on the screen. At the bottom of the page was room for a brief summary of the CI, and she’d typed that in also. She’d assumed no one outside Valley Med would see it, certainly not the police.
What would I have done differently if I’d known it was going to end on a cop’s desk? Dana asked herself, and thought, Nothing.
Matt pointed to QUESTION 10: TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE, WERE DRUGS INVOLVED IN THE CI?
Dana was startled by an x beside YES. She was sure she’d checked NO. What was this? A slip of her fingers? She’d have to explain.
“Uh, I’m sorry, this is an error. I meant to check no. Neither of us was using drugs.” That should clear it up, Dana thought, but still felt her mouth go dry.
“Not as simple as that,” Russell said. “Especially since we found rolling papers on her body.”
Rolling papers. Dana thought back to the convenience-store stop they’d made on Friday afternoon. Tanisha had bought a packet of her favorite, environmentally friendly papers, no flavored dyes or toxins, no glue.
What did all that health consciousness get her?
Dana thought.
“Papers are not illegal—” Dana began.
She stopped when Matt put his hand on her shoulder.
“Do you have anything else?” Matt asked Russell.
Russell smiled. Not a friendly smile, more like a “gotcha” smile. “As we speak, we’re searching the Hall residence in San Leandro.”
Dana’s throat closed up. She had no idea where Tanisha kept her stash, except far from where her daughter or her mother might come upon it.
It’s just weed
, she thought, but she didn’t dare say anything.
Some nonverbal communication that Dana missed had taken Russell and Matt to the side of the room, out of her hearing.
Inspector Russell’s briefcase stood under the small table. The soft-sided kind, not at all like the briefcase the Indian scientist left in her ambulance, but it reminded Dana of the one missing from her house. The police seemed to have forgotten about the Indian’s briefcase. No way was she going to bring it up now.
She thought back on her interview with Russell, and remembered Tom’s admonition:
Better be careful what you tell them
. And Julia’s warning:
Avoid anything that would reflect badly on the company.
She hoped she hadn’t said anything against that advice. Most of all, however, she wanted to get out of there without handcuffs.
 
Matt took Dana’s arm and led her down the stairs to the front door, a gesture Dana would never have accepted from a date, but one she welcomed now. Her legs felt like two elongated gel
packs, and she wanted to leave the building quickly. She knew she wouldn’t draw a decent breath until the last uniform was well behind her. She didn’t like the feeling; she’d always worked well with the cops she’d met on the job, who’d helped her with a few difficult transports, and she’d dated a rookie, Derek, a reasonably fun one-monther. Quite different being on the other side of them.
“What did all that mean?” she asked Matt, safely in her Jeep. “And why aren’t I in jail?”
“You weren’t found with drugs. They have to accept your explanation for now, that you made a mistake, but if they find anything at Tanisha’s, they may call you back.”

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