The Nitrogen Murder (21 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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Something seemed off this evening. Elaine’s Saab was as far to the front as possible. I’d driven way in to make room for Matt to pull Dana’s Jeep in behind me and clear the sidewalk comfortably. But where
was
Dana’s Jeep? Maybe I’d been distracted and didn’t notice that he parked on the street instead.
I called down the stairs. “Matt, where did you park the Jeep?”
“It’s in the driveway, right behind the Saab.”
Not anymore
.
D
ana sat in the hot, crappy interview room in one of the Berkeley PD’s substations. She took in the peeling paint, the rust spots on the ceiling, and furniture that was a lot worse than in most of the homeless shelters she’d seen.
Did they purposely not have air-conditioning in police stations? Is this what they meant by sweating a confession out of a suspect? At this point she was almost ready to confess to
something
, as long as the jail cell was cool.
Nobody had told her exactly why she was sitting here, waiting. She assumed they were searching her house.
Great
. Another household was being upset. She wondered if Jen or Robin would be home. She imagined Jen, who didn’t do well under stress, curled up on the overstuffed floral chair Elaine had given them. Jen would be whimpering about how she had homework to do and was going to flunk her summer class in the Age of Enlightenment if the cops upset her papers and lost her place in her textbooks. Robin, on the other hand, would probably scare the shit out of the cops.
Dana needed a shower. She needed to change her clothes. Mostly, she needed a smoke. The thought of her stash at home unnerved her. Scenes from all her favorite cop shows came to mind. In nearly every episode, suspects waited in shabby rooms while TV detectives Sipowicz and Clark, or Briscoe and Green, or Benson and Stabler, went out and searched their houses. If the Berkeley
cops
were
searching her house now, how thorough would they be?
Neither Jen nor Robin knew where Dana kept her little Baggie, but the police might think they did and grill them, too. She didn’t have much left of her latest bag. Would they find it, tucked under the top tray of her jewelry box? It wasn’t enough to send her to jail, but a citation and a fine would not look good on her med school apps. And what if whoever changed her incident report got into her room and planted drugs, the way they’d planted the stolen supplies in Tanisha’s house?
The crime of “possession” didn’t seem to apply to her. The term should be reserved for somebody with kilos of coke or a truckload of crack, not for the casual user she considered herself and Tanisha to be. It was practically medicinal, she and Tanisha had decided, except that to be legal they’d have needed the approval of a doctor.
“The job make us sick,” Tanisha had said, using her street grammar as she did whenever she was joking. Dana felt a great sense of loss and renewed her resolve to make things right with Tanisha’s mother. She’d visit Marne as soon as she got out of this pit.
Dana couldn’t believe the questions they’d asked her.
“Who’s your dealer?” some guy in a tacky polyester suit had demanded, his face contorted. As if she were connected to some drug lord in East Oakland.
Save the loathing for the hardened criminals,
Dana wanted to tell him. She was totally sure her friend Sergeant Matt Gennaro wouldn’t use these tactics.
“Do you have a regular pickup and drop for the drugs?” This from a young female detective, probably trying to make a good impression on her senior partner.
Truthfully, Dana didn’t know how the weed got to her hands. She’d told Elaine and Gloria and Matt the truth about that. She assumed it was grown somewhere in South America and was passed through a network in every city that was near a port.
Oakland was in an ideal position for that, being an international hub for cargo transportation and distribution.
Kyle, an EMT at another ambulance company, was her current contact. Dana knew Kyle was far from the big-distributor end of things. She’d met him at a training class just in time to fill in the gap when her own college contacts had gone away Kyle was apt to bring the weed to Dana as small branches, which she didn’t like. She’d have to clean off the branches and get rid of the seeds and stalk before she could roll the grass. She kept meaning to investigate further contacts at parties and raves in the neighborhood. Now it was just as well she hadn’t. They might be able to torture the information out of her.
Finally, after what seemed like a month sitting in that gray metal chair, the polyester suit came back.
“You can go,” he said. The smell of garlic reeked from his pores. “Just not too far, okay?”
Dana had a lot of questions about what the cops had been doing since they left her, but she had no intention of hanging around to ask them.
She nearly flipped the chair over backward leaving the room.
 
At the last minute Dana decided not to call Matt to pick her up with her Jeep. She also refused the cops’ offer of a ride home. Instead she called a cab.
“Pull over here,” she told the cabbie when they got within a block of Elaine’s house. She paid him and walked to her Jeep, thankful it was at the back end of the driveway.
She was glad she’d given Matt just her spare car key and still had her own set. She needed to take care of some business, and she didn’t want to have to explain herself. First, she wanted to visit Marne and Rachel and do whatever it took to assure Marne she had nothing to do with incriminating Tanisha in anything. Tomorrow she’d confront Julia at Valley Med and find out what
the fake invoices were all about and why Dana’s and Tanisha’s names were on them.
At the back of her brain always was her dad. She flipped between hating him for being so uncommunicative and worrying that he was dead, like Tanisha and Patel.
Dana felt bad about sneaking into Elaine’s driveway, but she couldn’t see any other way. She’d had enough of being around Elaine and her friends. Elaine was too depressed and, worse, trying to hide it for Dana’s sake, she could tell. Gloria was entirely too reasonable about everything, and Matt … well, she was becoming way too dependent on Matt, who’d be gone in a week and she’d never hear from him again. Might as well break it off now. Dana had to smile at how much it felt like Matt had been her prom date and would soon be going off to college.
Lights were on in the kitchen and dining room, and she figured they were holding dinner for her. It looked so inviting, but … some other time, she thought. She knew if she went inside, they’d all try to talk her into resting, eating, staying overnight again, and she didn’t have the energy to resist.
She rolled back into the street without headlights and pulled away as quietly as possible.
 
Dana had never been so happy to climb the stairs to her own house. Her plan was to go straight to the shower and then out again to Marne’s house across town. On the way she’d pick up some blueberry marble ice cream, Rachel’s favorite flavor.
She unlocked the door of her house and entered the foyer off the living room. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see her things turned every which way, left a mess by cops with a search warrant.
What she hadn’t counted on was seeing her boss, Julia Strega, one room away, in her dining room.
Julia and Robin were bent over pages strewn across the dining room table. When Dana walked in, Robin jumped, as if a
firecracker had gone off. She came into the living room to greet Dana with a hug—when had that ever happened?—while Julia pushed the papers together.
“Hey,” Robin said, all cheery. “How are you doing, Dana?”
“Hey,” Julia said, with a guilty grin. She made a mess of the papers while trying to act casual about shoving them into a shiny gray-and-silver duffel bag.
Dana couldn’t think of any business Julia and Robin would have together. As far as she knew, Robin hadn’t worked at Valley Med for more than a year, certainly not since Dana had started there.
“How’s it going, Dana?” Julia asked, as if she hadn’t seen her in years, instead of at work that very morning. Then, “I’m just about to leave,” she said, without waiting for Dana’s answer.
Here was Dana’s chance to face both Julia and Robin with her questions: Robin, where did you get those new clothes (okay, not that important), and why was Patel’s ID in your closet (very important), and why did you change my incident report (most important)? Julia, what’s up with those phony invoices and listing me as a driver on calls to fake facilities?
Matt was a cop; he had to worry about breaking rules of interrogation or whatever, but Dana could just ask anything she wanted.
Julia had already swung the duffel bag over her shoulder and brushed past Dana, heading for the door. Dana needed to act fast. But another image came to her—Tanisha swinging the duffel bag that belonged to Patel. The same bag? Dana shook her head. There must be millions of duffel bags in Oakland, and half of them gray, but what a coincidence that this one, with its distinctive wide white zipper, looked exactly like the bag Tanisha had been carrying when she was shot, the one with Patel’s tennis balls.
Dana swallowed hard and pushed away the image of her partner sprawled on the trauma center driveway.
The whole scene in her house was very curious. And starting to get very scary. Julia kept going toward the front door. Dana heard her clump away in her clogs, down the outside steps. Robin faced Dana, her look threatening, as if to say,
Go ahead and say something
.
Dana went to her room and sat on her bed. She wanted to curl up under the chenille throw, but she knew she was too edgy to relax. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stay close to Matt for a while.
She listened for movement in the rooms outside and heard none.
She wished she had a lock on her door.
 
Dana showered quickly and left her house, slipping out her bedroom door, around to the foyer, and out. She didn’t know whether Robin was still home until she noticed her old blue Ford a half block down on their street. She’d wanted to pack some things and camp out at Elaine’s but decided to come back later with reinforcements, like a certain Massachusetts cop. Amazingly, she’d remembered to check her jewelry box for the stash. It was gone.
She pictured some uniform taking a toke at her expense.
 
Dana pulled the Jeep up in front of Marne’s house at about eight-thirty. She knew Marne was a late-night person and hoped she might be more mellow the later it got.
Up a flight of stairs from the street, ringing Marne’s doorbell, Dana didn’t feel any braver than she had when she’d seen Julia and Robin together. She couldn’t figure why the scene had freaked her out so much, except it was one more creepy thing among too many lately. Maybe Robin was applying to return to Valley Med, but she hadn’t mentioned it, and Dana hadn’t been aware that the two women had even kept in touch.
Dana couldn’t believe what a coward she’d been, not only
abandoning her legitimate questions but cutting and running—a gutless wonder. And she was feeling more spineless by the minute on Marne’s front porch. She hoped Marne wouldn’t yell at her; she didn’t think she could handle it again.
No answer on the first ring. Dana thought she heard footsteps on the other side of the door and figured Marne saw her through the peephole. She pictured her friend’s mother scowling, hands on her narrow hips, as she was at Hutton’s Funeral Home.
She nearly cut and ran again, but instead she gave the bell a firmer push.
“Come on, Marne,” Dana said. “I just want to talk to you for a sec.” Her plea had been loud enough to penetrate the door, she hoped.
Maybe too loud. On the street below, several kids in baggy pants and sweatshirts stopped under the streetlight and looked up at her. Marne’s neighborhood—she used to think of it as
Tanisha’s
neighborhood—was an array of small, neat houses and mostly well kept front yards. The kids hooted and whistled. Though their gestures and taunts were obscene, Dana took them as harmless. Maybe this was the most interesting drama going on in their young lives. A white girl begging to be let into their neighbor’s house. In any case, they were certainly less scary than Robin had been earlier, in Dana’s own living room.
She rang a third time.
“Please, Marne. I have blueberry marble.” She glanced down at the kids, who’d already moved on.
The door opened, and Marne’s smile lit up the night. “Careful what you say, Miss Dana. People around here get mugged for less than a quart of ice cream.”
Dana nearly fell over the doorstep into Marne’s arms. Marne patted her back, as if Dana were the one who’d lost her only child.
“You’re not … mad?” Dana asked when she caught her breath. “I thought you weren’t going to open up.”
“I was in the back, putting Rachel down, but I’m thinking I’ll
get her up for the treat.” She took the bag from Dana. “And, oh, I
was
angry.” Marne led Dana into the house. “Truly angry. But now I believe you’d never do anything like that. I should have known.”
“How—”
“That cop came by,” Marne said. “The one with the Down East accent.”
Dana felt her shoulders relax. At least there were some things she could still count on.
 
Rachel sat on Dana’s lap and ate her blueberry marble ice cream, careful to keep spills away from her soft purple nightshirt.
“Are we friends again?” the little girl asked. Her deep brown eyes seemed to be pleading for more picnics and trips to the planetarium.

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