The Nitrogen Murder (26 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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The dull white walls of Phil’s room seemed to light up as I had a flash of memory.
“Maybe you got more than you thought, Phil. I’ll have to check the tape when I get home, to be sure.”
I was finished for the time being, and it’s a good thing, because the door opened and Nurse Bunting gave us a you’re-out gesture that we would have been foolish to disobey.
D
ana had to keep herself from resenting Gloria just because she’d be taking Matt home with her. After all, it was Gloria who’d located her father at Patel’s house in the first place, and then her bravery had allowed him to pass on the PDA while Dana was hiding at Marne’s. Her own discovery of Tanisha’s money counted only as serendipity, not courage or investigative ability.
Dana watched as Gloria pushed REWIND then PLAY on Elaine’s tape recorder. They all listened to the whole interview between her father and Howard Christopher once through, and then Gloria rewound to the passage she wanted.
The voice of Howard Christopher:
“Maybe his only violation was to use a classified computer to upload his PDA calendar with his kids’ birthdays, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t recall Phil’s saying anything about a PDA before this point in the meeting, do you?” Gloria asked. “I think this is what we need.” She glanced around the room, her expression too smug for Dana’s liking. Matt gave a thumbs-up; Elaine clapped lightly, a wide smile on her face; Dana was quietly thrilled that her Dad might have successfully stopped a threat to national security, however remote.
She shuddered at how close her father had come to dying this week—twice. She had a new respect for Robin, losing her father at nine years old, and in a way that couldn’t help but mar
her for life. Maybe Dana should cut her roommate some slack.
Dana was glad she finally knew how and when her father had hurt his hand—tussling with Patel and his killer. Probably Howard Christopher, from the sound of that tape. It was awful enough that Tanisha Hall had turned out to be on the wrong side of the law; she wouldn’t have been able to take her father’s being a bad guy, too.
“Can I call Dad and tell him?” Dana asked. She wanted to be the one to give her father the good news—that they finally had something to take to the Berkeley PD. She was pleased at how quickly everyone agreed, Gloria first.
“Of course,” Gloria had said. “That’s the best idea.”
Dana certainly couldn’t claim that Gloria was selfish or hard to get along with, and she was attractive enough for an old lady It wasn’t Gloria’s fault that Dana hadn’t found anyone her own age who was worth her time.
Now that things were getting cleared up, her life looked doable again. She might dig out those medical school applications and play up her EMT experience. Popular opinion was that it would go a long way to counteract her less than stellar academic performance.
As for dating possibilities, she’d exhausted the pool of guys at Valley Med; every eligible male was either an ex-boyfriend, like Scott Gorman, or a never-to-be, like Tom Stewart. And she’d already dated too many premed students. They all wanted to practice their phlebotomy procedure on her.
“It’s no fun pretending to draw blood from a straw,” Scott had told her as he stuck her arm.
She remembered how conscientious he was, getting down at eye level with the needle, so he could be sure to keep it between fifteen and thirty degrees. Too bad he wasn’t that meticulous about being faithful to her.
She might have to start doing the singles thing.
Nah
.
 
 
Dana’s phone call to her father was short, since her father was still being monitored by Nurse Bunting, but he was clearly happy and relieved that his ordeal might be over.
“You know, at the time that nagged at me, that Christopher mentioned the PDA, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was off kilter. Good for you, sweetheart.”
“It was Gloria, really,” Dana told him.
“But you were always on my side, I know, and that means a lot.”
Not always.
Dana remembered the Robin/Patel connection, still unresolved in her mind. But her recuperating father didn’t have to know that.
 
Dana sat in front of the TV in Elaine’s living room. She noticed Elaine had a new piece of furniture for her television set—an “entertainment center” that looked like a huge dresser, but with doors. She wondered if she’d ever have a home like this, where everything matched and all the prints were framed, or if she was doomed to stapled posters and dormitory decor forever.
“Make yourself at home,” Elaine had said when she went upstairs. Matt and Gloria went up, too, and Dana decided to hang around Elaine’s a little longer.
She’d put together a late-night snack of milk and crackers and peanut butter, too lazy to make popcorn with Elaine’s non-microwavable raw kernels. She got comfortable with an old Doris Day and Clark Gable movie. Good enough to stare at while she decided what to do next.
Dana hated to admit she was afraid to return to her own house. She hadn’t shown up there since she’d walked in on Robin and Julia shuffling papers, looking guilty (Julia) and angry (Robin). Jen, who seemed oblivious to the drama-filled days Dana had been having, had called to check on her, but she’d heard nothing from Robin, of course.
“Are you there alone?” Dana had asked Jen. She imagined
Robin somehow taking her anger out on their petite roommate.
“Wes is with me. Why? I came back to get some things, and I thought as long as you’re not depressed or anything, I’d stay at his house.”
Sweet thought, Jen.
“Do it,” Dana had said.
Dana tried to get her head around Tanisha’s being involved in the medical supply scam. Tanisha had had enough talent and personality for four; she could have made it without getting sucked into Julia’s scheme. Dana smiled, remembering the time Tanisha had talked down a crazy old guy. He’d been throwing furniture out the window of the convalescent home, yelling, “Satan is making me do it,” when they arrived. Everyone was afraid to approach him, except Tanisha. She’d put on a scary face and said, “I’m from Satan, and I have a message for you.”
That had stopped the guy just long enough for the paramedics to come in with straitjackets.
She tried again to come up with another reason for the wad of money under the mattress—ten thousand dollars in twenties—but she couldn’t. The irony was that Tanisha apparently hadn’t been shot over stealing the meds but because she happened to be carrying Patel’s duffel bag with some sweaty T-shirts and socks. At least that’s how it seemed.
Dana hoped that in time the old
knock-knock
Tanisha would prevail in her mind, and not the image of her friend tiptoeing around nursing-home medicine cabinets and making deals with the guys who monitored the hospital pharmacies. She also hoped everyone who participated in the scam would pay. She knew that a couple of Julia’s EMTs had already been suspended by the county office. Even so, it wouldn’t cost any of them as much as it had cost the Hall family.
Robin Kirsch’s behavior was still a little hard to understand. It was obvious now that she was still working for Valley Med, not as an EMT but as part of Julia’s scam, and that was probably what had set her off when Dana appeared to be—make that
was
—snooping in her closet. But how was she involved? As far as Dana knew, Robin didn’t have access to meds, unless one of the companies she did home consulting for was a pharmacy. Robin had never told them specifically what she was consulting about.
Another thing that didn’t make sense was that Patel ID in Robin’s closet. The cops had suggested that Dana herself dropped it there; maybe they were right. She did have a bunch of them in her pockets, and she’d been tense while she was rummaging through Robin’s new clothes, that much was for sure.
Dana wondered if Tom Stewart was also involved. Part of her wished he was, but she knew that was only because she wanted to make a trade—let him be guilty and not Tanisha.
Dana was due at the PD in the morning, along with Elaine and Matt and Gloria. So, by this time tomorrow, the police could have everything they needed to arrest all the perps. Everyone who wasn’t dead. She heard herself sound like Jerry Orbach/Lenny Briscoe on the original (still her favorite)
Law & Order
. She pictured Julia Strega and Howard Christopher in dull gray jumpsuits sitting at Rikers (so what if this was California, not New York City) with Sam Waterston/Jack McCoy and a model-thin lawyer from his office, offering them a deal.
Dana brushed cracker crumbs from her shorts. She’d been in them more than twenty-four hours, except for a brief stint in Tanisha’s T-shirt. She remembered her father saying he’d acted cowardly, but Dana felt she was the wimp in the family, hiding out wherever they’d take her in. Matt would be anything but proud of her. Look at what Gloria had accomplished by her courage and willingness to take risks. If Dana had been braver, she might have been able to help.
Wouldn’t it be cool if she had more to bring to the table at the PD tomorrow?
Something concrete.
Maybe it wasn’t too late.
But the first thing she needed to do was get a good night’s sleep in her own bed. How brave did she have to be to do that?
 
Dana unlocked the front door, ready to jump back if anything or anyone lashed out at her.
It’s pretty sad when you’re scared to enter your own house
, she thought, but there’d been too many creepy scenes lately, too many creepy places. Her Dad’s empty house in Kensington; Patel’s huge house in the Claremont district. She hadn’t entered Patel’s home, but her cop friend, J. J., had described the scene as bizarre, with the blood soaking into an Oriental carpet, making a surreal pattern. That was before he realized he was talking to the victim’s daughter.
Dana pushed open the front door and took a deep breath.
No sounds, no lights, except the little Washington Monument night-light in the hallway. Jen had brought it back from a trip she took to D.C.,
to gain an appreciation for our national treasures
, she’d said in her totally white-bread way.
She knew Jen was with Wes. Robin was either asleep or out. On Friday night, most likely the latter.
Dana put her ear to Robin’s bedroom door. Not a sound.
Jen’s door was open a crack and Dana pushed it a little more, until she got a look at Jen’s empty bed, neatly made up with a quilt from her mom. No surprise that it was a bright, cheerful flower pattern. Dana wondered what it would be like to have a mom who quilted. Her mom had spent most of her time at tennis and fitness, and ended up marrying her personal trainer.
Dana walked around the empty house, flipping light switches, her arms outstretched, doing twists from the waist. It was good to be home. She felt her body relax, warming to the idea that home was safe again.
The dining room table was messy as usual with mail, newspapers, and a pile of books for Jen’s summer class project on a French artist. Dana studied a painting in a huge, propped-open art history book. It was of a young girl reading, holding a book
up, her elbow resting on the arm of a chair.
Who holds a book that way to read
? Dana wondered.
And who could write a whole paper on one painting
?
Dana leaned over to pick up some papers that had fallen to the floor. Junk mail, mostly. She shook her head and pictured Jen and Robin deliberately tossing their catalogs and local ads on the floor around the wastebasket.
One loose piece of paper didn’t fit the profile of a credit card offer or a special rate for a magazine subscription. The red-and-white Valley Medical Ambulance Company letterhead stood out—an original this time, not a copy like Gloria had found behind her dad’s kitchen bulletin board.
Dana scanned the page, a spreadsheet. It looked like part of a tax form or a memo about finances. The totals and itemizations were of no interest to Dana—she already knew Julia’s books were fraudulent. But the signature at the bottom was news. The document was PREPARED BY ROBIN KIRSCH.
Robin was doing Julia’s books. More accurately, cooking them.
I
gave up on trying to sleep. I closed the door on Matt’s light snoring and went down the hall to Elaine’s office. As I passed the stairway, I saw the flickering light of the television set, telling me that Dana was still in the house. Dinner smells had dissipated, replaced by the fragrance of a large jasmine-scented candle, one of many in the house, its flame newly snuffed out.
I wanted to make the most of my interview at the Berkeley PD in the morning, and a review of our information would be handy. I was a self-designated consultant, it seemed. A part of me that I wasn’t proud of hoped that Russell would be on sick leave, but only because he didn’t seem the type to take a vacation.
The case for theft and fraud in
People v. Julia Strega, dba Valley Medical Ambulance Company
(I wasn’t sure what the charges would be, technically, but it was amusing to pretend I was) seemed unbreakable. If there were EMTs other than Tanisha Hall involved in her side business, the Berkeley PD could ferret them out.
I was also sure we had a vacuum-sealed case against Howard Christopher. He’d given himself away with his comment about Patel’s method of getting classified information out of a VTR. I pictured the Indian scientist, a trusted transfer manager, skulking around the vault-type room, taking the steps to remove data, copy equations, even record a note to himself—all the while
appearing to be just doing his job, preparing media for the transfer of material to unclassified sites.
It was easy to think of possible scenarios for intercepting secret information. I knew that some PDAs could beam data to each other at a distance of a couple of yards, no cable or computer required. I wondered if Patel had a partner, another operative receiving his information across the room. So high-tech—I gave some thought to getting myself a PDA after all.
I had a harder time imagining the end user of the information Patel had been stealing, but that was because I was embarrassingly out of touch with international politics. Give me a quiz on the status of the world’s major accelerators, from BESSY in Germany to KEK in Japan, and I could get an A. I was current on which countries were participating in the research program called ITER, the international collaboration for the advancement of fusion science and technology (Korea was still in; Canada had pulled out). But if you asked me to name the current leaders or political leanings of any non-English-speaking country, I’d be lost. Even for my native land, I was more apt to follow the press releases and decisions of the president’s science adviser than of his attorney general.
I’d always thought I’d do more nonscience reading when I retired, but I’d simply switched technical fields, from spectroscopy to forensics.
In Elaine’s office late Friday night, I had my ear to the sounds from outside the house. I’d opened the office window a crack and heard only light traffic. This was a quieter neighborhood than the streets closer to the campus, where weekend nights especially were alive with party noise from the many fraternity and sorority houses.
I was downloading and printing William Galigani’s attachments—the equations he’d mentioned, drawings of molecular configurations, notes, e-mails—when I heard Dana’s Jeep start up in Elaine’s driveway.
Finally
.
I looked out the window, hidden, I hoped, by Elaine’s draperies. Dana backed out and onto the street. I assumed she was heading home, having mustered the courage to face her roommate. My heart went out to her; it couldn’t have been easy for Dana this week. Elaine, at least, had a few life experiences under her belt. Dana was only twenty-four, a little older than I was when my fiance died. All in all, Dana had acted in a more mature way than I had. For one, she didn’t flee the scene and avoid dealing with the problem.
There was another reason I was happy to see the Jeep pull away Dana had been parked behind Elaine’s Saab, and I had an errand to do.
 
In a few hours everything would be out in the open. Julia Strega and Howard Christopher would be in custody, and the rest of us could get back to wedding plans.
So why was I driving to Patel’s house late Friday night when sensible people were either partying or sleeping? The only difference between the first two times I snooped around and now would be a bloody spot on the library carpet.
At least no one will be following me this time
, I thought. It was late at night, and besides, the Patel case was over. I asked myself again what I hoped to gain with this excursion.
The only thing I could come up with was that lately I’d been generating the same curiosity for crime scenes that I used to reserve for the results of the latest NASA mission. I had to admit also that I was searching for a link between the two cases. Patel’s ID card in Robin’s closet was tantalizing, and we still had no ballistics information about whether the bullets that entered Patel, Tanisha, and Phil were from one, two, or three guns.
For now, here I was, the poor man’s answer to Einstein, who spent much of his life trying to tie gravity and electromagnetic forces together, in one grand unified theory.
Winding through the narrow streets in the Claremont district, needing a U-turn in spite of my having been here before, I wondered how anyone could have followed me that first time without my spotting him. But assuming it was Howard Christopher, Patel’s boss, all he had probably needed was to realize the direction I was heading. Then he could have figured out that the Woodland Road home must be Phil’s hideout.
I pulled into the cul-de-sac, drove around under my own private hide-a-car willow tree, and stepped out of the Saab. No sounds other than whispering branches; no rooms lit up in the neighboring houses. No rowdy frat parties here. But there was a dim light in an upstairs room of Patel’s house, not the night-light I’d seen on the bottom floor on my last nighttime trip. Inadvertently left on by the crime scene team, I figured.
Light from the streetlights at two and at ten o’clock in the cul-de-sac circle bounced off various shiny surfaces—the chrome bumper of a car in a driveway (the least worthy vehicle in the family, I guessed), the handle or hand brake of a bicycle, and then the shiny yellow plastic of the crime scene tape. The strip of tape fluttered in the slight breeze, and as I approached the front door, I saw why.
The tape had been cut.
I froze.
Someone must be in the house. Someone also addicted to crime scenes? A curious neighbor who’d witnessed the drama earlier in the day? Not the police—the only cars in the cul-de-sac besides mine were tucked into driveways, and whoever had a right to be here wouldn’t need to hide his vehicle or nose around inside in dim light.
I’d gone halfway up the walk; my feet seemed attached to the flat stones. I strained to see if the door was open; it appeared to be slightly ajar. My body swayed involuntarily, following my mind. To go forward or to run back to the car?
I took a short step toward the door, mesmerized by the
shadows, the breezes, the dim light, the yellow tape that seemed to glow.
In the next second, the upstairs light went out, and a shot rang out over my head.
I unstuck my shoes from the walkway in record time and ran.
 
I arrived at the car gasping for breath, my already injured ankle and my knees hurting badly As I ran, I’d kept my head and shoulders low—no mean feat for someone without a well-defined waist, and now my limbs were protesting. My heart pounded somewhere up in my throat. I fumbled to put the key in the ignition, dropped it to the floor, picked it up, and tried again. When I finally roared out of the cul-de-sac, I checked the rearview mirror. I noticed no cars or people following me or even looking after me.
The shot had sounded like an early firecracker.
I wanted desperately to think that was what it was.
This time there was no interesting package on the front seat, no amusing prank I could play with a pizza delivery person.
Possibilities ran through my mind. My best guess was that Howard Christopher had broken into Patel’s house, suspecting his time was running out, trying to destroy any additional incriminating evidence at the last minute.
Halfway across town I caught my breath. I realized I would have been dead if the shooter had been seriously trying to kill me. I’d been the world’s best target, standing under a streetlight, my hips wide enough for any sighting mechanism, especially if this had not been the shooter’s first experience with a gun.
I was sure the person was only trying to scare me off.
It worked.
 
I pulled into Elaine’s driveway. Unlike the Patel house, in Elaine’s all the lights were on. I’d been found out. Comforting as the lights were, I knew it would be a specious welcome.
 
 
“You could have been killed,” Elaine said. Not one to talk after her stunt this morning. Except she could claim that her instincts saved Phil’s life; all I’d done was endanger mine.
My aborted visit to Patel’s house had been so upsetting that I’d blurted out the truth before I could stop myself.
Matt’s silence unnerved me. I wished he would yell, though yelling wasn’t his style. It had been a long while since he’d chided me for putting myself in a dangerous situation. I hated the thought of his being angry with me.
“I was curious.” It sounded lame, even to me. “And I guess someone wanted me to mind my own business, so they … scared me off.”
“Shot at you,” Matt said. “Someone shot at you. Is that right?” His tone was gentle; his voice would sound cool to anyone but me. I heard the undercurrent of distress and frustration.
“Yes, a shot went way over my head,” I said, making it sound as if I’d been able to calculate the harmless trajectory of the bullet. I looked at the kitchen clock. One o’clock; my fiancé and my hostess, each holding—almost leaning on—a mug of coffee, looked exhausted and tense. “I’m so sorry. I caused all this.”
Matt, not usually given to public displays of affection, finally came over and embraced me.
Elaine let us have our private words, then gave me a hug and went upstairs.
Matt wrapped an afghan around me on a living room chair. I was glad he didn’t lecture me. I convinced him to go up, too, and let me stay downstairs for a while, to get my bearings.
He left the room, taking Elaine’s keys with him.

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