Carbon Murder, The

by Camille Minichino

  “I’m weak,” Matt said, flipping back through the transcript.

  I let him get away with the ploy and took the call. The message made me the weak one in the house, sending a disturbing wave through my body, turning my muscles to plasma. Except for my mind, which whipped across the city to MC on Tuttle Street and then back across town to Revere High’s young Science Club students.

  Jake Powers was dead. His body had been found in Rumney Marsh by one of Daniel Endicott’s students.

  Another eruption in a case—a life—that was full of priority interrupts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  MC hung up the phone and stumbled back to bed. She tossed around for hours, it seemed, throwing off her blankets, tucking them back under her chin when she felt chilled, throwing them off again when a cold sweat came over her. She rolled onto her back, then to her left side, then to her right side. She got up several times to straighten her oversized T-shirt, a souvenir from one of Jake’s shows, and her holey black tights. She went to the window and peeked out, for a reason she couldn’t remember, then finally cried herself to sleep.

  MC hears the bells from St. Anthony’s Church. Since when do they chime all night long? The digital clock on her nightstand flashes on and off, running backward. Three A.M. Blink. Two A.M. Blink. One A.M. Blink.

  She hears a thumping noise at the door of her bedroom. Why had she closed it tonight? She never closes it. And there’s a peephole in the door. How did that get there, an enormous peephole on an inside door? She stumbles out of bed and looks through the peephole. She can see all of Houston through that peephole. All of Revere Beach. She sees Jake and the spotted gray Spartan Q sail over the brush jump. Then a trot half-pass right. Then a fan oxer. Good Spartan Q. But why are dressage movements and jumps all in the same show? No matter. Spartan Q will get treats tonight.

  She squints as Jake and Spartan Q do the final halt and salute, then ride away. She looks again. There’s Rumney Marsh right outside her bedroom. Jake and Spartan Q ride into Rumney Marsh. She strains to see them.

  Buzzzzzzzz!

  MC jumps back as her buzzer rings. Why is there a doorbell at the threshold of her bedroom? It must be Aunt G’s bell. She lives in Aunt G’s apartment now, she remembers. She hears a low moan, and then soft scratching on the lower part of the door. A puppy? She’s always wanted a dog but Jake won’t let her have one.

  The scratching continues; the moan grows louder.

  “Who’s there?” she yells. It’s Jake, she thinks. She’ll ask him again for a puppy.

  “MC.”

  She can just make out her name, and now she’s sure it’s Jake. He sounds drunk. Or hurt. That’s it; Jake is hurt.

  MC opens the door, ready to rail at him for getting into some bar fight again.

  Jake falls onto the threshold; his bleeding head touches her soft brown carpet.

  MC gets on her knees, cradles his head in her hands. Blood is pouring out of his head; his rusty leather jacket is sticky with blood and dirt. She wants to ask him what happened, but when she opens her mouth, no sounds come out.

  MC sees a trocar sticking out of Jake’s stomach. When she was a little girl, she begged her father to let her watch while he showed Robert how to use it. The trocar is sticking out from the right side of Jake’s stomach. MC knows this is the last step, after Jake has been embalmed. He doesn’t look embalmed. She sees her father injecting a fluid and hears him tell Robert, “We need to pay special attention to the bowels and the liver. We don’t want any problems upstairs in the parlor.”

  She hears Jake whisper her name. He’s alive; he can’t be embalmed. She bends low to hear, but she can’t tell what he’s saying. She knows he’s telling her who did this to him, who put him on the embalming table, but she can’t hear. She is useless. Jake is dying and she is useless.

  She brushes her hair back; it’s sticky where it has fallen over Jake’s wound. She swallows and tastes frittata with chilies. She pulls the phone off the table near Jake’s body and pushes 911, but the buttons don’t move. She presses hard; they won’t budge.

  When she turns back to Jake, he seems to have fallen asleep. He’s curled up, his breathing faint. She stuffs a pillow from the couch under his head and goes to her bathroom. She finds a box of gauze, scissors, and alcohol, and carries them back to the living room.

  MC kneels down by Jake. He’s rolled partway onto his back. His face is pasty, but he looks strangely relaxed. Her heart clutches as she reaches for his wrist.

  She lays her head on his shoulder and goes to sleep with him.

  MC woke up crying and shivering, all the covers on the floor. Her clock had stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Coyotes? In Revere?” Rose asked me, for once giving me the upper hand in local lore.

  I decided to give her a taste of being on the receiving end of an avalanche of information.

  “Absolutely. The Revere High Science Club is doing a project called ‘The Urban Coyote Field Study.’ I have the full report if you need it, with appendices on the current poor state of science education in the United States, how students seldom actually experience real-life science. Daniel Endicott’s students are also contributing to correcting the misperception of coyotes as dangerous predators that should be eliminated. They have a trap at a North Revere site, and they’ve captured a twenty-seven-pound female, which they named Cinnamon, for her color and spiciness. Her age can be determined from the wear on her teeth. They’re working with Tufts and BC and with local veterinarians.” I stopped for a breath, and started again. “Several students have been able to observe coyote pups raised in captivity—”

  I took a deep breath, and a drink of water.

  Rose laughed heartily and held up her hand. “You need water? You’re not as good as I am at holding your breath for an entire story. But, okay. I get it. Sometimes I go on too long.” She paused, her face reconfiguring into a serious expression. “I guess we shouldn’t be joking this way. MC is very, very upset, and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m glad in any way—”

  “Rose, no one would think that. Not MC, not me. We’ll just have to give her a little time to adjust to this. It’s awful for everyone.”

  “Thanks, Gloria. And you’ll find out who did it, you and Matt, I know.”

  I hoped she was right. I’d never had such a case, barely able to follow one lead when another crisis turned up. Matt and I had been so excited about what the Houston transcript revealed. Berger had missed some connections, mostly because neither he nor anyone in the department was seriously working on the Nina Martin case. With Matt out a good part of the time, everyone’s load had increased, and for all they knew, they’d found the only killer—Rusty Forman might even have been Nina’s jealous boyfriend, coincidentally an ex-con.

  I hated to admit, too, that Jean had a point—I knew that if MC were not involved, I would also have abandoned the case long ago, and focused completely on taking care of Matt.

  We expected that Jake’s murder would reopen the entire investigation, however, and I felt optimistic that all the threads would come together soon.

  As far as Matt knew, Rose had casually stopped by to see him. It was pure coincidence that she might hang around with him while his partner and I went to interview fifteen-year-old Jacqueline Peters, the RHS freshman who’d stumbled onto Jake Powers’s body. Matt, asleep at the moment, was doing well, but I still didn’t like the idea of his being left alone. What if he had a relapse and fainted again, this time without a dining room chair to support him? And what if Jean dropped in, found him unattended, and sued for custody? This was my next uncharitable thought.

  “Why did they leave him alive, I wonder?” Rose asked, her ad hoc remarks often leaving me speechless for a moment. She means Jake, not Matt, I instructed my brain.

  “Whoever shot him probably didn’t dream anyone would be crawling around the marsh late at night. But as I learned from Daniel, coyotes are nocturnal and—”

  Rose rolled h
er eyes here. “No, no.”

  I laughed. “I’m not going on with this, just to tell you that the class did the tracking during hours of darkness.”

  “Interesting. That poor child.”

  “Jacqueline Peters. Aren’t you going to tell me about her family?”

  “Only because you ask. Her mother used to be married to Timmy Peters, who did some handiwork for us on Tuttle, but then ran off not long after Jacqueline’s little brother was born. Then the mother remarried.” She leaned in close. “To tell you the truth, I think the little one was the new husband’s, before the fact, if you know what I mean. Don’t you love these information sessions?”

  I did.

  “How is MC doing? This must be very hard for her.”

  “She finally picked up the phone this morning. She sounds awful. I’m giving her another day, and then I’m going to force her to go shopping.”

  She gave me a weak smile, one that said she knew this was not something a trip to Boston’s Copley Place, one of Rose’s favorite shopping venues, could fix.

  “Is Frank going to take care of Jake’s body?”

  Rose nodded. “Frank will prepare it for delivery to Texas. MC knows to keep away from the prep room.”

  I heard Berger climb the steps to the porch and headed him off, opening the door before he could ring the bell and wake Matt up. I wasn’t really ready for an interview with a teenager. My brain felt crowded with information I hadn’t had time to process. It seemed every time I was ready to put two and two together, I was jerked away by another crisis. Stalkers, one murder after another, Matt’s illness, Jean’s hostility.

  I knew that there were still more clues to be followed in MC’s email, in Lorna’s records, in Jake Powers’s bute reference, in the HPD transcript, maybe even in Wayne Gallen’s ramblings. Suddenly I felt as tired as Matt and wanted to sleep more than anything.

  “Are you ready?” Berger asked.

  “You bet,” I said.

  Jacqueline Peters lived on the left side of a duplex with its unkempt front on Hutchins Street. The pale blue paint was chipped, the garden tools rusted, the chain-link fence lopsided and full of holes. George Berger and I climbed shaky steps to a tiny porch and rang the tiny metal doorbell, what I would have called “original equipment” in lab talk, meaning it had come with the house, probably built in the 1940s. I smiled as Berger pointed silently to drooping strings of Christmas lights around the edge of the Peters side of the porch—either two months early, or ten months overdue for dismantling.

  “Mrs. Peters?” Berger asked, holding his badge against a dirty storm door, in the face of a wiry young woman.

  “I’m Jacqueline’s mother. Mrs. Ramos,” she said in a voice so constricted I wondered if she had something to hide. Then I remembered how intimidating a police officer could be to someone who didn’t live with one.

  Mrs. Ramos, in stocking feet and tight, black Capri pants, formerly known as pedal pushers, led us through an uncarpeted living room and dining room to a large kitchen area that smelled of unhealthy breakfast meat. We passed two small children and two television sets on the way. I had the feeling Mrs. Ramos had been watching at least one of the shows, neither of which was Sunday morning political commentary.

  “Someone go get Jacqueline,” Mrs. Ramos yelled. Her loud voice caught me off guard, and I jumped. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. They never hear me over the TVs. Jacqueline’s upstairs. Don’t keep her too long, okay? This thing’s got her upset.”

  Berger and I gave reassuring nods. “We have just a few questions,” he said. “This is Dr. Gloria Lamerino, our consultant. She’s very good with young people; she’s had a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”

  Making me sound like a child psychologist, something Matt would never do. Berger had prepared me to take the lead, however, pleading incompetence with teenagers. “Besides there’s the woman thing, you know,” he’d said, making curly motions with his index finger in the air next to his head.

  I sighed. This partnership is temporary, I told myself, and Berger’s doing his best.

  Jacqueline Peters, chubby enough to remind me of myself in high school, came down the stairs. She was a large-framed girl and I figured Timmy Peters, wherever he was, had contributed the body-shape gene, since the now–Mrs. Ramos was filament-wire thin. Jacqueline joined Berger and me at the Formica kitchen table while her mother, arms crossed in front of her, leaned against a stove piled high with sticky saucepans and a skillet.

  “Am I supposed to leave?” Mrs. Ramos asked, tapping her foot on the linoleum.

  Berger shrugged. “Sometimes when parents are around, kids tend to—”

  “It would probably go much quicker if you were to wait in the other room,” I said with a smile.

  “Right,” Berger said.

  Mrs. Ramos pushed herself off the stove, went into the living room, and pulled an accordion door many shades of brown behind her, closing us in with Jacqueline and the heavy, greasy odor, but letting through the sounds of daytime television.

  “Do you remember when I came to your classroom?” I asked Jacqueline. A blank look. “I brought some materials and we made a geodesic dome.” I pushed aside the reminder of the little Styrofoam balls rolling into the watery gutter, of Wayne Gallen in my car.

  Jacqueline shrugged. “I guess.” Not flattering to a would-be teacher, or someone as good with children as Berger claimed I was, but then I didn’t especially remember her being there that day, either. Maybe she was absent, I thought, consoling myself.

  “What you saw in the marsh—it must have been awful for you, Jacqueline.” I leaned across the shiny red table, trying to land my elbows between drips of milk and syrup.

  Jacqueline nodded, lifting her eyebrows, widening her eyes, as if she were being surprised all over again by a dead body in the marsh. The cheers of a game show audience rose up behind the accordion door.

  “Is there anything I can do to make it easier for you to talk about what happened? Would you like to get yourself a glass of milk or some water?”

  She shook her head, causing large amounts of dark, curly hair to swing back and forth. Jacqueline was the best-groomed person in the Peters-Ramos household, her black T-shirt looking clean and smoothed out, if not pressed. No food stains were visible on its rubbery neon cartoon picture of a music group I’d never heard of. I wondered if she’d dressed for this interview.

  “Okay. What happened was, Cinnamon had some pups and we were trying to find them, ’cause they got separated from their mother, and we wanted to feed them. We had meat and stuff. And it was dark. We always go in the dark. Coyotes are nocturnal animals.” Jacqueline sounded like a bright student. I hoped her home environment was supportive of good study habits. “I went off on my own ’cause I saw a huge bird, maybe a vulture, although I’m not sure what they look like except for our science book, or even if there are any in Revere. Mr. Endicott gives us extra points for spotting something unusual, so I went to check.”

  Jacqueline sniffed and rubbed her eyes. I stole a look at Berger. He sat back far enough from the table that he could keep his notebook hidden on his lap. I dug out a packet of tissues and put it in front of Jacqueline. The televisions blared on.

  “Take your time. You’re doing really fine.”

  Another loud sniff. “Okay. I was sneaking up on this bird that was maybe a vulture, but I made a noise on a loose rock or something and the bird flew away. Then I saw something right under where it was. This, like, bright blue jacket—I thought it was empty, I mean, you know, just the jacket. And when I got close it started moving, and I went over and it was—this man, really bleeding and moaning. I was going to do some CPR but we just learned it last week, and I was afraid I’d hurt him even more. And … and …”

  Jacqueline broke into tears, quite out of proportion to the situation. It’s not as if she’d known Jake, I thought. Then I guessed the problem. I patted her hand.

  “I’ll bet you were nervous about putting your
mouth on his, too?”

  She raised her shoulders and shivered. “Uh-huh. So I probably killed him.”

  I glanced at the accordion door, expecting her mother to come and rescue her, but realized the television sounds would mask Jacqueline’s breakdown. I felt so sorry for the child, imagining the burden of guilt she’d been carrying, that I came up with a lie. Berger’s influence, I thought.

  “Jacqueline, the doctors said the man had been so badly hurt, nothing you could have done would have helped.”

  Sniff. “Really?”

  “Really. This might be a lesson for you, though, to get some more training, in case you need it again.” Jacqueline gave me an I don’t think so look. “But not for a long, long time,” I said.

  A smile, finally. “We’re almost through, Jacqueline. Just one or two more questions.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you see anyone in the marsh? Anyone besides Mr. Endicott and your classmates?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did the man say anything before—did you hear anything from the man before you called for Mr. Endicott?”

  “He was moaning a lot and he said something like ‘Sarta’s dead’ or ‘Satan’s dead,’ maybe, I don’t know. It was hard to tell.”

  “Could it have been ‘Spartan’s dead’?” I asked.

  Jacqueline shrugged. “I guess. Yeah, it could have been Spartan.”

  Spartan Q. Jake’s horse.

  Another dead horse?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Matt and I followed the hospital’s faded blue dots to the waiting room for radiation therapy. This would be our route five days a week for six weeks. We’d re-read all the literature, which predicted no ill effects until well into the treatment, if at all. We’d stocked up on bouillon and cranberry juice. No citrus or food with small seeds. Matt had circled in red an item on controlling fatigue: Let others cook for you and eat six or seven small meals a day.

  “Do you really think two cannoli are what they mean by a meal?” I’d asked.