The Nitrogen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  I looked at Matt and asked myself what he might care about. “Who’s on the case at the RPD?” I asked Rose.

  “Michelle Chan was the officer at the scene. I don’t know who else. She cut her long, beautiful hair, you know. Looks a lot older. Frank and Robert are down there now, and Robert is thinking of hiring a private security service for us. Everyone in the business is sure Bodner and Polk are behind this.”

  “The mortuary chain? Is there any evidence?”

  “I don’t know from evidence, but Frank’s hoping to get a copy of the police report. I’ll send it to you, and maybe you and Matt can take a look at it. William says there’s a way to send these things by e-mail.”

  Uh-oh. I knew that Rose’s grandson, like most teenagers, was more than capable of attaching a document to an e-mail, but I couldn’t risk further aggravating Elaine. Besides, I might never again have access to Elaine’s computer.

  “A fax is better,” I told her. “In a few minutes I’ll have a fax number you can send to, right down the street from Elaine’s.”

  “Okay, I can do that myself. Gloria, that hearse was a black, black, black … shell. Can you imagine if anyone had been in it? The family would be devastated.” As usual, Rose worried about the dear departed and their families. She continued, “I wonder if that would be a homicide if the person killed was already dead? Matt would know.”

  “I’ll let you ask him.” I gave Matt a smug smile and handed him the phone.

  While Matt—such a good sport—talked to Rose about intent to kill and felony murder, I was free to pursue the thoughts cluttering my mind.

  We found a twenty-four-hour copy shop in the next block. I took the fax number and called Rose. I was able to get off the line quickly by letting her think we were just sitting down to dinner. Not that it showed in her size-six body, but Rose Galigani took mealtime very seriously.

  I called Andrea next.

  “You got a new battery,” she said.

  “Oh, uh, everything’s all set.” Lies always come back to haunt you, I remembered, and my punishment for the battery fib was my stuttering over Andrea’s comment. Anyone but sweet, naive Andrea would have seen through me, even without being able to see the flush in my cheeks.

  “It’ll probably take me an hour or so to get these ready, Gloria. I have to copy them here, and then go back to my office and get the fax code, because all the secretaries have left, and then—”

  “Don’t worry. I completely forgot how late it is there. I don’t expect you to do it immediately. Even tomorrow would be fine.” Not fine, exactly, but here was another friend I needed to hold on to. I didn’t have that many left.

  “No, no, I can do it,” Andrea said. “Call me back in an hour and I’ll let you know how it’s going, okay?”

  “That sounds good. And let me give you Matt’s number in case you need to reach me and this phone isn’t working.”

  “Oh, good. I know I shouldn’t call the bride, right?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  It was after six o’clock, many hours since my bagel with Phil Chambers, colleague of the deceased Lokesh Patel.

  Matt and I sat at a table in a small Japanese restaurant on Shattuck Avenue. I wasn’t sure about Matt, but I wondered less about what I’d order for dinner—crabmeat with wasabi mayonnaise or shrimp tempura?—than where we’d be sleeping that night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The hour after dinner was an active one. We collected faxes from Andrea and Rose and walked to the UC campus library, open later than the public library branches. I was able to use my BUL retiree card to gain admittance, once I’d extricated it from deep in my purse and detached it from the sticky wrapper of an old cough drop.

  UC Berkeley had overlapping summer classes, guaranteeing that the campus walkways and libraries would be busy in all seasons. Whether a sign of the times or of California, the students we passed were all ages and ethnic groups. Even with our mature body shapes and graying hair, Matt and I blended in with the mixed population. We might have been administration-of-justice majors, I mused.

  Matt picked a dog-eared copy of the Berkeley yellow pages from its place in a row of phone books that seemed to cover all the counties of California. “We should think about renting a car,” he said. “And maybe a room.”

  My meddling ways had brought me problems before this, but nothing that left me homeless. “And a Laundromat,” I said, returning his smile.

  I was grateful for Matt’s presence; I knew I wouldn’t have found humor in the situation if I’d been facing it alone.

  I took my cell phone from my purse and laid it on the metal table.

  “In case she calls before we get to that point.”

  We’d agreed to read the faxes and then make a decision about where we’d sleep.

  Matt took Rose’s fax, relieving my feelings of guilt over not paying much attention to her plight in the last couple of days. If he was stunned that I didn’t quickly grab at an official police report, he didn’t show it.

  “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with whatever information is on that report,” I said. “It’s not as if we could investigate, even if we were home.”

  Matt kindly did not point out that nothing so trivial ever stopped me before. “I think Rose just misses us,” he said.

  “Maybe we should go back where we’re welcome,” I said, close to tears.

  Matt took my hand. “It’ll work out, Gloria. You and Elaine have been friends too long for it to end like this.”

  I wondered if Elaine would agree. I tried to imagine what she was going through, whether she felt betrayed or angry, or both. I couldn’t guess.

  I straightened the pages from Andrea and retreated to a safe nitrogen-rich environment, free of human miscommunication.

  Phil Chambers and Lokesh Patel had collaborated on a number of weapons-related papers. The unclassified versions Andrea had sent were more or less status reports, as opposed to detailed technical documents, and I longed to see an equation. There’s nothing like a reaction expressed in symbols to bring home the essence of a piece of theory or experiment. The distinction between what can be distributed broadly and what is designated one of the many classified levels is generally a question of quantification—equations and numbers. Even the composition of a high explosive may be spelled out in open literature, but the specific amounts and arrangements of each chemical in the mix make all the difference.

  “Like a recipe,” Matt said after I briefed him on my faxes. “It’s okay if the competition knows you use tomatoes, garlic, and basil in your gravy, but the amounts and how you cook them are held back.”

  I had a flash-forward to a time when I’d be wearing a flowered apron, making spaghetti for Matt, waiting for him to come home from work. How desperate was I for a crisis-free life? I recovered quickly. “And in the case of explosives, the specific amounts play a big part in whether you have a Fourth of July firecracker or a nuclear fission bomb. The firecracker travels only a few hundred meters per second. The explosion could reach a million meters per second.”

  Matt waved Rose’s fax at me. I saw the familiar Revere Police Department letterhead. “I guess what blew up O’Neal’s hearse would fall somewhere between the firecracker and the atomic bomb. At those speeds you don’t need to translate the meters into miles per hour for me,” Matt said. “Well over the speed limit. And I’m no longer surprised that you’d know these numbers off the top of your head.”

  “Just ballpark guesses,” I said, with a modest shrug.

  This must be the silver lining, I thought—Matt and I with another opportunity to learn from each other. I loved sharing the elements of science with him, and when the occasion arose, he introduced me to the intricacies of human behavior, police procedure, and the administration of justice.

  To prolong our pleasant interaction and avoid our current predicament, I was inspired to write my own version of what a nitrogen-containing high-explosives equation might look like. I knew I
couldn’t write an exact, balanced equation, but I did remember the general energy reaction for one of the most commonly known explosives, trinitrotoluene—TNT. I took out my notebook and pen and enjoyed trying to figure out reasonable—that is, scientific—behavior. Unlike the human sphere.

  I played with the left-hand side of the equation, knowing only that the reaction involved a combination of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Then it dawned on me that I was surrounded by the resources of the UC Berkeley library.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Matt, and headed for the science section.

  It felt good to be up and moving, and researching, if only in a basic chemistry book. I found the formula for TNT: C7H5N3O6—a benzene ring with a methyl group attached, and three nitro groups in the form of nitrogen dioxide. I read more than I needed to, of course, indulging myself in pages on the structure of the molecule and the dynamics of an explosion—essentially a regrouping of all the elements, as with any chemical or physical reaction. Another marvel of science. No new atomic particles added or subtracted, just a reorganization that converted a benign configuration into a lethal one.

  I headed back to the area where I’d left Matt, my arms full of books, prepared to lecture, as he called my explanations, on the conversion of nitrogen dioxide to nitrogen gas.

  I was within a few yards of Matt when I noticed he wasn’t alone. He was deep in conversation with a tall, thin woman who sat on the chair next to him.

  I stopped short and thrust my head forward to see more clearly, though I had little doubt who it was. The woman, wearing an olive green skirt with sandals to match—the only person in the school library dressed for tea—was Elaine Cody.

  My unsettling first thought was that Elaine had our luggage out in the trunk of her car. My second was that Matt must have called her as soon as we arrived in the building, on his alleged restroom trip.

  I had no time to decide whether that should annoy me or thrill me. First Dana, now Elaine. Matt seemed to be headed for a career in HR, taking over the human relations part of this trip.

  I dropped the books on the nearest table and walked toward Matt and Elaine. I was prepared to drop the whole business, too, if that’s what it took, if that was the price of repairing our friendship.

  I greeted Elaine with a hug that threatened to wrinkle her white sleeveless shell.

  Matt stood by as we uttered mutual apologies and forgiveness. If any of the other library patrons noticed the display, they gave no sign.

  When Elaine stepped back, she dabbed at her eyes with her left hand and held up her right, in the halt position. “Before we go any further I need to tell you really what brought me here.” She looked at Matt. “Besides Matt’s phone call.”

  Uh-oh, I thought, the bags are in her car. “Elaine, I promise—”

  She shook her head, causing her long gold and green-glass earrings, which I’d sent for her birthday one year, to swing. “I went to Phil’s place as soon as you left the house, Gloria. I needed to talk to him or just … I needed him. He didn’t answer, so I let myself in, thinking he was upstairs in the back, in his office, where he might not hear the bell. Well, he wasn’t home, but you’ll never guess what was in his office.”

  With her rambling sentences, she sounded more like Rose than the old Elaine, a sign of her high stress level. Then it hit me. I had a pretty good idea what she’d seen in her fiancé’s office.

  “The briefcase,” I said.

  Elaine nodded; her eyes filled up.

  “We’re going to figure this out,” I said. “Now that we’re all together.”

  Back in Elaine’s living room—never was there such a welcome sight—I tried to express my regrets once more about my inappropriate snooping. I didn’t want Elaine to think I was happy to have been correct about Phil’s involvement, however slight it might turn out to be, in the deaths of Tanisha Hall and Lokesh Patel.

  “There may be a perfectly innocent explanation,” Matt said. I agreed, showing more enthusiasm than I felt. I’d learned my lesson.

  “Right now, I just want to help straighten all this out,” Elaine said.

  Since she didn’t believe Matt and I could have had a satisfactory dinner, Elaine had laid out a spread of berries, California cheeses, and small cocktail breads. I’d long ago decided that food eaten under stressful conditions didn’t count as caloric intake. I cut into the white slab of Monterey jack, decorated my dessert plate with strawberries and a handful of See’s chocolate-covered raisins, and settled into one of the burgundy leather easy chairs.

  “We have some questions,” Matt said, arranging snacks on his plate. “Could help clear things up. First would be, do you know how Dana met Robin?”

  Elaine’s red-rimmed eyes widened. “Robin Kirsch? Dana’s roommate? Is she involved in all this?”

  Matt updated Elaine on the few scattered facts we had: the deceased Lokesh Patel’s Dorman Industries ID card, found in Robin’s closet; her expensive new wardrobe; the slew of coauthored scientific papers showing that Phil had lied to me about his association with Patel, the topic of those papers being weapons research; how Robin most likely altered Dana’s report concerning drugs being involved in the incident that took Tanisha’s life; the missing, now located, briefcase.

  “What if Phil and Robin are … involved involved?” Elaine asked, placing her mug on the coffee table. She hadn’t taken any food from the lovely three-tiered serving set, though I was sure she hadn’t had dinner.

  I saw that Elaine was still operating on the personal level, as if she preferred that Phil turn out to be a traitor to his country rather than an unfaithful fiancé.

  “It might be bigger than that, Elaine,” I said. Another blunder, implying I didn’t think her engagement to Phil was a big deal. I hurried to add, “I mean it might have to do with national security.”

  Elaine sighed heavily. I regretted every complaint I’d uttered, albeit to myself, about her bridelike demeanor and wished I could get it back for her. Maybe if instead of nosing around I’d offered to tie little ribbons around delicate, lacy favors, Elaine wouldn’t be in this predicament. But Lokesh Patel and Tanisha Hall would still be dead, I reminded myself.

  “Someone at work, I think his name is Tom.” Elaine seemed to have pulled a name from a high corner of her newly furnished living room.

  Matt and I looked at each other. What?

  “You asked how Dana and Robin met.” Elaine managed to make “Robin” sound not like a lovely bird with a red breast but like an ugly witch to be reckoned with and from whom you needed to protect your family. “An EMT, Tom something, introduced them.”

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” Matt said, rubbing his hands together. Exactly where, I wasn’t sure, but I admired his technique. A cop is always a cop, I thought, even on vacation in sunny California. “Did Phil ever talk about working with a scientist from India?”

  “He works with people from all over the world, all the time. And I know he can’t talk about his projects, so I don’t question him about them.”

  Unlike me, I thought.

  I took a few minutes to explain to Elaine the importance of the work Phil was doing.

  “Insensitive bomb materials? I remember seeing something like that in BUL’s annual report, the glitzy version they send out to potential funding partners. I thought it an oxymoron.”

  “The term refers to how easily an armed and ready package might go off.” I reached over to an end table and lightly tapped one of her Hummels, a little girl with a red bow in her hair and a book on her lap. Elaine flinched, then gave me an I-trust-you smile. “You don’t want detonation at the slightest jiggle,” I said. “Insensitive explosives resist shock and temperature changes, making them safer. Insofar as an explosive can be safe.”

  “She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she?” Matt said.

  I looked at the ormolu clock on Elaine’s mantel. Almost eleven o’clock. “Is it too late to go over and check out that briefcase?” I asked Elaine.
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  Elaine cleared her throat. “The briefcase is empty,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I thought about the ideal vacation Elaine, Matt, and I had worked out before our visit. On this Tuesday morning we’d be packing for a trip south, to Monterey and Carmel. I wanted to show Matt the Carmel Mission and the oft-photographed Lone Cypress Tree on the touristy Seventeen Mile Drive down along the Pacific coast. Over the past weekend, we would already have picnicked in Muir Woods, called “the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world,” by conservationist John Muir, and Elaine would have coaxed us into San Francisco’s downtown Museum of Modern Art.

  As it was, between our arrival on Friday evening and now, we’d breathed neither salty ocean air nor fragrant redwoods. Instead of wandering the shops of Carmel (no great loss for me, I reminded Elaine), at one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, we were climbing the steps of Dana’s Oakland house.

  We’d agreed to go together to Tanisha’s service. Dana was feeling remorseful about not visiting Tanisha’s family in the days since her death.

  “I’d like some company, if you don’t mind,” she’d told Elaine on the phone.

  We both knew she meant Matt.

  We’d had a roundtable discussion in Elaine’s living room before we left for Dana’s, still trying to settle on a strategy. To tell Dana about her father’s work with Patel, or not? Matt and I were pro, since Dana had already seen a Patel ID card for Dorman Industries. Elaine was con, arguing that we shouldn’t upset Dana any further “until we know what we’re talking about.”