The Nitrogen Murder

by Camille Minichino

  “William, do me one more favor and tell her I’ll call her later. I’m just walking out the door.”

  “I get it.”

  When we hung up, I had the awful realization of what a bad role model I was to children everywhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Matt and I sat in front of coffee and sourdough toast, both of us a little bedraggled. I’d put a load in the washing machine so that at least our clothes would be fresh and unwrinkled. My brow, on the other hand, had felt more furrowed with each day in California. Looking back over the week, I realized our only crisis-free moments with Elaine had been our time in the rush hour traffic from the San Francisco airport to Berkeley

  There was still no sign of Elaine from the upstairs quarters, and I hesitated to rattle around in the office, lest I disturb her.

  I’d done enough of that.

  From William’s assessment, I thought we wouldn’t get much more from Patel’s PDA anyway. Probably the most useful information had been the owner’s address and phone number, which had allowed me to find Phil in the first place.

  Also, for my purposes now, the equations themselves weren’t as important as the fact that Patel had downloaded them. I was sure William’s observation about “sort of like ammonium nitrate” but with an unfamiliar term or two had to do with reworking a standard high-explosives equation to accommodate a new, more energetic nitrogen molecule.

  For those reasons, I didn’t mind delaying my access to Elaine’s computer.

  About one hour and two pots of coffee later, Matt and I were well into the construction of scenarios that would account for two murders. To make it easier to follow our trains of thought, we wrote on a large piece of newsprint I’d tacked onto the bulletin board in the kitchen.

  I’d found the pad in the guest room closet, left over from when Elaine had taken drawing classes through local adult education programs. I thought again how alike Elaine and Rose were, always exploring new subjects, trying different crafts—Rose’s current project was making glass beads. When I retire, I’d told them, and myself, but I’d come to realize that people hardly ever take up new interests in retirement.

  Except for police work.

  My current craft was sketching plausible threads as Matt and I talked about the events of the week. One thread seemed very neat.

  Howard Christopher

  Shoots Patel

  (to cover up security breaches)

  Follows ambulance

  (to finish job and confiscate materials in briefcase and duffel bag)

  (disks? printouts? extra PDAs to hold all the equations?)

  Shoots Tanisha Hall

  (wrong place, wrong time)

  (thinking duffel bag had information, not tennis stuff)

  We also managed to account for Phil’s wounded hand. Not from creating our shrimp-wrap hors d’oeuvres, we knew from Dana’s intern friend.

  “What if Phil was there at the scene when Patel was shot and got wounded himself?” I asked.

  “The timing’s right,” Matt said.

  “And it would explain how Phil knew about the briefcase and the duffel bag.” It seemed ages since our word games over the briefcase/duffel-bag mix-up, and I felt vindicated that I hadn’t made a fuss over nothing.

  Matt scribbled out a timeline for our first Friday evening, working backward from the pickup call to Dana and Tanisha at about five-forty-five. “By then, the wounded Patel had made it back to his car, driven himself to the wrong hospital, got bandaged up—”

  “But Phil probably went straight to the trauma center.” I drew a thick black line that went nowhere but helped me think it out.

  “A little tip he’d picked up from his EMT daughter.”

  “So Phil was already at the trauma center when Dana and Tanisha pulled up in the ambulance with Patel in the back, though he couldn’t have predicted they’d meet. He must have ducked into a closet when he saw them.”

  “Or gone out the side and shot Tanisha.”

  I sighed, or rather, whined. “That puts us back to ‘Phil shot Patel.’ I thought we agreed on Christopher.”

  “Okay, we’ll save the ‘Phil is a double murderer’ thread for later. For now, we’ll go with ‘hand slashed by Christopher at the crime scene.’” Matt ticked off that question from our list of loose ends. “If only our checkmarks made it so, huh?” he said, always the reality checker.

  I’d been asking Matt all week, in one way or another, how he felt about working during his supposed vacation. I asked again, “Are you still all right with this … project?”

  He took my hand. “I’ll warn you when I’m going to faint again, okay?”

  “Don’t even joke about it.”

  I was satisfied with the thread that linked Christopher to Patel’s and Tanisha’s murders. But Matt was not, his tick marks notwithstanding.

  “We have a tape,” he said. “We have no authentication so far, from either party.”

  “But it must have been Phil who put that envelope in my car. It’s his voice. Elaine recognized it. And it was a live meeting.”

  “So you say.”

  Of course, Matt was right. I thought about how deeply technology influenced the rules of evidence. On the one hand, digital cameras had time and date stamps so you could always tell when a photo was taken, to the minute, or even the second with some systems. On the other hand, anyone bright enough could alter that information. The audiotape we listened to could have been made up; the PDA material could have been tampered with. Even by young William Galigani, I imagined a defense attorney saying.

  “And think about it,” Matt continued. “There’s nothing really incriminating on that tape. Just upper management who didn’t want to acknowledge a problem area so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. How common is that?”

  Temporarily defeated, I moved on to the second thread. “Julia Strega,” I said, indicating the name at the top of our second column.

  Julia Strega

  Steals supplies and meds

  (through her EMTs? which ones?

  Tanisha??)

  Sells to ??

  Launders $$ through phony pickups and deliveries

  It bothered me to list Tanisha’s name as a potentially corrupt EMT, but until we had some reason to believe the evidence was planted, we felt she belonged there.

  “This thread’s not so neat,” I said.

  Matt tapped his pencil on our list of questions. “We do have one or two leaps and bounds and a few fringe items.”

  I had to agree. “The Robin connection, for one—the fact that she had one of Patel’s IDs and that she apparently altered Dana’s incident report.”

  Slap. Something hit the kitchen table while we had our backs to it.

  We turned to see Dana as she pointed to an envelope she’d slammed on the table.

  “And the fact that Robin and Julia had their heads together over something fishy yesterday, at my house, and the other enormous fact that Tanisha had this wad of cash stuck under her mattress.”

  Dana looked as bad as we did, only a younger version. Sleep-deprived, on edge, frustrated. Her shorts and top looked as though she’d worn them while she slept—or tossed in her bed.

  “I’m so angry,” she said, adding to the emotional inventory I’d concocted for her. “Tanisha. She did steal those meds and supplies. She was a thief.”

  Matt put water on for tea. By now we all knew where Elaine kept the special African teas Dana liked.

  Dana sat down and gave us a dramatic rendition of how she’d found Robin and Julia at her house, and how Robin all but threatened her life, sending her into Marne Hall’s arms. All this was a lead-up to how she happened to roll under Tanisha’s bed, which I understood. But she didn’t have a good explanation of why she took the money.

  “I’m not going to use it,” Dana said, sending a scowl my way when I asked.

  “We know that,” Matt said.

  “I just wanted to get it out of the house, I guess. In case the cops went
back.”

  Dana buried her head in her arms on the table. I could hardly imagine how difficult it would be to find out your good friend was a criminal.

  “Could there be another explanation for the cash?” I asked.

  “No.” No hesitation. “I remember now, certain things. Like, she’d never want to gossip about the stolen meds, the way me and everybody else did. She’d always change the subject, and God knows she’d gossip about everything else. And she’d be hanging around the pharmacies here and there, and she had a lot of private meetings with Julia that she never talked about. Things like that. Plus, lately she’s had all this extra money so Marne could stay home and take care of Rachel. She said it came from overtime, but she didn’t seem to be putting in much more time than I did. She said she got a raise, too, and now I’ll bet she didn’t.” She pushed the envelope away from her. It slid to the edge of the table and stopped, as if it had some internal sensor that kept it from falling. “Unless you count this as a raise.”

  I wasn’t used to sharing my investigative activities with another layperson. I had to struggle even to think of myself as “lay,” especially since George Berger, Matt’s partner at the RPD, had come to accept me as a de facto member of the police team. Still, I welcomed Dana’s input.

  I changed my thinking—from Tanisha as victim to Tanisha as scam artist—and edited our newsprint diagram accordingly. I struck out a few question marks in Julia Strega’s column.

  (through her EMTs?

  Tanisha)

  We were getting close but still had kilometers to go.

  “Thanks for speaking up for me, Matt,” Dana said. “I can’t believe you actually went over there, to Tanisha’s house. I suppose cops know all the addresses in the universe.” She smiled, a worshipful look. “It means so much to me to at least have Marne and Rachel back in my life.”

  It was the first I knew about his side trip to the Hall residence. I figured he must have stopped off there one of the times when he had Dana’s Jeep to himself. I decided to leave Dana and Matt alone, hoping that her near adoration of him might calm her enough to help even further with our posted schematics.

  I headed up the stairs to retrieve the equations William had sent. I walked past Elaine’s still-closed bedroom door quietly, though I was beginning to think I should wake her, or at least check on her.

  In the office, I booted up Elaine’s computer and watched the software icons take their place on Elaine’s tapestry desktop.

  “That’s a very famous tapestry,” she’d told me a while ago. “See that lovely unicorn in the middle of the fenced-in area?”

  I would have been more impressed if the fantasy animal could have speeded up the start process.

  I walked to the window over the driveway and gazed out at a sunny day. Perfect for a BART trip to the newly renovated Ferry Building in San Francisco, for example. Though I’d never get on my knees in the dirt, I loved looking at flower gardens. Elaine had planted a strip about two feet wide of low-lying deep purple flowers along the fence between her yard and her neighbor’s. I gazed at the colorful blossoms on both sides of the driveway And then I noticed …

  Not again.

  A missing car.

  This time it was Elaine’s.

  I knocked on Elaine’s bedroom door, but I knew there’d be no answer. I shoved it open. Empty I had a good idea where she was.

  I pushed the buttons for William’s cell phone, shifting from one foot to the other while I waited for the connection.

  “Hey, Aunt Glo. I have caller ID, so I could tell this call was from California. Cool, huh? Did you get the equations?”

  I hadn’t checked. “Yes, thanks a lot, William.” Lying to a minor, again. “I have another question, though, a quick one. When you called this morning you said something like you were surprised to know I’d be awake?”

  “Right.”

  “How did you know I’d be up in the first place?”

  “Oh, your friend Elaine called around seven o’clock California time. So I figured you’d be up, too. She called Grandma first, and then she called me and she asked me for that address from the PDA.”

  I was right, but not happy about it.

  Matt, Dana, and I piled into her Jeep, and she drove us across town to Patel’s Woodland Road home. By now I knew the windy route by heart and could direct her easily.

  It wasn’t clear why we decided, with almost no discussion, that we needed to go to the house in Claremont immediately. I realized in retrospect that it was the first Dana had heard that her father might be alive and living at Patel’s, and she naturally would want to see him. For me, I wanted to support Elaine in what must have been an overwhelming need to see and confront her fiance.

  I suspected we all also felt an undercurrent of fear.

  Because it might not be Phil, but a murderer waiting for Elaine? Because it was Phil, and he was a murderer? No one offered a conjecture.

  I pushed the numbers for Patel’s phone. “We’re on our way,” I said to his answering machine—again, without a clear reason for what seemed like a warning to Elaine. I felt like the leader of a posse. The effect of being out west, I figured.

  I navigated as Dana took a left from Claremont Avenue and eventually a right onto Woodland.

  And into an emergency situation.

  A sliver of sunlight made it through the morning fog and bounced off a bright red fire truck, a stark white ambulance, and the spinning blue lights of a police car, giving the scene a patriotic look. The emergency fleet took up most of the cul-de-sac in front of Patel’s house.

  Dana gasped and slammed on her brakes, throwing us all forward, as if our bodies were mimicking our minds: stunned, doing double takes, straining to look more closely and understand what was happening.

  I didn’t breathe again until I saw Elaine, in her familiar Burberry windbreaker, standing by a police car.

  I stayed to the side, a few yards away, in the small, albeit slowly accumulating, crowd in the cul-de-sac. Mostly women in jeans and T-shirts, I noticed. I wondered if I was in the land of stay-at-home wives and mothers, though I didn’t see any children.

  We’d arrived in time to see two paramedics push a gurney into the ambulance and lock it down. Matt joined the Berkeley police officers who were questioning Elaine, and so far they were letting him hang around. Dana talked to a uniformed young man she seemed to know. I didn’t see Inspector Russell in the contingent of two uniforms and two suits, and I couldn’t hear anything of the conversations. I was determined to keep out of the way and satisfied myself with the thought that I’d be briefed shortly.

  After a few minutes, Dana climbed into the back of the ambulance, whether as the victim’s nearest relative—I assumed it was Phil’s feet I’d seen on their way into the bus—or as visiting EMT, I didn’t know. I caught Elaine’s pained expression as the imposing vehicle pulled away, sirens blaring.

  I wanted to wave to Elaine, to make sure she knew her closest supporter was handy, but I held still, feeling helpless.

  We convinced Elaine to leave her car in the cul-de-sac and ride with Matt and me in Dana’s Jeep. We seemed to have spent a lot of time figuring out car logistics on this trip.

  “It was just routine out there, Gloria,” Matt said from the driver’s seat. Meaning, You didn’t miss anything. “They want us all down at the station in the next day or two.”

  “The paramedics wouldn’t tell me a thing,” Elaine said, “except that it seemed to be a gunshot wound and that Phil’s alive.” She took a long breath. “I told the police about Howard Christopher. And I heard Dana talking to her cop friend about Julia and her scam. Phil had those invoices, and maybe Julia knew he was on to her. I’ll bet the police are sorry they didn’t listen to us before.”

  We were all sorry for one thing or another, I thought. My biggest regret was that I might have led the shooter to Phil.

  At some point I’d have to face that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  We sat in the sta
rk waiting room of the trauma center where Lokesh Patel and Tanisha Hall had died. And countless others, I thought. I had an urge to ask the young Asian nurse at the desk if anyone left here alive. My heart went out to Elaine. An image came to me of Al Gravese, my own fiancé who died, and I tried to brush away the connection. Phil was still alive, I reminded myself. There could still be a wedding.

  “I had to go over to that house, you know,” Elaine told us. “I couldn’t stand it another minute. I needed to know, was he in danger? Was he just having a crisis of faith in our marriage? Was he …?”

  “It’s okay, Elaine,” we all said in different ways, from our multicolored plastic chairs. Dana was slumped in an orange one, her arms across her chest.

  Elaine stared at the wall, at a landscape that even I knew was not fine art. “I got there and the front door was open. And I heard moaning from the living room or library, whatever it was. Phil was on the floor.”

  I pictured the area I’d peeked in on from the side yard, with the bookcase full of matched sets. I tried to imagine what I would have done if I’d seen someone sprawled on the carpet of the elegantly furnished room.

  Elaine choked back tears. “He was bleeding from his side,” she said, patting her own. She was in a dark green sweatsuit I’d never seen, with rubber-soled shoes that also looked strange to me. Apparently Elaine had a whole separate wardrobe for slipping out of her house undetected.

  Matt handed her a second bottle of water from the six-pack he’d picked up somewhere. I thought he might remember this vacation as one where his main function was driving strange cars and providing water and comfort to frazzled females.