The Fluorine Murder
Ninth Story in the Periodic Table Mysteries
Camille Minichino
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Camille Minichino
All rights reserved.
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The Fluorine Murder
There's nothing special about a third wedding anniversary, unless your best friend has been waiting three years to get you to celebrate. Deprived of the pleasure of planning my wedding, Rose Galigani wouldn't stop nagging until Matt and I agreed to some form of public display.
"It's leather," Rose told me, as we sat on lawn chairs facing the geranium-filled back yard of the mortuary she ran with her husband.
I looked around. The seats were rattan. My purse was fabric. "What's leather?"
"The traditional gift for third anniversaries is leather."
"Who else knows this?" I asked.
"It's a hard theme to deal with, but maybe we can work up something around luggage. We can have tiny suitcases for favors, but that means you'll have to take a trip right after the wedding, Gloria."
I checked her expression. Teasing or serious? It was never possible to tell for sure. Rose didn't ask for much in life, other than continued good business for her funeral home, which was pretty much guaranteed, and the freedom to provide a meaningful social life for those she loved.
"We agreed to a small party," I reminded her. "Not a full-blown wedding. We're already married. And we're not twenty years old."
Homicide detective Matt Gennaro and I had run off, if fifty-somethings can be said to run, for a weekend in Vermont and had come back married. Thus, the delayed consumer-approved show of bliss.
Rose snapped her fingers. "A Unity Candle. That's what you need," she said. "They do that at all the weddings these days. The mothers in each family light a small candle. Then the bride and groom use those flames to light a big candle in the middle, to symbolize the coming together of the two families."
I could have sworn her eyes started to fill up.
"Our mothers are dead, Rose. Matt has one sister; I have one cousin. It will look silly."
"Maybe you're right, Gloria. But we need candles. How about just one big one?" She held her hands to indicate a circumference of about nine inches. If we lit a candle that size, it would alert every smoke detector in its path.
As Rose's hands grew farther and farther apart, the candle expanding to larger and larger proportions, the shrill whine of a siren filled the night air, still humid at eight o'clock in the evening. I heard a loud honk, then saw the flash of a fire engine zipping past on Tuttle Street.
For a minute I thought they'd come to extinguish the flame on our imaginary Unity Candle.
****
The next day's newspaper reported that the fire was one of the biggest in the history of Revere, Massachusetts. It was also the fifth major blaze in the small city in less than a month, which was five times the usual number. The first four fires had leveled empty buildings, sweeping through an abandoned elementary school, a set of vacant apartments in a long-ago public housing project, a deserted church hall, and a car dealership that had gone out of business.
This fifth and latest fire was different in one significant way. The inferno had hit a sprawling, operating nursing home across town from Rose and Frank Galigani's mortuary. The box-shaped building, which had been a general hospital many years ago, was full to capacity with patients at various levels of disability, from people in a doctor-recommended program of physical therapy to those needing around the clock care.
This fire had also claimed a life. The body of a young woman, as yet unidentified, had been found in the rubble.
The residents of the home had been moved to safety, and all members of the staff were accounted for. The fire had broken out well past visiting hours.
So who was the dead woman? I wondered.
Not to mention—who was trying to burn down Revere?
****
I learned a little more a week later when a call to Matt's cell phone interrupted our regular Sunday morning brunch in the Galiganis' beautifully appointed dining room. Matt's and my dining room, by contrast, was still a work in progress even after three years.
"Looks like we're going to need your help again," Matt said, addressing me as he clicked his phone off. "Fluorine came up in the investigation of the fires."
"Fluorine," I said. "I'm on it."
"Is that the deceased woman's name?" Rose asked.
"It's the ninth element of the periodic table," her husband, Frank, said, polishing off his second home-baked croissant and earning a nod of approval from me for his science literacy. "And we know who's the expert on all things science."
"Dr. Gloria Lamerino," Rose said, using her best drum-roll voice.
I did enjoy my association with the Revere Police Department, which called me in as a consultant whenever science was involved in a case. Revere was home to the Charger Street Laboratory, a major research facility with more than seven thousand scientists and support staff. I often found myself in the position of interpreting and explaining their work to my husband and his department.
"The autopsy report says she was dead before the fire got to her," Matt said. "A homicide." His somber tone brought us up short. It wasn't as if he'd just heard the news, or that any of us knew the murder victim. But the senseless ending of a human life made any other topic of conversation seem inconsequential. For a moment we were all silent.
"No smoke in her lungs, I'm guessing," Frank said finally, almost to himself.
There was business to do and people like Matt and Frank were used to focusing on what their role was in the messiness of the human condition.
"That's a big factor," Matt said. "No inhalation. Apparently the victim's body was dumped at the fire site. The only identifying mark is a tattoo that looks like a coin or a seal of some kind."
"The tattoo survived the fire?"
I'd addressed Matt, but Frank raised his hand to answer, as if we were all back in school. If I was supposed to know "all things science," Frank, the veteran embalmer, knew "all things dead body."
"Tattoo ink is embedded in deep scar tissue," Frank explained. "Even if a body is badly decomposed, a pathologist can just wipe away the sloughed skin and there's the tattoo as pristine as the day it was made."
"Not the first time I've seen it," Matt said. "In this case, the victim's body wasn't destroyed by the fire, so there's a decent image left of the tattoo. They tell me they can't read the writing, but there's a pretty clear representation of a woman with some kind of crown."
We cleared away juice glasses and craned our necks to view the photograph Matt pulled out of his pocket, Columbo-style, and set on the table. The circular graphic, on the victim's lower back, looked like a collage of several themes—as if the Statue of Liberty had left her New York Harbor post and taken a seat in a cluttered garden. Draped in fabric, the faux Miss Liberty was holding what might have been a large-diameter candle, and at her feet were what looked like an urn, farming equipment, and some indefinable shrubbery.
"It's not an American coin or any common foreign currency," Matt said. "Too bad we don't have one of those magic computers where we scan this in and some enormous database with every image from the beginning of time clicks away and then suddenly blinks 'MATCH MATCH M
ATCH'."
Frank smiled and helped Matt out with hand gestures, imitating a blinking computer screen. I knew he was trying to prevent Matt from launching into a speech about how inadequate real-life forensics labs were compared to the hi-tech environments we saw on television shows.
Rose took us off the topic with her own analysis. "There weren't even any injuries in the other fires and now we have a fatality. Do they think this was set by a different person?"
"No, there are too many other similarities," Matt said. "For one, although the accelerant is different every time, it's never very sophisticated. He's used everything from a cigarette to a welding spark to ordinary fuel."
"Maybe he's trying to make it look like different people were involved," Rose suggested.
"The RFD doesn't think so. The blazes have one strange feature in common."
I was already on my way to the living room to retrieve the notepad and pen from my purse. Matt kindly waited.
"Go ahead." I smiled, pen poised.
"Okay, the RFD equipment gets there in record time, of course, but in each case there's been evidence that someone got there before they did."
"The arsonist," Frank offered, with a chuckle.
"Yeah," Matt said. "But also someone who tried to put the fire out."
"Amateurs with fire extinguishers?" I asked. "Like someone who follows fires? Aren't there people who actually get a thrill watching fires?"
"There are plants called fire followers," Rose said. "There was this case where a plant that hadn't been seen in a location for a thousand years suddenly bloomed again after an enormous fire swept through the area."
"How?" I asked, amused at myself for succumbing to one of Rose's trivia lessons, irrelevant as it seemed to our discussion.
Rose shrugged. "What do I know? But I read that the fire raised the temperature of the soil and burned away some stuff that wasn't friendly to that particular plant. It was in a plant book." Rose and I obviously frequented different parts of the bookstore. "Also, I think fire symbolically brings things together, as well as being destructive."
Matt and Frank gave her funny looks, but I knew she was talking about the Unity Candle she saw as the centerpiece of our anniversary party.
"We know lots of people who have scanners and intercept police and fire calls. John is one of them," Frank said.
"He's a reporter," Rose said, as if she needed to defend their second son from his father.
"Badge bunnies," Matt said, a grin forming. "That's what we call people, especially women, who follow cops around."
Should I be jealous? Probably not, I decided. Matt had been a celibate (according to him) widower when we got married, and I had no reason to think he'd go astray now.
"What do they call fire groupies?" Rose asked.
"Hose bunnies," Frank said, then blushed. Our usual conversation was singularly free of double entendres. Something about the fire talk had sparked a different kind of repartee.
"Good one," Rose said, letting him off the hook.
"Who do the firefighters think is helping out at the scenes?" I asked Matt.
"At first it was impossible to say. But now we have an RFD report—whoever is getting there before the engines is using a variety of different kinds of fire extinguisher material. There's nothing the RFD has ever seen before, but they all contain fluorine."
Aha. The fluorine connection, at last. I thought back to industrial research I'd read about in science magazines.
"It's not that strange to have a fluorine compound in a flame suppressant. Early attempts wreaked havoc on the ozone layer, so they had to go back to the drawing board. I'd have to do a little research, but I believe the latest products with perfluorinated compounds work better."
"I remember when we just used water," Frank said, gilding the lily by adding butter to a third croissant. It was hard to figure how he and Rose were the trim, fit ones in this foursome.
"Water puts out fires but it ruins most materials that it falls on," I reminded him. "Imagine a room with expensive and important computer equipment drowning in water. It's tricky to find something that will put out a fire but not destroy everything and also leave breathable air for people to survive."
"Unless they're dead to begin with," Matt said, bringing us back to the case at hand.
"Where exactly does Gloria come in?" Rose asked.
Good question. "I might remind you that I'm a retired physicist, not a chemist," I said. "We deal with simple atoms and simple reactions. Once you get into the complicated alphabet soup compounds like PEIK—that's perfluoroethylisopropylketone—or PMIK—that's perfluoromethylisopropylketone—I'm lost."
"You don't sound lost," Rose said.
"She never does," Matt said.
I had a thought, a way that I could help. "Would you like me to introduce you to the Charger Street chemists who've been working on fluorine-based flame suppressants?" I asked.
My loving husband of The Year of Leather gave me a vigorous nod. "You know the language, which puts you way ahead of most of us on the force. And right now we're going on the assumption that the fires and the murder are related."
"I know the fluorine research team fairly well," I said. "I attend their seminars now and then. I'm sure they'll be a big help in figuring this out." Matt raised his eyebrows and gave me a sad look. "What is it?" I asked.
"You might not be happy to hear this."
It took a few seconds to register. "The Fire Department thinks the fluorine chemists are racing to the fires so they can test their formulas?" I could hardly keep my voice steady.
"Or … " Matt said, completing his sentence with a shrug.
"Could they be deliberately … ?" Frank was wide-eyed.
Rose gasped. "You don't think they're … ?"
No one dared say the words in my presence—the idea that the scientists could be setting fires themselves, to use in their research. My husband and friends knew my extreme protectionist attitude, wanting to hold onto the concept that scientific research was carried out by women and men whose motives were always pure and altruistic.
"I'm assuming the RFD is investigating, too," Rose said.
"The murder is ours," Matt said, not meaning to sound so callous, I was sure. "They've already interviewed the Charger Street chemists once." He turned to me. "I have to be honest, Gloria. The RFD suspects the chemists, but they can't prove anything."
"Suspects them of what?" I hadn't meant to raise my voice, but no one seemed surprised.
Matt scratched his head. I could tell it was bad news. "Everything."
Rose stifled another gasp, turning it into a cough.
I took a deep breath. It didn't help much. "So I'm supposed to get evidence against fellow scientists? To show that they go around setting fires and then experiment on putting them out? And that they may have killed someone in the process?"
I took my husband's silence as a "yes."
My three brunch companions left the mental battlefield and went off on another subject, back to the Galiganis' son, John, and his newest assignment. I tuned out. I needed to make some notes on the fluorine researchers at the Lab. No one said I couldn't try to clear their names. I left the dining room table and settled myself one room away on a kitchen stool. I heard no protests.
****
One of the best things about being retired was that I no longer had the pressure of knowing what was being done every waking hour in my own field of spectroscopy. Instead of focusing on one narrow field, I could dabble in every area that held interest for me, reading books and magazines and attending seminars across the board in physics and chemistry and even math departments. It was nice to listen to everyone's problems—not enough temporal resolution with the new scanning equipment, unexplained glitches in what should be smooth curves of data, too many unknowns in a set of equations—and not have to solve them.
It was time to organize my thoughts about the fluorine group. I was sure their combined expertise would help identify the guilty party.
In my mind they were resources, not suspects.
I wrote Stan Nolan's name first. He was the leader of the fluorine research group, nearing retirement and eager to have one last paper accepted in the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry. I pictured his thinning gray hair and the same dark green cardigan I'd seen him in at every meeting.
Peter Barnett and Teresa Verrico were the new post-docs in the group. The two young people seemed to get along well, their only rivalry stemming from an ongoing chess game, played at times in the chemistry department lounge and at times on line. Peter played up his nerdy reputation by wearing a pocket protector.
Teresa was the reason I attended so many chemistry meetings. She'd gotten her degree at the University of California, like me, and we'd met at a reunion of UC science alums now residing in Massachusetts. Unlike me, however, Teresa missed the sunny, even weather of the west coast. I let her moan about the humidity of a New England summer and helped her buy a snow shovel for the winter.
Carson Little was the heir apparent to replace Stan as the group's leader. Not much younger than Stan, Carson was affectionately called "Little Boy" not only for his surname and small stature but because he was an avid student of mid-twentieth century atomic science. Carson's personality was a match to that of Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, in many ways—he was volatile, energetic, and unpredictable.
The last member of the team was an on-again off-again young temp who handled the clerical work for as many hours per week as the budget (also on-again off-again) allowed. Danielle Laurent was a French exchange student in environmental sciences at a Boston college.
I tapped my pen on my notepad. What else did I know about the fluorine chemists? Romance, I thought. After seminars I often went out for coffee with Teresa, Peter, and Carson. I didn't think it strange that Stan and Danielle always declined, saying they had work to do. They'd go off, Stan in his long cardigan and Danielle in a sweater that barely reached her waist. Then a few weeks ago, I was treated to the workings of the chem department rumor mill.
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