The Carbon Murder(16)

I’d insisted on throwing all the clothes we wore to the clinic into the wash, as if the sign-in pencil-on-a-string, the doorknobs, and the ugly green chairs were all highly contaminated. The late-night sounds of the washing machine soothed me. Swishing soap, clean rinse water pouring into the tub—Matt’s system cleansed by a new miracle drug.

George Berger called a second time, close to midnight. Unlike Jean, Berger always greeted me before asking for his partner. I gave Matt the phone, slipped a notebook and pencil onto Matt’s lap, and hung on his shoulder to read his scribble.

“A DOA?” he said into the mouthpiece.

Nina Martin, he wrote.

“Where?” he asked.

Rumney, he wrote. The old Rumney Salt Marsh, former home to mutant insect life and multiple tons of North Shore trash. A few years ago, before the marsh restoration project, a body would never have been noticed amid the discarded shopping carts and refrigerator-size boxes.

“Hmm,” Matt said to Berger. I drummed my fingers on the back of his chair.

“The Galiganis?” he asked. An alert. More drumming.

“Anything else?” he asked.

GSW, he wrote. Gunshot wounds.

“Evidence?” he asked.

2 BT on vic, he wrote. Two blood types found on the victim. I was pretty good at Matt’s special combination of police code and his own shorthand.

PI, he wrote. Principal Investigator? No; wrong context. That was for grant proposals. This must be a Private Investigator, I guessed.

“Whoa,” Matt said.

FDA, he wrote. The Food and Drug Administration? The people who put the purple stamps on rump roasts?

“Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Berger,” he said.

“Who’s Nina Martin and how is a private investigator from the FDA connected to the Galiganis?” This from me before the telephone receiver hit the cradle.

Matt made a slow down motion. “Martin was a PI; she had two business cards in her wallet, one for the local FDA office, and one for the Galigani Mortuary, plus a list of names and numbers they’re still tracing.”

“Hmm.” This time from me.

I settled back on my chair and folded my hands in my lap. Ready for information.

Only when Matt grimaced as he shifted in his chair did I remember his tender bottom. I also remembered to worry about his test results, but pushed that aside. I got his pillow and patted his bald spot. That would have to do for now.

I spread my palms, waiting. “Not to rush you,” I said.

Matt gave me a silly smile, cleared his throat. It was the yes, boss expression he’d recently adopted.

“An engineer from the EPA was with the MTA people out at the marsh. They’re the ones who found her,” Matt said.

First the FDA, now the Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Too many agencies, but it made sense, once I thought about it.

The EPA was needed on the marsh restoration project. An unfinished leg of highway, constructed in the 1960s and called “the expressway to nowhere” for years, had been removed, opening the clogged arteries of the marsh to seawater, and providing the ideal laboratory for wetlands study.

The MTA was connected to Boston’s Big Dig, the multiyear, multibillion-dollar construction of an underground expressway, under the heart of the city, and said to be the largest construction project in US history.

The link: Roadbed gravel from the restoration of Rumney Marsh—I thought I’d read two hundred thousand cubic yards of it—was being recycled to Big Dig sites.

Matt tapped his notebook on his knee. “They found a female Hispanic, early thirties, multiple gunshot wounds. Fingerprints came back as a PI. Real name Nina Martin, though she had a couple of different IDs on her. Probably dumped there, though it’s hard to tell whether or not the marsh is the crime scene.”

“More than one ID? I didn’t know PIs went undercover.”

“Sure, they do it all the time. Claim to be someone else to get information. They don’t usually go deep, though, except for the brave ones.”

Or the dead ones, I thought. “What do you make of the Galigani connection?”

Matt frowned. “You won’t like this. She’s from Houston, and MC’s name was written on the back of the Galigani Mortuary card.”

I sat up, on alert, my senses suddenly sharpened. Our Fernwood Avenue home was much farther away from a main street than my mortuary apartment had been; at midnight, the only sounds were from inside the house. A zipper clacked against the drum of our dryer; my computer hard drive hummed, always at the ready; a soft saxophone tune emanated from the speakers in our living room.

The loudest sounds were of links connecting, in my mind. A murdered private detective from Houston. Did Jake send a PI to snoop on MC? I couldn’t entertain the thought that MC herself had done anything wrong, something worth an investigation, not for a nanosecond. But Jake was a different story. Maybe into drugs?