The Carbon Murder(38)

“I know he hasn’t rented a car from any of the local places—we checked, just for closure after we let him go last week,” Matt said. “We could check again, see if anything’s changed in the last few days.” Matt had taken out his notebook. Making this now an official interview?

“What about the car Rusty Forman rented?” I asked, wondering if indeed hit men did rent cars. “Maybe Wayne took that car.”

Matt shook his head. “That vehicle was impounded from outside the motel when Forman’s body was found. Either it’s still in the impound lot, or it was returned to the rental agency, a place at Logan if I remember correctly.”

“What should I do?” MC asked, looking like a child, asking a question to which there should be a simple answer. I felt utterly inadequate.

“A PFA,” Matt said. “That’s about all we can do at the moment.”

“Isn’t that like a restraining order? Is that it?” I asked, my voice shrill.

“Protection From Abuse, a specific kind of restraining order. Even that’s pushing it,” Matt said, “since he didn’t really threaten her. Right, MC?”

She nodded, shrugged her shoulders. “I guess not,” she said, in a weak voice.

“He entered her car and kept her there against her will,” I reminded them both.

“Let me get busy on the PFA,” Matt said, doing his job.

We have to find him first, to serve him, I thought, but decided not to make a point of it.



An hour later, I sat next to MC in my old apartment on Tuttle Street. Matt had insisted on accompanying us. He made some calls from MC’s phone, then fell asleep in one of my old glide rockers. I worried about all the extra napping he was doing these days, and hoped it didn’t mean his system was breaking down. The cancerous “five” that was always at the back of my mind.

MC had installed her computer on the opposite side of the room from where mine had been, and I felt lopsided. I found myself checking off items in the apartment that were the same as when I’d lived there. The blue-and-white speckled linoleum in the kitchen, a small bookcase I’d brought from California, appliances that were duplicates with Matt’s, like the espresso maker and the toaster. I’d left MC my bed, too, and it looked the same, except for colorful pillows that I wouldn’t have thought to add.

We sat together in front of her monitor, waiting, after MC clicked on open messages.

It seemed to take forever, though I knew if we clocked it, no more than fifteen seconds would have passed. How quickly we adjust our level of patience to the speed of the digital era, I thought—by the time we get to MC’s children’s generation, even the Polaroid camera will be in the Smithsonian, if it wasn’t there already.

MC scanned through to two emails from Mary Roderick, Nina Martin’s undercover name. As MC suspected, the correspondence had to do only with the private investigator’s term paper for MC’s class. She read the first one aloud.




Thanks so much for extending the deadline for my research paper, Ms. Galigani. Dr. Gallen has given me some new references that I want to check out. MR





“Dr. Gallen. Ugh,” MC said, giving a shudder. She wiped her hand across her mouth and took a drink of water from a bottle on the desk.

We double-clicked on the second email, dated a couple of days later, and I read aloud this time.




Just to let you know that I left the paper in your office this morning. :=) MR





“A smiley face and all.” MC choked up, biting back a swell of tears. I swallowed, feeling the tragedy myself, though I hadn’t known the woman. Playing on the keyboard one day, and the next, the police are dragging your body from a marshy grave.

“Well, see, there’s no hint that she was headed for Revere,” MC said.

“I wonder why she was so conscientious about her homework if her entire student persona was simply an undercover identity,” I said. “It’s not as if she really needed a grade.”

“Not to arouse suspicion,” Matt said, from the rocker, apparently awake enough to hear our conversation. I’d noticed he’d been going in and out of a light sleep while we worked. “Undercovers are nothing if not thorough. She probably had a secretary write the paper for her.”

MC groaned. “That’s annoying.”

“Why can’t we just find out who hired her to take MC’s class?” I asked, straining my neck to make eye contact with Matt. “And then ask the FDA if she was working on anything for them.”

“No one at the FDA admits to knowing anything about a case with a Houston PI. Not their procedure to work with civilians, they said.”