The Carbon Murder(78)

I got off the couch, pulled my navy corduroy bathrobe tighter, and walked around the living room and dining room to warm up and to reorganize my thoughts. I needed to talk to someone. Andrea Cabrini could help, but not at two o’clock in the morning. It was only eleven o’clock in California, but I hadn’t given Elaine Cody running commentary on this case as I had on others. I had, however, poured all my stress over the phone lines to her.

I went upstairs to my office and found my notes from the first interview Matt and I had had with Lorna. I made noises, shuffled past the bedroom door, but not too loudly, just enough to wake Matt gently, I hoped. He slept on. I went back down with only my notes.

I’d recorded the dialogue as best as I could remember it, once we’d left Lorna’s office. I read the section where I’d questioned her about having veterinarians on her payroll:




Q./me: Do some of your programs require testing on animals?





A./LF: Not exactly. (Annoyed. Ends meeting abruptly.)





The question of chips never came up. I started to blame Houston PD for not sharing the transcript sooner. If we’d known from the beginning Nina Martin was investigating the death of a horse, things might have moved more smoothly. Matt had defended them when I’d brought it up, however.

“It hasn’t even been two weeks,” he’d said. “And the HPD couldn’t just walk into Nina’s office and take her files. Not only that, once they had them, they had to sift through to find the case that might have sent her here.”

“And it’s not as if she had had an equestrian card in her pocket,” I’d said, deciding to join his side.

After another fruitless half hour, I wanted to shake Matt awake and brainstorm, but I’d never keep him from the sleep he needed. It would be too rude, I concluded—unless he woke up from an odor, like the aroma of espresso.

Technically, I knew better—we can’t smell in our sleep—but something worked, because Matt came downstairs a few minutes into my middle-of-the-night coffee break.

“I thought I was going to have to bake lemon cookies,” I said. “Or try my new intense pesto sauce recipe.”

“You mean if I’d held out a little longer, there’d be an extra treat?”

“Next time.”

I summoned him to the coffee table and briefed him on my marked-up lists.

“What I don’t understand—besides what processing they’re doing—is why Lorna’s giving us all this potentially incriminating evidence in nicely bound reports.” I spread out the material on the coffee table, making a fan of the colorful plastic strips down the left-hand side of each report.

Matt shrugged. “You know what they say. If criminals didn’t do dumb things …”

“None of them would get caught.”

Matt pointed to other line items on the expense sheet. “Also, look at how expensive these other items are. Capital equipment, for one. Rare chemicals. CPU time, whatever that is. The chips are way down in the noise of the money they’re spending. But Lorna certainly wants to be reimbursed for the full amount she’s spending, so she sticks these little chip expenses in there. Why not, if she thinks no one will question her.”

Good point. “So where are we on this?” I asked him, exhausted and frustrated. “Are we any closer to why Nina and Jake were murdered?”

“Maybe it will look better in the morning.”

I was tired enough to wait.

Matt climbed the stairs extra slowly, holding on to the worn oak banister that was on our list to refinish some week. Along with repapering the hallway and buying new stairway lighting.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, but planning to sleep in.”

“Me, too.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

On Tuesday morning I was awakened by retching noises coming from the bathroom. I shot out of bed. Matt was doubled over, unable to tell me exactly what was wrong. He mumbled syllables I couldn’t understand, then a few seconds later his eyes rolled to the back of his head, and he fell over, unconscious. I called 911, then Rose, and then George Berger, as if it would take all of them to save Matt.

How could I have been so selfish? I asked myself over and over as I sat in the hospital waiting room, dry-eyed, having used up my tears driving behind the ambulance. I’d kept Matt up late, luring him to work in the wee hours of the morning, helping him ignore his doctors’ orders to rest. I’d even let him heat up the clam chowder himself, and forgotten to restock the cranberry juice.

Dr. Rosen had been assigned to Matt again. I hoped she would be a little less cheery now that she had at least more one week of experience, but her chestnut ponytail still bounced when she greeted me.