The Carbon Murder(83)

Rose sighed and left me for a while, mentally. I watched her eyes roam the room without focusing. Her thin legs were crossed at the ankles, but the perfect creases in her beige wool slacks did not touch each other. Like Elaine, Rose would never dream of stepping outside her house without dressing well. The two of them joked about having nothing in their closets with elastic around the waist.

“I wish the guys were here tonight,” Rose said when she came back from her trip—down the aisle with MC, I guessed. “We are definitely due for a celebration of good news. Too bad Frank is out of town, and Matt is doped up!”

Doped. A strange word. Until Matt’s current intimacy with medicines, my first free-association matching word would have been semiconductors. Doping a semiconductor material meant adding “foreign” atoms to it, to increase the electron content, and therefore, the current flow. My mind shot off in the direction of semiconductor physics. Germanium could be doped. Also silicon. The stuff of microchips.

But the doping material would be trapped in the chip, of no use to the host. The horse in this case. What was the other word Matt had used? His tongue was … coated. He felt as though his tongue had been coated.

What if the microchips had been coated with something?

I sprang to life and off the chair. “A coating. That’s it. The EID microchips are coated. That’s what the processing step is all about. That’s why Lorna gives the chips to the doctors at practically no cost. The vets think they’re on the payroll for future animal testing. As far as they know, all they’re doing is chip implantation and receiving money slightly illegally. They’re making a big profit on the product, but that’s it. As if that weren’t enough. Or maybe the vets know about this scam. Maybe Dr. Schofield was confessing to the lesser crime to hide the bigger one. Hmm. I don’t think so.”

Rose knew better than to interrupt—it wasn’t the first time she’d been present at one of my solo brainstorming sessions. By the time I finished talking I’d gathered all the material and spread it on the coffee table between us.

“This is great, Gloria. It’s about the case, I know. Jake’s murder. I haven’t wanted to ask you about it, with Matt being sick and then the engagement.” Rose shook her head and breathed out loudly. “Too much on our plates.”

I gave Rose a briefing on what I’d learned from the horse ID charts. I pointed to the mysterious column in the appendix. “The only question I’ve had was, what’s this step?” I tapped my pen on the heading. PROCESSING. “And now I think I know.”

“Wow.” Rose paused. “What?”

I laughed at her straight-woman caricature. “Coating. They—who, I’m not sure. Lorna and Alex and maybe both of their teams. But they must be sneaking in some drug, putting it onto the chips that are used for identification. It’s like putting a rider on government legislation. Everyone’s focused on the main text, but you’ve added a little clause at the bottom that has nothing to do with it, but that is your real purpose all along.”

“Like the city council did last year, adding a nice little bonus for themselves to the school lunch bill.” I nodded. That would do. “Why would they do that?” Rose asked.

“To get around FDA regulations and the interminably long time it takes to get a drug to market. And that would be why Nina Martin had an FDA business card in her pocket. She must have caught on to the scheme while she was investigating Lucian Five’s death.”

“Whose death?”

“He’s a dead horse in Texas … never mind for now. And I imagine Jake Powers also caught on to them, probably when his horse died.” I walked in front of the fireplace, which we had lit early in the evening. I removed the screen and added a log. Rose and I had a running disagreement about wood-burning fireplaces and the damage they did to the environment, but tonight I’d let her prevail. “I need to make some phone calls.”

“Go right ahead. I’ll put the coffee on. And then if you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here and watch a master at work.”

I gave her a look that said I had no time for her snide remarks.

My first call was to George Berger, at home. I told him my coating theory so far.

“Can you get me Dr. Schofield’s home phone number?” I asked him. “It’s too late to reach him at the office, and he’s not listed.”

“Whatever the Revere Police Department can do to help you, Gloria, we are only too happy to assist.”

Everyone was being snide, but I laughed at Berger’s friendly tone. Matt’s partner liked me, and now so did his sister. I had no enemies anymore.