I swallowed hard. Had Stan already destroyed the evidence I needed to put him at the scene of the latest fire?
"Nice to see you, Dr. Lamerino," Albert said in Italian-flavored English.
"You look busy," I said. "Doing errands for Dr. Nolan?"
"Yes. His sweater. He let me borrow it last week when I was sick and had the chills. I have it cleaned for him and now I return it. He's a nice man, no?"
"He's a very nice man," I said.
As relieved as I was that the fluorine team leader was probably not an arsonist, I was aware of the huge setback in solving the case.
I turned and headed back to the conference room, peering into cubicles as I walked. Only the leader of each group in the department had an office; the others worked in cubicles, open to the world.
Teresa's space was surprisingly pink for the modern girl that she seemed to be. A pink stuffed animal of generic makeup sat atop her four-drawer file cabinet. I bent my neck to read the nameplate on the side wall, to be sure I had the right cubby. Peter's cubicle was spare, no decorations except for a large poster of chess champion Boris Spassky. I wondered if Peter was even around during Spassky's reign in the early seventies.
I came to Carson's cubicle and stopped short. I knew of his passion for the early days of atomic energy, but I'd never seen the array of photographs in his workspace.
Many of the shots were familiar from my own passion, reading science history and biographies. Carson's collection included a sketch of the pile at the University of Chicago, where sustainable nuclear fission was born; a startling black and white image of Little Boy; a fiery mushroom cloud.
Most striking was a series of time-lapse images of test houses at the Nevada Proving Ground. Several operations during the era of above-ground testing consisted of building houses at different distances from ground zero and blowing them up to test their responses. The set of pictures on Carson's wall showed six shots of one house, from standing upright to collapsing in a surge of flames, in less than three seconds.
I felt a shiver as it dawned on me how Carson Little's hobby was woven into his approach to his research.
I walked back toward our meeting room knowing all I needed to know about the fires.
****
Matt and the fluorine team seemed to have taken a break at the same time that I did. I wondered if Teresa had looked for me in the women's room.
Now Matt was ready to resume. He pulled four copies of a photo from a folder and placed one in front of each chemist. He folded his hands and watched their expressions, like a macabre Nevada blackjack dealer: Hit or no hit?
Not only the chemists gasped at the sight of the charred body, face down, surrounded by a thick layer of debris. So did I. Up to now, I'd seen only the cleaned up image of her tattoo. I couldn't help staring at this image, making out a human form that was as black as carbon and so thin in places that I knew it could be pulled apart with very little force. I was grateful that I hadn't eaten yet.
"Is this the woman who died in the fire?" Peter asked.
"Not in the fire," Matt said. "Someone murdered her first."
Teresa shivered. "Why are you showing us these? Are we supposed to recognize her?"
I knew better. Matt was trying to shake loose a telltale reaction—a show of remorse, a slip of the tongue, an uncontainable need to confess.
No such thing happened, however. Instead, everyone looked ill; they drew back from the table and now all arms were folded across chests.
"Can you tell me a little about your work here?" Matt asked. He smiled and added, "In layman's terms, please."
Teresa volunteered. "Sure, I'll explain what we do. We're investigating various flame retardant coatings."
"Coatings for … ?" Matt asked.
"Anything," Carson said. "Once we figure out the process, we'll be able to use the coating for leather, glass, ceramic, plastic, wood … you name it."
As the other members of the team pitched in to inform us of the value of their research, I got a chance to slip Matt a hastily written note that read TATTOO IS DANIELLE. He nodded and paused.
"You have quite a testing facility here." I said.
"Sure do," Peter said. "We have all the standard stuff."
"But there's nothing like testing in the laboratory of real life, is there?" I asked. "It reminds me of the model town built at the Nevada Proving Grounds in the fifties." I turned to Matt, as the one who might need an explanation. "The government built houses of every kind of material, furnished them, and then blew them up and studied the results."
"Is that what you're doing?" Matt asked, looking from one chemist to the other.
Stan stood up, kicking his chair behind him. "Absolutely not," he said. "Is that why you're really here? To accuse us of setting the fires in town?"