The Nitrogen Murder(58)

At this point, nothing would surprise Dana.





CHAPTER NINETEEN

According to his secretary, the message that interrupted Phil’s presentation sent him to another meeting “in an hour.” That would put the urgent meeting at about three o’clock on Monday afternoon. But where was the rendezvous? And with whom?

We bent over the local map spread on Elaine’s farmer’s-style kitchen table, like treasure hunters looking for a chest of gold, or human genome researchers seeking clues to genetic markers.

What would be a likely spot? we asked. I put the stylus of a compass—neither Elaine nor Matt was surprised that I’d have one with me—on Dorman Industries. I was ready to swing it around in a circle of radius one hour.

“Do you think we can assume it would take an hour for Phil to get there?” Elaine asked. “Or that the other man needed an hour? Or each needed half an hour?” She threw up her hands. “This is too much like the word problems I always hated in freshman algebra. ‘If it takes three men four days to chop down six trees …’”

“Then those men aren’t working very hard,” Matt said.

Elaine laughed, but just barely. “It’s hopeless,” she said, and I saw the same look in her eyes.

We abandoned the map project and put together a list of questions that would have simple answers. If only we had the legal right, or the nerve, to ask them.

“We could just ask Robin what she was doing with one of Lokesh Patel’s IDs,” Dana said. “And why she changed my incident report to Valley Med before she printed it.”

We turned to Matt, the only one with any authority or training to evaluate the situation. I knew he was skittish about investigating in any formal way He’d want to put together a reasonable presentation for Russell.

Matt’s look said it wasn’t good news. “Russell’s already claimed no interest in Robin,” he said. “First, Dana gave the uniforms at the scene a stack of IDs with Patel’s photo and different names. One of them might have been accidentally—or deliberately, for all he knows—held back. The card could have fallen from Dana’s pocket onto Robin’s closet floor. They are roommates, after all.”

Strike one.

“Same with number two. We have only Dana’s word that Robin changed the report. Dana was clearly stressed and could have marked it incorrectly or, in a fit of honesty, marked it correctly—indicating that drugs had been involved in the incident.”

Elaine bristled. “Are you saying—”

Matt held up his hand. “I’m only saying what the Berkeley police have said and might well be investigating. Let’s say Dana files a formal complaint against Robin, accusing her of fraud with respect to the report. So we have to ask, what will we gain by doing that, or by approaching Robin without real proof that she had something to do with the deaths?”

“What about confronting Julia with the fake invoices?” I asked, bracing for a third strike.

“Same thing, really,” Matt said. “There are any number of explanations for those sheets of paper. Besides, they’re obviously copies. We have nothing to take to Julia or the Berkeley PD at the moment. They’re never going to issue a search warrant on what we have. We’d essentially have to catch her in the act. Whatever that might be.” He gave an apologetic shrug, the bearer of bad news.

“So, we have all this evidence, and all these crimes, but not enough of anything, no way to connect them,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Then there’s my dad,” Dana said in a weak voice. I figured it cost her a lot to throw her father into the mix of suspicious characters. “He knew about Patel’s briefcase. He had the briefcase. And he lied about his hand.”

“His hand?” Elaine asked, her voice exasperated, as if this were the last straw. She couldn’t even count on her fiancé to have a legitimately slashed hand.

Dana briefed us on a conversation she’d had with an intern at the trauma center.

“Didn’t you actually see Phil cut himself while working on the shrimp?” I asked Elaine. “You mentioned all the blood—I assumed you were there and drove him to the ER.”

Elaine looked sheepish. “No, no. I was at work when it … something … happened. I just repeated what Phil told me.”

I understood. Elaine seemed to have adopted the same storytelling technique Rose had always used. Even when Rose related an event from the days of the nineteenth century about one of the more famous Revere natives, Horatio Alger, she spoke as if she’d been present at his speeches. I’d always thought she’d have made an excellent history teacher. More recently, her description of the blown-up hearse had all the elements and drama of an eyewitness report.