The Nitrogen Murder(78)

“And think about it,” Matt continued. “There’s nothing really incriminating on that tape. Just upper management who didn’t want to acknowledge a problem area so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. How common is that?”

Temporarily defeated, I moved on to the second thread. “Julia Strega,” I said, indicating the name at the top of our second column.




Julia Strega





Steals supplies and meds

(through her EMTs? which ones?

Tanisha??)





Sells to ??





Launders $$ through phony pickups and deliveries





It bothered me to list Tanisha’s name as a potentially corrupt EMT, but until we had some reason to believe the evidence was planted, we felt she belonged there.

“This thread’s not so neat,” I said.

Matt tapped his pencil on our list of questions. “We do have one or two leaps and bounds and a few fringe items.”

I had to agree. “The Robin connection, for one—the fact that she had one of Patel’s IDs and that she apparently altered Dana’s incident report.”

Slap. Something hit the kitchen table while we had our backs to it.

We turned to see Dana as she pointed to an envelope she’d slammed on the table.

“And the fact that Robin and Julia had their heads together over something fishy yesterday, at my house, and the other enormous fact that Tanisha had this wad of cash stuck under her mattress.”

Dana looked as bad as we did, only a younger version. Sleep-deprived, on edge, frustrated. Her shorts and top looked as though she’d worn them while she slept—or tossed in her bed.

“I’m so angry,” she said, adding to the emotional inventory I’d concocted for her. “Tanisha. She did steal those meds and supplies. She was a thief.”

Matt put water on for tea. By now we all knew where Elaine kept the special African teas Dana liked.

Dana sat down and gave us a dramatic rendition of how she’d found Robin and Julia at her house, and how Robin all but threatened her life, sending her into Marne Hall’s arms. All this was a lead-up to how she happened to roll under Tanisha’s bed, which I understood. But she didn’t have a good explanation of why she took the money.

“I’m not going to use it,” Dana said, sending a scowl my way when I asked.

“We know that,” Matt said.

“I just wanted to get it out of the house, I guess. In case the cops went back.”

Dana buried her head in her arms on the table. I could hardly imagine how difficult it would be to find out your good friend was a criminal.

“Could there be another explanation for the cash?” I asked.

“No.” No hesitation. “I remember now, certain things. Like, she’d never want to gossip about the stolen meds, the way me and everybody else did. She’d always change the subject, and God knows she’d gossip about everything else. And she’d be hanging around the pharmacies here and there, and she had a lot of private meetings with Julia that she never talked about. Things like that. Plus, lately she’s had all this extra money so Marne could stay home and take care of Rachel. She said it came from overtime, but she didn’t seem to be putting in much more time than I did. She said she got a raise, too, and now I’ll bet she didn’t.” She pushed the envelope away from her. It slid to the edge of the table and stopped, as if it had some internal sensor that kept it from falling. “Unless you count this as a raise.”

I wasn’t used to sharing my investigative activities with another layperson. I had to struggle even to think of myself as “lay,” especially since George Berger, Matt’s partner at the RPD, had come to accept me as a de facto member of the police team. Still, I welcomed Dana’s input.

I changed my thinking—from Tanisha as victim to Tanisha as scam artist—and edited our newsprint diagram accordingly. I struck out a few question marks in Julia Strega’s column.





(through her EMTs?

Tanisha)





We were getting close but still had kilometers to go.



“Thanks for speaking up for me, Matt,” Dana said. “I can’t believe you actually went over there, to Tanisha’s house. I suppose cops know all the addresses in the universe.” She smiled, a worshipful look. “It means so much to me to at least have Marne and Rachel back in my life.”

It was the first I knew about his side trip to the Hall residence. I figured he must have stopped off there one of the times when he had Dana’s Jeep to himself. I decided to leave Dana and Matt alone, hoping that her near adoration of him might calm her enough to help even further with our posted schematics.

I headed up the stairs to retrieve the equations William had sent. I walked past Elaine’s still-closed bedroom door quietly, though I was beginning to think I should wake her, or at least check on her.