The Nitrogen Murder(83)

That was Elaine in her I-might-as-well-have-been-there storytelling mode.

An older African American nurse ushered us into Phil’s room, where Dana sat beside him. The nurse, whose name tag said BUNTING, was pleasant, except for reminding us sternly that she planned to return shortly to usher us all back out.

“Too much traffic for this man,” she said, shaking her head of tight black curls. “Police, fiancee, daughter, friends …”

Phil was sitting up, forced into an erect posture by stiff wrappings that were partly visible over his blanket. “I’m so sorry to have put you all through this,” he said. “I suppose you think I’m a coward.”

We shook our heads vigorously. I caught a whiff of food from a tray table that had been pushed to the side. I wondered if the gray and brown lumps on the plate made Phil long for a pizza from Giulio’s, with or without anchovies.

“I had to hide,” Phil said. “I had no idea who to trust in my own company. I’d been working with a friend outside the company, Rob Driscoll—”

“That computer geek?” Elaine asked. She turned to us. “He’s a very nice guy,” she explained, “but too brainy, if you know what I mean.”

I did.

“Right,” Phil said. “Rob called me Friday and said he’d hacked into Patel’s files and seen some action that shouldn’t have been there. Patel was what we called an ATM. Not your local cash withdrawal machine but an authorized transfer manager. He was the go-to guy if you needed to send something out of the company, say, to another consultant or to a lab.”

Phil’s attention seemed to drift. I wondered if he was in pain. When he started up again, it sounded more like stream of consciousness.

“It’s so much more complicated now. We all sit in a windowless room and work on portable hard drives that have to be locked up at night, and we have these metal inserts that we put into computer drive slots to keep anyone from inserting and downloading, and on and on.” Phil eventually found his way back to his recounting of events leading up to this moment. “Evidence was mounting against him. So I faced Patel, to give him one last chance to give himself up.”

“And that’s when whoever shot Patel found both of you on that Friday evening,” Elaine said.

Phil nodded and held up his hand, still bandaged, as evidence. But the strips of gauze paled in contrast to the massive wrapping around his torso. I thought I saw streaks of blood on the pad and worked hard at not staring at them. I wondered what kind of matter the bullet had gone TNT, as Matt had put it. I was certain there’d been great trauma to Phil’s body, no matter what the doctor had said about the bullet’s not hitting anything “important.”

Besides first aid, I needed a course in biology, sadly lacking in my science education. When I was in school, biology was the stepchild science, without a solid theory behind its catalog of data and random bits of information. Rutherford once called it stamp collecting. Now—and during the days of discovering the extent of Matt’s cancer—I wished I’d paid more attention to my one high school freshman class in anatomy.

“I eventually managed to unlock Patel’s briefcase and get his PDA out of it.” He gave Dana a smile. Evidently they’d already discussed how he took it from her house.

“What about the duffel bag?” I asked him. “Why would Christopher, or whoever was the shooter, want the duffel bag?”

Phil shrugged the shoulder on his good side. “I knew there was nothing of value in the duffel bag.”

“No value as in misinformation, or no value as in gym clothes?” I asked.

“Gym stuff. Patel was a tennis nut,” Phil said, his voice sad. “Either the shooter didn’t know that or he was really after Tanisha.”

“Are you getting tired?” Elaine asked. “We don’t have to do this now.”

“I’m fine for a while,” Phil said. He gave his fiancee a loving look, then said softly, “I missed you.”

If we hadn’t all been so curious, I’m sure we would have left the two lovebirds alone at that point, but nobody budged. For me, I was willing to let Nurse Bunting decide when Phil had had enough.

“You got an urgent call on Monday afternoon,” I reminded him.

“Right. Rob called me on Monday and said he’d broken another password barrier.”

“And you rushed out to meet him,” I said.

Rob Driscoll, computer geek, was the strange, urgent voice Ms. Cefalu had been hearing on the phone lately. Somehow, I’d pictured a darker, more shadowy spooklike figure.

“I got the PDA back from Rob, and you know the rest. Originally I’d just meant to have it in a safe place while I thought about what to do.”