The Nitrogen Murder(84)

“And the flight to Hawaii?” Elaine asked.

“You’d be surprised how easy it is to fake a departure.”

Surprised and dismayed, I thought.

“I still don’t get why you had to play spy in the first place,” Dana said. “Isn’t that why we have the FBI and the CIA and the DOE and all those other alphabet orgs?”

I understood Dana’s question—an amateur had been sent to do the work of a professional. Sort of like me, I thought.

“Funding sponsors,” I said.

Phil nodded, his disheveled hair and dark-ringed eyes taking little away from his good looks. “When there’s a problem like this in your company, you don’t necessarily want to alert your funding sponsors. You try to solve it in-house first. You’re competing with a lot of people, and something like this could tip the balance against you.”

“If you can’t handle your own staff and security, why should we give you big bucks for research?” Elaine added. “Happens all the time in my department.”

“What’s worse is that, in this case, we’re dealing with national security, not just company secrets. The NNSA has shown interest in our project, for example. The National Nuclear Security Administration. In the wrong hands, this nitrogen molecule could do us a lot of harm, military-wise.”

“Is that a word? ‘Military-wise’?” Elaine asked. I was glad to see the editor was back in form. “We were this close,” Phil said, illustrating the small gap with his thumb and index finger, “to being able to sell our nitrogen design to a national lab for development. We’d had a couple of briefings with them already. Then I started to see some signs that Patel was not quite straight up.”

Phil’s voice was fading, his eyelids drooping, and I worried that he was going to drift off to sleep before we had any new information or confirmation of our newsprint theories. “It seems Christopher didn’t take your investigation seriously. Was he in on it?” I asked. Could he be the man with the gun? I meant, but couldn’t bring myself to articulate the thought.

“I think so. But it’s hard to imagine him a killer. Hell, it’s hard to imagine anyone you know as a killer.”

I shivered a bit as I thought how easy it had been for me to think of Phil as a killer.

“I took my concerns to Christopher right away,” Phil continued, “and he told me to look into it, but when I did … well, you heard what he thought about it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the cops?” Dana asked, clearly still shaken from nearly losing her father.

“What could I have done? Given them Patel’s PDA? They wouldn’t have understood the context,” Phil said. He glanced quickly at Matt. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Matt said. He stood back from the bed. I loved his serene expression and took it to mean he wasn’t hurting. I was glad he’d been in the almost constant company of an EMT on this trip, however.

I looked at my watch. I wondered how long we had before the curfew nurse returned and cut us off. I needed more from Phil, and I didn’t have much time.

“What about the invoices in your house, Phil?” I asked. “From Valley Med.”

Phil looked surprised. I realized he’d been missing in more ways than one. He had no idea of the extent of our investigation. How could he have guessed we’d been rooting around behind his kitchen bulletin board?

He glanced at Matt. “You’re a good detective,” he said.

I supposed it was natural that Phil would think it was the cop among us who’d been pursuing the case. This, in spite of our Robert Boyle/Galileo messages. Old stereotypes died hard.

Matt smiled, wisely letting me decide whether to call Phil on his false assumption. I let it go—he was recovering from a TNT gunshot wound, after all—and Phil continued.

“Well, I was looking for missing special materials, not just nitrogen but other controlled material, to try to trace it to Patel. I searched everywhere, both classified and unclassified Web sites, and I hit on a lot of lists with details of incidents and reports of missing substances, nuclear and nonnuclear. These would be either illegal or hazardous in the wrong hands.”

“And the missing hospital meds came up?”

“You’d be amazed. There’s nitrogen in Viagra, for example. And nitroglycerin. And of course morphine, C17H19NO3, which, coincidentally, I was offered a shot of this afternoon.”

I was impressed that Phil could rattle off the chemical composition of a complicated molecule like morphine. And I’d had no idea it contained nitrogen. He shifted a bit and his lips tightened. He had to be hurting, I thought.