The Nitrogen Murder(88)
Robin was doing Julia’s books. More accurately, cooking them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I gave up on trying to sleep. I closed the door on Matt’s light snoring and went down the hall to Elaine’s office. As I passed the stairway, I saw the flickering light of the television set, telling me that Dana was still in the house. Dinner smells had dissipated, replaced by the fragrance of a large jasmine-scented candle, one of many in the house, its flame newly snuffed out.
I wanted to make the most of my interview at the Berkeley PD in the morning, and a review of our information would be handy. I was a self-designated consultant, it seemed. A part of me that I wasn’t proud of hoped that Russell would be on sick leave, but only because he didn’t seem the type to take a vacation.
The case for theft and fraud in People v. Julia Strega, dba Valley Medical Ambulance Company (I wasn’t sure what the charges would be, technically, but it was amusing to pretend I was) seemed unbreakable. If there were EMTs other than Tanisha Hall involved in her side business, the Berkeley PD could ferret them out.
I was also sure we had a vacuum-sealed case against Howard Christopher. He’d given himself away with his comment about Patel’s method of getting classified information out of a VTR. I pictured the Indian scientist, a trusted transfer manager, skulking around the vault-type room, taking the steps to remove data, copy equations, even record a note to himself—all the while appearing to be just doing his job, preparing media for the transfer of material to unclassified sites.
It was easy to think of possible scenarios for intercepting secret information. I knew that some PDAs could beam data to each other at a distance of a couple of yards, no cable or computer required. I wondered if Patel had a partner, another operative receiving his information across the room. So high-tech—I gave some thought to getting myself a PDA after all.
I had a harder time imagining the end user of the information Patel had been stealing, but that was because I was embarrassingly out of touch with international politics. Give me a quiz on the status of the world’s major accelerators, from BESSY in Germany to KEK in Japan, and I could get an A. I was current on which countries were participating in the research program called ITER, the international collaboration for the advancement of fusion science and technology (Korea was still in; Canada had pulled out). But if you asked me to name the current leaders or political leanings of any non-English-speaking country, I’d be lost. Even for my native land, I was more apt to follow the press releases and decisions of the president’s science adviser than of his attorney general.
I’d always thought I’d do more nonscience reading when I retired, but I’d simply switched technical fields, from spectroscopy to forensics.
In Elaine’s office late Friday night, I had my ear to the sounds from outside the house. I’d opened the office window a crack and heard only light traffic. This was a quieter neighborhood than the streets closer to the campus, where weekend nights especially were alive with party noise from the many fraternity and sorority houses.
I was downloading and printing William Galigani’s attachments—the equations he’d mentioned, drawings of molecular configurations, notes, e-mails—when I heard Dana’s Jeep start up in Elaine’s driveway.
Finally.
I looked out the window, hidden, I hoped, by Elaine’s draperies. Dana backed out and onto the street. I assumed she was heading home, having mustered the courage to face her roommate. My heart went out to her; it couldn’t have been easy for Dana this week. Elaine, at least, had a few life experiences under her belt. Dana was only twenty-four, a little older than I was when my fiance died. All in all, Dana had acted in a more mature way than I had. For one, she didn’t flee the scene and avoid dealing with the problem.
There was another reason I was happy to see the Jeep pull away Dana had been parked behind Elaine’s Saab, and I had an errand to do.
In a few hours everything would be out in the open. Julia Strega and Howard Christopher would be in custody, and the rest of us could get back to wedding plans.
So why was I driving to Patel’s house late Friday night when sensible people were either partying or sleeping? The only difference between the first two times I snooped around and now would be a bloody spot on the library carpet.
At least no one will be following me this time, I thought. It was late at night, and besides, the Patel case was over. I asked myself again what I hoped to gain with this excursion.
The only thing I could come up with was that lately I’d been generating the same curiosity for crime scenes that I used to reserve for the results of the latest NASA mission. I had to admit also that I was searching for a link between the two cases. Patel’s ID card in Robin’s closet was tantalizing, and we still had no ballistics information about whether the bullets that entered Patel, Tanisha, and Phil were from one, two, or three guns.