The Fluorine Murder

Ninth Story in the Periodic Table
Mysteries

Camille Minichino

Smashwords Edition

Copyright

2009
Camille Minichino

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There's nothing special about a third wedding
anniversary, unless your best friend has been waiting three years
to get you to celebrate. Deprived of the pleasure of planning my
wedding, Rose Galigani wouldn't stop nagging until Matt and I
agreed to some form of public display.

"It's leather," Rose told me, as we sat on
lawn chairs facing the geranium-filled back yard of the mortuary
she ran with her husband.

I looked around. The seats were rattan. My
purse was fabric. "What's leather?"

"The traditional gift for third anniversaries
is leather."

"Who else knows this?" I asked.

"It's a hard theme to deal with, but maybe we
can work up something around luggage. We can have tiny suitcases
for favors, but that means you'll have to take a trip right after
the wedding, Gloria."

I checked her expression. Teasing or serious?
It was never possible to tell for sure. Rose didn't ask for much in
life, other than continued good business for her funeral home,
which was pretty much guaranteed, and the freedom to provide a
meaningful social life for those she loved.

"We agreed to a small party," I reminded her.
"Not a full-blown wedding. We're already married. And we're not
twenty years old."

Homicide detective Matt Gennaro and I had run
off, if fifty-somethings can be said to run, for a weekend in
Vermont and had come back married. Thus, the delayed
consumer-approved show of bliss.

Rose snapped her fingers. "A Unity Candle.
That's what you need," she said. "They do that at all the weddings
these days. The mothers in each family light a small candle. Then
the bride and groom use those flames to light a big candle in the
middle, to symbolize the coming together of the two families."

I could have sworn her eyes started to fill
up.

"Our mothers are dead, Rose. Matt has one
sister; I have one cousin. It will look silly."

"Maybe you're right, Gloria. But we need
candles. How about just one big one?" She held her hands to
indicate a circumference of about nine inches. If we lit a candle
that size, it would alert every smoke detector in its path.

As Rose's hands grew farther and farther
apart, the candle expanding to larger and larger proportions, the
shrill whine of a siren filled the night air, still humid at eight
o'clock in the evening. I heard a loud honk, then saw the flash of
a fire engine zipping past on Tuttle Street.

For a minute I thought they'd come to
extinguish the flame on our imaginary Unity Candle.

****

The next day's newspaper reported that the
fire was one of the biggest in the history of Revere,
Massachusetts. It was also the fifth major blaze in the small city
in less than a month, which was five times the usual number. The
first four fires had leveled empty buildings, sweeping through an
abandoned elementary school, a set of vacant apartments in a
long-ago public housing project, a deserted church hall, and a car
dealership that had gone out of business.

This fifth and latest fire was different in
one significant way. The inferno had hit a sprawling, operating
nursing home across town from Rose and Frank Galigani's mortuary.
The box-shaped building, which had been a general hospital many
years ago, was full to capacity with patients at various levels of
disability, from people in a doctor-recommended program of physical
therapy to those needing around the clock care.

This fire had also claimed a life. The body
of a young woman, as yet unidentified, had been found in the
rubble.

The residents of the home had been moved to
safety, and all members of the staff were accounted for. The fire
had broken out well past visiting hours.

So who was the dead woman? I wondered.

Not to mention—who was trying to burn down
Revere?

****

I learned a little more a week later when a
call to Matt's cell phone interrupted our regular Sunday morning
brunch in the Galiganis' beautifully appointed dining room. Matt's
and my dining room, by contrast, was still a work in progress even
after three years.

"Looks like we're going to need your help
again," Matt said, addressing me as he clicked his phone off.
"Fluorine came up in the investigation of the fires."

"Fluorine," I said. "I'm on it."

"Is that the deceased woman's name?" Rose
asked.

"It's the ninth element of the periodic
table," her husband, Frank, said, polishing off his second
home-baked croissant and earning a nod of approval from me for his
science literacy. "And we know who's the expert on all things
science."

"Dr. Gloria Lamerino," Rose said, using her
best drum-roll voice.

I did enjoy my association with the Revere
Police Department, which called me in as a consultant whenever
science was involved in a case. Revere was home to the Charger
Street Laboratory, a major research facility with more than seven
thousand scientists and support staff. I often found myself in the
position of interpreting and explaining their work to my husband
and his department.

"The autopsy report says she was dead before
the fire got to her," Matt said. "A homicide." His somber tone
brought us up short. It wasn't as if he'd just heard the news, or
that any of us knew the murder victim. But the senseless ending of
a human life made any other topic of conversation seem
inconsequential. For a moment we were all silent.

"No smoke in her lungs, I'm guessing," Frank
said finally, almost to himself.

There was business to do and people like Matt
and Frank were used to focusing on what their role was in the
messiness of the human condition.

"That's a big factor," Matt said. "No
inhalation. Apparently the victim's body was dumped at the fire
site. The only identifying mark is a tattoo that looks like a coin
or a seal of some kind."

"The tattoo survived the fire?"

I'd addressed Matt, but Frank raised his hand
to answer, as if we were all back in school. If I was supposed to
know "all things science," Frank, the veteran embalmer, knew "all
things dead body."

"Tattoo ink is embedded in deep scar tissue,"
Frank explained. "Even if a body is badly decomposed, a pathologist
can just wipe away the sloughed skin and there's the tattoo as
pristine as the day it was made."

"Not the first time I've seen it," Matt said.
"In this case, the victim's body wasn't destroyed by the fire, so
there's a decent image left of the tattoo. They tell me they can't
read the writing, but there's a pretty clear representation of a
woman with some kind of crown."

We cleared away juice glasses and craned our
necks to view the photograph Matt pulled out of his pocket,
Columbo-style, and set on the table. The circular graphic, on the
victim's lower back, looked like a collage of several themes—as if
the Statue of Liberty had left her New York Harbor post and taken a
seat in a cluttered garden. Draped in fabric, the faux Miss Liberty
was holding what might have been a large-diameter candle, and at
her feet were what looked like an urn, farming equipment, and some
indefinable shrubbery.

"It's not an American coin or any common
foreign currency," Matt said. "Too bad we don't have one of those
magic computers where we scan this in and some enormous database
with every image from the beginning of time clicks away and then
suddenly blinks 'MATCH MATCH MATCH'."

Frank smiled and helped Matt out with hand
gestures, imitating a blinking computer screen. I knew he was
trying to prevent Matt from launching into a speech about how
inadequate real-life forensics labs were compared to the hi-tech
environments we saw on television shows.

Rose took us off the topic with her own
analysis. "There weren't even any injuries in the other fires and
now we have a fatality. Do they think this was set by a different
person?"

"No, there are too many other similarities,"
Matt said. "For one, although the accelerant is different every
time, it's never very sophisticated. He's used everything from a
cigarette to a welding spark to ordinary fuel."

"Maybe he's trying to make it look like
different people were involved," Rose suggested.

"The RFD doesn't think so. The blazes have
one strange feature in common."

I was already on my way to the living room to
retrieve the notepad and pen from my purse. Matt kindly waited.

"Go ahead." I smiled, pen poised.

"Okay, the RFD equipment gets there in record
time, of course, but in each case there's been evidence that
someone got there before they did."

"The arsonist," Frank offered, with a
chuckle.

"Yeah," Matt said. "But also someone who
tried to put the fire out."

"Amateurs with fire extinguishers?" I asked.
"Like someone who follows fires? Aren't there people who actually
get a thrill watching fires?"

"There are plants called fire followers,"
Rose said. "There was this case where a plant that hadn't been seen
in a location for a thousand years suddenly bloomed again after an
enormous fire swept through the area."

"How?" I asked, amused at myself for
succumbing to one of Rose's trivia lessons, irrelevant as it seemed
to our discussion.

Rose shrugged. "What do I know? But I read
that the fire raised the temperature of the soil and burned away
some stuff that wasn't friendly to that particular plant. It was in
a plant book." Rose and I obviously frequented different parts of
the bookstore. "Also, I think fire symbolically brings things
together, as well as being destructive."

Matt and Frank gave her funny looks, but I
knew she was talking about the Unity Candle she saw as the
centerpiece of our anniversary party.

"We know lots of people who have scanners and
intercept police and fire calls. John is one of them," Frank
said.

"He's a reporter," Rose said, as if she
needed to defend their second son from his father.

"Badge bunnies," Matt said, a grin forming.
"That's what we call people, especially women, who follow cops
around."

Should I be jealous? Probably not, I decided.
Matt had been a celibate (according to him) widower when we got
married, and I had no reason to think he'd go astray now.

"What do they call fire groupies?" Rose
asked.

"Hose bunnies," Frank said, then blushed. Our
usual conversation was singularly free of double entendres.
Something about the fire talk had sparked a different kind of
repartee.

"Good one," Rose said, letting him off the
hook.

"Who do the firefighters think is helping out
at the scenes?" I asked Matt.

"At first it was impossible to say. But now
we have an RFD report—whoever is getting there before the engines
is using a variety of different kinds of fire extinguisher
material. There's nothing the RFD has ever seen before, but they
all contain fluorine."

Aha. The fluorine connection, at last. I
thought back to industrial research I'd read about in science
magazines.

"It's not that strange to have a fluorine
compound in a flame suppressant. Early attempts wreaked havoc on
the ozone layer, so they had to go back to the drawing board. I'd
have to do a little research, but I believe the latest products
with perfluorinated compounds work better."

"I remember when we just used water," Frank
said, gilding the lily by adding butter to a third croissant. It
was hard to figure how he and Rose were the trim, fit ones in this
foursome.

"Water puts out fires but it ruins most
materials that it falls on," I reminded him. "Imagine a room with
expensive and important computer equipment drowning in water. It's
tricky to find something that will put out a fire but not destroy
everything and also leave breathable air for people to
survive."

"Unless they're dead to begin with," Matt
said, bringing us back to the case at hand.

"Where exactly does Gloria come in?" Rose
asked.

Good question. "I might remind you that I'm a
retired physicist, not a chemist," I said. "We deal with simple
atoms and simple reactions. Once you get into the complicated
alphabet soup compounds like PEIK—that's
perfluoroethylisopropylketone—or PMIK—that's
perfluoromethylisopropylketone—I'm lost."