The Hydrogen Murder (13 page)

Matt looked less uncomfortable than I would have been in the
same circumstances.

"Let's cut the cake and get rid of that number,"
he said. Mimicking an evil grin, he picked up a white plastic knife and cut
into the center of the cake, slashing through the outline of a speed limit sign
with the numbers 55 in black and white icing. I did a quick calculation. He was
younger by eight months. Probably a year behind me in school. Maybe it's a good
thing we didn't meet in high school, I thought, when the age barrier would have
been an issue. Not that it would have been likely since Matt had gone to Everett
High, three or four miles away. In the days before every teenager had a car, we
might as well have been across the country from each other.

Matt's birthday cake tasted like a discount supermarket
special, but that didn't keep me from eating every crumb on my little white
paper plate. The party was over almost as quickly as it had begun and Matt and
I were left with the Mylar decorations and a wastebasket overflowing with
crumpled napkins and dripping cups. The remains of the cake had been whisked
away to the lounge and I felt like the survivor of a heavy but benign windstorm
that left the air with the over-sweet smell of cheap frosting.

Matt pinched his nose where his glasses rested, and laughed.

"Wasn't that fun?"

"I'm glad I was invited."

"I'm glad you were, too."

I liked the way he said that. An image of Rose passed before
my eyes and I almost invited Matt to dinner, picturing the four of us around
Rose's elegant candlelit dining room table. I let the feeling pass.

"Wonderful cake," I said instead, realizing that
Rose would have been ashamed of me. Matt laughed again and cleared his throat.

"The divorce lawyer," he said, and I remembered
where we'd left off.

"I wonder if Janice knew," I said, "I can't
believe Andrea did, or she would have told us."

I paused and rummaged in my briefcase for a pen to give
myself a few seconds to debate the wisdom of telling Matt about Annie Lee.
Would he consider it meddling, I wondered? Although both Leder and Andrea had
mentioned the possibility of a West Coast girlfriend, to my knowledge Matt
hadn't pursued it. I plunged in.

"I was talking to a friend in California," I said.
"And she reminded me that Eric had the same sort of relationship to
another woman out there. A young Asian woman named Annie Lee. Not an affair, exactly,
just flirting and 'hanging out,' as Andrea called it."

"Thanks for telling me," Matt said. "I figure
anyone still in California is not worth following up at this point. Anyway,
none of this necessarily means anything."

"Unless Janice got word of the divorce and was unhappy
that Eric would take his degree and run off with someone else. Unhappy enough
to murder him," I said, wondering why I was being so pushy.

"Janice is our problem, not yours, since she's not
involved in the technical stuff. It's just as well if you keep out of those
lines of inquiry."

I felt my face heat up and folded my hands like a first
grader as I absorbed the mild rebuke. I have my answer, I thought, he does
consider it meddling.

"The next item is Connie's alibi," Matt said,
"she says she was home alone and made calls to her boyfriend at his hotel
in Chicago. The phone logs show nothing after about nine o'clock, so that
doesn't help. I'm telling you because you might see something in the computer
printout or other lab documents that indicates otherwise. If so, I'd like to
know about it."

Matt looked at me over his glasses. "I think that's all
I have that's new."

"I'm expecting that some of us will go out for coffee
after the wake tonight," I said. "It won't be too hard to get the
conversation around to the gas gun data. Something new might emerge."

"Good," Matt said, "let's see if we can
narrow down what we're looking for from you."

He took a second file from a basket on the corner of his
desk and I noticed the label 'LAMERINO'
along
the edge. It was my first glimpse into Matt's organizational style and I didn't
know whether to feel flattered to have my own file or slighted because the file
was so thin.

"Is that my rap sheet?" I asked, and immediately
regretted the cute remark, blaming the sugar high from the birthday cake for my
frivolous mood.

Matt uttered a polite laugh, opened the manila folder and
took out a sheet of paper with handwritten text.

"We'll start with Andrea. We need to know if her work
had anything to do with the discrepancy Eric was talking about. Also, how much
did the experiment mean to her career, and did it matter to her whether the
article got published or not."

Although heavy duty crying wasn't proof of innocence, I was
tempted to rule Andrea out as Eric's killer. Her alibi seemed good to me,
too—home with her two roommates, sleeping in adjacent rooms in a small
apartment. But that wasn't what Matt was asking me.

"I doubt that her name would be on the journal
paper," I said. "In general a technician just follows instructions
from the scientists and engineers. But I'll try to engage her in a technical
discussion and see what comes out. Maybe she was applying to grad school and
needed this work as a reference."

Matt wrote in his notebook and moved on.

"Next is Connie—" he said. "I still
don't quite understand her work, but I'm not ready for a physics lesson right
now. Just keep in mind I'll need a little more on that some time."

I made a note to think about an easy explanation of
conductivity. Connie would be depending on conductivity measurements for their
journal article. As for reputation in the physics community, Connie's was at an
important beginning stage.

"Connie talked a lot in California about how the gas
gun work was her ticket to a fast rise in high-tech company management," I
said, trying to be as objective as possible. "Not that ambition is
necessarily a motive for murder."

"Not that it isn't," Matt said. "Jim Guffy
looks like a choir boy. And his parents say there's no way he could have left
the house without waking them up."

"Jim coaches softball for St. Aidan's in Everett,"
I said. "He bought a van just so he could take underprivileged kids to
ball games."

"But he's a key member of the group and if I remember
right, you said his trigger thing was what Eric was raving about the night of
the Saint Patrick's Day party."

I made another note, to review the physics of the trigger
thing with Matt.

"I know Ralph Leder is high on the list of who profits
from Eric's death," Matt said. "We need to know exactly how important
these results were to him and this high-tech agreement he's entered into. How
much money are we talking about? How far off was the data? Is it something he
really could have compensated for in a short time after receiving
funding?"

"I have the article describing the negotiations,"
I said. "I'll look at it more closely and brief you on it."

"Okay. That's about it," he said, closing the
LAMERINO folder and putting it back in the basket. He stretched his shoulders
back, flexed his fingers, and took a deep breath.

"Which brings me to one final thing," he said,
folding up his glasses. "I want to make it clear that in all of this,
you're not to take any chances. We don't know for sure, but any one of these
people could be a murderer. And they know you're helping us. It doesn't matter
if they cry. It doesn't matter if they're your friends. So you must tell me
anything that seems suspicious and keep to your role as a purely technical
consultant."

Hearing the emphasis on the words 'must' and 'anything,' I
wondered if Matt suspected that I was holding something back. I swallowed hard
and weighed the merits of telling him about Leder's phone call. I convinced
myself it didn't matter right now.

"Are you coming to the wake?" I asked.

"Yes. Berger's back part time, putting in some hours at
the Shirley Avenue substation since he lives near there. He's cleaning up some
paper work on old cases, still in no shape for a regular schedule. I'll see you
at the funeral home?"

"I live there," I said, with a smile, partly from
learning that Berger wasn't on the Bensen case yet.

"Right," Matt said, returning my smile. He stood
up as I gathered my belongings, preparing to leave his office.

"Did you get a chance to look at that printout I gave
you?" he asked.

I felt my face redden as I started my confession.

"Not yet, but I've set aside tomorrow after the
funeral. It's something I really need a block of time for. It's very detailed
and takes some concentration."

I was just short of saying "My dog ate it," when
Matt waved his hands in a broad sweep in front of his face.

"No problem," he said. "As soon as you can. I
know you have a life."

Not really, I thought, but it's nice of you to think so. I
wanted to continue and tell him how unlike me this was, how I'd gotten bogged
down temporarily, how I was overloaded by the emotional interview with Andrea,
tension between me and Peter, revisiting my life with Al, and having Eric's
dead body in my house.

Matt pulled on the string of a silver balloon with a bright
blue caricature of Lady Justice holding her scales.

"Libra," he said. "Do you think it means that
I was born to be in law enforcement?"

His tone was light and I silently thanked him for trying to
smooth over my embarrassment at not doing my job.

"What's your sign?" he asked, the sing-song rhythm
of his voice telling me that he wasn't a fan of astrology. I was relieved at
that.

"My birthday's the same as Galileo and Kepler," I
said, "February fifteenth. I guess I was born to be in science."

Matt laughed and walked with me toward the door. As I
brushed some newly found party crumbs from my skirt, I responded to a random
thought.

"What's Eric's sign?" I asked.

Matt gave me a quizzical look.

"Andrea said she gave Eric the Einstein figure for his
birthday," I said, "and Janice mentioned seeing it in the lab with
the action figures around Eric's computer monitor. Janice also said she hadn't
been to the lab since the Memorial Day weekend. Maybe..."

"Maybe...," Matt said, raising his eyebrows and
immediately flipping through the file on his desk.

"September 29," he said, looking up.

"Enrico Fermi's birthday."

"Whose?"

"Fermi, the Italian and eventually American nuclear
scientist—I've been boning up on him for a class and I just happened to
remember his birthday. Sorry."

Matt laughed and shook his head as if to ask himself what
kind of weird woman he'd hired. I hoped he didn't start suspecting me of Eric's
murder.

"In any case, Janice couldn't have seen Einstein in
May. Nice going, Gloria."

I wondered how I'd even thought of it and decided that my
subconscious mind was working to help me redeem myself for my laziness in other
areas.

"It might be nothing," I said.

"It might be something," Matt said.

CHAPTER
13

Back in my apartment, I went directly to my desk and picked
up the computer printout. I hated the idea of black marks in the LAMERINO file.
Josephine would not be happy. Whatever her failings, Josephine would never have
shirked her responsibilities. Also, I had enough of a competitive spirit to
want to solve the case before my designated nemesis and new Daddy, George
Berger returned to work.

The format of Eric's printout was the large, wide variety
from a continuous feed printer, one long string of attached pages with
perforated edges. The alternating white and green rows were supposed to make it
easier to distinguish a line of characters from the one just below it, but
still it was tough going. Folded up, the stack was about two inches thick. And
I wasn't even sure what I was looking for.

I got through all the pages once without a single insight.
The only curious thing about the printout was its last line—a series of
three characters, the first of which looked like a small triangle, the second
the Greek letter mu, and the third an integral sign. Except for the triangle,
the characters were not used anywhere else in the program, neither singly nor
as a group.

Following common practice, Eric used small triangles
throughout the program to represent minute differences in the values of a
particular quantity. In the gas gun calculations, he used T to represent
temperature, and the triangle symbol in front of T to represent a small change
in temperature. I had no clue, however, how that could apply to the string of
three in the printout.
 
 
The Greek letter mu was popular in texts
as a representation of parameters that had to do with magnetism, but it hadn't
been used at all in Eric's program except for that last line. It was highly
unlikely that he was introducing a whole new symbol that far into a
calculation.