The Hydrogen Murder (8 page)

~~~~

Matt was in his office when I arrived, seated behind one of
two completely outfitted desks occupying the small space behind a door with a
frosted glass window. The other belonged to his partner, George Berger, whom
I'd met on previous department visits. My memory of Berger, a short, heavy man
in his early thirties, was not pleasant—he'd made it clear from the beginning
of my contract that he'd taken physics in high school and chemistry in college
and didn't need my help solving a murder.

"You have any experience in detective work?" he'd
asked.

"Just a lifetime in scientific research," I'd
replied, less confident than my clever remark indicated. It was hard enough for
me to get over my feeling of intimidation simply walking into a building full
of police officers, in spite of only one moving violation in my thirty-five
years of driving. Just as every driver on a California freeway automatically
slows down at the sight of a black and white highway patrol car, I straightened
my shoulders and walked with careful strides every time I entered the tiny
high-security vestibule of the Revere police station.

"Here's her resume," Matt had said that first day,
holding out my complete professional history. Meager, I thought, fitting on six
pages stapled together, hardly more than a page for every ten years of my life.
But Matt made a lot of what he had to work with.

"She has everything but the Nobel Prize," he said.
"She has all these publications and she's an honorary fellow of three
different scientific societies." Overblown as his summary was, I was
grateful to Matt for his support. My pre-retirement research was of the
everyday garden variety, basic experiments on the properties of crystals.
Almost every workday for years, I'd plug away at some step in my experimental
procedure—zap a small piece of solid crystalline material with a laser,
collect the light that bounced off, put the data into a computer and analyze it
for information about the structure of the material. Not even close to
brilliant or award winning, but my perseverance and hard work had paid off with
recognition in my narrow specialty of crystal spectroscopy.

Remembering the interaction with Berger, I was happy to find
him out of the office as I started work on a new contract. Matt gave me the
schedule for the day—Jim Guffy was first, due at ten-thirty, then Connie
Provenza after lunch. He hadn't been able to reach Andrea Cabrini, Eric's
possible East Coast love interest.

"Let me give you a progress report," he said, his
voice soft and comfortable, but sounding more like a bank loan officer than a
friend. "First, I got a printout from Casey, our computer guy. I'm not sure
it's useful, but I'll get you a copy. Also, since Janice Bensen and Leder have
registered guns, we checked them out. Both guns are clean."

I wasn't happy to hear that Leder owned a gun, and it
occurred to me that I ought to tell Matt about my bedtime phone call. Not yet,
however. Leder didn't threaten me physically, and I didn't want to scare Matt
into removing me from the case.

Whenever I could sneak a look, I glanced around Matt's desk
and file cabinets for telltale photographs, like a slim young girlfriend framed
in a bikini. I knew he hadn't remarried, but not much more about his current
status. There was only one picture on his side of the office—an older
couple in formal dress seated behind an elaborate cake, presumably his parents
at an anniversary celebration.

Matt sat forward in his chair, pulled a yellow pad of paper
in front of him, and picked up his pencil.

"One more thing," he said. "The security
guard saw a late model Corvette in the lab parking lot just before midnight. He
remembers that it was red and had out of state plates, but doesn't remember
which state. Sound familiar?"

"No. Not off hand."

"Okay. Let's move to the physics. Can you tell me again
exactly what this group has accomplished?" he asked. He'd twisted his nose
and set his face into a grimace. Frown lines appeared on his forehead.

"It's not going to be that bad," I said. I thought
of reciting the Fermi quote I'd used with Peter's students, but ruled against
it. This was serious business that I was getting paid for. I cleared my throat
and forged ahead.

"Under normal conditions, like the air temperature and
the pressure in this room, hydrogen is a gas," I said, trying to sound
friendly, as if I were giving directions to my apartment.

"For at least fifty years scientists have been
predicting that hydrogen could be made into a metal if the conditions were
right. But they also knew that the so-called right conditions involved
extremely high pressures. We've never been able to reach those pressures. But
now with lasers and modern electronics, we can create the conditions we need.
Are we okay so far?"

"So far."

"Furthermore, still talking about fifty years ago, they
predicted that although it would take extraordinary conditions to produce the
metal hydrogen, once it was made, hydrogen would stay a metal even at normal
temperatures and pressures."

Matt had been doodling, but I thought I saw him write an
actual word or two during my last sentence.

"And we care about this because ...?" he asked,
raising his eyebrows and tapping his eraser on his pad.

"Because if hydrogen can survive as a metal at room
temperature, it might be useful as a superconductor—able to conduct
electricity with no resistance."

"And that's where we get these special power lines and
the levitated railway trains?" Matt asked.

"Right," I said. "What Leder's group did was
the very first step—they claim to have made metal hydrogen that lasted
for about a millionth of a second. No one saw it, of course, but the data in
the group's printout says it was there."

Matt was getting into the swing of things. The frown had
left his face, and he sat back.

"So they're saying, we made metal hydrogen, so give us
money to get to the next step," he offered. "And the next step after
that way down the road, we'll give you trains that run in the air and perfect
utility lines."

"You've got it."

"Whoa," Matt said, using almost the same non-word
as when he saw my Cadillac. "How do we know they really made it?"

"There's nothing unusual about the way they're making
their claim. When we're dealing with something that's so small or lasts for
such a short time that we can't see it with our eyes, we have to rely on
instruments to detect their existence. This is where Jim's work comes in. He's
the experimentalist in the group. Jim's the one who designed the equipment that
tells us that metal hydrogen appeared for a brief time."

Matt nodded in a way that gave me hope about his level of
understanding, but before we could go any further, Jim Guffy arrived. With his
awkward gait, boyish grin and bright eyes, he had the look of an Irish altar
boy. At twenty-something, he wasn't that much older than Peter's students. It
was hard to think of him as a potential murderer.

"It's good to see you again," he said to me. He
shook Matt's hand and stumbled into the chair next to mine, dropping his
sunglasses on my feet.

"Sorry," he said, brushing back thick brown hair.
He sat at the edge of the chair, his hands on his knees in a ready-set-go
position.

Matt went over Jim's written statement that he hadn't seen
Eric since the end of the workday on Monday. He was at an all-day meeting in
Boston on Tuesday, he said, and didn't go to the gas gun lab at all. He didn't
hear about the murder until lunch break on Tuesday, when everyone was talking
about it.

"I just want to make sure I have this right," Matt
said. "You live with your parents in Everett?"

"Yes," Jim said, "I was home that night. I
mean I was sleeping when Eric, uh..."

Jim trailed off, shuffling his feet under his long legs. If
nervousness is a sign of guilt, I thought, Jim did it. Lucky for him, I knew he
was naturally shy and uncomfortable in strange situations. And this situation
was about as strange as you could get. I also figured that, like me, he was
afraid one of the officers in the station would ID him as having made an
illegal lane change on Route 1A three years ago.

"Do you remember Eric's saying anything about a
discrepancy in the hydrogen data at your party?" I asked.

"No, I don't. I guess I was too busy with the
songs."

Jim took his Saint Patrick's Day party seriously. He
photocopied the words to dozens of Irish folk songs, with verses no one ever
heard before, and we all sang along to the music on CD. It was the only time
I'd seen Jim show any signs of leadership.

"But I know a lot of people heard him," Jim said.
"Doctor Leder says Eric was drunk."

"Do you know what Eric's supposed problem was?" I
asked.

Jim looked down at his brown tassel loafers. "I heard
it was about my trigger mechanism," he said. "Eric said the timing of
the signal was off."

"You mean 'they say Eric said,' don't you," Matt
asked, "since you didn't hear him?"

"Right," Jim said. He looked flustered and nearly
dropped his glasses again. "That's what they told me."

After a few more questions, Matt thanked Jim for coming in
and encouraged him to call the station if he thought of something that might
help the investigation.

Jim let out a deep breath and started out the door. As he
passed me, he said, "Neat hologram, Gloria."

"What was that all about?" Matt asked when Jim had
left.

"The hologram?"

"That too. But I was thinking about the trigger
thing."

"Jim designed a trigger mechanism that produces an
electrical signal when the shock wave from the gas gun hits it. A certain
measurement at that very moment tells us whether or not the hydrogen has been
metallized. It'll be clearer if I draw a diagram."

I reached over to the pad on his desk and noticed several
infinities, just like the ones he'd drawn in Leder's office. I wondered if I'd
ever know Matt well enough to tease him about that.

"No more science until after lunch," Matt said,
leading me out by my elbow. "There's a small deli around the corner,
unless you have other plans."

I was starting to worry about the Police Department food
budget, but I didn't let that keep me from agreeing. The deli was almost all
counter, with a high refrigerated meat and cheese case along the length of it.
There was a single row of small round tables along the opposite side and we got
the last one at the back.

The turkey sandwich was good, but no match for Russo's
eggplant special. I picked up our conversation, explaining how Eric's computer
program would determine when the trigger fired.

"Eric might have seen something in his own
program—a line of code that told the trigger to fire at the wrong time.
Then the measurement they got would be meaningless."

"Do we have to do this during lunch?" Matt asked.
"Tell me about your Einstein picture."

He looked at my hologram resting on my bosom when he said
this, sending a pleasant shiver through my upper body. His question also caused
me to look again at Albert Einstein and a piece of a puzzle clicked into place.
I put down my forkful of oniony potato salad and looked at Matt.

"He's missing," I said. "That's why the
figures on Eric's desk were rearranged. Someone took Albert Einstein and
covered his tracks by moving the superheroes around."

"Are you sure?" Matt asked.

"I'm sure," I said. "Einstein's missing."

CHAPTER
8

As soon as we got back to Matt's office we checked into the
eight-by-ten color photograph of the area around Eric's computer monitor. The
small white figure of Einstein was in front, as I remembered it, to the right
of the monitor, next to Batman and the UC mug.

Matt was almost as certain as I was that Einstein was no
longer on Eric's desk. He changed our schedule to fit in a return trip to the
lab to be sure.

"So much for yellow tape and a police guard," he
said. "Whoever did this risked being caught at a crime scene without
authorization."

Matt tried reaching Andrea Cabrini again and left a message
that he'd look for her in the physics building around four in the afternoon. As
I was preparing my notebook for the interview with Connie Provenza, Matt
shuffled through pink phone message slips and pulled one out.

"This one's from the security guard at the lab. He's
been thinking about the Corvette and is now pretty sure it had Connecticut
plates. I'll have to check that out. See if there's anyone from Connecticut in
the group, or anyone visiting. Maybe the Physics Department secretary would
know."

Matt seemed to be talking to himself, so I waited for a sign
to continue our conversation.

"I see that Connie Provenza lives in Chelsea,"
Matt said. "Before she gets here, can you tell me what her job is in this
group?"

He turned over a page on his yellow pad and started to
frown, with his science-is-boring look, but relaxed his face instead. Maybe I
have a convert to physics, I thought.