The Hydrogen Murder (The Periodic Table Series) Read online

  THE HYDROGEN MURDER

  by

  Camille Minichino

  The First Periodic Table Mystery

  THE HYDROGEN MURDER

  PROLOGUE

  At two o'clock on Tuesday morning, Eric Bensen got into his aging cream-colored Volvo and drove to the laboratory complex. He needed one more look at the data, with no one else around, before he settled on his course of action.

  City traffic does sleep, he thought, as he wound through deserted streets a few miles from Boston, a light October rain bouncing off his headlights. Eric parked in front of the three-story physics building and let himself in through the back door.

  Even in the middle of the night, the corridors were noisy with the whining of generators and the hum of long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Patterns of tiny red, yellow and green dots from filaments and stand-by lamps reminded Eric of miniature traffic lights spread at random over the racks of electronics visible through small windows in the heavy metal doors that lined the hallway.

  Eric walked past dark offices, supply closets, and workshops smelling of acids and graphite. He headed down a ramp and entered the basement room that held his gas gun—sixty feet of pistons, valves, and gases encased in metal piping, the heart of his hydrogen research. He flicked on the overhead lights, sat at his computer and picked up the printout from Monday's runs.

  Resting the thick sheaf of data on his lap, Eric weighed his choices. He could kill one or two lines in the software program and the annoying result would disappear. Or he could acknowledge the error he and his team had made, retract their journal article, and be responsible for setting ten scientists, including his mentor, back to square one.

  Eric took a deep breath and ran his fingers through the small amount of dark brown hair he had left. With a wrinkled brow and heavy glasses, he looked much older than his thirty-one years.

  Eric was within two months of getting his doctorate and moving on to a real job with a good salary and some free time to put his personal life in order. The ticking of the generic clock on the wall above his desk seemed to grow louder as he thought of his wife's constant nagging about starting a family.

  He swiveled around, rotating from side to side in his patched gray vinyl chair. Clockwise, instant recognition in the field of hydrogen research and financial security for life. Counterclockwise, embarrassment and disappointment for him and his colleagues.

  Eric heard the ramp door open and saw a figure approaching.

  "I thought you'd be here," said a familiar voice.

  "Well, there's work to do," Eric said.

  "You're not going to do this to me."

  "What ... ?"

  Eric stopped short and watched, as if in a trance, as the figure moved toward him. His eyes formed a question that he didn't bother to ask. He looked at the gun pointed directly at him and turned away, the slowness of his motion at odds with the intense speed of his thoughts. His fingers brushed the keyboard just before the first shot rang out.

  Eric fell to the floor. The sounds of two more shots echoed in his brain.

  His chair rocked for a few moments without him, then slowed to a full stop.

  CHAPTER 1

  I blame my mother for all my character flaws. My inability at fifty-five years of age to decide whether to relax to an old Perry Como album or ride my exercise bike to operatic drinking songs, can be traced to my first twenty years with Josephine Lamerino.

  "You don't like yellow," Josephine would tell me. "You don't want that blouse. It'll only hang in the closet. And forget skating lessons, Gloria. You're not athletic." No need for decision-making with Josephine around to do it for you.

  Now with an evening free, a rarity since I'd come back to my hometown just north of Boston four months ago, I was like an electron searching for an orbit. I couldn't focus on what I wanted to do. I looked around my newly furnished living room, lined with neat rows of science books, biographies, and an occasional classic. I caught my reflection in the large framed print of a cable car on the highest street in San Francisco, a farewell present from the friends I'd left in California, and straightened up to my full five feet three inches.

  Maybe there'll be a murder tonight, I thought, something to give me a focus. A strange thought, but thanks to old friends looking out for my mental health, I'd been asked to help the Revere Police Department on science-related cases. Working on my first and only contract thus far, I'd testified as an expert witness in a murder trial involving a chemist as defendant.

  I'd felt a thrill to match my best research day when I was able to give homicide detectives the break they needed—I decoded a formula for liquid tungsten that eventually led to proof of industrial espionage as the motive for a murder. I considered myself an official amateur detective, if there were such a thing.

  Not exactly what I had in mind when I took early retirement. I'd cleaned out my Berkeley condo and my physics lab, signed for my bonus, and flown east. My only plan had been to return to the place I'd fled thirty years before and see what it felt like.

  I made a private resolution to give it a year, then make a new decision. For someone who had a hard time choosing between "Hot Diggety-Dog" and the opening chorus from La Traviata, I'd set a lofty goal for myself.

  When my phone rang, I was on my way across new blue and white speckled linoleum to the refrigerator, another habit learned from Josephine. When bored or in doubt, have a snack. I was relieved to hear Rose's voice. I didn't really want someone murdered just to make my evening interesting.

  "The car's ready for you," Rose said. "Why don't I drive over and we'll go for coffee. You can finally dump that old Jeep you brought from the West Coast."

  Rose had been my biggest supporter when I first entertained thoughts of coming home again. We'd gone to grade school and high school together, and had never lost touch. After Revere High, I commuted to college in Boston. Rose went to secretarial school, married our childhood friend Frank Galigani, and had two sons and a daughter before I finished a B.S. in physics. By the time I became Doctor Gloria Lamerino six years later, Galigani's Mortuary was a thriving business.

  "This is where you belong," Rose had said when I told her I was thinking of moving back to Revere, "even though it's not the same as when you left."

  "You mean it's not half Italian and half Jewish anymore?" I'd said. I already knew that the last three decades had brought great changes in Revere, with large groups of Asians moving into the old Jewish neighborhood on Shirley Avenue. But if the information I'd gathered from the Internet was correct, the city was still more than ninety percent Caucasian.

  Rose laughed and told me not to worry, Italians were still the majority group and Luberto's Bakery on Broadway had pastry to die for.

  "The cannoli are as good as Josephine’s," she'd said, thus providing one more reason for me to return.

  Rose even had a plan to help me get started again in Revere. She set me up in the apartment above the funeral home she and Frank operated, and made arrangements to hand down last year's Cadillac. Galigani's Mortuary kept only the newest models in its fleet, so I could count on a great used car deal every October.

  While I waited for Rose and my new black luxury car, I looked out my window at the enormous Romanesque church standing less than a quarter of a mile away, outlined in the fading sunlight of early fall. Of all the structures that were part of my youth, Saint Anthony's was the only one that had survived the years. My beloved grammar school, the Abraham Lincoln, had burned to the ground, and my crumbling red brick high school had been razed and replaced by a more modern facility with much less architectural character.

  Worst of all
, the two-mile long Revere Beach Boardwalk, with its giant roller coaster and Ferris wheel, Bluebeard's Palace, and daredevil rides, was history. Multi-story apartment buildings lined the oceanfront property where once there were frozen custard and pizza concessions, carousel horses, and bandstands. I'd driven along the coastline once or twice since returning in June, but still hadn't summoned the courage to take a long slow walk along the stretch of beach and boardwalk where I had my first job, my first kiss, my first inkling that I was a person. Later, I told myself, when it's colder and the crowds of beach-walkers have gone.

  I heard a car drive up and went to the door. Prepared to greet Rose, I saw instead someone I hadn't seen in thirty years. He was wearing a gray and black tweed jacket and flannel slacks with a crease as sharp as a laser beam. His arms overflowed with a dozen red roses and a box of Fanny Farmer butter creams, my favorites. My old boyfriend Peter Mastrone, voted best dancer in our high school class.

  I stepped back, and with one smooth gesture fluffed my short, curly hair and straightened my faded blue and gold Berkeley sweatshirt.

  "You look beautiful," Peter said.

  "I wasn't expecting you," I said, glancing at my oldest jeans with a hopeless look.

  "If I waited for you to phone, it would be another thirty years," Peter said. "I figure you came back to marry me this time." His wide grin was familiar and comforting, his wavy hair, mostly gray, a reminder of how my own had changed color since I last saw him.

  I breathed in the newly arrived smells of chocolate, flowers, and after-shave and had the sense of being thrown back in time. An old confusion of feelings stirred, as if there were decisions still to be made, or unmade. I tilted my head and smiled.

  "Hello, Peter," I said. "Come in."

  Before he could cross the threshold, we had more company. Rose came up the stairs and into my hallway. She didn't seem surprised at Peter's presence, and I made a mental note to ask her about it later. Not much taller than I, but a great deal trimmer in her designer jeans, and without a gray hair on her head, Rose followed Peter into my living room.

  "I brought the newspaper with me," she said, holding out The Revere Journal. "There's a piece in here about a physicist I remember hearing you talk about, Gloria."

  Peter and I leaned over Rose's shoulder as she pointed to a small grainy photograph of Eric Bensen. "Local Scientist Found Shot To Death," the caption read.

  "Isn't he the one you know from California?" she asked. "He was murdered early this morning over at the lab at the end of Charger Street."

  It's a good thing I hadn't decided what to do tonight. This evening is out of my hands.

  CHAPTER 2

  It worried me that presented with a new car, an old boyfriend bearing gifts, and a murder, I zeroed in on the murder. After a brief concession to "remember when we . . ." and "whatever happened to the girl who . . ." with Rose and Peter, I got to what really interested me.

  "Eric Bensen's research team is the one that may have made the biggest breakthrough yet in metallic hydrogen," I said. "I wonder if that had anything to do with his murder."

  "Here she goes. I'll bite. What's metallic hydrogen?" Rose asked.

  "And what could it possibly have to do with a murder?" Peter asked.

  From their opposite corners of my brand new blue-gray couch, they both reached into the bowl of pretzels, so I knew their questions were ten percent interest and ninety percent polite. I answered them anyway.

  "Remember the articles in all the popular news magazines last month?" I said. "This hydrogen work is connected to superconductivity. The potential for utilities and big business is enormous—one hundred percent efficient power lines and magnetically levitated railroad trains, to name only a couple of hot new technologies."

  "From hydrogen?" Peter asked. He was sitting up as straight as he could on the deep corduroy cushions, his hands folded on a napkin in his lap as if he were in Sunday School at Saint Anthony's.

  I was impressed at the lengths to which Peter was going to be polite. As a history major in college, with a minor in European languages, he'd never liked anything remotely scientific. And he followed up that distaste with a stunning avoidance of technology. According to Rose, who'd given me updates through the years, Peter still had a rotary dial phone and a black and white television set that he kept hidden in an antique oak cupboard.

  I took advantage of the moment.

  "We've never been able to produce hydrogen in useful metallic form. Eric Bensen's mentor, who directs the project, is hinting to the scientific world that they've met the challenge. The technical articles won't be released until next month, but high tech businesses are already fighting to get in on the profits."

  "And where there's big money there's a motive for murder even among scientists, I guess," Rose said.

  "Right. And this is not your mother's hydrogen research. Let me show you how Eric's gas gun works."

  Rose stood up and poured more iced tea into our glasses. She'd already expressed disapproval at my meager selection of beverages. I don't drink alcohol and always forget to keep wine or beer on hand for guests. Peter, on his best behavior, claimed to prefer iced tea.

  I went to my desk for a pad of paper, but by the time I returned, their eyes had glazed over. I knew I'd lost them, just as I had in our school days when I was excited about a science fair project and my friends wanted to go for pizza. I solved the problem back then by talking about levers and pulleys at the pizza parlor. That's what I'll do now, I thought.

  "Okay," I said, "let's go for pizza."

  Peter's face, dark and unwrinkled at fifty-six, took on the expression of a schoolboy caught stifling a yawn in class.

  Rose threw up her hands and let out her deep throaty laugh, still marked by the telltale hoarseness of a smoker, although she'd quit years ago. "It's Gloria's famous physics-on-the-back-of-the-napkin trick," she said.

  It amazed me how easily the three of us fell into our old pattern of negotiating. We made a deal—we'd go out for science-free pizza, but not until I made a phone call to Sergeant Matt Gennaro at the Revere Police Department, the detective I'd worked with on the convicted chemist case. I wanted a copy of the police report on Eric Bensen's murder. And, as Rose figured, I hoped he'd ask for my help with the investigation.

  "I think it's strange that the Police Department would hire a physicist," Peter said.

  "Frank was able to set that up through his connections. It's certainly no stranger than hiring a psychic," Rose said, making me proud of her. "And Gloria has an outstanding reputation as a scientist."

  "I know that," Peter said, addressing Rose. "Hasn't the Journal been documenting her career for us? Every time Doctor Lamerino has a new publication or gets an award, they print a notice. You'd think she never left town."

  "That wouldn't be because the editor is Rose and Frank's son, would it?" I asked.

  "Not at all," Rose said, "it's more like 'local girl makes good.' And John is always looking for feel-good-about-Revere stories. It beats headlines like 'townies drive out newcomers'."

  "None of this explains why you need to sell yourself to the police," Peter said, finally turning to me. "If you need money—"

  "It's not the money." I said, interrupting Peter before he could finish his sentence, which sounded like the beginning of an offer I'd have to refuse.

  It was hard to explain, but I still didn't have quite enough to do in Revere. I'd signed up as a volunteer at the library and set up my computer to network with science consultants in the area. I also had a couple of science education contracts to finish for a museum in San Francisco, but that was a far cry from the number of projects I was used to handling at one time.

  I had to admit, at least to myself, that my social life was also a factor in wanting to work on Eric's murder investigation. I'd wanted to get to know Matt Gennaro personally ever since I met him on the tungsten case, and I wasn't used to acting on such feelings without an excuse.

  I brushed aside the embarrassing thought
that Eric Bensen's murder was designed to enrich my intellectual and my social life.

  Matt was my age, a widower for ten years, and had the look of all my favorite Italian-American movie stars, including a shadowy beard that never went completely away, and dark brown eyes that looked droopy and sad until you got them smiling. I knew he owned a house on Fernwood Avenue, close to the center of the city, and I wished I could think of a safe way to determine whether he lived alone. Is it normal, I wondered, for a woman to work at a career until retirement and then consider dating? Or was it the death of my fiancé, Al Gravese, three months before our wedding that shaped my romantic life?

  It was always easy to put off answering the big questions, and with Rose and Peter waiting for me, I had a good excuse. I left a message for Matt and drove my friends in my new Cadillac to The Fenway Pizzeria, a few blocks from the City Hall on Broadway, one of Revere's main streets.

  The evening was cool and crisp and the maples and birches wore the glorious reds and yellows that I'd missed so much during my years in California. With each leaf, I felt a tiny—micro-, really—bit at home.

  ~~~~

  The Fenway had the best pizza in this neighborhood where at one time blondes and blue eyes were scarce. All of us had grown up second or third generation Italian. Looking at our eighth grade class photograph you'd think all thirty or so students were related. Boys and girls alike, most of us had olive skin, dark hair, and about ten too many pounds on our short bodies. Peter was one of the exceptions, having the long, thin torso and angular features that were more characteristic of his Sicilian grandparents.

  We'd all learned Italian as children and Peter had taught Italian language and literature, along with European history, at the new Revere High. He still had a full-time schedule of classes with no plans for retiring. I didn't ask why he'd never married. I figured he'd tell me soon enough.

  As I looked around The Fenway, the routine meeting place after basketball games when I was in school, I half expected to see my old Revere High chums. For all I knew these were my old chums. Evidently the youth of present-day Revere hung out in a different spot. From the jukebox music that greeted us at the door—Julius La Rosa's "That's Amore"—I was able to pinpoint just where The Fenway got stuck in time.