Free The Carbon Murder by Camille Minichino Page A

was more telling than asking, as he continued his elaborate hand gestures. “Won’t know till we talk to him. Where is he now?”
    “Oh, that’s the bad news.”
    “He’s DOA,” Matt said, with a click of his tongue.
    “Right.”
    Bad news for sure. I’d been hoping for a wellspring of information from a killer in custody, some connections that might also solve MC’s problem, though I seemed to be the only one who thought there was anything to worry about in that regard.
    “Any ID?” Matt asked.
    “Yep. An ex-con, Rusty Forman, from—three guesses, the first two don’t count.”
    Leave it to George Berger to pull up a corny expression from the fifties.
    “Houston,” Matt and I said together.

CHAPTER NINE
    S unday morning. Still raining, and still twenty-four hours before there was a chance we’d hear from Matt’s doctor. It had been a while since I’d been to church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral, and I gave it some thought. I pictured myself kneeling to pray, opening my missal—where was it? Had I seen it when I was packing for the move to Matt’s house?—singing a hymn, standing for the Gospel. Then came the hard part. I heard the priest’s homily as clearly as I had when I was in Confirmation prep classes. As they were then, the words were meaningless to me, and I mentally left the church again.
    Rose was still practicing the faith. On the most recent Holy Day of Obligation, August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, I’d called their house, and Frank told me she was at mass.
    “She goes for all of us,” he’d said lightly.
    Later, I’d chatted with Rose about how likely it was that the body of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, had been assumed into heaven, not subject to the deterioration process every other human body underwent.
    “And why not just pray wherever you are?” I’d asked her, continuing our Why I Am (or Am Not) Still A Roman Catholic debate.
    “Because God lives at St. Anthony’s,” she’d said with a grin. End of discussion. At times I envied her faith.
    The mortuary was just down the street from St. Anthony’s Church, so I’d had a daily reminder when I lived there of the choices I made regarding religion. I always came to the same conclusion—I
couldn’t pretend. Some days I felt I knew what it meant to pray, and others I didn’t. Some days I believed there was an all-loving God in heaven who knew each hair of our head, and other days I imagined random gaseous events set in motion and left to the laws of science. There was no use trying to package that into religious observance. Blame it on Sister Pauline, I thought, who never could answer my logic questions when I was ten.
    “Maybe they counted the loaves of bread and the fishes wrong to begin with, and that’s why there seemed to be more at the end,” I’d said, earning no holy card that week.
    Surely there was no hope for me now.
    Matt, another fallen-away Catholic, as we were officially called by Holy Mother Church, was spending Sunday morning at his office to make up for his hours on the tubular pillow in our living room. He was being productive, while I was home, too distracted to do anything useful.
    I grunted and paced the thirty-foot expanse that included the living room and dining room, picking up a piece of lint here and there, ignoring the dust gathering in the corners of the hardwood floors. When the bottom level produced nothing inspiring, I climbed the stairs to the old guest room that was now my office. I looked with distaste at the pile of notes I’d accumulated for my next Revere High Science Club lecture, on crystallography, which had been my specialty in graduate school and for many years after.
    The rain beat down on the roof, spilling out of the gutters, sweeping an idea into my head. The Science Club. I shelved the old notes. Another time. I couldn’t very well storm the clinic for medical information on Matt, but I could face the other, distracting loose end.
    I