The Fluorine Murder by Camille Minichino Read Free Book Online Page B

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."
    "You don't sound lost," Rose said.
    "She never does," Matt said.
    I had a thought, a way that I could