The Nitrogen Murder by Camille Minichino Page B

verbal responses had compared to her mental reactions, but Dr. Barnett’s look said her out-loud answers had been garbled at best.
    “Is there anything you’d like to ask me, Dana?”
    Dana frowned and tried to focus. She smoothed Robin’s skirt and wished she had a joint, or better yet her pipe, a present from Scott Gorman during happier days. She pictured the swirls of green and orange and purple on the beautiful glass bowl. “I can’t seem to forget,” she said. “I remember every detail, like in slow motion, Tanisha walking toward the building, falling. Then on the ground.”
    “You can’t heal what you can’t remember, Dana. So you’re doing well.”
    Dr. Barnett sat back and folded her hands on her lap. She seemed pleased with herself, as if she’d just delivered a favorable verdict.
    “Okay then I’m on track,” Dana said.
    That seemed to be what Dr. Barnett wanted to hear.
    Maybe things hadn’t changed all that much since Matt’s early days.
     
    “Two down, one to go,” Dana said to Matt as they drove in Dana’s brown-and-cream Jeep to the Berkeley PD.
    “This should be easy,” Matt said. “Cops are the good guys.”
    Dana turned to see how serious Matt was, and caught his grin.
     
    The scene in the Berkeley PD building reminded Dana of a coloring book she’d had as a child. The pages had line drawings of uniformed men and women in working poses. Handcuffing a bad guy, seated behind a high counter answering a phone, tapping
away at a computer terminal, handling a drug-sniffing dog, closing a barred jail-cell door.
    No insulating blanket around this building, Dana noted, as the sounds of the busy street outside competed with those within. Phones, pagers, printers, fax machines, clacking keyboards. Dana picked out angry, loud voices and guttural human sounds, like the kind you heard from the homeless on Telegraph Avenue and around the Shattuck BART station. It was expensive to ride the Bay Area Rapid Transit system but cost nothing to sleep in its stairwells.
    Matt seemed right at home, leading her up a wide staircase to the offices, and she remembered he’d been here before. She noticed he’d put on a sports coat. Professional courtesy, she figured, but it was a weird shade of blue that looked awful with his maroon polo shirt.
    Dana expected a lengthy delay, but a young female uniformed officer was waiting for them at the top of the stairs and ushered them into a long, narrow room. Even the walls in this room are busy , Dana thought. They were covered with maps and flyers and pushpins, not limited to the framed bulletin boards.
    Inspector Russell, whom Dana recognized from Matt’s description, sat at the end of the room behind a desk that was too small for his tall frame. His feet stuck out past the edge of the desk, into the area where Dana and Matt would be sitting. He pulled at the sleeves of his sports coat, slightly too short, and drew in his legs as they approached. If med schools rejected her, Dana decided, she’d investigate a career in personal shopping for cops.
    Quick handshakes all around, and Russell got down to business. He put on half-glasses like Julia’s, minus the comment about getting old, and lowered his head to a sheaf of papers in front of him. Dana thought she’d never seen a pointier chin.
    “I have your statement from last Friday evening, Ms. Chambers. At that time you indicated that your partner, Tanisha Hall, was not a drug user.” Dana gulped. She remembered the question,
remembered deciding that a toke now and then, and a pipe at parties, did not constitute “drug use.”
    “That’s correct,” she told Russell, clutching her purse to keep from wringing her hands.
    “Well, that’s what I thought you said.” Russell leaned back in the chair until it hit the wall behind him. His head landed next to a poster on crime prevention. Bold letters and bullets shouted safety tips and information on burglar alarms, senior safety, holiday safety, personal