The Boric Acid Murder by Camille Minichino Page A

fire her.”
    Andrea tilted her head from side to side, in an “iffy” motion. “You know how these things work.”
    I did. It was always a contest between official procedures on the one hand and a supervisor’s desire to get rid of an employee on the other. Although legislation was in place to protect rights on both sides, there were ways around it.
    Andrea handed me a lab-issue orange folder. “I pulled the last few articles Yolanda wrote for the lab’s official newspaper. They all have to do with boron and the state of the waste generated by nuclear power plants. Remember, the lab has a contract with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to oversee the waste storage containers.”
    I flipped through the pages, noting titles like “The Quest to Bury Nuclear Waste,” “Keeping Assemblies Subcritical,” and “Safety Injection Systems.”
    “Thanks. I’ll read these later,” I said as a lovely young Asian woman—CYNDI, her name tag said—brought our pasta and beans. Russo’s had become a melting pot.
    “I’ve looked through the articles. They’re pretty harmless. Taruffi would never let anything but happy talk get out to the public. Once in a while Yolanda slips in scenarios about breaks in the steam line and that kind of thing. And she talks about the quantity of boron that’s required for safety in the waste pools.”
    “Maybe there’s more inflammatory material in her newsletter.”
    Andrea nodded. “Maybe. And if Yolanda had found a controversial angle to nuclear safety, it could be another motive to fire her.”
    “Right.”
    Or kill her, I added to myself.
    ANDREA ESCORTED ME through the building that housed the Public Affairs Office, the Visitor Center, and the Science Education
Center—all the functions that had to do with the world outside the lab. I wondered what percent of the total budget was designated for “outreach” as my Berkeley lab had called it. Not much, in my experience—just enough to keep the activists at bay.
    Yolanda had been fired a week before her murder, but according to Andrea, the police had visited her former work site anyway and carried off a carton of material.
    “Would you like to see her old desk, too? Maybe you’ll get a vibe or something.”
    I gave her a teasing look of disapproval, evoking a giggle from her small round mouth.
    “I know—this is logic, not magic. But the police might have left something behind.”
    I didn’t hold out much hope for a cubicle that had been gone over by the police and, presumably, by Yolanda’s murderer, if he or she was a lab employee. It was as good a place as any to start, however, and I followed Andrea through the labyrinth of partitions that divided one large room into dozens of small work areas. The building was empty, but well lighted even on a Sunday. Its interior design was a relic of the seventies, when beams and pipes were painted bright colors and left exposed.
    No one had claimed Yolanda’s work space, still stacked with office supplies, but containing no personal items I could see. Andrea walked around the area, ran her hand under the desk and chair, pulled out drawers, and inspected the computer ports.
    “I’ve seen this on TV,” she said. “They find clues taped under the furniture.”
    I smiled. “I think it only works on TV.”
    As we toured the divided room, I felt I should be leaving a trail of crumbs. It was hard to tell one end of the windowless maze from the other. Name plates stuck to the fake walls with Velcro were a help—the third time I saw LORNA SANFORD on a brown felt partition, I knew we’d covered the area.
    As supervisor, Tony Taruffi had a real office, closed in by glass on two sides.
    “We call it the fishbowl,” Andrea said.

    We peered in, palms on the glass as if we were waiting for the gelato shop to open. In spite of the bright lights, the lack of noise from people, printers, or telephones gave me a creepy feeling that seemed to be following me around since I’d heard of