The Nitrogen Murder by Camille Minichino Page B

clothes and about privacy in general. She’d insisted on having the bedroom with its own door and often locked it; Dana and Jen didn’t mind having a common bathroom between their bedrooms and never locked their doors.
    “I hope you don’t freak out that I’m in here, Robin,” Dana whispered to the empty room.
    Dana tiptoed past Robin’s twin bed and newly painted white dresser. She always thought the photo Robin kept of her father was a little creepy. An eight-by-ten (who had those anymore?) in his military uniform, with a look so somber you almost knew he was going to kill himself soon. Jen’s centerpiece photo, on the other hand, was of a Bradley family reunion, with her father wearing a chef’s hat, standing at an outdoor grill.
    Dana put her hand on the knob of the accordion-style closet door and paused. She looked over her shoulder and listened for a sound. She laughed at herself. She was alone in the house, and anyway, she wasn’t a thief. Only a borrower, and Robin had lent Dana clothes before. Dana had never just walked in and taken something, but she felt sure Robin would cut her some slack, especially this week.
    She opened the closet door and stepped back. At least a dozen new items, tags still on them, had been squeezed into the middle section of the rod. Dana flipped through them, careful not to wrinkle anything. Skirts, pants, sweaters, at least four dresses, and all looking very expensive. She scratched her forehead. None of the women could afford shopping sprees like this, and neither could Jeff, TA-ing his way through a graduate program in English lit. Dana grinned. Well, none of her business if Robin wanted to max out her credit cards.
    Robin didn’t hide the fact that her goal in life was to be as rich as the people she read about in all her money magazines. She’d spent about six months’ pay to join a fancy tennis club.
    “Volleyball is for kids,” she’d said when Dana asked if she
wanted to join the city league. “If you want to meet rich people, you have to take up their sports.”
    Dana found the black skirt she’d come for, looking old and faded next to the new threads. She took it off the hanger and pushed the new clothing back together, leaving the rod the way she thought she’d found it. A silky spaghetti-strap top slipped off its hanger, and Dana rushed to retrieve it from the closet floor. She gave the strap a little pull toward her. With it came another item. A card of some kind. The strap had fallen around it, making an inadvertent loop. Dana picked up the card. A laminated ID for Dorman Industries. The company of consultants her dad worked for. And the photo. A dark-skinned man, forty-ish, short-cropped dark hair—could it be … ? Dana frowned, concentrating, struggling to piece together the bits flying around her mind. The gunshot victim? Their patient when Tanisha was shot? How …?
    “What the hell are you doing in here?” Robin’s voice was low and threatening.
    Dana gasped and fell back on her butt. “Robin! I … I just came in to borrow …” She pointed to the black skirt, now on the floor next to her.
    Robin, about the same height as Dana, loomed over her. Her face was red, way out of proportion to the offense, Dana thought. But not out of character. Robin had a temper and could easily blow up if she or Jen so much as dipped into her box of coffee filters. If she was going to meet her stated goal in life, to be a female Donald Trump, Robin would have to get a new attitude. Or not .
    Dana hoisted herself from her position half in and half out of Robin’s closet and, for a reason she couldn’t explain, surreptitiously slid the ID card into the back pocket of her shorts.
    Robin’s brown eyes narrowed to mean-looking slits; her arms were folded across her chest, partly obscuring the image of a dragon on her black T-shirt. She didn’t say anything further, as if
she were deciding which to do battle with, her words or her fists.
    “I’m sorry,” Dana said.