Storm Walk

by Melissa Bowersock

  Lacey studied an aerial drone photo of the burned-out husk. Most of the walls still stood, tan stucco on the outside, flat black on the inside. The entire interior was reduced to charred rubble, with only a handful of metal beams still uselessly bridging sections of the building. It was a complete and total loss.

  The list of the dead was depressing.

  Warren Knox, fifty-four, was the manager of the warehouse. He left a wife and three grown children, plus two grandchildren.

  Hugh Bellamy, forty-eight, had been a truck driver who just happened to be there that day instead of on the road. He was divorced, but left two grown sons that lived out of state.

  Mario Escobar, forty-four, was a foreman. His survivors included his wife and six children. The oldest was seventeen; the youngest was six.

  Jay Rafferty, thirty-two, and Tate Beall, twenty-six, were both forklift operators and both single. Jay was engaged to Pam Devlin, twenty-eight, the administrative assistant. They had planned to marry in June.

  Lacey couldn’t help but think of the multiple funerals planned and the families left in ruins. Fathers who never came home; children struggling to understand. It was heart-breaking.

  Knowing that Sam wanted very little advance knowledge before he walked the site, she folded the printouts and put them in her notebook. The handful of pages added an inordinate weight to the slight book.

  ~~~

  The warehouse was located in an industrial area just northeast of LAX. Lacey took the 405 south that next morning, and with Sam’s map, they had no difficulty locating it. Once they exited the freeway and drove down the surface street, the place would be hard to miss.

  Even now, weeks after, when the remaining walls were stabilized and clean-up efforts had started, even now the destruction was stunning. The entire front wall had been torn down, exposing the inner blackened rubble. Whatever was there was black and twisted. Nothing was recognizable.

  Lacey pulled into the parking lot, turning tightly into one small clear corner of it next to a white pickup truck. A man had been standing staring into the building but now walked to meet them. He was stocky with a red buffalo-plaid jacket and close-cropped blond hair.

  “Ray Gibbons,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Sam Firecloud,” Sam said. “This is my partner, Lacey Fitzpatrick.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ray said, shaking hands with both. “Thanks for coming.” He half turned back toward the building. “There it is. A total loss.”

  They approached the wreckage carefully, stepping over chunks of concrete and blackened slats of metal. As they neared, a gust of wind swirled bits of ash and the smell of smoke upward. Ray led them up several concrete steps to a loading dock that spanned the front of the building.

  “The walls have been stabilized—or torn down, like this front one—so it’s safe to enter. There were four bay doors here.” He waved across the front. “We’ve pulled out most of the bigger chunks so you should be able to walk anywhere. Had two forklifts that were melted down to piles of shit.” He glanced at Lacey. “Pardon, ma’am.”

  She ignored both the profanity and the apology. “What was kept here?” she asked. “What kind of merchandise?”

  “Tools, hardware and auto parts mostly,” Ray said. “You’ll see a lot of nails and screws on the floor, chunks of metal. Just watch your step.”

  Sam silently surveyed the wreckage. Lacey watched his eyes shift from one side of the building to the other, catching briefly on some sight—or feeling—then going on.

  “Was there a door here?” he asked abruptly. He motioned to the front left, the northeast corner of the building, not far from where they stood.

  “Yes, there was,” Ray said. His voice echoed his surprise. “Like I said, four bay doors all along, but a single steel door here. One in the back, too.” He pointed through the blackened skeleton to the back wall, still mostly intact. A gaping rectangular hole opposite them gave evidence of the door that no longer existed.

  “All right,” Sam said. “I’m going to start here.” He indicated the place where the front door had been, then glanced to Lacey. “Ready?”

  ~~~

  FOUR

  She held up her phone. “Ready.”

  Pulling in a deep breath, he stepped across the low rubble that marked the perimeter and entered the wreckage.

  He stepped carefully, placing one foot, hesitating, then placing the next. Lacey, too, had to watch where she stepped while trying to keep Sam centered on her screen. She was glad he was going slow.

  “A female,” he said suddenly. He stopped and stared down at the ground. “She’s crying out, ‘Jay! Jay!’ Horrified. Terrified. Running forward, looking back.” His gaze slid from that front corner toward the diagonally opposite back corner, then returned. “Then the collapse. Burying her. She was dead before the fire reached her.”

  For a moment he just stood quietly, breathing. Lacey could see his nostrils flaring, as if seeking a scent, while his eyes were just slits.

  “There’s a man here, too,” he said, motioning to one side. “He’s just… stunned. In disbelief.” Sam shook his head once. “Even as the debris buried him, he was still just… incredulous. No time for anything else.”

  Sam pulled in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, lifting his head and looking around. His attention was drawn to the right front section of the building, and he carefully made his way over that direction. He skirted what might have been metal shelves, now burned and mangled, a twisted hulk.

  “A man here,” he said. “Looking up, seeing it coming. He’s thinking of his wife, his children. Praying to God. Sad that he can’t say goodbye. Crossing himself.”

  Lacey thought she could hear the sadness in Sam’s voice, feel the inevitability of untimely death—surprise and powerlessness.

  “Back here,” Sam said to her, pointing toward the back right. He stepped gingerly over chunks of charred wood beams with nails sticking out. Lacey realized something like that might easily pierce his soft moccasins. She was glad he was being mindful, and she did her best to step exactly where he did.

  “Two back here,” he said. He put out both hands, fingers spread. “Sitting. Talking, laughing. No warning. Like when lightning hits and before the flash is over, the thunder booms. That’s how sudden it was. Instantaneous. And it’s over.”

  His gaze roamed the blackened concrete floor, then slid up the back wall, all the way up to the open roof. The top edge of the wall was ragged where the roof had pulled away as it fell.

  “All right,” he said, more to himself than Lacey. He turned to the left and walked carefully that way. He stopped just a few feet from the gaping hole that used to be a door.

  “A male here. He tried to run. Thought he could make it. He didn’t. Angry. Just… enraged. Not fair. Not his fault. Not fair.”

  Sam stood over that spot for a moment, then shook his head. Finally he turned toward the front again. Lacey clicked off her camera.

  They rejoined Ray on the loading dock. He waited anxiously.

  “Well?” he asked hopefully.

  Sam frowned. “I didn’t get anything that tells me cause,” Sam said. “It was very sudden, I know that.”

  Ray’s brow creased with irritation. “Yeah, we knew that. Nothing else?”

  Sam exhaled heavily. “The thing is, when people die, they’re not usually trying to figure out whether or not there might be a design flaw. They’re thinking about who they’ll never see again. They’re sad, or scared, or angry. Not taking measurements.”

  Sam’s reply, although spoken in a calm, low tone, was not balm to Ray’s annoyance. The man looked as if he might spit out an angry retort, perhaps thought better of it, but fumed. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Sam from under his brows.

  Lacey stepped forward. “Can you tell us which bodies were found where?” she asked. “And do you have the Medical Examiner’s report on the causes of death? We need more information.”

  Ray slid his eyes from Sam
to Lacey. “Yeah, I got that,” he said.

  “Great,” she said. “Can you email them to me? Here’s my card. Also, I’d like to see the police report. Oh, and the insurance company’s denial of the claim.”

  Ray studied her for a moment. “You need all that?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled sweetly. “If we’re going to make any kind of assessment, we need everything. Oh, and one last thing—why do you think it might be a construction issue? What leads you to believe that? You must have some reason.”

  Ray scanned the wreckage behind her, then let his gaze drift upward to the gray sky. “It was rain,” he said, waving a hand flippantly at the sky. “A building’s supposed to be able to stand up to rain, for crying out loud.”

  The exasperation in his voice warned Lacey to refrain from reminding him that seven inches of rain in less than an hour was a lot, and that water weighed over eight pounds a gallon. But it did make her think of something else.

  “Do you still have the original construction plans? I’d like to see those, too.” Ray rolled his eyes. “Look,” Lacey said, “if there is a flaw somewhere, we need to have all the information available. We can’t make any kind of informed assessment without the facts.”

  Ray glanced at Sam. “I thought you could…”

  Sam didn’t blink. “Like I said, when people are dying, they’re not concerned with how and why. But if we can look over all the physical information, form a context for the deaths, we may be able to put together a scenario that will help explain what happened.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

  Ray did not look pleased. Not exactly what you were hoping for, is it? Lacey thought. She wondered if Ray thought Sam had x-ray vision or something, maybe a Magic 8-Ball. Sam was a talented medium, but Superman powers were a little beyond him.

  “Okay,” Ray said finally. “I’ll round all that up and send it to you.”

  Sam nodded. “Okay, great.” He put out his hand. “We’ll get you some answers.”

  “Soon, I hope,” Ray said. “I need to clear the lot so I can start rebuilding as soon as possible. Can’t make any money this way.”

  Ray shook hands with them, but instead of walking with them down the loading dock to the stairs, just turned and stared into the blackened hull of his building.

  Lacey tossed her phone into her pack as they took the stairs down to the parking lot. She angled toward the car, but Sam stopped her.

  “Wait,” he said. “I want to walk around back.”

  “Oh?” Lacey was ready to reach for her phone again.

  “Just for a sec,” he said. “Come on.”

  They turned and walked the outside of the south wall, avoiding the larger chunks of concrete and metal that littered the parking lot. Behind the back wall sat a dumpster, half full of charred debris. Sam rounded the corner of the building and examined the back wall.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Would you take a few pictures of this back wall?”

  She got out her phone and switched it to photo mode. “Anywhere in particular?”

  He thought about that, staring at the wall, his hands on his hips. “Take a couple wide shots of the whole thing, then take a few details. The upper edge there, that back door. These electrical wires coming in from the back of the lot.”

  She hadn’t noticed the utilities before, but did now. The electrical lines hung limply from a pole at the back corner of the lot, obviously no longer live. She wondered where the gas line came in; probably the same area. The construction drawings would show that.

  While she took shots of whatever looked interesting, Sam walked the back line of the lot where a chain link fence bounded the property. When Lacey judged she had enough photos, she turned around and noticed Sam toeing a compressed mass of wet, dead leaves packed against the bottom of the fence. Above him, several large trees from the lot behind spread skeletal limbs in a wide arc. She suspected those limbs would start showing green leaf buds in the coming weeks. Judging by all the rain they’d had, spring should be a riot of growth.

  Finally Sam joined her. “Ready?” she asked. He nodded, his hands jammed into his jeans pockets.

  He was lost in thought all the way home.

  ~~~

  FIVE

  As soon as the multiple emails from Ray appeared in Lacey’s inbox, she opened the attachments and printed them all out. The blueprint of the building was two pages, one of the interior and one of the roof. The ME’s report was several pages long, and included a diagram showing where the bodies were found, and in what configuration beneath the rubble. The police report was also several pages, while the insurance denial was fairly short.

  Once she had everything, she took it all to the dining room table and called Sam over.

  “I thought this diagram was interesting,” she said, flipping to that page of the ME’s report. “It looks like we can correlate your findings to the physical locations.”

  Sam turned the diagram his way and leaned over it.

  “Pam Devlin,” he read, pointing at a sketched figure in the left front portion of the building. “She was the first one I felt there.”

  “She and Warren Knox were both found just ten or fifteen feet from that front door,” Lacey noted. “They must have been running to get out, but didn’t make it.”

  Sam slid his finger over to the right front, taking the same direction as his walk. “The foreman, Mario Escobar,” he read. “He was the man who was crossing himself.”

  “The two forklift drivers were back here,” she said, tapping the back right. “It says one was found still on his forklift, and the other was right next to it.”

  Sam nodded. “They were talking, laughing together. No warning.”

  “And near to the back door was the truck driver, Hugh Bellamy. He must have been trying to get out, too.” The sketch there showed a figure flat out on the floor, feet toward the interior, arms stretched forward toward the door. Lacey thought he probably died looking out that door.

  “He was absolutely furious,” Sam said. “Not sad, not scared, just furious.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it,” Lacey said, “how each person meets death in a different way?” She couldn’t help but wonder how she might feel in the same situation.

  Sam didn’t answer. He was totally absorbed in the diagram, no doubt correlating his ghostly impressions with the sketches before him.

  “I’m going to look at the insurance report,” Lacey said. She wanted to see how they reasoned it out, how they deduced it was an act of God. Insurance companies were known to be pretty prickly about multimillion dollar claims like this one, but they had to back up their denial with solid information. She took that report to the couch and settled in to read.

  Math.

  She hated math. She hadn’t gone into the police academy so she could practice algebra. Scanning over actual numbers, she concentrated instead on pertinent phrases in the insurance company’s process and subsequent conclusion.

  The walls and loadbearing supports were all built to code; no problem there. The roof, also, was built to code and rated to take substantial weight. After all, Lacey figured, heavy heating and cooling units were placed there, and if the roof needed repairs, it would have to safely hold a team of workers. The roof was drained by several downspouts so the rain could be siphoned off at a regular rate of…

  She skipped the equations and jumped down to the meat of it. The loadbearing capacity of the roof combined with the rate of drainage meant the roof could handle large quantities of rain without being overloaded, but the investigation of the physical damage determined that it was, indeed, excess weight that had caused the initial collapse, therefore the rate of rainfall was catastrophic and beyond all norms, ergo an act of God.

  Lacey thought about that. She was no engineer, not an architect nor a physicist, but she had no doubt the insurance company would love to prove something other than the factors they hedged against was at fault, so if there had bee
n even a hint of design or construction flaws, she felt sure they’d have jumped on that. But they hadn’t.

  Catastrophic rain. An act of God.

  Lacey went back to the table and snagged the layout of the building. Sam was still mesmerized by the ME’s drawing of the victims’ locations, so she didn’t bother him. She sat cross-legged on the couch and cradled the rendering in her lap. Much of the text notes were too tiny to read, but she scanned the roof details. Each corner of the roof did, indeed, show a downspout, and each quadrant showed a slight gradient of slope toward those downspouts. Everything the insurance company said checked out.

  Lacey had a feeling they were going to have to give Ray the bad news.

  She took the rendering back to the table and leaned over Sam’s shoulder. He was still perusing the diagram. He’d made no notes, which wasn’t surprising. Facts and hard evidence were her wheelhouse. His was feelings and nebulous impressions.

  “Hey,” she said softly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I hate to say it, but I don’t think you’re going to uncover much.”

  Sam tore himself from the paper in front of him and looked back at her.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  She sighed. “I’ve been all over the insurance investigation and correlated their findings with the construction layout. They’re right; there’s no evidence of flaws.”