Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  So Samantha would have been working on the very top floors – the more likely place for her to go, as long as they weren’t still wet. But Theresa continued her methodical check of every floor. Better to start from the beginning than have to go back.

  By nineteen the wind had begun to pick up, pushing and prodding at her body as if gauging its ability to send her over the edge, an invisible cat making desultory swipes at a mouse. Theresa asked Novosek what working construction was like, in a city where the temperatures could, and did, range from ninety-eight in the summer to twenty below in winter.

  ‘Rough,’ he told her as she combed over another empty level. ‘The weather does suck. It’s more or less a young man’s game. By fifty guys are just beat. But I think it’s one of the few occupations where someone who doesn’t particularly like school – like me – can still make a good buck and advance reasonably. I started out in high school laying pipe.’

  ‘Your guys here are good?’

  He waited for her by the stairwell before they continued up, considering this question. His body seemed to hum with strength but his face showed uncertainty. ‘They aren’t angels. Construction workers have a reputation, and for the most part they live up to it. You can get a lot of sketchy kind of guys, but in this economy it’s an employers’ market. I could get the best because they’re available. This is probably the most clean-cut crew I’ve ever had, and the most experienced. Guys with no experience are the most nerve-racking to work with, because it’s easy to get hurt here if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘And Sam did.’

  ‘She knew. Whether she did it or not is another matter. Like I said, the young ones . . .’

  They took another flight of steps.

  By twenty-one, Novosek asked what she was looking for.

  ‘Signs,’ she said.

  On twenty-three, she found them.

  EIGHT

  Workers had delivered an open box of metal fittings and the long but thin steel beams that made up interior walls all over the building, but the rest of the floor remained bare. The sun, now fairly high, slanted into the building and caught each mote in the floor’s layer of concrete dust weighed down by lake effect moisture. Swipes and smudges appeared, shapes that could be footprints or could mark the sloppy landings of large birds. Theresa caught them on camera, then proceeded, the two men behind her.

  The marks in the dust were not suspicious in themselves, of course, since workers had no doubt inspected the concrete floor and delivered the few materials present, but the way they made a meandering path to the eastern edge raised the hairs on the back of Theresa’s neck. The dark spots she found on an interior pillar, even more so.

  ‘What’s that?’ Novosek asked.

  ‘Looks like blood,’ Frank panted.

  Theresa photographed. There were three small dots on the two-foot square concrete post, and another one at its base.

  Novosek snorted. ‘That? It looks like dirt. How can you tell?’

  ‘I see a lot of it,’ Theresa understated, and followed the trail. She found another dark stain, about the size of a pea with a tapering tail, five feet away. They could belong to a construction worker with a paper cut, but she kept thinking of the bruises on Samantha Zebrowski’s face, which might or might not have come from an intermediate collision on her long trip down.

  The man who had operated the lift – somewhere between floors fifteen and twenty she had learned his name was Jack – found this much more fascinating than his boss did. ‘You want blood, there’s some on thirty where I jammed my spud wrench into my side the other day. Put a good gash in it – want to see?’ He patted his left hip, from which hung the nasty-looking tool. A normal monkey wrench at one end, tapering to an unnervingly sharp point at the other.

  But since Samantha Zebrowski hadn’t been stabbed, Theresa politely declined the invitation to view his flesh and continued photographing.

  ‘Hey,’ Frank said, loudly. ‘Ten feet, remember?’

  ‘I’m civil service,’ she pointed out. ‘OSHA doesn’t care. Stay there. I don’t want any stray shoe-prints.’

  ‘There’s going to be stray shoe-prints all over this place,’ Novosek pointed out. He had picked up a plastic bottle before their trek and now swigged something that looked like Gatorade.

  Theresa wished she had some, and she didn’t even like Gatorade. ‘Then there’s no sense in adding more.’

  But nothing else sprang into sight. No bloodstains, no stains of any kind. Disturbances in the dust that could have been workers coming to see how well the concrete had hardened. Over the side, the eastern edge of Samantha Zebrowski’s landing zone came into view.

  Chris Novosek offered to set up a safety harness for her. Frank observed the ten-feet rule, OSHA relevance or irrelevance, but bounced on his feet in agitation.

  Theresa didn’t have a daredevil bone in her body. She didn’t approach the unrestrained edge of a two-hundred-odd-feet-high platform because she liked to flaunt conventional safety rules, but because she needed to see. Without a railing she sought out the exterior pillar, a solid rock of security. But just as she put her hand up to serve as a brace, she saw another dark smudge on its poured cement surface.

  She photographed it, then pulled on a fresh latex glove, leaned that hand against the pillar, and looked down.

  From twenty-three floors up the city became an abstraction, an artist’s canvas of structure and color, each buff hue leading into the next in a patchwork of life and achievement. Up here the struggle, the inhumanity of each to the other became abstractions as well and Theresa thought only of the vibrant pulse of the wind as it skimmed over her skin and its promise of utter freedom, terrifying and thrilling in equal measures. It made the brain dizzy, both physically and emotionally. Was that why Samantha Zebrowski had fallen?

  Theresa felt her own knees sway. She straightened up and took a half-step back.

  The only buildings high enough for their occupants to have a glimpse of Samantha’s plunge were the PNC Bank and Erieview Tower, both directly east, both office buildings and unlikely to be occupied at night.

  Samantha Zebrowski’s final resting place lay directly below, the dark and drying blood marking the spot. A wall would eventually encircle this slab, currently represented by sticks of rebar. The woman would have been impaled had she not landed in the center.

  Theresa retreated, to her cousin’s audible sigh of relief, but only to take more photographs. Then she approached the edge on all fours, which felt much more secure even if it looked ridiculous. But she got a good look at the floor, collecting a few fibers and a piece of plastic, and dizzying shots to illustrate the distance between where the female construction worker began and where she stopped.

  The concrete pillar closest to where the woman went over sat to Theresa’s right, and she stood to examine it more closely. The rising sun made this difficult, slanting directly into her eyes and turning the inner surface of the pillar to a deep shadow and the outer surface, when she leaned out to take a look, to a blinding mirror. She let her eyes adjust, while her cousin made loud and dire predictions for the next few moments of her life.

  Three dark red smears marred the pristine cement surface. They could have come from Samantha’s right hand, any smears on those fingers now lost during its soaking in the pool of blood. Because the victim injured herself first in an inebriated fall, then tried to scoot to the outside of the pillar before throwing herself to the ground? Because she changed her mind just as she took that last step into space? Because she hadn’t meant to take that last step, maybe was trying to climb around the pillar in a Spiderman imitation, to win an ill-conceived bet with herself? Because someone was trying to throw her off the building, and she was trying not to go?

  ‘Would you stop dangling over the city?’ Frank said, his voice dangerously tight.

  ‘Ma’am, please step away from the edge,’ Chris Novosek said with even more authority.

  Theresa removed herself to safer ground
. ‘Yes. Sorry. No, don’t come any closer! I want to take another stab at looking for shoe prints. And there’s some blood smears on this pillar I’ll have to collect.’

  She retraced half her steps, then turned back and crouched. This time the rising sun worked for her, outlining every disturbance on the smooth concrete surface. Theresa sketched, marked, approached, tried to photograph as best she could.

  ‘What do you think?’ Frank finally asked. ‘Murder, accident or suicide?’

  ‘I think it’s still a wide-open field. We’ll have a lot more answers when we get her tox screen back, find out if she was staggering drunk or as sober as a church lady. But I’ve got two shoe-prints here without much detail but too much length to belong to Ms. Zebrowski. Which means someone was up here with her.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’ Novosek demanded.

  ‘I’m not trying to make your life difficult. It could be suicide, or accident, and whoever was here with her is afraid to come forward because they’re traumatized or because they think they can be held liable. But between Sam bleeding before she went over the edge and Ghost’s insistence that someone pushed her mother, we’re going to have to proceed with choice number three. Murder.’

  NINE

  Ian Bauer didn’t hang on to the construction worker as the zip lift ascended, because he was a man and couldn’t do that sort of thing, so he let his knees soften and rock with the movement and assured himself that even if he fell flat on his back he still wouldn’t go over the edge, as long as he stayed in the center and got nowhere near that thin railing that looked as if it wouldn’t hold in a slender six year old. And there was another reason he didn’t grab the man’s arm. Most people shied away from being touched by a guy who looked like Ian.

  He was homely. After forty-seven years this had become the easiest way to describe himself to himself. He wasn’t hideously deformed or scarred or discolored, he was simply too tall, too thin, his hair too sparse (and getting sparser, to his dismay) and his eyes sunk too far back into his skull, his skin too pale (and not in a good way, more gray than porcelain), his fingers too long and his lips too wide. He looked like exactly what people expected to find in the dictionary when looking up the word ‘pedophile’, which seemed doubly ironic to him since he had prosecuted six pedophiles in the course of his career, and they had all resembled soccer dads.

  He had done the best he could to deal with this handicap; he kept himself clean, dressed professionally and neatly, was uniformly polite to everyone he met and pretended not to notice the shock in their eyes at their first meeting, or second, or third. At the fourth it began to level out and they got used to him, sometimes enough to shake his hand without flinching. He had a job he enjoyed, a suitable little city loft within walking distance of it, and a few real friends to share the occasional beer or wine. Not bad at all. He was, of course, single. Single and searching.

  He tended not to think on his situation much these days, which was why he had plenty of notice left over for how many feet of empty space were accumulating between him and the ground.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked the guy, shouting over the light wind and the whine of the lift machinery.

  ‘Twenty-three.’ The worker grinned. A manly man, with steel-toed boots and a flannel shirt over a stained tee. He had shaggy hair and a dissolute bonhomie that meant, had he been born thirty years earlier, he would have been a hippie. Except for being tall and wiry, the utter opposite of Ian. Making some guy in a suit and tie nervous was probably the most enjoyable thing he’d done all week. Ian didn’t begrudge him. Life was hard; you had to get your fun where you could.

  The platform slowed to a merciful stop and the worker waved a gracious hand at the nice solid concrete floor. Two men and a woman were present. He recognized the detective, at least. The woman wore a windbreaker with ‘Medical Examiner’s Office’ on the back.

  ‘Patrick,’ he said, and approached.

  Frank Patrick nodded. ‘Don’t know yet if it’s accident or murder. Or suicide. What are you doing here?’

  A good question. Because it was a spring day and he was dying to get away from the pile of briefs for a drive-by shooting didn’t seem sufficient. ‘I happened to be in the room when the boss got the call. County building, dead woman. He thought I might as well walk the block and a half and take a look.’

  The detective shrugged and introduced him to the project manager, whose expression said he had already pegged Bauer for a pedophile, hands down.

  ‘Her car’s down there,’ said a voice behind them. The worker who had run Bauer up in the lift had not left. ‘Sam’s car, that piece of shit Camry she drives. It’s parked on the grass, just like normal.’

  ‘You go in it?’ Frank Patrick asked in a tone that left no doubt as to what the man’s answer had better be.

  ‘Hell, no. Just sayin’. You can see it from here.’ He jerked a thumb toward the western side of the building, as if he’d be happy to point it out from above.

  The detective didn’t move.

  Bauer watched the woman for a few minutes while Frank Patrick filled him in on what they had learned so far, which didn’t seem to be too much, from the victim’s extreme injuries to the pathetic image of the child carrying around her mother’s tool. She had set up a tripod over what appeared to be a nondescript patch of concrete floor, collecting copious photographs and not, apparently, happy with any of them. When the detective had finished, he moved closer.

  ‘Stop!’ the woman said, and held up a hand for emphasis but without even looking up from her viewfinder. He obeyed, and after another few moments she either finished or gave up.

  ‘OK.’ She stood and rubbed the back of her neck. ‘You guys can come on now. I think I’ve gotten everything there is to get.’

  He went past her, up to the edge, tucking his body behind the pillar in order to feel secure enough to look down. The height was dizzying, but he could just glimpse the dark-red patch on the concrete below. If it was suicide, the woman had really wanted to ensure the outcome. No crippling, no spending eternity on life support. Just bam, DRT. Dead Right There.

  ‘So she wasn’t dressed for work and for some reason had her kid along,’ Bauer began, thinking out loud. ‘She didn’t stay late or come in early. And even if she was working she would have no reason to be on this floor, is that right?’

  Novosek nodded. ‘All the finishers are done on this floor. They’re up on twenty-eight now.’

  ‘Any security? Cameras?’

  ‘No and no. Not until we’re enclosed.’

  ‘What about the elevator?’ Bauer asked. ‘Will it eventually go back down by itself?’

  Novosek opened his mouth but the construction worker answered. ‘No. And someone’s got to have a hand on the control box the whole time. So she either walked up, or someone took it back down afterward. If the first guy here this morning had to walk up twenty-three floors to get it, sure as – well, we would have heard about it.’

  ‘Better get it back down now, Jack,’ Novosek told him, quiet but firm. They all waited until the disappointed-looking construction worker left. All but the forensic woman, who pulled out swabs and a plastic vial and collected the bloodstains. She dropped the swabs into a paper box, the tiny box into a paper envelope, taped and initialed the seal. Very little of that made any difference to the blood sample but would make a huge difference when – if – they went to court.

  As soon as the lift departed and the top of Jack’s head disappeared below the edge of the open floor, Bauer went back to musing aloud: ‘In her sneakers, not dancing shoes, so she could have climbed twenty-three floors. But why?’

  ‘She didn’t want to make one of her co-workers do it?’ the woman suggested.

  ‘She was afraid of the lift?’ Frank directed this question to Novosek.

  The manager grimaced. ‘You don’t work high-rises if you have a problem with heights. She wasn’t afraid of the lift. If she was afraid of anything, she kept it to herself.’

 
; ‘Or heights at night,’ Bauer went on. ‘She came here in her own vehicle, parked it in the usual spot. Doesn’t sound like duress. At least not until they got up here.’ He stayed next to the pillar. The breeze was light; it might be heavier at times but it wouldn’t sweep the victim out into the abyss, not unless she wanted to go. The M.E. woman seemed to have no more fear than the construction workers; she knelt at the edge, popping another dirtied swab into its cardboard box. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ he asked her.

  ‘Theresa MacLean. How long have you been with the prosecutor’s office?’

  ‘Ten years.’

  She hid it better than most. Just the tiniest hint of a wrinkle between her eyebrows as she tried to figure out what was wrong with him, with his face and his body. It smoothed as she gave up. ‘Odd we haven’t met before.’

  ‘We probably have.’ He lied, because she would certainly remember the strange-looking something he represented and he would certainly remember those eyes. Perhaps it was only that the late morning sun slanted directly into the irises but the light seemed to penetrate their color and produce a glow of sky blue with a touch of aqua. The rest of her face had the same level of quality and for a moment he had no idea what to say next. And a lawyer was always supposed to know what to say next.

  She turned back to her swabs, slipped the box into an envelope and relieved herself of the burden of gazing at him without recoiling. Usually he appreciated that avoidance, but now the melancholy slammed his body as hard as their victim’s final stop.

  But then she looked up again, spoke to him. ‘At the moment, forensically, there isn’t much I can tell you. She might have come up here on a drunken lark and fallen. She might have been depressed and jumped. She might have had a fight with her boyfriend and been pushed. Unfortunately every person on the site has access to this floor, as well as any person in the city who could climb the fence and figure out how to use the lift. The larger shoe-prints could have been here yesterday or the day before. Maybe. I have no idea how long they would last up here.’