by Lisa Black
Frank introduced himself and his partner, not in a pleasant social way but in the don’t let that courtesy fool you, I will be asking the questions here tone that he had learned in the academy. ‘You’re Kyle Cielac and Todd Grisham?’
He waited until they specified who was who. Kyle resembled a high school football hero ten years after graduation, fleshy shoulders and no neck, close-cropped blond hair. Todd had dark good looks of indeterminate origin. But they wore identically wary expressions. In the next few minutes Frank established that the two men had worked with Samantha Zebrowski since the project began, or rather since the project progressed to the point of needing concrete finishers. A finisher usually worked with the concrete after it had been poured into the giant rebar-enhanced slabs that formed the floors of the skyscraper. They would trim the edges and cut the grooves into the slab that would keep the concrete from cracking during the temperature changes endemic to northern Ohio. They also followed up with finishing touches and repairs. One pointed to a slight crack in the corner, too close to that sparse railing for Frank’s comfort, their ostensible reason for being off on a tête-à-tête.
They were thirty and twenty-eight respectively, both unmarried with no kids. Kyle had been in construction one way or another since high school; you could say it ran in his family. Todd just needed a job after getting out of the military. Neither had known Samantha before this project, neither had dated her, neither knew who she was dating, if anyone, and neither had a conflict with her, or knew of one she might have had with someone else.
None of this struck Frank as plausible. Samantha had been single, hard-bodied and a bit of a party girl, and neither of these guys wanted to tap that? He would have thought they might be more interested in each other than their curvy co-worker if it hadn’t been for their constant glances toward his curvy partner. Though perhaps they were admiring her fashion sense. She did look good in those stretchy dress pants that all the female detectives wore these days and a thin brown sweater that matched her eyes . . . but still. It seemed to him that two single guys should have a lot more to say about one of the few women on the site.
But maybe he was just the cultural dinosaur that Theresa sometimes accused him of being. Maybe they viewed Samantha simply as one more fellow construction worker, no more, no less.
Yeah, right.
The rest of their testimony stayed in line with that of their boss: Samantha had been good at her job, reliable, seemed to care deeply for her mother and daughter, and nothing at all had seemed amiss during her last day on the job.
‘And she would have told you if she had a steady boyfriend?’
‘We heard about her daughter’s math grade, her new sports bra and her mother’s pot roast,’ Todd said. ‘So, yeah.’
Frank rubbed the back of his neck. ‘OK. Say she meets a guy, or has a new boyfriend. Would she bring him here?’
The two construction workers exchanged a glance, nodded.
‘Probably,’ Kyle said. ‘She said she drove her kid by, and a girlfriend. She was real proud of the place. This is the biggest job she’d ever been on, did mostly parking lots until now.’
‘What about to do something besides marvel at the majesty of the architecture?’ Frank asked. ‘Might she bring a guy here to have sex in a – different setting?’
They didn’t bother to exchange a glance before nodding this time. Todd said, ‘That’d be Sam. Uninhibited, you might say. Besides, she lived with her mom, so she always needed someplace to go besides home. According to her. You might want to use that black light thing on the back seat of her car,’ he added with a smirk that faded into a much sadder expression of regret, either for a young life cut short or the fact that now he would never know the wonders to be found inside the beat-up Camry.
More questions on the subject of Samantha Zebrowski’s sex life garnered no useful information. She had been an upbeat young woman, more or less liked by her co-workers and without any apparent romantic or financial woes. Her mood on the previous day had been utterly normal with no indication of any distress. Suicide, Frank thought, appeared more unlikely with each passing minute. ‘And no problems on the job here?’
‘No.’ They answered in unison, too fast.
‘What about you guys? Any problems, conflicts?’
‘No.’
He caught the first scent of fear, like the hint of distant smoke. ‘Union negotiations? Safety issues?’
‘Nothing,’ Kyle said, and Todd nodded.
‘What did you do yesterday?’ Angela asked.
‘Poured thirty,’ Todd said, and Kyle nodded.
Frank said nothing. He was a man and supposed to understand the language of construction as intrinsically as the language of football, or belching.
Angela had no such restriction. ‘What does that mean?’
Kyle said, ‘Cement is pumped up through a flexible pipe and poured into the forms with rebar and metal mesh.’
‘And then you finish it?’
‘Not until it hardens. The pouring, we mostly just help out with the physical labor. They need every hand they can get when we’re pouring a floor. Once the stuff is mixed it has to go, but it has to be the right consistency so they do a slump test. If that’s not right . . . then they have to adjust the mix, and sometimes you can get a blockage in the tubes, and all sorts of stuff can cause a delay.’
‘So it’s stressful,’ Angela surmised.
‘Yeah. Well, more for the masons – it’s their responsibility. Like I said, we just help out.’
‘And Samantha worked on this? No problems?’
‘None,’ Kyle said, exchanging a look with Todd.
They both had alibis for the evening, more or less: Todd had been living on his brother’s couch since the previous year, and so he had a sibling, a sister-in-law, a fourteen-year-old nephew and a ten-year-old niece who liked to use him as a sparring partner to swear he stayed home all night; Kyle had a room-mate with not one but two live-in girlfriends, who took turns sleeping on the couch – don’t ask him how that worked – so he also had the potential to prove that he had not left his bedroom all night, unless he snuck out his window and managed to climb down five stories of sheer brick wall.
Frank kept at them for another twenty minutes, going in every direction possible, without shaking loose one more iota of information regarding Samantha Zebrowski. These two had worked with her for eight hours a day, five days a week, and yet seemed to know no more about her life than the big boss.
Possibly, Samantha had been one of those people who could talk a lot without saying much.
Or, Kyle and Todd had something to hide.
TWELVE
‘Anything on the prints?’ Frank asked. They stood on opposite sides of the autopsy table where whatever parts of Samantha Zebrowski’s body that remained together were now being cut apart. The clothing had been removed and hung to dry, the contents of her pockets spread out on a clean sheet of paper in the examination room, the fingernails (though soaked in blood) scraped and the toothpicks secured in tiny folds of glassine paper. Christine Johnson, pathologist, made the Y incision herself, avoiding the natural rips in the flesh as the body had impacted the concrete slab at a force equal to Samantha’s body weight times acceleration due to gravity.
‘Nothing. Nothing interesting in the hairs and fibers – a variety of both, but at this point I have no idea what’s significant and what’s not.’
‘Watch your tie, Detective,’ Christine murmured as she directed a spray of water at the ruined flesh on the table. Red-stained drops flew over the side and Frank took a step back without any change of expression.
‘I liked it better when we could drink coffee in here,’ he said, apropos of nothing.
‘Me too,’ Christine agreed. ‘How many stories?’
‘Twenty-three,’ Theresa told her for the third time. ‘Why? Doesn’t that seem consistent?’
‘Oh, completely consistent.’ Christine poked a gloved finger into the pile of still-neat small
intestine gathered on Samantha’s right side. ‘Just hard to picture.’
Frank went on, asking Theresa: ‘Nothing so far supports the suicide theory, but then suicides are often careful to act like everything is fine. I can’t imagine why else she would drag her kid there in the middle of the night.’
‘Ghost insists she went there on her own. Says she’s done it before.’
‘That stretches coincidence even further, if she just happened to show up right at the moment her mother bites it. Is it possible she didn’t see the actual plunge, only found the body?’
‘The shaking, the zoning-out, the way the blood drained from her face every time she looked at the concrete slab all suggest post-traumatic stress. But finding the body would be extremely traumatic too, so I don’t know. There’s so much about kids I don’t know, despite having raised one.’
With the shards out of the way, Christina removed the organs which had been sliced and diced by the broken bones, then scooped out what little liquid remained in the peritoneal cavity. ‘Toxicology is going to be crap,’ she pronounced. ‘Gastric and urine is all mixed in with the blood. But I can smell one component.’
‘What?’ Theresa supplied.
‘Alcohol.’
Theresa added to Frank, ‘But the blood was still very wet when it seeped into her pants. If Ghost didn’t witness the actual death then she arrived shortly after.’
‘Which still makes even less sense than arriving with her mother. Unless the girl is telling the absolute truth and she does make a habit of roaming the city in the wee hours. She wouldn’t be the first kid in history who had to go and pull their parent out of the bar on a regular basis.’ A shadow, or perhaps a memory, seemed to color his face for a moment. ‘All we’re getting right now is the knee-jerk the-victim-could-do-no-wrong reaction, but perhaps Samantha Zebrowski had a lot more faults than anyone is willing to admit.’
Christina picked up a large metal bowl that in another profession would be used to whisk eggs or mix dough and took it over to the counter. Theresa and Frank followed, watching over her shoulders as she examined and dissected each on a thick polypropylene cutting board. The heart, aside from where it had been slashed by the sternum, had been as strong and healthy as one would expect in a twenty-nine year old. The lungs would have wanted Sam to lay off the cigarettes but were otherwise clear. The eleventh rib had punctured the stomach, leaving only the partially digested residue of some corn product.
‘Like tortilla chips?’ Theresa suggested.
‘Tacos?’ Christina suggested.
‘Are you guys hungry?’ Frank joked.
To which the two women answered ‘Yes,’ in unison.
Christina returned to the body, theorizing: ‘I’ll bet it’s bar munchies. There’s not enough for a full meal, and not much in her intestines. It would fit with the odor of alcohol.’
‘So her last meal wasn’t even a full one,’ Frank said with the first touch of sympathy he’d shown.
‘Food only absorbs the alcohol,’ Theresa explained.
‘I’m not going to ask how you know that, cuz.’
‘Tavern on the Mall is right across the street.’
‘Didn’t that used to be Pat Joyce’s? But if she’s drunk, then tell me again why we think this is murder, why Sammy here didn’t just take it in her pickled little mind to get a look at the city skyline at night. Other than the little matter of how the zip lift got back to the ground, that is?’
‘This,’ Christina said.
She had flayed back the skin on Samantha Zebrowski’s right arm to reveal the pinpricks of broken blood vessels. ‘Petechia in an area about three inches round.’
‘What’s that?’ Frank asked.
‘It would have been one hell of a bruise, had the ecchymosis not been arrested by this girl’s death.’
‘She worked in construction,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s a very physical activity.’
‘True. But if it had happened on the job it would have been a full bruise by the evening, and the forearm is a common place for someone to grab you when they want you to do something and you resist. Like climb a building in order to fall to your death.’
Frank and Theresa said nothing as Christina examined more beginning-to-bruise areas, and eventually concluded that Samantha had suffered contusions very shortly before her death in six areas: right and left forearms, stomach, breast, and at least two spots on the left side of her face.
‘She was beaten,’ Theresa said.
Frank said, ‘Or she got in a fight with someone. She takes boyfriend up there for a little canoodling high atop the city lights, and they have an argument. She falls, and he sure as hell isn’t going to fess up, lose his job and probably go to jail.’
‘There’s no reason to think he’s another construction worker,’ Theresa said a bit regretfully. ‘She might have met him in a bar just that night. She wants to show off, and he takes it as an invitation to accelerate their relationship a bit faster than she was ready for. She resists, they fight. Though none of this explains how Ghost comes to be there.’
‘Maybe she did walk a mile or two to drag Mom out of the bar. Mom decides she’s a terrible mother and kid would be better off without her. Or Mom is having too good a time with her new beau, decides to show off her workplace first.’ Frank sighed. ‘We need someone else who saw her that night besides the kid. Time to pound the pavement.’ He’d have to show Samantha’s picture to every employee of every bar or restaurant in the area and any others she was known to frequent. They’d have to question every pal and acquaintance for any mention of a romantic interest, any recent friendships. Then, even if they found a likely suspect, they might be left with no way to place him at the scene that night. ‘Sure you can’t call this one an accident, doc? Maybe a misadventure?’
‘Sorry,’ Christina said, without sounding sorry at all.
The DNA analyst, Don, stopped in the doorway to the autopsy suite. ‘Theresa, there’s a kid here.’
Three faces swirled toward him, all struck dumb.
‘To see me?’ Theresa finally got out.
‘No.’ Don nodded at the body on the stainless steel table. ‘To see her.’
It couldn’t be that hard to find her. How many Zebrowskis could there be in the city? He’d check the phone book. Phone books still existed, right? Sometimes time passed so quickly that things disappeared for years before you even realized they were gone. Like phones with dials. Anacin aspirin. Parents.
He went over it again. The Tavern, he figured, was fine. No observant witnesses there. The mall, empty. Construction site: empty, until it wasn’t.
He still couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of the kid’s presence. How did she get there? Where was she while he was on top with Samantha? He had looked down, hadn’t seen any movement. No one there, then suddenly she was. Just transported there like—
The car.
Sam’s car. What if the demon/angel/child had been in the car, if Sam, that paragon of motherhood, had left her kid locked in the car while she bar-hopped? What if the grandmother needed a night off and no babysitters were available? Was that why Sam had gone to the car, to make sure the kid still slumbered, clearing the next hour for Mom to get some? Maybe Sam already had the screwdriver on her, or combined the two tasks.
That made a lot more sense. It also made him feel a little sorry for the kid. Some upbringing.
Not sorry enough, however, to forget the fact that the girl remained a witness. The only witness. His angel-demon was a sane and real human, and her presence there a sane and real event. And she now represented a threat to him, sane and very real.
THIRTEEN
Charlie’s Bar-be-que had been a west-side staple since long before Damon’s birth, back when – according to local tales – he roasted the succulent meat out of the back of an old school bus, parking in whatever lot would tolerate him for a time. Once you located Charlie’s and placed your order, you then had to listen to him try to save your soul as you ate, but
even the irreligious found this a small price to pay for the best ribs north of the Mason-Dixon line.
The current incarnation of Charlie’s had a permanent location, curtains on the windows and Formica on the tables, and a smell that Damon loved more than anything else in the world. He lit into his second slab of ribs; with all the work he’d done that day, he needed a meal that would stick to his. Across the table, Boonie grinned as if reading his mind, halfway through a second slab himself. ‘Nothing like honest work to give a man an appetite.’
‘Got that,’ Damon nodded. Work at the construction site constituted his first foray into ‘honest’ labor in all his nineteen years. He had never picked up a wrench before but their boss – their real boss, not Chris Novosek or even the plumbing foreman – had greased some palms and suddenly Boonie and Damon were apprentice pipelayers. Even though the ‘laying’ part didn’t seem to fit, since most of the piping ran along the ceiling instead of the floor, and they both – especially Boonie – resented the job title. There was nothing ‘apprentice’ about either of them. Damon had started out as a runner when he was barely old enough to read and managed a crew that spanned two blocks by the time he was sixteen. Boonie had started at fifteen, but Boonie was some distant cousin of the boss’s, so he had preference. His blocks had done well, too, always sold out and never skimmed, and there had been talk of expanding his territory, taking over Marlow’s crew while Marlow served three to five. But then the boss got this idea, and boom, they were out of the drug dealing business and into the pipelayers’ union. Paying dues and shit, the whole tamale.
Damon finished the ribs, then condescended to notice his coleslaw. After the third bite he slowed down enough to say, ‘Didn’t get nothing done today, what with that chick and all. Turning up dead. We didn’t even get to the first bend at the elevator shaft.’
‘Dead chick on our watch, and all you care is how much pipe got into place?’
