Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  ‘How?’ They approached the tenth floor elevator opening as the zip lift began to groan, its cables quivering. Maybe it was Frank, with news. It would be bad news, if he took the time to deliver it in person.

  ‘Companies have figured out how much that scrap metal is worth. Copper’s the highest right now – three dollars a pound, pure profit.’

  ‘Anything else in the habit of disappearing around here?’ Theresa asked as she crouched next to the gaping hole. Actually, bad news or good news, Frank would probably just call. He couldn’t know how attached she had gotten to their littlest witness in the past twenty-four hours.

  ‘I ain’t no snitch, Miss Forensic Person. And I said, the forms aren’t really stealing. They throw them out eventually and the company don’t bother recycling it. Not even on a government job, which I think is basically wrong, don’t you?’

  Just as Theresa noticed a speck of white resting on the center girder, the construction elevator squeaked to a halt. Ian Bauer thanked its operator and stepped off. He wore a suit identical to the one he’d worn the previous day but a different tie, and the fine skin on his cheeks lifted as he saw Theresa. But all he said was, ‘I heard about the girl going missing. Finding anything?’

  ‘Missing?’ Jack asked. ‘Who’s missing?’

  Theresa didn’t get up from her edge of the pit. Stick to business. Focus. ‘Not much. I can’t figure out what floor he fell from – I went over every one and, unlike Sam, find no evidence of a struggle. They all have footprints all over the place and there’s no drops of blood or sign of a weapon. That piece of paper out there is the closest thing to a clue I’ve found and the breeze may carry it off at any second.’

  The prosecutor nodded at Jack, stepped around him and walked two feet out on the girder just as the latter had. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Safety harness! Eighty-three!’

  He blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Get off that thing!’

  ‘Oh!’ He retreated. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t going to touch it.’

  ‘No, you merely violated several OSHA requirements and almost stopped my heart.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again, but he didn’t look very sorry. ‘Son of an ironworker. It’s sort of ingrained. You think that’s something important?’

  ‘I won’t know until I look at it.’ She straddled the girder, feet on its lower edge, and inched forward.

  The construction worker stopped scowling at Ian long enough to look startled. ‘Whoa! I’ll get you a safety harness, and a hard hat too, if you really want to do it.’

  The wind nudged the paper one more millimeter toward the abyss, and Ghost had not been found or else Frank would have called her. ‘No time.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Ghost had promised her grandmother she wouldn’t go out that night, and she hadn’t. She’d waited until the morning. The sun was well up, somewhere behind the clouds, and the humidity kept the air warm. So it should be all right.

  Besides, if today proceeded anything like the previous evening the kitchen would stay bustling with a group of ladies from the surrounding homes. They had brought food and gossip and moral support to commemorate this opportunity to feel sorry for someone other than themselves. Nana said they already had enough food to last them into next month. Ghost couldn’t understand why people would think she felt like eating. But they’d keep Nana busy; she probably wouldn’t even notice Ghost had gone.

  She sped past the Walker house, quiet and docile in the gray daylight, and up to the intersection. Plenty of people now occupied the same path she had taken the night before; dodging them took some time but she didn’t have to stop and hide from cars. The city’s occupants paid even less attention to her during the day than they did at night.

  She stopped first at a place on Huron with black walls and big posters of people playing musical instruments. It sat a few blocks away from the construction site but she had to start somewhere, and it looked friendly enough – a man sat at a table next to the glass front, drinking coffee and reading the paper. So she pushed the glass door open and went in. Aside from the man with the coffee, the only other person stood behind the counter, stacking glasses on a shelf mounted to the wall. Ghost approached, a bit more apprehensive with each step. The glass wall at the front provided the only illumination and the dark walls absorbed more of it the farther back they went. Bars, she thought, looked better at night. During the day they just looked sort of dirty. Kind of like fireworks.

  The man behind the counter did sort of a double take when he saw her, and watched her approach as if she were somehow scary, like a large dog that you weren’t sure was friendly or not. She climbed up on a bar stool, balancing on her knees on its surface, and placed the photo of her mother on the bar. ‘Have you seen this woman? This one here?’

  The guy didn’t respond at first, but after he stared at Ghost for a moment or two he glanced at the picture. ‘Uh, no. She doesn’t ring any bells.’

  Ghost tried to figure out from his face if this were the truth; not easy, but she thought he seemed more confused than anything else. ‘Are you sure?’ she pressed, because on TV people, especially in bars, always said no at first and then admitted they did when the detectives asked more questions. ‘Did she ever come in here?’

  He picked up the photo and held it up, as gingerly as Ghost had moved around glass slides the day before, and held it at eye level as if afraid to take his gaze off of Ghost for even a moment. ‘No. Sorry, I don’t recognize her and I’m pretty good with faces. What happened – why all the questions? You lose your mother?’

  ‘I’m just trying to retrace her steps.’ This only startled him more, and he put the photo down and slid it across the bar to Ghost, as if trying to keep his distance. She had never known adults to act so – uncertain – as they had since her mother’s death. She held out the other picture. ‘What about this man? Have you ever seen him? It’s an old picture,’ she added as he picked that one up as well. ‘He’d be really old now. Like maybe thirty.’

  The guy snorted a laugh, as annoying as it was inexplicable. ‘No, sorry, kid. I don’t know him either. What’s going on? Are you supposed to be walking into bars by yourself like this? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’

  ‘It’s over for the day,’ she said as she climbed down.

  The man by the window watched her over his newspaper as she left.

  One down.

  She continued down Huron toward East Ninth. It would practically be a miracle if she could find where her mother had been just before she died, but worth a try. Like Theresa and the fibers: every bit of information either told you something or told you what you didn’t need to worry about. She trusted Theresa to work hard to find her mother’s killer, but knew you couldn’t count on adults to do everything themselves. And Theresa had a mean boss who made her work on other things when she needed to be working on her mother’s stuff. So Ghost had to help.

  Armed with this bit of rationalization, she opened the door to a diner, half-full with the lunch crowd, and pulled the photos from her pocket.

  He watched the kid enter the restaurant. What the hell was she doing? This kid should be curled up in a ball in her bed at home, and instead she pranced along the city street like a sales rep making cold calls. Pretty funny, actually. He felt oddly proud of her, as if he had had a hand in her creation.

  He had, as decided, left the house by the back door the previous night, even locking the knob before pulling it shut behind him which he thought terribly courteous of him. Wouldn’t want to leave the old lady unprotected.

  The sound from above had not been repeated, and he thought it must be the maple tree branch moving in the wind, knocking on the roof. Or it might be the girl returning through her window-door. Either way, he decided not to find out. If the kid were wide awake she might hear him coming up the steps and start up with the screeches, loud enough to wake the half-deaf grandma, and then he’d have two of them to deal with, which he had finally decided was not a good idea. S
o he slipped out, rounded the house, went back to his car – miraculously unmolested, maybe the neighborhood was more law-abiding than it looked, or perhaps wise enough to let sleeping dogs lie – and went home, only to find he remained without the screwdriver and the DNA and fingerprints that could send him to the electric chair. Did they still send people to the electric chair? No, no, it was lethal injection now. And people even argued about that – stupid. How much nicer could you be? If they really wanted a human method of execution, he mused as he waited for Ghost to emerge from the diner, they’d go back to the guillotine. The quickest, most painless method ever. Little chance of that, though.

  She came out shortly, glanced around as the door swung shut behind her. Her gaze brushed over him, came back, paused, and flustered him so that he pulled out his cell phone and pretended to read the display, watching her through his eyelashes. But she continued her look about, then turned and walked away. Without haste and without looking back.

  Definitely a real girl, flesh and blood, seen and reacted to by others. Not an angel or a demon, though he knew he would continue to think of her as such because he enjoyed it. A real girl – who had, apparently, not recognized him.

  Well, that was interesting.

  He followed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘What the hell is she doing?’ Chris Novosek boomed.

  ‘Evidence,’ Ian Bauer began.

  ‘She said—’ Jack sputtered.

  From her seat on the edge of the pit, Theresa flung one leg over the girder, glanced down – and then she couldn’t breathe at all. She gave it a minute, then slowly tried looking again.

  ‘Get out of there! You’re not covered by my liability insurance.’

  ‘I’m covered by the M.E’s office,’ Theresa said without looking up. ‘Don’t worry about it. This falls under “other duties as assigned”.’

  The crime scene clean-up crew had finished disposing of Kyle Cielac’s blood pool, using absorbent rags and gallons of non-bleach cleaner that would disinfect the area without oxidizing the rebar and making it rust. Only the dark sheen of the wet concrete let her know where Kyle Cielac had so recently bled out.

  Edges of the other floors lined up above it in a concentric pattern. Occasionally workers would shuffle around them in a flicker of color or movement.

  How long would it take you to fall such a distance? Long enough to form conscious thought? Long enough to know you were going to die, that no force in the universe could save you?

  Like a horse, she thought. Grip with the knees.

  ‘You have no training in moving around on an I-beam.’

  ‘I’m not going to try a backflip, or even a flying dismount.’

  She tuned out the rest of what he said. Forensic work involved the ability to focus; not everything could be done in a gleaming, silent laboratory. Often she had to calculate or collect evidence while surrounded by gung-ho cops, irate suspects, grieving families, dangerous traffic and adverse weather conditions. Theresa had learned to let all her surroundings fade into the background. Frank often said she had learned this technique too well.

  ‘This is my site,’ Chris Novosek fumed, ‘and you’re—’

  She put both hands on the girder, one palm on each side. The metal was fairly smooth, coated steel with only a few flecks of rust to roughen the surface. They were called I-beams because of their shape. The top horizontal bar of the I became her saddle, and the bottom horizontal bar her stirrups. It was plenty wide enough for her to sit comfortably, her fingers wrapped around each edge, but her feet in their Reeboks didn’t feel completely secure. She pushed with her toes and pulled with her hands, scooching herself forward like a very small child, moving two inches at a time and feeling acutely ridiculous to be sliding around on her crotch in front of the three grown men watching her, until her right foot slipped and she stopped and gripped with her knees and her hands and forgot all about caring what she looked like.

  The pit swam before her eyes and the wind felt stronger than it should, there in the middle of the building. Her heart beat wildly for a moment or two; when it calmed some she repositioned her feet and went again.

  Just another foot.

  ‘She’s doing pretty good,’ someone said.

  ‘Shut up, Jack.’ Chris Novosek spoke with quiet but absolute authority. ‘Just shut up.’

  Only a few more scooches and she reached the paper just as the breeze strengthened for another attack. First she clicked a few pictures with the heavy and expensive camera dangling from her neck, after placing a small ruler next to the stain and hoping the wind wouldn’t pick it up before she could shove the small piece of plastic back into her pocket. She didn’t need that flying off and hitting someone either. Even such a small, lightweight item – what was the conventional wisdom? Throw a penny off the Empire State Building and it would have enough momentum to penetrate a man’s skull by the time it reached the ground?

  Photographing the paper meant looking down, but at least the background shaded into fuzziness beyond the focal length of the shot. Then she pulled one latex glove and a Manila envelope and plucked up the scrap. White, with a blue border forming a corner. The backing felt sticky.

  Had Kyle slammed into the girder as he fell? Was he conscious at the time? Who killed people by beating them up and then pushing them off a building? Killed both male and female? But if it wasn’t deliberate, how did two different people get in fights on two consecutive days and wind up stumbling off the edge of their own work space? One person she could see, but two? Kyle and Sam walked along the edge every day. Even in the middle of a fist fight, they would have known to stay the hell away from it.

  And where did Ghost fit in?

  Now she wondered whether to continue to the other side or go back the way she’d come and turned around to gauge which might be the shorter distance. Of course twisting put her body slightly off balance, so that she repeated the clutching grab on with the hands and grip with the knees until the heart calms down process again. Then she began the long scooch back. This time Ian Bauer walked around the pit to greet her, latching on to one arm just as Jack latched on to the other, practically pulling her to her feet and then away from the edge. It would have been less nerve-racking to stand up on her own. Helping hands could, at any moment, change direction and push you in instead of pulling you out.

  Neither showed any desire to let go until she shook off their hands and said, ‘Enough! I can do this.’

  Chris Novosek did not offer to help. He had not moved from his spot at a corner of the pit, watching all of them with arms folded over a wide chest. ‘Well? Was it worth it?’

  ‘Time will tell,’ she said, stowing the envelope in her camera bag. ‘OK, onward and upward.’

  ‘You’re not done?’ Novosek asked.

  ‘Not by a long shot.’

  They continued the trudge upward, checking each floor’s area around the open pit for signs of a struggle, signs of recent activity, signs of Kyle Cielac’s presence. Ian Bauer continued along but Novosek had sent Jack back to work as the rest of the employees had trickled in, and now the site rang with the usual sounds of saws and jackhammers, the clang of metal on metal. They were becoming as familiar to Theresa as the whirr of a centrifuge and the hum of the bone saw.

  Novosek had been angry when he returned from the police station, which came as no surprise to her. Frank often had that effect on people, especially suspects, and plus her wing-walking exercise had not helped. But that had faded into weariness, and he answered any questions easily enough. He even offered to carry her camera bag. She had already called Frank twice. To keep herself from dialing his number a third time, she asked Novosek about the asbestos on Sam’s clothing.

  ‘Yeah, the cop told me that. I don’t have any idea. There’s no asbestos in any of our materials. Was she doing any remodeling at home?’

  Theresa shrugged. ‘I didn’t see any. Why, would that be a likely source?’

  ‘If it’s pre-seventies. Paint, insulatio
n, fiberboard, siding, soundproofing tiles all had asbestos at one point or another. People rip out a wall or redo a ceiling, and expose themselves.’ He panted only slightly as they reached the eleventh floor, emerging from the twisting concrete tunnel that formed the stairwell. Theresa hoped they would be well lit in the new jail. The building might be only an open skeleton but the stairwells already gave her the creeps.

  ‘What about the silica?’

  ‘That’s in the concrete. That’s not surprising. It’s a plasticizer, added to increase the strength. Buildings this tall, you have to reinforce it all, especially on the columns.’

  ‘Where do you mix the concrete?’

  ‘At the supply depot over off Broadway.’

  ‘Doesn’t it start to dry en route?’ They reached the open spot where the elevators would go. Boxes of pipe ends, stacks of metal bars, no apparent disturbance to the dust and dirt near the pit.

  ‘That’s why the trucks keep mixing on the way here. The trip is taken into account. The mixer needs to rotate a certain amount of times but not over a certain number, and there are counters on each truck. If it’s over the limit, we have to send it back. The first load is checked by the inspector to make sure it’s within the slump test specs, then we rely on the counters to make sure the other loads are consistent. They get stuck in traffic, we can lose a lot of concrete.’ They plunged back into the dim stairwell on their way to twelve. ‘We have to pump it up to the floor. The pump can clog or stick. The time factor is still in play. You’ve got to get it down before it hardens.’