“You must be the two detectives here about the accident,” he began.
“Terrible tragedy, just terrible.” His words sounded false.
“I am Detective Tooms and this is Detective Marinelli. You must be Mr. Jackson, the foreman?” Tooms said. The two detectives flashed their badges to the man, who just smiled and nodded.
“Well I don’t know what to say, Detective. Our sight crew took a look round and deemed it an accident.”
The man appeared to be hiding something and the fact oozed from his behaviour, the way alcohol seeps from a person’s bones after a heavy night on the booze.
“Well, sir, we would still like to take a look if we may?” Tooms spoke coolly, knowing that if he rattled the man he would button up and they would have nothing.
The foreman stepped back and looked up at the towering mass of metal.
“Be my guest, Detectives, go on up.” He grinned as he looked at their faces.
“Unless there’s a problem?”
Tooms could tell he was taunting them. Just the look on his smug face said, ‘I bet they don’t go up’.
Tony smiled back agreeably.
“So where do we get some hard hats?”
Which is when the foreman’s grin dropped and a look of panic flashed across his pale face.
The cab of the crane was attached to the underbelly of the structure. Above it, the long steel arms of the bridge-like construction supported the cab and crane unit. The long beams stretched out far over the murky waters of the Hudson River below. As they began to climb the steel ladders inside the structure, the wind began to pick up. Tony turned to Tooms who just nodded and edged him on. At the top, they arrived at a staging unit beside the cab. Everything was encased in a medium height steel safety barrier. The two men walked round the cab looking for patches of oil or anything else that could have contributed to the ‘so called’ accident.
As they met back at the crane’s stairwell both men looked disappointed. The foreman smiled reassuringly.
“You see? No foul play. The guy must have jumped.”
Tony stopped walking as he neared the corner of the metal structure and looked upwards. Along the side of one of the metal walls of the cab a fairly deep scrape angled upwards. “Hey, Tooms, come here a sec, will ya?”
Tooms walked round and found Tony looking at the inch-long scrape.
“What you got, man?” Tooms looked down and smiled as he pulled out his cell phone.
“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” Tony asked as he watched his partner dial for CSU.
Tooms just nodded slowly as he put in the request. Tony walked over to the foreman, displaying a grin so wide it almost cut his head in half. “Sorry, Mr Jackson, this is now a crime scene and I am going to have to ask you to leave. But please make yourself available for further questions.”
The man stormed off, but Tony noticed he seemed to be more scared than angry.
Something was off, by a mile.
McCall entered the ME’s office floor and opened the double doors to Tina’s office.
Tina was sitting at her computer typing up some notes from one of the cases. She looked up over the monitor and a pleasant smile crept over her pretty, dark-skinned face.
“Good morning,” McCall announced, lifting the coffee cup. Tina lifted a finger to signal she was busy typing and talking would put her off her stroke. McCall mouthed an apology and slipped into the cutting room.
Sam wandered aimlessly round the brightly lit room while she waited for Tina to complete her work. The sound of her fingers rattling over the keyboard echoed around the small office space. McCall put down both coffees and picked up one file marked with Donald Major’s name. She flicked through it as if she was reading a magazine in a surgery waiting room.
“So how did your date go with Doctor Dave?” Tina called out.
McCall turned round suddenly, slapping down the file back onto the pile of ‘To dos’.
Tina was wearing a broad cheeky smile as though she knew something her friend did not. As she crossed over from the dark office the bright ceiling lamps made Tina’s red lip-gloss shine. McCall picked up Tina’s coffee cup and offered it towards her.
“The date was fine, why?”
Tina took a sip from the welcomed coffee, but her eyes were still smiling.
“What did he tell you?” McCall asked, feeling nervous.
“Nothing. He just phoned to thank me for arranging it. But you have told me plenty, Sam, oh yes plenty.”
McCall jumped up onto the stainless steel counter and took a sip from her mug. A small self-indulgent smile broke the corners of her mouth and Tina clapped with joy.
McCall had spent around half an hour at the morgue. Tina had no new information on Donald Major. There was no doubt he had been electrocuted but it was also obvious that it was no accident. Nevertheless, she had questions. Like why had the fuse box been wiped clean of prints? And why were the cameras in the alley disabled? Sam had the same questions in her mind, and knew that they mattered. As she saw things, she had to decide what factors suggested this was a murder and not an accident. Now all she had to do was figure out who did it and why?
She looked over her notes again as she sat at her desk. Looking up at the white board, she scanned every photograph, every name and every date. McCall leant back in her chair and closed her eyes for a second then slowly opened them. What was she missing? She ran through the facts on her jotter pad.
Fact 1: Donald always used a partner but not for the last two jobs. Why?
Fact 2: Why was a highly skilled electrician doing a two-bit job that was miles from his home and not recorded officially?
Fact 3: The fuse box was wiped down and the cameras were disabled, meaning that the murder had been premeditated.
Fact 4: What was the big job that he had completed prior to the 7-Eleven job?
Fact 5: Where was his workshop?
McCall stood up, as realisation dawned.
“His workshop!” she said out loud. Now she realised that was the missing piece of the puzzle. She grabbed her jacket and headed for the elevator, just as Captain Brant walked out of his office.
“Where’s the fire, McCall?” he asked. She turned, surprised to see him.
“Donald Major had a workshop and I think that may hold some answers.”
Brant nodded, with the look of someone weighing up the options.
“Do you know where it is?” McCall shook her head.
“No, sir, but I know someone who does know.”
“The wife?” Brant guessed.
Sam nodded as she put on the leather jacket and headed for the open doors of the elevator.
The sun was high and the streets were thronged with people, and children laughed and joked. The Majors’ residence seemed bright and friendly as Sam approached the front door. It was four o’clock and the average Joe’s day was just about done.
McCall stopped before entering the small pathway to the front door. She knew that as soon as she knocked on the door Mrs. Major would be full of hope, if only for just a few seconds. She would be happy for a brief moment, thinking that McCall had some good news about finding her husband’s killer. The detective also remembered the hopeless look people had, as she had to explain that they had no new information. She had been down that road too many times and each time it happened a little part of her died.
She raised a shaky hand ready to knock. Before she did, the door opened and there stood Mrs Major, her eyes raw from too much crying, and her lips chapped from not drinking enough fluids.
“Hi, Mrs. Major,” Sam began. “I am Detective McCall —we met the other day. Are you okay?”
Stephanie Major nodded and stepped to one side to let her enter. The house had been cleaned from top to bottom, its floors vacuumed and the surfaces polished. McCall figured she was cleaning so as to keep her mind occupied.
Stephanie reached out a hand to offer McCall a seat on the long couch in the sitting room, and Sam sat down.
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“Firstly, Stephanie, I want you to know I am treating this as a murder investigation, and not as an accident.” She detected approval in the slight twitch of Stephanie’s lips—almost a smile.
“I understand that your husband had a workshop?” Stephanie nodded and wiped a tear from her left eye.
“I need to see it, if I may. Can you tell me where it is, and do you have a key?”
Stephanie Major stood up and headed for a key press that hung next to the back door in the kitchen. She soon returned with a bunch of keys and a piece of paper.
“The place is a small disused garage in Harlem, you’ll need the code—the whole place is alarmed.”
Sam stood up and took the keys and piece of paper from her. As she did so, she smiled confidently at Stephanie Major.
“I promise I will find whoever did this and bring them to justice.”Stephanie nodded slowly.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Detective.” Sam smiled again.
“Sam, please call me Sam.” And with that, she left the house and headed for her car.
The workshop turned out to be a small white-painted brick building with a shutter door on the side, used as an entrance way for vehicles. It was a small-secluded place, which she guessed had originally been some kind of car-repair garage.
McCall parked and got out of her car. The streets seemed oddly quiet with only the birds on the neighbouring trees to keep her company. The workshop itself looked disused, with large weeds creeping from cracks in the concrete slabs in front, and stylish graffiti that was more like an artistic statement than random scrawls.
At first she tried the brass Yale lock. The key slid in halfway then it stopped. McCall tried to force it but to no avail. Initially she assumed that the keys she had been given were the wrong ones—after all, Stephanie Major was probably confused.
She thought for a moment. Donald Major was careful. He had a workshop that was disguised as a rundown disused garage. He had a reputation for discretion—the reason why he was given the most secret jobs. What if the Yale lock was also a fake? she wondered.
It took McCall a while to find the correct key slot. The real lock had been concealed in the door under a piece of rubber that was designed to look like a repair to the door’s upper panel. The key slid in effortlessly, and she opened the door.
As she entered, McCall took out her small flashlight and moved carefully. There was a click from a pressure pad and then a countdown beep beeped through some wall speakers. She rushed inside. Stephanie had written down the location of the disarm unit, which was behind a playboy calendar. McCall moved it to one side, found the keypad and typed in the code. There was another click and then the lights came on.
The detective stood for a moment just looking round. Her mouth fell open at the contents of the room. As she had entered into the wide open space of the workshop, she felt as if she had been transported to another place entirely. From outside, the building looked rundown and disused. Weeds grew from cracks in the concrete, and the large metal chain-link fencing was weathered and old.
However, the inside of the workshop looked like the drawing room of the designers of the Starship Enterprise. Blueprints, workstations, computers—it had everything and more.
“Wow!” Her eyes were alight with amazement. Shaking herself back to reality she looked around, hoping to find some details relating to Donald’s last job. In the back of the room there was a small office which was filled with computers, their screens flickering as they booted into life. McCall had noticed the surveillance cameras on the outside and the ones that littered the corners of the interior. As the computer screens finished their start-up procedures, she noticed the feed from the cameras.
Sam took out her cell phone and dialled the Tech Department of CSU.
“Hi, this is Detective McCall. Is Brian there?” she asked. As she waited, she looked around the office to see if there were bits of information that might stick out regarding the case. A man’s voice sounded on the other end of the line.
“Yo, McCall, what’s up?” She smiled at the greeting from the tech.
“Brian, I have a camera feed here but it’s not going to a hard drive. My guess is it’s an online server or something. Can you run a trace for me?” She scrambled round for a phone number.
“Where you at?”
She told him the address and waited as he did a search. McCall moved to the large workshop and looked through a filing cabinet in the left-hand corner next to a workbench, that contained a coffee machine and a small refrigerator.
“McCall,” Brian told her, “This may take some time, so if you leave it with me I’ll get back to you.”
McCall closed the cabinet and moved over to a large pin-board on the north wall. “Thanks, Brian, I owe you one.” She could almost see his smiling face.
“Bye, Brian,” she concluded, hanging up before he could come back with a jokey remark.
She noticed a large blueprint that looked more like a rail plan than a plan for electrical cabling. Whatever his last job had been, it had been massive. She took the blueprint down and put it into an evidence bag. Taking out her small camera, she began to take photographs of the room and its contents. There was something important here, but she concluded it would take the Tech department to figure it out.
However, she had another worry: if someone had wanted him silenced because of one of his current jobs, she had the feeling that this place was brimming with evidence. But she couldn’t risk calling in more officers, in case someone was scoping the place. She had the blueprint and later she would have the feed. If they could maintain the feed, the place would be as good as secure. If anything were to happen, it would recorded on film.
Tooms and Tony had returned as soon as CSU had arrived to make their calculations and examinations. They had gone straight to the morgue in the hope of finding evidence their ‘vic’ (victim) had been shot. The brightly lit corridors felt cold and uninviting. Soft music emanated from one of the rooms and the two detectives knew that it was coming from Tina’s workspace. A tall uniformed officer stood watch at the loading entrance, and Tooms waved a greeting as they entered Tina’s cutting room. The tall brown-haired officer returned the greeting as he watched them go in through the double doors.
Tina stood over the remains of John Barr, which she had wheeled out especially for them to see.
“Hi, Doc. So what we looking at?” Tooms asked. A small lollypop locked into the side of his left cheek clattered as he spoke.
Tina nodded a welcome and threw back the sheet. The two detectives reeled back as the blue sheet’s removal revealed a tangled mess of flesh and bone. The body had been stripped of all its clothing, which made the sight even more horrific.
The body of John Barr lay on his back. Shattered bone fragments stuck through bruised flesh. Both of his shinbones had snapped in two. Each half was now angled side-on to the other as they had ripped through the damaged flesh of his legs. His ribcage now stuck out through his sides. As he had landed on his back, almost every bone in his body had exploded like a crockery plate. His spine had disintegrated along with his pelvis. The impact had turned his organs into a liquid mush. The corpse lay on a special table with drainage slats on the sides that reminded Tooms of gutters on a street. The two detectives had expected it to be messy, but this was something else.
Tina looked up as she put on her protective goggles. “You boys want to stay for this or shall I call you?”
Both men shook their heads frantically whilst holding their noses against the noxious aroma. “We came down because we have reason to believe our vic here was shot before he fell,” Tooms explained.
Tina looked at the mangled remains. She started at his feet then examined it carefully, moving up until she got to his left shoulder. She stopped and examined the hole where the collarbone had broken through the skin. The hole was large—around the size of a golf ball, and pieces of shattered bone protruded out of the angry-looking wound. The man’s back was badly
scarred and shredded from bone meeting hard cold concrete, so any evidence of an entry or exit wound would be lost. Tina picked up a magnifying glass and looked closer.
“Well I’ll be... Yep, this guy took a slug to the shoulder alright.”
The two detectives’ eyes lit up with excitement, their hands still covering their noses.
“If you look closely enough you can see a large hole behind the bone.” She looked up and saw the two of them giving her the thumbs up from a distance. “Honestly, you’re unbelievable, the pair of you.”
Tony and Tooms both shrugged and got out, but not before Tooms gave the ‘Call me’ signal to her with his thumb and pinkie.
They made their way back to the precinct and the comfort of their desks. By all accounts, it had been a productive but gruesome day. Tooms looked up at the wall clock and noted the time. He sighed, unhappy that it was only two in the afternoon. He turned to Tony, who was busy making quick notes on what had happened at the dockyard.
“I am hungry, you want something?” Tooms asked.
Tony turned to him slowly. “You’re kidding me, right? After seeing crash-test man, no thanks!” Tooms just shrugged and headed for the vending machines. While he was at the machines his cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out, simultaneously slipping a dollar into the machine, and looked at the ID. The text was from John Steel. It was a simple message with an attachment. The message was a simple one: Please check this out. Urgent. He opened it the attachment to find a bloody fingerprint. He heard the candy bar drop into the pull-out tray. His hand delved in and retrieved the bar and he wrenched it open with his teeth as he bit off the end of the wrapper, all the while his gaze fixed on to the print. ‘What you up to on that ship, man?’ he asked himself, thinking of Steel’s holiday, then bit into the chocolate and caramel bar.
Back at his desk, Tony was going through John Barr’s file. Nothing jumped out. Barr was an ordinary guy doing an ordinary job. He had an ex-wife and two kids. Killing him didn’t affect her financially. In fact, she was just about to remarry, so Barr was about to be off the hook as regards alimony payments. He didn’t owe anybody money so that was wasn’t a factor, plus even if he had done, killing him wouldn’t mean his debtors would get their money back. No, if this was a murder, the simple answer would be that the killer was some psycho.
Operation:UNITY (John Steel series Book 2) Page 16
