The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I lost my camera,’ Theresa said. ‘Leo will make me pay for it.’

  ‘Don’t let him,’ Frank said.

  ‘You two sure you’re OK?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Peachy,’ Frank said.

  They sat for a while longer as the fire department roped off the block and refused to let any non-EMS personnel in. No one could know yet how many pounds of asbestos, lead paint or stored biohazards might lurk underneath unstable piles of rock.

  As most humans would, Theresa sorted through selfish considerations first: it seemed unlikely that she would know any of the victims. Her daughter was safely ensconced at a college halfway across the state; her mother was home, probably doing laundry, and she had just left her favorite and even not-so-favorite co-workers at the Medical Examiner’s Office trace evidence lab. Frank was here beside her, making it possible for her to react to the situation as impartially as she could.

  To the north sat a garment warehouse, with at least ten broken windows on the second and third floors. Behind her, to the east, the blast had ruined the appetites of the lunchtime diners, who abandoned their tables to watch the EMS personnel scour the site for anyone left alive. So far, Angela told them, there had been five: two from the parking lot and three from the south-west corner of the building, including a large and naked man who had been in the bathtub at the time. The porcelain shell offered just enough protection to save him as the apartment upstairs joined his.

  With most of the west side of the Bingham gone Theresa could see the tops of the bars and warehouses in the Flats, if not the Cuyahoga running along its crooked course. The Lambert mansion-slash-factory which occupied the rest of the block to the south did not seem to have suffered any damage beyond a few broken windows and gashes in the stone exterior. Its employees had been evacuated as a precaution and now blocked the intersection, slender young men and women with glasses and Tshirts advertising video games. Most had their cell phones out, videotaping the EMTs search of the rubble. Cleveland’s very own 9/11.

  Theresa knew something about the Bingham. It had been built in 1915 for Bingham Hardware, designed by a well-known architectural firm whose handiwork could be found in many other landmarks. More recently it had been turned into lofts for beautiful tenants and had done well, despite the fact that not really much had been trendy about Cleveland since the turn of the previous century. Well-intentioned developers kept trying to graft some sort of style on to the city: building stadiums, closing off East Fourth to showcase local gourmet restaurants, adding a subway platform in Playhouse Square. These efforts convinced no one, but Clevelanders loved them no less for their contrivance.

  But the lower levels of the building had not been made fashionable, only left as the owners had found them: functional, large and empty. Other businesses in the city could rent this space for storage and the Medical Examiner’s Office, crammed into three sixty-year-old floors in University Circle, had done so. Decades of files, X-rays, tissue slides and homicide victims’ clothing had been stored in a room on Lower Level 2. And that was how Theresa had become familiar with the Bingham building, with the loading dock paved with wooden bricks and the sublevel freight elevator so old that it could be run only by building personnel.

  So yes, the relevant items from every homicide in the history of the Medical Examiner’s Office had been buried, at best, or had disintegrated at worst. It made her want to cry. Her boss, Leo, would probably have to be hospitalized. Equanimity had never been part of his nature.

  She asked of no one in particular, ‘Do we have any idea how many people were inside?’

  ‘Not according to the fire department. We can only hope that most of the tenants were at work, at ten-ten on a Wednesday.’

  It had to be some kind of accident, had to have some kind of, if not natural, than at least non-malicious origin. No one would kill that many people to collect an insurance policy, or to eliminate one particular enemy. She didn’t even consider any political motivations. No one else in the country paid any attention to Cleveland; why would a terrorist?

  Angela said, ‘Here they come.’

  They got to their feet and moved away from the curb, Frank actually straightening his plaster dust-covered jacket. A phalanx of cops, suits and uniforms came toward them, or rather toward the center of the block. The briefing had obviously concluded and a plan had been formed. Good, Theresa thought. Cleveland saw its share of troubles, crime, unemployment and political unrest, but large-scale disasters – earthquakes, hurricanes, plane crashes – usually passed the city by. No way could she and DNA analyst Don Delgado handle a scene of this magnitude all by themselves. Even by combining with the Cleveland Police forensic unit—

  Too busy looking at the approaching army to watch where she was going, she stumbled over a brick and went down, keeping her knees safe but putting another gash in her left hand with a piece of glass. She surveyed the damage to her palm, not sure how much blood belonged to her and how much to the woman they had uncovered. Either way, the sticky red substance had collected dust, grit, two straws of dead grass and a cloudy crystal of rock. She pulled it off with her other hand and was about to throw it away when its smell stopped her, the same acrid scent she had been noticing for the past fifteen minutes.

  ‘You OK?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ She brought it to her nose, sniffed. Perhaps it had been used as a building material, some sort of insulation. She gave up and dropped the faintly purplish stone into the pocket of her jacket, wiping the blood on her pants. They were ruined anyway.

  The arriving officers had fanned out a bit, surveying the scene, and paid no attention to Theresa or her cousin. Frank walked up to a man Theresa recognized as the Chief of Police, and asked, ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘We don’t. The Fee— the FBI will be handling it, mostly just to hold it until Homeland Security can take over. The Region II Strike Team will be here any minute.’ He nodded at a man and a woman in matching suits, both middle-aged and suitably grave. Actually, the woman looked grave. The man wore a pissed-off scowl, as if someone had blown up the city’s bomb shelter just to make him look ineffectual.

  ‘They’ll ruin their shoes,’ Frank said.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Theresa said.

  The man glared at Frank. The woman smiled at Theresa. ‘That’s not the reaction we usually get,’ she said.

  Theresa didn’t bother to introduce herself, since her windbreaker identified her as M.E. staff. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to have a lack of experience in explosions. One thing, though, which my boss will want you aware of – we had our off-site storage on the second sublevel. It’s buried, somewhere in there.’

  ‘Ours, too,’ the woman told her.

  THREE

  Tuesday

  By the next morning both Theresa and the city had regained their composure. The cause of the blast remained unknown. The number of confirmed dead so far totaled a remarkably low seven, all building personnel except for one, who had apparently been visiting his storage area. The woman Theresa had found ran the snack bar in the lobby; the man pulled from the car had been about to move in that day; the man in the bathtub had been home sick from work. The pretty young couple had survived. The six dead employees included one maintenance man, three cleaners, one rental agent and the freight elevator operator/loading dock manager. The suicide didn’t count, of course.

  The building manager – who had held the door for Theresa and Frank when he left for a doctor’s appointment, only to have the blast throw him across the street – reported that the man who had been visiting his storage area in the lower levels worked for an electronics importer and appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. No one worried too much about that. If a malcontent wanted to hit something in Cleveland there were much more likely targets – political ones such as City Hall, all-American ones like the baseball or football stadiums or glitzy ones like Tower City. Most people still anticipated a rational explanation, rational but scary –
if a stray gas leak or an underground sinkhole had taken down the Bingham, no structure could feel safe. Tall buildings in the surrounding area had been all but abandoned, employees calling in sick to work and tenants deciding to spend a few days with relatives in the suburbs.

  Theresa had used Neosporin as body lotion to treat the myriad of cuts, scratches and abrasions that covered every inch of her body. The bruises were on their own.

  The victims would be transported to the M.E.’s office for autopsy after the federal agencies did an initial exam. There could be more, would almost certainly be more, as excavations continued. Homeland Security arrived with an army and someone had had the sense to inform them that Cleveland in the spring did not go more than a day or two without rain, so they worked at breakneck speed to transport all the rubble to the Convention Center where it could be searched through at leisure. Still, they had not reached ground level, much less the sublevels. Theresa’s boss, Leo, had spent his time since the blast articulating a mental list of every untried homicide in his twenty-five-year career and his concern that all those killers would now walk free because the evidence had been compromised. As much as Theresa didn’t care for dramatics, she knew he had a valid point.

  ‘And just the historical significance,’ Leo would persist. ‘The Sam Sheppard stuff was in there!’

  ‘At least that case is over.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure. Conspiracy theories never die.’

  With relief she went out on a call at about eleven o’clock and met a patrol officer at the scene of a possible overdose which did not involve either conspiracies or explosions. The victim’s house perched at the edge of Lake Erie near Bratenahl, at the end of a long, wooded driveway off Lake Shore Boulevard. The view alone made life worth living, the three-story mansion with the four-car garage merely icing on the cake. ‘Why would a guy who lived like this want to overdose?’

  ‘Wife left him,’ the stocky cop told her. ‘Which is why I never married.’

  Theresa dropped her Support the Troops water bottle into the console and pulled her basic crime scene kit from the trunk. Every movement brought to life a scratch, cut or bruise left over from the day before. ‘I find it very disappointing that money can’t buy happiness.’

  ‘I’d sure like to give it a try, though.’ He led her into the house, past the stainless steel appliances and Persian rug. The man of the house had sat in a brown leather armchair and flicked on the TV before taking a handful of prescription Xanax and washing it down with a Manhattan. Half of the drink remained in the glass with the cherry.

  ‘He’s fifty-five, two grown kids, owns all the Circuit Warehouse stores in northern Ohio. The soon-to-be ex-wife called us, said he hadn’t answered the phone since yesterday morning and missed a meeting with their attorneys at nine. Door was unlocked when I got here. A detective should be out in a while, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. They’re all jockeying around trying to get in on the Bingham investigation. Did you see that place?’ The cop stood about six-four with a few too many pounds attached to it, but plenty of muscle as well. He had curly brown hair and the requisite mustache and she guessed his age at a few years past hers.

  ‘Yeah, I saw it.’ She turned on the digital Nikon and took a picture of her clipboard with its form detailing the date, time, location and her name.

  ‘Big, smoking hole in the ground.’

  She suppressed a shudder. ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’ve been a cop for twenty-three years, never saw anything like that. What could take out a whole building? I mean, that thing was solid.’

  She snapped a picture encompassing the man, the chair, the end table with the drink and pill bottle. ‘No idea. Explosives are not my area.’

  ‘They think it’s that Arab guy. They have his name, I forget what it is exactly. I haven’t seen his picture yet.’

  ‘I don’t think they think it’s him.’ Theresa felt compelled to interject some reason. ‘There were other people there. And he wasn’t Arab.’

  ‘Why would they blow up the place they worked in?’

  ‘Why would he blow it up if he was in it at the time?’

  ‘He’s probably nuts,’ the cop said, looking away in a hurry as she caught him studying her rear end. ‘All terrorists are nuts. I think they were trying to take out the Lambert place, get rid of all the technology that might keep us safe from them. Didn’t work, not with how tough the Bingham is – was – and their stuff wasn’t powerful enough. Stupid ragheads.’

  ‘It looked pretty powerful to me. Didn’t scratch the Lambert place, though, except for a few windows.’ And there were so many better targets for politically motivated murderers – like the State Capitol in Columbus, where Rachael now attended OSU. Bad enough to fret constantly about school shootings, now this … how far did the campus sit from the Statehouse?

  Rachael had called last night. She had no idea how close Theresa had been to the blast – Frank and Theresa would keep that their little secret, especially from Frank’s mother – but was now worried because her mother worked in Cleveland.

  There would always be a reason to agonize about loved ones, and a reason for them to worry that you’re worried – unfair, the pressure we put on others. No wonder so many cops were divorced.

  A further thought occurred to the one in front of her. ‘But you know what else? The FBI stored stuff there. They say it was just old training manuals and stuff, but you know they’re lying. I bet it was the mob. The FBI probably had all the witness relocation information there and the mob stole it and then blew the place so they wouldn’t be able to tell it was stolen.’ He rocked as he spoke, as if impatient, but his gaze bespoke only enthusiasm for his theories – or her figure, she couldn’t tell.

  Theresa finished photographing and took a closer look at the victim’s face. No foaming appeared in the nose or mouth, characteristic but not always present in a drug overdose. ‘Seems like a lot of work to find somebody.’

  ‘Not just one somebody. A whole list of somebodies, everyone who’s ratted them out since the beginning of time. That might be worth taking out a whole building for.’

  ‘It’s as good as any other theory, I guess. I’m still holding out for a gas leak.’

  He smirked as if at her naivety, running one hand through his short hair. Two deep but obviously old scars ran up his forearm, leaving furrows in the hair. ‘Do you need me for anything in here? I was going to canvass the neighbors, find out if anyone’s seen him since yesterday morning. Though how they’d see anything at this house, two hundred yards up a wooded driveway—’

  ‘Money might not buy happiness, but it sure buys privacy. No, I’m OK in here. Just don’t leave for good without telling me first.’

  He promised not to and she picked up the pill bottle as the cop’s footsteps trailed off through the kitchen. The prescription had been written for sixty pills, a thirty-day supply, filled three weeks ago. Twelve remained. If he’d been taking them as prescribed that left only six unaccounted for. What Theresa didn’t know about pharmacology could fill several books, but she didn’t think six ought to kill him. Unless he hadn’t taken them as prescribed, and swallowed all forty-eight right together. But she didn’t see any other signs of overdosing. Perhaps the man had simply had a heart attack.

  She heard a sharp sound, not quite a bang but more like a sudden snap of air, and then another one, louder and more like a bang. Maybe a car had backfired, though she didn’t think cars backfired any more, and certainly not the cars in this neighborhood. Perhaps someone had dropped something, something heavy.

  The man’s jaw muscles were rigid in rigor, and the reddish lividity in the lower extremities had fixed itself in place. Early yesterday, she thought, and began to sketch the room on her crime scene form, the victim represented by a round head with sticks for limbs.

  Could it have been a car door slamming, that noise she had heard? No, it had sounded too concise, too sharp. Perhaps a neighbor liked to shoot targets. Probably not legal, but maybe the wealth in t
his area let residents do whatever they wanted.

  Without any conscious decision she found herself setting down her clipboard and retracing her steps back through the house. The door from the kitchen opened on to the driveway, with her county station wagon parked neatly on the concrete, directly behind the officer’s marked patrol car. No humans or animals were in sight, and only the new spring leaves moved in the breeze off the lake, their surfaces a bright Kelly green against the weathered wood of the trees. No voices, not even a bird.

  Theresa moved off the small porch, the soles of her black athletic shoes scratching loudly against the driveway, feeling every step in her aching muscles. The shade from the towering pines and oaks dropped the temperature in the yard several degrees and the chill reminded her that summer had not yet arrived.

  She kept going until she rounded the front of the patrol car. Then she saw him.

  The officer lay on the ground, face up, not moving. A pool of blood spread out from under his head.

  She ran to him, took in the shredded forehead and the globs of brain leaking on to the concrete, flowing along with the blood, even before she noticed the open, lifeless eyes and the growing stain in the middle of his shirt. Then she did the only sensible thing under the circumstances – she pulled her phone from her belt and called Cleveland’s police dispatch.

  ‘Police Department. Can you hold?’

  ‘No. This is Theresa MacLean from the M.E.’s office. Your officer is down, he’s been shot, he’s signal 7. Send help to forty-seven Sunrise Drive, it’s off Lake Shore.’ There, that sounded pretty calm. Coherent, even.

  ‘Forty-seven?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Which officer?’

  She had no idea. He had just been another uniform, generic and interchangeable. By twisting her neck she read ‘Davis’ off the silver bar above his badge.

  ‘He’s shot?’ the dispatcher asked, after shouting to someone else to send units to their location.

  ‘Twice. He’s dead.’