Blunt Impact (12 page)

But when she walked in to her house she went upstairs without so much as a
hello
to her grandmother. Mrs Zebrowski seemed beyond caring about minor points of courtesy, however. ‘I’m just glad you called, I was nearly beside myself. I’d given up worrying about her, she does it so much – shouldn’t have done that. It’s got to stop. Now with Sam gone, I just can’t take it.’

Theresa handed the woman a small brown envelope with Samantha’s cell phone, had her sign a receipt, and then sat down at the table with its vinyl tablecloth and napkin holder and box of tissues within Mrs Zebrowski’s reach. The kitchen smelled of stuffed cabbage and grief. Neighbors must have stopped by – five Tupperware containers of various sizes sat on the counter and no doubt there were more in the refrigerator. It was at once clichéd and exactly what Theresa loved about human beings: their drive to nurture however possible. No one starved while in mourning. ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’

The woman snorted a laugh. ‘Thank you, dear, but I’ve practically drunk five pots already. And eaten four muffins and who knows how many cookies. Help yourself.’

‘No, thank you. I just – I’m not trying to pry, Mrs Zebrowski, but what did happen to Ghost’s father? Is he deceased?’

The woman leaned one elbow on the table and said without rancor, ‘I don’t have any idea.’

‘She showed me his picture, told me he was a soldier and killed in a training exercise, but—’

‘That wasn’t her father.’

Theresa waited.

The old woman rubbed her forehead with one hand, glanced toward the staircase, and then leaned forward. ‘I don’t have any idea who Ghost’s father is. Samantha told Ghost that boy in the picture was her father, except that picture was taken when Samantha was sixteen. The boy, Nathan,
did
go and join the army and
did
get killed, but that happened at least a full year before Ghost came along. Sam loved that kid, too – Nathan. I think losing him, after losing her father –’ now the woman rubbed both temples – ‘is why my girl turned so wild. Little after eighteen she got pregnant and wouldn’t tell me a single thing about who did it. I guess she was ashamed of herself. Maybe ashamed of him, I don’t know. Or maybe she thought I’d go after him, make her get married. And he must have been all right with getting off scot free because no man ever came around here looking to help out, that’s for sure.’

‘So she let Ghost think that Nathan was her father.’

‘He must have made a much prettier story than the real guy. She put his name on the birth certificate even though the dates would make it impossible if Ghost ever really looked it up. And Sam really loved him. She wanted Ghost to think she entered the world through love.’

‘I can understand that.’ Though eleven years of child support would have been of assistance. Especially now, without Sam’s income . . . But now it couldn’t be helped. The only person who had known the man’s identity had died.

Ghost was chasing a ghost.

Theresa handed the woman a piece of paper. ‘This is my card. I’ve put my cell phone number on it, too. Call me if there’s anything I can do. And please tell Ghost I said good night.’

She slipped out of the house without further ado. She couldn’t possibly tell the little girl where she was headed.

Kyle Cielac could probably commit any crime he wished without leaving evidence; he had no fingerprints. The pads of his digits were worn and pitted with only a patch of ridge detail here or there. When fingerprinted – because the construction company had done that almost at the start, wanting to be sure who they were working with – the inked ovals were pockmarked with white voids. Cement work did that. Sam had rubbed in hand lotion day and night and it hadn’t helped. She hadn’t had any fingerprints, either.

Good thing they found her while we could still recognize her face, Kyle thought, and his stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch.

‘You OK there, pard?’ the cop asked him.

‘Fine.’

The cop placed his Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table’s gleaming wood surface. They always met here, at his temporary office in city hall, but always after hours when the coffee had grown stale enough to grow legs and walk around by itself. ‘So you had some trouble at your site today?’

‘You could call it that,’ Kyle said.

‘She’s dead,’ Todd said. He had a cup in front of him as well, but hadn’t touched it. ‘Dead. They said she fell twenty-three floors.’

‘Smush,’ the cop said, and Kyle gritted his teeth.

‘He killed her. She figured out how he’s doing it and he killed her.’

‘Todd, Kobelski is a crook. Novosek is a crook. They are stealing money by using substandard concrete from Decker and Stroud in the county’s new jail and pocketing the difference between the cheap materials and the wad that the county is spending on this new and stunning facet of the criminal justice system. Thieves. They don’t kill people.’

The lawyer said nothing. He often didn’t. He didn’t even seem to be listening.

‘Do you know how much this project is going to cost?’ Todd demanded of the cop.

‘Eighty-five million, five hundred and thirty thousand. Give or take some odd change.’

‘Of that price, one quarter of it is the concrete. One-quarter – over twenty-one million. One quarter of
that
is the equipment and personnel – the trucks, the troughs, my paycheck. The other three-quarters is the materials.’

‘Yes.’ The cop rubbed his eyes, not even pretending to look interested. He wasn’t really a cop but an agent for the State of Ohio’s Congressional Task Force on public corruption; Kyle thought of him as a cop because he had the good one/bad one pattern down. Problem was he fulfilled both roles himself, his temper and impatience zinging him so quickly from patronizing empathy to whip-snapping overlord that Kyle had stopped trying to keep up.

‘If you could shave ten percent off the cost of the raw materials, you could pocket over one point six
million
dollars.’

‘Yes.’

‘So if that’s not worth killing for,’ Todd said, ‘what is?’

A momentary silence descended upon their little group.

Kyle sipped. ‘He’s got a point.’

The cop, state investigator John Finney, said: ‘Fine. So help me catch him. How is he faking the slump test?’

‘What’s that again?’ the lawyer asked.

He would know if he hadn’t daydreamed through the first half-hour, Kyle thought; wonder what’s got him so distracted? Maybe he’s not as sure as Finney about the non-lethal tendencies of career thieves. ‘Every truckful of concrete is tested for consistency – both the consistency of the mixture and how wet it is, so that it is consistent between loads. A hollow funnel is filled with a sample from the truck and then overturned on a flat surface.’

‘You make a sandcastle and then dump it out?’

No one had any idea how complicated, how delicately balanced, and how vitally important that sandcastle was to keeping a building upright instead of collapsing inward, crushing every single occupant in a nightmare of rock and twisted steel – ‘Yes. The sample should slip more or less depending on what you want to do with it and what kind of plasticizers are used. If it’s too thin, it won’t be strong enough. If it’s too thick, it might leave gaps and cavities that will also reduce its strength. The inspector—’

‘Kobelski,’ the cop interjected, ‘who is supposed to be working for the state but is actually working for himself. Or rather splitting his take with the supplier, who has to be in on it.’

‘—measures how much the concrete stack falls in height, then checks it against the ASTM charts to make sure it’s within the acceptable range.’

‘Too little slump, the finished floors will have cavities, too much, they’ll be weak. Got it,’ the lawyer said. ‘And you see him do this and it’s within the ranges. So your concrete is right but it’s still wrong. How?’

‘That’s the question.’

‘No, how do you know?’

‘I’ve been spreading concrete since I was seventeen,’ Todd told him.

The lawyer waited. Then: ‘That’s it? You know it’s bad because you have a
feeling
?’

‘No, because I work with it, touch it, spread it, see how it sticks to the trowel or doesn’t. It’s too thin, and I don’t care what the slump test says. That building is going to look great, and then it’s going to start to crack deep inside the columns and the floors where no one will see it, and then, in about five or ten years, it’s going to come down.’

Finney said, ‘We have to be able to prove that. Otherwise this is all academic. Can we prove Novosek? Would he have to know the concrete is bad for this to work? He’s not a concrete guy.’

Todd said, ‘He has to. The man built the Peterson building, for chri— And he’s at Kobelski’s elbow at every test. He comes up with stuff to keep us busy. No way he doesn’t know.’

Kyle drained the lukewarm cup. ‘I’m not so sure. He’s a steel guy, barely knows slag from fly ash.’

‘I believe you, Todd,’ the cop said, shifting back to ‘good’ mode. ‘That’s why we need you to stay there and find our proof. Otherwise we’ll have a pile of rock and twisted steel and how many dead corrections officers.’

‘And inmates,’ Kyle said.

‘What?’

‘All the inmates. They’d be killed, too, if the building collapsed. But I expect you don’t care much about them, do you?’

‘No,’ Finney said. ‘Not at all. You can, if you want; feel free to worry about those poor misguided children of Jesus all you like, and help us catch the son-of-a-bitch who’s going to get them killed. Don’t turn and run because some chick fell off a building.’

‘Samantha.’

The cop didn’t even bother to respond.

‘Her name was Samantha.’ Kyle felt the unbecoming flush start at his neck and work its way up until his scalp tingled. ‘She first picked up a trowel on her seventh birthday. She lived with her mom and her daughter and her dad died of cancer before she got out of grade school. She worked hard and hated coffee and complained about the price of good shampoo. She was a
person
.’

‘Were you doing her?’ was all the cop wanted to know.

The tingle became a burning and for a moment Kyle considered leaping over the table and beating the shit out of the guy. Considered, decided not to bother. Yes, he would have gladly ‘done’ Samantha Zebrowski once she learned to seek more than to pick up and fling away guys who were basically a walking pedestal for their penis. Once he knew her well enough to get over her giddiness at working in a thoroughly male milieu. Once he was sure he actually wanted to do
her
, the sentient being, and not just the slim hips and that hair that hung to the middle of her back and seemed to have a life of its own, because when a woman had those attributes it got real hard to sort out your own feelings. ‘No.’

‘Not yet,’ Todd clarified with that weird insight he could sometimes render. ‘Point is, she’s dead, and there’s no way it was an accident.’

‘Point is,’ the cop said, ‘you bail out now, Kobelski might get spooked and change his ways. Then he pockets his money and goes on to sabotage some other building, and you lose three months of work on this guy. I lose three
years
, but don’t let that bother you.’

‘Did this girl know about the concrete?’ the lawyer asked. ‘You said she picked up a trowel at seven. Did she notice the consistency?’

‘She complained about it,’ Kyle said. ‘She’d agree with Todd when he first started talking about it. But nothing more, so I don’t think she knew. Sam was good at finishing and edging, not mixing.’ And she spent too much time focused on those walking pedestals instead of her job.

‘So you have no reason to think her death had anything to do with Novosek and Kobelski.’ Todd opened his mouth to protest but the lawyer pressed on: ‘There could be a thousand other little intrigues going on at that job site, or she simply drank too much and decided to go look at the city lights. Don’t wander around the twenty-third floor in the pitch dark and you will be perfectly safe. Help us put this guy behind bars and a lot of other people will be safe as well.’

Kyle eyed him. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I am,’ Ian Bauer said.

F
rank Patrick asked himself, not for the first time, just what the hell he thought he was doing. He hadn’t wanted to be up high in this open death-trap of a structure in the broad daylight. He sure didn’t want to be there in the pitch dark.

‘It
is
pretty,’ his partner chose that moment to say. As Theresa had, Angela Sanchez stood right at the edge with nothing to steady her but one hand on a beam, as if that would keep her from falling over if she, for some reason, lost her balance. Or someone pushed her.

‘Gorgeous.’ Frank tried but failed to keep the tension out of his voice, and waited for his heartbeat to return to normal. This time he had not insisted on climbing the twenty-three floors, even in the cooler night-time temperature, and consented to get on to the zip lift. He had thought that somehow the wall-less elevator would not be so bad at night, that maybe in the dim lighting he could pretend it was a glass one and that there wasn’t really nothing at all but a flimsy cable railing between himself and hundreds of feet of empty air. He had thought wrong. ‘What do you think? Any potential witnesses?’

‘There’s more lighted windows than I would have expected.’ Angela waved toward Eaton Center and the PNC Bank building – the idiot, she should keep both hands on that concrete column. ‘But I don’t see much activity. Lights might be kept on for security. This floor would be hidden to anyone on the ground until Sam got right up to the edge. Nothing was happening at the Convention Center last night. And this could have happened in the wee hours, one, two – when even the most dedicated office worker had probably gone home. No witness except our kid. What do you think of her statement?’

‘She says it was a man in the dark. She can’t describe his height, weight, clothing, or hair color. All were simply described as “dark”. So even if she saw a man, it doesn’t help us much.’

‘“Even if”? You still doubt her?’

‘I still have a hard time believing this kid makes a habit of roaming the city at night when her mother and grandmother have her on a pretty short leash.’