Blunt Impact (13 page)

‘All the more reason.’

‘What if Samantha got those bruises earlier in the evening? Picks up the wrong guy, has a tussle, decides she’s a horrible mother and goes home to pick up her kid and end it all. At the last minute Mom can’t do it, and mercifully – or not – lets the kid witness instead of participate. Kid can’t process what’s happening, sees a figure in the dark.’

‘It’s possible,’ Angela conceded. They had seen stranger things.

He turned around, headed toward the south-west corner to make it seem like he had a logical reason not to approach the spot where Samantha Zebrowski went over the edge. ‘Hotels are twenty-four hours.’

She joined him, then passed again – what was it about people who liked flirting with a two-hundred foot plunge? – to gaze at the twenty-five glittering floors of the Marriott Building. The cool night breeze off the lake lifted her hair and the city lights turned her to a silhouette, framing a tight figure that the other cops still couldn’t believe he wasn’t tapping.

He was beginning to have a hard time with that himself.

Angela Sanchez had been his partner for three years and two months. Though she did not talk about herself often he knew everything about her, inevitable after such a long acquaintance. He had met her children on only two occasions but had a good idea of their abilities and general attitudes. He knew where Angela had grown up, that her mother still lived in the same house, that her brother had made a lot of money on a dot.com and then lost it all, and the extraordinarily subtle signs to announce her monthly period. He knew that her nose wrinkled when she laughed hard and that she had finally used up that bottle of Polo for Women that some ex-boyfriend had given her for Christmas four years ago. He had learned all this in the last three years and two months. He had spent the last two years and nine months of that period telling himself that he was not going to fall for a partner.

Not even if she were beautiful, intelligent, kind, unattached and managed to not be annoying in any significant way. In short, the perfect woman. Perfect for anyone except him. Falling for his partner would not only be professionally inadvisable – not when he planned to take the sergeant’s exam the following month – but pathetically cliché and he was not going to do it. Period. His heart might seek but he would not let it find.

Unfortunately, every day it got harder to believe that. Especially at times like this, when her tailored white blouse skimmed over her breasts and down her abdomen and her sleek black hair brushed her shoulder blades as she turned to look at him with that slight smile, the one that made it seem they shared a private joke. And here they were in the dark, with the lights of the city spread before them.

This could have been the night he gave it up. Had they been alone.

‘Are you done here?’ Chris Novosek asked.

The guy had to be exhausted, Frank knew, but it had been a long day for everyone else, as well as a very short one for Samantha Zebrowski. So he shuffled the question off to his cousin. After all, this little nocturnal jaunt had been her idea. ‘Theresa?’

She moved across the interior of the floor, almost invisible in the dark except for the weak beams of a dying flashlight. Unless the killer had carried a lantern along with him, Frank thought, no potential witness would have been able to see Samantha Zebrowski’s struggle for life. Even if the Marriott or the PNC Bank buildings were right next door, and certainly not from well over five hundred feet away. They were wasting their time.

Theresa said, gesturing with the tiny Maglite, ‘I’d been hoping to see a homeless guy who camps here every night, or a group of friends who makes a habit of leaving the Tavern or maybe the Crown Plaza at a late hour. But it’s pretty quiet down here. One question – what’s this big hole in the floor? Elevator shaft?’

‘Yep,’ the project manager answered.

‘Pretty big elevator.’

‘There will be three passenger elevators plus room for the counterweights, and more in the south bank. Elevators are always a pain . . . They take up a lot of space, but the more floors a building has, the more people, so the more elevators. Determining the elevator to floor ratio is one of the hardest parts about planning. Elevators are expensive, so clients always want to keep to the bare minimum and then the second the place is finished the tenants will already be crying about how the elevators take forever and aren’t big enough.’

‘There’s no one perfect balance,’ Theresa muttered.

‘That’s why no two buildings are exactly the same,’ Novosek said. ‘We keep searching for the perfect design. Haven’t found it yet.’

‘Still, I don’t think these tenants will complain about much.’

‘The staff will.’

‘What about the elevator we rode up on? Will that be a glass one?’

‘The zip lift?’ Novosek chuckled to himself as if that were the funniest thing he’d heard in a month. ‘No, that’s just for construction. It will be disassembled once all the floors are enclosed.’

Theresa went to join Angela at the western edge of the floor, encouraging Frank’s partner to move to the opening.

‘Hey!’ Frank couldn’t help calling out. ‘At least hang on to the girder.’

‘Beam,’ Novosek corrected.

‘What?’

‘The vertical stacks are beams, the horizontal ones are girders.’

Theresa turned from the western view. ‘And ironworkers connect the two?’

‘They weld the beams together and the girders to the beams, yes.’

‘No rivets?’

‘Rivets haven’t been used since before I was born.’

‘And that’s what Jack does?’

She was keeping him busy, Frank realized, keeping the project manager occupied so that he and Angela could look around, do their jobs. Investigate. Problem was, even as he drew as close as he dared to Angela, he still couldn’t see anything to investigate except the stack of steel beams on the floor behind them, a lone man talking on a cell phone as he meandered up Rockwell, and the fact that Chris Novosek knew an awful lot of prison lingo for a guy who was only building one. He also seemed to have no problem moving around the site in the pitch dark.

‘Crazy Jack? Yeah.’

‘He’s crazy?’

‘Ironworkers are all crazy. Who else is going to walk along an I-beam four hundred feet above the ground? They have a fall harness, but let me tell you something – they’d do it even without a harness. Most of them are descendants of guys who did, back before OSHA. Especially Jack.’

‘Why especially Jack?’

‘His father died doing exactly that – working without a harness. Fell twenty-eight floors.’

‘Wow,’ was all Theresa could come up with, apparently. ‘And he went into the same line of work?’

‘He’s not the only one here who’s lost someone to the job. Maybe we’re all crazy.’

Frank watched the guy on Rockwell reach the security fence along the sidewalk and disappear from view, hoping Theresa had run down, but no such luck. ‘What holds up the floors?’

‘A cage of rebar and metal mesh spans the girders. That’s filled with reinforced concrete.’

‘So the beams hold up the building and the girders hold up the floors. What about the walls?’

Novosek moved to the edge with the women, of course, chatting as if they were one foot off the ground instead of hundreds. ‘The cladding? Walls just close in the interior. They aren’t particularly important to the structure, which is why you have walls of glass if you want. It doesn’t make the building any less sturdy.’

Theresa said, ‘I see the floor has been edged and grooved. So Samantha would have been done working on this floor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you think of any reason for her to come to this floor in particular?’

He shook his head, gaze turned toward the Terminal Tower and its well-lit peak. ‘Not a one.’

‘What’s that sound?’ she asked.

All four people stopped and listened to a soft padding sound that drifted up from below. Frank checked Rockwell again but cell phone guy had not reappeared at the other end of the site. Now he heard a slight clink as well.

Novosek shrugged. ‘The wrappings on three or four, probably. We’ve started enclosing the lower floors so that the interior guys can start work, get going with the plumbing, heating ducts, metal bars on the holding cells.’

‘But you’re not finished going up yet, are you?’

‘Nope. We have five more floors to add. Be forty-one altogether when it’s done. Why we couldn’t stop at forty and have a nice even number, don’t ask me. Forty-one.’ This seemed to irritate him almost as much as Samantha Zebrowski’s death, but then it
had
been a long day. ‘Once the exterior walls go up they’re wrapped in aluminum paper, and sometimes the wind catches it and rips it out. Then drywallers hang plastic to keep the dust out of everyone else’s spaces while they sand. Ducts have chains and other braces on them and the wind can catch them too. Wind gets to be a bigger problem the higher you go, especially if you’re working with anything more lightweight than a hammer. One unexpected gust and your pail or even your hard hat can go over the edge and bean some passer-by, and then the whole project gets sued . . . Anyway, don’t let little noises scare you. New buildings can make as much noise as old buildings.’

All the same, Frank thought, and tried to listen beyond their voices as his cousin went on.

‘But you haven’t enclosed the first two floors, just the next three?’

‘Lot more steel has to go in there yet, for the sally port and all. Prisoner transport is apparently the most vulnerable area. And the third floor is all medical – even a drug testing lab – and four will be the cafeteria, so there will be ovens, distilled water lines, garbage disposals, counters with outlets out the wazoo, fume hoods. Those two floors will take more work than the rest of the building put together, so we close them in ay-sap.’

Theresa quieted, finally run out of questions.

Frank said, ‘I’m going down. There was a guy on the street out there who seems to have disappeared.’ He even forced himself back on to that hellish moving platform that would plummet them to the ground.

His cousin hung on to the project manager again.

Angela did not hang on to him.

G
host did not leave the house that night. Her grandmother pleaded with her, bursting into tears – which Nana rarely did, outside something drastic like her daughter dying – and making Ghost feel guilty for thinking about it since Nana couldn’t come upstairs to stop her or even check on her. So she promised, pinkie swear, and she couldn’t go back on that.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t put the time to good use.

She went into her mother’s bedroom, at first held up at the doorway by a wave of grief and guilt. She shouldn’t be poking through her mother’s things, not that her mother had ever minded Ghost coming into her room. When she was a little kid she used to pull her mother’s clothes off the hangers to play dress-up, sure that she would look exactly like the beautiful woman one day. Her mother would patiently drag her vanity chair into the closet so that Ghost could hang all the items back up again, waiting for her daughter to decide the work wasn’t worth the fun. It took more than a couple of sessions.

Too old for that now, and her pale skin, boring brown hair and shapeless body didn’t resemble her mother in any way. She must take after her father. She checked his picture on the mirror again, the stiff smile, blond hair sticking straight up in the style of the time, a loud shirt threatening to come untucked from dress slacks that looked too big. The beginnings of a dimple in one cheek. He shouldn’t be too hard to recognize if she saw him. When she saw him.

She also needed to find the shadow man.

Her father could help her. He’s the only person who could, who would – he must have loved her mother once. She really needed him right now, which was why it would be the perfect time for him to reappear.

But of course he might really be dead like Nana said and like Mom usually said. Then she might really be on her own, except for Nana and that nice lady Theresa. Theresa was also looking for the shadow man and she had all those microscopes and technology and computers and stuff so she would be able to do it. Ghost knew that from watching TV, when she could coax the remote away from Nana and her reality shows.

So she had better stick close to Theresa. Theresa would find the shadow man and tell the cops and they would come and arrest him and tie him up and put him in a room with bars, where he would never ever get out. Maybe they’d even shoot him. That would be all right with Ghost.

But just in case, she should look for clues on her own, too. So she did a slow pirouette in her mother’s bedroom to see what she could see.

The police had brought back her car and handed Nana a brown paper bag with her mother’s purse and keys and other things from the car that they had examined. Nana hadn’t even looked inside, just asked Ghost to take it upstairs. Now she dumped it out on the floor. Keys – keys. No clue there. A box of cigarettes which had some black powdery stuff all over it. It came off on Ghost’s fingers and she wiped them on her shirt. Some papers with the name of the car and the insurance company and other boring stuff like that. Ghost turned to the purse. Her mother had bought it at Payless and loved the big slouchy thing even though the vinyl had worn off in spots. Inside she found two more boxes of cigarettes, two ropes of plastic beads (red and yellow), pieces of gum and a vial of hand sanitizer, four different lip glosses and one ChapStick, two bottles of perfume and one powder compact as well as mascara and a slowly leaking bottle of foundation, which meant Ghost had to wipe her fingers on her shirt again. Her mother’s wallet, which held twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents, her driver’s license, other plastic cards and a bunch of worn business cards. Some were restaurants, or grilles, or had people’s names on them. These were also covered in the black powdery stuff. None sounded familiar to Ghost. She put aside the money to give to Nana and separated out all the restaurant and bar cards. She made a third pile with the lip glosses, which she might want to use some day. Waste not, want not, Nana always said.