Blunt Impact (17 page)

Theresa watched Chris Novosek as he gazed back. If his expression contained the ability to either comfort or threaten, she didn’t see it.

‘No,’ Todd said. Then he noticed Kobelski, standing to the side. His eyes grew even wider and what tiny bit of blood remained in his face evanesced.

‘Any idea who might have wanted to kill him?’ Frank asked. ‘Todd?’

‘No,’ Todd said. Except he continued to say it: ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ as he turned and broke at a fast walk for the exit. Three of the five other people called his name, to no avail.

‘Follow him,’ Frank said to the uniformed officer. ‘Don’t stop him, but I want to see what he does.’

‘But the scene—’ The officer made a circling motion with his hand that managed to state his concerns in one-half second: he was the contamination officer, responsible for admitting or restricting human beings from the crime scene in order to preserve its integrity, and how was he supposed to do that when he was following Todd Grisham to the nearest receptacle in which to upchuck or the bus station or his home in one of Cleveland’s many beautiful suburbs or God knows where?

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Frank snapped. ‘Just go. Consider him a suicide risk.’

The cop hustled.

‘
Suicide
?’ Novosek asked, with a
what else could happen?
tone to his voice.

‘It’s as good a reason as any to keep an eye on him,’ Angela explained. ‘And his reaction seemed a bit extreme.’

‘His friend is laying there with spikes through him! Isn’t
that
a bit extreme?’ The man turned away, finally, as if suddenly more disgusted by the investigators than the sight of the body. He walked twenty feet, slumped to a seat on a stack of cardboard boxes and put his face in his hands.

Kobelski didn’t move. He didn’t seem to want to miss even a second of taking in Kyle Cielac’s corpse, not a bolt of the camera flash, not a whiff of the uncertain smell of fresh death when the wind changed directions, not a glimmer of sunlight reflecting off the pool of blood. Theresa would get Frank to kick him out, state ID or no state ID. She might be accustomed to working with an audience, but he had begun to get on her nerves.

‘To everyone except ghouls like us,’ Frank muttered.

‘Both single, both denied even the temptation to ask Samantha Zebrowski out on a date,’ Theresa observed. ‘You think they’re gay?’

‘I think we’d better find out,’ he said.

‘Either way, that kid didn’t kill him. Or else he should be on a red carpet somewhere accepting an award.’

‘Agreed. But if they’re more than just fellow concrete finishers, then he might know what his buddy was doing here last night.’

Theresa nodded. ‘OK, two things. I don’t think he fell from twenty-three like Sam Zebrowski did.’

Angela raised an eyebrow. Frank said, ‘And you’re basing that on—?’

‘She hit hard enough to crack the slab. Kyle, on the other hand, doesn’t even reach the foundation. The bars don’t penetrate the back side of his skull or rib cage, just the more fleshy areas in the arm, stomach and thigh. If I could recall everything I learned in college I could probably calculate it out, but Physics 102 was a long time ago. I just don’t think he fell quite as far and that’s about as scientific as I can be about it. I’m sure we could find an accident reconstructionist somewhere who could help us.’

‘And the second thing?’

‘What cuts through rebar?’

T
he answer turned out to be a short Sawzall-type instrument, as grimy as a used hard hat but as intimidating as a bone saw. They ran three mesh straps around the body and suspended those from a small winch provided by the project manager, and then suited up a game body snatcher in a leather apron, heavy gloves and eye protection. He got a crash course in how to safely cut through the small iron bars without losing a finger and went to work. Novosek could have done it in a quarter of the time, but he resided firmly in the center of their suspect pool and could not be allowed that close to the body. If it were even possible – the man kept coming close to the pit, taking one glance at the manhandled corpse before turning and stalking a few feet away, then feeling somehow sheepish or weak or disloyal and turning back. He’d take a few steps, his face would flush an unbecoming shade of green, and he’d whirl
again. Theresa gave up watching him and instead kept the body snatcher’s electrical cord from snagging on the rebar.

Frank had finally gotten rid of Kobelski – Theresa didn’t know how but they’d had a short and apparently bitter conversation before Kobelski stalked off, throwing, ‘I won’t forget this!’ over his shoulder. Frank gave her a wink, magnificently unconcerned about the retributions of a state concrete inspector.

The fact that Kyle Cielac’s body had been so efficiently drained of its lifeblood made the job much less messy . . . which was not to say exactly un-messy. Finally the last pinion had been freed and the winch lifted the skewered corpse up and over to the gurney. They left the sawed-off pieces in him, of course, so that the pathologist doing the autopsy could see exactly what had occurred. The body snatcher heaved the tool up to the ground level floor and then heaved himself up as well, his feet scrambling for purchase. Theresa took a step toward him to help, stubbed her toe on one of the sticks and began to fall. Rebar spikes rose up toward her torso, her arms, her eyes—

‘
Tess
!’ she heard Frank shout.

She grabbed the two heading for her neck, all her weight suddenly depending on the grip she could maintain on two half-inch thick iron poles, one of which was slick with Kyle Cielac’s blood. The latex glove granted some traction and she managed to keep from impaling herself. Heart pounding hard enough to cause a roaring in her ears, she straightened. ‘That would have hurt.’

‘Get out of there,’ Angela demanded. ‘Here, I’ll give you a hand up.’

‘Wait.’ Theresa inched – very carefully – through the minefield of rebar spikes, crouching where she had enough room. The pool of Kyle Cielac’s accumulated blood had partially dried along the edges, hard and cracked like a dry river bed in places while still smooth and glossy red in the center. She stuck her fingers into this pool, methodically patting every inch of it. Chris Novosek watched her with an expression that said that even with the body gone he might still be sick at any moment, and Frank said, ‘Eww,’ about every fourth pat.

‘You’re not helping,’ she told him.

In the small lake of blood she found four pieces of gravel, five screws, and a crumpled up foil gum wrapper with a piece of chewed gum inside. That she kept. The coating of blood might make it problematic to impossible for DNA analysis, but tooth-marks could be interesting as well. She also kept a crumpled Pepsi can and two Styrofoam cups with dried up coffee on the inside and a splash of blood on the outside. One had a distinct mouth print in deep coral colored lipstick. Theresa found that interesting.

Directly under where Kyle Cielac’s heart had been, she touched a flat square of plastic. She picked it up and let the blood drain off it.

‘Probably his ID card,’ Novosek said.

It had been in such a thick part of the puddle that the blood coating it had not dried, only clotted to a gel-like consistency that slid off easily enough, leaving a slick but sufficiently transparent coating behind. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘It’s yours.’

‘I lost it yesterday,’ Novosek told Frank and Angela. ‘Spent part of the afternoon looking for it.’

Frank had brought him to the Justice Center, only two blocks but a world away from his own environment. Away from the jackhammers and the ironworkers, it gave him a tiny taste of what jail might be like, in the form of an interrogation room. The blank walls, the suspicious stares, the knowledge that you are cut off from everyone you know and we really might be able to do anything we want to you without interference – at least, any interference that would arrive in time to help. We
have
you, man. What do you think of that? ‘You lost your ID card. Really. Because, as you may recall, we spent a lot of time together yesterday, and I distinctly remember it dangling from your chest pocket. Don’t you?’ he asked his partner.

‘Distinctly.’ Angela sat next to him at the metal table, hands folded over a Manila file in front of her. ‘When did you lose it, Mr Novosek?’

‘If I knew that I probably wouldn’t have lost it. All I can tell you is that at some point I looked down and it wasn’t there, and I didn’t have time to retrace my steps. I had too many other things to deal with.’

Frank said, ‘Oh, we know. We were there, picking the pieces of Samantha Zebrowski up off a concrete slab.’

Novosek blanched, but only by a shade or two. Either he was getting used to the memory or self-preservation now crowded out any feelings of regret.

A loud noise blasted in the hallway outside, stopped, and blasted again; probably a nail gun or sander. The county had finally decided to spend a few bucks on fixing the holes in the walls and getting some new paint and the department had been torn up for months. Frank had gotten used to skirting the equipment but now it annoyed him; he didn’t want the bustle to make Novosek feel at home.

So he said: ‘You don’t like having to let girls do a man’s job, do you?’

‘Oh,
please
.’

‘Don’t like when these uppity females throw equal rights in your face, just so they can take a job away from a guy who really needs it?’

‘That’s completely untrue.’ Novosek said this calmly but with a clipped manner that belied the anger lurking within him. ‘I have always treated the women who work for me exactly like the men. I don’t care who it is, what they’ve got in their pants, what color their skin is, what church they go to. If they do their work right, they’re OK by me.’

‘That’s very nice,’ Angela said. ‘That’s exactly what you should say. Unfortunately that’s not exactly what you do, because three times women have sued you for failing to prevent a hostile work environment. One said –’ Angela opened the Manila file and made them wait while she located a particular phrase – ‘that she was groped and manhandled by three co-workers while on your job.’

‘That’s true.’

The detectives blinked. ‘True?’

‘Yes. She was, and I fired the guys. Two were just jerks, but one had a record that Personnel didn’t catch, so she’s suing everyone from the building owner on down. Just because I got caught in that net doesn’t mean it was my fault. I put a stop to it as soon as she told me. I never harassed Sam and I would have taken steps if she had told me one of my guys had.’

‘What about the other two cases? One said—’

‘I know what they said,’ he interrupted, his face growing red. ‘You know how many women I’ve had work for me over the years? The last time I had to go to court I looked it up. Thirty-five. Thirty-three of them were good workers who did a good job, reliable, pretty tough. Two were lazy bitches who saw an opportunity to cash in. In both cases they worked a week or two and next thing I know I get a subpoena. They never made a complaint to me or to the guys they worked with. Their stories are invented out of whole cloth but you know what? You can’t find a judge who will simply say, you’re making this up. Because it sounds so
believable
, doesn’t it? Women in a man’s environment, the men will get hostile. Everyone knows construction workers are a bunch of pigs anyway. So no matter how many times they
don’t
prove their case, it keeps getting shuffled to another court. And I keep getting subpoenas.’

He sounded pretty convincing, Frank had to admit as plumes of powdered plaster wafted under the door. And it could be the gospel truth. Unfortunately his innocence in sexual harassment cases said absolutely nothing about his innocence of murder. ‘Speaking of subpoenas . . . our excellent secondary team canvassed your employees yesterday. You probably saw them. They spoke to each and every person who works at your job site.’

‘I hope you cops will be so talkative when the county exec asks me why the new jail is behind schedule. He takes the completion date as gospel. I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed Sam himself just so he could take back five thousand dollars a day from what he owes me.’

‘That’s not funny,’ Angela pointed out.

‘No,’ he said, his voice as firm as the beams in his building. ‘It isn’t.’

‘They interviewed each person, at their homes if need be –’ Frank went on as if the other two hadn’t spoken – ‘except for three. Guys named Johnson, Rodriguez, and Stears. One is an ironworker, one a pipefitter, one an electrician.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Novosek said.

‘They couldn’t find them. Johnson, Rodriguez and Stears did not have a correct address, phone, or social security number.’

‘Hmmph,’ was Novosek’s only comment.

‘Do you have any explanation for that?’

‘Only that I am building a building, not a security detail for the President. Guys show up and turn a wrench, that’s all I know. I can’t do a background investigation of each one, which is how I got that sexual predator on my crew. I give them a form and they fill it out. I’m not going to follow them home to verify their address.’

A long protest for some missing HR information. ‘Sam and Kyle both worked in cement.’

Chris Novosek seemed to examine this statement from all angles before agreeing. ‘Concrete, yeah.’

‘Weird that both dead people at your site worked at the same job, isn’t it?’

‘It’s weird that they’re dead at all.’

‘How many concrete people do you have?’

‘Seven, including Sam, Kyle and Todd. But they’re the only finishers.’

‘Can you think of any reason Sam would have had asbestos and silica on her clothing when she died?’

‘
Huh
? No. Well, silica, yes – that’s used as a strengthener in the cement, so that’s around, at least. But there’s no asbestos at my site. It’s not used in anything any more – obviously.’

‘Could it have been left over from the previous building?’ Angela asked softly, in what Frank thought of as her sweet voice.

Novosek didn’t think at all about that one. ‘I don’t see how. Most of it was removed before demolition. It’s impossible to get it all out, yes, but the entire building was razed and carted away. I can’t see how there could be enough around for Sam to have gotten it on her clothes.’ A glimmer of faint hope came into his eyes. ‘She must have been somewhere else first. She was somewhere else that night.’