Blunt Impact (22 page)

‘GHOST!’

At least she had to slow up for two cars blocking the tiny alley that Theresa had never known was there, but once she’d darted around the compact vehicles the kid sped out on to Short Vincent. It might have an odd name but it was a real road with real cars, and Theresa almost shut her eyes as she saw a blue metallic object hurtle toward Ghost.

But one blare of the horn later, the car had passed and the kid still stood there, shocked into a pause. By the time she jumped up on to the opposite sidewalk Theresa had nearly reached her. Two more feet and she could feel the heat from the child’s body with her outstretched hand.

It took discipline not to grab her by the hair, but she summoned one more burst of speed from her tired legs and grabbed her T-shirt. ‘Ghost! Stop!’

The girl struggled at first, clutching at Theresa’s hands, but finally halted, breathing too hard for any words. Theresa wasn’t ready to chat herself, and simply guided the child to the landscaped area behind the Huntington Building. There they collapsed on a low brick wall under a tree just as a streak of heat lightning lit the sky. She loosened her grip on the kid’s T-shirt and took a furtive look around. Two women having a smoke on Huntington’s patio were watching them with eagle eyes, waiting for a sign to intervene. A man pulled open the glass doors and went inside. People waiting at the light crossed East Ninth. Ian had not appeared. Provided no more dramatics ensued, they would not be disturbed.

‘Why did you run from me?’ Theresa panted.

‘Not you,’ Ghost said, her breathing already returned to normal. The kid was in decent shape, all right. ‘Him.’

‘Ian? Why?’

Maddeningly, the little girl only shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He scared me.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yeah.’

Theresa wiped sweat from her forehead.

‘And,’ Ghost added, ‘I was afraid you’d make me go home again. I was trying to investigate.’

Anger propelled Theresa to one knee in front of the kid, holding both of the thin shoulders in her hands. ‘Why did you leave your house without telling your grandmother? You scared her half to death, Ghost. You scared
me
.’

Again, this seemed to genuinely surprise her. ‘I thought she’d think I went to school.’

‘
School
. Honey – your mother just died yesterday. No one expects you to go to school.’

Ghost nodded judiciously. ‘I wasn’t really going to go, anyway.’

‘You cannot leave your house without telling anyone. Do you understand that?
Never
. Especially now.’ Stress took her voice into the upper octaves, reminding her that she really shouldn’t be berating a recently bereaved child and that she should hide her anxiety that Ghost herself might be in danger. The kid was traumatized enough without adding in fear for her own safety. Though fear for her own safety might be exactly what she needed. ‘And you can’t be walking around going into bars—’

‘Why not? Why can’t I?’ Now Ghost’s voice rose. ‘She was
my
mother!’

‘I understand that, and I understand that you want to do something. But it’s our job to find out what happened to her, not yours.’ Theresa cringed as the words came out in all their lameness. ‘I—’

‘Did you know about her phone calls? Did you look at her phone?’

‘Yes. She called the library, city hall, and her doctor’s office to make an appointment for her annual physical. We’ve identified all her incoming and outgoing phone calls during the past month except for two numbers. Frank is tracking them down right now.’

That she had that information did not mollify the girl. ‘The bartender said she had been in there.’

‘Good. Let’s go see what else he can tell us, and then I’ll drive you home.’

‘No! I don’t want to go home! Why are you always trying to get rid of me?’ the girl shouted. Theresa had hoped she’d go for the idea of talking to the bartender, but Ghost was in full-blown meltdown, so agitated that she began to walk in circles. ‘I can come here if I want to.’

‘It isn’t really safe to—’

‘
I have to!
’

Theresa sat down on the low brick wall, modulated her voice, did nothing sudden or threatening and hoped it would calm the child. In her softest voice she asked, ‘Why, Ghost?’

‘I have to find him!’

‘The shadow man?’

In strangled tones, she spit out: ‘No, not him – my dad. I have to find
my dad
!’

Then Theresa stood, still moving slowly, and put her arms around the girl as she burst into hopeless sobbing, spasms racking the tiny body. Theresa rubbed her back, feeling every bone, smoothed her hair and let her cry it out.

Ghost didn’t roam the streets looking for her mother. She knew where her mother was. Operating on a single cryptic comment by a hard-drinking Sam about ‘losing him downtown’, Ghost went out at night looking for her father.

Theresa didn’t even consider telling the girl that she was right about her mother and grandmother lying to her but not in the way she thought, that the man she thought was her dad couldn’t have been. That was not her secret to reveal, and she couldn’t see what good it would do anyone if she did.

Then, as the tears began to slow and the breath returned, she set the girl back down and wiped her cheeks with her bare hands, not having a handkerchief or tissues or anything other than her car keys. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Theresa never had a handkerchief when she needed one.

Ghost slumped, saying nothing. After a moment she pulled the second photo out of her pocket, the one of her mother and a boy at the school dance, and stared at it.

‘Ghost,’ Theresa said, ‘I know it isn’t the same, but when I was just a little older than you, my father died.’

The girl looked up at her, listening with caution, extending the benefit of the doubt only part way.

Theresa told how she had come home from school with nothing more on her mind than an algebra test and found her mother sobbing as if her heart had been shredded, as indeed it had. He had suffered a brain aneurysm while at work at the steel plant. There had been no period of emergency, no need for her mother to speed to the hospital, too late to do anything but send his supervisor to the house to tell her in person. The next couple of days had passed in a fog interrupted only by moments of piercing agony that radiated throughout her body until Theresa thought she would die herself.

Funny how sharing pain seems to lessen it, and yet it always works. The girl stopped crying, contemplating her photo. ‘Who took care of you then?’

‘My mother. And my Grandpa Joe. He was a police officer. Mom says that’s why Frank and I both wound up doing this for a living, trying to take after Grandpa Joe.’ Theresa smiled and rubbed the girl’s back again. ‘He tried to help me get through the months and years, but it was hard. That’s why I know it’s very hard for you. Sometimes the hardest thing of all was to
let
him help me. But that’s what you need to do here, is let us help you find out what happened to your mother.’

Ghost looked up at her, calmer, a glint of determination back in her eye. ‘And when you do, will you tell me?’

‘Yes.’ Any other answer would not be acceptable, and they both knew it. ‘But I’ll tell you something else that helped me – I started trying to do what my dad would have wanted me to do. You need to do what your mother would have wanted you to, and she would have wanted you to be safe. She didn’t want you going places by yourself, did she?’

‘No.’

‘She would want you to be considerate of your grandmother, wouldn’t she?’

Guilty sigh. ‘Yes.’

‘OK, then. Let’s get back before it starts to rain.’ She stood up then, as if that settled the matter, and hoped wildly that it had.

They returned to the Tavern, Ghost expertly navigating their path, Theresa making phone calls on the way. Ian Bauer waited at the bar, Ghost’s photo and Theresa’s purse on the counter next to him.

‘I started to follow you, then remembered your purse. By the time I realized you weren’t coming right back I’d totally lost you.’

‘No problem. Thanks for guarding it. This is Anna Zebrowski, Ghost to her friends.’ She indicated the girl she now wore as a belt, since Ghost had her arms wrapped around Theresa’s waist and her face buried in the woman’s back. ‘She’s apparently feeling a little shy right now.’

‘That’s all right. As I said, I have that effect. Our barkeep Michael says Sam was here often and he is sure she came in the night before last, but is very fuzzy on how long she stayed. She drank mostly with a few other women who frequent the place, maybe one or two guys, but he really can’t be sure he isn’t confusing it with some other night. The women will probably be back on Friday if not sooner, and he will call Frank when they return or if he has any more concrete recollections in the meantime.’

‘Thanks.’

The child unbent enough to take her mother’s picture back, shooting furtive looks at the prosecutor as she did so.

‘What now?’ Ian Bauer asked.

‘Now I take her home,’ Theresa said, one arm across the girl’s shoulders, ‘and then I need to get to an autopsy.’

‘R
eally?’ was all Christine would say to Theresa as they surveyed the multiple impalements of Kyle Cielac. ‘
Really
?’

‘I don’t know why you always act like this is my fault,’ Theresa said.

‘Spikes?’

‘They’re not spikes, they’re rebar. They’re there to reinforce the concrete.’

‘I know what rebar is,’ the woman snapped, and didn’t say another word until Kyle Cielac had been de-pierced, sliced open, and gutted like a fish. The six wounds had been opened and examined. His nails were clean, his hands rough but unbroken. Kyle hadn’t smoked, and he’d eaten a healthy amount of grilled fish and potatoes for his last meal. Then the pathologist finally forgave Theresa enough to ask, ‘Did you find anything on his clothing?’

‘His entire ventral surface was soaked in blood. On the back I found a few hairs that look like his, a cat hair – apparently his room-mate has one – and some sticky little yellow-colored globules.’

‘Is that a scientific description?’

‘Close enough. I have no idea what they are but they start coming apart when exposed to moisture. They’re either some kind of a pigment or dye, or a food item. I ran them through the FTIR and got a bunch o’ nothing, so I suspect they’re organic. I’ll have to talk Oliver into testing via the gas chromatograph.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘If I bring him Cheetos, it usually helps.’ Theresa watched Christine slice up Kyle’s smooth, red-brown liver with what looked like a bread knife. ‘The ironworkers all carry these nasty-looking tools. A spud wrench has a monkey wrench at one end but tapers to an ice pick on the other. A sleever bar is just a pry bar that also tapers to an ice pick at the other end. They use them to line up the beams and girders before they weld them together.’

Christine peered at a fatty deposit. ‘So you’re thinking someone could have stabbed Kyle and then tossed him into a pit in a way that the stab wound would just coincidentally slide over a piece of rebar?’

‘No . . . it would take some arranging.’

The pathologist removed a sliver of the tissue and dropped it into the quart container of formalin, already half-filled with slivers of other organs. ‘That would be tough to do without causing significant damage to the body. He’s a good-sized boy.’

‘True. Unless there were two of them.’

Christine picked up a wet, red object about the size of a fist and slashed open the coronary arteries in a series of quick stripes, with two or three millimeters between each slice. ‘Then, what, they jumped up and down on his back to simulate a fall?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that would take a lot of force. Enough to get some subdural hemorrhaging started, and I don’t see any.’

‘Oh.’ Theresa turned back to the steel table. With his torso flayed open and vacated and his scalp pulled back until his skull cap could be sawed off and even one arm and one leg opened and dissected, Kyle Cielac now bore only a passing resemblance to a human being. ‘So we’re back with him falling into a dark pit in a place with which he should have been intimately familiar, for no discernible reason.’

Christine didn’t respond, only used a bigger knife to section the ventricles. ‘He had a good heart.’

‘Yes.’ Theresa gazed at what was left of Kyle Cielac. ‘I think he did.’

Damon picked through five elbow joints before he found one he liked, free of any rough edges or dimples. His father, for the brief few months he had been present in Damon’s life, had referred to any blemish on a surface as a ‘tit’ which always made the child have to stifle a laugh. ‘You rub that wax out good, boy,’ he’d call from the porch as Damon ran a rag over that falling-apart maroon Cadillac that wasn’t worth a wash, much less a wax. ‘I don’t want no tits in it.’ It had been the most amusing thing about a not terribly amusing person. He disappeared for good just after Damon’s eighth birthday, the best present the boy could have received.

He cleaned the end of the white plastic pipe with the joint cleaner, gave it a minute, then coated it lightly but thoroughly with the plastic PVC glue. Hard to believe the water pipes in a forty-story building were going to be held together with glue, but the foreman didn’t think it strange and Damon didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to tip the guy off that he had never put two ends of a pipe together before this job.

As it dried he prepped the next, very long section. Boonie and the foreman helped him settle it in place, then, as Damon expected, the foreman wandered off to have his fifteenth cigarette of the day which gave Damon the time and privacy to pull out a piece of white paper, folded over and over again, and add that day’s work to that floor’s diagram. He sketched quickly, knowing that if an engineer ever checked his work – which would not happen – he would find it remarkably close to scale. Damon’s mother had often told him he would be an artist, a Harlem Michelangelo. Hah. He didn’t even tag buildings. His talent with the pen or pencil came in handy but didn’t give him any particular joy. He just happened to be good at it.

By the time the new jail opened for business, Damon would have provided his boss with a complete set of plans, including all doors, windows, pipes, electrical conduit, stairwells and elevators. Of course a great deal of finishing work would be done after all the plumbing had been completed and Damon no longer had a reason to be on site, but most of that would be cosmetic. The hardware, as he thought of it, would be set in concrete. They might not know the exact location of controls to open and shut certain containment doors or the pass codes to computers or which clerks might be partial to a bribe, but they would know every way of getting in and out of the building, where the main monitoring stations were and which office belonged to the warden. The boss had said that trying to break out of jail was a fool’s errand, in his opinion, but that surely that information would be of great value to someone, some day.
Great
value.