Blunt Impact (25 page)

‘Drunk?’

‘What I said. Blood alcohol level: one point two. Not passed-out falling down drunk, but definitely tipsy. Which might have tipped her right over the edge, hmm?

Theresa and Ian exchanged a glance. This would not help any prosecution, but might also explain why Samantha chose to climb to the top of an unfinished building in the pitch dark. It was a lark, a bit of fun. Until the mood changed and the beating began.

Theresa asked, ‘What about Kyle Cielac?’

‘Sober. Yes, I have him done already, only a few hours after the autopsy, because I am extraordinary and because your homey put a Post-it on his bottle saying: “Rush!” That woman is entirely too liberal with her Post-its. Oh, he’d probably had a beer earlier in the evening, maybe even two, a big strapping guy like him, but BAC was zero point four. I’d say sober as a judge, but I’ve known too many judges. The skunk simile is probably more accurate.’

‘What about those yellow globules I gave you? In a glassine fold?’

With an exaggerated sigh he turned away from them to shuffle through the papers on his desk, muttering dark tidings about organic compounds, Post-it notes, and forensic scientists who thought their samples should take precedence over all others in the county.

Theresa turned to Ian. ‘Samantha’s state complicates her motivations, doesn’t it? She might have been there to enjoy the view, to spice up her sex life with an unusual location, because she thought someone was up to no good at the site and decided to investigate, for all three reasons or no reason at all.’

‘Yeah. It doesn’t help. But I don’t waste a lot of time worrying about motivation. After twenty plus years in this line of work I’ve come to the conclusion that you never really know why anyone does anything.’ A thought seemed to strike him, and he turned to gaze into her eyes for a brief moment. ‘Even ourselves.’

Oliver cleared his throat. ‘Not to tear you away from the labor-intensive process of making puppy-dog eyes at each other, but speaking of sticky balls – the stuff you gave me is aspartame, citric acid, and potassium citrate.’

Theresa considered this while Ian’s phone buzzed. He checked the screen, thanked them both for their time (Theresa somewhat more effusively than Oliver) and left.

‘It sounds like artificial flavoring,’ she mused to the toxicologist.

He turned back to his desk, signaling that she had gotten all the help she’d be likely to for one day. ‘It could be a lot of things – drink mix, box mix, kid’s candy – none of which concern me.’

‘Thanks, Oliver.’

‘Oh, any time, any time. I exist to serve at others’ whimsical pleasure. You know, puppy dogs are terribly cute,’ he added, turning to glance at Ian Bauer’s back moving down the hall, ‘until they pee on the rug one too many times.’

‘Similes. I’m simply drowning in similes.’

When her new father stood up, the front of his long flannel shirt fell open. Underneath he wore a T-shirt and jeans with a leather belt and a large buckle.

The light caught the buckle.

And glinted back to her in the shape of a star.

He wasn’t her father. He was the shadow man.

She looked at him, clearly visible in the ordinary light of an ordinary room in an ordinary house, but she knew who and what he was, and now he knew she knew. The expression on his face changed from benevolent to sneering in the time it took her to draw in enough air to scream.

Then he was upon her.

He clamped one hand over her mouth; it felt like it covered her face up to her eyes just as she needed to breathe in, the force coming as such a blow that it knocked her backward on to the floor. The surface met her spine and her head struck the edge of the bed post. She forgot about breathing and saw stars.

‘Shut
up
,’ he told her.

He put the hand over her mouth again and then picked her up that way, so that her neck threatened to snap from suspending the weight of her body. Ghost sucked in air through her nose just to grunt in pain. Then she felt his hands on her.

He rubbed thick fingers down her arms and back, then moved to her hips and thighs –
nonononono
!

She kicked out. Her shoes might be too big but they had a firm sole and she heard the slightest grunt from him. He used the hand holding her face to give her head a shake and then turn it away from him, crushing the back of her skull into his chest. His other hand slid over the front of her body again. Just as she thought she might suffocate, she realized that he didn’t mean to molest her. He was picking her up. He pulled her hips up across one of his and marched her out of the room as if she were a plank of wood.

He plunged awkwardly down the steps, practically breaking her neck. She didn’t struggle much, too busy trying to comprehend what had happened, until they got to the bottom and she caught sight of her grandmother sprawled on the living room floor, a trickle of blood from the side of her head.

‘
Nana! Nana! Nana!
’ Ghost tried to scream, and her body rocked in a frantic thrashing. She had to get to Nana. But the man just held her tighter until her spine felt as if it would snap in half. He dragged her out of the living room and to the back door. There he had to take his hand off her mouth for a moment in order to turn the knob. Maybe her cry startled him as well, because he let her feet slump to the ground, but then he put the hand back on her mouth, kept her head pressed to his shoulder, and dragged her through the side yard to the street.

A few drops of water hit her face, and the wind whipped her hair over her eyes, but she saw a car parked at the curb. She silently flailed her arms and legs. She tried to bite him, but he kept his skin away from her teeth. She tried to grab the gate as they went out and got a handful of splinters for her trouble.

With her vision partially obscured by his large palm, she saw a tall black boy in the next yard, one of the younger Walker kids. He had been looking at the car, but did a double take when he saw Ghost and the man.

‘Don’t say a word,’ the shadow man told him.

‘Hey – what – let that kid go,’ the boy shouted. Behind him, one of his brothers stepped off the porch.

‘Shut up,’ the man said, and let go of Ghost’s waist to open the passenger door.

‘You best be letting go of that kid,’ the boy said, with just as much authority and now a gun in his hand to back it up.

The door open, the man switched hands suddenly, clamping Ghost’s mouth with his left hand and freeing his right. She could have escaped if she didn’t need her head, her body free from the neck down but her skull pinned tightly. She tried to kick him, didn’t stop even when his right hand came forward with a large black gun in it.

‘Get back,’ he said to the Walker boy. ‘Don’t move.’

The boy threw his free arm out in exaggerated exasperation. ‘Well, what is it? Don’t move or get back? You see, man –’ his gun didn’t waver an inch – ‘you need to let that girl go before I blow your head off.’

Behind him, his brother also had a gun, and both were pointed right at the shadow man. And at Ghost, too, but that was all right. The man loosened his grip just enough that she could turn and kick him harder than she had ever kicked anything in her life, so hard that she felt the impact reverberate up her skeleton and into her brain.

His grip loosened another tiny bit. She pulled out of it and ran, past the Walkers and their guns, down the street, heading for the narrow overgrown passageway between the two homes second and third from the end, the wind clutching at her body.

Behind her, she heard a shot.

F
rank would have bet that nothing else about the day could surprise him – and would have lost. ‘What do you mean, he went there to meet you?’

‘He figured out how Kobelski did it. How he faked the slump test,’ Todd said, his tone hovering between terrified and miserable.

Frank pictured the barrel-chested, pugnacious state inspector. ‘What’s a slump test?’

Finney told him to shut up before turning to Todd Grisham. ‘How did he do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

The state agent goggled. And with his coloring, goggling turned into a pretty impressive display of apoplexy. ‘
What do you mean you don’t know?
’

‘Before we left for the day Kyle told me to meet him back there at ten. He said he knew how Kobelski faked the test and wanted to show me, so we were both on the same page before we brought it to you. In case anything happened to him.’ Todd’s voice choked and strangled. ‘In case anything
happened
to him. I should have just made him tell me right then and there, but there were so many other guys around and everyone wanted to talk to us about Sam and we were afraid to say anything where someone else might overhear.
I
was afraid.’

‘So what happened?’ Angela gently prodded.

‘We went home. I ate dinner – my sister-in-law’s gyros, guaranteed to incapacitate – so I was a little late getting back. It was ten sixteen by my watch, but it’s five minutes fast. I went into the site—’

‘Past the fence? How did you get in?’ Frank asked.

Todd shrugged. ‘Gate was open. It has a big honkin’ padlock on it, but Novosek keeps the key in a lockbox. Everyone knows the code is the street address number, one three eight zero. Even my niece could figure that one out.’

‘Would have been helpful to hear that when we were trying to figure out how Sam Zebrowski got on the property.’

Todd shrugged again, his face lit by a bolt of lightning that appeared over the lake. ‘Didn’t know you didn’t know. So I went in, up to where the I-beams are stacked. I figured Kyle had opened the gate. I listened but didn’t hear anything, so I called his name. I probably called three or four times, loud as I could. Sounds crazy but what choice did I have? I wasn’t going to wander around and I wasn’t going to stand there all night.’ Now he not so much shrugged as shuddered. ‘The darkness just swallowed up the sound like I wasn’t even there. Just consumed it, man, like a living thing waiting there to eat me.’

‘Very descriptive, Todd,’ Frank told him. ‘Let’s just stick to facts, OK?’

‘This is facts. Because there was something waiting for me to come closer but it wasn’t the darkness. It was Novosek.’

‘You saw him?’

‘I didn’t see shit. You think I would have left Kyle lying there all night like – like he was?’

Frank tamped down his impatience, but Finney didn’t. ‘So what the hell
did
you do?’

‘I left. I just turned and walked away, man. I went home and went to bed.’ His voice broke. ‘I left Kyle stuck there with the life draining out of him.’

‘You couldn’t see the elevator pit from where you were?’

‘No. I never set foot on concrete, never walked more than a foot past the I-beams. The whole place was darkness, man, just one mass of living, breathing darkness.’

Frank got down to practicalities. ‘How long were you there?’

‘Maybe ten minutes.’

‘So from approximately ten sixteen to ten twenty-six p.m.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you close or lock the gate behind you?’

‘Left it exactly as I found it, man.’

‘And you never saw another person the whole time you were there? Heard a scrape, a clink of metal? Glimpsed movement, or a reflection?’

‘Nothing but silence. A living, breath—’

Finney cut in. ‘So you don’t know it was Novosek? You don’t even know if Kyle had arrived. He might have been late too.’

Todd examined this statement like a tethered Styrofoam ring tossed into raging seas. ‘You think so? Maybe he wasn’t even there yet?’

‘Nah, he probably was bleeding out just like you thought. But how would Novosek have known exactly when to come by and give your buddy a shove? Who else knew you two had this little rendezvous planned?’

‘No one.’

‘Come on! You must have told someone! Your brother. Sam’s mother. Your niece. Your bookie. Someone!’

‘Nobody! Nobody else would have even had any idea what I was talking about.’

‘Then maybe Kyle. Who would he have confided in? His room-mate? His priest?’

‘Nobody. Me. Maybe Sam. You. Why the hell didn’t he call you?’ Todd suddenly demanded of Finney. ‘You’ve been nagging us to figure out Kobelski’s trick. Did he call you?’

‘That would have made too much sense.’ Finney slumped back in his chair to massage the bridge of his nose. ‘I hate working with amateurs. And you have no idea what your partner referred to when he said he had figured it out.’

‘He’s dead, don’t you get that? Dead! Maybe that’s a little more important than your concrete fraud case!’

‘And you’ve got absolutely nothing on the guy you think killed him. Not for fraud, not for malicious endangerment, not for murder. You’d better rethink your recollections of last night if you ever want to get any justice for your friend.’

‘Stop leading my witness.’ Frank stood up. ‘He’s got one thing right – murder trumps fraud. Todd, you’re coming with us. I’m going to put you into protective custody.’

The kid didn’t move. ‘Do I have to sleep in a jail cell?’

He looked so pathetic that Frank couldn’t snap at him, as much as he did not necessarily believe a single word of what they’d been told so far. ‘No, I think we can find a more comfortable spot than that.’

Todd Grisham used the edge of the table to pull himself to his feet. It seemed to require a great deal of effort. ‘Good.’

Chris Novosek’s day, like so many of them lately, did not improve. Getting the guys back to the job had been only partially successful; most of them had begun to enjoy their impromptu day off and didn’t feel like picking up the phone when the foreman called. They’d miss out on the overtime – good for him – but a skeleton crew couldn’t lay more than half of the pipe, even if they worked until nightfall and didn’t get too held up by the rain that had just begun to sprinkle them with drops. He found himself calculating the outlay of overtime versus the monetary loss if the pipe were stolen, and figured out they should knock off around eight p.m.

He had just completed this complicated series of calculations, which only intensified the pain behind his eyes, when the two homicide cops showed up again. Definitely not improving. ‘Don’t tell me you’re here to shut me down again.’