Blunt Impact (3 page)

Samantha’s beat-up Skechers were thoroughly scuffed, and none of the damage appeared particularly new. The back half of the body had been soaked in the pooling blood but the front half did not show any inconsistent smudges or stains.

Theresa looked up from her work now and then. She could feel eyes upon her, even when she couldn’t determine the source of the stares. The dead girl’s co-workers ran the gamut in terms of reactions. Some came for a quick peek with appropriately sorrowful expressions, then removed themselves and did not return. Some skirted around the concrete slab until they could get a good look at the gore, turned slightly green, and likewise disappeared. Some stood at the edge of the cement and watched Theresa’s every move without the slightest hint of sorrow; in fact, body language made it clear that all they lacked for an entertaining morning was a lawn chair and a cold one.

Two black men, however, didn’t fall into any of these categories. Young, buff, with nearly matching bandannas, they stood back and yet watched every move, and spoke only to each other, often with a sharp shake of the head and deep scowls of consternation instead of regret. Theresa absently theorized that they had come from some island community where a death on the job was a bad omen for all and the presence of a dead body an invitation to a curse. But their faces and dress seemed as American as apple pie and TiVo, so she gave up on that. Every person had their own and intensely personal reaction to death, and Theresa did not fool herself that she had yet seen them all.

After copious photographs and the arrival of the body snatchers (technically called the ambulance crew, though their patients were never transported to a hospital), Theresa was finally ready to turn the body on its side.

Rigor mortis had set in, putting the woman’s death at some time in the wee hours. The mild temperatures and the additional coolness of the concrete slab would have delayed the process.

The skull came apart with the first movement, leaving pieces on the slab. The small intestine, which lay in surprisingly clean coils next to and slightly under the abdomen, peeked out from under the T-shirt. Theresa photographed as best she could, noting items in the girl’s back pockets but leaving them in place. They would have to be carefully removed and dried of the saturating blood and she didn’t have time or room to do it there.

She and the two men moved the body and its pieces to a clean sheet as best they could and from there into a body bag. Theresa sealed the bag with evidence tape and a zip-tie, as if some nefarious person might steal into the back of the ambulance en route, open the bag and alter or remove some piece of evidence without alerting the crew. Downright silly, some of the hoops she jumped through in the name of security.

Without the body to command one’s attention, she took a fresh look at the bloodstained concrete, circling around to find the outermost reach of the impact pattern. It seemed to exist in a fairly oval shape, radiating out from where the victim’s head landed, but Theresa continued to find dark red specks trailing off to the south. Nothing organized enough to be a splash pattern or shoe prints. When she got her face down to the specks via a contorted position that might garner extra points in yoga class, she could swear that the stains weren’t stains at all, but flakes. Flakes of dried blood. She collected some with a swab before moving on.

Most of Samantha Zebrowski’s blood had dried by then – perhaps a strong wind?

But then she reached the end of the concrete slab and any further flakes were lost in the packed dirt and patchy grass surrounding the building.

And shoe prints began.

Theresa stepped out on to the mud, now hard, though it would have been softened during the damp night. The prints traveled in a vaguely south-south-east direction, fading out and then beginning again, or so she guessed, since the trail led through a minefield of boot prints, shoe prints and tire tracks that ranged from bicycle to Sherman tank-size. More than once a crate or small trailer or piece of machinery presented a fork in the path and she had to guess at one, then go back and choose the other. But as she reached the second dumpster along the eastern fence, she found where they led.

And she couldn’t believe it.

Huddled in the gap between the two metal squares, knees drawn up to her chest, sat a little girl. And the girl was covered in blood.

Earlier that morning

T
ime to go, Ghost had decided. She would have to take in the view another night. If the sounds came from her mother, Ghost didn’t want her to know that she had snuck out of the house so early. And if they came from some other person, she didn’t want to meet them. Ghost turned from the stairwell and walked, quickly but carefully, back the way she’d come.

She’d gotten to the other end of the foundation when something occurred to her. The gate had been open when she’d arrived. It had always been chained shut before (though she could slip through the opening under the chains). So the people on the site had come in through that gate and would most likely leave through that gate. If she wanted to avoid an encounter, she should take the other exit.

Terrifically pleased with herself over this show of logic, Ghost stepped off the concrete foundation and down the small hill at the side of it. The smaller East Sixth gate remained placidly locked on the other side of a flat concrete slab protruding off the side of the main building, a span of patchy grass, three huge cardboard boxes on wooden pallets, a pyramid of long pipe, and three dumpsters, parked parallel along the side of the fence. Ghost felt pleased with herself for this observation as well. Parallel and perpendicular were the only two concepts in math she
had
managed to grasp, perhaps because they only involved pictures and no numbers.

All of these areas, unfortunately, were well lit by a bright security light on a high pole. If the people on the upper floor looked out, they would see her walk to the gate.

Circling outside the light’s reach, Ghost took some tentative steps, hugging close to the other objects on her route. She skirted behind a bulldozer and along a small trailer. Two more cardboard boxes and she finally stood far enough away from the building to be able to see the interiors of some of the lower floors.

She scanned these for movement, listened for sound. Nothing.

Another ten feet brought her to a large truck-like thing with a scoop on the front. She touched it gingerly, as she had the bulldozer, as if they were sleeping animals that might wake up at any moment. If they did she would have much more to fear than being grounded by Mom and Nana.

But the machine sat cold and quiet, and Ghost sprinted five more feet to the side of one of the dumpsters. Almost to the fence, about as far away as she could get from the building without leaving the site.

Way,
way
up high, two dark shapes moved against the dark interior. They hovered at the edge of the building, moving cautiously along the open space. When Ghost squinted the people became fairly clear, lit from behind by the security lights along the mall and from her direction by the security light on the pole. Two people, touching each other, but not in a friendly way. One seemed to be holding the other with one hand, arm out as straight as a pipe. The one being held clutched at the other’s wrist and kept buckling at the knees.

At least they seemed too occupied with each other to notice her. Ghost breathed out, but decided not to make a run for the gate until they went away. The shadow of the dumpster would keep her hidden.

One of them said something; Ghost couldn’t make out the words but heard the voice, low and almost sweet. The other said something harsh and fast like a scream. Like a woman screams. Like her mother screamed.

But that couldn’t be her mother. Her mother had long hair, black and silky down to her waist, and if that were her backing toward the open edge of that high-up floor until she became easier to see with every step, her hair would be swishing over her back. It wasn’t, so she wasn’t.

Ghost knew she should breathe out in relief about that, but didn’t.

She also knew they should be getting away from the edge, but instead both people moved closer until the one being held had backed right up to empty space. Ghost couldn’t figure out what they were doing, other than talking – at least, one talked, a slow, steady stream of words. Ghost couldn’t make it out and didn’t try, just wished they would go away. The East Sixth side entrance was twenty feet away and chained, but she had gotten through it before. But if she ran for it now they would see her. Patience, Mrs Dressler always told her class, is a virtue. Ghost didn’t know the definition of virtue but had figured out the saying meant that sometimes it was better to wait for stuff. It somehow made you stronger to wait for stuff. And usually she was good at it.

This was different. Something bad was going to happen and she didn’t want to see it.

The one person pushed the other over the edge.

The long hair trailed her body as the earth pulled her down to it. Arms and legs waved wildly but the empty air wouldn’t hold her up.

Long hair.

Ghost wanted to close her eyes but she didn’t, because closing her eyes had never done her any good. Maybe if she watched, something would catch her mother. A trampoline or a swimming pool or a tree full of leaves that she could grab on to –
catchhercatchhercatchher
—

All at once Ghost felt aware of every single thing around her. Her skin tingled with awareness as she watched her mother fall. The wind was there but not strong enough, it whispered instead of moaned. Summer bugs, already hatched, formed a light cloud around the street light along East Sixth, nowhere near as bright as the security light whose rays caught and illuminated the gleam of her mother’s face. The man on the building looked down at his handiwork, the front of him illuminated by the street lights and the back of him disappearing into the gloom of the inner building as if he were part of it. A car horn bleated from a block away, the rest of the city going on as usual without the slightest idea—

Ghost’s lungs began to ache from not breathing, as if she could possibly think about breathing when her mother—

The woman hit the ground.

The impact seemed to shake the earth all the way over to Ghost, making the dirt underneath her quiver as if with electric shock, and the
sound
– both a thud and a crunch and the snap of a bunch of broken bones all at once. All the sounds were ordinary in their way, but taken together in one quick cacophony they turned into something alive and more horrible than anything Ghost had ever heard.

Time seemed to stop, the bugs stopped buzzing, the distant cars receding to their own reality.

Ghost looked up. No one. She did not see the other person, could not even be sure what floor they had been on. No movement broke up the darkness or gave a flicker of reflected light. It was almost as if the other person – the one who pushed – had been swallowed up by the deep murk of the building’s interior as if he were part of it.

She moved out from beside the dumpster, across the patchy grass, up on to the flat concrete slab and toward the person lying there without hesitation. It would not be her mother. It could not be her mother.

Even though it was her mother’s hair, her mother’s face, her mother’s scuffed shoes and her favorite jeans and the silly friendship bracelet of colored string that Ghost had made for her in art class months and months ago.

This didn’t make sense. Her mother worked up on those high floors every day. She wouldn’t have fallen. Nobody would have pushed her—

But her eyes were open, so maybe she’d be okay. Ghost knelt down and shook one shoulder. ‘Mom,’ she said, calmly, in an even tone, the first sound she had made. ‘Mom.’

No response. Her mother didn’t even blink.

Ghost kept shaking. ‘Mom. Mom. Mom.
Mom
—’ her voice rising in timbre and level until she was screaming, her throat rasping and the frantic shakes causing the growing puddle of blood to splash and fling itself about—

And then suddenly the monster, the shadow man, appeared next to her. She looked up but the security light blinded her until he seemed to be only a fuzzy black outline of head and arms and legs, artificially elongated until they could surround her, both her and her mother, and pull them into the center of his darkness.

He spoke to her, in a sibilant hiss of incomprehensible sounds. A star flashed at her from inside him and she turned her face away.

She would never remember what happened after that.

T
heresa stood for a moment startled into utter paralysis. Whatever she had thought she might find, this child was not it.

‘
Honey
.’ Theresa dropped to her knees and began to pat the thin arms and shoulders. ‘What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?’ The blood had soaked the girl’s pants from the knees down until they were as stiff as thin cardboard. Dried. Obviously the source of the flakes. Heavy smears coated her forearms and hands, marked her cheeks and dark blue polo shirt. None of it wet. Any injuries had since clotted.

Unless this blood wasn’t from her at all. Of course it wasn’t; the kid would be passing out if she’d lost that much—

The girl gazed up at Theresa and spoke, grim, hopeless, shell-shocked: ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘Who?’

‘Mom. Where are you taking Mom?’

The implications of this struck Theresa completely dumb. How—? Why—?

Worry about that later. What seemed obvious right now: this child had either found her mother’s body or witnessed her actual death, was now in shock and required immediate medical attention.

‘Where are you taking her?’ The child’s voice rose a note or two, and at least the effort brought the first tinge of pink to her bloodless cheeks at the same time a tremor ran through her body. ‘
Where are you taking her
?’

‘To my office,’ Theresa blurted. ‘We’re going to take her to where I work. We’ll take really good care of her there.’