Blunt Impact (5 page)

But she didn’t open any other drawers. Enough remained on the surface to keep her busy: jewelry, make-up, postcards from girlfriends on vacation, a parking ticket, an overdue notice from the library and a receipt from Netflix, a short stack of Ghost’s homework papers with distressingly low grades, a recipe for dill dip, a flyer from something called PETI which had been used as a receptacle for a discarded piece of chewing gum. Nothing that screamed ‘disturbed mental state’. Frankly, it seemed an older version of her daughter’s bedroom – cluttered with the clothes and the shoes and the old magazines and the costume jewelry of a struggling but utterly normal family.

Theresa checked again on the bathroom – water still running, a soft clunk like a bar of soap hitting the floor. She resumed her survey.

The mirrored vanity table had only a few new item categories. An overflowing ashtray, two crystal bowls with beads and key chains, and a news clipping about the groundbreaking ceremony for the new jail. It mentioned a ‘searing controversy over this use of public funds’. There were four photos of Ghost ranging from infancy to what must have been a year or two prior, snapshots taken both indoor and out. Theresa recognized the living room in one, Cedar Point in another. A fifth photo showed Samantha with two other women about the same age, and a sixth obviously dated back to the victim’s school years. Sam could only have been about fifteen or sixteen, her date about the same. The framing suggested a school dance.

‘That’s my father,’ Ghost said from the doorway.

Theresa jumped, feeling guilty that the absence of shower sounds had not alerted her. ‘Oh. Where is he now?’

‘Nana says he’s dead. He joined the army and got blowed up in an accident there, but he was brave and good and the angels are taking care of him now.’ She said this as if by rote, arms wrapped around her midsection, wet tendrils clinging to her cheeks. ‘Mom said he was dead too, most of the time.’

‘Most of the time?’

The girl perched against her mother’s bed, her face dazed and empty. ‘This one time I was up really late ’cause it was summer and I didn’t have to go to bed for school, and she came back from going out with friends and laid on the couch where I was watching TV ’cause she said she was really tired. I asked her what happened to my father – I guess I just wanted to hear the story again. But she said, “I lost him.” So I asked where she lost him and she said, “Downtown.”’ Ghost ended there and waited for Theresa’s reaction.

Which she had a hard time producing. ‘Lost him?’

‘Yeah. So I don’t think the soldier that got blowed up was really my father, or if he was, he didn’t get blowed up. I asked her about it the next day, but she wouldn’t answer me. And Nana gets all funny when I ask about it too.’

Theresa finally settled on a response. ‘What do you think that means?’

Ghost shook her head, solemnly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Ghost, do you have any idea why your mother went to that building this morning?’ Or why she took you along, Theresa thought but didn’t ask.

‘No. I don’t know why he pushed her, either.’

‘The shadow?’

‘Not a shadow,’ Ghost corrected. ‘The shadow
man
.’

T
hey left Ghost damply wrapped in the arms of her grandmother. Angela would stay behind to await the child protection team while Frank and Theresa returned to finish processing the scene. But before Theresa could escape, Ghost grasped her wrist and said, ‘I want to come to your office.’

‘That’s not necessary. You can trust me to take good care of your mother.’

‘I want to go there.’

‘You need to stay here with your grandmother right now. Besides, by the time you get there your mother will probably have already moved on to the funeral home, where you and your family members and friends will have a ceremony to say goodbye. So you don’t need to worry about coming to my office.’

The child let her finish before saying, ‘That’s not acceptable,’ in a tone so clipped it seemed chilling and comic at the same time.

‘I’m so sorry, Ghost. I know this is really really hard for you.’

‘Don’t argue with the lady, Ghost,’ her grandmother told her. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

The girl obeyed this apparently familiar refrain, but not before shooting Theresa a steely glance to let her know the matter had not been settled.

Now she and Frank compared notes.

He turned on to Rockwell. ‘She says the shadow was a man?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘But no details? Height, weight, hair color?’

‘Too dark.’

‘Terrific. I’m assuming you have a reason to believe he isn’t just the product of a traumatized child trying to rationalize why her mother would commit suicide right in front of her.’

‘That’s still possible, I suppose. I’m no child psychologist. But she didn’t waver from her story: that she saw the man struggle with her mother and then push her over the edge. After she ran to her mother’s body, suddenly he was there. She looked up but only saw a dark outline – black cloth points, she said. It sounded like he wore a hoodie. I’m thinking that the security light at the north-east corner of the slab blinded her, so his face and chest were lost in the darkness. That would make sense. So yes, she’s sobbing and terrified half out of her mind, but she gave plenty of details, which indicates a true memory and not a fabrication. Unfortunately they’re not helpful details. Plus she looked up and to her left most of the time.’

‘Accessing visual memory.’

‘Yes. But not auditory. Apparently he didn’t say anything to her.’

‘But even if she truly believes she saw a man, that doesn’t necessarily mean she did.’

‘True.’

‘And then this guy just leaves her there. His only witness?’

Theresa shrugged.

‘Terrific.’ He pulled into the lot, easing around the milling construction workers. ‘She say what floor Sam was on?’

‘Just “way up high”.’

He peered through the windshield at the structure. ‘To an eleven year old, that could be anything above three. We’ve got our work cut out for us. You really think this isn’t the suicide of a drunk, melancholy party girl? That a shadow man pushed her?’

‘At this point,’ Theresa said as she swung herself out of the front seat, ‘it makes as much sense as anything else.’

They found Chris Novosek, who still looked slightly green. ‘She’s eleven?’ he asked them without preamble. ‘That kid’s eleven? I knew Sam had a daughter, but I would have thought a younger one . . . Can we open back up? We have a lot to do and I can’t keep them all busy down here.’

‘Sorry,’ Frank said absently, then gestured at the ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire. ‘It was cloudy last night, but you have lights. And they found the place open this morning? Any sign of forced entry?’ Keep the questions coming.

Novosek shook his head. ‘Usually I get here first and open the gate. Only two keys – me and the construction superintendent, who’s in Aruba for two weeks. I ran late today because my wife didn’t slide the pot into the coffee-maker all the way so I woke up to dark roasted all over my kitchen floor.’

‘Then how’d Sam get the gate open?’

The guy looked at them and Theresa would swear he told the complete truth when he said: ‘I have no idea.’

‘You don’t have a hide-a-key somewhere?’ she asked.

‘Lockbox. No one has the combination except me. And the guy in Aruba.’

‘There any security here? A guard? Cameras?’

Novosek snorted again. ‘No and no. Gang boxes have been broken in to at least twice, guys had their tools stolen. Vehicles have been vandalized by kids who want to take a backhoe for a joyride. I’ve scheduled a copper pipe shipment so we can put it in the same day it arrives because if we don’t it will disappear overnight. The project is government-funded. We’re lucky we have the fence.’

Theresa asked him, ‘Can you think of any reason she would come back here on her own time?’

‘No.’

‘She might have come back for something she forgot to take home? Maybe wanted to show the site to a friend?’

‘How would I know that?’ he asked, but reasonably.

‘Does it ever happen?’

Chris Novosek began to fidget, shifting around like he wanted a cigarette. ‘Look, Sam was all right. Yeah, there’s only three women on this job, but she wasn’t some sort of raging, um . . .’

‘Feminist?’ Theresa supplied.

‘Yeah. She worked hard and was a perfectionist about her edges, which most guys aren’t. She was fun and joked around. Did she like being surrounded by guys all day? Yeah, probably. Why not? She’s young and – she
was
young,’ he corrected himself, visibly swallowing, and tilted his head to see past Theresa as if to make sure the corpse was still out of earshot, ‘and good-looking, and got plenty of attention here and liked it. Just flirting, though – most of these guys are married and the rest are nothing but talk. If she hooked up with anyone I would have heard about it, and I didn’t. If my crane operator got a bunion I’d hear about it. These guys can’t work without talking at the same time.’

‘So you don’t know of any red flags in her life or work?’ Frank asked.

‘Not a one.’

Theresa was trying to read between his lines. ‘But she might consider this a romantic place to take a boyfriend?’

‘Or meet one?’ Frank added. ‘Show off her work, give them a ride in the hoist?’

Again that glimpse toward the dead woman.
She might
, he was clearly thinking and trying not to admit. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard of her doing that, or anyone else. They spend eight hours a day here. The last thing they want to do in their spare time is come back.’ Again, that hesitation, as if he were thinking:
But they might.
A construction site aroused the senses. So much raw power and noise, not to mention the outsize ego that made humans alter their surroundings and form a tower that reached into the sky in clear defiance of the law of gravity.

‘How was she on the job?’ Frank asked. ‘Did she follow all the regs? Did she get careless, ever?’

‘They all do,’ Novosek admitted with a rueful shake of the head. ‘Fool around, think safety equipment is for geeks. That’s the hardest part of this job, truth be told. Looking out for safety slows me down more than anything, but I’m pretty strict about it. But if they make it past thirty they get smart and start looking out for themselves a little more.’

‘Anything change in her personal life recently? Is it possible she didn’t fall, but jumped?’

A new wave of horror rolled through Novosek’s face. ‘No! I mean – why would she? She was young, had a good job. No way.’

If he’d been a callous man he would have went with the idea. The construction company could not be held liable for a suicide. But he insisted that, like Samantha’s on-the-job romantic life, if something had gone terribly wrong for her he would have heard about it.

‘You had a more personal relationship with her?’ Frank asked, his face a study in innocence.

Novosek didn’t take offense at the implication. ‘I don’t have a personal relationship with any of them. I can’t – I’m the boss. I have to lay guys off when work is slow. I have to give them stuff to do when they’re just standing around because you have to keep everyone busy or they’ll slack off even when they don’t have a reason. I have to fire people. It’s tough to do that when you consider them a real friend. No, Sam just wasn’t real good at hiding her feelings. She was a talker. There’s time to kill while the stuff is mixing, and she’d talk. And the way she looked, guys would listen.’

‘And yet she wasn’t dating any of them.’

‘I think she went out with Jimmy Malone once or twice. That would have been three or four months ago, now.’

‘They broke up?’

‘His wife found out, made him quit. He signed on with a job in Independence.’

‘Oh,’ Frank said.

Theresa said, ‘We’re going to have to look at the floors. To figure out which one she was on when she fell.’

Novosek nodded. ‘What floor do you want to go to?’

‘The one she fell from.’

‘How do you know which one that is?’

‘I don’t. So let’s start at the fifth and go up from there.’

‘Terrific,’ Frank muttered.

‘We have a zip lift,’ Chris Novosek told them. ‘A construction elevator. It doesn’t have any walls, though, just a platform.’

Frank turned a bit green himself. ‘A little exercise will not kill us.’

‘But why take the chance?’ Novosek said, and led them across the ground floor to a two-by-four enclosed structure that functioned as a huge dumb-waiter. No walls, only hip-high cable railings and a control box dangling from a post, held by a grinning man in a hard hat and a Marlboro belt buckle. Evidently Novosek felt he got enough exercise during the day.

Theresa stepped in after him. Frank did not move, but looked at them, at the platform, at them again.

‘No way,’ he said, ‘in hell.’

Novosek hit a button on the control box, and the platform began to rise. Theresa shifted her crime scene kit to the hand holding the camera bag as the sight of her cousin’s upturned face was cut off by the second floor. With nothing else to hang on to, she wrapped her fingers around Chris Novosek’s arm. This made both him and the other man smile but she had long since passed the point in life of caring to look tough, or cool, or unflappable. Theresa could walk up to a badly decomposed corpse without batting an eye, and everyone knew it. That was as tough as she needed to be. So on an open platform about to move fifty feet into the air, she had the good sense to hold on tight to Chris Novosek’s rock-like biceps.

On the fifth floor she immediately went toward the eastern edge of the building. She had expected a vacant space, but found a surprising amount of stuff present and had to skirt around stacks of impossibly long pipes and shiny metal braces, five-gallon buckets of joint compound, cardboard boxes three feet square with pipe ends and fittings, and one sturdy table made of two-by-fours with a slanted top which held a set of dog-eared blueprints. Here and there were rusting metal boxes the size of a refrigerator turned on its side, with spray-painted labels like ‘Coastal Duct Pro’ and ‘Amer Pipe’. One had been opened to reveal a confusing jumble of tools and power cords. It seemed that the building and every single item in it was heavy, rough and covered with grime. Obtaining fingerprints would be well nigh impossible.