Blunt Impact (7 page)

The detective shrugged and introduced him to the project manager, whose expression said he had already pegged Bauer for a pedophile, hands down.

‘Her car’s down there,’ said a voice behind them. The worker who had run Bauer up in the lift had not left. ‘Sam’s car, that piece of shit Camry she drives. It’s parked on the grass, just like normal.’

‘You go in it?’ Frank Patrick asked in a tone that left no doubt as to what the man’s answer had better be.

‘Hell, no. Just sayin’. You can see it from here.’ He jerked a thumb toward the western side of the building, as if he’d be happy to point it out from above.

The detective didn’t move.

Bauer watched the woman for a few minutes while Frank Patrick filled him in on what they had learned so far, which didn’t seem to be too much, from the victim’s extreme injuries to the pathetic image of the child carrying around her mother’s tool. She had set up a tripod over what appeared to be a nondescript patch of concrete floor, collecting copious photographs and not, apparently, happy with any of them. When the detective had finished, he moved closer.

‘Stop!’ the woman said, and held up a hand for emphasis but without even looking up from her viewfinder. He obeyed, and after another few moments she either finished or gave up.

‘OK.’ She stood and rubbed the back of her neck. ‘You guys can come on now. I think I’ve gotten everything there is to get.’

He went past her, up to the edge, tucking his body behind the pillar in order to feel secure enough to look down. The height was dizzying, but he could just glimpse the dark-red patch on the concrete below. If it was suicide, the woman had really wanted to ensure the outcome. No crippling, no spending eternity on life support. Just bam, DRT. Dead Right There.

‘So she wasn’t dressed for work and for some reason had her kid along,’ Bauer began, thinking out loud. ‘She didn’t stay late or come in early. And even if she was working she would have no reason to be on this floor, is that right?’

Novosek nodded. ‘All the finishers are done on this floor. They’re up on twenty-eight now.’

‘Any security? Cameras?’

‘No and no. Not until we’re enclosed.’

‘What about the elevator?’ Bauer asked. ‘Will it eventually go back down by itself?’

Novosek opened his mouth but the construction worker answered. ‘No. And someone’s got to have a hand on the control box the whole time. So she either walked up, or someone took it back down afterward. If the first guy here this morning had to walk up twenty-three floors to get it, sure as – well, we would have heard about it.’

‘Better get it back down now, Jack,’ Novosek told him, quiet but firm. They all waited until the disappointed-looking construction worker left. All but the forensic woman, who pulled out swabs and a plastic vial and collected the bloodstains. She dropped the swabs into a paper box, the tiny box into a paper envelope, taped and initialed the seal. Very little of that made any difference to the blood sample but would make a huge difference when – if – they went to court.

As soon as the lift departed and the top of Jack’s head disappeared below the edge of the open floor, Bauer went back to musing aloud: ‘In her sneakers, not dancing shoes, so she could have climbed twenty-three floors. But why?’

‘She didn’t want to make one of her co-workers do it?’ the woman suggested.

‘She was afraid of the lift?’ Frank directed this question to Novosek.

The manager grimaced. ‘You don’t work high-rises if you have a problem with heights. She wasn’t afraid of the lift. If she was afraid of anything, she kept it to herself.’

‘Or heights at night,’ Bauer went on. ‘She came here in her own vehicle, parked it in the usual spot. Doesn’t sound like duress. At least not until they got up here.’ He stayed next to the pillar. The breeze was light; it might be heavier at times but it wouldn’t sweep the victim out into the abyss, not unless she wanted to go. The M.E. woman seemed to have no more fear than the construction workers; she knelt at the edge, popping another dirtied swab into its cardboard box. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ he asked her.

‘Theresa MacLean. How long have you been with the prosecutor’s office?’

‘Ten years.’

She hid it better than most. Just the tiniest hint of a wrinkle between her eyebrows as she tried to figure out what was wrong with him, with his face and his body. It smoothed as she gave up. ‘Odd we haven’t met before.’

‘We probably have.’ He lied, because she would certainly remember the strange-looking something he represented and he would certainly remember those eyes. Perhaps it was only that the late morning sun slanted directly into the irises but the light seemed to penetrate their color and produce a glow of sky blue with a touch of aqua. The rest of her face had the same level of quality and for a moment he had no idea what to say next. And a lawyer was always supposed to know what to say next.

She turned back to her swabs, slipped the box into an envelope and relieved herself of the burden of gazing at him without recoiling. Usually he appreciated that avoidance, but now the melancholy slammed his body as hard as their victim’s final stop.

But then she looked up again, spoke to him. ‘At the moment, forensically, there isn’t much I can tell you. She might have come up here on a drunken lark and fallen. She might have been depressed and jumped. She might have had a fight with her boyfriend and been pushed. Unfortunately every person on the site has access to this floor, as well as any person in the city who could climb the fence and figure out how to use the lift. The larger shoe-prints could have been here yesterday or the day before. Maybe. I have no idea how long they would last up here.’

Somewhere in the middle of her fourth sentence he had prodded his mind to overcome the suddenly vexing problem of coherent speech. ‘Things will be a lot simpler if she was good and drunk. Misadventure, and the county and the construction company will be off the hook. Any family members will take accident over suicide and hold off suing either group.’

That little wrinkle came back. He should have just stayed dumb.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That sounds cold. Mostly I would just hate to think a healthy young woman would want to die this much.’

She said, ‘I hate to think of making this fall sober. But that’s always a toss-up.’

‘What is?’

‘Is it better to die with your eyes closed, or open?’

‘Better not to die at all,’ Bauer said. ‘I think we should take a look at her car.’

Shit, he thought. There really
had
been a girl? It hadn’t been an angel or a demon who looked right up into his face; not a figment of his imagination, but a real child.

Who had now become a real problem.

T
heresa had offered to accompany Frank on his winding trip down twenty-three flights of enclosed concrete steps, but he waved her off; she had her camera and the crime scene kit to carry. And so she wound up with her feet back on solid ground in record time, making conversation with the project manager, that rather unfortunate-looking prosecutor, and the talkative ironworker named Jack.

‘We all park on the grass here – that’s her Camry, two over from that beat-up blue pickup. That’s mine. Some idiot busted out my window last week, that’s why the cardboard is in it, but I’m going to get that fixed. We’re allowed to park there ’cause it’s part of the site, and using a lot down here would take half our pay, seems like.’

Theresa scanned the haphazard rows perched on the lawn of the south-eastern quadrant of the Mall – now a sea of fairly firm mud with only the occasional stubborn blade of new grass clinging to its trampled life. The statue and its water jets called The Fountain of Eternal Life stood only two hundred feet away and had provided no such benefit for Samantha Zebrowski. Future inmates granted windows would have a terrific view. Starting with the public library to the south and pivoting north, they could see the sweeping mall and, beyond it, the Marriott Hotel (tallest building in the city), a sliver of the Justice Center, and then the convention complex and the blue expanse of Lake Erie.

‘There’s only about twenty cars here,’ Theresa said. ‘How many people—’

Novosek rubbed his left forearm again. ‘Fifty-seven at the moment. Close to a hundred and thirty when we get into the later stages, drywall, tile.’

‘How many are women? Of the current fifty-seven.’

‘Three,’ he said; defensively, as if waiting for her to make something of it. ‘Including Sam.’

‘I think we should talk to the other two women. Maybe she would have told them things she didn’t share with the men.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sure. They didn’t work together, though. Thompson is an ironworker and Missy Green is a pipefitter. They might have gone out after hours, but I never noticed them in a huddle here. She worked mostly with the other finishers and concrete workers.’

‘Most of the guys take the bus or the rapid, or have their wives drop them,’ Jack went on as if there hadn’t been a digression.

‘What about after work? Any favorite hang-outs?’ Theresa asked him.

Pleased, as she expected, at this show of interest, he named two or three bars within walking distance. ‘But we’re not big drinkers. I know it sort of goes with the persona, but when you’ve been hauling beams or hanging pipe for eight hours you don’t have a lot of energy left over for raising hell. Most guys just want to go home, take a shower, eat more than their body weight in food and put their feet up. Fridays they might feel like partying but on a Monday night there’d be no one there except your hardcore alcoholics.’ The watery eyes widened when he noticed the other three people gazing at him. ‘Not that we have any of those.’

Prosecutor Bauer glanced at a gaping concrete path that disappeared into the depths of the muddy earth. ‘You’re going to have underground parking?’

Novosek looked at him, winced, then said: ‘The old building had the underground lots. No point wasting a perfectly good excavation and, like Jack said, city parking is a bitch. It will also have an enclosed sally port for secure prisoner transfer.’

A burly kid with blond hair approached Novosek with what looked like a phone book wedged under his arm. ‘The slump test was OK.’

‘Go ahead, then.’ This didn’t seem to please the project manager much, though, and the guy didn’t move until Novosek looked at him again. ‘Go ahead, pour it. And put the book back. Oh great, there
they
are.’

Theresa followed his gaze. Three people, armed with signs and a cooler, stood on the tree lawn between the sidewalk and Rockwell. A fourth person joined them, pointing to the construction site and the cop cars in particular. ‘Who are they?’ Theresa asked.

‘Protestors.’

‘Oh, I read about that. The school administration building was a historic landmark, wasn’t it?’

‘
Was
it,’ Novosek said with feeling. ‘The old protesters are still fighting about it, petitions, council meetings. The place is
gone
, rubble, and they’re still bending the mayor’s ear. It was a Walker and Weeks building, like the rest of the group around here – the convention center, the Federal Reserve, the library. All Beaux-Arts.’ He gestured as he talked, waving a hand at each of the graceful stone structures which encircled them. ‘What? I build things for a living. You think I don’t know architecture?’

‘No, no,’ Theresa assured him. ‘I just can’t believe they would tear down a Walker and Weeks building.’

‘It
is
kind of a pity, but the building needed too many repairs and the county needed a new jail. They already owned the land, so money trumped history.’

‘Not for the first time,’ Ian Bauer murmured.

‘But those aren’t them,’ Novosek said before he slumped to a stack of concrete blocks and pulled out a small box. ‘Those are the new ones. Cigarette?’

‘No, thank you,’ Theresa said. ‘What do you mean, new?’

He sighed again. She got the feeling the man needed a vacation, or at least forty-eight straight hours of sleep. ‘Just how I got to thinking of them. The old ones protest our disrespect of the past. The new protestors think we have no respect for the present. This jail has a new design. I mean,
new
, as in never having been done in the history of the world.’

‘You’re using some new building technology—?’

‘No, no. Nothing radical about the actual structure, it’s just steel and concrete like anything else. I mean, some eggheads got together and decided that what causes the chronic failure in the rehabilitation of prison inmates is other inmates, and that the most danger to any inmate comes from other inmates. Fighting, shivving, rapes, settling scores left over from the outside – if they’re kept away from each other, that kind of stuff can’t happen. So they’re physically safer when isolated. Then the reason that rehabilitation falls short is that the mopes don’t learn skills for a constructive life, they learn skills to become better criminals. The same habits, the same gangs, the same occupations just transfer from outside to inside and back again. The only way to get them to build up enough of their own identity to be able to break away from all that is to give them a vacuum in which they finally have the freedom to think for themselves. I.e., isolation again. I’m quoting, understand. Nobody asked my opinion on the relative merits of social reform programs. I’m just building the building.’

Theresa studied the group, which had now grown to six, spanning race, gender and age from a white-haired grandmotherly type to two men, one black, one white, who looked as if they could work as bouncers or perhaps extras on
The Wire
. Plus a person shaped like a tall barrel with hair to his (her?) waist. All were united in the evil stares they sent in her direction. ‘So the designers think the perfect prison is one where each prisoner is kept in solitary confinement for the duration of their sentence?’

‘As I said, I’m just building the building. The cells will be set up with two sections: a bedroom and a small exercise area. How they’re going to exercise without equipment, I don’t know. Supposedly they’re trying to design an indestructible treadmill as we speak.’