Blunt Impact (8 page)

‘Complete isolation,’ Ian Bauer mused aloud.

‘Complete
physical
isolation. They’ll be able to hear each other and will be able to talk all they want. But never physical. Food will be delivered. Books, supplies, and temporary and highly monitored laptops will be brought to the cells. They’ll actually have more personal space than ever before but no common space. No cafeteria, no library, no prayer meetings. No exercise yard, which should reduce the number of murders to a fraction right there.’

‘Like a kennel,’ Theresa said, picturing where she had once had to leave Harry for a brief stay. ‘No wonder they’re protesting. The concrete block cell with a remotely operated door to an outside area. Shoving in dinner through a slot in the door.’

‘Exactly like a kennel. The blacks say the man has been trying to get them back in chains since 1865. The Hispanics say they’re treated like dogs everywhere in America and apparently that includes prisons. The whites say it’s barbaric to deny any human simple human interaction. I say maybe it’s more barbaric to toss a guy into a pit of snarling hyenas, but there’s no capital letters at the end of my name. I’m just building the building.’

Theresa ran one thumbnail along her teeth. ‘So this patch of land was not a happy place even before Samantha’s death.’

Chris Novosek puffed. ‘You could say that.’

‘These protests ever get violent?’

‘Not yet. They have to stay off the property and they do. They have to stay off the mall green proper and they do. They put their vitriol in writing and direct it to the prison commission and the city exec.’

‘Never a run in with one of your guys?’

‘Nope, got to say that for them. They don’t accumulate until after we’ve started and they disperse before we leave for the day. They concentrate on office workers and yuppies who come to eat their lunch on the mall. They’re not stupid, they know enough not to pick a fight with a guy who spends all day lifting very heavy things, and they know no one here is going to sign a petition that might put them out of work, not in this economy. But it won’t be long. They’re growing in numbers and starting to shout insults now and there.’ He didn’t sound bitter toward the protesters, he didn’t even sound particularly unhappy. But then a shadow crossed his face and he said, ‘You think maybe they came in here to kick up their efforts and ran into Sam? Maybe she got caught in the middle?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m sure Frank will want to check it out.’

The man in question reappeared, red-faced and having shed the jacket. He panted: ‘Car is registered in her name. Chief says we don’t need a warrant.’

Theresa put an arm around him. ‘It’s over here. No matter what we find, you are not making that climb again today.’

‘You’re telling me.’

She rubbed his back. ‘Maybe you need to start running again, cuz.’

‘Too hard on the knees. I think I need to start drinking again.’

‘You stopped?’ The group made their uneven way towards the parked cars. Bauer glanced back at them with a frown. He probably thought them unprofessional, but Theresa had dropped caring what other people thought on her fortieth birthday and had never looked back.

Jack led them to the Camry, opening the passenger door with a toss of his shaggy hair. Theresa ruined this gallant flourish when she asked him to please not touch it. She might want to fingerprint the surface.

Theresa felt torn about the car. If Samantha had come to the building with a boyfriend and that person had then pushed her off the floor, he might have left hairs and fibers behind him in the vehicle which could be picked up with adhesive tape and analyzed. If Samantha had jumped or fallen, then the vehicle and everything in it (excepting a suicide note) became irrelevant. Towing the car to the coroner’s office created an expenditure she would have to justify, but impounding it, or worse yet leaving it to be picked up by family members, would eliminate its current integrity.

A thorough search, she decided, dusting the doors and rear-view mirror and then a quick taping of the seats and floors should cover all her bases. She could pick up any loose hairs or fibers and then let the vehicle go, because what she didn’t see was blood. No drops on the dirty gray upholstery, no signs of a struggle. Nothing broken or, aside from the collection of stained McDonald’s coffee cups littering all four floor mats, out of place. Neatness, apparently, did not count for much in Samantha Zebrowski’s life, to judge from the interior of her unlocked Camry. Neither did safe driving practices – she had two outstanding speeding tickets and five parking violations, which Frank detailed for them as his breathing slowly returned to normal.

On the rear passenger side floorboard, tucked under a reusable shopping bag, Theresa found an oversized purse in shiny black vinyl, with large silver-colored rings and clasps. It held a department store of mascara, lip gloss, scratch-off lottery tickets, about fifteen bucks in crumpled bills and loose change, four condoms, two pay stubs and a phone number written in pencil on a scrap of paper. It had been torn from a menu, apparently, since the reverse side read ‘—
wich with tomato on rye, $7.95
.’ She read the number to Frank but slipped the paper into an envelope to process later for fingerprints.

‘She had a passenger,’ Ian Bauer said. ‘Or else the purse would be on the passenger seat, wouldn’t it?’

Theresa shook her head. ‘She had it tucked underneath the shopping bag. That suggests to me that she didn’t want to carry it but didn’t want to leave it in plain sight and give any passing thieves a reason to break her window.’

‘And then leaves the doors unlocked?’

‘Doesn’t make sense,’ she agreed. ‘So perhaps she
was
distracted with a passenger.’

‘And if you’re about to kill yourself, why worry about your purse at all?’

She grinned. ‘You have to understand the long-standing, long-suffering, deeply ingrained relationship between a woman and her purse.’

Bauer flushed as if she had spoken of thong underwear, and Frank said, ‘That number comes back to city hall.’

Theresa stopped grinning and blinked at him. ‘What? What department?’

‘Switchboard. She could have been trying to talk to the mayor or pay her water bill or ask about one of those parking tickets.’

Novosek had been watching them work with a reluctant but dutiful gaze. He wasn’t responsible for Samantha Zebrowski’s life, Theresa knew, yet he seemed to feel obligated to observe the processes of her death. Such things came with being the boss. He had sent the hovering Jack back to the steel beams as work resumed in every area except the concrete pad and the twenty-third floor.

Theresa shut the door, and she and Frank discussed the release of the vehicle for a moment or two. Frank would come by the coroner’s office to get the car keys, which they assumed were in Samantha’s pockets. Then he and Angela would go the extra mile and drive the car to the family rather than make Betty Zebrowski pay to have her dead child’s vehicle towed.

‘You can’t get it out of here now?’ Novosek had been about as cooperative as possible, but Frank could tell the shock had begun to fade as more practical matters seeped back in, such as how much of the day had been wasted and how that might affect all future stages of construction.

‘No keys,’ Frank said. ‘Plus, we don’t have either permission or probable cause to remove it. Why?’

‘It’s just . . .’ The project manager, as large and tough as he looked, squirmed like a schoolboy. ‘When somebody dies on the job, it freaks everyone out. It’s probably the same at your place – if a cop gets shot, don’t you all get jumpy? I’ve got to get that blood off that pad, and her car sitting here where everyone can see it—’

‘I understand,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll do what I can but it’s still going to be a day at least.’

‘Yeah, I got it,’ Chris Novosek said. ‘It’s just that here, jumpy can get people hurt.’

A
ngela returned. As she and Frank headed up the stairwell she said that the county child advocate had arrived and talked to Betty Zebrowski about funeral arrangements and also about living arrangements, which would not be changing. Mrs Zebrowski could handle shopping, cooking and cleaning for the household. The only thing she couldn’t do was climb the steps to the second floor.

The child advocate had also spoken to Ghost about death and stages of grief.

‘How’d she take it?’

‘As well as can be expected. She seems like a pretty sensible kid, almost too sensible . . . I don’t know, as she was listening to the caseworker – at times she’d zone out or start to cry, but other times she’d just stare at the woman and I could swear she was thinking to herself, “Yada yada yada.”’

Frank tried to control his panting, but by the fifth floor it had grown difficult. ‘So you think she might be right about a man pushing her mother over the edge?’

‘I don’t know. She didn’t say anything more about it. Still, how does Samantha, her daughter and a killer all wind up here at the same time? If she’s meeting a man, why bring her daughter?’

‘Wanted her to meet the new daddy?’

‘In the middle of the night?’ She didn’t even breathe heavy when she said it, damn her, but at last they could stop. Samantha’s two fellow finishers were working on the sixth floor, and Frank wanted to talk to them before time, thought or regret could affect their stories.

The guys weren’t hard to pick out. They were the only two humans in the vast empty space. One held a long piece of equipment that resembled a lawn edger, and the other carried a simple trowel, but it didn’t appear that a lot of work was getting done. Conversation broke off as the cops approached.

Frank introduced himself and his partner, not in a pleasant social way but in the
don’t let that courtesy fool you, I will be asking the questions here
tone that he had learned in the academy. ‘You’re Kyle Cielac and Todd Grisham?’

He waited until they specified who was who. Kyle resembled a high school football hero ten years after graduation, fleshy shoulders and no neck, close-cropped blond hair. Todd had dark good looks of indeterminate origin. But they wore identically wary expressions. In the next few minutes Frank established that the two men had worked with Samantha Zebrowski since the project began, or rather since the project progressed to the point of needing concrete finishers. A finisher usually worked with the concrete after it had been poured into the giant rebar-enhanced slabs that formed the floors of the skyscraper. They would trim the edges and cut the grooves into the slab that would keep the concrete from cracking during the temperature changes endemic to northern Ohio. They also followed up with finishing touches and repairs. One pointed to a slight crack in the corner, too close to that sparse railing for Frank’s comfort, their ostensible reason for being off on a tête-à-tête.

They were thirty and twenty-eight respectively, both unmarried with no kids. Kyle had been in construction one way or another since high school; you could say it ran in his family. Todd just needed a job after getting out of the military. Neither had known Samantha before this project, neither had dated her, neither knew who she was dating, if anyone, and neither had a conflict with her, or knew of one she might have had with someone else.

None of this struck Frank as plausible. Samantha had been single, hard-bodied and a bit of a party girl, and neither of these guys wanted to tap that? He would have thought they might be more interested in each other than their curvy co-worker if it hadn’t been for their constant glances toward
his
curvy partner. Though perhaps they were admiring her fashion sense. She
did
look good in those stretchy dress pants that all the female detectives wore these days and a thin brown sweater that matched her eyes . . . but still. It seemed to him that two single guys should have a lot more to say about one of the few women on the site.

But maybe he was just the cultural dinosaur that Theresa sometimes accused him of being. Maybe they viewed Samantha simply as one more fellow construction worker, no more, no less.

Yeah, right.

The rest of their testimony stayed in line with that of their boss: Samantha had been good at her job, reliable, seemed to care deeply for her mother and daughter, and nothing at all had seemed amiss during her last day on the job.

‘And she would have told you if she had a steady boyfriend?’

‘We heard about her daughter’s math grade, her new sports bra and her mother’s pot roast,’ Todd said. ‘So, yeah.’

Frank rubbed the back of his neck. ‘OK. Say she meets a guy, or has a new boyfriend. Would she bring him here?’

The two construction workers exchanged a glance, nodded.

‘Probably,’ Kyle said. ‘She said she drove her kid by, and a girlfriend. She was real proud of the place. This is the biggest job she’d ever been on, did mostly parking lots until now.’

‘What about to do something besides marvel at the majesty of the architecture?’ Frank asked. ‘Might she bring a guy here to have sex in a – different setting?’

They didn’t bother to exchange a glance before nodding this time. Todd said, ‘That’d be Sam. Uninhibited, you might say. Besides, she lived with her mom, so she always needed someplace to go besides home. According to her. You might want to use that black light thing on the back seat of her car,’ he added with a smirk that faded into a much sadder expression of regret, either for a young life cut short or the fact that now he would never know the wonders to be found inside the beat-up Camry.

More questions on the subject of Samantha Zebrowski’s sex life garnered no useful information. She had been an upbeat young woman, more or less liked by her co-workers and without any apparent romantic or financial woes. Her mood on the previous day had been utterly normal with no indication of any distress. Suicide, Frank thought, appeared more unlikely with each passing minute. ‘And no problems on the job here?’

‘No.’ They answered in unison, too fast.

‘What about you guys? Any problems, conflicts?’

‘No.’

He caught the first scent of fear, like the hint of distant smoke. ‘Union negotiations? Safety issues?’