The Burning Point (16 page)

"For the great sex," Carmen called.

When Bull blushed beet red, Donovan grinned at Kate. "I neglected to mention that these two are married."

"I thought it would be cheaper to marry her than keep paying an extortionate salary," the developer explained.

"Boy, was he wrong!" Carmen caroled over the partition.

"I'll take you over to the Palace." Bull plucked a down vest and a hard hat from a peg on the wall. "Since Carmen is already hassling me, you might as well, too." Despite his complaints, he gave his wife a thorough kiss on the way out.

Outside, Donovan stopped by the rental car and opened the trunk. After rummaging in his luggage, he pulled out two hard hats and tossed one to Kate. "Here."

"Thanks." The shiny white hard hat was screened with the PDI logo on the front and sides. After she put it on, he handed her a two-way radio, a match for the one he hooked to his belt. Donovan might wish that she'd stuck to needlework, but he was treating her like a real co-worker.

They climbed into Bull's pick-up truck and he drove them the short distance across the parking lot to the Palace. There was a bite to the wind, but the temperature was still a relief after the bitter cold of Maryland.

With its shining, mirrored windows in place, the building looked normal enough for movie use. Then Bull drove around to the back. Debris generated by the soft-stripping process was removed from this side, so banks of windows were broken or missing.

All three of them climbed to the highest of the five shot floors, which were the levels where explosives would be placed. Inside the Palace, the illusion of normalcy vanished. The hotel was a shell of its former self, the interior echoing with the harsh sounds of the demolition work being done.

The shot floors were being completely stripped of furniture, carpeting, and non-load bearing walls, leaving bare concrete floors, concentric rings of support columns, and emptiness.

As Kate sniffed the distinctively acrid, dusty scent of a stripped building, she wondered about the human dramas that had been played out here--honeymoons and holidays, business trips and illicit rendezvous. In a matter of days these listening walls would be gone, taking their memories with them.

She glanced at Donovan. Backlit by the light that poured in the windows, he looked lithe and strong and completely at home, like a lion prowling the savanna. For a moment, she was struck by the sheer weirdness of the situation--how after years of separation, she and her ex-husband were now working and living together. It was stranger than anything she could have imagined.

Unaware of her thoughts, Donovan said to Berrigan, "Sam told me this place was pretty eccentric, but didn't give any details. What have you found?"

"For starters, no blueprints. Ray Farmer, the guy who built the palace as his personal playpen, was loony as a goose--as each floor was finished, he had the contractor burn the plans."

"Bizarre," Kate said.

"Gets even stranger." Bull gestured to a rectangular hole in the concrete floor. Looking through, identical holes could be seen in every floor below all the way down to the basement. "I thought this would be a utility well for plumbing and wiring. Turned out to be a secret elevator that ran all the way from Farmer's penthouse down to a hidden exit on the street. God only knows who snuck in and out that way."

"Starlets, if Farmer's reputation is to be believed." Donovan looked into the open space. "Time to start checking if your boys have done the prep work properly."

Berrigan groaned. "All the times I've worked with PDI, you still don't expect me to do the job right. You gonna make me walk-through every square foot of every floor?"

"Not at all. Kate and I will do it. The inviolable law of explosive demolition--take nothing for granted."

That had been one of Sam's guiding principles, she remembered. A compulsive streak was essential for this kind of work.

"Have fun," Berrigan said. "I'll get back to the office." He touched his hard hat in an informal salute to Kate, then left them to their work.

When the developer was gone, Donovan said, "Now it's time to get acquainted with this building. Find out all her strengths and weaknesses and secrets. Then we can bring her down." He made a slow circle, his gaze going to every corner of the empty floor. "Usually a project manager has weeks or months to study a building. This time I'll have to learn it in three or four days."

"Then it's time we got to work," she said briskly. "What do you want me to do?"

He led her around, explaining what she should look for. Any stiffening elements that should have been removed but hadn't been. Oddities that might have been uncovered during the stripping process. Anything that might complicate the implosion of the building. His explanation helped pull her rather erratic knowledge of the business into a more unified whole.

On the next lower shot floor, he said, "This time, you take the lead."

Kate was slower than Donovan, but by the time she finished the inspection she was getting the hang of it. Doing this work that had been her father's life gave her an uncanny sense of connection with him. Suppressing the thought that Sam should have been the one to train her, not Donovan, she finished her survey of the floor.

When she was done, Donovan said, "Continue with the lower floors while I go to Bull's trailer and call the office. It may take a while until I come back--the administrative side of the business is pretty chaotic at the moment."

"I can see why, since you're doing both your job and Sam's?"

"On top of that, a lot of time has been taken up with the accident investigation."

"The state fire marshal's office?"

"Plus the state police, and the state health and safety inspectors because there was a fatality. Everyone who worked on that job has been interviewed at least three times."

She guessed that such interviews had left Donovan beating up on himself mentally the whole time. "Accidents happen."

"Yes. But we need to find out why so it never happens again. The fire marshals are sifting through the building debris with mesh screens. I hope to God they find out what happened soon."

The lines around his eyes deepened. "I'll see you later. If you notice anything you don't understand, make a note of it and talk to me later. Assume nothing. Ninety-nine percent of what happens in an implosion is predictable, but there are always some surprises. It's our job to make sure that there are as few as possible."

He left, knowing he would have to check Kate's work later, but thinking that she needed a chance to work on her own. The sooner she was qualified to work independently, the better for the firm.

His call to the office ran longer than expected. Not only did Janie, the office manager, need to talk to him, but half the other employees as well. Janie ended with the ominous promise to fax paperwork to his hotel.

Getting back to the Palace and locating Kate was a relief. She'd inspected two more floors. He asked, "Any problems?"

Her gaze swept the vast space. "I don't think this building has any cross beams. The drawings you showed me on the plane assumed beams, but I think the floors are just slabs of concrete hung from the columns and the elevator core in the middle of the building."

He gave a soft whistle. "Damn, I think you're right. That explains why this structure has been giving me an itchy feeling. More eccentricity to lay at the builder's door. The explosives plan is going to require major revisions."

"Good. I can watch you do the calculations."

"The sooner you learn how, the sooner I'll make you do the work," he warned.

"You do that," Kate said with a spontaneous smile.

For the moment, at least, they were partners again.

Chapter 14

It was dusk by the time Kate and Donovan finished surveying the hotel. After they climbed into opposite sides of the rental car, Kate asked, "Now that you've seen the place, how does the timetable look?"

"The soft stripping should be finished by the end of the day tomorrow. Having the movie crew come in gives us a couple of extra days beyond that--enough time to work up a new explosives plan and implement it before Bull starts tossing his horns." Donovan started the car and drove to the parking area exit, waiting for a gap to appear in the heavy traffic. "I called Luther and Jim. They'll arrive tomorrow."

Traffic thinned, and he pulled onto the Strip. Kate noticed lines of weariness around his eyes. Of course, he was on East Coast time, where it was well into the evening. Here, the gaudy lights of Las Vegas were coming on, turning the night to carnival. "Will four people be enough?"

"Luther's the most experienced man in the office, and Jim is head of engineering as well as a project manager." He braked for a red light. "We can have that building ready to go pretty quickly once the explosives plan is set. You'll earn your pay."

Pay? She hadn't thought about what salary she'd get. Eventually she'd have to negotiate a reasonable sharing of the household expenses, but she didn't have the energy to tackle Donovan about that yet. "I remember the first job you did on your own, that office building in St. Louis. All the charges went off, but it didn't come down."

"Don't remind me! I was scared to death when I went inside to figure out what had happened. Every column in the place was gone, but the building still stood. I expected it to fall on my head at any second. I almost wished it would--the whole thing was damned embarrassing."

Kate had been alarmed when Donovan phoned her that night and told her the story, though at the time he had treated the misfire as a hilarious joke on himself. That was the moment when she'd really recognized how dangerous explosive demolition was.

As a child, she'd thought the process was a kind of magic, and that her father and his company were infallible. But they weren't. Even someone as smart and careful as Donovan could make a potentially lethal miscalculation. "As I recall, the whole structure was supported by a single beam that you'd underestimated. You never did that again."

"I sometimes wondered if Sam let me make that mistake just to teach me a lesson. If so, it worked. Every project I've done since has been calculated six ways from zero."

"No more buildings that fail to come down." Kate started to smile, then stopped when she realized that they had slid into another moment of intimacy. A shared past was a dangerous bond. "Where are we staying?"

"A suite at the Grand Maya."

Their destination was coming into view. One of the gaudier hotel casinos, it was shaped like a giant step pyramid, surrounded by lush jungle gardens, and bathed in colored spotlights. "I thought PDI was counting pennies."

"Berrigan is part owner of the Grand Maya, so he's comping us the suite."

They both fell silent as fatigue kicked in. It had been a very long day, and it wasn't over yet. Kate sighed. Demolition was easy; shacking up was hard.

To reach the front desk of the hotel, they had to pass a hall full of raucous, nightmarishly jangling slot machines. Assault by electronic muggers. After registering, they took a glass elevator up the central atrium to one of the top steps of the pyramid.

Kate groaned when they entered their suite. It was decorated in Love Nest Modern, the wide windows bracketed by flamboyant draperies, a chrome-paneled bar, and lots of white carpeting and mirrors. A blatant invitation to sin, Las Vegas style. "This place looks like a bordello."

"But a high class one. Take your choice of the bedrooms."

She wheeled her suitcase into the nearer one and was unsurprised to see that the bed was set on a carpeted dais, with a mirror on the ceiling. The view of sparkling city lights outside was much more to her taste. "Suit yourself for dinner. I'm going to shower and call room service."

"That's exactly what I'm planning," Donovan said. "If our meals arrive together, would you object to our eating at the same table at the same time?"

"I suppose it would be pretty silly to take my food into the bedroom just to get away from you." It wasn't a very gracious acceptance, but Donovan smiled at her words.

Exasperated, she locked the door, then dug out her toiletries bag, peeled off her clothes, and headed for the bathroom. Sam had known it would be impossible for her to be stiff and formal with Donovan for a whole year. She hadn't even managed a full day.

On a superficial level, Donovan was easy to have around. Amusing. Considerate. Sinfully attractive. No wonder her diabolical father had assumed that regular contact might make her re-think why she had ended the marriage.

She turned on the shower and waited for the temperature to stabilize. It had been her choice to ask for a divorce without explaining why. >From a murky mixture of guilt and compassion, she'd chosen to look like the villain of the break-up. If she'd revealed her reasons, Sam would have gone after Donovan with a horsewhip. It would have cost her husband his job with PDI, and a good deal more. She hadn't wanted that.

Had it been a mistake to conceal the truth? Maybe. There were those who argued that the truth, no matter how ugly, was always better than lies. Kate wasn't so sure. She'd chosen the path that seemed as if it would cause the least damage to Donovan and her family. Though it really hadn't been a choice--her shame and humiliation about the situation had left her unable to talk about what happened then, or now.