Blunt Impact (16 page)

The living room occupied the front half of the house, which wasn’t saying much. It barely had room for a couch, chair, coffee table and TV stand. A bathroom had been tucked under the stairs and the back of the house held a kitchen and another room. Hanging curtains closed it off from both the kitchen and the living room. He crept up to the gap in the middle.

Nothing too exciting, just the grandma snoring away underneath a triangle dangling over her head. Maybe the kid was in there with her, somewhere under the comforter, who knew. He could take care of both of them, the kitchen must have a ready supply of weapons, but knifing grandma in her bed would be, again, showy. He should probably avoid showy. But it would be easy then, to grab the kid and go. No, if you’re going to be showy with the grandma then you might as well do the kid right here.

He debated. The old woman snorted, shifted slightly, snored some more.

As he thought, his gaze fell on the coffee table, and suddenly he remembered the other reason he had come into the house. Under the dark blotches of coffee cups and magazines, the kid’s backpack sat propped against one leg.

He promptly forgot about killing the grandma and snatched it up. It might not be the same one, of course, but he felt sure it must be. How many backpacks would the little bitch have, and surely Samantha and the grandma didn’t use one. To have it sitting there ready to catch his eye just as he pondered killing Mrs Zebrowski, that had to be a sign. He had been meant to find it, and now that he had he should go. He must have missed the kid; she had already escaped this little palace and taken to the streets. Just like her mother. Going to get hurt, doing that.

He decided to leave via the back door, recalling from his childhood how climbing down a tree had been nothing at all like climbing up it. It had three dead bolts and a knob lock, and he turned these quietly and stealthily. The door scraped against the jamb as he opened it, but he had already figured the grandma for half-deaf and didn’t worry about it.

Then he heard a sound from the second floor.

W
hen Theresa arrived at the construction site at 6:33 the following morning, the sun had just peeked over the horizon, its beams blocked by low, gray clouds so that the site seemed to glow in a sort of unholy dusk.

Frank and Chris Novosek and a stranger waited for her at the edge of the ground floor, wearing identical and grim expressions. She gave Novosek a fresh once-over in light of what Ian Bauer had told her, but if he harbored any lecherous feelings they had been well pushed aside by the morning’s events. His face spoke only of pain and deep worry.

The new guy had a few extra pounds on his 5’ 10’ frame, a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a hard hat. He wore a white shirt and tie with his black jeans and a windbreaker he obviously didn’t need, since sweat dampened his brow.

Unlike the previous day, no noise existed at the site, no attempt to continue with work as usual. Silence surrounded them instead of men in hard hats. The only sounds – voices, the squeal of tires – came over the fence from another world.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked in lieu of greeting.

Frank said only, ‘This way,’ and headed into the interior.

Chris Novosek put a hand on her elbow to help her up the high step on to the foundation, since she carried a camera bag, a fingerprint kit and the small suitcase they used as a basic crime-scene kit. It added about twenty five pounds to her total weight. Concrete dust and other dirt crunched under her shoes.

‘This is State Inspector Kobelski,’ Novosek told her, adding: ‘It’s bad. Almost worse than Sam.’

She didn’t ask him to explain, preferring to see the body with an open mind. But in another moment she knew exactly what he meant.

In the center of the building sat the bottom of the open shaft that would become the elevator bank. It appeared to measure, to Theresa’s unpracticed eye, about thirty feet by fifteen, and at this point consisted of nothing but extra vertical beams with a central empty space plus a sparse collection of rebar sticking up from the base like punji sticks. And speared atop these sticks stretched the body of a man.

He wore worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, now punctured in three places. Feet to the north, head to the south. One of the iron rods had gone through his neck and opened his carotid, so that he bled out in spectacular fashion. Nearly every drop of blood that had been in his body now gathered in a sticky pool two feet underneath his body and his skin had turned a blueish pale. This left his body fairly clean and his face unblemished, if you didn’t notice how he had landed with his head turned to one side and a stick of rebar had entered his left temple, bulging that eye out to twice its usual protuberance. Even so, Theresa instantly recognized their newest victim.

‘Kyle Cielac.’

‘Yes,’ Frank and Novosek answered in unison.

He had stuffed the backpack into a dented garbage can teetering on the curb after searching it, tossing away Ghost’s pen, pencil and math homework. How the hell could it not be there? Where would a kid have – he didn’t even finish the thought. She could have put it anywhere. A locker at school – did kids that little have lockers? She’d had all night to hide it at home . . . When he had been eleven, he had a loose piece of baseboard, an old apple tree and a large flat piece of shale rock in the patchy woods behind their house to hide anything of value from his two tormenting brothers. So who knew how many hidey-holes this kid had. Maybe he should just not worry about it. The kid wouldn’t have any idea of its significance. How could she? He slumped against the bumper of his car.

But he hated to leave a job unfinished. Several years before he had been hired to build a small parking garage off the shoreway. Six months in, the market had crashed and the owner had drowned in his own debt. He still drove past the base of the garage, its upstretched beams rusting and pools of rainwater turning the concrete slick with algae, like one picks at a scab. When he started something, he wanted to finish it. Closure, or whatever. Even if the brain tells you it’s not necessary, the heart tells you it is.

He pushed off the bumper. Never leave a job unfinished.

‘He’s wearing Nikes,’ Theresa commented. ‘Not dressed for work.’

‘No,’ Novosek said.

‘So we have another employee inexplicably hanging around here after hours and winding up dead.’ She looked up. ‘Any clue as to how? What floor?’

‘No,’ Novosek said. ‘I made sure to get here first today. Kobelski arrived a few minutes after I did – we had a lot of concrete scheduled to pour today, to make up for yesterday.’

‘I have to test every truck of concrete that’s poured,’ Kobelski announced, ‘to make sure it’s within the correct parameters for the structure. Do you know how many trucks of concrete go into even one of these floors?’

‘I’ve got slightly more immediate questions at the moment,’ Frank said, showing admirable, and therefore suspect, restraint. Theresa and Angela both shot him a glance, but he went on. ‘How long were you here until you found the body?’

Novosek said, ‘About fifteen minutes, just as the guys began to arrive. I made them move back out, sent them home. No one went upstairs, including me.’

‘Good job,’ she said. The workers probably wouldn’t have gotten much done today anyway and it eliminated the problem of trying to keep them out of affected areas. Their project manager was getting good at managing a crime scene. Theresa wondered if he realized that he himself was a suspect.

Frank didn’t seem as appreciative. ‘I’m going to have to talk to them all.’

‘I know,’ Novosek said. ‘But I didn’t think you’d have to do it right away.’

‘Yet our state inspector is still here,’ Frank observed. Theresa had known the restraint wouldn’t last long.

‘I thought I might be able to help,’ the man said, without taking his gaze from Kyle’s body. His eyes seemed to drink it in, the glistening spikes, the scarlet blood. His voice made her think he should cut back on the cigarettes.

‘Help how?’ Frank pressed.

He finally turned his head, glaring, chest rising an inch. ‘I’ve been on the scene of a number of industrial accidents. This is hardly the first dead construction worker I’ve seen.’

Which didn’t answer the question, but Frank didn’t push it. Exaggerating one’s jurisdiction was one of the advantages of government work, after all.

Novosek distracted them with: ‘I know Kyle left with everyone else about four thirty yesterday. I saw him.’

‘Getting into his car, driving away?’

‘Walking toward Tower City. I think he takes the rapid. I’ve never seen him with a car. This place empties out fast at quitting time, and I made sure I was the last one out.’ He didn’t look at any of them as he spoke, only at the dead man. The moisture in his eyes ebbed, then flowed, then receded again.

Theresa got out her flashlight and examined the elevator pit. It sat approximately three feet below the ground level with no way of getting down to it except to jump, carefully. The bottom pad had gathered a uniform layer of construction dust which told her no one had walked around in it recently. Kyle’s killer had not gone to the body to make sure all life had departed, so she could do so without worrying about shoe prints. She began to photograph the pit and the ground floor around it, thoughts about this new death interrupted here and there by yet another round of possible explanations for her daughter’s sudden reticence.

Frank, joined by Angela, peppered Chris Novosek with questions to learn everything he knew about Kyle Cielac. Theresa listened as she worked, but none of it sounded particularly useful. Kyle had just been another worker, reliable, apparently competent, complained about no one and no one complained about him. Kobelski stood six feet away from anyone else, distancing himself while observing all, arms crossed as if he were the one in charge of the whole shebang. Theresa, camera cradled against her chest, slid into the pit.

She touched the man’s chest, prodded his arms. He felt as cold and stiff as a Popsicle and she guessed he had been dead for most of the night. The killer had not been lax by not double-checking his work; from the clean hands it seemed clear that Kyle had not moved after landing. He had not brought his free right hand – the left arm had been impaled just above the elbow – to his body to feel his grievous wounds. The spike through his head took out his brain instantly and mercifully, while the heart kept pumping on its own long enough to exsanguinate its host through the hole in the carotid. It was a ghoulish and unreasonable tableau, but if Chris Novosek thought this was bad, he had obviously never seen the results of a small-plane crash, a motorcycle versus car accident, or a person dead for a week in the middle of summer with no air conditioning.

Considering Samantha Zebrowski’s death, Theresa took a close look at Kyle Cielac’s hands and face. No apparent bruising or other injuries. The fingernails were neatly trimmed, the shirt buttoned, jeans tightly belted. There might be more stuff under the skin, but she would have to wait until the autopsy. Speaking of that, how on earth were they going to get the body off its pincushion without causing further, and significant, damage?

‘At least in here we’ll be shielded from the rain, when it comes,’ Frank said.

She looked up. The shaft continued in a hollow square straight up to the gray clouds. ‘Maybe not. And no idea where he came from, huh?’

‘Are you going to start talking about mass times acceleration due to gravity again?’

‘Nine point eight feet per second squared. If we knew force, we could solve for feet. Or –’ she stopped craning her neck – ‘we could just go look.’

‘I knew you’d get to that.’

But before they could gear up for another ascent, voices interrupted. Todd Grisham strode toward them with a uniformed patrol officer, each trying to keep just ahead of the other until they were nearly running. The officer finally called a halt to both of them at a distance of about twenty feet, throwing a beefy arm in front of the construction worker.

‘Is it Kyle?’ Todd demanded. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Guysaysheworkshere,’ the patrol officer said. ‘Needs to see the body. I said you—’

‘Let him in,’ Frank said.

‘Come here,’ Angela said, and without so much as a glance at each other they moved around the hole in perfect unison, in order to flank Todd Grisham as he moved forward to view the dead body of his friend and co-worker. Close enough to both watch his reaction and to grab him if he made a sudden move to either touch the body or run away. A signature move of her cousin; Theresa had seen him in action many a time before.

But Todd Grisham did not move, only stared at the dead man and his grisly position until he was nearly as pale as the corpse. It would have been comical, in a cartoon: the wide eyes, the fallen-open mouth, the stammering pleas for information. But his trembling horror stayed all too real.

‘What happened?’

‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ Angela said gently. ‘When did you last see Kyle?’

She had to repeat the question three times before he could become self-aware enough to answer. ‘Yesterday. As we were leaving.’

‘And what time was that?’

‘About four thirty.’

With everyone’s attention on Todd, Theresa watched Chris Novosek as he heard this part of his testimony verified. His expression did not change and he said nothing, only watched his employee’s face as if everything – his life, the building project, the murders – depended upon it.

‘Where did he go?’

‘Dunno. Home, I guess.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Home. What happened to him? What was he doing here?’

‘Were you home all night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can anyone verify that?’

‘I – dunno. My brother and my niece, I guess. What was he doing back
here
?’

‘We don’t know,’ Frank admitted, a touch of silk to his voice. ‘Would you have any idea what he might have been doing back here on the job, after hours?’

For the first time Todd tore his gaze from his dead friend and looked at his boss, in fact stared with a desperate and pleading intensity.