Blunt Impact (6 page)

She took this in, trying to detect a recent disturbance in an area that appeared to be nothing
but
disturbance and movement and activity, a controlled chaos.

The open edges of the building were framed with a railing of two-by-fours; the crude structure didn’t seem to be able to hold in a kitten but no doubt was as solid as everything else around her. Nevertheless, she approached gingerly, scouting every inch of the floor even while at the same time she kept an eye on the great open space before her, drawing ever closer. But the dirt and dust and bits of paper and scattered materials did not reveal any fresh scars, no signs that the victim had been there, struggling with someone else or even only herself.

Neither did the sixth floor, the seventh, or the eighth. They gave up on the lift and took the steps to each new level. Frank caught up with them there, a bit red-faced but refusing to pant.

‘You need to lay off the cigarettes, cuz,’ she told him.

‘You need to—’ he began, but a coughing fit overtook the rest of the sentence.

They continued upward. The amount of items present thinned with each subsequent floor. After seven no ductwork had been laid out, and after eleven, no buckets of joint compound. By seventeen even the pipes were dwindling and the edges of the building were left open, without even a railing of two-by-fours. Theresa asked about that.

‘That’s why there’s no work being done up here yet,’ Novosek told her. ‘The floor is poured and left to cure. When it’s solid enough then the railing will be put up and work can begin. Until then we can deliver materials to the center and guys are not to get within ten feet of the edge. OSHA rules.’

So Samantha would have been working on the very top floors – the more likely place for her to go, as long as they weren’t still wet. But Theresa continued her methodical check of every floor. Better to start from the beginning than have to go back.

By nineteen the wind had begun to pick up, pushing and prodding at her body as if gauging its ability to send her over the edge, an invisible cat making desultory swipes at a mouse. Theresa asked Novosek what working construction was like, in a city where the temperatures could, and did, range from ninety-eight in the summer to twenty below in winter.

‘Rough,’ he told her as she combed over another empty level. ‘The weather does suck. It’s more or less a young man’s game. By fifty guys are just beat. But I think it’s one of the few occupations where someone who doesn’t particularly like school – like me – can still make a good buck and advance reasonably. I started out in high school laying pipe.’

‘Your guys here are good?’

He waited for her by the stairwell before they continued up, considering this question. His body seemed to hum with strength but his face showed uncertainty. ‘They aren’t angels. Construction workers have a reputation, and for the most part they live up to it. You can get a lot of sketchy kind of guys, but in this economy it’s an employers’ market. I could get the best because they’re available. This is probably the most clean-cut crew I’ve ever had, and the most experienced. Guys with no experience are the most nerve-racking to work with, because it’s easy to get hurt here if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘And Sam did.’

‘She knew. Whether she did it or not is another matter. Like I said, the young ones . . .’

They took another flight of steps.

By twenty-one, Novosek asked what she was looking for.

‘Signs,’ she said.

On twenty-three, she found them.

W
orkers had delivered an open box of metal fittings and the long but thin steel beams that made up interior walls all over the building, but the rest of the floor remained bare. The sun, now fairly high, slanted into the building and caught each mote in the floor’s layer of concrete dust weighed down by lake effect moisture. Swipes and smudges appeared, shapes that could be footprints or could mark the sloppy landings of large birds. Theresa caught them on camera, then proceeded, the two men behind her.

The marks in the dust were not suspicious in themselves, of course, since workers had no doubt inspected the concrete floor and delivered the few materials present, but the way they made a meandering path to the eastern edge raised the hairs on the back of Theresa’s neck. The dark spots she found on an interior pillar, even more so.

‘What’s that?’ Novosek asked.

‘Looks like blood,’ Frank panted.

Theresa photographed. There were three small dots on the two-foot square concrete post, and another one at its base.

Novosek snorted. ‘That? It looks like dirt. How can you tell?’

‘I see a lot of it,’ Theresa understated, and followed the trail. She found another dark stain, about the size of a pea with a tapering tail, five feet away. They could belong to a construction worker with a paper cut, but she kept thinking of the bruises on Samantha Zebrowski’s face, which might or might not have come from an intermediate collision on her long trip down.

The man who had operated the lift – somewhere between floors fifteen and twenty she had learned his name was Jack – found this much more fascinating than his boss did. ‘You want blood, there’s some on thirty where I jammed my spud wrench into my side the other day. Put a good gash in it – want to see?’ He patted his left hip, from which hung the nasty-looking tool. A normal monkey wrench at one end, tapering to an unnervingly sharp point at the other.

But since Samantha Zebrowski hadn’t been stabbed, Theresa politely declined the invitation to view his flesh and continued photographing.

‘Hey,’ Frank said, loudly. ‘Ten feet, remember?’

‘I’m civil service,’ she pointed out. ‘OSHA doesn’t care. Stay there. I don’t want any stray shoe-prints.’

‘There’s going to be stray shoe-prints all over this place,’ Novosek pointed out. He had picked up a plastic bottle before their trek and now swigged something that looked like Gatorade.

Theresa wished she had some, and she didn’t even like Gatorade. ‘Then there’s no sense in adding more.’

But nothing else sprang into sight. No bloodstains, no stains of any kind. Disturbances in the dust that could have been workers coming to see how well the concrete had hardened. Over the side, the eastern edge of Samantha Zebrowski’s landing zone came into view.

Chris Novosek offered to set up a safety harness for her. Frank observed the ten-feet rule, OSHA relevance or irrelevance, but bounced on his feet in agitation.

Theresa didn’t have a daredevil bone in her body. She didn’t approach the unrestrained edge of a two-hundred-odd-feet-high platform because she liked to flaunt conventional safety rules, but because she needed to see. Without a railing she sought out the exterior pillar, a solid rock of security. But just as she put her hand up to serve as a brace, she saw another dark smudge on its poured cement surface.

She photographed it, then pulled on a fresh latex glove, leaned that hand against the pillar, and looked down.

From twenty-three floors up the city became an abstraction, an artist’s canvas of structure and color, each buff hue leading into the next in a patchwork of life and achievement. Up here the struggle, the inhumanity of each to the other became abstractions as well and Theresa thought only of the vibrant pulse of the wind as it skimmed over her skin and its promise of utter freedom, terrifying and thrilling in equal measures. It made the brain dizzy, both physically and emotionally. Was that why Samantha Zebrowski had fallen?

Theresa felt her own knees sway. She straightened up and took a half-step back.

The only buildings high enough for their occupants to have a glimpse of Samantha’s plunge were the PNC Bank and Erieview Tower, both directly east, both office buildings and unlikely to be occupied at night.

Samantha Zebrowski’s final resting place lay directly below, the dark and drying blood marking the spot. A wall would eventually encircle this slab, currently represented by sticks of rebar. The woman would have been impaled had she not landed in the center.

Theresa retreated, to her cousin’s audible sigh of relief, but only to take more photographs. Then she approached the edge on all fours, which felt much more secure even if it looked ridiculous. But she got a good look at the floor, collecting a few fibers and a piece of plastic, and dizzying shots to illustrate the distance between where the female construction worker began and where she stopped.

The concrete pillar closest to where the woman went over sat to Theresa’s right, and she stood to examine it more closely. The rising sun made this difficult, slanting directly into her eyes and turning the inner surface of the pillar to a deep shadow and the outer surface, when she leaned out to take a look, to a blinding mirror. She let her eyes adjust, while her cousin made loud and dire predictions for the next few moments of her life.

Three dark red smears marred the pristine cement surface. They could have come from Samantha’s right hand, any smears on those fingers now lost during its soaking in the pool of blood. Because the victim injured herself first in an inebriated fall, then tried to scoot to the outside of the pillar before throwing herself to the ground? Because she changed her mind just as she took that last step into space? Because she hadn’t meant to take that last step, maybe was trying to climb around the pillar in a Spiderman imitation, to win an ill-conceived bet with herself? Because someone was trying to throw her off the building, and she was trying not to go?

‘Would you stop dangling over the city?’ Frank said, his voice dangerously tight.

‘Ma’am, please step away from the edge,’ Chris Novosek said with even more authority.

Theresa removed herself to safer ground. ‘Yes. Sorry. No, don’t come any closer! I want to take another stab at looking for shoe prints. And there’s some blood smears on this pillar I’ll have to collect.’

She retraced half her steps, then turned back and crouched. This time the rising sun worked for her, outlining every disturbance on the smooth concrete surface. Theresa sketched, marked, approached, tried to photograph as best she could.

‘What do you think?’ Frank finally asked. ‘Murder, accident or suicide?’

‘I think it’s still a wide-open field. We’ll have a lot more answers when we get her tox screen back, find out if she was staggering drunk or as sober as a church lady. But I’ve got two shoe-prints here without much detail but too much length to belong to Ms. Zebrowski. Which means someone was up here with her.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’ Novosek demanded.

‘I’m not trying to make your life difficult. It could be suicide, or accident, and whoever was here with her is afraid to come forward because they’re traumatized or because they think they can be held liable. But between Sam bleeding before she went over the edge and Ghost’s insistence that someone pushed her mother, we’re going to have to proceed with choice number three. Murder.’

I
an Bauer didn’t hang on to the construction worker as the zip lift ascended, because he was a man and couldn’t do that sort of thing, so he let his knees soften and rock with the movement and assured himself that even if he fell flat on his back he still wouldn’t go over the edge, as long as he stayed in the center and got nowhere near that thin railing that looked as if it wouldn’t hold in a slender six year old. And there was another reason he didn’t grab the man’s arm. Most people shied away from being touched by a guy who looked like Ian.

He was homely. After forty-seven years this had become the easiest way to describe himself to himself. He wasn’t hideously deformed or scarred or discolored, he was simply too tall, too thin, his hair too sparse (and getting sparser, to his dismay) and his eyes sunk too far back into his skull, his skin too pale (and not in a good way, more gray than porcelain), his fingers too long and his lips too wide. He looked like exactly what people expected to find in the dictionary when looking up the word ‘pedophile’, which seemed doubly ironic to him since he had prosecuted six pedophiles in the course of his career, and they had all resembled soccer dads.

He had done the best he could to deal with this handicap; he kept himself clean, dressed professionally and neatly, was uniformly polite to everyone he met and pretended not to notice the shock in their eyes at their first meeting, or second, or third. At the fourth it began to level out and they got used to him, sometimes enough to shake his hand without flinching. He had a job he enjoyed, a suitable little city loft within walking distance of it, and a few real friends to share the occasional beer or wine. Not bad at all. He was, of course, single. Single and searching.

He tended not to think on his situation much these days, which was why he had plenty of notice left over for how many feet of empty space were accumulating between him and the ground.

‘Where are they?’ he asked the guy, shouting over the light wind and the whine of the lift machinery.

‘Twenty-three.’ The worker grinned. A manly man, with steel-toed boots and a flannel shirt over a stained tee. He had shaggy hair and a dissolute bonhomie that meant, had he been born thirty years earlier, he would have been a hippie. Except for being tall and wiry, the utter opposite of Ian. Making some guy in a suit and tie nervous was probably the most enjoyable thing he’d done all week. Ian didn’t begrudge him. Life was hard; you had to get your fun where you could.

The platform slowed to a merciful stop and the worker waved a gracious hand at the nice solid concrete floor. Two men and a woman were present. He recognized the detective, at least. The woman wore a windbreaker with ‘Medical Examiner’s Office’ on the back.

‘Patrick,’ he said, and approached.

Frank Patrick nodded. ‘Don’t know yet if it’s accident or murder. Or suicide. What are you doing here?’

A good question. Because it was a spring day and he was dying to get away from the pile of briefs for a drive-by shooting didn’t seem sufficient. ‘I happened to be in the room when the boss got the call. County building, dead woman. He thought I might as well walk the block and a half and take a look.’