Blunt Impact (2 page)

From her street she headed straight into downtown. No traffic to worry about; when a car did come by she ducked into an alley or a doorway, sort of a game but with a purpose. Her mother and Nana had told her over and over again to
never
get in a car with someone she didn’t know, no matter what they said, so she wanted to avoid the situation if possible. Also, the car might belong to a cop and for some unknowable reason they didn’t care for eleven-year-old girls roaming the streets in the dark hours. They had caught her once, shortly before her tenth birthday, and taken her home. Nana and Mom had yelled for hours, she’d gone without dessert for weeks, and worst of all some woman from the government had come three times afterwards, looking around the house and asking Ghost weird questions like did Mom and Nana ever make her uncomfortable (no), was she happy (yes) and did she have good friends at school (Ghost wouldn’t call them
good
friends, but she’d said yes anyway). It had convinced Ghost that if she wanted to continue these bouts of freedom, she’d have to get a lot better at keeping them to herself. So when Mom or Nana found her bed empty she’d claim to have walked to school, leaving out exactly what time she had left. Neither her mother or grandmother ever woke before their alarms clanged loud enough to prod the neighbors. So the idea of Ghost leaving for school while they overslept remained utterly believable.

She encountered no one save two rats and a stray dog until she passed a bar closing up for the night, its clients now shoved out on to the pavement, blinking and stretching as if they’d been asleep for hours. Ghost paused at the corner of the building and studied each one carefully. None looked familiar. She skirted around the group and walked on.

She passed two more closing bars, paused to look in the window of an all-night diner where the lone cook lifted a hand at her, just as the Walker boy had done. She waved back, made a quick visual survey of the three men slumped about the place, and continued on to the construction site.

The spring air brushed gently at her warming cheeks as she nearly stepped on a homeless man, curled up on a piece of cardboard. Her shoes – a little big for her, Nana believed in growing into things – merely brushed the edge of the flattened box but the man sprang up instantly, growling a warning. Ghost skittered away, though her pounding heart quickly settled down. He had changed his corner. He usually sat at Prospect and Twenty-First.

She was only a block away from her mother’s workplace now, but if she were honest about it, Ghost wasn’t concerned about her mother. Her mother had probably stayed with a friend (she often did) and would be home by the next dinner time.

The huge empty frame of the new building sat about two miles from Ghost’s front door. Next to the fenced site sat a large open area, with grass and sidewalks and a water-filled fountain with the statue of a man rising out of waves and reaching toward the sky. They called this park a mall but it didn’t have any stores. Its lights let her see her mother’s car, parked in a rutted, sparse area. Ghost walked toward it, then stopped. Something about the car’s dark interior, a visible black pulsing behind the glass, made her hesitate, and she approached the vehicle with a dragging step. No sound, not a flicker of movement. If anyone sat in the car they were utterly still.

She drew up next to the passenger side window and looked in. The slanting light from the park area opposite her passed through the interior, illuminating the emptiness.

Ghost let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She had come to the site just for something to do, not because she really expected to find her mother there. Her mother might be there very late, after a date or dinner with a friend, or very early, before the work started, but at this terribly wee hour neither explanation really made sense. Unless Mom had fallen to the same impulses that drove Ghost.

The building, while still only a collection of beams and flooring, dwarfed everything around it. It would span a city block and have forty-one floors when completed, her mother had told her more than once, and even now it thrust upward until it seemed to brush the night-time clouds. Ghost figured you could see the whole city from up there, all the streets and sidewalks and cars and people. Her mother always said that she felt proud to be part of its construction, of smoothing out concrete floors that would stand there until the next century. But Ghost had figured it out. Ghost’s mother didn’t spend her days walking over beams hundreds of feet off the ground just to do a job. She used that eagle’s nest viewpoint to look for Ghost’s father.

Ghost left the car and turned back to the site. The double gates were closed but not locked, and her tiny frame slipped through the gap without even snagging her backpack. She’d been there more than once during her night-time excursions.

No sign of her mother, no sounds or voices. Perhaps she had gone home with a friend and left the car here. One time Ghost and her mother had left their car at a cousin’s house and drove with them to a birthday party in Pennsylvania, so something like that could have occurred here. In any event there was no way to find her mother in the floors and floors and floors of dark building in front of her, unless her mother made some noise or Ghost shouted. And Ghost felt as strangely reluctant to shout as she had been to approach the car. As if the darkness were a living thing; it ignored her for the moment but could turn violent if disturbed.

Besides, Mom probably wouldn’t be too pleased to find Ghost here. Not pleased at all. They’d clamp down on the rules, and worse, maybe think about trimming the maple tree. Better to stay hidden.

Better yet to just leave, but instead she moved further toward the building.
What is she doing here in the middle of the night?

The site spread out before her, a huge and unusual playground. She took ten steps, jumped up on a wooden spool of pipe or wire, then jumped down again. Perhaps if – then she heard a sound, like a scrape of a shoe against concrete, and automatically leapt into the sheltering shadow of a garbage can. Crouched against the greasy object, she tried to look in all directions at once.

Silence again. The office building across the street sat nearly dark, with no activity in its few lit windows. A car drove by at least one street over. A door slammed somewhere over by the hotel. With the sound bouncing and moving all over, the scraping sound could have come from anywhere. Ghost waited until her insides calmed down and no one emerged, then stood up and rushed into the shadow of the building proper.

For the first time she thought that there might be someone present who was
not
her mother. That worried her for a moment or two, but there were two exits to the site. If a person appeared in one direction she would simply take the other. Anyone who found her might shout, but they wouldn’t chase. Ghost was tiny and had been told that from a distance people couldn’t be sure if she were a boy or a girl. She wasn’t worth chasing – not yet. That would change in another year or two.

She did not hear any more sounds and thought it unlikely that grown-ups could stay quiet that long. Unless they were watching television, adults were always making noise. So Ghost felt free to move into the building proper, a pitch-dark area of large and comfortingly inanimate objects. She walked into a few of them before her eyes adjusted to the dark. The workers kept huge metal boxes to store all their stuff, plus there were cardboard boxes and stacks of pipes and big plastic buckets of things. First she stubbed her toe on one of those, then her other foot knocked into something that slid and clattered. The beams from outside slanted into the area creating varying sections of dark and light but the clattering object rolled five inches into a light one – a screwdriver.

It looked like her mother’s, with black and red stripes along the handle, so she decided to take it home to make sure. Her mother took her tools very seriously, and if Ghost borrowed one she had to wipe it off and put it back in the basement exactly where she’d found it. So she knew her mother would be upset if she lost one. And if it wasn’t her mother’s, she could just bring it back.

Ghost dropped the screwdriver into her backpack, which didn’t have much else in it – school was not the place to carry anything of value – besides a piece of pencil, a pen that wrote in splotchy ink, a few papers from her classes yesterday including one page of homework she had been supposed to fill out for math class. She’d watched television instead. Ghost didn’t care much for math.

She crossed the entire building to the stairwell, a black hollow that wound up and up and up. Ghost always pooped out around fifteen or so, but some day she would make it to the top floors and be able to see every single street for miles around. She plunged into the hole of nothingness, not afraid of the dark. The shadows had always been her friends.

But then she heard another sound, like a cross between a scrape and a thud, and thought it came from one of the upper floors. Then a voice, just a few words, quiet and not angry.

There must be someone there after all.

T
heresa straightened up, already unzipping her camera case as she asked Frank, ‘You have an ID?’

‘Samantha Zebrowski. Twenty-nine, unmarried. Licensed for cement work. The first guys on the job found her, about five thirty this morning. They got here about five, entering from the south entrance – gate was open, they assumed the project manager was here – and didn’t see her until they started flicking on the halogens.’

Theresa wondered why construction workers always started so early. Aside from avoiding rush hour traffic, she couldn’t see the advantage of trying to function in the dark. ‘She worked here?’

‘Yeah,’ the project manager, Chris Novosek, answered, and Theresa turned toward him.

‘What did she do?’

‘Cement finisher. She could also work on spreading. She’s been here since the project started. Wasn’t bad at it.’

She wondered if he had a lot of female construction workers, but couldn’t think of a reason to ask. ‘So she would be working on the upper floors?’

‘Yeah.’

The man was upset, she could see, but not abnormally so. She couldn’t blame him. The job and its workers appeared to be his responsibility, and seeing the young person tossed down like an unwanted toy would upset anyone. ‘She has some sort of safety equipment she’s supposed to use up there?’

‘Yeah, of course. They all use a fall harness if they’re doing anything within ten feet of an edge. But nothing like that was scheduled for today. She should have been in the center of thirty for the rest of the week.’

‘She’s not dressed for work anyway, is she?’ The woman’s pants were a deep indigo, and unfrayed. A woman wouldn’t risk getting a good pair of skinny jeans full of concrete.

He shook his head. ‘Everybody has to have steel-toed shoes.’

Theresa persisted. This was important. ‘Maybe she kept her shoes in her box and changed when she got here.’

Chris Novosek snorted. ‘Nah. Nobody does that.’ He had blue eyes under the brown hair, something like Theresa’s. There were a lot of blue eyes in Cleveland, from all the northern European ancestors who had come to the city during the Industrial Revolution.

‘So why ever she was on this property, she wasn’t here to work,’ Theresa said.

‘Therein lies the rub,’ Frank said. ‘If it wasn’t part of her job duties, then it’s not covered by OSHA, Worker’s Comp, union rules – do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. On top of that, this is – or will be – a county building. That necessitates the crossing of T’s and dotting of I’s.’

‘That’s why you’re here,’ Theresa said.

‘That, and because business is slow. Which is what happens when your population dips seventeen percent in the past ten years. The chief has to justify his guys or we’ll get transferred to vice. Or worse, traffic.’

Theresa knelt again, pulling on a glove and touching the woman’s stomach. The bones crinkled and shifted, making a sound like a bag of potato chips, but the muscles were beginning to stiffen. The cool night and lying on the cold concrete would cause the rigor mortis to progress more slowly, making it very difficult to determine whether the woman had died before work started that morning or if she had returned to the site during the night, for reasons of her own. Why come there at all? What had she been looking for?

Theresa glanced at her cousin.

‘They knocked off at five thirty yesterday,’ Frank said, anticipating her thoughts. ‘Everyone is fairly sure she left with them, everything normal, no beefs with anyone, no arguments. We’re going to have to keep everyone off the upper floors until I can examine them, try to figure out where she went over.’

Chris Novosek made some desultory complaints, but nothing too stringent, and he and Frank went off to make that happen. Theresa could have examined the floors first and then worked on the girl, but decided that removing the poor broken body trumped completion date penalties. Whether there had already been workers on the upper floors became a matter of some debate, with no one admitting to it while not exactly denying, either.

Theresa spent the next hour photographing, measuring, documenting everything about the body and its landing spot. Samantha Zebrowski had two red marks on the left side of her face which could have become bruises had she lived long enough for the blood to pool along its broken vessels. She might have struck the edge of a lower floor on the way down, or they might have come from someone’s fists. Her hands showed no signs of defense, however, and no small injuries that might have occurred from clinging to a beam or platform before the final plunge, at least not so far as Theresa could determine, since the right had been soaked in the blood pool. The left had bounced up on to the girl’s stomach and remained clean. Cement work was hell on skin, and Samantha’s palms and fingers were heavily calloused. Her cell phone had also survived the fall, stored in her front pants pocket, cushioned from the shock of impact by the woman’s body, something Theresa would not have believed was possible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. But perhaps it was not that surprising; cell phones were designed to withstand a teenager throwing them across the room.