Blunt Impact Page 2

  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.

  THREE

  Theresa 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 o
n 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.

  Samantha’s beat-up Skechers were thoroughly scuffed, and none of the damage appeared particularly new. The back half of the body had been soaked in the pooling blood but the front half did not show any inconsistent smudges or stains.

  Theresa looked up from her work now and then. She could feel eyes upon her, even when she couldn’t determine the source of the stares. The dead girl’s co-workers ran the gamut in terms of reactions. Some came for a quick peek with appropriately sorrowful expressions, then removed themselves and did not return. Some skirted around the concrete slab until they could get a good look at the gore, turned slightly green, and likewise disappeared. Some stood at the edge of the cement and watched Theresa’s every move without the slightest hint of sorrow; in fact, body language made it clear that all they lacked for an entertaining morning was a lawn chair and a cold one.

  Two black men, however, didn’t fall into any of these categories. Young, buff, with nearly matching bandannas, they stood back and yet watched every move, and spoke only to each other, often with a sharp shake of the head and deep scowls of consternation instead of regret. Theresa absently theorized that they had come from some island community where a death on the job was a bad omen for all and the presence of a dead body an invitation to a curse. But their faces and dress seemed as American as apple pie and TiVo, so she gave up on that. Every person had their own and intensely personal reaction to death, and Theresa did not fool herself that she had yet seen them all.

  After copious photographs and the arrival of the body snatchers (technically called the ambulance crew, though their patients were never transported to a hospital), Theresa was finally ready to turn the body on its side.

  Rigor mortis had set in, putting the woman’s death at some time in the wee hours. The mild temperatures and the additional coolness of the concrete slab would have delayed the process.

  The skull came apart with the first movement, leaving pieces on the slab. The small intestine, which lay in surprisingly clean coils next to and slightly under the abdomen, peeked out from under the T-shirt. Theresa photographed as best she could, noting items in the girl’s back pockets but leaving them in place. They would have to be carefully removed and dried of the saturating blood and she didn’t have time or room to do it there.

  She and the two men moved the body and its pieces to a clean sheet as best they could and from there into a body bag. Theresa sealed the bag with evidence tape and a zip-tie, as if some nefarious person might steal into the back of the ambulance en route, open the bag and alter or remove some piece of evidence without alerting the crew. Downright silly, some of the hoops she jumped through in the name of security.

  Without the body to command one’s attention, she took a fresh look at the bloodstained concrete, circling around to find the outermost reach of the impact pattern. It seemed to exist in a fairly oval shape, radiating out from where the victim’s head landed, but Theresa continued to find dark red specks trailing off to the south. Nothing organized enough to be a splash pattern or shoe prints. When she got her face down to the specks via a contorted position that might garner extra points in yoga class, she could swear that the stains weren’t stains at all, but flakes. Flakes of dried blood. She collected some with a swab before moving on.

  Most of Samantha Zebrowski’s blood had dried by then – perhaps a strong wind?

  But then she reached the end of the concrete slab and any further flakes were lost in the packed dirt and patchy grass surrounding the building.

  And shoe prints began.

  Theresa stepped out on to the mud, now hard, though it would have been softened during the damp night. The prints traveled in a vaguely south-south-east direction, fading out and then beginning again, or so she guessed, since the trail led through a minefield of boot prints, shoe prints and tire tracks that ranged from bicycle to Sherman tank-size. More than once a crate or small trailer or piece of machinery presented a fork in the path and she had to guess at one, then go back and choose the other. But as she reached the second dumpster along the eastern fence, she found where they led.

  And she couldn’t believe it.

  Huddled in the gap between the two metal squares, knees drawn up to her chest, sat a little girl. And the girl was covered in blood.

  FOUR

  Earlier that morning

  Time to go, Ghost had decided. She would have to take in the view another night. If the sounds came from her mother, Ghost didn’t want her to know that she had snuck out of the house so early. And if they came from some other person, she didn’t want to meet them. Ghost turned from the stairwell and walked, quickly but carefully, back the way she’d come.

  She’d gotten to the other end of the foundation when something occurred to her. The gate had been open when she’d arrived. It had always been chained shut before (though she could slip through the opening under the chains). So the people on the site had come in through that gate and would most likely leave through that gate. If she wanted to avoid an encounter, she should take the other exit.

  Terrifically pleased with herself over this show of logic, Ghost stepped off the concrete foundation and down the small hill at the side of it. The smaller East Sixth gate remained placidly locked on the other side of a flat concrete slab protruding off the side of the main building, a span of patchy grass, three huge cardboard boxes on wooden pallets, a pyramid of long pipe, and three dumpsters, parked parallel along the side of the fence. Ghost felt pleased with herself for this observation as well. Parallel and perpendicular were the only two concepts in math she had managed to grasp, perhaps because they only involved pictures and no numbers.

  All of these areas, unfortunately, were well lit by a bright security light on a high pole. If the people on the upper floor looked out, they would see her walk to the gate.

  Circling outside the light’s reach, Ghost took some tentative steps, hugging close to the other objects on her route. She skirted behind a bulldozer and along a small trailer. Two more cardboard boxes and she finally stood far enough away from the building to be able to see the interiors of some of the lower floors.

  She scanned these for movement, listened for sound. Nothing.

  Another ten feet brought her to a large truck-like thing with a scoop on the front. She touched it gingerly, as she had the bulldozer, as if they were sleeping animals that might wake up at any moment. If they did she would have much more to fear than being grounded by Mom and Nana.

  But the machine sat cold and quiet, and Ghost sprinted five more feet to the side of one of the dumpsters. Almost to the fence, about as far away as she could get from the building without leaving the site.

  Way, way up high, two dark shapes moved against the dark interior. They hover
ed at the edge of the building, moving cautiously along the open space. When Ghost squinted the people became fairly clear, lit from behind by the security lights along the mall and from her direction by the security light on the pole. Two people, touching each other, but not in a friendly way. One seemed to be holding the other with one hand, arm out as straight as a pipe. The one being held clutched at the other’s wrist and kept buckling at the knees.

  At least they seemed too occupied with each other to notice her. Ghost breathed out, but decided not to make a run for the gate until they went away. The shadow of the dumpster would keep her hidden.

  One of them said something; Ghost couldn’t make out the words but heard the voice, low and almost sweet. The other said something harsh and fast like a scream. Like a woman screams. Like her mother screamed.

  But that couldn’t be her mother. Her mother had long hair, black and silky down to her waist, and if that were her backing toward the open edge of that high-up floor until she became easier to see with every step, her hair would be swishing over her back. It wasn’t, so she wasn’t.

  Ghost knew she should breathe out in relief about that, but didn’t.

  She also knew they should be getting away from the edge, but instead both people moved closer until the one being held had backed right up to empty space. Ghost couldn’t figure out what they were doing, other than talking – at least, one talked, a slow, steady stream of words. Ghost couldn’t make it out and didn’t try, just wished they would go away. The East Sixth side entrance was twenty feet away and chained, but she had gotten through it before. But if she ran for it now they would see her. Patience, Mrs Dressler always told her class, is a virtue. Ghost didn’t know the definition of virtue but had figured out the saying meant that sometimes it was better to wait for stuff. It somehow made you stronger to wait for stuff. And usually she was good at it.

  This was different. Something bad was going to happen and she didn’t want to see it.