Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  ‘Just sayin’. She got nothing to do with us, anyway.’

  ‘I know that and you know that. The cops ain’t going to know that, especially if they find our sheets.’ Boonie had done five years for aggravated assault. Damon had been to jail twice already, but only for minor possession charges.

  ‘Totally different floors, different jobs. I didn’t even know her name. You?’

  ‘Nope. Noticed her ass, though.’

  ‘Only one there worth noticing,’ Damon agreed. ‘But nothing to do with us. Wish she’d jumped off someone else’s site. Blew practically a whole day.’

  Boonie watched him dig the last bit of shredded cabbage out of its plastic cup. ‘You’re likin’ this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘This workin’ and shit. Getting up before dawn every day, punching a time clock. Eating your lunch out of a cooler like some tomato-pickin’ illegal. You actually like it.’

  Damon thought before he spoke. The boss always seemed to, and he studied the boss’s habits carefully. Now he thought that, though he would trust Boonie with his life, and there were only three people on earth he would say that about, there were also things, subtle things, that he might want to keep to himself. Such as, he didn’t really mind working on the site. He found it interesting – connecting one pipe to another, making them capable of holding water without leaking for the next fifty years, fitting each piece into the vast network that would span forty-one floors without any loss of pressure. How the men took a picture on a piece of paper and translated it into a solid structure of steel and concrete. How water and power, two things he had always taken for granted – you turned a knob and they came out – were the lifeblood of the city, living, breathing entities that could be channeled and controlled. All this spoke to a part of him he hadn’t known was there. Yeah, he kind of liked it.

  What he didn’t like was the boss’s plan, which seemed highly improbable at best and, well, stupid at worst.

  But the one thing he would never admit, not even to his best friend, was any lack of faith in the intelligence of the boss. That way lay annihilation. So now he said, ‘It’s different, that’s all. Maybe I was ready for a change. Got to admit, running a crew is stressful.’

  A pause. ‘Stressful,’ Boonie said, as if Damon had brought up the latest fashion in slipcovers or perhaps his golf handicap.

  ‘I’m sayin’. Got to watch everybody every minute. Everyone who works for you is looking for a way to skim. Everybody don’t work for you is looking for a way to rip you off. Boss is looking out in case you skim. Cops looking out to get their cut or run you in just to show they’re doin’ something. Then there’s the drama. Guys dippin’ into their own supply, getting all crazy. Fightin’ with their ladies. The girls hauling their babies all over the place, whinin’ to me about their dude like I’m freakin’ Dr Phil or something.’

  Boonie shrugged. ‘That’s the life.’

  ‘I’m just sayin’, that’s all. Rough.’

  ‘So you’d rather cart pipe around for the man, make practically minimum wage?’

  ‘Didn’t say that, did I?’ Damon asked as he studied a rib, picked clean.

  ‘Whatever. But on that other thing – we tight, right? We ready?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Damon said. He snapped the rib in half with one twist of his toughened hands and examined the exposed marrow with great interest. ‘Hey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Think that chick’s bones looked like this?’

  Boonie laughed so hard he spewed tiny bits of barbecue sauce on to the Formica, wet bits of dark red that glistened like blood.

  Ghost sat in the lobby, in the same clothes she’d donned after her shower, rubbing at one reddened eye. She straightened up as Theresa approached, steeling herself for the inevitable confrontation. The kid might not have good grades but she had quite a handle on how the world worked. Theresa’s first words did not seem to come as the slightest surprise. ‘Ghost, you shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I want to see my mother.’

  ‘This isn’t the place for that. You’ll see her at the funeral home.’

  ‘Then why can’t I see her here too?’

  Technically, of course, a reasonable question, so Theresa fell back on the great stonewall: policy. ‘Because no one under eighteen is allowed past this room, just like children aren’t allowed to vote or drink or see R-rated movies.’

  ‘I thought that was because the people were having sex. In the movies.’

  The receptionist giggled. Theresa sank on to the ancient vinyl bench next to the girl, who smelled of strawberry shampoo with the faintest hint of leftover cigarette. ‘There’s a collection of reasons for all those rules. It’s just better for people to remember their loved ones the way they were, and to see them in a peaceful setting like a funeral home, where they can be surrounded by their family and friends for support. We don’t let adults in here either, unless we absolutely have to for purposes of identification. That’s just the way it is, Ghost.’

  The girl didn’t seem convinced, so Theresa added, ‘And you couldn’t see her now anyway, because she’s in with the doctors.’

  ‘Are they cutting her up?’

  Theresa gulped. She had always believed in honesty being the best policy when it came to children, but now began to reconsider. ‘The doctor’s name is Christine, and she’s looking at your mom really closely, to see if there’s any bruises or scratches on the skin or if maybe she had been feeling sick or anything like that. Ghost, how did you get here?’

  ‘I walked.’

  ‘From your house? That must be three miles.’

  The girl shrugged. ‘I walk a lot.’

  ‘What do you do when you walk?’

  ‘Look for – stuff,’ she mumbled, but at least she didn’t ask any more questions about the autopsy.

  Theresa asked, ‘Does your grandmother know where you are?’

  ‘She laid down for a nap. I didn’t want to wake her,’ she added with patent innocence and the first hint of sneaky and totally normal kid behavior that Theresa had seen from her.

  ‘Ghost, you can’t walk all over by yourself like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  The kid fixed her with another one of those looks, the one that said her statement had been belied by the facts. Ghost had, so far, been perfectly safe. It had been the adult who got killed. ‘I need to see her,’ she started again, with a cloudiness in her eyes that hinted of a storm of sobs behind it. The receptionist watched them as if they appeared on a TV screen. ‘It’s not fair! I’ve got to figure out who killed her.’

  ‘I understand, Ghost, but—’

  ‘I have to find the shadow man!’

  ‘The police will do that.’

  ‘No, me!’ the girl wailed. ‘I have to do it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t have a father!’ Now she did sob, tears squeezing out slowly as if she didn’t have many left. ‘There’s no one but me and Nana and she’s in a wheelchair!’

  Theresa put an arm around the child and let her cry. She understood it perfectly, the overwhelming need to do something, to push back against this assault on her life. That the girl was only eleven didn’t dilute that in the least. So she rubbed Ghost’s back, pulled a few tissues out of a box on the end table, and said, ‘Why don’t we go up to the lab and I’ll show you the clues we have from your mother’s – case?’

  The girl sniffled as Theresa wiped her nose. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  Ghost sniffled again, thought of something. ‘You’re a lot like my mom.’

  ‘I am?’ Theresa stood up. ‘How?’

  ‘She would always make deals with me too, when I wanted something and she didn’t want to give it to me. And she would bite her fingernails without biting them off when she was thinking hard, like you do. But her hair is darker. Was,’ the child corrected herself with heartbreaking precision. ‘Was darker.’
r />   They went upstairs.

  ‘It’s a first, yes,’ Theresa announced to her boss, Leo, as she escorted Ghost into the lab.

  They started out with the Cellebrite device, a small system designed to quickly download information from cell phones. The Cellebrite itself was about the size of an electrical meter, but came accompanied by a briefcase filled with no less than one hundred and twenty different cables to fit most of the myriad of digital phones available on the market. The hardest part of the process was figuring out the make and model number of the phone, which often involved taking off the back and removing the battery, in order to find the correct cable. After that Theresa simply plugged the free end of the cable into one end of the device and inserted a jump drive into the other side. The device would then take all the information on the phone and write it to the jump drive, from which it could be viewed, printed, copied or written to CD.

  But again, the market supplied an ever-increasing variety of products, so until the phone had been connected to the device Theresa never knew whether it would be possible to download all the phone’s information, including ring tones and text messages, or none. Often it would be some combination in-between. She might be able to get the contact list and photographs but not text messages. Or call history but no photos. Or texts but not videos.

  ‘Why not?’ Ghost asked.

  ‘Even with the amazing advances in technology – when I was your age no one had ever heard of a cell phone – there’s still a lot of hit and miss. We can only do what we can do. It’s never –’ Theresa sighed – ‘as easy as it looks on TV.’

  Samantha’s phone proved relatively cooperative and Theresa downloaded the call history, contact list and text messages, both incoming and outgoing. She had already reviewed them before the autopsy and knew there were none that seemed distinctly relevant to the crime, and nothing unsuitable for viewing by an eleven-year-old.

  Next she settled the child in front of the comparison microscope, adjusting a task chair to the correct height. Then she provided a short introduction to the basics of microscopy, as Ghost stared down the oculars in fascination. They had to slide back and forth a few times so Theresa could adjust the focus, but Ghost showed surprising patience, waiting to see the brightly colored shapes of the hairs and fibers retrieved from her mother’s clothing.

  ‘On the left here is a blue fiber from her shirt. See? It’s kind of wide and looks like it has a channel running through it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any idea where that might have come from? Her shirt wasn’t blue.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about your shirt? The one you were wearing – at the time.’

  The girl paled a bit, but then said, ‘It was blue.’

  ‘So let’s compare the fibers from that shirt.’ Theresa placed a slide on the other stage, adjusted the focus.

  ‘You have fibers from my shirt?’

  ‘Yes. I took it out of your bathroom, remember? I told you.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘That’s what we call a reference sample – your shirt, because we know where it came from and we’re using it only to try to identify some of the unknown fibers in this case. Now take a look.’

  She squinted down the lenses for a while before saying, ‘They’re not the same. The one from my shirt doesn’t have that channel in it, and has little bubbly things through it.’

  ‘Very good. Those bubbly things are probably titanium dioxide, added to make the color brighter. You’re right, it doesn’t match. So our blue fiber didn’t come from your shirt. Do we have anything else that’s blue?’

  Ghost shrugged.

  ‘What about her car?’

  A wrinkle appeared between the girl’s eyebrows. ‘But that’s painted.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, the outside is painted. But the seats are fabric. And the carpeting is composed of fibers. Let’s take a look at the carpeting.’

  ‘It’s the same!’ Ghost said after a moment.

  ‘Yes, it looks the same. We can analyze the samples in this machine here, too, to make sure that they’re both made of the same stuff. So that eliminates that blue fiber that we found on your mom because now we’re pretty sure where it came from.’

  The wrinkle returned. ‘But then – how does that tell us who—?’

  ‘It doesn’t really tell us anything helpful about what happened to your mom, no. But it tells us what isn’t relevant. Then when we find a hair or a fiber we can’t explain, maybe that will be a clue to – what happened.’

  The girl sighed.

  ‘A lot of this work is like that. It’s not always how it is on TV. We have to go through all the pieces that tell us stuff we already know so we know which pieces tell us stuff we don’t already know.’

  Ghost sighed again. ‘What if the shadow man didn’t leave any fibers?’

  ‘Then he might have left something else. And physical evidence is only part of solving a crime.’ She spoke with more confidence than she felt. Samantha’s assailant might still be simply a product of a traumatized child’s imagination. The bruising on the woman’s body supported the theory but didn’t clinch it.

  ‘But,’ the little girl said, her sad voice barely above a whisper, ‘what if we never find him?’

  ‘It’s much too early to give up hope, Ghost. Let’s try another slide. Look at this one.’

  ‘That looks strange. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Theresa pulled a long but somewhat flat file box from a cabinet. ‘These are slides of all different kinds of fibers and materials. We’ll have to look at each one to see if we can find something that looks just like our sample.’

  ‘I thought you would put this stuff into some kind of machine,’ the girl grumbled as Theresa set up the first slide.

  ‘Sometimes we can. But sometime you just have to look at it.’ She left the girl going through the reference library, placing each tiny glass slide on to the microscope stage with a light touch. The slides were so uniform that the focus did not need to be adjusted with each new one, so Theresa felt free to step away from the extremely expensive piece of equipment just long enough to snag the cup of coffee she so desperately needed. She kept an eye on Ghost from Leo’s office.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked, to her complete lack of surprise. He didn’t bother to lower his voice, either, and she saw Ghost glance over at them. ‘You know what a big deal a defense attorney would make about you letting a kid into the lab?’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to tell them. Besides, she’s not touching anything confidential, she’s just looking at slides. And what’re they going to say, that an eleven year old planted evidence to frame a person unknown to her at this point, one we’re not even sure actually exists?’ Of course Leo, skinny, bespectacled, paranoid-as-all-get-out Leo, was probably right. Having unauthorized people in the lab was never a good idea. ‘The kid has to do something other than sit in her bedroom and contemplate life as an orphan.’

  ‘They have people for that, and those people are called social workers. You are not a social worker.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘There are other people who have died in the past twenty-four hours. You have gunshot residue samples to run and that gang-banger’s clothing has got to be dry by now. I want your report on that before you leave today.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  He could have simply kicked both of them out, but Leo’s style of management had always been to retain all power without ever actually making any decisions. ‘She has to go. Now.’

  ‘I know.’ Theresa sipped, the hot liquid coursing down her throat, and watched Ghost move on to another slide, the tiny fingers moving the piece of glass around as gently as humanly possible, working with a concentration that pierced Theresa’s heart. ‘You know about my dad.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Leo said. ‘But you weren’t that young.’

  ‘Fourteen. Only three years older. And he wasn’t murdered, he died of a brain aneurysm, and I wasn’t there w
hen it happened. But I still remember pacing through my house, walking from corner to corner, from the bedroom to the kitchen to the basement . . . just wanting to be able to do something to fix what had happened or at least to understand it. To find something that would make me comprehend why the day couldn’t start over and take a different course. No one had any answers. No one even had any questions.’

  The day hadn’t started over, which was why her ex-cop grandfather had more or less taken over the role, which was probably why, relatives often sighed, Theresa and Frank had wound up in their respective lines of work.

  From the edge of her line of vision her boss watched her. Then he said, ‘You can’t run a day care here just because you feel sorry for the kid.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Get her out of here.’

  ‘All right.’

  She returned to the main lab, where Ghost held a slide in her flat palm as if it were a live butterfly. ‘I think I found something.’

  Theresa promptly decided to ignore Leo a while longer. ‘Let’s take a look. I think you could be right.’ The reference slide had been labeled asbestos.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ghost asked. ‘I thought that was bad.’

  ‘It’s something to make stuff fire-resistant, so it’s not bad in certain conditions. It was probably around the job site, or left on her tools or car from a previous job.’

  Eyes on the prize, Ghost asked: ‘Will that help us find the shadow man?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It might. Even if it doesn’t help us find him, it might help us prove he’s the shadow man once we do find him.’

  The girl had cornflower blue eyes, something like her grandmother’s, and she rubbed one of them. Fatigue had begun to catch up. Briskly, Theresa explained that she would drive Ghost home now.

  The girl offered some half-hearted protests and then gave up. ‘You are going to catch him. Right?’

  Theresa had hoped to avoid that question. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ghost. There are no guarantees. But I can promise that we’re going to do our best. We – I am going to do everything I possibly can.’

  The girl’s expression said it all: