Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  ‘You make a sandcastle and then dump it out?’

  No one had any idea how complicated, how delicately balanced, and how vitally important that sandcastle was to keeping a building upright instead of collapsing inward, crushing every single occupant in a nightmare of rock and twisted steel – ‘Yes. The sample should slip more or less depending on what you want to do with it and what kind of plasticizers are used. If it’s too thin, it won’t be strong enough. If it’s too thick, it might leave gaps and cavities that will also reduce its strength. The inspector—’

  ‘Kobelski,’ the cop interjected, ‘who is supposed to be working for the state but is actually working for himself. Or rather splitting his take with the supplier, who has to be in on it.’

  ‘—measures how much the concrete stack falls in height, then checks it against the ASTM charts to make sure it’s within the acceptable range.’

  ‘Too little slump, the finished floors will have cavities, too much, they’ll be weak. Got it,’ the lawyer said. ‘And you see him do this and it’s within the ranges. So your concrete is right but it’s still wrong. How?’

  ‘That’s the question.’

  ‘No, how do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been spreading concrete since I was seventeen,’ Todd told him.

  The lawyer waited. Then: ‘That’s it? You know it’s bad because you have a feeling?’

  ‘No, because I work with it, touch it, spread it, see how it sticks to the trowel or doesn’t. It’s too thin, and I don’t care what the slump test says. That building is going to look great, and then it’s going to start to crack deep inside the columns and the floors where no one will see it, and then, in about five or ten years, it’s going to come down.’

  Finney said, ‘We have to be able to prove that. Otherwise this is all academic. Can we prove Novosek? Would he have to know the concrete is bad for this to work? He’s not a concrete guy.’

  Todd said, ‘He has to. The man built the Peterson building, for chri— And he’s at Kobelski’s elbow at every test. He comes up with stuff to keep us busy. No way he doesn’t know.’

  Kyle drained the lukewarm cup. ‘I’m not so sure. He’s a steel guy, barely knows slag from fly ash.’

  ‘I believe you, Todd,’ the cop said, shifting back to ‘good’ mode. ‘That’s why we need you to stay there and find our proof. Otherwise we’ll have a pile of rock and twisted steel and how many dead corrections officers.’

  ‘And inmates,’ Kyle said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All the inmates. They’d be killed, too, if the building collapsed. But I expect you don’t care much about them, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Finney said. ‘Not at all. You can, if you want; feel free to worry about those poor misguided children of Jesus all you like, and help us catch the son-of-a-bitch who’s going to get them killed. Don’t turn and run because some chick fell off a building.’

  ‘Samantha.’

  The cop didn’t even bother to respond.

  ‘Her name was Samantha.’ Kyle felt the unbecoming flush start at his neck and work its way up until his scalp tingled. ‘She first picked up a trowel on her seventh birthday. She lived with her mom and her daughter and her dad died of cancer before she got out of grade school. She worked hard and hated coffee and complained about the price of good shampoo. She was a person.’

  ‘Were you doing her?’ was all the cop wanted to know.

  The tingle became a burning and for a moment Kyle considered leaping over the table and beating the shit out of the guy. Considered, decided not to bother. Yes, he would have gladly ‘done’ Samantha Zebrowski once she learned to seek more than to pick up and fling away guys who were basically a walking pedestal for their penis. Once he knew her well enough to get over her giddiness at working in a thoroughly male milieu. Once he was sure he actually wanted to do her, the sentient being, and not just the slim hips and that hair that hung to the middle of her back and seemed to have a life of its own, because when a woman had those attributes it got real hard to sort out your own feelings. ‘No.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Todd clarified with that weird insight he could sometimes render. ‘Point is, she’s dead, and there’s no way it was an accident.’

  ‘Point is,’ the cop said, ‘you bail out now, Kobelski might get spooked and change his ways. Then he pockets his money and goes on to sabotage some other building, and you lose three months of work on this guy. I lose three years, but don’t let that bother you.’

  ‘Did this girl know about the concrete?’ the lawyer asked. ‘You said she picked up a trowel at seven. Did she notice the consistency?’

  ‘She complained about it,’ Kyle said. ‘She’d agree with Todd when he first started talking about it. But nothing more, so I don’t think she knew. Sam was good at finishing and edging, not mixing.’ And she spent too much time focused on those walking pedestals instead of her job.

  ‘So you have no reason to think her death had anything to do with Novosek and Kobelski.’ Todd opened his mouth to protest but the lawyer pressed on: ‘There could be a thousand other little intrigues going on at that job site, or she simply drank too much and decided to go look at the city lights. Don’t wander around the twenty-third floor in the pitch dark and you will be perfectly safe. Help us put this guy behind bars and a lot of other people will be safe as well.’

  Kyle eyed him. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I am,’ Ian Bauer said.

  SIXTEEN

  Frank Patrick asked himself, not for the first time, just what the hell he thought he was doing. He hadn’t wanted to be up high in this open death-trap of a structure in the broad daylight. He sure didn’t want to be there in the pitch dark.

  ‘It is pretty,’ his partner chose that moment to say. As Theresa had, Angela Sanchez stood right at the edge with nothing to steady her but one hand on a beam, as if that would keep her from falling over if she, for some reason, lost her balance. Or someone pushed her.

  ‘Gorgeous.’ Frank tried but failed to keep the tension out of his voice, and waited for his heartbeat to return to normal. This time he had not insisted on climbing the twenty-three floors, even in the cooler night-time temperature, and consented to get on to the zip lift. He had thought that somehow the wall-less elevator would not be so bad at night, that maybe in the dim lighting he could pretend it was a glass one and that there wasn’t really nothing at all but a flimsy cable railing between himself and hundreds of feet of empty air. He had thought wrong. ‘What do you think? Any potential witnesses?’

  ‘There’s more lighted windows than I would have expected.’ Angela waved toward Eaton Center and the PNC Bank building – the idiot, she should keep both hands on that concrete column. ‘But I don’t see much activity. Lights might be kept on for security. This floor would be hidden to anyone on the ground until Sam got right up to the edge. Nothing was happening at the Convention Center last night. And this could have happened in the wee hours, one, two – when even the most dedicated office worker had probably gone home. No witness except our kid. What do you think of her statement?’

  ‘She says it was a man in the dark. She can’t describe his height, weight, clothing, or hair color. All were simply described as “dark”. So even if she saw a man, it doesn’t help us much.’

  ‘“Even if”? You still doubt her?’

  ‘I still have a hard time believing this kid makes a habit of roaming the city at night when her mother and grandmother have her on a pretty short leash.’

  ‘All the more reason.’

  ‘What if Samantha got those bruises earlier in the evening? Picks up the wrong guy, has a tussle, decides she’s a horrible mother and goes home to pick up her kid and end it all. At the last minute Mom can’t do it, and mercifully – or not – lets the kid witness instead of participate. Kid can’t process what’s happening, sees a figure in the dark.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Angela conceded. They had seen stranger things.

  He turned around, headed toward the sou
th-west corner to make it seem like he had a logical reason not to approach the spot where Samantha Zebrowski went over the edge. ‘Hotels are twenty-four hours.’

  She joined him, then passed again – what was it about people who liked flirting with a two-hundred foot plunge? – to gaze at the twenty-five glittering floors of the Marriott Building. The cool night breeze off the lake lifted her hair and the city lights turned her to a silhouette, framing a tight figure that the other cops still couldn’t believe he wasn’t tapping.

  He was beginning to have a hard time with that himself.

  Angela Sanchez had been his partner for three years and two months. Though she did not talk about herself often he knew everything about her, inevitable after such a long acquaintance. He had met her children on only two occasions but had a good idea of their abilities and general attitudes. He knew where Angela had grown up, that her mother still lived in the same house, that her brother had made a lot of money on a dot.com and then lost it all, and the extraordinarily subtle signs to announce her monthly period. He knew that her nose wrinkled when she laughed hard and that she had finally used up that bottle of Polo for Women that some ex-boyfriend had given her for Christmas four years ago. He had learned all this in the last three years and two months. He had spent the last two years and nine months of that period telling himself that he was not going to fall for a partner.

  Not even if she were beautiful, intelligent, kind, unattached and managed to not be annoying in any significant way. In short, the perfect woman. Perfect for anyone except him. Falling for his partner would not only be professionally inadvisable – not when he planned to take the sergeant’s exam the following month – but pathetically cliché and he was not going to do it. Period. His heart might seek but he would not let it find.

  Unfortunately, every day it got harder to believe that. Especially at times like this, when her tailored white blouse skimmed over her breasts and down her abdomen and her sleek black hair brushed her shoulder blades as she turned to look at him with that slight smile, the one that made it seem they shared a private joke. And here they were in the dark, with the lights of the city spread before them.

  This could have been the night he gave it up. Had they been alone.

  ‘Are you done here?’ Chris Novosek asked.

  The guy had to be exhausted, Frank knew, but it had been a long day for everyone else, as well as a very short one for Samantha Zebrowski. So he shuffled the question off to his cousin. After all, this little nocturnal jaunt had been her idea. ‘Theresa?’

  She moved across the interior of the floor, almost invisible in the dark except for the weak beams of a dying flashlight. Unless the killer had carried a lantern along with him, Frank thought, no potential witness would have been able to see Samantha Zebrowski’s struggle for life. Even if the Marriott or the PNC Bank buildings were right next door, and certainly not from well over five hundred feet away. They were wasting their time.

  Theresa said, gesturing with the tiny Maglite, ‘I’d been hoping to see a homeless guy who camps here every night, or a group of friends who makes a habit of leaving the Tavern or maybe the Crown Plaza at a late hour. But it’s pretty quiet down here. One question – what’s this big hole in the floor? Elevator shaft?’

  ‘Yep,’ the project manager answered.

  ‘Pretty big elevator.’

  ‘There will be three passenger elevators plus room for the counterweights, and more in the south bank. Elevators are always a pain . . . They take up a lot of space, but the more floors a building has, the more people, so the more elevators. Determining the elevator to floor ratio is one of the hardest parts about planning. Elevators are expensive, so clients always want to keep to the bare minimum and then the second the place is finished the tenants will already be crying about how the elevators take forever and aren’t big enough.’

  ‘There’s no one perfect balance,’ Theresa muttered.

  ‘That’s why no two buildings are exactly the same,’ Novosek said. ‘We keep searching for the perfect design. Haven’t found it yet.’

  ‘Still, I don’t think these tenants will complain about much.’

  ‘The staff will.’

  ‘What about the elevator we rode up on? Will that be a glass one?’

  ‘The zip lift?’ Novosek chuckled to himself as if that were the funniest thing he’d heard in a month. ‘No, that’s just for construction. It will be disassembled once all the floors are enclosed.’

  Theresa went to join Angela at the western edge of the floor, encouraging Frank’s partner to move to the opening.

  ‘Hey!’ Frank couldn’t help calling out. ‘At least hang on to the girder.’

  ‘Beam,’ Novosek corrected.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The vertical stacks are beams, the horizontal ones are girders.’

  Theresa turned from the western view. ‘And ironworkers connect the two?’

  ‘They weld the beams together and the girders to the beams, yes.’

  ‘No rivets?’

  ‘Rivets haven’t been used since before I was born.’

  ‘And that’s what Jack does?’

  She was keeping him busy, Frank realized, keeping the project manager occupied so that he and Angela could look around, do their jobs. Investigate. Problem was, even as he drew as close as he dared to Angela, he still couldn’t see anything to investigate except the stack of steel beams on the floor behind them, a lone man talking on a cell phone as he meandered up Rockwell, and the fact that Chris Novosek knew an awful lot of prison lingo for a guy who was only building one. He also seemed to have no problem moving around the site in the pitch dark.

  ‘Crazy Jack? Yeah.’

  ‘He’s crazy?’

  ‘Ironworkers are all crazy. Who else is going to walk along an I-beam four hundred feet above the ground? They have a fall harness, but let me tell you something – they’d do it even without a harness. Most of them are descendants of guys who did, back before OSHA. Especially Jack.’

  ‘Why especially Jack?’

  ‘His father died doing exactly that – working without a harness. Fell twenty-eight floors.’

  ‘Wow,’ was all Theresa could come up with, apparently. ‘And he went into the same line of work?’

  ‘He’s not the only one here who’s lost someone to the job. Maybe we’re all crazy.’

  Frank watched the guy on Rockwell reach the security fence along the sidewalk and disappear from view, hoping Theresa had run down, but no such luck. ‘What holds up the floors?’

  ‘A cage of rebar and metal mesh spans the girders. That’s filled with reinforced concrete.’

  ‘So the beams hold up the building and the girders hold up the floors. What about the walls?’

  Novosek moved to the edge with the women, of course, chatting as if they were one foot off the ground instead of hundreds. ‘The cladding? Walls just close in the interior. They aren’t particularly important to the structure, which is why you have walls of glass if you want. It doesn’t make the building any less sturdy.’

  Theresa said, ‘I see the floor has been edged and grooved. So Samantha would have been done working on this floor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason for her to come to this floor in particular?’

  He shook his head, gaze turned toward the Terminal Tower and its well-lit peak. ‘Not a one.’

  ‘What’s that sound?’ she asked.

  All four people stopped and listened to a soft padding sound that drifted up from below. Frank checked Rockwell again but cell phone guy had not reappeared at the other end of the site. Now he heard a slight clink as well.

  Novosek shrugged. ‘The wrappings on three or four, probably. We’ve started enclosing the lower floors so that the interior guys can start work, get going with the plumbing, heating ducts, metal bars on the holding cells.’

  ‘But you’re not finished going up yet, are you?’

  ‘Nope. We have five more floors to add. Be
forty-one altogether when it’s done. Why we couldn’t stop at forty and have a nice even number, don’t ask me. Forty-one.’ This seemed to irritate him almost as much as Samantha Zebrowski’s death, but then it had been a long day. ‘Once the exterior walls go up they’re wrapped in aluminum paper, and sometimes the wind catches it and rips it out. Then drywallers hang plastic to keep the dust out of everyone else’s spaces while they sand. Ducts have chains and other braces on them and the wind can catch them too. Wind gets to be a bigger problem the higher you go, especially if you’re working with anything more lightweight than a hammer. One unexpected gust and your pail or even your hard hat can go over the edge and bean some passer-by, and then the whole project gets sued . . . Anyway, don’t let little noises scare you. New buildings can make as much noise as old buildings.’

  All the same, Frank thought, and tried to listen beyond their voices as his cousin went on.

  ‘But you haven’t enclosed the first two floors, just the next three?’

  ‘Lot more steel has to go in there yet, for the sally port and all. Prisoner transport is apparently the most vulnerable area. And the third floor is all medical – even a drug testing lab – and four will be the cafeteria, so there will be ovens, distilled water lines, garbage disposals, counters with outlets out the wazoo, fume hoods. Those two floors will take more work than the rest of the building put together, so we close them in ay-sap.’

  Theresa quieted, finally run out of questions.

  Frank said, ‘I’m going down. There was a guy on the street out there who seems to have disappeared.’ He even forced himself back on to that hellish moving platform that would plummet them to the ground.

  His cousin hung on to the project manager again.

  Angela did not hang on to him.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ghost did not leave the house that night. Her grandmother pleaded with her, bursting into tears – which Nana rarely did, outside something drastic like her daughter dying – and making Ghost feel guilty for thinking about it since Nana couldn’t come upstairs to stop her or even check on her. So she promised, pinkie swear, and she couldn’t go back on that.