Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  ‘Thanks.’

  The child unbent enough to take her mother’s picture back, shooting furtive looks at the prosecutor as she did so.

  ‘What now?’ Ian Bauer asked.

  ‘Now I take her home,’ Theresa said, one arm across the girl’s shoulders, ‘and then I need to get to an autopsy.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  ‘Really?’ was all Christine would say to Theresa as they surveyed the multiple impalements of Kyle Cielac. ‘Really?’

  ‘I don’t know why you always act like this is my fault,’ Theresa said.

  ‘Spikes?’

  ‘They’re not spikes, they’re rebar. They’re there to reinforce the concrete.’

  ‘I know what rebar is,’ the woman snapped, and didn’t say another word until Kyle Cielac had been de-pierced, sliced open, and gutted like a fish. The six wounds had been opened and examined. His nails were clean, his hands rough but unbroken. Kyle hadn’t smoked, and he’d eaten a healthy amount of grilled fish and potatoes for his last meal. Then the pathologist finally forgave Theresa enough to ask, ‘Did you find anything on his clothing?’

  ‘His entire ventral surface was soaked in blood. On the back I found a few hairs that look like his, a cat hair – apparently his room-mate has one – and some sticky little yellow-colored globules.’

  ‘Is that a scientific description?’

  ‘Close enough. I have no idea what they are but they start coming apart when exposed to moisture. They’re either some kind of a pigment or dye, or a food item. I ran them through the FTIR and got a bunch o’ nothing, so I suspect they’re organic. I’ll have to talk Oliver into testing via the gas chromatograph.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘If I bring him Cheetos, it usually helps.’ Theresa watched Christine slice up Kyle’s smooth, red-brown liver with what looked like a bread knife. ‘The ironworkers all carry these nasty-looking tools. A spud wrench has a monkey wrench at one end but tapers to an ice pick on the other. A sleever bar is just a pry bar that also tapers to an ice pick at the other end. They use them to line up the beams and girders before they weld them together.’

  Christine peered at a fatty deposit. ‘So you’re thinking someone could have stabbed Kyle and then tossed him into a pit in a way that the stab wound would just coincidentally slide over a piece of rebar?’

  ‘No . . . it would take some arranging.’

  The pathologist removed a sliver of the tissue and dropped it into the quart container of formalin, already half-filled with slivers of other organs. ‘That would be tough to do without causing significant damage to the body. He’s a good-sized boy.’

  ‘True. Unless there were two of them.’

  Christine picked up a wet, red object about the size of a fist and slashed open the coronary arteries in a series of quick stripes, with two or three millimeters between each slice. ‘Then, what, they jumped up and down on his back to simulate a fall?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that would take a lot of force. Enough to get some subdural hemorrhaging started, and I don’t see any.’

  ‘Oh.’ Theresa turned back to the steel table. With his torso flayed open and vacated and his scalp pulled back until his skull cap could be sawed off and even one arm and one leg opened and dissected, Kyle Cielac now bore only a passing resemblance to a human being. ‘So we’re back with him falling into a dark pit in a place with which he should have been intimately familiar, for no discernible reason.’

  Christine didn’t respond, only used a bigger knife to section the ventricles. ‘He had a good heart.’

  ‘Yes.’ Theresa gazed at what was left of Kyle Cielac. ‘I think he did.’

  Damon picked through five elbow joints before he found one he liked, free of any rough edges or dimples. His father, for the brief few months he had been present in Damon’s life, had referred to any blemish on a surface as a ‘tit’ which always made the child have to stifle a laugh. ‘You rub that wax out good, boy,’ he’d call from the porch as Damon ran a rag over that falling-apart maroon Cadillac that wasn’t worth a wash, much less a wax. ‘I don’t want no tits in it.’ It had been the most amusing thing about a not terribly amusing person. He disappeared for good just after Damon’s eighth birthday, the best present the boy could have received.

  He cleaned the end of the white plastic pipe with the joint cleaner, gave it a minute, then coated it lightly but thoroughly with the plastic PVC glue. Hard to believe the water pipes in a forty-story building were going to be held together with glue, but the foreman didn’t think it strange and Damon didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to tip the guy off that he had never put two ends of a pipe together before this job.

  As it dried he prepped the next, very long section. Boonie and the foreman helped him settle it in place, then, as Damon expected, the foreman wandered off to have his fifteenth cigarette of the day which gave Damon the time and privacy to pull out a piece of white paper, folded over and over again, and add that day’s work to that floor’s diagram. He sketched quickly, knowing that if an engineer ever checked his work – which would not happen – he would find it remarkably close to scale. Damon’s mother had often told him he would be an artist, a Harlem Michelangelo. Hah. He didn’t even tag buildings. His talent with the pen or pencil came in handy but didn’t give him any particular joy. He just happened to be good at it.

  By the time the new jail opened for business, Damon would have provided his boss with a complete set of plans, including all doors, windows, pipes, electrical conduit, stairwells and elevators. Of course a great deal of finishing work would be done after all the plumbing had been completed and Damon no longer had a reason to be on site, but most of that would be cosmetic. The hardware, as he thought of it, would be set in concrete. They might not know the exact location of controls to open and shut certain containment doors or the pass codes to computers or which clerks might be partial to a bribe, but they would know every way of getting in and out of the building, where the main monitoring stations were and which office belonged to the warden. The boss had said that trying to break out of jail was a fool’s errand, in his opinion, but that surely that information would be of great value to someone, some day. Great value.

  Damon had the paper folded and back in his pocket before the foreman returned, and they moved on to the next section. The second and third floors would have more pipe flowing through them than the rest of the building put together, almost, between the cafeteria, the staff kitchen and lunchroom, and the hospital and laboratory.

  ‘What do they need a laboratory for in a jail anyway?’ Boonie grumbled. ‘They’re going to be doing experiments on the prisoners, betcha.’

  ‘Like sewing their feet on to their shoulders, that kind of thing? Mengele shit like that.’

  Boonie handed him the jar of pipe cleaner. ‘What’s Mengele?’

  ‘You know, that Nazi doctor. Don’t you ever watch the History Channel?’

  ‘Yeah, in-between Martha Stewart and Oprah. No, not that kind of experiments – be pharmaceutical testing, more like. That’s where the money is.’

  Damon slid the pipe end into the sleeve joint. ‘I don’t mind no pharmaceuticals. Might not be so bad in here, if that be the case. ’Cept for us blowing the place up, maybe.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Boonie hissed with more than his usual vehemence. ‘Five-oh.’

  Damon looked up, and sure enough, two guys in suits were crossing the concrete toward them. He schooled his face, kept his shoulders and arms down, took a deep breath to relax his vocal cords. Cool. We’re just a couple of workers, doing a job for the man. We’re supposed to be here. We’re paid to be here.

  ‘Hey,’ one of the cops said. ‘You two are Cooper and Whitson, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  His partner, a chubby dude in cheap pants, asked: ‘Did you guys see or speak to Kyle Cielac yesterday?’

  ‘Nope.’

  They followed up, easily accepting Damon’s monosyllabic answers and Boonie�
�s accompanying nods. Then the first one asked, ‘You guys know a Rodriguez?’

  ‘Couple of them,’ Boonie said. ‘Which in particular?’

  ‘Tyler Rodriguez. Pipefitter.’ At their blank stares he added, ‘He works here,’ as if they were idiots for not figuring that out.

  ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘Me, neither.’

  ‘Rodriguez,’ repeated the one with bad taste in clothing. ‘Rod-ri-giz.’

  ‘Heard you the first time, man. Don’t know him. But it’s a big building.’

  ‘So it’s possible he could be a pipefitter here and you just don’t happen to know him?’

  Damon shrugged. Boonie shrugged. And they kept shrugging until the two suits went away, shaking their heads in frustration. Damon watched them go.

  Figured. The first true answer he’d given, and the cops didn’t believe it. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Nothing to do with us,’ his partner said. ‘That’s all I care about.’

  ‘Who’s this Rodriguez?’

  ‘We know everybody who lays pipe here. Probably someone who quit the first week. Maybe he don’t exist, the boss man just uses the name to round out his payroll.’

  ‘So it looks like he’s paying some guy named Rodriguez, but the money’s going into his own pocket?’

  ‘Lot of shady stuff go on around a construction job. But the boss white, so he ain’t going to end up a client of this fine establishment, once it be finished,’ Boonie said, already losing interest in the topic.

  ‘This is not a good day for this to happen, with that other thing comin’ up.’

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘They’re checking everyone out. So how come they haven’t come down on us yet? We’ve both got paper.’

  ‘They might yet. That’s why the situation bears watching. You see her today?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Damon said.

  ‘Bears watching.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Damon said again. ‘I got that.’

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, low but persistent.

  Chris Novosek paced the marble hallway of the county planning office, cursing slowly and steadily under his breath. He had left the site in the hands of his capable foreman but still chafed at being away, even for an hour, on such a cluster of a day. The copper tubing had been delivered and the guys were installing it as fast as they could, but the day had gotten such a late start with Kyle’s death and they couldn’t possibly get even half of it done. Not that the copper would necessarily be safer stretched out and bolted in – at three dollars a pound, thieves were breaking open small window units to get the A/C coils – but having to cut each individual pipe would be a lot less tempting than a big stack of it lying there loose. He had even considered hiring his own security guard but the county had some restriction about private security on their property. They wouldn’t hire their own, though, because that would be an addition to the contract amount and they had their constituents to answer to. The deals we will make in a down economy, Novosek thought. He should have stayed in residential work. Give him some Gates Mills mansion to build, where the contract is a handshake and the owner doesn’t give a damn about much as long as the finished product has more square feet than his neighbor’s.

  By the time the contract specialist emerged from his office and waved Novosek in, he would have gladly strangled the man and left his body there on the marble floor to cool. But all he said was, ‘This had better be good.’

  ‘Good is what it’s not.’ The man collapsed into his desk chair as if he’d just climbed ten stories. The desk and both extra chairs were piled high with papers and blueprints and Novosek didn’t bother to clear one off. He wouldn’t be staying that long. ‘You get your concrete from Decker and Stroud, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There might be a problem with them.’

  Now Novosek wished he had cleared someplace to sit down. ‘What?’

  ‘They won the bid with extra points for a minority-owned business.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So they might lose that rating.’

  ‘How is that possible? I’ve met Decker; he’s as black as the ace of spades. If you’ll pardon the expression,’ he added to the county worker, who was equally dark.

  ‘That’s the result of one tough gene from one single grandparent. Johnson isn’t a minority; he’s an opportunist. His name is all over the company – along with Stroud, who’s Irish – but the actual articles of incorporation are in his wife’s name. Who, as long as we’re using descriptive language, is as white as pasteurized milk. Apparently Mr Decker has some fraud convictions in his past which would have precluded a business license.’

  ‘How does this affect me?’ Novosek’s voice hinged on desperate, because he suspected exactly how it affected him.

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ the clerk went on as if Chris hadn’t spoken. ‘The protests over the jail design have not gone away. They haven’t even faded. Every civil rights group in the country is weighing in on the topic and the ACLU is recruiting talking heads by the score for the series of lawsuits they’re already writing up. The prison superintendent is getting death threats – from people who actually sign their name at the bottom. How does it affect you? At least twenty percent of your subcontracting work has to be a minority-owned business. Concrete is such a huge chunk of the overall that Decker & Stroud alone more than fulfilled that clause. If they’re reclassified, you’re in violation.’

  ‘Somebody may be in violation, but it’s not me! I didn’t certify their status, the county did. I didn’t solicit a quote from them, you guys did. This isn’t my fault.’

  ‘No one’s saying it’s your fault, Chris,’ the man told him with patent patience. ‘I’m just saying that the entire contract will have to be reviewed. It’s possible you have enough other subcontractors that fit the bill to make it a moot point. It’s possible that we still have time to add them on in the finishing work stages. Maybe the exec will reassess the policy. Mostly I just wanted to give you a heads up because there might be some bad press on this.’

  ‘Not for me. This is the county’s screw-up, not mine.’

  ‘And you expect them to own up to that? No, they’ll let the chips fall where they may, and if some fall on you instead of them, they’re not going to worry overmuch. You know how it goes.’

  Novosek rubbed his temples, feeling the first rumblings of pain behind his sinuses. ‘Great. Whatever. You really could have told me this on the phone. My copper pipe came this morning and thanks to losing half the day with the cops I’m going to have to work everyone on overtime to get it laid before night falls and it disappears to the recycling centers. I knew I should never have built a jail. It’s a bad place with bad – I don’t know, karma.’

  The county employee smiled wearily. ‘You superstitious, Novosek?’

  ‘Never used to be. But I’m starting to reassess that policy.’

  THIRTY

  Nana had been pretty upset. She yelled at Ghost and said she should be locked in her room if only Nana could get up the steps, which made Ghost feel bad. Then Nana burst into tears again, which made her feel even worse.

  No one seemed to believe Ghost when she said she thought Nana would simply assume she had gone to school. Apparently a death in the family meant you didn’t have to go to school, but Ghost hadn’t known that and no one had told her.

  School would be out for the summer in another week anyway. Hard to believe that she had been so looking forward to the break, to not having to go to that noisy place full of kids who shoved and shouted. She had been dreaming about summer for the past two months, and now it had become completely unimportant, an abstract, vaguely recalled concept.

  Nana had relented enough to make her a toasted cheese sandwich – arguments always seemed to end in food when it came to Nana, along with disappointments, celebrations, debates, bad weather and the kind of day Mom used to call ‘getting your ass kicked’ – and Ghost had eaten more of it than she had planned. All
the walking and running must have worked up some sort of an appetite, which Nana said was good since they now had enough food to feed a small army. She let Ghost leave her sight long enough to go upstairs as a knock at the door promised a delivery of yet more edibles.

  After Ghost washed her face, she sat in her own room for a moment or two, felt unable to interest herself in a single item within it, and went back into her mother’s.

  When she had played dress-up in Sam’s clothes, Ghost would go straight for the glittery stuff, tops with bling and frilly, lacy skirts (though her mother didn’t have too many of those). A stretchy, sequin-encrusted halter top had always been her favorite. She would pull it over her flat chest and thought she looked as glamorous as someone in a movie. Mom would look at her and say the same thing every time: ‘You’d better take that off before Nana sees you.’

  Someday Ghost would be old enough to wear it. But her mother wouldn’t be there.

  With some difficulty she swallowed the lump in her throat and dug through the closet looking for the top. When she couldn’t find it there she started on the drawers. It suddenly felt very important to find it, or maybe she just didn’t know what else to do.

  She heard a thump downstairs.

  In the vanity drawer she found a tangled collection of bras, pairs of underwear and a white envelope with a clear window in it, like the kind bills come in. She glanced inside, saw green.

  Money.

  Ghost felt surprised, but not that surprised. Adults always had money, even when they insisted they didn’t. But she wouldn’t have expected her mother to have that much. The bills added up to four hundred and seventy-five dollars.

  She wondered what her mother had planned to do with it. She’d probably been saving up for a new television; the one they had wasn’t very big. Ghost had seen huge ones in stores. She stuffed the cash back into the envelope and stood up. She’d give it to Nana.

  She had reached the door to the hallway when she heard a man’s voice.