by Lisa Black
“Vaguely. But that’s probably changed in the digital age.”
“As far as the actual printing is concerned, yes and no.” They reached the east wall. He used his key card to exit the lofty atrium, into a space that was equally impressive in a totally different way. Overhead lights burst into illumination as they entered, as if by magic, to reveal a maze of huge and inexplicable machinery. If the atrium represented pure creativity, then this place embodied pure function. The floors were concrete, clean but stained, and so were the walls.
“The master sheet is made on a piece of flexible aluminum, using the reaction of oil and water and ultraviolet light. The point is that the ink sticks to the printed areas and the rest washes away. That’s done in here.” Her nose wrinkled from the smell, not offensive but definitely chemical as they passed a roomful of paper rolls, most standing on their ends but some on their sides, ready to be rotated into the printing process, and huge drums of liquid ink. The rolls only came up to her chest but were enormously round, and she guessed that they could easily kill someone. Kevin told her they weighed nearly 1900 pounds each.
They entered the next section. “Wow,” Maggie said.
Kevin let her take it in. “Yeah, it’s pretty impressive.”
Though they had been on the ground floor, it became the second level in this room and they took a metal staircase down. The three-story-high ceiling allowed for four towers of steel machinery to function, squeezing an unbroken stream of moving newspaper between huge, horizontal rollers. The rollers were stacked vertically inside the steel-framed towers, and not all the towers were the same size. The tallest had four sets of rollers, others two or one. The paper ribbon stretched from the top of one to the bottom of the next like a spiderweb. The noise drowned out everything else and Kevin had to shout as he led her along.
“The aluminum sheets are wound around the rolls there, but they print on a rubber roll next to it, which then prints on the paper. That’s why it’s called offset. There’s one on each side of the paper, so it prints on both sides at once. Every turn prints eight sheets of newspaper.”
She could see the rolls and the paper, but there seemed to be much more than that, from the huge boxes feeding the paper in and suspended vats of what must be ink, feeding through metal tubes to a mechanism that ran parallel to the rollers, an array of scaffolding and even steps surrounding each tower. What appeared to be super heavy-duty skateboards moved around in a set of tracks that wound around the bottoms of the roller towers. Kevin told her they would carry the huge rolls of paper into place. The clacking filled her ears, and the speed with which the paper moved made her dizzy. Or perhaps the fumes from the ink and its solvents did that.
“The taller towers with more rollers are doing the color printing, the shorter ones, all black. Four colors, of course—red, blue, yellow, and black. The paper roll then feeds into the folder, where the paper is folded and cut and sent to binding.”
She followed him to the other end of the roller towers. The stream of paper exited the printing process, was cut into two by a tiny rotating pizza-cutter–like blade, and folded over each side of a V-shaped wedge, only to disappear into a contraption that folded and sliced and spit out what would appear at her front door every morning. She would have thought this would cause the whole stream to flutter and snap back into the towers as if untying one end of a clothesline, but by that point the next newspaper had been folded and the paper just kept flowing. Each finished paper wound up suspended from an overhead conveyor belt, held by a clip, and moved into the next area, visible through glass windows.
“What?” Kevin asked her. “You’re frowning.”
“I just can’t believe it picks up and carries each paper individually like that. It seems so—delicate. I thought they’d be stacked—”
“Oh, they’re not done yet. Different sections have to be added and then the inserts—all those sale papers that only the real shopaholics look at. You ever wonder about those Post-it note ads that we stick over the headline on the front page?”
“I hate those.”
“Everybody does. But they’re great advertising. Those get stuck on as the papers are going by on the overhead conveyor.”
The papers flowed into the center of a carousel that had at least a dozen small platforms radiating from it, with a human stationed at each one. They were stacking some papers, setting them on the platforms to straighten them out, and—she couldn’t figure out the rest from her vantage point but assumed they were somehow piling up and binding the papers. At the far end of the building, probably half a football field away from her, people moved around a loading dock and shuffled the stacks onto trucks backed up to the open overhead doors. And from there, she thought, to a public wanting something to read with their morning cup of coffee in a glorious and time-honored tradition. “How many—”
“Twelve papers a second. Fifteen hundred feet per minute . . . twenty-five feet per second,” Kevin answered, shouting over the noise. “Now, if we could only sell twelve per second. . . .”
She could have stood there for another hour, absorbing all the action in front of her, where the pressed wood pulp went at each step and how and why, but she hadn’t come there for a tour.
“Where’s . . .” She refrained from saying the body, and asked instead, “Where are the police officers?”
“Ah, come this way.” They backtracked past the folder/ cutter and stepped under the moving stream of newspaper to the other side of the long room. She followed, ducking her head much lower than it needed to be ducked—she couldn’t imagine what a mess an obstruction in the paper stream would cause. And it would cause one hell of a paper cut.
On the other side of the roller towers, Kevin Harding pointed upward.
She followed the gesture.
On the highest platform of the tallest stack, a uniformed officer and two men in plainclothes peered over the railing. Two weren’t looking at her, though. Instead their attention rested on a man who hung in midair between that platform and the next lower one, swinging ever so slightly from the end of a thin white rope. The other end of the rope had been attached to the railing the men stood behind.
“That’s Davis,” Kevin told her.
Maggie’s attention was usurped from the unfortunate Mr. Davis. One of the men on the platform was looking at her, and she knew why.
Jack Renner.
Chapter 3
Maggie opened her camera bag, then snapped a few shots looking up at the body from different spots on the floor. Then she started up the steps. Kevin remained below, which was fine with her. The platforms didn’t appear too spacious. Or maybe he wanted to keep his distance from the body of his coworker.
She had thirty feet of stairway to prepare to meet Jack, and her mind ping-ponged with every clack of the paper rollers. There was nothing to prepare for, of course, since they would not say anything about their past association, would act in front of other people as if their acquaintance had been casual. She would function exactly as she always functioned at a crime scene: professional, courteous, and observing more than she spoke.
Still her heart pounded with a near panic she couldn’t control. This seemed a test of sorts, to see if their tenuous pact could hold up in the real world.
Maggie reached the top of the steps. Back to work. Calm. Professional.
Jack stared, but so did his partner, Riley, and the uniformed officer she didn’t recognize.
“Morning,” Riley said.
She took a deep breath. Normal, everything was normal. She was normal. Problem was, she no longer knew what that word meant.
“I don’t think it is, quite,” she said. “Please tell me you haven’t touched that railing.”
All three men looked sheepish.
She sighed, a bit more theatrically than necessary.
Four people moving about on a platform designed for a single mechanic required coordination. The uniform, low man on the totem, shuffled to the next level. Jack and Riley switched p
laces with her. They brushed chests while passing, inevitable at those quarters. Even as Maggie hoped the inking mechanism wouldn’t grab up her hair as it shuttled along the rollers, she could feel the heat emanating from Jack’s torso. She wondered at his thoughts. Did he feel amused? Awkward? Threatened?
She did not want him to feel threatened. She had seen his handiwork close-up.
But the idea of him feeling amused ticked her off.
She reached the railing. The rope, she now saw, was not a rope at all but a flat mesh strap about an inch wide. It appeared new and a little shiny, clean, tied off at the round metal bar with two simple square knots. The strap hung as straight and true as a Foucault pendulum with the fully grown male pulling down the other end, quivering only slightly with the vibration of the tower’s machinery. She followed its line and caught herself before putting one hand on the railing. She couldn’t blame the cops. At that height the urge to steady oneself was an instinctual and involuntary reaction before peering over to a thirty-five-foot drop with nothing but two thin bars of steel to keep you from plunging into that abyss.
As from below, she noted the jeans, pale blue collared shirt, battered running shoes, and black watch with a rubbery band. From above she could also see that his sandy-blond hair had grown thin at the top, a perfectly round skullcap. She took a few more photos.
Then she straightened, turned to the cops, and waited.
“Robert Davis,” Riley said. “Forty-four, married, two kids, copy editor here for at least six years. Lives in Garfield Heights. No known health problems, at least none documented in the HR file. No EMS or cop calls on record for him or his address. ID’d by the printing supervisor, but we haven’t—obviously—pulled him up or checked for a wallet yet, so we haven’t made notification.”
Meaning his wife and kids would have a few more hours of sleep before their world fell apart. Maggie asked, “Any history of depression or suicide attempts?”
“Who knows? The only person here to even recognize him is the printing supervisor, and he knew him only as another guy who worked here. They weren’t best buddies.”
Yeah, he hadn’t seemed too broken up about it. “Any conflicts? He about to be fired or something?”
“Not according to the HR gal we woke up, but she might not have been told yet. Layoffs have been a scourge upon the earth in this place for years, according to the printing supervisor.”
“So I heard. Why was Davis here in the middle of the night?”
“It’s a newspaper,” Riley said. “They write all day and print all night. Copy editors often work late checking stories before they go to print, according to the supervisor. That’s maybe why his family hasn’t called to see where he is—they’re probably used to it.”
She darted a glance at Jack. He stood as he always did, weight balanced, shoulders slightly hunched as if to downplay his height, a fiftyish, brown-haired, strong but not buff, calm, and utterly ordinary man. No one could ever guess what he had been up to for the past ten or so years. She knew only his most recent history, and wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest. He returned her gaze—steady, neutral, noncommittal. They would play it cool, for both their sakes. She gave him the barest nod. Their deal stood.
“He couldn’t confirm the clothing,” Riley was saying, “but I’m guessing our poor Mr. Davis never went home last night. Of course he could have a cell phone in his pocket that’s been going off for hours. Who could hear it over this racket?”
“Can’t they turn it off?”
“No,” Riley and Jack answered in unison. Riley said, “It would cause a huge disruption in the process and cost thousands upon thousands of dollars in late papers and lost revenue, blah blah blah. The supervisor nearly fainted when I suggested it. We didn’t insist.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. Whether the machinery turned or not didn’t affect their work. It was just loud.
“Too bad. I was really looking forward to yelling, ‘Stop the presses!’” At her blank look Riley added, “You know, like in the old movies. The really old movies? Stop the presses? Ah, you’re too young. How are you going to get him off that? Pull him up or lower him down?”
She glanced over the edge again. The body hung only a few feet below the next platform down. If they could pull it up slightly, the body snatchers could maneuver him onto that level. Simpler than the other two alternatives.
First, though, she would need to process the railing, exercise in frustration though it may be after at least three men had been leaning on it. The fingerprint kit in her vehicle, at the other end of a long walk through the facility, would be required. She really should move her car.
* * *
The body snatchers arrived. Maggie guided them in through the loading dock, where the truck crews shuffled their morning cargo. This attracted attention from the loading staff, which had been incurious until now. Maggie could see why. The cutting and folding process did not require the high ceilings of the roller tower area, so once the paper had been guided into that machine, the building became one level. This effectively cut off the view of the upper roller towers from the loading dock area. The forklift workers and truck drivers hadn’t noticed Davis’s body because they couldn’t see it from where they were.
The body snatchers’ official term remained “ambulance crew,” even though their “ambulance” was a van without lights or sirens. Their transports did not require haste, and they had not been trained in lifesaving techniques. They had, however, gained extensive experience in retrieving dead bodies from awkward and inconvenient areas, such as drainage ditches, too-small bathrooms, fire escapes, heating ducts, and once, a still-smoking chimney. They didn’t even blink at the suspended Mr. Davis.
The heftier member of the team, Deion, went to the uppermost platform to pull upward on the strap. Maggie and the less-buff Tony waited on the second-highest level to pull in the victim as if they were landing a prize tuna. The Medical Examiner’s investigator, a statuesque blonde who happened to be six months’ pregnant, supervised.
“Ready?” Deion called from above.
Davis faced away from them. The opposite wall had only a few windows, spaced to be visible from the roller towers. Past them the dark water swirled in what would be a gorgeous view during the day. She wondered if he had wanted one last glimpse before he went, or if the printing tower was simply the highest spot he could find in the building.
She also wondered where Printing Supervisor Kevin had been when Davis made his lonely climb to the top.
The body quivered and inched up. She and Tony reached out. Tony pulled the back of the man’s shirt and she grabbed his belt, resolving to let go if he started to fall. She would not let a dead man kill her.
She became aware of Jack standing behind her. She would not let the cops assist in the recovery, both because she didn’t automatically leave heavy lifting to men, and because she wanted to minimize the amount of personnel making contact with her victim. The ME investigator, obviously, should not be doing any heavy lifting in her condition.
But Robert Davis was frickin’ heavy. Her shoulders strained as she pulled. Deion kept the tension on the strap as she and Tony wrestled the stiffening body toward them. They had to stop with his thighs resting on the metal pipe railing, since the strap didn’t allow enough slack to go farther.
“Cutting,” Deion told them, screeching to be heard over the machinery.
“Hang on to him,” Tony told her.
The strap went slack, its loose end free-falling through the air in an undulating flash. She and Tony pulled with a quick ferocity, hauling Mr. Davis in before he could tip the balance of their collective weight. When his feet cleared the railing they lowered him, not too gently, onto a sheet laid out for just that purpose. Maggie straightened, sure her shoulders would be feeling the strain in a few hours.
Deion clattered down the metal steps. Jack made way for him.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Tony told him. Then, “Dude—what’s th
at?”
Deion looked down at his neatly pressed pants, which now bore a distinctive dark stripe from hip to hip. Obviously he had leaned against the railing Maggie had just processed with fingerprint powder. He brushed at it. Then he looked at Maggie.
“Oops,” she admitted. “I forgot to tell you.”
The investigator hid a snicker behind one hand.
With an impatient puff of air he brushed (futilely) at the stripe. But he spoke to her kindly enough to say, “That strap is still up there. Want me to get it?”
Maggie panted. “No, I will.”
“You sure? I can grab—”
“No.”
Three men and a woman looked at her.
Breath caught, she explained, “I’ll collect it. Because we have a problem.”
They kept looking.
“This isn’t a suicide.”
Chapter 4
Riley’s eyebrows disappeared into the crop of reddish hair. He pinched the bridge of his fleshy nose between his thumb and index finger, a picture-perfect expression of not-so-patient exasperation. “What do you mean, not suicide?”
“The vee,” she said, crouching next to the body. She no longer had to shout to be heard; the day’s paper had finished printing. Two areas over the binding mechanism hummed over the cut, collated stacks. Beyond them, the papers were trundled to the loading docks to be placed on idling trucks. Relative serenity reigned in the printing room.
“See the furrow in his neck? When someone is hung, the rope is pulled upward. The knot isn’t at the back of their neck; it’s more at the nape or even at the back of their head, depending on the elasticity of the rope. It forms a vee shape. When someone is strangled, the rope is pulled straight back, making more of a circle. The difference in the furrows is obvious.”
The investigator, rubbing her belly, backed Maggie up. “Exactly. Homicide.”
The two detectives bent over to gaze at the dead man’s neck. So did the uniformed policeman, who had returned to their little group. He looked curious, but the two detectives appeared to each have a touch of indigestion.