Blunt Impact (28 page)

‘—and then Jenna said – oh wait, Mom, I got a click. I’ll talk to you later, OK?’

Theresa said
sure
and
love you
and slowly snapped the phone shut. Maybe she had just been reading too much into the whole thing. Teenage girls were moody, everyone – but everyone – knew that. Some moods lasted longer than others. There would be other inexplicable phases and unexplained silences and that was just part of life. Rachael was a person. She had a right to her secrets. Just keep the door always open—

Period.

Since when did a girl sound so perfectly OK with getting her period, especially when she faced a weekend of swimming near a handsome boy?

Theresa tried not to follow that chain of thought to its logical conclusion and failed miserably.

When the girl had been worried she might not get it at all.

Theresa’s desk phone rang. She ignored it.

Secrets were inevitable. Life was inevitable. What mattered that her daughter was her daughter and she was relatively safe and relatively happy. And the lines of communication, though slightly clogged, were still open.

Right.

The desk phone rang again. She snatched it up and all but barked her name. The night receptionist said, ‘You still here?’

‘Since I just picked up the phone, I’d say that’s – yes, I’m here.’

‘Good. ’Cause there’s a girl in the lobby for you.’

Boonie unlocked the back of the van, feeling damp. He couldn’t tell if the rain had arrived in a thin mist or if the humidity made him sweat more than usual. Copper was not a lightweight metal and even narrow pipes got heavy when you carried enough of them. He and Damon had filled the van from side to side but they didn’t want to overload it until the rusted frame fell apart or until the sagging rear end attracted attention, so Boonie went to make a delivery and Damon remained behind to stage another load at the entrance to the parking area. They had plenty of time. As suspected, no one had returned to the site. Their co-workers were scared, and the cops – ‘I’m not complaining, mind,’ Damon had told Boonie ‘It’s just, two murders in two days here. You’d think they’d kind of want to keep an eye on the place.’

‘They done,’ Boonie had panted. Inside the van, he’d grab one end of the pipes and slide them down to the floor between his feet, keeping the noise of the process to a minimum. The street lights, safety lights and full moon provided more than they needed to work. ‘Once they take their pictures and move the body and pick up their little things with little tweezers, once they take down that yellow tape, they’re done. They don’t come back. They go on to the next one.’ Sometimes you had to explain these things to Damon. Not a bad guy, but sometimes he just didn’t seem to know nothing about how the world worked. ‘Besides, nobody wants to be around a huge pile of metal spikes in the middle of a thunderstorm. No one’s gonna be out and about tonight at all.’

‘Like I said –’ Damon had also panted, to Boonie’s pleasure – ‘I ain’t complaining.’

Twenty minutes later Boonie moved the pipe a second time, wishing they could take them straight to the salvage yard instead of eventually having to move the entire load again. This wouldn’t have occurred to the boss, who sat on his lawn chair throne next to the open doorway. Or maybe it did.

The boss’s errand boy helped Boonie move the pipe; the second-in-command and the bodyguard flanked the lawn chair. No one said anything; nothing needed to be said. When the cargo van stood vacant once again, Boonie hopped in the driver’s seat and went back downtown, to commit more felony theft within sight of the Cleveland Police Department. The idea gave him a chuckle.

He parked the van next to the growing pile of copper pipe on the outside of the site fence. Cops doing a spot check might notice it, but with the gate shut they probably wouldn’t get out of the car to investigate. People were used to seeing stuff piled around a construction site and besides, like the boss said, every investment required some risk.

He shut off the van, unlocked the back door and slipped inside the gate. No way would he start loading that stuff by himself. Too noisy and his back was already hurting.

The place was crazy dark. The moon had gone behind a cloud, or one of the security lights had burnt out; he felt sure it had been light enough to see the debris chip piles, like the one he had just tripped over, when he left. And quiet; the most silent he had ever known the place to be. No movement, no wind, not even a car driving by outside the fence. Boonie felt a tiny frisson of – not fear, exactly, more like worry – brush over the back of his neck.

He stepped around the I-beams and up on to the foundation. He had to pick his way even more carefully there, feeling around with his feet before each step without letting on that he was doing so. He pictured Damon sitting at ease, eyes adjusted to the dark, watching him stumble around with his hands stretched out like he was blind or something. The idea made Boonie cut loose with a curse, adding, ‘Where you at?’

No response. The breeze picked up, carrying the scent of concrete dust and a faint, metallic odor that seemed both familiar and strange at once. Boonie reached the cache of copper pipe, accidentally kicking one free so that it rang out with a startled clap. He cursed again, and finally risked a quiet shout: ‘D! Where you at?’

No answer.

Maybe Damon had gone to take a leak. Maybe he’d walked over to Prospect to chat up some ladies. Maybe he’d gone to Michael Symon’s place on Fourth to have a steak, who the hell knew. Boonie moved off to his right, avoiding the more well-lit east side of the site. One thing was for sure: he was not loading that pipe by his own damn self. He would hunt up his partner first.

He stubbed his other toe on a gangbox and nearly fell over the slag crate, but made it back to the edge of the foundation, albeit on the south corner now. Still no sound.

Boonie stepped down the short embankment of gravel and sand and chunks of concrete, beginning to chafe at the waste of time. He wanted to get the next two loads done and get out of there, get some sleep before they had to come back the next morning. He looked forward to that, acting all innocent: ‘Man, the copper pipe got stolen? Shit!’ Of course with murders and the boss being arrested, maybe no one would even notice the pipe, which would be even funnier. The idea lifted his spirits until he plunged into the particularly dark valley between the I-beams and the crane and tripped over something.

He seemed to have both tripped and slipped at the same time, and just as this began to ruin his mood the rest of his mind put two and two together – a pliable object surrounded by a pool of liquid – and came up with horror.

‘
Damon
!’

Had to be him, the long shirt he always wore over his tee, the Ralph Lauren cologne he practically bathed in. The more Boonie patted and prodded, trying to revive his friend, the more the body crackled like a bag of broken chips and his own hands grew slick with blood. He tried to turn him over, but each limb and part moved on its own and he gave up. At the end he simply crouched, rocking on his feet in time to the wind’s keening wail. Once he realized the sound was coming from him, he shut up. He had to tell the boss. The boss would know what to do.

He got halfway back to the van before it occurred to him to look up.

‘S
he’s totally worn out,’ Theresa told Ian over the phone. ‘She’s soaking wet from the rain and I think she ran here – all the way from East Thirty-First. What is that, two, three miles?’

‘At least. What’s her mental state?’

‘Not much better. She’s nearly hysterical, keeps sobbing about the shadow man being her father and he hurt Nana. The guy was in her
house
, Ian.’

‘Her
father
? And what about Mrs Zebrowski?’

‘I called Dispatch, they’re sending an ambulance.’

‘Well, that’s best of course – just remember that in Ghost’s state, we have to take any statements with a healthy grain of salt. Have you heard back from Dispatch?’

‘Not yet. I only just called them, before I called you. I can’t get a hold of Frank – he’s in the middle of interrogating Chris Novosek. Otherwise I’d call him.’

‘Of course,’ he said with a sharper tone, then added, ‘At least she’s safe.’

‘No, Ian, she’s not. Because if Chris Novosek killed Sam and Kyle, then who attacked Ghost and her grandmother? Novosek has been under police observation all day and in custody for the past two hours.’

‘Maybe he has a partner?’ Ian mused aloud.

Theresa held the cell phone between shoulder and cheek as she rummaged in the trace evidence department closet for her emergency sweater, a fuzzy red cardigan. It smelled a bit like disinfectant but she wrapped it around the trembling child, now curled up in her desk chair. Ghost was too exhausted to eat, drink, or even talk. It had taken all her strength to reach the medical examiner’s office and what little reserve she had left she used to beg Theresa to send help to Nana. After that she’d collapsed into an unresponsive ball of trembling flesh.

‘I don’t know, Theresa,’ Ian Bauer said. ‘But keeping her safe is the top priority. After that we have to get a complete description from her. A composite sketch is probably all we need to break this whole case.’

‘Exactly.’ She sighed and moved out of earshot. ‘And we have to hurry. He knows she can identify him, which means he needs to kill her. He already killed two able-bodied adults, why would he stop at a child? Ian – can you get an artist? I don’t know who to call.’

‘OK, OK. Look – bring her here.’

‘Where?’

‘My apartment. The police department victim advocate areas are a disaster right now and all the noise and dust will make it impossible for an already traumatized child to concentrate. I will get the artist to come here – with luck Becky will be on call – and I can take Ghost’s statement. By the time we’re done with that, maybe your cousin will have gotten some more details out of Novosek and we can figure out where to go from there.’

‘That sounds like a plan.’

‘With luck the grandmother will go to a hospital instead of the morgue and we can take the girl there, have a doctor check her out at the same time. Ready for the address?’

Theresa repeated it back to him, slid the phone into her purse and very gently pulled the nearly comatose girl to her feet. ‘Come on, Ghost. We’re going.’

Frank knew the crumbling feeling in his stomach was his case coming apart, showering his budding ulcers with shards of flying debris. ‘You’re trying to tell us you didn’t kill Samantha Zebrowski?’

‘Of course not! Why would I kill Sam? I didn’t even mean to kill Kyle!’

Angela said, ‘You expect us to believe that two different people killed two different victims on two consecutive days at the same location, in the same manner?’

‘I don’t know what you can believe or can not believe, but I never laid a finger on Sam. Why would I?’

‘That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out.’

Novosek spoke with great patience, ‘The night Sam died, I left work at the usual time. I even saw her heading to her car. I was home in time for
Live on Five
. I never left the house until I came to work the next morning.’

‘And who can verify that?’ Frank tried to put a sneer into it but the pains in his stomach made his voice squeak and ruined the effect. ‘Your wife?’

‘Yeah, my wife. And my neighbor, because I went out and helped him push his lawnmower into his garage when it quit on him at the tree lawn. The sun had just gone down. And my wife’s sister, who’s staying with us for the week. And her son, who’s sleeping on the couch in the living room without a word of complaint because he stays up all night watching pay-per-view because he knows I won’t get the bill until after he’s gone.’

‘Take the remote to bed with you,’ Angela said automatically. ‘So you’re telling us you killed Kyle but not Sam.’

‘For the fifteenth time,’ Novosek said through the fingers over his face, ‘
I did not kill Sam
. I did not push her. I did not see her. I was not there that night.’

‘You had no motive to kill Sam?’

‘None. I – I cared for Sam.’

‘Then why did you pay her off?’ She slapped two photocopies on to the surface in front of him. ‘You withdrew a thousand dollars from your paycheck in the middle of last month. My ex, he used to take the same amount out in cash every time he got paid. Walking-around money, he called it. For lunch, parking, a magazine, cigarettes. You do the same – five hundred dollars, every two weeks.’

‘I said it was for increased costs—’

‘Not the company. This is your personal mad money. Five hundred dollars, every two weeks. I went back six months. All of a sudden, last month –’ she pointed to an entry on the bank statement – ‘you take out a thousand. Next check, back to five hundred. Five hundred. Five hundred. Then a thousand, exactly a month after the first. Five hundred. Five hundred.’

He had had enough. ‘So?’

‘After that first double amount, what turns up in Sam Zebrowski’s bank account?’ She pointed to another entry. ‘Five hundred. Exactly. Something about that number you like? Nice and round, maybe? I’m almost convinced you didn’t know about this concrete problem, Chris. I really am. But there’s this one little detail that doesn’t fit.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with the concrete.’

‘Then what?’

He really crashed then, elbows on the table, letting his face fall forward into both hands. ‘I gave it to Sam for the kid. To help out.’

‘For Ghost? Why?’

‘Because she’s mine.’ He sat back, let his hands drop. ‘I’m her father.’

B
oonie didn’t mean to go running back to the boss like some sniveling bitch, but he couldn’t help it. He’d beaten guys before and seen plenty of blood. He’d come upon men dead of gunshots and knife wounds. He wasn’t some young’un. But he had never before stumbled over a body he wasn’t expecting to see, the body of someone he knew, of someone he’d come up with and who was practically his best friend in the whole world. No, it’d be all right to be a little freaked out about something like that.