Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“Who are you and what the hell are you doing up here?” His baritone was heavy and uncompromising.

“My name’s Warshawski. I’m a detective and I’m here with some follow-up questions about the dead girl you found.”

“Police left hours ago.” He moved his hand away from the gun, but his hard eyes didn’t relax.

“I just came from the morgue where I met with Sergeant McGonnigal and Lieutenant Mallory. They forgot to ask a couple of things I need to know. Also, since I’m here, I’d like to see where you found her.”

For a tense moment I thought he was going to demand some police identification, but my fluency with the right names apparently satisfied him.

“I can’t take you down to where I found her unless you have a hard hat.”

I picked up one of the Hurlihey and Frain hats from the drafting table. “Why don’t I just borrow this one?”

His cold eyes weighed me some more, not wanting to let me do it, but he seemed to be a man of logic and he couldn’t argue himself into sending me back to Mallory empty. “If you people did your homework you wouldn’t have to waste so much of my time. Come on. I’m not going to wait while you trip around in those ridiculous shoes of yours-our liability policy doesn’t pay for police who don’t dress right for the job.”

I picked up the hard hat and followed him meekly back into the shadowy maze.

Tender Site

As I stumbled behind him in the dark I persuaded him to tell me his name-Leon Garrison. He was a night security man, head of a team working the Rapelec site. His firm, LockStep, specialized in guarding construction projects. It seemed to me part of his anger toward me was hurt pride that someone had climbed onto the premises to die without his knowing about it. He was further annoyed that I’d managed to come in undetected as well. When I explained I’d shouted a couple of times to try to rouse someone it didn’t cheer him any.

He took me down to the bottom in a hoist that ran along the outside of the building, moving the levers with a morose efficiency. When we got off he shone the flashlight in swift arcs in front of him, uncovering coils of wire, boards, loose chunks of concrete. By staying half a step behind him I could see the obstacles in time to avoid them. I had a feeling that disappointed him.

He stopped abruptly in front of a deep square pit. “You know anything about construction?” he demanded.

“Nope.”

That improved his mood, enough that he explained they put the elevators in last, after the shafts were built up to the height of the building and the machinery installed on top. The cradles they rest in go down a good way- they have to be able to cushion the elevators if the cables break or some other ghastly accident occurs.

This building had four banks of eight elevators each. Garrison moved along to the hole where he’d discovered Cerise’s body, looking in each one to make sure no more unwelcome surprises awaited him. When we got to the right one he pointed the flashlight up so I could see the platform supporting the crane some twenty stories overhead. The crane took up the space that the elevators would fill once the place was finished.

Between the depth of the pit and the crane platform swaying gently overhead, I felt a rush of nausea. As I stepped back from the edge I thought I caught a little smirk on Garrison’s face-he’d been trying to upset me.

“Why did you look in here, anyway?” I tried to sound forceful, not as though I was on the brink of throwing up.

“We had a fire in one of the cradles last week. Guys like to dump trash in here on account of it’s an open hole. Someone flipped a butt in and things started burning. I just check to see what kind of rubbish we’re piling up.”

I asked him to shine the flash down into the pit again. A rough-hewn set of slats had been nailed down the side so that you could climb in and out if you wanted to, but it wasn’t at all easy to get into. It was hard to believe Cerise, or any addict, would go to all that work just to find a private place to shoot up.

“How often do you check them?”

“Just once a night, usually. That was near the start of my shift. Since the fire I look in the pits first.”

“And you saw her and called 911?”

He scratched the back of his head behind the hard hat. “Strictly speaking I called August Cray first. He’s in charge of the site at night. He came down here, took a look, and told me to call the police. Then he called the contractor.”

“Wunsch and Grasso?”

“You’d have to ask Cray-this project’s got a bunch of contractors working on it. They need to know if anything special is happening on the site, and I guess you could call a dead body pretty special.”

He seemed to be smirking again, although it was kind of hard to tell in the dark. I wondered where this Cray person had been when I was calling out on the third floor. Anyway, he phoned someone at Wunsch and Grasso, maybe Ernie himself. Then Ernie buzzed his boyhood pal Furey and told him to make sure the building site was clean, that they didn’t get any adverse publicity or any liability suits. That was plausible, even likely, but it didn’t explain why Bobby had been called in and why he was ticked about it.

Unless the boys had used their connection to Boots to get county heat on the investigation? But that didn’t make any sense-they would want to keep the thing as quiet as possible, and getting Boots and the county involved would have the opposite effect. I prodded Garrison as best I could, but he didn’t know whom Cray had called or why the city had sent the head of their Violent Crimes Unit in.

“You see everything you need?” Garrison asked roughly. “I don’t want another relay coming from the cops tonight telling me they forgot one last diddle-shit question. There’s plenty of work to do here.”

“This should do it,” I said. “I think you can feel safe from the police for at least twelve hours.”

“I’d better be.” He snapped off the flash and headed back toward the hoist. “I guess I’d better tell Cray you’ve been here-he likes to know who’s on the site at night.”

We rode back to the third floor. “You’re dressed kind of funny for a cop, aren’t you?’ he said when we got off.

“I’m dressed funny for a construction site,” I corrected. “Even detectives have private lives. Cerise Ramsay’s death interrupted mine.” The memory of Bobby shining his spotlight on Robin and me popped into my head. It seemed funnier now than it had at the time. I bit back a laugh as Garrison knocked on the door to one of the little cubicles.

Cray turned out to be a heavy white man in his late fifties. He eyed me suspiciously as Garrison outlined the reason for my visit.

“You didn’t hear her when she came up here?” the security man asked.

“I was in the John,” Cray answered briefly. “You get what you need here? Next time, call ahead.”

I smiled brightly. “Next time I sure will. Who did you call-Ernie or Ron?-after Garrison told you about the body?”

Cray’s frown deepened. “Does it matter?”

“It kind of does. A dead junkie shouldn’t bring down a senior cop and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“Why not ask your boss that?” He kept a heavy, unpleasant edge to his voice.

“Lieutenant Mallory? I did ask him-he wasn’t saying. Just for the record, he’s not my boss.”

“Just a minute here.” Cray got to his feet. “Let’s see some ID from you.”

I pulled out my wallet and took out the laminated miniature of my PI license to show him.

“You’re not with the police? We went through all that for you and you’re not a cop? Goddamn you, I ought to get your ass arrested.”