The Price of Innocence (2 page)

She nearly stopped, because, of course, she needed to find
Frank
, but her body continued to work while her mind calculated how quickly she could abandon this stranger without overwhelming guilt. Heedless of the pain in her fingers, her hands scattered rubble aside until she got to the bloodied right forearm with the delicate wrist of a woman. Bone protruded from the black skin in two places. Theresa proceeded more carefully, still calling for her cousin as she dug.

The firetrucks arrived, sirens continuing to blare. Couldn’t they turn them
off
now that they were here?

The woman’s left arm had been pinned by a slab of concrete that ran under the rubble so that Theresa could not guess how far it went. She abandoned that arm as well and moved around to where the girl’s head must be, trying to pick up and remove each shard rather than brush them, trying to function with both gentleness and all possible speed. Where was
Frank
?

Black hair sprang into view, twisted into knobs, the face too covered in blood to reveal much about age or appearance. The woman shifted her head slightly but did not make much effort to move. Was she conscious? What other bones had been broken? Had her spine snapped? What if—

Someone reached her side, and began to pull the stones away as well.

The woman’s eyes opened, and immediately narrowed in pain. She looked at Theresa but made no sound.

‘Cuz, you OK?’ asked the form next to her.

‘
Frank
!’ He was dirty, dusty and had streaks of blood everywhere – probably much like herself, she realized – but he was alive, mobile and speaking.

‘We’d better—’

‘
Hey
!’

Theresa glanced up at three firefighters, now crowding around them. ‘Help,’ she said.

‘Get out of the way,’ one told her in a firm but kind voice, and then firmly but kindly picked her up by the shoulders and moved her several feet to the side, so that almost before she absorbed what had happened the three men had finished excavating the woman as two more ran up with a backboard. Unneeded, she and Frank headed for the street, instinctively moving
away
. She held his hand for the first time since kindergarten.

Ten minutes later, Frank’s extremely competent partner Angela Sanchez found them sitting on the curb across the street in front of the Waterstreet Grill. Frank stared at the smoking lot. Theresa had managed to hang on to the car keys she had stuffed into the front pocket of her pants; a mini Swiss Army knife, a present from her daughter, served as a keychain. She flexed her fingers over it, relaxed, flexed again.

Some of the olive color returned to Angela’s face as she said, ‘There you are. I was wondering.’

‘I know you covet my desk,’ Frank said, ‘but this is not the way to get it.’

‘It’s your blotter I really want. Those vinyl corners just thrill me.’ Her voice shook as she said it, though, and she settled on to the curb as if her legs were unsteady as well. She sat on the other side of Theresa. She did not hug her partner or even shake his hand. They were a man and a woman working together, both single and reasonably attractive. Distance, Theresa had long ago surmised, had to be maintained. At least in public. In private, they’d been sleeping together for six months.

‘The powers that be are conferring. What about MacAfee?’ Angela asked, referring to the patrol officer assigned to the scene with them.

Frank jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the restaurant. ‘Lucky stiff came over here for a cup of coffee and a pack of matches, missed the whole thing.’

‘Good for him.’ She sighed in relief.

‘He didn’t want to come back out, though,’ Frank went on. ‘Kind of startled him a little, building collapsing his second week on the job. I sent him up the street to help with traffic.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Theresa interrupted. ‘The building fell down.’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘It
exploded
,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘Some kind of gas leak?’

‘That would be my guess,’ he said. ‘Problem is, you smell any gas?’

‘Not all gas has a smell. They have to add it to propane.’ Some kind of odor wafted around, and she tried to place it – chemical-like, but not gas, gasoline or any sort of accelerant, not like a base compound or a medicine … more like a cleaner.

‘That’s true.’

‘I lost my camera,’ Theresa said. ‘Leo will make me pay for it.’

‘Don’t let him,’ Frank said.

‘You two sure you’re OK?’ Angela asked.

‘Peachy,’ Frank said.

They sat for a while longer as the fire department roped off the block and refused to let any non-EMS personnel in. No one could know yet how many pounds of asbestos, lead paint or stored biohazards might lurk underneath unstable piles of rock.

As most humans would, Theresa sorted through selfish considerations first: it seemed unlikely that she would know any of the victims. Her daughter was safely ensconced at a college halfway across the state; her mother was home, probably doing laundry, and she had just left her favorite and even not-so-favorite co-workers at the Medical Examiner’s Office trace evidence lab. Frank was here beside her, making it possible for her to react to the situation as impartially as she could.

To the north sat a garment warehouse, with at least ten broken windows on the second and third floors. Behind her, to the east, the blast had ruined the appetites of the lunchtime diners, who abandoned their tables to watch the EMS personnel scour the site for anyone left alive. So far, Angela told them, there had been five: two from the parking lot and three from the south-west corner of the building, including a large and naked man who had been in the bathtub at the time. The porcelain shell offered just enough protection to save him as the apartment upstairs joined his.

With most of the west side of the Bingham gone Theresa could see the tops of the bars and warehouses in the Flats, if not the Cuyahoga running along its crooked course. The Lambert mansion-slash-factory which occupied the rest of the block to the south did not seem to have suffered any damage beyond a few broken windows and gashes in the stone exterior. Its employees had been evacuated as a precaution and now blocked the intersection, slender young men and women with glasses and T-shirts advertising video games. Most had their cell phones out, videotaping the EMTs search of the rubble. Cleveland’s very own 9/11.

Theresa knew something about the Bingham. It had been built in 1915 for Bingham Hardware, designed by a well-known architectural firm whose handiwork could be found in many other landmarks. More recently it had been turned into lofts for beautiful tenants and had done well, despite the fact that not really much had been trendy about Cleveland since the turn of the previous century. Well-intentioned developers kept trying to graft some sort of style on to the city: building stadiums, closing off East Fourth to showcase local gourmet restaurants, adding a subway platform in Playhouse Square. These efforts convinced no one, but Clevelanders loved them no less for their contrivance.

But the lower levels of the building had not been made fashionable, only left as the owners had found them: functional, large and empty. Other businesses in the city could rent this space for storage and the Medical Examiner’s Office, crammed into three sixty-year-old floors in University Circle, had done so. Decades of files, X-rays, tissue slides and homicide victims’ clothing had been stored in a room on Lower Level 2. And that was how Theresa had become familiar with the Bingham building, with the loading dock paved with wooden bricks and the sublevel freight elevator so old that it could be run only by building personnel.

So yes, the relevant items from every homicide in the history of the Medical Examiner’s Office had been buried, at best, or had disintegrated at worst. It made her want to cry. Her boss, Leo, would probably have to be hospitalized. Equanimity had never been part of his nature.

She asked of no one in particular, ‘Do we have any idea how many people were inside?’

‘Not according to the fire department. We can only hope that most of the tenants were at work, at ten-ten on a Wednesday.’

It had to be some kind of accident, had to have some kind of, if not natural, than at least non-malicious origin. No one would kill that many people to collect an insurance policy, or to eliminate one particular enemy. She didn’t even consider any political motivations. No one else in the country paid any attention to Cleveland; why would a terrorist?

Angela said, ‘Here they come.’

They got to their feet and moved away from the curb, Frank actually straightening his plaster dust-covered jacket. A phalanx of cops, suits and uniforms came toward them, or rather toward the center of the block. The briefing had obviously concluded and a plan had been formed.
Good
, Theresa thought. Cleveland saw its share of troubles, crime, unemployment and political unrest, but large-scale disasters – earthquakes, hurricanes, plane crashes – usually passed the city by. No way could she and DNA analyst Don Delgado handle a scene of this magnitude all by themselves. Even by combining with the Cleveland Police forensic unit—

Too busy looking at the approaching army to watch where she was going, she stumbled over a brick and went down, keeping her knees safe but putting another gash in her left hand with a piece of glass. She surveyed the damage to her palm, not sure how much blood belonged to her and how much to the woman they had uncovered. Either way, the sticky red substance had collected dust, grit, two straws of dead grass and a cloudy crystal of rock. She pulled it off with her other hand and was about to throw it away when its smell stopped her, the same acrid scent she had been noticing for the past fifteen minutes.

‘You OK?’ Frank asked.

‘Yeah.’ She brought it to her nose, sniffed. Perhaps it had been used as a building material, some sort of insulation. She gave up and dropped the faintly purplish stone into the pocket of her jacket, wiping the blood on her pants. They were ruined anyway.

The arriving officers had fanned out a bit, surveying the scene, and paid no attention to Theresa or her cousin. Frank walked up to a man Theresa recognized as the Chief of Police, and asked, ‘Where do we start?’

‘We don’t. The Fee— the FBI will be handling it, mostly just to hold it until Homeland Security can take over. The Region II Strike Team will be here any minute.’ He nodded at a man and a woman in matching suits, both middle-aged and suitably grave. Actually, the woman looked grave. The man wore a pissed-off scowl, as if someone had blown up the city’s bomb shelter just to make him look ineffectual.

‘They’ll ruin their shoes,’ Frank said.

‘Oh, thank God,’ Theresa said.

The man glared at Frank. The woman smiled at Theresa. ‘That’s not the reaction we usually get,’ she said.

Theresa didn’t bother to introduce herself, since her windbreaker identified her as M.E. staff. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to have a lack of experience in explosions. One thing, though, which my boss will want you aware of – we had our off-site storage on the second sublevel. It’s buried, somewhere in there.’

‘Ours, too,’ the woman told her.

B
y the next morning both Theresa and the city had regained their composure. The cause of the blast remained unknown. The number of confirmed dead so far totaled a remarkably low seven, all building personnel except for one, who had apparently been visiting his storage area. The woman Theresa had found ran the snack bar in the lobby; the man pulled from the car had been about to move in that day; the man in the bathtub had been home sick from work. The pretty young couple had survived. The six dead employees included one maintenance man, three cleaners, one rental agent and the freight elevator operator/loading dock manager. The suicide didn’t count, of course.

The building manager – who had held the door for Theresa and Frank when he left for a doctor’s appointment, only to have the blast throw him across the street – reported that the man who had been visiting his storage area in the lower levels worked for an electronics importer and appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. No one worried too much about that. If a malcontent wanted to hit something in Cleveland there were much more likely targets – political ones such as City Hall, all-American ones like the baseball or football stadiums or glitzy ones like Tower City. Most people still anticipated a rational explanation, rational but scary – if a stray gas leak or an underground sinkhole had taken down the Bingham, no structure could feel safe. Tall buildings in the surrounding area had been all but abandoned, employees calling in sick to work and tenants deciding to spend a few days with relatives in the suburbs.

Theresa had used Neosporin as body lotion to treat the myriad of cuts, scratches and abrasions that covered every inch of her body. The bruises were on their own.

The victims would be transported to the M.E.’s office for autopsy after the federal agencies did an initial exam. There could be more, would almost certainly be more, as excavations continued. Homeland Security arrived with an army and someone had had the sense to inform them that Cleveland in the spring did not go more than a day or two without rain, so they worked at breakneck speed to transport all the rubble to the Convention Center where it could be searched through at leisure. Still, they had not reached ground level, much less the sublevels. Theresa’s boss, Leo, had spent his time since the blast articulating a mental list of every untried homicide in his twenty-five-year career and his concern that all those killers would now walk free because the evidence had been compromised. As much as Theresa didn’t care for dramatics, she knew he had a valid point.

‘And just the historical significance,’ Leo would persist. ‘The Sam Sheppard stuff was in there!’

‘At least that case is over.’

‘Don’t be too sure. Conspiracy theories never die.’

With relief she went out on a call at about eleven o’clock and met a patrol officer at the scene of a possible overdose which did not involve either conspiracies or explosions. The victim’s house perched at the edge of Lake Erie near Bratenahl, at the end of a long, wooded driveway off Lake Shore Boulevard. The view alone made life worth living, the three-story mansion with the four-car garage merely icing on the cake. ‘Why would a guy who lived like this want to overdose?’