Free Blunt Impact by Lisa Black Page A

the reverse side read ‘—
wich with tomato on rye, $7.95
.’ She read the number to Frank but slipped the paper into an envelope to process later for fingerprints.
    ‘She had a passenger,’ Ian Bauer said. ‘Or else the purse would be on the passenger seat, wouldn’t it?’
    Theresa shook her head. ‘She had it tucked underneath the shopping bag. That suggests to me that she didn’t want to carry it but didn’t want to leave it in plain sight and give any passing thieves a reason to break her window.’
    ‘And then leaves the doors unlocked?’
    ‘Doesn’t make sense,’ she agreed. ‘So perhaps she
was
distracted with a passenger.’
    ‘And if you’re about to kill yourself, why worry about your purse at all?’
    She grinned. ‘You have to understand the long-standing, long-suffering, deeply ingrained relationship between a woman and her purse.’
    Bauer flushed as if she had spoken of thong underwear, and Frank said, ‘That number comes back to city hall.’
    Theresa stopped grinning and blinked at him. ‘What? What department?’
    ‘Switchboard. She could have been trying to talk to the mayor or pay her water bill or ask about one of those parking tickets.’
    Novosek had been watching them work with a reluctant but dutiful gaze. He wasn’t responsible for Samantha Zebrowski’s life, Theresa knew, yet he seemed to feel obligated to observe the processes of her death. Such things came with being the boss. He had sent the hovering Jack back to the steel beams as work resumed in every area except the concrete pad and the twenty-third floor.
    Theresa shut the door, and she and Frank discussed the release of the vehicle for a moment or two. Frank would come by the coroner’s office to get the car keys, which they assumed were in Samantha’s pockets. Then he and Angela would go the extra mile and drive the car to the family rather than make Betty Zebrowski pay to have her dead child’s vehicle towed.
    ‘You can’t get it out of here now?’ Novosek had been about as cooperative as possible, but Frank could tell the shock had begun to fade as more practical matters seeped back in, such as how much of the day had been wasted and how that might affect all future stages of construction.
    ‘No keys,’ Frank said. ‘Plus, we don’t have either permission or probable cause to remove it. Why?’
    ‘It’s just . . .’ The project manager, as large and tough as he looked, squirmed like a schoolboy. ‘When somebody dies on the job, it freaks everyone out. It’s probably the same at your place – if a cop gets shot, don’t you all get jumpy? I’ve got to get that blood off that pad, and her car sitting here where everyone can see it—’
    ‘I understand,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll do what I can but it’s still going to be a day at least.’
    ‘Yeah, I got it,’ Chris Novosek said. ‘It’s just that here, jumpy can get people hurt.’

ELEVEN
    A ngela returned. As she and Frank headed up the stairwell she said that the county child advocate had arrived and talked to Betty Zebrowski about funeral arrangements and also about living arrangements, which would not be changing. Mrs Zebrowski could handle shopping, cooking and cleaning for the household. The only thing she couldn’t do was climb the steps to the second floor.
    The child advocate had also spoken to Ghost about death and stages of grief.
    ‘How’d she take it?’
    ‘As well as can be expected. She seems like a pretty sensible kid, almost too sensible . . . I don’t know, as she was listening to the caseworker – at times she’d zone out or start to cry, but other times she’d just stare at the woman and I could swear she was thinking to herself, “Yada yada yada.”’
    Frank tried to control his panting, but by the fifth floor it had grown difficult. ‘So you think she might be right about a man pushing her mother over the edge?’
    ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say anything more about it. Still, how does Samantha, her