Free Blunt Impact by Lisa Black Page B

daughter and a killer all wind up here at the same time? If she’s meeting a man, why bring her daughter?’
    ‘Wanted her to meet the new daddy?’
    ‘In the middle of the night?’ She didn’t even breathe heavy when she said it, damn her, but at last they could stop. Samantha’s two fellow finishers were working on the sixth floor, and Frank wanted to talk to them before time, thought or regret could affect their stories.
    The guys weren’t hard to pick out. They were the only two humans in the vast empty space. One held a long piece of equipment that resembled a lawn edger, and the other carried a simple trowel, but it didn’t appear that a lot of work was getting done. Conversation broke off as the cops approached.
    Frank introduced himself and his partner, not in a pleasant social way but in the
don’t let that courtesy fool you, I will be asking the questions here
tone that he had learned in the academy. ‘You’re Kyle Cielac and Todd Grisham?’
    He waited until they specified who was who. Kyle resembled a high school football hero ten years after graduation, fleshy shoulders and no neck, close-cropped blond hair. Todd had dark good looks of indeterminate origin. But they wore identically wary expressions. In the next few minutes Frank established that the two men had worked with Samantha Zebrowski since the project began, or rather since the project progressed to the point of needing concrete finishers. A finisher usually worked with the concrete after it had been poured into the giant rebar-enhanced slabs that formed the floors of the skyscraper. They would trim the edges and cut the grooves into the slab that would keep the concrete from cracking during the temperature changes endemic to northern Ohio. They also followed up with finishing touches and repairs. One pointed to a slight crack in the corner, too close to that sparse railing for Frank’s comfort, their ostensible reason for being off on a tête-à-tête.
    They were thirty and twenty-eight respectively, both unmarried with no kids. Kyle had been in construction one way or another since high school; you could say it ran in his family. Todd just needed a job after getting out of the military. Neither had known Samantha before this project, neither had dated her, neither knew who she was dating, if anyone, and neither had a conflict with her, or knew of one she might have had with someone else.
    None of this struck Frank as plausible. Samantha had been single, hard-bodied and a bit of a party girl, and neither of these guys wanted to tap that? He would have thought they might be more interested in each other than their curvy co-worker if it hadn’t been for their constant glances toward
his
curvy partner. Though perhaps they were admiring her fashion sense. She
did
look good in those stretchy dress pants that all the female detectives wore these days and a thin brown sweater that matched her eyes . . . but still. It seemed to him that two single guys should have a lot more to say about one of the few women on the site.
    But maybe he was just the cultural dinosaur that Theresa sometimes accused him of being. Maybe they viewed Samantha simply as one more fellow construction worker, no more, no less.
    Yeah, right.
    The rest of their testimony stayed in line with that of their boss: Samantha had been good at her job, reliable, seemed to care deeply for her mother and daughter, and nothing at all had seemed amiss during her last day on the job.
    ‘And she would have told you if she had a steady boyfriend?’
    ‘We heard about her daughter’s math grade, her new sports bra and her mother’s pot roast,’ Todd said. ‘So, yeah.’
    Frank rubbed the back of his neck. ‘OK. Say she meets a guy, or has a new boyfriend. Would she bring him here?’
    The two construction workers exchanged a glance, nodded.
    ‘Probably,’ Kyle said. ‘She said she drove her kid by, and a girlfriend. She was real proud of the place. This is the biggest job she’d