The Price of Innocence (18 page)

‘Only a forensic lab would hang on to a skull for sentimental reasons,’ Dr Banachek said.

Theresa picked up yet another box, this one from a crime scene on Payne Avenue, and pivoted to place it with the others.

Wait.

Where had she heard the name of that street lately? Not that such a mention would be unusual – Payne Avenue stretched through a mile and a half of downtown Cleveland.

Ken Bilecki. He said he, Lily and Marty had lived in a ‘pit on Payne’ when attending the university. The label said 2401, which would have been only a block from the school. She checked the date – spring, 1985. If they had been in the class of ’88 …

The label also noted ‘explosion’.

‘What’s that?’ Don asked, no doubt wondering why she had become as still as Lot’s wife.

‘It’s from an explosion on Payne Avenue over twenty years ago. I didn’t know Cleveland was such a volatile city.’

‘Aside from the East Ohio Gas disaster, I didn’t either.’ He moved past her to brush gravel off another container, prodding gently. ‘I
would
like to be out of here before breakfast.’

‘Sorry. It’s just that this guy Frank questioned about the suicide last night mentioned living on Payne when he went to Cleveland State, and—’

Dr Banachek stirred, producing creaks from the deformed chair. ‘Oh. The chemistry students.’

Theresa stared. ‘You know this case?’

Don sighed.

The portly doctor sighed too. ‘I couldn’t forget it – the first time I saw a body burned beyond recognition. Unfortunately, not the last. Only a week later they brought in a family of four from a house fire, an old Berea duplex, the upper floor fell on to the lower. The couple in the upstairs—’

‘But what about the students?’

He blinked, eyes big behind round lenses. ‘Oh yes. It was my first explosion case … actual explosions are rare, as opposed to fires … they’d been living in a building converted to student housing and a room on the ground floor blew up, burned the rest of the place pretty bad. His own fault, too.’

‘He started the fire?’

‘The police thought he’d been cooking methamphetamine – making his own chemistry. And it killed him. He had no hands or feet by the time he came to us.’

‘Ouch.’

‘That was the early days of the meth epidemic. Bad stuff. Could easily be curtailed, you know. Pharmaceutical companies could make cold medicine with an optical isomer of pseudoephedrine that could not be made into meth.’

‘What’s stopping them?’ Don asked from behind a pile of boxes.

‘Their lobbyists. They get paid a lot of money to water down any bill that might inconvenience their bosses.’ He patted Theresa’s box. ‘But I could be mixing it up with another case, you know. They all blend together after a while.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

Don had filled the rest of the container, finishing with just enough space to fit the box she held. He went to take it out of her hands but she pulled it away. ‘Not this. I want to take a look at it later and that garage is going to be a Rubik’s cube by the end of the day.’ She set the box aside with her tote bag full of snacks and an extra pair of work gloves. Then she dutifully helped Don and the deskman maneuver the filled box to the truck. When she returned, Dr Banachek once again stood at the severely damaged file cabinets, removing X-rays to new file boxes.

The trace evidence department enclosure had only one slide cabinet and approximately twenty cardboard boxes of various shapes remained. Don hefted one up, heavy for its size. ‘This is dense.’

‘It’s a solid block of index cards. That’s how we used to sign evidence in and out, before the printed voucher forms.’

‘Sounds cumbersome.’ Don had been weaned on a keyboard and hated writing anything longhand.

‘A little bit. But we never lost anything and you can pull out a card thirty years later and see what was submitted, what analyses were performed, the results and who picked it up. Nothing got lost in cyberspace.’

‘Only in real space. So what is so fascinating about a twenty-year-old meth lab?’

Theresa explained how Marty Davis had lived on Payne Avenue during college with Lily Simpson and Ken Bilecki, and that Lily said Marty had been part of a meth cooking operation. ‘Cooking and selling, I mean.’

‘So you think this cop could have been killed in revenge for the death of a student in his meth lab twenty-odd years ago?’

She carted another box of index cards, thinking. ‘I guess it
is
a silly idea when you put it like that. It’s bubbling in my mind because the few facts I know about Marty Davis keep coinciding. But those facts are such a small fraction of his life. There must be worlds more to it than what I know.’

‘Sure.’ Don picked up the red sealing tape.

‘All the same, it can’t hurt to look up the case.’

‘No, it can’t. Is there any more coffee?’

‘Come on, kid! I’ve got eleven years on you and I’m still going.’

He laughed, and they moved the box to the truck, gingerly scooting past two FBI agents in the narrow walkway. Theresa recognized the female agent she had run into three times in as many days.

The truck had filled again, and Don climbed into the passenger seat to escort their booty back to the office. Theresa stood in the chill of West Ninth Street and wondered at the rules they followed. Did anyone care enough about these ancient cases to steal into the rubble of a ruined building to find the evidence relevant to them? Why? If the evidence could incriminate them, it would have done so long ago. Plus they’d have to search through the piles of items to find the one they wanted, assuming they could interpret the archaic numbering system. It would require a determined and intrepid criminal, a cut well above the hapless, thoughtless murderers and violent types she usually dealt with.

Perhaps it
would
make more sense just to dynamite the whole lot. Her thoughts moved to the cardboard box now tucked underneath her purse.

Ridiculous. The twenty-year-old fire had been quite forgotten. At least she assumed so – she would have to ask Frank. The investigation could have been reopened without either of them knowing. She opened her Nextel, saw the time and date and decided her question could wait until a more reasonable hour. He would not appreciate her input at four thirty a.m., no matter how ingrained the habit had become of telling each other every fact, insight or wild guess at the moment it occurred. She would not call a non-blood-relative homicide detective as continually. She never knew if being related to Frank made their working together more effective, or less. They communicated more freely because of the relationship, which should be a good thing. But perhaps they focused on each other’s well being more than the case at hand. What had Lambert said about inattention going unrewarded?

‘Excuse me.’

Theresa looked up to see the two FBI agents, struggling with a bulky plastic container to load on their own moving truck. Instead of trying to go around them, Theresa simply backed up along the caution-taped walkway and made use of the serendipitous meeting. ‘How’s the investigation going? Do you guys know why this happened yet?’

‘No,’ the woman panted. The man, a different agent than the man who had been with her before, ignored Theresa entirely.

‘Can I help you with that?’

‘No, we got it.’

Rules to be followed. Non-authorized personnel prohibited. Theresa continued, walking precariously backwards along the path. ‘The explosion seems to have started in one place, right? That’s obvious from the gaping hole in the center of the building. It’s not like he put charges at strategic points, wanting to take the whole building down.’

‘Did a pretty good job of it anyway,’ the woman said. She didn’t seem to be any happier with the wee hours than Don.

‘We used this place for storage.’ Theresa reached the sidewalk and nearly fell over it, but recovered and accompanied the agents to their truck. ‘I guess you guys did too.’

They didn’t bother to answer, needing all their breath to heft their box into the waiting arms of two agents in the moving truck. Must be nice to have so much manpower at your disposal. At least they hadn’t worn suits and ties, just sweatshirts, jeans and jackets with
FBI
emblazoned on the back.

When it had been settled to their satisfaction, Theresa walked with them back into the site, dogging the two like an unwanted kid brother. ‘Is Kadam still your main suspect?’

‘Yes,’ the woman said.

‘Ask Homeland Security,’ the man with her said.

‘Even though there’s absolutely no strategic significance to this building,’ the woman sighed. The man glared at her. The lateness of the hour had lowered her defenses.

‘I don’t know what you had stored here,’ Theresa said, ‘but have you considered the possibility that the purpose of the explosion might have been to destroy your records?’

The man made a sound, a cross between
pfft
and
pah
.

The woman took a swig from a bottle of water which dangled from her belt. ‘I doubt it. How would he know a particular file was here and not in our offices, and these were all old, mostly closed. Why go after them now?’

‘I had the same thought. But—’

‘Besides, if he targeted a storage unit and didn’t simply blow himself up by accident, it would have been yours.’

Theresa stopped, and looked down into the evacuated hole. Standing at street level she could see what the woman meant. The FBI’s section had been in the south-east corner, the M.E.’s unit in the north-west corner. And the worst, most blackened, most gaping part of sublevel one had been right across the hall.

B
reakfast had come and gone by the time they finally finished, and driving back to the office in rush hour traffic made Theresa think perhaps working during the night had not been such a bane. It would have taken their little truck four times as long to make each trip back and forth during working hours. But then, she was running on the fumes of adrenalin and feeling a bit punchy. At least that was Don’s explanation.

‘Why
not
us?’ she explored aloud, gazing at the many empty storefronts on Euclid Avenue. The decline of the once-revolutionary industrial city was not just a punch line or the exaggerations of fund-seeking politicians. The city hurt, and its citizens felt helpless to do anything about it. ‘Why bomb a mostly empty building of trendy apartments? There are only two logical targets existing in that building, us and the FBI. And the epicenter of that particular quake occurred much closer to us than to them.’

‘Take out a whole building in order to conceal some moldy old evidence that everyone, including us, had forgotten about?’ Don uttered a mild curse as they failed to make the light at Fifty-Fifth.

‘Maybe they’re stupid. Or maybe they’re super-cautious.’

‘I think the Feds are leaning toward the first theory.’

‘Why?’

‘Christine said her source said they found more wires and suchlike than would have been needed for one explosion.’

Theresa pondered that. ‘So it wasn’t a criminal trying to destroy our evidence or a terrorist who came in and set a charge to take down the Bingham. A terrorist stored all his charges there in order to take down other buildings.’

‘Makes sense. Everyone else rented storage there, why not a terrorist? He’d hardly want to keep the stuff in his apartment.’

‘He could spend hours there, working on bombs. The rooms are so huge, with such thick walls. No one to notice noises or smells. People coming and going all the time with no one really paying attention, or assuming that box he’s carrying contains nothing more than files. Until something went wrong.’

‘Really wrong.’

Theresa settled back into her seat, the box from the Payne Avenue explosion at her feet. Many arsonists and bomb-makers died, accidentally, by their own hands. More walked around with scars and burns to remind them of their errors. ‘I sure hope that’s it.’

‘Your feelings would be hurt if a criminal tried to take out our store of evidence in order to help his own case?’

‘Well, then it would be
personal
. And you didn’t tell me that Christine had said that! After we’ve just spent twelve – no, fourteen hours together, and you’ve been holding out on me.’

He glanced at her, sideways. ‘How many cups of coffee have you had?’

‘I lost count. But if it really was an accident …’

‘Yes?’ He pulled into the Medical Examiner’s Office parking lot, coasting to a stop in front of the garage.

‘… what does it have to do with Marty Davis?’

Don killed the engine. ‘Nothing! You happened to go to both scenes. That’s all the connection there is. There is no more.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, with a complete lack of conviction.

‘No more caffeine today, Tess, seriously. Tell Leo you’re done and you’re going home.’

‘And forfeit all the overtime I just racked up by sleeping all day?’

‘Yes.
I
am.’

She wrenched the door handle until it opened. ‘You don’t have a kid in college.’

Leo had made the county public works department install a barrier – it appeared to be a wooden barn door held in place with metal brackets – to section off one bay of the three-car garage for the trace evidence department, in order to preserve its integrity and maintain the chain of custody … as if the fifty-year-old overhead door would pose a serious obstacle to anyone who wanted to get in, as if they could find what they wanted once they got in, and as if anyone even cared to. The true threat might not even be a criminal who didn’t want to see a particular piece of evidence in court, but a rabid fan of the forensic TV shows who wanted a ‘real’ souvenir.

At any rate, the volume of material which had seemed manageable when spread – or smashed – throughout the Bingham building’s storage space turned into a floor-to-ceiling, wall-bulging mass in their assigned one-third of the garage. ‘Good thing we’re done,’ Theresa said. ‘She canna’ take much muhr, Captain.’

‘I’m not sure we can even fit this truckload,’ Don said, eyeing the precariously stacked, near-critical mass of boxes. ‘If someone blows
this
place up too, I’m getting into another line of work.’