Forgotten in Death(4)

“Yeah.”

Boots rang on metal.

“It’s going to be done right this time. Mackie says we’re building an urban jewel, and we’re building it to last.”

She didn’t see a jewel. She saw construction chaos, with a section roped off, and farther north the beginnings of a skeleton that, she assumed, would be one of the residential buildings.

“Who’s in charge?”

“Mackie. I’ll get him.”

“Yeah, do that. But who owns it? Who’s in charge of the project?”

“Um. You are.”

Eve looked into Darlie’s big, puzzled green eyes. And said, “Crap.”

Darlie raced off to where a number of people stood around the roped-off area.

“I can tag Roarke,” Peabody offered. “He’s going to want to know.”

“Yeah.” Her husband, the owner of almost everything in the universe, would want to know. “We’ll see what we’ve got first. Crap,” she said again, and started over as a Black guy who looked like he could curl a couple of the airjacks without breaking a sweat peeled away from the rope and came toward them.

She judged him at about forty, ridiculously handsome, and built like a god in his work jeans, safety vest, and hard hat.

“Jim Mackie, just Mackie’s good. I’m the job boss. I had them rope off the section where we found it. Her, I guess.”

“Her?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking her because it’s them. Sorry. It looks to me like maybe she was a woman. A pregnant woman when it happened, because there’s what looks like baby or infant or fetus remains with her. Sorry.”

He took off the hat, swiped his arm over his forehead. “That got me shook some. The little, um, skeleton.”

“Okay. How about you move your people away from there, and my partner and I will take a look.”

“You got it. If you need to go down to her? I gotta fix you into a safety harness. The old stairs collapsed even before we took down the building. I don’t trust the supports, and the street-level building below is just as bad—condemned for good reason. This was a shit-ass job. Sorry, sorry. I’m upset.”

“Shit-ass jobs upset me, too.”

That got a smile. “Heard you were okay. Figured you’d be because the big boss, he’s okay. No shit-ass jobs when you do a job for Roarke. You do quality, or you get the boot.”

“She’s the same,” Peabody told him, and earned another smile.

Then he turned around. “Get on away from there, move back. Anybody on Building One, get on back to work.”

The way people scrambled told Eve that Mackie did that quality work, and knew how to run a crew. She stepped to the rope.

She didn’t know much about building, about concrete and beams and rebar, but even she could see a lot in this section was some sort of filler, more like dirt than stone. And curled in it, about eight feet down, between two crumbling walls, the remains of one adult, one fetus.

Too small to be called a child, she thought, and also curled, likely as it had been inside the womb at the time of death.

“Do you know when this was built—poured—whatever it’s called?”

“I do. Not the exact day, but the year: 2024. If the really half-assed records are accurate, late summer, early fall of that year. I expect if there’s a better record of it, Roarke can tell you the day, and the hour.”

Yes, he would, though he wouldn’t have owned it in the late summer of 2024. He wouldn’t have been born quite yet, she thought.

But he’d know who had owned it. He’d know the owner; he’d know who developed it. Whatever he didn’t know, he’d find out.

“I’ll take that harness, Mackie. Peabody, contact DeWinter, get her here.”

They’d need the forensic anthropologist, but in the meantime, Eve needed a closer look. Whoever they’d been, they, as much as Alva Quirk, were hers now.

“I’ll tag Roarke.”

While Mackie sent for a harness, she pulled out her ’link.

Caro, Roarke’s admin, answered. “Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Caro, sorry. You need to get him.”

Always efficient, Caro merely nodded. “One moment.”

As the screen switched to holding blue, Eve considered she’d have gotten exactly the same response in exactly the same tone from Caro whether Roarke sat alone at his desk enjoying a cup of coffee or ran a meeting involving the purchase of Greenland.

She didn’t think Roarke could actually buy Greenland, but if he could, if he was planning on it, Caro’s response would have been the polite: One moment.

Eve glanced over as Mackie held up a safety harness. “Give me another sec.”

She took another couple steps away as Roarke’s face filled the screen.

He didn’t smile. Not annoyance, she knew, but concern. Those wild blue eyes held steady on hers. Making sure she was in one piece, Eve thought.

“Sorry,” she began. “I hope you weren’t buying Greenland.”

“Not at the moment.” Ireland shimmered like morning mists in his voice. “Something’s wrong.”

“I caught one on my way in, but that one’s not the issue. It’s the one I caught about a block away from the first. That one’s on, or maybe it’s under, your Hudson Yards Village project.”