Forgotten in Death(52)

“Yeah, I caught that. To hide the body.”

“A logical conclusion, yes. But what we noticed was quality and material. And so, to satisfy our curiosity, we took a few samples.”

“What do you mean you took samples? It’s a crime scene.”

His tone marked a cool contrast with her instant outrage.

“And you’ve, no doubt, taken your own and you’ll do your own lab tests, but it remains my property and I bloody well wanted to know. So I went down—”

“You went down there?”

“Appropriately sealed, though, Lieutenant, you and I both know there had already been considerable activity in that area since the murder. The remains had been removed by then, and the evidence collected. I took a few moments to take samples from the floor, what had been the ceiling, the exterior wall, and that inner wall.”

“You weren’t cleared for that. Damn it, Roarke.”

He met her angry glare with a careless shrug.

“Neither had any official document been served, at that point, to prevent me. Would you like to argue about it, or would you like to know what we found?”

“Both.”

“Multitasking.” After giving Galahad a last rub, Roarke hefted him up, set him aside, then rose. He walked over to sit on the leg of her command center. “To, perhaps, hold off the argument, let me say you had, rightfully, left the scene to go back to Alva Quirk. We had, cooperatively, begun the process of shutting down the work, relocating the workers in anticipation of the official paperwork.”

“If you’d seen something, you should have reported it to the primary investigator.”

“And so I am, though we’ve both been very busy for, what is it, sixteen, seventeen hours now? And the results verified what I saw while you were speaking with the brother of your victim.”

“Fuck it. What the hell did you see?”

“As you’re aware, we razed what was left of that building, and continued demolition on the concrete, into that cellar because it was unsafe. Substandard materials. That’s not unusual, as again you’re aware, for post-Urban construction, not for the three years or so before regulations locked back into place. But that inner wall, you see—or I could, Mackie could—it hadn’t crumbled as easily or in the same way. It had a different texture to the brick. And while the ceiling above the wine cellar was low-grade preformed concrete, the section, that three-foot section between the brick interior and concrete exterior wall? Top grade, poured and formed on-site to my eye, and Mackie’s.”

“Done to hide her body.”

“These weren’t discrepancies we found important prior to finding the bodies. Just idiosyncrasies of the era, the builder, or so we thought. So I took the samples, and as we suspected, everything else used, substandard. But not that single wall, not the span above it. That was built with good, solid brick—very costly at that time—and top-grade mortar, and poured concrete.”

“How come she wasn’t buried in the concrete?”

“It was formed up, you see, to the exterior wall. And then that section—and only that section—poured, leveled, left to set. The work we could see—as, if you remember from your trip down, that wall wasn’t fully down—that was on the sloppy side, with uneven joints, too much mortar or not enough. Not the work, I’d say, of a professional bricklayer or stonemason, but superior material. That single wall.”

“Needed it to hold up, willing to spend more—or steal better material —to make sure it would.”

“Precisely. You’ll have the report, or you can do your own.”

“The sweepers would have taken samples. We’re not idiots.”

“I would never think, much less say, you were. But I could, and did, expedite mine. You have necessary priorities, as does your lab. I wanted to know. The child, Eve. The woman was bad enough, but those tiny bones…”

“I want to be pissed. I am pissed, but not as much as I should be, or want to be. Because … I went down there, I looked at them up close. Tiny bones,” she repeated and had to get up, had to pace.

“It made me think about what’s going on inside Mavis, which creeps me out, sure, but … It hits cops, too, no matter how long you’ve been on the job, it hits when it’s a kid.”

She shook it off, had to shake it off. “I’ll bribe Dickhead to push on our analysis. It has to run through the chain, Roarke, to make sure it holds up in court when we have who did it.”

“Understood.”

“They’re not going to get away with it. I don’t care if it’s Singer’s hundred-and-whatever-year-old grandmother who built that wall, I’m tossing whoever put them behind it in a cage.”

He smiled a little. “She wouldn’t have been a hundred and whatever at the time.”

“Don’t know how old, exactly, she would have been until DeWinter does her work. But nothing in the background shows she knows any more about laying bricks than I do. Maybe sloppy work, but I’d think more rushed, nervous, had to do it at night, right?”

Hands in her pockets now, she wandered the room. “At night when nobody else is on the site. You can’t have a bunch of construction guys around when you’re walling up the body of a pregnant woman. Can’t have them around when you put bullets into her.”