Forgotten in Death(66)

Setting her cup aside, Eve leaned forward. “Substandard materials—but if she threatened to blow the whistle there, nobody would give a damn. Regs and codes had been rolled back. Nobody’d kill her over it. But there’s been a steady stream of pilfering and stealing, doctoring invoices going on at the Singer site. Maybe that’s got a history.”

“Singer owned this site at the time.” Mira nodded. “She discovered, as you believe Alva did, this activity, threatened to report it?”

“She went to the wrong person—maybe. Agreed to meet the wrong person on the site. Bang, bang, you’re dead. Whoever killed her knew enough to know where to hide the body. Knew where to get good brick—not substandard—and build a wall, and the form thing, pour the form over her with concrete. Seal her up.”

“Cold, killing a woman, a pregnant woman, and walling them up. It takes cold calculation, planning, and, as you say, the ability to access the materials and use them to conceal the bodies.”

“I don’t see how it could be someone on the level of Delgato—he wasn’t employed by them then, I’m just meaning at his level. Why wasn’t the wall, the work, questioned? Even if it was all so rushed, nobody noticed the wall was three feet farther in—and I understand construction often was rushed and cheap and disjointed post-Urbans, but nobody questions the work?”

Dissatisfied, Eve pushed up. “The murder had to happen when nobody was working. Probably at night. Crew comes back to work in the morning, or say after the weekend, and nobody goes, ‘Hey, somebody poured this section of floor in this building’?”

“A good question. Then again, if anyone at a higher level answered that question by claiming they’d done it over the weekend, that would likely suffice. People were hungry for work,” Mira pointed out, “for paychecks, for housing, for normality.”

“So they might not question it in the first place.” Eve sat again. “She may have been married, may have been in a relationship, may have carried the baby as a surrogate. If any of those are true, someone should have looked for her. I’ve been running missing persons from a three-year period, to cover all the possibilities, but I haven’t come up with any record of a woman in her early twenties in the later stages of pregnancy.”

Eve shook her head. “It feels like someone killed her and sealed her up, and everyone just forgot her. She had bottles of wine stacked up in front of her, on the other side of that wall. People ate and drank and worked over her head.”

It didn’t seem right. None of it felt right.

“Didn’t anybody go to where she worked, where she lived? Didn’t she have family or friends who filed reports? But I don’t find any.”

“It may have been a friend or family who killed her.”

“Yeah, I’m working with that, too. Have to ID her to go there. But … what if she wasn’t from New York? She could have worked at one of the suppliers, seen the problem. She comes in to meet with someone to report it, to offer what she knows. Bang, bang, you’re dead. But the missing persons don’t show up because she wasn’t from here. She might not have told anyone she was coming. She could have been told to keep it quiet. ‘Don’t want to alert the bad guys, don’t let on what you know, where you’re going. We’ll look through everything and go to the authorities.’”

Mira nodded, sipped tea. “It’s a theory, and a good one. Given her age, she may have been naive enough to believe all that and follow those instructions. And I’m not helping you.”

“It helps to talk it through. I haven’t been able to give her much time. I wanted to give her this, talk it through. I need a face, I need a name. But I’ve got this picture.”

She looked back at Mira. “Young, pregnant, proper. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes. Proper.”

“Probably well brought up, so either married or planning to be. Because pregnant. Healthy—no signs of abuse. Good, practical shoes, good, subtle jewelry—including the ring. She probably wore a dress or a suit—that’s long gone. She went up there to meet someone. Maybe she was coerced, maybe she was deceived, but it was important enough for this young, proper woman to go up to a construction site, at night, either alone or with her killer. She couldn’t have believed she was in danger. She hadn’t carried the kid that long, taken that much care, to risk it, or herself.”

“Someone she knew?”

“I keep circling to that when I can give it five minutes. Maybe the husband or lover. Maybe he was married and promised her the usual bullshit. She believed him, and now he’s in a box. So he had to get rid of her.”

She rose again, shook her head again. “But that doesn’t hold strong for me. She goes poof, somebody’s going to ask questions. Somebody knows about the relationship. So that doesn’t play all the way through.

“Anyway, thanks for the time.”

“If it really did help, I’m happy to give it.”

It did help, Eve thought as she made her way back to Homicide. Some consults with Mira, like this one, pushed her to pick through her own brain, study the angles she’d pushed. See the strengths and weaknesses of embryonic theories.

And with Mira’s help she was forming a picture of Jane Doe.

And now she had to put her aside, again, and focus on Alva.