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pillar. The breeze was light; it might be heavier at times but it wouldn’t sweep the victim out into the abyss, not unless she wanted to go. The M.E. woman seemed to have no more fear than the construction workers; she knelt at the edge, popping another dirtied swab into its cardboard box. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ he asked her.
    ‘Theresa MacLean. How long have you been with the prosecutor’s office?’
    ‘Ten years.’
    She hid it better than most. Just the tiniest hint of a wrinkle between her eyebrows as she tried to figure out what was wrong with him, with his face and his body. It smoothed as she gave up. ‘Odd we haven’t met before.’
    ‘We probably have.’ He lied, because she would certainly remember the strange-looking something he represented and he would certainly remember those eyes. Perhaps it was only that the late morning sun slanted directly into the irises but the light seemed to penetrate their color and produce a glow of sky blue with a touch of aqua. The rest of her face had the same level of quality and for a moment he had no idea what to say next. And a lawyer was always supposed to know what to say next.
    She turned back to her swabs, slipped the box into an envelope and relieved herself of the burden of gazing at him without recoiling. Usually he appreciated that avoidance, but now the melancholy slammed his body as hard as their victim’s final stop.
    But then she looked up again, spoke to him. ‘At the moment, forensically, there isn’t much I can tell you. She might have come up here on a drunken lark and fallen. She might have been depressed and jumped. She might have had a fight with her boyfriend and been pushed. Unfortunately every person on the site has access to this floor, as well as any person in the city who could climb the fence and figure out how to use the lift. The larger shoe-prints could have been here yesterday or the day before. Maybe. I have no idea how long they would last up here.’
    Somewhere in the middle of her fourth sentence he had prodded his mind to overcome the suddenly vexing problem of coherent speech. ‘Things will be a lot simpler if she was good and drunk. Misadventure, and the county and the construction company will be off the hook. Any family members will take accident over suicide and hold off suing either group.’
    That little wrinkle came back. He should have just stayed dumb.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That sounds cold. Mostly I would just hate to think a healthy young woman would want to die this much.’
    She said, ‘I hate to think of making this fall sober. But that’s always a toss-up.’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘Is it better to die with your eyes closed, or open?’
    ‘Better not to die at all,’ Bauer said. ‘I think we should take a look at her car.’
    Shit, he thought. There really
had
been a girl? It hadn’t been an angel or a demon who looked right up into his face; not a figment of his imagination, but a real child.
    Who had now become a real problem.

TEN
    T heresa had offered to accompany Frank on his winding trip down twenty-three flights of enclosed concrete steps, but he waved her off; she had her camera and the crime scene kit to carry. And so she wound up with her feet back on solid ground in record time, making conversation with the project manager, that rather unfortunate-looking prosecutor, and the talkative ironworker named Jack.
    ‘We all park on the grass here – that’s her Camry, two over from that beat-up blue pickup. That’s mine. Some idiot busted out my window last week, that’s why the cardboard is in it, but I’m going to get that fixed. We’re allowed to park there ’cause it’s part of the site, and using a lot down here would take half our pay, seems like.’
    Theresa scanned the haphazard rows perched on the lawn of the south-eastern quadrant of the Mall – now a sea of fairly firm mud with only the occasional stubborn blade of new grass clinging to its trampled life. The statue and its