Civil Twilight. Susan Dunlap

       9

      IN LESS THAN a minute we were racing for his car. We shot through Broadway, down Columbus and were crossing Market before John had the flasher on his roof. He had his cell on speakerphone. The squawk was coming so fast from so many locations it was almost impossible to make sense of it.

      “Freeway’s blocked off at First Street. They’re detouring drivers off there. Anything east of us’ll be a parking lot,” he said, cutting west. “Damn, I wish I had a patrol car. But even . . .” His voice trailed off. I didn’t need to look at him to know he’d been on the verge of griping about his missing unmarked car, but he caught himself. He, too, was trying to square the idea of the living, breathing Karen Johnson with a corpse lying on the roadway. I eyed him, attempting to gauge whether he was mourning the loss of a lover or puzzled by the violent death of a practical joker. Or if he was worrying about his car and career. My cop brother’s a grand master at masking emotion.

      Suddenly I was shivering, not from the chill but from shock and loss. “I liked her, when we were running up to Coit Tower. We were planning to go to dinner—‘somewhere above our element,’ she said. It was going to be fun. She was fun. We’d pick a restaurant where you have to bribe the maître d’, you know, the kind of place where you’re paying for the view.”

      “Where?”

      “She was going to meet me at the set and decide.”

      “Last meal, huh? Special place because she knew it’d be her last?”

      I stared out the windshield; darkened storefronts flew by. “It didn’t sound like that. But I was with her half an hour, and we were running, then panting, then talking about the hundred-foot pole—”

      “What pole?”

      “It’s a koan, one that’s always gotten to me. How do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole? Karen said she wasn’t a Buddhist, but she knew the answer, or an answer.”

      “A koan that had gotten to you? More than others?”

      “Yeah, why?”

      He turned left. Ahead we could see the flashing reds on the light bars, the silver-white glare from lines of motionless headlights. “Had you mentioned anything about Buddhism before?”

      “No. But when I said a hundred feet made me think of the koan she knew what it was. You’re trying to work out whether Gary primed her, right?”

      He didn’t answer, which meant he was.

      “I can’t say what Gary’s involvement is in all this, but it’s not with the koan. She recognized it, and more than that, she knew the general answer.”

      “Which is?”

      “What do you think?”

      “I don’t have time—”

      “Then don’t think, just answer. You’re on a hundred-foot pole. How do you proceed?”

      “Easy. We get that every couple months. Top of a pole? Call the fire department.”

      “No phone. Just answer.”

      He hit the horn, pulling around the car in front. “Okay. How’d you get up? Were there handholds? Like a telephone pole? Step-bars? Then you could climb back down again. If not, you’d have to hug and slide. Damn lot of splinters. But the whole thing makes no sense. What’s the point anyway?”

      “You just made it. You had a perfectly sane response. But it’s not the answer. How do you step off a hundred-foot pole? You just do it.”

      “And you’ll fall.”

      “Yeah.”

      “And be killed.”

      “Maybe.”

      “Dammit, Darcy, look ahead. What do you see? The crime scene for a woman who fell a hundred feet out of a half-constructed high-rise and was killed! What do you Buddhists say to that?”

      “I don’t know.” I could barely get the words out. Don’t know is a respected answer on many levels. But neither of us was thinking of the cosmic not-knowing now. I was looking ahead at the mass of red taillights flashing up from the roadbed of the freeway above us. I was imagining and trying desperately not to picture Karen Johnson’s crushed body in the middle of it all. “The truth is I don’t know anything about her, except she said she was here to get a divorce and maybe even that’s not true.”

      Traffic shifted. He shot left, up a ramp and into the construction parking area at the base of a skeletal building. He flashed his ID at the patrol officer on guard. “Where’s the scene?”

      “Fifth floor. Elevator’s over there, sir.”

      All around us were police, fire, ambulance, and coroner’s vehicles. John squeezed his car so tight in between two unmarkeds we had to sidle out and jump back as a patrol car and then a van raced in before we made it to the base of the high-rise.

      In another year it would change the skyline, stab the sky higher than many thought safe in a city that lives under the threat of the next big one. Now only the bottom floors had been walled in. Above, it was a skeleton of structural support beams and crossing supports.

      “Fifth floor—first open floor?”

      “Looks like it.”

      “Like construction in hell,” I said mostly to myself. Flashing red lights dueled, coating the cement in almost constant crimson. Sirens from vehicles trying to slice through the traffic jam and radio squelches fought with shouts from all directions. I kept expecting John to bark at me to get back in the car or away from the scene, but it was almost as if he’d forgotten who I was—or wasn’t. Moving between clumps of uniforms and cops in street clothes, he strode purposefully, as if this was his case. I followed as if I was a part of it, too, into the cage of a freight elevator.

      “Look,” a uniformed guy pointed to the front ceiling corner as the door rolled shut. “Bird’s nest? Here?”

      “Elevator probably wasn’t moving yet when the mama bird made it,” a tech said.

      “Spiffy address.”

      “Nah, it’s just the freight elevator. They’ll be blue collar birds.”

      “Hey, was that a head? I thought I saw a head in the nest.”

      “Birds have ’em. Makes flying easier.”

      A couple of guys chuckled. “But how’d they last here?” the uniform insisted. “You’d think the construction outfit would’ve—”

      “Endangered species?”

      “You better check with—”

      The cage eased to