He was looking at her in a way that took her off guard. It was more than just a way of studying her to gauge her sincerity. It was something else, something deeper. There was a softness there and it made her flush with a very quick heat.

  “I’ll go,” he finally said. “But if we’re caught somehow, I’ll blame you. I’ll say I figured out what you were up to and came to stop you. I’m sorry, but I can’t lose my job for you.”

  Deal,” she said.

  Seems I’m making all kinds of deals as of late, she thought.

  “Well, let’s go ahead and get it over with, then,” Frank said, getting up from his chair and grabbing his badge. “And in the meantime, you might want to think of some reason you would have been led back to the factory. Because even if this pans out for the good, that’s one of the first things Minard is going to ask you about.”

  Ava had already started thinking about this and though she had no real answer just yet, she thought one might come to her before all was said and done.

  Besides, it made no sense to her to have an answer for that if she had no real idea if this last-minute theory was going to pay off.

  ***

  It was clear that a new shift had come on by simply looking at the workers. They weren’t yet covered in filth, no one was sweating heavily yet, and most of the men out on the floor and behind the machines seemed to be in decent moods. The floors were also much cleaner than they had been during Ava and Frank’s first visit.

  After being ushered to the factory floor by a very nervous receptionist, Ava spotted the same foreman they’d spoken with during their first visit. Cal Nettle was walking around on the floor with a clipboard, stopping by each machine and asking the operator a quick question. He’d then scribble something down on a form on the clipboard. Ava and Frank approached him as he made his circuit between two machines. When he saw them coming, all of the color seemed to drain out of his face.

  “Mr. Nettle,” Ava said. “I was wondering if we could—”

  “No,” he said, waving his hands as if swatting away flies. “I can’t speak with you. I’ve been given very specific instructions not to speak to the two of you.”

  “By George Pickett?” Frank asked.

  “Yes. And that’s all I can say.” He then looked around quickly, a bit nervously in fact, and added: “I want to help. I really do. But I can’t risk losing this job.”

  Ava understood this. Jobs like this one weren’t easy to come by. Yet as she looked around at the other employees on the floor, an idea occurred to her. “Do you know if that same instruction was given to everyone else?”

  A knowing and almost pleased look came to Nettle’s face. “Not sure,” he said. Then, with a shrug, he walked away staring at his clipboard.

  “You really think anyone working here is going to be of any help?” Frank asked. “I’m certain Pickett has struck the fear of God into them.”

  “I go back to my earlier statement. A place like this, at least one person is going to have beef with him. We just need to ask—”

  She stopped when she noticed something about the majority of the workers. She estimated that there were thirty or so men on the floor, either behind the machines, running the belts, or loading and unloading rubber. They all had their sleeves rolled up and the ones loading and unloading the machines were also wearing gloves. More specifically, the men running and unloading the machines seemed to have something streaked on their arms. It was brown in color with no distinct pattern, just smears of it here and there. It looked almost wet, but stuck to them like…

  Like grease, Ava thought.

  “Frank…look at their forearms.”

  “What?” But as soon as he’d asked the question, he seemed to see the same thing. If he said anything to her, Ava didn’t hear it. She’d already started walking towards one of the men that had just unloaded a strip of rubber from the belt. He had added it to a small cart with a few other strips and started to push it along to the other side of the factory.

  “Sir? Sir, excuse me,” Ava said, rushing up to him.

  “Yeah?” he asked, clearly irritated that he was being interrupted.

  “What’s that on your arms?”

  “My arms?” He looked at them and then, seeing the grease, rolled his eyes at her and started walking again. Over his shoulder, he called out: “It’s lubricant from the belt.”

  Ava walked to the nearest machine and saw the area where the belt came out of the back. It chugged along loudly and she could clearly see the lubricant on the underside of the belt. From what she could tell, it was used to make sure the wheels and rods continued to churn along. There was some of the lubricant on the concrete floor. Seeing it there brought it all home for her. She knelt down to look at it just as Frank joined her.

  She looked up to him and said, “Look familiar?”

  “Damned if it doesn’t.”

  Just as Frank knelt down to get a better look, a loud male voice shouted from beside them. “Hey, who the hell are you two?”

  They both stood, and Frank was quick to pull out his badge. “Detectives Wimbly and Gold, NYPD. This grease on the floor…it’s used to lubricate the bearings and wheels for the belt, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” the employee said. His tone had changed drastically when he realized he was speaking to the police.

  “And does it usually get all over the place like this?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How much do you use in any given shift?” Ava asked.

  “I’m not too sure. I don’t mess with it all that often. But I’d guess at least half a bucket or so.”

  Ava figured any questions they asked employees should be brief and to the point. The last thing she wanted was to draw more attention to themselves. She let her mind make the leaps and stretches it wanted, landing on a question she felt might help to lead them in the right direction.

  “Sir, do you know if there have been any injuries on site as of late?”

  He seemed to think about it for a moment, but it was clear he was nervous about it. “Gee, I honestly don’t know. You should check with the people in the filing room.”

  “And where’s that?” Frank asked.

  The man, already starting to walk away from them, pointed behind them and to the left. Ava followed the direction of his finger and saw an office space above the factory floor, built in the far wall and accessible by a set of thick, wooden stairs. Ava started walking and as Frank followed, he asked a question that she pretty much expected.

  “Injuries? How’d you get there?”

  “I was trying to think of what sort of working conditions might drive someone to murder Penny. Firing, sure. That could be it. But I figure in an operation like this, if you get injured and have to miss work, you’re probably replaced pretty quickly. So I went to the most extreme. And if we find nothing there, maybe then we settle on typical firings.”

  “Damn good thinking, Gold.”

  She did her best to not let the compliment go to her head as they reached the stairs. When they came to the top, there was a single door. It was closed but unlocked, so they let themselves inside. There were two large desks in a modest-sized room. A series of filing cabinets sat against the far wall, and an electric fan was plugged in, pointed at a tall, thin man sitting behind one of the desks. He wore wire-framed glasses and was currently hunched over a stack of paperwork. A beast of a typewriter sat beside him, a form currently rolled into it.

  He looked to them and just as a question formed on his thin lips, Frank showed his badge. “Detectives Wimbly and Gold,” he said. “We need to look at your recent injury reports. Where would we find them?”

  The man behind the desk looked flabbergasted. “I don’t…well, I don’t think you can do that. I need to get Mr. Pickett’s permission for that and as you know, he’s dealing with—”

  “Exactly,” Ava said. “We know what he’s dealing with. So, it’s probably going to make him very angry if we have to bother him today for that permission. You either give us five minutes to check right now, or we’ll go ask him for permission, telling him it’s your fault that we had to bother him.”

  ‘Fine,” the man hissed, though it was clear the idea of Ava’s scenario terrified him. “Injury reports are in the bottom drawer in the second cabinet.”

  Ava walked to the cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. The folders and documents inside were immaculately organized, making it easy to find what they were looking for. Ava started three months back, taking out the stack of folders and placing them on the vacant desk. The stack wasn’t very big at all; when she separated them out, they found only six reports.

  They looked through them one by one. The first one Ava read concerned a man that broke three fingers on his right hand when they were bent too far back when a crate fell from the top of a stack and he tried to catch it. The second was, ironically, a man that slipped in a streak of belt lubricant and twisted his ankle. In both cases, the report made it quite clear that each accident was the fault of the worker, not the factory or the working conditions. Ava was opening up her third folder when she heard Frank utter a curse from beside her.

  “Got something?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. Look at this.”

  He slid the folder over to her. The first thing she noticed was that it was several pages thicker than the two reports she’d already seen. She read over the report and within just two lines, she felt sure they had found something.

  The report told the story of what was labelled “an irregular accident.” Four employees had died in the space of about fifteen seconds when one of the belts on the machines snapped. From what the report said, the belt snapped because one of the rubber pressing machines threw a rod and malfunctioned. The report gave every scant evidence (likely intentional, if Ava had to guess) but even that brief glimpse was horrible enough.

  The rod that was thrown tore through the side of the machine. It struck an employee in the back of the head, essentially crushing his skull. The thrown rod caused the belt to speed up and come untethered from the track. This increased the speed of the rubber strips coming off and one strip that was about a foot thick slammed into the chest of a worker at the end of the belt rail. This employee was thrown back into a cart which collided with a stack of crates, all filled with lubricant and various kinds of rubber. The crates fell over, some from a height of more than twelve feet, and fell on six people. Four survived with just scratches and, in one case, a broken arm. The other two, however died instantly.

  Her own curse was lodged in her throat and nearly came out, but then she saw the most brutal fact of all. The employee that had been nailed by the flying chunk of rubber had only been thirteen years old. His name was Kevin Osmond, and his father was Steven Osmond…who just happened to be one of the employees that had survived the falling stack of crates.

  Steven Osmond’s injury report was part of the file. He’d suffered a deep cut on his left arm and nothing more. Meanwhile, his son had died either from having his chest crushed by the projectile from the machine, or from the falling crates.

  Even more alarming was the fact that Steven Osmond’s report came to an end with a single comment that sent a chill through Ava.

  Steven Osmond had returned to work six weeks after his son’s death. Based on what Ava could see, he was still an employee of Pickett Rubber.

  “My God,” she said, thumbing through the rest of the papers.

  Frank, meanwhile, turned to the man behind the desk. “Is Steven Osmond currently working?”

  “Osmond?” the tall, thin man asked. “No. He’s night shift. You missed him by about an hour and a half.”

  Ava eyed the address listed for Steven Osmond and committed it to memory. As she put the file back into the cabinet, Frank was already at the door. It was another of those unspoken agreements: they both felt that Steven Osmond was the next logical stop.

  And maybe even the final one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  The address took them to the Five Points area in Harlem. Ava was not overly familiar with the area, though she had performed in a few clubs along some of the streets they passed by. It was only nine thirty in the morning, but something about the gloom of the streets made it feel like perpetual dusk. The difference between Harlem and the Fifth Avenue setting they’d been dealing with for the past two days was almost polarizing. It broke Ava’s heart that a city that was supposed to be so full of promise and hope allowed people to live in two completely different states of life like this. It was also a stark picture of how men like George Pickett lived in excessive wealth because of the hard work of people that lived in places like these.

  They came to the address twenty minutes after leaving the factory. Frank parked the car in a stretch of dirt in front of saltbox, ramshackle buildings. Ava noted outhouses behind a few of them, meaning there was no operational running water in this area just yet. After killing the engine, Frank moved to open his door but Ava stopped him.

  “Maybe just me,” she said. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Gold, he just got off of work and he lost a son not too long ago. This man is going to be a tired, emotional wreck.”

  “Exactly. The last thing he needs is two cops grilling him. He doesn’t need some jacked up jobbie standing right in front of him, asking about his son’s death.”

  His softened features told Ava that he saw her point. He sighed and said, “Okay. I’ll give you five minutes.”

  “Ten. And trust me. If I get in any sort of trouble, I can defend myself.”

  “Oh, I know you can. Just….be careful.”

  She saw that softness in his eyes again and this time there was no doubt what it meant. Clarence had looked at her like that when they’d been courting. It was the absolute last thing she needed to see (or feel) from her partner before going in to speak with Steven Osmond. She got out of the car before it could get any stranger.

  She felt Frank’s eyes on her as she walked towards Steven’s house. A series of old, wooden boards ran between the dirt lot and his low, dusty porch. There was no overhang, just a single platform a few inches off of the ground that led to his front door, which sat slightly crooked in its frame. She knocked on the thin, wooden door and then looked around to the dusty yards of the neighboring shacks. A few houses down, several African American children were playing with a ball in the dirt. On the other side of the dirt lot, two old men sat in small chairs, chatting idly about something.

  She nearly knocked again, but the door was finally answered. There was no caution or hesitancy when it was answered. The door was opened completely, and Ava found herself looking at a man of about forty or so. There were dark bags under his eyes and Ava had no problem guessing this man may have not slept well in weeks. He was gaunt and unshaven, withered to a frail frame. In other words, the exact representation of someone that had recently lost a child but was still forced to work hard to make ends meet.

  “Yeah?” the man, presumably Steven Osmond said. “Who are you?”

  Before she answered, Ava noticed that there were slight brown smudges on his forearms and wrists. The poor man hadn’t even showered from his shift yet. If he even had the easy accessibility to a shower, of course.

  “Are you Steven Osmond?” Ava asked.

  “I am. Who are you?” He considered this for a moment and shook his head. “Even in the morning, this place ain’t fit for a lady.”

  She showed him her badge and introduced herself, doing her best to gauge his reaction. “I’m Detective Ava Gold, with the NYPD. My partner, Detective Frank Wimbly, is in the car behind us and over to the right a bit. I was wondering if I could have a word with you?”

  He seemed to think about it for the briefest of moments but then gave a simple shrug and ushered her in. She stepped into his house and found it not only sweltering, but sparsely furnished. It was a simple two room set-up, with a single door off to the right that she assumed was a closet of some kind. The floor was made of cracked wood. She could see the dirt beneath the house between two of the boards. Two simple chairs occupied the main area, and a mattress without a frame sat in the second room, which was divided by only a wall and no door. There was no running water and the only light came from the windows and a small bulb hanging from a questionable socket in the center of the room.

  “A lady detective, huh?” Steven said. “That’s good. Glad to see it.” He sat down in one of the chairs and looked at her with tired resignation.

  “Can I be honest with you, Mr. Osmond?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t seem all that surprised that a detective was knocking at your door. Maybe a little shocked that it was a woman, but not a detective.”

  He shrugged and without taking his eyes from her, they started to well up with tears. “I figured someone was going to find out sooner or later.”

  She knew what was coming next. She could feel it in her heart, but she almost wanted this to come out to nothing. She wanted to be just as wrong about this as she had been about Robert Abraham. But her heart—as well as Steven Osmond’s moist eyes—told her that was not going to be the case. Still, she had to hear him say it.

  “Find out what, exactly?”

  “I didn’t leave fingerprints, did I? I was wearing my new work gloves. I’d just gotten them that day. Or was it maybe out on that damned ledge? I almost fell off of it. Twice! Oh, but I didn’t care.”

  Ava decided to play along. She didn’t think he was trying to be clever, to tell her everything but not give a confession. She just thought he needed some pushing.

  “No. There was a smear of something on the floor. Something we now believe to be the lubricant used on the belts at the factory.”

  He nodded, frowning. “I guess, in a way, I’m happy someone knows. It’s been eating at me and as soon as I left…I wish I hadn’t done it. That girl didn’t do nothing, you know? But because of her daddy, I lost…”