Work Text:
You Got It, Boss
“One sugar and two cream, detective.” A clearly irked deputy plunked a paper cup a little too hard at the edge of the desk he’d commandeered, a beaten old thing covered in water stains and sticky spots where the varnish had worn away. It might have been said deputy’s; he really couldn’t recall who he’d displaced when he’d set up shop a week ago. “Is there anything else before I get back to work, or…?”
Eyes on his screen, Louis St Clair gave a dismissive wave and reached automatically for the cup. It was scorched, bitter coffee, and too close to boiling, but he was too deep in thought to wrinkle his nose. The last week left him feeling more and more like he was going down the rabbit hole, no mushrooms involved. Or maybe he’d been slipped some in his coffee? The thought was enough to make him glance suspiciously at his cup, but he needed the caffeine too much to throw it out.
The pictures lived in his nightmares. Eight days ago the construction team for the new seven-acre Mercy Hospital had assembled at their build site at eight a.m., and at 8:02 the emergency call was made. Police, ambulance, and fire responded; a very confused coroner came after. Joseph McGrath, the site foreman, had been crushed by a full Porta Potty. A crane arm hung, silent and ominous, above the gruesome (and smelly) scene. According to the final investigation, the crane’s hook had been heavily worn and finally gave out while suspending its unfortunate plastic load. Why the deceased had been on site overnight remained a mystery no one could—or would—answer. And, while shocked, no one seemed particularly mournful about losing Mr. McGrath.
The police had managed to find one homeless man who claimed to be a witness to the incident. Of course, he said Elvis was in the operator’s cabin. And to make this all the more surreal, he swore on his mother’s grave that The King had been singing “Big Boss Man.”
He’d been whistling it off and on since he read the file. You got me workin’, boss man, workin’ round the clock, he found himself humming morning to night, fingers jittering out the notes on the edges of tables and the top of his steering wheel. He’d caught it on the local radio on Wednesday, and even heard it from the jukebox at the little diner down the road. Elvis may not have visited a local construction site to release a ton of shit onto the head of the local foreman, but he had now taken up residence in this corner of shit county, Alabama.
And the poor investor…he’d think about that later. It gave him a migraine every time it crossed his mind.
Time for more interviews. It was a damn big list.
Linda, brilliant server that she was, left two mugs and the entire carafe of coffee at the table for him and his scheduled interviewee. He’d been pulling anyone he could for short meetings, trying to find whatever new angle on the deaths that he could, anything that might give him an opportunity to get an in. There had to be something here. Things just didn’t happen on accident like this. And if he was able to prove it, he might just score enough points for creativity to find his way into that promotion he’d been dying for.
“Thanks for coming during your lunch break,” St Clair said. It was pointless pleasantry; he’d been told by several others from the job that this guy’s English was minimal at best. He checked his notes. “Your name is…Lucky B…Back? How is that pronounced again?”
Evidently the question was obvious (or common) enough no translation was needed. “Bäck,” Lucky answered, the syllable clipped tight at the end in a way the detective knew he wouldn’t bother trying to replicate. Fine, bake it was. The whole name sounded like a bad pun.
Mr. Bäck gestured for him to take his cream from the provided bowl first, a courtesy quickly explained when, as soon as the detective had taken his chosen two cups, the Swede began systematically running through the entire lot until his mug was full to the brim and his coffee the colour of a raw cashew. Mildly unnerved, St Clair sipped his own, dark brown coffee. Maybe Swedes just liked theirs pale. “I didn’t know Lucky was a Swedish name,” the detective commented drily.
Emptied cups of creamer piled haphazardly onto a napkin in the middle of the table, Mr Bäck looked up again and made eye contact. St Clair flinched, and wondered why he'd spooked. It wasn't as if he were a large man, and he wasn't particularly imposing. White, brunet, brown eyes—the guy would get lost in a crowd. Louis was pretty sure he'd forget his face after the interview, all but that quick smile and wry look.
There was a long moment, solid on Lucky’s side and increasingly perturbed on the detective’s, until Louis tilted his head away to gulp coffee. As if on cue to give him a welcome reprieve, Linda trotted around the counter and placed a heavy tower of pancakes onto the hardtop with a clunk. They smelled like heaven, and after a curious examination they looked to be topped with Reese’s pieces. Those were definitely not on the menu.
“Enjoy, sweetie!” Linda chirped, all boister and bushy tail, and the grin and wink she got back from Lucky made a whole lot of things very clear very quickly. Too bad none of them were relevant and he really didn't want to know.
“Look, Mr. Bäck,” he sighed. “How familiar were you with the dead? Your coworkers said you didn’t talk much to the foreman. And how about…Carlos Gutierrez? The guy that went no-show?”
He'd almost forgotten about that part entirely. Carlos was a Hispanic migrant worker who'd been handling some of the cement laying for the foundation of the nascent hospital’s to-be-emergency wing. Nobody had seen him after the foreman's death, but no one did anything but shrug about one of the migrants moving on without a word. It was as common as sunburn in the Alabama sun out here, and while it had been just enough of a red flag for the police to open the case to begin with, it certainly wasn't enough for them to follow.
Bäck was definitely a hard labourer, the way he tucked himself into his meal with the gusto of the famished. But as predicted, he only tilted an eyebrow with a mild look that might be inquiring at the detective’s waste of his time, as if a construction worker that barely spoke English would be able to reply to any of the questions. It was fine, he was just here to check some boxes.
“Okay,” St Clair sighed, pinching his nose. “So…what is your job on the site?”
That one got some recognition. Lucky gestured one direction, then another—this and that, maybe. “Handsy,” he grinned, heavily accented, fingers splayed like jazz hands. “For manager Davenport.”
“What do you…” Oh. Handy. “Handyman. General work,” he guessed. Satisfied, Bäck nodded. Jesus Christ, he needed to end this soon or he'd lose what was left of his sanity.
Though he hadn't hoped for much, Louis wasn't able to finagle any more conversation. There was something smug about the way Lucky polished off his food and saluted on the way out. He knew full well how frustrating this was, but the few people who'd mentioned him said he was a good worker and otherwise kept to himself. Euros were just weird like that. He was only one of a hundred labourers on site, and he hadn't had half the amount of contact with the foreman as most of the others. At least McGrath spoke Spanish.
He didn't even bother asking about the investor. Just thinking about it made him feel like an idiot.
“Have you found out why Wagner was here yet?”
“Damn, not even a ‘hi?’” He cut an exhausted glare across the room and his partner huffed but let it slide. Damien pushed a paper towards him across his own worn out policeman’s desk. “Not a thing. Looks like he got on McGrath for some slowdowns in the work, but McGrath said there were OSHA regs about the summer heat. Looks like they were skirting some protocols that might get them in hot water if they were alive, but that doesn't explain why Wagner showed up to the site after the foreman died.”
St Clair took his own seat, twirling a pen before his ass hit the chair. So they had recent communication, but that was normal. The investor had his own interests in the work turnaround. “Maybe he was worried they'd get found out? Someone said he was asking how long til the job continued, sounded pretty upset about it.”
“More upset about it than his buddy dying? I kind of don't feel bad for either of them,” Damien snorted, with the air of an idle observation. “Just admit we're on a goose chase, man. I want to go home to my own bed, and that diner food has my ankles swollen.”
“Stop talking like an old biddy.” The gears were turning, and he couldn't quite figure out in which direction. It sounded like the site workers had every reason to want these guys dead. But did they even know if the investor guy, Wagner, was in on it? Did it matter?
No human could have arranged Wagner’s death, after all. How often did bulldozer brakes fail? And no one had any idea they could move that fast.
Someone had claimed to hear music coming from the cab, but he couldn't imagine how they would, with all the screaming. All just the mind playing tricks. It was only another example of the lack of maintenance on site. Kind of ironic, given they were building a hospital.
The dreamy feeling was beginning to creep in again. He needed to get out of town. The world just didn't work like this.
His fingers tapped a ditty on the desk. You got me workin’, boss man…
Damien’s phone rang. A moment later, so did his. The sudden cacophony split through the stale, coffee-scented air, and they met eyes as they reached simultaneously for the devices. Never a good sign.
Sirens met them halfway to the site and followed with them the rest of the way. Their dingy little rental car found a spot to the side where they wouldn't obstruct the various ambulances and fire trucks already on site and the half a dozen more on the way. Grey concrete was bathed in flashing red lights in an effect that Louis St Clair thought he'd dream about for years to come.
When five stories of construction came down, the storm of destruction was apparently twice the size of the original foundation. The dust hung heavy and they'd been handed thick, stuffy masks the second they stepped out. Acrid air made his eyes burn and there was a heat that he couldn't quite locate but made him worry about fire deeper in the site. There would be no hope for these suits, but the FBI would probably reimburse them for replacements.
They were there for hours, unable to do anything but watch and sometimes direct emergency vehicles coming from surrounding counties to different sections of the disaster. The day was dreary, thirsty work, continuing into the night with only headlamps and mag lites, and more the next day as the county struggled to verify exactly how many people had been on the job. It was a whole other matter keeping up with extractions as they were bussed to a dozen different hospitals for treatment.
Finally they ended up sitting as a pair in one hotel room, watching the records update. At first they'd gone to the coroner, only to find very confused staff who had been all hands on deck and yet whose fridges sat completely empty. Then the local hospital, hoping to find someone in the ICU who would be awake enough to tell them more, and again finding shaking heads and shrugs. Apparently all of the labourers who'd been brought in had been scanned thoroughly and sent home. None had more than bruises and a healthy dose of surprise.
Only one person was deemed missing. Name was Heath Davenport, the safety manager and head of liaison, and when it was mentioned St Clair got the impression no one gave much of a damn. Interesting indeed.
Not that it meant anything. It had been determined that there were no explosives involved. Just one pillar in the complex that had failed and taken the entire place with it like a long, multi-ton pile of dominoes. An engineer had taken a look under close supervision and come out looking shaken, his voice wet when he talked.
“It, uh…the concrete would have been weakened, you know, structurally. By the…”
“The body,” St Clair filled in.
The engineer nodded, pale. “Yeah. That.”
No x-rays were necessary. The pillar had cracked almost neatly in half and fallen in such a way that the corpse had been sheltered from the surrounding destruction. It hadn't been found immediately, but the search dogs had sniffed it out once they cleared that deeply into the zone.
“And, um, it looked a little shaky around it. Like it hadn't been set right. It all broke up too easily.”
Lack of portable toilets on site, a new preliminary report had announced just this morning. The ones there were quickly filled and had been left unchanged.
“I read that sometimes workers will piss in concrete while it's wet and it can compromise the structure. Do you think that could explain it?”
Another nod, this time grimacing. “Yeah. I guess that could do it. The grunts don’t know how this shit works.”
And the coroner report: Carlos Gutierrez, a Hispanic worker who had stayed late working the night before foreman McGrath’s body was discovered. He had, somehow, died in the cement of a load bearing pillar in the rising emergency wing and been buried there. The foreman’s presence that night remained a mystery, but one had to wonder what he’d had to hide, or if Carlos’ death had gone unnoticed after all.
And the second body, found completely alone but for a strangely pristine Reese’s wrapper. Crushed beneath the initial fall, the only casualty of the entire collapse—Heath Davenport, the man responsible for checking the stability of the build and guaranteeing the safety of those on-site. His death certificate said something about crush syndrome. Too bad he hadn't been discovered for days, or he might have been rescued.
Only one employee went completely unaccounted for. Unseen at the hospital, unfound in the wreck, and never contacted by investigators. Lucky Bäck dropped off the map.
Another migrant that had moved on. The final report made no note of it.