She capitulated, not happily. Which took me to the Virejas Tower early the next morning.
Presumably the city would supply a road to the building when it was completed, but right now the only access was a gravel track that I found by following the dump trucks rattling along Illinois Street toward the lake. I bumped my long-suffering Mustang behind them and parked outside the gate. The guard inspected my ID, made sure I had a hard hat—my silver number with “V. I. Warshawski Investigations” on it in red—and decided I could talk to the project manager.
Up close, the building’s footprint was massive, covering the same amount of ground as the tower formerly known as Sears. As I approached the building, I felt tinier and tinier, an ant approaching Everest. Even the flatbeds looked small as they unloaded girders.
The building was supposed to top Trump Tower when it was finished; so far, they’d poured the deck for the seventeenth floor. The hoist operator took me to the sixteenth, where the concrete was now dry and ready for work. A crew member who’d ridden up with me escorted me across the acreage, past the open holes for the elevator shafts, to the cranes on the far side where the project manager was overseeing delivery of steel for the day’s work. He wasn’t eager to interrupt his job to talk to a detective, and even less eager when he learned I was private, not with the CPD.
He also wasn’t interested in Sebastian Mesaline’s disappearance. “We have a dozen construction engineers on a project like this. We expect them to come early and stay late—we need materials double-checked, we need stress points assessed, we need the CE’s to isolate flaws the architect or design engineer didn’t foresee. This design is every project manager’s nightmare, too many curved surfaces, too many unusual materials. So when I have a CE who isn’t on time or is phoning it in, I don’t trust him. The longer Mesaline stays missing, the happier I’ll be. My eleven other guys and gals are picking up the slack nicely, thank you very much.”
“Why don’t you fire him?” I asked.
“Brentback, the contractor, they put him on the job. I told them he wasn’t pulling weight but they said he needed the experience of a big project. I’m supposed to babysit him.”
“You didn’t bury him in the deck, did you?”
That drew a reluctant laugh from the manager. “Would’ve if I’d thought of it in time. But a kid that useless probably would have made the concrete bubble. Anything else?”
I got him to take me to the makeshift office on the twelfth floor where five of the other construction engineers were already at work. After comparing notes, they agreed they could pinpoint the last day they’d seen Sebastian at the job site.
“It sticks out partly because he was the first one here,” an African-American woman with beaded braids said. “I’m one of the newbies so I’m almost always doing setup and making the sludge Tyler likes to drink.”
Tyler was the senior construction engineer on the project, a man in his forties with a square, wind-beaten face. “Aliana treats coffee like an engineering project, not the art form it is. She’s always calculating air pressure and humidity and adjusting the measurements, instead of realizing you need hot mud to keep you going on a day like this.”
“Herbal tea, Tyler,” Aliana said. “I don’t want your intestines when I’m your age.”
I brought the conversation back to Sebastian’s last day on the job.
“Right. So that morning, Sebastian was acting kind of furtive,” Aliana said, “like there was something he didn’t want me to see, but it didn’t look like he was stealing materials or anything.”
“What about your computers?” I asked, waving a hand at the array of monitors.
“They’re all accounted for,” Tyler said.
“Software,” I said. “Could he have been putting something onto a thumb drive?”
The engineers looked at each other and shrugged. “Could’ve been,” Tyler said, “but there’s nothing unusual on our machines. Even if he wanted to give materials specs to a rival firm, it’s not like they’re secret formulas.”
As to the last time they’d seen him, he’d worked a full day, but with even less than his usual lackluster performance. “I went back over his report with him twice,” the senior man said. “He’d made a couple of mistakes that could have been costly. Aliana here, she makes a mistake like that once and she goes back through her entire workload for the day. She’s the other rookie Brentback sent over, she’s shaping up to be a first-class engineer.”
Aliana blushed and fiddled with the buttons on her work jacket.