The Fourth Angel Page 2

  “What kind of fire melts cast iron?” Georgia had meant the question to be rhetorical. She forgot Carter was the only marshal who could recite the flashpoint of almost any substance.

  “A fire with a core temp of at least twenty-eight hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit,” he said without meeting her gaze. Georgia started. Fires that level whole buildings average no more than about 1,500 degrees. This blaze was nearly double that. Mother of God, what are we dealing with here?

  Carter swept water off a patch of concrete and shone his flashlight across it. Georgia noticed an irregular black stain, darker at the edges and clear in the center, like a dye that had bled outward.

  “That looks like a pour pattern,” she told him excitedly. Pour patterns are stains left when an arsonist uses a flammable liquid to start a fire. The liquid—typically gasoline or kerosene—tends to protect the surface beneath when it burns, charring mostly at the edges.

  “Something burned here,” Carter agreed. “But it’s not a pour pattern.” To prove his point, he directed his flashlight to a grouping of identical stains on another part of the floor, then to a similar drip down a brick wall burned clean from the intense heat. “Pretty clever torch to get a fire started halfway up a wall, I’d say.”

  “If it’s not a pour pattern, what is it?”

  “Probably tar stains from when the roof melted. We’ll get it tested, but I’ll buy you lunch if it’s anything else.”

  Georgia looked up through what had once been the rafters to the halogen-lit night. Roofing tar. She wondered if she’d ever get good at this job.

  A thick Brooklyn accent crackled over Carter’s handie-talkie. “Carter, Skeehan, come in.”

  Carter rolled his eyes and mouthed the words, “Man of Action.” Frank Greco’s nickname. Georgia grinned. In five years as the chief of department, Greco’s most notable accomplishment was changing the shade of blue in the officers’ dress uniforms.

  Carter depressed his speaker button. “Here, Chief.”

  “The commissioner needs a COA for the cameras. So does Mr. Michaels. What can you pull together in fifteen minutes?”

  “What’s a COA?” whispered Georgia. She thought she knew all the department jargon.

  “Condensed overview analysis,” said Carter, shaking his head. “Greco-speak. Gives the chief something to do at headquarters all day besides play with himself. Rest of us peons call it a briefing.”

  “Oh. Who’s Mr. Michaels?”

  “Beats me.” He shrugged, then depressed the speaker button. “Chief? This Mr. Michaels? Does he own the building?”

  “And the Knickerbocker Plaza Hotel. And half of New York besides. That’s Sloane Michaels. You copy, Carter?”

  “Ten-four. We’ll get right on it.” Carter clicked off the speaker button, then added, “You bald-headed, butt-kissing, can’t-decide-your-way-out-of-a-paper-bag bureaucrat.”

  Georgia laughed. “So that’s how you ended up with me, huh? Forgot to turn off the speaker first?”

  “Something like that.”

  They split up to look around. Georgia shone her flashlight across a pile of rubbish where one of the building’s timber support beams should have been. Hundred-and-twenty-year-old lofts typically boast beams thirty to forty feet long and a foot thick. Even in the worst fires, the wood does little more than become blackened and segmented on the surface—a condition known as alligatoring. Yet here all she could find was a huge mound of charred splinters, none more than six inches in length.

  “Randy, this is incredible,” Georgia called out, sloshing over. “I think the fire disintegrated the timber supports.”

  Carter had his back to her. He was staring at something in his hand. She was nearly on top of him before he looked up, startled. He slipped whatever he was looking at into his coat pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to do my goddamned job here. How ’bout doing yours for a change?”

  Georgia froze. Not once in all their time working together had Randy Carter ever lost his temper—not the tour when he took a shot to the jaw from a drug dealer. Not the night some bozo firefighter started peeing on crime-scene evidence. Not even when the other marshals ribbed him about having a rookie girl for a partner.

  “Are you all right?” she asked softly.

  He tipped back his black fire helmet and ran a hand from the top of his receding hairline to the bottom of his graying mustache. “Yeah.” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m just having a bad tour. Look, maybe y’all better handle the briefing.”

  “Me? Brief the commissioner?” In the eighteen months since she’d been promoted from firefighter to marshal, Georgia had investigated nothing bigger than a few tenement torchings. Though on paper they were equal partners, in practice she almost always let Carter take the lead. “What do I say?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “We don’t even know if it’s arson.”

  “Yeah, we do. I do.” The statement stopped Georgia cold. Carter never made definitive judgments this early in a case. He must have read the shock on her face, because he beckoned her over to a swirling bluish-green depression on the basement floor, about fifty feet from the stains they’d noted earlier. It was shiny and sleek, almost like glass. And it was etched deep into the concrete, as permanently as a tattoo.

  “You see this pretty burn?” He ran his fingers across the mark. “Something very bad and very deliberate caused it.”

  “Nothing burns concrete,” Georgia insisted. “That’s why they call concrete buildings fireproof.”

  “Fireproof,” Carter mumbled. “Well, maybe y’all gonna have to change the term.” He straightened with the groan of a man who suddenly felt too old to be crawling around burned buildings on his hands and knees. “Go to the command post and talk to the brass for me, will you? I’m going to get some air, see if I can round up any witnesses.”

  As Carter hoisted himself out of the basement, something fell from his turnout coat pocket. Georgia picked up a tiny piece of blackened metal melted around a pinkish stone and called to him, but he was already out of earshot.

  Georgia frowned at the stone flickering lazily in her palm. Randy Carter could tell the difference between accelerant and roofing tar from ten feet away, yet he hadn’t bothered to bag evidence even a rookie would know how to handle. She couldn’t read him tonight.

  The command post was like a war zone. Cigarette butts and foam coffee cups littered the ground. High-ranking chiefs and aides conferred on handie-talkies. Big men in helmets and turnout coats pushed past Georgia, their faces granite masks of concentration.

  What am I doing here? she wondered. No one in the upper echelons of the FDNY knew her, least of all the commissioner. And all she knew about William Lynch was what she’d heard from other firefighters—namely that Lynch, a lawyer by trade, had never come within fifty feet of a speck of ash. That’s why his white helmet stayed so shiny.

  He was talking to Frank Greco, the chief of department, when she came upon him. Georgia introduced herself to both men and saluted. Lynch gave her a puzzled look. The chief of department, a head taller, frowned.

  “Where’s Carter?” Greco asked, squinting into the crowd on the assumption that a gray-haired black man would be easy to spot in a sea of Irish and Italian faces.

  “Talking to witnesses, Chief. He asked me to brief you, but I can radio him, if you’d prefer.”

  Greco’s enormous black handlebar mustache twitched nervously. The Man of Action hated decisions.

  “Oh, for Chrissake,” Lynch said finally. “Look, young lady, just tell me what you know. I’m doing the goddamned press conference in five minutes.”

  Georgia launched into a brief description of the melted cast iron and burned concrete found at the scene, and the 3,000-degree temperatures the evidence suggested.

  “A gas leak?” the commissioner interrupted.

  “There’s too much destruction—”

  “So you’re thinking arson?
”

  “At this point, yes,” said Georgia. Greco shot her a murderous look. She hadn’t realized she wasn’t supposed to offer opinions. The chief quickly stepped in.

  “What the marshal is trying to say is that the department will need a specialized task force to assess the impact of the damage and prioritize the various scenarios—”

  “Put a lid on it, Frank,” the commissioner growled. Georgia stifled a grin. She was beginning to like Bill Lynch, lawyer or not. He turned to her now.

  “Arson, you say…Then what’s the motive, Marshal?”

  “Motive, sir…?” Georgia stammered.

  “Wouldn’t the building have been just as much of an insurance loss at fifteen hundred degrees as at three thousand?”

  “I suppose,” said Georgia.

  “And wouldn’t everyone inside have been killed from carbon monoxide in a fire with a core temp of only eight or nine hundred?”

  “That’s true…” She’d forgotten that Lynch, a former DA, had probably prosecuted a fair number of arson cases in his day. Motive would’ve been one of his first considerations.

  “So how do you explain a three-thousand-degree inferno? It’s like using ten bullets to kill a man you could’ve killed with two.”

  A cloud of stinging smoke drifted overhead. Georgia stared at the pavement where body bags were being stacked like carpet remnants. The death toll was now up to forty-three.

  “Maybe,” she ventured softly, “someone really liked pulling the trigger.”

  3

  “Yo, Chief! You goin’ to work?”

  “I sure am, squirt.” The blond man hoisted two large spackling buckets and a couple of paint cans into the back of his beige, graffiti-covered Ford Econoline van and smiled at the six-year-old boy. Scabby knuckles, two front baby teeth missing, but at least no black eyes or bruises. Ramon’s mother had finally found a boyfriend who didn’t use her and her kids as punching bags.

  “How come you’re not in school?” It was a Tuesday morning in early April. No holiday he was aware of.

  “Teacher conferences, Chief.” Everyone called the blond man “Chief” up here in Washington Heights—even the drug dealers. Thirty-nine years of age, with a boyishly round, smooth face, sawdust-colored hair, and pale blue eyes, he was one of only a handful of white people left in this upper-Manhattan neighborhood. Almost everyone else was Dominican.

  The chief wiped his hands down the sides of his white, paint-splattered carpenter’s pants and checked his watch. “I’ve got an hour before I have to be at a job in TriBeCa. You get Luis and Bobby and I’ll take you hotshots for ice cream.”

  “All right!” said Ramon. He disappeared into the dim recesses of the building and came bobbing back down the stairs with his obese seven-year-old cousin, Bobby, and Luis, Ramon’s tall, gangly eight-year-old half brother. Luis was trying to maneuver his black-and-chrome dirt bike down the stoop.

  “Hey, little man, let me get that for you,” the chief said, grabbing the bike with one hand and balancing it for the child on the cracked sidewalk. He knew the bike well. A BMX all-terrain he’d bought the boy last year when his shabby hand-me-down got stolen. He’d bought a sturdy combination lock as well so this bike would never stray.

  “Me and Bobby’ll walk with you,” said Ramon. “Luis is gonna bike.”

  “That’s cool,” said the chief.

  There were no trees along this block in Washington Heights, not even any weeds to signal the onset of spring. The dilapidated tenements and low brick apartment buildings were bathed in shadow on even the sunniest of days. Luis, normally a talkative child, biked silently alongside the trio. He had been acting strangely lately. The chief was worried about him.

  “How’s that bike holding up, Luis?”

  “Okay,” the boy mumbled.

  “He won’t give me no rides,” complained Ramon.

  “Hey, Luis.” The chief frowned. “You gotta look out for your little brother. Loyalty. Fraternity. All that stuff we talked about. You wanna be a fireman one day, don’t you?”

  Luis shrugged. That stopped the chief cold. The boy had wanted to be a fireman since they’d first met, three years ago. That was all he ever talked about.

  “What’s going on, son? Is Orlando doing something to you he shouldn’t?”

  He’d threatened the boy’s mother, Celia Maldonado, once before with calling child welfare, after her last boyfriend beat the kids. The chief didn’t do it, of course. Celia’s taste in men had always been poor, but she was basically a good mother. And besides, if the city really did take her boys, Celia would probably go off the deep end. The children would most likely be split up, and God only knew what hellhole of a foster home they’d end up in.

  “Luis,” the chief said softly. “You know what touching is, don’t you?”

  The boy frowned. “Orlando ain’t doin’ nothin’…”

  “You’d tell me the truth, wouldn’t you?”

  “No one’s hassling me, okay?” The child got on his bicycle and pedaled ahead. The chief gave the other two boys quizzical looks. Bobby shrugged. Ramon looked at his sneakers. “Orlando told Ma you weren’t really a fireman,” the child blurted. “And Ma told Luis.”

  The chief’s easy, handsome smile flickered for only for a moment. Then he took off down the street. He was a good runner, despite having been asthmatic as a child. Twice, he had completed the New York City Marathon in just over three and a half hours.

  He planted himself in front of Luis’s bike, then put two strong arms between the handlebars, forcing the child to stop.

  “You lied,” Luis muttered. “Orlando says you didn’t leave the fire department because you got hurt rescuing somebody. He says you weren’t even a firefighter.”

  The chief squatted in front of the bike and gently pulled at the boy’s chin until their eyes met. Luis was crying.

  “Son, I’d never lie to you.” He pulled out a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped the boy’s tears. “Didn’t I buy you this bike?”

  Luis nodded.

  “And when your ma gets short of cash, don’t I always take you guys to Mickey D’s?”

  Again the child nodded.

  “So why would I lie to you? Why would I hurt you?”

  The boy thought a moment. Then he sniffed back tears and braved a smile.

  In the cramped bodega, the chief bought three ice-cream sandwiches for the children and a copy of the Daily News for himself. HELLFIRE! screamed the front-page headline. Beneath, a full-page photo showed a giant hole in SoHo where a building had stood until eleven P.M. last night. Fifty-four people were dead.

  “I gotta go to work,” said the chief, squeezing Luis’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about anything, son, you hear me?” The boy smiled warmly at the man.

  The chief tucked the newspaper under his arm and left the store. Outside, he bent down beside Luis’s bike to retie the laces of his paint-spattered work boots. He fingered the bike’s combination lock idly. 35-62-27. He’d bought that lock. He’d protected Luis. He’d always protected Luis. In this neighborhood, the bike would be gone in a heartbeat without it. 35-62-27. He turned the dial and felt the familiar click as the lock gave way.

  The chief can giveth, yes. But the chief can also taketh away.

  4

  The bagpipes wailed on a gathering breeze. “Amazing Grace” floated in a high, reedy tenor above the sea of midnight-blue uniforms and white caps that lined the hilly Yonkers boulevards Terry Quinn once called home.

  Georgia Skeehan and Randy Carter gathered their somber dress blues around them as a sharp gust lifted off the Hudson River, past the tumbledown row frames, gray factories, and bars with neon-green shamrocks blinking in the windows. They were both dog-tired from having been up all night, but a firefighter’s death wasn’t something you shrugged off.

  “Was it like this for your dad?” Carter asked softly, taking in the carpet of dark blue extending a half mile in every direction.

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s sort of a
blur to me,” Georgia admitted. “I saw the whole thing through a twelve-year-old’s eyes.”

  She looked up to the steps of the dull redbrick Roman Catholic church where Quinn’s widow and two little girls were standing. The older girl had to be about six. She was crying. Her sister, three, looked blissfully unaware as a gleaming red fire truck, bearing the flag-draped casket of her father, rolled toward the packed congregation.

  “I still miss him a lot,” Georgia confessed. “It’s crazy, you know, but for years, his death felt like a kind of abandonment to me. Like he’d just up and left me to grow into a woman without him. I really needed him, growing up. I guess every girl does.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Georgia thought she saw Carter fighting back tears. She turned and touched his sleeve. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” His voice was hoarse and labored. She studied him now. His basset-hound eyes seemed sunken and glassy, and there was a slight stoop to his normally ramrod-straight posture. His chin bore two small scabs from a hasty shave. And Carter, the neat freak, had dirt under his nails.

  “What’s wrong, Randy? Something’s eating you, I know it. C’mon, tell me. You’ve heard every goddamned inch of my life.”

  “I’m fine. Really.” He waved her off. “I’m tired from last night, that’s all. I just need to walk around, get some air.”

  Before Georgia could argue with him, she felt a meaty hand on her shoulder. She turned. A burly man with hair the color of spent charcoal gave her a bear hug. “Hello, love,” said Jimmy Gallagher. For a man of fifty-six, he was still surprisingly strong.

  Georgia gave him a peck on the cheek, then turned back to Carter. “You want me to come with you, Randy…?”

  “No. I’ll catch up to y’all later. Jimmy…” He tipped the brim of his white dress cap at Gallagher, who returned the gesture, then frowned as Carter disappeared into the crowd.