The Fourth Angel Read online

  “I’m talking about Thursday night,” Margaret interrupted.

  “Richie’s basketball team’s season finale,” Georgia droned, as if by rote. “I haven’t forgotten. Eight-thirty P.M. Saint Aloysius Auditorium.”

  “Good. Because if you don’t make that game, you’ll break your little boy’s heart.”

  6

  “I could’ve been a mugger,” scolded Georgia. “Don’t you at least lock your doors?”

  Walter Frankel looked up from his ancient microscope, lost in thought. A half-eaten chicken salad sandwich beside him was either the remains of his lunch or the extent of his dinner. He no longer bothered much with food since his wife, Doris, died last year.

  “You said you were coming at seven P.M. It’s seven. What’s to steal?” He gestured to beakers and jars of various colored solutions lining shelves along the walls.

  The Bureau of Fire Investigation’s Criminal Forensics Lab was a misnomer. The name implied a sophisticated laboratory with state-of-the-art equipment. In truth, the lab was nothing more than a couple of rooms with some high school chemistry cast-offs in a warehouse on West Thirteenth Street, a block from the Hudson River. In summer, the stench from the nearby meat-packing warehouses was unbearable, and rodents as big as cats wandered freely. In winter, transvestite prostitutes who prowled the area warmed themselves in doorways over open trash-can fires. Every year, the FDNY talked about folding this one-man operation into the much more sophisticated NYPD lab in Jamaica, Queens. And ever year, Frankel managed to hold on.

  “Did you bring the bike?” he asked with excitement.

  “I thought it might rain, so I drove the clunker instead.” A Ford Escort. Eight years old. Once red. Now rust.

  “Oh,” he said. She didn’t think he’d be so disappointed.

  “I’m still getting the hang of being on two wheels,” she apologized.

  “Me too.”

  Georgia smiled at his stab at black humor. Ten years ago, when Frankel was forty-two, doctors diagnosed him with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. Two years later, his legs gave out for good. Since then, he’d undergone every torture imaginable, from bee-sting venom and huge doses of steroids to experimental diets. Last fall, after Doris died, he had entered a special intensive program at New York Hospital, funded, like so many other things in the city, by real estate tycoon Sloane Michaels. Frankel raved about the program, but Georgia had yet to see any improvements.

  “So, what besides company am I here for?” she asked, flopping into an orange vinyl chair repaired with duct tape.

  Frankel rummaged through an enormous stack of papers. Behind him, a movie poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator loomed, two rounds of machine-gun ammunition crisscrossing his sculpted torso. The Austrian muscle man was Frankel’s idol. Schwarzenegger’s body never failed him.

  “That blaze in SoHo was no ordinary fire, and you know it,” Frankel said. “The moment that thing was lit, it was Hasta la vista, baby.”

  “So I gather. Randy told me it was definitely arson, and he never makes statements like that.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I wish I knew.” Georgia sighed. “I called his house this afternoon. Marilyn said he disappeared after the funeral and wouldn’t even tell her where he was going…”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Randy? He’s straight as they come. No, Walter. Something scared him at the fire.”

  Frankel shrugged. “Look, don’t worry. Carter’s a survivor. Believe me, I know. He’s been through worse.” He unearthed a black videocassette box from underneath a pile of papers. “This was what I wanted to show you.”

  “I’m not gonna have to sit through another Schwarzenegger flick, am I?”

  “I’ve got something here that would turn Arnold into a Bavarian cream puff. C’mon.”

  Georgia followed Frankel into the small office adjoining his lab. He slipped the tape in the VCR. A uniformed figure flashed on the screen. Chief, Fire Department, City of Seattle was printed in amateurish typeface beneath the head shot. The man rattled on in a stiff and overly rehearsed way about something he called high-temperature accelerant fires, or HTA for short. Georgia yawned. She’d had enough training films at Randalls Island to last a lifetime.

  The camera zoomed in awkwardly on a vacant strip-shopping center. Underneath, the location was identified as Puyallup, Washington, but it could have been anywhere. Georgia had passed hundreds just like it on highways from Long Island to New Jersey. It had a concrete foundation, plyboard-and-gypsum walls, plate-glass display windows, and a tongue-and-groove wood roof supported by steel beams. Except this one had nothing in it. From end to end, it was broom-clean, save for a random scattering of large boxes spread across the linoleum floors. She counted perhaps ten of these boxes. In the center, someone had draped open a firefighter’s turnout coat. At the right-hand corner of the screen were small red numbers. Whatever was about to unfold was going to be timed.

  “The Seattle Fire Department’s going to torch the place?”

  “Watch,” Frankel commanded.

  The camera zoomed in again through the plate-glass windows. Someone in uniform laid a small gauge that Georgia took to be a thermometer underneath the turnout coat. Georgia grew restless. The video had all the panache of a home movie. Then, from off camera, a voice shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

  Suddenly, a blinding white-hot column of flame like the tail of a rocket shot up from inside the structure as the red numbers began a second-by-second count. In the blink of an eye, murky gray smoke filled the main section of the building.

  “Where’s the fire load?” asked Georgia. “The building’s empty. There’s nothing in there to burn.”

  “It’s burning itself. It’s burning the concrete, the gypsum board, the wall studs.”

  At the twenty-second mark, smoke was already banking down from the ceiling. At one minute, the heavy metal front door exploded into the parking lot. Georgia had heard about really bad fires from veterans—PCB meltdowns, five-alarmers in supermarkets with bow-truss roofs that collapsed without warning. Nothing could compare to this. Those took hours to work themselves into a frenzy. They burned because they had plenty of kindling in the form of gas or tires or furniture. This fire raged on nothing at all.

  Suddenly, a hoarse, jittery voice behind the camera spoke. “It just fried the coat. It friggin’ fried the coat.”

  Frankel leaned into her. “The department used a thermocouple to measure the temperature under the turnout coat left inside,” he explained. “They just got a reading of five hundred degrees. At floor level.”

  Georgia looked at the red numbers on the screen. One minute and forty-two seconds had elapsed since the fire started. Any firefighter caught inside that building wouldn’t have stood a chance. At 500 degrees, blood boils, lungs scorch. Even if the skin doesn’t fry, the organs poach from the inside.

  Frankel read her face. “Like I said, Hasta la vista, baby.”

  Only two minutes into the blaze, the entire length of stores burst into one solid wall of orange-yellow flame. Windows shattered. Flames up to forty feet high danced across what was once the roof. Georgia shifted in her seat.

  “Why don’t they put it out now?” she asked as the roof collapsed in on itself.

  “Because they can’t. If you put water on a fire that hot, it’ll split instantly into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and the oxygen will feed the flames. Water will just make the fire hotter.”

  “How do you extinguish it, then?”

  “Basically, you wait until all the accelerant has burned off. Then the temperature of the fire drops from about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit to a standard fifteen hundred degrees, which you can douse with water.”

  The movie’s final moments recorded what was left of the wreckage after the flames had been extinguished. All that remained was a depression of concrete with glassy blue-green stains and a few mostly vaporized steel beams. Timber supports had disintegrated into five-inch
splinters. Frankel flicked on the lights.

  “What the hell is that stuff?” asked Georgia. “Rocket fuel?”

  He shook his head. “Rocket fuel is a carefully controlled substance, like dynamite. But if you mean does it act like rocket fuel? Absolutely. It has its own oxidizer, or built-in source of oxygen, just like rocket fuel. That’s why it doesn’t need a fuel load to burn. It’ll burn concrete if you let it.”

  She thought about the burned concrete and melted cast iron at the Rubi Wang fire on Spring Street. “If it’s not rocket fuel, what is it?”

  “In the test? A cocktail of ammonium nitrate, potassium perchlorate, metal alloys, diesel fuel, and aluminum powder, with a little magnesium thrown in to make those pretty white sparks.”

  “And these are carefully controlled substances too, right?”

  “Ammonium nitrate is a commercial plant fertilizer. Potassium perchlorate is used in flash powder. Ground aluminum is sold by paint dealers.” Frankel took off his thick glasses and wiped them on his shirt. “I could probably find a recipe for HTA on some computer bulletin board and almost every ingredient needed to start a fire like this at Kmart. Anybody who’s had high school chemistry is competent enough to mix the ingredients, and you don’t need a lot of the stuff, either, like with an explosive. Even a couple of shoe boxes’ worth work nicely. These fires give a hell of a bang for the buck.”

  “Fires—plural? You mean a bunch of these have occurred?”

  “Under two dozen over the last two decades. Mostly in Washington State and California, with a couple in Canada and the Midwest.”

  “What about in New York?”

  “None that we know of,” he said, returning his glasses to his face, “until now.”

  “The Rubi Wang blaze. So Randy was right about it being arson.”

  Frankel breathed in, a raspy hollow breath suggesting to Georgia that perhaps his lungs, too, were beginning to suffer the wrath of his disease. His lips parted as if ripe with thought. Then they closed again. He was tired. No—“weary” was the word. A long sleep couldn’t lift the burden of his thoughts.

  “C’mon, Walter. You didn’t bring me all the way down here to tell me that that fire wasn’t HTA.”

  Frankel wheeled himself to a file cabinet in his outer office, where he unearthed an accordion folder crammed with reports and newspaper clippings. He fished out a plastic evidence bag. A single piece of lined notebook paper was inside. “Here,” he said, handing her the bag. “Read this.”

  Georgia studied the small, excessively neat, linear print.

  And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.

  “This was mailed to fire department headquarters in early December, four months ago,” Frankel explained.

  Georgia furrowed her brow. “I don’t get it.”

  “Hey, you’re the parochial school graduate. It’s from the New Testament. The Book of Revelation, to be exact. It arrived the day after a very hot fire turned a vacant Manhattan furniture warehouse into a parking lot.”

  “You think the letter and fire were connected?”

  “I didn’t—until the second letter arrived.”

  “The second?”

  He handed her another letter in a sealed evidence bag. Same handwriting. Same lined notebook paper.

  And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.

  —THE FOURTH ANGEL

  “This one arrived at headquarters in late January—on the heels of another superhot fire,” Frankel explained.

  “In Manhattan?”

  “Uh-uh. This one was in Red Hook, Brooklyn, at a vacant five-story apartment house.”

  “Any casualties?”

  Frankel scanned his notes. “One squatter. The building was probably used as a crack house. A few days after that letter, this one came.” He handed her a third letter.

  The second woe is past; and behold, the third woe cometh quickly.

  —THE FOURTH ANGEL

  “The day after this letter arrived, there was a big fire up in East Tremont in the Bronx. Also a vacant apartment building. Also one squatter death.”

  Georgia studied the three letters. “You think these fires were HTA?”

  “You tell me. Three vacant buildings leveled in under half an hour each. No fire load. No accelerant residue. No discernible points of origin. I saw the angle iron on that building up in East Tremont—it was melted like a Hershey’s bar left in the sun.”

  “Did you put this stuff in your reports?”

  “I attached copies of the letters. I never heard about them again.”

  “The building owners must have cared…”

  “The two apartment houses were on city-owned land.”

  “Any code violations?”

  “You tell me.”

  Georgia frowned at him. “Didn’t you look at the building inspection reports?”

  “There were none. I went back and forth with the Buildings Department three times. There are no reports in the files. Nada. Zip. It’s as if the buildings never existed.”

  Georgia sank into the chair and stared up at the ceiling. Loose paint and water stains covered the perimeter. “What the hell’s going on here, Walter? How come three buildings have gone up in high-temperature blazes and nobody in the fire department wants to talk about it?”

  “That’s what you’ve got to find out.”

  “Me?” Georgia straightened.

  “I’ve got two years to go before I can retire with full benefits. The department’s got ample reason to yank my rear out on disability before then. I’m trying to hang on, Georgia. But you? You’re young and smart, and you need a challenge, or you’re gonna spend the rest of your career fighting off those ghosts roaming around in your head.”

  She flinched. Her ghosts were her own business. “You’ve never gotten anyone killed, Walter. You’ve never faced death firsthand.”

  “I haven’t?” His gaze fixed on her, and Georgia felt instantly foolish. She looked down at him, past the black polyester pants that hid his sticklike legs where the muscles had long since atrophied. Lately, his doctors had been suggesting he invest in a motorized chair that would hold up his neck when he couldn’t any longer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I just meant that things haven’t gotten any easier for me. I thought leaving the firehouse and becoming a marshal would help.”

  “You made a deal with God, yes? You figured if you just kept filling in those little job tickets, that your guilts about Ferraro would disappear, that one day you’d wake up whole again.” Frankel slapped his painfully thin thighs. “God’s the worst bookie in the business, let me tell you. He never keeps his end of a bargain.”

  He held out the brown dog-eared folder. “You have to hand over the preliminary report on the Rubi Wang blaze to Chief Brennan, anyway. Read my stuff. If you don’t feel there’s a pattern, fine. You don’t have to mention it. Just take a look.”

  The folder weighed down Frankel’s bony arm. Georgia took it, more to relieve him of the burden than anything else.

  “I’ll read it,” she promised.

  “Tonight,” ordered Frankel.

  Georgia made a face, then shrugged. “Okay, okay. Tonight.”

  7

  ARTHUR P. BRENNAN, CHIEF FIRE MARSHAL, BUREAU OF FIRE INVESTIGATION, FDNY, read the black stenciled lettering on the door. Brennan was on the phone when Georgia entered, his beefy frame stuffed in a swivel chair aimed at the grime-encrusted window. Beyond headquarters loomed the squat, gray skyline of downtown Brooklyn. The Bureau of Fire Investigation was the law-enforcement arm of the New York City Fire Department. Every marshal had once been a firefighter, and some went back to it after a year or two. For those who stayed, a series of civil service exams took them up the ranks—from fire marshal to supervising fire marshal to assistant chief. The chief was
usually appointed.

  Brennan wore a department uniform—dark blue jacket with brass buttons and medals on the pocket—which made him look something like a navy general. It had the desired effect, for though he made no move to acknowledge her, Georgia remained at attention, ready to salute.

  “You stand like that long enough, you’re liable to attract pigeons.”

  The voice came from behind the door. Georgia turned, her concentration broken. Supervising Fire Marshal Mac Marenko was slouched in a chair, a toothpick wedged in his mouth. Though his rank entitled him to more clout and pay, it didn’t automatically make him anyone’s boss—least of all hers.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Georgia asked.

  “Nope.” He grinned. “I’m just a fly on the wall.”

  “Then how about you find a nice pile of manure and make yourself at home?”

  “Clever, Skeehan. I like a girl who’s clever.” Marenko rose. He was a big man, easily six-two, in good physical shape, with a mop of wavy blue-black hair that needed trimming and a nose made all the more striking for its appearance of having been broken. “The chief asked me to stay. Besides, I know why you’re here. The prelim report on the Rubi Wang fire, right?” He moved toward her. “Can I see it?”

  Georgia shot a quick, nervous glance over at Brennan, who was still on the phone.

  “For Chrissake, Skeehan, I’m heading the investigation. I’m gonna see the report anyway.”

  “Oh. I thought the NYPD had the case.”

  “So did they.”

  She wanted to offer congratulations, but the words wouldn’t squeak past her lips. Marenko, she knew, considered women a liability in the fire department. It was hard to root for a guy like him. She extracted the report and handed it over.

  “Thanks.” He pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and flicked it into a waste basket. “And thanks, too, for your warm show of support.”

  “You want support, Marshal, buy a jock strap.”

  “Ouch.” He feigned injury. “That was hitting below the belt.” He opened the report, and Georgia realized that two pages of Frankel’s notes had somehow gotten lodged under the front cover. If Brennan or Marenko got so much as a whiff that Frankel was feeding her information, he’d be out on disability before he could say hasta la vista, baby. She lunged for the papers. Marenko caught her wrist.