The Fourth Angel Page 5

  “Ah-ah-ah. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to grab?”

  “That stuff doesn’t concern you.”

  “I’ll be the judge. First tell me what it is.”

  “Some background on other fires that resemble Monday night’s blaze.”

  “What other fires?” The voice boomed, startling even Marenko, who let go of Georgia’s wrist. Chief Arthur Brennan was off the phone. He fixed his beady blue gaze on Georgia. Frank Greco, as chief of department, was higher ranking, but he was more politician than commander. To really feel your knees quake, there was nothing like a good session with the chief fire marshal.

  “A furniture warehouse in upper Manhattan last December, sir.” Georgia licked her lips. Her throat felt parched. “And two vacants—one in Brooklyn; one in the Bronx. All appear to have been started by something with the same intense heat and destructive power as Monday’s fire.”

  “Says who?” The rosacea on Brennan’s face, normally just a bumpy red sheen on his cheeks and nose, looked particularly florid right now. Georgia sensed she was the reason.

  “It’s in the reports from each of the fires.” She patted the side of her folder. No reason she couldn’t have looked up the reports herself—without Frankel’s help. Brennan couldn’t prove otherwise. “All of the fires occurred in New York City within the last five months. So far, none has yielded even a trace of accelerant residue.”

  “And you think one person is behind them?”

  “There’s a pattern,” she said, relaxing a bit as she gathered steam. “We’re talking about combustion temperatures high enough to melt iron and turn concrete into glass. I’m assuming these are arson jobs, but the accelerant is a whole lot fancier than kerosene or diesel fuel—”

  “This is, of course, your expert opinion.” Georgia saw the smile, swift and faint, travel from Brennan to Marenko. She had no friends in this room.

  “Sir, I know I’m a rookie here—”

  “Damn straight, Marshal. You are a rookie, and don’t you forget it.” Brennan spread two large palms on the edge of his desk and rose, his girth straining at his white uniform shirt, his face growing redder and puffier right up to his thinning silver hair. “Who gave you authorization to go looking through other marshals’ investigations?”

  “I was just being thorough…” Georgia stammered.

  “Thorough? By trying to show people up? Undermining their credibility?”

  “Not at all…”

  “Well, that’s what it sounds like. Sounds to me like you’re saying everybody else was sitting on their brains while half of New York burned to the ground. And lo and behold, with only—what? A year and a half in this bureau? Seven, tops, in the FDNY?—you’ve got everything solved.”

  Georgia swallowed. Why did Walter ever get me into this? “What if something was overlooked? Are you saying you don’t want to know?”

  “What I’m saying, Skeehan, is that your input here is over. Do I make myself clear?”

  She felt weak and nauseated, anxiously aware of the bitter coffee she’d gulped this morning. In Brennan’s mind, she was now a backstabber. As long as he sat in that chair, she could count on writing fireworks summonses for the rest of her career.

  “Something wrong here, Arthur? I could hear you bellowing all the way down the hall.”

  Fire Commissioner William Lynch was standing in the doorway. Georgia had forgotten his office was on the same floor. Though Lynch was easily a half foot shorter than the chief, Brennan’s expression of panic reminded her of a humbled schoolyard bully’s. Lynch had the power to hire and, if not fire, at least retire anyone who sufficiently ticked him off.

  “It’s just a small department matter, Bill,” said Brennan, nervously patting the air.

  Lynch ignored him, shifting his gaze around the room. “Good to see you again, young lady.” He nodded to Georgia. He passed a fleeting glance over Marenko, who seemed to be trying to melt into the dingy beige of the walls. By the time Lynch settled his eyes back on Brennan’s, they were hard. And in that instant, Georgia knew. The commissioner and the chief fire marshal hated each other.

  Lynch turned his attention to Georgia.

  “Refresh my memory, Marshal. The name is…?”

  “Skeehan. Georgia Skeehan.”

  “Have you been with the bureau long?”

  Probably about thirty more minutes, if Chief Brennan gets his way. “Almost nineteen months, sir,” she replied. “So you’ll be part of the Rubi Wang investigation?”

  Brennan cleared his throat. “I’ve appointed Supervising Marshal Marenko here to head the investigation. He’s been with the bureau for ten years. He’s a sixteen-year veteran of the FDNY with two Class B citations—”

  “What brings you to headquarters, Marshal Skeehan?” Lynch asked, pointedly ignoring Brennan.

  “It’s like the chief says, Commissioner. Just a department matter.”

  “Oh, really?” Lynch pulled up a chair from the conference table and sat down with a casual slouch that suggested he wasn’t going anywhere. “I’d like to hear about this department matter.”

  Georgia shot a sideways glance at Brennan’s acne-scarred face. He was giving her a hard look. She could deliver an Oscar-winning performance and still wind up dead. Maybe it was time to try a different tack.

  “Commissioner, have you ever heard of high-temperature accelerants, or HTAs?”

  Lynch shook his head, so Georgia gave him a brief sketch of the pattern of fires. Brennan interrupted.

  “Bill, I can assure you my men will consider every lead. But for a rookie to assume these fires are related without any shred of evidence—”

  “Except the letters,” Georgia mumbled. The room went silent. Brennan shot a quizzical look at Marenko, who spread his palms and shrugged.

  “The letters. The three letters,” Georgia stammered. “From someone calling himself the Fourth Angel.” She turned to the commissioner.

  “Twenty-four hours after the first two fires and twenty-four hours before the third, a letter arrived here at department headquarters.” She fished copies of the three letters out of a folder and handed them to the commissioner. Lynch studied them carefully, then handed them to Brennan.

  “You haven’t seen these before?” he asked the chief.

  “No.” Brennan wiped a hand across his ruddy face and held the packets up to Marenko, who also shook his head.

  Now it was Georgia’s turn to be surprised. Frankel had insisted he’d made the letters known. Marenko might not have been aware of them, but Brennan? That seemed impossible. The chief handed the letters back to Georgia.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “They were supposedly part of the original reports.”

  “Not that I saw,” Brennan countered.

  “Commissioner, may I say something?” Marenko had been remarkably quiet until now, Georgia noticed. Lynch nodded for him to continue.

  “I don’t know where these letters came from or who wrote them. But I’ll tell you this: there are dozens of wackos in New York—harmless wackos—who do nothing but write threatening letters. And tracking them down won’t solve the Spring Street arson. Somebody offed Rubi Wang because they were sore at him. Or his magazine. Or somebody at his party. The odds are very good that this fire was a jealous-lover, Happy Land sort of thing.” In March 1990, eighty-seven New Yorkers died after a jilted boyfriend set fire to gasoline he poured into the Happy Land social club in the Bronx. It was one of the deadliest arsons in city history.

  “I’ve already gotten hold of a surveillance tape from a warehouse across the street from the fire,” Marenko continued. “It shows a guy in a cowboy hat leaving the building at eleven P.M.—just minutes before the first alarm was called in. We’re circulating a sketch through the media. Our boy shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  Lynch steepled his fat fingers under his double chin. No one spoke. Georgia could hear herself breathing.

  “Tell me, Marshal Skeehan,” the commissioner said fi
nally. “What would you do if you were part of this investigation?”

  “But sir, I—”

  “Indulge me.”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “I would certainly follow up on the surveillance tape, as Marshal Marenko is suggesting. But I still think it’s a hell of a coincidence that four very hot blazes with all the earmarks of HTA have taken place in New York City within a five-month period. I think the connections bear investigating. I think the letters do, too.”

  Lynch’s smooth, blank features betrayed no emotion. Then, all at once, he clapped his hands.

  “I agree,” he said. “And since you’re the only one here with the guts to pursue this, I want you on board.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me. I want you to be part of the Rubi Wang investigation.”

  Brennan was on his feet immediately. His complexion had gone from red to ashen. “She’ll be a drain on manpower and resources…” the chief stammered.

  “My best guys are gonna end up baby-sitting her,” Marenko protested.

  Georgia tried to quell the trembling in her voice. “Sir, this is a great honor, believe me. But I’m really not qualified—”

  The commissioner slammed his fist on the conference table.

  “This lousy department wouldn’t even have the investigation if it weren’t for me. You think the NYPD just rolled over and played dead? I went into debt with the mayor big-time, so don’t even think of telling me who I can and can’t appoint.”

  A dull throb began to form at Georgia’s temples. A capricious appointment by a hated outsider could doom her entire career in the FDNY. But that was something the commissioner probably hadn’t considered. Lawyers, she reminded herself, play by a different set of rules.

  Lynch glanced at his watch, a clear sign the meeting was over. “There’s a cocktail party I’ve been asked to speak at tonight, at Sloane Michaels’s hotel, the Knickerbocker Plaza. Michaels is a good friend of mine. It was his building that burned on Spring Street. I would appreciate it, Marshal Skeehan, if you’d accompany me and help calm everyone’s jitters over the situation.”

  “Uh, yessir,” Georgia choked out.

  “Good. The event’s at eight P.M. Black-tie. Please give my secretary your address and my car will pick you up at seven-thirty.” He gave Brennan a parting look. “And Arthur, you try to sabotage Marshal Skeehan or any part of this investigation, I won’t only go after you, I’ll go after your nice fat pension…Civil servants, my ass,” Lynch muttered as he left. “Three years running this godforsaken bureaucracy, and I haven’t met a civil one yet.”

  Lynch’s footsteps disappeared down the hallway. Georgia fought the tightening in her throat. “Chief, it was never my intention to undermine—”

  “Shut up,” said Brennan icily. “Shut up and listen good.” He pointed a fat finger at her. “You’re window dressing on this investigation, you hear me? Keep quiet and do as you’re told, and maybe I’ll just forget this ever happened. But if you do anything to make me look bad, I swear, EEO or no EEO, after this is over, you won’t have the authority to piss out a match in this city. Got that, Skeehan?”

  “Yes, sir. I got it.”

  8

  Georgia was so shaky from the morning’s encounter that she missed her turn on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. While she was crawling through traffic, she dialed Walter Frankel from her cell phone and told him the news.

  “Mazel tov. Lynch has more brains than I gave him credit for.”

  For a smart man, Frankel could be deliberately obtuse at times. “Walter, I’m in a no-win situation. If I do my job well, they’ll say I’m looking to upstage them. If I do nothing, they’ll say, ‘See? She was just a political appointee.’”

  “You want some advice? Follow the letters from the Fourth Angel.”

  “Hey, news flash. Brennan and Marenko say they’ve never seen them before.”

  “They’re lying.”

  “Funny, they’d probably say the same about you.”

  He laughed. “Keep me in the loop.”

  “Yeah, the hanging kind.”

  She hung up and made her way into Manhattan and across town to Engine Two in the West Village. Engine Two, the site of the new task force, was a squat, heavy redbrick firehouse, two stories high, with cornices pockmarked from years of grime and exhaust. The red enamel apparatus door was open, and the engine in quarters. A burly young firefighter sat at a desk near the entrance.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan. I’m part of the new task force.”

  He knew the back story already. She could tell by the sour, distant look in his eyes. Telephone, telegraph, tell-a-firefighter. News travels fast in the FDNY.

  He pointed to a metal staircase across the apparatus floor with the word BROADWAY taped to the wall behind it. Underneath, someone had pasted a picture of a naked woman. Boys will be boys.

  On the second story, gray light oozed in through an old airshaft, dribbling across wainscoting painted with too many coats of mud brown and plaster walls as cracked and gouged as a child’s scabby knees. Long ago, a battalion chief had been stationed here, in a small room across from the brass sliding pole. The frosted-glass door to that room now had a piece of lined notebook paper taped across it. FIRE AND ARSON-RELATED TACTICS SQUAD, it read. Georgia didn’t know the task force had an official name. Then she made the connection. In this acronym-happy bureaucracy, the men had dubbed this the FART Squad.

  Mac Marenko was already inside, hunched over a compact figure with broad shoulders and coppery skin who was puffing a Newport Light at a computer terminal. Neither of them bothered to acknowledge her, though Georgia recognized the seated marshal immediately. His name was Eddie Suarez; he was a crackerjack investigator, fluent in Spanish, with a good ten years in the bureau. She wasn’t surprised to find him on the investigation. She closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw another marshal poke his face out of the evidence locker: Randy Carter. He still looked dazed and drawn, but at least they would be working together.

  Carter’s eyes met hers. He offered a quick, faint smile, which Georgia returned, though she was surprised at his tentativeness. His tie appeared hastily knotted, and there was a slump to his shoulders she had never noticed before. It occurred to her suddenly that Carter might be ill.

  She walked over. “I called your house twice yesterday. You never called back.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I got home late.” He attached a log book to the front of the evidence locker without meeting her gaze, then meticulously recorded the date on the top sheet. He seemed aware of Georgia’s shadow, hovering expectantly, but made no move to speak.

  “Okay, fine.” She hissed. “Don’t tell me what’s going on. Shit, Randy. You can recite the names, occupations, and personal tics of every one of my dates from hell…When Ma found that lump on her breast last fall? Before we knew it was benign? You baby-sat me on the job—and off. For Chrissake, you can tell when I’m on the rag. What is it you can’t share with me?”

  Carter sighed and shook his head. “I would, Skeehan. If I could tell anybody, I…” He fumbled around for something more to say. But his hurt—deep and profound and unspeakable as it apparently was—had seemingly robbed him of the ability. He squeezed her shoulder. “I’m sorry, girl. I gotta work this one out for myself.”

  “I’m just worried…”

  “I know you are. I appreciate that.”

  Marenko, his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up, breezed by and pointedly slammed a box of supplies at Carter’s feet. “There’s ten more where that came from.”

  Georgia faced Marenko. “What would you like me to do?” she asked.

  “You don’t want me to answer that one, sweetheart,” he said, then turned on his heel and went back to unloading supplies.

  Georgia threw her jacket on a chair and walked up to him. He was standing in front of a file cabinet, attempting to open the top drawer, which was stuck.

&nbs
p; “Look Mac,” she said. “I realize we didn’t start off too well today, but if you’ll just give me an assignment—”

  Marenko banged on the side of the drawer and cursed, pointedly ignoring her.

  “I’m eager to learn and I won’t get in anyone’s way.”

  He didn’t give any hint that he’d heard. So Georgia stepped between him and the file cabinet. From a black leather bag she wore around her waist, she extracted a small screwdriver she always carried, poked it in the drawer, grabbed the handle and lifted. The drawer slid smoothly forward.

  Marenko, nearly a foot taller, made a face and patted his empty shirt pocket searching, it seemed, for a cigarette. “Everybody’s got a talent,” he said sourly. “Yours seems to be showing people up.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  “I’ll just bet you were.” He grabbed a toothpick from a drawer and jabbed it in his mouth.

  “You gotta excuse Mac,” said Suarez, flicking ashes in an empty Coke can. “He just quit smoking. What is this, Mac? Your fifth try?”

  “Why don’t you just discuss my sex life while you’re at it.”

  “I would if you had one.”

  Georgia followed Marenko around the room while he checked paper supplies and set up mail bins and key locations.

  “C’mon, Mac,” she reasoned. “Give me a chance. I’ll do a thorough job. Randy will tell you—I’m no slouch. We make a good team.”

  Marenko, squatting to count cartons of fax paper, stopped in midcount, grinned, and shook his head.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He stood up. “Carter may be your partner when this investigation’s over. But on my task force, sweetheart, I decide who partners with who. Carter’s with Eddie Suarez.”

  “So who’s my partner?”