The Fourth Angel Read online

  13

  In New York, the living meet sudden death in the strangest of ways. Some slump over white linen tablecloths in four-star restaurants; others sprawl on park benches, or lie prostrate in bed beside a poor choice of lover. They meet death in fits of rage, in pleas of forgiveness, in cries of denial, and with nary a blink. In life, they could be princes or paupers, heirs or felons, geniuses or lunatics. In death, they share equal berths beside one another in the bowels of an unassuming eight-story turquoise-and-steel building at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue—the office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York.

  “Follow the bodies,” Carter always told Georgia. “Buildings will only tell you how they burned. They won’t tell you why.” People, however, were another matter. They were doozies. Georgia wished Carter were here now, using some phrase no one this side of eighty would understand.

  The door to the chief medical examiner’s office opened now, and a fireplug of a man with bushy black eyebrows thrust out a hand.

  “Greetings. I am Dr. Kaplov.” He rolled his r’s like some mad scientist in a Cold War-era movie. “You are marshals on the Spring Street investigation, yes?”

  Georgia had been to the ME’s office dozens of times and never met Kaplov. Assistants handled the smaller cases. She and Cambareri flashed their badges and handed Kaplov their business cards.

  “We don’t want to take up all youse time,” Cambareri said quickly, shooting Georgia a warning glance. “We’ll just take the reports. Our supervisor, Mac Marenko, will call youse later.”

  “That’s fine,” said Kaplov. “I’ll ask my secretary to get them.”

  Kaplov buzzed her on the intercom while Georgia let her eyes wander the length of one of the walls of Kaplov’s office. Mounted on it was a large framed medieval print depicting a group of young people on horseback coming across a pile of dead bodies in various horrific stages of decomposition. The dead had little bubbles of dialogue coming from their mouths. The words appeared to be in Italian.

  “You are intrigued by the artwork, I see,” said Kaplov.

  The secretary knocked on the half-open office door and thrust a thick, bound report in Kaplov’s hands, which he handed off to Georgia. “The print’s a reproduction of a Francesco Traini fresco, painted in the fourteenth century, at the height of the bubonic plague. It’s called Triumph of Death.”

  “Pretty graphic,” noted Georgia.

  “I like the sentiment. Do you speak Italian?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “The corpses say here, ‘What you are, we once were. What we are, you will become.’”

  “Comforting.”

  Kaplov grinned like a little boy who’d just scared his sister. Then he clasped his hands together. “You want to take a moment in my office to look through the report? Discuss anything with me?”

  “No,” Cambareri interjected. “Thank youse anyway.” He made a move to the door. Georgia took a seat and defiantly began to flip through some pages. Cambareri folded his short, fat arms tightly, then leaned against a bookshelf, wheezing. Kaplov looked from Georgia to Cambareri and shrugged, like a man caught in the middle of a marital spat.

  “On this page?” said Georgia, holding up a mimeographed section labeled Cause of Death. “For the firefighter Terry Quinn, you wrote ‘Cause undetermined, pending police investigation.’”

  “That’s correct,” said Kaplov.

  “I thought Quinn wasn’t wearing his facepiece, took too much smoke, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “With contributing factors,” explained Kaplov. “He did have lethal amounts of carbon monoxide in his blood. But he also presented a subdural hemorrhage on the right side of his skull.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A subdural hemorrhage is bleeding into the brain. Quite possibly, he lost consciousness and fell on something, or something fell on him. But the angle is also consistent with blunt force trauma.”

  “Blunt force trauma?”

  “Being hit—deliberately or not—with some blunt external object. There was pressure from your department to release him quickly so as not to prolong the family’s suffering. Our offices, of course, obliged. But I will not allow my people to list a cause of death they’re not satisfied with.”

  Kaplov’s phone rang. He picked it up. Georgia massaged her temples and avoided Cambareri’s frown. She tried to picture Quinn’s last moments of life. Black smoke. Heat that even low to the floor was probably approaching 350 degrees. He was crawling around, taking puffs off his air tank with the cheater in his mouth. No mask, his PASS alarm off. He banged into something. A pipe. A two-by-four. Maybe his helmet came loose, and something fell on him and knocked him out. The jolt forced the cheater from his lips. Without his PASS alarm on, no one could find him in the smoke. It would take only four to six minutes to die that way. No grand mystery—just bad luck. She rose from her chair, to Cambareri’s great relief.

  “Just one more question, Doctor,” said Georgia as Kaplov got off the phone. “Have all the bodies been identified?”

  “All except for one,” he replied. “A female—thirty to forty years of age. African-American. She’s still downstairs. We can’t track her through the guest list, and no one’s come forward. Oh, and one more thing—she was pregnant.”

  “Really?” Georgia sat back down. Cambareri blew his nose loudly. On purpose, she surmised.

  “The world is changing, yes?” said Kaplov. “Perhaps there was no husband. Maybe not even a boyfriend. But in my experience, when a pregnant woman dies violently, I always like to know where the baby’s father is. And since no one’s come forward, I have to wonder whether this man may know something about this fire, don’t you think?”

  “May we take a look at her body?”

  “I’ll have my secretary buzz the attendants in the basement to get her ready,” he said.

  “Georgia, we gotta get back,” Cambareri pleaded.

  “It’ll just take a minute.” Georgia looked over at Kaplov, who was speaking into the intercom. She could tell something was wrong by the way the doctor’s black eyebrows knitted together like two fuzzy caterpillars.

  “Apparently,” said Kaplov, rearing back from the intercom, a note of surprise in his voice, “a man is in the process of identifying the woman’s body now. I believe if you hurry, you might still be able to catch him.”

  “I’m on my way,” said Georgia. She turned to Cambareri. “Meet you downstairs.” She wasn’t about to wait for Lightning and his bunions.

  Until 1989, the process of identifying a body in New York City was a nightmare. Relatives who came in to make an ID were led down a narrow metal staircase to a side door off the basement morgue. There, they would stand on the antiseptic blue tile, shivering in the 38-degree temperature while some attendant wheeled a gurney over, often within earshot of orderlies joking about the “floaters” and “jumpers”—suicides—they had seen that day.

  After half a dozen mothers suffered heart attacks, seeing their kids on a slab of steel, someone finally got the bright idea to create a viewing room, a soothing, plushly furnished room where relatives could see the body behind glass. To make the process even more humane, attendants also took instant photos, so families didn’t even have to ID the body—they could do it via photos.

  Georgia knew this. She ran straight past the lobby with its maroon velvet couches and pen-and-ink sketches of New York, and into the viewing room. But the room was empty. She found a receptionist and flashed her badge.

  “Where’s the guy making the ID on the Jane Doe from the Rubi Wang fire?” she asked breathlessly. The receptionist looked puzzled. “The guy,” Georgia repeated. “Where is he? Did he leave?”

  “He’s downstairs. With the technician.”

  “He’s downstairs?” Only cops and marshals went downstairs anymore. Not that there was anything gory about the body vaults, per se. In fact, they had the look and feel of storage lockers at an airline terminal. But there was no d
enying their grisly contents.

  Georgia took the elevator down and stepped into the basement. An unsettling odor of formaldehyde permeated the air. Along one side of the blue painted walls were several autopsy rooms, their only windows facing inward to the six rows of shiny steel vaults spread out across the antiseptic interior. Georgia scanned the well-lit aisles, looking for an attendant. In the third aisle, she found a short Indian man in a white coat, nonchalantly zipping up a body bag. He could’ve been wrapping a chicken, so blasé was he about the contents. Georgia walked over and flashed her badge.

  “Is that the Jane Doe from the Rubi Wang blaze?” The attendant nodded. “Where’s the guy who ID’d her?”

  “In the men’s room, getting sick.” He shrugged.

  Georgia could see why. The body was hairless, as powdery in parts as spent charcoal. Gray-white bone protruded from sections of the face, and the lips and eyelids had melted away, leaving eyeballs that looked to Georgia like overcooked egg yolks. The face had a gaping stare, as if poised to scream, the result of vaporized muscle tissue. There were no ears. On what looked like the remnants of a hand, there were no fingers, only some gnarled nubs curled into a retracted claw. The smell was the worst—an ammonialike stench, as acrid as pepper in the nostrils, but with a fatty, putrid undertone that seemed to settle on the tongue like candle wax. She felt bad for anybody who had to see a loved one like that. Why the hell did he insist on coming down here?

  Georgia found the men’s room at the end of the aisle and planted herself squarely at the exit, her gold shield gripped and ready. The door opened slowly. She saw the familiar basset-hound eyes first. Only today, the rims were red and swollen. His mustache and hair seemed to have gone a shade grayer overnight, and his cheeks were gaunt and cut with new lines. Georgia took a step backward, tried to speak, but couldn’t mouth the words.

  “Randy…?”

  As soon as he met her gaze, his knees gave out. He leaned against a wall for strength, then slowly sank to the floor, dropping his head into his hands. Georgia couldn’t hear his sobs, but she saw his bony shoulder blades beneath his suit jacket jerk and twitch as waves of grief wracked his body. She knelt beside him and lifted a hand to comfort him, but her fingers simply dangled in midair. He was like a raw wound that she could only make more painful by touching. She sat next to him for a long time without speaking.

  “Who…?” she asked finally. She didn’t have the energy for more words.

  “…Cassandra,” he choked out, “my daughter.”

  Georgia started. Carter had been with Marilyn for twenty years. He’d raised her two children like they were his own. They called him Dad. Those were the only kids he’d ever mentioned. Carter wiped the sleeve of his suit across his eyes.

  “I was in the Marines,” he explained in a raw voice. “Cassie’s momma and I never married. I left the service, moved to New York, and…” His voice trailed off. He reached for his wallet and pulled out a creased, dog-eared photo of a young black man in military fatigues with a little toffee-skinned girl on his knee, her hair in cornrows. “When she came up this way later on, I tried to be part of her life…I guess it was too late.” A new wave of tears welled up, and he hung his head, embarrassed. “Now it’ll always be too late.”

  Georgia reached out to stroke his arm. He didn’t pull away. “Are you sure it’s her?”

  He nodded. “At the fire, I found part of the rose quartz necklace I had made up for her when she was little. I didn’t want to believe she was dead, so I checked out her apartment. When she wasn’t there, I knew. Dental records came up today from North Carolina. It’s a match. Now I’m gonna have to tell her momma.”

  “Oh Randy. God, I’m sorry.” The words seemed so inadequate. “Did you know she was—” Georgia panicked. Was it possible the attendants hadn’t told him?

  “Pregnant?” His voice cracked, and he shook his head. “Not until I got here today. I know so little about Cassie’s life.” He looked as if he might cry again. “I have no idea who the father was.” He took a deep breath. “Please Georgia, don’t tell anybody about this.”

  “But why?”

  “Marenko will take me off the investigation. It’s standard procedure. You know that.”

  “Maybe you should be…”

  “No,” he said angrily. “She’s my kid. All her life, I wasn’t there for her. At least let me be there for her now. Please, Georgia. Please give me that. You know what it’s like not having your father looking out for you. You told me so yourself.”

  “Okay.” Georgia sighed, feeling a familiar stab of pain at the mention of her dad. She helped Carter to his feet. “You’re my partner and my friend, Randy. I’ll always back you up.”

  14

  “So, youse find out who ID’d the Jane Doe?” Cambareri asked Georgia as they walked back to the car from the ME’s office. The sun was strong, the rumble of traffic along First Avenue deafening.

  “He was a relative of the victim’s mother in North Carolina, I think. He’d already left the viewing room when I got there.”

  At a kiosk, Cambareri bought a Snickers bar and a lottery ticket. Georgia inhaled the smell of hot pretzels at a vending cart nearby. It felt good to be out among the living. She wondered if Carter would ever feel that way again.

  “Then how come,” Cambareri took a bite of candy, “youse went down to the morgue basement? You was there awhile.”

  “I wanted to take a look at the body—all right, Gene?” A First Avenue bus rumbled by, and they both got a mouthful of diesel fumes. “Not for nothing, but aren’t you the guy who always tells me not to ask so many questions?”

  Cambareri crumpled the candy wrapper and grinned. “You’re learning, young lady. You’re learning.”

  Back at the firehouse, Cambareri wandered into the kitchen to sample the lasagna. Georgia trudged upstairs. Marenko was on the phone. His blue denim shirtsleeves were rolled up; his navy blue wool tie dangled over the desk. She could see the silky black hair on his sinewy forearms. She handed him the medical examiner’s reports, which he scanned without a thank-you while he was on the phone, then put to one side. When he hung up, she planted herself in front of him.

  “I’d really appreciate the opportunity to track down Alison Simon’s boyfriend, José.”

  Marenko pushed back from his desk and clasped his hands behind his head. “Why?”

  “Because it’s a good lead. You know it is, Mac.”

  He rummaged in his desk drawer for a toothpick and jabbed it in his mouth. “Suarez is already handling it.”

  “You gave Eddie my lead? Why did you do that?”

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  Georgia threw up her hands. “What’s that got to do with it? I’ll bet neither does Alison Simon. For all I know, neither does José.”

  “The point is,” said Marenko, reaching across his desk, “you don’t believe Fred Fischer had a hand in this fire anyway.”

  “What do you know what I believe?”

  He tossed her a fresh copy of the Daily News. FIRE OFFICIALS SUSPECT SERIAL ARSON, exclaimed the headline.

  “That wasn’t me,” she countered. “That was the commissioner who made that statement at the party last night. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Tell him he’s wrong. You’re good at giving superiors your opinions.”

  “At least I’m trying here. Not like you. As soon as Gene and I walked out of this office yesterday, you put together your game plan. You eliminated all the fire’s accidental causes, broke down the evidence, and divvied up the important interviews. For all I know, you’ve got the suspect in cuffs already.”

  “Close.” He smiled, rolling the toothpick in his mouth. “And he ain’t no serial arsonist, sweetheart. I’ll tell you that.” Marenko rummaged through a pile of papers on his desk and threw a report at her. It was from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’s national laboratory in Washington, D.C.

  “What’s this?”

  “A couple of marshals in Br
ooklyn still had some containers of untested evidence from that fire in Red Hook last January—one of the ones you claim is HTA,” Marenko reminded her. “So I sent it to the ATF’s labs and asked them to do a search for hydrocarbon accelerants. You see their conclusions?”

  Georgia flipped through the report. Marenko had yellow-highlighted the senior forensic chemist’s words: “Sample tested positive for diesel fuel.”

  “They found diesel fuel at that HTA site in Red Hook?” asked Georgia, amazed.

  “They sure did. And you know what that means? It means that that building in Red Hook wasn’t burned by HTA. Diesel fuel, even if it had been one of the firebomb’s ingredients, couldn’t have survived an HTA. It’s what I’ve been telling you, Skeehan—the fires aren’t related.”

  Georgia slumped against the edge of his desk, put the report down, and shook her head. Brennan and Marenko were right, she thought. I am a rookie in over my head. “Okay, Mac.” She sighed. “You win.”

  Marenko leaned forward. “Listen, Skeehan. You probably think I’m being a prick here. But I’m just trying to save you—and this department—from looking really stupid in the press.” He patted her hand. His palms were callused and firm.

  “You want me to quit the case?” she asked.

  He pursed his lips together and opened his palms expansively. “Think about it, okay? You don’t have to make any decisions today.”

  Georgia stared at him and said nothing. Marenko misread her silence as consent. “Hey, it’s not your fault.” He shrugged. “Lynch and Brennan were playing a game of whose dick is bigger. You just happened to get emotionally caught up. Maybe you were having one of those women’s days—”

  “A ‘woman’s day’? You mean my period?” She frowned, feeling a churning in her gut.

  “Or PMS, or whatever,” he stammered.

  He’d almost had her. Almost. But like most men, he never knew when to quit. “I don’t get PMS,” she said quietly. “I don’t take Prozac. I don’t suffer from father envy, penis envy, or the need to get in touch with my inner child.”