The woman studied him a moment. The rugged build, the blond hair damp from a morning run, the paint-flecked sweatshirt. He grinned ruefully, blue eyes twinkling.
“What’s her last name?”
“Nolan…geez, thanks, ma’am. You’re the best.”
The bill came to $40 for two pairs of pants, a blazer, a blouse, and a silky peach nightshirt. The chief paid in cash. A block away, two sanitation workers were loading garbage into a compactor. When they turned, he threw everything but the nightshirt into the truck.
He folded the shirt into a ball under his arm and found a stationery store where he purchased a small padded envelope, then smiled his winning smile at the cashier and asked if she’d be kind enough to address the envelope because he was having a problem with double vision. The woman obliged, neatly printing out the address he rattled off. At the post office two blocks away, he had the package weighed and stamped, but didn’t seal it.
It was nearly nine A.M. by the time he crossed back into Central Park and found his way into one of the park’s deserted tunnels. There, he shivered in the damp air as he fumbled in his pockets for a butane lighter.
Seconds later, a warm orange flame glowed invitingly in the darkness, its light shimmering across the nightshirt. The chief could almost picture her in it now, that long, dark hair oozing like molasses over her shoulders. That pale porcelain skin disappearing into the folds of silky peach fabric around her cleavage. She had such a fair, unblemished complexion. He would bet she burned easily. So easily.
He touched the lighter to the back of the shirt. A flame flared up the middle. It grew quickly, jagged teeth tearing into fragile silk. Then he threw the shirt on the damp, filthy cement and stamped on it until the flames were extinguished. A charred slash ran down the back. A hideous scar. He opened up the mailing envelope and stuffed the shirt inside.
Her delicate white shoulders would tremble when she saw it. She’d know right away who it was from—and what it meant.
First the shirt, it would whisper. Then you.
22
Georgia awoke with a start. A strong breeze snapped loudly at the vinyl shades across her windows. She massaged her throbbing temples and took stock of the time. Nine A.M. She’d had three hours of shut-eye in the last twenty-four. She realized now that she’d been dreaming of the dead firefighter, Sean Duffy. But in her dream, the face was her father’s.
Grief sat like an anvil on her chest. Every dead firefighter seemed to bring that painful day back. Sean Duffy had saved that little girl, she’d heard. The child was going to be in the hospital for a few days, but she’d recover. Georgia wondered if Duffy’s family ever would.
She went downstairs to the kitchen and forced a stale jelly doughnut on herself, hoping to stem the queasiness in the pit of her stomach. The house was quiet. Richie was at school; her mother, at her secretarial job. The plastic Easter eggs on the bare lilac out front swayed in the breeze. Forsythia bloomed along a chain-link fence.
On the kitchen table was a pile of papers. Bills, mostly, addressed to her. Some contest entry forms addressed to her mother. A folded orange sheet caught Georgia’s eye. It was Richie’s basketball program from last night. When she opened it, a gold-plated medallion tumbled out, with the words MOST IMPROVED PLAYER etched across it. Richie had gotten an award—and she’d missed it.
Damn, thought Georgia, shaking her head. It’s not like I was out with some guy or drunk in a bar. Lives were at stake—many, many lives. And besides that, she had to put food on the table. She was here, goddamnit. Not like Rick. She was here.
She poured herself a cup of black coffee and roughly shoved the papers to one side of the table. An envelope thudded to the floor. Georgia picked it up. It was blank on the outside and unsealed, but inside there was a sheet of lined yellow paper filled with Richie’s painstaking scrawl. Richie hated writing. She had to bribe him to pen thank-yous.
She unfolded the paper. A school photo dropped from the creases. Her throat went dry. Her eyes blurred with tears as she read it:
To My Dad,
Hi. My name is Richie. I’m 9. I never wrote a letter like this before. But I guess you never read one like it, so we are even.
I always wanted to know something about you. My grandma used to tell my mom I look like you. Here’s my school picture. What do you think? If I walked down the street, would you know me? I wouldn’t know you. That makes me sad.
It’s okay if you don’t want to be my dad. You don’t have to, like, play ball with me or anything. But maybe we could just be friends or something. Maybe call each other on our birthdays and Christmas. When is your birthday? Mine is May 13th. I like to play basketball and collect Pokemon cards. I like reading Goosebumps books. Do you like these things?
Please write me. You don’t have to send me presents or nothing. I got plenty of stuff. But a letter from you would really rock.
Your Friend,
Richie Skeehan
Georgia gripped the table for equilibrium. She wiped the tears away clumsily with the sleeve of her nightshirt.
You don’t have to send me presents or nothing. I got plenty of stuff. But a letter from you would really rock.
Her fingers curled into a fist, and she pounded the table. She could taste the bitter bile of anger and guilt as it traveled down her gut. The only thing Richie wanted was the one thing she couldn’t give him. She stuffed the letter back in its envelope and glared at it, silently cursing it as if the man himself were standing there.
But he never would be. Not for her. Not for Richie. It had been seven years since she’d seen Rick, but the memory of him never quite faded in intensity. He would always be twenty-five, with a mane of dark hair and a body as lean and taut as new rope. Hell, she couldn’t even afford the luxury of hating him today—not with one of the biggest arson investigations in department history hanging over her head, and two dead firefighters haunting the recesses of her brain.
The phone rang now and she picked it up.
“You see? What’d I tell you? Another HTA.” Walter Frankel never bothered identifying himself. “The department can’t stick its head in the sand about these fires anymore.”
“Oh, goody for me,” said Georgia dryly. “Two firefighters are dead in less than a week, the civilian body count’s up to—what? Fifty-eight? And now I get the keys to this broken-down jalopy.” She was still numb from Richie’s letter. She wasn’t in the mood for Frankel’s enthusiasm. “What’s up?”
“Obviously not you.”
“Hey, when I want guilt, I’ll talk to my kid.”
“Listen, I’ve got some good news. That bucket bottom you uncovered last night in Howard Beach? I managed to lift a thumb latent off it.”
“A fingerprint survived that heat?”
“Actually, under the right conditions, heat can permanently affix a fingerprint to a surface. I’m running the print through AFIS now.” The Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, was a national clearinghouse of fingerprints. Anyone who’d ever been arrested, or served in law enforcement or the military, had their fingerprints stored in AFIS.
“Any matchups?” Georgia caught her reflection in the chrome of the stove and made a face. Her hair looked like a feather duster.
“So far, no. Which means our guy’s not a criminal, ex-military, or one of New York’s Finest or Bravest.” He giggled. “Or drunkest.”
Georgia groaned. “I can’t believe those assholes last night. I think they should get fired.”
“They won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the Breathalyzers were administered by fire department EMTs,” said Frankel. “Those guys won’t screw a brother, even if he was seeing pink elephants. Greco’ll probably lift the entire house and scatter the guys throughout the city, but I’ll bet you anything, they’ll all pass their Breathalyzers.”
Georgia tried to run a comb through her hair, then gave up. Who was around to care, anyway? “Have you noticed, Walter? A lot of t
hese fires seem to have caught the department with its pants down…”
“Not hard to do,” he reminded her. “Screwups happen all the time. They’re just more noticeable on a high-profile case.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I get the feeling it’s not random. It’s like somebody wants to make the department look bad. And who’d want to do that except an ex-firefighter?”
“Then how do you explain Spring Street? Nothing embarrassing there. Look, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll ask AFIS to manually scan the fingerprints of New York City Fire Department personnel again. Maybe a print was smudged and we missed a match.”
“Yeah. Have them do that,” said Georgia. “Of course, even if you do find a matchup, it doesn’t prove the guy who handled that bucket set the fire.”
“Actually, combined with the right evidence, it just might. Come see me later, I’ll show you why.”
Georgia sighed. “I gotta go face the firing squad first.” Frankel knew what she meant: the task force. “I’m scared, Walter. I can’t run a major investigation. And if I fail, I’m going to let so many people down. The families of those firefighters, the civilians…” And Randy, she thought. What if I mess up and can’t find his little girl’s killer?
“Darling, you won’t fail if you stand your ground,” Frankel assured her. “My father taught vocational high school in the Bronx for thirty years. He dealt with gang members, drug addicts, kids from mental hospitals—you name it. His motto was ‘Don’t demand to be liked. Demand to be respected.’ You remember that, they won’t push you around.”
“Yeah, but your dad worked with emotionally disturbed children.”
“So?” Frankel laughed. “Don’t you?”
23
Georgia could feel the chill as soon as she walked through the doors of Engine Two. Firefighters stopped talking when she passed. No one said hello.
Upstairs, voices grew hushed at the sound of her footsteps. Inside the task-force office, Eddie Suarez was planted in front of a tabletop television by the window, smoking a cigarette while he watched news coverage of the Howard Beach fire. Gene Cambareri was wolfing down a jelly doughnut and picking out guys he knew over Suarez’s shoulder. Marenko was running something through the fax machine. Only Carter acknowledged her, and he did it by pretending to throw something in a wastebasket behind the door where she was standing.
“Watch out for yourself, girl,” he muttered as he leaned over. “Mac’s out for blood.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Georgia whispered. “You holding up?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I’m still walking and talking, so I guess I must be.”
Georgia hung up her jacket and threw a folder of papers on her desk. Marenko trudged over, carrying an enormous cardboard carton. He plonked it on her desk.
“The commissioner said to give you everything,” he said coolly. “Here’s everything.”
“Mac,” she pleaded. “Please don’t do this.”
He turned away and walked over to the television where Cambareri and Suarez were flipping daytime news channels, trying to pick up other coverage of the fire. Carter was sitting at his desk staring dully at the screen, his mind seemingly a million miles away. Georgia took a deep breath and strode toward the group.
“Okay,” she said tentatively. “We’re going to need to speak to the Howard Beach landlord, tenants, and neighbors, review the crime-scene photos, and supervise the Queens marshals’ dig for evidence at the site…”
No one heard her. They were all focused on the television. Cambareri was passing out doughnuts. Suarez was poking fun at Greco’s handlebar mustache. Georgia tried again, making her voice more forceful this time.
“Guys, listen up. We’ll need to streamline what we have on each of these five fires, so we can compare them at a glance. And we’ll need to get a list together of firefighters and ex-firefighters who’ve faced disciplinary action or dismissal during the past year in case our guy’s FDNY…”
Carter bit his lip and looked at the floor. The rest of them didn’t even seem to hear her. A rage churned inside her now. Georgia planted herself behind the set, determined to get their attention, but the men chatted away, oblivious. Her pant leg brushed against the television’s electrical cord. A raw impulse seized her. She reached down, ripped one end of the cord out of the wall, the other out of the set, then opened the alleyway window and threw the cord to the pavement.
The talking stopped. The men flicked gazes at one another, then stared at Georgia in stunned silence. Cambareri’s doughnut dripped jelly down his tie. He didn’t even bother to wipe it off.
“If that’s what I have to do to get your attention, so be it.” Georgia paced in front of them now, her heart beating wildly. “All I’ve wanted since I got here was to be a productive member of this team. And you guys did everything in your power to shut me out. So if you’re looking to blame somebody for what’s happened, blame yourselves.”
She took a deep breath, feeling her mind and body picking up a rhythm. “Now, we’ve got two firefighters and fifty-eight civilians dead, and I care about that deeply. I know you do, too,” she said, shooting a quick, piercing glance at Carter. “I want interviews. I want someone to go out to Queens and oversee the collection of evidence. And I want to know about firefighters with a beef against this department. So you guys can start helping me work this case, or you can get the hell out and I’ll find four other warm bodies who will.”
The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats and looked at Marenko. What he said, clearly, they’d all go along with.
“You don’t know how to run a case, Skeehan,” Marenko said finally. “That’s not a put-down. That’s just simple fact.”
“Then help me, please. Aren’t we on the same side?” But in a sense, they weren’t anymore, Georgia realized with a jolt. Marenko had suffered a humiliating loss of face last night. She could see it now in the slump of his shoulders, the way he rubbed the back of his neck. When his blue eyes met hers, they looked worn and defeated.
“Mac,” Georgia offered gently. “I know you’re in a difficult position here. Most men would walk away. Only the strongest would put their egos aside for the greater good of catching whoever did this…Please—I need you. I need all of you. Stay and help me.”
Marenko wiped a thumb across his lips and studied her now. She knew he was trying to read her—her ambitions, her intellect, her level of sincerity. He was entitled to that. She wouldn’t rush him. He shook his head and cursed under his breath. “You could talk anybody into anything, couldn’t you?” He sighed. “You shoulda been a lawyer.”
Georgia laughed, relieved at the break in tension. “Right now, you probably wish I was.”
The phone rang. Suarez picked it up, then held the receiver to his chest.
“Yo, Skeehan. That José you were trying to find is on line two. You wanna take it?”
“Yeah.” She picked up. She could hear traffic in the background and a buzz of static. The guy was calling from a cell phone on some street corner.
“Hey, are you really a lady fire marshal?” He had a slight Spanish accent, and the breathless distractedness of a low-level street dealer.
“Sure am.”
“So you won’t pull my rap sheet if I give you a statement?”
“I’ll pull it, José. I just may decide not to read it too closely if you help me out here. Alison tells me you worked for Fred Fischer.”
“I used to fix locks and shit like that for Fred.”
“And deal drugs for him, too, right?” Silence. “C’mon, José, don’t get cute with me.”
“Okay, okay. We had some business dealings—know what I’m sayin’? Fred stored my stash in his room. Monday’s fire cleaned me out.”
“I’m not falling over with sympathy here.” Georgia frowned at her notes. “When you say ‘Fred’s room’—do you mean he lived in the building?” Spring Street was a commercial structure. There was no certificate of occupancy, or CO, for residential us
age.
“Yeah. He lived in the basement. His brother owned the building, I think.”
Obviously, José had no idea who Fred’s brother was. Fred probably never told him.
“Alison said you think Fred burned the building down.”
“He was always talkin’ ’bout it, ’cause his brother wanted to put him in rehab…And the night before the fire—Sunday night? Fred’s brother made him go down to Atlantic City on some errand. Gave him a wad of cash and told him to keep his ass down there until at least Tuesday. I had some business I wanted to do with Fred, know what I’m sayin’? So it was a problem—”
“Wait a minute,” said Georgia, startled. “Are you telling me Fred said his brother told him to stay out of the building?”
“Yeah. Made it real clear he wasn’t s’posed to come back until Tuesday. But Fred, man, he takes the money and gets fucked up on blow. By Monday, he’s broke, so he comes back and crashes. Maybe he got to thinkin’…”
“Why would Fred’s brother want him to stay away?”
“I don’t know, man. But that was Fred. He never fucking listened.”
24
Sloane Michaels’s secretary told Georgia that her boss often went to New York Hospital on Friday afternoons to visit his wife. But when Georgia got to Amelia’s room at the hospital, the door was wide open, and neither of them were there.
“She’s getting bathed,” a nurse explained. “They should be back any moment.”
Georgia idly scanned a wall of photographs opposite Amelia’s bed while she waited. The pictures showed a tiny, dark-haired sprig of a woman in running shorts and tank tops with numbers pinned to her back. In some, she was in full stride, her jaw set firmly against the pain, sweat pouring off her sinewy body. In others, she was collapsing over the finish lines, a look of relief mingling with something sad around her eyes.
There were medals, too—big, garish gold discs strung with ribbons that had faded from their once-brilliant hues. And newspaper articles that had yellowed with age. On a bedside table, a hardcover book lay open along a cracked spine: a biography of the runner Prefontaine. Michaels had been reading to her.
The Fourth Angel Page 13