Georgia turned at the sound of rubber wheels on polished linoleum. Two nurses were wheeling Amelia into the room. Sloane Michaels walked behind them. His suit jacket was off and his shirt sleeves rolled up. His brown eyes registered shock and a certain wariness at Georgia’s presence.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Georgia stammered. “I just needed to speak to you for a few minutes. This was the only place I could track you down.”
She glanced over at Amelia lying on the steel gurney, her body twisted and emaciated, her freshly shampooed hair matted to her head, threads of gray sprouting like weeds among the black strands. “Would you rather I call you later?”
Michaels folded his arms across his chest. The smile that had beamed back at her from countless television interviews and newspaper articles was gone. He was reserved, protective. He leaned over and told Amelia who Georgia was. The woman’s dark eyes focused clearly. She parted her lips to say something, but the words were garbled.
“I suppose you might as well stay.” Michaels sighed, tenderly stroking his wife’s hand. “Amelia loves company.”
The nurses settled the woman back into her bed, then left.
“Amelia can’t talk much anymore,” Michaels explained. “But she understands everything.”
Georgia, accustomed to death but not to the process of dying, had no idea how to respond. Embarrassed, she nodded and smiled, then leaned on the edge of the bed, nearly toppling a monitor. Michaels pulled up a chair and Georgia sat stiffly on it, fidgety and nervous in the sour, stuffy room. She’d thought herself so tough, so superior in life experience to Sloane Michaels the other night. But watching the kindness and patience he showed with his wife, she wondered which of them was really the more cocooned.
“Amelia wanted to be a firefighter, too,” said Michaels. “Right after she got out of grad school. But that was before they let women on the job.” He took his wife’s limp hand between his. “Amelia’s quite an athlete.”
The present tense took Georgia aback. For a man so shrewd in business, he seemed willfully boyish and naive in his wife’s presence. Georgia sensed it wasn’t an act. Sloane Michaels was used to controlling every aspect of his life. Yet his wife was dying before his very eyes. Georgia suspected that, on some level, he couldn’t accept what he couldn’t control.
Michaels’s cell phone rang. He cleared his throat and took the call—sounding, to the world, like a man in charge. He dispatched the caller quickly, then explained that he was due back for a meeting at three P.M. “If we walk out together, will that give you the time you need?” he asked Georgia.
“That’s fine,” she said.
Michaels leaned over and murmured something to his wife, then gently pressed his lips against hers. In the hallway, his pace quickened until he was nearly at a gallop. He seemed to need the physical release. His way of decompressing, perhaps. Georgia wouldn’t speak until he was ready.
“She loves people,” Michaels murmured when they reached the lobby. “God, she was a talker. Talked to everybody…I worry that if something were to happen to me…” His voice trailed off and he seemed suddenly embarrassed. Georgia rescued him.
“I shouldn’t have intruded upon your time with her today. It was bad judgment.”
“No harm done.” He unrolled his sleeves, slipped back into his gold cuff links, then wiped a hand down his face. He reminded Georgia of an actor getting ready to go onstage. “What did you want to see me about?”
“Your brother, Fred. I understand you sent him to Atlantic City last Sunday?”
“I have property down there. I asked him to pick up some rental receipts.”
“When was he supposed to return?”
Michaels shrugged. “I don’t think I gave him a timetable. I may have told him to take a couple of days down there and enjoy himself.”
“Didn’t you specifically tell him not to come back until Tuesday?”
“Ms. Skeehan, you couldn’t tell my brother anything. He always did what he wanted.”
“Were you aware he’d returned Monday?”
“Not until they pulled his body from the wreckage.”
“You never told me he lived in the building.”
“Because you’re a fire marshal and it was an illegal occupancy. Look, I let my brother have a small room in the basement. Otherwise, he’d have been homeless. He was too messed up most of the time to pay rent. If I’d put him in any of my residential buildings, the other tenants would’ve complained. Spring Street was funky, the building commercial. He didn’t cause any harm down there—”
“Except probably deal drugs.”
Michaels sighed. “He may have. I’m sorry if he did.”
He barreled through the revolving doors. His limo was waiting at the curb. “I know that to you, Ms. Skeehan, my brother was a lowlife. But sober, he was a good guy, and I loved him. Just because he came back early from some errand doesn’t mean he set any fires.”
The chauffeur got out and opened the rear passenger door. Michaels offered to drop Georgia someplace. She declined.
“He talked a lot about burning the building, you know,” she told him as he got into his car. “He wanted to hurt you.”
“He hurt me, all right—he died. I buried him yesterday.” Michaels looked up at the hospital and shook his head. “People get sick. People die. All the money in the world, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. That’s the biggest hurt of all.”
25
Walter Frankel’s lab was pitch-black when Georgia arrived. The shades were drawn, the overhead fluorescent fixtures off. The only light in the room emanated from a long table with a steel hood. Frankel, dressed in safety goggles, was hunched over it, a shifting array of colored light reflecting in his lenses—from deep red to amber to blue-green. Overhead, a ceiling fan whirred noisily.
“What are you doing?” asked Georgia.
“Can you get the light switch?” he yelled over his shoulder.
She did, tripping over Frankel’s calico cat in the process. Two bright bands of overhead fluorescents buzzed to life. Frankel turned off the table light and lifted his goggles. “I’m trying to find the best wavelength of spectroscopic light to highlight this thumbprint from the plastic bucket you found at Howard Beach. We still haven’t got a matchup.”
“I don’t know why you’re still fooling with that when we’ve got so much else to do.” She flopped into his duct-taped orange chair. “You wanted to show me something. This better be good, Walter. I’ve got Gene and Randy out interviewing witnesses at the Howard Beach blaze and overseeing the collection of evidence. And I’ve got Mac and Eddie chasing down former firefighters, some of whom would just as soon deck them as speak to them.”
Frankel laughed. “I see you’ve whipped these guys into shape already. What’s your secret?”
“I ripped the cord out of the task-force television and threw it out the window.”
“Whatever works.” He wheeled himself over to a sink and handed her a disposable paper cup.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“I didn’t say you were.” He put a finger to his lips, striking a thoughtful pose. “Question: How fast would this cup burn if I suspended it over an open flame?”
“Walter.” She rolled her eyes. “I flunked chemistry in my sophomore year in college. That’s why I dropped out.”
“Indulge me.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “I’ll say five seconds.”
Frankel clamped the empty paper cup to a Bunsen burner stand and turned on a flame beneath it. Fire spread evenly over the bottom of the cup, then up the sides. Ten seconds later, the blackened cup shriveled into ash that dissolved in the fire.
“So?” said Georgia.
“Wait,” Frankel urged. He took another cup, this time filling it to the brim with water. “Now, how long do you think it will take to burn up?”
Georgia shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe twenty seconds?”
“And how will it burn?”
“The same
way. The bottom will catch fire, then travel up the sides and blacken it until the whole thing’s reduced to ash.”
“So you say.” He smiled. He clamped the filled cup to the Bunsen burner and turned on the flame. Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. The water inside the cup boiled and turned to steam, but still the base didn’t catch light. By thirty seconds, the rim was burning where the water had evaporated. And it continued to burn that way—from the top down—for another twenty-five seconds, until all the water had turned to vapor and the sides of the cup had burned away. Frankel shut off the flame and grinned at Georgia’s surprised expression.
“A simple paper cup, with a hot flame underneath. And yet the bottom doesn’t burn. Why?”
“Because the water in the cup’s keeping it from burning,” said Georgia, amazed.
“The energy is being transferred from the flame to the water, turning it into vapor,” Frankel explained. “Only when there’s no more transference does the heat consume the cup. The base is the last thing to burn.”
Georgia snapped her fingers. “Those plastic bucket bottoms found at the fires—”
“Exactly. I’m willing to bet they were filled with accelerant, Georgia. Had the buckets just been lying around, they would’ve been consumed. But we know fire travels upward in a V-pattern. So those buckets heated up, but the heat was transferred to the fuel inside. By the time the fire was going good, it was in the vapors above the bucket, burning so hot, so fast, the base never had a chance to melt—something our torch probably never realized. My opinion? I think our guy may be building his HTA devices in five-gallon hardware-store buckets, then dropping them, ready-made, at the scene.”
“Can we do a trace on the buckets?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do now. All the buckets were made of high-density polyethylene—HDPE. Unfortunately, ninety-four percent of all recyclable plastic is HDPE, so that doesn’t give us much to go on. I’ve done a GC on the bucket samples to see if I can pick up any manufacturing variations. So far, they’re all coming back identical.”
GC, or gas chromatography, is a test in which a sample of material is heated until it turns into vapor. The vapor is then broken down and graphically analyzed, component by component, to determine its exact chemical composition.
“The problem is,” Frankel continued, “many different stores buy the same kinds of buckets. I don’t know if we’ll be able to say our guy bought these at a Sears in Long Island or Joe’s Hardware in the Bronx.”
“Sounds like a dead end to me.” Georgia sighed.
“Maybe, maybe not. In the meantime, I’ve uncovered something else interesting.” He thumbed through some notes. “I went back through the evidence on those first three HTA fires. Marshals found type-A blood on a piece of window glass at the Washington Heights blaze—sharp glass from a break-in, rather than combustion. I’ve ordered a DNA test.”
“But we don’t have a perp to match it against…”
“No. But if we get one, we can link him to the Washington Heights blaze, if nothing else. And we can narrow the field just by checking his blood type.”
Georgia massaged her temples and sank back down on the orange chair.
“What’s wrong?” asked Frankel. “You look like you need something to eat.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not that. Walter, I’m starting to have cold feet. How do we really know all these fires are connected? No bucket bottoms were found at Spring Street. Except for the possible presence of HTA, nothing ties these fires together. Maybe Brennan was right. Maybe I am putting a bunch of unrelated fires together to play hero.”
“Then how do you explain the letters—from the Fourth Angel?”
“Mac and Brennan still insist they’ve never seen them before.” Georgia read his frown. “All right, I know—they’re lying. But forget about the letters for a moment. You told me yourself—HTA’s not that hard to manufacture. Couldn’t more than one person have mixed up a batch of this stuff?”
“Sure they could. But five unrelated fires in the space of five months? C’mon, darling, I’m a scientist—I don’t believe in coincidences.” He slapped his desk. “Okay—let’s say you’re right. We still have to solve all these fires—”
“But at least we’re only concerned with one fire at a time. Maybe just a fire started by some nerdy Joe-average, looking for revenge…”
“And this nerdy Joe-average, I presume, isn’t as dangerous.” He laughed. “You know, back in the early nineties, after a bunch of these HTAs occurred, a group of guys from the ATF, the Seattle Fire Department, and some heavy-hitting government science labs got together and started brainstorming all the ways Mr. Joe-average-American could build a bomb in his garage. They came up with hundreds.”
Frankel ticked off a few now on his fingers: “Swimming pool cleaner and brake fluid…potassium chlorate and table sugar…plaster of paris and linseed oil…sawdust and chicken fat—no, you didn’t hear wrong: chicken fat. These guys wrote up a report, warning how easily a bunch of nerdy Joe-averages, as you call them, could blow up just about anything they set their sights on. And you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Nothing…until April, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and his companions got their hands on forty-eight hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and took down a nine-story concrete-and-steel building in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people. Which means, Georgia, that even if your so-called nerdy Joe-averages are behind these bombs, that doesn’t make them any less deadly.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Frankel slumped in his wheelchair. “Hard evidence is going to be sketchy, so you’ll have to look for motive. In Seattle, for instance, investigators were pretty sure the fires were the work of organized crime. But here, I don’t know. There’s no obvious profit motive. No mob vendetta, either. That’s why I keep going back to the letters.”
Georgia sighed. “If you’re right, then Sloane Michaels has to be one of the arsonist’s targets.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, he did get a copy of that first letter from the Fourth Angel several weeks before the Spring Street fire…”
Frankel frowned. “He told you that?”
“Of course.” Georgia shrugged. “You know that. I put the letter in an evidence packet and asked you to check it for prints.”
“You didn’t tell me he gave it to you.”
“How else would I have gotten it?” Georgia rose to leave, then paused in the doorway. “Walter, if what you say is true and these fires are all related, yet easy enough to put together, how come we’ve never seen any in New York before?”
Frankel’s calico jumped on his lap. He stroked her back as a knowing gaze came into his dark eyes.
“Who’s to say we haven’t?”
26
What do I have to link these five fires together? Georgia asked herself as she drove her motorcycle back to Queens. Three cryptic letters that could’ve been written by a nut? Some plastic bucket bottoms? A bit of type-A blood on a broken pane of glass?
And what about Ron Glassman? she thought as she nosed her Harley into the driveway, with fifteen minutes to spare before Richie returned from school. Marenko had developed some pretty incriminating stuff on this guy. Glassman had motive: a pregnant mistress. He had opportunity: a surveillance camera had recorded him leaving the building right before the fire. And when confronted about it, Glassman had lied and threatened to lawyer up. Plus, he had a history of fire-setting. Georgia had seen people get twenty-five-to-life on less than that.
Still, that left Howard Beach and those other three unexplained fires. They couldn’t be Glassman’s. Or even Fred Fischer’s. Brennan said they weren’t related; Frankel said they were. Who was right?
Georgia sat on the cement stoop in front of her house, waiting for Richie’s school bus. In one folder, she’d collected the dispatch printouts from each of the suspected HTA fires. The dispatch printouts
were second-by-second records of activity at each fire scene. The fires were labeled—as they always were—by a four-digit number corresponding to the nearest alarm box to the blaze, even if the blaze was called in to 911.
In another folder, Georgia had collected copies of each of the fire’s face sheets—summaries of the cause-and-origin investigations. She propped a yellow legal pad on her lap and tried to draw up a very basic fact sheet about each fire.
HTA FIRE NUMBER ONE
Date: December 16th (four months ago)
Alarm box number: 1608
Building: Vacant, single-story furniture warehouse in Washington Heights, Manhattan.
Ownership: Private
Insurance: Adequate
Fatalities: None
Point of origin: Unknown, but plastic bottom of bucket was found in basement.
HTA FIRE NUMBER TWO
Date: January 29th (less than three months ago)
Alarm box number: 1008
Building: Vacant, five-story apartment house in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Ownership: Land is city-owned. Records missing regarding building.
Insurance: Probably none specific to building. Records missing.
Fatalities: One
Point of origin: Unknown, but plastic bottom of bucket was found on first floor.
HTA FIRE NUMBER THREE
Date: February 3rd (less than a week after HTA number two)
Alarm box number: 1114
Building: Vacant, four-story apartment house in East Tremont, the Bronx.
Ownership: Land is city-owned. Records missing regarding building.
Insurance: Probably none specific to building. Records missing.
Fatalities: One
Point of origin: Unknown, but bucket bottoms found on first floor.
Georgia looked up the street and stretched. She could see a pattern, more or less. Three vacant, or nearly vacant, rundown buildings in fringe areas of the city, torched within a two-month period. With the building records missing and two of the properties city-owned, she couldn’t see insurance profits as a motive. The torch looked instead like a classic pyro—someone who got his kicks setting fires, then hanging around to see the show.
The Fourth Angel Page 14