The Fourth Angel

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Yes, Marshal. I help out a lot of causes anonymously. I’m not looking to have three hundred charities lined up at my office door every morning, begging for money.”

  “You knew the building burned down.”

  “So I’d heard.” Michaels ran a hand against the grain of his close-cropped beard. “I didn’t get involved with the purchase until after the building had burned. I had nothing to do with it before. The land was county-owned.”

  “But you knew the dead firefighter, Terry Quinn?”

  “In passing. His widow, Kathleen, is a nurse. She took care of Amelia for a time at our apartment on Sutton Place before my wife needed round-the-clock hospitalization.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered. And more to the point, it seemed rather tacky after Quinn died to be boasting about how I’d given money to help out his neighborhood.” He stroked his beard and studied her now. “Is that what this is all about? You’re upset because I didn’t tell you I knew Terry Quinn?”

  “I’m not upset, Mr. Michaels. What I am is concerned. That you don’t tell me things until it suits you—about your brother, about your relationships with people.”

  “You’re right.” He shrugged. “My apologies. How ’bout we change that?” He opened up a cabinet above his tool bench and unfurled a set of blueprints. “Do you know what these are?” he asked her. “They’re plans for turning that land up in Yonkers into Quinn Memorial Park. I was going to announce the groundbreaking tomorrow. I’ve already hired architectural and landscape firms. So I’m hardly hiding anything.”

  Georgia took in the blueprint notations for playground equipment, benches, and fountains to be installed. She nodded with satisfaction. It promised to be a beautiful park. “I’m sure Terry’s family and community will appreciate the generous gesture. Sorry to bother you.”

  “Never a bother.” He rolled up the plans and walked her to the elevator.

  “Just one last question,” said Georgia. “Your brother lived in the basement of Spring Street, is that right?”

  “Illegally, yes. Don’t shoot me for it, okay?”

  “Did he have a phone?”

  Michaels started. “Of course.”

  “Did you know his phone number?”

  “Sure. 212-673-1702. Any special reason you need it?”

  Georgia jotted it down. “Just being thorough.”

  35

  The smell of greasy Chinese food hit Georgia before she even opened the door to the task-force office. Inside, Gene Cambareri was at his desk, wolfing down a double order of spareribs.

  “What’s this?” Georgia held up the empty white cardboard carton. “I told you to trace those Spring Street calls, and you go out for Chinese?”

  Cambareri wiped barbecue sauce off his sausagelike fingers and frowned at her. “Youse worry too much, you know that, Georgia? I traced the calls. The last one was to a Chinese restaurant on Twenty-third and Seventh called Ho Yen. So whiles I was there, I figured, why not kill two birds with one stone?”

  Georgia stared at the plate of bones on his desk. “Looks like you ate them, too, Gene.”

  “Youse want some?” He held out a carton of fried rice and ribs to her. The smell was overpowering.

  “No, thank you. What did you find out?”

  He licked his fingers and rummaged through some phone records splattered with barbecue sauce. Georgia rolled her eyes. “The Bell Atlantic printout came up with only one call made to the entire building after nine-thirty Monday night—to a number listed for a Mr…” He held the printout at arm’s length and squinted. He’d probably forgotten his glasses. “…Fred Fischer. Here it is: 212-673-1702. Came in at exactly eleven P.M.” Cambareri scratched his belly. “Fischer…he’s Sloane’s brother, right?”

  Georgia nodded. So Glassman was telling the truth. “Was the call made from a pay phone at Ho Yen?”

  “Yep. I spoke to the owner…” Cambareri checked his notes. “A Mr. Sam Chu. He was there Monday night, but he doesn’t remember anybody unusual in his restaurant. You know, Georgia”—Cambareri spread his fleshy palms—“this brother of Sloane’s, he was a street mutt. Them guys lead strange lives, have strange friends. A call from a Chinese restaurant at eleven on a Monday night don’t mean nothing in their world—”

  “Where’s Randy?” Georgia interrupted. She wanted to hear Carter’s opinion on this, not Cambareri’s. “Isn’t he supposed to be on duty until six?”

  Cambareri frowned. “Everybody’s looking for the guy. You, his wife, Chief Brennan…”

  “Chief Brennan?”

  “Yeah. He wants youse to call him.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Georgia…” Cambareri shook his head.

  “I know. You don’t ask.”

  “Right.”

  Georgia dialed the chief’s beeper and waited for him to return her call. Below, in the firehouse kitchen, she could hear the clatter of lunch dishes, a television blaring a stock-car race too loudly, and above it all, the static-filled drone of the department radio.

  Fires, medical emergencies, car wrecks, and collapses—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the radio hummed with the steady rhythm of dispatchers relaying 911 calls to fire companies and acting as the department’s eyes and ears.

  Though she heard their voices every day, Georgia had never met most of the dispatchers. She didn’t even know their names. Unlike firefighters and marshals, dispatchers—civilian employees of the FDNY—didn’t refer to themselves by name on the airwaves, only by number. Once in a while she’d meet one and it was always a strange feeling, for not only did they know her, they often knew virtually everything about the fire department. Yet they wandered faceless and nameless along its perimeters.

  And he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.

  Georgia froze as the line of scripture came back to her now. She shook her head, surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before.

  “Gene,” she called over. “Phone Walter Frankel. Ask him to get an update on that AFIS manual search of FDNY fingerprints. Tell him I want special attention paid to the fingerprints of the fire dispatchers.”

  “Gotcha,” said Cambareri.

  Stacked neatly on a shelf beside Georgia’s desk were the dispatch recordings of each of the HTA fires. She popped them in a tape recorder and listened to the disembodied voices now:

  Box one-six-oh-eight. Report of a ten-seventy-five at a single-story taxpayer at one-one-eight-four Amsterdam Avenue, corner of One-seven-five Street…Box one-oh-oh-eight. Report of a ten-seventy-five at a five-story multiple dwelling at eastern corner of Bay Street and Fifth…

  Nothing about the recordings seemed unusual. Different dispatchers. Different boroughs. The phone rang. Georgia picked it up. “Special operations, Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan,” she droned.

  “All right, Skeehan. What the hell is going on?” fumed Brennan.

  Fatigue had made her giddy. “Which part of ‘the hell’ are you referring to, Chief?”

  “Don’t get smart with me.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  He paused, and Georgia grinned in spite of herself. She’d pay big-time for this when the investigation was over. But it was so much fun right now, she was too tired to care.

  “Where’s Carter?”

  The question sobered her up fast. “I…I’m trying to locate him, sir.”

  “Now, listen to me, Skeehan. I’m going to ask you something. And I want a straight answer. Is there any reason why Carter shouldn’t be on this investigation?”

  Georgia stiffened. She’d promised Carter she’d cover for him. She’d given her word.

  “I…that is…Marshal Carter…is a very capable investigator. He’s checking an important lead for me right now, sir—”

  “Bullshit, Skeehan. I just got a call from his wife. She said Carter’s been distraught since this case started. Twenty minutes ago, he apparently left their house talking abo
ut how he wanted to kill a suspect in this case. Now, I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Oh God,” Georgia mumbled. She felt sick. “Please, Chief, let me find him.”

  “One hour. Find that son of a bitch, get his ass straitjacketed to a chair and see to it that he hasn’t said so much as ‘good afternoon’ to any suspect without prior written authorization. Because we’re not talking getting kicked out of the bureau here. You’ll both be out of the FDNY. Your ass is mine on this one, Skeehan.”

  Brennan hung up. Cambareri called over to Georgia, his pudgy Italian face all smiles.

  “I just spoke to Frankel. He thinks youse are on to something with that dispatcher theory. He’s gonna get AFIS to do a manual scan of prints, but he said you could speed the whole thing up if youse just hike over to Manhattan dispatch now and talk to ’em yourself, see if you can’t narrow the field of suspects.”

  “I can’t.” Georgia sighed. “I gotta find Randy first.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  Georgia gave Cambareri a dubious look.

  “Young lady, I been doing this job since youse was in diapers. I’ll hunt up Marenko and Suarez and we’ll play baby-sitter, okay? Keep Carter outta trouble.”

  “You haven’t asked why I need to find him,” Georgia noted.

  “It’s like I always say—”

  “I know, I know,” said Georgia. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Youse got that right.”

  36

  The afternoon sun brushed golden against the white marble building as the chief double-parked his Ford Econoline van by the service entrance. He wiped his sweaty palms on his paint-splattered carpenter’s pants and considered his week.

  The loft in TriBeCa was finished; four rooms covered over in plum, chartreuse, and lemon yellow that would make a dog barf. But it had earned him a cool $3,500 profit off the books. Today, he was on to his next job. His biggest job yet.

  Three construction workers with tool belts strapped to their waists walked out of the building’s service entrance. Above them, a latticework of scaffolding draped like a cobweb across a window. It was four P.M. Saturday. Quitting time. They wouldn’t be back at work again until Monday.

  The chief opened the back doors of his van. Paint, plaster compound, tools, and a reel of eight-gauge stranded heavy copper wire lay spread across the interior. He slipped on canvas work gloves, then loaded his materials onto a small metal pushcart and headed for the service entrance. He could feel the heat of the late-day sun through his plaid flannel shirt. He could see the light, as thick as spun maple syrup, pour over the bronze reliefs on the main entrance doors.

  He maneuvered his cart down a ramp by the service entrance and through a set of doors to the building’s basement. The walls were granite block, the hallways long and winding, with storage rooms off to the sides and gothic arches leading to narrow spiral staircases carved in stone. The overhead fixtures, despite their heavy wattage, were cold and subdued, and a thick odor pervaded the air—a combination of mildew, stale incense, and tallow.

  The metal wheels of his cart rumbled noisily across the concrete floor. It accentuated the pounding in the chief’s chest and made his stomach turn slow somersaults in anticipation. He had only the vaguest sense of the crush of bodies and cars along the avenues above him, of the size and majesty of the building he was now traveling beneath, a monument of stone, wood, and glass that rose three hundred and thirty feet in the air and had taken more than twenty years to build. He was struck, as always, by the contradictions he found here—the placid, gleaming, symmetrical exterior, the cobwebbed, labyrinthine passageways within. Compassion and cruelty, mercy and misery springing from the same dark well of the human soul.

  At a bend in the hallway, he found the service elevator, barely large enough for his cart. He pressed the second-floor button and the elevator slowly ascended, opening onto a small wood-paneled room. He maneuvered through the room and onto a balcony where drop cloths encircled a section of damaged wrought-iron railing. A portable construction lamp hung from a timber beam above the railing. The bulb inside the mesh cage was unlit. The chief nodded with satisfaction. He didn’t want any live voltage to interfere with the job he had to do.

  Not right now, anyway.

  The job took about twenty minutes. He worked quickly, deftly. When he’d finished, he stood and admired the beauty of the marble walls around him. There was an aura of spectacle about this place that moved him, in much the way he was moved by a good fire. He loved the order men tried to bring to both environments—the rituals, the sense of bonding, that ever-present connection between life and death. Firefighters loved a good spectacle.

  And on Monday, he thought as he wheeled his empty cart back to the service elevator, I’m going to give them one.

  37

  Manhattan’s fire dispatch station was located in the middle of Central Park on Seventy-ninth Street. For New York City, it was a strangely bucolic place to work. The small, one-story fieldstone building was surrounded by sycamores and white dogwoods just beginning to bloom. Behind the adjacent parking lot, bike trails meandered through hilly, daffodil-spotted terrain, and children’s voices drifted over from a nearby playground. It looked more like a park-service headquarters than command central for the busiest fire department in the world.

  A female dispatcher buzzed Georgia through the solid steel front door. The woman was in her twenties, tall and thin, with long, dark, wavy hair, parted in the middle. Her angular face was pale, the skin as taut as a trampoline, the lips slightly pouty. Georgia recalled hearing a dusky, Brooklyn-edged female voice over the department’s Manhattan frequency. The voice definitely fit the face—young, sort of tough, but with a lot of common sense. Georgia flashed her shield and asked to see the supervisor on duty.

  “His name’s Bello. He’s in the operations room. At the end of the hall.” The woman gestured. “You want some coffee?”

  “That’d be great.”

  The operations room at Manhattan dispatch looked as if it had been lifted wholesale from a B-grade science-fiction flick. The overhead lights, set into water-stained acoustic tiles, were dim and diffuse. Ancient computers the size of Dumpsters lined two of the room’s four beige walls. On a scattering of dented metal desks in the center, outdated video screens glowed green with information about fires in progress. Tabletop fans sputtered from dusty file cabinets in a vain attempt to circulate the humid air.

  Bello was leaning over the desk of a middle-aged Latino dispatcher—one of seven on duty—when Georgia approached. The supervisor was a short, beefy man in shirtsleeves and a knit tie that followed the curve of his gut. A fringe of hair surrounded his bald pate, making him vaguely resemble a Franciscan friar. Georgia extended her hand. It hung there for a moment before Bello thought to shake it.

  “I can spare five minutes,” he said, checking his watch.

  “My name is Georgia Skee—”

  “I know who you are,” he said impatiently, walking over to his own desk, slightly above and apart from the others. He plopped down in a well-worn swivel chair without offering Georgia a seat. “What I don’t know is what you want.”

  The woman dispatcher returned with a foam cup of coffee and handed it to Georgia. “You want milk or sugar?” she asked. “Sugar” came out “sugah.” Definitely the voice Georgia had been hearing on the radio.

  “Black is fine. Thanks.”

  The woman retreated to her desk. Georgia located a spare chair beside a metal bookcase of fire department reference manuals. She sat down and pulled out a tape recorder and pen under Bello’s glare. Clearly, this was going to be an adversarial encounter—not, she sensed, because Bello didn’t like firefighters. On the contrary, like many dispatchers, he’d probably wanted to be one and either failed the physical fitness test or never scored high enough to get the job. He probably had a lot of friends—maybe even family—in uniform. It was Georgia he didn’t seem to like.

  “I’m looking for a man who might be
a dispatcher,” she explained. “White, blond, well built. Late thirties to early forties…”

  Bello squinted at a map of Manhattan on the wall across the room, winking red and green like a Christmas tree. The lights were the locations of Manhattan firehouses—red, out of service or responding to an alarm; green, in service and ready. No fires were coming in at the moment.

  “Is this guy you’re looking for a suspect in these fire bombings?”

  “Could be. He’s familiar with stuff—embarrassing stuff—that only someone in the department would know.”

  “And he couldn’t possibly be one of New York’s Bravest…” Bello’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “We’ve come into some evidence that suggests he’s probably not an FDNY firefighter at the present time.” Evidence? What a joke. The guy couldn’t get laid at the La Guardia Arms because he lacked a badge. Some evidence. She’d love to see a lawyer present that to a grand jury.

  Bello rubbed a thick hand across the shiny dome of his head and leaned back in his chair. “The guy could be a buff. He could be a volley from upstate or Long Island…”

  “His knowledge is too inside for that. We think he might be a dispatcher.”

  “Of course.” Bello threw up his hands. “Anything goes wrong, the uniforms always blame the dispatchers. You should know about that, Marshal.”

  Georgia caught the reference and stiffened. People in the FDNY had long memories.

  “So it’s me you don’t want to help, is that it?”

  “When you give me something solid, I’ll help. But you come in here with these accusations, honey, you ain’t my friend, badge or no badge.”

  Georgia put down her pen and stared at him. The heavy stone walls resonated like ocean waves with the steady whoosh of cars cutting across Seventy-ninth Street.

  “I’m doing my job here, Mr. Bello,” she said softly. “I was doing it eight months ago, too. And I won’t apologize for that. I missed the chance to collar an arson suspect—a suspect who went on to set a fire that killed two people a week later.”