47
Carter knew of an all-night Dunkin’ Donuts in Chelsea, just north of Frankel’s lab. There, he treated Georgia to a large coffee and a cream doughnut, which she barely touched. She called her mother and Richie to tell them she’d be working overtime tonight, but didn’t elaborate. She didn’t want to alarm them—not yet, anyway.
The Dunkin’ Donuts was surprisingly busy for ten-thirty on a Sunday night. Four of the six booths were full and there was a pretty steady stream of take-out customers as well. Most were young and garishly dressed—rings in their noses, uncombed green and purple hair, clothes that were either so baggy the wearers looked like kids playing dress-up, or so tight they looked like hookers.
Georgia had always thought of herself as pretty young and hip. Yet sitting in one of the booths, hunched over an orange-laminated table under the overly bright lights, she felt suddenly very old. Maybe it was just that she hadn’t slept much since the case began. Or that she’d suffered enough physical punishments to feel rain in her bones.
But there was something else that set her apart from the young women with green hair, she decided. It wasn’t chronological or even sartorial. This past week, she had risked more of herself—emotionally and physically—than she had in all the thirty years preceding. And it had changed her in a subtle way—opened her up. She would never see people in such black-and-white terms again. That was bad in the case of men she loved, like Frankel and Gallagher. But it also, strangely, made her able to see herself in a more forgiving light. She wasn’t the only human being who was haunted on dark nights by the what-ifs and maybes of life.
Carter needed some kind of formal statement from Georgia, but he went easy on her, to his credit. So she turned over the computer disk and gave him a thumbnail sketch of what she believed had happened at the lab: that Michaels had demanded the incriminating disk, Frankel had refused and been shot—by Michaels or his men—then left to die in what was supposed to look like a botched robbery.
Georgia left out any mention of Frankel’s complicity. Or Gallagher’s. Walter had screwed up, unintentionally, it seemed. In the end, he had given his life to protect the only real piece of evidence they had against Michaels. As for Gallagher, she’d have to handle that one herself. She wanted to look into his eyes when she told him what she had found in his locker. She wanted to be sure.
Carter wrote everything down, then rubbed a hand across his face, which was as tired and sad as her own. “Michaels will try to bump off Finney, you know. If Finney’s dead, then all the fires will probably die with him.”
“I know,” said Georgia. “Before Walter died, he told me Michaels had booby-trapped Finney’s apartment—probably with that same idea in mind.”
Carter jotted a note to himself. “The search warrant’s supposed to come through soon. I’ll make sure the NYPD’s bomb people comb Finney’s place before our guys.”
“Finney’s smart,” said Georgia. “He won’t go back there.”
“We’ll find him,” Carter assured her.
Georgia gave him a dubious look. “I don’t know. We’re what, maybe twelve hours away from probably the biggest of his firebombs? And nobody has the faintest idea where he’s put it…” She tried to choke down some coffee. “Have you been able to reach Eddie and Gene?”
Carter nodded. “Cambareri’s asking for seconds on hospital food. Can you believe it?”
Georgia grinned. “Not too much wrong with him. He’ll be sneaking doughnuts by tomorrow.”
“Suarez and a couple of marshals at Manhattan Borough Command have already been dispatched to arrest Michaels at his duplex on Sutton Place,” said Carter. “As for Mac, I can’t reach him. No answer at his apartment.”
“His daughter’s seventh birthday party was this afternoon. Maybe he’s still out on Long Island.”
Carter grinned. “You know his schedule, huh?”
“Yeah, so?”
“You know my schedule?”
“Listen, I’m not…that doesn’t make me…” Georgia blushed.
“Okey-dokey. Ten-four. Anything you say, Skeehan.”
“Screw you.”
“I’d return the compliment, but I think you’re already spoken for.”
She blushed some more and they both laughed, feeling good at being able to release some of the night’s tension. Then her beeper went off, and the color drained from her skin.
“You want me to call that in for you?” Carter offered kindly. He could see she still needed to decompress. He dialed the number on his cell phone, then frowned and grunted into the receiver.
“What’s wrong?” Georgia asked when he hung up.
“That was Suarez. Michaels wasn’t home. His housekeeper said he got some kind of urgent call, then told her he was going to visit his wife at New York Hospital. That was about an hour ago, but he never showed up.” Carter shook his head. “Wherever he is, though, I can tell you one thing: he’s been a busy boy.”
“How’s that?”
Carter turned up the volume on his department radio. A static of voices filled the airwaves. Something about a 10-24—a car fire—under the FDR Drive at Sixtieth Street. Georgia heard the fire lieutenant at the scene mention a 10-45, code one.
“A car fire with a dead body inside—so?”
“Skeehan, that’s not just any car. It belonged to Ralph Finney.”
48
Georgia and Carter could see the dense cloud of luminous, gray-white smoke a block away, drifting over a scattering of Seagrave pumpers and police cruisers. The flames had already been extinguished, but the smoke was biting. Georgia’s eyes stung and her nose and mouth felt dipped in pepper as she stepped closer.
“You smell the gas?” she shouted to Carter over the whoosh of traffic above on the FDR Drive and the surge of water from the firehoses. “The fuel tank must’ve ruptured.”
Great plumes of noxious smoke hovered in the air, opening and closing around the vehicle like a fog. Through the drifts, Georgia made out an older-model beige Ford van. It was surprisingly intact in the back compartment, yet hideously disfigured in the cab. The passenger doors were burned black, the windows shattered, and the seats razed in places to the coiled springs. Yet for all the charring, the vehicle’s framework appeared structurally intact, a fact Carter pointed out now. The car had not been in a collision.
“Look,” he said, shining his flashlight on the slick runoff from the hoses. A slimy, swirling sheen of oil ran through the cascades of water. “The gas tanks on these vans are toward the back. Yet the burning occurred in the cab. So it’s not a gas-tank rupture.”
“Then where’d the gas come from?”
“From somebody putting it there—in the passenger compartment. That’s my guess,” he said.
They flashed their badges at the battalion chief in charge, then found Suarez. He looked tired, rubbing the back of his neck and muttering to himself in Spanish, an unlit cigarette between his lips. He was probably dying for a smoke, but couldn’t so close to the fire. He shook his head over the news about Walter Frankel. Though none of the men were close to him the way Georgia was, he was a fixture in the fire department. Not having Frankel around was as unsettling as if you told them that all the FDNY’s trucks and pumpers were going to be painted phosphorescent yellow. The FDNY’s rigs were always red. And Walter Frankel would always run the department lab.
Suarez told them Brennan and several Manhattan marshals were directing the manhunt for Michaels. Then he gestured to the burning vehicle’s back license plate, which drifted in and out of the smoke.
“The plates went through the computer and came up as Finney’s. The van matches the make and model of Finney’s registered vehicle as well.”
The smoke parted for an instant across the passenger compartment. On the upper rim of the steering wheel, a hand—gray-white and skeletal—flashed before them in all its grisly splendor. Suarez took the cigarette out of his mouth and gestured with it now. “We just don’t know if that’s Ralph Finney.”
>
“What’s a guy who lives in Manhattan doing with a van?” asked Georgia. “That had to be a bitch to park.”
“Finney worked on the side as a painting contractor,” explained Suarez.
Georgia snapped her fingers. “Those plastic spackling buckets—the ones we found at Howard Beach and Red Hook—that’s probably how Finney gained entrance into all these buildings without being noticed. He pretended to be a painting contractor, then carried the fuel in the buckets.”
“Marenko’s running a check on area paint and hardware stores to see if Finney had an account with any of them,” said Suarez. “Hell, as a contractor, he could walk into any hardware store, buy all the aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate fertilizer he wanted, and no one would bat an eyelash. All contractors buy in bulk.”
Georgia looked again at the smoky wreckage. “So we know what Finney did and how he probably did it. Yet we’re still no closer to finding out where he set tomorrow’s fire.”
The smoke began to dissipate. Four firefighters opened the driver’s side of the vehicle and extricated the body. The blaze had badly charred both car and victim—but only in front. The victim’s backside, which had been pressed against the seat, remained mostly intact, as did the fabric of the seat where he was sitting. Georgia gave a passing glance to the skeletal face, to the frozen, bluish eyes, like overcooked egg yolks, that seemed to follow her, to the teeth nearly glowing in their whiteness, untouched by the ferociousness of the flames. Even for Finney, it was a hellish way to die.
The firefighters rolled the body on its right side. The burning had already tightened muscle tissue so that it lay, legs bent, in a semifetal position. Georgia squatted down to look at the unburned backside now. She paled when she noticed the sweatpants—light blue with a pattern of orange and yellow palm trees. An unusual design—hard to find, and about a size too small for the wearer. She stood up, feeling woozy and light-headed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Carter.
“The pants.”
“Tacky, ain’t they?” joked Suarez. “My ex-mothers-in-law could dress better.”
Georgia didn’t laugh. Instead, her lower lip began to quiver.
“Those were my pants,” she said softly. “They were in the laundry bag in the backseat of my car the night Finney assaulted me.”
Carter and Suarez traded nervous glances. “Well, now we know it’s Finney, all right,” said Suarez.
Then Carter donned a pair of latex gloves and rolled the body a little farther onto its stomach. “And we know something else, too,” he said, stepping back to let Georgia and Suarez take in the large, reddish-black hole in the chest cavity.
“He shot himself?” Georgia asked with amazement.
“Humdinger of a trick, I’d say,” said Carter. “Shooting yourself in the back.”
“Especially,” said Suarez, “when he’s got someone who’ll be glad to do it for him.”
49
Sloane Michaels owned a beachfront house in Southampton, New York, a ski chalet in Aspen, Colorado, and a winter retreat in West Palm Beach, Florida. Georgia took the precautions of alerting authorities in all three locations. But in her bones, she sensed Michaels was still in New York. He’d never leave Amelia.
“Still, he hasn’t shown up at the hospital or his office at Knickerbocker Plaza,” Carter reminded her. “He’s probably got some rich friend who’s hiding him until he can find a good lawyer.”
“I don’t think so,” Georgia argued. “I know Michaels a little. I don’t sense that any of those rich people he hangs out with are his friends. And I think he’d be afraid that his drug-dealing clients would rather shoot him than save him.”
“So, where do you think a man worth eight hundred million might escape to?”
My freedom…my escape…
“A place no one who doesn’t know him would think to look.”
The Knickerbocker Plaza’s night manager was all of twenty-six, yet he possessed the haughtiness of a dowager. He regarded Georgia’s bruised face and black leather jacket sourly as she and Carter flashed him their shields and asked to be let into Sloane Michaels’s office.
“I’ve already accommodated the NYPD.” He sniffed. “I can’t have people traipsing willy-nilly through his office without a search warrant.”
“It’s not the office I’m interested in,” Georgia shot back.
The manager went to open his mouth, but Carter put a hand on his jacket sleeve. “Son, I think it’s best if you just let us in.” The “son” was deliberate, Georgia knew. The manager might take an attitude with a disheveled white woman from Queens, but he would be reluctant to give offense to a black man in a suit who was old enough to be his father.
“Don’t touch anything,” the manager warned, wagging a finger at them as he led them up the mezzanine stairs. With an electronic key card, he unlocked the suite’s door. The reception area’s carpet had the thick, brushy look of a recent vacuuming, and the Queen Anne chairs smelled of lemon oil from a fresh waxing. Georgia and Carter each put on a pair of latex gloves and followed the wainscoted walls to the elevator. Georgia pushed the down button.
“Where’s this lead?” asked Carter.
“To Michaels’s private garage.”
Carter grinned. “He show you his etchings down there or something?”
Georgia made a face. “Every firefighter’s got a one-track mind.”
A smoldering smell, like rubber tires, greeted them as the elevator doors opened. Georgia sniffed at her clothes and noticed Carter doing the same. They had been in a lot of smoke at the car fire. It wouldn’t be the first time they came away smelling like pork chops. But then Georgia noticed the night manager wrinkling his nose as well.
In the middle of the lounge, a beige linen couch sat across from a television. Something brown had dripped along the couch’s armrest. Carter scratched at the stain through the sheer covering of his latex gloves.
“Blood,” he said, a puzzled look on his face. He turned the seat cushion over. On the other side, all that was left of the fabric was a jagged edge of brittle black cloth along the perimeter. The cushion had been burned.
Georgia walked into the garage and fumbled around for a light switch.
“Do me a favor, Randy? Find the light for this room, will you?”
“Affirmative,” he said. “I think it’s back here, in the lounge.”
Georgia pulled her flashlight off her duty holster now and shone it across Michaels’s tool bench and equipment, trying to locate his bikes. He had four of them, she recalled. A Ducati racer, a vintage Vincent Blackshadow, an Italian Bimoto, and the monster Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic. If one was missing, Georgia would be able to call in the description to police and track Michaels down.
Her heart sank as she counted all four sets of chrome. She went to lower her flashlight when a metallic red motorcycle helmet caught her eye. It was resting on the cement of the garage floor, just behind the rear wheel of the Ultra Classic.
Georgia took a step forward, noticing for the first time that there was something inside the helmet, something dark but glistening. She shined her beam on it and stepped closer. The burning smell intensified. She recognized it now. Not just a burning smell—a human burning smell. Like rotten meat. Her stomach roiled. A buzz reverberated overhead as the fluorescent lights kicked on. Georgia looked up while they flickered to life, then, with the full force of their wattage on the room, she looked back at the helmet.
The face inside was hideous. The skin was blackened and swollen, the nose and lips burned away. The eyes were just slits of brown-red blood. But what really scared her was what she found as she stepped closer to get a full glimpse of the rest of the body. It wasn’t burned—at least not like the face. The horror was more personal than that.
The victim was wearing Georgia’s sweatshirt.
It was the navy blue one, with an FDNY insignia on the left shoulder and the number of her old engine company stitched on the right front pocket. Her sweatshirt—
from the laundry bag in her car. People were dying hideous deaths in her clothes.
Carter came up behind her now and got a good look at the body. “Holy mackerel,” he said slowly, drawing out each syllable. “You think this guy is Michaels?”
Georgia nodded as if in a trance. “Finney did this to him.”
“Finney’s dead, girl.”
“No, he’s not. The sweatshirt? It’s mine. Finney stole my laundry that night he attacked me in my car. He’s the only one who could’ve put it here. It’s a terrible, terrible joke, Randy—don’t you see? A joke on me.”
Carter put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Why don’t you get some air?” he said gently, helping her to the door of the lounge. “I’ll call Suarez, tell him we’ve got another body, and see what he’s coming up with.”
Georgia sat on the steps by the front entrance of the Knickerbocker Plaza, across from Central Park, breathing in the midnight air as if it had the power to wash thoughts from her head. Above the dense, dark thickets of trees in the park, the sky seemed nearly colorless, the streetlights having sucked up the darkness the way a child sucks the flavoring from a snow cone. Georgia rubbed her neck, feeling tired and distracted. A headache throbbed at the base of her skull. She thought suddenly of Richie. It seemed like years since she’d seen him, rather than just hours. She felt heartsore with longing.
A couple of police cruisers screeched to a halt at the curb, along with a van from the medical examiner’s office. Georgia turned to see Carter racing toward them, out of breath. He briefed the cops and the ME’s assistant, then shot Georgia a panicked look.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I just spoke to Suarez,” he sputtered, trying to catch his breath. “Marenko’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“The search warrant for Finney’s apartment? It came through.”
The Fourth Angel Page 27