Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  Flashover

  Suzanne Chazin

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2002 by Suzanne Chazin

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition April 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-731-9

  Also by Suzanne Chazin

  The Fourth Angel

  Fireplay

  For Kevin,

  for the boy you are, for the man I know you’ll be.

  Acknowledgments

  There are times when an event eclipses all that came before it—when heart and nerve and sinew are all that’s left to carry us through. That happened tragically, on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers, taking the lives of some three thousand civilians and rescue workers, including three hundred forty-three members of the Fire Department of the City of New York. My husband, FDNY Deputy Chief Thomas Dunne, was fortunate to avoid the same fate because of a reassignment that occurred barely two months before the disaster. Our family is eternally grateful. However, no words can express our profound sorrow and heartache for the firefighters and their families who were not so lucky. We will never forget their courage, devotion and sacrifice. It has been estimated that those three hundred and forty-three men helped save the lives of twenty-five thousand New Yorkers that day. Though the world at times may be short of heroes, the FDNY never is.

  I would like to offer my condolences to the members of the FDNY as well as my deepest gratitude for their efforts—both large and small—in support of this book. In particular, I’d like to thank retired FDNY Fire Marshal Gene West, whose enthusiasm and expertise in arson investigation are equaled only by his intellect and instinct for story. I owe all my best material to him. I’d also like to thank FDNY Supervising Fire Marshal Randy Wilson for his patience and good humor in orchestrating all my firsthand research. A special thanks as well to several current and retired members of the FDNY for their generous efforts on my behalf: Louis Garcia, Vincent Dunn, Denis Guardiano, Neil McBride, Arthur Parrinello, and Brian Dixon.

  Thanks, too, to the following people for their technical expertise: Roy Haase, Jr., Salvatore Oliva, Richard Gehlhausen, Ned Keltner, Edward Scharfberg, David Djaha, Robert Dosch, Jr., Jessica Gotthold, Rip Gorman, and especially my agent, Matt Bialer, and my editor, David Highfill.

  A special thank-you to Susan Stranahan and Larry King, who sparked my interest in the subject of toxic fires with their wrenching eight-part series in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a fire in Chester, Pennsylvania, that was responsible for the deaths of dozens of emergency personnel over a two-decade period.

  And finally, thanks to my parents, Sol and Lillian Chazin, to my dearest friends, Janis Pomerantz, Sharon Djaha and Warren Boroson, and most of all to my husband, Tom, for being the pillar of my life. I couldn’t imagine going on without you.

  A final note about the badge number on the cover: 594. It was my husband’s number when he was a firefighter. It also belonged to my late father-in-law, FDNY Lieutenant Frank Dunne. The cover is in tribute to him.

  Beware the fury of the patient man.

  —JOHN DRYDEN

  Flashover…

  a transition phase in the development of a contained fire in which surfaces exposed to thermal radiation reach ignition temperature more or less simultaneously and fire spreads rapidly throughout the space.

  FROM THE NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION ASSOCIATION’S

  Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations

  Prologue

  Everyone called him Bear, even his four-year-old. Six feet four, 240 pounds, he towered over the other men in Ladder One-twenty-one. “You’re gonna be tall yourself one day,” Bear promised the child.

  “And a firefighter, like you,” the four-year-old vowed. When Bear talked about fighting fires, the child pictured cartoon flames shriveling like day-old balloons with just one swipe of Bear’s callused paws.

  For all his size, Bear was a quiet man. His hands did the talking. He built things—a wooden race car for the four-year-old, a jewelry box for Mommy, a crib for the baby growing inside her tummy. He’d come home from work, a lollipop tucked into the right front pocket of his uniform shirt. The child loved to climb all over him, patting his chest for the telltale crinkle, breathing in the smell like burned pork chops that radiated from his hair and skin. Bear always smelled like that when he came home from the firehouse. Even after he showered and put on clean clothes. Mommy said fighting fires did that to you—got under your skin. In ways you couldn’t imagine.

  The youngster didn’t mind. On Bear, burned pork chops smelled good, especially when you rode his broad shoulders and buried your face in his thick hair, the color of fresh wood shavings. Up there, the world was a safe place. Monsters didn’t dare crawl out from under your bed, and bad guys didn’t jump out at you from inside your closet or from the stairs to the basement. Nothing was brave enough to mess with Bear.

  The summer air was as thick and sticky as cotton candy when Bear came home from work early one morning. It was barely light out yet. He always bounded into the kitchen, but this time, his footsteps trudged straight to the basement. “Don’t touch me,” he yelled at Mommy as she came down the stairs in her robe. He’d never yelled like that before.

  He ordered Mommy to get him a garbage bag and hot soapy water and bring it down to the basement. Maybe Bear had found a puppy. He was always promising they’d get a puppy. Maybe they were going to give it a bath. The four-year-old stumbled out of bed and toddled toward the shaft of bright light coming from the open basement door. A puppy was worth getting up early for.

  Bear was coughing—a hoarse walrus bark that resonated throughout the row house. Mommy was talking in a high, excited voice. Then there was a sort of slippery sound, like the time the four-year-old ate all those jelly beans and threw up on the living-room rug.

  The child took one step down. Then two. Something was pooling on the basement’s beige linoleum tiles. Something black, but reddish, too. Lumpy. Gooey. Like bits of rotten strawberries in Hershey’s chocolate syrup. The four-year-old shivered in bare feet, fighting a sudden urge to pee.

  The youngster took one more step and froze. At the bottom of the stairs, Bear, naked and trembling, was doubled over. His soot-stained body was covered with oozing red sores like the ones cousin Johnny had when he got chicken pox. Only this wasn’t chicken pox. Mommy wouldn’t be crying about chicken pox. And Bear—big, strong Bear—wouldn’t be on his hands and knees, retching up this foul, dark liquid that even then, the youngster knew, was something to be feared.

  1

  At first, she was aware of nothing. Not the feathery darkness that stole across her closed bedroom window. Not the bitter smell that blanketed the lilac potpourri on her dresser. Not the odd way shadows seemed to flicker up her heavy floral drapes and across the dentil moldings on the ten-foot ceiling. Hers was the perfect blackness and stillness of deep sleep. The sleep without dreams. The sleep of death.

  But gradually, something hot permeated that cocoon Dr. Louise Rosen found herself in. She felt the heat pressing down on her with physical force, tunneling into her unconscious. It curled the downy fluff on her arms until each hair felt as coarse
as a steel scouring pad. She coughed violently, as if someone were trying to shove a towel down her throat. Her nostrils stung. Her airways began to spasm. She forced her eyes open. She saw what instinct had already told her: Her bedroom was on fire.

  Get out. Get to the door. Actions came slowly. Words, not at all. The smoke blackened, eclipsing everything in the room, sealing off the Manhattan streetlights below. She couldn’t see the bedroom door, couldn’t even recall closing it. She didn’t have the energy to crawl to it, much less open it. Wisps of flame darted across the ceiling. There were jagged fingers of orange climbing up her drapes, devouring a padded chair in the corner. She tumbled off the bed, hoping to hide from the heat. Even here, on the floor, it bore down hard on her tender skin, blistering it. Her hair became as coarse and brittle as straw. She felt as if nails straight from a blast furnace were being driven through her flesh.

  Got…to…got to—what? She couldn’t remember the sequence of steps needed to get to the bedroom door. Fifty-six years of living, a Columbia University medical degree, and it had all fizzled in the space of a heartbeat. She wasn’t even sure, if pressed right now, that she could remember her name. The pain was excruciating, tearing into her flesh like a pack of wild dogs. A dress she had tossed near the windowsill burst into flames, as if an invisible hand had just taken a blowtorch to it. She wanted to scream, but her throat had swollen up too much to make a sound. Skin hung from her fingers like wet tissue paper.

  Hide. Got…to…hide. She rolled under the bed and lay on her stomach, her hands protecting her face. She was playing a deadly game of limbo now, trying to make her body as flat as possible to escape the descending curtain of heat. It banked lower and lower, like a murderer working his way down a flight of stairs. First the paint on the ceiling blistered. Then the pictures on the walls began to melt. Next came the lampshades. Then one by one, the bottles of perfume on her dresser began to shatter as if they were being picked off in a shooting gallery. The heat was on top of her now, sizzling like hot butter across the surface of the mattress. Soon, there would be nothing in the room that wasn’t burning up. Nothing.

  And then she heard it—a popping like gunfire, then cracks like footsteps on a frozen lake. Her bedroom window had shattered. The smoke, so black before, began to thin. The heat seemed to hiccup for a moment. But it lasted for less than half a minute before a new and louder roar took its place. A fiery cyclone. She couldn’t see it, but she knew by the sounds of breaking glass that nearly everything in the room was igniting. The bed frame collapsed and the box spring ticking pressed down into her seared flesh.

  She became vaguely aware of another noise beneath the roar. Someone was kicking down her bedroom door. She heard a whoosh like a huge wave. It hit the ceiling then fell like rain upon the floor. Then the wave subsided. The heat should’ve washed away as well, but it had crawled so deep inside of her, she felt branded on the soul. Before that moment, she believed the pain could get no worse. But she was wrong.

  Someone doused the mattress and box spring with water, then lifted them off the floor. There was a tearing sound, like a Band-aid being ripped off hairy skin. The ticking had melted to the flesh on Louise Rosen’s back. The movement of the box spring ripped it off her, right down to the nerve endings. Pain tore through the synapses of her brain, wiping out all other sensations. She knew no past, no future. She felt no joy or sadness, no hope, no will to survive. There was only a silent, unbearable agony. She couldn’t even scream. Her throat had swollen up too much to make a sound.

  “Hey, Cap, you better get on the radio. We got somebody,” said an excited voice.

  There was a murmur of other voices, a shuffle of heavy boots and then a long, slow, exhale before another, older voice spoke.

  “Not for long.”

  2

  Just a few misplaced embers from a smoldering cigarette. Fireflies on a hot August night. That’s all a mattress fire was. A belch of black smoke. A long, slow burn. And pretty soon, someone was dead. Or in this case, damn close to it.

  Georgia Skeehan gazed up at the apartment building from her fire department Chevy Caprice. Four stories above the hunter green entrance canopy, two upturned braids of soot streaked the white marble façade. It wasn’t often she and her partner, Randy Carter, got called to a Park Avenue address.

  On the sidewalk, a doorman in epaulettes watched a firefighter hose something down. Georgia didn’t have to see what it was to know: the victim’s mattress. It was a common sidewalk site in poor neighborhoods. Here, beside the prewar buildings of Manhattan’s elite, it attracted ghoulish curiosity from spectators.

  “Lady can afford Park Avenue,” said Georgia. “She should be smart enough not to smoke in bed.”

  Carter ran a long, bony thumb and finger down the sides of his graying mustache and gazed at the crowd behind the police barricade. The pulsating red lights of rescue vehicles washed out the color of his dark, lined skin like overexposed film.

  “Lady can afford Park Avenue.” He shrugged. “She should be smart enough to get out of the city on a ninety-five-degree weekend.”

  “What does that say about us?” Georgia jabbed her finger at the air-conditioning button on their dark blue Caprice. Lukewarm, moldy-smelling air continued to pour from the vents. Even the silver chain she always wore was sticking to her skin. “Record-breaking heat wave and we get stuck with a November vacation slot and a toaster oven of a car.”

  “You think this is bad?” said Carter. “Wait ’til you step outside.”

  Georgia opened the door of the sedan. It was four-thirty in the morning and, still, the mid-August temperatures hovered near eighty degrees and the city’s nicotine breath coated her skin like Vaseline. Static-filled voices from one of the fire engine’s radios cut through the dark, humid night as sharply as a welder’s torch. When she turned her head, Georgia caught the moldy cheese smell of ripe garbage from a can on the corner of Seventy-fourth Street. The contents of her stomach rolled about like marbles in a tin can. She hoped it was just the heat making her nauseous. Her period, which you could set a detonator by, was a week overdue. Don’t even think about it, she told herself. She hadn’t seen Mac Marenko in three days. She wouldn’t begin to know how to tell him.

  She and Carter made their way through the crowd just as two fire department EMTs emerged from the building wheeling a woman on a stretcher. The woman was badly burned and writhing in pain. She lifted an arm. It was black and flaky in some places, bright pink like chewed bubble gum in others. If the rest of her looked like that, she’d be dead within hours.

  “Can she talk?” Georgia asked, hustling over to the EMTs as they loaded the victim into an ambulance.

  “Honey,” said one of the EMTs, a heavyset black woman, “she’s lucky she can breathe.” The EMT adjusted an oxygen mask around the victim’s face. Her partner, a slight, Latino-looking man, injected a clear liquid into the victim’s veins. Her burned skin balled up on his powder blue latex gloves like a label on a wet shampoo bottle. The smell of it—an odor like burned sugar and copper—hung in the air.

  “You probably wouldn’t have gotten much out of her anyway,” said the man. “There were a lot of empty liquor bottles in her kitchen. A and E was looking at them.”

  “Dang,” said Carter. He slapped his thigh in disgust at the mention of the Arson and Explosion Squad, a rival unit in the New York City Police Department. “Maybe we could actually do our jobs if the PD didn’t always get there first.” Although only fire marshals are allowed to examine physical evidence and make a determination of arson, nine-one-one dispatchers typically notify the NYPD of an emergency first. In higher profile cases, the resulting scramble over jurisdiction can turn into a political slugfest.

  An urgent beep pierced the close air inside the ambulance. The Latino EMT furiously began chest compressions on the victim.

  “Gotta go, guys,” he said. “She’s falling fast.”

  Georgia and Carter stepped back as the doors closed and the ambulance took off, cuttin
g across a wide, nearly empty stretch of Park Avenue, lights and sirens at fever pitch.

  The waterlogged queen-sized mattress lay behind them on the sidewalk, next to a pile of what looked like charred red blankets. An unburned area, resembling the shape of a body, marked the center. On each side of the unburned area, great wads of foam padding erupted like volcanic lava. Georgia pushed a foot on the mattress’s edge, expecting the springs to have annealed—collapsed because of extended exposure to high heat. But the springs rebounded perfectly.

  “Couldn’t have been a very hot mattress fire,” Georgia noted to Carter.

  Carter shrugged. “If it was a mattress fire at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the burns,” he said. “They’re even on both sides of the body outline.”

  Georgia could see Carter was right. If the victim had been smoking in bed, the burns should have been deeper on the side of the mattress where the cigarette fell. The victim’s body would have acted as a firestop and kept the other side of the mattress from burning as badly. Georgia could think of dozens of explanations for the unusually even burn, but they were all conjecture at this point. If eighteen months as a fire marshal had taught her anything, it was not to get too caught up in the “what ifs” so early in a case.

  She walked ahead of Carter into the lobby, past firefighters carrying out tools. The fluorescent yellow stripes on the men’s bulky black turnout coats reflected the gleam of the chandelier, silently mocking its elegance like a pair of fuzzy dice in the window of a Mercedes. Georgia overheard snatches of conversation above the piecemeal crackle of radios. The rumor mill was going strong this week. The police commissioner had resigned to take a job in San Francisco and word was that William Lynch, the fire commissioner, might take his place.