Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  “They could hold his freakin’ farewell party in a phone booth,” she heard one of the firefighters say. Lynch, a lawyer, was not a popular man with the FDNY’s rank and file. Georgia always knew he’d move on. It was one of the reasons she’d kept her distance from him since her last big investigation in April. She knew she’d have to work with the people he’d alienated long after he was gone.

  Georgia and Carter got the name of the victim from the doorman. It wasn’t until they looked at the mailboxes in the lobby, however, that they realized she was a doctor. Louise Rosen, M.D., read her mailbox.

  “She was burned so badly, it was hard to tell even how old she was,” said Georgia.

  “Mid to late fifties,” mumbled Carter as they walked across a Persian rug and past two cream-colored damask couches. Carter pushed the elevator button.

  “You know her age just by looking at her?”

  He shrugged. “She’s a doctor with bread, Skeehan. She’s not twenty.”

  The elevator doors opened and Georgia found herself staring at two vaguely familiar, rough-hewn faces in silk-blend suits. Detectives from Arson and Explosion. The older detective, Phil Arzuti, was a lean, dark-haired man, a little on the haggard side, with a crooked, world-weary smile and bags under his eyes. He was reputed to be a first-rate poker player, and the few times Georgia had worked with him, she could see why. He exuded an air of nonchalance that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking. Georgia racked her brains to remember the name of his younger partner. Chris something. White? Williams? She saw Carter stiffen as the younger detective stepped out of the elevator and rocked on the balls of his feet.

  “Well, whatta ya know. It’s the Mod Squad,” said Chris loudly. He was probably only in his mid-thirties, but he already wore the waistband of his pants at a downturned angle to accommodate the overhang of his gut. His blond hair had begun to recede at the temples. It contrasted oddly with his thick red mustache. “Hey, Pops,” he said to Carter, “I thought they’d have put you out to pasture by now.”

  Carter’s dark, basset-hound eyes seemed to crawl deeper into their sockets, and the lines on his face tightened as if attached to a winch.

  “Somebody’s got to get their hands dirty, Willard,” Carter drawled as if he’d just come up from North Carolina last month instead of thirty-three years ago. “Can’t all of us be worrying ’bout mussing up our hair”—he made a point of looking at the top of Chris Willard’s head—“or what’s left of it, anyway, for a collar.”

  “Collar? The Bureau of Fire Investigation’s got no collar here, old man,” said Willard. “Chick got tanked on Jack Daniel’s, then roasted herself smoking in bed, pure and simple. Casework on this baby wouldn’t fill a pencil box.”

  Georgia flinched. Cops and firefighters talked this way all the time—but not within earshot of civilians, some of whom were being allowed back into the lobby now. Willard either didn’t have the smarts to understand this, or he didn’t care. Either way, she disliked him. She stepped into the elevator and Carter followed, but he made a point of giving a backward glance at Willard’s shoes. The detective followed his gaze, though his gut was probably beginning to get in the way of it.

  “What?” asked Willard, self-consciously lifting a sole. Probably thought he’d stepped in dog shit. Georgia stifled a giggle.

  “Gucci, Willard?” asked Carter.

  “My shoes?” The detective frowned as the door started to close.

  “I need to know so that when the lab tells us some horse’s ass walked all over our crime scene in expensive Italian shoes, I can tell them which horse’s ass to look for.”

  The doors closed, and Georgia bit back a grin as they rode to the fourth floor.

  “What’s up with you and that jerk, Willard?”

  Carter pulled at the cuffs of his gray pinstriped suit. “Nothing that five minutes in a dark alley couldn’t cure.”

  There was no door on Louise Rosen’s apartment anymore, just a steel frame that was compressed in two places like a crushed tin can. The fire was out and the smoke had cleared, but the taste of ash settled at the back of Georgia’s throat. Her tongue felt as if it were coated with road tar. A layer of oily residue covered the teak furniture in the living room. Soot shaded the white plaster walls and a set of heavy, floor-length red drapes drawn across a window. The hallway mirror was opaque enough from the fumes to write on. Yet, in the living room at least, there was no burning. Lamps hadn’t shattered. Even Sunday’s New York Times, scattered in a corner, lay intact, opened to the crossword puzzle.

  A row of photographs on a huge, well-stocked bookshelf sported an oily layer of soot but hadn’t gotten hot enough to melt. One woman was in enough of the shots for Georgia to assume it was Louise Rosen. She was a slim, middle-aged woman with a short helmet of dyed-blond hair and a penchant for ice pink lipstick. A closet drunk, Georgia supposed, as she glanced into the kitchen where two empty fifths of Jack Daniel’s and six crushed Michelob cans sat on a solid granite counter.

  Georgia and Carter followed the tamped-down carpet, blotted black like the brushstrokes in a Chinese watercolor. It grew darker with soot as they neared the bedroom. Here, the fire told a different story. There were scorch marks along the walls. The bedroom door, now open, was burned heavily on the inside, especially along the upper half. There were sharp demarcation lines between the burned and unburned areas, suggesting it had been closed at the time of the fire.

  Inside, the walls were black and powdery like coal dust. The floor was soggy from hose runoff and littered with plaster and debris. A chair in one corner had burned so thoroughly, it no longer had any legs. The finish on the dresser had blackened, and everything on top had charred or cracked. The window glass had either shattered or been broken and the wall next to it was so badly burned, Georgia could see the original wood studs beneath, now segmented like logs left overnight in a fireplace. The mattress was in the street but the box spring was still in the center of the room, surface burned. The air had a close, heavy smell of ash, sweat, and the sickly sweet stench of fried skin.

  Carter ran a gloved hand over the burns on the door. His eyes tracked the blistering on the ceiling.

  “Looks to me like this place was cooking,” he said. “The hot gases were collecting on the ceiling and radiating back down fiercely, judging from the damage.”

  “Then how come the mattress springs weren’t annealed?” Georgia noted. “A fire that causes this much damage to a room should’ve done a little more damage to the mattress.”

  “Maybe the captain can tell us,” said Carter. He nodded to a far wall where four firefighters from a ladder, or “truck,” company were punching holes in the plaster ceiling, looking for pockets of fire that could smolder and reignite, a task called “overhauling.” Georgia saw Carter cringe. Overhauling was hell on a crime scene.

  The truck captain slogged through the muck to greet them. Hagarty was his name. He was a doughy man with washed-out brown hair and pale skin. Carter and Georgia nodded to him, and Georgia pulled out her notebook.

  “What’ve you got?” she asked the captain. She had to shout over the noise of the falling plaster.

  Hagarty tipped back the brim of his black helmet and wiped a sleeve of his turnout coat across his sweaty brow. The air-conditioning was off in the apartment, and the temperature hovered around ninety degrees.

  “Routine smoking in bed, as far as I can see,” said Hagarty. “Looks like she got drunk and fell asleep. Her bedroom door was shut. When we arrived, there were already flames rolling across the ceiling. A couple of minutes longer, and everything in the room would’ve ignited, for sure.”

  “A flashover,” Carter mumbled, his eyes scanning the scorch marks that traveled three-quarters of the way down the walls.

  “You vented the window?” Georgia asked Hagarty.

  “Didn’t have to break it,” said the captain. “It broke before we got into the room.” Hagarty shrugged. “Not that it’s my call, but those A and E detectives did a
walkthrough and came up empty. It’s a mattress fire—in an upscale neighborhood maybe, but still in all, a mattress fire.”

  Georgia turned to Carter. “What do you think?” she asked him.

  Carter shrugged and said nothing. He’d never done that before. They’d been partners for a year and a half now—ever since Georgia left the firefighting arm of the FDNY to become a fire marshal. Although they always took turns running investigations, and this one was Georgia’s, Carter—with sixteen years as a marshal—was usually the guiding force.

  But since that serial arson investigation in SoHo last April, Georgia had noticed Carter hanging back more. On the one hand, she welcomed it as a sign of his increased regard for her abilities. But there was a bittersweet side as well. Carter was fifty-nine years old. He had nearly thirty-one years in the FDNY. One of these days soon, he’d probably put in his retirement papers. In his own quiet way, he was forcing her to become less dependent on him.

  Georgia put away her notebook and scanned the room. There was something wrong with this smoking-in-bed scenario. Carter was right—the mattress burn was too even. And the springs hadn’t annealed. But there was something else, as well. She pulled out her flashlight and shined it across the blistered ceiling, bringing the beam to rest on the blackest part in the far corner, directly above what was left of the chair. She walked across the room and moved the chair frame aside. The floor was badly burned underneath.

  “If Rosen was smoking in bed,” Georgia wondered aloud now, “how come the lowest, deepest burns are in this corner?”

  Beneath Randy Carter’s mustache, Georgia thought she saw the hint of a smile. They both knew that because fire typically travels in a V pattern, upward from the base, the lowest burn point is often the point of origin.

  She walked past Carter and Hagarty to a floor lamp five feet from the burned-out chair. The metal had oxidized—rusted—because of the heat. The lampshade had burned away. The lightbulb underneath had melted and elongated as if made of Silly Putty, a process known as “pulling.” Carter had taught her that when lightbulbs melt, they have the odd habit of pointing in the direction of the heat.

  “The bulb is pointing to the chair in the far corner, by the window, not the box spring,” Georgia noted.

  She turned to Carter, waiting for a reaction. She thought she’d done a thorough initial sizing up of the fire. But instead of looking pleased, he was frowning in the direction of the living room.

  “The front door,” Carter asked Hagarty. “It was locked when y’all arrived, right? That’s why you took the rabbit to it.” The rabbit is a twenty-five pound hydraulic wedge so named because it looks like a rabbit’s foot.

  The captain rubbed the back of his grimy neck and shifted his feet. His eyes flicked to the firefighters at the wall behind them. They were nearly finished. “We’re not sure,” he admitted.

  Georgia started. The firefighters broke down the door without first trying the knob. It happened all the time in the adrenaline rush of the moment. Only in this case, an unlocked door could be significant because it signaled the possibility of an intruder. She couldn’t believe she had missed it. What else am I missing? Georgia wondered. She scanned the charred top of the dresser, noting the shattered perfume bottles and a three-candle, wrought-iron candelabra with two melted orange blobs still in their holders. She kicked at the debris surrounding the box spring with the tip of her crepe-soled black work boot. And then it hit her. She scanned the floor of the room.

  “Where are the ashtrays?” she mumbled.

  Carter gave her a puzzled look.

  “Maybe we wouldn’t find cigarettes or matches in a fire this hot,” said Georgia. “But I don’t see anything that would pass for an ashtray—not even an empty glass or bottle or beer can.”

  Carter straightened. He started to speak, then swallowed the thought. He walked the perimeter of the box spring, nudging soggy bits of wood and plaster. When he met her gaze, his deep, soulful eyes held a mixture of pride and something else she couldn’t quite read. A sadness, perhaps. He wasn’t ready for this shift in their relationship.

  “So she ditched her ashtray and neatened up before she passed out,” said Hagarty. “She’s a regular eighty-proof Martha Stewart—so?”

  “Maybe,” said Carter. “Then again, she’d be the first one I ever saw who was.”

  3

  Nobody really knows what’s under the concrete and asphalt of New York City. Way, way down, there are graveyards of slaves from the seventeen hundreds and scattered timber remnants of houses that haven’t stood since sailing ships called New York home.

  There are elegant subway stations with fresco murals and mosaic tiles, miles of tunnel and track that were begun with great optimism, then simply abandoned when the money ran out or the politician in charge couldn’t get his kickback.

  There are water tunnels blasted out of the granite bedrock big enough to drive a semi through that connect reservoirs upstate to water-processing plants in the city. And there are pneumatic tubes that once delivered mail between New York office buildings at nearly the speed of the Internet.

  People live in the bowels of the city, too. “Mole people” they call themselves—mostly drug addicts and crazies, but some children as well. Robin Hood knew why they came. Down here, it was peaceful. Damp, glistening bricks. Puddles of water that pooled like quicksilver in the light. Down here, the oppressive August heat was but a memory, the city noise, a rumble like distant thunder. Only the splash of water on boots and the jingle of Hood’s tool belt passed for noise. It was the city of a hundred years ago—fashioned not by silicon chips, but by bricks and mortar and the sweat of men. A good place, thought Hood, for hiding just about anything.

  Hood rubbed two grimy gloved hands down a pair of baggy blue jeans. It was done now. One way or another, there would be justice—not the formal, antiseptic variety, perhaps. Hood had seen men die waiting for the formal, antiseptic variety. This was something better—something befitting a Robin Hood.

  At a juncture where a wall of bricks had turned white with lime and decay, Hood felt for the familiar rusted rungs of a ladder and slipped through the porthole that separated earth from sky. Dawn would come within the next ten minutes; the eastern horizon was already the color of faded denim.

  Hood removed a hard hat and slipped off the tool belt. An oily stench hung low in the air, as heavy as wet canvas. In the distance, cars rolled over the steel plates of a bridge and a police siren wailed until it was out of earshot. Hood surveyed the landscape, amazed that in a city of eight and a half million most people still went about their daily routines giving very little thought to what lay beneath the paper-thin façade of glitz and power that passed for civilization here. New York City could be like a teenager in that regard: vain, full of hubris, clinging to a faith in its immortality, yet defiantly naïve when you came right down to it.

  That surface toughness and razzle-dazzle soothed the bankers down on Wall Street, the press with their minicams, the tourists ogling the Broadway marquees. But it remained an act, a sleight of hand from the men who really kept the city together with tape, glue and prayer. Hood knew it. And so did they.

  And what’s more, thought Hood, stretching with satisfaction, those men would pay a lot of money to keep others from figuring that out.

  4

  The task before Georgia and Carter was dirty and brutal—equal parts muscle and precision. They were alone in the apartment now. Just the two of them, a couple of shovels and a large stainless-steel toolbox known as a PET kit—PET being short for Physical Examination Tools. The box was filled with pliers, screwdrivers and claw tools—everything necessary to pull apart the wreckage to figure out how and where the fire had started. Called a Cause and Origin determination, or C and O, it was the first step to any fire investigation.

  Georgia slipped on a pair of navy blue coveralls and opened the red drapes across the living room window. The air-conditioning was off in the apartment. Sweat ran in rivulets down Georgia’s b
ody as she and Carter shoveled plaster dust off the box spring. Dawn was breaking outside and the heat of the day was coming on strong. Carter’s breathing became ragged.

  “Take a break,” she urged him. “I can do this.”

  “Y’all gonna start treating me like Chris Willard now?” he choked out. “I ain’t ready for a nursing home yet, you know.” He leaned on his shovel for a moment and wiped the sweat that coated his face like butter. Georgia could see he was hurting, no matter how much he pretended otherwise.

  “I think you’re right, by the way,” said Carter between gulps of air. “About Rosen not smoking, I mean. There are no ashtrays or matches or lighters in this place. No cigarettes in her garbage, either.”

  “None of that proves she wasn’t drinking, though,” said Georgia.

  “She’s got two bottles of good Chardonnay—not the cheap stuff—in her refrigerator. One of ’em’s open.”

  Georgia stopped shoveling and wiped her brow on the sleeve of her coveralls. “So?”

  He took a deep breath. “Y’all ever seen an alcoholic who could open a bottle of anything and not drink it all?”

  “You’ve got a point there.” Georgia turned her attention to the chair in the corner. It sat legless on the scorched floor like a beggar.

  “Randy? Do you remember that seminar we went to at the crime lab last May?”

  “The one given by that Indian chemist with the towel on his head?”

  “Turban, Randy.” Georgia rolled her eyes. “They call it a turban. Anyway, I seem to recall him saying that once a room passes through the flashover stage and becomes fully involved, it can be very difficult to determine whether a fire was accidental or incendiary.”

  “But this fire didn’t reach flashover,” Carter reminded her. He bent down by the box spring and picked up a nickel-sized piece of half-melted red plastic. A bottle cap of some sort. “Every burn is still in a condition to tell us something.”