“Look, Andy,” she began. “I know you were trying to help back there. And I appreciate it. But please, in the future, let me handle my own problems.”
Kyle crumpled the wrapper. They were on the platform by themselves now. The group had already descended a yellow metal staircase. “But that detective…”
“—is a son of a bitch,” Georgia cut him off. “But you took a momentary embarrassment and turned it into a permanent grudge. Willard’s going to go out of his way now to highlight any screwups I made on the Dana case.”
“I’m sure you didn’t make any screwups,” said Kyle. He dropped the foil gum wrapper onto the platform. Georgia frowned.
“That’s your first mistake: to be sure of anything on this job.” She picked up the wrapper and stuffed it back in his hand. “And by the way, this it metal. Anything metal gets under the third rail, it can short the whole track out. So don’t make assumptions.”
Kyle looked at her for a long moment. Then he shook his head at the wrapper in his hand. “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know yet, even after five years as a firefighter.” He took a deep breath. “Look, Georgia, I said what I said because I don’t like to see people pushed around. That’s my father’s style, and I hate it. It’s not mine.”
“I wasn’t being pushed around,” she insisted. “Not really.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I misinterpreted the situation.”
Nobody from Woodside ever used words like misinterpreted. Georgia wondered how two people could grow up in the same twenty-five-mile radius from Manhattan and speak so differently.
“Fair enough,” said Georgia. “Then let me give you some advice: Keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Don’t solve other people’s problems. And don’t apologize. The guys I work with save ‘sorry’ and ‘thanks’ for the really big stuff. The rest of the time, they speak in four-letter words.”
“Okay, sor—Gotcha.”
“That’s better.”
They caught up to the group just as they were heading back to the bustling concourse. Carter pulled Georgia to one side.
“Willard’s gonna be looking for every opportunity to stick it to you after that little episode this morning.”
“I know,” said Georgia. “Did he at least give you an update on the Dana case?”
“I got diddlysquat from both him and Sandowsky,” he told her. “But I heard Sandowsky talking on his cell phone at one point, and it sounded like the PD’s got guys all over JFK and LaGuardia airports looking for something…”
“—The Empire Pipeline runs to both airports,” Georgia reminded him.
“I know, but they said nothing to me. All I know is, they still want our cause-and-origin report on Rosen by six P.M.today.”
“We’re gonna look like idiots putting that report together with nothing to go on.”
“Nobody’s giving us anything,” said Carter. “Heck, Brennan’s so eager to wrap this up, I keep thinking somebody ordered him to minimize the publicity on this thing.”
“Maybe they did,” said Georgia. “But our names are still going on that report. You think perhaps someone at the crime lab could help us?”
“Couldn’t hurt to pay them a visit after this,” said Carter. “Speed things along.” He touched her elbow and nodded to one of the men in their group. Georgia had noticed him when they first sat down in the stationmaster’s office. He was a handsome man in his mid-thirties, a little hefty, but with a nice head of blue-black hair. He spent a lot of the tour talking to Suarez.
“Hey, guess who that is?” asked Carter.
“You got me,” said Georgia.
“Nick Marenko—Mac’s brother. Suarez told me. The guy just made detective in the PD’s transit bureau. Why don’t y’all go say hello. Bet he didn’t realize who you are.”
They were headed back to the stationmaster’s office, but Georgia hustled a little ahead and came up on Nick Marenko now. He was tall like Mac, but bigger boned. His eyes were brown, not blue, but in the shape of his face, she thought she saw a family resemblance. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed it before, especially when she watched him walk. He had the same, slightly cocky swagger of his brother.
“Detective?”
He turned and flashed her the famous Marenko smile.
“I’m Georgia Skeehan.” She thrust out a hand and he shook it. His face was pleasant, but his eyes were flat, like the eyes you give to a waitress taking your order. “Mac may have mentioned me to you,” she stammered, hoping to jog his memory.
A tiny crease settled between his black eyebrows.
“You, um, work with my brother?” he asked politely.
He doesn’t know who I am, Georgia realized with a jolt.
“Yeah, I…I was on that big case with Mac several months ago.”
“Sure,” said Nick, smiling. “I remember that case. The Spring Street arson, right? I think I saw you on television.”
Georgia waited for some further spark of recognition, but there was none. She searched for a graceful retreat. “I…I just wanted to congratulate you on your promotion to detective.”
“Oh…thanks. I think Mac’s out on Long Island today, but I’ll tell him I saw you.”
14
Georgia said little in the car as they drove to the NYPD’s crime lab in Jamaica, Queens. Carter didn’t seem to notice at first. He kept flipping radio stations, seeing if he could find out any more about the Jets football stadium project. The air conditioner was still barely functional, so Georgia rolled down the windows. Somewhere nearby was a bakery plant. Its yeasty smell softened the scent of Dumpsters and exhaust that seeped into the car.
“What’s eating you, girl?” Carter asked her finally. “Ever since you spoke to Mac’s brother, y’all been looking like you stepped on a honeybee and you still got the stinger in your toe.”
“Don’t ask, Randy. It’s better this way.”
The lab was a drab, fortresslike building, made even drabber by a Tuesday-morning sky of dulled chrome and air as tactile as cobwebs. A row of pigeons stared down at them from the roof of an adjoining auto body shop as they got out of their Caprice. Just being here was like a needle prick to Georgia’s skin. The FDNY used to have its own lab, run by her good friend Walter Frankel. When he died, the lab died with him. It was at moments like these when she really missed him.
“What’s the matter?” Carter pressed as he and Georgia sat in a couple of stiff chairs in the lobby, waiting to speak to the forensic chemist handling the case. “Y’all want more of Mac than he’s ready to give?”
Georgia tossed off a small, hard laugh. “I think the problem is, he gave too much of himself already.”
Carter frowned in the direction of the lab doors. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“I should’ve known, right?” Georgia muttered, picking up a magazine and flipping through it. “Mac’ll follow anything that resembles a ball. Stands to reason his sperm would do the same. Probably had John Madden announcing the play-by-play.”
“Humdinger of a situation,” said Carter, shaking his head. “Here I’ve been, hoping you wouldn’t stick with that son of a gun, and now, I’m gonna have to hope that you do.”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
Carter said nothing for a long while. He could do that—live in all that silence and be comfortable with it. Georgia suspected this was a rural trait. New Yorkers considered it tantamount to holding one’s breath. Do it for more than four minutes, say, and you’d become unconscious, which to New Yorkers, was the same as being from somewhere else.
“I reckon I always thought you could do better,” he said finally.
The doors to the lab opened now, and a short, dark-skinned man with a close-cropped black beard walked toward them. Georgia recognized him instantly as the chemist who’d given that lecture on flashovers in May. He wore a turban on his head the color of port wine, and underneath his white lab coat, the loudest pink-and-green floral shirt this side of Waikiki. He pressed his palm
s together and nodded his head slightly as Georgia and Carter rose and introduced themselves and explained that they were there on the Louise Rosen case.
“Skeehan, Carter, yes. Your names are familiar,” said Ajay Singh. He had a singsong Indian accent that, coupled with his loud shirt, made Georgia think of the convenience-store owner in The Simpsons.
“We were at your lecture in May,” Georgia explained.
“Yes, yes. Good to see you again. I have just finished reviewing the evidence. Come.”
They followed Singh through a maze of windowless hallways and cubicles, all done in government-issue grays and greens. At another door, Singh held up what looked like an ATM card and buzzed them into the lab. There were powder blue tiles on the floors, stainless-steel counters along the walls and banks of microscopes and specimen slides. Singh beckoned Georgia and Carter over to a personal computer.
“Have you done any work with fire modeling?” he asked them.
“Not really,” said Carter.
Singh typed in some codes on the computer screen now. “I take the known variables about a fire—the dimensions of the room, the fuel load, the amount of initial ventilation and suspected point of origin—and I plug them into a computer program to try to replicate the fire,” he explained.
“Can the fire model tell you what happened?” asked Georgia.
“Sometimes,” said Singh. “But where it is really useful is in telling an investigator what did not happen. It narrows the possibilities.”
“This got something to do with the Rosen fire?” asked Carter impatiently. Randy Carter was old school. He still believed that a smart, experienced investigator didn’t need a lot of high-tech gadgetry to solve most cases.
“Yes,” said Singh curtly. He had obviously dealt with a lot of old-school cops before. “And I think you will be surprised by what you see, Marshal.”
Singh punched in some keys and brought up what looked like a three-dimensional topographical map.
“This is Louise Rosen’s bedroom before the fire,” Singh explained. He pointed to abstract squares and rectangles of color, representing the doctor’s bed, dresser, chair, lamps, window and door.
“In this initial representation, we need to identify the three factors that make up the fire—the so-called fire triangle,” Singh explained.
“Heat, oxygen and fuel,” said Georgia.
“Correct,” said Singh, clearly pleased that he had, at least, one interested party. “Insufficient heat, and the fire won’t ignite. Or it will smolder, but not flame. Insufficient fuel and the fire will burn itself out. Insufficient oxygen and the fire won’t spark. Or it will die out until it can get more oxygen. Then it will explode all at once into a backdraft. But if you have the right quantities of heat, oxygen and fuel, then the fire will…”
“—flash over,” offered Georgia.
“Not necessarily,” said Singh. “If the room is very large, well ventilated or has a very high ceiling, there will be no spontaneous ignition of all the contents of the room. Things will burn—yes. But in order for a flashover to happen, the gases in the ceiling must be hot enough to radiate back down and ignite other fuel sources not in direct contact with the flames.”
“Isn’t that what almost happened in the Rosen fire?” asked Carter in a tone that suggested Singh had just used a lot of fancy language to tell them the obvious.
“That’s what you think happened,” said Singh. “But factoring in the ten-foot ceilings, the size of the room and the fire load, it is impossible for a spark in a chair cushion to have produced a fire of that magnitude. Watch.”
He pressed a button to start the program. Georgia saw a small orange triangle form in the center of the upholstered corner chair. A timer at the top of the screen recorded the elapsed seconds. Within twenty seconds, the triangle colors started turning a darker shade of orange. Singh explained that the darker the orange on the screen, the hotter the temperature of the flame.
At one minute, a V pattern began to form in the corner of the room as hot gases traveled across the ceiling. The triangles darkened in color and spread across the room. Colored bands in shades of yellow recorded temperatures at different heights in the space. Georgia frowned. The uppermost band showed temperatures of six hundred degrees. Five minutes later, the temperature along the ceiling had climbed by only fifty degrees. It was as if the fire had somehow maxed out—burning briskly but never getting hot enough for the room to flash over.
“I’ve seen flashovers occur at six hundred and fifty degrees,” Carter mumbled defensively.
“Not in this room,” Singh corrected. “Factoring in all the variables, I have estimated that ceiling temperatures would have to reach eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit for a flashover.”
A blue dot now appeared on the model and widened. Georgia noticed the temperatures dropping. Singh had obviously programmed in the arrival of the firefighters. The screen froze on this last image. Georgia stared at it in amazement.
“But the room did come close to flashing over,” she insisted. “We’ve got the physical evidence to prove it.” She glanced at Carter. He gave her an I-told-you-so look and shrugged.
“That’s why y’all should never trust a computer.”
“The program does not lie,” Singh explained with irritating confidence. “There was not enough fuel load in that chair to start a fire of that magnitude. It is not arguable.”
“How about if we assume there were a lot of pillows on the chair?” asked Carter.
“It would alter the outcome very little,” said Singh. “For this fire to reach eleven hundred degrees, you would need something with a significant fuel load in that corner.”
Georgia tried to picture the room. The chair was near the window. The broken window. A window without…
“—Drapes,” said Georgia. Singh and Carter looked at her. “Rosen had these floor-length red drapes in her living room.”
“But there weren’t any in her bedroom,” Carter reminded her.
“Because they were in the street, next to the mattress,” said Georgia. “I thought they were blankets. But now that I think about it, they looked a lot like the drapes in her living room.”
Singh asked her some questions about the drapes and tried to estimate their size and fuel load for his model. He plugged in the variables and ran the program again.
Georgia and Carter watched the orange triangles darken and multiply again. Only this time, they began to grow quickly in size, feeding freely on the upholstered chair, then enveloping the heavy drapes. The yellow bands recorded temperatures climbing above eight hundred and fifty degrees as the smoke banked down lower and lower to the floor. At three minutes, fifteen seconds, the window glass failed. Twenty seconds later, objects in the room began to ignite spontaneously. The room was quickly approaching flashover.
“If the drapes provided the initial fuel for the fire,” asked Georgia, “what provided the ignition? There were no electrical outlets, there was no evidence of any accelerant…”
“—The candle,” muttered Carter, staring at the screen. “It was on the floor, near the window. It could’ve lit up the drapes—accidentally or on purpose, I don’t know.”
“What I don’t get,” said Georgia, “is what kept Rosen on that bed? Her carbon monoxide levels in her bloodstream weren’t that high. There was no evidence she was beaten or restrained.”
Singh opened a file drawer in the lab and pulled out a small, sealed vial of what looked like water. “I think she may have been put into a temporary coma by this,” he said, handing the vial to Georgia.
“What is it?”
“Gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB. Commonly called the ‘date rape drug,’” Singh explained. “I made this batch myself. It’s not hard to do. There are recipes on the Internet.”
“But Louise Rosen’s tox screen was negative,” Georgia reminded him.
“The screen was for alcohol and a standard panel of drugs,” said Singh. “GHB disappears very quickly from the body. To
find it, you have to isolate small samples of tissue and subject them to rigorous testing. I have ordered new tests, but even these may not isolate any GHB. Dr. Rosen was alive six hours after the fire—long enough for the drug to have begun to leave her system.”
“What makes you think she consumed any, then?” asked Carter.
“I recovered some GHB residue from a red plastic cap you found in her bedroom. The cap was from a bottle of McCormick’s liquid extract,” Singh added.
“What the heck is extract?” asked Carter.
“You know,” said Georgia. “When a recipe calls for vanilla or almond flavoring and you measure out a teaspoon or two?”
Carter gaped at her as if she’d just revealed a fluency in Swahili.
“What? I cook,” she said defensively.
“Reheating pizza doesn’t count.”
“You are correct, in any case,” Singh told her. “It would certainly explain Rosen’s incapacitated state.”
Georgia handed the vial of GHB back to Singh. “So our physical evidence, combined with your fire model, suggests that Rosen was drugged and then burned in a fire started by drapes and perhaps a candle—is that right?” asked Georgia.
“That would be consistent with the evidence,” said Singh.
“None of that hooey gets us any nearer to finding out whether we got an arson on our hands,” grumbled Carter. “Rosen could’ve drugged herself, then passed out.”
“You are forgetting one thing, Marshal,” said Singh.
“What?”
“Charles Dana. I am handling the evidence on this case, too. And I think Dana may have also been drugged and intentionally burned.”
“Your fire model tell you that?” asked Carter. Georgia could tell he was still suspicious of evidence he couldn’t hold between his fingers.
“No,” said Singh. “Your Bronx marshals told me that. And I agree. The tracking along the inside of the automatic garage door was bent. The tool marks are consistent with a firefighter’s halligan…”
“—We used a halligan,” said Georgia.
“Not on the tracking, we didn’t,” Carter corrected. “But the firefighters who put out the fire could’ve.”
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