“I went to get the box of records and the damn shelf collapsed on me. Can you give me a hand?”
“Sure.” She grabbed a chair to stand on and positioned herself in front of him. Then she snaked between his arms and grabbed the shelf. “I’ve got it,” she said, propping the shelf temporarily back into position. “It looks like one of the brackets gave out. It wasn’t drilled into a wall stud like it should’ve been—”
“Thank you, Bob Vila.”
Georgia turned to him. He was still behind her, their bodies almost touching. “You’re bleeding, Mac.”
“Huh?” He touched his forehead. “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll just tell the guys you came to my apartment, had a couple of beers, and took advantage of me. Hey, since you’re the boss now, maybe I can plead sexual harassment.”
“Very funny,” she said, stepping down from the chair. “Let me get you some ice.”
“I’m all right.”
“You don’t know that. Lie down on the bed and I’ll get some ice from the kitchen.”
She opened his freezer. The ice trays were bone-dry and the freezer bare, except for a mostly empty gallon of crystallized vanilla ice cream and a frozen pizza that had been in there so long that the tomato sauce on it had turned pink. Along the freezer’s perimeter, however, ice crystals were gathered a half inch thick.
“You don’t have any ice cubes,” she called out to him. “For that matter, it looks like your freezer hasn’t been defrosted since the building was built.”
“Geez, you’re supposed to defrost it? I thought that’s how you got ice,” he yelled back. “Just take a knife to the edges. I’ll take whatever you can scrape into a plastic bag.”
She came back in the bedroom with a sandwich bag of ice crystals. Marenko winced as she gently placed it on his forehead. The gash wasn’t bad, but the skin around it was already turning purplish.
“I’m sorry about your head, Mac.”
“Forget about it. I deserve it. Shit, maybe all this time we could’ve been focusing this investigation on catching a serial arsonist. I feel like it’s all my fault.”
“Brennan told you to get rid of the records, didn’t he?”
“He just made some comment about if the New York Times gets ahold of these, we can all kiss our pensions goodbye. I knew what he was telling me to do. We go back a lot of years.”
“You think Brennan had any other reasons?”
“Nah. He’s interested in bureaucratic self-preservation, nothing more. I didn’t see any harm in keeping this part of the investigation quiet. I figured if we got the torch on fifty-four counts of murder, we could worry about a bunch of vacants at grand jury time.”
Georgia followed Marenko’s line of vision to a chest of drawers. On top was a foldout frame with two color portraits of children.
“Your kids?” she asked, examining the frame. Marenko nodded. The boy looked a lot like Marenko. He was about ten, with a face that promised to grow more handsome and chiseled with age, and those same sparkling blue eyes underneath a mop of wavy, blue-black hair. The girl, maybe six or seven, was brown-haired with hazel eyes and a string of freckles across the nose. Georgia could almost see what Patsy looked like.
“How long have you been divorced?”
“Long enough,” he said, wincing as he repositioned the ice pack. “I deserved that, too.”
“I don’t know.” Georgia smiled. “The longer I’m around you, the harder it is to hate you.”
“That’s ’cause I’m not making you work with Lightning anymore,” he teased. “So, like, maybe in fifty years we can be friends?”
She laughed. “I’d have to trust you first.”
He raised himself on an elbow and grinned. “Oh, forget about it, then. I’m completely untrustworthy.”
“You cheated on your wife, huh?”
“Never.”
Georgia raised an eyebrow.
“I swear. That one, I swear, Scout. I bullshit about a lot of things, but I don’t go around pinching all the peaches in the supermarket to get a ripe one. That ain’t me. I find the one I want, I stick with her.”
She laughed again and they locked eyes for a long moment, neither of them moving. Then he smiled that boyish, innocent smile and she returned it. Slowly, he lifted himself off the bed and moved toward her. She didn’t resist, even after he brushed his hand against the sleeve of her shirt and drew her closer. Gently, he folded her into his embrace and brought his lips down on hers. Their tongues found each other while he combed a hand through her hair and slowly snaked it down her spine and across the firm outline of her buttocks.
Georgia’s breasts began to tingle. She felt sweat cool against her neck and a fiery warmth build up between her legs, gradually radiating through her whole body until even the shafts of her hair felt erogenous.
He undressed her slowly, his warm, moist lips christening each new patch of bare skin. A light stubble on his unshaven cheeks heightened the sensuousness of his caresses. When he held her breasts in his hands, he massaged them gently, then kissed them, running his lips tenderly along her skin. He didn’t race into her pants. And when they were both naked, staring at each other’s yearning bodies, he paused and held her close. She could feel his erection hard against her abdomen.
“Are you sure you want to?” he whispered, stroking the side of her face. “I don’t want you to hate me tomorrow.”
She gulped, letting her eyes wander the length of his body. He was well-built, with broad shoulders, strong, sinewy arms, and a fine, dark dusting of hair across his chest. His eyes were a deep, rich blue, set off by fine black eyebrows. The effect would have been almost too pretty if not for the fact that his nose was slightly flattened across the bridge, probably from a fistfight or two, knowing Mac. It gave him the right combination of toughness and tenderness that was hard to resist. But what made him really sexy was the nonchalant way he carried himself, as if it never occurred to him she might want him at this moment as much as he wanted her.
“Do you have a condom?”
He grinned and nodded. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Afterward, lying naked and sweat-soaked in the bed, still warm from his gentle, constant touch, she couldn’t even remember how it had all begun. An evening drizzle played at the edges of sleep. Car horns and alarms echoed from the street, and tires hissed on the wet pavement.
She propped herself on one elbow and watched him doze. His face, despite the gash, was soft and angelic, bathed in the reflection of streetlamps through a rain-speckled window. She stroked his damp hair, wanting desperately to feel him inside her again. She longed to experience once more the weight of his chest on hers, to delight in the rough sandpaper of his stubbled face across her abdomen, her cheeks, her thighs, as he probed her with his tongue. He rolled over and wrapped a muscular arm around her. She sighed and snuggled close. She wished she could stay, but it was impossible. One of them had to talk to somebody at the La Guardia Arms. And she was awake. What time is it? she wondered.
She searched for a clock on the upended crate beside Mac’s bedside that doubled as a nightstand. There was none. So she slithered out of his embrace and rummaged through the only other piece of furniture in the room—the chest of drawers. She didn’t find a clock, but in the top drawer, she found his wristwatch, draped across his wallet, next to his nine-millimeter. She turned to see whether he was awake enough to help her, but he was breathing deeply now. The wallet was stuffed with cash and bits of paper that made it bulge open to the picture on his driver’s license. Stanley Marenko, Jr., it read. She grinned. So “Mac” was just a nickname. She’d tease him about that tomorrow.
She lifted the watch to the thin band of streetlight coming in between the Venetian blinds. Nine-fifteen. She would let him sleep. She rummaged in the drawer for some paper to leave him a note. Her fingers brushed along a notebook, like the kind used on investigations. She opened it now and scanned his messy scrawl to make sure she wouldn’t be ruining something important. The notes, sh
e quickly realized, were from their interview with Ron Glassman on Thursday evening. She flipped to the next page, where he had scrawled:
Call Brennan. GS unstable? Check out incident with dead firefighter in Queens. Way to get her off case???
Georgia stumbled to the edge of the bed. Her insides burned with a mixture of shame and fury. She longed for a shower to erase his scent from her skin. How could she have been so stupid as to confide in him about Petie Ferraro? The only reason Brennan was able to humiliate her in front of the commissioner the other night was because Mac had fed him the lines. And to think she actually thought Mac was trying to rescue her. What a joke.
She tried to stuff the notebook back in his drawer, but it jammed on some papers. She moved them aside. Three sheets of painstakingly scrawled biblical passages she knew only too well.
Her breath was quick and shallow as she grabbed her clothes, hastily throwing them on. There was only one reason Georgia could think of why Mac Marenko would deny seeing the Fourth Angel’s first three letters—copies of which he’d had in his apartment all along. That’s because he knew—had known from the start, perhaps—that the person who had penned those letters was no outsider.
More than likely, Georgia began to realize, the Fourth Angel was one of them.
28
The La Guardia Arms was a gray twelve-story hotel on Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue, on the far west side of Manhattan. It had small, boxy windows, a neon marquee running down the side of the building with the letter “M” burned out, and a front awning that had once been red but was now faded to something between orange and pink.
The lobby was small and sparsely furnished. Behind a high black counter, a chunky Asian woman regarded Georgia warily. Hardly a Big Apple welcome. She stepped up to the counter and flashed her shield.
“I promised no trouble. No trouble,” the woman said excitedly.
“Excuse me?”
“No police raids. No fire summonses. That was deal.”
“Deal? I don’t follow.”
The woman froze. “What you want?” she asked tersely. So this is why the Fourth Angel sent me this note on hotel letterhead, Georgia thought. This is the game. Chalk up another embarrassment for the FDNY.
“You know,” Georgia told the woman, “if I didn’t know better, I’d figure you’ve got a little sideline business going on upstairs. And this being a hotel and all, well, the only kind of sideline business I can think of in this neighborhood might have to do with working girls, am I right?”
The woman pursed her lips and didn’t answer.
“So maybe some cops and firemen figure, why should out-of-towners grab all the fun? And you figure, hey, they don’t raid me. They don’t write summonses for code violations. So what if they enjoy a little hospitality on the house now and then? Tit for tat. Or maybe in this case, tat for tit, yes?”
The woman stared at her stonily, arms folded across her chest. Georgia slammed a fist on the counter and she jumped.
“Personally, I think it stinks. But that’s not why I’m here. So you tell me what I want to know, and maybe I’ll just go away and let these guys get the clap and explain it to their wives.”
“What you want?” the woman asked again.
“Something nice and simple. A guy. I’m guessing he’s white, maybe a firefighter or ex-firefighter. Ticked off at the department. Maybe he was fired or disciplined in some way. Talks about getting revenge. He had a piece of your letterhead stationery. Maybe he had a piece of one of your girls? He work for you? Is he a client?”
“I don’t know anyone like that…”
“Think harder. This could be your last day as a police/fire liaison. The guy I’m looking for likes to throw around quotes from the Bible.”
Something in the woman’s eyes changed. Nervously, she played with the nylon band of her watch, pressing it into the subcutaneous fat of her wrist. “There was man,” she said hesitantly. “A few weeks ago. White. Late thirties, maybe early forties. Blond. Nice-looking. Well built. He…he wanted…”
“He wanted to get laid.” Marenko was rubbing off on her. The woman looked uncomfortable.
“He said he was firefighter. I ask for badge. He didn’t have. He had some other ID. ‘No good,’ I say. He knew about our…service. I say, ‘No freebies without badge.’ I…offer discount. He got angry. When he leave, he say, ‘A whore is a deep ditch.’ This is from Bible, yes?”
Georgia froze. To pass the time in catechism as a kid, she used to look up the R-rated passages in the Bible. This phrase was one she recalled.
“What did the ID look like that he showed you?”
“I don’t remember. Something with flame on it. But not a badge. I’ve seen badges. Many, many badges.”
“I’ll bet you have,” she noted dryly. Was this guy a buff? Georgia wondered. Every firehouse had buffs—groupies who hung around, basking in the firefighters’ reflected glory. Some of these usually single, lonely guys knew more trivia about firefighting than the thirty-year veterans. Or maybe this guy was a volley—volunteer firefighter—from some town upstate or out on Long Island.
“I told you what I know,” said the woman. “Now, do we have deal? You keep quiet, yes?”
“I promise not to open my mouth any wider than your girls do. The rest, you’ll just have to sweat.”
Georgia walked out the front door just as Marenko was about to walk in. He took her by the arm.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked, his blue eyes bleary with sleep, his hair looking as if he’d barely had time to run a comb through it. “I’d have come with you. You get anything from the clerk?”
She shook her arm from his grip. Two streetwalkers in fishnet leggings and miniskirts stood on the opposite corner, eyeing their encounter.
“Leave me alone,” Georgia hissed through clenched teeth.
Marenko stepped back. “Whoa, talk about postcoital regret. I didn’t force—”
“This isn’t about sex, Mac,” she yelled, then blushed. The women on the opposite side of the street guffawed.
“It’s always about sex, girlfriend,” one of them shot back.
Mac stared at her. Then a flash of recognition crossed his face. “You went through my drawers. You saw the letters from the Fourth Angel.”
“I was looking for a sheet of paper to leave you a note. And by the way, I also found your little missive to Brennan. ‘GS unstable’? So that’s what you think of me?”
He dropped his head against the wall of the hotel and cursed. She noticed that the purplish gash on his forehead from earlier in the evening had feathered into a lovely mixture of greens.
“Listen to me, Scout.” He turned and tried to put both hands on her shoulders. She shoved him away. “I was just letting off steam. It was dumb, okay? I know that. When the chief tried to use that stuff against you, didn’t I step in?”
“And I suppose you just forgot you had copies of letters from the Fourth Angel, huh?”
“When this whole thing started, Brennan didn’t think those letters were for real. I didn’t either. Then Howard Beach happened…What was I gonna do—tell you now I had them?”
“I am a Girl Scout, Mac,” Georgia said, shaking her head in disgust. “Only a Girl Scout would’ve ever believed you. Then or now. And by the way, if the clerk’s description is accurate, the Fourth Angel is definitely connected in some way to the FDNY. Now you tell me: Who’s protecting this guy?”
“No one. Scout, there’s no conspiracy here.”
“Liar.” She began walking away.
He started after her. “Where’d you park?”
“Eleventh and Thirty-seventh.”
“Then at least let me walk you to your car.”
“No.”
“But it’s dark, and this isn’t the greatest—”
“I’ve got something more reliable than you,” she said, patting the nine-millimeter holstered to her hip, underneath her bulky beige cable-knit sweater and windbreaker. “I don’t need your
help.” She walked down the street, leaving him standing on the corner with his hands in his pockets.
“Hey, I thought we had something good going tonight,” he called over the whoosh of traffic along the wet pavement. But she didn’t turn around to answer. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
29
The walk to her car seemed endless. On the avenue, streetlamps filled the darkness with a coarse, shallow light. But along this far western stretch of Thirty-seventh Street, the murky blackness enveloped Georgia. Cellar doors and entranceways lost all form, and metal trash cans bulged with strange, menacing shadows.
She kept to the middle of the deserted sidewalk, pulling her jacket around her and clutching her keys tightly in her fist. Too late, she remembered the green laundry bag on her car’s backseat, bound for the dry cleaner. She hoped some kid wouldn’t bust a car window for the privilege of discovering that laundry bags do, indeed, carry dirty laundry.
Her Ford Escort was wedged in between two vans, which half buried the car in shadows. She fumbled with the lock for only a second before inserting the key. A pallid interior light instantly welcomed her, like the glow of a diner sign from a highway. She threw her pocketbook on the front passenger’s seat and jumped in. The door closed with a resounding thud, and she punched down the lock.
There was a soft rustle from behind.
“Turn, and you’re dead.”
A weight settled on Georgia’s chest. Every muscle tensed. Her pulse quickened, and she breathed rapidly.
“My bag’s on the seat. I have about eighty dollars in it—”
“I don’t want your money.”
If this wasn’t a robbery, then it had to be a…
No. Please. Not that. A thousand showers could never make her feel clean again.
Slowly, Georgia tried to maneuver her right hand to the holster under her windbreaker. The intruder caught the movement, highlighted by the pale green glow spilling out from the car’s digital alarm clock. He grabbed her arm and yanked it behind the seat. Pain seared through Georgia’s shoulder socket.
The Fourth Angel Page 16
