Finney had gotten to him. Georgia could see that. He knew how to rub against that splinter of resentment that must have been festering inside Suarez—inside all of them—since this case started.
“What’s your second scenario?” Suarez grunted. He didn’t sound as cool anymore.
“Two is, you got the right guy.” Finney shrugged. “But that doesn’t help you much either. ’Cause you know if you’ve got the right guy, the fires aren’t over.”
“What do you mean?” Suarez straightened. In the control booth, Georgia leaned forward. Was Finney talking about the fire that had been promised in the letter? The fire that was supposed to take place at eleven A.M. Monday?
“I’m not saying more unless I get the deal I want.”
“What do you want?”
“For starters? Keep that Skeehan bitch away from me.”
“We can accommodate you there, Ralph.” Suarez said the words without hesitation. It was the right answer, of course. But Georgia felt a twinge of betrayal. None of them wanted her on the case, it seemed. Not even the suspect.
Seconds ticked by. Finney stared at the ceiling. Cambareri’s wheezing was the only audible sound in the room. Finally, Finney spoke.
“Check out Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church. Four-ten Dupont Street, Brooklyn.”
“What’ll we find there?” asked Suarez, trying to sound casual.
“A surprise.”
“There it is!” whooped Brennan. “We got a bead on the location of Monday’s fire.” He reached for an intercom and buzzed the precinct captain with the details. “We’ll need that forwarded to the NYPD bomb squad, ASAP.”
“You see, Skeehan.” Lynch beamed. “We find that device and disable it, the investigation’s a wrap.”
There were high-fives all around when Suarez and Cambareri met up again with Georgia, Brennan, and Lynch. Suarez seemed quietly pleased, Cambareri had a big sloppy grin on his face, and Brennan, for once, managed to mumble a couple of words of praise—for Suarez and Cambareri, of course. Not for her. In the precinct lobby, there was a feeding frenzy of reporters. Bright spotlights blinded Georgia. The commissioner took her hand.
“Why don’t you stand beside me while I say a few words?”
Georgia pointed to her oversize red sweat suit. “I’m not really up to it, sir. I think I’d just prefer to go home.” Her mother, Richie, and Gallagher would be waiting for her. That’s what she needed right now.
The commissioner shrugged. “If you wish, Marshal. Go out tonight and celebrate.”
“Celebrate. Right,” Georgia said woodenly. Celebrating was the last thing she wanted to do. She was tired—and confused. Finney had manipulated everyone in that interrogation tonight. He’d suggested that Annette Nolan was nothing more than an ex-lover hell-bent on revenge. He’d offered no motive that would tie him to the Spring Street blaze. And he’d tossed out the supposed location of an HTA device—which everybody else seemed to believe not only existed, but was the “Armageddon” he’d been promising for Monday. More than likely, Georgia decided, Finney had sent them all on a wild-goose chase. They’d find that out soon enough.
She stopped by the station-house front desk to get the address of the sergeant who’d loaned her the clothing so she could mail it back in a day or two.
“You’re Georgia Skeehan, right?” asked the desk officer on duty.
“Yeah…,” she said uncertainly.
“There’s a call for you on line one.” Georgia picked it up.
“Scout? I found Carter.” Georgia never thought she’d be so happy to hear Mac Marenko’s voice.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s alive, which is more than I can say for Ron Glassman. The transit cops are scraping his body off the subway tracks now.”
“Oh God, no. Was it a suicide?”
Marenko paused. “Let’s hope so.”
40
“Honest, girl. I swear. Ron Glassman was already dead on the tracks when I got to the platform. I never touched him.” Randy Carter rolled a nearly empty cup of cold Starbucks coffee between the knuckles of his fingers. “I came straight upstairs, called my wife. She got in touch with Marenko, and here I am, in this doozy of a mess.”
Carter slumped on the bottom step of a sweeping marble staircase in the cavernous concourse of Grand Central Station. He was wearing a blue suit and paisley tie beneath a brown leather bomber jacket. The tie had been loosened—unusual for Carter. And his right leg jiggled nervously under a golden light that oozed over him from the graceful chandeliers above. Underneath the landmark station’s hundred-foot-high ceiling of star constellations, he looked especially small and beaten-down.
“This is a real humdinger, all right,” he mumbled as he watched a janitor push a broom across the sparkling granite floor.
“Did Glassman throw himself on the tracks? Did somebody push him?” Georgia asked softly.
“I wish I knew.” He nodded down a long corridor of closed kiosks to the entrance of the Lexington Avenue subway. “Mac’s down at the crime scene with the transit police now. He told me to stay away and not say a word to anybody.”
“All right.” She sighed. “Sit tight till we check things out.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said dully, staring at the floor. “Y’all think I’m going somewhere?”
It was seven on a Saturday night—a quiet time at Grand Central. The station’s weekday commuters from upstate New York and Connecticut were replaced by a more subdued scattering of suburbanites off to concerts, dinner, and Broadway shows in the city. Only the red flashing lights of police cruisers parked on Forty-second Street, and the clusters of blue uniforms leading down to the subway, gave any hint of what lay below.
A set of concrete steps, darkened to an indefinable shade of gray-black and smelling faintly of urine and stale sweat, led down to the dank, windowless subway platform. Yellow crime-scene tape sectioned off the low-ceilinged platform, and a grimy silver subway car was stopped halfway along the tracks. Georgia peered over the edge. Two police technicians in coveralls were taking samples and measurements six feet below. Glassman’s body was gone, but she could still see dark red splatters along the rails and little bits of what looked like gray gelatin—brain tissue, in all likelihood—stuck to the dirty white tile wall behind. There was a heavy, earthy smell to this concrete tomb, she realized now. The smell of death.
She found Marenko by the base of the stairs, talking intently to a cluster of transit cops and a couple of men in suits—NYPD detectives, she guessed. When he saw her, he broke away from the men with a round of hearty handshakes and pats on the shoulder. Georgia vaguely recalled that Marenko had a brother in the transit police. They’d give Mac more leeway than they would her. For once, she was glad he was here.
“What did you find out?” she asked him as soon as they got out of earshot.
He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and jabbed it into his mouth.
“You can’t smoke down here,” she scolded him.
“I can pretend, can’t I?” He pulled a notebook from his pocket. “It happened around six-forty this evening. There were about thirty people on the platform at the time. A witness said she saw a black man in a suit walk up to the dead man a few minutes before the train came and whisper something in his ear.”
Georgia started. “But Randy said he never spoke to Glassman. He said Glassman was dead when he got down here.”
“I know.” Marenko’s unlit cigarette bobbed up and down on his lips. “Could be a different black man in a suit, or the witness could be mistaken. In any case, the cops don’t know about Carter. They think I’m here ’cause Glassman was our witness—and that’s the way we’re keeping it. I already told Randy he’s faking a back injury and putting himself on medical leave first thing tomorrow. He shoulda never been working this case to begin with.” Marenko’s bright blue eyes held hers a moment, a silent reproach. Georgia let it pass.
“Why was Randy tailing Glassman anyway?”
“Carter
told me he was trying to work up the courage to confront this guy and find out the truth about his daughter’s death.”
“How’d they end up here?”
“Glassman drove in, parked at a garage on Forty-eighth and Sixth. Nobody knows why he chose to park there.” Marenko pointed to the sign above them. “Or why he was catching an uptown train.”
Georgia nodded. “The whole thing’s strange. Who phoned him? Gene said Glassman told his wife the call was from someone at the task force.”
Marenko jotted a note to himself. “I’ll get the telephone company to run a trace on that call to Glassman’s house. You know, Scout. It still could be a suicide. The conductor swears he never saw anyone but Glassman throwing himself onto the tracks.”
“It doesn’t sound like a suicide.”
Marenko pulled the cigarette from his mouth and frowned. “You don’t think Carter really pushed him, do you?”
Georgia gazed over at the police technicians carefully bagging a smashed gold wristwatch and sighed.
“Somebody did.”
Marenko took Carter home while Georgia rode the E train back to Queens. It was a familiar ride, but on this Saturday evening, there was something disquieting about the lurching subway car, the glassy-eyed riders all staring straight ahead, and the lights that periodically flicked on and off as the wheels screeched along the tracks.
Nothing in Ron Glassman’s demeanor this morning had suggested he was planning to kill himself. And if he was, why drive all the way into Manhattan?
Then there was the matter of the phone call to Glassman’s house. Only someone who knew about his eyewitness testimony to the Spring Street blaze could’ve placed that call. But there were only eight people besides Georgia for whom that was true: the commissioner, Chief Brennan, Walter Frankel, Jimmy Gallagher—who knew next to nothing about the case but had driven her up to Chappaqua—and the guys on the task force—Carter, Marenko, Cambareri, and Suarez. Yet within eight hours of that news, Glassman was dead, his face pulverized beneath the wheels of a subway car. The facts were alarmingly indisputable, at least to Georgia. Glassman had not only told her the truth about Spring Street, but someone close to her didn’t want anyone to know it.
When Georgia arrived home, Richie rushed into her arms. His concern touched her, and she held him close.
“You caught the bad guy.”
“Yes. Everything’s okay now,” Georgia lied. Margaret came out of the kitchen and hugged her daughter tightly.
“We’ve been watching it all on the news.” She looked down at her daughter’s oversize sweat suit. “Where are your clothes?”
“Damaged beyond repair. I borrowed these.”
Richie thrust a red race car into her hands. “Look what me and Uncle Jimmy finished.”
“The slot car. That’s terrific.” Georgia noticed Gallagher now, standing by the entrance to the living room. He was wearing a button-down shirt and dark blue slacks, his gray hair slicked back like a little boy’s in church. Behind him, the television was blaring news reports of Finney’s capture.
“Cheers to the hero,” Gallagher said, raising a glass of beer.
“Nah. I had a lot of help.” She shrugged. “You, Eddie, Walter, Randy—even Gene.” She couldn’t bring herself to mention Marenko.
“Yes, but if you hadn’t collared him, that church might’ve been bombed and all those parishioners killed.”
Georgia furrowed her brow. Gallagher gestured to the television.
“It’s all over the news, love. The bomb squad found a firebomb at Our Lady of Mercy in Brooklyn—right where that creep Finney said it would be.”
Georgia walked into the living room and stared at the screen. The camera panned a large stone church with yellow crime-scene tape around it.
“You don’t look happy,” Gallagher noticed.
“I am.” She forced a smile. “I’m just in shock and kind of tired, that’s all.”
“What you need is a drink,” he said. It looked to Georgia like he’d had a few of his own already, though he wasn’t drunk, just happy and relaxed.
“I think I’ll wash up first.”
“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll show you your mother’s new pool table in the basement. I’ve already started taking off the brass hardware.” He looked as excited as a kid with a new toy. Just like my dad, thought Georgia as she trudged upstairs to the bathroom. She could still remember tagging along behind her father, handing him tools as he fixed hinges, soldered pipes, and rebuilt cabinets. She wished he were here now to talk to. Maybe he could help her fix this case.
At the sink, Georgia splashed cold water on her face and thought about Ralph Finney. Everything he’d done up to this point had been a game. So how come he gave up his last fire to Suarez and Cambareri with no struggle at all?
Or did he?
In her bedroom, Georgia stepped into jeans and shrugged on a crew-neck sweatshirt. And suddenly, it came to her. All this time, she’d been trying to make sense of the fires—when it was the letters she should’ve been trying to make sense of. The game was in the letters. She walked over to her desk and pulled out an envelope. Copies of the letters were neatly stacked. She read them again, in order.
Letter number one:
And the Fourth Angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
Revelation. Chapter sixteen, verse eight
Letter number two:
And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.
Revelation. Chapter ten, verse eight
Letter number three:
The second woe is past; and behold, the third woe cometh quickly.
Revelation. Chapter eleven, verse fourteen
Letter number four:
His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns, and he had a name written that no man knew, but he himself.
Revelation. Chapter nineteen, verse twelve
All the passages were from Revelation. All spoke of fiery destruction, angels, and death. But there had to be more—something else about them she couldn’t see. The answer wasn’t at Our Lady of Mercy. It was still here—locked inside these lines of scripture she couldn’t make sense of.
Gallagher knocked on her door. “You all right, love? Your mother waited until you came home to get dinner ready.”
“Be right there.” She shoved the letters back into the envelope and followed Gallagher downstairs. The dining room table, rarely used, was set with her mother’s fine china and linens. Two long red tapered candles rose from crystal candlesticks at either end. She didn’t even know her mother had candles, never mind candlesticks.
“Looks great, Ma,” said Georgia as Margaret put the salad on the table. She could smell roast chicken and mashed potatoes in the oven. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble for me.”
“I didn’t. I’m bribing Jimmy to refinish my pool table before the summer.”
“So she can beat the pants off me.” He laughed. “I’m glad I never played your mother for money. I’d be broke.” He winked at Georgia. “So, what do you say we all have a quick round on that hunk of junk before dinner?”
“I thought you’d already taken it apart.”
“I’m taking the legs off Monday. It’s still in one piece for now.”
“I’ll watch,” said Georgia. “I’ve been beaten enough these last few days.”
The pool table sat in the middle of the basement, smelling of smoke and mold. The legs had white, wavy lines from water damage, the wood was pockmarked with cigarette burns, and the green felt was knobbly and worn down to a sheen in sections.
“Ma, you outdid yourself,” said Georgia, popping open a beer. “I never thought you’d win something more useless than those Engelbert Humperdinck recordings.”
“Now hold on, lass,” said Gallagher, coming to her mother’s rescue. �
�This wood?” He rapped a knuckle on a faded, splintered corner. “That’s solid mahogany. They don’t make things out of solid mahogany anymore. When I’m done with it, it’ll be a thing of beauty, it will. Good-looking as your mother—”
“And a fair bit younger.” Margaret grinned, racking up the balls.
Gallagher looked at her tenderly. “Wine, women, and wood, love,” he said softly. “All get better with age.” Margaret blushed, but concealed it by chalking up her cue.
“Eight ball? Or straight pool?” she asked.
“Eight ball,” said Gallagher, rubbing some chalk on his own cue. “I’ll break.”
Gallagher popped the tab on a can of Budweiser and clinked it against Georgia’s and Margaret’s beers and Richie’s Coke. “Cheers.” He took a sip, then gave the white ball a solid smack. A striped one went into the hole. He took aim at another stripe and missed. He straightened and rubbed his back.
“I’m going easy tonight, I am.”
“Excuses, excuses…,” Georgia ribbed. Richie giggled as his grandmother brought a step stool over and helped the boy line up a shot. He rarely got anything in—he had Georgia’s lack of talent at pool—but he enjoyed being part of the action.
“No, honest,” Gallagher explained as Richie missed the shot. “I’m going fishing early tomorrow, I am.”
“Not for nothing, Jimmy,” said Georgia. “But the last time you went fishing, all you caught was a cold.”
“I brought back three pounds of perch,” he said defensively.
Margaret leaned in low and aimed a backspin shot at the number-six ball. “Yes, you did.” She grinned. The ball thudded cleanly into the far right corner pocket with the white ball still in place. She dispatched two more balls in quick succession. “Cleaned, filleted, and wrapped—from Sal’s Seafood.”
“You’re not staying over?” asked Richie with disappointment.
The Fourth Angel Page 22
