3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  The streets nearby were crowded with pedestrians who stared at the gray ribbons of smoke puffing into the air. They were hushed and somber, not morbid gawkers come to rubberneck the gore but more like mourners come to pay their respects on hallowed ground. Gov. Paul Cellucci ordered all state flags to be flown at half-mast. At most of the fire stations in the commonwealth, the flags were lowered as a matter of course. Pres. Bill Clinton wrote a letter of condolence, which was printed in the local paper:

  Hillary and I were deeply saddened to learn of the tragedy that has struck the Worcester community. The six firefighters, who are now missing and presumed dead, valiantly put their lives on the line in the effort to save others and protect their city. Their courageous service reminds us all of the tremendous commitment and sacrifice made by the thousands of firefighters across America who risk their own lives every day to protect our communities.

  Ordinary folks sent condolences and cash. An anonymous donor wrote a $10,000 check to the Salvation Army Saturday morning, and by the afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the first alarm, the Telegram & Gazette collected $1,200 for a relief fund the newspaper had established the night before. Eventually, the paper would collect more than $6 million.

  The men in the ruins, grimy and tired, didn't know any of that, not then. And they might have been chagrined. Friday night they'd been waiting to eat dinner on secondhand furniture in stations where, not so many years before, they'd been told to keep the doors closed on even the hottest summer nights so testy taxpayers wouldn't see them sitting around, waiting for the bell to go off. Friday night, they sent out trucks with too few men and with radios that shorted out when they got wet. Friday night, they had to borrow a thermal imager from a neighboring town, a piece of equipment that might have helped them see through the smoke, might have saved two men if they'd been able to crawl in with it an hour earlier. Friday night, they had gone into a death trap that had stood vacant for a decade, that was supposed to have been shuttered tight, an aging hulk on a decrepit block in which the Worcester Redevelopment Authority had invested $89,000—the price of three thermal imagers—to study whether a private developer could convert it into a biotech facility. Friday night, Paul and Jerry and Tommy and Tim and Jay and Joe were alive.

  Saturday morning, the president was calling them heroes and the governor was in a state of official mourning and people were throwing money at their corpses. It was all well intended, but disquieting just the same.

  Darkness fell. Lights were attached to large stands, their beams directed into the warehouse, illuminating the wreckage and the men who scoured it. Mike could feel the fatigue now, his reflexes slowing, his mind blurring. He decided to get some rest, come back early the next morning. From the look of things, there would still be work to do then, enough digging for everyone.

  He got home and took a long, hot shower, scrubbing off the filth, trying to wash away all the dirty traces of the night. He thought about the details of the recovery, how cranes and back-hoes could do some of the work, but that most of it would have to be done with shovels and sifting screens. He was still thinking like a tactician, professional, focused.

  After he dried himself and dressed, he padded through the den and into the living room and eased into an easy chair covered with orange velour, so old that it had molded to his shape. The chair faced the front window. He stared at the Lyonses’ house, his mind numb.

  The phone rang. He picked it up. “Hello?”

  It was Kate, his oldest daughter. “Hi, Daddy.”

  Mike heard her voice and started to cry. He sat in his chair, facing the window, and wept.

  19

  MIKE STEERED HIS GOLD BUICK AROUND THE LONG WAY, TO the far end of Franklin Street, avoiding the avenues that the police had blocked off. It was early, about nine o'clock Sunday morning, almost forty hours after the first alarm rang for Worcester Cold Storage. As he drove down a long hill, he could see the warehouse smoldering beneath him, a pall of yellow-gray smoke held low to the ground under an unusually bright December sky. Fire and brimstone, he thought. The Building from Hell.

  Joanne sat next to him. She eyed the building, remembered when Mike had told her how badly it scared him. She wondered if it had known, if the warehouse itself was alive and malevolent, if it had been stalking her husband, her friends, all those men. She watched the steam and the smoke pulse out of the ruins. It was breathing, hissing at her. “It's a devil,” she muttered. She hardened her glare. “That building's a devil.” She decided she would stare it down, stand on the street and watch it finally die.

  Mike parked the Buick fifty yards from the warehouse and walked the rest of the way to the command post in the parking lot opposite the A-B corner of the building. He wasn't scheduled to work, and, in his jeans and sweatshirt, he wasn't dressed for it. But he'd been drawn to the building, compelled to be there when his men were finally found. He'd stowed his gear—boots, coat, pants, helmet—in the trunk of the Buick.

  Most of the B wall had been torn down and part of the A wall, opening a gaping wound in the corner of the warehouse. He leaned against the chain-link fence, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at the wreckage. The devastation was immense and thorough, an isolated landscape from Dresden or Berlin, something he'd only seen in black-and-white war footage. Charred timbers, big as maples, jutted up at sharp angles through mangled coils of refrigeration piping and tangles of wire and heaps of shattered concrete, all of it covered with slushy cinders. Near the center wall, men played streams of water on spot fires and flare-ups, and the steam hung over the detritus like white flak smoke. And that was only half of it: the rest of the building lay behind the firewall, waiting to be exposed.

  They were all dead. Mike had suspected that since Friday night, but now he was certain. The warehouse had become a crematorium, its thick shell holding in the heat, its insides disintegrating, crumbling, melting. For a few deadly hours, the building had functioned like the woodstove in his kitchen, air flowing into a combustion chamber, alchemizing into fire, exhausting through the chimney. Yet the destruction was contained in the firebox, a controlled burn that never spread to the counters or the china hutch. When the logs had been consumed, Mike swept out the ash. His men would be sweeping ash from Worcester Cold Storage.

  He watched a dozen men scramble across the jumble on the deck, which is what the second floor, where the others had collapsed, was called. The search for bodies was a deliberate process, conducted in carefully organized phases to both preserve any evidence of arson and to retrieve human remains. After the two exterior walls had been pulled down, the men divided the deck into sections. They did a surface search first, walking through the debris, stepping around beams and loose bricks, scanning for a hose, a helmet, a badge, anything that might reveal a body. Then cranes lifted away the largest pieces of wreckage and deposited them on Franklin Street. After another surface search, the loose material was scooped out with a clamshell bucket and piled in the street. Firemen raked through the mounds, picking out the larger pieces, spreading the rest out to look for clues and remains. The smaller fragments were sifted through a screen of half-inch mesh and, finally, quarter-inch mesh.

  It was filthy and miserable work, picking through wet ashes and warm bricks under a raw December sky. The men were wet and sore and grieving, and a few were suffering wounds from the firefight on Friday night. Robert A. had sucked in so much smoke, had scarred his throat so badly, that he couldn't speak and wouldn't be able to for another six weeks. Mike Coakley ignored the sharp ache stabbing at his chest, the result of three ribs he'd torn out of place. But every man from the Worcester Fire Department wanted to be on the deck, his fingers blistered and chapped, scraping through the ruins for his comrades. When the crane swung the bucket clear, the officer in charge on the deck would yell “Go!” and every man would scurry across the deck and dig like mad. “Ho!” meant clear the area, that the crane was coming back, that men shouldn't be lingering in its path. Mike noticed no one moved as
quickly getting out of the way.

  An hour after Mike arrived, a few minutes after ten o'clock, one of the deputy chiefs ambled up to him. “Mike, I hate to do this to you,” Walter Giard said. “But we need you. We could really use you up there.”

  Mike jerked away from the fence. “Absolutely,” he said. “I just didn't know how you wanted to work this, if you wanted the regular shifts working. But I've got my gear in the car.”

  He turned toward his Buick, took a step. A flicker in his peripheral vision, all the men on the deck converging on a single point, like bees to a hive. He wheeled, sprinted toward the warehouse. “What's going on?” he asked the first man he saw.

  “We got one.”

  Mike ran up Franklin Street, flung open the trunk, kicked off his civilian shoes. He stepped into his bunker pants, rammed his feet into his boots, and started running back toward the warehouse, pulling his coat on between strides, the heavy gear slowing his pace. He went to the B wall, near where the overhead doors were hidden behind the rubble, and hustled up a long yellow ladder that angled up to the deck. The other men were gathered approximately halfway between the remnants of the B wall and the fire wall, but closer to the front, the Franklin Street side. Mike reconstructed the building from memory. The stairwell, the only exit down from the fifth floor, was about thirty feet away. The man they'd found had been only ten big steps away from getting out alive.

  Scorched mortar crunched under Mike's boots. He noticed the site had fallen church quiet, the rumbling cranes shut down, the hissing hoses switched off. It was difficult to see the corpse, to separate it from the burnt shards surrounding and partially covering it. Men dug gently, lifting pieces of rubble aside, careful not to disturb the remains more than necessary.

  Fire did ugly things to the human body, private things, damage that no one should be forced or maybe even allowed to see. When it was one of their own, privacy was even more important. Below, at the corner of Arctic and Franklin, the aluminum ladder from the back of Tommy Spencer's truck, Ladder 2, slowly extended into the air. Three men climbed out on it with massive tarps. They draped them over the stick, secured them with rope, let them hang in the still and smoky air like a giant curtain, blocking the view into the warehouse.

  It took fifteen minutes to untangle the body from the debris. Up close, seeing how big the man was, most of the men guessed they'd found Tim Jackson.

  A body bag and a stretcher were brought to the deck. The remains were freed, then tenderly packed into the black plastic bag. District Chief Larry Mulry blinked back tears as the bag was placed on the stretcher. “No,” he said. “He's not going down in that fucking body bag. No one's going to see him like that.”

  Worcester firemen had no protocol for recovering their own dead. They were improvising, cribbing from terrible scenes they'd witnessed somewhere else, Boston, New York, and Chicago. But no one argued with Chief Mulry. The men waited on the deck, behind the drape hanging from Ladder 2, until a red firehouse blanket was brought up to cover Tim's body. Then four men from his station, Grove Street, lifted the stretcher and carried it toward the B wall. Mike walked in front, leading the procession. At the edge of the deck, a second ladder had been placed parallel to the first, and firemen from Grove Street and Central Street passed the stretcher to the ground.

  At the bottom, the rest of the firemen, paramedics, and police officers stood in two lines, forming a corridor that led from the base of the warehouse to the ambulance. A reverend waited partway down the line to say a prayer over the body. Then Mike led them to the ambulance, where the men slid the stretcher inside.

  From the moment his body had been found, only Worcester firemen touched Timmy Jackson's body.

  For hours, the search focused in the same area, the clamshell bucket closing, rising, swinging away, men monkeying back to the dig site. There should have been another body nearby. Firemen worked in pairs, would have clung to each other in the dark. But there was no one else beneath that particular mound of debris. Tim might have become separated from Tom Spencer in the roaring black. Or he might have died somewhere else, closer to the fire wall or more toward the center of the building, and his corpse slid to its eventual position as each of the floors collapsed. No one knew, had any way of knowing. So they dug deeper, through ten feet of debris.

  Mike stayed on the deck through most of the morning and into the afternoon. An hour or so before dusk, he climbed down to Franklin Street to rest. Near the fence surrounding the parking lot across the street, he saw one of the men from the Fire Investigations Unit.

  “You guys got any idea how this started?” Mike asked the investigator.

  He looked to either side, made sure no civilians or reporters were within earshot. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “We got two people, and we got confessions from both of them. But keep it quiet. We aren't releasing it yet.”

  Mike nodded. He had only one question. “Was it intentional?”

  The investigator shook his head. “No,” he said. “It doesn't appear so.”

  Finding Tom Levesque and Julie Ann Barnes hadn't taken long. Early Friday night, before the evacuation signal was sounded, two detectives from the Worcester Police Department's arson squad, Michael Sabatalo and Michael Mulvey, canvassed the bystanders and onlookers, ferreting out witnesses. One of the people they spoke to was Bill McNeil, who ran an all-night diner called Bill's Place on the corner of Franklin and Grafton streets, on the other side of the highway from Worcester Cold Storage. Bill had told the police early on that homeless people lived in the warehouse; by Saturday morning, he was wracked with guilt, convinced—wrongly— that none of the firemen would have gone into the building if he'd kept his mouth shut. For the next week, he fed any man who asked for free.

  When the detectives came to see him Friday night, Bill gave them two names: Tom Levesque, who he'd hired to wash dishes for a few weeks the previous summer, and Julie Ann Barnes. Sabatalo and Mulvey found them both the following morning, Saturday, and, in separate interviews, they both told essentially the same story. Tom had wanted to have sex, they argued, then struggled, a candle tipped, the fire spread, they left. The only difference was what time all that had happened. Tom said about four-thirty, but Julie thought it was about six o'clock.

  They weren't arrested right away, though, and hadn't been by Sunday afternoon. The detectives were still building their case. They talked to Scott, a man Julie dated for a few weeks in September. He confirmed that Tom and Julie had lived in the warehouse, and described the squalid office where they kept their bed, the heater, and the candles. They talked to Bruce, with whom Julie was staying in room 410 at the Regency Suites Hotel in Main South. He knew about the fire because the window in his room faced the orange glow searing the sky above the highway. He said that Julie watched the fire with him.

  Mike listened to the rough outlines of the story. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Maybe it would have been better if the building had been torched, if an arsonist had lit it up for insurance or revenge. Then there would have been a villain, a bona fide criminal, a murderer. There would have been someone to blame. Instead, there was only a pair of vagrants, pathetic, almost pitiable. He could imagine them, unwashed and disheveled, tussling amid the filth in the warehouse. If they'd reported it earlier, if Tom was right and the fire had burned for almost two hours before the first alarm rang, would it have made a difference? Mike was sure it would have. But the worst thing they'd done was run away. Mike couldn't help but wonder whether six of his men were dead because two misfits were too scared to dial 911.

  He shook his head as he walked away. “Son of a bitch,” he said again. “What a stupid, stupid thing.”

  Emily McGuirk understood why her daddy couldn't come home yet. She had figured out exactly what had happened and she wasn't happy about it but she understood and she was very proud of her father.

  She knew there had been a bad fire in a warehouse and that her father had gone into the building with his friend Jay Lyons. When they were inside, Jay
got hurt. Her father would never leave his friend alone, especially if he was hurt. So that's why he hadn't come home. He was in the warehouse, next to Jay, waiting for the other firemen to dig them free.

  Joe McGuirk had been gone a long time, though, almost four days. Emily hadn't seen her father since she kissed him at the bottom of the stairs on Friday afternoon. Her mother had let her sleep with her and Everett every night, the three of them curled together in Linda's bed. That helped a little. But she was still upset.

  “I'm so worried about Daddy,” she told her mom on Tuesday. “Because now he's missed breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast. That's”—she counted, added everything up— “four breakfasts and three lunches and three dinners.”

  Linda hugged her daughter, pulled her close. “I know,” she whispered in her ear. “I'm worried about Daddy, too.”

  When the sun went down, banks of heavy-duty lights threw a lunar-white shine across the deck. The timbers and coils and men broke the light, cast strange shadows onto the rubble and the remnants of the walls. The searching continued around the clock, all through the night, stopping only once, before dawn on Monday, when it appeared the firewall might topple down, eighty feet of bricks and mortar crashing onto the deck. The digging started again the next morning, after a giant crane removed the wall.

  Five men were still missing. There had been no other body near Tim Jackson. Two dogs, trained to find cadavers, prowled the ruins now, their snouts low, near the ash, sniffing. Every so often, one of them would loiter over a certain spot, then take a step backward and sit, the signal that she had smelled something human. The men would focus on that area, scooping with small hand trowels and their fingers. But they found only bits of canvas hose, nozzles, scraps of leather, items that had only been touched by humans. After almost three days of painstaking excavation, the men were increasingly frustrated. Yet they still jockeyed for shifts on the deck. No one wanted to quit.