Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  The words stopped Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan cold. She leaned over the department radio that straddled the space between the Chevy Caprice’s two front seats. The battalion aide’s voice was flat and emotionless, colored only by a heavy New York accent. He gave no specifics over the public airwaves about the nature of the injuries. Then again, when it came to firefighters, no one ever did.

  Georgia flipped the light-bar switch and turned on the siren. “Can’t you drive any faster?” she snapped at her partner, Randy Carter. Normally, she chided him for speeding.

  Carter stepped on the accelerator and zoomed through a light on Hudson Street that had just turned red. Georgia shivered, not sure if it was the bitter early December air seeping through the Caprice’s vents that brought on her chill or the sound of those bleak words across the airwaves. Carter’s lean, dark face seemed to pale at the wheel. She could tell he was thinking the same thing: Not again. Dear God, not so soon.

  “I wish I’d stayed on vacation,” Georgia mumbled, tossing an empty Styrofoam coffee cup in back. Not that it was much of a vacation. The weather stank. Richie was in school. Mac couldn’t finagle any time off. The most Georgia had managed was a long weekend out in Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, but it had rained most of the time they were there. Richie ended up glued to his GameBoy. Georgia ended up glued to a VCR, watching movies she’d had the good sense not to pay nine bucks for when they were first released.

  Carter’s vacation, on the other hand, appeared to have been quite good. Three weeks in sunny Florida had caused his skin to take on a rich chocolate color. His face had filled out from good food and regular sleep. And, up until the radio transmission a few minutes earlier, he’d begun to smile again. He hadn’t done much of that lately. No one had.

  “A couple of our guys probably took too much smoke—that’s all,” said Carter, laying on his soft southern drawl the way he always did in stressful situations. “I reckon we’re just imagining the worst. Like the time Sal Giordano forgot to take his car off the Staten Island Ferry.”

  Georgia allowed a faint smile at the memory of Giordano lumbering into Manhattan base one evening while the Coast Guard was out dredging the waters for his body. Everyone worried that he’d slipped or jumped. For months after that, Giordano couldn’t come to work without finding tuna fish on his desk or in his drawers. Sometimes the marshals were even nice enough to leave it in the can.

  The battalion aide’s voice came over the radio again, jarring Georgia back to the present. “Battalion Two to dispatch, I need the mixer off.”

  Mixer off meant the conversation would not be broadcast over the airwaves. It was private—between the chief and the dispatcher—and private conversations were always bad news. A cold wad of bile gathered in Georgia’s stomach.

  “It feels like my father all over again,” she said softly.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as all that,” said Carter, but he took the corner sharply. The Caprice’s wheels squealed on the pavement.

  “One hell of a Christmas present for the family if it is,” said Georgia.

  “Your dad died in the autumn, right?”

  “October twenty-fifth,” said Georgia. “The kid who set the fire didn’t even miss Halloween.”

  “They ever punish him?”

  “I don’t know. Counseling, I guess. He was only six at the time—too young to charge. I don’t think he even spoke English.”

  Carter turned onto a wide, V-shaped swath of cobblestoned streets that formed the southeastern end of the meatpacking district. In a storefront window once used as a butcher’s shop, several garishly bright oil colors competed for space. Carter took them in and shook his head.

  “I remember when there was nothing down here but gay bars, cross-dressing prostitutes and guys in bloody aprons with meat cleavers. Some of my best informants came from this neighborhood.”

  “Things sure have changed,” said Georgia, taking in two art galleries, a dance club and a couple of upscale restaurants all within a block of one another. The graffiti on the rolldown security gates had largely disappeared, as had the piles of trash and rusted oil drums that the homeless once used for outdoor fires.

  They turned onto West Thirteenth Street. Fire trucks, ambulances and police cruisers were lined up beside a two-story redbrick warehouse. Smoke the color of spoiled milk rose from an open cellar hatch. The fire was out, and it didn’t look like it had extended beyond the basement. Silver garlands fluttered from a canopy above a former loading dock, and the mullioned window that had replaced a garage door still sported sheer white curtains.

  “Café Treize,” Carter mumbled, reading the sign. “This place used to be Weingarten’s Wholesale Meats. And then it was a gay bar called the Meat Market.”

  “It’s a really hot French restaurant now,” said Georgia. “Madonna eats here. So does Julia Roberts. I read it in People magazine.”

  Carter gave Georgia a bored look. Celebrity talk never impressed him. “They should’ve been here when it was a gay bar,” he said. “Down in the basement, they used to have all these little cubicles where the guys used to, um…” Carter shrugged and looked away, embarrassed. At fifty-nine, he was old enough to be Georgia’s father. Still, she loved to break his chops.

  “And how would you know about that?” she teased.

  “I hear stories,” he said indignantly. “Y’all didn’t have to ever go down there to know about it. The Meat Market’s owner secretly wired up all these cameras in the cubicles. Sleazeball used to sell the videos to private collectors.”

  Carter parked the car down the street from the building so as not to block the rescue vehicles. A cold wind whipped off the choppy waters of the Hudson River as they got out of the car. They grabbed their turnout coats, helmets and toolbox from the trunk.

  “How bad do you think it is?” Georgia asked. Carter didn’t answer, but all the Florida sunshine had left his face. Georgia followed his line of vision to a dark blue van marked Medical Examiner. Somebody was dead, and judging from the somber looks on firefighters’ faces, Georgia had a sinking feeling it was one of their own.

  They found the deputy chief at the back of the warehouse, in an alleyway littered with broken bottles that glittered in the sharp morning sun. Broward was his name. He’d been a high-ranking chief longer than Georgia had been on the job. He gave them the faintest nod of his head as they walked over. He knew they had a job to do, but his men were hurting and that was all he cared about right now. Georgia would have felt the same way.

  “Two of our guys from Ladder Seventeen didn’t make it,” he said through lips that barely moved. He squinted down a set of concrete steps to the warehouse’s back door. “The probie got out. He’s being treated by EMS for minor burns and smoke inhalation.”

  “What happened?” asked Georgia. She and Carter took turns leading investigations. This fire was hers. Oh, joy.

  “Rubbish fire in the basement,” said Broward. “Captain and two firefighters got separated from their life rope and couldn’t find their way out. The basement’s heavily partitioned. No one could find them.”

  “Any evidence of a break-in?” asked Georgia.

  “The back door had been forced before we got here. The lock was broken.”

  Georgia frowned in the direction of the cellar. There was still a lot of smoke. She could only see a short way, but even in that distance, she noted the unmistakable oxidized heads of sprinklers in the ceiling.

  “The sprinklers weren’t working?”

  “We had a busted water main in the neighborhood two weeks ago,” grunted Broward. “City turned the water off. The landlord may never have turned the sprinkler line back on.” The chief shook his head in disgust. He knew as well as Georgia did that a working sprinkler probably would have been able to put out that fire in minutes.

  “Surely there was a valve in the basement somewhere,” said Georgia. “The landlord would’ve known the sprinkler wasn’t operational.”

  Broward gave Georgia a
n irritated look. Carter stepped in.

  “A lot of these owners, they’re afraid that the water damage from a nuisance fire will end up being more expensive to repair than the fire itself, so if the city forgets to tell them to turn their sprinkler system back on, they don’t argue.”

  Broward nodded. “Owner probably figured that the most he’d lose would be a few crates of vegetables.” He shook his head sadly. “Instead, we lost two of our finest men.”

  The chief’s words sounded more resigned than enraged. It was the way all the men were now—even the ones who hadn’t experienced that terrible September day. They had all borne too much for too long.

  “The men who died,” said Georgia. “Are they still in the basement?”

  “I’ve got companies digging them out.”

  Georgia peered down the open basement door into the dim, soggy interior. The smoke had cleared. Firefighters were everywhere. They all had a downcast tilt to their eyes and a grayness to their faces. No one was smoking or conversing. An aide came over to ask the chief a question and he excused himself. Georgia went to descend the stairs. Carter put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Go easy, Skeehan,” he warned her. “Give the men space, okay? Emotions are running high down there. You know as well as I do that no one here gives a hoot and a holler about our investigation. Far as they’re concerned, nothing we do is gonna bring their brothers back.”

  3

  They looked like they were sleeping. True, their faces were slightly swollen from the heat and black with soot. The backs of their turnout coats had a ragged coarseness to them from the burning debris. But otherwise, Captain Joseph Russo and Firefighter Tony Fuentes looked like they should have been able to get up, dust off their gear and walk out of the basement of the Café Treize. There was still the glow of life in those grimy, handsome faces, a glow that made it impossible to comprehend that they would never go home to their families again. It was a hell of a piece of news to have to deliver three weeks before Christmas.

  Georgia heard some of the firefighters speak about Russo and Fuentes in traded whispers as they gently scooped debris off them. Both were husbands and fathers. Both were veterans of the Gulf War. Russo’s son had just received a football scholarship to Notre Dame. Fuentes’s oldest daughter was dancing in a school production of The Nutcracker this weekend. His wife was expecting their fourth child in May. He had three girls. He had been hoping for a boy.

  Georgia kept her distance, as Carter had cautioned. Like every fire marshal in New York City, she had once been a firefighter. But the dividing line between investigator and rescuer was keenly felt at a time like this, especially when the investigator was a woman.

  The men had nearly finished unearthing Russo and Fuentes when Carter exchanged nods with a hulking figure in a helmet and turnout coat. He had a thick mustache and a broad, grizzled face smeared with grime. The dirty white leather patch on the front of his black helmet had a “17” on it. He was either the truck’s roof man or the rig’s chauffeur.

  “O’Dwyer,” Carter mumbled softly, inching toward him. “How y’all holding up?”

  “Three hundred and forty-three men die in one fucking day,” said the old veteran, “and you think you can’t grieve for two more. But if it’s one man or a hundred—a year or ten years later—it feels just the same.”

  “I know,” said Carter. They shared a look that Georgia had seen before in firefighters who had lived through the day the World Trade Towers collapsed. No matter how much time went by, some part of them could never heal.

  O’Dwyer ran a hand down his face and tried to shrug off the memory. “Anyway, it’s not me I’m worried about,” he said. “It’s the kid—the probie.”

  “Where is he?” Georgia asked, joining the conversation carefully. She was heartened when O’Dwyer made eye contact with her. Carter, with thirty-one years in the FDNY, knew everyone on this job. He could go places that Georgia, a woman and a relative rookie with only eight years in the fire department, could not.

  “With EMS,” O’Dwyer told her. Then he leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Already there’s a chill in the air, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  Georgia frowned. “Why is that?”

  “It was the kid’s first real fire. Russo and Fuentes were pros. There’s a feeling that maybe the kid…maybe he held ’em back.” O’Dwyer massaged the back of his bull neck. His eyes locked on Carter’s. Georgia sensed that the old veteran might have worked with Carter when he was a firefighter. He trusted Carter not to traumatize the young firefighter further.

  “We’ll go easy on him, Jack,” Carter promised.

  “What’s his name?” asked Georgia.

  “Hanlon. Douglas Hanlon. His father’s a fire captain in Queens.”

  “Seamus.” Georgia whispered the name. The lining of her gut felt like someone had just carved a set of initials in it. The last shred of Florida sunshine left Randy Carter’s face.

  “You know him?” asked O’Dwyer, bouncing a look from Georgia to Carter.

  “A family friend,” Georgia replied. She wished she knew Captain Seamus Hanlon less well—wished she hadn’t walked around his empty kitchen only this past summer, and felt the palpable loneliness of a man who had lost his wife and his best friend, Jimmy Gallagher, in the space of a year. She was glad he hadn’t lost his son as well, though it was too soon to know whether the young man who came out of that building would ever be the same as the young man who went into it.

  The firefighters were getting ready to carry their brothers out. Carter touched O’Dwyer’s sleeve.

  “Do me a favor, Jack? Tell them we just need to take a quick look at Russo and Fuentes before you move ’em.”

  “No pictures,” O’Dwyer growled. Georgia looked at Carter. They always took pictures of fire victims. It was an essential part of reconstructing an arson scene. But Carter simply nodded. This was not the time to push.

  “No pictures, Jack. Of course,” he said.

  Georgia and Carter didn’t speak again until Russo and Fuentes had been carried out of the basement. They were by themselves in a storage cubicle ten feet from the back door, surrounded by charred shelves and exploded canned goods. They’d been in about a dozen identical cubicles in the space of ten minutes. Café Treize’s owner had obviously never taken down the partitions from the days when the warehouse was a gay bar. In the smoke and heat, those flimsy Sheetrock dividers had become a fatal maze of dead ends.

  “Did you notice that neither Russo nor Fuentes was wearing his mask?” asked Georgia.

  Carter shined his flashlight at a soggy, blackened piece of cardboard on the concrete floor. It was the bottom of a carton of paper towels.

  “Their air tanks were empty,” said Carter. “Burning debris blocked their escape. They had a choice: Die from the heat and flames banking down on them, or take a couple of quick breaths of smoke and get it over with. I’d have done the same thing.”

  Georgia moved her flashlight beam up the charred paneling and across the concrete subflooring from the main floor above. The dropped ceiling that hid the ductwork had burned away entirely.

  “This place was like a pizza oven,” said Carter. “Concrete on the bottom. Concrete on top. Brick walls all around. You won’t see any fire damage upstairs. The concrete contained it. But it killed our brothers. Baked them alive.”

  Georgia peered into the ductwork. “There’s a lot of wiring up there for a warehouse basement. Maybe a circuit got overloaded.”

  Carter examined the wires. They were burned at multiple points along a continuous cable, rather than in one spot. “The blowouts are more consistent with fire damage,” he said. “I don’t think an electrical overload was the cause of the fire.”

  Georgia studied the burned cardboard box of paper towels. She shone her flashlight on the concrete ceiling directly above. A section of the ceiling about the size of a manhole cover had turned flaky and white—a condition known as “spalling,” which occurs at prolonged high tempe
ratures. “The fire seems to have been at its most intense in this room,” said Georgia. “In fact, right above this box of paper towels.”

  Carter took in the box, then slammed a gloved hand against the wall. “Dang,” he said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “These things never are.” Georgia thought he was talking about Russo and Fuentes.

  “No,” he said. “I mean literally. Look at this place. There’s nothing in this room that would spontaneously ignite. No shorted-out wires. No solvents. No evidence of a smoking accident. The back door was forced. Everything points to an arson.”

  “I agree,” said Georgia.

  “Yeah, but you saw those cubicles back there, Skeehan. There were cleaning solvents and cooking oils and linens stacked a foot high. Anybody looking to torch this place had his pick of highly combustible materials not ten feet from where we’re standing. Yet he didn’t use it—why?”

  “’Cause this was fast,” said Georgia. “Force the back door, drop a match in the paper towels and leave.”

  “But if the sprinklers had been working, what would that have accomplished? Heck, the fire would’ve probably gone out before it had even finished consuming the box of paper towels.”

  Georgia nodded. “Then the torch knew the sprinklers had been shut down. It’s an inside job.”

  “Yeah, but if it was an inside job, then the torch also would have known about the solvents ten feet in. He could’ve taken the whole place out with just a few more minutes of effort.”

  “You think maybe he just wanted to send a message?” asked Georgia.

  “It makes sense,” said Carter. “The torch forces his way in, drops a match into the paper towels, then splits,” said Carter. “Only he doesn’t know the sprinklers have been shut down.”

  “And a misdemeanor nuisance fire turns into a double homicide,” said Georgia. “The press is going to be all over this one. We’ve got to get to Seamus’s son before those vultures do.”