Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin Narrated by Nicol Zanzarella

Overview

As Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan investigates the deaths of two doctors, both victims of "flashover" fires and on the board approving "line of duty" compensation for disabled fire fighters, her whole world is shattered when her boyfriend and fellow marshal Mac Marenko is found murdered in her best friend's apartment.

Editorial Reviews

Booklist

The appealing main character and the fast pace will keep readers turning the pages into the wee hours...

Bookpage

Deftly drawn, Flashover's believable characters drive the action to the very last page.

Publishers Weekly

In this eagerly anticipated but disappointing follow-up to The Fourth Angel, whatever foundations Chazin might have laid for a good thriller get buried beneath an exasperatingly overwritten and overwrought tale marred by contrived plot mechanisms. Fire marshal Georgia Skeehan and her veteran sidekick, Randy Carter, are called to investigate a fire that took the life of a retired doctor with a history of denying pensions to firefighters disabled in the line of duty. To complicate matters, Georgia's best friend, NYPD detective Connie Ruiz, confirms that there is talk of a bomb threat to a fuel pipeline under the city and that whoever is behind it knew the retired doctor. Fearing the fatal fire connects to other doctors formerly associated with the FDNY, they rush across town too late to save a second M.D. from a similar fate, and Mac Marenko, Georgia's supervisor and lover, accuses her of negligence. The entire situation ignites when Connie mysteriously disappears and Mac is found in her bullet-riddled, blood-splattered apartment, with no memory of what happened. Despite efforts to discourage her investigation, Georgia follows a trail of clues unearthing a connection between a toxic New York warehouse fire in the late 1970s and the current mayor's plans to erect a new football stadium on the site. Politics, greed, betrayal and cold-blooded murder: sadly, the elements of a dark, suspenseful story become ashes on a pyre of pulpy melodrama and artless crafting. And the somewhat tasteless however well-intended listing of all 343 members of the FDNY who died in the World Trade Center disaster may strike some as rather inappropriate for the dedication page of a commercial thriller. (May) Forecast: The Fourth Angel's success and FDNY's heightened fame will draw in new readers and bring back the old ones, but Georgia's sophomore adventure is a bumpy ride. Everything research, description, dialogue feels overdone, and could dampen sales.. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Spunky Fire Marshal Georgia Sheehan copes with a vengeful arsonist, a rocky love affair, a thorny career path, and tainted brass—in a satisfying sequel to last year's The Fourth Angel. Two doctors, known to each other, are killed by fires set in their respective homes only hours apart—puzzling fires, the precise causes not immediately apparent. But it isn't until Georgia learns more about how the docs were connected that she gets that first unsettling whiff of arson. Before retirement, both doctors served on the One-B Board, a panel viewed darkly throughout the New York City Fire Department for the austerity of its dealings with compensation matters. Further, her veteran partner informs her, both were notorious "for turning down injured firefighters for line-of-duty pensions." The idea that one of those rejected might be seeking vigilante justice is difficult to avoid. Nonetheless, Georgia learns that it's an idea anathema to several of her bosses for reasons that have to do with the way power corrupts. Soon enough, she's bumping into secret agendas every which way, and people who care about her are lining up to warn her off. Moving discreetly—she does understand that her career is at stake—she takes awhile to uncover the cover-up, but in the meantime there are all those auxiliary worries heaped on her plate. Like, for instance, the fact that she might be pregnant. Then, suddenly, Georgia's investigation, sub rosa as much of it is, takes a violent twist in a terrifying direction and she finds herself hunting for a vanished best friend, hoping desperately that she's still alive, and, if she isn't, that the murderer isn't who Georgia's scared stiff it might be. Authoritative settings—Chazinis married to a veteran firefighter—and an extremely likable heroine are enough to survive even a wildly melodramatic climax.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178759141
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Series:	Georgia Skeehan FDNY Thriller , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

At first, she was aware of nothing. Not the feathery darkness that stole across her closed bedroom window. Not the bitter smell that blanketed the lilac potpourri on her dresser. Not the odd way shadows seemed to flicker up her heavy floral drapes and across the dentil moldings on the ten-foot ceiling. Hers was the perfect blackness and stillness of deep sleep. The sleep without dreams. The sleep of death.

But gradually, something hot permeated that cocoon Dr. Louise Rosen found herself in. She felt the heat pressing down on her with physical force, tunneling into her unconscious. It curled the downy fluff on her arms until each hair felt as coarse as a steel scouring pad. She coughed violently, as if someone were trying to shove a towel down her throat. Her nostrils stung. Her airways began to spasm. She forced her eyes open. She saw what instinct had already told her: her bedroom was on fire.

Get out. Get to the door. Actions came slowly. Words, not at all. The smoke blackened, eclipsing everything in the room, sealing off the Manhattan streetlights below. She couldn't see the bedroom door, couldn't even recall closing it. She didn't have the energy to crawl to it, much less open it. Wisps of flame darted across the ceiling. There were jagged fingers of orange climbing up her drapes, devouring a padded chair in the corner. She tumbled off the bed, hoping to hide from the heat. Even here, on the floor, it bore down hard on her tender skin, blistering it. Her hair became as coarse and brittle as straw. She felt as if nails straight from a blast furnace were being driven through her flesh.

Got...to...got to-what? She couldn't remember the sequence of steps needed to get to the bedroom door. Fifty-six years of living, a Columbia University medical degree, and it had all fizzled in the space of a heartbeat. She wasn't even sure, if pressed right now, that she could remember her name. The pain was excruciating, tearing into her flesh like a pack of wild dogs. A dress she had tossed near the windowsill burst into flames, as if an invisible hand had just taken a blowtorch to it. She wanted to scream, but her throat had swollen up too much to make a sound. Skin hung from her fingers like wet tissue paper.

Hide. Got...to...hide. She rolled under the bed and lay on her stomach, her hands protecting her face. She was playing a deadly game of limbo now, trying to make her body as flat as possible to escape the descending curtain of heat. It banked lower and lower, like a murderer working his way down a flight of stairs. First the paint on the ceiling blistered. Then the pictures on the walls began to melt. Next came the lampshades. Then one by one, the bottles of perfume on her dresser began to shatter as if they were being picked off in a shooting gallery. The heat was on top of her now, sizzling like hot butter across the surface of the mattress. Soon, there would be nothing in the room that wasn't burning up. Nothing.

And then she heard it-a popping like gunfire, then cracks like footsteps on a frozen lake. Her bedroom window had shattered. The smoke, so black before, began to thin. The heat seemed to hiccup for a moment. But it lasted for less than half a minute before a new and louder roar took its place. A fiery cyclone. She couldn't see it, but she knew by the sounds of breaking glass that nearly everything in the room was igniting. The bed frame collapsed and the box spring ticking pressed down into her seared flesh.

She became vaguely aware of another noise beneath the roar. Someone was kicking down her bedroom door. She heard a whoosh like a huge wave. It hit the ceiling then fell like rain upon the floor. Then the wave subsided. The heat should've washed away as well, but it had crawled so deep inside of her, she felt branded on the soul. Before that moment, she believed the pain could get no worse. But she was wrong.

Someone doused the mattress and box spring with water, then lifted them off the floor. There was a tearing sound, like a Band-aid being ripped off hairy skin. The ticking had melted to the flesh on Louise Rosen's back. The movement of the box spring ripped it off her, right down to the nerve endings. Pain tore through the synapses of her brain, wiping out all other sensations. She knew no past, no future. She felt no joy or sadness, no hope, no will to survive. There was only a silent, unbearable agony. She couldn't even scream. Her throat had swollen up too much to make a sound.

"Hey, Cap, you better get on the radio. We got somebody," said an excited voice.

There was a murmur of other voices, a shuffle of heavy boots and then a long, slow, exhale before another, older voice spoke.

"Not for long."

2.

JUST A FEW misplaced embers from a smoldering cigarette. Fireflies on a hot August night. That's all a mattress fire was. A belch of black smoke. A long, slow burn. And pretty soon, someone was dead. Or in this case, damn close to it.

Georgia Skeehan gazed up at the apartment building from her fire department Chevy Caprice. Four stories above the hunter green entrance canopy, two upturned braids of soot streaked the white marble faade. It wasn't often she and her partner, Randy Carter, got called to a Park Avenue address.

On the sidewalk, a doorman in epaulettes watched a firefighter hose something down. Georgia didn't have to see what it was to know: the victim's mattress. It was a common sidewalk site in poor neighborhoods. Here, beside the prewar buildings of Manhattan's elite, it attracted ghoulish curiosity from spectators.

"Lady can afford Park Avenue," said Georgia. "She should be smart enough not to smoke in bed."

Carter ran a long, bony thumb and finger down the sides of his graying mustache and gazed at the crowd behind the police barricade. The pulsating red lights of rescue vehicles washed out the color of his dark, lined skin like overexposed film.

"Lady can afford Park Avenue," he shrugged. "She should be smart enough to get out of the city on a ninety-five-degree weekend."

"What does that say about us?" Georgia jabbed her finger at the air-conditioning button on their dark blue Caprice. Lukewarm, moldy-smelling air continued to pour from the vents. Even the silver chain she always wore was sticking to her skin. "Record-breaking heat wave and we get stuck with a November vacation slot and a toaster oven of a car."

"You think this is bad?" said Carter. "Wait 'til you step outside."

Georgia opened the door of the sedan. It was four-thirty in the morning and, still, the mid-August temperatures hovered near eighty degrees and the city's nicotine breath coated her skin like Vaseline. Static-filled voices from one of the fire engine's radios cut through the dark, humid night as sharply as a welder's torch. When she turned her head, Georgia caught the moldy cheese smell of ripe garbage from a can on the corner of Seventy-fourth Street. The contents of her stomach rolled about like marbles in a tin can. She hoped it was just the heat making her nauseous. Her period, which you could set a detonator by, was a week overdue. Don't even think about it, she told herself. She hadn't seen Mac Marenko in three days. She wouldn't begin to know how to tell him.

She and Carter made their way through the crowd just as two fire department EMTs emerged from the building wheeling a woman on a stretcher. The woman was badly burned and writhing in pain. She lifted an arm. It was black and flaky in some places, bright pink like chewed bubble gum in others. If the rest of her looked like that, she'd be dead within hours.

"Can she talk?" Georgia asked, hustling over to the EMTs as they loaded the victim into an ambulance.

"Honey," said one of the EMTs, a heavyset black woman, "She's lucky she can breathe." The EMT adjusted an oxygen mask around the victim's face. Her partner, a slight, Latino-looking man, injected a clear liquid into the victim's veins. Her burned skin balled up on his powder blue latex gloves like a label on a wet shampoo bottle. The smell of it-an odor like burned sugar and copper-hung in the air.

"You probably wouldn't have gotten much out of her anyway," said the man. "There were a lot of empty liquor bottles in her kitchen. A and E was looking at them."

"Dang," said Carter. He slapped his thigh in disgust at the mention of the Arson and Explosion Squad, a rival unit in the New York City Police Department. "Maybe we could actually do our jobs if the PD didn't always get there first." Although only fire marshals are allowed to examine physical evidence and make a determination of arson, nine-one-one dispatchers typically notify the NYPD of an emergency first. In higher profile cases, the resulting scramble over jurisdiction can turn into a political slugfest.

An urgent beep pierced the close air inside the ambulance. The Latino EMT furiously began chest compressions on the victim.

"Gotta go, guys," he said. "She's falling fast."

Georgia and Carter stepped back as the doors closed and the ambulance took off, cutting across a wide, nearly empty stretch of Park Avenue, lights and sirens at fever pitch.

The waterlogged queen-sized mattress lay behind them on the sidewalk, next to a pile of what looked like charred red blankets. An unburned area, resembling the shape of a body, marked the center. On each side of the unburned area, great wads of foam padding erupted like volcanic lava. Georgia pushed a foot on the mattress's edge, expecting the springs to have annealed-collapsed because of extended exposure to high heat. But the springs rebounded perfectly.

"Couldn't have been a very hot mattress fire," Georgia noted to Carter.

Carter shrugged. "If it was a mattress fire at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at the burns," he said. "They're even on both sides of the body outline."

Georgia could see Carter was right. If the victim had been smoking in bed, the burns should have been deeper on the side of the mattress where the cigarette fell. The victim's body would have acted as a firestop and kept the other side of the mattress from burning as badly. Georgia could think of dozens of explanations for the unusually even burn, but they were all conjecture at this point. If eighteen months as a fire marshal had taught her anything, it was not to get too caught up in the "what ifs" so early in a case.

She walked ahead of Carter into the lobby, past firefighters carrying out tools. The fluorescent yellow stripes on the men's bulky black turnout coats reflected the gleam of the chandelier, silently mocking its elegance like a pair of fuzzy dice in the window of a Mercedes. Georgia overheard snatches of conversation above the piecemeal crackle of radios. The rumor mill was going strong this week. The police commissioner had resigned to take a job in San Francisco and word was that William Lynch, the fire commissioner, might take his place.

"They could hold his freakin' farewell party in a phone booth," she heard one of the firefighters say. Lynch, a lawyer, was not a popular man with the FDNY's rank and file. Georgia always knew he'd move on. It was one of the reasons she'd kept her distance from him since her last big investigation in April. She knew she'd have to work with the people he'd alienated long after he was gone.

Georgia and Carter got the name of the victim from the doorman. It wasn't until they looked at the mailboxes in the lobby, however, that they realized she was a doctor. Louise Rosen, M.D., read her mailbox.

"She was burned so badly, it was hard to tell even how old she was," said Georgia.

"Mid to late fifties," mumbled Carter as they walked across a Persian rug and past two cream-colored damask couches. Carter pushed the elevator button.

"You know her age just by looking at her?"

He shrugged. "She's a doctor with bread, Skeehan. She's not twenty."

The elevator doors opened and Georgia found herself staring at two vaguely familiar, rough-hewn faces in silk-blend suits. Detectives from Arson and Explosion. The older detective, Phil Arzuti, was a lean, dark-haired man, a little on the haggard side, with a crooked, world-weary smile and bags under his eyes. He was reputed to be a first-rate poker player, and the few times Georgia had worked with him, she could see why. He exuded an air of nonchalance that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking. Georgia racked her brains to remember the name of his younger partner. Chris something. White? Williams? She saw Carter stiffen as the younger detective stepped out of the elevator and rocked on the balls of his feet.

"Well, whatta ya know. It's the Mod Squad," said Chris loudly. He was probably only in his mid-thirties, but he already wore the waistband of his pants at a downturned angle to accommodate the overhang of his gut. His blond hair had begun to recede at the temples. It contrasted oddly with his thick red mustache. "Hey, Pops," he said to Carter, "I thought they'd have put you out to pasture by now."

Carter's dark, basset-hound eyes seemed to crawl deeper into their sockets, and the lines on his face tightened as if attached to a winch.

"Somebody's got to get their hands dirty, Willard," Carter drawled as if he'd just come up from North Carolina last month instead of thirty-three years ago. "Can't all of us be worrying 'bout mussing up our hair"-he made a point of looking at the top of Chris Willard's head-"or what's left of it, anyway, for a collar."

"Collar? The Bureau of Fire Investigation's got no collar here, old man," said Willard. "Chick got tanked on Jack Daniel's, then roasted herself smoking in bed, pure and simple. Casework on this baby wouldn't fill a pencil box."

Georgia flinched. Cops and firefighters talked this way all the time-but not within earshot of civilians, some of whom were being allowed back into the lobby now. Willard either didn't have the smarts to understand this, or he didn't care. Either way, she disliked him. She stepped into the elevator and Carter followed, but he made a point of giving a backward glance at Willard's shoes. The detective followed his gaze, though his gut was probably beginning to get in the way of it.

"What?" asked Willard, self-consciously lifting a sole. Probably thought he'd stepped in dog shit. Georgia stifled a giggle.

"Gucci, Willard?" asked Carter.

"My shoes?" The detective frowned as the door started to close.

"I need to know so that when the lab tells us some horse's ass walked all over our crime scene in expensive Italian shoes, I can tell them which horse's ass to look for."

The doors closed, and Georgia bit back a grin as they rode to the fourth floor.

"What's up with you and that jerk, Willard?"

Carter pulled at the cuffs of his gray pinstriped suit. "Nothing that five minutes in a dark alley couldn't cure."

There was no door on Louise Rosen's apartment anymore, just a steel frame that was compressed in two places like a crushed tin can. The fire was out and the smoke had cleared, but the taste of ash settled at the back of Georgia's throat. Her tongue felt as if it were coated with road tar. A layer of oily residue covered the teak furniture in the living room. Soot shaded the white plaster walls and a set of heavy, floor-length red drapes drawn across a window. The hallway mirror was opaque enough from the fumes to write on. Yet, in the living room at least, there was no burning. Lamps hadn't shattered. Even Sunday's New York Times, scattered in a corner, lay intact, opened to the crossword puzzle.

A row of photographs on a huge, well-stocked bookshelf sported an oily layer of soot but hadn't gotten hot enough to melt. One woman was in enough of the shots for Georgia to assume it was Louise Rosen. She was a slim, middle-aged woman with a short helmet of dyed-blond hair and a penchant for ice pink lipstick. A closet drunk, Georgia supposed, as she glanced into the kitchen where two empty fifths of Jack Daniels and six crushed Michelob cans sat on a solid granite counter.

Georgia and Carter followed the tamped-down carpet, blotted black like the brushstrokes in a Chinese watercolor. It grew darker with soot as they neared the bedroom. Here, the fire told a different story. There were scorch marks along the walls. The bedroom door, now open, was burned heavily on the inside, especially along the upper half. There were sharp demarcation lines between the burned and unburned areas, suggesting it had been closed at the time of the fire.

Inside, the walls were black and powdery like coal dust. The floor was soggy from hose runoff and littered with plaster and debris. A chair in one corner had burned so thoroughly, it no longer had any legs. The finish on the dresser had blackened, and everything on top had charred or cracked. The window glass had either shattered or been broken and the wall next to it was so badly burned, Georgia could see the original wood studs beneath, now segmented like logs left overnight in a fireplace. The mattress was in the street but the box spring was still in the center of the room, surface burned. The air had a close, heavy smell of ash, sweat, and the sickly sweet stench of fried skin.

Carter ran a gloved hand over the burns on the door. His eyes tracked the blistering on the ceiling.

"Looks to me like this place was cooking," he said. "The hot gases were collecting on the ceiling and radiating back down fiercely, judging from the damage."

"Then how come the mattress springs weren't annealed?" Georgia noted. "A fire that causes this much damage to a room should've done a little more damage to the mattress."

"Maybe the captain can tell us," said Carter. He nodded to a far wall where four firefighters from a ladder, or "truck," company were punching holes in the plaster ceiling, looking for pockets of fire that could smolder and reignite, a task called "overhauling." Georgia saw Carter cringe. Overhauling was hell on a crime scene.

The truck captain slogged through the muck to greet them. Hagarty was his name. He was a doughy man with washed-out brown hair and pale skin. Carter and Georgia nodded to him, and Georgia pulled out her notebook.

"What've you got?" she asked the captain. She had to shout over the noise of the falling plaster.

Hagarty tipped back the brim of his black helmet and wiped a sleeve of his turnout coat across his sweaty brow. The air-conditioning was off in the apartment, and the temperature hovered around ninety degrees.

"Routine smoking in bed, as far as I can see," said Hagarty. "Looks like she got drunk and fell asleep. Her bedroom door was shut. When we arrived, there were already flames rolling across the ceiling. A couple of minutes longer, and everything in the room would've ignited, for sure."

"A flashover," Carter mumbled, his eyes scanning the scorch marks that traveled three-quarters of the way down the walls.

"You vented the window?" Georgia asked Hagarty.

"Didn't have to break it," said the captain. "It broke before we got into the room." Hagarty shrugged. "Not that it's my call, but those A and E detectives did a walk-through and came up empty. It's a mattress fire-in an upscale neighborhood maybe, but still in all, a mattress fire."

Georgia turned to Carter. "What do you think?" she asked him.

Carter shrugged and said nothing. He'd never done that before. They'd been partners for a year and a half now-ever since Georgia left the firefighting arm of the FDNY to become a fire marshal. Although they always took turns running investigations, and this one was Georgia's, Carter-with sixteen years as a marshal-was usually the guiding force.

But since that serial arson investigation in SoHo last April, Georgia had noticed Carter hanging back more. On the one hand, she welcomed it as a sign of his increased regard for her abilities. But there was a bittersweet side as well. Carter was fifty-nine years old. He had nearly thirty-one years in the FDNY. One of these days soon, he'd probably put in his retirement papers. In his own quiet way, he was forcing her to become less dependent on him.

Georgia put away her notebook and scanned the room. There was something wrong with this smoking-in-bed scenario. Carter was right-the mattress burn was too even. And the springs hadn't annealed. But there was something else, as well. She pulled out her flashlight and shined it across the blistered ceiling, bringing the beam to rest on the blackest part in the far corner, directly above what was left of the chair. She walked across the room and moved the chair frame aside. The floor was badly burned underneath.

"If Rosen was smoking in bed," Georgia wondered aloud now, "how come the lowest, deepest burns are in this corner?"

Beneath Randy Carter's mustache, Georgia thought she saw the hint of a smile. They both knew that because fire typically travels in a V pattern, upward from the base, the lowest burn point is often the point of origin.

She walked past Carter and Hagarty to a floor lamp five feet from the burned-out chair. The metal had oxidized-rusted-because of the heat. The lampshade had burned away. The lightbulb underneath had melted and elongated as if made of Silly Putty, a process known as "pulling." Carter had taught her that when lightbulbs melt, they have the odd habit of pointing in the direction of the heat.

"The bulb is pointing to the chair in the far corner, by the window, not the box spring," Georgia noted.

She turned to Carter, waiting for a reaction. She thought she'd done a thorough initial sizing up of the fire. But instead of looking pleased, he was frowning in the direction of the living room.

"The front door," Carter asked Hagarty. "It was locked when y'all arrived, right? That's why you took the rabbit to it." The rabbit is a twenty-five pound hydraulic wedge so named because it looks like a rabbit's foot.

The captain rubbed the back of his grimy neck and shifted his feet. His eyes flicked to the firefighters at the wall behind them. They were nearly finished. "We're not sure," he admitted.

Georgia started. The firefighters broke down the door without first trying the knob. It happened all the time in the adrenaline rush of the moment. Only in this case, an unlocked door could be significant because it signaled the possibility of an intruder. She couldn't believe she had missed it. What else am I missing? Georgia wondered. She scanned the charred top of the dresser, noting the shattered perfume bottles and a three-candle, wrought-iron candelabra with two melted orange blobs still in their holders. She kicked at the debris surrounding the box spring with the tip of her crepe-soled black work boot. And then it hit her. She scanned the floor of the room.

"Where are the ashtrays?" she mumbled.

Carter gave her a puzzled look.

"Maybe we wouldn't find cigarettes or matches in a fire this hot," said Georgia. "But I don't see anything that would pass for an ashtray-not even an empty glass or bottle or beer can."

Carter straightened. He started to speak, then swallowed the thought. He walked the perimeter of the box spring, nudging soggy bits of wood and plaster. When he met her gaze, his deep, soulful eyes held a mixture of pride and something else she couldn't quite read. A sadness, perhaps. He wasn't ready for this shift in their relationship.

"So she ditched her ashtray and neatened up before she passed out," said Hagarty. "She's a regular eighty-proof Martha Stewart-so?"

"Maybe," said Carter. "Then again, she'd be the first one I ever saw who was."

--from Flashover by Suzanne Chazin, Copyright © May 2002, The Putnam Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

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