The temperature was almost chilly inside New York Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Even so, Georgia felt a trickle of sweat creep down the silver chain tucked inside her shirt as she pushed the elevator button. She didn’t want to be here, at the Cornell Burn Unit, one of the most advanced burn-treatment centers in the world. But then again, neither did Louise Rosen.
“What odds of survival are the doctors giving her?” Georgia asked Carter as they stepped off the elevator and walked down the windowless seventh-floor corridor, polished to a blinding sheen.
“Not good,” he said. “She’s got burns over sixty percent of her body. And you know the rule…”
“Age plus burn equals the likely percent of fatality,” Georgia said grimly.
“Fifty-four plus sixty,” said Carter, shaking his head. “I don’t think she’ll last long.”
“Seems horrible for someone to suffer all this only to have no hope of survival.”
“Gives her family a chance to say good-bye, at least,” said Carter. Georgia caught the wistful note in his voice. His own estranged daughter had died four months ago in a monstrous blaze. There had been no prolonged suffering, as far as Georgia could tell. But there had been no opportunity for a farewell, either.
“You wouldn’t have wanted this for Cassie,” Georgia offered softly.
Carter shrugged but said nothing. Georgia could talk to him about almost any subject—except Cassie’s death. At times like these, his grief danced around them, a black hole that Georgia could sense, yet not see.
She was concentrating on her partner’s reactions so intently, she didn’t notice the two familiar figures in silk-blend suits walking toward them until they were practically on top of her. Chris Willard’s too-tight Italian shoes squeaked on the shiny white linoleum. He walked a little ahead of his partner, his gut jiggling over his downturned waistband. He spoke first. Georgia got the impression he always spoke first.
“Hey, Pops,” said Willard, stroking his red mustache. “You’re wasting your breath if you think the nurses will let you talk to this chick. Those bats won’t let you get within half a mile of intensive care.”
Carter gave Willard a long, stony stare—long enough for Willard to feel the heat of his gaze. Then he shifted his eyes to Phil Arzuti. “I thought y’all had no interest in Louise Rosen,” said Carter.
Arzuti offered up his trademark poker player’s smile. “A formality,” Arzuti assured him. “It’s been a slow tour.”
A good feint, but Georgia wasn’t buying it. “Your CO sent you back out, huh?”
The bags under Arzuti’s eyes tightened slightly in surprise. He opened his palms. “Marshal”—he sighed, like a man just following orders—“we have a very thorough commanding officer.”
Damn, thought Georgia. The cops know about Rosen’s connection to the FDNY. She noted the sudden military erectness in Carter’s posture—a vestige of his days as an army drill sergeant. Clearly, he was thinking the same thing.
“Did you find out anything?” Carter kept his eyes on Arzuti. Willard answered.
“The chick can’t talk,” said Willard sourly, waving his hand about as if swatting a fly. “You won’t get past Nurse Ratchett there at the main desk.”
“Watch me.” Carter turned toward the entrance of the burn-care unit. Georgia began to follow. That’s when Chris Willard looked at her for the first time. He had eyes the color of soggy cardboard—flat and muddy. But there was a glimmer of something else, too—something sharp and unseen, like a knife in the silt of a riverbed.
“You like seeing crispy critters, Marshal?” Willard asked her now. “The ones still walking and talking with their faces hanging off?”
“I’ve seen plenty of burned people,” Georgia reminded him. She tried to sound firm and in command, but the raggedness of her voice betrayed her. In nearly eight years in the fire department, she’d encountered more than her share of burned bodies—some fatally. As a fire marshal, she’d taken statements from severely burned victims. But she never got used to it. There was nothing as horrific as a burn. She hated Willard for uncovering this chink in her armor.
He smiled wickedly at his victory. “You’ll see her in your dreams,” he promised.
“Are you okay?” asked Carter. “That moron didn’t get to you, did he?”
“No,” she lied. “I’m just not very good with burn victims.”
Carter exhaled. “Okay, look—you’ll be fine,” he assured her. “A couple of rules. Go in and suit up without being asked—cap, gown, booties—the works. It’s a sterile environment, and the nurses won’t even talk to you if y’all don’t respect that. That’s why Arzuti and Willard got thrown out.”
“I understand,” said Georgia.
“Remember that Louise Rosen doesn’t know she’s checking out of the picture, so don’t say anything to her to suggest that. She’s not a perp. And we’re not doctors. We don’t tell people whether they’re gonna live or die.”
Kathleen O’Meara, the head nurse in the burn unit, looked to be in her late forties, with the sinewy arms and hollowed cheeks of a long-distance runner. Her moss-green eyes held a mixture of kindness and determination. She hugged Carter as soon as she saw him.
“I haven’t seen you in ages,” Kathleen scolded. “Not since that fire department fund-raiser for the burn center.”
“I’ve been sort of…preoccupied,” Carter said thickly, and Georgia thought again about his daughter, Cassie. Carter introduced Georgia and asked Kathleen if they could talk to Rosen. “We’ll be quick and compassionate, I promise,” he added.
Kathleen looked over their clothes. They both had donned white smocks and masks from a sterile bin. Georgia had tucked her curly, reddish-brown hair under something that looked like a shower cap. She and Carter had slipped clear plastic booties over their black-soled work shoes.
“I’d like to, Randy. Really, I would,” Kathleen explained. “But it’s like I told the detectives—she can’t talk. She’s got inhalation burns and she’s on a ventilator…”
“—Can she blink?” asked Georgia.
“Yes…of course,” Kathleen stammered.
“Perhaps we could ask her yes/no questions and she could blink her answers,” Georgia suggested. “One blink for yes, two for no.”
“No,” Kathleen said sharply. “Look, Marshal, you won’t get answers to those kinds of questions with a blink.”
Georgia and Carter exchanged puzzled looks.
“Kathy,” said Carter gently. “What do y’all think we’re gonna ask?”
“The same as the detectives, of course.” Kathleen played with a small gold post in her ear. Her face went pale. She leaned closer. “You know—the bomb,” she whispered.
“The bomb?” asked Georgia. Carter’s eyes were as wide as hers.
“You mean a bomb in Rosen’s apartment?” They had done a thorough physical examination of Louise Rosen’s apartment. If there had been a bomb there—or evidence of a bomb—they should have found it.
“No…I don’t think so,” stammered Kathleen. “Somewhere else, I guess. I…I thought you knew.”
“It’s all right, Kathy,” Carter said soothingly. “We know those detectives. We’ll probably get briefed about it later.” It was a lie, Georgia knew. Whatever made Arzuti and Willard do a one-eighty on this case, they weren’t sharing it with the FDNY. Only civilians believed that all the good guys were on the same side.
“We’d really be grateful if you could give us a heads-up on this bomb thing,” Georgia coaxed Kathleen. “It could take hours for the information to come through official channels. By then, the trail could be cold.”
“No one has to know where it came from, Kathy,” Carter assured her.
“But I don’t know anything else,” said Kathleen. “Really—that’s the truth. The detectives asked me if Dr. Rosen had mentioned a bomb. I don’t think the bomb was supposed to be in her apartment. I got the feeling it was somewhere else. But as I told you, Dr. Rosen can’t talk. She never mentioned a bomb. She never said anything.”
“Kathy”—Carter put a hand on hers—“please let us visit with her and see if there’s anything we can find out. We won’t cause any trouble.”
She hesitated a moment, then sighed. “Come on, then.”
They followed Kathleen O’Meara through a set of double doors. The temperature on the inside of the hallway was at least fifteen degrees hotter than it was in the waiting area. Georgia had forgotten that burn victims have no skin to help them maintain their body heat. She swallowed back a sudden, metallic taste in her mouth and searched for a comfortable way to hold her hands. To her relief, she noticed that even Carter got quiet. Maybe no one really became accustomed to seeing people horrifically burned.
In a large room to their left, Georgia could hear screaming and moaning above the white noise of a pounding shower. An ear-piercing shriek echoed above the thrumming of water, followed by whimpers that didn’t sound human at all—more like cats in heat. Kathleen must have seen the discomfort in Georgia’s face.
“The tank,” she said evenly, answering Georgia’s unspoken question.
“The tank?”
“Nurses have to scrub off a burn patient’s dead skin so that infection doesn’t set in and the doctors can do skin grafts,” Kathleen explained. “The scrubbing’s done under a high-pressure shower. It makes removing the skin a little easier, but it’s hard on the nerve endings.” She smiled sadly. “The patients’—and the nurses’,” she added.
Georgia heard the unmistakable cries now of a young child and winced. “Can’t they give him morphine to make the pain go away?”
“Oh, we do,” said Kathleen. “Those cries? That’s with morphine. If the nurses give that child any more, they’ll kill him.”
A male nurse doing the morning rounds nodded to Kathleen, then tousled the nappy hair of a black boy of about three, wearing a diaper, his legs encased in gauze bandages. The boy clutched a metal walker to help him get around, like an old man in a nursing home. His large, soulful eyes looked far too old for his years.
“How are you doing, E.J.?” said Kathleen, giving the child a big smile. The boy did not smile back. They were at the other end of the hall before Kathleen spoke.
“E.J.’s mother got mad because he wet his bed. So she gave him a bath—in one-hundred-and-forty-degree water.”
“Is he going to recover?” Georgia asked.
“Physically? Yes,” said Kathleen. “Emotionally? How do you ever get over something like that? We get a lot of children through these doors. Some are just unlucky, but a lot of them are either burned intentionally or left alone for hours, even days. They get into matches or try to cook something to eat and next thing you know, they’re here. Or dead.”
Kathleen pointed to a glass door at the end of the hallway. The three-bed intensive-care unit. She opened the glass door and led Georgia and Carter to the nurses’ station. There was a printout on the desk, and Kathleen picked it up and read it.
“This is interesting,” she said. “The hospital did a toxicology screen on Dr. Rosen when she was admitted. The lab results just came back. They found no alcohol or drugs in her system. Even her carbon monoxide readings aren’t exceptionally high.”
Georgia raised an eyebrow in Carter’s direction. He’d been right about Rosen not being a drunk. But that only made her injuries more perplexing. If she hadn’t been drugged or drunk or near death from CO poisoning, thought Georgia, what had kept her in that bedroom for so long?
Kathleen led them past the nurses’ station now and into intensive care. Along one entire wall, machines encased in black plastic and stainless steel beeped and whirred and whooshed like a NASA space station. In the center of all this gadgetry, a bloated figure lay motionless, swathed in gauze bandages. The sickly sweet odor of burned hair and flesh permeated the room.
Louise Rosen was unrecognizable by age, race or gender. She was hooked up to at least two dozen tubes and wires. Feeding tubes. Breathing tubes. Cardiac and blood-pressure monitors. A morphine drip. Antibiotics. Electrolyte fluids. But her eyes were open. She was awake and alert.
“Can she tell we’re here?” asked Georgia.
“She sees you,” Kathleen explained. “But she’s been given drugs to paralyze her because she’s on a ventilator. She’s suffered tissue damage to her lungs, and the doctors don’t want her to move and make them worse. She’s on sedatives, too, so she won’t panic about being temporarily paralyzed.”
Georgia willed herself to step close to the bed. Her eyes settled on Louise Rosen and she swallowed hard. A burn—even a very severe one—often doesn’t look that bad when it first happens. The body may be all red or charred or even milky white. The person is often in shock and doesn’t feel much pain. Sometimes they’re walking and talking. But a few hours later, it’s an entirely different story. Like taking the peel off a banana and then watching it rot.
Louise Rosen looked as if she’d gained a hundred pounds from the pictures Georgia had seen of her in her apartment. Her eyes were nothing but two slits in a face as plump and red as a tomato. Her nose was black, and blood seeped from her lips. Her right arm, which Georgia hadn’t noticed before, lay unbandaged. A deep gash ran the length of the blackened skin, exposing bloody, pulpy tissue and muscle. The gash wasn’t a trauma—it was a surgical incision, an escharotomy, performed by surgeons on severely burned tissue to ensure that the swelling didn’t cut off blood flow and invite gangrene.
Georgia cleared her throat and tried to appear relaxed, though she felt as if she were about to pass out in the overly heated room. “Dr. Rosen? My name is Georgia Skeehan and this is my partner, Randy Carter. We’re with the fire department, we’re marshals and we’d really like to talk to you.” She spoke to Rosen the same way she interviewed children and older people—burying her title and authority in an effort to humanize the encounter. This was particularly necessary for a fire marshal because, unlike police officers, fire marshals have the legal power to take sworn affidavits—admissible in court—on the spot. This upped the stakes on interviews because a well-prepared witness statement could make or break a case.
“May we sit down?” asked Carter, dropping his voice an octave, turning it softer and more southern. It was a rhetorical question; Louise Rosen could neither invite them to sit nor prevent them from doing so. But the politeness of it was all part of what made Randy Carter so effective. People wanted to tell him things—even criminals tended to confess in his presence.
Georgia pulled up two chairs by her bedside. The ventilator pumped out a rhythmic whoosh while other machines hummed and beeped their white noise. It was like listening to the engines in the bowels of a huge ship. A phone rang at the nurses’ station, and Kathleen walked back to answer it. Georgia took a deep breath.
“Dr. Rosen?” she began. “We want to find out what happened to you. We know you can’t talk, but if you can blink your eyes, we can help. Can you do that? Blink your eyes? Show me a blink, Dr. Rosen.”
Rosen’s eyes looked tight and fearful. Georgia had a sense the woman knew she was going to die. She was a doctor, after all. Still, very deliberately, the woman shut her eyes tight, held them a moment, then opened them. Georgia smiled.
“That’s great, Dr. Rosen. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions. Blink once for yes, twice for no—got it?”
Rosen blinked once again.
“Y’all doing real good, ma’am,” Carter offered.
“Were you smoking when this fire broke out?” asked Georgia.
Two blinks—no.
“Were you alone in your apartment?”
Kathleen O’Meara interrupted their session. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re going to have to leave.”
“But why?” asked Georgia.
“I just got a call from my director,” said Kathleen. “Those two detectives lodged a complaint about not being able to interview Dr. Rosen. My director said we could be in legal trouble if we allow one law-enforcement branch to interview a patient, but not another. She said we have to let everyone in, or no one. I’m sorry. The interview is over.”
Georgia looked over at Louise Rosen. Rosen blinked twice. No.
“Two more questions—just two more questions,” Georgia pleaded.
“I’m sorry, Marshal. I could lose my job if I let you stay.” Georgia looked over at Louise Rosen’s bloody, pulpy face and saw her blink twice again. Georgia tried to manage an encouraging smile.
“You rest up, Dr. Rosen,” she said. “We’ll do this another time.” But the woman didn’t blink. She knew as well as Georgia: there would be no other time.