In the typical seesaw fashion of city fiscal logic, Ladder One-twenty-one and Engine Two-oh-three were closed up in the mid-1980s because of budgetary cutbacks, then reopened in spanking new quarters eight blocks away in the early 1990s. The result, unfortunately, was that there were no old-timers in the new Greenpoint firehouse. They had long ago been scattered to other parts of the city.
Georgia stood at the entrance of the sleek new firehouse, all concrete and beige tile, and interviewed Lieutenant Prager, the officer on duty. Prager was simply too young to know anything about a twenty-five-year-old fire. Georgia was ready to leave when he snapped his fingers.
“Denise Flannagan,” the lieutenant said suddenly. “She might know. She’s Captain Flannagan’s widow. He was the captain of the old Ladder One-twenty-one. She comes around here sometimes with cakes and cookies for the guys. Nice lady. She runs a day-care center out of her row house here in Greenpoint.”
Prager didn’t have Denise Flannagan’s address, but Georgia got it from a phone book and walked the few blocks to a yellow aluminum-sided row house with crepe-paper cutouts of children on the front windows and the squeal of youngsters out back. It was a cheerful house with flowers in the window boxes and balls in the front yard. And yet, on closer inspection, it was a house in sore need of repair. The concrete stoop was crumbling. The iron railing was rusting into the cement. The gutters looked old and pitted, and there were stains along the edges of the roof where it had been leaking. Georgia walked up the long concrete stoop to ring the doorbell.
A woman about Georgia’s age answered. She had fine, dark blond hair pulled up in a straggly bun and the greenest eyes Georgia had ever seen. Although she wore no makeup, her skin was smooth and flawless, all except for a certain tiredness about the eyes. She had a baby on her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” said Georgia. “I’m looking for Denise Flannagan.”
“I’m Tricia, her daughter,” said the woman. The baby started to cry. “Can I help you?”
Georgia showed the woman her badge. “I was hoping to talk to your mother about a fire that happened in the neighborhood many years ago.” Georgia had to shout over the baby’s cries. “Have I got you at a bad time?”
Tricia nodded to the child. “With Kolya, every time is bad.”
“Your son?”
“Kolya? No, I’m not Polish, but a lot of the kids we care for are,” said Tricia. “My two are in back. My mother and I run a day-care center. We’ve got six besides mine we take care of. Come in.”
Georgia stepped through the front door. There were baby swings and playpens and sippy cups of juice everywhere. In the corner, Barney the purple dinosaur danced across the television screen. Above the television, a crucifix hung on the wall and next to it, a cross-stitch of the same Irish blessing Georgia’s mother had in their kitchen: May the wind be at your back…May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead.
“My mom’s just putting a couple of the children down for a nap. Which fire do you want to talk to her about?”
“A fire that happened on Bridgewater Street back in 1978.”
Tricia’s smile disappeared. “The fire at Kowalski’s warehouse?”
“Do you know about it?” asked Georgia.
“My father did.” The baby fussed some more on her shoulder. Tricia’s hair loosened in its bun and fell down onto her sweaty neck. A little voice called out from the kitchen for cookies. “I’ll get you cookies in a minute, Caitlin,” she snapped. “Go outside and play.” Then she turned back to Georgia. The baby was screaming now. Tricia bounced him on her shoulder in an attempt to quiet him down. “I don’t think my mother will want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Because my father’s obsession with that blaze was almost worse than his illness. Both nearly bankrupted the family. We almost lost the house. My mother’s still barely able to hold onto it. Look, Miss Skeehan, please don’t upset her. She’s been through enough.”
“I don’t want to upset her. But this is really important.”
“Important?” Tricia’s face hardened. “My father died from this job, Miss Skeehan. Do you have any idea what that’s like?” The hoarse, emotional sound of Tricia’s voice made the baby stop crying. The two women stared at each other, both breathing heavily.
“When I was twelve,” Georgia said softly, “my father went to work one night in Engine Two-seventy-eight in Woodside. He never came home. I still hate the smell of incense and red roses. I hate the sound of bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace.’ I can’t walk into his old engine company and not get a lump in my throat. I miss him every single day, and it never gets any easier. So yes, I do know what it’s like.”
Tricia swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t realize…”
She hefted the fidgety child on her hip. “Wait here. I’ll get my mother for you.”
Tricia took Kolya upstairs, leaving Georgia in the living room—just her and a little boy teething on a rubber pretzel in a playpen in the center of the room. The pretzel dropped to the floor, beyond his reach, and he let out a little squeal.
“I’ll get that for you,” Georgia cooed to the child. He beamed—a big, grateful grin, just like the ones Richie used to give her at that age.
“You’re a real charmer—yes you are.”
As she babbled on to the delighted child, Georgia found herself fantasizing about life with a baby attached to her hip instead of a nine-millimeter Glock. She’d bake cookies, volunteer in the PTA and spend her evenings talking to Mac about birthday parties and picnics at the beach. Richie would come to see her as the kind of mother she’d always wanted to be. A real mother. Joined to a real father.
“Miss Skeehan?”
Georgia rose from the side of the playpen. A small, reed-thin woman shuffled forward and extended her hand. It was nearly impossible to gauge her age. In her youth, Denise Flannagan must have been a beauty. She had the same deep green eyes as her daughter. Even wrinkled, her skin had a milky white glow to it—all except for under her eyes, which were dark with shadows. She walked with a slight limp, the result, Georgia suspected, of an arthritic hip. She looked like a kind woman, but she seemed too old to be caring for so many young children.
“Mrs. Flannagan?” Georgia shook her hand. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I don’t know if your daughter told you why I’m here.”
“She did.”
The little boy in the playpen reached out to Denise Flannagan. She picked him up, wincing from the effort.
“You must really love children to do all this,” said Georgia over the drone of cartoons.
“Oh, I do.” The woman smiled. She felt the child’s diaper. It was time for a change. “I raised six of my own. But I think I’d give the day care up if I could. It’s getting awfully hard on me.” She walked the child over to a changing table.
“Why don’t you?” It was a bold question, and Georgia felt suddenly embarrassed for asking it. But Denise Flannagan only laughed—a warm, good-natured laugh—as if words were the least of her troubles.
“Because, dear,” she said kindly, “I need the money. I would’ve lost the house without it.”
“But your husband was a fire captain…”
“—Who retired many years ago on a small, basic pension. Pat was sick a long time, and the medical plan only covered so much.” She finished the diapering, found a rocking chair by the front window and rocked the boy on her lap.
“May I ask what he died of?”
“Well…” She sighed. “He had the cancer.” She whispered the word cancer the way older people in Woodside sometimes did, as if it were an all-purpose illness, synonymous with death and far too personal to make an issue of. Georgia knew right then that Denise Flannagan would never say what kind of cancer.
“But he didn’t die of that, you see,” Denise added. “Pat was leaving his doctor’s office one day, stepped off the curb and got hit by a car. They never caught the driver.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Georgia. “Your daughter said he was obsessed with the fire at Kowalski’s warehouse.”
“He was, indeedy,” said Mrs. Flannagan. “He believed that’s what made him so sick.”
“Why did he think that?”
“Well,” she said, “it was just about the worst beating Pat ever took. Tricia—Patricia, she’s named after my husband—she was a little girl at the time, but she still remembers how bad he looked. He was green when he came home the next morning, and he had these sores all over his body. It was horrible. He couldn’t eat for two days. He couldn’t keep anything in his stomach.” Denise Flannagan had that polite, older-person way of talking, Georgia noticed. She’d never say her husband “vomited.”
Tricia came down the stairs now. Denise Flannagan nodded at her. “Isn’t that right, dear?”
“What?”
“Daddy was so sick after that fire?”
The baby was fidgeting on Denise’s lap. Tricia picked the child up. “I don’t want to talk about it.” The younger woman wandered down the hall. Georgia heard a refrigerator door open.
“She was very traumatized,” Mrs. Flannagan said in the kind of conspiratorial whisper she’d reserved up until now for cancer. “All the children were. But it hit Tricia the hardest, I think. She was so close to her father.”
“I know the feeling,” said Georgia, thinking about her own dad. “When did Captain Flannagan start to get sick? Was it right after the fire?”
“Not really,” said the older woman. “He recovered from that initial bout after a few days. And then, for a long time, Pat didn’t pay it no mind. He was so strong and healthy. He smoked—all the men did back then. But he also ran in a couple of New York City Marathons. It was five or six years after the fire that things started happening to him. Small things, at first. He started trying to track down the men who were there. They closed the firehouse, you see. So the men were scattered all over the city.”
“Were a lot of the men sick by then?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “There were maybe a hundred men at that fire. A lot of them seemed just fine.” The old woman clasped her hands in her lap. The knuckles were bony, the fingers bent from arthritis. “I had the children to think about and when Pat got sick, I concentrated on him—and the medical bills. I was too busy to keep track of much else.”
“How long has it been since he died?” asked Georgia.
“It’ll be seven years next month, God rest his soul. But he had to retire eight years before that—he was so sick.” She cocked her head. “May I ask why you’re interested?”
“Because the Bridgewater fire might have something to do with a case I’m working on, and no one seems to know much about it.”
“My husband could’ve helped you,” said Mrs. Flannagan. “Before he passed away, Pat was putting together a case history of that fire. He had files and records all over the basement.”
“What happened to the stuff?” asked Georgia.
“I just boxed everything up and left it there. Would you like to take a look?”
“I’d love to.”
“Tricia will have to show you,” she apologized. “I don’t take the basement stairs more than I have to. It’s hard on my knees.”
The basement was unfinished. White asbestos sleeves covered the pipes. Mold and dust covered a stack of cardboard cartons by a workbench. Tricia grudgingly pulled one of the cartons out and plonked it on top of the workbench.
“You don’t want me to look through this stuff, do you?” asked Georgia.
“You go to your father’s old firehouse much?” Tricia shot back.
Georgia nodded. “Point taken. Look, I won’t remove anything without your permission—okay? Can you give me half an hour?”
Tricia grabbed a folding chair from the corner and pulled it open. “Have a seat,” she said. “You’ve got until the babies wake up from their naps.”
The dust and mold on the carton made Georgia sneeze as she opened it. On the top was a sheet of lined yellow notebook paper with fourteen names across it. Beside each name was a ladder or engine company number, followed by a date of death.
Georgia noticed right away that each name was from one of four fire companies Ed Delaney had mentioned in his 1984 Division of Safety report. The companies were also the ones in closest proximity to the blaze—the companies that would have gone inside the warehouse that night. And fourteen of the men were dead by the time Pat Flannagan compiled this list seven years ago.
Georgia pulled out a sheaf of papers and heard something thud onto the concrete floor. It was a stack of photographs that had stuck together. Georgia leafed through them now. The top one was a black-and-white fire department photo, the “death shot,” as firefighters called it. It was the portrait the FDNY kept on file in case a firefighter died in the line of duty and the newspapers wanted a picture of him.
The firefighter in the photograph was handsome in a bland sort of way. He had a square face and shoulders that suggested he was tall and muscular. He wore firefighter’s dress blues, and his faded blond hair was bushy like a character in a 1970s sitcom. Georgia guessed the picture had been snapped around that time. Beneath his thick blond mustache there was a hint of a smile. She guessed the man was about twenty-four years old. The pale eyes were eager—maybe too eager. He’d probably just come on the job. Along the bottom, someone had scrawled his name. Georgia stared at it and her heart stopped. Michael “Mickey” Hanlon, March 1978, it read.
If she had any doubt about the connection, the very next photo—a color snapshot—showed a group of men with their arms around one another at a barbecue. There, next to Mickey Hanlon, was a muscular young man with watery blue eyes, a thick mustache and a slight fleshiness beneath the jowls. No one had to tell her she was looking at a much younger Seamus Hanlon.
Georgia put the picture aside and turned her attention to the next photo in the stack. The sight made her draw back in horror. It too, was a black-and-white portrait, though clearly, this one never graced any FDNY personnel file. It was a photograph of a man in a wheelchair with sticklike arms and legs. His grizzled face sported a two-day growth of beard and was hollow and gaunt as if he were sucking on a lemon. The skin on his neck was black and purple, and his eyes had a frightened look. She felt her breath catch in her chest when she read the words on the bottom: Mickey Hanlon, August 1995. He couldn’t have been more than forty-one years old.
Forty-one? It didn’t seem possible. Georgia flipped through to the next photo. Another department shot of a young firefighter, followed by another horrific shot of the man at the close of his life. And then another. And then another. Only the hair color seemed to change. The before-and-after shots made Georgia feel nauseated and clammy. She kept bouncing between the shots, looking for a clue that the men in the “before” shots would become the men in the “after”s. She could tell they were the same men around the eyes, but little else remained recognizable.
Why didn’t Seamus tell me? Georgia wondered. His brother. His own brother.
Beneath the stack of pictures was a manila envelope. She opened it up to find a mimeographed map of the Empire Pipeline, yellowed with age—the kind Georgia had seen in many firehouses, listing all the locations of valves and shutoffs from Staten Island to Brooklyn and up through Queens. Attached to it was a faded blueprint from the city Buildings Department outlining the original construction of Kowalski’s warehouse on Bridgewater Street.
Georgia put the blueprint to one side, puzzled as to why Pat Flannagan would want it. It sat on a corner of the workbench, the paper so thin that the map of the pipeline bled right through it, with the roads and junctions lining up perfectly—and Kowalski’s warehouse smack dab over the Empire Pipeline.
Georgia frowned at the blueprint, certain that she’d made a mistake. Buildings weren’t supposed to straddle the pipeline—yet this one had. Flannagan had uncovered a nasty little blunder. And then he was killed. By a hit-and-run driver who was never found. Though it wasn’t cold in the basement, Georgia felt a shiver travel through her body.
She could hear the babies starting to fuss, so she began putting Flannagan’s notes away. A piece of letterhead at the bottom of the box caught her eye. It was from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, a “work for hire” form dated February 1, 1978. The form authorized a firm called Tristate Trucking to remove “unspecified manufacturing by-products” from Kowalski’s Carting and Hauling and truck them to a firm called Camden Bonded Disposal in Camden, New Jersey.
Georgia stared at the form. It was dated six months before the fire. Did the DEP know there were hazardous chemicals in that warehouse, she wondered? And if so, why weren’t the firefighters told?
She heard a set of footsteps on the rotting wood risers at the far end of the room and turned. It was Tricia.
“Time’s up,” the young woman told Georgia.
“I was wondering if I could hold on to a few things from the boxes,” asked Georgia. “I promise to return them.”
“What few things?”
“This form,” said Georgia, holding up the DEP authorization. “A blueprint of a building. And some pictures and names of the men at the fire. I know the brother of one of the men. Captain Hanlon in Engine Two-seventy-eight.”
Tricia descended the rest of the stairs. She folded her arms across her chest. There was a hard look to her beautiful green eyes. Georgia could see it now—the same thrust-out jaw of runaways in the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
“My mother’s been through a lot, Miss Skeehan,” said Tricia. “I don’t want her dealing with depositions and subpoenas.”
“I understand,” said Georgia. “I won’t put her through any more heartache. We’re all fire department here.”
“All fire department? That’s supposed to make everything okay?” Tricia laughed bitterly. “My dad loved the department—loved it like he loved his own kids. All the men did. And what did they ever get in return? My God, Ms. Skeehan, the city never even put up a goddamn plaque in their memory.”