CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Fire Investigation Bureau is on the second floor of a district building on the near west side, up a stairwell that smells like floor stripper.
There is a display case in the lobby with a length of hose in it and a leather helmet from nineteen twenty something and a plaque about a fire in a shoe factory.
I got there at ten on a Thursday, eight days out, in a coat from a garbage bag.
Dean Ostrander came down to get me himself.
Mid-thirties. Tie, no jacket, a lanyard, glasses. He shook my hand and said thank you for coming and asked whether I wanted coffee, and when I said no he got me a bottle of water anyway and put it down in front of me where I could reach it and then did not mention it again.
The room had a table, four chairs, a laptop, a legal pad, and a small silver recorder.
“I’m going to ask if I can record. You can say no.”
“You can record.”
He said the date and the time and my name into it, and then he put both hands flat on the table.
“Before anything else. I want to be clear about what I do, because people get it mixed up and then they get upset with me later.”
“Okay.”
“I determine origin and cause. Where the fire started, what started it, and how it moved through the building. That’s it.
That’s the whole job.” He tapped the pad.
“There is a separate process going on about department conduct. I am not part of that. I don’t work for them and they don’t tell me what to write. ”
“But they’ll read what you write.”
He looked at me for a second.
“Everybody will read what I write,” he said.
Then we did the timeline.
He wanted times and I had times, because I had my phone and because I am the kind of person who has times.
Eleven fifty, roughly, when Danny’s coughing woke me.
Eleven fifty-eight, the 911 call, on the record, to the second.
Twelve oh six, my best estimate for when I saw the first rig come over the curb.
Twelve eleven, boots on my landing. Twelve fourteen, the time I looked at my phone in the bedroom.
Twelve twenty-two, when I said a thing to my daughter about who was going out that window first. Twelve thirty-two, the window.
He wrote it down and then he stopped writing and looked at the pad.
“Ma’am, can I ask what you do for a living?”
“I’m a bookkeeper.”
“Right,” he said. “Okay. That helps me a lot, actually.”
We went through the apartment. Which room, which door, which window, what was sealed with what. He drew a little floor plan on the pad upside down so I could see it and turned it around twice to have me correct it.
Then he asked about the alarms.
“Did you have working smoke detectors in the unit?”
“Yes. Two. One in the hall and one in the kids’ room.”
“Batteries?”
“He changed them,” I said. “Every time the clocks change. Both of them, and the one in the kids’ room, and he did the neighbor’s too, the man downstairs, because he can’t get up on a chair.”
Ostrander wrote that down.
“Do you remember hearing them go off?”
I opened my mouth.
And there was nothing there.
I sat in that room for what felt like a long time going back into that hallway, into that bedroom, into all of it, and I could not find the sound anywhere.
I could find the cough. I could find the water running in the bathroom.
I could find a woman screaming downstairs on one note.
I could find a piece of cardboard being torn.
I could not find an alarm.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“That’s all right.”
“No, but I mean” I put my hand up. “I don’t remember one way or the other. I can’t tell you it didn’t go off. I just can’t find it.”
“Mrs. Halloran, that’s extremely common.” He said it the way you’d say the bus runs every twenty minutes. “It’s one of the most common things I hear. People remember the smell and they remember the temperature and they lose the noise entirely.”
“Did it go off?”
He hesitated for exactly as long as it takes an honest person to decide to be honest.
“The hallway unit was recovered and it functioned on test,” he said. “So probably yes.”
So it did.
It went off in my hallway and I did not hear it, or I heard it and put it somewhere I cannot get to, and my son’s coughing got me up first.
I would like to tell you I have made peace with that. What I have done instead is buy four detectors for the new apartment and test them on the first Saturday of every month at nine in the morning, out loud, in front of both children, so that all three of us are perfectly familiar with the noise.
“Okay,” Ostrander said. “Now the door.”
“Okay.”
“You said you crawled out to the front door around twelve eleven, twelve twelve.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because they were on the other side of it.”
He nodded slowly and wrote something and did not look up.
“How long were you there?”
“Six or seven minutes. I went back when I heard them start down the stairs for the saw.”
“And you could hear them the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Clearly?”
“Not perfectly. They had masks on. But yes.”
He put the pen down.
“Mrs. Halloran.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, which I understood was something he did to give himself two seconds.
“I want to ask you something and I want to ask it plainly, because I have been dancing around it for four days with other people and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. ”
“All right.”
“While you were at that door, did you hear anything about staffing?”
I looked at him.
I had come in there braced for a completely different question. I had spent two days getting ready for a man in a tie to ask me about my marriage, and I had a whole shape worked out for that, and here he was asking me about a headcount.
“They said they were five,” I said.
The room got very still.
“Say that again for me.”
“One of them said something about a second team. He was shouting about it. And another one said, Wes, we’re five. And the first one said, I can count.”
“Wes,” Ostrander said.
“Nowak. He was acting officer.”
He was not writing anymore. He was looking at the pad.
“You are certain about the number.”
“Five. I counted them myself out the window before that. I got five twice.”
“You counted them.”
“Yes.”
He picked up the pen and put it down again.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Did they say why they were five?”
And that is the question.
That is the entire book of it, right there, asked at eleven twenty in the morning by a polite man with a legal pad in a room that smelled faintly like a coffee pot left on.
I sat there with my hands around a bottle of water I had not opened.
I had not decided anything. I want that on the record too, because of how it got told later, because there is a version going around in which I walked into that building with a plan.
I did not have a plan. I had eight days of a vinyl chair and a boy who wouldn’t let a door shut, and I had not decided one single thing about what I was going to say when somebody finally asked me.
I opened my mouth.
There was a knock.
A woman put her head around the door, apologetic, half in and half out.
“Sorry. Sorry, Dean.” She looked at me. “Mrs. Halloran? Your husband’s downstairs at the desk. He says he needs you for a minute. He says it’s about your son.”