Daddy's Gone a Hunting

14

Fire Marshals Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein had been on duty at their desks in Fort Totten in Queens when they received the early-morning phone call about the fire at the Connelly complex in Long Island City. They had rushed to it to find squads from two companies battling the flames. The fact that two people had barely escaped the building after the explosion suggested that others might have been trapped inside, even at that unusual hour. At that time they could not tell if Gus Schmidt had managed to crawl out on his own before he died. When they learned that the one survivor had been rushed to Manhattan Midtown Hospital, they immediately followed, hoping to be able to interview her. She was already in surgery, and her sister and the plant manager had no idea why she had gone to the complex.

The marshals had returned to the fire and then changed into the gear they always carried in their car. After they had battled the flames for four hours, the fire was finally extinguished and it became clear that no one else had been in any of the buildings. The back wall of the museum had been the first to collapse, but by then the searchers had gotten out of the conflagration.

Ramsey and Klein, their heavy boots protecting them from the heat of the scorched remains of the complex, methodically searched for the source of the fire.

The first eyewitness, a watchman from a neighboring warehouse, had come running over at the sound of the explosion and verified that the flames were originally shooting straight up from the museum. The fact that its back wall had collapsed was the second clue that it was there that the fire had started.

Next was the painstaking search for evidence of causation, including possible arson.

By eleven o’clock on Thursday morning, Marshals Ramsey and Klein had found a partially unscrewed gas pipe that had leaked gas into the museum. The wall that had fallen had covered the remains of the charred outlet that had the wires exposed. The two veteran fire marshals did not need to look any further. The fire was of an incendiary nature and had been deliberately set.

Before they could finalize their crime report, Jack Worth, the plant manager, had arrived on the scene.