Read In This Rain for Free Online

“You people were put in place after Dolan Construction so we could look New Yorkers in the eye and tell them that wouldn’t happen again. That it’s safe to walk past a construction site because we have departments and agencies whose job is to keep it safe. Then all of a sudden a scaffold collapses and five men are laid up. We got spontaneous combustion in a trailer and I’m visiting a firefighter in the hospital. Now we get a goddamn storm, bricks fly off a roof and suddenly three little kids are orphans! What the hell happened?”
    He backed off slightly, a strategic moderation. “I hope and pray these were unrelated accidents, Virginia, of a type your inspectors couldn’t have prevented. Everyone hopes that. But you have to be able to prove it.”
    “Exactly how, Charlie?”
    If she were a white man, he’d have reamed her out for her tone alone. Instead, in a voice of immense forbearance, he said, “For one thing, you can prove your people went to the site. And if they found anything, they’d damn well better have gone back and reinspected. I want a mile-long paper trail.”
    McFee looked pointedly at Farrell. Farrell’s eyes widened, as though it hadn’t occurred to him he’d be asked to speak.
    “Since
    ” Farrell cleared his throat and started again. “Since the scaffold collapse two weeks ago, we’ve had inspectors on the Three Star site every day.”
    “Why? You spot something wrong?”
    “No,” Virginia McFee interposed. “That collapse looks like just an accident to us. But we know how seriously you take construction site safety, Mayor.”
    “Go on, Mr. Farrell,” Charlie snapped.
    “We sent three different guys,” Farrell said. “Rotating, so in case, you know? Found a couple things, routine. Point is, nothing related to the accidents.”
    “Or nothing they reported.” That was Mark Shapiro, scowling.
    Farrell shrugged. “Could be. But that trailer fire, we don’t inspect the trailers anyway, so who knows? And this brick thing
    ” He wiped his mouth with his thick fingers. “Storm came up Friday night. Some idiot might have put those loose bricks on the tarp as just, like, insurance, before they left. The inspector who saw that tarp earlier in the week swears it was weighed down with strapped bricks.”
    “Strapped?” asked Charlie for the record, though he knew what it meant.
    Farrell’s hand made a circle. “Steel straps around the pallet. If those bricks was piled on a pallet, even without a strap, they’d never have flown off like that.”
    Charlie blew out a breath. “So what you’re telling us, Mr. Farrell, is that your men went there, you have reports, there was nothing wrong?”
    Farrell nodded.
    Virginia McFee said, “Well, Charlie, that’s what you wanted: nothing.”
    Charlie looked deliberately away, down the table to his DOI Commissioner. “Mark?”
    Grimly, as though it were a matter of life and death— and it had been for Harriet Winston, Charlie reminded himself, and could be politically for him— Mark Shapiro said, “We’re doing new background checks on the inspectors.”
    “Please tell me those were done when these guys were hired.”
    “Of course they were. And they checked out. But people change.”
    Charlie had his own theory about that but this wasn’t the time. “What angles are you looking at?”
    “A number,” said Shapiro. “One possibility, and the best, would be if these were three unrelated, unpreventable, purely coincidental accidents. Nothing the inspectors should have found.”
    Out of the corner of his eye the mayor saw a tiny triumphant smile flicker on Virginia McFee’s lips, as though by stating this possibility Shapiro had proved it.
    “Or?” he pressed.
    “Accidents, but preventable if the inspectors had been doing their jobs. Or,” Shapiro said, “not accidents, but preventable: sabotage the inspectors missed, because they were born stupid or because they were paid to be.”
    “That’s the theory the developer’s pushing,” Charlie said.
    “Of course.”
    “But who?” Charlie demanded. “Why? A