They waited as the seconds continued to run backward. And then the doors opened and a man with a large instrument case appeared on stage left, walking backward, and entered the office doors, backward, the door shutting.
“Freeze!” D’Agosta said.
Hradsky froze it.
“Play forward in slo mo.”
He played it forward, and now the doors opened and the man walked out.
“Freeze frame.” D’Agosta got up and stared. It was a remarkably clear shot. “That’s our guy, right? He was the last one out of the office before the bodies were found. That’s gotta be him.” He looked at Pendergast, half expecting a contradiction.
But no, Pendergast said: “Your logic is airtight.”
“Look at the thing he’s carrying. Big enough for either a sword or two heads! And the timestamp is just when the M.E. put the time of death. Holy shit, that’s him!”
“It would seem without a doubt,” said Pendergast.
“So who is he?” D’Agosta turned to Hradsky. “You seen him before?”
Hradsky moved the frame forward and backward, isolated the guy’s face, expanded it, and worked a few software controls to sharpen it. “He looks familiar. I think he works here. Shit, it’s McMurphy!”
“Who’s that?”
He pressed a button and a digital personnel file sprang on the screen. There was a picture of the man beside his name: Roland McMurphy, assistant vice president, with all his personal data: phone, address on Columbus Avenue, everything.
“That’s our guy.” At last. D’Agosta had difficulty keeping the exultation from his voice.
“Um,” Hradsky said, “I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“McMurphy? I can’t even begin to imagine him doing this. He’s one of those slope-shouldered guys, you know, with the double chin, a hypochondriac, butterfly collector, cello player, scurries around like he’s about to get whipped.”
“It’s sometimes the guys you least suspect,” said D’Agosta. “They explode.”
“We can verify his presence. We keep digital records of everyone who comes in and out of the building.” Hradsky was paging through some on-screen records. “Says here he didn’t come in to work—called in sick, it seems.”
“So he called in sick and then sneaked in.” D’Agosta turned to Curry. “Send two squad cars to his place with a backup and SWAT team alert. Do it now.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” He moved away and got on the phone, making calls.
Hradsky cleared his throat. “I’d like to think that what you suggest, him sneaking in, would be difficult if not impossible. We’ve got state-of-the-art security here.”
Pendergast said quietly, “May I make a request?”
D’Agosta glanced at him. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“The killer left the office at four oh one PM. How long does it take to get from there to the main entrance?”
“I’d say about six to eight minutes,” said Hradsky.
“Excellent. Let us check the lobby camera at four oh seven to see whether he left.”
Hradsky set it up and a moment later, sure enough, they watched the man with the cello case walk out of the lobby at four oh eight.
“Now,” said Pendergast, “continue running the original office cam in reverse until we see him entering.”
They watched as the video ran backward, and then they saw the man emerge from the door and walk backward out of view.
“Three fifty PM,” said Pendergast. “Now we know the murder took place over the course of eleven minutes, between three fifty and four oh one. Excellent. Mr. Hradsky, take us to the lobby cam eight minutes before to see if he enters the building.”
D’Agosta watched as Hradsky did so—and there was the man, coming in the door at 3:42 PM. They watched as the man entered the revolving door, went straight to the electronic gate, and slid in his security card, which promptly opened the gate.
“What’s the timestamp on swiping the card?” asked Pendergast.
“Three forty-three and two seconds,” said Hradsky.
“Please check your security logs for whoever logged in at that precise moment.”
“Yes. Smart.” Hradsky tapped some more, then frowned at the image on his screen. He stared a long time, lips pursed. He tried it again.
“So?” D’Agosta asked. “Who was it?”
“Nobody. Nobody signed in at that time.”
At that moment Curry emerged from a far corner, after having made a series of phone calls. “Lieutenant?”
“What is it?”
“Roland McMurphy was in the hospital the entire day having a colostomy bag installed.”
They emerged from the lobby into the plaza in front of the Seaside Financial building, where a noisy crowd had formed, shouting and waving placards.
“Not another demonstration,” D’Agosta said. “What the fuck do they want now?”
“No idea,” said Curry.
As D’Agosta searched the seething mass for a path through, he began to get an inkling of what was going on. There were, in fact, two very different groups protesting. One was waving signs and shouting slogans like Down with the One Percenters! and Decapitate Corporate Greedsters! They were at the young, scruffy end of the spectrum, pretty much the same crowd D’Agosta remembered from the Occupy Wall Street protests of a few years before. The other group was quite different; many of them were young, too, but dressed in coats and ties, looking more like Mormon missionaries than radical leftists. They were not shouting anything, just silently carrying signs with various slogans, such as WHO OWNS YOU?…WELCOME TO THE NEW BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES…THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T “THINGS”…and CONSUMERISM IS A FATAL ILLNESS.
Even though the two sides seemed to agree on the wickedness of money, there were shouted insults and scuffles where they were crowding together as more and more people arrived from various side streets to join in. As D’Agosta watched, he saw that one man seemed to be the leader of the quieter group—a thin, gray-haired man wearing a dirty down coat over what looked like monk’s robes. He was holding a sign that said
VANITIES
With crudely painted fire underneath the word.
“Hey, see that guy? What do you make of him?”
Pendergast glanced over. “An ex-Jesuit, by the looks of the threadbare cassock underneath his jacket. And the sign is evidently an allusion to Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities.’ That’s a rather interesting twist on the current situation, wouldn’t you say, Vincent? New Yorkers never cease to surprise me.”
D’Agosta had a vague recollection of hearing something about a madman named Savonarola in Italian history but he couldn’t quite pull it up. “Those quiet ones—they scare me more than the rabble. They look like they mean it.”
“Indeed,” said Pendergast. “It appears that we are not just dealing with a serial killer, but with a social protest movement—or even two.”
“Yeah. And if we don’t solve this soon, New York’s going to have a frigging civil war.”
35
MARSDEN SWOPE EMERGED into the December chill in front of his East 125th Street apartment and breathed deeply, trying to rid his lungs of the dead air of his basement studio. Following the protest of the previous afternoon, he felt energized. Ever since—for eighteen hours straight—Swope had been sitting at his old Gateway computer, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, and emailing. It was astonishing, he thought, how one modest idea could snowball into something so big in such a short period of time. The world was hungry for what he had to offer. How strange this felt—after all his years of laboring in obscurity and poverty.
He took several more deep breaths. He felt light-headed, not just from staring at a computer screen for so long, but also because he hadn’t eaten in two days. He felt no hunger, but he knew he had to eat something to keep going; while his spirit was nourished, his body was running on empty.
Out on the sidewalk, in the bright, cold winter ligh
t, cars rushed by, heedless people going about their meaningless business. He walked down to Broadway and crossed it, passing under the elevated tracks as a train rumbled overhead, clacking and thundering on its way northward, then he angled toward the McDonald’s on the corner of 125th and Broadway.
The place was occupied with the usual derelicts trying to escape the cold by nursing a cup of coffee and the inevitable group of Asian guys playing cards. He paused: here were the very invisibles, the poor, who had been trodden upon, crushed, and ground into the dirt by the rich and powerful of this fallen city. Soon, very soon, their lives would change…thanks to him.
But not quite yet. He went to the counter and ordered two dozen Chicken McNuggets and a chocolate milk jug, collected his order, and took it to a table. He might as well have been invisible: nobody knew him, nobody looked at him. And to be sure, there wasn’t much to look at—a small man in his fifties with thinning gray hair, a close-cropped beard, skinny and undernourished, dressed in a brown Salvation Army down jacket, slacks, and secondhand shoes.
Formerly a Jesuit priest, Swope had left the Society of Jesus ten years earlier. This was to avoid being expelled, mostly due to his highly vocal disgust with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church regarding all the money and property it had accumulated over the centuries, in direct contradiction to Jesus’s teachings on poverty. As a Jesuit he had taken a vow of poverty, but what a contrast that was with the obscene riches of the church. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” was, in his mind, the clearest statement Jesus ever made in his time on earth, and yet—as he had expressed many times to his superiors, much to their displeasure—it was the one universally ignored by many so-called Christians.
But not now. No longer were the downtrodden going to take this. The answer wasn’t an outer revolution, the kind espoused by so many others who had suddenly begun protesting. Nothing would ever change humanity’s greed. No, what Swope was calling for was an internal revolution. You couldn’t change the greed of the world but you could change yourself, make a commitment to poverty and simplicity and rejecting the vanities.
And so he had left under a cloud and continued his lonely crusade online, railing against money, wealth, and privilege. He had been a voice in the wilderness—until he joined that demonstration, on a whim. And as he talked to folks, and marched, and talked some more, he realized he had finally found his people and his calling.
Only two days ago, while reading about the Decapitator killings in the New York Post, he had an idea. He would organize a bonfire. A symbolic bonfire, like the one put on by the monk Savonarola in the central square of Florence on February 7, 1497. On that date, thousands of Florentine citizens had answered Savonarola’s call to bring into the great piazza items of vanity and greed, pile them up, and burn them in a symbolic cleansing of their souls. And the citizenry had responded with enormous enthusiasm, flinging on cosmetics, mirrors, obscene books, playing cards, rich clothes, frivolous paintings, and other manifestations of worldly greed, then setting them alight in a gigantic “bonfire of the vanities.”
And then, as if on cue, he had heard about the demonstration on social media, joined it, and it had crystallized all his previous thoughts and ideas around that one idea: a twenty-first-century bonfire of the vanities. And what better place to do it than New York City, the Florence of the modern world, the city of billionaires and bums, the richest and the poorest, the midnight playground of the rich and the midnight pit of despair of the poor.
And so the ex-Jesuit, Marsden Swope, had put out a modest appeal on social media to everyone out there fed up with the materialism, narcissism, greed, selfishness, inequality, and spiritual emptiness of our modern society. He had invited them to attend this new bonfire of the vanities, to take place somewhere in New York City. So as to confuse and confound the authorities, the actual place and date of the bonfire, he wrote, would be kept secret until the very last minute. But it would take place in a public arena, a very public area, and it would happen so quickly the authorities would not have time to stop it. His readers, followers, should prepare themselves and await his instructions.
The idea, Swope wrote, came from the brutal killings of the Decapitator. Here was a person who pretended to recognize the evil in our modern world. If you believed in Satan (and there was much evidence to support that belief), you understood that the Decapitator was actually Satan’s servant. He was capitalizing on the predatory evil of the one percenters and their corporate henchmen to spread more evil. The Decapitator had set himself up in judgment as God himself, the ultimate blasphemy. He was an agent that would deflect the faithful from their real duty, which was to ask forgiveness, seek to purify themselves, to take the beam out of their own eye before trying to remove the mote from their brother’s. Those other protestors, the ones calling for the destruction of the rich, were as much Satan’s servants as the rich themselves. No, you don’t destroy the rich—you do as Jesus did, and convert them.
To that end, Swope was offering a bonfire of expiation. He asked everyone who wished to attend to bring something symbolic to be burned, something that represented to them the evil they wished to expunge in themselves. It should be an emblem of the purification each wished to undergo, the atonement they hoped to achieve, the penance they wanted to earn.
His modest postings had hit a nerve. At first, there was almost no response. And then there were a few retweets and a scattering of Facebook shares. Suddenly, like a rocket, it took off. Boy, oh boy, had the message gone viral. For eighteen hours straight, his computer had been pinging nonstop with posts and likes and responses to his appeal: hundreds of thousands. People were captivated. They yearned to purify themselves, to shed the dreck of materialism and greed. Thousands and thousands had posted pictures of the things they’d chosen for his bonfire of the vanities. It was astonishing, truly, how people in the tristate area had responded. They were all awaiting his announcement of where and when.
The last Chicken McNugget disappeared into his mouth and he chewed slowly and thoughtfully, barely tasting it. He drained the chocolate milk jug. His bodily needs taken care of, he cleared his table, dumped the refuse, and headed out the door and into the bitter December cold, back down 125th Street to his basement studio and his ancient PC.
There, he would continue rallying the city to his cause.
36
DR. WANSIE ADEYEMI was a most impressive-looking woman when she arrived at the United Nations to deliver a 10 AM speech to the General Assembly, Charles Attiah thought. He had been called in for a time-and-a-half shift for the UN Department of Safety and Security, where he was posted in the soaring lobby of the General Assembly building. He joined eighty other DSS guards whose job was to manage the dignitaries and delegations arriving for the speech, along with crowds surging to see Dr. Adeyemi, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier that year. Attiah was especially anxious to see her and had in fact requested this overtime detail, due to the fact that he was of Nigerian descent—and was proud of Adeyemi, now Nigeria’s ambassador and most famous citizen, and wanted to hear her speech to the UN.
Adeyemi had arrived about an hour before, with a large entourage and her own security detail, dressed in spectacular Nigerian kitenge dress, printed in a stunning black-and-white geometric pattern with bright-colored borders, and wearing a shimmering orange silk scarf wound around her head. She was tall, stately, dignified, and remarkably young given all her achievements, and Attiah was thrilled by her charisma.
Thousands had come to greet her as she passed through the lobby to cheering and the tossing of yellow roses, her signature flower. It was a shame, Attiah thought, that Dr. Adeyemi, a prominent Christian, had been forced to travel with such a large group of armed security guards, due to a fatwa, death threats, and even an assassination attempt.
Attiah had helped keep the respectful crowd in check behind velvet ropes as Dr. Adeyemi had passed through. She had been inside the hall now
for an hour, giving a speech on HIV/AIDS and pleading for more funding from world governments for the string of HIV clinics she had established across West Africa. He couldn’t see her, but the speech was being broadcast live into the lobby for the general public to listen. Adeyemi spoke eloquently in English about the work of her clinics and the remarkable decline in new HIV infections due to her organization’s efforts. Thousands of lives had been spared because of her clinics, which provided not just lifesaving drugs but also educational programs. All this, however, had made her a target of Boko Haram, who claimed that her clinics were a Western plot to sterilize Muslim women, and who had bombed several of them.
The General Assembly loved the speech, interrupting many times to applaud. Here was something purely good, Attiah thought; something every nation could agree on.
Attiah could hear the speech winding up. Now Dr. Adeyemi’s vibrant voice was reaching a crescendo of expression, calling on the world to pledge to eradicate HIV/AIDS as it had smallpox. It was possible. It would take money, dedication, and education on the part of the governments of the world—but it was within reach.
More cheering, and she concluded to a rousing standing ovation. Attiah braced himself for the surge about to enter the lobby. Soon the doors opened and the foreign delegations, dignitaries, press, and guests streamed out, followed by Adeyemi and her entourage of Nigerian politicians, doctors, and social workers. The group was surrounded by her security contingent. What a world this was, Attiah thought, that even a saint such as her had enemies. But that was the way it was, and the security around her was tight as a drum, even on top of the United Nations’ highly trained DSS.
The crowd continued pouring out, excited, talking, still full of the inspiring speech. They streamed along the velvet ropes, all very orderly, surging as Dr. Adeyemi, her entourage, security guards, and fans moved through the lobby. The place was as full of people as Attiah had ever seen it, all centered on Adeyemi like bees clustering around a queen. The press was there, of course—bristling with television cameras.
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