4
The nearest helipad turned out to be a rather notorious one on the top of the MetLife Building above Grand Central Station. Jon had found out in his research about the city that it had been used for public transportation in the 1970s until a horrible accident closed it down. One of the rotor blades from a helicopter had broken off when the landing gear malfunctioned, causing the aircraft to turn sideways. Whirling out of control, the blade struck four people waiting on the rooftop, killing three of them instantly, then plunged over the skyscraper’s west parapet. After striking a window and breaking in two about halfway down the eight-hundred-foot gray tower, one piece continued down to Madison Avenue and killed another unsuspecting pedestrian.
This was one of the reasons, John had learned, why commercial helicopters hadn’t been allowed to land on any of the big buildings for many years now. It was also a reminder to him of how anything could happen in New York.
After a long elevator ride down and a walk of a couple blocks, Jon arrived at One Hundred Park Avenue, an older International Style office building with a facade of white brick piers separated by vertical stripes of glass and aluminum spandrels. It sat on an L-shaped plot, thirty-six stories facing Park Avenue and a smaller wing extending back on the Fortieth Street side. Above the base the main tower rose to a set-back top with an illuminated “100” shining just below the roof.
Jon met Frank Halladay in the lobby after milling with a growing crowd of reporters for about five minutes, because his new partner wasn’t considerate enough to come down ahead of time and wait for him to arrive. Halladay also wasn’t much for introductions; as soon as he found Jon and led him through the turnstiles, he dove right into details of the case.
“This is Exhibit A,” said the sandy-haired man, gesturing at the security measures. He was in his fifties and slightly out of shape, but tall enough at six foot two to still present an imposing figure, especially compared to Jon’s five-foot ten-inch frame. “State-of-the-art security and surveillance here and at the two freight entrances. Not so airtight inside the building, as you’ll see, but we can’t for the life of us figure out how he got in.”
This was obviously the reason for Mayor King’s reference to the killer as someone who could “walk through walls.”
“I’m wondering about the roof,” Halladay continued as they headed for the elevators. “Because it’d be so hard to sneak in from the ground, and there are no cameras up there. But there’s nowhere to land up there, either, as you found out. You had to walk from the MetLife Building, right?”
Jon said, “Yes” as an elevator arrived and they got in. The older man hit the button for the fourth floor and asked, “So how do you like the Big Apple? Is it true that you’ve never been here before?”
“Less crowded than I expected,” Jon answered, ignoring the second question.
“Did you walk through Grand Central on the way?” Jon nodded, and Halladay continued, “Yeah, the thinning out is definitely noticeable in there.… It’s still busy, but it’s not Grand Central Station, if you know what I mean.”
Jon nodded again, and smiled slightly to acknowledge the joke. It wasn’t all that funny, but he didn’t want to alienate his new partner at the beginning.
“About a third of us have left the city,” Halladay explained. “And a lot of the subways have been shut down because of the flooding.”
“Why did so many people leave?” Jon asked. “Constant darkness get to them after a while?”
“Yeah, and other things. Only a few ways to get on and off the island now, and just the general quality of life is lower, ’cause the city is hurting for money.”
“And a lot of people are wearing those masks,” Jon added. “Some interesting fashions.”
“They don’t know whether the air here can really kill you, or even hurt your health. But you heard about that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“So why aren’t you wearing one?”
“I don’t expect to be in this city for very long,” Jon answered. “Why aren’t you?”
“I guess I don’t expect to be on this planet for very long,” he said with a crooked smile. “Or really want to.”
The elevator stopped and they stepped out into a utilitarian hallway, leading Jon to presume that this wasn’t a typical floor of rented offices, which would likely be more stylish.
“I’m taking you to the places we know that he went, in order,” Halladay said. “His first stop was the security camera room, which puts a kink in my roof theory, because there’s pretty good coverage of the path from the roof entrance to the elevators—probably ’cause they’re worried about jumpers or the quarter-mile-high club. But maybe the perp knew how to wriggle around the cameras, or took the chance that the guy watching them wouldn’t notice.”
Halladay nodded to a police guard standing outside the room, pulled aside the yellow tape on the door, and opened it. “Whatever happened, the camera guy was surprised. As you can see.”
A uniformed rent-a-cop sat in a chair in front of the banks of video screens, having swiveled around to see who had entered the room. The man’s hand was on his gun but the weapon was still in its holster, and a seeping bullet wound stained his forehead.
“Smart,” Halladay said as he waved his hand at the screens. “Uses a silencer to be safe, takes out this guy, can see a lot of things from here. Where the cameras are and aren’t. Who in the building is vulnerable. This was during the latest stretch of daylight, of course, so a lot of people stayed home from work out of fear, while others wanted to be outside out of fascination. So when the killer was here, there were a lot of people working alone in various parts of the building. He picked out a couple, and you’re about to see what he did to them.”
“But he couldn’t tamper with the recordings?” Jon asked.
“No, not without some kind of very high clearance. Which he definitely didn’t have, because … look.”
Halladay punched a button in front of one of the bigger screens in the middle, and un-paused a loop that he and the security personnel had found earlier. It was a shot from a hallway ceiling outside an elevator entrance, and it showed a middle-aged female in office attire waiting at the door and then walking through it when the elevator arrived. Then another figure flashed in from outside the camera’s view and blocked the door before it could close. He was wearing something that covered most of his face—either a piece of ski apparel or one of those health masks. The killer was short but muscular, built like a bowling ball. He pulled open his jacket as he blocked the door and liberated some duct tape that seemed to be attached to the inside of the coat, next to some other objects that sparkled with light briefly before he passed out of view and into the elevator.
Jon wondered what he’d just seen, but fortunately Halladay or some technician had appended to the brief recording a slow motion version of those few seconds.
“Those are knives,” Jon said after watching it.
“A whole collection of ’em,” Halladay agreed. “That’s how he’s done most of his victims, and that’s one of the reasons you’re here, I’m thinking. Didn’t the Full Moon guy in Philly like knives, too?”
“Yeah,” Jon said, pointing to the bandage that still graced the bottom of his chin. “I’m not much of a fan.”
“This is the only video memento we have of our perp’s little trip to One Hundred Park Avenue,” Halladay said, returning to the task at hand. “There are only cameras on the elevator doors on some floors, at the discretion of the tenants. And we don’t get much from this clip, except to give the research staff some work trying to find out who might make custom leather jackets for serial killers … or chefs or cutlery salesmen or whoever might buy something like that.”
“Too bad there wasn’t a camera inside the elevator,” Jon said.
“No.… It’s actually good there wasn’t a camera in there.”
The big detective led Jon out of the room and reattached the police tape, and soon they were back in an elevat
or heading up to the fourteenth floor.
“Did I hear the rumor correctly?” Halladay asked, studying the ceiling of the car. “That you’ve been given a private number for the King?” When Jon didn’t answer, he added, “Must be nice.”
Jon didn’t answer again, and the elevator reached its destination.
“He got on with the woman the floor above this,” Halladay said as they exited. “Stopped it in between the two floors to do his dirty work, then pried a door open and crawled out. We brought it down to this level.”
Jon didn’t hear the end of what his new partner was saying, because they were standing in front of another elevator that was diagonally across the hallway from the one they had ridden. And inside was the body of the unlucky woman who had found out what the knives were for. Her face was unmolested except for the swath of duct tape covering her mouth, but her lower midsection was a bloody mess from what was apparently a series of stabs and slashes directed at her genitals, or womb, or both. The Full Moon Killer in Philadelphia had defiled that part of women’s bodies for his own twisted pleasure, but for some reason this Dayfall Killer was destroying them.
“It’s like Jack the Ripper,” Halladay said.
“How many of the previous vics have been this same M.O.?” Jon asked.
“All of them. But one out of the first seven was a male, and number eight, who’s upstairs, is also a male. And he’s only done that three times.”
Halladay pointed to the back wall of the elevator, above the body, where some letters were scrawled in blood. They spelled, TIME DIEM.
“What does that mean,” Jon said, “‘time of day’?”
“No, I guess you say it ‘timay’ and it’s an imper … er … or whatever it’s called. A command. It means, ‘Fear the Day.’”
“Oh,” Jon said.
“Don’t worry, someone had to tell me, too.” The older cop started to move away to the next scene, but Jon put his hand on an arm to stop him.
“He exited on this floor, right?” Jon said. “Because the camera above didn’t get him leaving.”
“That’s right.”
“Where’s the blood?” Jon asked, looking around at the floor. “There’s so much in the elevator.… How did he not get some on his shoes and leave a trail?”
“Good question. Maybe he was really careful. Maybe he wore plastic bags on ’em and put those bags in another plastic bag.”
“And the knives,” Jon added. “He’s not gonna put them back in his jacket all wet, is he?”
“Maybe he wiped them with something and put that in the bag. And maybe he took that bag and its contents to the perfect place for his next kill, where he could flush it all down the cludgie.”
“The what?” Jon said, as they started moving again and ended up back in an elevator.
“It’s a Scottish word for the toilet,” Halladay said.
“I thought I heard a bit of an accent.”
“Yep. I come from a long line of distinguished Scotsmen, who served the motherland and then this country for centuries. If anyone rates a private number for the King—”
“Your father was a New York detective, right?” Jon interrupted. “And your grandfather was a beat cop.”
“How the hell did you know that?” Halladay’s nonchalant exterior had cracked a little for the first time.
“I did some checking on you.”
By now the elevator had arrived at the eighteenth floor, and they were walking the hallways toward a bathroom that would be a janitor’s hell for the next day or two.
“This asshole is good at what he does,” Halladay said on the way, his slight annoyance seeming to have vanished. “He not only knew where to end up so he could flush his cleaning supplies, he knew how much time he’d likely have to commit another murder and leave the building before someone figured out one of the elevators wasn’t working.”
When they reached the men’s bathroom, there were two men with a fold-up gurney hanging around just inside the door, in a more spacious part with sinks and lockers on each side, before it narrowed into urinals and stalls in the back.
“It’s about time,” the older man said with a grimace. “Can we finally get the bodies out of this building, before they paint over them?”
“Very funny,” Halladay said. “I told you I wanted my new partner to see them as they lay, and he’s gonna see them as they lay. And you’re gonna leave the room now so we can talk. You can wait outside or go clear the other two—we’re done with them.”
The older man frowned again, and gestured to the younger one to exit with him. As he left he also gestured to Halladay, with his middle finger. But Halladay just watched him go.
“These ‘reverse surgery’ guys—like I call ’em—don’t like to be jerked around,” he said. “Pretty depressing job as it is.”
Jon remembered from his research that New York was unusual in that it didn’t have a coroner’s office, just the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME. But he didn’t have time to consider what that might mean practically, because his partner pulled him toward the back of the bathroom to see the corpse propped up in a sitting position on one of the toilets. The lower abdomen was mutilated on this one, too, and the last small remnants of blood in the body were still dripping into the white-and-red bowl below it.
“He chose a small male, and a weak one at that,” Halladay explained. “Maybe even a jobbie jabber.” Jon could only guess what that expression meant, and didn’t want to know. “Not chancing too much resistance, I’d say, like accidentally picking someone who’s taken karate classes. But this was definitely a male, ’cause he cut some things off him and threw ’em across the room.”
Halladay nodded toward the floor on the other side, where before he looked away Jon glimpsed a small pile of bloody body parts. Despite some prior experience with violent murder, the young detective still gagged a little at the sight.
“Why shoot the camera guy but cut up the others?” he asked, keeping his mind occupied.
“Been thinking about that,” the older cop said. “Maybe the risk angle.… A security guy could give him trouble unless he takes care of him quick. Or the blood issue … not wanting to have too much to clean up that early in the game. Or maybe he just had to take care of the camera guy to get to the people he wanted to cut up.… Could be some personal or passion motive we haven’t been able to figure out.”
“Seems unlikely, with seven other vics cut up just as bad. You haven’t found any connections between them, right? Only that they happened when the sun was out?”
“Yeah, otherwise they appear random, as far as we can tell. Hell, a lot of crime has no real point to it, but I just can’t buy the idea that the Dayfall is causing all this.”
“Which theory?” Jon asked. “The psychological stuff or the scientific idea of it being in the air?”
“Neither,” Halladay sneered. “‘Yer arse and parsley,’ as my grandpa used to say. But people are starting to panic enough that it might end up being—what do you call it?—a self-fulfilling prophecy. You got people injured and dying in the ‘chaos crimes’ that have been happening in public places at the same time, and you got this guy”—he gestured at the bloody body in the stall—“making people think this could happen to them anytime they’re alone, even in places like an elevator or the john.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Jon said, then backed away from the victim and looked around the room one last time. “Where are the trash cans?”
“Taken back to the lab at HQ, along with all the other possible evidence from the other scenes.”
“Then that’s where I wanna go next,” Jon said.
5
DAYFALL MINUS 26 HOURS
When they reached the Flatiron Building and parked the car in the garage behind it, Halladay insisted that they walk around the outside of the building and stand in front for a while before going inside. He wanted to show Jon a “visual picture” of the politics of New Manhattan, comparing and contrasting some of t
he important buildings around Madison Square Park.
What Jon noticed first about the park were not the buildings around it, however, but the fact that unlike most of the city, it was actually filled with living grass and trees. Because this district was now so central to what remained of the island, and to the politics of the city because of who occupied the buildings, the park was lit by industrial-strength UV lamps, and had been heated by warmers to melt the snow before the temperatures had warmed recently at the coming of Dayfall. The UV lamps seemed to be the primary cause of the odd-colored, otherworldly glow that emanated from the area, though there were also two large TV screens positioned at the north and south ends of the park.
Despite the recent warming, it was still cool enough that Jon could wear his black leather trench coat, with its long belt tied around his waist and its collar turned up. It was an inexpensive one made by Navarre, with an Italian Stone Design pattern, all he could afford on his police salary. But it was lightweight enough to move around in and didn’t elicit ridicule from his coworkers like the tan one he had bought at first, in an attempt to dress like Philip Marlowe. He never even tried to wear a fedora, because of the same problem, though he would have liked to. Halladay, for his part, wore a shorter leather jacket, beat up and brown.
“The Flatiron was the first skyscraper built in New York,” the older cop said, gesturing at the building they were standing in front of. “Which is one of the reasons, along with its central location, that the King picked it. She wanted to connect her post-flagger regime with old New York … ‘a symbol of our enduring past,’ I think she called it. So Darth Render went and picked another old building for his base, right across the park, obviously for symbolic reasons of his own.”
Dayfall Page 3
