Dayfall

by Michael David Ares

  The door was an external one leading out to Tenth Avenue, and it wasn’t hard to spot Shinsky as he made his way rather clumsily through the crowd on the adjacent Twenty-Ninth Street, and then ran up the stairs leading to the High Line. The two cops didn’t have much time to wonder why he chose the elevated park rather than the city streets below it, where it would be easier to find a place to hide, because they were already running after him.

  14

  The High Line was an elevated train track platform, formerly part of the West Side Line, that was disused for many years and then transformed by the city into a park in a “rails-to-trails” program. The park was first opened in 2009, completed in 2015, and ran all the way from Thirty-Fourth Street in the north to below Thirteenth Street in the south. But as a result of the River Rise and construction of the Water Wall, the only part left was a stretch from Thirtieth to Twenty-Third Streets. The Wall was built right next to the outer edge of that section of the High Line, making it the only place in the city where residents and visitors could “walk the ramparts” along the Big Apple’s newest architectural wonder.

  When Jon and Halladay reached the top of the stairs, it wasn’t hard to tell that Shinsky had gone south on the narrow parkway. There was a decent-sized crowd, and the big perp was bumping into enough of them that the cops could see the ripples of offended and off-balance pedestrians he’d left behind in his wake. Jon noticed the same eerie blue-green glow up here that he had seen at Madison Square Park, from the UV lamps that lined the path and kept the plants growing.

  “I guess he’s done hiding,” Jon said, puzzled at the level of desperation the big ex-athlete had apparently reached. But he and Halladay just shrugged at each other and took off after him, making their own waves through the walkers and bicyclers. NFL linemen weren’t very fast even in their heyday, and Shinsky was older now, so the two officers were soon gaining on him. They even lined up their guns a few times when they caught an unobstructed view of his fleeing figure, but there were too many people in the park for them to fire on him. Plus, they wanted him alive for the sake of their investigation, and there weren’t any good angles to go for a wounding shot.

  When Jon estimated they were about a block from closing on him, both the big man and the ripples in the crowd ahead suddenly disappeared. As the two cops reached the spot where they had lost sight of him, they found a small stairway that was on the Wall side of the path, unlike the others used by most of the people for access to the street level. It seemed their prey had descended this smaller stairway because of where the crowd ripples ended, and because of the wordless communication from a few bystanders who nodded and pointed that way. So Jon bolted down the stairs himself, noticing that they were half built into the Wall itself and therefore had been added during the newer construction.

  Just a few feet away from the bottom of the steps there was a big steel door set into the inside of the Wall itself, and because Jon didn’t see Shinsky running away from it toward the street, he instinctively stepped over to it and looked for a handle to open it. He found none, only a small mechanism built into the door requiring some kind of key, so he turned around and starting moving through the smattering of cars parked underneath the roof formed by the elevated train platform above. It was extra dark under there, so he and Halladay stepped around the cars carefully with their guns drawn, as they had done with the beds at the sex club. But Shinsky was nowhere to be found.

  They scanned the nearest street, which led out to Tenth Avenue, but there was no sign of the big man, nor any indication he had gone that way. It didn’t seem to Jon that the perp had been far enough ahead of them to have cleared that street, or the buildings on the other side of the High Line. So he had to rethink, and soon found himself sprinting back to the stairway and running up it, his older partner huffing and puffing as he tried to keep up.

  When he got back up to the High Line, he made Halladay’s heart beat even faster by jumping onto the railing on the Wall side of the stairway entrance, and then propelling himself up onto the top of the parapet itself, which was about six or eight feet high.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the Scotsman said between heavy breaths.

  “He could have climbed up here and jumped,” Jon answered, peering over the wall into the darkness of the river below and listening for any sounds of swimming, or a boat, or whatever. He heard none.

  Meanwhile, Halladay was using his still considerable vocal strength to ask people if anyone saw “a big hairy guy” jump, or go down the stairs, or anything else. But no one responded, presumably because the park was designed for walking and biking rather than loitering, and everyone who been here earlier had moved on by now.

  The sound of MPD sirens arose from the bottom of the stairway, so Jon and Halladay descended it again and found three police cars had pulled in near the parked ones. Officers Ari Hegde and Brenda Dixon, of the Chaos Crimes division, had exited the lead one and were approaching them.

  “Well, if it isn’t Airhead and Dickless,” Halladay said, still breathing heavily.

  “You sound like you’re about to have a heart attack, Frank,” said the Indian cop.

  “I’m fine,” Halladay croaked. “What are you doing here?”

  “We got reports from people who thought a chaos crime was going down.”

  “I thought they only happened in the daylight,” Jon said, putting his gun back into its holster.

  “Apparently they do,” Hegde said, “because the only chaos I see here is Frank’s shirt coming all out of his pants.”

  “Hilarious,” Halladay growled. “Why don’t you do something useful and head out onto Tenth and see if you can find a big hairy guy who’s probably sweating even more than me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jon interjected. “Before you do anything else…” He motioned for the three cops to follow him in the direction of the big steel door built into the wall. “What’s this?”

  “What do you mean?” Hegde said. “It’s a door.”

  “Can we get it open? The city must have keys for it, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Halladay said, “but I assume GS would, because they built the Wall.”

  “I’ll make a few calls for you,” Hegde volunteered. He turned to go back to his car, followed by Dixon.

  Jon and Halladay waited for Hegde to return, but after a couple minutes his car and the other two just backed out and pulled away.

  “What the hell?” Halladay said, and dialed Hegde’s number on his phone. Jon took it from him while it was ringing.

  “Hegde,” the Indian man answered.

  “Where’d you go?” Jon asked.

  “Oh, we’re looking for your perp, like you asked.”

  “We’re standing here waiting for you. You said you were gonna check on the door.”

  “Oh, sorry. Yeah, MPD doesn’t have keys for Wall access points like that.… No one does. Render built it, and GS provides security for it. You’d have to talk to them. Sorry.”

  Jon ended the call and handed the phone back to Halladay, who just shrugged when the younger cop shot him a puzzled look.

  “Do ya think he jumped?” Halladay said as they walked back toward their own car.

  “Could be,” Jon said. “Why would he go up onto the High Line just to run back down again?”

  “Maybe because there are a lot of people.”

  “There’s a lot of people on the street, too. But going down those stairs would have taken him away from the crowd and given us a clear shot.”

  “Maybe he knew we didn’t want to shoot him.”

  “What if there was some way to get in the Wall from outside it, by jumping at that spot? Or he had a way to get in that door we saw? He could have been heading for that spot all along. That would explain the desperate sprint, if he knew he could disappear somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” Halladay said.

  “I want to talk to Render again,” Jon said. “But first let’s visit the people at NYU.”

  “Can�
�t we just make calls?”

  “Always better to talk in person, if you can. That’s what Philip Marlowe says, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Raymond Chandler’s detective, in his books—“

  “I know who he is,” Halladay said as they reached the car and got in. “I’m not completely illiterate. But why would anyone give a flyin’ bawbag what a fictional character says?”

  “Truth is no stranger to fiction,” was all Jon had to say as they pulled out onto the Manhattan streets.

  “What about the hot bartender?” Halladay asked. “I’m surprised you don’t want to question her now, since we got the info from the cameras there. And I can understand why you’d want to do that in person.”

  “Already did, while you were having your family time.”

  “Oh you did?” Halladay looked surprised. “You questioned her, did you? In person. How’d that go?’”

  When Jon didn’t respond except to smile slightly against his will, Halladay was even more surprised.

  “You dog!” the big Scot said. “I thought you Amish didn’t go in for that kinda thing.”

  “I’m not Amish.”

  “I guess not,” Halladay agreed, now seeming more impressed than surprised.

  “There was…,” Jon paused, still serious, and looking for a word, “a connection.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that.” Then Halladay himself turned more serious. “While you were, uh, connecting, did she have anything to say about the pictures?”

  “Not much. Nothing helpful, yet.”

  “Maybe I should question her, then.”

  “No,” Jon said, not sure whether Halladay was still being serious, then added in a lighter tone, “I don’t think you’re qualified.”

  “Oh, believe me, I am. Did I tell you my ancestors, the Halladays in Scotland, had a family motto? ‘The fourth to health.’ You know what that means?” He raised his eyebrows conspicuously as he said the last sentence.

  “No, I don’t know what that means,” Jon answered. “And I don’t care. You don’t exactly deal with things in a gentle way.”

  “Me? Whaddya mean?”

  “You shot Bagheera, Frank.”

  “Hey, that’s the first time you’ve called me ‘Frank.’ Does that mean we’re friends now?”

  Jon said nothing.

  They didn’t talk for a few minutes, because Halladay was concentrating on driving and Jon was on his phone looking at a few internet pages about the two experts at NYU who were predicting that Dayfall would be a disaster. Then he looked at the MPD database, which had nothing about them except their phone numbers and addresses.

  “The man looks familiar to me,” Jon said.

  “Of course he does. You’ve been looking at pictures of him.”

  “No, it’s something else. And they both have PO boxes, with no physical addresses listed in their file. Is that typical?”

  “Welcome to New York,” Halladay answered. “You’re not in Fart-Town anymore. We have to call the post office to get a residence address.”

  “No one could take the trouble to find them and put them online?”

  “Actually, I think it’s by choice. One of the few things I don’t like so much about our liberal Mayor. Privacy concerns, you know, dating back to the Patriot Act and all that.”

  “Whatever,” Jon said, and simply called the two professors’ phone numbers. He reached the first, and told her to meet them at her office in a half hour. When the other didn’t answer, Jon called the school and found out he was in class, so he left a message telling him to come to the other teacher’s office when he was done.

  “Don’t you want to talk to them separately?” Halladay asked.

  “We already know they have the same perspective,” Jon answered. “I want to see if they have a relationship with each other.”

  “Another hunch of yours?”

  Jon just smiled, and then called Amira and asked her to look for any pattern in the violence of the daylight chaos crimes that might point to a single perpetrator. He also told her to check to see if there were subway tunnels, used or not, near the buildings where the Dayfall murders had taken place. And then after some more Web browsing he called her once more, this time asking her to find out as much as she could about Mallory Cassady and the circumstances surrounding her boyfriend’s death.

  15

  DAYFALL MINUS 8 HOURS

  Since Columbia University had been lost to the River Rise, along with the rest of the Upper West Side, New York University was now without competition as the premiere higher educational institution on Manhattan Island. This virtual monopoly gave the thinkers there a tremendous amount of influence on the citizens of the city itself, and on the outside opinion of it—which explained how seriously the theories of Peter Gunther and Turnia Carter were taken, though they had been espoused by almost none of their peers around the country.

  Gunther, a science teacher, was currently in class. So the detectives were meeting Carter, a social psychologist, in her office, which was on Lafayette Street in the Puck Building, a handsome historical landmark made of burgundy brick, with two gold statues of Shakespeare’s mythical character on its exterior. One sculpture of the mischievous sprite graced a corner of the building and the other was above the front doors, framed by two sets of four high Corinthian columns. According to a directory inside the entrance, a significant portion of the building was taken up by NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and a stop at the front desk inside the main entrance sent the two cops one story up on the lobby elevator.

  They stepped out of it and into the most unique office area Jon had ever seen, though his experience was admittedly limited. A huge space that had probably once housed a factory was now converted into multiple levels of partial floors that seemed to hang in the air, following no uniform pattern, connected by numerous metal staircases that were painted a pristine white, as were all the walls and ceilings, contrasting with lightly colored hardwood flooring throughout. Above the offices and running through some of the higher ones were long stretches of visible iron pipes, which looked like they were part of the original architecture but were meticulously preserved and painted in a rich scarlet color that was matched by some of the furniture on display. The look was visually arresting.

  “Cool place to work,” Halladay said as they entered Carter’s office, which sat on the corner of one of the partial floors and had a nice view of several others and the high space in between them.

  “We like it,” Carter said. She was an almost-middle-aged black woman who was noticeably taller than she looked in pictures, and seemed hunched over a bit because of it. “How can I help you gentlemen?”

  “We’re trying to find the Dayfall Killer,” Jon said, “And we’d like to hear firsthand why you think everything is about to go to hell in this city.”

  “I can’t help you with your murder investigation,” she said coolly, “because I don’t know anything about it except what I see on the news.”

  “But your theories about the effect of the daylight on people here, couldn’t they apply to the murderer?”

  “No, because my theories are about an effect that occurs involuntarily in people, and is exacerbated in groups of people. Your serial killer works alone in a premeditated fashion. He seems to have chosen daylight, rather than the daylight affecting him.”

  “What about Dr. Gunther’s scientific angle … might that apply? Will he be able to help us when he arrives?”

  “Our theories are similar in that way.” She had no noticeable reaction to the news of him coming to the office. “But you can certainly ask him.”

  “Tell us about yours anyway, while we wait.”

  “Well, I like to use the illustration of what happens when a caver or spelunker shines a bright light into an underground nest where hundreds of bats are roosting. The bats panic and lash out violently toward anything around them, including one another. The same dynamic can occur with the human animal, given the righ
t set of circumstances. So the Dayfall Effect is really based on some simple primal psychological and social forces that are inherent to our nature. I call them ‘The Four Phobias.’”

  “And they are?” Jon said.

  “The first is metathesiophobia, or the fear of change. Many of the people in this city have known nothing or almost nothing but darkness for many years. To be exposed to full sunlight tomorrow, if they insist on being outside to welcome it, will by any definition be a trauma for at least most of them. They will respond emotionally in the various ways trauma victims do, and that will make human communication and conflict resolution problematic, to say the least.

  “The second phobia is more subtle and controversial, but I’ve become convinced of it the more I study and observe. It’s a form of photophobia, or the fear of light. There’s something about light in particular, in contrast to darkness, that creates a feeling of exposure and guilt in humans. The major religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam—all speak repeatedly of the dark as a place where people can hide what they don’t want others, or the gods, to know. For example, the Bible says people love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil, and they won’t come to the light for fear of being exposed by it. And you have many similar references in all the so-called ‘holy books.’ I’m not a religious person myself, but such a ubiquitous idea in the sacred records of so many cultures has to reflect something in reality.”

  “Hmph,” Halladay grunted. “I personally like to leave the light on when I’m sinning.”

  “But those religious references are metaphorical,” Jon said, ignoring his partner.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Carter said, “But why did they choose that metaphor in the first place, instead of, say, the other way around? Because more crime clearly takes place at night, and the morning is when we have the hangovers, the walk of shame, et cetera.”

  “Interesting. What’s the third?”

  “Ochlophobia, the fear of mobs. The feelings of panic that will occur because of the traumatic psychological effects of the Dayfall are contagious, if you will—they will increase exponentially in crowds.”