Unlike the hallway, this space had obviously been upgraded. It was the size of a large corporate office, with faux-wood paneling and a conference table in the center of the room. There were twenty chairs, large phone consoles in front of each one, and a spider-phone that made external communication accessible to all participants in the room.
“What happens here?” Mike asked.
“This is where we come to figure out how to run the railroads when something else shuts them down,” Gleeson said with a laugh. “Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the great blackout in 2003. You can even go back to 9/11. It’s our command and control center, for times when things are out of control.”
“I know your trains are running today,” Rocco said. “But it’s clear we’ve got a situation here.”
“And I’m not exactly sure what that is, other than the body that was found this afternoon. I’ve been given information about this, but I’m afraid I’m not a crime buff. I don’t read the tabloids.”
“It’s our third homicide in as many days, Mr. Gleeson. Two didn’t happen here, although close by, but they’re linked to this victim because someone drew train tracks—at least, that’s what we think the design is—on each of the bodies.”
Gleeson picked up a remote control and turned from the head of the table to a wall off to the side, where eight television screens were mounted in two stacks of four each. With a single click they were on. Each one was tuned to a different channel, and all seemed to be in the middle of the evening news cycle. Five of the screens showed reporters standing somewhere within the landmarked terminal.
“I guess the news is out,” he said. “I’m a novice at this. Just holding a place while our terminal’s CEO gets a bit of a sabbatical. Tell me what you need.”
“So our first victim was found Tuesday night. Fiftieth Street, in the Waldorf Hotel,” Mike said. “A young woman who was probably drugged and kidnapped before she was murdered. No reason to connect it to Grand Central then. Now we’ve got this track thing going on—some kind of souvenir the killer leaves on their bodies, and like the girl in the railroad car downstairs, that one had her throat slit, too. Probably raped.”
Bruce Gleeson shook his head.
“Second victim is a guy. Stabbed in the back. Found up on DePew Place, right on the street, but we confirmed this morning that he lived in one of your tunnels.”
“That’s a story we don’t need to tell the reporters.”
“It’s all hanging out there by now.”
“Actually, Mr. Gleeson,” Mercer said, “the deceased didn’t seem to have anything to do with the station proper—I mean, with the terminal. By the accounts we have so far, he came and went by the Northwest Passage. He was more of a street hustler who burrowed in when he needed a place to stay.”
“So it’s this body on the private railcar that brings everything under our roof right now, am I right?”
“Yes, sir,” Mercer said.
“This young woman,” Gleeson asked, “does she work in Grand Central?”
“We don’t know who she is yet. Not a whit of identification, just like the first one. We may not be able to answer that till we get her picture out in public tomorrow.”
“Do you think the killer could be an employee?” Gleeson’s fingers were nervously tapping on the table.
“Until an hour ago,” Mike said, circling the table as he talked, “we had no reason to connect this to the terminal. We don’t know whether this guy is a train buff or a conductor, a mole or a commuter. But I don’t like the direction the case is taking.”
“What direction is that?”
“Bodies getting closer to the terminal.”
“You’ve got a luxury hotel on 50th Street,” Mercer said. “The body’s found in a Tower suite, forty-five flights up in the air. Dicey because the president is due to take over that space in a few days, but it seems like the location is just a coincidence.”
Mike was running his fingers through his hair. “No such thing as coincidence.”
“Next guy is on a dead-end street. Stabbed in the back. In our business,” Mercer said to Gleeson, “there’s no reason in the world to connect him to the first victim—who turns out to be a well-educated girl from a stable family with a work history and maybe dating a bad guy.”
“Emphasis on maybe,” Mike said.
“The boyfriend didn’t like the breakup—that’s often cause for violence,” Mercer said, “and he happens to channel all his anger toward POTUS.”
“That’s a far cry from being able to organize all this shit,” Mike said.
“He fled, didn’t he?” Rocco said.
“Lousy timing, although I’m not sure he’s perp material.”
“But not just a coincidence, in your book.”
“Never is,” Mike said, shaking his head.
“Only the design of the tracks on both bodies,” Mercer said, “which we first thought was a ladder, is what connected them. I don’t think any cops would have linked the two deaths otherwise.”
Gleeson was trying to divert the crimes from his turf. “Could that be what they are? Ladders?”
“That’s what Coop thought,” Mike said. “Led us off course, like she often does. We’d all be happy if they were ladders.”
“This new case changes the whole dynamic,” Mercer said. “It happens in a railroad car that’s sitting on a platform directly adjacent to your terminal, two days before the president of the United States, who’ll be staying at the Waldorf, is due to arrive.”
“But we’ve got excellent security here,” Gleeson said, watching Mike as he did laps around the table.
“Like what?” Rocco asked.
“There’s an NYPD presence, as you know. Well armed and patrolling all parts of the terminal. There’s Metro-North police.”
“What, two hundred of them covering more than thirty stations?” Mike said. “Not exactly reassuring. Especially if you remember the midnight cowboys.”
More than a decade ago, the Metro-North police force was rocked by a scandal. Videos surfaced of officers patrolling the concourse of the great terminal on the late shift, wearing only their hats, neckties, shoes, and holsters. The building was nicknamed the Wild West. Massive firings that resulted led to the slow growth of an entirely new crop of officers.
“They’ve got K-9 units—dogs that sniff bombs and others that are trained to detect poisonous vapors. And they can bring in assault weapons if needed.”
Homeland Security had long ago designated major transportation hubs for heightened security measures. Operation Torch established teams comprised of six detectives and a dog—all trained in counterterrorism techniques—to patrol on New York City subways.
“Are they in place now?” Mike asked.
“I know they’re planning to saturate the terminal over the weekend, for the president’s arrival,” Gleeson said, counting off a list on his fingers. “Sniffers are installed all over, too.”
“You said that. Dogs.”
“No, I mean the electronic sensors. They’re called sniffers.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“I’m sure you’ve seen those metal boxes around the concourse, and the wires dangling from some of the arches?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never noticed them.”
“That’s part of the plan,” Gleeson said. “They sniff the air for traces of poisonous gas or any kind of chemical that would signal a biological attack.”
“Someone actually monitors that?” I asked.
“No, Ms. Cooper. The sensors feed data to a computer system that runs constantly and is primed to alert security if there’s a positive result.”
“That’s happening now?” Mike asked.
Gleeson hesitated. “It’s supposed to be. I’ll have to check and get an answer for you. Occasionally the chemicals in the cleaning fluids set off the sensors, so they have to be readjusted from time to time. And we have surveillance cameras, as you know. With facial recognition capability.”
“Using that term very loosely.”
“Why? You’ve had a problem with it? Most of the officers think it’s been very effective.”
“It has been, Mr. Gleeson,” Rocco Correlli said. “Chapman doesn’t like anything to slip through the cracks. Every now and then—”
“Face it, Loo,” Mike said. “You don’t want your mug on the camera? Anyone with half a brain can bypass the system. Head down, any kind of hat with a brim.”
“A wig, a fake mustache, a pair of large sunglasses,” Mercer said. “Facial recog is not going to help us in the short run here.”
“What’s this?” Mike asked. He had circled the conference table enough times to make me dizzy from watching him. “What’s behind these blinds?”
He was standing to the right of the table, pointing at a large panel of venetian blinds.
“It’s—it’s the operations room behind there,” Gleeson said. “It has nothing to do with the issue of security inside the terminal itself.”
“Lift them, will you?”
Gleeson picked up one of the remotes and pressed a button. The white blinds glided up and rolled back, revealing another room twenty feet below us. There were two rows of men—ten per row—each in front of a desktop. Covering the entire wall in front of them was a giant board, run by a computer, with brightly colored lines that danced as the workers typed on their keyboards.
“What am I looking at?” Mike asked.
Bruce Gleeson stood up and approached the window to the operations room. “Those men can tell you where every piece of equipment that’s running is at any given moment. They’re the rail traffic controllers.
“There are thousands of square miles—and hundreds of thousands of travelers—serviced by this system. There are two thousand switches along the rails the trains ride, going to the north and west of the city. Used to be there were men who stood in the switch towers all day to make changes on the tracks according to the signals they were sent. Now,” Gleeson went on, “these guys you’re looking at just right-click on the mouse and the change is made, whether the rail is in New Haven or Poughkeepsie. No more towers. No more men out there flipping the switches.”
“That’s a lot of power for these guys,” Mike said.
“And a huge responsibility.”
“The lines on the big screen?”
“A train arrives at this terminal every forty-seven seconds, Mr. Chapman. To the far right, you can see that there are only four lines. White lines.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s because there are only four tracks that go in and out of the tunnel, once they merge from the departure platforms. Four tracks,” Gleeson said. “Keep your eye on the white lines.”
“Will do.”
“As soon as the color changes—there you go—one of them is red now.”
The red neon streaked onto the screen. “So that’s an arrival,” Mike said.
“Yes. And when the four tracks reach northern Manhattan, they branch out. Soon there are eight tracks going in different directions. Then sixteen.”
“The green and yellow lines.”
“Exactly.”
“How about all that purple?” Mike asked, pointing to lines on the left.
“Those are tracks under repair,” Gleeson said. “Or an indication that a VIP is going to be coming through, so they’re left empty.”
“Is any of that clearance for this weekend? For the president?”
“I—I don’t know. I’m in management, I’m not an engineer. I’ll have to find out for you.”
“I’m getting ahead of myself. Following tracks up to Canada when I should be more interested in a bad guy heading this way.” Mike turned his attention back to the conference room. “How many exits and entrances to Grand Central? To the terminal itself?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mike said. “Twenty-six separate and distinct entrances? We’d need an army to cover those—and monitor every train pulling in or out—twenty-four/seven.”
Bruce Gleeson put his hand to his forehead. “You’ve got the entrance on Vanderbilt Avenue, at the top of the marble staircase. Opposite the Yale Club.”
Mike nodded at Mercer. “Where the trunk was stolen.”
“On the south side—42nd Street—there are entrances on both corners—and of course the Grand Hyatt hotel is in the middle of the block. You can access the terminal and subway through a back corridor in the lobby.”
“Check.”
“Lexington Avenue has the long arcade entrance, past all the shops and food halls. It draws you right into the main concourse as well as down into the subway station.”
“Don’t forget the Park Avenue Viaduct,” Mercer said.
That roadway above street level that encircles the building has an entry into the upper tier above the Grand Hyatt lobby, too, which I had used many times coming and going to ballroom events and avoiding the crowds at the bar downstairs.
“And from Park Avenue,” Gleeson said, “through the MetLife Building, you come directly in here.”
“That’s what we did this afternoon,” Mike said.
“I don’t have to remind you that there are feeds from subway lines all over this building, so one could theoretically get in from any corner of the city by coming underground,” Gleeson said.
“Talking underground, you’ve got the opening from the commuter train tunnels—wider than the mouth of the Nile,” Mike said, “that feeds into the concourse. You got your homeless, your employees, your odd sorts traveling in privately. Hundreds of miles of train tracks just waiting to be compromised.”
“Don’t sound so negative,” I said, still thinking of the Grand Hyatt, built directly above the landmarked old terminal. “There’s a hotel right upstairs. If our killer was looking to make that kind of connection to the terminal, he could have murdered Corinne Thatcher right here.”
It had been a long day. I was exhausted and distressed about Raymond Tanner. I didn’t need Mike to overdramatize the already titillating events.
“So what’re you saying?” Mike asked.
“I’m rejecting your ‘no coincidence’ theory, Detective Chapman,” I said, twisting my hair to get it off my neck and banding it into a ponytail. “I’m suggesting the fact that Thatcher’s body was deposited in the Waldorf may be just that. A coincidence.”
Bruce Gleeson had moved to the window overlooking the operations room. He lowered the white blind covering the window that separated the two spaces before he spoke. “I think you’re wrong, Ms. Cooper. I’d have to agree with Mr. Chapman—much as I would hope otherwise, for the sake of everyone in this terminal—that the murder in the Waldorf is not likely to be a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?”
Gleeson bit his lip, then continued to speak. “You know there’s a city underground, right below this mammoth building?”
“The train tunnels,” Mike said, “where the homeless people live. We get it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What then?”
“When the design for Grand Central was sketched out in 1900, the master planners wanted to change the entire complexion of Midtown Manhattan. The area to the east of 42nd Street—prime real estate now—was made up entirely of slums and slaughterhouses.”
“Right here?” I asked.
“East Side slaughterhouses, Ms. Cooper. Cattle used to escape from time to time and wander onto the old tracks, when they were aboveground, unlike where they are today. The buildings weren’t skyscrapers and office towers. They were tenements and shanties.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“You’ve heard of the White City?” Gleeson asked. “The movement to beautify urban areas, which started at the exposition in Chicago.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the White City, and the devil who lived in it. Dr. H. H. Holmes, wasn’t it? The serial killer who turned his home into a World’s Fair hotel, complete with a gas chamber and a dissection ta
ble. That’s not what you’re thinking?”
“No, no. But the architecture that turned Chicago into the White City was the impetus for what the builders did here, in the Grand Central zone.”
“What’s that?” Mike asked.
“They stood to gain a fortune from creating something that was not only safer in terms of train travel, but that would make this complex the center of the sprawling city. That would rid it of slums and shantytowns,” Gleeson said. “The railroad tracks had already been sunk below street grade by the commodore.”
“Cornelius Vanderbilt?”
“Yes, Detective Chapman. But Commodore Vanderbilt died in 1877. Twenty-five years later, the chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad came up with the concept of air rights. Do you know what that means?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Vanderbilt dredged the area north of Grand Central that we now call Park Avenue—home to some of the world’s most expensive real estate—and ran the trains below street level. Dug deep trenches in the ground to lay the tracks. Saved lives by doing that. Threw up iron fences and plotted patches of grass. That’s when they changed the name of the street.”
“What do you mean?”
“Down below Union Square, where the road begins, it’s still Fourth Avenue, named like all the numbered avenues. Once the trains were laid in and the flowers planted, they tried to class it up by dubbing it Park Avenue.”
“Seems to have taken,” I said, thinking of all the glorious flower displays in the meridians throughout each season and the sparkling Christmas tree lights.
“People used little footbridges to cross the avenue, and all the flying cinders from the steam engines stayed down in the ditches, no longer setting fire to everything around the old rails.”
“Clever,” Mike said.
“Then, with the introduction of electric trains after 1900, this fellow named William Wilgus—the chief engineer—took the commodore’s concept a step further.”
“He covered the tracks,” Mercer said. “They were already dug below the surface, and these gents figured that they could pave right over the damn things. Enclose them completely. Get them out of sight altogether and build on top of the train tracks.”
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