“Okay, the Dayfall murder locations,” Amira began. “Now that we have the GS map of the underground, with all their modifications on it, I found out there’s subterranean access into every building where the Dayfall Killer has struck. They’re all near subway tunnels, used or unused, and they all have passageways from the tunnels to their basements put in by GS engineers when they were securing the underground. There are over a hundred such access points throughout the city, all below buildings because entrances on the surface would be too easy to discover. Where they could, they made use of already existing underground structures, like the floors below the library and the abandoned construction below Grand Central.”
“So our ghost-who-walks-through-walls mystery has been solved,” Halladay added. “The one who just attacked you was using them to sneak in and out of those buildings to play with his cutlery collection, and Shinsky could use them to disappear after working the crowd with his.”
“Here’s an overlay of the underground map and the fatalities and injuries that happened during the chaos crimes,” Amira said as she brought it up on a nearby screen. “As you suspected, there is a pattern to them.… They all started with fatal wounds that took place near access points from the underground, and then spread out in concentric circles, with the nonfatal injuries happening as people panicked after the fatal ones occurred. And as you can see by the different times and locations of the circles, Shinsky could easily have caused almost all of this by himself. You can actually tell where he waded into a crowd, did his thing, then traveled to another place a little later via the underground and did it again. And here’s what made it seem like there was chaos all over the city.…”
She added another overlay to the map that showed a bunch of red spots that were also near access points to the underground, but in different parts of the city than the ones before.
“These are the fires and explosions that took place when the sun came out briefly,” Amira said. “This is obvious enough that it didn’t take me long to figure it out once I knew what to look for, thanks to your suggestions. One wonders why the Chaos Crimes people don’t seem to know it.”
“Maybe they do,” Halladay said, “but they’re just not doing anything about it.”
“So there’s a third perp, one who’s a pyro,” Jon said. “The short guy carves up people inside buildings to scare the city, the big guy slashes people in crowds to create panic on the streets, and the third one does it by burning and blowing shit up so it’ll look like the city’s descending into chaos because of the Dayfall.”
“All because Garth Vader wants them to feel unsafe,” Halladay offered, “so they’ll vote for him on Tuesday.”
Jon looked at Amira, who nodded slightly.
“Or,” the young cop said, “someone else who has access to the underground is behind it.” Halladay reacted, but he went on. “Look, Frank, you can hit me in the head all you want, but Mayor King did make a payment to Carter at NYU. That’s still the hardest evidence we have about who wants there to be fear in the city.”
“She explained that to you, Piss-Pants.”
“Stop calling me that!” Jon started to say, but Amira jumped in.…
“It could be precisely because Mayor King is well intentioned that her payment was so easily discovered. She doesn’t know how to hide a bribe like criminals do, nor does she have as much need to.”
“No offense intended, Amira,” Jon interrupted. “But Gotham Security is prejudiced against your religion—they would never hire you—so don’t you think that might make you biased against them?”
“No offense taken,” the woman in the head scarf replied. “But one reason I like my religion is that it emphasizes justice, and I’m determined to be just in my judgments. My older brother was killed in a crime on the streets of New York when I was a teenager—that’s why I wanted to be a cop in the first place, and I fought through a lot of obstacles to make it to where I am. I’m actually sympathetic to GS because it’s true that the police are hog-tied sometimes, so I think I’m seeing this objectively.” She paused and met Jon’s stare. “So can I finish what I was saying?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I took a closer look at the professors’ accounts, and I realized there’s something important that’s not there.”
“What’s that?”
“Housing payments. I couldn’t find any mortgage or rent.”
“So you’re thinking someone could be giving them a place to live as incentive to promote the chaos theories.”
“Though it would have to be a really nice place,” Amira said, after nodding, “to offset the amount of money the Mayor gave Carter.”
“And we don’t know where,” Halladay said, “because their addresses are PO boxes, so we’d have to tail them to find out.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Jon said, as a light bulb went on in his head. “I know where they live.”
“Really?” his partner said. “How’s that?”
“Remember how I thought I’d seen Gunther before? I just remembered where. It was in the lobby of One Madison, where Render lives. He came out of the elevator in the lobby when we were going in.”
21
“Wow,” said Amira, “a free condo in that building is a pretty nice bribe, especially in a city where housing is such a big deal.”
“And you have a pretty good memory,” Halladay said to Jon, “for an incontinent.”
“That’s why we talk to people in person,” Jon fired back, “instead of being lazy and calling on the phone.”
“Even if we put all our biases aside,” Amira said, “it seems pretty clear that Gareth Render is the only person who could have arranged for the NYU professors to live at One Madison. And with the way that’s been done clandestinely, and what we heard from the Mayor’s daughter, it seems pretty clear that their theories were invented to create panic under the Mayor’s watch and give the impression that only Gotham Security can keep people safe.”
“So Darth was making extra sure he would get elected,” Halladay said, “just like the King suspected. If the experts spreading their lies didn’t work, the killers spilling some blood would.”
“It makes sense,” Jon said, thinking about it for a few moments. “Except that Render doesn’t actually seem like the type to me. It’s just a feeling, I don’t know.”
“Don’t let him fool ya.”
“Researching the underground reminded me,” Amira said, “how the homeless population down there basically disappeared when GS was securing it. It was reported that they were wiped out or driven to the surface by flooding, but the idea that it happened to all of them seems really far-fetched. There was a lot of whispering that Gotham Security actually killed most of them, but of course most people didn’t care that much because it didn’t hurt them personally. So there have probably already been examples of Gar Render sanctioning murder if he thinks it will benefit the city.”
“Or his own ambitions,” Halladay said.
“You said you discovered something about Mallory Cassady?” Jon asked, not really wanting to know.
“A couple things, actually,” Amira answered, and Jon’s heart sank more. “First, about her fiancé’s death. I have access to police records and data that Miss Cassady doesn’t, so my guess about what happened to him is much more educated than what she heard from GS. And as far as I can tell, it wasn’t that he died in a random crime and GS avenged his death by killing the perps. The random part was that he accidentally witnessed one of their unauthorized law enforcement actions, when they executed three alleged criminals without legal process.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because he reported it to the MPD.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell Mallory?”
“Maybe he was scared, maybe he didn’t want to put her in any danger. But he only kept it secret for less than a day, because it looks like someone from GS was sent to kill him. Then they blamed it on the three dead perps and told her that they
killed them in reprisal for his death.”
“She said the MPD dragged their heels or something,” Jon said. “Seemed like a while before she heard from GS.”
“The bodies of the perps weren’t found until months later,” Amira answered. “They were put into the river, probably through a service hatch in the wall.”
“Why didn’t the MPD investigate GS and find this out?”
“Like you’ve already seen,” Halladay jumped in, “it’s a crapshoot whether the police who get a report are willing to investigate GS, or whether they’ll just look the other way. Some of ’em will even doctor reports to help the bastards in a lie like this.”
“I just sent the report on that case to your phone,” Amira said, looking up from hers. “You can look at it for yourself, but I think you’ll see the same thing I did.”
“What else about … Miss Cassady?” Jon said.
“We think that list she showed you is an assassination list, not a protection list.”
“Told you so,” Halladay said.
“‘Bear’ could be a code name for Shinsky,” Amira continued, “considering how he looks. And he may need to be knocked off, now that he’s been identified by us and almost arrested, because he might talk if we get him. And ‘Whoever you can at Dayfall’ could easily be instructions for a killer to do the same things they’ve been doing the other times the sun has come out.”
“Did she tell you anything about the guy who picked up the list?” Halladay asked Jon, who thought about it. He hadn’t asked Mallory about that when she’d shown him the list, because previously she’d been adamantly against giving up any of her contacts. Plus, he had trusted her that it was a protection list, since he’d believed her to be sincere. Or maybe he’d just wanted her to be. He also realized she could simply be wrong, and misled by the people she was trying to assist.
He thought back through the review of the security tapes from the bar, and remembered that the facial recognition software had only flagged four customers, and none of those had any criminal record beyond traffic violations. He remembered that one of them was obviously a woman, but mistakenly came up under a male name when the software identified her. This made him think of Natalie, the transgender GS agent who’d died in the tunnels and might have exemplified the trend of Special Forces operatives creating a new identity for themselves when they left the service. Then he put two and two together and called up the pictures of the bar customers he had saved on his phone. He swiped through them until he got to the woman who had been identified as a man.
It was the Dayfall Killer, who had been captured on the video and had tried to kill him in the park. Jon was almost sure. She had the same round face and short round figure, but clearly looked like a woman without the mask, with makeup and long dark hair.
“This is why we leave no stone unturned,” Jon said emphatically to Halladay and Amira, holding out the phone with the picture on it. His anger was swelling, probably because this was the last nail for any relationship with Mallory, but his excitement was also returning because this was a great development in the case. “I’ve been carrying this around in my pocket all day.” He handed the phone to Amira. “Run the male name that came up for her.… She was a man before.”
In less than a minute, there was little doubt left about the identity of the Dayfall Killer. The bar customer’s name (at least before her transition) was Rogers Sturm. He was a Navy SEAL originally from New York who had been hired by Gotham Security after being discharged from the military, but let go by GS after less than two years. Apparently she’d transitioned while working for GS, because there were a few news stories on transgender websites saying that she claimed discrimination as the cause of her termination, but there were also some quotes from unnamed sources within GS accusing her of being “a loose cannon,” “really unhinged,” and “sadistic.” One person interviewed even alleged that Gar Render himself had found out about some of the things she had done to criminals on the street, and said “he doesn’t tolerate that kind of brutality at GS.”
“To me,” Amira said, “this likely paints a picture of the kind of unstable, violent person who would commit the Dayfall crimes. But what doesn’t seem to fit is that she had been fired by GS.”
“Maybe she’s the kind of person they need now,” Jon said. “Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.”
“She has no home address in Manhattan,” Amira said.
“’Cause she’s living underground in one of those Belows,” Halladay said, “like Shinsky was.”
“And if so, we can’t just send MPD SWAT down there to find her,” Jon said. “We don’t know if whoever does might be GS sympathizers and let her go.”
“So what now, boss?” Halladay said to Jon, with a sneer. “Now that you seem to be back in the game.”
“I was always in the game, Frank,” Jon said with pride, which dwindled when he saw their faces. “I just … hit a few foul balls.” They both smiled, and he felt confident they were still on his team. Whether the Mayor was, however, he was unsure. “We need the evidence that I was brought here to find. So we’ll shake down the NYU teachers—at least one of them is bound to be in their condo right now because of the storm and Dayfall coming. But first we’ll start at The Office, to confirm that Sturm was Mallory’s contact.”
“Better take me with you this time,” Halladay said. “Or she’ll have you thinkin’ the Pope is behind all this.”
“Don’t worry about me—the blinders are off. Amira, while we’re gone, do whatever you can to find Shinsky or Sturm. And see if you can find out anything more about the third perp, the pyro, now that we know what was happening there. And send us a map of the underground that’s easy to use on our phones, please.”
He and Halladay took the nondescript patrol car, even though they could have walked the three blocks to The Office, because Sturm was still out there somewhere and might possibly see them if they were on foot. Obviously knives had been her weapon of choice recently for stealth purposes, but a former Navy SEAL would be good with guns as well, and probably even a sniper rifle. There was also less cover than usual now that the storm had driven so many people indoors, to wait it out until the Dayfall. So Halladay kept his eyes open even while driving, as Jon scanned the rest of the report about Mallory’s fiancé. He didn’t have to read too much of it to see that Amira was obviously right in her assessment of the situation, and his disappointment with Mallory continued to mix with the newfound excitement at the progress in the case.
Along the way, Halladay asked him why they had to talk to her when they already basically knew that Sturm was the killer to whom she passed the names. Jon didn’t respond to the question, but he knew the answer. He wanted to bring some closure to this relationship that had been extremely brief but nonetheless more promising than any he’d had before. And he wanted to find out, if possible, whether Mallory was intentionally deceiving him or just being deceived herself. He was still clinging by a thread to the hope of a relationship, because he had never felt as good as he did in the few times he’d spent with her.
22
DAYFALL MINUS 4 HOURS
They parked in the nearby garage, not wanting to draw attention to themselves by doing so illegally on the street, and made their way to The Office under a couple of umbrellas they’d grabbed at headquarters. Once inside, Mallory caught Jon’s eye when they were halfway to the bar, but her initial smile faded when she saw his expression and the big Scottish cop accompanying him. The place was semi-busy, but they found two stools toward the middle and waited for her to approach after she’d finished serving another customer.
“Do you want a drink?” she asked, obviously wondering why they were here and sensing a bad vibe.
Halladay pursed his lips and shook his head no, but Jon said, “I’ll take a Whisky Sour this time.”
“You really want one?” she said. “Or is that just another metaphor?”
Jon tried not to notice how her ice-blue eyes flashed in l
ovely contrast with the dark lashes, brows, and wisps of hair on her forehead, and he held out his phone to her with Sturm’s picture displayed on it. She reacted initially, but quickly gained her composure.
“What about it?” she said.
“Is this your GS contact, the one you give the names to?”
Jon could already tell that it was.
“I told you I didn’t want to give you any more information about this,” Mallory said, “because I don’t trust the police.” She looked at Halladay. “Why is he here?” She was asking Jon, but the older cop answered.
“I’m here to make sure he doesn’t end up in the back room with his brain hanging out.”
She looked back at Jon, her face flushed, and said, “Was it a mistake for me to give you that list?”
“No,” Jon said, “but it was a mistake for you to give it to this person.” He pointed at the picture on his phone. “You’ve gotten a lot of people killed.”
“What are you talking about?” she said softly, then looked around a little to make sure no one was eavesdropping.
“Those lists were not people to protect,” Jon said as he pointed at the picture, “they were people to murder. This woman is the Dayfall Killer. She’s a vicious mercenary, hired by GS to brutally mutilate her victims in order to cause panic in the city. And there are two other killers on the loose, too.”
“Gar Render would never do something like that,” she objected.
“Gar Render also paid two professors at NYU to falsify research for the same purpose. We’re on our way to get the evidence to prove it right now. And what’s more, you were fed a bunch of lies about what happened to your boyfriend. We investigated it and found out that Gotham Security wasn’t avenging his death—they were the ones who killed him, and then took advantage of your grief to enlist you.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said after a moment, but she put her hands on the bar to steady herself, and her breathing was a bit uneven.
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