The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  “I’m lead detective on that investigation.”

  “Looks like somebody doesn’t want you to be.”

  When he finished inside, Sam plodded onto the front porch. Brass casings from the shots he’d fired lay twinkling beneath the light like fallen stars. In his mind’s eye, faceless silhouettes stalked through his yard with grins that were all teeth.

  He turned toward the driveway and his wife and son. They leaned against Jenny’s Prius. She had one arm looped around Jason’s shoulders, and their faces reflected the rhythmic strobe of the emergency beacons like bruises.

  Whoever did this, whoever you are, you’re gonna pay.

  Sam and Jenny decided they’d all spend the rest of the night in a motel, and in the morning Jenny and Jason would drive upstate and stay with her parents. After the investigators finished inside the house, Jenny packed their toiletries bags and stuffed a week’s worth of clothes into a pair of suitcases. Sam told them everything that had happened since that morning at the Café del Mar. They listened, wide-eyed and shell-shocked like a pair of doughboys in the trenches of the Western Front.

  When he finished, Jenny said, “Oh, Sammy,” and began to cry.

  Sam stapled black garbage bags over the windows, pulled the door shut, and trudged away. His wife got behind the wheel of her Prius, and Sam leaned in through the open window, brushed the hair back from her face, and kissed her hard on the mouth. He glanced at Jason, who lay in the reclined passenger seat, eyes closed.

  “He asleep?”

  Jenny nodded. “He zonked out as soon as he got in the car.”

  Sam shook his head and smiled in spite of everything. “Hell of a tough kid.”

  “Takes after his father.”

  “What about you?”

  She held out one hand, palm down. “Steady as a rock.”

  “I’m sorry, Jenny. About all of this.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’re not responsible.”

  “But I—”

  “No. Don’t blame yourself, Sammy. You catch those bastards who did this, and you hold them responsible.”

  He reached out and squeezed her hand. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She followed him to the hotel and, after checking in, the three of them stumbled into a room that reeked of mildew and the sweat of strangers. The air conditioner hitched and rattled and, through a cataract of sheer curtains, neon lights glowed.

  Sam lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head, Jenny curled against him with one hand on his chest. In the bed next to them, the soft snores of his son rose from beneath the sheets. God bless the resilience of youth.

  The sky glowed through the window with the first hint of dawn, and he was going over his plan for tomorrow when his smartphone rang. Jenny propped herself on an elbow next to him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and patted at his pockets. His smartphone continued to ring.

  “Where the hell is it?”

  Jenny pointed. “You put it on the nightstand.” The smartphone rang a third time.

  Jason yawned. “Who is it?”

  Sam grabbed it. “The lieutenant.” He tapped the touch screen and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Sam, it’s Bill.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nelson and Devine are missing.”

  “Missing?” Sam wiped the sleep from his eyes. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “I mean they’re gone, Sam. They weren’t answering their calls, so we sent a patrol to check on them. They were gone, their car was gone, there was blood in the street. A lot of blood.”

  Sam didn’t respond. Jenny and Jason stared at him with imploring eyes.

  “Your witness is missing, too. Jaffe? Not in his apartment, no idea where he is.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Sam ran a hand through his hair and began pacing the length of the motel room. “When?”

  “The last time they radioed in was just after ten, and they missed their eleven o’clock call, so sometime between then.”

  “They came after me, too. It must be connected.”

  “What? Who?”

  “When I got home last night. They shot up my place. CSI matched the gunshot residue to the Café del Mar.”

  “Shit, Sam. Are you hurt? Is your family hurt?”

  “We’re fine. We’re in a motel. Jenny and Jason are leaving in the morning to stay with her parents upstate.”

  “If you need to take some time off—”

  “No. I need to find who did this.”

  “You sure?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yes. Where’re we at?”

  “CSU’s at the apartment now—Jaffe’s apartment, I mean. I wouldn’t have called, but I thought you’d want to take a look for yourself.”

  “Why? What’d they find?”

  “It’s twisted. Really bizarre.”

  Sam listened while the lieutenant laid it out for him. Halfway through the tale, he stopped pacing and sat on the bed. The sheets rustled, and Jenny’s arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek pressed against the small of his back. When the lieutenant finished, Sam asked, “What the hell’s going on, Bill?”

  “I wish I knew. Are you gonna head over to the apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When you’re done there, come see me. Anything I can do for you and your family, anything the department can do, just say the word. We’re gonna catch these assholes.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Take care, Sam.” The line went dead.

  Sam lowered the smartphone into his lap, closed his eyes, and sighed.

  Jenny’s arms slipped from his waist like autumn leaves from their branches. “You have to go?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.” Her voice betrayed no regret or resentment. She understood what it meant to be a cop’s wife.

  “Think you can go back to sleep after I leave?”

  “I doubt it. We’ll probably leave in a few.”

  He glanced at Jason. “Watch after your mom.”

  “I will.”

  Sam stood and leaned in to kiss Jenny on her forehead. “Text me when you get to your parents’.”

  Jenny nodded. A single tear spilled out of one eye and rolled down her cheek in a silent soliloquy that said everything.

  Sam wiped it away with his thumb and brushed his lips against where it had been. He pulled on his shoes, grabbed his holstered pistol off the end table and his jacket from the back of a chair, and slipped out of the room. The chill morning air whispered across the nape of his neck with a baleful caress, as if a portent of things to come.

  He was a shadow. He was the night.

  Shawn Jaffe slipped through the city like a wraith and paralleled East Eighty-Ninth Street as he headed toward Central Park. He kept to the alleys and side streets and avoided the lights and crowds of the main thoroughfares whenever possible. Abruptly, he sprinted across Park Avenue like a man crossing a minefield and vanished into the shadows of a narrow alley behind the Church of Saint Thomas More.

  “Hey, hey. Looky what we got here.” Two men materialized out of the darkness and blocked his path. Both wore leather jackets and had shaved heads. A silver cross dangled from one’s earlobe. The other brandished a knife. The steel glinted in the moonlight.

  Shawn didn’t break stride as he continued forward. The two men looked at each other, and uncertainty darkened their faces. The one with the knife threw his shoulders back and stepped toward Shawn.

  “You want some of this?”

  Shawn kept coming.

  The man waved the knife. “Stop right there. I said stop—you wanna get cut?”

  Shawn leapt forward, a blur of violence as he grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted it. Something snapped, and the man cried out. The knife fell from his grasp and clattered onto the pavement. Shawn’s other hand shot forward and slammed into the man’s face. Bones shattered. The man staggered backward. Shawn whirled around, sweeping h
is leg through the air in an arc—a spinning hook kick. The heel of his foot connected with the man’s neck. The man pinwheeled sideways and fell to the ground, his head bent at an impossible angle.

  The man with the silver-cross earring backpedaled away from Shawn, jaw open in a yawn of surprise and fear.

  Shawn bent and claimed the knife. The man with the silver-cross earring turned to run, stumbling as he fled. Shawn cocked his arm back, and the knife flashed in the moonlight as it spun through the air. It thunked into the man’s back, and he grunted and fell. Silence followed.

  Shawn stepped over the body, exited the alley, and turned left. A block ahead, a row of trees marked the edge of Central Park. The hollow echo of his footsteps increased their cadence. He darted across Fifth Avenue into the wood line.

  Here, there was less need for caution. He made good time, skirting the trails and slipping through the trees and undergrowth like a wild animal, bent low and breathing hard.

  His destination drew him like a siren’s call. It echoed in his mind until it consumed him. He needed to get there before the eastern sky glowed with dawn and the city came to life. He’d left the police cruiser in a parking garage, but he’d forgotten about the bodies in the trunk, and in another hour, he’d forget about the cruiser, too. But he knew his destination, and he knew what to do when he got there.

  He was a shadow. He was the night. And nothing would stop him now.

  Chapter Three

  Sam had heard the stories about how New York City got its nickname, the “Big Apple,” and they were all bullshit. If New York City was an apple, it had fallen off its tree long ago and rotted to the core.

  Even at this early hour they gathered, men and women lured by the prospect of violence. Like flies to the dying flesh of that apple, curious neighbors mingled on the sidewalk, a few still wearing their robes and slippers, held at bay by the fluorescent yellow and diagonal black lines that appeared on the street to mark the dimensions of the crime scene. They stared in fascination at the smear of red where Clint Nelson and Leonard Devine had kept their watch.

  From time to time, Sam wondered why he bothered. Each morning, he woke and took a shower. He suited up and ate breakfast. He drove to work, and each day he faced countless acts of immorality and ungodliness that deepened his contempt for humanity. Evil came in the form of colorful pills, white powder, and a syringe. It dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, a business suit, and sometimes it wore a uniform and carried a badge. It wielded a pistol, a rifle, a knife, a baseball bat, and anything else it could get its hands on to shoot, stab, and bludgeon. It stole cars, money, and lives. It raped, and it murdered, and it was everywhere.

  But sometimes acts of kindness and compassion shone through like distant stars in the fabric of darkness. Sometimes, it was something small, like witnessing someone stop to help a stranger change a flat tire or offer their seat to an elderly woman on the subway. Sometimes it was big, like the men and women who gave their lives during the attack on Avalon Stadium during the Super Bowl.

  He continued to stare out the window at the scene seventeen stories below. The killer often returned to revel in the aftermath of his handiwork, posing in the crowd as a concerned citizen. Perhaps he preened out there now, hidden behind a mask of compassion. Sam had reassigned a traffic video cam to watch the crowd just in case he was.

  No one had witnessed the shooting, although several of the nearby residents confirmed hearing two gunshots an hour earlier. One for Nelson and one for Devine.

  With a sigh, he turned from the window and paced forward, hands clasped behind his back. His footsteps echoed throughout the studio apartment, and the strangeness of it struck him again.

  When they first met, Shawn Jaffe told Sam he’d moved from Ohio several weeks ago, and a cursory inspection of the apartment supported his claim. Jaffe had furnished the place with only the necessities.

  A bed, dresser, and armoire populated the bedroom, and a microwave, a refrigerator, and a small table were all that was in the kitchen. The only food consisted of a freezer full of microwaveable meals and a half-empty bottle of scotch. A lack of photographs and keepsakes, along with a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner opposite the bedroom, created the illusion he’d yet to finish unpacking.

  But once they opened the boxes, that theory flew out the window like a stockbroker on Black Tuesday.

  Inside, they found no pictures of family and friends, no souvenirs from vacations or memories of the past. Nothing of personal worth or importance. Instead, they found empty soda cans, balled-up newspaper pages, glass jars filled with nails, screws, and nuts, and a couple of bricks.

  And that was all.

  None of the officers from the evidence collection unit or any of the detectives, including Sam, could make heads or tails of it. Although not overjoyed to find the police at his door at one in the morning, the landlord became cooperative enough when they shoved a search warrant in his face, and he confirmed Jaffe had moved in two weeks ago. So why did Jaffe stack boxes of trash in his apartment to make it look like his unpacking efforts remained a work in progress? He’d fooled no one but himself.

  The initial responding officers had found the door to the apartment locked and no signs of forced entry or a struggle. On the kitchen table, a briefcase and a half-empty glass tumbler stood on either side of a hard copy of the New York Times like taciturn sentinels. Whether Jaffe had departed against his will or of his own volition remained a mystery.

  Detective Nat Francis sidled alongside the table next to Sam. “Haven’t seen one of those in ages,” he said, jabbing a finger at the Times. “Printed newspaper. Wonder if it’s one of those retro trends, like blogging.”

  It lay open to the classified ads, and Sam remembered that when he first met Jaffe, an app for the Times had been open on the restaurant table then, too, and it had also shown the classifieds. Jaffe had denied having any interest in them, yet here again lay a copy of the Times turned to the classifieds.

  Sam tried calling Jaffe’s smartphone, and a muffled marimba ringtone murmured from within the briefcase on the kitchen table. Conversations withered and heads turned, as if they were at a dinner party and someone had passed the port to the right or committed some other egregious faux pas. The detective slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, flipped the clasps on the briefcase, and opened it. Inside, he found a shuffle of papers comprising prospectuses, financial reports, and account statements for several of Jaffe’s clients. On top of these lay the smartphone, still sounding its iconic timbre. Sam picked it up and thumbed the wake button. The screen came to life, and a retinal scan interface appeared.

  “Goddamn technology.”

  “Locked?” someone asked.

  “Yeah.”

  The room released its collective breath, and with a flick of his wrist, Sam tossed the phone back into the briefcase.

  His mind reeled as he tried to fit the facts into place like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, but it was as if he had half the pieces from two different puzzles—the newspaper, the boxes in the apartment with their bizarre contents, Devine and Nelson unaccounted for and blood in the street, the shooting at his home, Shawn Jaffe saving him from the kamikaze van, the bomb threat and the missing body, the drama and homicide at the Café del Mar, and at the end of the day, Jaffe nowhere to be found. No matter how he turned them, the pieces refused to fit together.

  Detective Francis asked, “So what do you make of all this? You think your boy was snatched?”

  Sam shook his head. “Hell if I know.” He scratched the stubble on his jaw and said, “I need you to swing by One PP and see what they can get from his phone.” One Police Plaza was the headquarters for the NYPD and home to the Technical Assistance Response Unit, which provided computer and electronic forensic support to the rest of the force.

  “No problem,” Francis said.

  “Also, there are files on his clients in that briefcase. See what you can find on them. And find out what he was looking for in the classifieds.
Maybe we can link it to—I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

  “You got it.”

  Sam jabbed a finger at Ethan Mooney, a detective with jet-black hair who would’ve looked more in character wearing a high school letterman’s jacket than a badge and a gun. “Mooney, you’re coming with me.”

  Mooney raised his eyebrows. “Where to?”

  “Jaffe’s office.”

  He was darkness in a world of darkness.

  Shawn Jaffe waited in the shadows near the service entrance. Hours passed. The sun had begun to sear the eastern horizon when an old pickup rolled into view, crunching over gravel and glass like bones of the damned. He dropped into a predatory crouch as the vehicle stopped alongside a loading bay, and the engine fell silent but for the clicking of the exhaust manifold as it cooled. The driver pushed the door open.

  Shawn tensed and waited.

  As the driver eased himself out of the cab with a grunt, Shawn separated himself from the darkness and hurried forward. Something crunched beneath his foot. The driver swiveled to face him, eyes wide with alarm, and turned back to the pickup, perhaps praying he had time to climb back inside, slam and lock the door, start the engine, and stomp on the gas. But the driver had time for none of this.

  Shawn palmed the back of the man’s head with one hand and cupped his chin with the other, then gave a violent twist. The driver’s neck made a sound like celery torn in two. The body crumpled into his arms, and he hauled it backward into the shadows, its heels leaving two shallow furrows through the dirt and the grime.

  He changed into the man’s clothes, a custodial uniform with gray trousers and a blue shirt, and clipped an ID card to his breast pocket. The picture was his. The name was not. Shawn didn’t remember where the ID had come from, and he didn’t care. He jogged over to the loading bay and pressed it to a security panel next to the bay door. A buzz sounded, and the lock popped open. He rolled the door up halfway and stooped inside. A green plastic trash bin on wheels stood tucked against a stack of wooden pallets. It squeaked and scraped as he hauled it outside.

  Glancing around, Shawn bent and lifted the body under its arms and draped it over the side of the trash bin. Then he grabbed its ankles and swung them over, and the corpse folded itself into a neat pile of naked flesh at the bottom. He covered it with his old clothes and a couple of garbage bags and wheeled it back inside.