The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  He passed through the loading bay and weaved through a series of corridors that led deeper into the building. The flat beat of his footsteps echoed alongside the rattle of the trash bin as he pushed it through the empty hallways, his tuneless whistle serving as a discordant accompaniment.

  He stopped in front of a blank door, pressed the ID to another security panel, then pushed the garbage bin inside and closed the door behind him. Darkness swallowed him as if some vengeful god had extinguished the sun.

  Shawn waited.

  Before long, he forgot how he came to be sharing this darkened room with a dead man. In his mind, he’d always been here. His memories faded into oblivion, a canvas wiped clean by the passage of time. Only what was next remained. Like the prayers of a guilty man, the past held no worth.

  He was darkness in a world of darkness, and soon he’d dance again.

  Sam Harrington wove through the streets of Manhattan like he was pulling a needle through thread while on a caffeine bender. Ahead, a red holographic stop signal stretched across the road, and he sped through the intersection without tapping the brake. Mooney fastened his seat belt. Sam didn’t slow until he squealed around the corner on Nassau Street, squinting at the numbers on the buildings that loomed over him, and found the one where Jaffe worked, the address chiseled into a granite brick on one corner. He pulled to a stop at the curb and killed the engine.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Mooney.

  They fought their way through the early-morning crowd of pedestrians that surged along the sidewalk with heads down and smartphones out as if guided by a collective consciousness of text messages, geo-location check-ins, and status updates. The glass exterior of the building that contained the offices of Lark Morton reflected the cityscape and its inhabitants like a translucent ghost world.

  Sam slipped inside and made his way to the rear of the lobby, and Mooney fell into step behind him. They flashed their badges at security and climbed the short flight of stairs leading to the elevators, where a half-dozen desk jockeys lingered. When the doors slid open, they shuffled forward and packed themselves into the cab like cattle.

  The detectives got off on the thirty-fifth floor. The receptionist’s desk was empty. The hallway was empty. They were alone.

  Sam cocked his head, listening, but only the whir of the HVAC climate control broke the silence. He slipped down the hall to the first door on the left and reached for the doorknob.

  “Wait,” Mooney said, pointing. “What’s that?”

  A rectangular-shaped discoloration at eye-level marred the door’s wooden surface. Sam touched it and rubbed his fingertips together. “Some kind of adhesive.”

  “Must’ve had a nameplate or something on it,” Mooney said.

  Sam frowned at the door, reached for the knob again, and pushed. It yawned open with a soft squeal, like a crypt being opened.

  The room beyond was empty.

  Still frowning, Sam spun on his heels and stepped toward the door on the opposite side of the hall. It had the same discoloration as its neighbor, and when Sam eased it open, he surveyed another empty room.

  They continued down the hallway. Someone had removed the nameplates from every door, and behind each, another empty room waited with the patience of the inevitable. A few opened to reveal an outer office with a second door set into the far wall that led to a larger executive suite. But these rooms proved as barren as the rest.

  “Are you sure we’re on the right floor?” Mooney asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “So where is everyone?”

  If Lark Morton had cleared out shop the day of Jaffe’s disappearance, it would be as damning to the company as a bloody thumbprint. But the other option—that he’d invented a fictional investment firm as a cover story—felt wrong. Between the missing nameplates and Jaffe’s heroic actions the day before, Sam’s gut told him that if they’d shown up twenty-four hours prior, the suits of Lark Morton would have been in full business mode.

  Yet he also remembered what Jaffe had told him about the man who’d warned him yesterday morning. “He said my name wasn’t Shawn Jaffe, I wasn’t from Ohio, and I wasn’t an investment broker.”

  “Let’s check a couple more,” Sam said.

  Three rooms later, he had his answer.

  As he pushed the door open, the sharp aroma of fresh paint slapped him across the face. He wrinkled his nose and stepped into the room and onto a freshly shampooed carpet. An inner door opened upon an executive office with tall windows that revealed the city’s skyline, gleaming like a misshapen row of teeth. Like the outer office, someone had painted its walls and shampooed the carpet.

  “The hell?” Mooney said, pivoting in a slow circle.

  “Someone went through a lot of trouble to wipe this place clean,” Sam said.

  “You think this is where your guy worked?”

  “Look at the indentions in the carpet. There was a desk in here.”

  Mooney poked his head back into the other room. “Hey, out here, too. A secretary or something?”

  Sam shrugged. “The only furnished rooms on the floor. Except for the nameplates, the others were empty.” He stared out the windows at the city that stretched out before him. Without turning, he said, “Like the apartment.”

  “Huh?”

  “This was supposed to be an investment firm, but Jaffe had the entire floor to himself. It’s all for show, like the apartment.”

  “But why?”

  For that, Sam had no answer.

  Before returning to the precinct, Sam dropped Mooney off at his car, which he’d left at Jaffe’s apartment.

  “Get with CSI,” he told Mooney as he pulled alongside the young detective’s red coupe. “Have them check those offices, see if they pick up trace evidence, any indication someone was there at all.”

  Mooney nodded.

  “And find out who manages rent there. See what they can tell you about Lark Morton—a name, a number, whatever. If you can, hook them up with a sketch artist, and run it through facial rec. You find anything, lemme know. I’ll do some research when I get back to the office, too. See what Google has to say about them.”

  By the time Sam pulled into the parking lot of the Midtown North Precinct, the sun had reached its summit. The heat rose off the asphalt in shimmering waves and pressed itself against the exterior of the car.

  He slid the gearshift into park and checked his smartphone. Jenny had sent him a text.

  “Here safe. Naptime now. Call me tonight. XOXO.”

  His feet were lead as he plodded toward the precinct. Several officers huddled together outside, smoking cigarettes and swapping war stories.

  “How’s it going, detective?”

  Sam returned the greeting with a nod of his chin, yanked open the door to the precinct, and disappeared into the belly of the beast.

  He went first to Lieutenant William Thompson’s office. The door stood open, and the lieutenant sat behind his desk, a big man with a bald pate and ruddy cheeks. Sam leaned against the door frame and cleared his throat.

  The lieutenant glanced up. “Sam. How’s Jenny and Jason?”

  “They’re fine.” Sam dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “Catching up on sleep at her parents.”

  “If you need anything…” The lieutenant let the words trail off like an open door.

  But Sam shook his head. “The only thing I need is to catch the assholes behind this.”

  Thompson regarded him, then nodded. “Okay. Tell me where we stand with Nelson and Devine.”

  “So far?” Sam shrugged. “We got nothing. We have some leads on Jaffe, though. I’m hoping if we find him, we find them.”

  “What leads?”

  “His smartphone and client list. Oh, and the New York Times.”

  The lieutenant frowned.

  “He had an app for the Times open to the classifieds at the restaurant yesterday morning,” Sam said. “Found the same thing in his apartment today, but in a hard copy edi
tion.”

  “What’s he looking for?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I got Francis tracking it down,” Sam said. “Also, Mooney and I just came from his office—Jaffe’s, I mean. Place is a ghost town. Entire floor—no desks, no cabinets, not a single paper clip. One of the offices had the walls repainted and carpets shampooed, though. I figure they cleared out sometime yesterday.”

  Thompson exhaled. “This shit just keeps getting crazier. You check with the property manager?”

  “Already got Mooney on it.”

  “That’s why I love you, Sam.”

  “I’m gonna go see what the guys found out while I was gone,” Sam said. “You got anything else for me?”

  “Nope. Keep me posted.”

  Next, Sam paid a visit to the detective squad’s cubicle farm. He found Nat Francis with his feet propped on his desk and his Web browser open to YouTube. One hand lay like a limp dishrag over his mouse, scrolling through a series of video thumbnails.

  “Francis,” Sam said.

  Francis whipped his feet off his desk and sat bolt upright. His thumb and index finger flew to his keyboard and found Command-Tab with the lightning-fast precision of a neurosurgeon, and his e-mail in-box replaced YouTube on the screen.

  “Oh, hey, Harrington,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

  “We ran into a dead end at Jaffe’s office.”

  “They stonewall you?”

  “They moved out. Offices were empty. What’ve you got?”

  “Oh, um.” Francis frowned. “I took that smartphone to One PP like you asked. I was about to call and check on it.”

  “And the classifieds?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah. I, uh.” Stacks of papers and folders lay scattered across Francis’s desk, as if a tsunami had swept across it. He shuffled through them and reached for a tablet. “I found this ad on the page Jaffe was turned to. The others were your typical shit for sale, looking for roommate or butt buddy, or whatever. But this one, it was the creepiest goddamn thing.” He pressed the wake button and thrust the device at Sam. “I check with the Times, and they didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  Sam frowned down at the screen. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that ad only existed in Jaffe’s paper. It wasn’t in the original edition. Either Jaffe or someone else doctored the hard copy we found in his apartment.”

  The tablet showed a picture of the ad. The words glared at Sam like a line of darkened thunderheads marching out from the horizon.

  What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! 555-4490.

  “I looked it up on Google.” Francis said. “It’s a quote from Shakespeare—Hamlet. And I checked the number. It’s a burner. You figure the ad’s a signal to call?”

  “Must be.” Sam shook his head. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I dunno. Fuckin’ weird, right?” Francis said.

  “What’d you find on those clients of Jaffe’s?”

  Francis flicked the tablet’s screen and scrolled through his notes with an index finger. “There were two files,” he said. “One for an Emmett Denning, the other for Jack and Alice Smith. The social security number listed for Denning belongs to a Matthew Barnes, who died in 2006 at the ripe old age of two months. The address is a fake, too. It doesn’t exist. Same story for Jack and Alice. Both using social security numbers of dead kids and a fake address.”

  Sam’s expression creased into a scowl. “You’re telling me all his clients used stolen identities?”

  Francis shrugged. “What do you want me to say? This is a serious fuckeroo, Harrington.”

  Sam rubbed his jaw with one hand, the stubble as coarse as a pumice stone against his palm. “Okay. Bounce the accounts off the Securities and Exchange Commission. Maybe we get lucky there.”

  Francis gave him a two-fingered salute. “Aye-aye, boss.”

  After leaving the detective squad room, Sam checked in with Amy O’Brian, the sketch artist who’d helped Jaffe develop the facial composite of the man he claimed to have seen in the Café del Mar. She sat at her desk behind a bank of monitors four wide by three high. Several played local real-time streaming news stations, while others flipped through a series of closed-circuit camera feeds and live streams of the city.

  As he approached, she flashed a smile. “Hey there, Harrington.”

  He smiled back. “O’Brian. How’s it going?”

  “It’s going. I’ve got facial rec running on Nelson and Devine and the composite from the restaurant this morning. Nothing but a swing and a miss so far.”

  “Keep swinging. What about Jaffe?”

  “Small problem.” She held up her index finger and thumb with a narrow gap between them. “There’s nothing on him in our database—in any database. I tried the DMV, civil record, criminal record,” she ticked them off on her fingers, “birth record, tax history, property record, marriage record, social websites—the works. I found a handful of Shawn Jaffes, but not our Shawn Jaffe.”

  “What? Yesterday, everything was five by five.”

  “Well, today it is so not.”

  Sam frowned. “How do you erase someone’s existence in a day?”

  “You think if I knew I’d be working here? You overestimate my sense of civic duty, Harrington. People pay big bucks for that kind of skill set.”

  He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. “So no records, no photos. No way to ID him with facial rec.”

  O’Brian’s face brightened, and she flashed a smile. “Have no fear. I built my own composite of him from memory. If he’s out there, I’ll find him.”

  “You’re a lifesaver,” Sam said. His stomach grumbled, and he shrugged in response to her raised eyebrow. “I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Gonna stop by Herman’s. You hungry?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cheesesteak work?”

  “That’d be lovely.”

  Sam walked the three blocks to Herman’s Steaks to clear his head and refocus. The lunch hour had come and gone and taken with it the press of bodies upon the sidewalks, a cycle as predictable as the moon or the seasons. He wove through the thinning crowd that shuffled along at a funeral pace, as if paid by the hour to wander the streets and tap at their smartphones.

  Inside the restaurant, a large, wooden fan hung from the ceiling, spinning like a slow-motion daydream. Sam ordered two Philly cheesesteaks from a young cashier with acne-pocked skin and boredom-pocked eyes.

  “You want organic or synthetic meat?” the cashier asked.

  “Organic,” Sam said. He paid and slipped out of the restaurant and into the sweltering afternoon.

  Back at the precinct, he dropped off one of the cheesesteaks with Amy O’Brian before venturing to his office. He turned on his computer and tore into his own sandwich, then loosened his tie and settled in behind his monitor.

  O’Brian was right. All references to Shawn Jaffe had vanished. Both state and federal records came up with a goose egg. Sam even inquired about Jaffe’s enrollment at Ohio State, but they’d never heard of him, either.

  Next, he tried googling Lark Morton. No dice. He checked the New York State Department of Labor, Department of State, and Internal Revenue Service records, and when none of them offered recompense, he searched every business-lookup website at his disposal. Still he found nothing, and the hours slipped by like memories.

  The boxes in Jaffe’s apartment had acted as stage dressing, as had the offices of Lark Morton. Like a house of cards that collapsed under the weight of casual scrutiny, his apartment, his job, his clients, even his name and his life were an elaborate origin story contrived to conceal a truth Sam couldn’t fathom.

  He said my name wasn’t Shawn Jaffe, I wasn’t from Ohio, and I wasn’t an investment broker.

  And Jaffe had seemed so goddamn sincere in his confusion, not to mention throwing himself in front of a
van to save the one man capable of sending his house of cards crashing to the ground.

  Sam’s fingers remained poised over the keyboard with unsung theories before dropping into his lap. He tried to picture a scenario in which Jaffe remained the innocent bystander. He’d been kidnapped, his identity erased. But if he was guiltless, to what end?

  “Who is this guy?” he asked the empty room.

  He pulled up the case file from the shooting at his house last night and scrolled through the forensic report. The blood in the yard matched the records of three men from different parts of the country with no commonality between their backgrounds. They’d all been dead for ten years.

  To clear his head, he tabbed over to his e-mail and skimmed his unread messages. As usual, a flood of them had accumulated in his in-box. The daily struggle to get through them was like treading quicksand. He’d made it through half of the messages when a knock at his door interrupted him.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door swung open, and Detective Nat Francis waddled into the room. “Hey, Sam,” he said. “The forensics guys at One PP got back with me about that smartphone. Sorry it took so long. It had some kind of high-level encryption on it or something.”

  Sam leaned forward. “What’d they find?”

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” Francis said. “Right after they cracked it, someone did a remote wipe.”

  “You gotta be shitting me. So we got nothing?”

  “I didn’t say that. The guy I talked to pulled the call history and text messages. The last was a text from that number in the classified. Turns out it was an image file, a 3-D render of blueprints for Madison Square Garden.”

  Sam leaned back in his chair. “Oh my God.”

  “I know,” Francis said. “Weird, right?”

  Sam shook his head. “There’s a debate tonight.”

  “At the Garden?”