“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
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.”