“Maybe he wiped them with something and put that in the bag. And maybe he took that bag and its contents to the perfect place for his next kill, where he could flush it all down the cludgie.”
“The what?” Jon said, as they started moving again and ended up back in an elevator.
“It’s a Scottish word for the toilet,” Halladay said.
“I thought I heard a bit of an accent.”
“Yep. I come from a long line of distinguished Scotsmen, who served the motherland and then this country for centuries. If anyone rates a private number for the King—”
“Your father was a New York detective, right?” Jon interrupted. “And your grandfather was a beat cop.”
“How the hell did you know that?” Halladay’s nonchalant exterior had cracked a little for the first time.
“I did some checking on you.”
By now the elevator had arrived at the eighteenth floor, and they were walking the hallways toward a bathroom that would be a janitor’s hell for the next day or two.
“This asshole is good at what he does,” Halladay said on the way, his slight annoyance seeming to have vanished. “He not only knew where to end up so he could flush his cleaning supplies, he knew how much time he’d likely have to commit another murder and leave the building before someone figured out one of the elevators wasn’t working.”
When they reached the men’s bathroom, there were two men with a fold-up gurney hanging around just inside the door, in a more spacious part with sinks and lockers on each side, before it narrowed into urinals and stalls in the back.
“It’s about time,” the older man said with a grimace. “Can we finally get the bodies out of this building, before they paint over them?”
“Very funny,” Halladay said. “I told you I wanted my new partner to see them as they lay, and he’s gonna see them as they lay. And you’re gonna leave the room now so we can talk. You can wait outside or go clear the other two—we’re done with them.”
The older man frowned again, and gestured to the younger one to exit with him. As he left he also gestured to Halladay, with his middle finger. But Halladay just watched him go.
“These ‘reverse surgery’ guys—like I call ’em—don’t like to be jerked around,” he said. “Pretty depressing job as it is.”
Jon remembered from his research that New York was unusual in that it didn’t have a coroner’s office, just the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME. But he didn’t have time to consider what that might mean practically, because his partner pulled him toward the back of the bathroom to see the corpse propped up in a sitting position on one of the toilets. The lower abdomen was mutilated on this one, too, and the last small remnants of blood in the body were still dripping into the white-and-red bowl below it.
“He chose a small male, and a weak one at that,” Halladay explained. “Maybe even a jobbie jabber.” Jon could only guess what that expression meant, and didn’t want to know. “Not chancing too much resistance, I’d say, like accidentally picking someone who’s taken karate classes. But this was definitely a male, ’cause he cut some things off him and threw ’em across the room.”
Halladay nodded toward the floor on the other side, where before he looked away Jon glimpsed a small pile of bloody body parts. Despite some prior experience with violent murder, the young detective still gagged a little at the sight.
“Why shoot the camera guy but cut up the others?” he asked, keeping his mind occupied.
“Been thinking about that,” the older cop said. “Maybe the risk angle…. A security guy could give him trouble unless he takes care of him quick. Or the blood issue… not wanting to have too much to clean up that early in the game. Or maybe he just had to take care of the camera guy to get to the people he wanted to cut up…. Could be some personal or passion motive we haven’t been able to figure out.”
“Seems unlikely, with seven other vics cut up just as bad. You haven’t found any connections between them, right? Only that they happened when the sun was out?”
“Yeah, otherwise they appear random, as far as we can tell. Hell, a lot of crime has no real point to it, but I just can’t buy the idea that the Dayfall is causing all this.”
“Which theory?” Jon asked. “The psychological stuff or the scientific idea of it being in the air?”
“Neither,” Halladay sneered. “‘Yer arse and parsley,’ as my grandpa used to say. But people are starting to panic enough that it might end up being—what do you call it?—a self-fulfilling prophecy. You got people injured and dying in the ‘chaos crimes’ that have been happening in public places at the same time, and you got this guy”—he gestured at the bloody body in the stall—“making people think this could happen to them anytime they’re alone, even in places like an elevator or the john.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Jon said, then backed away from the victim and looked around the room one last time. “Where are the trash cans?”
“Taken back to the lab at HQ, along with all the other possible evidence from the other scenes.”
“Then that’s where I wanna go next,” Jon said.
5
When they reached the Flatiron Building and parked the car in the garage behind it, Halladay insisted that they walk around the outside of the building and stand in front for a while before going inside. He wanted to show Jon a “visual picture” of the politics of New Manhattan, comparing and contrasting some of the important buildings around Madison Square Park.
What Jon noticed first about the park were not the buildings around it, however, but the fact that unlike most of the city, it was actually filled with living grass and trees. Because this district was now so central to what remained of the island, and to the politics of the city because of who occupied the buildings, the park was lit by industrial-strength UV lamps, and had been heated by warmers to melt the snow before the temperatures had warmed recently at the coming of Dayfall. The UV lamps seemed to be the primary cause of the odd-colored, otherworldly glow that emanated from the area, though there were also two large TV screens positioned at the north and south ends of the park.
Despite the recent warming, it was still cool enough that Jon could wear his black leather trench coat, with its long belt tied around his waist and its collar turned up. It was an inexpensive one made by Navarre, with an Italian Stone Design pattern, all he could afford on his police salary. But it was lightweight enough to move around in and didn’t elicit ridicule from his coworkers like the tan one he had bought at first, in an attempt to dress like Philip Marlowe. He never even tried to wear a fedora, because of the same problem, though he would have liked to. Halladay, for his part, wore a shorter leather jacket, beat up and brown.
“The Flatiron was the first skyscraper built in New York,” the older cop said, gesturing at the building they were standing in front of. “Which is one of the reasons, along with its central location, that the King picked it. She wanted to connect her post-flagger regime with old New York… ‘a symbol of our enduring past,’ I think she called it. So Darth Render went and picked another old building for his base, right across the park, obviously for symbolic reasons of his own.”
Halladay pointed across the east end of the park at a thick, imposing-looking structure that sat to the left of one with a taller and thinner tower topped by a large lighted clock. The tan stone facade of the building on the left was terraced and buttressed in an almost martial fashion, and the top seemed to be abruptly truncated rather than decorated with a tower like the one adjacent.