City of Endless Night

34

The security offices for the Seaside Financial building, and LFX Financial in particular, were located in a windowless basement suite of painted cinder block and functional metal furniture. But the actual surveillance system, D’Agosta realized as soon as they entered, was state-of-the-art, brand-new, and run by a more-than-competent group. The head of the security team, a guy named Hradsky, had sequestered all the video from the entire building and had organized and copied it onto hard drives for the NYPD tech team, who had carted it away. But D’Agosta didn’t want to wait to see it at 1PP, which would take hours, if not a day, to set up. He wanted to see it immediately. And so Hradsky had obligingly organized it and had everything ready to roll when D’Agosta and Pendergast arrived with Sergeant Curry in tow.

“Gentlemen, come on in.” Hradsky was a small guy with black hair, a rack of dazzling white teeth, pink gums, and a big smile that was, apparently, continuously on display. He looked more like a barber than a security tech, but as D’Agosta watched the man bustle about the viewing room, switching on this, plugging in that, and tapping on this and that keyboard, he realized they were damn lucky. Most security directors were unhelpful, if not downright hostile. This guy aimed to please and clearly knew what he was doing.

“So what, exactly, would you fellows like to see?” Hradsky said. “We have a lot of cams and over a thousand hours of video created in just the last day. We sent it all back with your people.”

“What I want is simple. There’s a cam right outside those inner office doors. I want you to go to that feed and start at the moment the bodies were discovered — and run the tape backward at double speed.”

“Very well.”

It took Hradsky only a moment to set things up and darken the room. A surprisingly clear image popped up on the screen, a wide-angle view of the inner double doors and the area surrounding them, with desks on either side. It started out with the guy who found the bodies sitting with his head in his hands, while a secretary was laid out on a couch next to him. Then they staggered up, the guy dragging the lady backward into the inner office. A few moments later they came back out, walking backward, and here was the guy trying the locked door handle with the lady, and then the lady walked backward to her desk and the guy walked backward out of view and the doors remained closed while people swarmed this way and that in the outer office.

They waited as the seconds continued to run backward. And then the doors opened and a man with a large instrument case appeared on stage left, walking backward, and entered the office doors, backward, the door shutting.

“Freeze!” D’Agosta said.

Hradsky froze it.

“Play forward in slo mo.”

He played it forward, and now the doors opened and the man walked out.

“Freeze frame.” D’Agosta got up and stared. It was a remarkably clear shot. “That’s our guy, right? He was the last one out of the office before the bodies were found. That’s gotta be him.” He looked at Pendergast, half expecting a contradiction.

But no, Pendergast said: “Your logic is airtight.”

“Look at the thing he’s carrying. Big enough for either a sword or two heads! And the timestamp is just when the M.E. put the time of death. Holy shit, that’s him!”

“It would seem without a doubt,” said Pendergast.

“So who is he?” D’Agosta turned to Hradsky. “You seen him before?”

Hradsky moved the frame forward and backward, isolated the guy’s face, expanded it, and worked a few software controls to sharpen it. “He looks familiar. I think he works here. Shit, it’s McMurphy!”

“Who’s that?”

He pressed a button and a digital personnel file sprang on the screen. There was a picture of the man beside his name: Roland McMurphy, assistant vice president, with all his personal data: phone, address on Columbus Avenue, everything.

“That’s our guy.” At last. D’Agosta had difficulty keeping the exultation from his voice.

“Um,” Hradsky said, “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“McMurphy? I can’t even begin to imagine him doing this. He’s one of those slope-shouldered guys, you know, with the double chin, a hypochondriac, butterfly collector, cello player, scurries around like he’s about to get whipped.”

“It’s sometimes the guys you least suspect,” said D’Agosta. “They explode.”

“We can verify his presence. We keep digital records of everyone who comes in and out of the building.” Hradsky was paging through some on-screen records. “Says here he didn’t come in to work — called in sick, it seems.”

“So he called in sick and then sneaked in.” D’Agosta turned to Curry. “Send two squad cars to his place with a backup and SWAT team alert. Do it now.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” He moved away and got on the phone, making calls.

Hradsky cleared his throat. “I’d like to think that what you suggest, him sneaking in, would be difficult if not impossible. We’ve got state-of-the-art security here.”

Pendergast said quietly, “May I make a request?”

D’Agosta glanced at him. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“The killer left the office at four oh one PM. How long does it take to get from there to the main entrance?”

“I’d say about six to eight minutes,” said Hradsky.

“Excellent. Let us check the lobby camera at four oh seven to see whether he left.”

Hradsky set it up and a moment later, sure enough, they watched the man with the cello case walk out of the lobby at four oh eight.

“Now,” said Pendergast, “continue running the original office cam in reverse until we see him entering.”

They watched as the video ran backward, and then they saw the man emerge from the door and walk backward out of view.

“Three fifty PM,” said Pendergast. “Now we know the murder took place over the course of eleven minutes, between three fifty and four oh one. Excellent. Mr. Hradsky, take us to the lobby cam eight minutes before to see if he enters the building.”

D’Agosta watched as Hradsky did so — and there was the man, coming in the door at 3:42 PM. They watched as the man entered the revolving door, went straight to the electronic gate, and slid in his security card, which promptly opened the gate.

“What’s the timestamp on swiping the card?” asked Pendergast.

“Three forty-three and two seconds,” said Hradsky.

“Please check your security logs for whoever logged in at that precise moment.”

“Yes. Smart.” Hradsky tapped some more, then frowned at the image on his screen. He stared a long time, lips pursed. He tried it again.

“So?” D’Agosta asked. “Who was it?”

“Nobody. Nobody signed in at that time.”

At that moment Curry emerged from a far corner, after having made a series of phone calls. “Lieutenant?”

“What is it?”

“Roland McMurphy was in the hospital the entire day having a colostomy bag installed.”

They emerged from the lobby into the plaza in front of the Seaside Financial building, where a noisy crowd had formed, shouting and waving placards.

“Not another demonstration,” D’Agosta said. “What the fuck do they want now?”

“No idea,” said Curry.

As D’Agosta searched the seething mass for a path through, he began to get an inkling of what was going on. There were, in fact, two very different groups protesting. One was waving signs and shouting slogans like Down with the One Percenters! and Decapitate Corporate Greedsters! They were at the young, scruffy end of the spectrum, pretty much the same crowd D’Agosta remembered from the Occupy Wall Street protests of a few years before. The other group was quite different; many of them were young, too, but dressed in coats and ties, looking more like Mormon missionaries than radical leftists. They were not shouting anything, just silently carrying signs with various slogans, such as WHO OWNS YOU?… WELCOME TO THE NEW BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES… THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T “THINGS”… and CONSUMERISM IS A FATAL ILLNESS.

Even though the two sides seemed to agree on the wickedness of money, there were shouted insults and scuffles where they were crowding together as more and more people arrived from various side streets to join in. As D’Agosta watched, he saw that one man seemed to be the leader of the quieter group — a thin, gray-haired man wearing a dirty down coat over what looked like monk’s robes. He was holding a sign that said

With crudely painted fire underneath the word.

“Hey, see that guy? What do you make of him?”

Pendergast glanced over. “An ex-Jesuit, by the looks of the threadbare cassock underneath his jacket. And the sign is evidently an allusion to Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities.’ That’s a rather interesting twist on the current situation, wouldn’t you say, Vincent? New Yorkers never cease to surprise me.”

D’Agosta had a vague recollection of hearing something about a madman named Savonarola in Italian history but he couldn’t quite pull it up. “Those quiet ones — they scare me more than the rabble. They look like they mean it.”

“Indeed,” said Pendergast. “It appears that we are not just dealing with a serial killer, but with a social protest movement — or even two.”

“Yeah. And if we don’t solve this soon, New York’s going to have a frigging civil war.”