“Well, that I can explain,” she said, nodding and sitting back in her seat. “Turnia Carter is a college friend of my daughter Ria, and they’ve kept in touch since then. She confided in Ria that she was feeling guilty because she was being paid to slant her research—she was torn because the pay and notoriety are great, but she knows this could hurt her friend’s mom. It was all pretty vague but I could tell what was going on from talking to Ria, who did not want Turnia to get into any trouble. She made me promise that I wouldn’t let the cat out unless it was absolutely necessary. So we tried to offset whatever GS was doing for her by Ria giving her the ten thousand, which was the most I could manage to earmark for research from my budget without raising red flags. But it hasn’t been enough to turn her, obviously. It was like a bidding war, and I lost.”
“If this is all true,” Jon said, thinking she was a very good liar if it wasn’t, “why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I was trying to keep my promise to my daughter. I was hoping you would discover the GS bribe and deal with it, so she wouldn’t blame me for whatever happened.”
“And if I discovered your bribe?”
“Then I would explain it to you, like I just did.” She made a gesture with both hands that said, It’s as simple as that. “In fact, I knew you would probably find out, because after you interviewed Turnia, she called me to ask if it was okay with me to give you permission to look at her bank account. I just thought you were a better detective than to assume the worst about me.”
“Halladay could have told you all this when you talked to him,” Jon said, “giving you time to come up with your story.”
“It all can be verified,” King said. “You can talk to Ria if you must, though I’d rather not involve her if we can help it. But I think something else Halladay told me is more pertinent to what’s going on here.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, speaking of being prejudiced, he was concerned that you seem to have fallen under the spell of a GS sympathizer, who also happens to be ‘hot as shit,’ to use his words. Love is blind, Detective Phillips, and sex makes you stupid…. There’s a reason for those clichés.”
“Is that what you think?” Jon said, caught a bit off guard.
“I think you’re young, and like a lot of young cops, you can rush to judgment too soon. But you’re talented, too, so as stupid as some of your ideas are, you’re probably on to something with the others.” She sat up in her chair and leaned toward him. “I’m going to give you another chance, if you promise to think this all through some more. But if you don’t get your head straight in the next few hours, I’ll have no choice but to take action.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You’re damn right I am. And you can make use of the door, please—I’ve got work to do.”
Jon nodded and left the office, more off-kilter now and not sure what else to do.
He felt like he needed to get his bearings and think through all of this before talking to Halladay, Amira, or anyone else, so he walked out of the building and across the street to Madison Square Park. There were still plenty of cars on the street, but the storm had left the park almost deserted.
At first Jon used his jacket again as an umbrella, but then gave up and let the unusually warm rain drench him as he situated himself on a bench facing north about a third of the way into the park. The clouds above flashed and rumbled slightly more often now than during his previous walk, and the tops of the highest buildings around the park were hidden in the fog generated by the storm. Only the lighted clock on the Met Life tower to his right was bright enough to shine through, and it was just a dim yellow, moonlike sphere. He couldn’t see above the first five floors or so of the Gotham Security base to its left, or the thin glass monolith of One Madison to its right. The whole scene was colored even more blue-green than before, because the light from the industrial UV lamps was bouncing off the clouds, fog, and maybe even the rain.
Because of those features, the park seemed even more otherworldly than usual, an impression heightened by the two huge sculptures planted in the patch of grass to the left of Jon’s bench. They were of similar shape and size, at least ten feet tall and a little less than five feet wide, and both obviously represented Manhattan because there was a solid ring like a wall around the bottom and a cityscape of buildings projecting diagonally up from the tall center columns above them. There were only two differences between the sculptures: the one on the left had a moon extending from the top and buildings that were well defined and recognizable (Jon could make out the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, for example); the other one had a sun at the top and buildings that were noticeably unfinished, looking almost like they were melting.
John became curious enough about the artist’s meaning and the material used (bronze, he guessed) that he got up from the bench and walked toward the sculptures to get a closer look.
As a result, he didn’t see the masked figure emerge from the cover of the street behind him and move purposefully in his direction.
20
At first glance, Jon thought the sculpture with the sun at the top was predicting doom for the city, because of the “melted” look of the buildings on that one. But when he got closer he realized it had a different meaning, because he could read the inscriptions on the solid rings around the bottom of each. The one with the moon at the top said, “What we are” and the one with the sun said, “What will we be?”
As Jon got close to the sculpture on the left, he could tell that his guess was right and it was made out of bronze. But he reached out to touch one of the semi-vertical buildings with his hand anyway, appreciating the detail in the metal. As he did, an unconscious instinct suddenly caused him to jerk his upper body slightly to the right, and a long blade flashed by his neck and slammed into the statue, sending sparks flying. Jon turned his whole body to the left and managed to pull back just enough that a backhand slash of the knife barely missed him. This only took a second or two, but even in that short time his brain registered that his attacker was the Dayfall Killer they had seen on the video from the office building, the one with the short “bowling ball” figure and the utilitarian black mask.
If the attacker would have simply slashed back the other way again with the knife, it probably would have connected. But fortunately he brought it to his waist in a stabbing position and lunged toward Jon, probably wanting to make sure the young detective wasn’t only wounded by the next attack. The time it took for this adjustment, however, was just enough to allow Jon to roll his body around part of the big sculpture and put it between him and the killer.
Jon thought of fleeing toward the street, but his heart was already pounding from the shock of the attack, and he wasn’t sure he could outrun the powerfully built man to the edge of the park. Just as he was about to try it anyway, for lack of a better plan, several gunshots rang out behind him and a couple of bullets sparked on the metal of the statue.
Jon glanced back to see Halladay walking calmly toward him across the grass with his gun extended, and then looked forward again to see that the killer had immediately taken off running in the other direction, keeping the statue between him and Halladay’s gun, and quickly disappearing through some bushes into the busy street beyond. Now that Jon had seen how fast the little man could move, he was glad that he hadn’t tried to outrun him.
“You all right?” Halladay asked when he reached Jon, who was breathing hard.
“Yeah, barely,” Jon said. “Thanks to you.”