“Using that term very loosely.”
“Why? You’ve had a problem with it? Most of the officers think it’s been very effective.”
“It has been, Mr. Gleeson,” Rocco Correlli said. “Chapman doesn’t like anything to slip through the cracks. Every now and then-”
“Face it, Loo,” Mike said. “You don’t want your mug on the camera? Anyone with half a brain can bypass the system. Head down, any kind of hat with a brim.”
“A wig, a fake mustache, a pair of large sunglasses,” Mercer said. “Facial recog is not going to help us in the short run here.”
“What’s this?” Mike asked. He had circled the conference table enough times to make me dizzy from watching him. “What’s behind these blinds?”
He was standing to the right of the table, pointing at a large panel of venetian blinds.
“It’s-it’s the operations room behind there,” Gleeson said. “It has nothing to do with the issue of security inside the terminal itself.”
“Lift them, will you?”
Gleeson picked up one of the remotes and pressed a button. The white blinds glided up and rolled back, revealing another room twenty feet below us. There were two rows of men-ten per row-each in front of a desktop. Covering the entire wall in front of them was a giant board, run by a computer, with brightly colored lines that danced as the workers typed on their keyboards.
“What am I looking at?” Mike asked.
Bruce Gleeson stood up and approached the window to the operations room. “Those men can tell you where every piece of equipment that’s running is at any given moment. They’re the rail traffic controllers.
“There are thousands of square miles-and hundreds of thousands of travelers-serviced by this system. There are two thousand switches along the rails the trains ride, going to the north and west of the city. Used to be there were men who stood in the switch towers all day to make changes on the tracks according to the signals they were sent. Now,” Gleeson went on, “these guys you’re looking at just right-click on the mouse and the change is made, whether the rail is in New Haven or Poughkeepsie. No more towers. No more men out there flipping the switches.”
“That’s a lot of power for these guys,” Mike said.
“And a huge responsibility.”
“The lines on the big screen?”
“A train arrives at this terminal every forty-seven seconds, Mr. Chapman. To the far right, you can see that there are only four lines. White lines.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s because there are only four tracks that go in and out of the tunnel, once they merge from the departure platforms. Four tracks,” Gleeson said. “Keep your eye on the white lines.”
“Will do.”
“As soon as the color changes-there you go-one of them is red now.”
The red neon streaked onto the screen. “So that’s an arrival,” Mike said.
“Yes. And when the four tracks reach northern Manhattan, they branch out. Soon there are eight tracks going in different directions. Then sixteen.”
“The green and yellow lines.”
“Exactly.”
“How about all that purple?” Mike asked, pointing to lines on the left.
“Those are tracks under repair,” Gleeson said. “Or an indication that a VIP is going to be coming through, so they’re left empty.”
“Is any of that clearance for this weekend? For the president?”
“I-I don’t know. I’m in management, I’m not an engineer. I’ll have to find out for you.”
“I’m getting ahead of myself. Following tracks up to Canada when I should be more interested in a bad guy heading this way.” Mike turned his attention back to the conference room. “How many exits and entrances to Grand Central? To the terminal itself?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mike said. “Twenty-six separate and distinct entrances? We’d need an army to cover those-and monitor every train pulling in or out-twenty-four/seven.”
Bruce Gleeson put his hand to his forehead. “You’ve got the entrance on Vanderbilt Avenue, at the top of the marble staircase. Opposite the Yale Club.”
Mike nodded at Mercer. “Where the trunk was stolen.”
“On the south side-42nd Street-there are entrances on both corners-and of course the Grand Hyatt hotel is in the middle of the block. You can access the terminal and subway through a back corridor in the lobby.”
“Check.”
“Lexington Avenue has the long arcade entrance, past all the shops and food halls. It draws you right into the main concourse as well as down into the subway station.”
“Don’t forget the Park Avenue Viaduct,” Mercer said.
That roadway above street level that encircles the building has an entry into the upper tier above the Grand Hyatt lobby, too, which I had used many times coming and going to ballroom events and avoiding the crowds at the bar downstairs.
“And from Park Avenue,” Gleeson said, “through the MetLife Building, you come directly in here.”
“That’s what we did this afternoon,” Mike said.
“I don’t have to remind you that there are feeds from subway lines all over this building, so one could theoretically get in from any corner of the city by coming underground,” Gleeson said.
“Talking underground, you’ve got the opening from the commuter train tunnels-wider than the mouth of the Nile,” Mike said, “that feeds into the concourse. You got your homeless, your employees, your odd sorts traveling in privately. Hundreds of miles of train tracks just waiting to be compromised.”
“Don’t sound so negative,” I said, still thinking of the Grand Hyatt, built directly above the landmarked old terminal. “There’s a hotel right upstairs. If our killer was looking to make that kind of connection to the terminal, he could have murdered Corinne Thatcher right here.”
It had been a long day. I was exhausted and distressed about Raymond Tanner. I didn’t need Mike to overdramatize the already titillating events.
“So what’re you saying?” Mike asked.
“I’m rejecting your ‘no coincidence’ theory, Detective Chapman,” I said, twisting my hair to get it off my neck and banding it into a ponytail. “I’m suggesting the fact that Thatcher’s body was deposited in the Waldorf may be just that. A coincidence.”
Bruce Gleeson had moved to the window overlooking the operations room. He lowered the white blind covering the window that separated the two spaces before he spoke. “I think you’re wrong, Ms. Cooper. I’d have to agree with Mr. Chapman-much as I would hope otherwise, for the sake of everyone in this terminal-that the murder in the Waldorf is not likely to be a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?”
Gleeson bit his lip, then continued to speak. “You know there’s a city underground, right below this mammoth building?”
“The train tunnels,” Mike said, “where the homeless people live. We get it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What then?”
“When the design for Grand Central was sketched out in 1900, the master planners wanted to change the entire complexion of Midtown Manhattan. The area to the east of 42nd Street-prime real estate now-was made up entirely of slums and slaughterhouses.”
“Right here?” I asked.
“East Side slaughterhouses, Ms. Cooper. Cattle used to escape from time to time and wander onto the old tracks, when they were aboveground, unlike where they are today. The buildings weren’t skyscrapers and office towers. They were tenements and shanties.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“You’ve heard of the White City?” Gleeson asked. “The movement to beautify urban areas, which started at the exposition in Chicago.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the White City, and the devil who lived in it. Dr. H. H. Holmes, wasn’t it? The serial killer who turned his home into a World’s Fair hotel, complete with a gas chamber and a dissection table. That’s not what you’re thinking?”