Terminal City by Linda Fairstein

Author:Linda Fairstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Legal, Thriller & Suspense, United States, Thrillers, Women Sleuths, Police Procedurals, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 0751550469
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

“That’s the very place I made my movie debut, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said.

It was after 8:00 P.M. on Thursday evening, and Mike had asked Ledger and Gleeson to take us through some of the physical plant, to explain to us the size and scope of the terminal. It was a good time to do it, with rush hour crowds already dispersed to their homes.

“Maybe that’s why you look so familiar to me,” I said, smiling back at him.

“You think I’m kidding, do you? Are you a Hitchcock fan?”

“My favorite.”

“North by Northwest? It was the first movie ever shot in Grand Central. 1959. My boss wanted a walk-on in a frame with Cary Grant, who was jumping on the Twentieth Century ’cause he was suspected of murder, so I tagged along in the shot.”

We were standing at the iconic information booth, which was crowned by an opalescent four-faced Seth Thomas clock, a priceless golden ball that had kept perfect time for a century.

“Good flick. Almost makes sleeping in the sleeping car of a train look sexy,” Mike said. “What are we looking at, Don?”

“The main concourse, all thirty-six thousand square feet of it. Larger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral.”

I remember, as a kid, thinking this was the largest indoor space I’d ever seen. That still held true.

“Nowhere to hide out here,” Mike said. “Wide-open.”

The room was enormous, with only the round information booth obstructing its center. The south side of the great hall, broken by the walkway to the old waiting room, was lined with ticket booths, most closed for the evening. Each one of them—if breached—could be a cubbyhole for someone looking to do evil.

The departure gates covered the north side.

“Yeah, but those gates are the portals to the unknown,” Mercer said, waving his arm across the length of that quarter of the room, a gaping mouth full of tunnels that led under- and aboveground to all of Manhattan.

We could see up the staircase on the west to the doors fronting Vanderbilt Avenue. The eastern end was much more troublesome. The staircase there, replicated in the restoration of the terminal, despite its grandeur, was a dead end, leading up to an Apple store that was one of the biggest revenue sources for the building. No exit.

But on either side of the staircases there were wide archways, one framing the entrance to the subway station and the other to an arcade of shops and services, then eventually to Lexington Avenue. Between the two sets of stairs was another one down to the lower concourse.

“Portals to the unknown kind of nails it, Detective,” Ledger said. “This terminal and its train yards actually cover seventy acres of territory.”

“What?” Mike said.

“That’s the amount of land that Vanderbilt and his successors bought up. Penn Station? That’s got less than thirty acres. We go on forever, or so it seems. We control track up to 97th Street, all buried now under Park Avenue. Try keeping your eye on that.”

“And below us? Is there something

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