McCrory stopped and cocked his head.
“Look at me, Jamal. You following all this?”
Jamal glanced at him, then looked back at his feet.
McCrory went on: “It’s important that you do. Because it’s my job to find out who’s responsible, and I’m telling you now that I don’t give up. Nobody deserves to die that way. Especially an innocent little girl.”
He paused to let that sink in, then pointed at the evidence markers in the photo of the street scene.
“See these? They’re .40 cal casings. These and the bullets that were collected at the drive-by can be matched to the gun that fired them. And if even one was fired by the gun you had on you . . . then you need to start talking, Jamal.”
Jamal glanced at the photograph, then stared at his feet a long moment, anxiously crossed his legs the opposite way, then back again. He met McCrory’s eyes, and sighed.
“Told you I don’t know no Dante,” he finally said.
“So you keep saying,” McCrory said, his tone disgusted. “Not knowing him and shooting him are two different things. I can imagine that you don’t know the little girl, either. But that doesn’t change the fact that she may die.”
“I didn’t shoot nobody. That gun I got so I can defend myself. There’re crazy folks out there, shooting you for no reason. But that ain’t me.”
McCrory picked up the stack of photographs and began laying them out on the table so that they were all visible at once.
In the viewing room, Payne grunted, then glanced at Kennedy.
“Don’t know about you, Hal, but I say he’s lying.”
“How can you tell?” Kennedy said. “Because his lips are moving?”
“He may not have pulled the trigger, but he knows who Dante is and/or knows who did it. And you nailed it—we’re wasting our time with him right now.”
Payne then reached into his suit coat pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper.
“Show this to Jamal the Junkie,” Payne said, handing the sheet to Kennedy. “Just to throw him off. Maybe it’ll jar loose that rectal cranial inversion.”
Kennedy unfolded the sheet and saw that it was the Wanted flyer of the heavyset male suspect in the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. He shook his head as he looked at the cold, empty eyes and the spread of tattoos—the inverted heart under the left eye, the inverted peace symbol under the right one, “Family” inked in tall, dark lettering across his throat.
“What’ve we got to lose?” Payne said. “I just want to watch his reaction—if any—to seeing the doer.”
Kennedy left the viewing room and, a moment later, Payne heard him over the speaker knocking twice on the interview room door. McCrory cracked open the door, leaned toward it to listen as the Wanted flyer was passed inside, then nodded and closed the door.
Payne watched McCrory glance over the flyer, then extend it toward Jamal.
“What about this guy, Jamal?” McCrory said, his tone sarcastic. “Don’t know him, either?”
Jamal didn’t move to take the sheet, and McCrory put it on the table on top of the other papers before him.
As Jamal focused on it, his eyes grew wide and he wrinkled his forehead. He quickly tried to mask his reaction by taking off his glasses, then running his hand over his face and rubbing his eyes.
“So you do know him?” McCrory asked, making it more a statement.
Jamal’s body slumped as he shook his head.
“What?” McCrory said.
Jamal shook his head again, and, apparently thinking he was being clever, looked at McCrory and said, “Who is he? What’d he do?”
Payne grunted.
“At least he’s consistent with his lying,” he said.
McCrory had come to the same conclusion.
“You’re lying, Jamal. Who is this guy? How do you know him?”
Jamal looked at his shoes for a long moment.
“C’mon, Jamal. Talk to me. You’re looking at some serious time already with a gun charge on top of possession with intent to distribute . . . or worse.”
After a moment, Jamal sighed.
“He’s one I’ve seen at Needle Park, too,” Jamal said. “I don’t know him. But a guy I did know there said stay away from him. Said he’s a really bad dude. Angry at everything, you know?”
Jamal’s tired voice trailed off, and he began to rub his face again.
“What’s the guy’s name who told you that?”
Jamal shrugged.
“Harvey? Javier, maybe? Heard he OD’d. He didn’t say this guy’s name, just called him la gente loca . . .”
“‘Crazy people’?” Payne said, making the translation from Spanish. “I’ll be damned!”
He reached to pull out his cellular telephone, then felt it vibrate. When he checked its screen, there was a text from Kerry Rapier: “The mystery of Where’s Waldo solved! At least the where part . . .”
“Jesus!” Payne blurted, then looked at Kennedy and said, “If you’ll excuse me. I should be right back but might not. Nasuti and Lucke own the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. Let them and me know what else that bastard says about that doer, and also when you’ve got Pookie coming in for that heart-to-heart talk.”
“Will do, Sarge,” Kennedy said, crossing his arms over his massive chest. “We’ve already texted Pookie. Just waiting to hear back.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Oh, you can count on it that he’ll be in touch. The bastard thinks he’s due a payday for ratting out this knucklehead to us.”
[ TWO ]
As Payne stepped outside the viewing room, using his shoulder to push the door closed, he finished what he had started to do when Kerry Rapier’s text interrupted him: alert Nasuti and Lucke about what Jamal had said. Then he tapped the key on the screen to call back Rapier.
“Thought that’d get your attention, Marshal,” Rapier said, by way of answering the call. “We found the car, and just waiting on a positive ID on the victim, too.”
“Where?”
“Off Torresdale, some blocks up from Harding Middle School. The VeeDub initially was reported to nine-one-one as having been carjacked.”
“You’ve lost me. Waldo’s buddy said it was taken from them at gunpoint, before Waldo got whacked.”
“Right. But then a couple hours later an anonymous adult male called in to nine-one-one and said that a Puerto Rican with a gun had just carjacked a silver VeeDub Jetta with Jersey plates on Torresdale. A couple of marked units responded, and as they searched the area, there suddenly was a black plume rising over by the commuter train tracks.
“When they got to the fire, right before the fire trucks, they saw that it was a VeeDub and that it was completely engulfed in flames. Windows were either blown out or melted.”
“Nice.”
“There’s no question that the fuel tank blew up, but they also found remains of two metal cans, one that looked like it exploded, and it’s believed these were the accelerants. And the gas in the tank. It was a superhot fire.”
“And the body?”
“There’s not much left of it. Not a completely charred skeleton but close. Apparently when the gas tank cooked off, it blew the body up into the trunk lid, which may or may not have been simultaneously blown open.”
“Well, it’s logical that it’s Waldo. The shooter likely just stuffed him in the trunk and then torched the evidence.” He paused, then said, “Didn’t Waldo’s buddy say the shooter was a skinny black guy?”
“Yeah, and his drug dealer partner was a big black guy with a bald head and meth mouth. And the young kid delivering the product was also black.”
“But the nine-one-one caller said the carjacker was Puerto Rican?”
“And near Harding Middle School, which is approximately four miles from where Dan said he saw Billy killed. They
ran the Jersey plate, and it belongs to a Chevy. The Penn plate that was under the Jersey one is registered to the Jetta, and in Billy’s father’s name.”
“You have someone running down surveillance camera footage in the area?”
“Already on it before I texted you.”
“Good man.”
“One more thing, Marshal.”
“What?”
“Chuck Whaley’s headed to the location of the car fire since they found pretty much nothing but blood at the site of the killing. The Crime Scene guys have already wrapped up.”
Payne grunted derisively. “Great. Make sure he gets all you’ve got. He’ll need all the help he can get.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“No . . . wait. Yeah, there is. You have access to the recording in Homicide’s interview rooms, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Rapier said, and Payne heard the sound of rapid typing in the background. “Punched it up now. Michael Hayward, aka Jamal. That’s one filthy person.”
“Yeah. Jamal the Junkie. McCrory and Kennedy brought him in on the Dante Holmes drive-by, and he just now said he’s seen the doer in the park murders at McPherson Square in Kensington. But then again he’s been consistently lying for at least the last hour.”
“That’s a great break, if true. You believe it?”
“Hell if I know. I want to believe it, so we can grab the bastard. I was giving Nasuti and Lucke the heads-up when you texted. They can broadcast the info with a Flash, and then see if any of our blue shirts who patrol the park—who probably haven’t seen the Wanted flyer yet, otherwise they’d have already made him and tried running him to ground—can ID the doer. All of which hinges on if Jamal the Junkie isn’t lying—again. And, if he actually is telling the truth, if the doer’s been seen anywhere near the park.”
“So, what is it you need me to do?”
“Right now, just make sure everyone’s getting all updates and that there’re backups of backups of that interview recording.”
“Oh ye of little faith, Marshal. Redundancy is my middle name.”
[ THREE ]
SEPTA Somerset Station
Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia
Saturday, December 15, 3:12 P.M.
Transit Police Officer Thelonious “Theo” Clarke, a beefy five-foot-ten twenty-one-year-old African-American, stood near the concourse exit as he scanned the crowd stepping off the just-arrived southbound train.
Clarke had served six months on the force of three hundred that policed the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority mass transit system, the trains and buses of which servicing, as its name suggested, the City of Philadelphia proper as well as the surrounding four suburban counties.
If there appeared to be some similarities with the Transit Police and the Philadelphia Police Department, that was not by coincidence. SEPTA’s officers went through the same Philadelphia Police Academy training as did Philly’s officers. Thus, it was not unusual for SEPTA’s officers to later join the PPD, which, with manpower of more than six thousand, was approximately twenty times larger in size.
And, while not nearly as common, the reverse of PPD cops joining the SEPTA force also was true—right up to the top cop.
The police chief of SEPTA had served, prior to his transfer, as head of the PPD’s elite Highway Patrol Unit. Like many cops in both departments, it was said he had multigenerational blue blood running in his veins. The chief could in fact count on the fingers of both hands how many family members served in, or had retired from, the ranks of the Philadelphia Police Department, uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces—and his father, who had retired after rising to the level of deputy police commissioner.
While Clarke liked that—he devoutly considered his brothers in blue to be family—he was the first of his biological family to become a law enforcement officer.
Theo had grown up in Spring Garden, a tough section of the city wedged in just north of the wealth of Center City. In his senior year of high school he learned that one could apply to the Philly police at age nineteen, but that PPD required sixty hours of college credits, or a mix of education and experience that could be military service or two years in the Police Explorers Cadet Program and hundreds of hours of training.
His joining the army or navy simply was not a viable option because he needed to be near home to help care for his mother, who suffered from diabetes and could not get around by herself. So he had enrolled in Community College of Philadelphia to acquire the necessary credits—then about a year thereafter, while talking to another student as they scanned a bulletin board in the school’s Career Center, learned that SEPTA required only a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma.
Theo Clarke, anxious to do something job-wise, thought that he could put in time as a SEPTA transit officer—policing was policing, he decided, and he would get to go through the police academy same as the others—and continue with school and then at some point possibly look at transferring to the PPD.
He found that he actually liked being a SEPTA transit officer, especially because transit cops had authority all across the mass transit system, not just limited to one small area of the city.
While pursuing and arresting people who jumped over the turnstiles to evade paying the subway fare did get somewhat repetitious, he found that it could occasionally get interesting.
The bad guys whom the SEPTA police chased on the trains were, after all, if not the exact same bad guys who the Philadelphia Police Department chased—and oftentimes they were—then they could be equally as bad. They committed the same crimes—assaults, robberies, illegal drug sales, and the like. They just happened to do it on SEPTA property.
And of course there always was the steady stream of fare evaders.
The philosophy of the SEPTA police chief was that the bad guys—and, too often, the bad girls—who jumped the turnstiles were of course guilty (a) of theft of service but also (b) of being generally up to no good. They weren’t, to put a point on it, jumping the turnstiles during their commute to and from work or school—they were looking for an opportunity to commit a crime.
Thus, it wasn’t just a philosophy—and when the chief mustered his SEPTA patrols to crack down on fare evaders, there followed an immediate drop in the rates of other more serious crimes committed on the mass transit system.
Which was why Transit Officer Theo Clarke often found himself watching, as now, the crowds embarking and disembarking the train cars at the elevated Somerset station.
This being Kensington, he knew it was only a short matter of time before he would nab some miscreant leaping over—or, his favorite because they looked so ridiculous, crawling under—the rotating arms of a turnstile.
And, also entirely probable, committing a worse offense.
Clarke had been standing by the concourse exit for not even ten minutes when his eyes caught sight of a male walking in a crouch at the back of the last group exiting the train.
His first thought: That dude’s hiding something that’s making him walk that way.
Clarke saw that the male was short, maybe five-four, and chunky. He looked Hispanic—Probably Puerto Rican, Theo thought—and maybe around his own age. He wore a black stocking cap pulled low on his head. He had on a gray sweatshirt—the right cuff of which he suddenly realized was blackened.
Like it’s been on fire. What’s up with that?
Transit Officer Clarke started walking toward him to get a closer look, and then saw that the male was very carefully cradling his hand—That’s why the dude’s walking funny—and that the flesh of the hand was a bright red with black streaks.
Clarke intercepted him.
“You okay?” Clarke said. “What happened to your hand?”
When the male looked up and saw a uniformed policeman looming over him, his tired eyes grew wide.
Clarke
knew that wasn’t an unusual reaction to occur in Somerset station, where he figured at any given time a majority of people could be under the influence of some drug, legal or illicit, and thus Clarke, though remaining cautious, did not immediately read anything into it.
The injured male, whose arm with the burned hand then began shaking uncontrollably, did not respond to his questions.
“What’s your name?” Clarke pursued.
“Juan,” Ruben Mora lied.
“You really need to get that injury looked at, Juan,” Clarke said, then pointed past the concourse exit. “There’s a hospital ER just a few blocks away.”
For Clarke, it unfortunately was a regular occurrence to come across someone who had overdosed—not necessarily on the El, though that of course had happened. Just two days earlier he had had to administer a prefilled syringe of naloxone hydrochloride that he recently had begun carrying as part of his kit to a nineteen-year-old white female—the naloxone blocking and reversing the effects of opioid painkillers, such as Oxycontin, and heroin—and then had EMTs transport her the short distance down Kensington Avenue to the emergency room at Temple University Episcopal Hospital on West Lehigh Avenue.
“Yeah, it hurts bad,” Ruben Mora said.
Mora then looked from Transit Officer Clarke to his burned hand. Then all at once his eyes drooped, his shoulders slumped—and he collapsed to the ground.
“Damn!” Transit Officer Clarke blurted.
He quickly knelt and then lifted Mora off the ground. He threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and began trotting toward the exit, calling out, “Make way! Clear a path!” as he went.
After maneuvering down the stairs and reaching street level, Clarke carried Mora to the marked Ford Crown Victoria that he had left parked in the spot at the curb marked OFFICIAL SEPTA USE ONLY.
Transit Officer Clarke opened the Police Interceptor’s back door behind the driver’s, then squatted and carefully leaned forward, dropping Mora onto the backseat. He then hopped behind the wheel, activated the emergency lights and siren, then looked over his shoulder as he yanked the gear selector into drive.
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