Then he smirked, too. “Clever company, all right. I’d heard these were coming. A retired Philly detective came up with the idea, right?”
“Yeah,” Iglesia said. “Don’t know what he got paid for the patent, or maybe he’s got a piece of the company. But at forty, fifty bucks a pop, someone’s making a mint. Every agency with any budget is stockpiling the biohaz version, with the feds buying semitrailers full ‘just in case.’ ”
He tugged at the bag and with some professional pride added: “These really are better than the old ones, in every way. The old ones, they had zippers, and those could get really messy.”
Payne understood what he meant. The zippers allowed for the risk of contamination of the evidence, or for the viewer possibly to be exposed to any biological or chemical hazard that may be part of the remains, or both.
Not so with the new design. The bag-made of heavy-duty vinyl, oval-shaped and ringed with padded loops that doubled as lifting points and tie-down points-had two unheard-of features that made it unique and, more important, preserved the chain of custody.
The first was that the top of the bag had a black flap running its length that, when folded back, revealed a clear vinyl viewing panel. One could examine the bag’s contents without having to open the bag, which was important, as there was no zipper on the bag.
And that pointed to the bag’s second main feature: a chemically sealed main flap. Once the remains went into the bag and the clear panel was closed, a chemical reaction occurred as the seams touched, heat-sealing them securely closed. If someone opened the bag, it could not be resealed. A new bag, with a new, unique serial number, was required. And, as an added bonus, no zippers also meant no zipper teeth for bodily and other fluids to seep out through.
Harris pulled back the solid black panel, uncovering the clear vinyl viewing one.
“Actually, Javier,” Harris said, “what I meant was for you to show Matt the critter, not give a sales job on the damn bag.”
“Oh.”
The clear vinyl panel, despite being somewhat smudged on the inside by viscous fluids, did its job of allowing a remarkably clear view of the remains.
So clear that, for a moment, Matt Payne feared that he-and everyone else-was about to see his breakfast again.
But he gulped his coffee, pushing down the feeling in his gut while trying to maintain a detached inspection of the remains.
He saw that the Hispanic male victim’s face was disfigured beyond belief. And from head to toe the outer layer of skin was blackened and blistered. There were crude cracks and gouges in his darkened flesh, particularly about the face and arms and hands, which at points were scorched to the bone.
Scorched and seared, like a steak on a hot grill.
It would take more than a little imagination to piece this guy all back together for an ID shot.
Right now he looks like something out of a really bad sci-fi flick.
“Javier,” Harris went on, “is that the one with-”
“The circumcision?” Iglesia said, smiling. “Yeah.”
In Harris’s peripheral vision, he saw Payne looking between him and Iglesia, trying to decode what was being said.
“Give Detective Payne a peek, would you?”
Payne thought: I don’t want to see what’s left of his damn- Javier Iglesia slipped his hand under the bag, at the point just under the back of the dead man’s neck, and lifted.
– Oh, Jesus!
Payne felt the lightness rise in his stomach again. It went away when Iglesia pulled back his hand and the neck wound closed.
“Go on, Javier,” Harris egged him on, “tell him.”
Iglesia looked at Payne and, clearly pleased with himself, said, “The dickhead got himself circumcised.”
Then he unceremoniously flipped the body bag’s top flap back in place and rolled the gurney to the back bumper of the van. He aligned it there, and with a shove collapsed its undercarriage and slid it in beside the other gurney holding the other body bag.
Watching Iglesia close the van’s back doors, Matt suddenly thought: … forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.
Jesus. Where did that come from?
Where else? From years of reciting the Lord’s Prayer-sitting in the same sanctuary as Becca.
Then he thought: How bad can Becca be?
Matt looked at Harris and said, “Was Becca, the girl in the Mercedes-”
Tony Harris shook his head.
“Nothing like that, Matt. Curiously, what hurt her is also what saved her from something worse. When the windshield blew inward and struck her, it appears to have also acted like a shield that deflected the brunt of the blast.”
They walked back to the window. As they surveyed the scene, Harris put down his coffee and pulled out his notepad, flipping to a fresh page.
“Matt, how about giving me that information you said you have? You asked about the Mercedes. Do you know the Benjamin girl well?”
“Yeah, fairly well. We grew up in Wallingford. Went to the same church. And she was two years behind me at Episcopal Academy.”
Harris started writing on his pad, then said, “Any reason to believe she’s involved with running drugs, specifically meth?”
“No reason at all. And I sure as hell hope she’s not. Her boyfriend, however, is another case…”
“What about the boyfriend?”
“I haven’t seen Skipper Olde since we graduated from Episcopal Academy.”
“ ‘Skipper’?” he said, and spelled the last name aloud as he wrote.
“Right. J. Warren Olde,” Matt furnished, “initial J-Juliet, though I have no idea what it stands for. Also known as Skipper. He’s my age, twenty-seven.”
“Was he into drugs back then?”
Matt shook his head. “Not that I know of. Mostly beer and whiskey, and a lot of it. He led Becca Benjamin, who’s a couple years younger, down that path. Not that she maybe wouldn’t have gone down it on her own. Just sure as hell not so far and so fast.”
Harris nodded, then asked, “Is Olde the same as-”
“Yeah. Olde and Sons, the McMansion custom home builders. Philly, Palm Beach, Dallas. His old man J. Warren Olde, Sr.”
“Oh boy.”
Matt heard something in Harris’s tone that suggested more than mere annoyance at the mention of another wealthy family name.
“What ‘oh boy,’ Tony?”
Harris didn’t respond directly. He looked inside the motel room, and Payne followed his eyes.
“What in the hell happened here, Tony?” Payne then said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“On the assumption that that wasn’t a rhetorical question, I thought I told you-a meth lab. They’re volatile as hell.”
“But is that all that this is about?”
Tony Harris shrugged, then said, “I don’t know if it’s ‘all,’ but it’s certainly a large component.”
Payne nodded. “So were those two crispy critters in the body bags running the lab, and selling to Skipper? Or was it Skipper’s lab? Or had he come to throw them out of his motel? I cannot understand why he’d bring Becca, in Becca’s Mercedes that screams everything that this place is not, here…”
“Well, as you point out, there’re a number of possible scenarios. My money’s on the one that says your prep school pal-”
“He’s not my pal,” Payne interrupted. “Becca, however, I do like.”
“-okay, this Skipper guy, then, was in the illicit drug manufacture and distribution trades, specifically crystal meth. Maybe the girl, too. But we won’t know until we can talk to them. If we can talk to them. He was unconscious after he collapsed. And she was in and out of consciousness when the boys wheeled her out of here in the meat wagon.” Harris heard what he’d just said. “Sorry, Matt. No offense.”
Matt motioned with his hand in a gesture that said, None taken.
“Till then,” Harris went on, “any other pieces to the puzzle you can fill in…”
Payne thought, If anyone can figure this out, it’s Tony.
He then told him everything that Chad Nesbitt had said in the diner.
Harris finished writing that in his notes and said, “You were right. You’re really close to this. Anything else?”
Matt Payne made eye contact with Tony Harris.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Yeah, there is, Tony. I want in on this job.”
“And I’d like to have you. But I thought you were going-”
“No. That’s not happening. I’m a cop.”
“No, you’re not,” Harris said.
What-? Payne thought.
Harris went on: “Matt, at the risk of inflating what already might be an oversize ego, you were a damn good detective. Now you’re a sergeant-a supervisor. And I sure could use you on this job-if, that is, I get it.”
Payne nodded once. “Thanks, Tony. That means a lot coming from you.” He paused, then added, “Bari’s going to get this job?”
Harris shrugged.
Harris then watched as Payne reached for his cellular phone, scrolled the list of names, then hit CALL.
“Good morning, Captain Hollaran,” Matt said when the call was answered. “Matt Payne. How are you, sir?”
Captain Francis X. Hollaran was assistant to First Deputy Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin, the second in command of all of the Philadelphia Police Department. Commissioner Coughlin had been the one to order the overworked and overstressed Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, who was his godson, “Matty, you’re taking some time off. Thirty days. You’ve earned it, you deserve it-and you need it.”
Payne said into his cell phone: “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate it. I do feel better. Would it be possible to speak with the commissioner when he gets in?”
He glanced at his wristwatch, then said: “He’s in already? Then yes, please. Tell him I’m on my way to the Roundhouse, and I need ten minutes of his time.”
Payne paused to listen, then, making eye contact with Tony Harris, added, “Of course you can give him a heads-up what it’s about. Tell him my thirty-day R and R officially ended with a boom a few hours ago. I’m coming back to work.”
[THREE] Reading Terminal Market Center City, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 7:45 A.M.
In a crush of rush-hour commuters, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado stepped off the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s R1 “Airport Line” railcar at the Market East Station. He followed a half-dozen of the commuters as they one by one passed through the Eleventh Street exit’s revolving door. On the sidewalk, El Gato pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, covering his head against the rain that was starting. Two women in business attire and sharing an umbrella walked past, and he trailed them to Filbert Street, then into the Reading Terminal Market.
El Gato had boarded the SEPTA regional railroad at the Thirtieth Street Station, which was about a mile to the west, just across the Schuylkill River. And it had been into that dark river, from the tree-lined eastern shore under the Thirty-fourth Street bridge, that thirty minutes earlier he’d unceremoniously dumped the headless body of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez.
In the back of the rusty white Plymouth minivan, he had put her remains into a fifty-gallon black plastic lawn care bag and tied to the outside, around her ankles, a pair of twenty-five-pound workout dumbbells. Then he had poked a few holes in the bag to vent any trapped air. Once in the water, the bag had floated half-submerged with the river current for less than a minute, air bubbling out the vent holes. Then, when the bag had sufficiently filled with water, it had slipped toward the river bottom, a final series of bubbles popping on the surface.
El Gato then had rinsed off the blood from his hands with river water and thrown his bloody black clothing into the brush, behind a cardboard box long ago vacated by a homeless person. He’d driven the half-mile to the Thirtieth Street Station, and there carried a backpack into the men’s room. After cleaning up at a sink, he’d gone into a toilet stall. He had removed his gun from the backpack, run its sling over his right shoulder, then pulled on a clean hoodie sweatshirt and, over that, a cheap navy blue vinyl raincoat. Finally, he rolled up a Philadelphia Eagles ball cap and slipped it into his pants waistband at the small of his back.
The polymer-and-alloy weapon was a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale submachine gun, Model P90, capable of firing nine hundred 5.7-? 28-mm rounds per minute, though its magazine held only fifty rounds. It was of a bullpup design, the action and magazine behind the trigger allowing for a shorter weapon with a barrel of equal length and accuracy as that of a longer gun. At just under twenty inches long, the P90’s futuristic styling resembled something right out of a science-fiction movie.
He’d taken the gun off the hands, quite literally, so to speak, of a former business associate in Texas, who had acquired it in Nuevo Laredo from a low-level member of the Zetas, the paramilitary enforcement arm of the narco-trafficking Gulf cartel. Despite the P90 having been a prized possession, the former associate had had no further need of it. El Gato, in a crack house in South Dallas, agreed to the associate’s offer of the weapon as collateral against the unpaid debt he owed El Gato for a kilogram brick of sticky black tar heroin. Then El Gato pulled his pistol and shot the associate dead. Or, more accurately, shot up the associate. First with the nine-millimeter pistol, then with the P90. The burst of forty rounds was meant to send a message to others who might consider shorting El Gato.
After he followed the businesswomen into the Reading Terminal Market, the heavy metal door slammed shut behind him.
Juan Paulo Delgado reached inside his raincoat and pulled up on the right side of his sweatshirt. He readied the P90 while keeping it concealed under the raincoat.
Tricia Hungerford Wynne-an attractive fair-skinned blonde of twenty-two years who stood a slender and athletic five-foot-ten-waited patiently in Reading Terminal Market. Tricia, whose family could trace their lineage back to Dr. Thomas Wynne, William Penn’s personal physician and one of Philadelphia’s settlers, was a Swarthmore College senior about to graduate early with a degree in education.
As a teacher-in-training at West Catholic High School, she had already begun what she considered a life of influencing future generations. And it was for that noble cause that she stood on line five back at the busy glass display counter of Beiler’s Bakery. Beiler’s sold homemade Amish delicacies only on Wednesdays through Saturdays (no later than five-thirty each day, three o’clock on Saturday), and she’d come to pick up the shoofly pie she’d ordered. Tricia taught a cultural diversity class for West Catholic freshmen, and today’s emphasis was on the peaceful Amish of Lancaster County.
I should bring some scrapple, too, she thought, grinning mischievously.
Just to watch the boys turn green as they read aloud all the parts of a pig listed in the ingredients.
The Reading Terminal Market had opened in 1893 as a farmers’ market. The massive riveted steelwork of the onetime Reading Railroad train shed now housed nearly a hundred merchants. The shops and restaurants were laid out on a grid, boxed in by Twelfth Street to the west, Eleventh to the east, Arch on the north, and Filbert to the south.
Like every day Tricia could remember, the market was packed. Locals came regularly from their Center City offices; City Hall, with its statue of Willy Penn standing atop, was but blocks way. And tourists poured in from the nearby Marriott and Hilton Hotels and the Philadelphia Convention Center.
And for very good reason, Tricia thought.
She glanced around the market and marveled at the worldly mix it offered.
In addition to the dozen or so merchants representing the Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Reading Terminal Market had many others representing the four corners of the world. Up and down the aisles, hanging shingles advertised Little Thai Market, Kamal’s Middle Eastern Specialties, Hershel’s East Side Deli, Tokyo Sushi Bar. There were Greek souvlaki and gyros, French crepes, Italian hoagies, and the revered hometown favorite not to be forgotten, the Philly cheesesteak.
Then there was the market’s mascot, Philbert the Pig, a life-size bronze pig that doubled as a giant piggy bank. Tricia smiled at the thought of the money that visitors donated to it being used to teach children healthy eating habits.
Maybe next time I’ll just arrange for a class field trip here.
Because of the way that the line had bent in the aisle, Tricia now stood almost exactly in front of the counter for the Mercado-The Reading Market Market, she thought, amused at the translation. She eyed the exotic variety it offered. Everything from homemade Mexican cheeses to burritos to even a chicken mole.
Who knew a chicken dish could actually have chocolate in it?
Behind a short wall that was the kitchen food-prep line, she noticed a black male of about twenty. He wore a white T-shirt and apron. He had his black hair in thick ropelike dreadlocks, a hairnet ridiculously overstretched on them, and Tricia then realized that he was Jamaican.
A Jamaican working in a Mexican caf?.
Now, that’s really what you call a melting pot of worldly people.
He smiled at her, and she returned it as she reached over to a display. She picked up a jar and began to casually inspect it. It was salsa, which she knew to be a spicy sauce of chopped tomatoes, onions, jalape?o peppers, and more. The festive red lettering of the label read HOLA! BRAND HOT amp; TASTY TEX-MEX SALSA, A TASTE OF OL’ MEXICO VIA SAN ANTONE, TEXAS.
The line for Beiler’s moved forward, and she returned the jar to the display, once more smiling warmly. The thought of such a product-one having originated in a country so distinct and different-being readily available in the urban belly of a city like Philadelphia was wonderful. (Her warm feeling would have been somewhat tempered had she turned the jar and read the tiny print on the back of the label: HOLA! BRAND IS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF NESFOODS INTERNATIONAL, INC., PHILA., PENNA.) Tricia made brief eye contact with Kathleen Gingerich, who stood behind the counter at Beiler’s. The shy and sweet sixteen-year-old was of slight build and light features, and of course, being Amish, wore absolutely no makeup. She was dressed in the traditional Amish conservative clothing-a simple ankle-length tan cotton dress, white cotton blouse, and a tan cotton head cover, its spaghetti straps tied in a tiny bow beneath her chin.
When Kathleen’s light-brown eyes met Trish’s blue ones, her gentle face glowed.
Kathleen pointed to say that the shoofly pie was waiting there on the glass display in a white cardboard box. Tricia nodded, then reached into her purse, a purple Pravda knockoff she’d bought the previous weekend from a sidewalk vendor in New York City’s Chinatown. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill to have it ready when she got to the front of the line.
That’s so sweet of her.
If there’s any place in Philly that better exemplifies its motto of the City of Brotherly Love than this market, I just don’t know what it could be.
Tricia Wynne then heard one of the heavy metal doors to Filbert Street slam shut. It was fifty or so feet down the aisle, beyond Beiler’s. She looked there and saw two businesswomen. They turned and walked down a side aisle.
Then Tricia saw a young man in black jeans and boots and a navy blue raincoat standing at the door.
A Latino, Tricia noted approvingly.
She saw that the black hood of his sweatshirt was pulled over his head. It at first struck her as odd, but then she remembered the rain had just started and the chill it could cause when one entered an air-conditioned room.
The Latino began moving with a determined stride in her direction.
Then, behind her, Tricia heard a commotion at the food-prep counter of the Mercado.
She turned in time to see the Jamaican, now with a stricken expression, quickly moving out from behind the short wall. He went to a table in the corner of the Mercado and pulled out from under it a brown paper grocery bag, its top folded over and stapled shut.
He began carrying the bag toward the Latino. He forced a smile as he came closer to him, holding out the bag in his left hand.
The next moment, everything happened so fast that Tricia could not comprehend it all.
The right side of the Latino’s navy raincoat opened and out came what looked like some sort of firearm. It certainly had what looked like a barrel. Then the Jamaican threw the brown paper bag toward the Latino at the same time that he produced a small black semiautomatic pistol from the waistband behind his white apron.
She saw that the Jamaican held the pistol awkwardly, as if uncomfortable with it, and not in what one might call a traditional-or even natural-manner, which was to say with the grip of the pistol up and down, vertical. Instead, he held it sideways, the grip horizontal to the floor.
Then there came two series of deafening gunfire, the sound of which seemed to rattle around the heavy iron beams of the terminal. One series, from the Latino’s weapon, made a steady and pounding stream of braaaaaps; the other, from the pistol, of much slower and irregular bang-bang-bangs.
Tricia and those who’d been in line with her were on their knees, cowering, as the Latino strode past. He continued toward the Jamaican, who now lay on his right side on the concrete floor of the market with his pistol appearing empty. There were holes pierced in the upper part of his white apron, dark crimson stains spreading between them.
The brown paper bag had been shredded by bullets. Spread on the concrete near the Jamaican’s feet were its contents, what looked to Tricia to be two bricklike objects wrapped in butcher paper and a lot of small sugar packets, maybe thirty or forty, all scattered.
With an amazing speed and grace, the Latino effortlessly bent and grabbed the butcher-paper-wrapped objects, then, ignoring the sugar packets, moved to a heavy steel door-and was gone.
Then there immediately came a woman’s hysterical screams from behind the Beiler’s Bakery counter.
And it wasn’t until a woman beside Tricia wordlessly pointed to Tricia’s bloody upper left sleeve that she first felt the burning sensation in her arm.
After exiting the steel door onto Filbert, El Gato began walking purposefully in an effort to blend in with the morning crowd moving along the rain-slickened sidewalk.
As he went, he peeled off the navy blue vinyl raincoat, balled it up, then stuffed it in the trash receptacle at the corner of Filbert and Twelfth. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt from his head and put on the ball cap he’d tucked in his pants. Then, keeping his face down, he passed through the revolving door at the Market Street Station.
At the Thirtieth Street Station, El Gato disembarked the train and walked out to the lot where he’d left the white rusty Plymouth minivan. He drove it back to Hancock Street, then, exhausted, took his Tahoe home to Manayunk.
Police cars rocketed past him, headed toward Center City.
[FOUR] Office of the First Deputy Commissioner Philadelphia Police Headquarters Race and North Eighth Streets, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 7:50 A.M.
“Okay, gentlemen,” First Deputy Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin said, his ruddy face showing some displeasure. “So now we would seem to have two problems. Let’s stick with the first one at hand, concerning His Honor the Mayor and Mr. James Henry Benjamin, president and chief executive officer of Benjamin Securities.”
Coughlin, a tall and heavyset man, sat in the high-back black leather chair at his massive wooden desk and made a note on the leather-bound desk blotter. He was fifty-nine years old, still with all of his curly hair, though now silver, and all his teeth.
Standing beside him, and pouring coffee from a stainless-steel thermos, was his assistant, Captain Francis Xavier Hollaran. The forty-nine-year-old Hollaran was also a large Irishman who had all of his teeth. His luxurious mop of red hair, however, had thinned out long ago.
He was pouring into one of two heavy china coffee mugs he held. They bore the logotype of the Emerald Society. Both Hollaran and Coughlin belonged to the fraternal organization of police officers of Irish heritage. Denny Coughlin had joined “The Emerald” right out of the Police Academy. He had since served twice as its president, as the framed certificates behind him on the wall by the flat-screen television-which was muted and tuned to the local FOX newscast-attested.
Also in Coughlin’s office on the third floor of the Police Administration Building were Chief Inspector Matthew Lowenstein, commanding officer of the Detective Bureau; Captain Henry Quaire, commander of the Homicide Unit, who reported to Lowenstein; and Lieutenant Jason Washington, whose immediate boss was Quaire.
They were all white shirts, though not one wore his police uniform; instead, all were in coats and ties or suits and ties. Denny Coughlin had his well-tailored gray plaid double-breasted suit coat on a hanger on the peg on the back side of his office door, which now was closed.
And while this was a collection of department brass, a meeting of many of its best and brightest to handle a situation that had become a political hot potato, the air was at once serious and somewhat informal. The reason for the ease with which they worked was (a) that the men immensely respected one another and (b) that respect was the result of having a long history of working together.
In Coughlin’s case, damn near forever-it had been thirty-seven years since he’d graduated from the Police Academy.
“My phone has been going off constantly all morning,” Coughlin announced. “His Honor the Mayor is breathing down the neck of Commissioner Mariani, who of course has chosen to share said hot air.”
Ralph J. Mariani, a natty, stocky, balding Italian, was the police commissioner. The image of the mayor leaning on the top cop triggered a couple of chuckles and a derisive snort.
“Ralph,” Coughlin went on, “put it to me that His Honor had told him: ‘Commissioner, I suggest you suggest to your deputy that he suggest…’ ” He paused to let that sink in. “So, you see where this is coming from. Short of a personal visit, it doesn’t get much more direct than that.”
Not that Coughlin was at all fearful of a personal visit from His Honor the Mayor of Philadelphia.
If it hadn’t been for the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci following protocol and passing orders down the chain of command, Coughlin knew he’d have damn sure seen Carlucci standing in his office-or, more likely, Coughlin called to the mayor’s office.
Because before being elected to public office, Carlucci had, as he liked to brag, held every rank but that of policewoman in the Philadelphia Police Department. And during which time-as a captain, then on up through the ranks-Carlucci had been Coughlin’s rabbi.
The purpose of a rabbi was to groom a young police officer, mentoring him in preparation for the greater responsibilities of the higher and higher ranks it was expected he would hold down the line.
His Honor also of course had had a rabbi, Augustus Wohl, who ultimately retired as a chief inspector, one step shy of deputy commissioner. Wohl’s only son-who’d entered the Police Academy at age twenty, only two weeks after graduating from Temple University, and who’d at one point risen to be the department’s youngest staff inspector-was now Inspector Peter Wohl.
Like his father, Peter Wohl was damn smart, damn honest, and a damn good cop. Which was why His Honor the Mayor had damn sure seen to it that Wohl had been made commander of the Special Operations Bureau, reporting directly to Coughlin.
And everyone in the room knew Inspector Wohl was the rabbi to one then-Detective and now-Seargeant Matthew Payne.
“Carlucci breathing on Mariani to breathe on you, Denny,” Francis Hollaran, who had over the years followed Coughlin up through the ranks, said, “I believe that’s called ‘the shit flowing downhill.’ ”
The others in the room chuckled.
Coughlin glared at him. “Yes, it is, Frank. And would you care to wager a guess as to where, to use your crude phraseology, that shit’s going to land next?”
“With any luck,” Hollaran said, raising his Emerald Society mug to gesture toward the commander of the Detective Bureau, “right past me, and smack into Matt’s lap.”
Chief Inspector Matthew Lowenstein laughed out loud. He also was a large, stocky, ruddy-faced, barrel-chested man with a full head of curly silver hair. However, he did not belong to The Emerald. He was Jewish.
The very big and very black Jason Washington then intoned in his deep voice, “I pray that I am profoundly in error, but I suspect the flow of said fecal matter will wind up on my desk-thereon hitting the proverbial fan.”
Denny Coughlin chuckled.
“Jason, your astute suspicions aside,” Coughlin then said, “let’s take it from the top. Beginning with what we know. Would you care to bring everyone up to speed?”
“Certainly. As I’ve shared with the captain and the chief inspector,” he said, making eye contact with Quaire and Lowenstein as he said their ranks, “what we know is that at one-fifty this morning, there was an explosion at the Philly Inn on Frankford Avenue. Specifically, room fifty-two, which appears to have been actively used for the manufacture of the Schedule II controlled substance methamphetamine. We have two dead Hispanic males and two others, a white male and a white female, who suffered grave injury. The deceased were taken to the morgue, of course. The latter pair was transported to Temple Hospital, where they were admitted to the Intensive Care Unit, their conditions last listed as ‘critical.’ ”
“Clearly the girl being Benjamin’s daughter,” Coughlin said.
Washington nodded.
“We’re told,” he went on, “but are awaiting positive ID, that the white male is one J. Warren Olde, Jr., of the custom homebuilder family. We’re also told, but are awaiting verification, that he’s the owner of the motel.”
“And we’re told this by whom?” Coughlin said. “A reliable source?”
Washington nodded again.
“Absolutely reliable,” he said. “We have Anthony Harris on the scene, and after some initial confusion of the deskman on the Wheel, he now has the job-”
“Confusion?” Coughlin interrupted. “What’s that all about?”
“Just an administrative matter that has been taken care of, sir.”
Coughlin raised an eyebrow, nodded, then gestured for Washington to continue.
“Harris got the job in part because he’s one of the best. But also because he has been on the scene since just about the time the motel blew up. He lives only seven, eight blocks away, and the blast rocked him out of bed.”
“Jesus!” Denny Coughlin blurted.
“It was a significant explosion,” Washington said.
“What do we know about the dead ones?” Coughlin said. “Anything yet?”
“Beyond the fact that one had his throat cut, not much. No IDs. They were severely burned, clearly. Practically everything in that room was consumed by the fire. The technician from the Medical Examiner’s Office put their ages between twenty-five and thirty-five. The autopsy should narrow that.”
Coughlin nodded in serious thought.
“Nothing else?” he then said.
Quaire grinned ever so slightly and made eye contact with his boss. Matt Lowenstein shrugged and grinned, too, his face saying Why not?
It wasn’t lost on Coughlin, who barked, “What the hell is it?”
“The tech from the Medical Examiner’s Office,” Quaire said, and in his peripheral vision saw Washington cringe, “said that the critter making the meth got circumcised in the room.”
“He got what?” Coughlin said incredulously, and wondered if he was having his chain pulled.
“It’s true, Denny,” Lowenstein offered. “But, I’m sorry, it’s far beneath my dignified station to explain.”
Coughlin looked at Quaire, who rose to the challenge: “The tech said anybody involved in drugs was a dickhead, and so deserved to have his throat circumcised.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Coughlin blurted, but he was smiling.
“What we don’t know,” Washington went on, “among other things, is: Who cut his throat? That may be something we never learn, considering the conditions of the only other two people who were there.”
After a moment, Quaire asked in a serious tone: “What I’m curious about is, how did Benjamin find out?”
“That’s a good question, Henry,” Hollaran said. “We wondered that, too. Turns out the vehicle Benjamin’s daughter drives has one of those satellite systems. In the event of an accident, a crash sensor on the vehicle activates a communications module that uses the cellular telephone tower system-or maybe it’s the global positioning system, or both-to triangulate the vehicle’s location and then telephone an emergency number and pass along the details. Everything from whether the air bags deployed-how many of them, to determine the severity of the accident-down to the air pressure in the tires.”
“I heard those calls go to some call center in Bombay, India,” Washington offered. “Making it an even more impressive system. Excuse me, that should be Mumbai, India. They changed it.”
Hollaran nodded and a little disgustedly said, “That would not surprise me; Lord knows there’s no one in Philadelphia-or Brooklyn or Iowa-who could be taken off the unemployment line and trained to do that. Why the hell keep jobs here? Anyway, this operator”-he glanced at Washington-“in Mumbai, India, could not get anyone in the Benjamin vehicle to respond when she or he dialed the vehicle’s cellular telephone system connected to its high-fidelity sound system. So the operator then called the local 911 emergency number here. And, after that, started going down the list of emergency contacts that the owner of the vehicle had submitted when the vehicle was purchased.”
“And the girl had her father as the first to contact in case of emergency, air bag deployment, et cetera,” Washington said.
“Exactly,” Hollaran said.
“And,” Coughlin put in, “because her father has the mayor’s personal cellular telephone number-it’s my understanding that quite a few city bond-issuance programs have been managed by Benjamin Securities-His Honor knew all about whose SUV that was before we could even get there and run the plates or VIN.”
“Ah, the miracles of modern technology!” Lieutenant Jason Washington intoned.
“In addition to the team of detectives Tony Harris is running,” Matt Lowenstein offered, “we’ve got men sitting on the hospital in case either the Benjamin girl or the Olde boy is able to start talking. We’ve got a lot of manpower already on it, Denny. Unless you can think of something else?”
Coughlin considered that, then said, “No, not at this point. It sounds as if all the wheels are turning on this.” He paused, then added, “I never doubted that, of course. It’s just that this has become an extraordinary case.”
He exhaled audibly.
“Okay, that was the first problem,” Coughlin went on. “Now, as to Matty. I would like to hear everyone’s thoughts on what we should do with Detective Matthew Payne.”
He looked at Washington.
“I’m sorry, Jason. But it seems that proverbial fan you spoke of is attracting more for you. I’d like your opinion first, then Henry’s, then Matt’s, and then Frank’s.”
Everyone nodded, recognizing what Denny Coughlin was doing. It was the military method of beginning with the junior officer and working up to the most senior. It was an effective way of getting an opinion that was original-not something from someone who for self-preservation or other purposes simply agreed with what their boss had just said.
“Unequivocally, I think Detective Payne should stay on the case,” Lieutenant Washington immediately said.
“What do you mean, ‘stay on the case’?” Coughlin said.
“He’s our absolutely reliable source. The one you asked about earlier?”
“How the hell is that?” Coughlin said. He looked at Hollaran. “Is that why he’s on the way here, Frank?”
Hollaran shrugged. “He didn’t get into that. He just said the heads-up was that he wanted to come back to work.”
“Matthew went to school with the two in the hospital and is close to another who has a financial interest in the motel,” Jason Washington explained, then went into the background he had on that from Tony Harris.
When Washington had finished with that a few minutes later, he added, “In summary, I believe Matthew would be indispensable. I welcome him back to Homicide with open arms.”
“Okay,” Coughlin said, stone-faced. “Thank you, Jason. Henry? Your piece of mind, please.”
“Well,” Quaire began, “it’s no secret that I was not overly thrilled about Matt using The List and the mayor’s top-five-scores-get-their-pick to come to Homicide.”
About a month earlier, the department had released what was universally known as “The List.”
Some twenty-five hundred police officers-corporals, detectives, and patrolmen with at least two years’ service?had taken the examination for promotion. Those who passed and were promoted received a pay raise, a bump of four percent for the first two ranks, and fourteen percent for the patrolmen.
The List showed who had passed and how their scores had ranked them.
The exam was given in two parts, the first being written. Of the twenty-five hundred candidates, one in five had failed the written component. That washed them out, making them ineligible to move on to the exam’s oral component.
Not everyone rushed to take the exam. Detectives could bring home more money in overtime than could sergeants, who clocked fewer hours. But because retirement pay was based on rank, they eventually would take it in hopes of being promoted and, then, retired as a lieutenant or captain.
The first hurdle, however, was passing. And not everyone did. And of those who did, not all were necessarily promoted right away.
After the names of those who passed the written exam were posted, the oral exams were given over the next four months.
In the Sergeant’s Exam, nearly seven hundred detectives, corporals, and patrolmen had passed the oral component. That made them eligible for promotion, of course, but contingent on a number of factors. One was funding. There was money available for only ten percent of The List to be moved up immediately, in the next days or weeks.
The rest had to wait for attrition, a vacancy made by a sergeant who retired or was promoted.
Realistically, that meant if the score of one who passed the exam had them ranked no higher than the top one hundred or so, they would not get promoted. The List would expire after about two years, and the examination process would begin anew.
For those who did score very well, however, the mayor-in a moment of inspiration, thinking it would make for good public relations-had proclaimed that the five who scored the highest on The List would be given their choice of where in the department they wanted to serve.
And when The List had been recently posted, Number One on it was: PAYNE, MATTHEW M., PAYROLL NO. 231047, SPECIAL OPERATIONS.
And newly promoted Sergeant Payne had picked as his choice the Homicide Unit.
Captain Henry Quaire, commanding officer of the Homicide Unit, had not been thrilled with the news of the hotshot young sergeant’s arrival. But putting two and two together, Quaire understood that there was more to it, more to Matt. He quickly had learned that Matt Payne, like his rabbi, Inspector Peter Wohl, was of the very smart sort. The bright ones destined for greater responsibilities and higher ranks.
Once, over drinks one night, Quaire even had heard Denny Coughlin offhandedly say that judging by the speed with which Payne was progressing in the department, Coughlin was worried that it wouldn’t be long till Payne took his job.
Coughlin really hadn’t been worried or serious, of course. No one would be prouder of his godson getting the job than the godfather himself. And, besides, realistically that just was not going to happen anytime soon. It was simply Coughlin’s way of saying Payne was a rapidly rising star in the police department.
“And, Denny,” Henry Quaire now went on, “I don’t think it’s any secret-I sure as hell hope it’s not-that I now am in the camp of those who know Matt to be one helluva cop. I vote with Jason.”
Coughlin looked at Lowenstein.
“I don’t think you have to ask, Denny,” Chief Inspector Matthew Lowenstein said simply. “But, officially, I concur.”
“Ditto, Denny,” Francis Hollaran said.
All eyes were now on Coughlin.
After a long moment that in the absolute quiet seemed much longer, he grunted and then said, “All right. I thank you for your thoughtful opinions. This, as I’m sure you know, is not an easy decision for me, and I appreciate your input. But, making such decisions is the reason that I’m paid the big bucks.” He paused and grinned to show he was being facetious, then added, “Both of those big bucks.”
There were the expected chuckles.
Coughlin glanced at each of them, then said, “Until I order otherwise, I do not-repeat, do not-want Matty anywhere near the street.”
The shocked silence in the room bordered on the awkward.
Coughlin went on, “I have my reasons. For one, he’s had more than enough to deal with lately. Yes?”
There were a couple of agreeable nods.
Coughlin gestured toward the television with his right hand. “And he damn sure doesn’t need to be in the news again anytime soon. What’s it been? Not quite thirty days. The ink’s still wet on the newspaper articles about his shooting at that Italian restaurant-”
“La Famiglia Ristorante,” Hollaran furnished.
“That’s it.”
Hollaran said, “Matt’s a good investigator, right, Jason?”
“A most excellent one,” Washington said. “And supervisor.”
“And I have absolutely no argument with that,” Coughlin said reasonably. “So have him do it from the telephone. If I find out he’s on the street, I’ll put him on the goddamn midnight shift of the School Crossing Guard Unit.”
Hollaran said, “There’s no-”
“Of course there’s not,” Coughlin interrupted. “But I’ll damn sure establish one, and man it with the rest of you. Do I make my point?”
There was a chorus of yessirs.
“All right, then. When he gets here, Henry, send him in. It’s my order, so I’ll break the news to him.”