Deadly Assets (11 page)

Dan glared back down the street as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked in the other direction and saw two rough-looking males across the street glaring at him. He jerked his head at the sound of a car that turned onto Hart, then rattled toward him. Frozen, he just stared blankly as a battered Ford sedan with darkened windows rolled past.

I've gotta get the fuck out of here.

And, his lungs still burning, he took off running.

—

The slick high-gloss tan brick and bright blue painted steel of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority train station stood out on the street, its modern design sharply contrasting with the neighborhood's dilapidated hundred-year-old gray stone storefronts and the dirty broken sidewalks.

The elevated station on the SEPTA Market Frankford Line had been built over the five-way intersection of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street.

There were four young males standing by the entrance, and Dan carefully kept his distance as he moved past them. He then ran up the steps, taking them two at a time, catching the distinct foul odor of urine as he went.

When he reached the level with the turnstiles, a line of them directly ahead, he picked up his pace.

What happens if I get caught jumping?

Screw that! I need a cop to catch me—and get me the hell out of here.

He tried to time his run so he would easily hop over the first turnstile.

He jumped, clearing most of it, but then his ankle caught the stainless steel arm—and the momentum slammed him down to the concrete.

He sat up, stunned, his shoulder burning from the impact, but nothing seemed broken. A couple of people looked at him but said nothing.

He pushed himself to his feet and ran for the train.

When he got to the platform level, he saw that the doors of the railcars were closing.

No!

He headed for the closest door—but it shut just before he reached it.

His stomach sank.

Watching the train leave the station, he stood feeling helpless, thinking he was going to cry at any moment.

Then he noticed that the train was headed eastbound, and saw the signage stating that it was going north, toward Frankford Allegheny.

That would've been a mistake, going deeper into this hellhole . . .

He then saw other signage for the train that ran south then west through Center City out to Sixty-ninth Street. And then he heard the deep rumble of a southbound train approaching.

As it entered the station, there came the ear-piercing metallic squeal of brakes. The train stopped, and he stood in front of a door. It seemed to take forever to open—but then all the doors swooshed open, and Dan, squeezing past two people who were exiting, quickly stepped inside. He found a corner seat, then looked back to the platform.

Two of the males he had just passed down at the entrance were rushing to board.

His stomach dropped.

Are they chasing me?

He tried to figure out what he would do—
Maybe wait till the last second and then jump off right before the doors close?
—but then the pair darted aboard the adjacent railcar.

Dan put his head in his hands, looked at the floor, and let out a long sigh.

The railcar was almost half-full. He scanned the other passengers. With the exception of an older man who was deep asleep in the back—
The guy looks passed-out drunk
—Dan was the only pale-skinned passenger. Still, no one seemed to be paying him any attention.

He realized that he was again holding his arms over his stomach, and that his stomach was in an enormous knot, and that he was gently rocking himself.

What am I gonna do? He killed Billy . . .

Fuck him! I can just say we got jacked.

Cops find the car, they find that fucker, he goes to jail.

Then he can't get me.

But what do I say when they ask why we were in that part of town?

“Just buying some dope” won't fly.

Dan felt a chill go up and down his entire body.

Hell, I don't know.

Oh man . . . I told Billy we should've just got a damn bottle of Jack.

[ ONE ]

The Roundhouse

Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 2:21
P.M.

Matt Payne approached the double wooden doors to the Executive Command Center. As he reached for the handle, the right door suddenly began to swing open toward him. He could hear the murmur of voices coming from inside. He hesitated a moment, waiting for whoever was going to come out the doorway. When no one did, he raised an eyebrow, then entered.

Payne glanced up at the door frame and nodded when he saw that there was an electromechanical arm, newly installed, connecting it to the top of the door. Then he noticed beside the door a new button that activated the arm.

Inside, his eyes automatically went to the focal point of the big room: the ten-foot-high wall of twenty-seven flat-screen televisions. There were three banks of nine sixty-inch high-definition LCD panels, and on the screen in the lower left-hand corner of the first bank he saw an image of himself. It had been captured on camera only moments earlier, as he stood before the double doors. It then showed the door swinging open and him entering the ECC.

Payne looked back across the room that held a dozen detectives, most sitting at the two massive T-shaped conference tables. They talked on telephones, worked at notebook computers, studied images on the wall of screens. Corporal Kerry Rapier, who was sitting behind a control panel just beyond the farthest table, made a casual salute in his direction.

The ECC—along with the Forensic Sciences, Information Systems, and Communications divisions—was run by the Philadelphia Police Department's Science & Technology branch. And the ECC's master technician was also its youngest tech, Rapier. The twenty-five-year-old electronics wizard had an impossibly small frame and soft features that caused many, upon first meeting him, to wonder not only if he had passed the department's minimum physical standards and really was a cop, but if he might also be skipping out of his sophomore year of high school. After they witnessed his skillful work, however, no one questioned him again.

The command center—originally funded almost entirely by federal monies in order to help protect politicians attending their party's national convention in Philly—had been designed to serve as the nerve center during a crisis. It took in a staggering amount of raw information—some argued an overwhelming amount at times—from highly secure intelligence sources to open intel sources and everything in between.

The dark gray conference tables could accommodate more than fifty people, with seating along the walls for another forty-plus support staff, who assimilated the information, then analyzed and acted on it. An auxiliary communications center, a facility built minutes from the Roundhouse with federal funds provided by the Department of Homeland Security, had been added to handle additional law enforcement personnel.

As Payne walked over to Rapier, he looked at the images cycling on the televisions. Two of the screen banks showed live video feeds from closed-circuit cameras around the city, and also news broadcasts from local and national channels and those from the Internet. The third bank of screens was filled with images of the morning's crime scenes at LOVE and Franklin parks and at the casino, and the recordings from surveillance cameras.

“Hey, Marshal,” Rapier said, gesturing to the screen that showed a protester pumping a poster over her head. “Someone needs to call your buddy the reverend.”

Payne crossed his arms over his chest.

“Okay, Kerry, I'll bite. Why?”

“He needs to update your sign. Got a report of another. Which would now make number three hundred sixty-three—”

“The granddaughter from the casino?” Payne interrupted. “Damn! Does Tony know yet?”

“No. I mean, no, it's not her. It's a guy.”

Payne shook his head. “Small surprise. Where?”

“About a half hour ago in Kensington,” Rapier said, “just a few blocks from the Somerset El.”

Rapier then tapped on the glass monitor of the control panel. The top left screen on the third bank showed a blue shirt stepping off a sidewalk in front of two decrepit row houses with their windows boarded over. He was stringing yellow crime scene tape from the porch railing of one row house to a telephone pole across the street. The lower edge of the image included the white hood of a vehicle that had red and blue lights pulsing off it, making it obvious the video was being taken by a squad car's dash camera. There was a line of text at the top of the frame detailing the date, time, and GPS location of the imagery.

“Looks like drugs,” Rapier added.

“A drug deal in Kensington! No!” Payne said, somewhat loudly and dripping with sarcasm, causing a few people to look up at him momentarily, grin, and turn back to their work. “Next you'll further surprise me by saying it's payback for Dante Holmes getting capped yesterday, that this dead guy's a teen—”

“A teenaged white male named Billy Chester,” Rapier finished. “And it's probably not retaliation to settle scores. His buddy Dan Moss, also a teenaged white male, got collared getting off the El in Chinatown by a transit cop—they'd seen Moss on SEPTA surveillance cameras jumping the turnstile at Somerset.”

“And?”

“And the transit cop said Moss—after the kid stopped hugging him and crying—reported he and Chester had gotten lost, wound up in Kensington, and then got carjacked. Said after they were robbed, Chester apparently took at least three large-caliber rounds to the chest and neck.”

Payne looked at him a moment.

“A white teen? That's curious.”

“You mean unusual?” Rapier asked, but they both knew it was a statement of fact.

[ TWO ]

A week earlier, Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne had been approached with a proposition—“cornered,” he had claimed, but no one took the statement seriously. It was a hard argument to swallow considering (a) the person approaching had been in a motorized wheelchair and (b) who that person was.

The fact of the matter was that Payne would have done anything for Andy Radcliffe, a nineteen-year-old who was working an internship with the police department.

Andy had a kind, round face with gentle coal-black eyes and a full head of dark hair clipped tight to his scalp. He generally wore neatly ironed jeans and an oversized white cotton dress shirt with a somewhat worn navy blazer.

He was a sophomore—a double major studying criminal justice and computer science—at La Salle University, in North Philly, not far from where he lived with his mother and little brother.

Three years earlier, returning home with take-out dinner for the family, he had been robbed on the street by teenaged thugs. Not content with what little cash he had, they then stabbed him in the back. The knife had struck his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Even before the robbery, Andy's life had been anything but an easy one. Yet he still managed to keep a positive attitude after the attack, overcoming as best he could the obstacles that came with the paralysis.

Payne had found himself immediately impressed when he had met Radcliffe in the Executive Command Center, and even more when he'd heard his story.

Andy politely had brushed off Payne's praise.

“What was I going to do? Not keep helping Momma and my little brother? Or, worse, become a burden to them? Momma taught me discipline, to work hard and never give up. Like my father.”

Andy explained that Luke Radcliffe had worked as a crane operator at the Port of Philadelphia for fifteen years—until he found himself suffering severe shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed him with pulmonary fibrosis.

Andy had just turned ten.

Luke Radcliffe, as he bravely fought the advancing disease, was put on a lung transplant list. But the scars quickly covered more and more of the lung tissue, and, just a week after being rushed to the hospital and hooked up to an artificial respirator, he succumbed to severe infections.

The medical bills had been unbelievably expensive, and the cash from the modest life insurance policy Luke had taken out through the port had not lasted long. The family struggled to make ends meet, even as Andy's mother took on extra work.

Andy, desperate to help, finally got a job at a grocery store. It was all the then-twelve-year-old could find. He worked part-time as a shelf-stocker and bag boy after school and on Saturdays. He would have worked Sundays, but his mother cautioned him to keep holy the Sabbath, and to take time to be with family. Later, the answer had been the same when he offered to go to full-time—his mother again thanked him, but adamantly refused to let him miss any school.

It had been because of the robbery, and his meeting the cop who worked his case, that Radcliffe found himself at La Salle studying criminology.

Detective Will Parkman was a former marine who Radcliffe said really wasn't the hard-ass that people presumed. He described him as “an M&M, hard on the outside, soft on the inside. His buddies call him ‘Pretty Boy' Parkman because . . . well, he's the first to say he's not.” Parkman had told him about a La Salle scholarship, helped him apply for it, and then later helped him apply for the police internship.

Rapier told Payne that Radcliffe really knew his way around computers. And Payne found he had the makings for a thorough investigator, which Andy had proved when he dug up a detail in a file that connected two critically important dots in Payne's Halloween Homicides case.

Andy was diligent, worked long hours, and never sought preferential treatment. Thus, when Payne had looked up from his desk in the Homicide Unit and seen Radcliffe, hand on the armrest joystick that controlled his wheelchair's direction and speed, fluidly rolling toward him, his next words had come as somewhat of a surprise.

“I have a favor to ask,” Andy said, “and I understand if the answer's no.”

“No,” Payne said immediately, intending it as a joke.

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

Radcliffe bobbed his head once, thumbed the joystick to the right, and, after his wheelchair pivoted, began rolling out of the cubicle.

The look on Radcliffe's face made Payne feel as if he had just kicked a litter of puppies off a cliff.

“Wait!” Payne said. “What is it, Andy?”

It was a moment before Radcliffe brought his wheelchair to a stop and spun back around.

Radcliffe said: “At La Salle there's a class—Criminal Justice 350: Violence in Society—that I'm taking. I got it okayed to bring the others in my class on a tour of the department . . .”

“Sounds like a great idea.”

“. . . if I got a sponsor . . .”

“Upon further consideration, sounds like a really bad idea.”

Radcliffe stared at him, then finished, “. . . and it'd be great if you could do just the Homicide part. Detective Parkman's already agreed to be the sponsor.”

“What? Pretty Boy? You asked him first? Why do I suddenly feel like the last kid picked for a team on the playground?”

Payne tried to feign a hurt look. When he saw it wasn't working, he smiled.

“All right. Sure, Andy. When?”

—

The next night in the Homicide Unit, Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, wearing gray woolen slacks, navy blazer, and a striped necktie, stood before twenty-five criminal justice students from La Salle University.

It was a fairly varied group, despite being made up mostly of males. All were nicely dressed, a few of the males even in coat and tie. While it was impossible to pinpoint their exact ethnic lineage, a dozen in the group, including of course Andy Radcliffe, clearly were African-American, with the remainder being a mix of backgrounds well representative of Philadelphia. Payne recognized signs of Irish and English heritage as well as those of Italian, Spanish, Asian, and Hispanic descent.

What a great bunch of kids,
Payne thought.

“I've been asked to describe the makeup of crime here in Philly, with an emphasis on homicides,” Payne said. “But I'd like to ask you a question first: How many of you have had friends or family who've been victims of crime?”

All but four in the group raised their hands.

“And how many of you personally have been victims?”

A moment later, six hands remained raised.

Payne nodded, motioned for them to put down their hands, then said, “I'm sorry to see that, but I have to say I'm not surprised. You guys are what age—nineteen, twenty?”

They nodded.

“Okay, tell me: What's generally considered the largest cause of death for people your age?”

“Car crashes,” a tall, thoughtful-looking black male said.

“Correct. For those age fifteen to twenty-five, cars are by far the worst. That is, pretty much everywhere but Philadelphia. Anyone want to venture a guess what it is here?”

The group was silent, then a male voice in the back said, “Murder?”

Payne nodded solemnly. “Unfortunately, yes. Homicides are the top killer for that age group in Philly.”

There was a murmur, then the same voice in the back, his tone now incredulous, said, “But why?”

“That's a very good question. One I wish we had an answer for—then I wouldn't have to work so hard.”

That triggered polite laughter.

Then, toward the front, a light-brown-skinned female with short dark hair raised her hand to shoulder level and said: “Thanks to the media, it's not exactly a secret that you're known to get into shoot-outs. Weren't you just cleared in that shoot-out on the casino boardwalk?”

Payne thought that she probably was Puerto Rican.

He smiled.

“You don't beat around the bush, do you?” he said. “You're going to make a great cop.”

There were chuckles.

“No offense intended, Sergeant Payne,” she said. “I'm just curious about deadly force—that is, Officer-Involved Shootings—how the process works?”

Payne nodded.