Deadly Assets (13 page)

Payne looked up at the wall of televisions. Under the one with the Kensington crime scene, two screens showed surveillance camera imagery of the Lucky Stars Casino just before and during the robbery. Each had date and time stamps and camera identification text in the corner. Another screen showed a social media page on the Internet that had a cracked Liberty Bell icon next to
ROCKIN215
and the title
LUCKY STARS HOOKUP
. The page, top to bottom, had line after line of instant messages.

Payne nodded toward it.

“What's with the ‘hookup'?” he said.

Rapier pointed to a screen that showed the flash mob of teenagers coming through the casino's revolving doors.

“When Detective Krowczyk—”

“Who?” Payne interrupted.

Rapier nodded in the direction of a tall, lanky white male, maybe thirty years old, who was hunched over a notebook computer at the far end of Conference Table One.

Payne thought Krowczyk had to be at least six-foot-four but weighed maybe only one-sixty on a good day. He wore blue jeans, black sneakers, and a white, wrinkled knit polo shirt. A brown leather jacket hung on his seatback. He stared intently at the computer, the glow of the screen reflecting off his round frameless eyeglasses and illuminating his long pale face. There were cans of diet soda on either side of the computer and, behind it, a torn-open package of crème-filled Tastykake Dreamies.

“Danny Krowczyk's a SIGINT analyst recently assigned to our Digital Forensic Sciences Unit,” Rapier said, using the abbreviation for Signals Intelligence. “This morning he had his software scanning the postings on social media, trying to find possible leads on anybody planning activity we should interdict, or at least keep an eye on, when he came across the alert calling for the flash mob at the casino. It flared up fast, otherwise we might have had a chance to shut it down before it reached the casino.”

“And now we have all the instant message traffic?”

“Yeah. It's open source material. Anybody can find it if they want and they know where to look. But it's what's in the messages that can tell us what's important. I'm putting Andy Radcliffe on tracking who's behind the screen names of what appear to be the higher value messages. He's got a group of geeks—”

“Said the pot calling the kettle black,” Payne interrupted, smiling.

“—who're really good at drilling down and linking traffic that otherwise would appear unconnected. They're in Andy's advanced coding classes at La Salle—and in touch with others in the coding world—and talk a language I don't understand. Anyway, bottom line, many screen names are going to come up bogus, of course, but if his guys can get enough legit ones, or even link to bogus ones, they can digitally map out who was involved, maybe even whoever set it up.”

Payne nodded thoughtfully. “It's likely a long shot, but maybe they'll turn up a connection between the flash mob and the doers of the jewelry store robbery. That flash mob could very well have been a diversionary tactic for the theft.”

“Maybe. Or some other event that may link back to it. People post all kinds of incriminating things. Some of it just blows your mind. Like the gangs that self-promote and taunt other gangs . . .”

“‘Internet banging,'” Payne put in, nodding.

“Right. It's like they forget there's a whole world watching. And that's before we get warrants to monitor and search their accounts and devices.”

“It is amazing.”

“Anyway, Krowczyk is also now doing a really huge search of other open source intel to see if anyone's talking about suddenly having fancy jewelry and watches—or trying to sell it—like those that were stolen.”

Payne watched each of the screens for a long moment, then his eyes drifted to the center bank of screens where the top middle one was set to
Philly News Now
.

The news reader at the desk, a serious-looking forty-something with her brunette hair in a pageboy cut, was wrapping up a report on the arrest of a ring of Mexican nationals caught pushing black tar heroin in Strawberry Mansion. The ticker of red text across the bottom read . . .
BREAKING NEWS:
PHILLY POLICE ON SCENE OF CARJACKING THAT SOURCES REPORT LEFT
1 DEAD IN KENSINGTON . . . STAY TUNED FOR A LIVE REPORT . . .

Then the broadcast faded to black and on came an advertisement. It showed delicate ballerinas in Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker
prancing
en
pointe
at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and announced tickets remained available at the Center City venue.

Nice juxtaposition.

“The City of Brotherly Love: Home to drug cartels, junkies, carjackings, murders—and sugarplum fairies!”

Good luck selling all those tickets.

Payne looked back to the squad car dash camera image of the Kensington scene. The uniform, securing the scene, stood with arms crossed inside the yellow crime scene tape. Just beyond the tape, a dark-skinned man who looked to be about forty was pulling a video camera and tripod from the trunk of a Chevy compact. The sedan had the logotype of
Philly News Now
on its front door. The man set up the tripod a few feet outside the yellow tape, attached the camera to it, and then waved with a big black microphone in an effort to get the officer to come over to him. The blue shirt declined with a slow shaking of his head. The reporter raised his eyebrows, shrugged, then turned to the camera.

Payne, out of the corner of his eye, noticed that the wooden door to the ECC was opening. His eye dropped to the screen in the first bank where he'd seen himself enter the room, and saw no one at the opening door. Then, a moment later, Andy Radcliffe maneuvered his wheelchair into view.

“Aha,” Payne said, “so that's really what the mechanical door opener is for.”

“Andy wasn't too happy,” Rapier said. “He thought he was getting special treatment. But I told him it was the law, that we'd finally got it installed.”

“He did not hit any button on the wall. And I didn't see you buzz him in.”

“That's because I also put a sensor in his wheelchair. Don't tell him, but that's not required by law.”

Payne smiled. “Right.”

When Radcliffe approached, Payne turned and looked toward him.

What the hell?

Andy had a shiny bruise on his left cheek, his lower lip had been busted, and there were scratches on his hands. Black tape wrapped the wheelchair's left armrest, securing it and covering its torn fabric.

“What the hell happened to you?” Payne said.

Andy shrugged.

“Last night one of my wheels got caught in a busted sidewalk. I took a tumble.”

“That was more than some tumble,” Payne said. “You look like you bounced down three flights of stairs. Where did it happen?”

Andy hesitated a moment, seemed to avoid eye contact, then said, “Near my house. You know how bad those streets are busted up, especially in winter.”

“Did you see a doctor?” Rapier put in. “Are you in pain?”

“Nah,” Andy said, glancing briefly at him. “My mom fixed me up pretty good. Just a little sore in places.”

“Anything we can do?” Payne said.

He looked past Payne toward the wall of flat-screen monitors. Payne thought that Andy appeared embarrassed by all the attention.

“No, thanks,” Andy said, shaking his head. “I'm fine, Sergeant Payne. Just want to get to work.”

Payne studied him.

“Sergeant Payne”?
he thought.
Not “Marshal”?

Something's not right. He must really have smacked the hell out of his head.

Andy pointed to the right bank of monitors.

“That's Tyrone Hooks at the casino. What's up with that?”

Payne was about to ask how Andy knew of Hooks, but felt his cell phone vibrate multiple times.

He pulled it from his pants pocket and saw there were four new text messages. They were all from Mickey O'Hara.

—

Payne enjoyed a close friendship with Michael J. O'Hara that had begun years back when Payne was a rookie cop.

A wiry thirty-seven-year-old with an unruly head of curly red hair, O'Hara was an unusual journalist, and not only because he had won a Pulitzer prize for a series of front-page above-the-fold articles that uncovered deep corruption in the Department of Human Services, specifically the Children and Youth Division.

The Irishman had a genuine respect for the police—it was said he knew more Philly cops than did the police commissioner himself, always correctly spelling their names in what they considered his fair and factual reporting—and in turn had earned their respect, which had resulted in him being allowed inside the Thin Blue Line.

When Payne had been involved in his first shoot-out, and a ricocheted bullet grazed his forehead right before he returned fire, it had been O'Hara who photographed the bloodied Payne standing with his .45 over the dead shooter, a career criminal. That image, along with O'Hara's article extolling the Triumph of Good Over Evil in the City of Brotherly Love, appeared the next day on the front page of
The Philadelphia Bulletin
under the headline:
OFFICER M. M. PAYNE, 23, THE WYATT EARP OF THE MAIN LINE
.

—

Payne scanned the texts—then slowly read them a second time.

At first he wondered why there were four, and not just one. But then thought that Mickey might be being overly cautious about having the complete message self-contained. Which only added to the mystery and urgency.

And why didn't he call?

Maybe he had only enough signal to send a text?

Or maybe he didn't trust himself to speak?

Or . . . ?

He looked at them again.

The first text read: “Matty, this is seriously bad shit.” The second said: “One of my reporters was just brutally murdered.” Next: “Meet me at 3001 Powelton Ave.” And finally: “I need you to come ALONE.”

[ FOUR ]

4400 North Seventeenth Street, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 2:31
P.M.

“Jesus, Hal, what a lousy place to die,” Homicide Detective Richard C. McCrory said as he steered the unmarked four-door—a dirty-gray eight-year-old Chevy Malibu—off Wingohocking Street onto Seventeenth. “For that matter, what a lousy place to live, if you can call it that. We're in what now? Nicetown?”

Dick McCrory, who'd just turned thirty-nine, had been with the department eighteen years, six of those in Homicide. He'd grown up in Boston—his thick brogue over the years getting somewhat beaten into the Philadelphia dialect—and had joined the department right after slipping an engagement ring on the finger of Mary-Margaret, the nice Irish girl he'd met six months earlier at a South Philly wedding. McCrory had close-cropped dark hair that was graying at the temples, was of medium build, his lean body fit, the defined, toned muscles clear evidence that he still worked out regularly.

Thirty-six-year-old Homicide Detective Harold W. Kennedy Sr., an enormous African-American (six-two, two-eighty) whose beefy frame dwarfed the front passenger seat, grunted as he looked out his tinted window.

This section, on the northwestern side of Philly, was little more than block after block of dilapidated two- and three-story row houses with an occasional corner market. Its broken, uneven sidewalks were nearly covered in trash, some stuffed into torn black plastic bags but a great deal of it strewn along the entire block and on the empty lots cleared of crumbled houses.

“Yeah,” Kennedy said, “Nicetown-Tioga. But they oughta rename it Dumpville. Doesn't anyone have a damn trash can—and the basic decency to use it?”

“I'd think it's safe to say they don't have much of anything.”

“Well, they sure got garbage. And plenty of it. Living large in ol' Filthadelphia.” He paused and made a sniffing sound. “What is . . .
ugh
 . . . it smells like a sewer line break?”

Then he pointed across the street in the direction of a dead-weed-choked lot, the snow dotted with discarded car tires. In front of it, by a storm drain at the curb, was a faded yellow plastic ten-gallon bucket on its side.

“Will you look at that! Don't tell me they're also dumping their crap down that drain . . .”

McCrory looked at the bucket, then scanned the row houses. Only one had any lights visibly burning.

“Okay, then I won't tell you,” McCrory said drily. “But you should know, Detective, that if there's no power in a place, there's usually no running water, either. You can probably do the math from there.”

After a long moment Kennedy said, “It's just un-fucking-believable.”

They rolled farther down the block. Then the right tires of the unmarked sedan—it had been impounded after a drug bust, then confiscated in a forfeiture and released to the police department's motor pool—scrubbed the curb and bumped over it.

McCrory pulled to a stop in front of a burned-out, redbrick row house. Old dirty white vinyl siding sagged from the eaves. Entire panels were missing elsewhere on the facade. Windows, behind bent black metal burglar bars, were boarded over. Where the front door had once been, there now was a sheet of weathered plywood hanging at an angle from strap hinges and secured with a rusty chain and padlock. It had the crude rendering of a rodent—little more than a spray-painted black blob with huge whiskers and a long tail—with a large
X
painted over it. Written beneath it was
NO RATS!!!

“You sure this is the place, Dick? Looks locked up pretty good.”

“It's what Pookie texted,” McCrory said, then pointed down the block. “If not, we must be getting close. Wonder if they did that for him.”

Kennedy looked through the falling snow, then nodded. The two stop signs, on opposite corners, had been tagged with graffiti—silver spray paint that spelled
SNITCHIN
under the reflective lettering.