Deadly Assets

[THREE]

“But here’s the kicker on this Kensington carjacking,” Kerry Rapier said, pointing toward the image of the crime scene on the ECC wall.

Payne looked at it and said, “You mean as in: Where’s Waldo?”

Rapier snorted.

“Exactly. The uniform who was first at the scene reported an enormous amount of blood on the sidewalk. But no body. And no shell casings-”

“No spent rounds? Then the doer used a revolver,” Payne said.

“That, or the shooter actually stuck around and cleaned the scene of all his spent rounds.”

“Yeah, right. Possible. But it’d be a miracle.”

“Police Radio broadcasted a Flash info with the description of the car-a late-model VW Jetta-but dollars to doughnuts it’s probably already across the river in Jersey or Delaware. Or about to be.”

“Maybe Waldo’s not dead. Maybe he’s wounded and in hiding. With wounds to the chest and throat, there’d damn sure be a blood trail.”

Rapier shook his head. “More like a blood river. According to Moss, his buddy Waldo-Billy Chester-was killed. When Moss broke down talking to the transit cop, he said that right before he had to run for his life, it was clear that his buddy was dead.”

Payne reached toward the conference table, grabbed one of the telephones, and punched in a number.

“It’s Sergeant Payne,” he said after a moment. “Who was on the Wheel when this carjacking case in Kensington came in?” His eyebrows went up as he listened, then he said, “And where’s the kid, this Dan Moss, who reported it?” Then, after another moment, added, “Okay, thanks,” and replaced the receiver in its cradle.

He looked at Rapier and said, “This should be good. Chuck Whaley is on his way to the scene. He couldn’t find his ass with both hands even if he were spotted one cheek. And the Moss kid is in Homicide. He gave Whaley his statement and is now waiting for one of his parents to show up.”

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.”