Deadly Assets

[THREE]

Monmouth and Hancock Streets

Fairhill, Philadelphia

Sunday, December 16, 1:25 A.M.

It took not quite ten minutes to drive from the Word of Brotherly Love Ministry at North Twenty-ninth and Arizona to Monmouth and Hancock in Fairhill, a distance of a little under three miles.

The “small cabin cruiser” was about twenty-five feet long and right where Lynda Webber had said, sitting on the ground on its side next to the row house and behind a patched-together chain-link fence. Ragged-looking chickens were scattered around the yard.

As Payne and Harris started up the sidewalk, Payne saw that the birds were pecking around trash that littered the ground-cigarette butts, empty plastic baggies stamped with street names for heroin, even a discarded condom.

At the front door, which appeared to have been kicked in and now was slightly ajar, a dim light burned just inside.

They heard a woman sobbing softly on the other side.

Harris and Payne pulled their pistols out.

Harris then rapped hard with his knuckles on the door, announced, “Police!” and then cautiously pushed on the door.

Hinges groaned as the battered wooden door swung inward.

A skinny black woman, wearing a thin faded blue bathrobe, sat cross-legged on the bare wooden floor, her elbows on her knees and face in her hands.

“Police, ma’am,” Harris said, his eyes darting between her and the living room behind her. “You okay?”

After a moment, she slowly looked up. Payne guessed she was maybe forty years old, but could easily be mistaken for sixty.

Or older.

“Can we come in?” Payne said.

Between sobs, she said, “Why. . why not? All those others that just left did.”

Payne saw that the living room was a mess. The couch had been turned upside down, its cushions sliced open, the stuffing seemingly everywhere. Cabinet doors and drawers were open, their contents scattered.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Harris said.

“Jolene,” she said. “Jolene Hooper.”

“How are you related to Tyrone Banks?”

“He’s my boy.”

“Hooper, you said?”

“That’s my married name. . first husband, not Tyrone’s daddy.”

“Where is Tyrone?”

She made what sounded like a sarcastic chuckle.

“That’s what they wanted to know, too,” she said. “He ain’t here. But being gone at this hour’s normal.”

“The people who did this to your house, you mean?” Payne said.

“They say they were looking for Tyrone and the stuff they say he stole.”

“How many people?” Harris said. “What did they look like?”

She looked up at them, her face almost contorted.

“You serious, man? I don’t know who they was, but I do know they can come back. I ain’t getting no stitches.”

“Anyone else in the house?” Harris said.

“Not no more.”

“You mind if we look around?” Payne then said.

“Do what ya gotta do.”

She pointed to the stairs that led to the basement.

“His stuff is down there. I keep to myself upstairs.”

Payne, holding his Colt alongside his leg, moved quickly to the stairway, then raised the pistol chest high, sweeping the space as he descended.

The lights in the small basement were still on-a pair of dusty bare bulbs in an overhead fixture that was missing its glass bowl-and Payne stopped at the foot of the stairs.

The room had been gone through like the upstairs. The drawers of the desk were all pulled free and dumped on the floor. The entire cover of the mattress had been cut away, leaving exposed a skeleton of wire springs.

Payne, about to turn and go back up the stairs, noticed on top of the desk, next to piles that he figured had to have been dumped from a drawer or two, that there was a ruby-red crushed velvet pouch with a string closure. He stepped closer and saw that it was imprinted with WINNER’S PRECIOUS JEWELS

The pouch was flat, and he took an ink pen from his pocket to pull back the opening and check inside. It was empty.

–

After checking the top floor, which also had been ransacked, Payne found that Jolene Hooper was still talking to Harris. She stopped as Payne approached.

“Just more of the same up and down,” Payne said to Harris.

“Told ya,” she said, then looked back at Harris. “They said that robbery happened yesterday morning, and Tyrone ran it. Said a man got killed. But I told them that I know that ain’t right.”

“You told them what’s not right?” Harris said.

She looked at Harris with a sudden renewed strength, and said, “It ain’t right ’cause my boy would never do that. And I know he didn’t do it ’cause he was right here at home. With me. Had, uh, he had one of his girlfriends with him down there. She can tell you, too.”

Nice try, Payne thought. But we’ve seen the evidence.

You’re lying to cover his ass, and the girlfriend will lie, too.

“Where is Carmelita?” Payne said.

“Who’s that?”

“Tyrone’s girlfriend,” Payne said.

She shrugged. “Don’t know that one.”

“Ma’am,” Harris said, “I caution you that it’s considered obstruction of justice to make false statements to a police officer.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Lying to the law is illegal,” Payne said, as he walked toward the front door.

“I ain’t lying! No way my boy was there.”

Payne saw Harris pulling out his smartphone.

“Let me show you something,” Harris said. “I’d like to hear your thoughts on this video. It was taken off the casino cameras. .”

As Payne went out the door, he thought, Waste of time, Tony. I can already hear her saying, “Who knows when that was taken? He likes gambling. That could be long ago and they changed the date. .”

–

Matt Payne stood on the trash-strewn sidewalk. He looked at a scrawny white goat that had just bleated at him from behind the chain-link fence while he waited for Tony Harris to come out of the row house. Mentally debating what their next steps should be-Going home is sounding like a real winner-he then glanced at his watch and was somewhat surprised to see it was just about three o’clock in the morning.

Feels more like it should be at least dawn.

His cell phone then rang, which did not surprise him. He didn’t bother looking at the screen as he pulled it from his pocket.

He answered it: “Public Enemy Number One, how can I help you?”

Payne heard a chuckle at the other end, then, “Hey, it’s Hank Nasuti. I heard you were still out on a job.”

“Jobs-plural-actually. But, then, it is Saturday night, so no doubt more on their way. What’s up, Hank?”

“We got the doer in the LOVE and Franklin parks killings.”

Payne was quiet a moment as his tired brain processed that.

“No shit?” he then said.

“No shit.”

“Where are you?”

“Where you said he’d been seen. Kensington. McPherson Square.”

So, Jamal the Junkie wasn’t lying, Payne thought. Can thank Pookie for that-for once, a CI comes through.

“We’re maybe a half mile out. Be there shortly.”

–

“Ah, behold the urban beauty that is Needle Park,” Matt Payne said as they pulled up, the strobes from the emergency light bar on the tow squad wrecker pulsing in the dark. Then he yawned.

The wrecker was parked up on the sidewalk, near the Twenty-fourth Police District’s white panel van. A totaled subcompact sedan had been winched onto the wrecker’s flatbed.

No loss there-just another ugly Prius, Payne caught himself randomly thinking.

Why can’t a manufacturer design a good-looking small hybrid? They make plenty of other decent cars. You almost think it’s done on purpose.

That’s it! It’s reverse snobbery! The owners like the fact that the crappy styling stands out in traffic.

“Lookit me! Goofy, sure, but getting great gas mileage!”

Wait. Why do I care?

I must be getting punchy. .

But it really is ugly.

In the light of the red and blue strobes, it was clear that the car’s windshield was completely shattered and caved inward.

And now coated in the blood of a murderer.

Payne pointed.

“There’s Nasuti on the far side of the wrecker,” he said.

Harris pulled up on the sidewalk and stopped the car. They got out.

“Don’t even think of locking the damn thing,” Payne said across the roof of the car.

Harris chuckled.

Detective Henry “Hank” Nasuti, whose grandparents had been born in Italy before moving to Philadelphia in the 1920s, was thirty-four, olive-skinned, black-haired, medium build. As he approached, Payne saw that Nasuti’s dark eyes looked weary, and when he had spoken to him on the phone, the fatigue was evident in his voice.

Now Payne saw that Nasuti had a copy of the Wanted flyer that had been issued immediately after the murders. It had the images taken from the security cameras at Franklin Park and the description provided by the mother of the little girl who had been grabbed. He held it out to Payne.

“The miscreant’s name is Jermaine Buress, black male, age twenty-six, just released after serving a year in Curran-Fromhold. And, I mean, not even a month ago.”

Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, the largest in the Philadelphia prison system, each year processed upward of thirty thousand inmates. It was named in honor of the Holmesburg Prison warden and deputy warden murdered in 1973, the only staff from the PPS who had been killed in the line of duty. The prison had been built two decades earlier on twenty-five acres along State Road-seven miles from McPherson Square, just up the Delaware Expressway.

Nasuti went on: “Buress decided he wanted to streak across Needle Park in his birthday suit and then play in traffic. A co-ed from Bryn Mawr, Piper Ann Harrison, who said she volunteers for the free clinic near here, was bringing boxes of sandwiches to give out. Buress bounced off her bumper and wound up in the windshield.”

“How’d you make the connection?” Harris said. “It’s not like he was exactly carrying any ID on him.”

“When we were questioning one of the crackheads,” Nasuti said, “the guy was wearing a hoodie that was, like, three sizes too big. I asked where he got it and he said he found it on the ground. He showed me the spot up by the library. After he emptied his pockets, we found the crackhead had-along with a couple empty plastic capsules that look like they had held synthetic meth, maybe that alpha-PVP-Buress’s ID and his EBT card.”

The Electronic Benfits Transfer card, which looked like a credit card, was issued by the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously called food stamps.

Harris and Payne exchanged glances.

Payne then looked at the Prius sitting on the flatbed wrecker.

“That alpha-PVP,” he said, “would explain his choice of running clothes-or lack thereof-right before he lost his game of chicken with that glorified go-cart. His body was overheating.”

“We ran his ID,” Nasuti said. “Buress has got a long list of priors, most drug-related, but a few recent robberies and assaults, going back to when he was thirteen. One of the Twenty-fourth District guys-Manny Lopez, who had the Wanted flyer and called me after responding to the scene of this accident-said Buress had major anger issues. Was always flying off the handle. Which explains the assault raps, if not yesterday’s random murders.”

“Well, then, congrats, Hank,” Payne said. “Another crazy off the streets. And you and Lucke get a couple cleared-case boxes to check off. Where is Lucke?”

Nasuti gestured to the other side of the white panel van.

“In the car. Doing paperwork. We were here for hours waiting for the techs from the medical examiner’s office. Things are just now getting back to what passes for quote normal unquote after that Killadelphia Rally blew up. Anyway, we’re going to finish up here, swing by the Roundhouse, then that should put us at around seven o’clock, and we can call the parents of Lauren Childs and Jimmy Sanchez, asking if we can stop by and speak to them briefly.”

The Sanchez family lived in South Philly. The Childses were from Bethlehem, up in northern Bucks County, and had checked into a hotel in Center City, whose skyline twinkled peacefully in the distance.

Payne nodded solemnly.

“That works,” he said. “No reason to wake them at this ungodly hour. But telling them in person that you found the doer is best. After that, you guys go home. You’ve earned your rest. And it’s not like there won’t be plenty of work waiting.”

“Thanks. Getting home early should be a nice surprise for Natalie. Although she might rather have the overtime than my presence.”

Payne grunted.

With overtime pay, from working the gruesome scenes all night, then showing up during the day to testify in court cases, top detectives could double-or more-their base salary of $75,000. Payne could count on one hand those he knew who racked up close to a hundred grand in overtime.

But there was no question in his mind that they more than earned it, particularly those like Nasuti working Last Out-the busy midnight-to-eight shift, which got half of Homicide’s jobs.

There was also no question that, while the money was good, the difficult toll the hours took on a detective-and particularly his family-was one helluva price to pay.

Payne knew that Hank had returned from his honeymoon only a month earlier, and he smiled and said, “Give your bride my best regards.”

“Will do.”