The Traffickers

TWO

The Philly Inn Wednesday, September 9, 6:15 A.M.

Matthew Payne was carrying two foam cups of black coffee and sipping from one’s top. When the uniform from the Fifteenth Police District standing behind the tape saw him coming toward the motel, the uniform started to hold up his hand to stop him. But then Payne pulled back his shirt to flash his badge on his belt. He pointed toward Tony Harris at the back corner of the motel, indicating that that was where he was headed. The blue shirt nodded his understanding. Then, no doubt remembering that Harris had told him to pass Payne, he went so far as to hold up the tape for him to duck under it.

“Hey, Tony,” Payne said as he walked up to Harris.

Harris stood on the sidewalk in front of Room 44, scribbling furiously on his spiral-top pad.

Having written his share of them, Payne recognized what Harris was doing-making notes for a “White Paper.” It was an unofficial memorandum for internal use in Homicide, and since it was unofficial, it would not be available to defense counsel as a “discoverable document.” The White Paper was a report that was less formal and less precise than the “Activities Sheet.” This latter document listed every move that the Homicide detectives made in the case; it was discoverable, which meant it would be made available to the defense counsel of anyone brought to trial in the case. The two documents together would present the details of the case as it developed.

Harris did not respond for a moment as he finished what he was writing.

“Sorry about that. Didn’t want to lose my train of thought.” Then he looked at Matt and smiled warmly. “It’s good to see you, Matt.”

“Thanks, Tony. You, too.” Payne held out the cup with the lid. “Don’t say I never gave you anything. Coffee, black.”

Harris tucked the pad under his right armpit, took the coffee, and sipped from its plastic lid.

“I knew there was a reason why I missed having you around the office,” he said with a smile. Then he squeezed Matt’s shoulder. “It really is good to see you, and not just for the coffee. You look good. Relaxed. That time off has been good for you.”

Payne shrugged, and forced a smile. “I guess.”

“So, not that I’m not glad to see you, but what the hell are you doing here? And you said you had some information on this?”

As Harris sipped his coffee, he saw Matt’s eyes were pained.

“Kind of a long story, Tony. A lot of it I don’t know, and what I do know I don’t fully understand.”

Harris nodded appreciatively. “I probably could say the same about this job.” He looked at Payne and thought he detected some interest. “You want to see it?”

Payne immediately nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do, Tony.”

Harris thought, That’s not just morbid interest on his part.

It’s professional.

And maybe something more…

“The guys from the Medical Examiner’s Office are working the scene. It’ll be called in to Homicide anytime now.”

“It’s not your job?”

“No. At least not yet.”

Payne considered that, then asked: “How’d you wind up here?”

“I live over off Ryan. Across from the middle school?”

Payne nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

“When the room went boom, it about blew me out of bed.”

“No shit,” Payne said, then after a long moment: “So, who’s on the Wheel?”

“Bari.”

Payne frowned and shook his head.

Harris thought, And that damn sure was a professional assessment.

Great minds think alike, which explains why I’ve always liked Payne.

“I hear you, Matt.”

Harris motioned for Payne to follow him.

“C’mon. Let’s go have a look. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t.”

When Payne had approached Harris standing in front of Room 44, he’d noticed that all the rooms from there to the front of the motel had appeared more or less normal. But now, as they walked down the sidewalk and turned the corner, he had a clear view of the back side of the motel.

It looks like a war zone.

Debris was strewn-blown out from the building in an irregular semicircular pattern-all through the parking lot. Everything was coated either in water or what remained of the foam that the firefighters had sprayed to suffocate the flames. One room eight doors down from the corner looked to have taken the brunt of the damage-its broken and burned door hung outward at a great angle, only the bottom hinge holding it to the door frame. And both the plate-glass window and its frame were missing from their place in the masonry wall.

They followed the sidewalk that ran the length of the back side of the motel. The doors to all of the rooms they passed were wide open, and Matt knew that the rooms had been cleared by the first responders. By the look of the interior of the rooms, though, no one had occupied them recently, and certainly not in the last night.

The acrid odor of burned plastic, fabric, wood, and more hung heavily in the air. And it got heavier as they moved toward the middle of the building.

There were two cars and three pickup trucks, all showing various amounts of body damage, all with their windshields either shattered or completely blown inward.

Almost exactly in the middle of the vehicles, where clearly another vehicle had been parked before forcibly being removed-Becca’s Mercedes, Matt thought-there was a white Ford panel van backed up to the scene, doors open. A blue and gold stripe ran the length of the vehicle, with a representation of a police department shield on the door and, to the right of the driver’s window, MEDICAL EXAMINER in blue block lettering.

Harris saw Payne looking at that and gave him an overview of what he’d seen that morning, including the rescuers pulling the girl from the Mercedes and the white male who had run out from the burning room.

“It looks like a bomb went off, Tony,” Matt said as they walked up to the room with the missing window.

“May as well have been. Pretty much the same result,” Harris said as they looked inside.

Javier Iglesia stood in the middle of the room. His hands gripped the tubular frame at the end of a heavy-duty gurney, on top of which was strapped one of the black body bags. The other bag was gone, already loaded into the back of the medical examiner’s panel van. The photographer was in the van’s front passenger seat, downloading the digital files of her photographs onto a notebook computer hard drive and packing up her camera gear. Both the bodies and the images were going to the morgue, where Dr. Mitchell, or one of the medical examiner’s assistants, would perform the autopsies and review the crime-scene photos.

Harris and Payne’s appearance in the window caught Iglesia’s attention.

“Hey, Detective Payne! How the hell are you? Shot any bad guys lately?”

Payne grinned and shook his head. “Not in the last couple hours, Javier. But keep it up and I might have to use you for practice.”

Iglesia laughed appreciatively as he started pushing the gurney toward the blown-out door.

“Glad to see you back,” Iglesia said. “The cops need a classy guy like you, is what they need-”

“This isn’t my job, Javier. But thanks.”

“-and, as I was telling Detective Harris here, we damn sure need someone like you to put a bullet in these godless pendejos.”

Iglesia either let pass or did not hear what Payne had said. Instead, he loath ingly slapped at the body bag with the back of his left hand, then pushed the gurney through the door.

“Hold up a minute, Javier,” Harris said as he walked to meet him at the back of the Ford van. “Show Matt the bag, would you?”

“Are those the new-style ones?” Payne said.

Iglesia smirked and nodded. “You know about them?” he said.

He then reached down and tugged at the foot of the bag until it turned enough to reveal the manufacturer’s tag. It was imprinted in a white rectangle designed to resemble a cadaver’s identification toe tag.

Payne leaned forward and read it:

Remains Recovery Unit

SIZE ADULT X–LARGE-MAX TESTED CAPACITY 700 LBS. MFG BY 2 DIE 4 INC., PHILA., PA.

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.”