The Vigilantes

[THREE]

Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 12:04:01 P.M.

“You’re on in fifty-nine seconds, Mr. Mayor,” Kerry Rapier said.

The master technician was seated in a wheeled nylon-mesh-fabric chair behind a black four-foot-wide control bank, also on wheels, that had a series of panels with buttons and dials, its main feature a keyboard with a joystick and a color video monitor. A fat bundle of cables ran from the control bank to the wall and, ultimately, to a rack of video recording and broadcasting equipment, including the soda-can-size digital video camera that, suspended at the end of a motorized boom, seemed to float overhead.

Rapier, a police department blue shirt whose soft features and impossibly small frame made him look much younger than his twenty-five years, had shoulder patches on his uniform bearing two silver outlined blue chevrons. He manipulated the joystick and the camera overhead zoomed in to tightly frame the face of the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, who stood at a dark-stained oak lectern.

Carlucci, his brown eyes smiling, said, “Son, are you sure you’re even old enough to be a policeman, let alone a corporal?”

Corporal Rapier grinned.

“With respect, Mr. Mayor, that’s not the first I’ve heard that.”

Carlucci’s brown eyes, depending on his mood, could be warm and thoughtful or intense and piercing. Large-boned and heavyset, he was a massive fifty-one-year-old with dark brown hair. He wore an impeccably tailored dark gray woolen two-piece suit with a light blue, freshly pressed dress shirt and a navy blue silk necktie that matched the silk pocket square tucked into his coat.

Standing shoulder to shoulder behind Mayor Carlucci was a veritable wall of white shirts: Police Commissioner Ralph Mariana, wearing his uniform with four stars, and Denny Coughlin, with the three stars of the first deputy police commissioner, were directly behind the mayor. And standing on opposite ends of them were Homicide Commander Henry Quaire, whose uniform bore the captain’s rank insignia of two gold-colored bars, and Homicide Lieutenant Jason Washington, with the insignia of one butter bar on his uniform.

Looming on the wall behind all of them was a grid of flat-screen TVs. The screens alternately displayed either an official seal of the City of Philadelphia-the newly designed one, a golden Liberty Bell ringed by CITY OF PHILADELPHIA LIFE LIBERTY AND YOU in blue lettering-or the blue Philadelphia Police Department shield, which bore the older seal of the city and HONOR INTEGRITY SERVICE in gold lettering.

(Earlier official city phrases had been “The City of Brotherly Love” and “The Place That Loves You Back,” the latter falling into disfavor after some wits in the populace reworded the slogan to read “The Place That Shoots Your Back”-and worse variants thereof.)

Carlucci was about to give a prepared statement concerning the previous night’s triple murders and the first five pop-and-drops. In order to lend weight to his speech, the mayor of the City of Philadelphia was borrowing from the playbook of the police commissioner by using the Executive Command Center.

Ralph Mariana held almost all of his press conferences in the ECC, a state-of-the-art facility that held an impressive display of the latest high-tech equipment. The electronics made for terrific photo opportunities-and more important, as Mariana said, helped give the public a sure sense of confidence that the police department had the best tools to safeguard its citizens.

During a crisis, the ECC’s main objective was to collect, assimilate, and analyze during a crisis a mind-boggling amount of wide-ranging raw information-people and places and events and more-in a highly efficient manner.

And then to act on it-instantly, if not sooner.

“And that’s exactly what the hell we’re doing this morning,” Carlucci had bluntly told Mariana when he’d asked for everyone to gather in the ECC. “If this goddamn situation escalates, it has the potential to turn the city into something out of the Wild West.”

The bulk of the ECC was given over to a massive pair of T-shaped conference tables. Each dark gray Formica-topped table seated twenty-six. And each of these fifty-two seats had its own multiline telephone, outlets for laptop computers, and access to secure networks for on-demand communications with other law-enforcement agencies-from local to federal to the international police agency, Interpol-as necessary.

Along the back walls were more chairs to accommodate another forty staff members.

The focal point of the room, however, were three banks of sixty-inch, high-definition LCD flat-screen TVs. There were nine TVs per bank on the ten-foot-high walls. Mounted edge to edge, the frameless TVs could create a single supersize image, or could display individual pictures-each TV could even be used in split-screen mode.

Usually, when the screens were not showing live feeds from cameras mounted in emergency vehicles at the scene of an accident or crime, they showed continuously cycling images from closed-circuit TV cameras that were mounted all over the city-in subways, public buildings, and main and secondary roadways-and the broadcasts from local and cable TV news stations. Images could be pulled from almost any source, even a cell phone camera, as long as the signals were digitized.

The ECC fell under the purview of the Science amp; Technology arm of the Philadelphia Police Department, which included the Forensic Sciences, Information Systems, and Communications Divisions. Its two-star commander, Deputy Police Commissioner Howard Walker, reported to Denny Coughlin.

Acting on an order issued that morning by the mayor, Walker had alerted the local news media that a live feed of Mayor Carlucci would begin at precisely 12:05 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The timing gave the TV news programs the opportunity to start their noon newscasts with the announcement that an important statement by the mayor of Philadelphia concerning the rash of recent murders was coming up in five minutes.

“Stay tuned. We’re back with that breaking news right after this commercial break.”

“Thirty seconds, gentlemen…,” Corporal Rapier said.

Four hours earlier, when Coughlin had led his group into the Executive Command Center, he’d found the mayor and the police commissioner already seated at Conference Table One. They had heavy china mugs steaming with fresh coffee before them on the table. Mariana’s mug read : SCIENCE amp; TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE COMMAND CENTER. The mayor’s mug read GENO’S STEAKS SOUTH PHILLY, PENNA.

Everyone in the ECC was casually dressed. Even the usually stiffly buttoned-down Carlucci wasn’t wearing a necktie, and he had his shirt collar open. And Matt Payne and Tony Harris still looked rumpled and messy, the result of having been up most of the night running down leads in the death of Reggie Jones.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Carlucci said in a solemn tone suggesting he meant that it was anything but a good morning. He did not move from his chair except to grab his coffee mug handle.

There was a chorus of “good morning”s in reply.

Mariana added, “Fresh coffee in there.” He waved with his mug across the room, indicating a door that led to a kitchenette.

Carlucci then said, “Sergeant Payne, no offense, but you and Detective Harris look like hell.”

“Considering what we’ve been through, Mr. Mayor,” Payne said dryly, “hell sounds like an absolute utopian paradise. I enjoy the thrill of the chase as much as the next guy, but this one’s a real challenge. Right now we don’t know if we’re dealing with a single shooter-slash-strangler, or if there are others-that is, as someone put it earlier, Halloween Homicide Copycats.”

Ordinarily, a lowly police sergeant speaking so bluntly to the highest elected official of a major city would be cause for disciplinary-if not more drastic-measures.

But Carlucci’s relationship with Payne, and most everyone else in the group, was anything but ordinary.

Back when he’d been a cop, Carlucci had known and liked Matt’s biological father. And that went way back, to when Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt had been the best friend of a young Denny Coughlin before being killed in the line of duty.

Mayor Carlucci was also well acquainted with Matt Payne’s adoptive father, whom he also liked very much, and not only because Brewster Cortland Payne II was a founding partner of Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm.

And there was another connection between Matt and Hizzonor.

Carlucci had been Coughlin’s “rabbi”-his mentor-and had groomed the young police officer with great potential for the larger responsibilities that would come as he rose in the ranks of the department.

Denny Coughlin had gone on to groom Peter Wohl, son of Augustus Wohl, Chief Inspector (Retired). And then Peter Wohl-indeed among the best and brightest, having at twenty graduated from Temple University, then entered the Police Academy and, later, become the youngest staff inspector on the department-had been in recent years Matt Payne’s rabbi.

And, more or less completing the circle, the elder Wohl had in his time been the rabbi of an up-and-coming police officer-a young man by the name of Jerry Carlucci.

“If I didn’t know better, Matt,” Mayor Carlucci now said, his face and tone suggesting more than a little displeasure, surprising Payne, “I’d say you were on the street working all night.” He paused to make eye contact with the white shirt he’d mentored decades earlier, then went on: “But I do know that must not be the case, because we’d all agreed that the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line would stay the hell out of sight for a certain cool-down period.” He looked again at Denny. “Or am I mistaken?”

Mariana, Quaire, and Washington-the direct chain of command also somewhat directly responsible for seeing that Payne drove a desk so as to stay out of the news-looked a little ill at ease.

Payne saw that Howard Walker was more than a little interested to see Denny Coughlin in the mayor’s crosshairs.

But Coughlin, while deeply respectful of Carlucci, and cognizant of Carlucci’s iron fist and occasional temper, was not cowed by him. Over the years he’d learned a lot from his rabbi, and one of the most important lessons was to make a decision, then come hell or high water to stand by that decision.

Time and again, Carlucci had told him: “One’s inability to be decisive gets people killed. Make up your goddamn mind-based on the best available information, or your gut, or better both-and move forward.”

Denny Coughlin now said evenly, almost conversationally, “Jerry, I had the same initial reaction earlier this morning. But in light of what we’re dealing with, I decided to end the cool-down period as of today. Matt’s been all over the paperwork on these pop-and-drops, and if we have any chance of quickly figuring out who’s doing what-and we need to, or it’s likely going to get ugly very fast-we need to be able to put him back on the street.”

Carlucci looked thoughtfully at Coughlin a long moment, then at Payne, then back at Coughlin. He grunted and put down his china mug with a loud thunk.

“For the record, Denny, color me not completely convinced. Maybe it’s because I recently spent so much time trying-key word ‘trying’-to dissuade the media that we have a loose cannon in our police department.” He exhaled audibly. “But I do know better than to micromanage the people in whom I have absolute trust.”

With a deadly serious face, he looked at Payne.

“Just try not to add to the goddamn body count. Got that, Marshal? I don’t want to have to answer any more questions from the damned press about you.”

Payne nodded. “Yessir. Duly noted, sir.”

Carlucci met his eyes and added, “That doesn’t mean that I don’t support you in what were righteous shootings. You were doing your job, and you did it well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Okay, everybody have a seat,” Carlucci then said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got on the pop-and-drops, Matt.”

“Yes, sir,” Payne said. “But, as you noticed, Tony and I have been up all night. I can’t speak for Tony, but I could use some caffeine.”

“I’ll get ’em,” Harris said, heading across the room as the others sat down at the conference table.