The Vigilantes

[TWO]

A minute later, the main door to the ECC suddenly began to swing open. Payne, Harris, and Rapier could hear the soft humming sound of an electric motor on the other side. Then in the doorway appeared a black male in his late teens. He was in a wheelchair, but it was a highly maneuver-able power chair. He controlled its speed and direction with a joystick on the right armrest.

He fluidly rolled inside the ECC.

“Well, hell,” Matt Payne said, “look who’s still on the right side of the law. How are you, Andy?”

“Great, Marshal,” Andy Radcliffe said with a smile.

Radcliffe, with gentle black eyes and a round, kind face, had a full head of dark hair trimmed to his scalp. His jeans and slightly oversize cotton dress shirt were neatly pressed. His navy blazer was somewhat worn.

Payne admired the intern, not only because he was a sophomore at La Salle doing a double major in computer science and criminal justice, and planning to get on with the department. He was also genuinely impressed with Andy’s attitude after the teen had been robbed three years before in North Philly-then paralyzed when the robbers viciously stabbed him in the back.

Radcliffe looked at Rapier.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asked. He pointed at Payne’s mug. “More java, Marshal?”

And there’s that positive attitude, Payne thought. Willing to fetch coffee, anything.

“We’re reviewing some cases,” Payne said. “Never hurts to have a fresh set of eyes and ears. Make yourself comfortable. At the miserable rate we’re going, we’ll be here some time.”

Radcliffe nodded. “Yessir.”

“Okay, Kerry, let’s move on to Reggie Jones-”

“Can I first read this one on Cheatham?” Radcliffe asked. “Wait. I’ll pull it all up on the laptop. You guys go ahead.”

Payne looked at him and thought, And he’s got confidence. Just walks in as if he’s been doing it for years.

The motor of Andy’s power chair hummed as he went over to the end of the conference table, close to Rapier, and pulled out a laptop from a sleeve behind his chair. He plugged the box into the department’s communications system and started pounding its keyboard.

Payne and Harris exchanged glances, then looked back to the main monitor. The fat baby face of Reginald Jones was looking down on them.

Radcliffe looked up from his laptop and saw Rapier’s custom-made. 45 pointer on-screen.

He snorted. “That’s some sweet cursor, Kerry.”

“Watch this,” Rapier said. He typed a command on his keyboard, then put the cursor over REGINALD “REGGIE” JONES Case No.: 2010-81-039 613-Pop-n-Drop and clicked.

The overhead speakers then filled with the report of a gunshot, and a puff of smoke blew from the muzzle of the pistol pointer.

“Now, that,” Radcliffe said, shaking his head, “might be a bit too much.”

“Finally!” Payne said. “A clear voice of reason is heard on the task force.”

Harris snorted.

Radcliffe looked at him as if wondering if he was being mocked, then judging by Payne’s expression realized that wasn’t the case. He returned his attention to his laptop, fingers tapping the keyboard as he stared thoughtfully at the screen.

Rapier did something at the control panel, and when he went to the Notes section of Reggie Jones’s case file and clicked on FINGERPRINTS, the gunfire and smoke effects were gone.

He turned it off again, Payne thought. But he doesn’t look like he’s pissed or anything.

“Here’s this new guy James, Matt,” Rapier said as two boxes popped up with digitized images of fingerprints. One was headlined “Suspect Name Unknown #2010-56-9327.” The second had the new live link: MARC JAMES Case No.: 2002-41-093631.

Harris said, “The prints on the still-unknown doer are being run again. Forensics got a hit with James’s only because they reran his, too. They said they didn’t find a match the first time because his prints on record from a previous arrest didn’t have sufficient ridge detail for comparison. But the second go-round, they lit up just enough.”

Payne looked at Rapier. “Punch up James, Kerry.”

Reggie Jones’s fat baby face was now replaced with that of a shiny-skinned black male with a round face and male-pattern baldness.

Toilet seat hair, Payne remembered hearing someone describe it. Its shape was similar to those seats found on public commodes.

And the upper part of his garment looks like a hospital gown-or Roman-like robe.

“Who does this Cicero guy think he is?” Payne said. “Looks like he’s in a toga, too.”

“All kinds of crackpots in this city try to stand out from the crowd,” Andy Radcliffe said.

“There’s that voice of reason again,” Payne said.

This time Radcliffe didn’t at all feel like he was bring mocked.

Payne read off the screen: “‘Marc James aka Marcus Cicero, age twenty-eight. ’ Looks like a nice guy, if you can just overlook all those unfortunate priors for running meth and roofies. And, for good measure, he racked up a conviction on involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. Guess he wanted to test his product.”

Harris snorted. “Yeah. Really nice guy.”

“Who’s sitting on him now?”

“Charley Bell, in that old PECO van.”

Payne nodded. The Philadelphia Electric Company van was always a good choice, its paint shot but the faded PECO logotype on it easily recognizable.

“Okay,” Payne then said, “it’s no doubt way too soon to have much on this new one that’s got Hizzonor spitting mad. But punch up number twelve on the main bank, please.”

Rapier worked the keyboard and the case sheet for Jossiah Miffin appeared. It showed both his mug shot, in which he had close-cropped hair, and his Medical Examiner’s Office photo, where he had long black hair. Both showed the nasty J-shaped scar on his left cheek.

Name: Jossiah A. MIFFIN

Description: Black Male, age 30, 5'7", 180 lbs.

L.K.A.: 1822 W. Ontario St, Phila.

Prior Arrests: 8 total: possession of marijuana (6); possession of Methamphetamine (1); convicted of Indecent assault amp; corruption of a minor (1) and sentenced to probation of intense sex offender treatments amp; no unsupervised contact with minors.

Call Received: 02 Nov, 0730 hours.

Cause of Death: Gunshots (2) to head (99 percent probability).

Case No.: 2010-81-039617-POP-N-DROP

Notes: Fugitive. Warrants issued for multiple probation violations. Has prominent J-shape scar on left cheek. Takeeta Smith, 14-year-old female witness who claims to be niece of deceased, stated in interview that she saw him killed 01 Nov 2130 hrs by SNU in street at L.K.A. amp; described SNU as a skinny white male approximately 40 years of age wearing delivery uniform. Assailant left Wanted sheet at scene in FedEx envelope that was discarded. Body transported to Lex Talionis, Old City.

“Check out the Notes, Matt,” Harris was saying, looking at the main monitor.

Payne looked up at the main monitor and read it.

“A FedEx delivery there at nine-thirty on a Sunday night?”

Then he turned to Rapier: “Punch up that interview with the girl, the animal’s so-called niece.”

The main bank of screens then showed Homicide Detective Jeff Kauffman-a tall, dark-haired thirty-four-year-old who had a quick laugh when he wasn’t interviewing murder suspects-in Homicide Interview Room II with Takeeta Smith. She was sipping from a plastic bottle of grape-flavored soda. The empty wrapper of a Tastykake lay on the metal table.

They were almost exactly halfway through the interview when Takeeta’s scratchy voice coming through the speakers in the ECC ceiling said:

“It be a FedEx envelope. And dude had a FedEx uniform.”

“You’re positive?”

She looked at Kauffman like he was from another planet, then said:

“Yeah, fool. I be positive. I mean, he be standing in the headlight, clear as damn day. Can’t miss no FedEx sign. It be on every box my cousin’s black tar shit come in from Texas.”

Harris chuckled, then said, “Look at her Oh shit, what’d I just say? expression. Now who’s the fool, Takeeta?”

“What a brain trust,” Payne said. “They just don’t know better. Reminds me of that arrogant Hank Whatshisname, the U.S. congressman from somewhere near Atlanta, who was grilling an admiral on Capitol Hill about the Navy’s plans to station some eight thousand sailors and their families on Guam. He lectured the admiral that the island was only twenty-four miles long, seven ‘at its least widest’-that’s what he said, ‘least widest, shore to shore’-and that he was afraid that with all those extra people, the island would tip over and capsize.”

Harris laughed. “You’re kidding.”

Payne shook his head. “I shit you not, my friend. That’s the kind of brilliant example of the ‘geniuses’ in our government that kids like her get to look up to as role models.”

He looked over at Radcliffe. “Andy, who’ve been your role models in life?”

“Well, my momma, of course,” he said immediately, clearly without thought. “She taught me hard work, discipline, never to give up. And there’s Will Parkman, that really good cop who was a Marine and helps me go to school so I can eventually get a job here.” He paused and thought, then added, “And you, Marshal.”

Payne looked at Radcliffe, thinking that he now was being mocked. But when Matt saw Andy’s face, he knew Andy was sincere.

Payne said, “I’d be damned careful about that last guy. He’ll only lead you to trouble.” He sighed. “And damn sure not to catch any bad guys.”

“What’s up with the bad-guy pop-and-drops having histories of sex crimes,” Radcliffe said, “and STDs?”

“Where’d you get that?” Payne said, impressed.

He pointed at his laptop screen. “From the master file case notes.”

“You’ve gone all the way back to the beginning?”

“Sure. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when trying to turn over a rock under a rock?”

Payne nodded. “Yes, indeed it is. And, to answer your question, there’s not any single answer-with the exception of what Kerry recently suggested. None apparently knows what the hell a condom is.”

Radcliffe said, “I’ve been feeding key data into my skunk-works search engine.”

Radcliffe had managed to get his hands on an early version of a super-powerful software program developed at MIT, and Payne had seen him use it before.

“And?” Payne said.

“All the pop-and-drops who’d been shot had either been charged with or served time for a sex crime, all but the lawyer and his client.”

“Right.”

“Jay-Cee,” Harris put in, “had charges against him of involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and rape of an unconscious or unaware person in one case that Gartner got tossed.”

“Tossed on a technicality,” Radcliffe said. “The chain of evidence of the rape kit was broken. It was deemed inadmissible in the trial. But the results still are on file. They state that the blood test from the girl he raped showed that she had really early stages of the bacterial disease gonorrhea.”

“And?” Payne said.

Radcliffe shrugged. “Nguyen’s master case file from those charges says that he was undergoing treatment for gonorrhea.”

“So Nguyen gave the girl the clap,” Payne said.

“Would appear that way.”

“Nothing new. Kerry has a story about one where the rape victim got whatever disease in her throat,” Payne said. He then appeared to be in deep thought. He said: “Which puts Nguyen in line with the other pop-and-drops, leaving only Gartner with no sex-crime link. He may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when Jay-Cee got popped.” He paused, then added, “Lucky us.”

“You didn’t like Gartner?”

“Nobody liked that slimy sonofabitch.”

Andy Radcliffe raised his eyebrows, nodded once, then looked back to the laptop screen. “Maybe I can find a link with Gartner and some sex crime…”

“Kerry, let’s take another look at the interview I had with Shauna Mays.”

Rapier worked his control panel, and the image of Matt with the malnourished and badly bruised woman in Homicide’s Interview Room II came on the monitor. In the right-hand bottom corner was a small date stamp: 01 NOV, 13:20:01.

“Run it up to about 13:30,” Payne said.

Rapier fast-forwarded to that point on the clock, hit play, and shortly thereafter the sound of Payne exhaling came through the speakers in the ceiling. Then his voice, slightly frustrated, said:

“Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Who had the gun?”

“A delivery guy. He come in with Kendrik’s paper. That paper I had that the cop took?”

“The Wanted sheet?”

“Yeah, that’s it. He come in and-No, wait. First he say he got a check for Kendrik. And when I let him in, he give me the paper. The sheet. Said there was no check.”

“This began at what time?”

She cocked her head. “Time? This morning, all I know. Ain’t no clocks in a crack house!”

In the ECC, there was a chorus of chuckles from Harris, Radcliffe, and Rapier.

As they watched Payne in the video nodding while writing in his notepad, Kerry said, “Gee, Marshal, I thought everyone knew crack houses didn’t have clocks.”

Payne gave him the finger as his voice came through the speakers:

“What did this guy look like? And was he alone, anyone else in the house?”

“Just him. Old white guy, maybe my age. Tall. Kinda skinny.”

“Okay, you can stop it, Kerry,” Payne said. He looked at Harris. “So, a delivery guy. A FedEx delivery guy? And Mudd said the blue shirt had seen a FedEx minivan rolling through right before Cheatham took a bullet.”

“But that kid, his nephew, told Mudd that he didn’t see one. Which of course, as Mudd pointed out, could’ve been a straight-out lie.”

They were quiet a long moment, each in deep thought.

Then Harris said: “You have any idea how many FedEx trucks there are in Philadelphia?”

“But it was on a Sunday, not a normal day for deliveries.”

“I’ll say it again, Matt. You have any idea how many FedEx trucks there are in Philadelphia? And just because they may not be delivering, they’re still moving around the city for logistical and other reasons, like maintenance. And, then again, for all we know, this one was stolen.”

Matt nodded. “Agreed. But it’s a rock to look under. Maybe we’ll find another under it.”

Looking at the image of Marc James, Payne said, “Whoever he is, our mystery shooter’s bright. He’s doing the reverse of a sweepstakes sting.”

“A sweepstakes sting?” Radcliffe repeated.

Payne explained: “You mail out, say, a thousand letters to the LKA of people wanted on outstanding warrants. The letter says the recipient is guaranteed a prize worth up to a couple hundred bucks, and the first fifty people who show up have a chance to win a car. The official-looking but bogus letterhead has the address of some empty store in a strip center you get a civic-minded owner to let you borrow. The day of the ‘event,’ you furnish it with a couple desks and some chairs, then put signs in the window that say ‘Keystone State Sweepstakes Headquarters.’ And you borrow a nice new luxury sports car or SUV to park in front with a sign saying ‘Win This!’ Then, when the wanted ones show up, an undercover posing as a secretary matches the letter to the warrant list to make sure it’s still outstanding, then sends the idiot back to another room for his photograph and prize-a nice shiny pair of handcuffs.”

Radcliffe grinned. “Sounds like it works.”

“Not as good as it used to, but yeah, there’s still plenty of stupid critters out there. One really bright one even brought his court papers as his proof of ID.”

“So,” Radcliffe said, “instead of the guy sending out letters to the LKAs, he went to them individually, saying he was delivering FedEx envelopes containing checks?”

“That appears to be it,” Payne said.

Everyone was silent a moment.

Then Radcliffe went back to his keyboard and stared at the screen, then quickly typed something and smacked the enter key.

“There,” he said, pointing at the screen. “I don’t know if it means anything, but in Nguyen’s file?”

“Yeah?” Payne said.

“The district attorney’s case notes say that William Curtis is employed by FedEx here. Says he lives on Mount Pleasant.”

Payne casually sipped from his Homicide coffee mug, then said, “Who the hell is William Curtis?”

Twenty minutes later, Harris returned the receiver to the cradle of the multiline phone on the conference desk. He looked at Payne.

“This Will Curtis called in sick today. His supervisor”-he looked at his notes-“a guy named Jeff Allan, said he’s in a bad way. Curtis has been out sick most of the month. And he said that, judging by the look of him, it’s the real deal. He guessed it’s something terminal. He asked, but Curtis wouldn’t own up to it.”

Payne and Harris looked at each other.

“And there’s no answer at his house on Mount Pleasant,” Payne said.

Harris’s cell phone started ringing.

He checked the caller ID, then answered the phone with: “Whatcha got, Charley?”

Payne looked at Harris and saw his expression brighten.

“How many?” Harris said. Then: “Okay, got it. Let me know if anything changes. We’re on our way.”

He looked at Matt as he broke off the call.

“Bell says two black males just entered the James place on Richmond carrying a black duffel bag.”

Payne quickly stood up. “Kerry, you and Andy run things here and call me the minute you find anything else on this Curtis guy.”

As Payne pulled on his blazer and dug in his pocket for the Crown Vic keys, he said to Harris, “Let’s roll.”