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[ TWO ]

Payne entered the ECC and scanned the room. There were at least a couple dozen people around the tables, working in the glow of the bright banks of TV monitors.

He saw Tony Harris at the far table, standing beside a seated Danny Krowczyk. Harris waved him over.

Detective Krowczyk, in jeans, white polo shirt, and black sneakers, was hunched over his IBM i2 notebook computer. The Signals Intelligence analyst had an open package of Tastykake Dreamies beside his computer. He held one of the cream-filled sponge cakes, absently taking bites, while repeatedly tapping the RETURN key with his right index finger. Behind the computer screen, with its pages refreshing with every tap of the keyboard, Krowczyk had built a short pyramid of three empty diet cola cans.

As Payne approached, the skinny, six-foot-four thirty-year-old belched, then pushed his new black horn-rimmed eyeglasses higher up his nose and returned to tapping the keyboard.

“Gentlemen,” Payne greeted them.

“Hey, Matt,” Harris said.

“Sergeant Payne,” Krowczyk replied, looking up. He motioned with the sponge cake. “Want

one? You need one. Probably two. Or more.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“They have mystical power.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“You ever eat one?”

“Not after I read the ingredients. Those things could survive a nuclear meltdown.”

“That’s exactly right. And that explains their supernatural power to repel lead.”

“All right,” Payne said, then gestured with his hand for him to go on. “I’ll bite—”

“All I’m saying, Sarge, is that I eat them and have not suffered a single bullet wound. You, however . . .”

Harris chuckled.

“Screw you two,” Payne said, glancing around the room. “Where’s Kerry? I thought you said he was working on getting the cell tower dump.”

“Yeah, and he did that,” Harris said. “He sent the subpoenas to the seven service providers of the cell towers overlapping the scene, then said he’d have to come back later to help. There’s going to be a ton of call data to filter through from this morning. And that’s on top of what’s coming in from yesterday’s shooting, which, if we’re lucky, we should have by the time he’s back.”

Corporal Kerry Rapier, the department’s wizard of all devices electronic, was the ECC’s master technician and, at twenty-five, its youngest tech.

Krowczyk, his tone somewhat disgusted, added, “Wafflin’ Walker sent word down that he wanted Rapier, in uniform, at a conference at Temple. Kerry told me that since he had been one of the main techs the Temple guys had talked to when they planned the thing on data mining software, there probably wasn’t going to be much for him to learn there, so he was going, as ordered, and would sneak out the soonest he could.”

“Wafflin’ Walker”—Deputy Commissioner Howard Walker, the fifty-year-old two-star chief of Science & Technology—was very tall and slender, with a cleanly shaven head and long, thin nose. He wore tiny Ben Franklin glasses and effected a soft, intelligent voice, much like that of a cleric with a somewhat pious air. His domain of Science & Technology included the Digital Forensic Sciences, Communications, and Information Systems units—the latter two with oversight of the Executive Command Center.

Payne was privy to the fact that Walker would never have been Denny Coughlin’s first choice to work directly under him. Police deputy commissioners and above—the one- through four-star ranks—were appointed by the city’s managing director with the blessing of the mayor. Ralph Mariana, the police commissioner, had quietly told First Deputy Commissioner Coughlin that he’d had his reasons for getting Walker the job, though, interestingly, had never shared them.

Payne had yet to find anyone who didn’t think Walker had a highly inflated opinion of himself. He had earned the name Wafflin’ Walker because he rarely made a decision that he stuck with the moment it was questioned.

Now that I think of it, Payne thought, like someone afraid of his own shadow—and afraid for his job.

Someone who would freeze out a person worthy of promotion.

He didn’t like it one bit when I let slip in front of the mayor that the backup in the forensic lab was holding up that serial murder investigation.

“One of my guys,” Krowczyk said, “is working on that burner flip phone they recovered from the shooter’s van. It shows it was used yesterday—and yesterday only—with a bunch of texts sent and received right before fourteen hundred hours. He’s running down all those data points.”

“Okay,” Payne said. “What else?”