Page 124

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.”