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[ ONE ]

The Roundhouse

Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 2:21 P.M.

Matt Payne approached the double wooden doors to the Executive Command Center. As he reached for the handle, the right door suddenly began to swing open toward him. He could hear the murmur of voices coming from inside. He hesitated a moment, waiting for whoever was going to come out the doorway. When no one did, he raised an eyebrow, then entered.

Payne glanced up at the door frame and nodded when he saw that there was an electromechanical arm, newly installed, connecting it to the top of the door. Then he noticed beside the door a new button that activated the arm.

Inside, his eyes automatically went to the focal point of the big room: the ten-foot-high wall of twenty-seven flat-screen televisions. There were three banks of nine sixty-inch high-definition LCD panels, and on the screen in the lower left-hand corner of the first bank he saw an image of himself. It had been captured on camera only moments earlier, as he stood before the double doors. It then showed the door swinging open and him entering the ECC.

Payne looked back across the room that held a dozen detectives, most sitting at the two massive T-shaped conference tables. They talked on telephones, worked at notebook computers, studied images on the wall of screens. Corporal Kerry Rapier, who was sitting behind a control panel just beyond the farthest table, made a casual salute in his direction.

The ECC—along with the Forensic Sciences, Information Systems, and Communications divisions—was run by the Philadelphia Police Department’s Science & Technology branch. And the ECC’s master technician was also its youngest tech, Rapier. The twenty-five-year-old electronics wizard had an impossibly small frame and soft features that caused many, upon first meeting him, to wonder not only if he had passed the department’s minimum physical standards and really was a cop, but if he might also be skipping out of his sophomore year of high school. After they witnessed his skillful work, however, no one questioned him again.

The command center—originally funded almost entirely by federal monies in order to h

elp protect politicians attending their party’s national convention in Philly—had been designed to serve as the nerve center during a crisis. It took in a staggering amount of raw information—some argued an overwhelming amount at times—from highly secure intelligence sources to open intel sources and everything in between.

The dark gray conference tables could accommodate more than fifty people, with seating along the walls for another forty-plus support staff, who assimilated the information, then analyzed and acted on it. An auxiliary communications center, a facility built minutes from the Roundhouse with federal funds provided by the Department of Homeland Security, had been added to handle additional law enforcement personnel.

As Payne walked over to Rapier, he looked at the images cycling on the televisions. Two of the screen banks showed live video feeds from closed-circuit cameras around the city, and also news broadcasts from local and national channels and those from the Internet. The third bank of screens was filled with images of the morning’s crime scenes at LOVE and Franklin parks and at the casino, and the recordings from surveillance cameras.

“Hey, Marshal,” Rapier said, gesturing to the screen that showed a protester pumping a poster over her head. “Someone needs to call your buddy the reverend.”

Payne crossed his arms over his chest.

“Okay, Kerry, I’ll bite. Why?”

“He needs to update your sign. Got a report of another. Which would now make number three hundred sixty-three—”

“The granddaughter from the casino?” Payne interrupted. “Damn! Does Tony know yet?”

“No. I mean, no, it’s not her. It’s a guy.”

Payne shook his head. “Small surprise. Where?”

“About a half hour ago in Kensington,” Rapier said, “just a few blocks from the Somerset El.”

Rapier then tapped on the glass monitor of the control panel. The top left screen on the third bank showed a blue shirt stepping off a sidewalk in front of two decrepit row houses with their windows boarded over. He was stringing yellow crime scene tape from the porch railing of one row house to a telephone pole across the street. The lower edge of the image included the white hood of a vehicle that had red and blue lights pulsing off it, making it obvious the video was being taken by a squad car’s dash camera. There was a line of text at the top of the frame detailing the date, time, and GPS location of the imagery.

“Looks like drugs,” Rapier added.

“A drug deal in Kensington! No!” Payne said, somewhat loudly and dripping with sarcasm, causing a few people to look up at him momentarily, grin, and turn back to their work. “Next you’ll further surprise me by saying it’s payback for Dante Holmes getting capped yesterday, that this dead guy’s a teen—”

“A teenaged white male named Billy Chester,” Rapier finished. “And it’s probably not retaliation to settle scores. His buddy Dan Moss, also a teenaged white male, got collared getting off the El in Chinatown by a transit cop—they’d seen Moss on SEPTA surveillance cameras jumping the turnstile at Somerset.”

“And?”

“And the transit cop said Moss—after the kid stopped hugging him and crying—reported he and Chester had gotten lost, wound up in Kensington, and then got carjacked. Said after they were robbed, Chester apparently took at least three large-caliber rounds to the chest and neck.”

Payne looked at him a moment.

“A white teen? That’s curious.”

“You mean unusual?” Rapier asked, but they both knew it was a statement of fact.