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They stood in a small utility room off the kitchen at the back of the house. It had a dented stackable clothes washer and dryer in one corner. The rest of the space had been fashioned into a home office. Wooden boards for shelving had been mounted to the wall above an old wooden door that served as the desk. The shelving sagged under the weight of books and papers and a computer printer. A folding metal chair lay collapsed under the desk.

Payne stared at the notebook computer on the desk—and the severed head thereon.

Tim O’Brien’s dull, lifeless eyes gazed back in his general direction.

The scene did not surprise Payne.

After passing the badly bludgeoned body of Emily O’Brien, and Payne taking photographs with his cell phone camera, they had approached Tim’s body, the legs and feet of which stuck outside the kicked-in door of the hallway half-bath while the upper torso lay inside. There was an enormous pool of blood. Overhead, the exhaust fan rattled. The bulb in the half-bath was still on, too, casting a harsh light over the body that not only had been crudely eviscerated but also decapitated.

O’Hara and Payne had followed the blood trail to the kitchen, then into the utility room turned home office.

“Remind you of El Gato, Mickey?”

O’Hara nodded.

Months earlier, Sergeant James O. Byrth of the Texas Rangers had come to Philadelphia hunting a twenty-one-year-old thug from Dallas who was trafficking drugs and teenaged Latinas from Central America to Texas and finally on to Philly. Juan Delgado—called El Gato for his jungle cat–like fierceness—befriended the young, vulnerable girls, then preyed on them, forcing them into prostitution, feeding them drugs and forcing them to have sex with a dozen johns in as many hours as the means to pay for their being smuggled into the United States.

When one fourteen-year-old ran away in Philly, Delgado became enraged. He beat her young female companion to death, cut off her head, and dumped the body in the Schuylkill River. He then went to the laundromat in North Philly where the fourteen-year-old girl had found work with other illegal immigrants, and slid the severed head across the floor.

The Mexican national who quietly ran the laundry business, and had witnessed Delgado’s act, became a confidential informant. He helped Byrth and Payne track down Delgado to a dilapidated row house in Frankford, and then, with Byrth as witness to what he declared was an act of self-defense, ended Delgado’s reign of terror with shots from a .45.

Payne, who’d been in the next room when the two rounds were fired, quietly wondered if the confidential informant’s motive had been revenge. But while Payne could not prove it was not self-defense, there was ample evidence of Delgado’s brutal crimes—including El Gato and his crew having kidnapped Amanda Law, throwing her inside a minivan in front of Temple University Hospital and holding her hostage at the Frankford row house.

No one had any doubt whatsoever that El Gato finally had used up at least nine lives and that the bastard deserved to die.

And now Payne understood what Mickey meant when he had said, “Because you get it”—Matt had personally experienced the evil.

When he saw O’Brien’s butchered torso and then the severed head, he had flashbacks to when he’d been at the medical examiner’s office for the autopsy of the young girl’s body pulled from the Schuylkill and again when the confidential informant had showed him her head that he’d hidden in a bag in his basement deep freeze after it had been thrown in the laundromat.

“Like El Gato,” Mickey O’Hara said, “only worse. Delgado was a deluded wannabe thinking he could operate his small crew in the shadows, outside of the cartels. These bastards are the real deal. And they have no problem killing anyone in their way—not just little girls. In Mexico alone, a hundred journalists have been killed over the last decade, another twenty gone missing—and not a single one solved. If their bodies are found, they show clear evidence of torture. Mexico is the fourth most dangerous nation in the world for journalists, after Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan.”

He turned and met Payne’s eyes.

“And now it’s here. This is beyond intimidation. This is retaliation, Matty.”

[ THREE ]

The tall bartender approached Payne and O’Hara. He carried an almost empty bottle of Irish whisky, and held it up to them.

“Looks like you’ve killed one, gents.”

Mickey looked at the bartender, then at Matt—and suddenly burst into laughter.

Payne chuckled, and shook his head.

The bartender made a quizzical look.

“What?” he said.

“Bad reaction for a bad day,” Payne said. “Good people were murdered this morning just blocks from here.”

The bartender shook his head, his expression now one of disgust.

“What’s wrong with this world today, huh?” he said.

“Give him one, too,” O’Hara said, waving his index finger between both their shot glasses. “After what I’m about to show him, he’s going to need it.”