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“And what do you mean by that?”

“Remember the Frankford Five guys? Shaking down the dealers they were supposed to be arresting? And then that rookie kid walking his Fifteenth District beat actually caught one of the dealers dealing, and when he cuffed him the dealer announced that he was untouchable, and why.”

“Yeah, and then the rookie, trying to do the right thing, told his superior in the Fifteenth.”

“And next thing the kid knows,” O’Sullivan picked back up, “the dirty guys are calling him a gink, and even though no charges stuck, the kid spent every day looking over his shoulder, then finally felt he had to quit the department.”

“I hate that gink term, Sully. The kid wasn’t ratting out those dirty guys. He did the right thing. Those scumbags got lucky that nobody believed the dealers, who kept changing their stories. That’s why no charges stuck, and why they kept their damn badges, not because they weren’t dirty.”

O’Sullivan grunted. “You’re right. Trouble was, the kid still paid the price. But it makes my point, and you and I’ve seen this, that things are not always black and white, not always that right and wrong.”

Harris met his eyes for a long time.

“We go back a long way, Tony. I’m just giving you a friendly heads-up. I’m not saying that I know something is going to happen to this ghetto punk—”

“The hypothetical one?” Harris interrupted.

“—this hypothetical punk,” O’Sullivan went on, “but no one would be surprised if the shooter and everyone else involved suffers the consequences of their actions. And—who knows?—worse comes to worst, you might just get them handed to you on a silver platter. Add one more to the closure rate, you know?”

Harris looked at him for a long moment.

“You understand, Sully,” Harris then said evenly, “that I’m going to have to share this with Matt Payne. And you know he has the personal ear of the white shirts with stars on their shoulders.”

“That’s right—Payne got himself promoted to sergeant, didn’t he? Passed the exam at the top of the list. Super-smart guy. I always thought the bastards who called him a Richie Rich playing cop were just crumbs being petty pricks. His old man and uncle were damn good cops.”

He paused, then went on: “Tony, I fully expected you to send what I told you up the chain—I certainly would do the same in your shoes—but now that I know it’s going to go to the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, hell, that tells me the odds of this ghetto punk getting his due just got better.”

—

Five minutes later, Sully O’Sullivan, his arms crossed over his chest as he looked up at the security room’s wall of monitors, watched Detective Tony Harris walking through the revolving door and out of the casino.

O’Sullivan was not at all surprised to see Harris holding his cellular phone to his head with his left hand while he cupped his right hand over his mouth so that what he was saying could not be overheard.

VII

[ ONE ]

The Roundhouse

Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.

The enormous black thirty-six-year-old homicide detective standing at the two-way mirror of the Homicide Unit’s Interview Room II turned at the sound of the door opening.

Harold Kennedy nodded as Sergeant Matt Payne entered the small, dimly lit viewing room.

“Hey, Sarge,” he said.

“I miss anything, Hal?” Payne gestured toward the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. “How’s he doing in there?”

Payne saw that Detective Dick McCrory was in the slightly larger—ten by twelve feet—harshly lit room with a male teenager. McCrory stood leaning against the far wall, looking down at the teen, who was seated in one of two metal chairs, both of which were bolted to the floor on opposite sides of a bare metal table, also bolted to the floor. A manila folder was on the table, next to an open plastic bottle of water.

Payne studied the unkempt teenager, who was handcuffed to the chair, one cuff on his left hand and the other around a thick bar on the seatback. He had matted hair and filthy clothing—a black sweatshirt, ragged blue jeans, scuffed leather boots. The hood of his sweatshirt was down, exposing a hard face with hollow eyes behind thick black-framed eyeglasses and framed by a scraggly beard.

Kennedy’s massive shoulders shrugged as he raised his eyebrows, making a look of frustration.

“So far it’s looking like you wasted your time coming. All I can say for certain is the kid’s got a clear case of rectal cranial inversion.”