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“What’s Jamal the Junkie on?” Payne said.

“We thought smack. He’s pretty much got needle tracks on his needle tracks. But he said he smoked some wet. Whatever he took, we didn’t get much out of him on the drive over here. Dick wanted to see if he’d open up to him in here—and to you, but that was before we learned Jamal doesn’t know any Marshal Earp exists. Now we’re just about to hand him over to the Detention Unit—let him dry out downstairs and try again later.”

“Look at that body language,” Payne said. “He’s closed-off, defensive. Legs crossed, his free arm hugging his chest. And he’s clearly anxious—he’s about to chew off his lower lip.”

“Uh-huh. He’d probably really be a basket case if it wasn’t for the drugs making a zombie of him.”

Payne reached toward the control panel and turned up the volume to the interview room microphone. From the speaker in the ceiling came McCrory’s voice: “Okay . . . remember me asking, back in the car, how familiar you are with McPherson Square, Jamal?”

“With what?”

McCrory pointed at a sheet that was a desktop computer-printed map, his fingertip touching a square that had been marked in yellow highlighter.

—

The park—off Kensington Avenue, at F and Indiana, just two blocks from an elementary school and another two from a magnet middle school—was well known as an open-air market for the dealing and consumption of drugs.

When police patrolled it, the junkies slipped away into the shadows, looking like so many cockroaches suddenly exposed to light, and leaving the park grounds littered with empty glassine packets and dirty syringes. When the patrols left the park, the waves of junkie zombies rolled back in for another high.

Not all fled. Some were so severely wasted—it was not uncommon for the heavily addicted ones to shoot up ten to twenty hits of heroin a day—that they could not move, and simply sat or lay on park benches in a drug-induced state that bordered on the comatose.

The police found the park environment, as hopeless as it seemed, was preferable to the days of widespread drug dens in abandoned row houses and factory buildings. There the addicts would shoot up crack cocaine and heroin out of sight—but would then frequently simply disappear, their bodies discovered days or months later, if ever.

In the open, however, the officers—as well as various teams of volunteers, often those who had sons and daughters lost to the drugs—could approach those in and near the park and try talking them into attending a substance abuse program—detoxifications with the synthetic opioids Suboxone and Methadone—like the one at the addiction hospital across from nearby Norris Square.

The odds were great that the addicted, absent professional help would—sooner or later but most likely sooner—join the hundreds who died each year in Philly either from an overdose of heroin or, indirectly, from the violence associated with it—being killed in a robbery, for example, or in the course of performing sexual acts, as they tried to raise cash for their next high.

—

“Uh-huh,” Jamal said, nodding. “That’s Needle Park.”

“So McPherson—what you call Needle Park—that’s Antwan’s turf, right?”

“Antwan?”

“Antwan—Pookie.”

Jamal nodded again.

“I’ve seen Pookie there, if that’s what you mean—”

“Then it’s his turf?”

Jamal shrugged. “But I see lots of folks there.”

“Pookie work for anyone?”

Jamal again shrugged, then tried looking McCrory in the eye but looked away and said, “Guess you’d have to ask him about that.”

McCrory shook his head.

“So,” he pursued, “you see Pookie there working the park. And then along comes Dante Holmes. Was he trying to move in, work it, too? And that got him capped?”

Jamal, nervously chewi

ng on his lower lip, did not reply.

“Okay,” McCrory then said, opening the manila folder on the table and placing a series of photographs before Jamal. The top one showed the street view of a row house with police line yellow tape strung from the porch out to the street. Evidence markers, inverted yellow plastic Vs with black numerals, filled the marked-off area.