Page 79

“This is where the drive-by shooting took place,” McCrory said. “On the front stoop . . .”

Jamal’s eyes darted to the photograph, then looked away.

“. . . of Dante’s grandmother’s house in Kensington, on Clementine at E Street. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Yesterday. Grandma happens to look out her upstairs bedroom window when a Chevy Impala with tinted windows comes rolling up Clementine and stops shy of her house. It’s dark already, but she can just make out the car’s front passenger window opening, and she sees a guy waving Dante to come over. Dante, probably thinking he’s about to move some product, starts walking toward the Impala. Then the back passenger window goes down and a hand reaches out with a semiauto. The night lights up with muzzle flashes as both passengers start firing multiple shots, at least twenty-five, at Dante. Grandma says that it looks and sounds like really loud Chinese firecrackers going off. Then the car speeds off. And Dante’s down. Three rounds, two to the chest, one to his thigh. He never had a chance. And right in front of his grandma.”

McCrory paused to let that sink in, then went on: “That’s bad enough. But what’s worse: most of those bullets skipped past Dante, some going into a neighbor’s row house. You have any family, Jamal, any brothers or sisters?”

Jamal, stone-faced, did not respond.

McCrory flipped to the next photograph. It showed three evidence markers—one by a large dark stain on a threadbare couch—in the living room of a home.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, this is where a ten-year-old girl was watching TV after school with her little brother. She takes one of those bullets to the head. Now she’s still in intensive care, and not looking like she’s going to make it. And Dante, he’s dead.”

McCrory stopped and cocked his head.

“Look at me, Jamal. You following all this?”

Jamal glanced at him, then looked back at his feet.

McCrory went on: “It’s important that you do. Because it’s my job to find out who’s responsible, and I’m telling you now that I don’t give up. Nobody deserves to die that way. Especially an innocent little girl.”

He paused to let that sink in, then pointed at the evidence markers in the photo of the street scene.

“See these? They’re .40 cal casings. These and the bullets that were collected at the drive-by can be matched to the gun that fired them. And if even one was fired by the gun you had on you . . . then you need to start talking, Jamal.”

Jamal glanced at the photograph, then stared at his feet a long moment, anxiously crossed his legs the opposite way, then back again. He met McCrory’s eyes, and sighed.

“Told you I don’t know no Dante,” he finally said.

“So you keep saying,” McCrory said, his tone disgusted. “Not knowing him and shooting him are two different things. I can imagine that you don’t know the little girl, either. But that doesn’t change the fact that she may die.”

“I didn’t shoot nobody. That gun I got so I can defend myself. There’re crazy folks out there, shooting you for no reason. But that ain’t me.”

McCrory picked up the stack of photographs and began laying them out on the table so that they were all visible at once.

In the viewing room, Payne grunted, then glanced at Kennedy.

“Don’t know about you, Hal, but I say he’s lying.”

“How can you tell?” Kennedy said. “Because his lips are moving?”

“He may not have pulled the trigger, but he knows who Dante is and/or knows who did it. And you nailed it—we’re wasting our time with him right now.”

Payne then reached into his suit coat pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper.

“Show this to Jamal the Junkie,” Payne said, handing the sheet to Kennedy. “Just to throw him off. Maybe it’ll jar loose that rectal cranial inversion.”

Kennedy unfolded the sheet and saw that it was the Wanted flyer of the heavyset male suspect in the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. He shook his head as he looked at the cold, empty eyes and the spread of tattoos—the inverted heart under the left eye, the inverted peace symbol under the right one, “Family” inked in tall, dark lettering across his throat.

“What’ve we got to lose?” Payne said. “I just want to watch his reaction—if any—to seeing the doer.”

Kennedy left the viewing room and, a moment later, Payne heard him over the speaker knocking twice on the interview room door. McCrory cracked open the door, leaned toward it to listen as the Wanted flyer was passed inside, then nodded and closed the door.

Payne watched McCrory glance over the flyer, then extend it toward Jamal.

“What about this guy, Jamal?” McCrory said, his tone sarcastic. “Don’t know him, either?”

Jamal didn’t move to take the sheet, and McCrory put it on the table on top of the other papers before him.