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Mudd nodded. “And that’s why he’s pissed. I told him I was under orders to wait for the head of the homicide task force to get here. You’re here in that shiny undercover car—nice wheels, by the way; where’d you steal them?—and he’s probably guessing that I’m talking with The Man.”

Payne decided it best to ignore the hot-car question. But the fact that Mudd raised it indicated that it wouldn’t be the last time someone was going to ask how he came by a nice new vehicle when almost everyone else in the department was driving battered hand-me-downs with six digits on their odometers. It damn sure wasn’t the kind of vehicle that was going to hide in plain sight very well.

“So,” Payne said, “I still don’t get why he’s pissed at me.”

“He wants to return the crane to the rental place, which he says is now charging him Sunday double time. But I told him I couldn’t release him or his equipment until you gave the go-ahead.”

Payne raised his eyebrows.

“Like I said, Matt, I’m just doing what I was told. You know how antsy the department’s chain of command gets when Mayor Carlucci holds a press conference. And that shit flows downhill so fast.”

Payne nodded. “Understood, Harry. You know I have full faith in your skills, so we can skip the formalities. What the hell is going on here?”

Mudd pulled out his spiral notepad and began, “Thomas ‘Little Tommie’ Turco’s company was hired by HUD to turn the whole block back to dirt—”

“—and he’s really pissed at ‘that expediter sonofabitch who’s really going to pay for all this,’ ” Mudd finished a few minutes later.

“So, three dead?” Payne said. “But no idea why they were in the condemned buildings and no idea what killed the other two?”

/> Mudd was shaking his head. “No idea. And of course, until we hear from Dr. Mitchell’s autopsy, we won’t know for sure if the third died of blunt trauma. The one thing that is clear, however, is that there were people living in these houses right up until sometime today.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, these folks were holdouts. They didn’t want to move. They refused the buyout from PEGI.” He pointed down the street. “That middle house? We found one of the dead at the kitchen table, slumped over with his face in a bowl of apparently just-made tomato soup.”

“Possibly putting the time of death around noon?” Payne asked.

“Possibly,” Mudd said. “Who knows?”

Payne looked at Harris and Rapier.

“Any thoughts, gentlemen? You know as much about the cases as I do.”

Kerry Rapier shrugged, then grinned. “Death by drowning?”

Harris and Payne groaned.

“Only the obvious fact,” Tony Harris then said, “that this doesn’t fit the pop-and-drop MO in any way at all. Unless we’re missing something. . . .”

Mudd glanced at the line of five remaining row houses and said: “Do you want to take a look inside?”

“Not right now,” Payne said. “It’s going to be dark soon. Let’s talk about the other dead guy.”

“Even better,” Mudd said, “let’s go over to the scene.”

Payne gestured that Mudd should lead.

As they started walking along the sidewalk in front of the half-demolished row house, they heard an Italian-accented voice bark, “Aw, what the fuck, youse guys?”

When they all turned, they saw a frustrated Little Tommie Turco standing with both arms above his head, palms up.

Detective Harry Mudd held up his right index finger again, this time in a gesture meant to signal Back in a minute.

They heard Turco then bark, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” and watched as he tore the cigar stub from his mouth and threw it to the dirt.

[TWO]

As they rounded the corner from Jefferson to Hancock, Matt Payne saw that there was yellow POLICE LINE tape strung between two boarded-up row houses, blocking the entrance to an alleyway.