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O’Hara nodded. “Seriously.”

“Hell, I don’t know. Right now, I’d say that the odds are ab

out as high as the number of ‘r’s in ‘fat fucking chance.’ Zilch. Which is maybe slightly better than, say, finding all those fifty thousand fugitives.”

Harris said, “Hey, you got Fort Festung. He was in the wind.”

“Whoopie! One down, another forty-nine thousand nine-ninety-nine, give or take, to go. And don’t forget that he took almost twenty years.”

Tony Harris’s cell phone then chimed once and vibrated. He pulled it from the plastic cradle on his belt and glanced at the LCD screen.

“It’s Jenkins,” he said as his thumb worked the BB-size polymer ball to navigate the phone’s screen. He rolled and clicked to where the text messages were stored. “He’s working the Wheel.”

The Homicide Unit had a system called “the Wheel,” basically a roster that listed the detectives on the shift. At the top of the roster was the detective currently assigned to “man the desk.” When a call came in with a new murder, the “desk man” got assigned to the case. The detective listed below him on the roster—who was said to be “next up on the wheel”—then became the next “desk man.”

Harris pushed again, then saw the message and exclaimed, “Holy shit!”

O’Hara looked at Payne and casually inquired, “How come you don’t get ‘holy shit!’ texts from the Wheel guy? You’re a sergeant. That outranks a lowly detective like Harris.”

Tony handed Matt the phone for him to read the text message.

“Correction,” Payne said. “I’m a sergeant assigned to a desk. Tony gets the fun job of working the streets.”

He looked at the screen.

“Holy shit!” Payne repeated, rereading the message as he said, “Well, Mickey, do you want an exclusive for CrimeFreePhilly?”

“Sure. What?”

Matt handed the phone back to Tony, then his eyes met Mickey’s.

“Minutes after the last Crime Scene Unit drove off from Lex Talionis,” Matt said, “another body got dumped there. Someone walking by thought it was a vagrant passed out on the sidewalk. Then they noticed all the blood.”

“Holy shit!” O’Hara joined in, then downed his drink.

“You can’t run with this just yet, Mickey, but there’s something different with this pop-and-drop.”

“What?”

“He was strangled and beaten. But no bullet wounds.”

O’Hara banged the glass on the wooden bar and, making a circular gesture with his hand over their drinks, barked to the bartender: “Johnny, all this on my tab. We’ve got to go!”

[TWO]

Loft Number 2055 Hops Haus Tower 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 1:14 A.M.

Tossing his suit coat and kicking off his loafers, H. Rapp Badde, Jr., chased the beautiful and giggling Cleopatra past the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room. His intent: to make the beast with two backs after ripping off the Halloween outfit as fast as humanly possible.

I love that there’re no other high-rises near here so no one can see us through those big windows.

I can do whatever the hell I want. . . .

It wasn’t the first time that the idea of doing whatever the hell he wanted—damn the consequences—had entered the mind of H. Rapp Badde, Jr.

For almost all of his thirty-two years, Badde—a fairly fit, five-foot-eleven two-hundred-pounder with a thin face, close-cropped hair, and medium-dark skin—had learned that what he could not get with his charisma or his arrogant badgering, he could always get by subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, playing his favorite card, that of being a disadvantaged minority.

It was a tactic—a remarkably effective one considering that Philly as a whole was half black, some sections up to three-quarters—that he had learned from his father. Horatio R. Badde, Sr., had used it successfully to work himself up from being a small-business owner—first a barber in South Philadelphia, then the owner of a string of barbershops throughout the city—to being elected to the Philadelphia City Council, and then, almost ten years later, to the office of mayor.