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Payne took a sip from his china mug of black coffee, then said: “Kerry, would you please punch up”—he glanced at the second bank of nine sixty-inch, flat-screen TV monitors—“number seventeen, Reggie Jones’s file, on the main bank?”

The monitor still displayed various images and data from the first eight pop-and-drops—the five from the previous month and the three from last night—now all collected on the monitors numbered ten to eighteen. And, within the last hour, Rapier had added that of Kendrik Mays, including the video of Payne’s interview of Shauna Mays.

The third bank of nine monitors, numbers nineteen through twenty-seven, now showed the rotating feeds of video from the department’s various cameras around the city, as well as feeds from two local TV news broadcasts.

“Yes, sir,” Rapier said, and his fingers flew across the keyboard.

The image from TV monitor number seventeen was then duplicated—nine times larger—on the main bank of monitors. The image was from a digital video recording that had been shot at the crime scene the previous night, and showed the Old City sidewalk with the battered body of Reggie Jones lying inside the yellow police-line tape. The scene was brightly lit by a pair halogen floodbeams that were mounted high on the side of the Medical Examiner’s Office panel van, which also held the video camera.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the image was an ID stamp: Richard Saunders Holdings/Lex Talionis

Third & Arch

0105 hours, 01 Nov

Corporal Rapier then typed a few more keystrokes, and up popped another text box. It contained: Name: Reginald “Reggie” JONES

r /> Description: Black male, age 20, 5 ft. 11 in., 260 lbs.

L.K.A.: 725 Daly St, Phila.

Call Received: 01 Nov, 0012 hours

Prior arrests: 4 total: Possession of cocaine (3) and distribution of cocaine (1). On probation for possession of crack cocaine.

Cause of Death: BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA and/or STRANGULATION.

Case No.: 2010-81-039613-POP-N-DROP

Notes: Badly beaten by Suspect(s) Name Unknown. SNU 2010-56- 9326 SNU 2010-56-9327. Ligature strangulation caused by plastic zip ties (two (2) 24-inch-long zip ties put together to make a single 48-inch-long tie). Mildly mentally retarded. Body transported to Lex Talionis, Old City. Brother is Kenneth J. JONES, black male, age 22, a fugitive wanted on warrants for crack cocaine possession with intent to distribute.

Payne and Harris were looking at the image and reading the text.

“Still using ‘Pop-n-Drop’ as the code for the master files, Kerry?” Payne asked.

The youthful corporal grinned, then said, “Yes, sir. It just made sense to stick with the obvious.”

“What about the fact that Jones wasn’t shot?”

“Hey, getting beat up can be called getting ‘popped,’” Rapier said reasonably. “Besides, I didn’t want to have to recode all the others to fit. This way, it’s consistent from the start.” He looked at Payne, who was still studying the main screen, then felt he needed to explain better: “With the master files all linked by ‘pop-n-drop,’ the system can build on any of the previous composite reports, tables, graphs, maps, et cetera, that you created with the information from the earlier case files.”

Payne turned to him and nodded. He said, “Okay, Kerry. I really have no problem with that. It was just an idle question.”

“Yes, sir,” Rapier said.

Rapier knew that Payne was well versed in how the system worked. That it went into the digital files and took key words—names, locations, weaponry, et cetera—and attempted to cross-match them first to the files coded “pop-n-drop,” and then to all the other master case files in the system. If the system found a possible connection, it would generate a digital report citing those cases and the connections.

And, of course, it was able to then feed all that information to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and attempt to cross-match with NCIC’s vast criminal database that was constantly updated by law enforcement across the country.

“So there’s Commissioner Walker’s handiwork in the Notes section,” Tony Harris said casually, pointing with his ink pen in the direction of the text box on Reggie Jones’s image.

“And it’s not good news,” Payne said, looking at it. “Forensics, it appears, has found more than one doer’s prints on Jones.”

“Well, then,” Harris said with a smile, “on the positive side, that means we have twice the chance of getting lucky with IAFIS putting a name to those SNUs.”

IAFIS was the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. SNU was the abbreviation for Suspect Name Unknown.

“Kerry,” Payne said, “would you click on Reggie’s SNUs?”