The Vigilantes boh-10

by W. E. B Griffin

  “The doer didn’t wear gloves?” Payne said.

  Harris shrugged. “Unless the doer made either Gartner and Jay-Cee bind the other, or made someone else. Whatever the sequence, whoever did it left prints. We will just have to see if they match those of the deceased, or whatever prints they can lift at Gartner’s office.” He stopped and gestured upward with his left index finger. “Speaking of which…”

  He paused and finished off his Hops Haus lager, then signaled the bartender for another round of drinks for all three of them.

  “Speaking of which,” Harris went on, “when we ID’d Gartner at the scene-his wallet, including driver’s license and sixty-four bucks cash, was still in his hip pocket-we sent Crime Scene Units over to Gartner’s apartment and to his office. The apartment manager didn’t seem particularly upset with his demise, except for the fact he owed three months’ back rent. Anyway, the manager let us in. There was no apparent sign of anything having happened in the apartment.”

  “And the office?” Payne asked. “Where is it?”

  “Over on Callowhill, not far from the ICE office.”

  “Really?” Payne said, mentally picturing the building that housed the local office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that was under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Was Gartner into immigration law, too?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t think he was that smart.”

  “You know, those guys can be real lowlifes,” O’Hara put in. “Some poor immigrant, wanting to do the right thing and become a legal citizen of the United States, willingly goes through all the hoops, including hiring an immigration attorney to help him understand all the legalese. The immigrant gives the lawyer his five-grand cash retainer, then the lawyer doesn’t do shit and the poor immigrant, who probably drove a cab to hell and back to earn that five large, and now is even poorer, winds up deported. And the lawyer keeps the retainer, never again to see the client for whom he’s done nothing.”

  Payne shook his head. “Nice.”

  Mickey looked furious. “If I ever find a way to put stuff like that on CrimeFreePhilly, those guys are toast, too.”

  John Sullivan delivered their drinks, and after they’d all had a sip, Harris continued.

  “Gartner’s office was a mess. But it appeared to be just a normal office mess. There was no sign of a struggle there. And no forced entry. Curiously, both the front and back main exterior doors of the building had been left unlocked, as had the interior door to Gartner’s office. We found drugs on one of the desks, what looked like coke or crank in one zip-top bag, and another bag with roofies. There was even a line of powder on the desktop that hadn’t been snorted.”

  “That’s strange,” Payne said. “Like someone had to leave fast. But no signs that either he or his punk client was popped there?”

  Harris shrugged. “The CSU boys were still working it when I stopped by on the way here. But, for now, it appears the answer is no. And Jay-Cee’s motorcycle was parked on the sidewalk.” He paused, sipped his beer, then said, “Something did happen there, though-something really weird.”

  He looked between Matt and Mickey, whose curiosity clearly was piqued.

  After a moment, they said in unison: “What?”

  “Piss.”

  “Piss?” they repeated in unison.

  Harris nodded.

  “There was piss everywhere,” he said. “And I mean everywhere. You’d think gallons.”

  “Animal urine? Like some dog got loose in there?” Payne asked. “You said the doors were unlocked. Maybe they’d been open, too.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Judging by the amount, though, something bigger. I mean, who has that large of a bladder?”

  Mickey glanced over at a couple at the bar in a two-part cow costume.

  “Cows?” he offered. Then he looked back at Harris and said, “Or maybe the doer is a deer hunter. Once, when I was up in Bucks County, I found a place where they were selling bottles of animal piss-I think it was doe urine-that hunters poured on themselves to mask their human scent in the woods. Or maybe it was meant as an attractant to draw out horny males. Or something.”

  Payne looked at O’Hara, raised his eyebrows, and said, “So you’re thinking that fucking Bambi is the doer?”

  O’Hara and Harris laughed.

  Payne then looked at Harris and said, “I’m assuming there’s enough piss to run a DNA analysis?”

  Harris snorted.

  “Enough to float a boat. There was a pool of piss in the plastic bag alone. The dope that hadn’t dissolved just floated in it!”

  “Was there piss at the scene at Francis Fuller’s office in Old City?”

  Harris nodded. “Yeah. On Jay-Cee’s pants crotch. But that was more like he’d just pissed himself. Nothing like the pools of it in the office.”

  “Anything else out of the ordinary?”

  “Define ‘out of the ordinary,’ Sergeant Payne.”

  They all chuckled.

  Harris, looking deep in thought, then said, “Not really. Gartner was wearing a T-shirt that read PEACE LOVE JUSTICE.”

  Payne snorted. “File that under ‘Irony,’ Detective, not ‘Extraordinary.’”

  Harris shrugged. After a minute, he added, “Well, the only other thing that comes to mind is that there wasn’t any paperwork attached.”

  “Really?” Payne said, visibly surprised. “Now, that’s out of the ordinary-outside the MO of the other pop-and-drops, that is.”

  “Paperwork?” O’Hara asked, looking from Matt to Tony. “Like police forms?”

  Then he looked at Payne.

  “Wait,” O’Hara said. “Back up. Explain that ‘outside the others’ modus operandi oddity thing. What method of operation?”

  Payne took a sip of his single-malt, then said: “The MO in the other cases is that someone’s shooting fugitives in the head or chest and dumping their bodies. Further, the dead guys-and they’re only guys, so far-are wanted on outstanding warrants. A couple of them jumped bail, the others violated parole, for sex crimes against women and children. Involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, rape, aggravated indecent assault. These shits get popped point-blank, then dumped at a district station, one we assume is closest to where they got nabbed.”

  “None dumped at the Roundhouse?”

  “None. At least not yet. That’d be an interesting situation.”

  O’Hara nodded as he took all that in.

  “Now, the difference between those dumped at the districts and these two tonight is that tonight there was no ‘paperwork’-printouts of the bad guys’ Wanted info downloaded from the Internet. All the others had their paperwork stapled to them.”

  “Stapled? Like to their clothes?”

  Payne nodded. “Usually. But one bastard who’d raped a ten-year-old girl had his sheet stapled clean through his prick. Multiple times.”

  “Ouch!” O’Hara said, instinctively crossing his legs.

  Payne then said, “You know, it’s funny, because your website is one place from where more than one of the Wanted posters has been downloaded. You can tell because the line at the foot of the page shows the date the page was printed and its source URL.”

  “That’s great to know,” O’Hara said. “That means that CrimeFreePhilly is working!”

  “Only,” Payne said dryly, “to create more crime, it would appear. As far as I know, as much as a miserable dirty rotten shit Danny Gartner was, he had no criminal record.”

  O’Hara shrugged. “Chalk it up to collateral damage. You associate with swine, you’re going to get muddy, too.”

  “Jay-Cee,” Harris put in, “had charges against him of involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and rape of an unconscious or unaware person in one case that Gartner got tossed.”

  Payne nodded, then took a swallow of his single-malt and glanced at his watch.

  “I need to get the hell out of here. I’m trying to have a life outside of work,” he said, then looked at O’Hara. “Okay, Mick
. That’s all we know at this point. Now tell me what you know.”

  O’Hara raised his glass. “Not a goddamn thing, Matty. That’s why you’re called the confidential source close to the Roundhouse, and I’m called the reporter.”

  O’Hara took a sip of his drink as Payne gave him the finger.

  “Sorry, pal. I really wish I had something for you. You know that eventually I will. And when I do, it’s yours.”

  They all then stared into their glasses, quietly thinking.

  After some time, O’Hara suddenly said, “So, Matty, what do you think are the chances of solving this?”

  “Seriously?”

  O’Hara nodded. “Seriously.”

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

  Which was exactly Rapp’s planned next step: to become mayor. He was banking both on the name recognition-“Mayor Badde” still was familiar to voters despite the eight years since his father held the office-and what he considered to be his own accomplishments as a city councilman. And he was going to let nothing get in his way. There’d already been rumors trying to tie him to voter fraud, but he publicly dismissed them as exactly that-rumors that were simply a part of petty politics.

  Rapp Badde did as he pleased-damn the consequences-and the Hop Haus Tower condominium was no exception.

  The tax rolls of the Philadelphia County Recorder of Deeds, in Room 156 at City Hall, showed Loft Number 2055-a year-old 2,010-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath condominium on the twentieth floor-as being owned by the Urban Venture Fund, in care of Mr. James R. Johnson, JRJ Certified Public Accountants, 1611 Walnut Street, Suite 1011, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103.

  There was similar information on the books at the complex.

  The building management kept a regularly updated computer file known as PROPERTY OWNERS: PERMANENT RESIDENTS amp; REGISTERED GUESTS. It listed everyone who was officially on file and showed that 2055’s permanent resident was named Johnson, James R., and its listed registered guest was a Harper, Janelle.

  While it wasn’t unusual for the names of owners and guests to be different-there were, for example, many unmarried couples who cohabited, as well as many lawfully married couples whose surnames were not the same-neither James Johnson nor Janelle Harper had a genuine financial investment in Loft Number 2055.

  In fact, the apartment’s official owner, the Urban Venture Fund, was a corporate entity solely owned by one H. R. Badde, Jr., 1611 Walnut Street, Suite 1011, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103.

  That was in technical terms.

  Practically speaking, Unit 2055’s permanent resident and its (very) regular guest were actually Jan Harper and Rapp Badde.

  Never mind that Mr. James R. Johnson, CPA, had never set foot in the place.

  And never mind that Badde had purchased, with cash, the pied-a-terre love nest.

  And certainly never mind that the funds for the purchase were a small part of those provided to his mayoral election campaign chest by a generous businessman who believed in the politician, in his future at City Hall, and his influence therein for old friends.

  Twenty-five-year-old Jan Harper-who had a full and curvy five-six, one-forty body and a silky light-brown skin tone-was down to barely-more than Cleopatra’s golden-colored sheer panties and plastic-jeweled collar and crown as she ran into the bedroom. Rapp was hot on her heels.

  And just as she jumped on the king-size bed’s thick goose-down comforter, her legs flying up and ample breasts bouncing, Rapp heard his Go To Hell cell phone start ringing in his pants pocket.

  Damn! he thought.

  Badde shared the number of his Go To Hell phone, one of two he carried, with next to no one-only his accountant, his three lawyers, and a select few others who were friends or business associates, or both, had the number. Even Jan didn’t know it; being his executive assistant, she could call him on his main cell phone.

  He’d given it that name because, when somebody who did have the number called, chances were damn good that
something had just gone to hell. Or was about to.

  Jan was now busily unbuttoning Rapp’s white dress shirt as he quickly dug into his pants pocket.

  Retrieving the phone, he looked at the screen, hissed the word “Shit,” then pulled away from Jan’s hands. He walked toward the windows.

  “What?” she said, surprised. Then, a little indignantly, she added, “Who the hell is that at this hour?”

  He held up his left index finger to gesture Give me a minute, then flipped open the phone, put it to his head, and said, “Everything okay, man?”

  He listened for a moment.

  “Wait,” he suddenly said. “Who the hell is this, and how’d you get this number?”

  After a moment, he said, “Goddamn it!”

  His eye caught Jan, now sitting up on the comforter with her arms crossed over her naked breasts, her head cocked, looking at him curiously.

  “Hold on a minute, brother,” he said into the phone.

  Then to Jan he said, “I’m sorry, honey. I’ll be right back.”

  Badde slid open the glass door in the wall of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stepped out onto the small concrete balcony.

  The view from the twentieth floor was extraordinary. And for more than just the beauty of the lights twinkling in the night.

  H. Rapp Badde, Jr., enjoyed the feeling he got from being up so high and seeing so many parts of the city that made up his life. It made him feel literally on top of the world, or at least on top of what he thought of as his world-Philadelphia.

  “Okay, Kenny-I mean, Kareem,” Badde said when he’d closed the sliding glass door, “calm down and start from the beginning.”

  For his first twenty-two years, Kareem Abdul-Qaadir answered to the name Kenny Jones. That had changed two years ago when Kenny Jones, not the brightest bulb on the marquee, had gotten arrested for selling crack cocaine to undercover Philly cops in Germantown, then fled the justice system by jumping his two-thousand-dollar bond.

  The Jones family, who’d lived in a brick-faced row house across Daly Street from the Baddes in South Philly, had four brothers. Kenny was second oldest, after Jack, who’d been a classmate and friend of Badde’s seemingly forever.