He formed a ball with his right fist, leaving the middle finger extended and pointed at the multifunction screen.
“Are you testing me, Marshal?”
V
[ ONE ]
Police Administration Building
Eighth and Race Streets
Philadelphia
Friday, January 6, 1:21 P.M.
This place is looking worse every day, Payne thought, glancing upward as he approached the aged police headquarters, its coarse concrete exterior stained with dark streaks from a half century of pollution.
The complex had two circular buildings, each four stories high. They were sheathed in cast concrete and connected in such a manner that some said the complex resembled a giant pair of handcuffs. The interior walls of the buildings, mirroring the exterior, also were curved, thus causing police headquarters to be known colloquially as the Roundhouse.
There had been some talk for years of replacing the Roundhouse with a larger facility, and now that idea finally was getting traction. Plans were in place to renovate the eighty-seven-year-old Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company Building in West Philly, which had been vacant and shuttered for two decades. The enormous structure would become home to all Roundhouse occupants, as well as consolidate certain other offices that, for space reasons, either had been forced out of the Roundhouse or that there never had been room for in the first place.
Further talk, mostly from city council members jockeying to get their names and, they hoped, their faces on the nightly news, said that it was going to happen—and soon.
What the city council members conveniently failed to mention was that the only thing the slowly-skidding-toward-bankruptcy city needed was the money to do so. Among its many other financial failings, Philadelphia was short nearly six billion dollars for funding just its pension obligations.
Payne, after displaying his identification to the overweight blue shirt manning the secure door, waited to get buzzed through. The officer punched the button for the solenoid release. There was a long pause before Payne heard the buzzing. He tried the door, found it still locked, shook it. Still nothing.
The blue shirt let out an audible sigh, then made more noise as he squeezed out of the chair. He ambled over to the door and manually opened it.
Payne, after passing inside, debated taking the elevator up or the stairs. He finally decided his wound dictated his use of the former.
He got on the elevator and pushed the panel button for the third floor. When the doors chugged, struggling to close, he immediately regretted his decision. Next came strange grinding, metallic sounds as the elevator ascended in a manner that he thought could be described as anything but smooth.
He thought, What a dump.
—
Getting off at the third floor, Payne turned and followed the curved corridor. It had windows looking out over the front entrance of the building and, diagonally opposite across Race Street, Franklin Park. The curved interior wall of the corridor was lined with steel filing cabinets that no longer fit inside the offices.
Twenty feet or so later, Payne came to the Executive Command Center. Its door—and every state-of-the-art item behind it—stood in stark contrast to the aged building itself.
The ECC was the electronic nerve center of the Philadelphia Police Department headquarters. It was situated between the offices of the police commissioner and the deputy police commissioner in an area that had once been another office and a large conference room, the wall between them removed to form a larger space.
It had come into being thanks not to foresight from the elected officials in City Hall but, rather, from federal dollars having flooded in after Philly had been picked to host the Democratic National Convention.
Fears of a possible terrorist attack had been very real, and with politicians coming from across the nation, those voting on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., had not hesitated sending taxpayer monies to purchase the best technology that Philadelphia could acquire.
The Executive Command Center—what law enforcement members commonly referred to as a Fusion Center—aided in the collection, assimilation, and analysis of information from multiple agencies. The center had two enormous T-shaped, gray formica–topped conference tables in the middle of the room’s charcoal-colored industrial carpet, each of which could seat twenty-six officers and staff. On the tables, beside a small forest of black stalk microphones and multiline telephone consoles, were outlets and ports to accommodate at least that many notebook computers and other devices. Gray leather office chairs on casters ringed the table. Additional seating was provided by forty armless leather chairs along two walls that formed a sort of continuous bank.
Mounted on the ten-foot-tall walls opposite the conference tables were three banks of sixty-inch flat-screen, high-definition LCD monitors. Each bank had nine monitors, frameless and mounted edge to edge, which either could create a single enormous image or be divided to display up to eighteen different images. These images generally were live video feeds from a wide range of secure sources, such as cameras in the SEPTA mass-transit system, as well as the broadcasts of local and cable news shows. A half dozen of the monitors were dedicated to the cycling feeds from the cameras of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, somewhat grainy black-and-white shots of traffic on major arteries and bridges and on heavily traveled secondary streets. If any of the Aviation Unit’s assets—older Bell 206 L-4s and a new pair of Airbus A-Star helicopters acquired in the last year with federal funds—were airborne, the DOT images would rotate with the thermal and standard color videos sent from the aircraft.
The flat-screens also served as enormous computer monitors, broadcasting on a large scale anything that appeared on the computers plugged into the network ports on the conference tables. Some of these included the constant monitoring of calls coming into the 911 center so that when a unit was dispatched, a tech could check camera feeds in the area—and, if available, a helicopter’s eye in the sky—and relay critical real-time information on the scene to the responding officers.
That the ECC pulled together a wide array of disparate data on people, places, and events, then connected dots and disseminated the findings in a highly efficient manner, was without question an impressive achievement.
But the fact that the ECC also furthered a political component, interagency cooperation, was equally impressive. While turf battles between local and federal officials were nothing new—and had the tendency to render the term interagency cooperation an oxymoron—the ECC helped alleviate that by linking its secure communications networks with those of state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service, and all the alphabet agencies under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
[ TWO ]
Payne entered the ECC and scanned the room. There were at least a couple dozen people around the tables, working in the glow of the bright banks of TV monitors.
He saw Tony Harris at the far table, standing beside a seated Danny Krowczyk. Harris waved him over.
Detective Krowczyk, in jeans, white polo shirt, and black sneakers, was hunched over his IBM i2 notebook computer. The Signals Intelligence analyst had an open package of Tastykake Dreamies beside his computer. He held one of the cream-filled sponge cakes, absently taking bites, while repeatedly tapping the RETURN key with his right index finger. Behind the computer screen, with its pages refreshing with every tap of the keyboard, Krowczyk had built a short pyramid of three empty diet cola cans.
As Payne approached, the skinny, six-foot-four thirty-year-old belched, then pushed his new black horn-rimmed eyeglasses higher up his nose and returned to tapping the keyboard.
“Gentlemen,” Payne greeted them.
“Hey, Matt,” Harris said.
“Sergeant Payne,” Krowczyk replied, looking up. He motioned with the sponge cake. “Want
one? You need one. Probably two. Or more.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
“They have mystical power.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“You ever eat one?”
“Not after I read the ingredients. Those things could survive a nuclear meltdown.”
“That’s exactly right. And that explains their supernatural power to repel lead.”
“All right,” Payne said, then gestured with his hand for him to go on. “I’ll bite—”
“All I’m saying, Sarge, is that I eat them and have not suffered a single bullet wound. You, however . . .”
Harris chuckled.
“Screw you two,” Payne said, glancing around the room. “Where’s Kerry? I thought you said he was working on getting the cell tower dump.”
“Yeah, and he did that,” Harris said. “He sent the subpoenas to the seven service providers of the cell towers overlapping the scene, then said he’d have to come back later to help. There’s going to be a ton of call data to filter through from this morning. And that’s on top of what’s coming in from yesterday’s shooting, which, if we’re lucky, we should have by the time he’s back.”
Corporal Kerry Rapier, the department’s wizard of all devices electronic, was the ECC’s master technician and, at twenty-five, its youngest tech.
Krowczyk, his tone somewhat disgusted, added, “Wafflin’ Walker sent word down that he wanted Rapier, in uniform, at a conference at Temple. Kerry told me that since he had been one of the main techs the Temple guys had talked to when they planned the thing on data mining software, there probably wasn’t going to be much for him to learn there, so he was going, as ordered, and would sneak out the soonest he could.”
“Wafflin’ Walker”—Deputy Commissioner Howard Walker, the fifty-year-old two-star chief of Science & Technology—was very tall and slender, with a cleanly shaven head and long, thin nose. He wore tiny Ben Franklin glasses and effected a soft, intelligent voice, much like that of a cleric with a somewhat pious air. His domain of Science & Technology included the Digital Forensic Sciences, Communications, and Information Systems units—the latter two with oversight of the Executive Command Center.
Payne was privy to the fact that Walker would never have been Denny Coughlin’s first choice to work directly under him. Police deputy commissioners and above—the one- through four-star ranks—were appointed by the city’s managing director with the blessing of the mayor. Ralph Mariana, the police commissioner, had quietly told First Deputy Commissioner Coughlin that he’d had his reasons for getting Walker the job, though, interestingly, had never shared them.
Payne had yet to find anyone who didn’t think Walker had a highly inflated opinion of himself. He had earned the name Wafflin’ Walker because he rarely made a decision that he stuck with the moment it was questioned.
Now that I think of it, Payne thought, like someone afraid of his own shadow—and afraid for his job.
Someone who would freeze out a person worthy of promotion.
He didn’t like it one bit when I let slip in front of the mayor that the backup in the forensic lab was holding up that serial murder investigation.
“One of my guys,” Krowczyk said, “is working on that burner flip phone they recovered from the shooter’s van. It shows it was used yesterday—and yesterday only—with a bunch of texts sent and received right before fourteen hundred hours. He’s running down all those data points.”
“Okay,” Payne said. “What else?”
“McCrory’s second meeting with the Morgan woman’s assistant didn’t go worth a damn,” Harris said. “She told him that after their first meeting she had called the lawyer in Florida to notify him of Morgan’s death. He specifically ordered her, as a company employee, not to answer any more questions without a lawyer from the company present.”
“Damn it.”
“She did, though, give McCrory the list of those registered to attend the gala. Just over three hundred names. Frankly, I don’t see them as high-priority, and, short of just seeing who’s who, vetting them at this point would be a poor use of resources.”
“And risk the real possibility of analysis paralysis,” Payne said, glancing at Krowczyk.
Harris nodded, and said, “At least until we’ve run down other leads.”
“What about names from the bar and her condo?” Payne said.
Harris shook his head. “Lawyer told her no. But—”
“What’s this lawyer’s name?” Payne interrupted.
“Grosse. Michael Grosse. He’s got offices in Miami and New Orleans and Houston. McCrory has more details.”
Payne pulled out his smartphone, and, as he typed an e-mail, said, “The old man offered to see what he could find out about him.”
“But, as I was saying,” Harris went on when Payne had finished, “thanks to the advent of social media and our attention-starved society, we don’t need no stinkin’ lawyer to give us names. At least, ones from the bar.”
“What’d you turn up?” Payne said.
“You got it handy, Krow?”
Krowczyk put down his cake and typed rapidly. Payne and Harris looked up at the left bank of nine monitors. The individual images of Philly streets and traffic were replaced with one big image that also appeared on Krowczyk’s computer screen.
“I found this picture posted on four social media sites,” Krowczyk said, “the first belonging to that PR chick’s.”
Three women and three men, all with broad smiles, were leaning together in front of the fireplace in the Library Bar.
“I’ll be damned,” Payne said. “Nice group shot. And they even tagged names to the faces. How accommodating. Not that we don’t know who they are.”
“Yeah,” Krowczyk said, placing the cursor over the head of each person, triggering a text box containing their name to pop up, “so there’s Camilla Rose Morgan in the middle beside Sue Thomas, of Sweet Sue’s Homemade Pies—man, I love those pumpkin whoopies she sells. And John Broadhead, the architect. Aimee Wolter, the smoking-hot public relations chick, who’s obviously queen of spreading her face on social media. And City Council President Willie Lane, mugging it up with Anthony Holmes, quarterback of our beloved but besieged NFL team.”
Payne grunted. “I was wondering where you were about to go describing Wolter’s spreading . . .”
Harris and Krowczyk chuckled.
Payne added, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly rush to get the district attorney on the phone and announce that we have the short list of doers.”
“True,” Harris said, “but hope springs eternal that through them we’ll unearth the proverbial stone under the stone. Kennedy is down at his desk working on getting in touch with them all.”
“So, nothing on who in the bar crowd could have gone to her condo?” Payne said.
“Hank Nasuti managed to track down the head bartender,” Harris said. “Woke him up.”
“Here, I’ll pull up the interview,” Krowczyk said.
The group image on the monitors was replaced with a close-up of Detective Hank Nasuti, who was looking into the camera lens. The thirty-four-year-old was a second-generation Philadelphian, his grandparents having moved to Philly from Italy in the 1920s.
The camera panned and eventually fixed on a narrow-faced male with disheveled dark hair and tired gray eyes in his mid-twenties. He held a Wawa to-go coffee cup. Payne saw that the timer box at the bottom indicated the interview was just over twenty-one minutes long.
“Guy’s name is Harvey Wolfe,” Krowczyk said, and began dragging with the curser to advance the video, the male’s head moving in fast motion for a few seconds. He stopped when the timer read 14:50. “Here’s the meat of it.”
The video then played at normal speed, and Nasuti’s voice came from the IBM computer’s speakers. “Okay, so you said Miss Morgan had been in the Library Bar since ha
ppy hour?”
Harvey Wolfe nodded. “After you called, I called in and had them check her ticket. The bar register shows the ticket was opened with her first martini at six fifty-one.”
“And she was there with her party until just after nine?”
Sipping his coffee, Wolfe nodded again.
“About then,” he said. “I don’t remember exactly. She told me to leave open her tab, to give her table whatever they wanted to order.”
“And who was at the table?”
“The only ones I knew for sure was the football player and the city councilman.”
“Tony Holmes and William Lane.”
“Yeah. But there were a bunch of others who came and went. Someone said some actress, but I don’t watch TV so I couldn’t tell you.”
“How long was Miss Morgan gone?”
“I’m not sure. It was a busy, loud night,” Harvey Wolfe said. “I do remember that when she came back, she had me make her another martini. And that she looked a little annoyed for some reason.”
Payne felt Harris glance at him, saw his knowing look, and shrugged in reply.
“But once she got her drink she brightened,” Wolfe went on. “If I had to guess, I’d say that had to be about ten, ten-thirty-ish.”
Nasuti said, “And she stayed until . . . ?”
Wolfe laughed deeply.
“What?” Nasuti said.
“She wanted to keep drinking until the sun came up, if she could.”
“Why’s that?”
“At one-thirty, I put out the word to the servers to tell their customers that last call was at one forty-five. When Miss Morgan heard that, she tried to get me to keep the place open later. And when I said I was sorry, that was impossible—the hotel strictly follows the city’s two A.M. bar-closing law—she said she’d happily rent out the place, make it a private party.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, I really don’t have the authority, not that kind of flexibility. But, believe me, it was tempting—it was Miss Morgan, who’s always really nice and a big tipper, and the extra money for the staff would’ve been sweet. I mean, the bar tab already was over a thousand bucks. She asked me to ask and I said I would.”
Broken Trust Page 14