Payne looked back at her, then glanced at his watch and said to the recorder, “Interview paused at one-forty P.M.”
He stood, stuck his notepad in his pocket, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
He left the handcuff off her but, using the sliding bolt, locked the interview room door from the outside.
Only Jason Washington was in the small observation room when Payne entered.
“The minute you got her permission,” Washington said, his deep, sonorous voice answering the unasked question, “Tony went to get a Search and Seizure warrant signed by the judge and sent the Crime Lab to her house.”
“If that house is anything like its resident, I doubt we’re going to get anything of real use. Other than maybe a bullet fragment. The shooter probably collected his shell casings.”
Washington nodded and said, “You’re probably correct, Matthew. But you know to ‘never say never.’”
“And ‘always check the rock under the rock,’” Payne said with a smile, citing Washington’s well-known rule of thumb for conducting thorough investigations.
“I learned you well, Young Matthew,” Washington said mock-seriously.
Payne looked at Shauna Mays through the window and parroted her: “‘I want my reward.’”
Washington chuckled, but then in a serious tone said, “And she should get it, considering the hell she went through.”
Payne looked at him, then back at her.
After a long moment he said, “Jason, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“She didn’t do it,” Washington immediately answered. “She’s arguably guilty of a whole host of other mistakes in life. But murder isn’t one of them. And after one look at her physical condition, the DA isn’t going to go after her for harboring a fugitive.”
Payne nodded. “We could throw tampering with evidence charges at her, or even accessory to murder. But why?”
“I doubt the DA would press charges if they caught her jaywalking,” Washington said. “We’ll hold her till we see what, if anything, they find at the scene. Then let her loose to collect her reward.”
They looked at her again.
After a moment Payne said coldly, “I’m betting this won’t be the last we hear of Shauna Mays. And not alive.”
“Great minds follow similar paths, Matthew. I agree. There’re ten thousand reasons why.”
“The whole ’hood will be after her money.”
Matt Payne then felt his phone vibrating again. When he pulled it out, he saw the call was from the same number as the call he’d ignored earlier.
He looked at Washington, shrugged, and said, “Excuse me.” He answered it: “Payne.”
After a moment he said, “Hold on,” then hit the SPEAKERPHONE key.
“You still there, Sergeant Payne?” Javier Iglesia’s voice came over the speaker.
“Yeah, Javier,” Payne said. “I’m here with Lieutenant Jason Washington-”
“Hey, Lieutenant,” Javier interrupted. “Haven’t seen you in quite a while.”
“How are you, Javier?” Washington asked.
“Not real good. I was just telling Sergeant Payne that I’m near my home in Kingsessing-southwest Philadelphia?”
“We know it,” Payne said. “What’s this you just said about a Principal Bazelon being murdered?”
“We got the call from Twelfth District this morning that she’d died in her sleep,” Iglesia began. “But I just found out she really died during a home invasion by a really bad dude named Xpress Jones. ..”
“… and now part of that crowd is taking Xpress down to collect that ten-grand reward,” Iglesia finished some five minutes later. “It being a homicide and all, I thought you’d want to be the ones who grabbed him.”
“Give me this animal’s name again, Javier,” Payne said, pulling out his notepad and flipping to a clean page.
“Xpress Smith. Xavier Smith, aka Xpress. Black male, twenty-four.”
Payne wrote it down. “Okay. Got it. Any unusual features to look for to ID him?”
Javier snorted. “Other than being attached to an angry mob of wannabe gangbangers? And the ten-g price tag on his head? Don’t worry, Sergeant. You can’t miss him. Xpress is pretty messed up.”
“Thanks, Javier. We’ve already got someone down there. I’ll give him a heads-up.”
“Later,” Javier said.
Payne broke the connection, then slipped the cell phone back in the left front pocket of his pants.
Matt Payne looked at Jason Washington and said, “So we have a mother bringing in her dead son, and now we have street-justice punks cashing in a really bad guy? And those first eight pop-and-drops. Killadelphia, indeed. The vigilantes-and now we know there’s at least one-are everywhere. Worse, I’m beginning to think Operation Clean Sweep has been commandeered by Five-Eff.”
“Well, Francis Fuller’s reward system is certainly superior to ours in attracting attention,” Washington said. “To start with, he’s not a cop. And, as we well know, nobody on the street wants to talk to cops.”
Payne grunted.
He said, “Carlucci is really going to blow his cork when he hears about the street vigilantes turning in this thug and that Kendrik’s doer is still loose and, we can presume, still active. Next time you see my head, it’ll probably be on a platter.”
Payne looked at Washington a long moment, then sighed. He said, “You’re smarter than I am, Jason. What the hell do I do next?”
“Applying for the monastery ever cross your mind?”
[THREE]
Jefferson and Mascher Streets, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 1:55 P.M.
“Bobby, what the hell does five fucking minutes matter?” Thomas “Little Tommie” Turco glanced at his wristwatch and anxiously tapped his steel-toed work boot. “The permit says two o’clock start time. We’re wasting daylight, not to mention burning rental money. Go on and swing it.”
Puffing on a stub of a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, the bulky, thirty-eight-year-old Turco-who was anything but little-stood on the step outside the cab of a red-and-white Link-Belt crane he’d rented two hours earlier. A weathered cardboard sign, cut somewhat square, was taped to the door of the cab. It was poorly hand-lettered with a black permanent-ink marker: TURCO DEMOLITION amp; EXCAVATION. NOT FOR HIRE. UNDER CONTRACT WITH CITY OF PHILA HUD.
“You got it, boss,” said Bobby “the Ballbuster” Bucco, who was sitting at the controls. He fired up the Link-Belt’s diesel engine.
Little Tommie then gave a thumbs-up to Jimmy “Dirtball” Turco. His cousin was at the controls of a massive Caterpillar D3K bulldozer that sat next to a pair of Bobcats with front-end loading buckets and a line of five heavy-duty dump trucks waiting to haul away debris. The bright yellow, nine-ton dozer roared to life. Then its twin tracks and giant front blade began kicking up clouds of dust as the dozer started pushing into piles the scattered, busted debris of the onetime residential neighborhood.
This was the second time in the last ten days that Turco’s beefy crew-not one of the men weighed an ounce under two-fifty-had worked this Northern Liberties job site.
The first time, during a solid week of working dawn to dusk every day but Sunday, they had taken almost the entire block down to bare earth. Little Tommie himself would have admitted that it wasn’t really all that impressive an accomplishment, if only because over the years almost half of the row houses had burned and their shells had been removed by crews from the City of Philadelphia. Turco’s equipment only had to scrape up and truck off the concrete footings, and sometimes not even those were left, just weed-choked dirt.
The reason Turco’s crew had not been able to finish the job all at once-and had to return today-could be explained in part by the signs recently posted on the property.
There were four shiny new large ones, four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood painted bright white and nailed to four-by-four-inch posts, each erected on a corner of the block. Lettered in black was: MOVING PHILLY FORWARD! COMING SOON TO NORTHERN LIBERTIES: 3,000 NEW JOBS! PROJECT COST TO TAXPAYERS: ZERO! ANOTHER FINE DEVELOPMENT FOR YOUR FUTURE FROM THE PHILADELPHIA ECONOMIC GENTRIFICATION INITIATIVE A PROJECT OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA HOUSING amp; URBAN DEVELOPMENT COUNCILMAN H. RAPP BADDE, JR., CHAIRMAN