Deadly Assets (7 page)

“‘Fire and jail the killer cop Payne,'” Washington read aloud.

“Now look at the one that follows it, from the person calling himself Justice of the Piece. The one using the picture of a revolver as their avatar.”

Washington read: “‘Forget firing him! Fire at him! Cap the cop! If we're dying, Payne's dying.'”

“Not my first death threat,” Payne said, “but at least it's one that's a little more clever than the others.”

Washington read farther down, then looked from the phone to Payne.

“I would hesitate using the word
clever
, Matthew, but I will grant that it rises above the crudeness of these other illiterate messages. Regardless, they all anger me.”

Payne shrugged. “You know that people get brave online when they can hide behind their keyboard, Jason.”

“True. Let's just hope that's all it is, nothing more than tough rhetoric fueled by Reverend Cross,” Washington said. “Denny also said he was impressed with your remarkable restraint when Cross attempted to ambush you during the television interview at the LOVE Park scene.”

Payne's mind flashed back to the moment he caught a glimpse of the tall, skinny, bearded forty-year-old African-American in his black cloak and white clerical collar, approaching the camera crew.

“Fortunately,” Payne said, “I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye and figured what he probably was up to.”

“The posters being your first clue?” Washington said drily.

Payne grinned.

“I admit I can be more than a bit slow, Jason, but I eventually figure things out.”

Washington chuckled.

“I damn sure didn't want a confrontation,” Payne went on, “at least not one caught on camera. I leaned in close to the microphone so I'd be heard over the chanting, and said, ‘Excuse me. I have a job to do. And I would suggest that someone trying to create a cause célèbre on the spot where a young woman has just been brutally murdered is disrespectful at best, and damned disgusting at worst.'”

Washington raised an eyebrow.

“That sound bite should make headlines,” he said. “Especially when they edit out all but the last part, and begin with ‘. . . I would suggest.' Between the two of us, good for you. But I caution you to be careful. As you know, he was just elevated to chairman of CPOC.”

“So?”

“So you well could be the trophy he wants to make a name for himself.”

—

Pronounced
See-Pock
, the acronym stood for Citizens Police Oversight Committee. The five people on the self-governed entity were appointed to staggered terms by each of the city council members serving on the council's Committee for Public Safety. Current members were a female African-American pro bono publico criminal defense lawyer, a white Roman Catholic bishop, a Temple University professor of sociology who was a female of Puerto Rican heritage, a male civil engineer whose parents had emigrated to Philly from India, and its longest-serving appointee, whose five-year term would expire within the next ten months, the Reverend Josiah Cross.

CPOC had come into existence a quarter-century earlier, in the aftermath of the city's race riots. The then mayor had thrown it out as a bone, hoping to appease, if not silence, community activists. They complained that the police department's Internal Affairs Unit was nothing more than the cops policing themselves—read: paying lip service to allegations of misconduct, and doing next to nothing about said misconduct—and demanded an independent board.

Over the years, the members of CPOC, charged with only a mandate of reviewing and advising the mayor and city council on matters pertaining to police department policy, rarely accomplished anything beyond creating self-serving headlines. Which many observers said wasn't exactly a surprise, as it was very much in line with the accomplishments of the city council members themselves, ones who (a) knew they were appointing them to a position that in essence was political patronage, and who (b) quietly expected a portion of the CPOC member's annual $80,000 salary to find its way into the patron's reelection war chest.

—

“I appreciate what you're saying, Jason,” Payne said. “He's a grandstanding troublemaker. And I'm not going to let anyone from CPOC bother me. Every damn member comes with some ax to grind. Starting with that fraud who says he ‘found' religion in the slam.”

Washington chuckled deeply.

“Discretion being the better part of valor, Matthew, I probably should not tell you this, but I heard that the new head of the city's public relations department—”

“That tiny guy who's working for Ed Stein? Whatshisname? Finley?”

Washington nodded. “That's right, I forgot you met him shortly after Ed was tapped as the mayor's new adviser and brought him for a tour here. James Finley. As I was saying, I shouldn't tell you that Finley was said to have, at least at first, appeared quite excited by the tension of the moment. But then he announced to the mayor that he was terribly afraid you actually were about to shoot Cross right there on live television.”

Payne grinned.

“The thought crossed my mind. He deserved it for any number of reasons. But then I realized there's probably a line of people ahead of me really wanting to whack Skinny Lenny, beginning with his old drug-running pal he ripped off.”

Washington knew the story. The grittier details had been circulated by Cross's detractors shortly after his appointment to CPOC.

[ TWO ]

A decade earlier—listed in police records as “MUGGS, Leonard Robert, Also Known As ‘Skinny Lenny'”—the Reverend Josiah Cross had completed a year and a day in the slam. His offenses included assault and forgery of a financial instrument—while hopped up on crack cocaine, he'd beaten an elderly neighbor with a baseball bat, then cashed the old man's welfare check. Cross had, as he put it, “suffered an unfortunate incarceration for a simple misunderstanding at a difficult point in life, and I've paid my dues for it,” then returned to society penniless but on a mission and with a new identity.

Having arranged for a money order in the amount of thirty-five dollars to be sent to Utopian World Ministries of Cleveland, Ohio, he had received at the jail by return mail a certificate, suitable for framing, signifying that Leonard R. Muggs was licensed as an ordained minister of the Utopian World Order.

Certificate in hand, he headed straight back to the old run-down neighborhood where his mother still lived—the area known as Strawberry Mansion for its most prominent residence, though the place no longer was a shining landmark—and slept on the threadbare couch in her row house when he wasn't out looking up his old contacts.

Within days he had convinced, if not coerced, one Smitty Jones—the not very bright but very tightly wound thirty-year-old who was his onetime street-corner business partner—to front him a kilogram of marijuana on credit.

Cross moved the product, and with that cash then rented, for next to nothing, an empty building in the neighborhood that most recently had been City Best Chinese Eggroll for three years, before the owners tired of the regular robberies and fled.

The edifice had a mock pagoda facade, with a distinctive red-tiled roofline that curled out and upward, and a faded crimson red front door, on which he had painted in gold
WORD OF BROTHERLY LOVE MINISTRY, REV. J. CROSS PASTOR
and, above that, a big crucifix.

When Smitty showed up at the door and said that he wanted payment for the dope, Josiah announced that it had been “the work of a higher power” for the money to go to the new church. Josiah suggested that it might be possible Smitty would be repaid somewhat later, but then again he could make no promises.

“I have been redeemed,” Cross explained, somewhat piously, “and am now a man of the cloth. It's out of my hands, brother.”

Smitty wasn't buying it.

“That's bullshit, bro! I'm gonna snuff your sorry skinny ass out if I don't get my money back now!”

But about the time he finished making that threat he was staring at the black muzzle of the Reverend Josiah Cross's Beretta Cheetah .380 caliber semiautomatic, which Cross had instantly produced from somewhere beneath his black robe.

Smitty didn't think the tiny pistol could do much damage—he knew guys got hit all the time with a 9, which was bigger than a .380 and what most everyone else packed, and even those bigger bullets just went right through them and the ER doctors stitched them up and sent them home the same night—but he figured Skinny Lenny just might get lucky and hit some important part on him.

Wordlessly, hands above his head, Smitty slowly walked backward to the faded crimson front door.

Five years later—with a growing congregation that had come to include, after he put them on the church payroll as deacons, both Smitty Jones and the elderly man who “miraculously” had forgiven the old Skinny Lenny for assaulting and robbing him—Cross had preached himself into a position in the community that, courtesy of City Councilman (At Large) H. Rapp Badde Jr., was considered worthy of an appointment to the CPOC.

—

Matt Payne looked at Jason Washington and said, “It's no wonder that Badde bought his old neighborhood buddy. They're cut from the same corrupt cloth. I won't go into Badde's—the list is too long—but the quote Reverend unquote Cross's hypocritical behavior is nothing short of an outrage. As you well know, there are honest to God nuns and monks and others serving in those hard-hit neighborhoods. They're the real deal, actually doing God's work. They're not making a mockery of it all for personal gain like Cross, starting with his shilling for Badde from the pulpit and essentially turning that bogus church into a campaign office.”

“You are aware that Cross got on camera after your interview . . .”

“Yeah, I saw him as I was leaving.”

“. . . and when the reporter asked if he felt what he was doing in a place where a young woman had just been murdered was ‘disrespectful' or ‘disgusting,' he dodged the query by stating instead that he felt that three hundred and sixty-two murders was ‘disgusting' and that ‘a trigger-happy cop contributing to the bloodshed of citizens in the city was despicable.'”

Payne grunted. “I guess he'd rather have those murderers still running the streets.”

“It is anyone's guess what his genuine motives are . . .”

“Beyond personal gain, you mean,” Payne put in.

“. . . but he then announced that he would be leading a protest rally at his church this afternoon at five. The interview was then drowned out with the chants of ‘No more murder, no more Payne.'”

“Five o'clock?” Payne said, then touched the glass face of his cell phone.

From its speakerphone, a sultry, surprisingly real-sounding female voice practically purred,
“What can I do for you, Marshal?”

Payne saw Washington's eyebrows go up, and that he shook his head and grinned.

Payne spoke into the phone: “New calendar entry with alarm: Protest today seventeen hundred hours.”

“Protest December fifteenth at five
P.M.
,”
the sexy, artificially generated voice confirmed.
“Calendar alarm set
thirty minutes prior.”

“Thank you,” Payne said, looking up at Washington.

“My pleasure, Marshal.”

“If I did not know better, Matthew . . .”

“What?” Payne said mock-innocently. “Technology is our friend.” He looked at the phone a second, then added, “But I should probably change that voice before Amanda hears it. The mechanical robot tone that reads the NOAA weather radio alerts might be safer.” He then mimicked the disjointed droning computer-generated voice: “To-day's. Wea-ther. Fore-cast . . .”

Washington chuckled. “On that side note, how is your bride-to-be?”

Payne raised an eyebrow.

“She called, said she wasn't exactly thrilled to see me on TV being called Public Enemy Number One. She would be down there marching and chanting with a sign, too, if she thought it would hasten my finding other work.”

Dr. Amanda Law—whose father, Charlie Law, was friends with Washington, dating back to their time together in Northeast Detectives—had made it clear she was not thrilled with the prospect of spending every day, as she had while growing up, wondering if someone she loved would leave in the morning—and not come home alive. That her father took retirement only after taking a bullet to the knee served to strengthen her resolve.

“It's certainly a reasonable fear,” Washington said, “one my bride, who in decades hasn't gotten over it, is at least less vocal about after all these years.”

He paused, then added, “But . . . I still see it in her eyes. Special indeed are the strong ladies who tolerate the toll this occupation takes on their relationships.”

Payne nodded thoughtfully.

“What I meant a moment ago,” Washington went on, “was, and apropos of that side note: If I didn't know better, I would take it that you intend on attending Cross's rally. That does not seem to be a wise idea for ‘Public Enemy Number One.'”

Payne shrugged. “I'll have to think about it. Tell me no, and I won't go. We'll certainly have enough eyes in the crowd—”

Just then his phone vibrated, and he glanced at its screen. Then he looked back at Washington.

“Okay, that's a heads-up that the casino security camera imagery is finally all in the war room. Will be ready to review in ten. Want to take a look?”

Washington glanced at his wristwatch. “If I can squeeze it in. Speaking of Finley, you are aware that he visibly cringed during his tour of the Roundhouse when he heard you call the Executive Command Center the ‘war room.'”

The ECC, the department's enormous and enormously expensive nerve center, was outfitted with highly secure communications equipment able to link up local, state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies, as well as integrate satellite, Internet, radio, television, and citywide fixed and mobile surveillance cameras. It was next to the police commissioner's office, down the hall from where they now stood.