“I haven’t seen Skipper Olde since we graduated from Episcopal Academy.”

“ ‘Skipper’?” he said, and spelled the last name aloud as he wrote.

“Right. J. Warren Olde,” Matt furnished, “initial J-Juliet, though I have no idea what it stands for. Also known as Skipper. He’s my age, twenty-seven.”

“Was he into drugs back then?”

Matt shook his head. “Not that I know of. Mostly beer and whiskey, and a lot of it. He led Becca Benjamin, who’s a couple years younger, down that path. Not that she maybe wouldn’t have gone down it on her own. Just sure as hell not so far and so fast.”

Harris nodded, then asked, “Is Olde the same as-”

“Yeah. Olde and Sons, the McMansion custom home builders. Philly, Palm Beach, Dallas. His old man J. Warren Olde, Sr.”

“Oh boy.”

Matt heard something in Harris’s tone that suggested more than mere annoyance at the mention of another wealthy family name.

“What ‘oh boy,’ Tony?”

Harris didn’t respond directly. He looked inside the motel room, and Payne followed his eyes.

“What in the hell happened here, Tony?” Payne then said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“On the assumption that that wasn’t a rhetorical question, I thought I told you-a meth lab. They’re volatile as hell.”

“But is that all that this is about?”

Tony Harris shrugged, then said, “I don’t know if it’s ‘all,’ but it’s certainly a large component.”

Payne nodded. “So were those two crispy critters in the body bags running the lab, and selling to Skipper? Or was it Skipper’s lab? Or had he come to throw them out of his motel? I cannot understand why he’d bring Becca, in Becca’s Mercedes that screams everything that this place is not, here…”

“Well, as you point out, there’re a number of possible scenarios. My money’s on the one that says your prep school pal-”

“He’s not my pal,” Payne interrupted. “Becca, however, I do like.”

“-okay, this Skipper guy, then, was in the illicit drug manufacture and distribution trades, specifically crystal meth. Maybe the girl, too. But we won’t know until we can talk to them. If we can talk to them. He was unconscious after he collapsed. And she was in and out of consciousness when the boys wheeled her out of here in the meat wagon.” Harris heard what he’d just said. “Sorry, Matt. No offense.”

Matt motioned with his hand in a gesture that said, None taken.

“Till then,” Harris went on, “any other pieces to the puzzle you can fill in…”

Payne thought, If anyone can figure this out, it’s Tony.

He then told him everything that Chad Nesbitt had said in the diner.

Harris finished writing that in his notes and said, “You were right. You’re really close to this. Anything else?”

Matt Payne made eye contact with Tony Harris.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Yeah, there is, Tony. I want in on this job.”

“And I’d like to have you. But I thought you were going-”

“No. That’s not happening. I’m a cop.”

“No, you’re not,” Harris said.

What-? Payne thought.

Harris went on: “Matt, at the risk of inflating what already might be an oversize ego, you were a damn good detective. Now you’re a sergeant-a supervisor. And I sure could use you on this job-if, that is, I get it.”

Payne nodded once. “Thanks, Tony. That means a lot coming from you.” He paused, then added, “Bari’s going to get this job?”

Harris shrugged.

Harris then watched as Payne reached for his cellular phone, scrolled the list of names, then hit CALL.

“Good morning, Captain Hollaran,” Matt said when the call was answered. “Matt Payne. How are you, sir?”

Captain Francis X. Hollaran was assistant to First Deputy Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin, the second in command of all of the Philadelphia Police Department. Commissioner Coughlin had been the one to order the overworked and overstressed Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, who was his godson, “Matty, you’re taking some time off. Thirty days. You’ve earned it, you deserve it-and you need it.”

Payne said into his cell phone: “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate it. I do feel better. Would it be possible to speak with the commissioner when he gets in?”

He glanced at his wristwatch, then said: “He’s in already? Then yes, please. Tell him I’m on my way to the Roundhouse, and I need ten minutes of his time.”

Payne paused to listen, then, making eye contact with Tony Harris, added, “Of course you can give him a heads-up what it’s about. Tell him my thirty-day R and R officially ended with a boom a few hours ago. I’m coming back to work.”

[THREE] Reading Terminal Market Center City, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 7:45 A.M.

In a crush of rush-hour commuters, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado stepped off the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s R1 “Airport Line” railcar at the Market East Station. He followed a half-dozen of the commuters as they one by one passed through the Eleventh Street exit’s revolving door. On the sidewalk, El Gato pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, covering his head against the rain that was starting. Two women in business attire and sharing an umbrella walked past, and he trailed them to Filbert Street, then into the Reading Terminal Market.

El Gato had boarded the SEPTA regional railroad at the Thirtieth Street Station, which was about a mile to the west, just across the Schuylkill River. And it had been into that dark river, from the tree-lined eastern shore under the Thirty-fourth Street bridge, that thirty minutes earlier he’d unceremoniously dumped the headless body of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez.

In the back of the rusty white Plymouth minivan, he had put her remains into a fifty-gallon black plastic lawn care bag and tied to the outside, around her ankles, a pair of twenty-five-pound workout dumbbells. Then he had poked a few holes in the bag to vent any trapped air. Once in the water, the bag had floated half-submerged with the river current for less than a minute, air bubbling out the vent holes. Then, when the bag had sufficiently filled with water, it had slipped toward the river bottom, a final series of bubbles popping on the surface.

El Gato then had rinsed off the blood from his hands with river water and thrown his bloody black clothing into the brush, behind a cardboard box long ago vacated by a homeless person. He’d driven the half-mile to the Thirtieth Street Station, and there carried a backpack into the men’s room. After cleaning up at a sink, he’d gone into a toilet stall. He had removed his gun from the backpack, run its sling over his right shoulder, then pulled on a clean hoodie sweatshirt and, over that, a cheap navy blue vinyl raincoat. Finally, he rolled up a Philadelphia Eagles ball cap and slipped it into his pants waistband at the small of his back.

The polymer-and-alloy weapon was a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale submachine gun, Model P90, capable of firing nine hundred 5.7-? 28-mm rounds per minute, though its magazine held only fifty rounds. It was of a bullpup design, the action and magazine behind the trigger allowing for a shorter weapon with a barrel of equal length and accuracy as that of a longer gun. At just under twenty inches long, the P90’s futuristic styling resembled something right out of a science-fiction movie.

He’d taken the gun off the hands, quite literally, so to speak, of a former business associate in Texas, who had acquired it in Nuevo Laredo from a low-level member of the Zetas, the paramilitary enforcement arm of the narco-trafficking Gulf cartel. Despite the P90 having been a prized possession, the former associate had had no further need of it. El Gato, in a crack house in South Dallas, agreed to the associate’s offer of the weapon as collateral against the unpaid debt he owed El Gato for a kilogram brick of sticky black tar heroin. Then El Gato pulled his pistol and shot the associate dead. Or, more accurately, shot up the associate. First with the nine-millimeter pistol, then with the P90. The burst of forty rounds was meant to send a message to others who might consider shorting El Gato.