Rapier looked up from the console-and his face lost all color.
“Dammit!” Corporal Kerry Rapier said. “I’m, uh, I’m really sorry about that, Sergeant Payne. Particularly it happening in front of a Texas Ranger.”
“What is that?” Byrth said.
Rapier looked somewhat nervously at Payne.
Payne grinned. He turned to Byrth and said, “Looks to me like an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Right, Kerry?”
“Yeah,” Rapier said, clearly embarrassed. He gestured to a notebook computer on the console. “I’ve got the series saved on my personal laptop’s hard drive. It’s wired to the console here. When you called just now, I was on my afternoon break and watching…”
“No harm done, Kerry,” Payne said, still grinning. “I’m actually a fan, too. Especially of Sweet Dee.”
The sitcom revolved around a boneheaded crew of schemers trying to run an Irish bar called Paddy’s Pub-the worst bar in South Philly, if not all of Philly. Corporal Kerry Rapier glowed at Payne’s mention of the name of the white-hot but dim-witted blond main character.
Payne described her to Byrth.
“Ah,” Byrth said. “She’d be what a buddy of mine would call ‘a radio station.’”
“A what?”
“One anyone can pick up, especially at night,” Byrth said with a grin. “You know, naturally horizontal.”
Payne and Rapier chuckled.
Rapier punched a button on the console and the main bank of TVs with the show on it went dark.
Payne then said: “How about punching up whatever you have on the girl they pulled out of the Schuylkill.”
“So, you heard about that?” Rapier said. “They’ve put that case on a need-to-know basis.”
“I know,” Payne said. “And we’re on that need-to-know list.”
Rapier considered that a moment, then nodded. There was no need to call and have it confirmed. Everyone knew Sergeant Payne was Homicide-and with friends in high places. Even if he wasn’t on the list, Rapier figured he’d probably have quietly honored Payne’s request anyway.
Rapier then manipulated switches on the console, and the aerial image of the river with the Marine Unit’s Boston Whaler came up. The shot was frozen.
In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, a block of text popped up:
Schuylkill River at Grays Ferry Avenue Bridge 1158 hours, 24 Sept “As you can see by the time stamp,” Rapier said, “this is from earlier, during the recovery of the body.”
He threw another switch, and the image went into motion. The silver twenty-four-foot-long Boston Whaler, its light bar flashing red and blue, slowly moved backward. A shoal in the river became visible. The vessel then turned. The camera captured images of the officers onboard the boat pulling in a very full and very large black trash bag.
“Jesus!” Payne said.
“Yeah,” Rapier said. “Disgusting, huh? Toss away a human being like so much trash.”
“Is there anything else, any other details, on this case besides what’s on the text block?” Byrth said.
“Very little,” Rapier replied. “There are some shots of the medical examiner coming on the scene, but nothing of note. Javier told me…” He paused and looked at Payne.
Payne said, “Javier Iglesia. I know him.” He looked at Byrth. “He’s a technician in the Medical Examiner’s Office. Good guy, even though his humor runs on the really dark side.”
Rapier then went on: “Javier told me the body is that of a Hispanic female. He said he’s guessing that she can’t be even twenty years old. They haven’t done the autopsy yet. But they did take her fingerprints, and ran them.” He looked at his wristwatch. “That was almost two hours ago, so we should know at any time if we got a match on IAFIS.”
The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System was run by the FBI. With more than 55 million subjects-voluntarily submitted by local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies-it was the largest biometric database in the world. Accessible twenty-four/seven year-round, it could on a good day provide a response to the submission of a criminal ten-print fingerprint within a couple hours.
“With any luck, we’ll get a hit,” Corporal Rapier said. “Then it’s ‘In God We Trust-everyone else we run through NCIC.’ ”
Byrth chuckled.
“Amen to that,” he said.
Like IAFIS, the National Crime Information Center also was maintained by the FBI and available to law enforcement at any time. Its database contained critical records on criminals, including fugitives, as well as stolen property and missing persons. The data was provided by the same sources as those feeding IAFIS, plus whatever courts were authorized to contribute and some foreign law-enforcement agencies.
Then Byrth said, “If the doer is who I think it is, I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting that hit, Corporal.”
“Can I ask why?” Rapier said.
“The guy I’m hunting likes to lop off the heads of undocumented aliens. My money is on the real possibility that this poor girl has no paper trail.”
Rapier looked at him but didn’t know what to say. He looked to Payne.
“There was one other thing Javier did say,” Rapier added.
“What?” Byrth immediately said.
Rapier looked to Payne, who made a face that said, Well? “He noticed something unusual as he casually inspected the body before putting it in the body bag,” Rapier said.
“What?” Byrth repeated.
“Grass clippings. Javier told me that it was weird but there were some grass clippings, you know, where her head had been.”
“That is weird,” Payne said. “Maybe she was dragged through grass at some point? Or they were in the garbage bag?”
“No, not loose clippings,” Rapier said. “More like deep in the bone. Like what cut her was a tool that had had grass on the blade. And that grass got embedded.”
Payne looked at Byrth, who raised his eyebrows and made a face that said, Hell if I know…
They were all silent a moment. They looked absently at the other two banks of TVs. These showed the local and cable news show broadcasts, and the DOT highway and city traffic shots. Payne scanned the feeds. He found the ones of the Philly Inn, the Reading Terminal Market, and the Temple University Hospital. Their imagery was frozen.
“Anything else in particular you wanted to see?” Corporal Rapier said.
“Panel eighteen,” Payne said. “Is that what I think it is?”
Rapier punched a button on his console and the image on panel eighteen was replicated on the main bank of TVs, taking the place of the body recovery by the Marine Unit on the Schuylkill River. And Rapier punched another button, unfreezing the somewhat grainy black-and-white exterior shot of the Temple University Hospital.
Payne turned to Byrth as the cars and people began moving.
“This is the hospital I told you about,” Payne said.
Then the Hispanic assassin in royal blue scrubs kicked open the exit door and ran down the street.
“And that’s the sonofabitch I shot this morning!”
They watched the scene unfold.
When it was over, and started to loop, Byrth whistled.
“Pretty impressive, Marshal Earp. And that was a nice dodge of that taxi.”
“Not really,” Payne said. “I mean, I didn’t get the sonofabitch off the street.”
“Internal Affairs came and got a copy of that,” Corporal Rapier said. “I don’t know squat about how they do their job-I’ve heard some good stories, some horror ones-but that loop should get you cleared quickly.”
“Thanks, Kerry. I certainly hope so.” He looked back at the other banks of screens. “Can you put up the Philly Inn?”
Rapier did. And then for Byrth’s benefit, Payne went over the main facts of that scene. Rapier filled in any
