While Jason Washington was at least as good as any other Homicide detective while working the crime scene, and certainly at least as knowledgeable as any other Homicide detective in the use of the hightech techniques now available to match fibers, determine that a particular bullet had been fired from a particular weapon, and so on, his real strengths, he believed, were psychological and intellectual.
He believed, with more than a little reason, that he had no peers in interrogation. He could play, with great skill, any number of roles when interviewing a suspect. If the situation demanded it, Washington, who stood well over six feet and weighed 220 pounds, could strike terror into the heart of most human beings who had previously believed they were not afraid of the Devil himself. Or, with equal ease, he could assume the role of sympathetic uncle who understood how, through no fault of his own, the suspect had found himself in a situation where striking the deceased in the forehead with a fire axe had seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, and that the decent thing to do now was put the whole unfortunate incident behind him (or her) by making a clean breast of it.
Intellectually, Washington believed that both by natural inclination (perhaps genetic) and by long experience, he had no equal in discovering anomalies. An anomaly, by definition, is a deviation, modification, mutation, permutation, shift, or variation from the norm. If there was one tiny little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that didn't fit, Jason Washington could find it.
He had, in other words, been perfectly happy as the acknowledged best detective in Homicide when Jerome Nelson had been found in his apartment on Society Hill dead of multiple wounds probably inflicted by one of his own matched set of teak-handled Solingen kitchen knives.
The Wheel had assigned the case to Detective Anthony C. "Tony" Harris, who was not only a good friend of Washington's, but, in Washington's judgment, the second-best detective in Homicide. As soon as the case had come in, and as soon as Jerome Nelson's position in society had become known, Jason Washington had felt sure that he would soon be involved with it himself. Tony certainly would want some help, and would naturally turn to Jason Washington, or Captain Henry C. Quaire, who commanded the Homicide Bureau, would order him to work with Tony.
It hadn't happened quite that way. The Honorable Jerry Carlucci, mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, had taken the job away from the Homicide Bureau and given it to the newly formed Special Operations Division. Jason Washington's initial reaction to that had mirrored that of Captain Quaire and Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who commanded the Detective Division that included the Homicide Bureau: righteous indignation that once more The Dago had put his goddamn nose in where it had no business.
Mayor Carlucci's notorious penchant for issuing orders directly to various divisions (for that matter, to individual officers) of the Police Department, instead of letting the commissioner run it, was, in a sense, understandable. Before winning, in his first bid for elective office, the mayoralty, The Dago had been police commissioner. He had, in fact, held every rank in the Philadelphia Police Department except police woman. He therefore believed that he knew at least as much about running the Police Department as anyone else. And he had read the statutory functions of the mayor, which quite clearly stated that he was responsible for supervising "the various departments of the city."
On a secondary level, his parochial indignation as a Homicide detective aside, Jason Washington had thought that he understood The Dago's game plan, and that it would work. The Dago had turned out to be a better politician than anyone ever thought he would be.
Jason Washington and Jerry Carlucci went way back together. Carlucci had done a year in Homicide as a lieutenant, before he passed the captain's examination and moved to Highway Patrol. It was only fair to acknowledge that Carlucci had been a good lieutenant-he had been an all around good cop, no one ever denied that-one proof of which being that even back then he had been smart enough to exercise only the barest minimum of supervision over Detective Jason Washington.
When, rarely, they bumped into each other, Washington could count on a bear hug and being greeted either by his Christian name or as "Ol' Buddy," or both. Jason Washington, who did not like to be hugged by anyone except his wife and daughter, and disliked being called "Ol' Buddy" by anyone, always smiled and referred to The Dago as "Mr. Mayor."
The way Washington had seen the assignment of the Nelson job to Special Operations seemed to make sense. Carlucci had just set up Special Operations. It was his. What had become a big deal murder in the newspapers, because of the victim, was actually just a routine homicide. The odds were that the job would be closed in a week or two by Homicide. But that would not earn The Dago any favorable space in the newspapers. That's what Homicide was supposed to do, solve homicides.
But if Jerry Carlucci's Special Operations solved the Nelson job, His Honor the Mayor could, and would, claim the credit. And Washington had seen that The Dago had carefully hedged his bet: Special Operations was commanded by Peter Wohl, who not only had been a sergeant in Homicide, but was, in Washington's judgment (and that of a lot of other knowledgeable people), one of the smartest cops in the Department. Before The Dago had formed Special Operations and given it to Peter Wohl, Wohl had been the youngest (ever) staff inspector in the department.
Staff inspectors ranked immediately above captains. With the exception, now, of Wohl, they operated within the Internal Affairs Division, and were charged with, primarily, investigations of corruption within and outside the Police Department. Wohl, just before being given Special Operations, had sent two judges and a city councilman to the state penitentiary for some rather imaginative income augmentation.
Washington had reasoned that Carlucci had decided that Wohl would have no trouble finding who had punctured Jerome Nelson so thoroughly, and that Special Operations-thus the mayor-would get the credit.
Washington had underestimated both Carlucci and Wohl. To make sure that Wohl did indeed catch the critters who had punctured Nelson with his own imported butcher knives, he gave him blanket authority to transfer to Special Operations anybody he thought he needed. Wohl had immediately decided that he needed Detectives Washington and Harris, and over howls of protest from the chief inspector of the Detective Division, the commanding officer of the Homicide Bureau, and Detectives Harris and Washington, they had been transferred to Special Operations.
Wohl was not only a good cop, but a good guy, and he had assured both Washington and Harris that he would see they could make as much overtime money as they had in Homicide, and done other things to soothe their ruffled feathers. They would work directly for him (and his deputy, Captain Mike Sabara) rather than under some sergeant, and had even arranged for the both of them to draw brand-new cars (normally reserved for at least captains) from the Police Garage.
He would not, however, promise (as Washington asked) to return them to Homicide once they caught whoever had murdered Jerome Nelson.
That job had just about solved itself when two critters had been caught by the cops in Atlantic City using Nelson's credit cards, but by then a looney tune in Northwest Philadelphia had started abducting and then carving up women, and the process had been repeated: Jerry Carlucci had called a press conference to announce he had given the job of apprehending the Northwest serial rapist to Special Operations, and Wohl had given it to Washington and Harris.