“What about the bad guy Liz Justice mentioned?” Payne replied. “The one who cuts off heads? What the hell is that all about?”

“That’s only part of it. It’s my personal opinion that this guy is a ticking time bomb. He’s a psychopath with one helluva temper.” Then, surprising Payne, he made the sounds “Tick, tick, tick… BOOM!”

“This guy got a name?”

“El Gato.”

“What?”

“The Cat. That’s his street name.”

“What about a real name?”

Byrth shook his head. “Nope. Not yet, anyways. But his MO’s pretty consistent. Won’t be hard to track him down. As far as we can determine, he’s not MDTO. He just has connections with them.”

Payne of course recognized MO-the short version of the Latin modus operandi, the critter’s “method.” But the other acronym was new to him.

“MDTO?”

“Mexican drug-trafficking organization.”

Payne nodded. Then he said, “You just quoted ‘a person charged with a criminal offense.’ How does the name on this guy’s-this El Gato’s-warrant read?”

Payne glanced over at Byrth, who looked back and said, “What warrant?”

What? No warrant?

No wonder Liz Justice asked for doors to be opened in Philly.

But she would not have done that unless this guy’s a straight shooter.

“How did you track him to here?” Payne said.

“Night before last night, we bagged one of his runners in College Station.” He looked at Payne. “Where Texas A and M University is?”

Payne nodded. “Yeah. And home of the Presidential Library, Bush 41’s. Its recent chancellor, like old man Bush, used to be DCI. He left A and M to be secretary of defense.”

Byrth stared at Payne.

“Secretary of defense?” Byrth repeated. “Director of the Central Intelligence Agency? If that bit of Texas Connection trivia was meant to impress, it worked. About all I can recite about Philly is that there’s a broken bell here somewhere.”

Payne made a face. “No, not to impress. It’s actually information I’d really rather be blissfully ignorant of. At least the Bush Library part. But let’s get off this tangent.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d really like to hear what all that’s about.”

“Sorry. Maybe later. You were saying about the runner?”

Byrth raised his eyebrows in a sort of surrender.

“Okay,” he then went on, “we tracked this runner while he was en route to Houston. One Ramos Manuel Cach?n, just turned age seventeen. He’s got the usual list of priors, mostly petty stuff like truancy and assaults. He’d made a stop in College Station to service his retailers-”

“Explain that,” Payne interrupted as he changed lanes to pick up the Vine Street Expressway.

“Convenience stores, places that he wholesaled to. Some cocaine. But mostly blue cheese.”

“Blue cheese?” Payne said with some enthusiasm. “I love blue cheese. But something tells me we’re not talking about Roquefort.”

“Unfortunately, no. It’s a snortable combination of diphenhydramine and heroin-”

“Die-what-dramine?”

“Die is right. It’s a killer. Smack mixed with cold medicine.”

Payne nodded.

Byrth went on: “This cheese crap all started in Dallas, and grew quickly. The dealers began targeting inner-city kids, mostly Hispanics. That’s where this El Gato got involved. He marketed it with a friendly look and name-‘Queso Azul.’ The coloring comes from a blue sugar candy he mixes in it. But the smack in the mix makes it highly addictive. Right from the first hit.”

“How much does it cost? Heroin isn’t cheap.”

“Ain’t none of it cheap. But here’s the math. A kilo of coke costs from fifteen to twenty grand. A key of smack from Mexico-which tends to be the cheaper black tar stuff but still is every bit as deadly as any from, say, Afghanistan-can be had for about that much, and on up to fifty, sixty grand a key. All depending on supply and demand, of course.”

“Of course,” Payne said darkly.

“So, understanding the target demographic-kids-they take the cheapest black tar they can get and make the cheese. Then they sell it at an affordable two bucks a bump.”

“Target demographic”?

Sounds like Chad’s buzzwords.

And probably Skipper’s…

“Cheese is about ten percent heroin,” Byrth went on. “Get them hooked on that, then when their body craves more, move them up to the real thing. And once they’ve had a good taste of the lovely effects of withdrawal, they’re up to a hundred- or two-hundred-a-day habit.”

“Jesus! That’s insidious. Snorting smack makes it easiser to get hooked. I’ve always thought that most people stayed away from heroin because of its difficulty. Especially the needle part.”

Although that needle phobia didn’t stop my lovely Penny Detweiler from doing herself in with that shit.

“Yeah, Matt, it is insidious. El Gato and his ilk started out supplying inner-city convenience stores. Ones close to middle schools and high schools. Next thing we knew, the nonprofit and state-funded rehab clinics and the halfway houses were maxed out. They were overrun with young Hispanic kids who had nowhere else to go. Their families, often single moms, were already on some type of government program-things like Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children, Section Eight Housing, et cetera. And it got worse because these rehab clinics and halfway houses are geared for teenagers, college kids, adults. Not for middle-schoolers. So that became a problem-first keeping the age groups separated, and then protecting the youngest from being preyed on.”

“I’m afraid to ask, but in what way?”

“Free smack. It wasn’t unusual at all for the girls to be bribed. They either were lured away from the overfilled facilities, or they ran away. And after they turned that first trick, they found they’d do anything for their next high. And some boys were no better.”

“Jesus! Middle-schoolers? What is that, twelve, thirteen years old?”

“Yeah. And sadly, it really wasn’t considered a ‘problem’ until cheese became chic in the suburbs, until kids there started getting strung out-and dying. And suddenly it was a problem. The difference was that the families in suburbia could by and large afford to send their kids off to a decent rehab. And having your golden straight-A teenager in drug rehab simply became a soccer mom’s dirty little secret.”

“What drove the kids to do that?”

“The usual. Peer pressure. The desire to fit a clique. That cute little blonde with the ponytail? The one trying to keep the weight off to make the cheer-leader or gymnastics squad? The cheese works like cocaine to suppress the appetite-plus the added benefit of a great high.”

Payne shook his head. He drove along in silence.

Is that what happened, ultimately, with Becca?

Did Skipper do that to her? “So,” Payne finally said as he exited off the expressway, “getting back to the runner you collared at A and M.”

“The punk had tried to throw away his cell phone during the chase; actually did toss it, but we recovered it. It was a pay-as-you-go one, paid for with cash. But the call list on the phone’s internal memory had a steady string of calls to the area codes here. And I’m betting that the phone records we subpoenaed from the cellular service provider will have more of them.”

“What about the cache of texts?”

Byrth nodded. “The text messages could have been a mini gold mine. But because this punk wasn’t very far up the ladder, there wasn’t much detail. When our computer forensic people worked on the memory chip, they uncovered a few new names and numbers and data that had been ‘deleted.’ So we’re working on connecting those dots.”

Payne made the turn off Race onto Eighth, then just down the block made a left into the asphalt parking lot behind the Philadelphia Police Department headquarters.

“Ah,” Byrth said. “So this is the famous Roundhouse.”

Payne pulled into a slot marked HOMICIDE. He shut off the car and turned to Byrth. “So does that cover all of this El Gato’s MO?”