THREE 

AS THE rookie was sobbing, a tall man in a dirty gray hoodie cut across Eakins Oval. 

When he spied the two cops, he stopped in his tracks. He pulled his phone from his pocket and snapped a photo. Then he inched closer, a stunned expression on his face. 

“Hey, back off!” Parks shouted. “Crime scene!” 

Too late. The hoodie guy snapped another photo and ran away, thumbing something into his phone as he went. 

“Hey! Stop!” 

A photo of the vic was going to be online in a matter of seconds. Shit! But what was she supposed to do, chase after him and — what? Confiscate his phone? While leaving a rookie alone at his first murder scene? 

It turned out that Parks had been right to worry; when the two images of the blood-covered man in the Maserati hit social media, it was over. The news traveled worldwide at breakneck speed. People enlarged the grainy photos until the victim’s face was pixelated but identifiable. The reaction everywhere: utter astonishment. 

Some claimed the photos were photoshopped or deep-faked. But most who saw the images believed they were real. The powder-blue Maserati alone was confirmation of the victim’s identity. 

Online there was collective grief and an instantaneous outpouring of tributes. There were also macabre jokes, as always. And even though it was well after midnight, locals began to gather at the scene, arriving from Center City and Spring Garden and Fairmount and West Philly. As the crowds got bigger, more images from the crime scene spread online. Some people took awkward selfies in an attempt to place themselves in this historic moment. Some simply stared in shock. Some wept inconsolably, held by their friends. 

Fortunately Parks and Sheplavy had been joined by half a dozen other officers from the Ninth, and they’d established a wide perimeter around the car, so between that and the wall of bodies, the victim’s face was largely blocked from view. 

Unless you were in a helicopter. 

Parks had been right about local TV news always keeping an ear on police radio. An overnight staffer chained to the assignment desk at the local NBC affiliate heard the word Maserati and had a cop friend run the license plate on a whim — maybe some local CEO or sports figure had been involved in an embarrassing traffic accident. 

But when the Maserati’s owner’s name popped up, the staffer knocked over his Diet Coke in his scramble to get to the assignment editor. 

That station’s news chopper was kept at Penn’s Landing, which was thirty minutes from any location in the city. The art museum was so close, however, that the chopper was circling overhead within five minutes. A minute after it arrived, the station was interrupting the local broadcast to go live with footage from the air. 

Until they had official word from the Philly police brass — that meant a captain or higher — the station couldn’t confirm exactly who was in the powder-blue Maserati. 

But the word was already out, and distraught fans on the street knew the truth. 

Philadelphia would never be the same.