Charlie Mann was a cop, one who was able to blend into environments that other officers couldn’t. He could adjust his style from Brooks Brothers to FUBU, or his dialect from Ebonics to geek-speak. He was a new kind of policeman, and he was homicide’s fastest-rising star.

Mann had been selected to go to the train station when homicide received a tip about a meeting between a suspected hit man and the drug dealer who employed him. The state police would be assisting on this one, and homicide couldn’t afford any screw ups, especially with hundreds of commuters on the platform and on the trains. Mann knew that, and while he wasn’t about to violate the trust that they’d placed in him, he didn’t intend to let the suspect get away, either.

Pulling his iPhone from its case, Mann opened his pictures folder and clicked on the mug shot of the person he’d come to arrest.

The suspect didn’t look like a killer. His freckled face was framed by stringy red hair. He sported a silver stud nose ring. His lips were thin and chapped. From the look of him, he would be more comfortable with a skateboard than with a gun. Yet there was something haunting about his lifeless and cruel gray eyes.

Beyond those eyes was an addict who’d traveled to Philadelphia for the purest heroin on the East Coast and who’d learned along the way that drug dealers paid well for murder. Once he was armed with that knowledge, it was easy to transition from killing himself with needles to killing other people with guns. Over the last six months, he’d killed five times, and each time that he’d received his payment of drugs and cash, he’d come closer to dying himself.

As Detective Mann stared at the suspect’s picture on the screen, the iPhone began to vibrate. The mug shot disappeared and was replaced with the words Incoming call. He reached up to his ear and tapped the button on his Bluetooth headset.

“Hello?”

“I think our boy’s walking up to the platform,” a woman’s voice said in a calm whisper. “Jeans and a blue T-shirt, about thirty yards to your left.”

“Yeah, honey, I miss you, too,” Mann said, speaking in code as he moved through the crowd to get a better look at the suspect.

The blond-haired woman who was feeding him the information was sitting on a bench at the far end of the platform. In her pantsuit and heels, with Styrofoam coffee cup in hand, she looked to be just another passenger. In truth, Mary Smithson was the state police profiler who’d spent months studying heroin addicts from Philadelphia’s drug-infested Kensington neighborhood, eventually narrowing the list down to a single suspect. She was there to provide technical support for the operation.

“So what are the kids doing?” Mann asked.