7522 Battersby Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 1:55
Tony Harris returned to his bed, silently cursing himself for not having hit the john before he’d crawled under the sheets two hours earlier. Harris—a thirty-eight-year-old homicide detective in the Philadelphia Police Department who was slight of build and starting to bald—then clicked off the lamp on his bedside table. As he put his head on his pillow and sighed, wondering when—or even if—he’d start to drift off back to sleep, a monstrous BOOM shook the house.
It reverberated through the darkened room, knocking loose a picture frame from the wall, its glass breaking when it hit the floor.
“Holy shit!” he said aloud, sitting bolt upright and clicking on the lamp.
He looked toward the front window.
What in hell was that?
Did a damn gas leak just blow up the middle school?
Austin Meehan Middle School was a half-block down the tree-lined residential street.
Harris quickly got out of bed, crossed the room, and pulled back the
curtain to look out the window. On either side of Battersby, the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood had a series of nearly identical, neatly kept comfortable two-story brick duplexes with large lawns. The homes—some of which now with their lights flicking on—had stone façades on the front and garages in the rear, on a common alleyway. Because Harris’s garage served more as a storage unit than a car park, he left his city-issued Ford Crown Victoria sitting at the curb in front of his house.
