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sitting across
the bar from him at that moment, a man who had the blood of at least two people
on his hands, a murderer named Eduardo Robles.
     
        On a
hot summer afternoon in 2007, Eduardo Robles and his girlfriend were walking
down a street in Fishtown. According to Robles, at around 1:30 p.m. a car
cruised slowly by, the deep bass of a rap song rattling the windows of nearby
buildings. Someone in that car pointed a gun out the window and fired. Robles's
girlfriend, a seventeen-year- old named Lina Laskaris, was struck three times.
        Robles
called 911, and when he arrived at the police station, after having his
statement taken by a patrol officer on the street, a divisional detective
assumed that the young man was a suspect, not a witness. The detective cuffed
Robles and stuck him in a holding cell.
        Byrne
got the call at eleven p.m. When Robles arrived at the Roundhouse - nearly ten
hours after the incident - Byrne removed the cuffs, sat Robles down in one of
the interrogation rooms. Robles said he was hungry and thirsty. Byrne sent out
for hoagies and Mountain Dew, then began to question Robles.
         They danced.
        At
three o'clock the next morning Robles rolled, and admitted it had been he who'd
shot Lina Laskaris. Byrne arrested Robles for murder at 3:06 a.m., read him his
Miranda warnings.
        The
problem with the case was that, according to the law, the police had six hours
to determine someone's status as a witness or a suspect.
        Three
days later the grand jury came back with a no-bill because they believed,
rightly so, that the arrest had begun the moment Robles was mistakenly put in
cuffs at the station house. In that moment Robles went from witness to suspect,
and the clock began to tick.
        Five
days after killing his girlfriend in cold blood, Eduardo Robles was a free man,
courtesy of the astonishingly incompetent work of a divisional detective who,
incredibly, due to some unfathomable political connection, had recently been
rewarded for his incompetence with a job in the Homicide Unit, at an increase
in pay.
        That
man's name was Detective Dennis Stansfield.
        Robles
went back to the life and within months was involved in the murder of a man
named Samuel Reese, a night clerk at a bodega in Chinatown. Police believed
that Robles shot Reese twice, took the surveillance disk from the recorder in
the back room, and walked out with sixty-six dollars and a can of brake fluid.
        It
was all circumstantial - no ballistics, no physical evidence, shaky witness
accounts - nothing that would stand up in court. In terms of the reality of the
law, bullshit.
        Byrne
had spent the past two days building a case against Robles, but it was not
going well. Although they had not found the murder weapon, Byrne interviewed
four people who could put Robles in that bodega at that time. None of them were
willing to talk to police, at least not on the record. Byrne had seen the fear
in their eyes. But he also knew that talking to a cop on the street corner, or
in your living room, or even at your place of business was one thing. Talking
to a district attorney in front of a grand jury, under oath, was something
else. Everyone called to testify would understand that committing perjury in
front of a grand jury carried a prison term of five months, twenty-nine days.
And that was for each lie.
        In
the morning Byrne would meet with Michael Drummond, the assistant district
attorney assigned to the Robles case. If they could get four people to
implicate Robles, they might be able to get a search warrant for Robles's car
and apartment, perhaps finding something that would create a daisy chain, and
the evidence would roll in.
        Or
maybe it wouldn't get that far. Maybe something would happen to Robles.
        You
never knew about such things in a city like Philadelphia.
        Were
the police partially responsible for the death of Samuel Reese? In