LEX TALIONIS OFFICES . . . POLICE WITHHOLDING NAMES PENDING NOTIFICATION OF FAMILIES OF THE DECEASED . . . BREAKING NEWS . . .
Then the camera cut away from the shot of the sidewalk and the TV screen suddenly filled with an awkwardly tight shot. It showed the jowly face of an almost bald man wearing a dark rumpled suit coat and a wrinkled white shirt with no necktie. The emergency lights bathed him in pulses of red and blue.
“Oh, hell!” Matt said. “That’s a bit more of good ole Five-Eff than I’d care to see.”
Then, in a jerky motion, the camera lens pulled back.
Amanda looked at the TV screen. She recognized the man, who now was shown head-to-toe in front of a nice but old brick building. He was in his mid-forties, short and stout with a small defined gut. He had a round face and wore, perched at the end of his bulbous nose, tiny round reading eyeglasses.
He stood addressing a small crowd of news media types. Reporters held microphones to the portly man’s face, almost touching his big nose, as well as camera lenses, both still and video.
“‘Five-Eff ’?” she repeated. “I thought Frank Fuller was ‘Four-Eff.’”
Payne turned to her and smiled. He said, “Fucking Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth. That makes five.”
[THREE]
Matt Payne’s family had known Francis Fuller’s as long as Matt could remember. They had many connections, both social and professional, and while Payne did not actively dislike the man, he had on more than one occasion called him Five-Eff to his face—and that almost always had happened when Fuller was being a pompous ass.
Payne otherwise addressed Fuller as “Francis,” knowing full well (and purposely ignoring) that Fuller preferred the more masculine “Frank.”
Fuller boldly and shamelessly touted the fact that he traced his family lineage—and what he called its puritanical ways—back to Benjamin Franklin. Fuller fancied himself a devout Franklinite, mimicking his ancestor from his looks to his philosophical beliefs. Fuller regularly sprinkled his conversations with quotes from Poor Richard’s Almanac and other Ben Franklin sources. And like the multitalented Franklin, Francis Fuller was involved in all kinds of enterprises, private and public.
Payne somewhat begrudgingly admired Fuller for having built on the wealth he’d been born into, because he himself had enjoyed being raised, as he called it, “comfortably”—though certainly not nearly on the level of the super-wealthy Fullers—and he’d seen many others piss away vast sums of money that they had done nothing to earn and, he believed, thus did not deserve.
Fuller’s primary company—Richard Saunders Holdings, which he’d taken from the name Franklin had used to write Poor Richard’s Almanac—had many entities. There was KeyCom, the Fortune 500 nationwide telecommunications corporation that he’d built city by city by buying up local community cable television providers. And KeyCargo Import-Exports, which was one of the largest leasers of warehouse space at the Port of Philadelphia, which was easily visible from another of Fuller’s holdings—the Hops Haus Tower—which fell under his KeyProperties.
With so much financial wealth came a great deal of influence, and Francis Fuller had political connections from Washington, D.C., to Harrisburg to Philly’s City Hall and police department. He was more or less happy to share with all both his wealth and his opinions, though sometimes far more of the latter than the former. And in terms of the latter, Fuller was a devout believer in the Bible’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
And so Francis Fuller funded and personally promoted a nonprofit organization he called Lex Talionis, from the Latin phrase for the “law of talion,” which more or less translated as “an eye for an eye”—which, of course, was the meting out of punishments that matched the crimes. The logotype of Lex Talionis had the “o” as a stylized eyeball.
The offices for Lex Talionis took up half of the first floor of a five-story brick building on the tree-lined corner of North Third and Arch Streets. Fuller said he felt the location on Arch, in the historic section of Old City, with the Delaware River just blocks to the east and the Liberty Bell on display just blocks to the west, was more appropriate than any shiny marble-and-glass high-rise office building.
Francis Franklin Fuller V’s belief in the fundamental philosophy of Lex Talionis was strong and unwavering, and there was a good reason for it: Tragedy had struck him personally.
Five years earlier, his wife and their eight-year-old daughter had been driving home in the early evening of a rainy