Michael Lockhart sat across from Detective Joe Murray at a cramped desk on the second floor of Southwest Detectives' headquarters at 55th and Pine. They were so close, their knees practically touched.

There was something inevitable about this moment, this pairing — the cop and the con man who had both spent their lives trying to fill the shadows that were cast by their fathers. Had they grown up with different role models, it's easy to imagine their paths would have never crossed.

Murray didn't know what Lockhart would say, if anything, about the morning of Aug. 18 on Angora Terrace, when 31-year-old Lawrence Downs was shot 14 times.

But Murray had leverage. He had tracked down surveillance footage of Lockhart and three others fleeing the scene. Using the mug shot database, he'd painstakingly identified one getaway driver solely from a tattoo on his forearm. And Downs, recovering in his hospital bed where he lay paralyzed, had told him Lockhart had been one of the shooters who tried to kill him.

Still, the interrogation could be tricky. Lockhart wasn't just the son of a murdered drug dealer; he had a politician's knack for schmoozing, and was cunning enough to pull off living parallel lives, volunteering with the anti-violence nonprofit Philadelphia CeaseFire and selling guns to the ATF, all the while creating mayhem with a West Philly drug gang.

However Lockhart was going to play it, Murray knew pounding the desk and demanding answers weren't going to get him anywhere.

Lockhart mentioned that he did a lot of volunteer work for CeaseFire, and casually dropped the names of politicians and law enforcement types he'd met through the nonprofit.

Murray thought Lockhart was trying to convince him they were both on the same team, a couple of guys who were each doing their part to address Philly's gun-violence epidemic.

He kept the tone light for the first couple of hours. Then he offered Lockhart a break and a free meal. After Lockhart dined on chicken fingers, fries and a Coke, they started talking again.

It was about 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 12 when Murray started putting Lockhart's words down on paper.

There was something inevitable about this moment, this pairing - the cop and the con man who had both spent their lives trying to fill the shadows that were cast by their fathers.

"Michael," he said, "please tell me what you know about the events leading up to the shooting that occurred on August 18, 2015."

Jerry "Boog" Brooks, the head of a small West Philly drug gang, had asked one of his friends, Kerry Foster, to hide three of his guns for a few days, Lockhart told the detective.

The guns inexplicably vanished from Foster's house on Aug. 11. Lockhart had been there that night, hanging out for a few hours while Foster inked a tattoo on his ribs.

He carefully steered Murray toward his accomplices while minimizing his role.

Another friend had actually taken the guns, Lockhart insisted. He gave the name of someone who, conveniently, was behind bars on an unrelated murder charge.

Murray listened carefully, acutely alert despite the long day.

A neighbor claimed he saw Downs and two other men, Hassan Williams, and Kashif Love, near Foster's house the day after the weapons disappeared, Lockhart explained to the detective. Brooks called for all three to be murdered, he said.