Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

SIX

By measured steps, Patti Cassidy walks her husband into the crowded courtroom, where all is suddenly silence. The jury, the judge, the lawyers-the entire assembly sits transfixed as Police Agent Gene Cassidy stretches his right hand, touches a wooden beam, then guides himself into the witness stand. Patti touches his shoulder, whispers, then retreats to a seat behind the prosecution table.

The clerk rises. “Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth?”

“I do,” says Cassidy, his voice clear.

In a place where partial victories and gray equivocations always seem to dominate, Gene Cassidy’s appearance on the witness stand is a startling moment. Cassidy did not see Terry McLarney and Corey Belt and the other Western men in the hallway, gripping his shoulders with a few attaboys and go-get-’ems before the courtroom doors opened. He cannot see his wife, primly dressed and eight months’ pregnant, in the gallery’s front row. He cannot see one of the jurors, the young white girl, crying softly in the back tier. He cannot see the cold rage on the judge’s face, and he cannot see Butchie Frazier, the man who blinded him with two.38 rounds, staring with strange fascination from the defense table a few feet away.

The courtroom is crowded, the gallery packed with Western officers in uniform, a show of solidarity that does not extend to the departmental brass. The Western District commander is not in attendance, nor is the chief of patrol or any of the deputy commissioners-a fact noted with some bitterness by the rank and file. Take a bullet for the company and you’re on your own; the bosses may show up at the hospital and they’ll definitely be on hand for the funeral, but the departmental memory is short. Cassidy’s appearance in court will be witnessed by no one above the rank of sergeant. The space remaining in the gallery is occupied by the Cassidy family, a handful of reporters, curious courthouse regulars and a few friends and relatives of Butchie Frazier’s.

At one point during the jury selection, his younger brother, Derrick, appeared in the corridor just outside the courtroom, where prosecution witnesses are seated before their testimony. He eyefucked one, talked trash to another and then was suddenly confronted by McLarney and two Western men, who offered him an opportunity to leave as a free man. Given the alternative of becoming a projectile launched into the rear of a police wagon, Derrick Frazier issued a few more obscenities and then turned on his heel toward the St. Paul Street exit.

“Okay,” said McLarney to a Western officer. “I guess we put him on the list, too.”

The uniform shook his head. “That motherfucker…”

“Fuck him,” said McLarney, unsmiling. “One of these days, we’ll be chalking him off.”

For McLarney, the Cassidy trial was unrelieved agony, an ordeal of empty hours spent in courtroom hallways and prosecutors’ offices. Because he was at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse as a witness, McLarney was sequestered, and whatever happened behind the thick double doors of that second-floor courtroom was lost to him. As the most important criminal trial of his life lurched toward a verdict, McLarney could only watch a parade of witnesses from a bench in the hall, then buttonhole the prosecutors, Howard Gersh and Gary Schenker, during breaks:

“How’s it going in there?”

“Are we winning?”

“How’d Gene do?”

“Is Butchie gonna testify?”

Yesterday, McLarney spent the hours pacing the length of the second-floor hall and trying to calculate the odds. A 40 percent chance for first-degree, maybe 50 percent if Yolanda sticks to the grand jury testimony she gave against Butchie in February after passing the polygraph. Another 40 percent for second-degree attempted murder or attempted manslaughter. Maybe 20 percent for a hung jury or acquittal. At least, McLarney reasoned, they managed to land a decent judge. If you were a lawyer, Elsbeth Bothe could drive you crazy with her penchant for questioning witnesses from the bench, and, true, she had a few convictions reversed on appeal for commentary from the bench. But more important, from McLarney’s point of view, Bothe never got soft at the point of sentencing. If Butchie Frazier lost on points, Bothe would surely bang him.

Like any other appointee to the Baltimore circuit court, Bothe could judge men with the confidence that comes from incumbency and an elective term of fifteen years. Her voice was a quiet rasp, a perfect vehicle to express an undying irritation with prosecutors, attorneys, defendants and the criminal justice system in general.

From the bench, she was master of all she saw, and what she saw was a courtroom carved from the northwestern corner of the ornate courthouse, a paneled courtroom with high ceilings and portraits of long-dead judges glaring down from the walls. At first glance, it was not the sort of place where questions of life and death ought to be decided; whatever dignity was conveyed by the dark woods of the judge’s bench and trial tables was utterly corrupted by the jumble of insulated pipe and metal ventilation work suspended from the ceiling. From certain angles, the judge appeared to preside in a courtroom created from a government office building’s basement.

Elsbeth Bothe came to the Baltimore bench from the defense bar, where she had been one of the most talented attorneys in what was then a fledgling public defenders office. Many a man walked free of the Baltimore City Jail because Bothe had been his advocate, yet she could recall only one client among the hundreds she had defended whom she actually knew with any certainty to be innocent. It was, on reflection, the most appropriate history for a judge whose courtroom had become a cluttered stage for a large share of Baltimore’s homicide prosecutions. Black, or brown, or on select occasions an occasional white stray, they were brought to the Calvert Street courthouse in dull, dirty jail vans, then led in handcuffs and legchains from lockup to courtroom and back again to lockup. Poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, they were the daily feed for the trough, and whether by plea or verdict, they existed only to be consumed. Day after day, the lawyers were fed, the prisons were filled, the machine rattled forward. By choice and circumstance, Bothe was one of three city judges who, among them, handled more than 60 percent of the hundred and fifty or so murder prosecutions that made their way to circuit court each year. It was a grim, pathetic parade, a chain of human misery for which Bothe was psychologically as well as temperamentally suited.

Her chambers said as much: Amid the Maryland code books and legal texts rested a collection of human skulls-mostly manufactured caricatures, one the real McCoy-to rival any anthropologist’s closet. On the walls were original front pages from old turn-of-the-century Police Gazettes, each one recounting the details of some shocking spasm of violence. To homicide detectives, such a peculiarity was especially comforting, assuring them that Elsbeth Bothe-like any self-respecting cop-was capable of enjoying the best parts of a good murder.

Not that Bothe was some kind of hanging judge. Like everyone else compelled to deal with murder on wholesale basis, she was not above taking a light plea if it helped clear a crowded court docket of a cheap murder or two. This is the reality in Baltimore and every other American jurisdiction, where plea bargaining is the only way to keep the criminal justice system from strangling on its own caseload. The trick-for prosecutors as well as judges-is knowing which cases cannot be pled down.

By any reasoning, the case against Butchie Frazier could not be pled-not for anything that Butchie’s attorney could in good conscience accept. Prosecuting the case in tandem, Gersh and Schenker had offered fifty years, knowing that the maximum for first-degree attempted murder and a handgun charge would be life and twenty, which shakes out to about eighty years in all. Given the state’s parole guidelines, the ultimate difference to Butchie was maybe five years or so, but with any career criminal that kind of margin isn’t worth talking about. Guys like Butchie Frazier hear prosecutors talking double digits and their eyes glaze over.

As a result, the case went to a jury of twelve: eleven women, one man; nine black, three white. It was a fairly typical city panel, which, if it did nothing else of note, had managed to at least stay awake throughout the state’s case-no small accomplishment in a courthouse where judges are occasionally obliged to have a sheriff’s deputy nudge juror number three back into lucidity.

The jurors were downright fascinated by Yolanda Marks, who was a picture of both anger and fear on the witness stand. Yolanda had tried time and again to back away from her grand jury testimony in her pretrial interviews with prosecutors. Her courtroom answers to Schenker’s questions were all cold and monosyllabic and much of her testimony was laced with tears. Still, she gave up Appleton Street as Butchie glared at her from a few feet away.

Yolanda was followed by others, by McLarney testifying about the crime scene and Gary Tuggle, one of the two detail officers, testifying to the search for a suspect. Young, black, attractive, Tuggle was a necessity for this jury-a racial counterweight to Butchie Frazier, a subtle suggestion to black jurors that the system itself wasn’t altogether white. Then came the couple who had been walking south on Appleton Street from the corner bar, both of whom recounted the same shooting scenario as Yolanda, though both testified that they were too far away to identify the gunman. Still, they confirmed Yolanda’s account.

Finally, there was the kid from the City Jail, another murder defendant who had quarreled with Butchie when both were in pretrial detention. Butchie had told him about the shooting, offering details that only the shooter could know.

“What else did the defendant tell you?” asked Schenker.

“He said the police was roughing him up, so he pulled out his gun and shot him in the head. He said he wished he would have killed the bitch.”

The ultimate ghetto insult, it hung there in the courtroom for a moment and then fell on dead silence. A young man, blind for life, so casually denigrated by the man who had held the gun. Cassidy. A bitch.

Gary Schenker paused for effect as two jurors shook their heads and Bothe lifted a hand to her mouth. Asked whether he was offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony, the kid shook his head. This, he told the jury, was personal.

“I showed him a picture of my girl,” the kid explained. “He said when he got out he was going to have her.”

That was their case. Everything that could be done had been done before Gene Cassidy made his way to the stand. Cassidy was the emotional kicker, the unspoken appeal to a jury of Butchie Frazier’s peers, a jury that now sits staring at the young man on the witness stand, a young man who cannot stare back. Gene Cassidy is the psychological culmination of the state’s case, the last tug on the jury’s heartstring before the defense takes over.

Already the jury has heard the University of Maryland surgeon describe the path of each bullet in clinical detail and assess the slim chance of anyone’s surviving such wounds. Yet here is Cassidy, back from the grave in his dark blue suit to face the man who failed to kill him.

“Agent Cassidy,” says Bothe, solicitous, “there’s a microphone in front of you… if you could speak into it.”

Cassidy reaches forward and touches the metal.

Schenker then asks the preliminary questions. “Agent Cassidy, how long have you been a Baltimore city police officer…”

As Schenker continues, the eyes of several jurors bounce from Cassidy to Frazier, then back to Cassidy. The two men are close to each other, separated by no more than six feet, and Frazier is staring with genuine curiosity at the side of Cassidy’s head. Jet black hair covers the temple wound, and the facial injuries have healed perfectly. Only the eyes reveal the damage: one blue and vacant, the other translucent and distorted.

“And you are totally blind, correct?” asks Schenker.

“Yes, I am,” says Cassidy. “I’ve also lost my senses of smell and taste.”

It is the most precious kind of testimony. In every murder trial, the victim exists for the jury as an abstract entity, as a part of the process represented by nothing more than an autopsy report and some 3-by-5 crime scene photographs. The defendant, however, remains flesh and blood for the duration of the trial. In the hands of a competent defense attorney, his humanity is better displayed than the inhumanity of the crime, his ordinariness is more apparent than the extraordinary acts of which he is accused. A good defense attorney sits close to his client, touches him on the shoulder to get his attention, puts an arm around him to show the jurors that he likes this man, that he believes in him. Some lawyers go so far as to give defendants mints or hard candies, telling clients to pull them out at a quiet moment and offer one to the lawyer, perhaps even to the prosecutor, seated a few feet away. See, ladies and gentlemen, he’s human. He likes mints. He can share.

But Gene Cassidy denies Butchie Frazier the advantage. In this courtroom he, too, is flesh and blood.

Schenker continues: “On that particular evening, what if anything do you recall…”

Cassidy grimaces slightly before answering. “I have no recollection of the incident… the shooting,” he says slowly. “The last thing I remember is being at my father-in-law’s house in Pennsylvania earlier that afternoon.”

“Can you recall going to work that day?”

“I know that I must have,” says Cassidy. “But I can’t remember anything after my father-in-law’s house. They tell me that’s pretty common with these kinds of injuries-”

“Officer Cassidy,” asks Bothe, interrupting. “I take it that’s your wife who escorted you to the stand.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“And by the look of things,” the judge says, unwilling to let the moment pass, “I would say that she’s expecting…”

“Yes. Due on the Fourth of July.”

The Fourth of July. The defense attorney shakes his head.

“Is this your first child?” asks the judge, glancing toward the jury box.

“Yes it is.”

“Thank you, Officer Cassidy. I was curious.”

The beleaguered defense counsel has nowhere to go. What do you do with the testimony of a blinded police officer whose pregnant wife waits on a nearby bench? What do you ask on cross examination? Where do you make your points? Where, in such a scene, do you find a place for your client to breathe?

“No questions, your honor.”

“The witness is excused. Thank you, Agent Cassidy.”

Out in the corridor, McLarney watches the double doors open at the recess. The jurors are already upstairs in the jury room, Bothe is already back in chambers. Patti walks out with Gene on her arm, followed by Schenker.

“Hey, Gene, how’d it go?” asks McLarney.

“Okay,” says Cassidy. “I think I was good. What’d you think, Patti?”

“You were great, Gene.”

“What did Butchie do? Did he look at me?”

“Yeah, Gene,” says a friend from the Western. “He was staring right at you.”

“Staring? Was he eyefucking me?”

“No,” says the officer. “He just looked real strange, you know.” Cassidy nods.

“You hurt him, Gene,” says a Western man. “You got him good.”

McLarney claps Cassidy on the back, then walks down the hall with Patti and Gene’s mother and brother, both down from New Jersey for the trial. As the family heads upstairs to the law library to wait out the defense case, McLarney puts a hand on Cassidy’s arm and asks a string of questions about the testimony.

“I wish I could have been in there, Gene,” McLarney tells him on the stairs.

“Yeah,” says Cassidy. “I think I did okay, though. What did you think, Patti?”

Patti Cassidy reassures her husband again, but McLarney is too nervous to be satisfied by one opinion. Minutes later, he’s again pacing the courthouse corridor, buttonholing every lawyer, spectator and sheriff ’s deputy who walks out of Bothe’s court.

“How’d Gene do? What was the jury’s reaction?”

McLarney frowns at every assurance. The cost of following the most important jury trial of your life from a corridor is that you’re never willing to believe what you hear. Cassidy endured months of speech therapy, McLarney reminds the others. Did he hear the questions? How was his speech?

“He did great, Terry,” says Schenker.

“What’d Butchie do?” asks McLarney.

“He just kept staring at him,” says a Western man. “He kept staring at the side of Gene’s face.”

The side of Gene’s face. The wound track. Butchie Frazier staring at his handiwork, wondering what the hell went wrong. That son of a bitch, thinks McLarney, frowning at the image.

The defense takes the rest of the afternoon, calling a couple of witnesses who insist that Butchie Frazier is the wrong man, that he wasn’t out there at Mosher and Appleton on that fall night. But Frazier himself does not take the stand; his criminal history makes such an act problematic.

“What happened to Officer Cassidy is a tragedy,” declares the defense attorney in his closing argument. “But it is a tragedy we can do nothing about. It would be adding to that tragedy to convict Clifton Frazier based on the evidence the state presented.”

For their own closing, Schenker and Gersh counter in tandem, with Schenker taking the high road and Gersh going low. The high road asks for an impartial examination of the evidence; the low road calls to a communal instinct that may or may not exist.

“Don’t convict Clifton Frazier because the victim in this case is a police officer,” Schenker tells the jurors. “Do so because the evidence demands it… Because Clifton Frazier did not want to go to jail, he shot Officer Cassidy.”

Yet ten minutes later, Gersh stands before the same jury, reminding them that “when a police officer is shot, a little bit of each of us is killed.”

The “thin blue line” speech, thinks McLarney, listening to the closing arguments from the back bench. Every time a cop is shot, the prosecutors wheel out the protect-and-serve imagery. Does the jury believe it? Does anyone believe it anymore? McLarney looks at the twelve faces. They’re listening, at least-all except number nine. She’s looking right through Gersh, McLarney thinks. She’s going to be trouble.

“We can send a message to the Butchie Fraziers of the world that they cannot go out on the street and shoot police officers…”

And then it’s over. Walking single file, the jurors move past the prosecutors, past the defense attorney, past Butchie Frazier, to climb the stairwell to the deliberation room.

Standing with Gersh and Schenker near the courtroom doors, McLarney suddenly encounters Frazier as the defendant, in handcuffs and leg irons, is under escort to the basement lockup. Frazier actually sneers as the two face each other at the edge of the hallway.

“Yeah. Right,” McLarney mutters, fighting hard for control. “Who the…”

Gersh pulls McLarney away. “I think we’ve got it,” the prosecutor tells him. “It’ll take a few hours, but I think we’ve got it. How’d you like our closing?”

McLarney ignores him, staring instead at the procession of Butchie Frazier and his two guards out the courtroom doors and down the second-floor stairs.

“C’mon,” says Gersh, with a light touch on McLarney’s shoulder. “Let’s go find Gene.”

Cassidy is already settled in for the wait, seated with his wife, his mother and his older brother in the back of the nearby jury assembly room. Western uniforms, fresh from their eight-to-four shift, hover around the family, issuing congratulations on the victory sure to come. Out in the hallway, Gersh and Schenker accept congratulations from spectators. As the evening sky fades outside the courtroom windows, two of the Western men organize a pizza run.

“Gene, what do you want on yours?”

“I don’t care, as long as it’s anchovy.”

“What’s the name of the place again?”

“Marco’s. On Exeter Street.”

“We better order now,” says one officer, smiling. “We’ll not be hanging around here long.”

For an hour or so, they are the picture of confidence. For an hour, they are laughing and joking and telling stories from the streets of the Western, stories that always manage to end with someone in handcuffs. Waiting for a verdict they are sure will come quickly, they busy themselves by recounting the best parts of the closing arguments and the details of Gene’s testimony.

But suddenly their optimism is shattered by the news that shouting can be heard near the door to Bothe’s courtroom, shouting that comes from the jury room upstairs. At times, the loudest voices carry out into the courthouse hallway, just outside the room where Gene Cassidy and his family sit amid empty pizza boxes and Styrofoam cups. The mood of the Western men darkens.

Two hours go by, then three. The shouting in the jury room continues, and the wait becomes agonizing.

“I don’t know what to say, Gene,” says Gersh, losing faith. “I gave it my best and I’m afraid it wasn’t enough.”

Four hours brings only a note from the jury forewoman, indicating that the panel is hopelessly deadlocked. Bothe reads the note to the attorneys, then brings the jury downstairs and gives a standard instruction, urging the jurors to return and attempt to reach a verdict.

More shouting.

“This is a crime, Gene,” says Corey Belt. “I can’t believe it.”

Raw doubt is sticking in their throats as the angry voice of one juror carries above the others and is heard at the bottom of the jury room stairs. They always lie, shouts the juror. You got to convince me.

They always lie. Who does? The police? The witnesses? The defendants? Butchie didn’t even testify, so it can’t be him. So who in hell is she talking about? McLarney hears about the remark from a clerk and immediately thinks of juror number nine, the woman who seemed to be looking through Gersh during the closings. It’s her voice, he tells himself. Goddammit, she’s the one.

McLarney swallows hard and retreats to the second-floor corridor, where he paces back and forth in a smoldering rage. There wasn’t enough, he tells himself. I’m losing this jury because I didn’t give them enough. An eyewitness. Corroboration. A jail-house confession. Somehow, it wasn’t enough. As late evening arrives, McLarney finds it harder and harder to go back into the room where Gene is waiting. As he walks back and forth in the marble hallway, several men from the Western come outside to assure him that it doesn’t matter either way.

“Guilty, he goes to prison,” declares one uniform, aman who once served under McLarney in Sector 2. “Not guilty, he goes back out on the street.”

“If he comes back to the Western, he’s dead,” says another, agreeing. “That piece of shit will wish he’d been found guilty.”

Reckless words, but McLarney nods in agreement. In truth, there would be no need for a plan, no elaborate conspiracy. It would simply happen. Butchie Frazier was a stone criminal, and a criminal is nothing if not predictable. Back on the streets of the Western, he would surely do his dark little deeds, and just as surely, every last uniform would be there waiting. No trial, no lawyers, no jury. If Butchie Frazier is set free today, McLarney tells himself, he’ll be dead within a year.

Back in the courtroom, Gersh and Schenker contemplate the alternatives. Fearing the worst, they could go to Frazier’s attorney and offer a plea before the jury returns. But what kind of plea? Frazier already balked at fifty. Thirty? Thirty means parole in as little as ten. Cassidy said from the outset he couldn’t live with ten. But can he live with an acquittal? In the end, the entire discussion is academic; sensing perhaps the same thing as the prosecutors, Butchie Frazier turns down any notion of a negotiated plea.

But the six-hour mark brings another, different note from the forewoman, this one inquiring about the difference between first- and second-degree attempted murder. Guilty. They’re talking guilty in there.

Hearing the latest, the cops in the jury assembly room are suddenly breathing again; a few sidle up to Cassidy and offer congratulations. He shrugs them off. Second-degree, he says, shaking his head. How can they be thinking about second-degree?

“Never mind that, Gene,” says Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who has been through this wait a hundred times. “They’ve turned the corner. They’re coming around.”

Cassidy smiles at the thought. As if to lighten his mood, he asks permission to tell his joke.

“Which joke is this?” asks Belt.

“You know,” says Cassidy. “My joke.”

“Your joke? The one you told before?”

“Yeah,” says Cassidy. “That one.”

Belt shakes his head, smiling. “What do you want to do, Gene? Clear the room?”

“What the hell,” says Biemiller, another Western man. “Tell the joke, Gene.”

Cassidy launches into an unlikely tale of three pieces of string standing outside a barroom, all of whom are thirsty and in want of a beer. A sign on the door says no string will be served.

“The first piece of string goes into the bar and orders a beer,” explains Cassidy, “and the bartender says, ‘Hey, are you a piece of string?’”

The string answers in the affirmative and is escorted from the premises. Some of the cops offer loud, audible yawns. Ignoring them, Cassidy recounts the plight of the second piece of string, which happens to be markedly similar to the first.

“So then the third piece of string rolls around on the ground and ties himself up and gets all messed up before going into the bar, right?”

McLarney wanders in from the hallway, just in time for a punch line he can’t possibly understand.

“And the bartender asks him, ‘Are you a piece of string?’ And the string says, ‘ ’Fraid not.’”

Groans all around.

“Christ, that’s a terrible joke, Gene,” says one of the Western men. “Even for a blind guy, that’s a terrible joke.”

Cassidy laughs. Inside the jury assembly room the tension is gone, the pall of defeat lifted suddenly by the jury forewoman’s casual question. McLarney, too, is relieved, though the idea of a second-degree verdict still doesn’t sit well. As Cassidy launches into another joke, McLarney wanders back into the corridor and slumps onto a hallway bench, his head resting against the cold marble wall. Belt follows him out.

“Butchie’s going to prison,” says McLarney, as much to hear himself say it as for any other reason.

“We need first-degree, bunk,” says Belt, leaning over the bench. “Second-degree don’t cut it.”

McLarney nods in agreement.

Upon the arrival of the forewoman’s note, Gersh and Schenker immediately withdrew any and all plea offers. Judge Bothe tells the prosecutors in her chambers that she’s ready to take a second-degree finding right now if the jurors are unanimous.

“No,” says Gersh with a trace of anger. “Let them do their job.”

The deliberations stretch to more than eight hours, and it is closing on 10:00 P.M. when the courtroom reconvenes and Butchie Frazier is returned from the basement lockup. Cassidy sits in the front bench with his wife, directly behind the prosecutors. McLarney and Belt find seats in the second bench, closer to the door. The jurors come downstairs silently. They do not look at the defendant-a good sign. They do not look at Cassidy-a bad sign. McLarney watches them settle into the jury box, his hands gripping the crease of his pants at both knees.

“Madam forelady,” asks the clerk. “Have you reached a unanimous verdict on the charge of attempted murder in the first degree?”

“Yes we have.”

“How say you to that charge?”

“We find the defendant guilty.”

Gene Cassidy nods slowly, gripping his wife’s hand, as each juror is polled and the Western uniforms give up a soft cheer from the gallery. Several jurors begin to cry. From the trial table, Gersh turns around to scan the crowd, then gives McLarney a thumbs-up sign; McLarney smiles, shakes Belt’s hand and then pumps a fist in the air and leans forward, exhausted by the moment. Butchie Frazier shakes his head, then begins a careful examination of his fingernails.

As Bothe sets a sentencing date and then concludes the proceedings, McLarney is out of his seat and moving toward the hallway, hoping to grab a juror or two and find out what the hell happened up in that room. Near the top of the stairs, a black juror, a younger woman still trying to control her tears, looks at the badge and shrugs off his question.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

McLarney moves on and catches one of the three white jurors; he recognizes her as the girl who was crying during Cassidy’s testimony.

“Miss… miss.”

The girl looks back.

“Miss,” says McLarney, catching up. “I was one of the investigators in the case and I was wondering what happened with the jury.”

The girl nods.

“Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

Reluctantly, the girl agrees.

“I was the lead investigator,” McLarney tells her, a little embarrassed at the intensity he can in no way conceal. “What was it that hung you all up for so long?”

The girl shakes her head. “A lot of them didn’t care. I mean not at all. It was crazy.”

“They didn’t care?”

“Not at all.”

“What didn’t they care about?”

“The entire thing. They didn’t care about any of it.”

McLarney is stunned. Bombarding the young girl with questions, he begins piecing together eight hours of rancorous debate in which race and indifference played dominant roles.

The girl explains that two of the three white jurors argued from the beginning for a first-degree verdict, just as two of the younger black jurors had insisted on acquittal, contending that the police had put every witness up to testifying in an effort to convict someone-anyone-of shooting a white officer. That, they explained, was why all the police were sitting in court. Frazier’s girlfriend had cried because she had been forced to lie. The other two witnesses were probably drunk, coming from the bar. The kid from the city jail testified because he had cut a deal for himself.

The girl remembers that a younger black juror declared at one point that she didn’t like police, which prompted another juror to ask what that had to do with anything. I just don’t like them, the first juror replied, adding that anyone who lived in her neighborhood wouldn’t like them either.

The other eight jurors offered little opinion except to say that they would vote for whatever was agreed upon, the young girl tells McLarney. It was Friday, they pointed out, and the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. They wanted to go home.

McLarney listens in amazement. “What brought you all around to first-degree?” he asks.

“I wasn’t going to budge and that other woman, the one in the back row, she wasn’t going to change her mind either. She was for first-degree from the very beginning, too. After a while, everyone wanted to go home, I guess.”

McLarney shakes his head, incredulous. He has been a cop long enough to know that there is no understanding juries, but this is somehow more than he can take. The man who tried to kill Gene Cassidy has been given the right verdict for the wrong reasons.

The girl seems to read his mind. “I swear,” she says, “if that’s the way the system works, you can have it.”

Two hours later at the Market Bar, the beer gets good to McLarney and he asks the girl to tell him the whole sordid story again. The girl obliges. A nineteen-year-old waitress at a downtown sports bar, she came to the Market with the cops and prosecutors and the Cassidy family at McLarney’s insistence. She was a hero, he told her, and she deserved a beer. He listens to her alone for a few minutes, then begins calling over others from the Western to add to the audience.

“Vince, c’mere.”

Moulter walks over from the bar.

“This is Vince Moulter,” he says to the young juror. “He worked with Gene. Tell him the part about how the one juror said she thought Butchie was cute.”

Two tables away, Gene Cassidy sips quietly at a soda, laughing at the occasional joke. He and Patti will be there for an hour or two, long enough for McLarney to bring the young juror by for an introduction an hour or so later.

“Thank you,” says Cassidy to the girl. “You know you did the right thing.”

“I know it,” she says, a little unnerved. “Good luck to you, with the baby and all.”

McLarney listens to the exchange and smiles from the bar, already a little bit drunk. The gathering plays out until it is soon a little after one in the morning and Nicky comes out from behind the bar to begin cleaning tables. Cassidy is gone, followed by Belt and Tuggle and Gersh. McLarney, Moulter, Biemiller and a few others remain as the young juror finally gathers up her things.

“We’re going down to Clinton Street after we close this place,” McLarney tells her. “You’re welcome to come.”

“What’s Clinton Street?”

“Hallowed ground,” jokes another cop.

Even before the girl can answer, McLarney feels the awkwardness of his own suggestion. The end of Clinton Street is the best hole in the Southeastern District, but it’s nothing more than a rotting wharf. This girl here is normal. A civilian.

“Clinton Street is this pier a few minutes from here,” McLarney explains, embarrassed. “Vince is going to go get some beer and we’re going to meet him there. It’s no big deal.”

“I’ve got to get home,” she says, uncomfortably. “Really.”

“Okay, then,” says McLarney, relieved in a way. “Vince can drive you to your car.”

“Thanks for the beer,” she says. “I’ve got to say, I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but it’s been an interesting experience. Thanks.”

“No,” says McLarney. “Thank you.”

Vince Moulter leaves with the girl. McLarney finishes his beer and drops a tip on the bar for Nicky. He checks himself for car keys, wallet, badge, gun-the usual barroom inventory that tells McLarney he’s good to go.

“You thought she’d want to go to Clinton Street?” asks Biemiller, looking at him with raised eyebrows.

“You don’t get it,” McLarney tells him, irritated. “She’s a hero.”

Biemiller smiles.

“Who’s coming?” asks McLarney.

“You, me, Vince, maybe a couple of the others. I told Vince to get a couple cases.”

They leave in separate cars, driving east and south through the rowhouse neighborhoods of Fells Point and Canton. They pick up Clinton Street at the harbor’s edge, then drive south for a quarter mile, where the road dead-ends in the shadow of the Lehigh Cement towers. To the right, as they spill from their cars, is a corrugated iron warehouse. To the left, a battered shipping terminal. The night is warm and the harbor water gives off a slight, garbage scow stench.

Ten minutes behind the others, Moulter shows up with two cases of Coors Light. McLarney and the other Western hands pick up where they left off, their voices growing louder, less restrained, in the warm spring night. Moulter finds an FM station and cranks the car stereo. An hour passes with nothing more than shop talk and station house humor; McLarney does his bit, tossing a few amusing homicide tales into the kitty.

Soon there are two dozen silver empties bobbing in the harbor waters or lying dead against the metal side of the warehouse.

“A toast,” says Biemiller.

“To the Western.”

“No. To Gene.”

“To Gene.”

They drink and Moulter cranks the radio higher. It is several minutes before they notice a lone figure, a foreman perhaps, near the warehouse gate.

Biemiller sees him first.

“Sarge. Over there.”

McLarney pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. The foreman is just standing there, staring at them.

“Don’t worry about it,” McLarney tells them. “I’ll handle this.”

McLarney grabs a fresh can-a peace offering of sorts-and walks toward the warehouse gate. Leaning over the railing of a metal landing, the foreman stares down with undisguised contempt. McLarney smiles back apologetically. “How’s it going?” he says.

The man spits. “Ain’t you assholes got nothing better to do than come down here all drunk and raising hell? Who the hell you think you are?”

McLarney looks down at his shoes, then back up at the foreman’s face. His voice is only a little bit better than a whisper. “I don’t suppose,” he says, “that you’d want to come down here and say that.”

The foreman doesn’t move.

“I didn’t think so.”

“Fuck you,” the man replies, turning back through the gate. “I’m calling the cops.”

McLarney saunters back to the end of the pier, where the other revelers look at him quizzically.

“What’d he say?” asks Moulter.

McLarney shrugs. “We reached an understanding. He’s calling the police and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Somewhere close.”

“Calverton?”

“Calverton.”

The beers are quickly divided and they pile into three cars. At the sound of the engines, the foreman runs back to the gate, checking license tags. They race up Clinton Street with their headlights out, fugitives in their own city.

“Terry, maybe we ought to go home,” says a younger officer in McLarney’s car. “We keep going like this and we’ll get an IID number. Hell, we might even get locked up at this rate.”

McLarney offers a look of contempt. “No one’s gonna get locked up,” he says, wheeling his Honda Civic west along the Boston Street waterfront. “Have you forgotten that you’re in Baltimore? Nobody ever gets locked up in this fucking city. Why should we get treated different than any other criminal?”

McLarney laughs at his own logic, then guns the Civic through the streets just south of Little Italy, then west across the early morning vacancy of the city’s downtown. Street cleaners and newspaper delivery trucks own the streets now, and the traffic signals have gone from green and red to flashing yellow. Across from the Omni on Fayette, a lone derelict is dissecting the contents of a trashcan.

“It’s four A.M., Terry.”

“Yes,” says McLarney, checking his watch. “It is.”

“Where the hell are we going?”

“Where every wanted criminal goes to hide.”

“The Western?”

“The Western District,” says McLarney, triumphant. “They’ll never find us there.”

And soon enough, it is 5:00 A.M. and eight or nine more 16-ounce cans are lying spent in a Calverton Road gutter. The party is down to a foursome now, the others having fled before the threat of sunrise. Of the group, only Bob Biemiller is still a Western man. McLarney has been downtown in homicide ever since he took that bullet on Arunah Avenue; Moulter has transferred to Southeastern patrol. But they are together again on Calverton Road because it is the morning after the night after a city jury brought the Cassidy case to an end. And even after being chased off the Clinton Street pier, they still cannot go home.

McLarney rolls another empty into the pile, where it clatters against its brethren. Biemiller grabs a replacement from the back seat and hands it to McLarney, who shifts his weight against the car’s front fender.

“So, So, Vince, what do you think?” McLarney says, pulling the metal tab. White foam races around the rim of the can and down its sides. The sergeant mumbles an obscenity and shakes the wetness from his hand.

Moulter smiles vaguely. “What do I think?”

“About Gene.”

About Gene. All this drinking, all this bullshitting, all this riding around Baltimore like a pack of motorized Gypsies but McLarney still isn’t satisfied. Somehow the damn thing is still there to be reckoned with. At this moment, Appleton Street is the only station house story worth telling, and at this moment it demands some kind of moral.

Moulter shrugs, staring at the undergrowth and trash that mark the dead end of Calverton Road and the edge of the Amtrak railbed. The place has long been the favored hole in Sector 2 of the Western-a deserted spot to drink coffee and write reports, or share a six-pack, or maybe get a little sleep if you were scheduled for court in the morning.

McLarney turns to Biemiller. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” asks Biemiller.

“Yeah. We won it for him, didn’t we?”

“No,” says Biemiller. “We didn’t win.”

Moulter nods his head in agreement.

“I don’t mean it like that,” McLarney says, backing up. “I mean we got the verdict. Gene’s got to be pleased with that.”

Biemiller says nothing; Moulter heaves an empty can into the underbrush. From the railbed comes a sudden flourish of noise and light as a metroliner races east along the center track. The train disappears in a long wail that sounds very much like a human voice.

“It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” says McLarney after a time.

“Yeah, it is.”

“I mean here’s a guy that’s like a war hero,” says McLarney. “This is a war and he’s a hero. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Vince, you see what I’m saying?”

“What do you mean, Terry?”

“Lemme tell you something,” says McLarney, his voice catching up to his anger, “and this is something that I told Gene. I told him he has to see that he didn’t get shot for Appleton Street. Fuck Appleton Street. Fuck that. Fuck Baltimore. He didn’t get shot for Baltimore.”

“What did he get shot for?”

“It’s like this,” says McLarney, “and I told this to Gene. I told him that there’s this war going on in America. It’s a fucking war, right? And Gene was a soldier who got shot. He was defending his country and he got shot. Like any other fucking war.”

Biemiller throws an empty can toward the undergrowth. Moulter rubs his eyes.

“What I’m saying is that you have to forget it’s Baltimore,” says McLarney, very angry now. “This city is fucked up and it will always be fucked up, but that isn’t normal. Fuck Baltimore. Gene was a police in America who got shot and there are places where he would get treated like a war hero. Do you see that?”

“No,” says Biemiller. “Not really.”

McLarney slowly deflates, unable to sustain the rage without help. “Well, Gene does,” he says quietly, staring across the railbed. “That’s the important thing. Gene does and I do, too.”

McLarney wanders back toward the other side of the car as sunrise streaks the eastern sky red. An early work crew opens the gates to the city yard on Calverton Road; ten minutes later, a public works truck rumbles down to the pumps. At the sound of the truck, Biemiller looks across the asphalt, squinting through an alcohol haze.

“Who the fuck is that?”

A lone figure in blue is standing a few feet from the city yard entrance, glaring at them.

“Security guard,” says McLarney.

“Christ. Not again.”

“What the fuck does he want?”

“He saw the beer.”

“So what? Why should he give a fuck?”

The man in blue pulls a notepad and pencil, then begins writing. The cops respond with obscenity.

“Christ, he’s taking tag numbers.”

“Well,” says Biemiller. “Party’s over. See you boys around.”

“No point waiting around for the IID number,” says another. “Let’s get gone.”

They toss the last few cans in the underbrush, then climb into their cars. Two cars and a pickup peel off and run a gauntlet past the security guard and out onto Edmondson Avenue. Back behind the wheel of his Honda, McLarney gauges the effects of the beer, then calculates the number of state troopers between his current location and his home in Howard County. The resulting odds seem improbable, so he drives east through the scattered Saturday morning traffic, turning south on Martin Luther King Boulevard and arriving minutes later at the South Baltimore rowhouse that is the home of a friend who had been among them on Calverton Road. McLarney stands on the stoop in the new day’s light, the morning paper rolled in his right hand. The friend arrives a few minutes later.

“Got a beer?” asks McLarney.

“Jesus, Terry.”

McLarney laughs, handing the younger man the paper. The two make their way through the door and McLarney wanders into the first-floor living room.

“What a dump,” says McLarney. “You need to get a maid or something.”

The younger man comes back from the refrigerator with the paper and two bottles of Rolling Rock. McLarney sits on the sofa and pulls apart the newspaper, looking for a story about the Cassidy verdict. He scatters sections across the table before finding the article on the front of the local section, below the fold. The story is brief, maybe a dozen paragraphs.

“Kind of short,” he says, reading slowly.

He finishes the story, then rubs his eyes and takes a long drag on his beer. Suddenly, finally, he is exhausted. Very drunk and very exhausted.

“It’s so fucked up,” he says. “You know what I’m saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?”

Normal people. Citizens. Human beings. Even among the believers, there is a pathology to being a cop.

“Fuck, I’m tired. I got to get home.”

“You can’t drive.”

“I’m okay.”

“Terry, you’re fucking blind.”

McLarney looks up, startled at the word. Again he picks up the local section. Again he scans the story, looking for the things that never manage to find their way into newspaper accounts.

“I thought they’d do more,” he says finally. McLarney tries to fold the paper, crushing it awkwardly in his left hand.

“Gene did good though, didn’t he?” he says after a pause. “He was good on the stand.”

“He was.”

“He got respect.”

“He did.”

“Good,” says McLarney, his leaden eyes closing. “That’s good.”

The sergeant leans his head back against the wall behind the sofa. His eyes close at last.

“Gotta go,” he says in a slur. “Wake me in ten…”

He sleeps like a still life, sitting up, his right ankle to his left knee. The crushed newspaper is in his lap, the half-empty beer can is surrounded by the meat of his right hand. The sport coat stays on. The tie is twisted but intact. The wire-frame eyeglasses, bent and battered from a half dozen near-misses, have slipped down his nose. The badge remains in the upper right coat pocket. The gun, a silver.38 snubnose, stays holstered to his belt.

Print hit.

When the human mind has exhausted itself, technology flexes a muscle and creates a clue of its own. Diodes and transistors and silicon chips produce a connection as the swirl pattern on a right index finger is matched to a name and address. Each ridge, each curve, each imperfection is noted, catalogued and compared until the verdict of the Printrak computer is certain:

Kevin Robert Lawrence

D.O.B. 9/25/66

3409 Park Heights Avenue

Like any of its species, the Printrak is an unthinking beast. It knows nothing of the case file, nothing of the victim, and virtually nothing of any suspect it happens to identify. And it cannot ask the questions that necessarily follow from its discoveries. That is left to a detective, who stretches his cramped legs across a metal desk and stares at a printout sent upstairs from the lab’s ident section. Why, he wonders, does Kevin Robert Lawrence’s fingerprint appear on the inside cover of a library book on Afro-American heroes, Pioneers and Patriots? And how can it be, he inquires further, that this same book is somehow one of those found in the satchel of a murdered child in Reservoir Hill?

Good and simple questions, to which a detective can have no immediate response. The name of Kevin Robert Lawrence appears nowhere in the Latonya Wallace case file, nor does it stir the memory of any detective or detail officer involved in the case. And but for the fact that Mr. Lawrence was arrested yesterday for attempting to shoplift some veal cutlets from a Bolton Hill grocery store, his name would not correlate with any criminal history within easy reach of the Baltimore Police Identification computer.

This, the detectives must concede, is not a promising fact. Generally speaking, the ideal rape-murder suspect usually manages to post on his BPI sheet something more substantive than a single shoplifting charge. Yet this Lawrence kid managed to get his hands on a dead little girl’s library book without ever acquiring a police record. In fact, if it wasn’t for his little shopping spree, the name of Kevin Robert Lawrence would probably never be uttered by any homicide detective. But Mr. Lawrence wanted veal for dinner and he apparently wanted it on the cheap, and by that limited ambition alone, he is now the leading suspect in the murder of Latonya Wallace.

Caught by a store security guard and held for a Central District wagon, the twenty-one-year-old Lawrence was taken to the lockup late yesterday, where a turnkey applied the appropriate amount of ink and produced a fingerprint card with a freshly minted BPI number. Overnight, the card traveled the usual route to the fourth-floor records section at headquarters, where it got the requisite run through the Printrak, which can compare a latent print with the hundreds of thousands of print cards on file with the Baltimore department.

In a perfect world, this wondrous process would produce evidence on a regular and routine basis. But in Baltimore, a city that can in no way be called perfect, the Printrak-like any other technological marvel in the department’s crime laboratory-functions in accordance with Rule Eight in the homicide lexicon:

In any case where there is no apparent suspect, the crime lab will produce no valuable evidence. In those cases where a suspect has already confessed and been identified by at least two eyewitnesses, the lab will give you print hits, fiber evidence, blood typings and a ballistic match. And yet in the case of Latonya Wallace, a murder that genuinely matters, this rule seems not to apply. For once, the lab work has suddenly propelled a stalled investigation forward.

Not surprisingly, the sudden print hit found the Latonya Wallace case flat on its back because Tom Pellegrini was in precisely the same condition. His coughing had continued without respite, and the exhaustion seemed to leave him with less and less each day. One morning, trying to get out of bed, he felt as if his legs were barely moving. It was like one of those dreams in which you’re trying to run from something but you just can’t get started. Again, he went to a physician, who diagnosed the respiratory problem as an allergic reaction. But allergic to what? Pellegrini had never had an allergy before in his life. The doctor suggested that stress can sometimes trigger an allergy that might ordinarily be contained by the body’s defenses. Then: Have you been under any particular kind of stress lately?

“Who? Me?”

Every day for three months, Pellegrini had come dragass into the office to stare at the same photographs and read the same office reports. And every day the thing looked exactly the same. Every other day he was out wandering the streets of Reservoir Hill, checking the basement of a vacant rowhouse or the back of an abandoned car or truck, searching for his lost crime scene. He worked back on every significant suspect, interviewing friends, relatives and acquaintances of the Fish Man; and Ronald Carter, who tried to implicate the Fish Man; and Andrew, who parked his car in the back alley and admitted to having been out there on the night the body was dumped. He worked the fresh leads, too, checking out this sex offender locked up for a child rape in Baltimore County, or that pedophile caught playing with himself outside an elementary school. He went to the polygraph examinations at the State Police barracks in Pikesville, where each successive test of a potential suspect seemed to leave him with only a little more ambiguity. And when everything else failed, he went downstairs to the trace lab and argued with Van Gelder, the chief analyst. What about those black smudges on the dead girl’s pants? Roofing tar? Road tar? Can’t we narrow the field a little bit?

Meanwhile, Pellegrini tried to keep up with the rotation, working those calls that came his way and struggling to stay interested in the cheap shootings and domestic cuttings. Once, while interviewing a witness to one particularly unimportant bit of violence, he found that he had to force himself to ask even the requisite questions. It was scary. At that moment, he had been in homicide for less than two years and yet, for all practical purposes, he’d become a genuine case of burnout. The well is dry, Pellegrini had to concede. There is no more.

In early June, he took himself out on sick leave for more than two weeks, trying to recover whatever it was that had brought him to homicide in the first place. He slept and ate and played with the baby. Then he slept some more. He did not go downtown, he did not call the office and he tried, for the most part, not to think about dead little girls.

And when the print hit lands on Gary D’Addario’s desk, Tom Pellegrini is still on leave and the lieutenant decides-for reasons more humanitarian than tactical-not to call him back in. To the other detectives, it seems at first sad, and a little ironic, that the primary investigator is not there as they swarm into Kevin Lawrence’s life, learning everything they can about this nonentity who has somehow fallen upon them like manna from heaven. More than any man in the unit that year, Pellegrini has earned a shred of hope, and his absence is very much noticed when Donald Kincaid and Howard Corbin begin tracing the new suspect’s movements, trying to link him to friends or relatives in the Reservoir Hill area. Others on the shift tell themselves and one another that Pellegrini should be here as they’re running the NCIC check on the new man, or when they search the city computer for a criminal history that can’t be found, though they feel sure that it exists under some other name or alias. Pellegrini should be here, too, when they talk to Lawrence’s family and friends. In the hours after the print hit, they tell themselves that Pellegrini deserves to be on hand for that righteous moment when this bastard case finally falls.

Instead, the case file is transferred to Kincaid and Corbin: Kincaid, because he arrived early for the dayshift and D’Addario grabbed him first with a fresh copy of the Printrak report; Corbin, one of the true ancients on the detectives’ floor, because the Latonya Wallace murder has become an obsession for him as well.

An aging, snaggle-toothed wonder, Corbin is the product of twenty years in the homicide unit and another fifteen in the department. The man is edging away from sixty-five years, well beyond the point at which most cops see retirement as the reasoned alternative, yet he refuses to miss so much as a day of work. A veteran of perhaps three thousand crime scenes, Corbin is a walking piece of history. Older detectives remember a time when Corbin and Fury Cousins, two of the earliest black recruits to the homicide unit, knew everyone and anyone in Baltimore’s inner city and could put that knowledge to use on any kind of case. It was a smaller, tighter city back then, and Corbin owned most of it. If your shooter went by the street name of Mac, Corbin could ask you whether you meant the east side Mac or the west side Mac, or whether you were talking about Big Mac Richardson or maybe Racetrack Mac, from up on the Avenue. And your answer wouldn’t matter, because Corbin had two or three addresses for every one of them. In his time, he was that good.

But twenty years has transformed the city and Howard Corbin both, pushing Corbin to the career criminals unit at the other end of the sixth floor: For the last several years, in fact, Corbin has been fighting a rear-guard action against change itself, trying to prove to the chain of command that age and a diabetic condition have done nothing to slow him down. It is a noble fight, but in some ways painful to watch. And in the mind of any younger detective, Corbin has become a living, breathing reminder of the price you can be made to pay for giving too much of your life to a police department. He still shows up early every morning, still fills out his run sheets, still works a case or two, but the truth is that career criminals is a paper unit with half an office and a handful of men. Corbin knows it, too, and he doesn’t work a day there without wearing his heart on his sleeve. For him, the homicide unit will always be the promised land, and the Latonya Wallace case is his chance for an exodus.

A month into the case, Corbin asked Colonel Lanham if he could look at the case file, and the colonel couldn’t come up with any reason to deny the request, though he and everyone else could plainly see the motive behind it. But so what? Lanham reasoned that it couldn’t hurt to have an experienced detective review the file. You never knew what a fresh mind might notice. And if, by some chance. Corbin actually managed to solve the case, then maybe he had every right to come back to the other end of the hall.

To Pellegrini’s dismay, when the request was approved, Corbin immediately moved into the annex office and appropriated the Latonya Wallace case file. A blizzard of follow-up reports came on the heels of Corbin’s arrival as he documented his daily effort in lengthy, typewritten reports about whatever investigative leads he happened to be pursuing. For Pellegrini, the case file soon became unmanageable through sheer bulk, much of it unnecessary, to his mind. More important to Pellegrini, Corbin’s involvement was exactly the opposite of the approach he had argued in his memo to the captain. He had urged a careful, thorough review of the existing evidence, a review to be conducted by the primary and secondary detectives who were most familiar with the case. Instead, the file seemed once again to have become community territory.

And now Corbin will serve as Pellegrini’s proxy in the pursuit of Kevin Lawrence, or at least for as long as it takes to confirm that the suspect is viable. “If this guy looks good,” Landsman assures the others in his squad, “we’re definitely going to give Tom a call at home.”

But the next day, no one thinks about calling Pellegrini when the detectives check with the principal at Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary and are told that Kevin Robert Lawrence was enrolled there from 1971 to 1978. Nor do they think of calling when the more comprehensive computer search produces nothing remotely resembling a criminal record. Nor do they think of bothering him when the Wallace family says that they know nothing of this Kevin Lawrence and cannot remember his having anything to do with the victim.

Eight days after a police computer took his name in vain, Kevin Lawrence is brought down to the homicide unit, where he tells detectives that he knows nothing about any girl named Latonya Wallace. He does, however, remember a book about black American heroes with the title of Pioneers and Patriots. Shown the text itself, he can even recall the school report he prepared long ago using that same book, which he had borrowed from the Eutaw-Marshburn school library. The paper was on great black Americans and, as the young man recalled, it earned him an A. But that, he says, was more than ten years ago. Why are they even asking about it?

The investigation that exonerates Kevin Lawrence is still wrapping up when Pellegrini returns to duty. But by luck or mercy or both, the primary investigator is allowed to watch from the periphery as other detectives slam into a wall. He is, in a very real sense, spared the anguish of seeing a precious piece of physical evidence reduced to fantastic coincidence-a fingerprint that sat undisturbed on a book for more than a decade, waiting for a million-dollar computer to give it life enough to taunt a few homicide detectives for a week and a half.

Instead of riding the print hit into another psychological trough, Pellegrini manages to come back to work a little stronger. The cough is still there, but the exhaustion, less so. Within a day or two of his return, the manila folder that contains the information gleaned on the Fish Man is back on his desk in the annex office. And at the same time that the detectives are busy returning a blissfully unaware Kevin Lawrence to freedom and anonymity, Pellegrini is back up on Whitelock Street, interviewing other merchants about the habits of the man who still remains his most promising suspect.

On the same day, in fact, that Lawrence is boring other detectives with his grade school adventures, Pellegrini grabs a set of Cavalier keys and a handful of plastic evidence bags and makes his way inside the burned-out Whitelock Street store where the Fish Man had made a living until perhaps a week before the murder. The detective had been through the derelict property several times before, looking for anything to indicate that the little girl-alive or dead-had ever been inside the place, but to his frustration, the building had always seemed nothing more than a blackened shell. Neighboring merchants had in fact told him that the Fish Man had cleaned most everything out in the day or two before the discovery of the little girl’s body.

Still, Pellegrini takes another look around before getting down to the business at hand. Satisfied that nothing in the wreckage has gone unnoticed, he sets about prying up blackened soot and debris from several locations. In places, the stuff is thick and oily and mixed, perhaps, with the tar from portions of the collapsed roof.

The thought had occurred to Pellegrini while he was out on leave and it was, he had to concede, something of a long shot, considering how little the trace lab had so far been able to learn about the black smudges on the dead girl’s pants. But what the hell, he tells himself, if they have something specific with which to compare those smudges, Van Gelder’s people may be able to make something happen.

Every now and then a long shot does come in, the detective muses, a little hopeful. But even if the samples from the store never amount to anything, they are important to Pellegrini for another reason: It is his idea. It is his own thinking that the stuff on the little girl’s pants may match the soot from the Fish Man’s store. Not Landsman’s. Not Edgerton’s. Not Corbin’s.

In all probability, Pellegrini tells himself, this will be another dead end in the maze, another single-page report in the folder. But even so, it would be his dead end, his report.

Pellegrini is the primary and he is thinking like the primary. He drives back from Reservoir Hill with the soot samples beside him on the passenger seat, feeling, for the first time in weeks, like a detective.

Clayvon Jones lies face down in the courtyard of the housing project, his torso covering the loaded 9mm Colt he never had a chance to use. The gun is cocked, with a live round in the chamber. Someone was looking for Clayvon and Clayvon was looking for someone, and Clayvon got rained on first.

Dave Brown rolls the body and Clayvon stares up at him, white foam at the edges of his mouth.

“Damn,” says Dave Brown. “That’s a nice gun.”

“Hey, that is pretty,” says Eddie Brown. “What is that? A forty-five?”

“No, I think it’s one of those Colt replicas. They’re making nine-millimeters with that classic forty-five mold.”

“That’s a nine-millimeter?”

“Either that or a three-eighty. I saw an ad for one of these bad boys in the FBI magazine.”

“Uh-huh,” says Eddie Brown, giving the gun a last look. “She does look nice.”

It is daylight now, a little before six on a day that promises to be hot. In addition to having been the proud owner of a 9mm Colt replica, the dead man is a twenty-two-year-old east-sider with a thin, athletic frame. The corpse has already got a decent rigor to it, with the lone gunshot wound visible at the top of the head.

“Like he was duckin’ down and didn’t get low enough,” says Eddie Brown, a little bored.

A crowd has already gathered at both ends of the courtyard, and though a canvass of the neighboring rowhouses will produce not a single witness, half the neighborhood seems to be out bright and early for a glimpse of the body. Within hours there will be four anonymous calls-“I want to remain monogamous,” one caller will insist-as well as a report from one of Harry Edgerton’s paid informants on the east side. Together they will provide a full chronicle of the death of Clayvon Jones. Classify it as scenario number 34 in the catalogue of life-and-death ghetto drama: an argument between two dopers over a girl; a fistfight in the street; threats back and forth; young kid paid in cocaine to go shoot Clayvon in the head.

To Dave Brown’s amusement, three of the callers will insist that the shooter placed a white flower on Clayvon’s mouth after the murder. The flower, Brown will realize, was nothing more than the foam at the corners of the dead man’s mouth, which was undoubtedly visible to the crowd that greeted the detectives on their arrival at the scene.

At this moment, however, all of that is still to come. At this moment, Clayvon Jones is simply a dead yo with a quality weapon he never got to use. No witnesses, no motive, no suspects-the standard whodunit mantra.

“Hey, guy.”

Dave Brown turns around to see a familiar face on one of the Eastern uniforms. Martini, isn’t that it? Yeah, the kid who took a bullet for the company in a drug raid at the Perkins Homes last year. Good man, Martini.

“Hey, how you doing, bunk?”

“Okay,” says Martini, pointing to another uniform. “My buddy here needs a sequence number for his report.”

“You’re Detective Brown, right?” asks the other uniform.

“We both be Detective Brown,” says Dave Brown, wrapping his arm around Eddie Brown’s shoulder. “This here’s my daddy.”

Eddie Brown smiles, his gold tooth shining in the morning sun. Smiling back, the uniform takes in the salt-and-pepper family portrait.

“He looks like me, don’t he?” says Eddie Brown.

“A little bit,” says the uniform, laughing now. “What’s your sequence?”

“B as in boy, nine-six-nine.”

The patrolman nods and steps away as the ME’s van pulls to the edge of the courtyard.

“We done here?” asks Dave Brown.

Eddie Brown nods.

“Okay,” says Dave Brown, walking back toward the Cavalier. “But we can’t forget the most important thing about this case.”

“What’s that?” says Eddie Brown, following.

“The most important thing about this case is that when we left the office, the Big Man told us to bring him back an egg sandwich.”

“Oh yeah.”

Back in the homicide unit’s coffee room. Donald Worden waits for his sandwich in a cloud of Backwoods cigar smoke, nursing a rage that has been his for a week and a half. He does this silently, stoically, but with such energy and determination that no other man dares approach him with so much as a platitude during the morning shift change.

And what, in truth, can anyone really say? What do you tell a man who has tailored a career to his own sense of honor, his own code, when that honor is being bartered back and forth by politicians? What do you say to a man for whom institutional loyalty is a way of life when the police department in which he has spent twenty-five years is now offering fresh lessons in betrayal?

Three weeks ago, the brass had gone first to Rich Garvey. They went to him with a 24-hour report and some notes and a manila folder without a name or case number. State senator, they explain. Threats. Mysterious assailants. A possible abduction.

Garvey listened patiently. Then he looked at the initial report from two detectives on Stanton’s shift. It was not pretty.

“Just one question,” asked Garvey. “Can I polygraph the senator?”

No, the supervisors told themselves, perhaps Rich Garvey isn’t the best man for this case. They excused themselves quickly, taking the report and the manila folder to Worden.

The Big Man let them talk, then arrayed the facts in his mind: State senator Larry Young. A Democrat from West Baltimore’s 39th legislative district. A product of the Mitchell family’s west side political machine and the chairman of the General Assembly’s influential House Environmental Matters Committee. A leader of the Black Legislative Caucus with ties to City Hall as well as some of the police department’s ranking blacks. A forty-two-year-old bachelor living alone on McCulloh Street.

That much made sense, the rest was bizarre. Senator Young had called a friend, a highly respected black physician, and told of being abducted by three men. He had been leaving McCulloh Street alone and they had a van, he explained. He was forced inside, blindfolded, threatened. Stay away from Michael and his fiancée, they told him, referring to a longtime political aide who was planning to marry. Then these unnamed assailants dumped him out of the rear doors, up near Druid Hill Park. He had hitched a ride back home.

Outrageous, the friend had told him. You have to call the police. No need, Larry Young assured him. Why involve the police department? I can deal with this on my own but I just wanted to tell you about it, he explained to the friend, who nonetheless remained insistent, arranging for a conference call with Eddie Woods, the deputy commissioner for services and a political ally of the senator. Deputy Woods listened to the tale, then rightly insisted that an abduction of a state senator had to be investigated. Homicide was called.

“Will you take it?” they asked again.

Worden calculated the unspoken facts: powerful legislator, powerful friends. A reluctance to report a crime. A ridiculous story. Nervous bosses. The selection of an aging white homicide detective, a cop with a clean performance sheet and enough time on to take a pension should the thing get nasty.

Okay, Worden told them. I’ll eat it.

After all, someone had to take the file, and Worden reasoned that a younger man would have more to lose. The detectives on Stanton’s shift who originally took the call wanted nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nor was Garvey looking to lean into any punches. But what could they do to Worden? It made sense, and yet when Worden talked like that it sounded as though he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.

Closer to the point, Worden was truly the product of the department’s old school: Give him an assignment and he works it. And if some believed that loyalty to command had burned Worden in the Monroe Street investigation, everyone understood that he would never duck a request from a superior even if it meant getting burned again.

With Rick James in tow, Worden went first to the home of the political aide in Northeast Baltimore, where he spoke with the aide’s parents, a gracious, elderly couple fairly mystified at their playing host to a homicide detective. They told Worden that they knew nothing about any abduction. In fact, earlier on the evening of the alleged incident, the senator had come by the house to visit their son, who had not been home at the time. Mr. Young waited, chatting amiably with the couple, until their son returned. Then the two younger men walked out the back door and into the yard to discuss a private matter. A short time later, their son came back into the house without the senator, who had left. Then their son said he had hurt his arm and needed a lift to the emergency room.

Worden nodded, listening carefully. With each additional fact, the senator’s story was becoming both a little more ridiculous and a little more understandable. The ensuing interview with the aide confirmed the scenario that had already taken shape in Worden’s mind. Yes, the aide admitted, the senator had become angry during that discussion in the yard. At one point, he picked up a tree branch and struck the aide across the arm. Then he had fled.

“I guess the argument between you and the senator was over a personal matter,” said Worden, speaking with great care, “one that you would rather keep private.”

“That’s right.”

“And I take it you don’t want to press charges on the assault.”

“No. I don’t want that.”

The two men exchanged glances and a handshake. Worden and James drove back to the office, discussing the alternatives left to them. First option: They could spend days or even weeks investigating an abduction that had never occurred. Second option: They could confront the senator, perhaps with the implied threat of a grand jury investigation or maybe even a charge of false report, yet that would be dangerous because things would get ugly in a hurry. There was a third option, however, and Worden pushed it back and forth in his brain, weighing the risks and benefits. And when the two men and Lieutenant D’Addario were called into the captain’s office for a review of the case, Worden offered the third choice as the most sensible alternative.

If they treated the abduction report as genuine, Worden told the captain, trained homicide detectives would be wasting their days looking for some mystery men in a mystery van that would never be found. If they tried to go to a grand jury, that would be an even bigger waste of government time. A false report charge was penny ante stuff, and who in the homicide unit really wanted to waste his days trying to stick some politician with a misdemeanor, particularly when it wasn’t even clear that the politician had made any official complaint? After all, it was the senator’s doctor friend who made the original call to Deputy Woods; technically, that was reason enough to suggest that there wasn’t any real intent of filing a false report. The third choice was the best, Worden argued, though he had no intention of pursuing that course on his own.

The captain asked how Worden would proceed and what would be said. Worden gave him as clear a picture as possible. The captain then ran Worden’s proposal through once more for clarity and the four men in the room agreed that it made sense. Go ahead, the captain said. Do it.

Worden arrived at Senator Young’s office that same afternoon. He left James back at the office; the younger detective was six years shy of a pension and therefore at greater risk. Instead, Roger Nolan volunteered to go, telling Worden that he might need a witness to whatever occurred. And not only did Nolan have time enough to weather any storm, but, like the senator, he was black. Should anything said in this meeting ever become public, Nolan’s presence might diffuse any issue of race.

At his office downtown, Larry Young welcomed both men and said again that he saw no reason for the police to waste their time investigating the incident. It was a personal matter, the senator explained, and he had every intention of investigating it privately.

Worden seemed to nod in agreement, then offered the senator a review of the investigation thus far. Detectives had failed to locate anyone on McCulloh Street who had seen the abduction, nor had they discovered any physical evidence at the Druid Hill Park site where the senator claimed he had been pushed from the van. The pants that the senator claimed to have worn that night didn’t have so much as a grass stain on them. Likewise, Worden explained, the interview with the senator’s aide and the aide’s parents had raised additional questions. The detective recounted the details of that interview, then gave the senator his out.

“It’s my impression that this is something private between the two of you,” said Worden, “something that you would like to deal with privately.”

“That’s correct,” Young told him.

“Well, if a crime has been committed, then we will investigate it fully,” Worden said. “But if no crime was committed, then that puts an end to it.”

The senator took the offer for what it was, but asked a few questions to be sure. If he told them that no crime had occurred, that would end the investigation, correct? And if he told them here and now that there was no crime, that admission would not be used against him, correct?

“Not by me,” Worden told him.

“Then,” the senator replied, “there was no abduction. I would prefer that the matter be dealt with privately.”

Worden told the senator that he could regard the police department’s investigation as a closed file. The original abduction report had been written up as a police-information-only report, as was the case with all threat cases involving public officials. And because there is no incident report, there should be nothing in the newspapers.

“Our part in this is over,” Worden said.

Worden and Nolan shook hands with the senator, concluding the bargain. There would be no grand jury probe, no red-ball moneymaker for which a squad of homicide detectives could clock overtime, no awkward questions about the senator’s private life, no public revelations about a politician’s bungled attempt to fabricate a counterweight to his own assault and battery. Instead, the homicide unit would go back to the more parochial task of working murders. Worden returned to headquarters and typed the requisite report of the meeting for the captain, believing he had done the right thing.

But on June 14, a week and a half after his journey to the senator’s office, Worden’s quiet solution to the whole sordid affair was shattered by a news leak of the incident to a television reporter for the local CBS affiliate. From the amount of information about the case in the reporter’s broadcast, Worden and James both suspected that the leak had come from within the department. That scenario made sense; not everyone in the chain of command could be considered the senator’s political ally and the bizarre abduction report made for a pretty embarrassing picture.

Of course, once the confidential information was revealed, police officials and prosecutors alike were suddenly tripping over one another in an attempt to avoid the appearance of covert deals and cover-ups. Confronted by the reporter, the mayor himself got into the act, ordering the department to make public its incident report for the original abduction complaint. With the press suddenly baying outside City Hall, the original priorities were all immediately inverted. A week earlier, the brass had been content to have Worden end the probe of a nonexistent crime with some discretion, allowing the homicide detectives to return to their primary responsibilities; now, these same bosses were being asked in public why an influential West Baltimore senator who had admitted to making a false report had not himself been charged. Was some sort of deal cut? Was the incident kept secret to protect the senator? What kind of influence was used on behalf of the senator?

A steady deluge of newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts prompted city officials to begin a full review by the state’s attorney’s office, followed by a grand jury investigation. For the next week, there were meetings between prosecutors and police officials, followed by more meetings between prosecutors and an influential trial attorney retained by the senator. One particular afternoon, when Worden and James were leaving a meeting between prosecutors and the senator’s attorney at a private law office, they walked out of the building only to be confronted by the same television reporter who had been leaked the story.

“I wonder who even told her there was a meeting,” said James, amazed. “She fucking knows what’s going to happen even before we do…”

Everything that Worden had tried to avoid instead came to pass. He had wanted to work murders; now murders were not the priority. He had wanted to avoid spending time and effort wandering around in a public man’s private life for no valuable reason; now he and three or four other detectives would waste even more time prying up large pieces of the man’s privacy. Worden, James, Nolan-they were all pawns in a ridiculous game of brinksmanship as the bureaucrats tossed Larry Young’s political future around like a hot potato. And to what end? On the day that he had convinced the senator to recant his story, Worden had two open murders and was still actively involved in the grand jury probe of the Monroe Street shooting. Now, none of that meant a damn thing. Now, the bosses wanted nothing more than a complete investigation of state Senator Larry Young and his recantation of an alleged abduction. The department would be sending some of its best investigators out on the street to prove a negative, to show that a state legislator had not been abducted by three men in a mystery van. Then the senator would be charged with filing a false report-a paltry misdemeanor-in preparation for a court trial that the prosecutor’s office and police department had no real interest in winning. By tacit agreement, the trial would be nothing more than a public display, a show to appease public opinion. And Worden’s word-given honestly in the solitude of a beleaguered man’s office-now meant nothing. To the department, it was an utterly expendable commodity.

In a brief conversation that occurred a few days after the Larry Young imbroglio broke in the press, the captain mentioned Worden’s plight to Gary D’Addario and Jay Landsman. “You know,” he remarked, “I’d hate to see a good detective like Worden get jammed up over this Larry Young thing…”

Hate to see it? You’d hate to see it? What the hell does that mean? D’Addario wondered. The captain had signed off on the back door approach to Larry Young; they all had. How could this thing fall on Worden? D’Addario wondered whether the captain was trying to send a message or merely talking off the top of his head. With Landsman listening, D’Addario spoke up cautiously, trying to give the captain the benefit of the doubt.

“Why would Worden get jammed, captain?” he asked pointedly. “He was only following orders.”

It would be unfair, the captain agreed. He didn’t want to see it happen. At that moment, D’Addario was unsure what to believe and he held his tongue behind his teeth. If the captain’s comment was a grant of immunity-a suggestion that they could both skate any controversy by sacrificing Worden-then D’Addario hoped that his own response was enough to sink the plan. If the captain was just spouting off and not thinking about the implications, better to just let it pass.

Landsman and D’Addario both left the captain’s office confused. Perhaps the idea of Worden as a scapegoat was coming from the captain, perhaps from someone higher up. Perhaps they were misreading the comment. There was no way for D’Addario to know, but he and Landsman agreed that if the idea of burning Worden ever took solid form, they would have to go to war with the captain and burn every last bridge. Even to someone as jaded by command staff ethics as D’Addario, the idea of Worden as a sacrificial lamb was unbelievable. Worden was one of the best men in the unit, yet in a crisis, he was being considered as fodder.

The defense of Donald Worden in the captain’s office was a subdued affair, but D’Addario’s quiet refusal to burn a detective was soon known to the entire shift. It was, the detectives agreed, one of LTD’s finer moments and proof positive that he was a man that other men could follow.

It had been one thing, after all, for D’Addario to cater a bit to the chain of command when the clearance rate was low; that cost nothing and allowed his detectives to do their work with only a minimum of interference from the bosses. Besides, the same clearance rate that had made D’Addario seem vulnerable earlier in the year was now his ally. Even with the summer homicide deluge on them, the rate was now hovering at 70 percent, and the lieutenant’s leadership, which had earlier been open to question, was once again of some value to the bosses. For D’Addario, the worm had turned.

But even if the rate had been low, D’Addario would have felt obligated to speak up in the captain’s office. Worden in a jackpot? Donald Worden? The Big Man? What the hell could the bosses be thinking? However seriously the idea had been considered, if it had really been considered at all, there was no further mention of it after D’Addario’s conversation with the captain. And yet the lieutenant knew that his defense of Worden could only go so far; in the end, Worden might not be abused for his part in the Larry Young fiasco, but the detective was most certainly correct in believing that he had already been badly used.

Worden had given another man-a politician, of course, but a man nonetheless-his promise. And now, for the sake of its own public image, the police department and the mayor’s office were proving just how much such a promise was worth.

Still, even a badly used detective has to eat, and on this summer morning, Worden mixes his anger with a little patience as he waits for Eddie and Dave Brown to return from their murder scene. When Dave Brown finally returns to the office, he glides gently into the coffee room, conscious of Worden’s week-long anger. Wordless, he lays the egg sandwich directly in front of the Big Man, then swings back toward his own desk.

“What do I owe you?” asks Worden.

“I covered it.”

“No. What do I owe you?”

“That’s okay, bunk. I’ll get you next time.”

Worden shrugs, then sits back to pick at his breakfast. McLarney was off last night, and as senior man, Worden had worked the midnight shift as the acting supervisor. It had been miserable and now Worden can look forward to another full shift of shepherding witnesses to and from the grand jury that is hearing the Larry Young case. The whole fiasco would probably consume the rest of the week.

“What did you have out there?” Worden asks Dave Brown.

“Stone fucking whodunit.”

“Hmmm.”

“Dead yo in a low-rise courtyard. When we rolled him, he still had his own gun in his pants. That bad boy was cocked, too, with one in the chamber.”

“Someone was quicker on the draw, huh?” offers Rick James from the other end of the room. “Where’s he shot?”

“Top of the head. Like the shooter was above him or maybe caught him when he was ducking down.”

“Ouch.”

“He’s got an exit wound in the neck and we got the bullet, but it’s all fucked up, pancaked like. No good for comparison.”

James nods.

“I need a car for the morgue,” says Brown.

“Take this one,” says James, tossing the keys. “We can walk over to the courthouse.”

“I don’t know about that, Rick,” says Worden with bitter sarcasm. “I don’t know if we can give him a car to do real police work. If he was investigating a senator or something like that, it would be one thing. But I don’t think he gets a car for a murder…”

James shakes his head. “Hey, they can do whatever they want,” he tells Worden. “I’m just happy to be making money again.”

“Oh hell yeah,” says Dave Brown. “More money than I’m gonna make on this murder, I’ll bet.”

“That’s right,” says Worden. “For purposes of the Larry Young investigation, the overtime cap has been lifted. From now on, I won’t be working murders anymore. There’s just no money in it…”

Worden lights another Backwoods and leans back against the green bulkhead, thinking that the joke is both funny and unfunny.

Three weeks ago, the officer who discovered the body of John Randolph Scott in the alley off Monroe Street went before the same grand jury and refused to answer any questions about the unexplained death of a man whom he had been pursuing. Sergeant John Wiley read a brief statement to the grand jury, complaining about having been treated like a suspect in the murder, then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Wiley was not offered immunity by the prosecutors and he subsequently walked out of the grand jury, effectively sending the Monroe Street investigation into a long, final stall. In the absence of any other definitive evidence, Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor, did not ask the grand jury for any indictment. In fact, Doory had to do some fast talking to keep the grand jurors from issuing any indictments; after hearing Worden and James testify about the contradictory statements made by officers involved in the pursuit of John Scott, several members of the panel were more than ready to hand up a charge until Doory convinced them that the case could not be successfully prosecuted. Indict it now and we’ll lose it on the merits, he told them. And then, even if we get fresh evidence a year from now, we’ve played our hand. Double jeopardy says a man can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

Doory’s speech effectively closed the Monroe Street investigation, leaving both Worden and James with a bad taste. Doory was a good lawyer, a careful prosecutor, but both detectives were tempted to second-guess the decision not to indict: “If the suspect was Joe the Rag Man,” James declared at one point, “he’d have been charged.”

Instead, the Monroe Street investigation was consigned to a separate file drawer in the admin lieutenant’s office-a burial apart from the other open cases, an interment that befitted the only unsolved police-involved shooting in the department’s history.

After months of work, that outcome was hard enough for Worden to swallow. And on the board, meanwhile, the names of two March murder victims were still written in red next to Worden’s initial. Sylvester Merriman waited for the Big Man to find that missing witness, the teenage runaway from the group home; Dwayne Dickerson waited for Worden to shake something loose from the neighborhood around Ellamont Avenue. And for the rest of this week as well, McLarney’s squad would be working a midnight shift, virtually assuring Worden that he would catch a fresh one before Saturday. The last six months had left him with a full, heaping plate of bone and gristle. Yet the city of Baltimore was paying him unlimited OT to chew on a wounded politician’s leg.

“I’ll tell you this,” the Big Man tells Rick James in between bites of the sandwich. “This is the last time I let myself be used. I’m not here to do their dirty work.”

James says nothing.

“I don’t give a damn about Larry Young, but you give a man your word…”

Worden’s word. It was a rock in the Northwest District, and it was good as gold when he was back in the old escape and apprehension unit. Hell, if you found yourself in a room with a CID robbery detective by the name of Worden, you took anything said to you there as fact. But this was the homicide unit-land of the forgotten promise-and Worden is again being made to understand that at any given moment, the bosses own the rulebook.

“No matter what happens,” he tells James, blowing cigar smoke toward the window. “They can’t take your EOD away from you.”

James nods; the comment is anything but a non sequitur. Worden’s Entrance On Duty date is 1962. He’s got the mandatory twenty-five plus one for good measure; Worden can go out on a full pension in the time it takes to type up the forms.

“I can always make money building decks and putting up drywall…”

The last natural police detective in America slinging spackle. It’s a depressing image, and James says nothing.

“… or delivering furs. There’s a lot of money in furs.”

Worden finishes breakfast with another cup of black coffee, followed by another cigar. Then he cleans the desk and waits for the 9:00 A.M. shift at the courthouse in cold, empty silence.

Fred Ceruti knows it’s a bad one when he turns the corner on Whittier and sees the ambulance. Time of call was 0343 and that was a half an hour ago, he calculates, so what the hell is the guy still doing in the ambo?

The detective edges the Cavalier up behind the red glow of the medic unit’s emergency lights, then stares for a moment at the frenzied paramedics in the rear of the ambulance. Standing on the ambo’s rear running board, a Western uniform looks back at Ceruti and gives a quick thumb’s down.

“He don’t look so hot,” says the uniform as Ceruti gets out of his car and steps toward the red strobes. “They’ve been here twenty minutes and he still ain’t stable.”

“Where’s he hit?”

“Head shot. One in the arm too.”

The victim is writhing on his litter, moaning, with his legs buckling back and forth in slow repetition-outward at the knees, inward at the toes-an involuntary movement that tells a homicide detective to post the vacancy sign. When a head-shot victim starts dancing on his ambo litter-“doing the Funky Chicken,” Jay Landsman calls it-you can write it down as a murder.

Ceruti watches the paramedics struggle as they begin working a pair of pressure pants around the victim’s legs. Fully inflated with air, the device greatly constricts blood flow to the lower extremities, thereby maintaining blood pressure in the head and torso. In Ceruti’s mind, the pressure pants are as much of a threat as anything else; the damn things can keep a man alive until he arrives at an emergency room, but the trauma team eventually has to deflate those bad boys, and at that point, blood pressure takes a nose dive and all hell breaks loose.

“Where’s he going?” Ceruti asks.

“Shock-Trauma, if we can stabilize him,” says the ambo driver. “But I mean, shit, we haven’t been able to get him leveled out.”

Ceruti looks up and down Whittier Avenue and reads the scene like a short grocery list. Dark side street. Ambush. No witnesses. No physical evidence. Probable drug murder. Don’t die on me, you bastard. Don’t you dare go and die on me.

“Are you the first officer?”

“Yeah. Seven-A-thirty-four unit.”

Ceruti begins collecting the particulars in his notebook, then follows the uniform to an alleyway between the rowhouses at 2300 and 2302.

“We got the call as shots fired and found him lying right there, head to the wall. He still had this in his waistband when we rolled him.”

The patrolman holds up a.38 five-shot.

No good, thinks Ceruti, no good at all. His last case was also a drug murder from the Western. Boy by the name of Stokes shot down in an alley off Carrollton, skinny kid who turned out to be HIV-positive when they got him down to the ME’s office. That case, too, is still open.

Ceruti fills a couple of pages in his notepad, then walks a block and a half east to a corner pay phone to call for reinforcements. Landsman answers the phone on the first ring.

“Hey, Jay,” says the detective, “this guy didn’t look good in the ambo.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s shot in the head and it’s gonna be a murder. You better wake Dunnigan up…”

No, Landsman tells him. Not this time.

“Whoa, Jay. I had the last one…”

“It’s your call, Fred. Do what you got to do. Are you sending anyone down here?”

“There’s no one to send. There aren’t any witnesses or anything close.”

“Okay, Fred. Gimme a call when you finish up at the scene.”

Ceruti slams the receiver into its cradle, cursing his sergeant bitterly. The brief conversation has left him with no doubt that Landsman is trying to fuck him, sending him out on calls alone and holding back when he calls for help. It was the same thing on the Stokes homicide last month and on the beating in the Southwest back in April. Those are the last two homicides handled by Landsman’s squad and Ceruti was the primary on both; this guy here on Whittier makes three in a row. Landsman reads the board, Ceruti tells himself. He knows what’s up. So why the hell doesn’t he get on Dunnigan and send his ass out here to pick up this murder?

Ceruti knows the answer. At least he thinks he does. He isn’t the golden boy of Landsman’s squad, not by a long shot. He and Pellegrini arrived at the same time, but it was Pellegrini who caught the interest of the sergeant, Pellegrini with whom Landsman preferred to handle calls. Tom is not only a prospect but a sidekick for his sergeant, a straight man for the situation comedy in which Landsman lives. Two or three good cases and Tom is suddenly a prodigy, a candidate for rookie of the year. Ceruti is simply the other one, the dime-a-dozen new kid from the districts. And now he is alone.

Ceruti makes his way back from the pay phone just as the ambo is pulling away. He tries to forget the conversation with Landsman and do what he needs to do, working what little there is of this murder-to-be. One of the uniforms manages to find a spent bullet on a nearby stoop, a.38 or.32 from the look of it, but too badly mutilated to be of any use in a ballistics comparison. A lab tech arrives a few minutes later to bag the bullet and take scene photos. Ceruti wanders back to the pay phone to tell Landsman that he’s on his way in.

That’s his intention, anyway, until he spots a heavyset woman on an Orem Avenue porch, watching him strangely as he walks toward the phone. He changes direction and saunters up to the house as casually as possible, given that it’s four in the morning.

Incredibly, she saw them. More incredible still, she is willing to tell Ceruti what she saw. There were three of them running after the sound of shots, sprinting down the street toward one of the houses at the other end of Orem. No, she didn’t recognize them, but she saw them. Ceruti asks several more questions and the woman becomes nervous-understandably, since she still has to live in this neighborhood. If he takes her off the porch now, Ceruti tells the whole street that she’s a witness. Instead, he leaves with a name and phone number.

Back at the homicide office, Landsman is watching the overnight news channel when Ceruti returns and throws the notepad down on a desk.

“Hey, Fred,” says Landsman coolly. “How’d it go out there?”

Ceruti glares at him, then shrugs.

Landsman turns back to the television. “Maybe you’ll get a call on it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

From Ceruti’s point of view, his sergeant is being senselessly cruel. But for Landsman, the equation is simple. A new man comes up and you show him the ropes, carrying him along on a few cases until he knows the game. If you can, you may even throw him a few dunkers to feed his confidence. But up in homicide, that’s about it for the orientation program. After that, it’s sink or swim.

It is true that Landsman thinks the world of Pellegrini; it is also true that he would rather work a murder with Pellegrini than with anyone else in the squad. But Ceruti has had a year of handling calls with Dunnigan or Requer watching over him; he isn’t exactly being thrown naked to the wolves here. In that sense, he is right to find meaning in the fact that he has worked the squad’s last three murders and worked them alone. They were homicides and he’s a homicide detective and, in Landsman’s mind, now is the time to see if Ceruti can find the meaning in that.

Fred Ceruti is a good cop, brought to homicide by the captain after four years’ experience in the Eastern District. He did some respectable plainclothes work in the ops unit there, and in a department where affirmative action is a standing policy, a good black plainclothesman is going to get noticed. But still, CID homicide after only four years of experience is a hard road for anyone to walk, and the other sixth-floor units were littered with detectives who had been bounced from the Crimes Against Persons section. At crime scenes and during interrogations, things that could never slip past a more experienced investigator could still elude Ceruti. Such limitations weren’t immediately noticeable when he was working cases as a secondary investigator with Dunnigan or Requer. Nor did they become immediately apparent when Landsman began sending him out alone on calls four months ago.

Many of Ceruti’s first solo flights were successes, but those cases were largely stone dunkers-the February stabbing death of a Block prostitute came complete with three witnesses, and the suspect in the April bludgeoning from the Southwest was identified by patrol officers well before any detective’s arrival.

But a double murder from January, a pair of drug killings at an east side stash house, had been cleared only after some acrimony between Ceruti and his sergeant. In that case, Ceruti had been reluctant to charge a suspect with a case that consisted of one reluctant witness. Landsman, however, needed to get those two murders off the board, and when Dunnigan was later able to pressure the witness into a full statement, the case was sent to the grand jury over Ceruti’s objections. Substantively, Ceruti had been right-the weak case was ultimately dismissed before trial by prosecutors-but in practical, political terms, the late clearance made the new detective appear unaggressive. Likewise, the Stokes case, the back alley drug slaying from the Western, did not go well either. There, too, Ceruti had to his credit found a woman who had seen the fleeing gunmen, but he elected not to bring her downtown at the time. Considering the risk to a known witness, this was not the worst decision; Edgerton, for example, left his witness at the scene of that Payson Street shooting last month. The difference was that Edgerton put his case in the black, and in the real world, a detective can do anything he wants as long as the cases go down.

The fact that a new detective such as Ceruti was now looking at two consecutive open murders did not in itself constitute a threat. After all, neither Joseph Stokes nor Raymond Hawkins, the dying man on Whittier Street, was going to be mistaken for a taxpayer, and in practice, a homicide detective could go a fairly long time without typing a prosecution report so long as none of the cases was a red ball. In the end, therefore, Ceruti’s sin would not be that two drug murders stayed open. The sin was more basic. Ceruti would be brought down by willful neglect of the police department’s First Commandment: Cover Thine Ass.

A little more than a month from now, Ceruti will be down on the captain’s carpet for the Stokes murder, in particular. Taxpayer or no, the thirty-two-year-old victim in that case turns out to be the brother of a civilian communications clerk for the department. By virtue of that position, she knows enough about the police department to find the homicide unit and make repeated inquiries about the status of the investigation. In truth, the status of the investigation is that it has no status. There are no fresh leads and the woman who witnessed the flight of the shooters can identify no one. Ceruti puts the clerk off for a time, but eventually the woman directs a complaint to his superiors. And when those superiors pull the case file, they find nothing. No office report, no follow-ups, no paper trail documenting either progress or lack of it. And when the captain learns that Ceruti left breathing witnesses at his last two murder scenes, things go from bad to worse.

“That’s the first thing you’re supposed to learn up here,” Eddie Brown later tells Ceruti. “No matter what, you always cover yourself in the case file. You write up everything so that no one can come back and second-guess what you did.”

In the end, it is not Landsman who brings the empty case file into the captain’s office; he is on vacation at the time and Roger Nolan is the supervisor assigned to handle the woman’s complaint. For that reason, Landsman will later insist to anyone who will listen that he played no part in Ceruti’s misfortune. That is true in only the strictest sense, of course. In fact, Landsman sent him out alone on those murders with an air of practiced noncommitment, waiting to see if his detective would stand or fall. Ceruti may have been wrong to think that his sergeant was out to screw him, but he was right to believe that, in the end, Landsman did little to save him from being screwed.

It is altogether sad and painful, particularly because Ceruti is a decent guy, an intelligent, good-humored addition to the homicide unit’s camaraderie. But by summer’s end, the complaints about the Stokes case will reach a natural resolution. The captain and D’Addario will keep Ceruti on the sixth floor, of course; they owe him that much, though such considerations are of small consolation to Ceruti. By September, he will be a vice detective, honing himself on whores and pimps and numbers runners in an office three doors down the hall from homicide. And the proximity alone will make for hard moments.

A week after the transfer, Ceruti is standing with another vice detective in the sixth-floor lobby when an elevator suddenly disgorges Landsman, who looks blankly at the detective.

“Hey, Fred, how’s it going?”

Ceruti stares angrily and Landsman moves past him, seemingly oblivious.

“You tell me,” asks Ceruti, turning to his companion. “How cold was that?”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Terry McLarney tells him. “I just don’t believe you really mean it.”

Worden shrugs.

“You don’t want to leave like this, Donald. You’d fucking hate it. You know you would.”

“Watch me.”

“No, you’re just pissed off. Give it time.”

“I’ve given it a lot of time. I’ve given it twenty-six years.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Worden looks at him.

“What else are you gonna do with yourself? You’d be bored shitless.”

Worden says nothing for a moment, then pulls out the keys to his pickup. “It’s getting late, Terry. Time to be heading down the road.”

“Wait a minute,” says McLarney, turning toward a brick wall at the edge of the lot. “I gotta take a leak. Don’t leave yet.”

Don’t leave yet. Don’t give up on a long, dangling conversation between two white men in rumpled suits, two refugees who have been standing in an empty parking lot off the 200 block of West Madison Street for more than an hour. It is three in the morning, and the two-story Formstone structure on the opposite side of the street, an establishment that trades as Kavanaugh’s Irish Tavern, sits dark and empty, having expectorated four or five homicide detectives more than an hour ago. The two white men are the only remaining patrons, and they have but one can of warm beer remaining. Why in the world would anyone even think of leaving?

“Listen to me, Donald,” says McLarney, returning. “This is your job. This is what you do.”

Worden shakes his head. “This is what I do now,” he says. “I can always change jobs.”

“You can’t change.”

Worden glares at his sergeant.

“I mean you don’t want to change. Why would you want to change? How many other people can do what you do?”

McLarney pauses, hoping that some of this-any of it-will touch a nerve. God knows he means every word of it. Worden was struggling, true, but even the man’s most mediocre year is worth any aggravation. For a squad sergeant, having Worden working for you was like having sex: When it was good it was great, and even when it wasn’t so hot, it was still pretty damn good.

In the last week alone, Worden proved as much by clearing two murders on nothing less than instinct and talent. He made it all look effortless and elegant, even as the stink of the Larry Young debacle was still hanging in the air.

Six days ago, Worden and Rick James caught a stabbing up on Jasper Street, a twenty-three-year-old black kid half-naked under bloody sheets in a second-floor bedroom. The two detectives took one look at their victim and knew immediately that they were dealing with a dispute between homosexual lovers. The depth and number of the stab wounds told them that much; no motive other than sex produces that kind of overkill, and no woman can make those kinds of holes in a man.

The body was already coming out of rigor. It was a humid night, and the temperature in that rowhouse had to be 110 on the upper floors: still, the two men refused to rush their scene. Several times, when the heat became too much for him, Worden stepped out onto the street and sat for a moment on the corner bench, sipping quietly on a convenience store soda. They stayed with that scene for hours, with James working the second floor and the area immediately surrounding the body. Worden wandered through the rest of the house, looking for anything out of place. In the third-floor bedroom, the killer had apparently yanked a VCR off its table and pushed the appliance halfway into a plastic garbage bag before giving up on the theft and fleeing. Was it really a robbery? Or was someone trying to make it look like a robbery?

Eventually, Worden got down to the kitchen, where he found the sink half-filled with dirty water. Reaching down gingerly, he pulled the drain and the sink emptied slowly, revealing a cutting knife with its blade broken. Lying next to the murder weapon was a hand towel still pink from the blood; the killer had washed up before leaving. Worden looked down the kitchen counter at a dozen or so unwashed dishes, glasses and utensils-jetsam, it seemed, from the previous night’s dinner. One glass, however, stood on the far edge of the counter, alone and distinct. Worden called the lab tech over and told him to check that glass in particular for prints. Hot as it was, Worden figured the killer might have wanted a drink of water before leaving.

The Jasper Street scene took five hours, after which James headed for the morgue and Worden locked himself in an interrogation room with the roommate of the victim, who also owned the house. The roommate had discovered the body after returning from his night job and told Worden that when he left to go to work, the victim was entertaining a friend he had met at a bar. He had never seen the guy before and didn’t know his name.

Worden rode the roommate hard, seizing on the fact that he was out working while his bunky was lazing around the house with some new man.

“You didn’t like that, did you?”

“I didn’t care.”

“You didn’t care?”

“No.”

“I know that would make me angry.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

The man held firm to his story and Worden was left with nothing, or so it seemed until later that afternoon, when the Printrak got a solid hit off the drinking glass. The latent print matched that of a twenty-three-year-old west-sider with a long sheet of priors. With considerable reluctance, the owner of the house returned once again to the homicide unit and made the ID of the suspect from a photo array. For that clearance, Worden’s eye-his ability to see that separate drinking glass as precious evidence-got the credit.

Four nights later, his remarkable memory sent another murder into the black when a tactical section officer locked up two east side men on auto theft charges and found that one of them, Anthony Cunningham, was wanted on a murder warrant written by Worden a month earlier. The warrant had been typed and signed shortly after detectives from the robbery unit locked up a crew of east-siders for a series of holdups centered around the Douglass Homes. Lew Davis, a long-time colleague of Worden’s in robbery, had wandered across the hall with the news.

“We’ve got one of them in there now going for a whole bunch of holdups,” Davis asked Worden. “You all have anything up there that might match up to these guys?”

Standing in front of the board, Worden needed exactly fifteen seconds before his elephantine memory settled on one name among fifty: Charles Lehman, the fifty-one-year-old killed on Fayette Street as he walked to his car with a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner. Kincaid’s whodunit from February.

“I got one right in that area,” said Worden. “You’re talking to this guy now?”

“Yeah, he’s in the big interrogation room. Christ, Donald, he’s already gone for about a dozen robberies.”

After a brief parley with the kid in the large box, Worden knew that the kid could indeed put the Lehman murder down. The duty prosecutor that night, Don Giblin, was called down and the negotiations began. The prosecutor’s bottom-line offer: for identifying and testifying against the shooter on the Lehman murder, eleven years on one of the robberies and no immunity if you’re linked to any other murders or shootings.

Worden watched the kid mull over the deal, then attempt a counteroffer: “Five years.”

“You’re no good to me with five years,” the prosecutor told the kid. “A jury won’t believe you unless you get at least ten.”

“Too much,” said the kid.

“Oh, you don’t think you should get any time,” said Worden, disgusted. “What about all them people you robbed? What about that old lady you all shot on Monument Street?”

“We’re not talkin’ about them,” the kid snapped. “This is me we’re talkin’ about.”

Worden shook his head and walked from the room, leaving Giblin to cement the deal. It was ugly, all right, but the warrant for twenty-five-year-old Anthony Cunningham went to a court commissioner that same night. Now, with Cunningham locked up, that case, too, was down.

Four nights, two murders. McLarney has to wonder how many other detectives would have noticed that one drinking glass was a little too far from the others? And how many detectives would have made the connection between the Lehman case and the other east side robberies? Hell, McLarney tells himself, most detectives can’t remember the cases worked by their own squad, much less those handled by some other squad five months back.

“You can’t leave,” McLarney tells Worden, renewing his appeal.

Worden shakes his head.

“You can’t,” says McLarney, laughing. “I won’t let you.”

“You’re just talking like this ’cause you’re losing a detective. That’s what you’re worried about, right? You just don’t want to have to spend the time to break in a new guy.”

McLarney laughs again and leans back against the front of his car. He reaches into the paper bag for the last can. “If you leave, there’ll be no one around to fuck with Dave Brown and he’ll go all derelict.”

Worden gives back a half-smile.

“If you quit, Donald, he’ll start thinking he knows what he’s doing. It’ll be dangerous. I’ll be writing long reports for the captain every other week.”

“Waltemeyer will keep on him.”

McLarney shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this…”

Worden shrugs. “You’re the one talking.”

“Donald, you…” says McLarney, pausing to stare down the cross street toward Monument. Worden fidgets, rolling the keys to his truck back and forth on their ring.

“You see him?” asks McLarney suddenly.

“The boy in the gray?”

“Yeah, the sweatshirt.”

“Yeah I seen him. He’s only walked by here four times now.”

“He’s marking us.”

“Yeah, he is.”

McLarney stares back up the cross street. The kid is wiry and dark-skinned, sixteen or seventeen, wearing spandex bike shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. It’s still eighty degrees or better and the kid has both hands in his pockets and the hoody zipped tight.

“He thinks we’re victims,” says McLarney, laughing under his breath.

“Two old white guys hanging in an empty lot at this hour,” snorts Worden. “I’m not surprised.”

“We’re not old,” says McLarney, objecting. “I’m not old anyway.”

Worden smiles, tosses the key ring and catches it with the other hand. He told himself that he would be going straight home after the four-to-twelve shift; instead, he spent two hours on a Kavanaugh’s barstool, hurting himself with Jack Black. But the last hour’s temperance-Worden had no taste for the Miller Lite that McLarney bought carryout-was bringing him back down to earth.

“I got to get up early,” he says.

McLarney shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear this, Donald. You’ve had a bad year, all right, so what? So you get back in the saddle on another case and things change. You know how it is.”

“I don’t like being used.”

“You weren’t used.”

“Yes,” says Worden. “I was.”

“You’re still angry about Monroe Street, right? We disagreed about that and that’s okay, but that’s-”

“No. This isn’t about Monroe Street.”

“Then what?”

Worden grimaces.

“This Larry Young thing?”

“That’s part of it,” says Worden. “That’s definitely part of it.”

“Well, that was fucked, I have to admit.”

“They used me,” Worden repeats. “They used me to do their dirty work. I don’t need that.”

“They used you,” McLarney agrees reluctantly.

Worden turns his head slightly, catching the kid in the gray hoody out of one eye. Like a shark circling the raft, the kid is once again edging down the opposite side of the cross street, hands still deep in his pockets, watching the two men without seeming to watch them.

“Enough is enough,” says McLarney. He drains the can in one fluid motion, then reaches into his jacket pocket while starting across the lot. The kid has changed directions again, moving toward the detectives from the other side of the street.

“Don’t go and shoot him, Terry,” says Worden, mildly amused. “I don’t wanna spend the first day of my vacation writing.”

At McLarney’s approach, the kid slows, suddenly confused. The sergeant pulls the silver shield out and waves it once in a way that suggests nothing more than irritation. “We’re cops,” he yells at the kid. “Go rob someone else.”

One flash of silver and the kid is off on a new vector, bounding back to the other side of the street. He throws his hands in the air, palms open, as if to surrender.

“I ain’t about robbin’ nobody,” the kid yells over his shoulder. “You got it wrong.”

McLarney waits long enough for the kid to disappear onto Madison, then walks back to the conversation.

“We’re cops and you’re not,” says Worden, amused. “That was good, Terry.”

“I guess we pretty much fucked up his night,” says McLarney. “He wasted half an hour on us.”

Worden yawns. “Awright, sergeant. I think it’s about time to be heading down the road here…”

“Guess so,” says McLarney. “I’m outta beer.”

Worden gives his sergeant a light chuck on the arm and begins sorting through the key ring.

“Where’d you park?”

“Up on Madison.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“What’re you? My date?”

McLarney laughs. “You could do worse.”

“Not really.”

“Listen, Donald,” says McLarney abruptly. “Just give it some time. You’re pissed off now and I don’t blame you, but things will change. You know this is what you want to do, right? You don’t want to do anything else.”

Worden listens.

“You know you’re the best man I’ve got.”

Worden shoots him a look.

“Really, you are. And I’d hate like hell to lose you, but that’s not why I’m saying this. Really.”

Worden shoots him another look.

“Okay, okay, maybe that is why I’m saying it. Maybe I’m full of shit here and I just don’t want to be alone in the office with a mental case like Waltemeyer. But you know what I’m saying. You really should give it some time…”

“I’m tired,” says Worden. “I’ve had enough.”

“You’ve had a terrible year. Monroe Street and the cases you got… You definitely haven’t caught the breaks, but that will change. It’ll definitely change. And this Larry Young thing, I mean, who the fuck cares?”

Worden listens.

“You’re a cop, Donald. Fuck the bosses, don’t even think about the bosses. They’re always going to be fucked up and that’s all there is to it. So what? So fuck them. But where else are you going to go and be a cop?”

“Careful driving home,” says Worden.

“Donald, listen to me.”

“I heard you, Terry.”

“Just promise me this. Promise me you won’t do anything without coming to me first.”

“I’ll tell you first,” says Worden.

“Okay,” says McLarney. “Then we can have this discussion a second time. I get another chance to practice my speech.”

Worden smiles.

“You’re off tomorrow, right?” asks McLarney.

“For ten days. My vacation.”

“Oh yeah. Have a good one. You planning on going anywhere?”

Worden shakes his head.

“Staying around the house, huh?”

“I’m doing some work on the basement.”

McLarney nods, suddenly speechless. Power tools, drywall and all other facets of home improvement have always been a mystery to him.

“Careful driving home, Terry.”

“I’m fine,” says McLarney.

“Okay then.”

Worden climbs in the cab, pumps the ignition and edges the truck into the empty lanes of Madison Street. McLarney walks back to his own car, hoping against hope, wondering whether anything said tonight will make even the least bit of difference.