Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

SEVEN

Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil’s sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no piña coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every other rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by God-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical mass.

The season is an endless street parade, with half the city out fanning itself on marble and stone stoops, waiting for a harbor breeze that never seems to make it across town. Summer is a four-to-twelve shift of night-sticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyefucking each other and every passing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the season of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it’s the time for truly dangerous living, the season of massive and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won. A drunk switches off the Orioles game in a Pigtown bar; a west side kid dances with an east-sider’s girl at the rec center off Aisquith Street; a fourteen-year-old bumps an older kid getting on the number 2 bus-every one of them becomes a life in the balance.

In a detective’s mind, the beginning of the summer can be marked with precision by the year’s first warm weather disrespect murder. Respect being the rarest of commodities in the inner city, its defense by homicidal assault on an 85-degree-or-better day can suddenly seem required. This year, summer begins on a warm Sunday night in May, when a sixteen-year-old Walbrook High School student dies of a gunshot wound to the stomach, sustained during a fight that began when his friend was punched and forced to relinquish a 15-cent cherry Popsicle.

“This had nothing to do with drugs,” says Dave Hollingsworth, one of Stanton’s detectives, in a statement meant to reassure reporters and, through them, the sweltering masses. “This was over an ice cream.”

Summertime.

True, the statistics show only a mild increase in the homicide rate during the hot months, at least if you consider a 10 or 20 percent jump worthy of the term mild. But in the mind of any homicide detective, the statistics can’t say a goddamn thing until they get out in an Eastern District radio car for a Fourth of July weekend. Out in the streets, summer is something to be reckoned with no matter how much meat the shock-trauma units manage to salvage. To hell with the ones who die, a veteran detective will tell you, it’s the assault-by-shootings and cuttings and beatings that can keep a squad running all summer long. Beyond that there are the suicides and overdoses and unattended deaths-routine garbage detail duty that suddenly becomes unbearable when the cadavers are going ripe in 90-degree weather. Don’t even bother showing a homicide detective the charts and graphs because he’ll shake them off. Summer is a war.

Just ask Eddie Brown on a hot July afternoon in Pimlico as the neighborhood girls dance with each other on rowhouse porches while lab techs and detectives clean up a crime scene. A young man is dead, shot while sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car as he rode down Pimlico toward Greenspring in search of another homeboy who managed to find him first. A daylight murder on a main drag, but the driver of the car has fled and no one else saw a thing. Brown pulls a loaded.32 from the wrecked car as the girls move to a beat that has been brought to distortion by unlimited volume.

First a high wail: “It takes two to make a thing go right…”

Then the bass lick and another soprano shout: “… it takes two to make it outta sight.”

Number 1 with a bullet. The song is this summer’s hands-down winner for Sound of the Ghetto, with that deep-bottom bass line and those high-pitched screams on the quarter beat. Thick drum track, def rhythm and some sweet-voiced yoette wailing out the same two-line lyric. East side, west side, and all around the town, the corner boys of Baltimore are fighting and dying to the same soundtrack.

You think summer’s just another season? Then ask Rich Garvey about the Fourth of July shooting on Madeira Street in the Eastern, where a thirty-five-year-old woman ends a running dispute with her neighbor by firing one shot from a.32 at close range, then walks back to her rowhouse as the other woman lies dying.

“It takes two to make a thing go right…”

Ask Kevin Davis about Ernestine Parker, a middle-aged Pimlico resident who decides that it’s not the heat but the humidity, then puts a shotgun to the back of her husband’s head on a July night. And when Davis gets back to the office and punches Ernestine into the computer, he learns it’s her second bite of the apple; she had killed another man twenty years ago.

“It takes two to make it outta sight…”

Ask Rick James after a summer morning in the Hollander Ridge housing project, where a resident lies dead on a bloodsoaked mattress, having calmly gone upstairs and put himself to bed after being cut by a ladyfriend the night before. Or ask Constantine at his scene down on Jack Street, half a block from the Brooklyn Homes projects, where the wreck of a ninety-year-old woman waits for him in a bedroom with blood spatter on every wall. Beaten, raped and sodomized, the old woman was then forced to breathe into a pillow, finally ending the ordeal.

“It takes two…”

Ask Rick Requer or Gary Dunnigan about that domestic from the Northeast, the one where the dead man has a hole in his throat so deep you can see the whole thorax, and his girlfriend claims that he routinely asked her to come at him with kitchen knives, the better to show off his martial arts skill. Or ask Worden and James about the loser who tries to break into an East Baltimore rowhouse only to have his own pistol used against him by the surprised but otherwise athletic male occupant. A single shot is fired during the struggle and the dying man sits down suddenly on the living room sofa.

“Get out of here before I blow your head off,” the homeowner shouts, clutching the gun.

“You already did,” says his assailant, losing consciousness.

“… to make a thing go right…”

Summer needs no motive; it’s a reason unto itself. Just ask Eddie Brown about the fifteen-year-old who shoots his friend with a defective.22 on Preakness Saturday night in Cherry Hill, then smugly refuses any statement to police, assured in his mind and in fact that he will only be charged as a juvenile. Then ask Donald Kincaid about Joseph Adams, who bled to death on the way to University Hospital after picking a fight with a fourteen-year-old and getting pushed through a convenience store window, the broken sheet glass falling on his neck like a guillotine.

“It takes two…”

Bodies everywhere as June bleeds into July, and even among men for whom a studied indifference to human weakness and misery is a necessary survival skill, summer produces its own special strain of the disease. This is CID homicide, mister, and neither heat nor rain nor gloom of night will stay these men from their rendezvous with callousness. Cruel jokes? The cruelest. Sick humor? The sickest. And, you ask, how can they possibly do it? Volume. That’s right, volume. They won’t be outsold, they won’t be undersold; they will solve no crime before its time.

Picture Garvey and Worden sharing a smoke outside a second-floor apartment on Lanvale, where an aging alcoholic lies dead on the floor, his bottle empty, his neck cleanly broken. Chances are he was alive when he fell to the floor drunk, but was then killed accidentally by his equally intoxicated wife, who forced the door against his neck as she tried to enter the room.

“You want to make it a murder?” deadpans Worden, inspecting and then lighting his cigar.

“We could use the stat,” jokes Garvey, equally dry.

“Then make it a murder. What do I know? I’m just an ignorant white boy from Hampden.”

“It’s a dunker…”

“I don’t think she’s strong enough to kill him.”

“What the hell,” says Garvey, as if sizing up a trout. “We’ll throw this one back.”

Or Jay Landsman doing another stand-up routine in lower Wyman Park, where the elderly occupant of a senior citizens’ high-rise has done a header from a twentieth-floor balcony. From the look of things, the old woman stayed pretty much intact until she glanced off a second-floor landing, her head and torso staying upstairs, legs and rump falling to street level.

“She went her separate ways,” Landsman tells the uniform at the scene. “So you’d better write separate incident reports.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.”

“One guy on the sixth floor said he actually looked out his window and saw her falling,” the patrolman says, reading from his notes.

“Oh yeah?” says Landsman. “Did she say anything?”

“Uh, no. I mean maybe. I mean I didn’t ask.”

“Right,” says Landsman, “but have you found the pogo stick yet?”

“Pogo stick?” asks the flustered uniform.

“Pogo stick,” says Landsman firmly. “I think it’s pretty obvious this woman took a bad bounce.”

Blame it on the heat, because what else can explain that rollercoaster midnight shift in August, when Harry Edgerton takes an unattended death call from a young Southwest uniform, listens for a minute or two, then tells the kid he doesn’t have time to visit the scene.

“Listen, we’re kinda busy right now,” he says, cradling the phone on his shoulder. “Why don’t you throw the body in the back of your car and bring him on downtown so we can take a look at him?”

“Right,” says the kid, hanging up.

“Oh shit,” says Edgerton, fumbling through a directory for the Southwest dispatch phone number. “He actually believed me.”

A hellacious night it was, too, with a murder, two cuttings and a police-involved shooting. But two nights later, McLarney’s detectives are again tempting fate. Waiting for the first call of the night, Worden, James, and Dave Brown gather around the coffee room desk, concentrating their psychic powers on the phone extensions, trying to will into existence something more than a ghetto homicide, something that will bring unlimited overtime.

“I feel it.”

“Shut up. Concentrate.”

“I feel it.”

“Yeah, it’s coming.”

“A big one.”

“A double,” says Dave Brown.

“No, a triple,” adds James.

“Stone whodunit.”

“At a major tourist attraction…”

“Fort McHenry!”

“Memorial Stadium!”

“No,” says Brown, reaching for the motherlode, “the Harborplace Pavilion.”

“During lunch hour,” adds Worden.

“Ooooooh,” says Rick James. “A moneymaker.”

Bad craziness.

Or picture Landsman and Pellegrini a week or so later in the Pennington Hotel in Curtis Bay, where refinery storage tanks tower above a battered working-class neighborhood at the harbor’s southern approach.

“Third floor,” says the desk man. “On the right.”

The dead man is rigored and jaundiced, obviously diseased, with half a bottle of Mad Dog on the floor by his feet, an empty box of Hostess doughnuts on the facing table. In the last analysis, death at the Pennington Hotel is a sad redundancy.

A Southern District uniform, a young officer fresh to the street, nonetheless guards the scene with an earnest sincerity.

“I need you to tell the truth about something,” says Landsman.

“Sir?”

“You ate those doughnuts, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“The doughnuts. You finished ’em off, right?”

“No sir.”

“You sure?” asks Landsman, deadpan. “You just had one, right?”

“No sir. They were gone when I got here.”

“Okay then, good job,” says Landsman, turning to leave. “Whaddaya know, Tom, a cop who doesn’t like doughnuts.”

More than any other season, summer holds its own special horrors. Consider, for example, Dunnigan and Requer on a 100-degree dayshift and an old man in the clutter of a basement apartment on Eutaw Street. A decomp case with attitude, cooking in there for a week or more until someone caught the scent and noticed a few thousand flies on the inside of a window.

“If you got ’em, smoke ’em,” says the ME’s attendant, lighting up a cigar. “It’s bad now, but it’s gonna be worse when we get to flippin’ him.”

“He’ll burst on you,” says Dunnigan.

“Not me,” says the attendant. “I’m an artist.”

Requer laughs, then laughs again when the attendants try to roll the bloated wreck gently only to have it explode like a bad melon, the skin sliding away from the chest cavity.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says the attendant, dropping the dead man’s legs and turning to gag. “Jesus fuck-my-fucking-job Christ.”

“That ain’t pretty, bunk,” growls Requer, puffing harder on the cigar and looking at a rolling mass of maggots. “His face is moving-pork fried rice. You know what I’m saying?”

“One of the worst I ever had,” says the attendant, catching his breath. “By the number of flies, I’d say five or six days at least.”

“A week,” says Requer, closing his notebook.

Outside in the parking lot, a Central District officer, the first uniform in the apartment, has slipped away to eat lunch in the front of his radio car, a portable tape player on the dash blaring that same summer beat.

“It takes two to make a thing go right…”

“How the fuck can you eat after handling this call?” asks Dunnigan, genuinely amazed.

“Roast beef, rare,” says the cop, displaying the second half of the sandwich with pride. “Hey, you only get one lunch a shift.”

For summer, you need a scorecard to keep the lineup straight. Put Constantine and Keller in Pigtown, working a bar murder where the suspect turns out to be a kid who beat the robbery-murder of an elderly schoolteacher four years ago. Put Waltemeyer and Worden at a reggae dance club near the Metro tracks in the Northwest, its front walk covered by a dead Jamaican and a dozen spent 9mm casings, its interior cluttered by about seventy other Jakes who swear to Jah himself that they see not a blessed thing, mon. Put Dunnigan down in the Perkins Homes for a body in the closet; Pellegrini in the Central for a body in the gutter; Childs and Sydnor in the Eastern for a female skeleton beneath a rowhouse porch, a skeleton that is finally matched to a missing persons report three weeks later. She was the tiniest thing, barely eighteen and a hundred pounds dripping wet, and her bastard of a stepfather waited only long enough for his wife to go out of town for a week. He brought three friends home for Saturday night and after a six-pack, the four of them took turns on her, then strangled her by wrapping a towel around her neck and pulling in different directions.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, pleading.

“Sorry,” her stepfather told her. “We got to.”

The shouts and screams and curses rise and fall with the temperature in the stagnant, fetid air. The crescendo comes in the last and hottest week of July, six straight days of boiler room heat that makes the citywide police frequency sound like an endless tape:

“Forty-five hundred Pimlico, odd side in the rear, for a woman screaming… Thirty-six hundred Howard Park, for an armed person… Twenty-four fifty-one Druid Hill, for an assault in progress… Signal thirteen. Calhoun and Mosher. Signal thirteen… Fourteen-fifteen Key Highway for a man beating a woman…”

And then, the dispatch call that everyone most fears, the dayshift broadcast that only comes when the heat has truly touched the wrong nerve in the wrong man in the wrong place.

“Signal thirteen. Seven fifty-four Forrest Street.”

It begins with one inmate and one guard mixing it up in the security booth at the end of the No. 4 yard. They are joined by another inmate, then another, then a fourth-each one wielding an aluminum softball bat. Riot.

Detectives fly out of the homicide office in bunches-Landsman, Worden, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Dave Brown, James-heading for the Maryland Penitentiary at the eastern edge of the city’s downtown, the gray stone fortress that has served as the state’s maximum security prison since James Madison was president. The Pen is the end of the line for every lost cause in the state corrections system, the final repository for the men who somehow can’t live within the limits of the prisons at Jessup and Hagerstown. Home to Death Row and the gas chamber, the Maryland Pen warehouses human beings who are facing an average sentence of life imprisonment, and its antiquated south wing has been called “the innermost circle of hell” by a state attorney general’s report. By any reckoning, the population of the Maryland Pen has nothing whatsoever to lose; worst of all, they know it.

For fifteen minutes, the Pen correctional officers lose complete control of the recreation yards to more than three hundred inmates armed with homemade knives, clubs and every other available weapon. Two guards are beaten with bats in the No. 4 yard, another is bludgeoned with a metal cross bar from the weight room. A fourth is chased into the prison shop building only to find that the security area gate is locked shut. Unwilling to risk unlocking the metal gate, a female correctional officer watches, terrified, from the other side of the partition as six or seven inmates beat and stab the guard to within an inch of his life. Twenty other inmates drag another female officer out of a counseling clinic at the southern edge of the recreation yard, beating her badly, then rush into the clinic to batter a prison psychologist. Before being repulsed by a detachment of guards rushed through the Madison Street entrance, the inmates set fire to the clinic, torching as many psychological evaluations as they can find. Led by a deputy warden, the reinforcements arrive to retake the clinic and rescue the female officer and the psychologist, who has fallen to the floor of his office beneath a rain of blows from a metal pipe. The prisoners are pushed slowly back toward the yard-a retreat that only becomes a rout after two guards fire their shotguns from the clinic door. Two inmates fall wounded on the asphalt.

On the towers at the penitentiary’s east and west walls, guards try to fire their shotguns over the heads of the rioters-which only adds to the carnage by striking several guards as well as rioters. Just outside a west wall tower, yet another correctional officer is felled by shotgun pellets fired by an east wall guard two hundred yards away. There are no attempts to escape, no effort to take hostages, no demands, no negotiations. It is violence for its own sake, the mirror image of the summer that exists in the city that surrounds the penitentiary walls. You can lock them up and you can lose the key, but the men inside the fortress on Forrest Street still march to the rhythm of the streets.

Fifteen minutes after the last prisoner has been hauled out of the yard and dragged to a tier for lockdown, Jay Landsman walks across the No. 3 and 4 yards, mentally noting the bloodstains that represent a half-dozen crime scenes. From the south wing tiers immediately above him, the focused rage of the prison comes down on him like rain. Walking alone in the open yard, Landsman is made for a city detective immediately, perhaps by prisoners who have been among his clientele.

“Yo, you white bitch, bring yo’ tight ass up here and drop them trousers.”

“Get out my yard, you fuckhead cop.”

“Don’t be down there after dark, yo, we’ll fuck you good.”

“Eat my shit, cop. Eat my shit.”

The last comment catches Landsman’s ear; for just a moment he pauses, staring up at the south wing tiers.

“C’mon up here, faggot. We’ll fuck you like we fucked them bitch guards.”

“Bring yo’ white ass up here, faggot.”

Landsman lights a cigarette and waves cheerfully at the stone facade, as if it were some kind of cruise ship pulling away from its moorings. In its moment, the perfect gesture-better than a hard look or the standard finger-and the catcalls fall away. Smiling maniacally, Landsman waves again and the message becomes clear: Yo, assholes. My white bitch ass is going home tonight to an air-conditioned rancher and a woman and a dozen steamed crabs and a six-pack of beer. You’re going to a 98-degree prison cell for a steaming week of lockdown. Bon voyage, you simple motherfuckers.

Landsman finishes his tour of the yard and confers with the deputy warden. Nine correctional officers are hospitalized; three inmates have also been sent to emergency rooms. The prison authorities are responsible for security, but homicide will handle the prosecution of those inmates named as being part of the riot. That’s the theory anyway. But it’s hard for any guard to remember a single face when a crowd of men is beating on him with aluminum bats; after an hour, the tentative list of suspects stands at only thirteen inmates positively identified by authorities.

Landsman and Dick Fahlteich, the primary detective for the riot, have those suspects brought to the deputy warden’s office. They come in one by one, shackled and cuffed and devoid of expression. A quick survey reveals that every last one is a product of Baltimore, and all but four are down on a city murder charge. In fact, every other name on the list manages to trigger a memory in some detective’s mind. Clarence Mouzone? That crazy bastard beat three or four murders before Willis finally got him on one. Wyman Ushery? Didn’t he kill that boy at the Crown station on Charles Street back in ’81? Litzinger’s case, I think. Fuck yeah, that was him.

The accused shuffle into the office and listen impassively as Landsman tells them they were seen assaulting this or that guard. Each inmate listens with practiced boredom, glancing back and forth among the faces of the detectives, searching for anything that seems familiar. You can almost hear them thinking aloud: That one I don’t remember, but that one was there for my lineup, and that one in the corner took the stand on me in court.

“You want to say anything?” asks Landsman.

“I don’t got shit to say to you.”

“Okay,” says Landsman, smiling. “See ya.”

One of the last men to saunter down memory lane is a thick-framed nineteen-year-old monster, a kid with the kind of prize-fighter physique that can only come from a prison weight room. Ransom Watkins begins shaking his head halfway through Landsman’s speech.

“I got nothin’ to say.”

“Okay then.”

“But I want to know one thing from this man here,” he says, looking hard across the room at Kincaid. “I bet you don’t even remember me.”

“Sure I do,” says the detective. “I got a good memory.”

Ransom Watkins was all of fifteen when Kincaid locked him up for the Dewitt Duckett murder in ’83. Watkins was a smaller piece of a man then, but just as hard. He was one of three west side boys who shot a fourteen-year-old in a hallway at Harlem Park Junior High, then yanked a Georgetown athletic jacket off the dying kid’s back. Other students recognized the trio as they ran from the school, and Kincaid discovered the missing jacket in a suspect’s bedroom closet. The next morning, Watkins and the others were cracking jokes in the Western District lockup, charged as adults.

“You remember me, detective?” Watkins says now.

“I remember you.”

“If you remember who I am, then how the hell do you sleep at night?”

“I sleep pretty good,” says Kincaid. “How do you sleep?”

“How do you think I sleep? How do I sleep when you put me here for something I didn’t do?”

Kincaid shakes his head, then picks a piece of lint from his pants cuff.

“You did it,” he tells the kid.

“The hell I did,” Watkins wails at him, his voice cracking. “You lied then and you lyin’ now.”

“No,” says Kincaid quietly. “You killed him.”

Watkins curses him again and Kincaid looks back placidly. Landsman calls to the outer room for the escorting guards even as Watkins begins to argue his case.

“We’re done with this asshole,” he says. “Send in the next guy.”

It’s another two hours before the detectives begin making their way back through the labyrinth of steel grates and metal detectors and checkpoints, back upstairs to the visiting area and the lockers in which their service revolvers have been stored.

Outside the main gate, the television reporters are doing standups for the early afternoon broadcasts, just as representatives of the guards’ union show up to criticize prison administrators and demand yet another investigation of conditions at the Pen. Halfway down Eager Street, a young boy on a ten-speed stops at the wrought-iron gate to listen to the shouts coming from the inmates in the west wing tiers. He stays for a minute or two, soaking up the catcalls and obscenities, before punching the Play button on a tape machine wedged beneath his handlebars and pedaling toward Greenmount.

“It takes two to make a thing go right…”

Beat, scream, beat, scream. A mindless liturgy of another Baltimore summer, a theme song for a city that bleeds.

“It takes two to make it outta sight…”

Landsman and Fahlteich climb into the dry heat of a Cavalier’s interior and roll slowly toward the expressway with the windows down, waiting on a breeze that just won’t come. Fahlteich flips the AM radio dial to 1100 for the all-news station, where these and other stories are coming up on the hour. Twelve seriously injured in today’s disturbance at the Maryland Penitentiary. Night watchman found slain in North Howard Street store. And tomorrow’s WBAL forecast calls for partly cloudy and hot, with highs in the mid-90s.

Another day for bagging bent blades and chalking sidewalks. Another day for pulling semi-wadcutter projectiles from drywall, for photographing blood at the broken edge of the bottle. Another day’s pay on the killing streets.

Another hot, humid night wears out its welcome in a South Baltimore rowhouse, where violence takes as its servant a lovers’ quarrel. Edgerton walks the crime scene and sends a couple of witnesses downtown before jumping into the crowded rear of the ambulance.

“How you doin’, Officer Edgerton?”

The detective looks down at the gurney to see the bloody face of Janie Vaughn smiling back at him. Janie from the Patch, as the locals call South Baltimore’s Westport. A goodhearted kid, twenty-seven years old, who when Edgerton last knew her was running with a boy by the name of Anthony Felton. Felton’s problem was his propensity for killing people, shooting them for money or drugs, mostly. The boy beat two of those murders, then went down for fifteen years on a third shooting. From the look of things in the ambo, Janie’s new boyfriend wasn’t exactly the epitome of self-control either.

“How you doin’?”

“Do I look real bad?”

“You’ve looked better,” Edgerton tells her. “But if you’re breathing now, you’re gonna make it… They sayin’ your boyfriend Ronnie cut loose.”

“Yeah he did.”

“He just went off or what?”

“I didn’t know he’d go this far.”

“You really can pick ’em, huh?”

Janie smiles, her white teeth shining for a moment amid the bloody wreckage. A tough kid, Edgerton thinks, not the kind of girl to go into shock. Stepping deeper in the ambo, Edgerton looks closely at her face and notices the stippling-dirt and metal residue from the gunshot-embedded in her cheek. A contact wound.

“Did you know he had the gun?”

“He told me he got rid of it. Sold it.”

“What kind of gun did you think he sold?”

“A little cheap one.”

“What color?”

“Silver.”

“Okay, honey, they’re getting ready to head for the hospital. I’ll see you there.”

The other victim, the twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend of Janie’s older sister, is already dead on arrival at the University ER, a casualty for no other reason than that he tried to intervene when Ronnie Lawis began beating the hell out of Janie. Later, at the hospital, she tells Edgerton that it was over nothing, that it began because Ronnie saw her sitting in a car with another man.

“How’s Durrell?” she asked Edgerton in the emergency room’s code area, naming her sister’s boyfriend. “He gonna make it?”

“I don’t know. He’s in another part of the hospital.”

It’s a lie, of course. At that moment, Durrell Rollins is dead on the gurney to Janie’s immediate right, his mouth clamped around a yellow catheter, his chest pierced by a single shot. If Janie could move her head or see past the facial bandage, she’d know.

“I’m cold,” she tells Edgerton.

He nods, stroking the girl’s hand, then stops for a moment to wipe the blood from her left hand with a paper towel. Dark red dots speckle the lighter brown of his trousers.

“How’m I doin’?”

“Hey, if they’re leaving you alone in here with me, you’re okay,” Edgerton tells her. “It’s when about eight people are hovering over you that you’re in trouble.”

Janie smiles.

“What happened exactly?” Edgerton asks.

“It happened so fast… Him and Durrell was inside in the kitchen. Durrell had come in ’cause he was fightin’ with me.”

“Go back to the beginning. What started it?”

“Like I told you, he saw me in a car with this guy and got mad. He came in and went down, and when he come back he put the gun to my head and starts yellin’ and all, so Durrell comes into the kitchen…”

“Did you see him shoot Durrell?”

“No, they went into the kitchen, and when I hear the shot I ran…”

“Did Durrell and him talk?”

“No. It happened too fast.”

“No time for any words, huh?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then he came outside after you?”

“Uh-huh. Fired the first shot and I tried to duck, but I fell down in the street. He came up and was right over me.”

“How long you been going together?”

“Almost a year.”

“Where’s he stay?”

“In the house.”

“That wasn’t all his clothes in there.”

“No, he got more in the basement. He got another girl he stays with up on Pennsylvania Avenue, too. I seen her once.”

“You know her?”

“I just seen her once.”

“Where’s he hang at? Where’s he likely to go?”

“Downtown area. Park and Eutaw,’ round there.”

“Any special place he’d go?”

“Sportsman’s Lounge.”

“At Park and Mulberry?”

“Yeah. He know Randy. The bartender.”

“Okay, honey,” says Edgerton, closing his notebook. “You rest easy now.”

Janie squeezes his hand, then looks up at him.

“Durrell?” she asks. “He dead, right?”

He hesitates.

“It doesn’t look good,” he says.

Later this night, when Ronnie Lawis returns to the empty Westport rowhouse for his belongings, a neighbor is out on a porch to see him and call police. A responding Southern District uniform corners the man in the basement and, after applying the handcuffs, discovers a.32 Saturday Night Special behind the hot water heater. An NCIC fingerprint check the following day shows that Lawis is, in fact, a man named Fred Lee Tweedy who escaped from a Virginia prison a year ago, having been incarcerated on a previous murder conviction.

“If my name was Tweedy,” says Edgerton, reading the report, “I’d have an alias, too.”

Another summer call, another summer clearance. The season has brought out the new and improved Harry Edgerton, at least as far as the rest of his squad is concerned. He’s answering phones. He’s handling calls. He’s writing 24-hour reports. After one police shooting, there was Edgerton in the middle of the coffee room, offering to debrief a witness or two. If not entirely convinced of Edgerton’s character transplant, Donald Kincaid has at least been mollified. And while Edgerton isn’t exactly winning awards for early relief on midnight shift and daywork, he has been getting to the office a little earlier and then, as usual, leaving later than the others.

Part of the change is Roger Nolan-the sergeant trapped in the middle of it all-who talked to Edgerton about avoiding acrimony and using some practical politics now and then. Part of it is Edgerton himself, who took some of Nolan’s advice because he was getting damn tired of being the focal point for everyone else’s backbiting. And part of it has been the other men in the squad-Kincaid and Bowman, in particular-who are also making some effort to uphold the existing truce.

Yet everyone in the room knows that it is a temporary and fragile peace, dependent on the goodwill of too many aggravated people. Edgerton is willing to placate his critics to a point, but beyond that, he is what he is and he does what he does. Likewise, Kincaid and Bowman are willing to hold their tongues so long as the lamb doesn’t stray too far from the fold. Given these realities, the friendly banter can’t last, though for now, Nolan’s squad seems to be holding itself together.

In fact, Nolan’s boys are on something of a roll, handling five or six more cases than either of the other squads on D’Addario’s shift and solving a better percentage of those murders. Not only that, but Nolan’s people have been saddled with nine of the seventeen police-involved shooting incidents this year. And more than the murders, it’s the police shootings-with their incumbent issues of criminal and civil liability-that can bring the bosses down on the squad like a plague of locusts. This year’s crop of shooting reports, however, has so far cleared the command staff without causing so much as a rustle. All in all, from Nolan’s point of view, it’s turning out to be a respectable year.

Rich Garvey and his eight clearances are, of course, a large share of Nolan’s happiness, but Edgerton, too, is beginning a little streak of his own, one that began with that drug murder on Payson Street back in late May. After putting that case down, he found himself preoccupied with the Joe Edison trial in Judge Hammerman’s court, a successful three-week legal campaign to get a nineteen-year-old sociopath life in prison for one of the four drug murders from 1986 and ’87 in which he was charged. Edgerton returned to the rotation in time for nightwork and the shooting call in Westport, which would be followed by two more clearances before summer’s end-one of them a whodunit street shooting from the Old York Road drug market. In the homicide unit, four clearances in a row is usually enough to mute anyone’s critics, and for a brief time, the tension in Nolan’s squad seems to ease.

During one four-to-twelve shift in midsummer, Edgerton is sitting at his desk in the main office, a phone receiver braced against a shoulder and a cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

Worden walks by and Edgerton begins an exaggerated pantomime, causing the older detective to pull a Bic lighter from his pants and produce a flame; Edgerton leans across the desk to ignite the tobacco.

“Aw Christ,” says Worden, holding the lighter steady. “I hope nobody sees me doing this.”

Twenty minutes later and still a prisoner of the same phone conversation, Edgerton flags down Garvey for another light and Worden, watching from the coffee room, picks up on it again.

“Hey, Harry, you’re getting awfully used to havin’ white guys light your cigarette for you.”

“What can I say?” says Edgerton, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand.

“You tryin’ to make a point, Harry?”

“What can I say?” repeats Edgerton, hanging up the phone. “I like how it looks.”

“Hey,” says Kincaid, cutting in. “As long as Harry keeps handling calls, we can light his cigarettes, right, Harry? You keep answering that phone and I’ll start carrying a book of matches.”

“Fair enough,” says Edgerton, almost amused.

“We’re bringing Harry along, ain’t we?” says Kincaid. “We’re breakin’ him back into homicide. As long as we can keep him away from Ed Burns, he’ll be all right.”

“That’s right,” says Edgerton, smiling. “It was that nasty Ed Burns that messed me up, talking me into all these long investigations, telling me not to listen to you guys… It was all Burns. You should blame him.”

“And where is he now?” adds Kincaid. “He’s still over with the FBI and you’re back here with us.”

“He used you, Harry,” says Eddie Brown.

“Yeah,” says Harry, dragging on his cigarette. “I guess ol’ Eduardo did a number on me.”

“Used and abused and tossed away like a dirty condom,” says Garvey, from the back of the room.

“You talkin’ ’bout Special Agent Burns,” says Ed Brown. “Hey, Harry, I hear Burns already has his own desk over at the FBI office. I hear he’s all moved in.”

“His own desk, his own car,” adds Kincaid.

“Hey, Harry,” says Ed Brown. “You ever hear from your partner? Does he callyou up and tell you how things are going over there in Woodlawn?”

“Yeah, he sent me a postcard once,” says Edgerton. “It said, ‘Wish you were here’ on the back.”

“You stick with us, Harry,” says Kincaid dryly. “We’ll take good care of you.”

“Yeah,” says Edgerton. “I know you will.”

Considering it’s Edgerton, the banter is easy and almost affectionate. After all, this is the same homicide unit in which the diagnosis of Gene Constantine’s diabetes was greeted by a coffee room chalkboard divided by two headings: “Those who give a shit if Constantine dies” and “Those who don’t.” Sergeant Childs, Lieutenant Stanton, Mother Teresa and Barbara Constantine topped the latter list. The shorter column featured Gene himself, followed by the city employees’ credit union. By that standard of camaraderie, Edgerton isn’t putting up with anything out of the ordinary on this slow four-to-twelve shift. In fact, the scene being played out in the main office is a rare performance of Harry Edgerton as Just One of the Guys, a homicide man among homicide men. Never mind that Edgerton still thinks the world of Ed Burns and the ongoing Board-ley investigation. And never mind that Kincaid and Eddie Brown don’t really believe that Edgerton wants to be working straight murders when his bunky is over at the FBI field office fleshing out a two-year conspiracy probe. Never mind all that bitching earlier in the year, because right now Edgerton is handling murders.

It’s the new Harry who laughs when his colleagues assure him that they’re going to make something out of him, the changed man who makes a point of announcing to the office that he’s getting ready to answer a ringing phone.

“Go for it, Harry.”

“Don’t hurt yourself there, Harry.”

“He got it on three rings. Someone call a fuckin’ press conference.”

Edgerton chuckles, the picture of tolerance. He cups one hand over the receiver, then turns in his chair, feigning confusion.

“What do I do?” he asks in mock earnest. “Just talk into this part?”

“Yeah, put the top to your ear and talk into the bottom.”

“Homicide unit. Edgerton.”

“Way to go, Harry, babe.”

Hotter than hell up here.

It’s three in the morning and the coffee room is 90 degrees or better. Apparently, some bean counter in fiscal services decided that the midnight shift doesn’t need any heat before February or air conditioning before August, and now Donald Kincaid is out in the main office, stalking back and forth in his shirttails, Jockey shorts and socks, threatening total nudity if the temperature doesn’t fall before morning. And Kincaid without clothes on an overnight shift is a dangerous thing.

“Oh God,” says Rich Garvey, his face a sickly blue from the television glow. “Donald’s got his pants off. God help anyone who sleeps on his stomach tonight.”

It’s an old routine for Nolan’s squad, this running joke about Kincaid looking for love on the overnight shift, forcing his attentions on the younger detectives. Last night, McAllister fell asleep on the green vinyl sofa only to wake in mortal terror an hour later: Kincaid was on top of him, cooing softly.

“Naw, not tonight,” Kincaid says, pulling the tie from his collar and stretching himself across the sofa. “Too damn hot for that.”

Every man in the room sends up the same prayer: Lord, let the telephone ring. Let that 2100 extension light up with death and mayhem before we all drown in our own sweat and stink. Every man in the room would take a drug murder right now. A double even, with two bleached skeletons in a basement somewhere and not a witness or suspect to be found. They don’t care what the call is as long as they can get out on the street where, incredibly, it’s ten degrees cooler.

Out in the main office, Roger Nolan has the video recorder wired up so that half the squad can watch some godawful movie in which everyone is chasing one another in automobiles. The first movie in Nolan’s midnight shift triple feature is generally excellent, and the second is usually tolerable. But by three o’clock, Nolan always manages to come up with something guaranteed to induce sleep, and at that point, sleep begins to acquire a certain appeal.

The VCR is Nolan’s concession to the hell of midnight shift, to the absurdity of six grown men spending a week of overnights together in a downtown office building. In Baltimore, a homicide detective works three weeks of eight-to-four, then two weeks of four-to-twelve, then one week of midnight. Which leads to a strange inversion: at any given moment, an entire shift of three squads is working daywork, two squads are working four-to-twelve, and the squad working midnight is on its own in those hours when nearly half of all homicides occur. On a jumping midnight tour, no one has time for movies or anything else. On a shift with two murders and a police shooting, for example, no one even presumes to think about sleep. But on the slow nights, on a night like this, the detectives learn what rigor mortis is all about.

“My back is killing me,” says Garvey.

Of course it is. After all, he’s trying to sleep sitting in a metal desk chair, his head horizontal to the top of the chair back. The sixth floor is hotter than the inside of a Weber grill on a Fourth of July weekend and Garvey still has his tie on. The man is not real.

Kincaid is now snoring on the green couch. Bowman is around the corner, out of sight, but when last seen he was also nodding, his chair propped against the wall, his short legs barely touching the floor. Edgerton is who the hell knows where, probably down on Baltimore Street blasting space critters on a video game.

“Hey, Rich,” says Nolan, a foot and a half from the TV screen, “check this part out. This almost makes the movie.”

Garvey lifts his head in time to see one tough guy blow another apart with something that appears to be a rocket launcher.

“That was great, Rog.”

Nolan senses the ennui and slowly glides over to the television, using his legs to propel the wheeled chair. He scans the side of another videotape box. “How about a John Wayne movie?”

Garvey yawns, then shrugs. “Whatever,” he says finally.

“I’ve got two on this tape where the Duke actually dies,” says Nolan, still wide awake. “Trivia question: In how many movies did John Wayne’s character actually die?”

Garvey looks at Nolan and sees, not his squad sergeant, but a large black man with a pitchfork and horns on his head. The innermost circle of hell, Garvey now knows, is a steaming municipal building with no beds, bile green walls and trivia questions from a superior at three in the morning.

“Thirteen,” says Nolan, answering his own question. “Or is it fourteen? We figured it out last night… I think it’s fourteen. The one everyone always forgets is Wake of the Red Witch.”

Nolan knows. He knows everything. Ask him about the 1939 Academy Awards and he’ll tell you about the catfight for Best Supporting Actress. Ask him about the Peloponnesian War and he’ll explain the essentials of hoplite infantry tactics. Mention the western coast of Borneo and… well, Terry McLarney once made that mistake.

“You know,” he blurted during one four-to-twelve shift. “I understand that the beaches in Borneo are made of black sand.”

At the time, the statement might have seemed like a lonely non sequitur, but McLarney had recently read a five-hundred-page tome on the island of Borneo, his first conquest of a Howard County library book in perhaps three years. A fact is a fact, and McLarney had been trying to work this one into conversation for maybe a month.

“That’s right,” said Nolan. “They’re black from the volcanic ash. Krakatoa did a number on all the islands around there…”

McLarney looked as though his dog had just died.

“… but only on the western part of the island is it completely black. We practiced amphibious landings there when I was in the Corps.”

“You were there?”

“In sixty-three or so.”

“Well,” said McLarney, stalking away, “that’s the last time I ever bother reading a book.”

For a career cop, Roger Nolan is positively scary and a force to be reckoned with in any game of trivia. Still trying to find comfort in that metal chair, Garvey succumbs to his sergeant’s academic dissertation on the John Wayne mystique. He listens quietly because what else can he do. It’s too hot to type that prosecution report. Too hot to read the Evening Sun sitting on Sydnor’s desk. Too hot to go down to Baltimore Street and pay for a cheesesteak. Too goddamn hot.

Whoa. Incoming.

Garvey pushes the chair toward Edgerton’s desk and grabs the receiver on the first bleat, fastest on the draw. His call. His moneymaker. His ticket out.

“Homicide.”

“Northwest district, six-A-twelve unit.”

“Yeah, whatcha got?”

“It’s an old man in a house. No sign of wounds or anything like that.”

“Forced entry?”

“Ah, no, nothing like that.”

Garvey’s disappointment seeps into his voice. “How’d you get in?”

“Front door was open. The neighbor came over to check on him and then found him in the bedroom.”

“He live alone?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s in bed?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventy-one.”

Garvey gives up his name and sequence number, knowing that if this officer has misread the scene and the case comes back from the ME as a murder, Garvey will have to eat it. Still, it sounds straight enough.

“Do I need anything else for the report?” the cop asks.

“No. You called for the medical examiner, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s everything then.”

He drops the receiver back onto the phone and separates the sticky wetness that is his shirt from the back of the chair. Twenty minutes later, the phone rings again with a west side cutting-cheap stuff, too, with one kid in the University Hospital ER and the other in the Western lockup, staring out of his cell at Garvey and Kincaid through a cocaine haze.

“He just walked in here and said he stabbed his brother,” says the Western turnkey.

Garvey snorts. “You don’t think he’s on drugs, do you, Donald?”

“Him?” says Kincaid, deadpan. “No way.”

The cutting call keeps them on the street for no more than twenty minutes, and when they return to the office, Nolan is dismantling the VCR; all else is three-part snoring so regular that it takes on a hypnotic quality.

Edgerton has returned from videoland and the squad soon settles in for the worst kind of sleep, the kind where a detective wakes up more exhausted than before, covered by a layer of liquid homicide office that can only be scraped away by a twenty-minute shower. Still, they sleep. On a slow night, everyone sleeps.

At five, the telephone finally rings again, although now everyone is two hours past the desire to get a call-the general reasoning being that anyone inconsiderate enough to relinquish his life after the hour of three A.M. does not deserve to be avenged.

“Homicide,” says Kincaid.

“G’morning. Irwin from the Evening Sun. What’d you have last night?”

Dick Irwin. The only man in Baltimore with a work schedule more miserable than that of a homicide detective. Five A.M. calls for seven A.M. deadlines, five nights a week.

“All quiet.”

Back to sleep for a half hour or so. And then a moment of pure terror: some sort of thunderous machine, some kind of battering ram, is heaving against the hallway door. Metal hitting metal in the darkness to Garvey’s immediate right. Shrill, high-pitched noises as a violent, nocturnal beast clatters toward a sleeping squad, bulling its way through the dark portal. Edgerton remembers the.38 in his top left drawer, a firearm fully stocked with 158-grain hollow-points. And thank God for that, because the beast is now entering the room, its steel lance projected, its leaden armor clanging against the bulkhead on the far side of the coffee room. Kill it, says the voice in Edgerton’s head. Kill it now.

A sheet of light falls upon them.

“What the…”

“Aw, hell, I’m sorry,” says the beast, surveying a room full of cowering, bleary-eyed men. “I didn’t see you all in there where you was sleepin’.”

Irene. The monster is a cleaning woman with an East Bawlmer accent and yellow-white hair. The steel lance is a mop handle; the clanging armor, the larger half of the floor buffer. They are alive. Blind, but alive.

“Turn out the light,” Garvey manages to say.

“I will, hon. I’m sorry,” she says. “You go back to sleep. I’ll start out here ’n leave you alone. You get on back to sleep an’ I’ll tell when the lieutenant comes in…”

“Thank you, Irene.”

She is the ancient janitress with a heart of gold and a vocabulary that could make a turnkey blush. She lives alone in an unheated rowhouse, earns a fifth of what they do and never arrives later than 5:30 A.M. to begin shining the sixth-floor linoleum. Last Christmas, she took what little money didn’t go for food and bought a pressed-wood television table as her gift to the homicide unit. No amount of pain or aggravation could cause them to yell at this woman.

They will, however, flirt with her.

“Irene, honey,” says Garvey, before she can shut the door. “Better watch out now. Kincaid had his pants off tonight and he was dreamin’ about you…”

“You’re a liar.”

“Ask Bowman.”

“It’s true,” says Bowman, picking it up from the rear of the office. “He had his pants off and he was calling your name…”

“You can kiss my ass, Bowman.”

“You better not say that to Kincaid.”

“He can kiss my ass too,” says Irene.

As if on cue, Kincaid returns from the bathroom, albeit fully dressed, and requires only a little prodding from Bowman before he’s once again wooing the hired help.

“C’mon, Irene. Gimme a little somethin’.”

“Why should I, Donald?” she says, warming to the game. “You ain’t even got anything I’d want.”

“Oh yeah I do.”

“What?” she says, looking down disdainfully. “That little tiny thing?”

The entire squad cracks up. Twice a midnight shift, Kincaid talks dirty to Irene. Twice a midnight shift, Irene manages to keep up with him.

Beyond the darkness of the main unit office, the coffee room and the outer offices are brightening with the lighter blue of morning. And like it or not, every man in the room is now wide awake, rattled from sleep by Kincaid’s determined courtship.

But the phones stay quiet and Nolan cuts Bowman loose just after six; the rest of the squad sits quietly, trying not to move until the air conditioning kicks up again for the dayshift. The men lean back in their seats in some kind of communal trance. When the elevator bell rings at twenty after, it’s the sweetest sound in the world.

“Relief ’s here,” says Barlow, strutting into the room. “You all look like shit… Not you, Irene. You look as lovely as ever. I was talking to these ugly pieces of shit.”

“Fuck you,” says Garvey.

“Hey, mister, is that any way to talk to the man who’s giving you early relief?”

“Eat me,” says Garvey.

“Sergeant Nolan,” says Barlow, feigning indignation, “did you hear that? I just stated a simple fact by saying that these guys look like pieces of shit, which they do, and I’m subjected to all kinds of abuse. Was it this fuckin’ hot in here all night?”

“Hotter,” says Garvey.

“Proud to know you, mister,” says Barlow. “You know, you’re one of my personal heroes. What’d you have last night? Anything?”

“Nothing at all,” says Edgerton. “It was death up here.”

No, thinks Nolan, listening from the corner of the room. Not death. The absence of death, maybe. Death means being out on the streets of Baltimore, making money.

“You all can take off,” says Barlow. “Charlie’ll be in here in a couple.”

Nolan keeps Garvey and Edgerton waiting for the second dayshift man to arrive, letting Kincaid escape at half past.

“Thanks, Sarge,” he says, shoving a run sheet into Nolan’s mailbox.

Nolan nods, acknowledging his own mercies.

“See you Monday,” says Kincaid.

“Yeah,” says Nolan wistfully. “Daywork.”

“Aw Christ, another Bible.”

Gary Childs picks the open book up off a bureau and tosses it onto a chair with a dozen others. The bookmark holds the place even as pages flutter in the cool breeze of an air conditioner. Lamentations 2:21:

Young and old lie together

In the dust of the streets;

My young men and maidens

Have fallen by the sword.

You have slain them in the day of your anger;

You have slaughtered them without pity.

One thing about Miss Geraldine, she took her Good Book seriously, a fact confirmed not only by the Bible collection, but also by the framed 8-by-11 photographs of her in her Sunday finest, preaching the good news at storefront churches. If salvation is ours through faith rather than works, then perhaps Geraldine Parrish can find some contentment in the wagon ride downtown. But if works do count for anything in the next world, then Miss Geraldine will be arriving there with a few things charged to her account.

Childs and Scott Keller pull up the bed and begin riffling the stack of papers stuffed beneath it. Grocery notes, telephone numbers, social service forms and six or seven more life insurance policies.

“Damn,” says Keller, genuinely impressed. “Here’s a whole bunch more. How many does that make now?”

Childs shrugs. “Twenty? Twenty-five? Who the hell knows?”

The search warrant for 1902 Kennedy gives them the right to seek a variety of evidentiary items, but in this instance, no one is gutting a room in the hope of finding a gun or knife or bullets or bloody clothes. On this rare occasion, they are looking for the paper trail. And they are finding it.

“I got more of them in here,” says Childs, dumping the contents of a paper grocery bag onto the upended mattress. “Four more.”

“This,” says Keller, “is one murderous bitch.”

An Eastern District patrolman who has been downstairs for an hour, watching Geraldine Parrish and five others in the first-floor living room, knocks softly on the bedroom door.

“Sergeant Childs…”

“Yo.”

“The woman down there, she’s sayin’ she feels faint… You know, she’s sayin’ that she’s got some kind of heart condition.”

Childs looks at Keller, then back at the uniform. “Heart condition, huh?” he says, contemptuous. “She’s having a heart attack? I’ll be down in a minute and you can really watch her fall out of her chair.”

“Okay,” says the patrolman. “I just thought I’d tell you.”

Childs sorts through the jetsam from the grocery bag, then wanders downstairs to the front room. The occupants of the rowhouse are clustered together on a sofa and two chairs, staring up at him, waiting for answers. The sergeant stares back at the plump, sad-faced woman with the Loretta Lynn wig and red cotton dress, a genuinely comic vision under the circumstances.

“Geraldine?”

“Yes I am.”

“I know who you are,” says Childs. “Do you want to know why we’re here?”

“I don’t know why you’re here,” she says, patting her chest lightly. “I can’t sit like this. I need my medicine…”

“You don’t have any idea why we’re here?”

Geraldine Parrish shakes her head and pats her chest again, leaning back in her chair.

“Geraldine, this is a search-and-seizure raid. You’re now charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three attempted murders…”

The other occupants of the room stare as deep gurgling noises begin to rise in Geraldine Parrish’s throat. She falls to the carpet, clutching her chest and gasping for air.

Childs looks down, moderately amused, then turns calmly to the Eastern uniform. “I guess you might want to call for that medic now,” he says, “just to be on the safe side.”

The sergeant returns upstairs, where he and Keller continue dumping every document, every insurance policy, every photo album, every slip of paper into a green garbage bag-the better to sort through it all in the relative luxury of the homicide office. Meanwhile, the paramedics arrive and depart within minutes, having judged Geraldine Parrish healthy in body if not in mind. And across town, at the Division Street rowhouse of Geraldine Parrish’s mother, Donald Waltemeyer is executing a second warrant, digging out another thirty insurance policies and related documents.

It is the case to end all cases, the investigation that raises the act of murder to the level of theatrical farce. This case file has so many odd, unlikely characters and so many odd, unlikely crimes that it almost seems tailored for musical comedy.

But for Donald Waltemeyer, in particular, the Geraldine Parrish case is anything but comedic. It is, in effect, a last lesson in his own personal voyage from patrolman to detective. Behind Worden and Eddie Brown, the forty-one-year-old Waltemeyer is Terry McLarney’s most experienced man, having come to homicide in ’86 from the Southern District plainclothes unit, where he was a fixture of large if not legendary proportion. And though the last two years have taught Waltemeyer everything he needs to know about handling the usual run of homicide calls, this case is entirely different. Eventually, Keller and Childs and the other detectives assigned to the case will return to the rotation and it will be Waltemeyer’s lot to serve as primary investigator in the prosecution of Geraldine Parrish-a probe that will consume half a year in the search for victims, suspects and explanations.

In a unit where speed is a precious commodity, it’s the rare case that teaches a detective patience, providing him with those last few lessons that come only from the most prolonged and complex avenues of investigation. Such a case can transform a cop, allowing him to see his role as something more than that of an ambulance chaser whose task is to clean up one shooting after another in the shortest time possible. And after a month or two, or three, this sort of sprawling case file can also drive a cop to the brink of insanity-which for Waltemeyer isn’t all that long a journey in the first place.

Just yesterday, in fact, he was gnawing on Dave Brown’s leg about one case or another when Brown felt compelled to whip out Rule 1, Section 1, from the department’s Code of Conduct and read verbatim, to wit:

“‘All members of the department shall be quiet, civil and orderly at all times and shall refrain from coarse, profane or insolent language,’ And,” added Brown, glaring at his partner, “I emphasize the word ‘civil.’”

“Hey, Brown,” said Waltemeyer, making an obscene gesture. “Emphasize this.”

It isn’t that Dave Brown doesn’t respect his partner, because he does. And it isn’t that they can’t work together, because when they have to, they do. It’s just that Waltemeyer is constantly trying to explain police work to Brown, an exercise in condescension that Brown will accept only when it comes from Donald Worden, no one else. But even on his best days, Waltemeyer is quite possibly the most volatile detective in homicide, with a hair-trigger temper that never ceases to amaze the rest of McLarney’s squad.

Once, soon after Waltemeyer had come downtown, McLarney himself happened to be busy talking to one of several witnesses from a murder. He called Waltemeyer over and asked him to handle one of the interviews, but as he began explaining the details of the case, he quickly realized that it was simply easier for him to talk to the witness himself. Never mind, McLarney explained, I’ll do it myself.

But later, at several points during the interview, McLarney looked up to see Waltemeyer’s face staring at him from the hallway. Three minutes after the end of the interview, Waltemeyer was in the office, pointing a finger in McLarney’s face and raving wildly.

“Goddammit, I know my job, and if you don’t think I can handle it, to hell with you,” he told McLarney, who could only watch with detached awe. “If you don’t trust me, then send me back to the goddamn district.”

As Waltemeyer stormed away, McLarney looked around the office at his other detectives, who were, of course, biting the sleeves of their sport coats to keep from laughing aloud.

That was Waltemeyer. He was the hardest worker in McLarney’s squad, a consistently aggressive and intelligent investigator, and two days out of every five he was a confirmed mental case. A Southwest Baltimore boy and the product of a large German family, Donald Waltemeyer was a source of endless delight to McLarney, who would often distract himself on a slow shift by goading his new detective into a tirade against Dave Brown. If Brown could then be made to respond, the result was usually better than television.

Heavyset, with a ruddy face and a mop of thick, coal black hair, Waltemeyer suffered his most embarrassing moment in homicide one morning at roll call: a sergeant read an announcement that Waltemeyer had been named the hands-down winner in a look-alike contest for his portrayal of Shemp, the forgotten Stooge. In Waltemeyer’s considered judgment, the author of that little item would survive only as long as he remained anonymous.

Neither temper nor appearance had prevented Waltemeyer from becoming a first-class street police in the Southern District, and he still liked to think of himself as the same down-in-the-trenches patrolman he had always been. Long after his transfer to homicide, he made a point of staying close to his old bunkies in the district, often disappearing at night with one of the Cavaliers to visit the Southern’s holes or shift-change parties. It was as if there was something a little disreputable about his having gone downtown to CID, something for which a real cop ought to apologize. The vague embarrassment Waltemeyer so obviously felt at having become a detective was his most distinctive trait.

Once last summer, he made a point of taking Rick James out to lunch at Lexington Market, where the two bought tuna sandwiches from a carryout vendor. So far, so good. But then, instead of taking the meal back to headquarters, the older detective drove to Union Square, parking the Cavalier in his old patrol post.

“Now,” said Waltemeyer, pushing the driver’s seat back and spreading a napkin over his trousers. “We’re going to eat like real police.”

In McLarney’s opinion, Waltemeyer’s unswerving adherence to the patrolman’s ethic was his only real weakness. Homicide is a world unto itself, and the things that work out in the district don’t always work downtown. Waltemeyer’s written reports, for example, were no better than district quality when he first came to homicide-a typical problem for men who spent more time on the street than at the typewriter. But in homicide the reports genuinely mattered, and what fascinated McLarney was that after mentioning the value of coherent paperwork to Waltemeyer, the detective set out on a successful, systematic campaign to improve his writing ability. That was when McLarney first realized that Waltemeyer was going to be one hell of a detective.

Now, neither McLarney nor anyone else could teach Waltemeyer much that was new about working murders. Only the cases themselves could add to his education, and only a case such as Geraldine Parrish could qualify him for the advanced degree.

The case actually began back in March, though at the time, no one in the homicide unit recognized it for what it was. In the beginning, it appeared to be nothing more than a routine extortion case: a complaint from a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict who claimed that her uncle wanted $5,000 to keep her from being murdered by a contract killer. Why anyone would want to kill a brain-dead like Dollie Brown was unclear; the girl was a fragile little wraith with no known enemies, tracks on every appendage and very little in the way of money. Nonetheless, someone had tried to kill her, not once, but twice.

The first attempt was almost a year ago, when she was shot in the head during an ambush in which her thirty-seven-year-old boyfriend had been slain. That, too, had originally been Waltemeyer’s case, and though it was still an open file, Waltemeyer believed that the boyfriend had been the intended victim and that the shootings had been drug-related. Then, after being released from University Hospital’s shock-trauma unit back in March, Dollie Brown had the misfortune to be standing on Division Street when an unknown assailant cut her throat and ran away. Again, the girl survived, but this time there could be no doubt of the intended victim.

In any other environment, two such assaults in a six-month period may have led an investigator to believe that a campaign to end Dollie Brown’s life was indeed under way. But this is West Baltimore, a place where two such incidents-absent any other evidence-can be safely regarded as coincidence and nothing more. The more likely explanation, Waltemeyer reasoned, was that Dollie’s uncle was simply trying to capitalize on her fears and cheat her out of the $5,000 check she had received after the shooting from the state’s crime victims compensation board, a government agency that provides financial assistance to those seriously harmed by violent crime. Her uncle knew about that money and told his niece that in return for the cash, he would intervene by killing the man who had been trying to kill her.

Working with a special undercover unit of the Maryland State Police, Waltemeyer had Dollie and her sister, Thelma, wired up with Nagra recorders and sent under police surveillance into a meeting with her uncle. When the man again demanded the money to prevent the impending murder, the extortion attempt was captured on tape. A week or so later, Waltemeyer made an arrest and closed the file.

Only in July did the Dollie Brown case become truly bizarre, for only then did a murder defendant with the singularly appropriate name of Rodney Vice begin talking to prosecutors, trying to cut a deal for himself. And when Rodney Vice opened his mouth, the plot didn’t just thicken, it positively congealed.

Vice had been implicated as a go-between in the contract slaying of Henry Barnes, a middle-aged West Baltimore man who had been killed by a shotgun blast as he warmed up his car on a cool morning in October. The victim’s wife had paid Vice a total of $5,400 for his services in procuring a gunman to kill her husband, thereby allowing her to collect on a series of life insurance policies. Vice had given a Polaroid photograph of Barnes and a shotgun to a tightly wound sociopath by the name of Edwin “Conrad” Gordon. Told that the intended victim usually warmed his car in front of his rowhouse every morning, Gordon was able to get close enough to use the shotgun at point-blank range. Henry Barnes left this world never knowing what hit him.

All would have gone according to plan had Bernadette Barnes been able to keep her silence. Instead, she admitted to a co-worker at the city social services building that she had arranged her husband’s death, telling the woman, “I told you I was serious.” Alarmed, the co-worker called the police department, and after several months of investigation by the detectives on Stanton’s shift, Bernadette Barnes, Rodney Vice and Edwin Gordon were all in the Baltimore City Jail, tied together in a single prosecution report. Only then did Rodney Vice and his lawyer begin shopping some cooperation around, searching for a ten-years-or-less deal.

At a July 11 proffer session with lawyers and detectives at the Mitchell courthouse, Vice was asked how he had known that Edwin Gordon was a man capable of carrying out a contract murder. Nonplussed, Vice assured the detectives and prosecutors that Gordon had been in that line of work for some time. In fact, he had been killing people for an East Baltimore woman by the name of Geraldine for several years now.

How many people?

Three or four that Vice knew about. Not to mention that one girl-a niece of Geraldine’s-who wouldn’t die no matter how many times Gordon tried to kill her.

How many times did he try?

Three, said Vice. After the most recent occasion, when he had shot the girl in the head three times to little effect, Gordon was particularly disheartened, telling Vice, “It don’t matter what I do, the bitch won’t die.”

Checking back with Dollie Brown that same day, Waltemeyer and Crutchfield confirmed that Geraldine Parrish was indeed her aunt and that the young woman had indeed been assaulted a third time. She had been walking with Aunt Geraldine back in May, when the older woman told her to wait on a Hollins Street stoop while she went to get something. Seconds later, a man ran up and shot her repeatedly in the head. Again, she was treated and released from University Hospital; incredibly, she mentioned nothing to the investigating officers about the previous attempts on her life. McAllister handled the Hollins Street shooting, and knowing little of Waltemeyer’s extortion case two months earlier, he wrote nothing more than a brief 24-hour report.

As Vice spoke, a new tale was being added to the lore and legend of the BPD homicide unit, that of the Unsinkable Dollie Brown, the hapless, helpless niece of Miss Geraldine Parrish, alias the Black Widow.

Rodney Vice had a lot more to say about Miss Geraldine, too. After all, Vice told the gathering, it didn’t exactly stop with Dollie Brown and the $12,000 in insurance policies that Aunt Geraldine had obtained in her niece’s name. There were other policies, other murders. There was that man back in 1985, Geraldine’s brother-in-law, who had been shot on Gold Street. Edwin Gordon had taken that contract as well. And then there was the old boarder who lived at Geraldine’s house on Kennedy Street, the elderly woman whom Gordon had to shoot twice before he finally killed her off. It was Miss Geraldine herself who sent the old woman out to a Chinese carryout on North Avenue, then signaled Gordon, who walked calmly up to the target and fired one shot to the back at point-blank range, then issued a coup de grâce to the head after the victim fell to the sidewalk.

Veteran detectives left the courthouse with their heads spinning. Three murders, three attempted murders-and that was just what Vice happened to know about. On their return to the homicide office, open murder files dating back as many as three years were suddenly being yanked from the oblivion of the filing cabinets.

Incredibly, everything in those files conformed exactly to Rodney Vice’s account. The November 1985 murder of Frank Lee Ross, the common-law husband of Geraldine’s sister, had been handled by Gary Dunnigan, who at that time could find no motive for the slaying. Likewise, Marvin Sydnor had worked the fatal shooting of Helen Wright, sixty-five, who had been boarding with Geraldine on Kennedy Street; lacking any solid information about the murder, he had presumed that the old lady had been killed in a robbery attempt gone awry. Not that Sydnor hadn’t found a few loose ends in a routine interview with Geraldine Parrish; he even tried to polygraph the landlady, but he gave up when she produced a cardiologist’s note saying that her health could not stand the stress of a lie detector test. True to Vice’s account, the old woman had been shot in the head several weeks before being murdered but had survived the first assault-a redundancy that had also been written off as inner-city coincidence.

The sheer amount of new information made clear the need for a special detail, and Waltemeyer-because he had handled the original March extortion complaint as well as the initial shooting of Dollie Brown-soon found himself reassigned to Gary Childs’s squad on Stanton’s shift. He was joined by Mike Crutchfield, the primary detective on the Bernadette Barnes case, and later by Corey Belt, the bulldog from the Western District who had done so well on the Cassidy investigation. At Stanton’s request, Belt had been returned to homicide from the Western ops unit specifically for the investigation of Geraldine Parrish.

They began with detailed interviews of Dollie Brown and other relatives of Miss Geraldine’s, and what they heard became more incredible with each telling. Everyone in the family seemed to know what Geraldine had been doing, yet everyone seemed to have regarded her campaign to trade human lives for insurance benefits as an inevitable, routine bit of family business. No one ever bothered to call the police-Dollie, for one, had said nothing about her aunt during the extortion probe-but worse than that, many family members had signed insurance policies for which Geraldine was the beneficiary. Nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers-in-law, tenants, friends and neighbors-the detectives began learning of hundreds of thousands of dollars in double-indemnity policies. Yet when people were being shot, no one who knew anything about it had bothered to voice so much as mild apprehension.

They feared her. At least they said they feared her-and not just because they knew of the sociopaths that Geraldine Parrish employed for her insurance killings. They feared her because they believed that she had a special power, that she knew voodoo and hexes and all kinds of Carolina backwoods garbage. She could bend a man to her will, make one marry her or make one kill for her. She told them that stuff and, after a time, when people began dying, they actually took to believing it.

But Aunt Geraldine’s power wasn’t at all obvious to anyone outside the family circle. She was a semiliterate lay preacher with a gray Cadillac and a white stone rowhouse with fake paneling and dropped tile ceilings. She was heavyset, and ugly, too-a thoroughly unattractive woman whose penchant for wigs and fire engine red lipstick suggested a $20 Pennsylvania Avenue prostitute. Geraldine was a hard fifty-five years old when the city homicide unit finally kicked in her front door and that of her mother’s house on Division Street.

The search of both addresses takes hours, as Childs, Keller and Waltemeyer find policy binders and other papers strewn throughout the two rowhouses. Long before the search at Kennedy Avenue is complete, Geraldine departs in the back of an Eastern District wagon, arriving at the homicide office well before the investigators. She sits stoically in the large interrogation room as Childs and Waltemeyer arrive and spend another hour or so in the coffee room scanning the insurance policies, photo albums and documents seized in the two houses.

The two detectives immediately notice a proliferation of marriage licenses. As far as they can tell, the woman is married to five men simultaneously, two of whom were living with her on Kennedy Avenue and were taken downtown as witnesses following the raid. The two men sit together like bookends on the fishbowl sofa, each believing the other to be nothing more than a tenant at the East Baltimore home. Each is confident of his own place in the household. Each has signed a life insurance policy naming Geraldine Parrish or her mother as the beneficiary.

Johnnie Davis, the older of the two husbands, tells detectives that he met Miss Geraldine in New York and had, over his own objection, been intimidated into marriage and brought to Baltimore to live in the basement of the Kennedy Avenue rowhouse. Without fail, Miss Geraldine confiscated his disability checks at the beginning of every month, then returned a few dollars so that he could buy food. The other husband, a man by the name of Milton Baines, was in fact Miss Geraldine’s nephew and had rightly objected on grounds of incest when his aunt insisted on marriage during a trip back home to Carolina.

“So why did you marry her?” Childs asks him.

“I had to,” he explains. “She put a voodoo curse on me and I had to do what she said.”

“How did she do that?”

Baines recalls that his aunt had cooked him a meal using her own menstrual discharge and watched as he ate. Afterward, she told him what she had done and explained that she now had power over him.

Childs and Waltemeyer exchange glances.

Baines rambles on, explaining that when he continued to express concern about marrying his mother’s sister, Miss Geraldine took him to an old man in a neighboring town who spoke briefly with the bride-to-be, then assured Baines that he was not, in fact, related to Geraldine.

“Who was the old man?” Childs asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then why did you believe him?”

“I don’t know.”

It was not to be believed-a murder case with cosmic insanity as the only common frame of reference. When the detectives tell Milton Baines that the old man living in the basement is also Geraldine’s husband, he is stupefied. When they explain to him that both he and his rival were living in that house like hogs waiting for the slaughter, corralled by a madwoman who would eventually trade them in for a few thousand dollars of insurance benefits, the man’s mouth drops in abject wonder.

“Look at him,” says Childs from the other side of the office. “He was the next victim. You can almost see the H-file number stenciled on his forehead.”

Waltemeyer guesses by the marriage licenses and other documents that husband number three is probably in Plainfield, New Jersey, though whether he is dead or alive isn’t immediately clear. Husband number four is doing a five-year bit at Hagerstown on a gun charge. Husband number five is somebody by the name of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, whom Geraldine married this past January. The good reverend’s whereabouts are uncertain until Childs goes to the blue looseleaf binder that lists unattended deaths for the year. Sure enough, the seventy-nine-year-old Gilliard’s marriage to Miss Geraldine had lasted little more than a month; his sudden departure had been attributed by the medical examiner’s office to natural causes, though no autopsy had been performed.

There are also the photo albums, in which Miss Geraldine had saved not only the Reverend Gilliard’s death certificate but also that of her thirteen-year-old niece, Geraldine Cannon, who, according to an accompanying newspaper clipping, had been in her aunt Geraldine’s care when she succumbed to an overdose of Freon in 1975-an overdose ruled accidental, though pathologists attributed it to a possible injection of Ban deodorant. On the following page of the album, the detectives find a $2,000 insurance policy in the child’s name.

In the same album, they locate more recent pictures of Geraldine with an infant girl and soon learn that she had purchased that child from a niece. The baby would be found later that week at a relative’s house and would be taken into custody by the Department of Social Services after the detectives match that infant to at least three life insurance policies totaling $60,000 in double-indemnity benefits.

The list of potential victims has no end. An insurance policy is found for aman who had been beaten and left to die in a wooded section of Northeast Baltimore; however, he survived the attack and was later located in a rehabilitative hospital. Another policy is found for Geraldine’s younger sister, who died of unexplained causes several years back. And from one page of another album, Childs pulls out a death certificate, dated October 1986, for a man named Albert Robinson. The manner of death is listed as homicide.

Childs takes the document and walks to another blue binder that contains a chronological list of Baltimore homicides. He opens the binder to the ’86 cases and scans the column of victims:

Robinson, Albert B/M/48

10/6/86, shot, NED, 4J-16884

Nearly two years later, the case is still open, with Rick James as the primary detective. Childs takes the death certificate back into the main office, where James is at his desk, absently poking at a chef’s salad.

“This mean anything to you?” Childs says.

James scans the death certificate. “Where’d you get this?”

“Out of the Black Widow’s photo album.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Hot damn,” says James, jumping up to grip the sergeant’s hand. “Gary Childs done solved my murder.”

“Yeah, well, someone had to.”

A smokehound from Plainfield, New Jersey, Albert Robinson had been found dead by the B &O railbed at the foot of Clifton Park, shot once in the head. The man’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was 4.0, four times the legal standard in drunk driving cases. Working on that murder, James never did figure out why an alcoholic from north Jersey was dead in East Baltimore. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the man was a hobo who had hitched a southbound freight only to be shot to death for some unknown reason as the train meandered through Baltimore.

“How does she connect with Albert?” asks James, suddenly fascinated.

“I don’t know,” says Childs, “but we know she used to live up in Plainfield…”

“No shit.”

“… and I got a feeling that somewhere in that pile of papers we’re gonna find an insurance policy on your man.”

“Oooooo, you makin’ me feel all warm an’ happy inside,” says James, laughing. “Keep talkin’ that nice talk.”

Inside the large interrogation room, Geraldine Parrish adjusts her wig and applies another coat of makeup, using a small mirror. None of this has made her any less conscious of her appearance, such as it is. Nor has she lost her appetite; when detectives bring her a tuna sub from Crazy John’s, she puts away the entire thing, chewing slowly, pinkies raised as she holds the ends of the sandwich to her mouth.

Twenty minutes later, she demands to use the ladies’ room and Eddie Brown walks her as far as the door, shaking his head and smiling when his prisoner asks if he would be coming inside.

“You go on ahead,” he tells her.

She is in there for a good five minutes, and when she steps back into the hallway, it’s with a fresh coat of lipstick. “I need my medicines,” she says.

“Well, which medicines do you need?” asks Brown. “You had about two dozen different ones in your purse.”

“I need all of them.”

Visions of an interrogation room overdose dance through Eddie Brown’s head. “Well, you ain’t getting all of them,” he says, walking her back down the hallway. “I’ll let you pick three pills.”

“I got rights,” she says bitterly. “Constitutional rights to my medicines.”

Brown smiles, shaking his head.

“Who you laughing at? What you need to get is some religion… stand there laughing at people.”

“You gonna give me religion, huh?”

Geraldine saunters back into the interrogation room, followed by Childs and Waltemeyer. In the end, four detectives will take a crack at this woman, laying the insurance policies on the long table and explaining over and over that it doesn’t matter whether she actually pulled the trigger.

“If you caused someone to be shot, then you’re guilty of murder, Geraldine,” says Waltemeyer.

“Can I have my medicines?”

“Geraldine, listen to me. You’re charged with three murders already, and before this is over you’re probably going to be charged with some others. Now’s the time to tell us what happened…”

Geraldine Parrish stares up at the ceiling, then begins babbling incoherently.

“Geraldine…”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Mistah Poh-leeces,” she says suddenly. “I didn’t shoot no one.”

Later, when the detectives have given up on the notion of a coherent statement, Geraldine sits alone in the interrogation room, waiting for the paperwork to catch up with her before she is transferred to the City Jail. She is leaning forward, her head resting on the table, when Jay Landsman walks by the one-way window and glances inside.

“Is that her?” says Landsman, who has just come on the four-to-twelve shift.

“Yeah,” says Eddie Brown. “That’s her.”

Landsman’s face creases into an evil grin as he slams an open palm hard against the metal door. Geraldine jumps in her seat.

“Whhhhooooaaaaaaaaaaa,” wails Landsman in his best approximation of a ghost. “Whhhhooooaa, mmuuurrder… MMMUUURRDER…”

“Aw Christ, Jay. Now you fuckin’ did it.”

Sure enough, Geraldine Parrish dives under the table on all fours and begins bleating like a crazed goat. Delighted with himself, Landsman keeps at it until Geraldine is prone on the floor, bellowing at the metal table legs.

“Whhhhhoooaaaaa,” moans Landsman.

“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh,” screams Geraldine.

“Whhhhooooaaaaaa.”

Geraldine stays down on the floor, whimpering loudly, as Landsman strolls back into the main office like a conquering hero.

“So,” he says, smiling wickedly, “I guess we’re probably looking at an insanity defense.”

Probably so, although everyone watching Geraldine Parrish’s performance is now utterly convinced of her sanity. This writhing-on-the-floor nonsense is a calculated and naive version of the real thing, an altogether embarrassing performance, particularly when everything else about her suggests a woman vying for a special advantage, a manipulator measuring every angle. Her relatives have already told detectives how she would boast about being untouchable, about being able to kill with impunity because four doctors would testify toher insanity if need be. The musings of a sociopath? Perhaps. The mind of a child? Probably so. But a mind genuinely unhinged?

A week ago, before the search warrants were even typed, someone showed Waltemeyer an FBI psychological profile of the classic black widow serial killer. Prepared by the behavioral sciences unit at the Quantico Academy, the profile suggested that the woman would be thirty years or older, would not necessarily be attractive, yet at the same time would make great efforts to exaggerate her sexual prowess and manipulate her physical appearance. The woman would probably be a hypochondriac and would more likely than not enjoy portraying herself as a victim. She would expect special treatment, then pout if it was not forthcoming. She would greatly overestimate her ability to sway other people, men in particular. Measured against the profile, Geraldine Parrish seemed to be the product of Central Casting.

After the interrogation, Roger Nolan and Terry McLarney are both escorting Geraldine Parrish to the City Jail, following her down the sixth-floor hallway, with Nolan walking directly behind the woman.

“Just before the elevators, she stops suddenly and bends over,” Nolan later tells the other detectives, “as if she’s trying to make me run into her fat ass. I tell you, that’s what she’s really about… In her mind, she really believes that if I get a good feel of her ass, I’m gonna fall in love with her and shoot Terry McLarney with his own gun and ride off into the sunset in an unmarked Chevrolet.”

Nolan’s psychoanalysis may be sufficient to the occasion, but for Waltemeyer, the long journey into the mind and soul of Geraldine Parrish is just beginning. And while every other detective in the room is content to believe that they already know everything there is to know about this woman, it is now up to Waltemeyer to determine just how many people she killed, how she killed them and how many of those cases can be successfully prosecuted in court.

For Waltemeyer, it will be an investigation unlike any other, a career case that only a seasoned detective could contemplate. Bank statements, insurance records, grand jury proceedings, exhumations-these are things that no patrolman ever worries about. A street cop rarely takes the work beyond a single shift; one night’s calls have nothing to do with those of the next. And even in homicide, a detective never has to worry the cases beyond the point of arrest. But in this investigation, the arrest is just the beginning of a long, labored effort.

Two weeks from now, Donald Waltemeyer, Corey Belt and Marc Cohen, an assistant state’s attorney, will be in Plainfield, New Jersey, interviewing the friends and relatives of Albert Robinson, finding one of Geraldine’s surviving husbands and delivering subpoenas for bank and insurance records. Much of the evidence involves an interstate paper trail, the kind of detail work that usually inspires a street cop to nothing more than tedium. But the three men will return to Baltimore with the explanation for the migration of Albert Robinson to East Baltimore and his subsequent murder.

Brought once again to the interrogation room from her jail cell, Miss Geraldine will once again confront a detective who lays the insurance policies in front of her and once again explains the truth about criminal culpability.

“You not makin’ any sense,” Geraldine will tell Waltemeyer. “I didn’t shoot no one.”

“Fine with me, Geraldine,” the detective says. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you tell the truth or not. We just brought you here to charge you with another murder. Albert Robinson.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s the man from New Jersey you had killed for ten thousand dollars of insurance money.”

“I didn’t murder no one.”

“Okay, Geraldine. Fine.”

Once again, Geraldine Parrish leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs and, once again, Waltemeyer goes back to working the case, expanding it further, searching this time for answers in the death of the Reverend Gilliard. It is a deliberate, often tedious process, this prolonged investigation of a woman who has already been arrested and charged with four murders. More than a string of fresh street shootings, it demands a professional investigator. A detective.

Months into the Parrish investigation, McLarney will walk by Waltemeyer’s desk and overhear a lecture that the detective is delivering with calm sincerity. The beneficiary of Waltemeyer’s newfound wisdom will be Corey Belt, the prodigy from the districts whose detail to homicide was extended for the Parrish investigation. At that moment, Belt wants very much to respond to a lying, recalcitrant witness in the Western District way.

“Back in the Western,” Belt tells Waltemeyer, “we’d just throw the asshole against a wall and put some sense into him.”

“No, listen to me. This isn’t patrol. That kind of stuff doesn’t work up here.”

“That stuff always works.”

“No, I’m telling you. Up here you got to be patient. You got to use your head.”

And McLarney will stand there, listen a little longer, and then move on, delighted and amused at the notion of Donald Waltemeyer telling another man to shake off the lessons of the street. If there was nothing else to her credit, the Black Widow had at least taken a patrolman and turned him into a detective.

It’s a summer afternoon in the Woodland Avenue drug market, and suddenly, with a body on the ground, race becomes the dominant theme. The dead kid is decidedly black and the police, standing over their daylight scene, are decidedly white. The crowd grows restless.

“This could get out of hand in a hurry,” says a young lieutenant, scanning the sea of angry faces on the other side of the police line. “I’d like to get that body outta here as soon as possible.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” says Rich Garvey.

“I only got about six guys here,” the lieutenant says. “I’d call for more, but I don’t want to empty the other sector.”

Garvey rolls his eyes. “Fuck them,” he says softly. “They’re not going to do shit.”

They never do. And after a few hundred crime scenes, Garvey doesn’t even hear the trash that gets thrown out from the crowd. The way a detective sees it, you just let the assholes run their mouths as long as they keep out of your way. And if one actually jumps into your scene, you throw his ass against a radio car and call for the wagon. No problem whatsoever.

“Why don’t you cover that boy up and show some respect for the dead,” shouts a fat girl on the other side of the Cavalier.

The crowd shouts its approval and the girl, encouraged, presses the point. “He just another dead nigger to you, right?”

Garvey turns to Bob McAllister, glowering, as a uniform pulls a white plastic sheet over the head and torso.

“Now, now,” says McAllister, anticipating his partner’s anger. “Let’s have a little decorum here.”

The body stays on the pavement, stranded there by the delayed arrival of a lab tech, who is rushing from another call on the other side of the city. A hot summer day in August and only four techs are working, one consequence of a municipal pay scale that doesn’t exactly encourage careers in the fast-growing field of evidentiary processing. And though this fifty-minute delay is being regarded as yet another public display of the white racist police conspiracy that runs rampant on the streets of Baltimore, Garvey is somehow unrepentant. Fuck them all, he thinks. The kid is dead and he ain’t getting any better and that’s all there is to it. And if they think a trained homicide detective is going to dismantle a crime scene to satisfy a half a block’s worth of agitated Pimlico squirrels, they don’t know the game.

“How long you gonna leave a black man out in the street?” shouts an older resident. “You don’t care who sees him like that, do you?”

The young lieutenant listens to all of this nervously, checking his watch, but Garvey says nothing. He takes his eyeglasses off, rubs both eyes and walks over to the body, slowly lifting the white sheet from the dead man’s face. He stares down for half a minute or so, then drops the cloth and walks away. A proprietary act.

“Where the hell is the crime lab?” says the lieutenant, fingering his radio mike.

“Fuck these assholes,” says Garvey, irritated that this is even being mistaken for an issue. “This is our scene.”

And not much of a scene at that. A young drug dealer by the name of Cornelius Langley has been gunned down in a daylight shooting on the sidewalk in the 3100 block of Woodland, and no one in this crowd is rushing forward to provide any information. Nonetheless, it’s the only crime scene around, and as such, it’s real estate that now belongs to Garvey and McAllister. What the hell else does anyone need to be told?

The lab tech is another twenty minutes in arriving, but true to form, the crowd eventually loses interest in the confrontation well before that. By the time the tech gets busy taking photos and bagging spent.32 auto casings, the locals on Woodland Avenue are back to signifying, staring down the proceedings with nothing more than casual curiosity.

But just as the detectives are putting the finishing touches on the scene, the crowd on the far side of the street parts for the hysterical mother, who is already wailing inconsolably even before glimpsing her son’s body. Her arrival ends the truce and gets the crowd going again.

“Why you got to make her watch?”

“Hey, that the mother, yo.”

“They don’t care. That’s some cold poh-leece shit there, yo.”

McAllister gets to the woman first, blocking her view of the street and imploring the relatives with her to go back home.

“There’s nothing you can do here, really,” he says over the mother’s screams. “As soon as we can, we’ll be down to the house.”

“He was shot?” asks an uncle.

McAllister nods.

“Dead?”

McAllister nods again and the mother goes into a half-faint, leaning heavily against another woman, who helps her back into the family’s double-parked Pontiac.

“Take her home,” McAllister says again. “That’s really the best thing right now.”

At the other end of Woodland, closer to Park Heights, the spectators provide even more dramatics. A young kid points to a tall, gangly bystander and blurts out a vague accusation.

“He was there,” the kid tells a friend, loud enough for a uniform to overhear. “He was right there and broke running when they shot the boy.”

The uniform takes half a step toward the man, who turns and runs down the sidewalk. Two other uniforms join the chase and catch up to their quarry at the corner of Park Heights. A body search produces a small amount of heroin and a wagon is called.

Half a block away, Garvey is told of the arrest and shrugs. No, not the shooter, he reasons. Why would the shooter be hanging around an hour after the body hits the pavement? A witness, perhaps. Or maybe just a bystander after all.

“Yeah, okay, have the wagon take him on down to our office,” says the detective. “Thanks.”

Ordinarily, the routine lockup of a drug addict on Woodland Avenue-Pimlico’s grand boulevard of drug addicts-would mean nothing to a detective’s case. Ordinarily, Garvey would have every reason to stand over his latest body feeling a little like a lost ball in tall grass. But in the context of his summer, a sudden shout and a foot chase and a little bit of dope in a glassine bag are all it takes. It’s everything required to make even the weakest sister get up and dance.

It began with the Lena Lucas case back in February and continued with a couple of misdemeanor homicides in April-one whodunit, two dunkers, but all of them cleared by arrest within a week or two. No deeper meanings there; every detective can expect a run of good luck now and then. But when the Winchester Street killing went down in late June, a pattern began to emerge.

Winchester Street was nothing more than a couple of blood smears and a mutilated bullet when Garvey and McAllister reached the scene, and undoubtedly there would have been little else if the first uniform there hadn’t been Bobby Biemiller, McLarney’s drinking buddy from the Western.

“I sent two down to your office,” Biemiller told the arriving detectives.

“Witnesses?”

“I dunno. They were here when I showed up, so I fuckin’ grabbed ’em.”

Bob Biemiller, friend of the little man, hero to the unwashed masses, and the patrolman voted Most Desirable First Officer for a Ghetto Shooting by three out of five Baltimore homicide detectives. That cabbie slaying on School Street a few years back-Garvey’s first case as a primary-also starred Biemiller as first officer. A happy memory for Garvey, too, because the case went down. Good man, Biemiller.

“So tell me,” said McAllister, amused, “who are these unfortunate citizens that you’ve managed to deprive of their liberty?”

“One is your guy’s girlfriend, I think.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She was hysterical.”

“Well, that’s a start,” said Garvey, a man of faint praise. “So where’s our boy?”

“University.”

Down at the emergency room entrance, the ambo was still backed up to the door. Garvey looked inside and nodded to a black medic who was washing blood from the floor of Medic 15.

“How we doing?”

“I’m fine,” said the medic.

“I know you’re fine. How’s he?”

The medic shook his head, smiling.

“You ain’t makin’ my night.”

Dead on arrival, but the surgeons had cracked the chest anyway in an attempt to massage a spark or two into the guy’s heart. Garvey stayed long enough to watch an intern yell for a charge nurse to move the dead man from the triage area.

“Right now,” yelled the doctor. “We got a guy coming in eviscerated.”

Saturday night in Bawlmer.

“Eviscerated,” said Garvey, enjoying the sound of the word. “Is this a great city or what?”

University Hospital couldn’t save the victim, so the rulebook called for a case in which no reliable witnesses or evidence would be recovered. And yet back at the homicide unit, the dead man’s girlfriend readily gave up most of the murder and its origins in an $8 debt. No, she didn’t see it, she claimed, but she begged the boy Tydee not to use his gun. The next morning, McAllister and Garvey both canvassed the 1500 block of Winchester Street and turned up a pair of eyewitnesses.

At that moment, Garvey did not immediately pause and go directly to the altar of the nearest Roman Catholic church. He should have, but he didn’t. Instead, he merely typed out an arrest warrant and put himself back into the rotation, thinking that this happy little streak was merely a synthesis of investigative skill and random luck.

It took another week before Rich Garvey began to realize that the hand of God was truly upon him. It took a July tavern robbery in Fairfield, with an elderly bartender dead behind the bar of Paul’s Case and every living occupant of the establishment too drunk to identify their own house keys, much less the four men who robbed the place. All except the kid in the parking lot, who happened to get the license tag of the gold Ford seen speeding off the bar’s dirt lot.

Hail Mary, mother of God.

A quick records check on the tag came back with the name of Roosevelt Smith and an address in Northeast Baltimore; right as rain, the officers arrived at the suspect’s home to find the automobile parked in front, its engine still hot. The very braindead Roosevelt Smith needed about two hours in the large interrogation room before making his first down payment on Out Number 3:

“Here’s what I believe,” offered Garvey, working without the benefit of his power suit. “This man was shot in the leg and bled out from his artery. I don’t think anyone intended this man to die.”

“I swear to God,” wailed Roosevelt Smith. “I swear to God I didn’t shoot anyone. Do I look like a killer?”

“I dunno,” answered Garvey. “What does a killer look like?”

An hour more and Roosevelt Smith was admitting to having driven the getaway car for $50 of the robbery money. He also gave up the name of his nephew, who had been inside the bar during the holdup. He didn’t know the names of the other two guys, he told Garvey, but his nephew did. As if he understood that it was up to him to keep the investigation neat and orderly, the nephew turned himself in that same morning and responded immediately to McAllister’s classic interrogative technique, the Matriarchal Appeal to Guilt.

“My mm-mother is really sick,” the nephew told the detectives in a bad stutter. “I n-need to g-g-go home.”

“Well, I’ll bet your mother would be real proud to see you now, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?”

Ten more minutes and the nephew was crying tears and banging on the interrogation room door for the detectives. He did his mother a good turn by giving up the names of the other two men in the stickup crew. Working around the clock, Garvey, McAllister and Bob Bowman wrote warrants for two East Baltimore addresses and hit the houses just before dawn. The house on Milton Avenue yielded one suspect and a.45-caliber rifle that witnesses said was used in the robbery; the second address produced the shooter, a sawed-off little sociopath named Westley Branch.

The murder weapon, a.38 revolver, was still missing and, unlike his codefendants, Branch refused to make any statement in the interrogation room, leaving the case against him a weak one. But three days later, the trace evidence lab made up the difference by matching Branch’s fingerprints with those found on a Colt 45 malt liquor can near the Fairfield bar’s cash register.

Print hits, license tag numbers, cooperating witnesses-Garvey had indeed been touched. Hands had been laid upon him as he bounced an unmarked car back and forth across the city, turning every criminal act into an arrest warrant. The fingerprint match on the Fairfield bar murder alone demanded some kind of Old Testament offering. At the very least, Garvey should have sacrificed a virgin or a police cadet or anything else that could be the Baltimore equivalent of an unblemished heifer. A few priestly blessings, a little lighter fluid, and the Big Shift Commander in the Sky might have been appeased.

Instead, Garvey simply went back to his desk and answered the phone-the impulsive act of a man ignorant of the demands of karma.

Now, standing over the shell of a Pimlico drug dealer, he has no right to invoke the gods. He has no right to believe that the thin man now wagonbound for homicide will know anything about this murder. He has no right to expect that this same man will be looking at a five-year parole backup for that small bag of dope in his possession. He certainly has no reason to think that this man will actually know one of the shooters by name, having served some time in the Jessup Cut with the gunman.

Yet an hour after clearing the Woodland Avenue crime scene, Garvey and McAllister are writing furiously in the large interrogation room, playing host to a truly cooperative informant named Reds.

“I’m on parole,” the guy reminds Garvey. “Any kinda charge is going to back me up.”

“Reds, I need to see how you’re gonna do by us on this thing.”

The thin man nods, accepting the unspoken agreement. With a felony, it takes a downtown prosecutor to cut the deal; with a misdemeanor like drug possession, any detective can maneuver on his own, killing the charge with a quick call to the state’s attorney out at the district court. Even as Reds lays out the Woodland Avenue murder, a homicide detective is talking the Northwest District court commissioner into approving a pretrial release without bail.

“How many were there?” asks Garvey.

“Three, I’d say. But I only know two.”

“Who were they?”

“The one’s name is Stony. He’s my rap buddy.”

“What’s his real name?”

“I dunno that,” says Red.

Garvey stares at him, disbelieving. “He’s your rap buddy and you don’t know his real name?”

Reds smiles, caught in a stupid lie.

“McKesson,” he says. “Walter McKesson.”

“And the other guy?”

“I only know him by Glen. He’s one of them boys from North and Pulaski. I think Stony be working for him now.”

Little Glen Alexander, an up-and-comer in the shooting galleries along West North Avenue. McKesson is no slouch either; he beat a murder charge back in ’81. Garvey knows all that and more after a half an hour on the BPI computer. Alexander and McKesson were up in Pimlico on business, putting out free testers for all the Park Heights fiends, trying to expand their market share at the expense of someone else’s territory. A minion of one of the local Pimlico dealers, Cornelius Langley, took exception and there were some words on Woodland Avenue between Langley and Alexander that same morning. Like MacArthur, little Glen left the neighborhood declaring that he would return, and like MacArthur, he surely did.

When the gold Volvo pulled up on Woodland Avenue, Reds was walking through the alley from the Palmer Court apartments, where he had gone to score his dope. He came out on Woodland just as McKesson was taking aim at Cornelius Langley.

“Where was Glen?” asks Garvey.

“Behind McKesson.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“I think so. But it was McKesson who I seen shoot the boy.”

Langley stood his ground, a true stoic, refusing to run even when the men poured from the Volvo. The victim’s younger brother, Michael, was with him when the shooting started, but ran screaming when Cornelius hit the pavement.

“Did Langley have a gun?”

“Not that I seen,” says Reds, shaking his head. “He should’ve though. Them boys from North and Pulaski don’t play.”

Garvey runs through the scenario a second time slowly, picking up a few more details and committing the story to eight or nine sheets of interview paper. Even if they weren’t going to get rid of his dope charge, Reds wouldn’t make much of a court witness, not with his long arrest sheet and the HO-scale tracks running up and down each arm. Michael Langley, however, will be another story. McAllister goes downstairs and brings Reds a soda, and the man stretches his thin frame back from the table, his chair scraping across the tile floor.

“All this dopin’ is running me down,” he says. “You all took my shit and now I got to deal with that. Hard life, you know?”

Garvey smiles. In a half hour, the papers come downtown from the Northwest District Court and Reds signs the personal recog sheet and squeezes his gangly body into the cramped back seat of a Cavalier for the short trip up the Jones Falls Expressway. At Cold Spring and Pall Mall, he slumps down, head below the window’s edge, so as not to be seen in an unmarked car.

“You want to get out at Pimlico Road or somewhere else?” Garvey asks, solicitous. “Is this safe for you?”

“I’m fine right here. Ain’t nobody around. Just pull up on that side of the street.”

“Take care, Reds.”

“You too, man.”

And then he is gone, sliding out of the car so quickly that he is a half block away and moving fast before the traffic light changes. He does not look back.

The next morning, after the autopsy, McAllister gives his patented do-right-by-the-victim speech to the dead man’s mother, delivering it with so much apparent sincerity that as usual it makes Garvey want to throw up and has him wondering whether McAllister is going to finish by falling to one knee. No doubt about it, Mac is an artist with a grieving mother.

This time, the plea is for Michael Langley, who has not stopped running since the gunshots on Woodland Avenue. Rather than stand up as the eyewitness to his brother’s murder, the boy raced two blocks to his room, packed a bag and headed south for the Langley ancestral lands in Carolina. Bring him back to us, McAllister will ask the mother. Bring him back and avenge your son’s death.

And it works. A week later, Michael Langley returns to the city of Baltimore and its homicide unit, where he wastes no time identifying Glen Alexander and Walter McKesson from two photo arrays. Soon Garvey is back in the admin office, pecking out two more warrants on a secretary’s IBM Selectric.

Eight cases, eight clearances. While summer bleeds the rest of the shift dry, Rich Garvey is once again communing with an electric typewriter, building the Perfect Year.

Hell Night is three men on a midnight shift that never ends, with the office phones bleating and the witnesses lying and the bodies stacking up in the ME’s freezer like commuter flights over La Guardia. It arrives without pity at a quarter before midnight, little more than a half hour after Roger Nolan’s crew started walking through the door. Kincaid showed up first, then McAllister, and then Nolan himself. Edgerton is late, as usual. But before anyone can finish even one cup of coffee, the first call is on them. And this time it’s a little more than the usual corpse. This time it’s a police-involved shooting from the Central.

Nolan calls Gary D’Addario at home; protocol dictates that regardless of the hour, the shift lieutenant is to return to the office to supervise the investigation of any police-involved shooting. Then he calls Kim Cord-well, one of two secretaries assigned to the homicide unit. She, too, will have to come in on overtime so that the 24-hour report will be typed to perfection and copied for every boss by morning.

The sergeant and his two detectives then head for the shooting scene, leaving the phones to be answered downstairs in the communications center until Edgerton arrives to staff the office. No sense holding a man back, Nolan reasons. A police-involved shooting is by definition a red ball and, by definition, a red ball requires every warm body.

They take two Cavaliers, arriving at a vacant parking lot off Druid Hill Avenue, where half the Western District’s plainclothes vice unit is standing around a parked Oldsmobile Cutlass. McAllister takes in the scene and experiences a moment of déjà vu.

“Maybe it’s just me,” he tells Nolan. “But this looks a little bit too familiar.”

“I know what you mean,” says the sergeant.

Following a brief conversation with the Western’s vice sergeant, McAllister walks back to Nolan, quietly wrestling with the humor of it all.

“It’s another ten seventy-eight,” says McAllister, dryly creating a new 10 code for the occasion. “Your basic blowjob-in-progress interrupted by police gunfire.”

“Damn,” says Kincaid. “It’s gettin’ so a man can’t even get blowed without gettin’ himself shot.”

“This is one tough town,” agrees Nolan.

Three months ago, the same scene was played out on Stricker Street; McAllister was the primary detective for that one as well. The scenario in each case is the same: Suspect picks up a Pennsylvania Avenue prostitute; suspect parks at isolated spot, drops his pants and consigns his nether regions to $20 worth of fellatio. Suspect is approached by plainclothes vice officers from the Western District; suspect panics, doing something that seems to threaten the arresting officers; suspect is hit with a.38-caliber bullet and ends the evening in a downtown ER, reflecting on the relative joys of marital fidelity.

As law enforcement goes, it’s downright ugly. And yet with the right amount of talent and finesse, both incidents will be ruled justifiable by the state’s attorney’s office. In a strictly legal sense, they can certainly be justified; before firing their weapons at the two men, both officers may well have believed they were in jeopardy. When ordered to surrender, the suspect on Stricker Street reached for something in the back of his truck and a plainclothes officer fired one shot into his face, fearing that he was trying to grab a weapon. The officer in tonight’s incident fired one shot through the windshield after the suspect, attempting to drive away from the plainclothesmen, struck one of the officers with the car’s bumper.

For homicide detectives, however, a justified police shooting means only that there was no criminal intent behind the officer’s actions and that at the time he used deadly force the officer genuinely believed himself or others to be in serious danger. From a legal standpoint, this is a hole large enough for the proverbial truck, and in the case of these two vice squad shootings from the Western, the homicide unit will feel no qualms about using every inch of that chasm. The equivocation inherent in every police-involved shooting probe is understood by any cop with a year or two on the street: If Nolan or McAllister or Kincaid were asked at the scene whether they truly believed the shooting to be justified, they would answer in the affirmative. But if they were asked whether that shooting represented good police work, they would provide an altogether different answer or, more likely, no answer at all.

In the realm of American law enforcement, the deceit has been standardized. Inside every major police department, the initial investigation of any officer-involved shooting begins as an attempt to make the incident look as clean and professional as possible. And in every department, the bias at the heart of such an investigation is seen as the only reasonable response to a public that needs to believe that good cops always make good shootings and that bad shootings are only the consequence of bad cops. Time and again, the lie must be maintained.

“I take it the lady in question is already downtown?” says Nolan.

“Yes indeed,” says McAllister.

“If it’s the same girl as on Stricker Street, I’m going to bust a gut hearing about how every time she goes down on a guy, he gets shot.”

McAllister smiles. “If we’re all right here, I think I’m going to head for the hospital.”

“You and Donald can both go,” says the sergeant. “I’m going back to the office and get things started.”

But before he can do so, a nearby uniform overhears the citywide dispatch call for a multiple shooting in the Eastern. The uniform turns up the volume and Nolan listens as the call is confirmed and an Eastern officer asks the dispatcher to notify homicide. Nolan borrows a hand-held radio and assures communications that he’s responding from the shooting scene in the Central.

“We’ll meet you back at the office,” says McAllister. “Call if you need us.”

Nolan nods, then heads across town as McAllister and Kincaid go to the emergency room at Maryland General. Twenty minutes later, the thirty-six-year-old suspect- “a working man,” he is quick to assure them, “a happily married working man”-is sitting up in a back room, his upper right arm bandaged and encased in a canvas sling.

McAllister calls his name.

“Yes sir?”

“We’re with the police department. This is Detective Kincaid and I’m Detective-”

“Listen,” says the victim. “I’m really, really sorry, and like I wanted to tell the officer, I didn’t know he was a police-”

“We understand…”

“I had my glasses off and I just saw him coming up to the car waving somethin’ and I thought I was gettin’ robbed, you know?”

“That’s fine. We can talk later…”

“And I wanted to apologize to the officer but they wouldn’t let me see him, but really, sir, I didn’t know what-”

“That’s fine,” says McAllister. “We can talk about this later, but the important thing is that you and the officer are both all right.”

“No, no,” says the suspect, waving his sling in the air. “I’m fine.”

“Okay, great. They’ll be taking you down to our office and we’ll talk there, okay?”

The suspect nods and both detectives walk toward the emergency room exit.

“Nice guy,” says Kincaid.

“Very nice,” says McAllister.

The guy is telling the truth, of course. Both detectives couldn’t help but notice that the suspect’s eyeglasses were still sitting on top of the Oldsmobile’s dashboard. Parked in an isolated spot with his pants at his knees, the man probably felt particularly vulnerable at the sight of a young man in street clothes walking up to the car with something shiny in his hand. The victim on Stricker Street had the same fear of a robbery and, as a supermarket security guard, he impulsively reached for his nightstick in the back seat when the first officer jerked open the passenger door. Mistaking the stick for a long gun, the cop fired one round into the man’s face, and only by the grace of the University ER did the poor guy survive. To the department’s credit, the second shooting will be enough to prompt the deputy commissioner for operations to pull the district vice units off the street long enough to make changes in the prostitution detail procedures.

Over on the east side, Roger Nolan is dealing with the fallout from a triple shooting. The scene on North Montford is a wild one, too, with a young girl shot dead and two other family members wounded. The wanted man is the dead girl’s estranged lover, who compensated for the end of the brief relationship by shooting everyone he could find in his girlfriend’s rowhouse and then running away. Nolan is at the scene for two hours, prying witnesses from the neighborhood and sending them downtown, where Kincaid begins to sort through the early arrivals.

Returning to the homicide office, Nolan checks the small interrogation room, satisfying himself that tonight’s streetwalker is not the same girl whose customer was shot on Stricker Street. He checks in with D’Addario, who has arrived, and with the twenty-six-year-old plainclothesman who pulled the trigger and is now a nervous wreck in D’Addario’s office. Then he scans the bustling activity in the office and does not see the face he is looking for.

Sitting at Tomlin’s desk, he dials Harry Edgerton’s home number and listens patiently as the phone rings four or five times.

“Hullo.”

“Harry?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This is your sergeant,” says Nolan, shaking his head. “What the hell are you doing asleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re supposed to be working tonight.”

“No, I’m off. Tonight and Wednesday, I’m off.”

Nolan grimaces. “Harry, I got the roll book right in front of me and your H-days are Wednesday-Thursday. You’re on tonight with Mac and Kincaid.”

“Wednesday and Thursday?’

“Yeah.”

“No way. You’re kidding me.”

“Yeah, Harry, I’m calling you up at one A.M. just to fuck with you.”

“You’re not kidding me.”

“No,” says Nolan, almost amused.

“Shit.”

“Shit is right.”

“Anything going on there?”

“A police shooting and a murder. That’s all.”

Edgerton curses himself. “You want me to come in?”

“Fuck it, go back to sleep,” says the sergeant. “We’ll be all right and you’ll work Thursday. I’ll pencil it in.”

“Thanks, Rog. I could swear I had Tuesday and Wednesday. I was sure of it.”

“You’re a piece of work, Harry.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Go back to sleep.”

In a few hours, when events again overtake the squad, Nolan will regret his generosity. Now, however, he has every reason to believe that he can make do until morning with two detectives. McAllister and Kincaid have returned from the hospital with the wounded suspect, his arm in a sling, and an interview is already under way in the admin office. From the look of things, it is going pretty much as expected, too. After giving a half-hour statement to Kincaid and McAllister, the victim’s most sincere desire is to apologize to the cop who shot him.

“If I could just see him for a moment, I’d like to shake his hand.”

“That might not be a good idea right now,” says Kincaid. “He’s a little upset right now.”

“I can understand that.”

“He’s very upset that he had to shoot you and all, you understand.”

“I just want him to know that-”

“We told him,” says McAllister. “He knows you didn’t think he was a police officer.”

Eventually, McAllister lets the suspect use the admin office phone to call his wife, who last saw her husband an hour and a half earlier, when he was leaving for a five-minute ride to an all-night video store. The detectives will listen sympathetically as the poor man tries to explain that he’s been shot in the arm, arrested and charged with assault on a police officer and that it’s all just a big misunderstanding.

“I’m going to have to wait to make bail,” he tells her, “but I’ll explain when I get home.”

No mention is made of the perverted sex charge, and the detectives assure him that they have no reason to want to wreck his marriage.

“Just make sure she don’t show up for court,” Kincaid tells him. “If you can do that, you’ll probably be all right.”

Back in D’Addario’s office, the young plainclothesman is writing his own report of the incident, electing on the advice of his district commander to give a voluntary statement to the detectives. By law, any attempt to compel an officer’s statement makes that information inadmissible in court, and the detectives are under standing orders from prosecutors to do nothing more than request a statement from any officer involved in a shooting. Since the Monroe Street probe, however, the police union has been urging officers not to give any statements-a policy that in the long run is likely to breed trouble. After all, if a homicide detective can save another cop, he won’t hesitate to do so; but any cop who refuses to explain his actions is just asking for a grand jury investigation. On this night, however, the major from the Western manages to convince his man to consent to an interview, thereby giving the detectives room to work.

The officer’s report conforms to the suspect’s own statement that the plainclothesman fell on the hood of the car, after it jerked forward three or four feet, then fired a single shot through the windshield. The interview with the prostitute provides further corroboration. Not that she saw all that much, she tells the detectives, her field of vision at the time being somewhat limited.

Slowly, methodically, the five-page report begins to come together beneath the hum of Kim Cordwell’s word processor. Reading the draft, D’Addario pencils a change or two and suggests the rewording of a few critical sections. When it comes to police-shooting reports, D’Addario is something of an artist; eight years in homicide have trained him to anticipate the likely questions from the command staff. Rarely, if ever, has a shooting report bounced down the ladder after the lieutenant put his mark on it. As awkward and excessive as the use of deadly force might have seemed out on that parking lot, it reads squeaky clean in the finished product.

Nolan watches the paperwork progress and again tells himself that they can do without Edgerton and that it’s better, after all, to get a full night’s work out of Harry on Thursday rather than call him downtown two hours into a shift.

But two hours later, just as the floodwaters have started to recede, the phone rings again, this time with a shooting call from North Arlington Avenue on the west side. Kincaid leaves the last of the paperwork from the police shooting behind, grabs the keys to a Cavalier and drives twenty or thirty blocks to watch the sun rise over a dead teenager, his long frame stretched across the white asphalt of a back alley. A stone whodunit.

When the dayshift detectives begin arriving a little after seven, they find an office in a state of siege. Nolan is at one typewriter, working on his 24-hour report as his witnesses wait in a back room for transport back to the Eastern. McAllister is down at the Xerox machine, copying and collating his police-shooting opus for everyone above the rank of major. Kincaid is in the fishbowl, haggling with three west-siders who are trying hard to avoid becoming witnesses to a disrespect shooting that happened right in front of their eyes.

McAllister manages to slip out a little after eight, but Kincaid and Nolan end their day in the afternoon rush at the ME’s office, waiting for their respective bodies to be examined and disassembled. They wait together in the antiseptic sheen of the autopsy room corridor, and yet they are anything but together after this shift.

The issue, once again, is Edgerton. Earlier in the night, Kincaid overheard Nolan’s telephone call to the missing detective; if he hadn’t been knee deep in witnesses and incident reports, he would have boiled over on the spot. Several times during the night he had been ready to blast Nolan about it, but now, with the two of them alone in the Penn Street basement, he’s too tired to argue. For the moment, he satisfies himself with the bitter thought that in his whole career, he never managed to forget when the hell he was supposed to be working.

But Kincaid will have his say; that much is certain. The air of compromise, the teasing banter, the rough acknowledgment of Edgerton’s effort to handle more calls-all of that is out the window as far as Donald Kincaid is concerned. He’s had it with that crap. He’s had it with Edgerton and with Nolan and with his place in this goddamn squad. You’re scheduled to be in at 2340 hours, you’re in at 2340, no later. You’re scheduled to work the Tuesday shift, you come to work on Tuesday. He didn’t give the department twenty-two years to put up with this kind of bullshit.

Roger Nolan, for his part, simply doesn’t want to hear it anymore. To his way of thinking, Edgerton is a good man who works his cases harder than most of the men in homicide, and besides, he’s back to clearing murders. Okay, thinks Nolan, so every now and then Harry gets out there in the ozone. So he got his shifts wrong. So what should we do? Make him write a 95 explaining why he’s a space cadet? Maybe dock him some vacation days? What the hell good is that? That shit didn’t work in patrol and it sure wasn’t the way to do business in homicide. Everyone knew the story about the time a supervisor had demanded that Jay Landsman write a 95 explaining why he was late for a shift. “I was late for duty,” Landsman wrote, “because when I left the house to come to work there was a German submarine parked in my driveway.” For better or worse, that was homicide, and Nolan simply wasn’t going to jam it to one detective to make another feel better.

The middle ground is gone. On this, the morning after, Kincaid keeps the rein on his anger and says nothing. Nor does he give Edgerton more than a passing comment when both men show up for their shift on Friday.

“I don’t even blame Harry,” Kincaid tells the other squad members. “I fuckin’ blame Roger for not making him straighten up.”

But over the next few days, Kincaid’s anger becomes white heat, and the others-McAllister, Garvey, even Bowman, who is more likely than not to side with Kincaid in this dispute-know enough to leave it alone and stay out of the way. In the end, the inevitable explosion comes on a four-to-twelve shift that marks Edgerton’s next off-day. It’s a shift comprised entirely of yelling and cursing, of accusation and counteraccusation, that finishes with Nolan and Kincaid shouting at each other in the main office, emptying all their guns in the kind of firefight that leaves few pieces to be picked up. Nolan makes it clear that he regards Kincaid as more trouble than anything else, telling the detective to mind his own business and then accusing him of failing to work his cases hard enough or long enough. And while it’s true that Kincaid has a healthy share of open files over the last two years, it’s also fair to say that Nolan is offering up the kind of criticism that no veteran detective is willing to hear. As far as Donald Kincaid is concerned, he’s gone as soon as a vacancy opens up on either shift.

After showing its fault lines for more than a year, Roger Nolan’s squad is finally breaking apart.