Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

EIGHT

The sights, the sounds, the smells-there is nothing else in a detective’s frame of reference to which that basement room on Penn Street can be matched. Even the crime scenes, no matter how stark and brutal, pale against the process by which the murdered are dissected and examined: that is truly the strangest vision.

There is a purpose to the carnage, a genuine investigative value to the gore of human autopsy. The legal necessity of the postmortem examination is understood by a detached and reasoning mind, yet the reality of the process is no less astonishing. To that part of the detective which calls itself professional, the medical examiner’s office is a laboratory. And yet to that other part, which defines itself in hard, but human terms, the place is an abattoir.

The autopsy brings home the absolute finality of the event. At the crime scenes, the victims are most certainly dead, but at the point of autopsy, they become for the detectives something more-or less. It is one thing, after all, for a homicide detective to detach himself emotionally from the corpse that forms the center of his mystery. But it’s another thing altogether to see that corpse emptied of itself, to see the shell reduced to bones and sinew and juices in the same way that an automobile is stripped of chrome and quarter panels before being hauled to the wrecker. Even a homicide detective-a jaded character indeed-has to witness his share of portmortems before death truly becomes a casual acquaintance.

For a homicide detective, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is both a legal necessity and an evidentiary asset. A pathologist’s autopsy forms the baseline for any homicide prosecution simply because, in every murder case, it must first be proven that the victim died from human intervention and not from some other cause. But beyond that basic requirement, a good cutter’s abilities can often mean the difference between an accident being mistakenly viewed as a homicide or, equally disastrous, a homicide being attributed to accidental or natural causes.

To the pathologist, every body tells a story.

Given a gunshot wound, a medical examiner can determine from the amount and pattern of soot, burned powder and other debris whether a particular bullet was fired at contact range, close range or a distance greater than two to two and a half feet. More than that, a good cutter can look at the abraded edges of the entrance wound and tell you the approximate trajectory of the bullet at the point of entrance. Given a shotgun wound, that same pathologist can read the pellet pattern and gauge the approximate distance between the barrel of the weapon and its target. From an exit wound, an ME can tell whether the victim was standing free or if the wound was shored because the victim was against a wall, or on a floor, or in a chair. And when presented with a series of wounds, a good pathologist can tell you not only which projectile proved lethal but, in many cases, which projectiles were fired first, or which wounds were sustained postmortem and which were antemortem.

Give that same doctor a knife wound and you’ll learn whether or not the blade had one edge or two, was serrated or straight. And if the stab wound is deep enough, a medical examiner can look at the markings made by the knife hilt and tell you the length and width of the murder weapon. Then there are the blunt trauma injuries: Was your victim hit by a car or a lead pipe? Did that infant fall in the bathtub or was he bludgeoned by his babysitter? In either case, an assistant medical examiner has the key to the corporeal vault.

But if a forensic pathologist can confirm that a murder has been committed, if he can further provide some basic information about how the crime was done, he is rarely if ever able to lead a homicide detective from the how of it to the who of it. Too often the dead man comes to the detective as little more than a vessel emptied of life by persons unknown in the presence of witnesses unknown. Then the pathologist can provide all the detail in the world: wound trajectories, the sequence of wounds, the distance between shooter and victim-and none of it means a thing. Without witnesses, autopsy results become filler for the office reports. Without a suspect to be interviewed, the medical facts can’t be used to contradict or confirm information gained in an interrogation room. And though a cutter may be an absolute pro at tracking wounds through a human body, though he may recover every piece of lead or copper jacketing left inside that body, it hardly matters when no gun has been recovered for a ballistics comparison.

At best, an autopsy provides information that can be used by an investigator to measure the veracity of his witnesses and suspects. An autopsy tells a detective a few things that definitely happened in the last moments of his victim’s life. It also tells him a few things that could not have happened. On a few blessed occasions in a detective’s career, those few somethings happen to matter.

A pathologist’s death investigation is therefore never an independent process; it exists in concert with everything the detective has already learned at the crime scene and in interviews. An assistant medical examiner who believes that cause and manner of death can be determined in all cases solely by the examination of the body is just asking for pain. The best pathologists begin by reading the police reports and looking at Instamatic photos taken by the ME’s attendants at the crime scene. Without that context, the postmortem examination is a meaningless exercise.

Context is also the reason that the homicide detective is generally required to be present in the autopsy room. Ideally, cutter and cop impart knowledge to each other, and both leave the autopsy room with a greater sum of information. Often, too, the relationship creates its own tension, with the doctors arguing science and the detectives arguing from the street. Example: A pathologist finds no semen or vaginal tearing and concludes that a victim found nude in Druid Hill Park was not raped. Yet a detective knows that many sex offenders never manage to ejaculate. Moreover, his victim was a part-time prostitute and mother of three. So what if there isn’t any tearing? Alternatively, a detective looking at a body with a contact gunshot wound to the chest, a second contact wound to the head and multiple bruises and contusions to the torso may think that he’s got to be dealing with a murder. But the two gunshot wounds are not inconsistent with a suicide attempt. Pathologists have documented cases in which a person taking his own life has fired a weapon repeatedly into his chest or head with inconclusive results-perhaps because he jerked his hand at the last second, perhaps because the initial shots were far from lethal. Likewise, the chest bruising-though it may seem to be the work of an assailant-could be from the efforts of family members who, on hearing the gunshots, rushed into the room and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the victim. No suicide note? The truth is that in 50 to 75 percent of all cases, suicide is never accompanied by a written note.

The relationship between the detective and the medical examiner is necessarily symbiotic, but the occasional tension between the two disciplines produces its own stereotypes. The detectives genuinely believe that every new pathologist comes out of medical school with a by-the-textbook mentality that bears only a casual resemblance to what occurs in the real world. A new doctor must therefore be broken in like a new shoulder holster. Likewise, the pathologists consider the vast majority of homicide detectives to be glorified beat cops, untrained and unscientific. The less experienced the detective, the more likely they are to be perceived as amateurs in the art of death investigation.

A year or two back, Donald Worden and Rich Garvey happened to be in the autopsy room on a shotgun murder just as John Smialek, Maryland’s chief medical examiner, was leading a group of medical residents on the day’s rounds. Smialek had only recently arrived in Baltimore, by way of Detroit and Albuquerque, and consequently Worden probably seemed to him no more or less knowledgeable than any other police investigator.

“Detective,” he asked Worden in front of the group, “can you tell me if those are entrance wounds or exit wounds?”

Worden looked down at the dead man’s chest. Small entrance-big exit is the rule of thumb for gunshot wounds, but with a 12-gauge, the entrances can also be pretty fearsome. At close range, it’s never easy to say for sure.

“Entrance wounds.”

“Those,” said Smialek, turning to the residents with proof of a police detective’s fallibility, “are exit wounds.”

Garvey watched the Big Man go into a slow boil. It was, after all, Smialek’s job to know any and all entrances from any and all exits, whereas it was Worden’s to find out who put the holes there in the first place. Given the divergence in perspectives, several months and a dozen or so bodies are often required before a detective and a pathologist can work well together. After that initial encounter, for example, it took quite a while before Worden could see Smialek as a good cutter and investigator. Likewise, it took that long before the doctor began to regard Worden as something more than a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.

Because a medical examiner’s report is required on any case in which murder is probable, the autopsy room has long been part of a Baltimore detective’s daily routine. On any given day, the morning rounds may bring to Penn Street a state trooper handling a Western Maryland drowning or a Prince George’s County detective with a drug murder from the D.C. suburbs. But the sheer volume of city violence has established the Baltimore cops as fixtures at the ME’s office, and as a result, the relationship between veteran detectives and the more experienced pathologists has grown close with time. Too close, to Smialek’s way of thinking.

Smialek arrived in Baltimore with the belief that the natural ties to the homicide unit had allowed the medical examiner’s office to sacrifice some of its status as an independent agency. Detectives, particularly those from the city, had too much influence over the manner-of-death rulings, too much say in whether something would be called a murder or a natural death.

Before Smialek’s arrival, the autopsy room was indeed a less formal place. Coffee and cigarettes were bartered and shared in the cutting room and a few detectives had been known to show up on Saturday mornings with a six-pack or two, treating the cutters to some early relief from the weekend rush that always began with Friday night’s violence. Those were the days when practical jokes and raw banter were an established part of morning rounds. Donald Steinhice, a detective on Stanton’s shift who long ago had learned to throw his voice, was responsible for some notable feats, and many an ME or assistant began an autopsy by pausing for what seemed to be a dead man’s complaint about cold hands.

Nonetheless, the casual ease of these years also had a down side. Worden, for one, could remember visiting the autopsy room and noticing the clutter and disorganization; sometimes, when the weekend rush used up all the metal gurneys, bodies were even laid out on the floor. Nor was it uncommon for evidence to get lost, and the integrity of trace evidence was often suspect, with the detectives unsure whether hairs and fibers found on the bodies were from the crime scene or from the ME’s own freezer. Most important, to Worden’s way of thinking, there had simply been a lot less respect for the dead.

In a campaign for investigative independence and better conditions, Smialek ended all that, although he did so in a way that damaged the camaraderie of Penn Street and made the place a hell of a lot less fun in the process. As if to emphasize the professionalism of the office, he insisted on being addressed as a doctor and would not tolerate even a passing reference to his office as a “morgue.” To avoid acrimony, detectives learned to call the place-in Smialek’s presence, at least-the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Subordinates who were used to less formal arrangements, many of them talented pathologists, soon ran afoul of the new chief, as did those detectives who couldn’t sense the change in the weather.

Walking into the autopsy room on one occasion, Donald Waltemeyer made the mistake of wishing all the ghouls in the chopshop a fine good morning. Whereupon Smialek told other detectives that if Waltemeyer continued on that path, he would do so with a new and larger asshole. They were not ghouls, he declared, they were doctors; it was not a chopshop, it was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And the sooner Waltemeyer learned these things, the happier a warrior he’d be. Ultimately, the detectives’ verdict on the Smialek regime was divided: the ME’s office certainly seemed to be better organized and more professional in some respects; on the other hand, it was a fine morning when you could share a cold one with Dr. Smyth while listening to Steinhice speak for the dead.

Of course, the application of criteria such as comfort and amusement to the autopsy room is-in and of itself-ample proof of a homicide man’s peculiar and sustaining psychology. But for the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment, and Penn Street, even on a good day, was one hell of a vision. In fact, quite a few detectives came close to being ill the first couple times around, and two or three aren’t ashamed to say they still have a problem every now and then. Kincaid can handle anything unless it’s a decomp, in which case he’s the first one out the loading dock door. Bowman’s okay until they pop the skull to remove the brain; the sight doesn’t bother him so much as the clipped sound of the snapping bone. Rick James still gets a little unnerved when he sees a young child or an infant on the table.

But beyond those occasional hard moments, the daily routine at the ME’s office is, for a detective, exactly that. Any investigator with more than a year in the unit has witnessed the postmortem examination so often that it has become utterly familiar. If they absolutely had to do it, half the men on the shift could probably pick up a scalpel and break a corpse down to parts, even if they didn’t have any idea what, if anything, they were actually looking for.

The process begins with the external examination of the body, as important as the autopsy itself. Ideally, the cadavers are supposed to arrive at Penn Street in the same condition as they appeared on the scene. If the victim was dressed when found, he remains dressed, and the clothes themselves will be examined with great care. If there were indications of a struggle, the victim’s hands will have been encased at the scene in paper bags (plastic bags produce condensation when the body is later removed from the freezer) to preserve any hairs, fibers, blood or skin beneath the fingernails or between the fingers. Likewise, if the crime scene was in a house or some other location where trace evidence could be recovered, the ME’s attendants will wrap the body in a clean white sheet before removal, trapping any hairs, fibers or other trace material for later recovery.

At the beginning of the external examination, each body is removed from the walk-in freezer and weighed, then rolled on a metal gurney to the overhead camera that provides the photographs of record before the autopsy. Next, the body is rolled into the autopsy area, a long expanse of ceramic tile and metal that can accommodate as many as six examinations simultaneously. The Baltimore facility does not have, like many autopsy rooms, overhead microphones that allow the pathologists to record findings for later transcription. Instead, the doctors take notes periodically using clipboards and ball-points left on a nearby shelf.

If the victim was clothed, the pathologist will try to match the holes and tears in each item of clothing to the corresponding wounds: Not only does this help confirm that the victim was killed in the presumed manner-a good pathologist can spot a body that has been dressed after being shot or stabbed-but in the case of gunshot wounds, the clothes can then be checked visually or chemically tested for ballistic residue.

Once the victim’s clothes have received a preliminary examination, each article is then removed carefully to preserve any trace evidence. As with a crime scene, precision is preferable to speed. Bullets and bullet fragments, for example, often manage to leave the body only to lodge in the victim’s clothing, and often that evidence will be recovered as the body is slowly undressed.

In cases where sexual assault is suspected, the external examination includes a careful search for any internal trauma, as well as vaginal, oral or anal swabs for ejaculate, because semen recovered at the point of autopsy may be used later for comparison to link a suspect to the crime.

Other trace evidence can be extracted from the victim’s hands. In a murder that follows a struggle or sexual assault, fingernail clippings may produce fragments of skin, hair or even the blood of the assailant. If the struggle involved a knife, defense wounds-a pattern of straight incisions, often relatively small-may be visible on the victim’s hands. Likewise, if at any point the victim fired a weapon, particularly a large-caliber handgun, chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits on the back of each hand might yield proof of that fact. The examination of a victim’s hands may also mean the difference between a ruling of homicide or suicide; in about 10 percent of all self-inflicted gunshot wounds, the shooting hand will be speckled by blood and tissue particles-“blowback” from the wound track.

Just as a detective stares at a crime scene and tries to see those things that are out of place or missing entirely, a pathologist conducts an autopsy with a similar eye. Any mark, any lesion, any unexplained trauma to the body is carefully noted and examined. For that reason, hospital trauma teams are told to leave catheters, shunts and other tools of medical intervention intact so that the pathologist can differentiate between physical alterations that occurred in the effort to save the victim and those that occurred prior to the emergency room.

Once the external examination is complete, the actual autopsy begins: the pathologist makes a Y-shaped incision across the chest with a scalpel, then uses an electric saw to cut through the ribs and remove the breastplate. In the case of penetrating wounds, the doctor will follow the wound track at each level of the body’s infrastructure, noting the trajectory of the bullet or the direction of the blade wound. The process continues until the full extent of the wound is known and, in the case of gunshot wounds, until either the entrance wounds are matched with exits or the spent projectile is recovered from the body.

The wounds are further evaluated in terms of their likely effect on the victim. A through-and-through wound to the head no doubt caused immediate collapse, but another wound, a chest shot that pierced a lung and the vena cava, might not have resulted in death for perhaps five to ten minutes, though it would have ultimately proven just as lethal. By this process, a pathologist can speculate about what actions may have been physiologically possible after a wound was inflicted. This is always a difficult guessing game, however, because shooting victims do not demonstrate the same reliable and consistent behavior depicted in television and film. Unfortunately for homicide detectives, a badly wounded person often refuses to limit the crime scene by simply falling down at the first wound and then waiting for the ambulance or morgue wagon.

The distortion of television and popular culture is nowhere more apparent than in the intimate relationship of bullets and bodies. Hollywood tells us that a Saturday Night Special can put a man on the pavement, yet ballistic experts know that no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet. Regardless of a bullet’s weight, shape and velocity and regardless of the size of the handgun from which it was fired, it is too small a projectile to topple a person by the impact of its own mass. If bullets truly had such power, the laws of physics would require that the shooter would also be knocked off his feet in similar fashion when he discharged the weapon. Even with the largest firearms, this doesn’t occur.

In fact, a bullet stops a human being by doing one of two things: striking the brain, brain stem or spinal cord, causing immediate damage to the central nervous system; or damaging enough of the cardiovascular system to cause massive blood loss to the brain and eventual collapse. The first scenario has an immediate result, though the average shooter’s ability to intentionally strike the brain or spinal cord of a target is largely limited to luck. The second scenario takes longer to play out because there is an awful lot of blood for a human body to lose. Even a gunshot wound that effectively destroys the victim’s heart leaves enough blood to supply the brain with oxygen for ten to fifteen seconds. Although the popular belief that many people fall down upon being shot is generally accurate, experts have determined that this occurs not for physiological reasons, but as a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do. Proof of the phenomenon is evident in its opposite: There are countless cases in which people-often people whose mental processes are impaired by drugs or alcohol-are shot repeatedly, sustaining lethal wounds; yet despite the severity of their injuries, they continue to flee or resist for long periods of time. An example is the 1986 shootout between FBI agents and two bank robbery suspects in Miami, a prolonged gun battle in which both suspects and two federal agents were killed and five other agents wounded. Pathologists later discovered that one of the gunmen sustained a lethal heart wound in the first minutes of the incident yet managed to remain ambulatory for close to fifteen minutes, firing at agents and attempting to escape by restarting two cars before finally collapsing. People with bullets in them, even a considerable number of bullets, do not always perform to expectations.

Neither, for that matter, do the bullets themselves. Once loosed upon the innards of a human being, these little lead bits also tend toward the unpredictable. For one thing, bullets often lose their shape. Hollow-point and wadcutter rounds tend to flatten out against tissue, and all ammunition can shatter against bone. Likewise, most projectiles do a lot less spinning and drilling after encountering resistance inside the body; instead, they yaw and tumble, battering tissue and organs along the way. As bullets enter a body, they also become less directional, glancing off bone and sinew and following the altered trajectories of their own changing shape. This is as true for the smallest slugs as for the larger ones. Out on the street, the big guns-the.38s,.44s and.45s-still get the greatest respect, but the lowly.22 pistol has acquired a reputation all its own. Any West Baltimore homeboy can tell you that when a.22 roundnose gets under a man’s skin, it bounces around like a pinball. And every pathologist seems to have a story about a.22 slug that entered the lower left back, clipped both lungs, the aorta and the liver, then cracked an upper rib or two before finding its way out the upper right shoulder. It’s true that a man who gets hit with a.45 bullet has to worry about a larger piece of lead cleaving through him, but with a good.22 round, he has to worry that the little bugger is in there for the grand tour.

Most big-city medical examiners employ a fluoroscope or X-ray to hunt down the tiny shards of metal alloy that travel to all sorts of unexpected destinations. In Baltimore, that technology is readily available and is occasionally used by a cutter in situations where multiple gunshot wounds or shattered bullets have complicated the recovery effort. For the most part, however, the veterans on Penn Street take pride in being able to locate most of the bullets and fragments without resorting to the scope, relying instead on a careful examination of the wound track and an understanding of a bullet’s dynamics inside the body. For example, a bullet fired into the skull of a victim might not leave the head but instead ricochet off the inside of the skull at a point roughly opposite from the entrance wound; that much would be obvious from the absence of any exit wound. But an experienced pathologist begins his search knowing that projectiles bouncing off the interior skull rarely ricochet at acute angles. On the contrary, such a slug is more apt to strike the bone and then skate along the inside of the skull in a long arc, often coming to rest just inside the bone and a good distance from any point along the original trajectory. It’s esoteric stuff and, in a perfect world, nothing that a human being should ever need to know. Such is the cumulative knowledge of the autopsy room.

The process continues with the removal of the breastplate and the examination of the internal organs. Linked together in the body’s central cavity, the organ tree is lifted out as a single entity and placed on the steel sinks at the other end of the room. A careful vivisection of the heart, lungs, liver and other organs is then conducted, with the pathologist checking for any signs of disease or deformity while continuing to follow wound paths through the affected organs. With the organs removed, the remaining wound tracks can be followed into the posterior tissue of the body, and projectiles that have lodged in those muscles can also be removed. Bullets and bullet fragments, a critical category of physical evidence, are of course handled with great care, and they are removed by hand or with soft implements that cannot scratch the outer surface and thereby interfere with later ballistic comparisons of rifling marks.

In the final phase of the internal exam, the pathologist uses the electric saw to cut the circumference of the skull, the top of which is then popped upward with a lever-like tool. Pulling from behind the ears, the skin of the victim’s scalp is then folded forward across the face so that any head wound can be tracked and the brain itself can be removed, weighed and examined for disease. For observers, the detectives included, this last stage of the autopsy is perhaps the hardest. The sound of the saw, the cranial pop from the lever, the image of the facial skin being covered by scalp-nothing makes the dead seem quite so anonymous as when the visage of every individual is folded in upon itself in a rubbery contortion, as if we’ve all been wandering this earth wearing dimestore Halloween masks, so easily and indifferently removed.

The examination concludes with a sampling of bodily fluids-blood from the heart, bile from the liver, urine from the bladder-to be used for toxicology tests that can identify poisons or measure alcohol and drug consumption. More often than not, a detective will request a second blood sample as well in order to identify blood at the crime scene or any bloodstained items that are seized in a later search warrant. Toxicology results take several weeks, as does neutron activation testing for gunshot residue, which is analyzed at the FBI lab in Washington. DNA testing, another aid to identification that was introduced in the late 1980s, can credibly match samples of the human genetic code using blood, skin or hair samples and has therefore become the new frontier for trace forensics. But the process is beyond the lab capabilities of both the medical examiner’s office and the Baltimore department. When relevant to a case and requested by a detective, samples are instead sent to one of a handful of private labs used by Maryland authorities, but the backlog can be as bad as six months-a long time to wait for critical evidence.

A single autopsy can take less than an hour, depending on the complexity of the case and the extent of the wounds or injuries. When it is finished, an assistant returns the internal organs to the chest cavity, replaces the brain and skull top and closes the incisions. The body is then returned to the freezer to await a funeral home’s hearse. The gathered evidence-blood samples, swabs, nail clippings, bullets, bullet fragments-is then marked and bagged for the detective, who will take it to the evidence control unit or the ballistics lab, ensuring a clear chain of custody.

By its very efficiency, the process manages somehow to become less and less extraordinary. But what still has emotional force for even veteran detectives is the autopsy room as a panoramic vision, a sort of Grand Central Station of lifelessness in which human bodies are at varying stops along the disassembly line. On a busy Sunday morning, the hallway outside the cutting room might be filled with eight or nine metal tables and the freezer may hold a half dozen more. To stand amid the overnight accumulation of homicides and auto accidents, drownings and burnings, electrocutions and suicides, overdoses and seizures-that is always a little overwhelming. White and black, male and female, old and young, all come to Penn Street with no common denominator save that their deaths are officially unexplained occurrences within the geographic confines of the Old Line State. More than any other visual image, the weekend display in the tiled room reminds a homicide detective that he deals in a wholesale market.

Every visit to the autopsy room reaffirms a detective’s need for a psychological buffer between life and death, between the horizontal forms on the gurneys and the vertical forms moving between the metal. The detectives’ strategy is simple and it can be presented as an argument: We are alive; you are not.

It is a philosophy unto itself, a religion worthy of its own rites and rituals. Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are breathing and laughing and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, while you are stripped bare and emptied of vital pieces. We are wearing blue and brown and arguing with the attendant about last night’s Orioles game, insisting that the Birds can’t win without another RBI man in the lineup. Your clothes are torn and soaked with blood and you are refreshingly free of all opinion. We are contemplating a late breakfast on company time; you are having the contents of your stomach examined.

By that logic alone, we are entitled to a little arrogance, a little distance, even within the close confines of the autopsy room. We are entitled to walk among the dead with a false confidence, with a deceitful wit, with the self-sustaining assurance that it’s still the greatest of chasms that separates us from them. We will not mock the shells of the dead, sprawled on their wheeled alloy cots; but neither will we humanize them, growing solemn and mortal at the very sight. We can laugh and joke and bear witness in this place only because we will live forever, and if we don’t live forever, we will at least manage to avoid leaving this vale as an unattended death in the state of Maryland. In the safety of our imagination, we will only depart in wrinkled skin and a soft bed, with a signed death certificate from a licensed physician. We will not be bagged and weighed and photographed from above so that Kim or Linda or some other secretary in the Crimes Against Persons section can glance at the 8-by-10 glossy and remark that Landsman looked better with his clothes on. We will not be split and spliced and sampled only to have a civil servant note on a government-issue clipboard that our heart was moderately enlarged, our gastrointestinal system, unremarkable.

“Table for one,” says an attendant, sliding a cadaver into an empty slot in the autopsy room. An old joke, but he, too, is alive and therefore entitled to an old joke or two.

Likewise for Rich Garvey, taking note of a rather well-endowed male cadaver: “Oh, my goodness, I’d hate to see that thing angry.”

Or Roger Nolan, noticing a random racial configuration: “Hey Doc, how is that the white guys got their tables right away and the black guys are all waiting in the hall?”

“I think this is one time,” muses an attendant, “when the black guys would rather see the white guys go first.”

Only on rare occasions is the veil lifted, with the living compelled to acknowledge the dead honestly. It happened to McAllister five years back, when the body on the metal table was Marty Ward, a narcotics detective killed in a Frederick Street drug front when a hand-to-hand sale went bad. Ward was Gary Childs’s partner back then and one of the most popular detectives on the sixth floor. McAllister was chosen to work that autopsy because someone in the unit had to do it, and the other homicide detectives had been closer to Ward. None of that made it easier, of course.

For the detectives, the rule of thumb is that if you think about it, if you allow the imagery to be about human beings rather than evidence, you will be led to some strange and depressing places. Insisting on this distance is an acquired skill, and for new detectives, an established rite of passage. New men are measured by their willingness to watch a body disassembled and then adjourn to the Penn Restaurant, on the other side of Pratt Street, for the three-egg special and a beer.

“The real test of a man,” says Donald Worden, reading the menu one morning, “is whether or not he’s willing to substitute that nasty pork roll for the bacon.”

Even Terry McLarney, the closest thing to a philosopher in the homicide unit, has trouble finding anything more than black comedy in the autopsy room. When it is his turn to walk in that small space between the living and the dead, his empathy for the forms on the metal tables is largely limited to his ongoing and thoroughly unscientific survey of livers.

“I like to look for the more derelict-looking guys, the ones who look like they’ve had a hard life,” explains McLarney, deadpan. “If they open ’em up and the liver is all hard and gray, I get depressed. But if it’s pink and puffy, hey, I’m happy all day.”

On one discomfiting occasion, McLarney was in the autopsy room when one case appeared on the rounds sheet with the explanation that although the victim had no medical history, he was known to drink beer every day. “I read that and figured, What the fuck,” McLarney mused. “I might as well just find an empty table, lie down and unbutton my shirt.”

Of course, McLarney knows better than to think it can all be laughed off. The line between life and death isn’t so thick and straight that a man can stand on it every morning, cracking jokes with impunity as the doctors wield scalpel and knife. Once, in a rare moment, McLarney even tries to find words for something deeper.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” he says, serving up a platitude to the others in the homicide office one afternoon, “but whenever I’m down there for an autopsy, I can pretty much convince myself that there is a God and there is a heaven.”

“The morgue makes you believe in God?” asks Nolan, incredulous.

“Yeah, well, if not heaven, then someplace where your mind or your soul goes after you die.”

“Ain’t no heaven,” says Nolan to the rest of the group. “You look around that room down there and you know we’re all just meat.”

“No,” says McLarney, shaking his head. “I believe we go somewhere.”

“Why’s that?” asks Nolan.

“Because when the bodies are all laid out like that, all the life is just gone and you know that there’s nothing left. They’re so empty. You can look at their faces and know they’re completely empty…”

“So?”

“So, it’s got to go somewhere, right? It doesn’t just disappear. They’ve all got to have somewhere else to go.”

“So their souls go to heaven?”

“Hey,” says McLarney, laughing, “why not?”

And Nolan smiles and shakes his head, giving McLarney time to wander off with his seminal theologies intact. After all, only the living can argue for the dead, and McLarney is alive; they are not. By virtue of that one undeniable fact, he is entitled to win with the weakest argument.

Dave Brown pilots the Cavalier to within a block of the blue emergency lights, close enough to observe the general outline of the scene.

“I’ll take this one,” he says.

“You really are a piece of shit,” says Worden from the passenger seat. “Why don’t you just drive up and take a look at it first before deciding?”

“Hey, I’m deciding now.”

“Maybe you want to see if there’s a lockup first?”

“Hey,” says Brown again, “I’m deciding now.”

Worden shakes his head. Protocol demands that when two detectives are in a car and heading for a scene, one detective signs on as the primary before anything about the murder is known. By this unspoken agreement, those unseemly arguments in which one detective accuses another of grabbing dunkers and dumping whodunits are kept to a minimum. By waiting until the scene is within sight, Dave Brown is trampling around the edges of the rule, and Worden, true to form, is letting him know it.

“Whatever happens,” Worden says, “I’m not helping you with this case.”

“Did I ask for your fucking help?”

Worden shrugs.

“It’s not like I got a look at the body.”

“Good luck,” says Worden.

Brown wants this murder for no other reason than the location of the crime scene, but as reasons go, it’s pretty good. For one thing, the Cavalier is now parked in the 1900 block of Johnson Street in South Baltimore’s bottom, and South Baltimore’s bottom is deep in the bowels of Billyland. Stretching from Curtis Bay to Brooklyn and from South Baltimore on through Pigtown and Morrell Park, Billyland is a recognized geographic entity among Baltimore cops, a subculture that serves as the natural habitat for the descendants of West Virginians and Virginians who left the coal mines and the mountains to man Baltimore’s factories during the Second World War. To the chagrin of the established white ethnic groups, the billies swarmed into the red brick and Formstone rowhouses in the southern reaches of the city-an exodus that defined Baltimore as much as the northern movement of blacks from Virginia and the Carolinas during the same era. Billyland has its own language and logic, its own social framework. Billies don’t reside in Baltimore, they live in Bawlmer; it is the Appalachian influence that gives the language in the white sections of the city much of its twang. And although the advent of fluoride has allowed even the truest of billies to retain more of their teeth with each passing generation, nothing prevents their allowing their bodies to be treated like virgin canvas by the East Baltimore Street tattoo artists. Similarly, a billy girl might feel compelled to call police when her boyfriend throws a National Premium bottle at her head, but she will just as surely leap with claws bared on a Southern District uniform’s back the moment he arrives to take her man away.

For Baltimore’s cops, hard-core billyness is generally regarded with as much disdain and humor as the hard-core ghetto culture. If nothing else, this attitude provides some proof that it is class consciousness, more than racism, that propels a cop toward a contempt for the huddled masses. And in the homicide unit in particular, the working coalition of black and white detectives tends to drive home the point. Just as Bert Silver is excepted from the general dislike of female officers, so are Eddie Brown and Harry Edgerton and Roger Nolan regarded as special cases by white detectives. If you are poor and black and your name is floating around somewhere in the BPI computer, then you are a yo and a toad and-depending on how unreconstructed the mind of the cop-maybe even a brain-dead nigger. If, however, you are Eddie Brown at the next desk over, or Greg Gaskins down at the state’s attorney’s office, or Cliff Gordy on the circuit court bench, or any other member of the taxpaying classes, then you are a black man.

A similar logic applies in Billyland.

You may come from the same mountain stock as the rest of Pigtown, but by a detective’s reasoning, that alone doesn’t make you a true billy. Maybe you’re just another white boy; maybe you finished twelfth grade at Southern High and nailed down a decent job and moved out to Glen Burnie or Linthicum. Or maybe you’re like Donald Worden, who grew up in Hampden, or like Donald Kincaid, speaking in a mountain drawl and sporting that tattoo on the back of one hand. On the other hand, if you’ve spent half your life drinking at the B &O Tavern on West Pratt Street and the other half shuttling back and forth from the Southern District Court for theft, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and possession of phencyclidine, then to a Baltimore detective you most certainly are a billy boy, a white-trash redneck, a city goat, a dead-brained cul-de-sac of heredity, spawned in the shallow end of a diminishing gene pool. And if you happen to get in the way of a Baltimore cop, he’ll probably be happy to tell you as much.

Whatever their views on billy culture, the Baltimore detectives all agree that the best thing about working a murder on the white side of the tracks-aside from the sheer novelty-is that the billies talk. They talk at the scene, they talk in the interrogation rooms, they actually look up the number for the homicide office and then talk on the phone. And when asked whether he wants to remain anonymous, a good billy asks what the hell for. He gives up his real name, his correct address. He offers his work number, his girlfriend’s name and phone number, his girlfriend’s mother’s phone number and every thought he’s had in his head since the ninth grade. The code of the street-the ghetto rule that says a man never talks to a police under any conceivable circumstance-just doesn’t mean as much in Billyland. Maybe it’s because the cops have a little good ol’ boy in them, maybe it’s because the high-spirited Baltimore billy never managed to incorporate lying as an art form. Whichever, a detective working a white murder in the Southern or Southwestern District usually has more information than he knows what to do with.

Dave Brown knows all this, of course. As he takes in the swirl of blue-tops surrounding his crime scene, he also knows that he needs a clearance to balance some nasty red on the board. He’s been carrying a couple of open ones, most notably the Clayvon Jones killing, which can’t be put down without a witness no matter how many anonymous callers offer up the suspect’s name. Ordinarily, he might have shrugged young Clayvon off as a hard luck case, but the return of Corey Belt from the Western District for the Geraldine Parrish detail was, in Brown’s mind, a reason for genuine angst. No doubt, Belt had obviously impressed McLarney in the Cassidy investigation, and now Belt was happily teamed with Donald Waltemeyer, Brown’s usual partner, in a probe of the Parrish insurance killings that might take months.

Only last night, Brown had gone so far as to joke weakly about his status. Sitting at an admin office typewriter at the beginning of the overnight shift, he concocted a short, plaintive memorandum to McLarney, which he left in the sergeant’s mailbox:

With Officer Corey (I’m a superstar) Belt looming on the horizon, I thought I’d take just a moment to reintroduce myself to you.

Until I came to your squad, I was just another long-haired, drug-infested, raving homosexual. Working under your knowledge, talent, skill, kindness and love I have become a detective of barely questionable means. Keeping this in mind, and to include the great feelings of my squad toward me (Worden: “He’s a useless fuck”… James: “He never pays his fucking bar tab”… Ed Brown: “I doesn’t even know the motherfucker”) I was wondering what plans you had in mind for my CONTINUED service to you.

I will remain ever vigilant, awaiting your response. Respectfully (everyone takes advantage of me),

David John Brown, Detective.

CID? Homicide? (Forever, Please God)

McLarney found the memo about an hour into the midnight shift and read it aloud in the coffee room, giggling at the more obsequious passages.

“Amusing,” he declared in conclusion. “Inatrulypatheticsortof way.”

Fred Ceruti’s troubles had not gone unnoticed, and Dave Brown, in his own, feverish brain at least, was feeling a little of the same heat. Driving out to Johnson Street, he had reasoned that an investigative sortie into Billyland might be just the cure.

“Well, Brown,” says Worden, getting out of the passenger seat, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

She is face down in the hard mud and stone, a pale figure framed by a semicircle of radio cars. A short woman with straight reddish-brown hair, her red-and-white-striped tank top is pulled up to expose most of her back; her white corduroy cutoffs are torn at one side, revealing the buttocks. A pair of cream-colored panties, also torn from the left side, are down between her knees, and a single sandal rests a few feet from her right foot. Around her neck is a thin gold necklace and a pair of gold hoop earrings lie in the gravel on either side of her head. On closer inspection, one of the earrings is bloody, apparently because it was torn from the woman’s left earlobe, which shows a laceration and some dried blood. Scattered near the body are a few coins; working carefully, Worden manages to liberate $27 in bills from a back pocket. Jewelry, money-if it was a robbery, it didn’t get far.

Dave Brown looks at Worden, conscious of the fact that the Big Man is participating in this scene reluctantly.

“How old would you say, Donald?”

“Twenty-five. Maybe a little older. Can’t really say until we roll her.”

“I’d say twenty-five might be high.”

“Maybe,” says Worden, bending over the woman. “But I’ll tell you what my first question is.”

“Lemme guess. You want to know where that other sandal is.”

“You got it.”

The scene is a gravel lot that serves as a tractor-trailer turn-around and loading dock for an aging, red brick warehouse at the edge of the Chessie System railbed. Three trucks are parked at the eastern edge of the lot, but their drivers were sleeping in the rear of their cabs before the warehouse opened and they heard and saw nothing; whatever happened on the lot happened quickly or quietly enough that they stayed asleep. The body is on the western side of the lot, near the warehouse itself, perhaps ten or fifteen feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock. At the edge of the dock is a truck trailer that blocks any view of the body from Johnson Street.

She was found by two teenagers who live a few blocks away and were out running a dog at dawn. Both of them have already been sent downtown by uniforms, and McLarney will soon be busy taking statements. Both are billies tried and true, with Harley-Davidson tattoos and minor police records, but nothing about their story will arouse any suspicion.

While Worden deals with the lab tech, Dave Brown begins walking the length of the gravel lot, from the loading dock to the overgrown grass at the edge of the railbed. He jumps up on the concrete dock, then walks around both sides of the warehouse. No sandal. Brown walks a block and a half down Johnson Street, checking the gutter, then walks back to the southern boundary of the lot, where he jumps down to the railbed and searches a few hundred feet of the tracks. Nothing.

By the time he returns, the lab tech has recovered the money and jewelry, photographed the body in its original position and sketched the scene. The ME’s attendants have also arrived and taken their Polaroids, followed by two television news cameras that are perched at the lot’s entrance, shooting a few seconds of tape for the noon broadcasts.

“Can they see the body from up there?” asks Worden, turning to the sector sergeant.

“No. The trailer blocks the view.”

Worden nods.

“We ready?” Brown asks.

“Let’s do it,” says the ME’s lead attendant, putting on his gloves. “Slow and steady.”

Gingerly, the two attendants roll the corpse, turning the dead woman slowly onto her back. The face reveals itself as a bloody, fleshy pulp. More surprising, black treadmarks cross the left upper torso and head in a consistent diagonal.

“Whoa,” says Dave Brown. “Road kill.”

“Well, what do you know,” says Worden. “I guess it’s a whole new ball game now.”

The older detective walks back to the Cavalier for one of the handheld radios and opens the citywide channel.

“Sixty-four forty,” says Worden.

“Sixty-four forty.”

“I’m down at this homicide scene on Johnson Street and I need to get a supervisor in the traffic investigation section down here.”

“Ten-four.”

Half a minute later, a TIS sergeant is on the wire, explaining to the dispatcher that he is not needed on Johnson Street because the incident is a homicide, not an automobile accident. Worden listens to the conversation with growing irritation.

“Sixty-four forty,” says Worden, interrupting.

“Sixty-four forty.”

“I know it’s a homicide. I want someone from TIS down here for their expertise.”

“Ten-four,” says the traffic man, cutting back in. “I’ll be out there in a few minutes.”

Unbelievable, thinks Worden, a perfect illustration of the not-my-job reflex. Traffic section handles any auto fatalities, including hit-and-runs, so they are reluctant to send a man down if it means they might get stuck with the case. McAllister and Bowman encountered something similar back in March when they called for traffic while working a body found mauled by the shoulder of Bayonne Avenue in the Northeast. The detectives were walking around that scene looking for chrome and paint chips; the traffic man was looking for shell casings.

“Did you catch that?” asks Worden, almost amused. “That guy wasn’t going to come down here until he heard me say it was a homicide.”

Dave Brown doesn’t answer, preoccupied with the change in scenario. Death-by-auto requires an entirely different perspective, though neither detective believes that this was an accident. For one thing, the body is on a vacant gravel lot and was run over not ten feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock: It’s hard to imagine a car whirling around in such a confined area for no reason. More important is the missing sandal. If the dead woman was a pedestrian, if she was merely the victim of a hit-and-run, then why wouldn’t that other sandal be somewhere on the lot? No, the detectives reason, she wasn’t a pedestrian; she arrived at the scene in the car that killed her, and chances are she had to get out of that car in a hurry, leaving behind one of her shoes.

On a closer inspection of the body, Worden also notices bruising in the approximate shape of fingers on both forearms. Was she grabbed? Was she attacked before the killer got back in the car and finished her? And the earrings: Were they pried out by the movement of the tire over her head, or were they pulled from her ears in an earlier struggle?

Freed from his fears about being saddled with the case, the TIS sergeant arrives a moment later and, after examining the treadmarks on the dead woman, begins waxing eloquent on radial tire design and the myriad distinctions between manufacturers. Before his brain turns to yogurt, Dave Brown interrupts the discourse.

“What do you think hit her?”

“Hard to say. But that tread would be most common on a sports car. A Two-eighty Z.A Camaro. Something along those lines.”

“Nothing bigger?”

“Maybe a little bigger, but I’m saying it would have to be in that same class of sports cars. Those are like a high-performance tire, like you want for a car that’s riding low to the ground.”

“Thanks,” says Worden.

“You got it.”

Dave Brown squats down on his haunches to scan the treadmarks closely.

“No question it’s a murder, Donald,” he says. “No question in my mind.”

Worden nods agreement.

But the drivers sleeping in the tractor cabs at the opposite end of the lot heard nothing; nor did the railroad workers at the yard office across the tracks remember any noise or headlights. Worden talks to the sector sergeant and learns that at about four A.M.-little more than two hours before the discovery of the body-there was a fire alarm at the warehouse. Trucks and engines from the Fort Avenue and Light Street stations drove right onto the gravel lot, confirmed the absence of any flame or smoke, and then drove off-presumably without noticing the body. Either she was killed after four o’clock or half the fire department all but drove over the corpse. On second thought, Worden muses, maybe they did that, too.

News of the fire alarm makes both detectives realize that half their crime scene has already been destroyed. If the weapon is an automobile, treadmarks are important, and on a mud and stone lot such marks should be easy enough to find-provided, of course, that a convoy of fire trucks didn’t get a chance to roll across the scene, not to mention a half dozen radio cars, every last one of which made a point of pulling to within feet of the body. Dave Brown could spend a month matching tire prints to eliminate every vehicle that had been on the lot. Hoping for something easier, he checks the white cement of the loading dock and the scarred metal of a Dumpster, looking for fresh scrapes and dents.

“It’s a tight spot,” he says, hopeful. “Wouldn’t it be great if the guy clipped a fender while rolling around in here?”

It would be manna from heaven, but even as he speaks, Brown knows that the only physical evidence he has is the body itself. And depending on what happens in the autopsy room in two hours, he may have precious little of that. Contrary to his initial expectations, Johnson Street was turning out to be a stone whodunit; Billyland was turning out to be no fun at all.

After the body has disappeared into the rear of the black van, the two detectives walk back up to the lot’s Johnson Street entrance, where a crowd of onlookers has collected over the last two hours. A younger woman waves Dave Brown aside and asks for the name of the victim.

“We don’t know yet. We don’t have any ID.”

“Was she in her forties?”

“Younger. Much younger, I think.”

As the detective fights to remain patient, the woman slowly explains that her aunt left their home on South Light Street late last night and hasn’t been seen since.

“We don’t know who she is yet,” Brown repeats, handing her his business card. “If you want to call me later in the day, I’ll probably have something more.”

The woman takes the card and opens her mouth with another question, but Brown is already in the driver’s seat of the Cavalier. If the case was an ordinary shoot-’em-up, one of the detectives would be peeling off to work on the identification and interview relatives. But this case, more than most, hinges on the postmortem.

Brown guns the motor and races the Cavalier up South Charles Street; fifty miles an hour for no apparent reason. Worden looks at him.

“What?” asks Brown.

Worden shakes his head.

“What’s the matter with you? I’m a police. I’m allowed to drive like that.”

“Not with me in the car.”

Brown rolls his eyes.

“Go by the Rite Aid upon Baltimore Street,” says Worden. “I need cigars.”

As if to make his point, Brown guns the motor again and catches every light across downtown. At Calvert and Baltimore, he double parks outside the drugstore and gets out of the driver’s side before Worden can react. He waves off the older detective and returns a minute later with his own brand of cigarettes and a soft pack of Backwoods.

“I even got you one of them pink lighters you like so much. The bigger size.”

A peace offering. Worden looks at the lighter, then back at Dave Brown. They are both large men, both squeezed beyond all dignity into the cramped interior of a two-door economy sedan. They are flesh under pressure in that car, a vision of cluttered humanity that somehow increases the comedic possibilities.

“They say it takes a big man to carry a pink lighter,” says Brown. “A big man or a man familiar with alternative lifestyles.”

“You know why I need the bigger size,” says Worden, lighting a cigar.

“Because you can’t get them fat stubby fingers around one of the little ones.”

“That’s right,” says Worden.

The Cavalier bumps its way through the potholes and metal plates of Lombard Street in the late morning traffic. Worden blows smoke out the window and watches secretaries and businessmen coming out of office buildings for an early lunch.

“Thanks for the cigars,” he says after a block or two.

“You’re welcome.”

“And the lighter.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m still not helping you with this one.”

“I know, Donald.”

“And your driving still sucks.”

“Yes, Donald.”

“And you’re still a piece of shit.”

“Thank you, Donald.”

“Dr. Goodin,” says Worden, pointing to the metal gurney just outside the autopsy room door, “is this one yours?”

“That one there?” says Julia Goodin. “That’s your case?”

“Well, actually Detective Brown here is the primary investigator. I’m here for moral support.”

The doctor smiles. She is a small woman, tiny in fact, with close-cropped blonde hair and wire-rim glasses. And despite the additional authority of a white lab coat, she is a young woman with at least a passing resemblance to Sandy Duncan. To be blunt, Julie Goodin looks nothing like a cutter, and considering the prevailing stereotype, that’s probably something of a compliment.

“And also,” adds Worden, “because Brown promised to buy me breakfast across the street.”

Dave Brown shoots Worden a look. Cigars. Lighters. Breakfast. You miserable old bastard, he thinks, why don’t you just bring me your fucking mortgage payments?

Worden gives back a grin, then turns his attention to the pathologist, who now has her back to the two men. She is at the metal sink, cutting through the organ tree of this hour’s client, a middle-age black man whose empty center yawns at them from the gurney just behind the doctor.

“I guess,” says Worden, “that you’re real glad to be working with me again, right?”

Julia Goodin smiles. “It’s always interesting working on your cases, Detective Worden.”

“Interesting, huh?”

“Always,” she says, smiling again. “But I won’t get to her for another half hour or so.”

Worden nods and walks back out into the weighing room with Dave Brown.

“I’ll bet she’s real happy to see me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Tiffany Woodhous. The baby case.”

“Oh yeah.”

Doc Goodin has only been down at Penn Street for a few months, but already there is a history between her and Worden. It was a clusterfuck, of sorts, and it came three weeks back on a suspected child abuse call from Bon Secours, where the broken body of a dead two-year-old greeted Worden and Rick James in the rear examination room. Tiffany Woodhous had arrived at the hospital as a cardiac arrest case, but when the ER technicians forced a tube down into the child’s stomach, the only liquid they brought up was old blood from an earlier injury. Doctors then noticed that rigor mortis was already developing in the face and extremities. Both detectives noted a large bruise on the right side of the forehead, as well as others on the shoulder, back and abdomen.

Assuming the worst, the detectives had both parents taken down to homicide, and when they learned that there were three other children at the family’s Hollins Street home, they contacted the Department of Social Services. But after lengthy interviews, both mother and father remained insistent that they had no idea who could have caused those injuries. Then their thirteen-year-old daughter raised a new suspicion by mentioning an incident that had occurred when her ten-year-old cousin was caring for the baby. The daughter said that she was on the second floor of the house when she heard a smacking noise, and when she walked downstairs and asked about it, the younger boy explained that he had only clapped his hands. After that, she told Worden, she took Tiffany upstairs, but the little girl was quiet and listless. She put the infant back on the sofa and watched as she fell asleep.

Worden and James were both understandably eager to interview the boy, but he was suddenly nowhere to be found. He had been living with his aunt because he had already run away from his grandmother’s house on Bennett Place, and now he had fled from Hollins Street as well. Consequently, when Julia Goodin got her first look at the tiny body at the next morning’s autopsy, all she had to go on was the daughter’s statement and the obvious trauma to the body, which included a severe blow to the head that had caused massive hemorrhaging. That added up to at least a preliminary ruling of homicide-a ruling that was promptly released to reporters.

Later that same morning, however, the ten-year-old was finally picked up by district officers in the alley behind his grandmother’s house and taken to the homicide unit. In the presence of his mother and a juvenile division prosecutor, he gave a full statement. He told detectives that he had been alone with Tiffany shortly before 1:00 P.M. when she began to cry. He picked her up, played with her until she quieted down, then sat her on the arm of the reclining chair in the living room. But while the boy was watching television, the child fell backward off the chair, striking her head against a bicycle that was lying on the floor behind the chair. The little girl cried uncontrollably and the boy ran outside, looking for his cousin. He couldn’t find her and began to panic. Just then, the thirteen-year-old returned and the two of them noticed that Tiffany’s eyes were rolling back into her head. They put the child on a foam mat in the middle room of the rowhouse and listened to a gurgling noise coming from her throat. Then they noticed that Tiffany was not breathing.

They tried to resuscitate the child, a frantic and clumsy effort that explained the bruising to the chest, back and abdomen. The little girl began to breathe again and was put back on the sofa. Again she stopped breathing, and again the babysitters tried to revive her, this time by splashing her with cold water. Then they took the child to the middle room and laid her down beside her one-month-old brother. They did not call for an ambulance.

When the thirteen-year-old girl was interviewed again that same day, she recanted. She had lied in fear of her parents, and both teenagers had been reluctant to seek medical help for the same reason. Only when the parents returned home at eight that evening was an ambulance finally summoned. The children’s behavior was witless and the result was tragic, but to Worden’s mind, this was not by any stretch of the imagination a case of murder.

But the medical examiner’s office, and Julia Goodin in particular, was not entirely convinced. As the chief pathologist, John Smialek noted that the head injuries were severe, more so, in fact, than a child would be likely to sustain in a fall from a chair. But Worden believed his young witness, who had described the little girl’s fall as a backward flip from the armrest, straight down to the metal handlebars of the bicycle. And when the detectives convinced Tim Doory in the states attorney’s office not to charge the crime, Smialek insisted on a meeting. The ME’s office would not change the ruling, he told the prosecutor, and he was concerned that the case might seem to an outsider to be a cover-up by detectives who were reluctant to charge a ten-year-old defendant in a case that could never be won in court.

It was a standoff of sorts, and the problem for Goodin was simple: A forensic pathologist can’t be wrong. Not once, not ever. Not even with a preliminary finding. Because it’s a bedrock rule that any mistake by a professional expert in any criminal field-pathology, trace evidence, ballistics, DNA coding-once publicly acknowledged, becomes the domain of every defense attorney in town. Give a good lawyer a single case in which an expert’s opinion is open to criticism, and he can ride that train straight down the track to reasonable doubt. And, more than most cases, the death of a two-year-old girl can always be expected to produce headlines.

“Death of girl ruled homicide; no charges due,” declared the Sun. The paper quoted D’Addario as saying, “We have the basis for a case, but we can’t say factually what actually took place in the house… We have to stick with the medical examiner’s ruling.”

Smialek provided some counterweight with the statement that the babysitters’ explanation “is not consistent with the injuries… the child died as the result of an action on some other person’s part.” The ME did concede, however, that the death could have possibly resulted from accidental human intervention, but there was no way to tell. Trying hard for some middle ground, Smialek carefully explained that a medical ruling of homicide does not necessitate a criminal charge of murder. Meanwhile, the police department’s spokeswoman summed things up cogently by telling reporters: “She was not murdered. That is all I have to say.”

All in all, the Tiffany Woodhous investigation ended awkwardly for Worden, with a standing ruling of homicide for which no criminal charge would ever be filed. It also left the homicide unit and the ME’s office struggling for common ground in the glare of publicity, and it was, in retrospect, about par for the kind of year Worden was having.

Now, three weeks later, the Big Man is back down on Penn Street with another body. And who but Julia Goodin is waiting for him in the autopsy room.

The two detectives watch their Jane Doe from Billyland go beneath the overhead camera in the outer room, with Worden asking the attendant for particular attention to the treadmarks on the left arm and upper torso. Fifteen minutes later, they follow their victim into the autopsy room, where the external examination begins in the first available space, which happens to be between a fire victim from Prince George’s and an auto fatality from Frederick.

Doc Goodin is nothing if not cautious. And after the Tiffany Woodhous mess, she’s now working with even more deliberation. She moves slowly around the corpse, noting the location of the treadmarks, of the bruises and contusions, of every visible injury. She notes each on the top sheet of her clip-pad, which is itself a silhouette of a prone female form. She carefully checks the hands for trace evidence, then scrapes the fingernails, though she can see nothing in the scrapings to indicate that the victim fought against any assailant. She pays particular attention to the victim’s shins and thighs, looking for telltale bumper marks to indicate that she was struck while standing and then run over. Nothing there either.

Worden points out the finger-pattern bruising on each arm. “Like she was grabbed first?” he asks.

Goodin shakes her head. “Actually,” she says, “those are contusions that could have been caused when the vehicle went over her.”

Worden mentions the earrings, both found on either side of her head along with small clumps of hair. Could they have been pulled out by an angry assailant?

“More likely they were pulled out when her head was run over.”

And the torn shorts? The torn panties? No, says Goodin, holding the two together to show that they both tore on the same side, at the point that would be weakest as the wheels rolled over her.

“The tires could have done that.”

Worden sighs, steps away, and looks at Brown. Both detectives can now see where they’re going with this thing; they may as well let the good doctor work and adjourn to the Penn Restaurant.

“Well,” says Worden, “we’ll be across the street and back in a half hour or so.”

“You could make it an hour.”

Worden nods.

The Penn Restaurant is mostly a lunchtime venue, a Greek family-owned establishment that draws most of its business from the hospital complex across the street. The decor is blue and white, heavy on the Formica, with the requisite number of wall murals depicting the Acropolis and the Aegean coastline. The gyros are exceptional, the breakfasts, acceptable, and the beer, cold. Brown orders the steak and egg combo; Worden, a beer.

“How do you want the steak cooked?” asks the waitress.

“He’d like it rare,” says Worden, smiling.

Brown looks at him.

“Go on, David, get it bloody and show us how it doesn’t bother you.”

“Medium,” says Brown.

Worden smiles and the waitress wanders back toward the kitchen. Brown looks up at the older detective. “What do you think?”

“I’ll give you odds right now she won’t make it a murder,” Worden tells him.

“Not after what you put her through,” says Brown dryly. “You went and ruined her for the rest of us.”

“Yeah, well…”

They eat and drink in silence. Finishing his steak, Brown looks again at Worden.

“You know what I’m going to have to do?” he says. “I’m going to have to go out with her and show her the scene.”

Worden nods.

“You think that’ll help?”

Worden shrugs.

“I know it’s a murder, Donald.”

Brown finishes his coffee and snuffs out his second cigarette. Back in May, he was down to a couple of smokes a day on the Johns Hopkins clinic plan. Now, whenever he coughed, he sounded like a garbage disposal chewing on a spoon.

“You ready?”

“Yep.”

They cross the street, heading down the ramp and up the loading dock entrance, past the bulkhead door that marks the entrance to the decomp room; there the nastiest cases are examined apart from the others to keep life on Penn Street as bearable as possible. Even from the loading dock, there is still the suggestion of unbelievable stench.

Inside the autopsy room, Julia Goodin is finishing her examination. As expected, she tells the detectives that nothing about the body points conclusively to a homicide. Particularly important, she says, is the absence of any visible contusions on the legs. In all probability, she explains, the woman was already lying down on that lot when she was run over. The toxicology will take weeks, but both Goodin and the detectives can guess that the results will come back positive for alcohol, if not for drugs as well. After all, she’s a billy girl found dead on a Sunday morning; chances are she saw the inside of at least one or two bars the previous night. There’s no semen, no direct evidence of sexual assault.

How do we know, Goodin argues, that she didn’t just fall down drunk before someone ran her over? And what if one of those tractor-trailers didn’t see her lying there and backed up to that loading dock?

Worden gives her the traffic man’s opinion on the tires, suggesting that it’s a sports car rather than any kind of truck.

“If a semi-truck rolled over her,” says Worden, “it’d do a lot more damage than that, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s hard to say.”

Dave Brown brings up the missing shoe. If she just fell down drunk, wouldn’t that sandal be somewhere nearby? Intriguing thought, Goodin agrees, but she remains unconvinced, countering that if the victim was drunk, she could have lost the sandal two blocks away from where she eventually fell.

“Look, guys, if you bring me something conclusive, I’ll rule it a homicide,” she says. “Right now, I have no choice but to pend it.”

Later that afternoon, Dave Brown returns to Penn Street and collects the good doctor for a tour of the crime scene, arguing once again that the isolated lot just isn’t suited to the ordinary hit-and-run. Goodin listens carefully, scouts the scene and nods her understanding, but still refuses to call the death a murder.

“I need some solid evidence either way,” she insists. “Bring me something definitive.”

Brown accepts defeat graciously, and though he is still certain that the case is a murder, he understands on some level that it ought to be pended. Three weeks ago, after all, Goodin called a murder only to be overtaken by new evidence; now, the same bunch of cowboys are asking her to call another one without definitive proof. It’s probably a murder, Brown reasons, but right now it probably should be pended.

Nonetheless, Goodin’s ruling creates another kind of problem: A case in which the pathologist’s finding is being pended is not, to the police department’s way of thinking, a murder. And if it isn’t a murder, it doesn’t go up on the board. And if it isn’t up on the board, it doesn’t really exist. Unless the primary detective takes it on himself to pursue a pended case, it has every chance of falling through the cracks the moment that detective gets a call that is a murder. If this case goes down, it will go down because Dave Brown somehow managed to follow through, and Worden, for one, has doubts about Brown’s ability to do so.

Arriving back at the homicide office, the two men find that McLarney has already dispensed with the preliminaries. The paperwork has been given a start and the two billies who found the body are asleep in the fishbowl, their statements completed. And the woman that Brown talked with at the scene has called back; she’s heard a description of the victim on the neighborhood grapevine and it matches her aunt. Brown asks about the aunt’s jewelry and the woman describes both the necklace and earrings. He explains that there’s no need for the family to visit Penn Street for a positive identification; the facial injuries make that impossible. An hour or so later, fingerprint comparisons identify the dead woman as Carol Ann Wright, a young-looking forty-three-year-old who lived not two blocks from where she died. She was the mother of five children, and the last time her family saw her was a little before 11:00 P.M. on Saturday, when she walked over to Hanover Street to hitch a ride to the Southern District, where a friend of hers had been locked up.

By early afternoon, Brown has confirmed that his victim did indeed pay a brief visit to a prisoner at the Southern District holding cells before leaving for parts unknown. And by late afternoon the family is calling back with the rest of the story. True to Brown’s most fervent hopes, the good country folk of South Baltimore are talking to one another and to the police, spewing out any and all relevant facts and rumors.

Tracking the tale backward, Brown learns that a short time after the television stations began identifying the victim, the dead woman’s niece got a call from some friends over at Helen’s Hollywood Bar, down on Broadway in Fell’s Point. The bartendress and the manager both knew Carol, and both remember that she showed up close to 1:00 A.M. with some guy named Rick, who had long, dirty blond hair and drove a black sports car.

A short time later, the family calls again with more information: Before going to the bar that night, Carol went to a friend’s house over in Pigtown a little after midnight, looking to buy a little marijuana. Brown and Worden roll back out of the headquarters’ garage and drive first to South Stricker Street, where the friend confirms the visit but says she didn’t get a good look at the guy who drove Carol because he stayed in the car. She thinks he was young and kind of greasy looking, with longish blond hair. His car, she says, was blue or green. Maybe like a bluish green. Definitely not black.

Later that night, at Helen’s on Broadway, the two detectives get little more from the regular patrons and night employees. The guy had blond hair, kind of long and stringy, but with a little curl to it. And a mustache, too. Kind of thin.

“How tall?” Brown asks the bartendress. “My height?”

“No,” she says. “Shorter.”

“About his height?” he says, pointing to a customer.

“Maybe a little shorter than that.”

“What about the car?”

The car. Nothing is more frustrating for Brown and Worden than to listen to these people try to describe the automobile that ran over Carol Ann Wright. The woman on Stricker Street says it was a blue or green compact. The manager of the bar says it was black and sporty, with a T-top and a round insignia on the front of the hood, like a 280Z. No, says the bartendress, it had those doors that open upward, like wings.

“Winged doors?” says Brown, incredulous. “Like a Lotus?”

“I don’t know what you call it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

It’s hard to dismiss the employee because she actually went outside at closing time and listened to this guy talk about how he’s a mechanic, a transmission expert, and does his own work on the car.

“He was real proud of it,” she tells Brown.

But it’s harder to believe her when she says that some greasy motor-head named Rick is running around South Baltimore in a custom $60,000 Lotus, giving billy girls a ride down to the Southern District. Yeah, right, thinks Brown, and Donald Worden is my personal love slave.

What’s especially aggravating to the detectives is that if these witnesses can’t get the car right-the car being a definite object with its make and model number displayed in chrome on its exterior-then they sure as hell can’t be trusted to come anywhere close on the guy’s description. Everyone mentions the shoulder-length blond hair, but some are saying stringy and others, curly. Only half of them have the thin mustache, and they’re all over the map on the guy’s height and weight. Eye color? Forget it. Distinctive features? Oh yeah, he was driving a Lotus.

Ordinarily, a bad description is par for the course. Any good detective or prosecutor knows that stranger-to-stranger identification is the weakest kind of evidence; in a crowded world, people just don’t have the facility to commit a new face to memory. Many veteran detectives don’t bother to include preliminary descriptions in their reports for that reason: A description of a six-foot-two, 220-pound suspect will hurt you in court when the guy turns out to be five-seven and 150. True to the stereotype, law enforcement studies have also shown that interracial identifications-blacks of whites, whites of blacks-tend to be the weakest because at first glance, both races have trouble distinguishing between members of the other. In Baltimore, at least, the reputation for the most ineffectual identifications goes to the Koreans, who run every other corner store in the inner city. “All rook arike” is the only credo they ever offer to a robbery detective.

But this case should have been different. For one thing, the identification is white-on-white. For another, the guy was in the bar for over an hour, hovering around Carol, making conversation with the other patrons and employees. Collectively, these people remember that the guy claimed to be a mechanic, a transmission expert actually, that he drank Budweiser, that he mentioned that a particular bar up in Parkville was for sale and that his uncle owned some bar in Highlandtown with a German-sounding name that no one can recall. They even remember that the guy got mad when Carol got up to dance to the jukebox with another girl. All of that has been committed to memory by the regulars at Helen’s, and yet Brown is left with nothing better than a partial description.

Frustrated, Brown works the bartendress through her story a second time, then communes with Worden at the back of the tavern, near the pool table.

“These are our best witnesses?” says Brown. “We don’t have dick.”

Leaning against the pay phone on the back wall, Worden gives Brown a what-you-mean-we-Kemosabe look.

“The problem is that it was closing time and they were all shitfaced,” Brown continues. “They’re not going to remember this guy well enough for a composite.”

Worden says nothing.

“You don’t think there’s any point in calling an artist, right?”

Worden looks at him skeptically. Even with good eyewitnesses, the composite sketches never manage to look like the suspect. Somehow, all the black guys resemble Eddie Brown and, depending on hair color, all the white guys are dead ringers for either Dunnigan or Landsman.

Brown persists. “There’s not enough here for a composite, right?”

Worden holds out his hand. “Gimme a quarter.”

Brown fishes up a twenty-five-cent piece, presuming that Worden wants to use the phone or maybe punch a song on the juke.

“Brown, you’re a piece of shit,” says Worden, pocketing the coin. “Finish your beer and let’s go.”

They are left with the worst kind of investigation, a needle-in-a-haystack search for blond-haired Rick and his black or maybe blue-green sports car. Reluctantly, Worden puts a description out on a teletype to the districts. He had hoped to keep that information from floating around too freely, because if word somehow gets back to the suspect that they have a partial description of the car, he’ll paint it or ditch it or hide it in a garage somewhere for about four months. The car, both detectives understand, is essential evidence.

Ideally, the teletypes are read at every roll call citywide and maybe elsewhere in the state if a detective uses the MILES computer system. Hell, if an investigator thinks his man has gone on the wing interstate, he can go whole hog and put the thing on NCIC. But both the local and national teletype networks-like most everything else in the criminal justice system-are flooded to the point of absurdity. Usually, the only items a cop remembers from roll call will be red-ball items-cop killings, child murders-and the occasional punch line. At the beginning of a recent 8-to-4 shift, Jay Landsman made a point of reading a burglary teletype from Baltimore County in which the stolen property consisted of 522 gallons of ice cream.

“The suspects are believed to be a lot fatter than they were…”

In the Baltimore precincts, at least, a homicide lookout stands a good chance of being read at roll call, but whether anyone’s actually listening or not is open to debate. In Brown and Worden’s favor, however, is the fact that the girl was run over in the Southern District. In a detective’s mind, the street police in certain districts are known for certain things: The Eastern cops protect a crime scene better than anyone, the Western operations unit has decent informants, and in the Southern and the Southeast, there are still some guys out on the street who will actually work a lookout.

Over the next several days, uniforms in those districts make traffic stops on anything close to the description. The paperwork comes downtown to Brown’s desk, where names and license numbers are matched with motor vehicle registrations and BPI photos. There’s a lot of data and Brown looks at each report carefully. Nothing seems to match: This guy’s got a black 280Z with a T-top, but he’s got thinning brown hair. This one’s got a Mustang with some front end damage, but his long hair is jet black. This one’s got long blond hair, but his Trans Am is a light copper color.

In addition to the district car stops, Brown and Worden spend the days and nights after the murder wedged into a Cavalier, following up on everything that the victim’s family tells them. And with each passing day, the family comes up with a new suspect. First, there is the guy out in Middle River whose name is most definitely Rick and who had called for Carol about a week before she was killed. The family still has the guy’s phone number.

When Brown and McLarney ride out to the Middle River address, a man with short, thinning blond hair answers the door. Hell, thinks Brown, hopeful, he could have cut it. But downtown in the large interrogation room, the detectives learn that he works at the Domino Sugar plant in Locust Point, not as an auto mechanic. Worse than that, his only car is an old yellow Toyota; Brown checks it that day on the company lot. The man readily acknowledges having given Carol Wright a ride down Fort Avenue on his motorcycle, but he’s genuinely surprised to hear about the woman’s death.

Another kid stopped by the district has blond hair and the right kind of car listed to his mother’s address out on Washington Boulevard, but his alibi seems to hold. A third billy is a mechanic who goes by the name Rick and lives down in Anne Arundel: He even knew some of Carol’s friends, according to the family. Brown sits on the house for two days, looking for that black sports car, only to pick the guy up and learn that the family had already called him first.

“They told me you might be coming by,” he assures Brown. “What do you want to know?”

Billyland. Not only do they talk to the police, they babble to one another-so much so that there’s no conceivable way for an investigator to work effectively. As soon as one family member learns about a potential suspect, another family member is asking a friend of a friend to ask the guy whether he has a black sports car and if so, whether he used it to run over Carol Wright. Twice, Brown goes back to South Baltimore to urge the family not to discuss the case with anyone. Twice, they assure him that they will shut up.

Two days later, Brown is alone in a Cavalier, watching a side street off Dundalk Avenue for yet another suspect. He is there for hours, drinking 7-Eleven coffee and feeding his smoker’s cough and watching the billy boys come and go from their cars. Rarely does a homicide detective have time for this sort of endless surveillance, even if he has the patience. But so far no fresh murders have landed on Brown’s desk, allowing him to sit for hours with the air conditioning running. With white powder from a Hostess doughnut in his mustache and Appalachian bluegrass on the AM radio, it soon occurs to him that he hasn’t spent this long sitting on a house since his tour in narcotics. By the end of the day, in fact, he’s damn proud of himself for being careful, patient and determined-just like any real detective.

Finally, only after two successive dayshifts in a Cavalier, when it’s clear that there’s no black car anywhere near the house, Brown picks the guy up for an interview. “Yeah,” says his suspect. “They were sayin’ that they gave you my name a few days back. I don’t know why they did that, though.”

Brown drove back to the homicide office, ready to chuck the case file into the nearest empty drawer. “Get me a murder in West Baltimore,” he tells Worden. “I can’t deal with these fucking white people anymore.”

For his part, Worden has stayed with the case, but he has preserved a certain distance. Alongside the younger detective, he has cruised Highlandtown looking for a bar with anything resembling a German name. And he has also spent hours sitting with Brown on many of those same houses and parking lots, looking for that black mystery car. And yet there is a message to Worden’s presence on this case, something that Brown understands instinctively.

“You want to go?” Brown asks him after three long hours of watching a garden apartment down in Marley Neck.

“It’s your case,” says Worden, masking the Socratic method with indifference. “What do you want to do?”

“We’ll wait,” says Brown.

Still, after a week they are no closer to a killer, and the Carol Ann Wright case remains an undetermined death, not even a murder. And both men know that without a fresh lead, their task is Herculean. Three days ago, a DMV printout arrived at the homicide unit with the names and addresses of the owners of 280Zs in central Maryland. Even if their best witnesses are right about that particular make of car, and even if their man happens to be the registered owner of record, the computer list is more than a hundred pages long.

On August 30, Worden inherits a true red ball, a fourteen-year-old kid shotgunned to death in the Northwest, killed without any apparent motive as he walked home from his job at a fast-food restaurant. Five days after that, Dave Brown and McLarney are working on the disappearance of a twenty-six-year-old west side woman who has not been seen for a week, though two dopers have been locked up for driving her car.

Fresh bodies. Fresh leads. From Brown’s desk, you can listen close and hear a slow, grinding noise as the Carol Wright case slips out of gear.

The scene is a rowhouse basement, a dank, unfurnished place on East Preston Street, where an elderly white man is stretched across the floor in full rigor, covered by a few sheets of plastic tarp and a trio of die-cast, two-foot-tall Magi. Yessiree: the three wise men, those good souls who carry around myrrh and frankincense and visit blessed mangers on church lawns every Christmas. A nice, bizarre touch, thinks Rich Garvey. Someone blew a very big hole in this old man’s head, stole his money, dragged the body downstairs and then threw a plastic wrap and three wise men over the corpse. A nativity scene, East Baltimore style.

The dead man is Henry Plumer, and it’s immediately obvious to Garvey and Bob McAllister that the old man has encountered something very big-a.44 or.45 probably, and fired at point-blank range, too, judging from the powder burns. Plumer was in his late sixties and had for at least half his life been collecting for Littlepage’s Furniture in the city, wandering around the ghetto all day long, calling in the monthly payments on furniture and appliances. It was mostly no-money-down credit stuff, which lures poor folk into paying $10 a week until their living room set ends up costing more than a college education, but old Mr. Plumer had been at it for so long that the people on his route all knew and liked him. He’d become something of a neighborhood institution in East Baltimore, riding around all day with that little collection book of his. Donald Kincaid actually knew the man, since his mother still lived in the 900 block of Collington, refusing to quit her east side home even as the neighborhood around her fell into ruin.

Garvey already knows all about Mr. Plumer, or at least he knows everything that was in a missing person’s teletype sent out by county police yesterday, when the old man and his car disappeared into the wilds of Baltimore and his family began to panic. Garvey’s already fairly certain that he knows who killed Mr. Plumer-knowledge that comes easily when the owner of the basement in question is a drug user with a long sheet.

From what he has gleaned thus far, an addict by the name of Jerry Jackson owns this two-story brick pile, was one of the last people to see a living Henry Plumer, and apparently left for his housecleaning job at Rosewood Hospital with Plumer’s body still bleeding on his basement floor. As clues, these facts are decidedly unsubtle and suggest a certain lack of intellect on the part of the homeowner in question-a suggestion that is all but confirmed when the phone on the first floor suddenly begins ringing twenty minutes after the detectives’ arrival. Garvey bounds up the stairs and picks up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?” asks the male caller.

“This is Detective Garvey from the homicide unit,” he says. “Who’s this?”

“This is Jerry,” says the voice.

How considerate, thinks Garvey. A suspect who calls his own crime scene.

“Jerry,” says Garvey, “how fast can you get over here?”

“About twenty minutes or so.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

In his first statement on the matter at hand, Jerry Jackson doesn’t even bother to ask what a homicide detective is doing at his house, doesn’t think about denying anything or demonstrating shock and dismay. He hangs up the phone without ever expressing amazement or distress that a dead body is being examined in his basement. Nor does he express any immediate curiosity about why that body is there. Garvey hangs on until the phone line goes dead, delighted to be dealing with such an earnest, cooperative brain-dead.

“Hey Mac,” says Garvey, hanging up the receiver and walking back to the top of the basement stairs. “That was Jerry calling.”

“Oh really,” says McAllister from the basement.

“Yeah. He’s on his way over.”

“That’s nice,” says McAllister, deadpan.

The detectives continue to work the crime scene. Two hours later, they stop waiting for Jerry Jackson, who, for all his seeming cooperation, has still not made an appearance. Late that night, with a county detective in tow, they drive out to Fullerton and break the news to the Plumer family, whereupon the elderly widow goes white and faints. By morning, she is dead of a heart attack, as much a homicide victim as her husband.

It’s in the early morning hours that Jerry Jackson finally returns to the house on Preston Street, where he is greeted with some consternation by his own wife, a woman not at all pleased to be finding bodies in her basement. It was the wife who had located Henry Plumer and called police after hearing from friends in the neighborhood that the old bill collector was missing and had last been seen making his regular stop at the Jackson home. Rumors of the murder had been around the block a couple of times by then and a friend had urged Mrs. Jackson to check her basement carefully. The two got halfway down the stairs when they saw the shoes sticking out from under the tarp. The wife went no farther, but the friend managed to step forward and lift the plastic enough to convince herself that it was Mr. Plumer and that he’d definitely looked better. At that point, Jerry Jackson’s wife saw where things were going; without waiting for her husband to return from work, she went to the phone and dialed 911.

And so, by the time Jerry Jackson returns home and confers with his wife, it’s abundantly clear-even to him-that whatever the plan for this murder was, it definitely isn’t working. He does not, however, disappear into the bowels of East Baltimore. Nor does he try to scrape together some cash for a bus ticket to Carolina. No, sir. For his last act as a free man, Jerry Jackson elects to call the homicide unit and ask for Rich Garvey. He’d like to talk about the body in his basement. Perhaps, he offers, he could be of some help to the investigation.

But when Jackson arrives in the large interrogation room, his pupils are the size of purely theoretical particles. Cocaine, thinks Garvey, but he decides his suspect may just be able to manage a few intelligible sentences. After negotiating the Miranda, the detectives’ first question is the obvious one, of course.

“Ah, Jerry,” asks Garvey, scratching the top of his head in feigned confusion, “why was Mr. Plumer’s body in your house?”

Quietly, almost casually, Jackson tells the detectives that he made his monthly payment to Mr. Plumer yesterday afternoon; then the old man took the money and drove away.

“And I don’t know nothing about no murder,” he continues, his voice breaking, “until I called my mother’s house from work and was told THAT THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!”

The first half of the sentence is tense but quiet, but the last part is a wild rant, a shout that pierces the interrogation room doors and can be heard clear down at the other end of the sixth-floor hall.

Seated on either side of the suspect, the detectives look at each other for a moment, then down at the table. Garvey is biting his lip.

“Could, ah, you excuse us for just a moment,” says McAllister, addressing the suspect as if he were Emily Post and the man had just used the wrong salad fork. “We just need to discuss something and we’ll be right back with you in just a second, okay?”

Jackson nods, twitching.

The two detectives walk silently out of the room and close the metal door behind them. They manage to make it to the annex office before they both double over, convulsed by the force of suppressed laughter.

“THERE’S A BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey, shaking his partner’s shoulders.

“Not just a body,” says McAllister, laughing. “A motherfucking body.”

“THERE’S A MOTHERFUCKING BODY IN MY BASEMENT!” shouts Garvey again. “THERE’S A MADMAN ON THE LOOSE!”

McAllister shakes his head, still laughing. “Don’t you just hate that? You leave the house, you go to work, call your mom, and she tells you there’s a body in your basement…”

Garvey grips a desk in the annex office with both hands, trying to regain his composure.

“It was all I could do not to laugh in his face,” he tells McAllister. “God.”

“You don’t think he’s high or anything like that,” says McAllister dryly.

“Him? No way. He’s a little high-strung. That’s all it is.”

“Seriously, should we even bother with a statement?”

The question is a legal one. Any statement taken now could be mitigated by the fact that Jerry Jackson is somewhat compromised, chemically speaking.

“What the hell?” says Garvey. “Let’s go back in. We’ve got to charge him. We either talk to him now or not at all…”

McAllister nods, then leads the way toward the interrogation room. From outside the wire mesh window, the two detectives can see Jerry Jackson dancing a mad samba in his chair. Garvey begins laughing again.

“Wait a sec,” he tells McAllister.

Garvey finds his poker face, then loses it, then finds it again. “This motherfucker is killing me.”

McAllister grips the door handle, fighting hard for his own composure. “Ready?” he asks.

“Okay.”

The two detectives return to the room and their seats. Jackson waits for another question but is instead treated to a long monologue by McAllister in which it is explained that he has no reason to be upset or angry at the existing circumstances. None at all. After all, they’re just asking questions and he’s just answering questions, right?

“We’re not hurting you, are we?”

No, agrees the suspect.

“And we’re not treating you badly, are we?”

No, agrees the suspect.

“You’re being treated fairly, right?”

Yes, agrees the suspect.

“Okay then, Jerry. Why don’t you tell us-calmly-why don’t you calmly tell us why there was this body in your basement?”

Not that it matters what he says, because by daylight Garvey, McAllister and Roger Nolan have also obtained a complete statement from Jackson’s wife. They’ve also interviewed the nephew who helped Jerry Jackson plan the robbery and then ditch Plumer’s car. They’ve even interviewed the neighborhood dealer from whom Jackson bought $200 worth of cocaine, using the money he took off the old man’s body. All in all, the Preston Street call is definitely not what comes to mind when a detective is asked to think of the perfect murder. Presumably, Jackson planned to show up for work so as not to arouse suspicion, then remove the body from his basement and dump it somewhere else in the early morning hours. That’s assuming the man had any plan at all beyond robbing and killing a man in his living room for enough money to stay high all day.

Just before the morning shift change, Garvey is at his desk in the main office, battling the paperwork to a draw and listening to Nolan philosophize on just what it was that cracked this case. When we went back out and picked up the dealer who sold to Jackson, says Nolan, that’s when we really cracked it wide open.

At which point Garvey and McAllister both drop their pens and look at their sergeant as if he’s just stepped off the last Greyhound from Mars.

“Uh, Rog,” says McAllister, “what cracked this case was the fact that the killer left the dead guy in his house.”

“Well, yeah,” says Nolan, laughing but a little disappointed. “That too.”

So Rich Garvey’s Perfect Year marches ever onward, a divine crusade seemingly impervious to the touch of reality, a campaign unfettered by the rules of homicide that somehow manage to afflict every other detective. Garvey is getting witnesses, he’s getting fingerprint hits, he’s getting the license tags off getaway cars. You do a murder in Baltimore when Rich Garvey’s working and you may as well have a lawyer meet you at the district lockup an hour later.

Not long after Jerry Jackson returns to earth and a city jail tier, Garvey again picks up a telephone extension and writes down an East Baltimore address. This time it is the worst kind of call a murder police can get. Garvey is so certain of unanimity on this opinion that he actually puts down the phone and asks the other detectives in the office to name the call they least like to handle. McAllister and Kincaid need about a half second to say “arson.”

For a homicide detective, an arson murder is a special type of torture because the police department is essentially stuck with whatever the fire department’s investigator says is arson. To this day, Donald Kincaid is still carrying an open murder for a fatal fire that almost certainly began with nothing more sinister than an electrical short. At the scene, Kincaid could see the burn pattern running up the rowhouse wall where the wiring was, but some goof from FIB insisted on calling it arson. So what was he going to do then, arrest the goddamn fuse box? Not only that, but when a detective gets a genuine arson murder in front of a jury, he can never convince them that the fire wasn’t an accident, not without a six-pack of witnesses, at least. Even if there’s a pour pattern from gasoline or some other accelerant, a good lawyer can suggest that someone spilled the stuff by mistake and then accidentally dropped a cigarette. Juries like dead people who have bulletholes or steak knives attached to them; anything less is not convincing.

Knowing all this, Garvey and McAllister once again steer an unmarked car to a crime scene with fear and loathing in their hearts. It’s a two-story dump on North Bond Street and, of course, there are no witnesses-just a bunch of burned furniture and one crispy critter in the middle room. Some smokehound, an old guy, maybe sixty.

The poor bastard is lying there like a piece of chicken that someone forgot to turn over, and the FIB investigator is showing Garvey a dark splotch on the other side of the room and calling it a textbook example of a pour pattern. Sure enough, when they clear all the soot away, the splotch really does look darker than the surrounding area. So Garvey has a dead guy and a pour pattern and some drunk woman who jumped out the rear window when the fire started and is now up at Union Memorial breathing from an oxygen tank. From the fire investigator, the detectives learn that the woman is supposedly the dead guy’s girlfriend.

Having satisfied themselves that North Bond Street is indeed their worst nightmare come true, Garvey and McAllister drive to the hospital with the understanding that this blessed year of his has finally reached its terminus. They walk into the Union Memorial ER and greet two detectives from the arson squad who are standing out at the nurses station like a pair of bookends, telling them the injured woman’s story is all bullshit. She’s got the fire starting by accident in an ashtray or some nonsense like that.

The woman told the arson guys that much while she was being treated in the ER, but now she can’t be interviewed further because she inhaled a lot of smoke and talking is a problem. Garvey may have his arsonist, but there’s absolutely no way to prove the case. Given that conflict, the idea of getting an assistant medical examiner to pend the case for a little while-like maybe a decade-becomes more and more appealing in the minds of both detectives. At the following morning’s autopsy, Garvey manages to accomplish this feat, whereupon he and McAllister return to the office with the sincere hope that if they just click their heels three times, the entire case will go away.

Given recent events, such thoughts in the mind of Rich Garvey can only suggest a certain lack of faith, a certain disregard for his own destiny. Because two weeks later, the woman at Union Memorial succumbs to smoke inhalation and related injuries; two days after that, Garvey pays a second visit to Penn Street and assures the good doctors that they can go ahead and rule the case a homicide. That done, he can immediately show the case as cleared due to the rather timely death of his solitary suspect. A good detective, after all, is never too proud to take a paper clearance.

The arson case makes it ten out of ten since February and the Lena Lucas murder. Drug murders, neighborhood disputes, street robberies, unprosecutable arson deaths-it matters not to Rich Garvey, the luckiest sonofabitch on D’Addario’s shift of fifteen. Apparently the Perfect Year, like any force of nature, cannot be denied.

Up and down the stoops he goes, a homicide detective banging on North Durham Street doors in search of a little cooperation, a little civic responsibility.

“Didn’t see it,” says the young girl at 1615.

“I heard a loud bang,” says the man at 1617.

No answer at 1619.

“Lord,” says the woman at 1621, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.”

Tom Pellegrini presses a few additional questions on these people, trying hard to get himself interested in this case, to find something that might make a detective care about the bloodstain in the center of the 1600 block.

“Were you home when it happened?” he asks another girl, at the door of 1616.

“I’m not sure.”

Not sure. How can you not be sure? Theodore Johnson was hit by a shotgun blast fired at point-blank range, blown apart in the center of a narrow rowhouse street. The sound itself had to be audible all the way up to North Avenue.

“You don’t know if you were home?”

“I might have been.”

So much for the door-to-door canvass. Not that Pellegrini can blame the neighborhood for its reluctance to volunteer information. Word is out that the dead man crossed a local dealer on a drug debt and the dealer has just proven to everyone within earshot that he’s a man to be reckoned with. The people behind these doors have got to live on Durham Street; Pellegrini is no more than an occasional tourist.

With nothing on the horizon even remotely resembling a witness, Pellegrini has a body on the way to Penn Street and a bloodstain on dirty asphalt. He’s got a spent shotgun shell ejected by the shooter in the alley around the corner. He’s got a street so dark that the emergency vehicle unit has been called to light up his scene for the photographs. An hour or so later, Pellegrini will have the sister of his victim sitting in Jay Landsman’s office, feeding him a bit of rumor about some people that may or may not have had something to do with the shooting. He will have a headache, too.

Theodore Johnson joins Stevie Braxton and Barney Erely on the white rectangle in the coffee room. Braxton, the kid with a long sheet found stabbed up off Pennsylvania Avenue. Erely, the homeless man bludgeoned to death on Clay Street. Red names riding the board with Pellegrini’s initial near them, casualties in the year-long campaign to close the Latonya Wallace murder. It’s triage, plain and simple, but Pellegrini can live with that. After all, he’s got an eleven-year-old raped and murdered, and neither Theodore Johnson nor a drug debt that has now been paid has any real weight when hung in the balance. Tonight’s dead man will get one or two shakes from the homicide unit, one or two go-rounds in the interrogation rooms with a few reluctant witnesses. But then the primary investigator will set the file aside.

Months later, Pellegrini will feel some guilt about this, some concern about the number of cases sacrificed for the sake of one child. With much the same sort of self-recrimination that governs his thoughts on the Latonya Wallace murder, Pellegrini will wonder whether he should have pressed harder on that kid in the Western District lockup back in January, the one who claimed to know one of the shooters from Gold and Etting. He’ll wonder about whether he should have gone harder at Braxton’s girlfriend, who didn’t seem all that upset about the murder. And he’ll wonder, too, about the rumors that Theodore Johnson’s sister is now feeding him-information that will never be fully checked.

True, he could dump this case on the secondary. Vernon Holley handled the scene with him and he would probably understand if Pellegrini ducked the call to stay focused on Latonya Wallace. Still, Holley is new to the squad, a veteran black detective transferred from the robbery unit to replace Fred Ceruti. He’d been out on one murder with Rick Requer a couple of weeks ago, but that wasn’t enough to qualify as an orientation, even for an investigator as experienced as Holley. And the squad was a man short to begin with: Dick Fahlteich had voluntarily transferred to sex offense after six years in homicide. The body count had finally got to Fahlteich, a talented detective who nonetheless was handling fewer calls each year, working at a pace that others in Landsman’s squad were quick to compare to Harry Edgerton’s. The workload and the hours-coupled with a gnawing aggravation about his being passed over several times on the sergeant’s lists-had at last pushed Fahlteich down to the other end of the sixth-floor hallway at about the same time that Ceruti traveled the same route. At least with Fahlteich it was a matter of choice.

No, Pellegrini reasons, with the squad down to three regulars and a fresh transfer, the Theodore Johnson case is his to eat. At the very least, he owes it to Holley to stay with the thing for a few days. A graphic display of job-related burnout isn’t exactly the best lesson to be teaching a new man.

Bravely, Pellegrini fights his own impulses, doing a competent crime scene out on Durham Street, then canvassing the entire block for witnesses that he knows in his heart will never come forward. Holley peels off early, heading back to the homicide office to begin interviewing family members and a couple of kids at the scene who were sent downtown only because they were out there acting like squirrels when the first uniforms arrived.

The sudden role reversal-with Pellegrini now the tired veteran, breaking in the latest prodigy-is accepted without comment by everyone else in Landsman’s squad. Nine months of Latonya Wallace has changed Pellegrini: His metamorphosis from fresh-scrubbed recruit to battered trench rat is complete. To say that he can look at Holley and see himself a couple years ago goes too far: Holley already had the experience of CID robbery behind him; Pellegrini had come to homicide with no investigative background whatsoever. Still, Holley is working this Durham Street case as if it mattered, as if it were the only murder in the history of the world. He is fresh. He is confident. He makes Pellegrini feel one hundred years old.

The two detectives chase the murder on Durham Street through into late morning, gathering the information from the sister, then trying to check her story against that provided by a former police officer who has family living in the block. His family will not come forward, but the ex-cop, though fired from the force twenty years ago in a corruption case, has enough residual instinct to call in with the name of a possible participant. Pellegrini and Holley find the kid that same morning, go at him in the large box for several hours and emerge with little to show for the effort. Then, slowly, after a few more laps around the case file, Holley accepts the unspoken verdict of his tutor. He drifts away, looking for better pickings with Gary Dunnigan and Requer.

He finds them, too, hooking up with Requer on a domestic from Bruce Street, a true tragedy in which a young girl has been bludgeoned to death by her cokehead of a boyfriend and her orphaned infant is left crying on a policewoman’s shoulder, wailing at the world as the officer’s hand-held radio squawks out citywide dispatch calls. Holley follows that with another domestic from Cherry Hill that he works to completion with Dunnigan. Both cases are dunkers and both bring a certain confidence. By December, Holley will be handling calls as a primary.

For Pellegrini, however, the milestones marked by his squad mean little. Ceruti’s fall from grace, Fahlteich’s departure, Holley’s education-they are scenes from a play in which Pellegrini has no real part. Time stands still for one detective, leaving him alone on a stage of his own, trapped there by the same few props and the same few lines from the same sad scene.

Three weeks ago, Pellegrini and Landsman hit the Fish Man’s Whitelock Street apartment a second time, working through a search warrant that was written more for Pellegrini’s peace of mind than anything else. Months had passed and the chance of recovering any additional evidence from the apartment was minimal. Yet Pelligrini, now fixated on the store owner as his best suspect, was convinced that in their haste to hit the three-story shithouse on Newington back in February, they had blown off the earlier searches on Whitelock. In particular, Pellegrini vaguely remembered seeing a remnant of red carpeting in the Fish Man’s living room during the February raid; months later, he thought of the hairs and fibers taken from the young girl’s body at the morgue and recalled that one of those fibers was red cloth.

Red carpet, red fiber: Pellegrini suddenly had another reason to kick himself. For Pellegrini, the contents of file H88021 had become nothing less than an ever-changing landscape in which every tree, rock and bush seems to be moving. And it was no use explaining to him that this could happen to any detective on any case-this pit-of-the-stomach feeling that everything was being missed, that evidence was disappearing faster than an investigator could perceive it. Every detective in the unit had lived through the sensation of seeing something at a crime scene or during a search warrant and then looking twice to see that it was no longer there. Hell, maybe it never was there. Or maybe it’s still there, but now you’ve lost the ability to see it.

It was the stuff from which the Nightmare was made, the Nightmare being that recurring dream that occasionally ruins the sleep of every good detective. In the throes of the Nightmare, you are moving through the familiar confines of a rowhouse-you’ve got a warrant, perhaps, or maybe it’s just a plain-view search-and from the corner of your eye you glimpse something. What the hell is it? Something important, you know that. Something you need. A blood spatter. A shell casing. A child’s star-shaped earring. You can’t say for sure, but with every fiber of your being you understand that it’s your case lying there. Yet you look away for a moment, and when you look back again, it’s gone. It’s an empty place in your subconscious, a lost opportunity that mocks you. The Nightmare scares the hell out of young detectives; some of them even live the dream at their first crime scenes, convinced that the entire case is evaporating into the ether. As for the veterans, the Nightmare just pisses them off. They’ve gone through it enough not to believe every voice that speaks from the back of the mind.

And yet on this case the Nightmare owns Pellegrini. It ordered him to write the second warrant for the Fish Man’s apartment, it demanded that he collect enough probable cause to get back inside a door that had been opened to him once before. Not surprisingly, the September raid left the Fish Man as bored and indifferent as its predecessor. Nor did it produce a red cloth carpet fiber: Pellegrini found the remnant he remembered on the bedroom floor, but it proved to be plastic, an outdoor Astro-Turf carpet. Nor did a small blue pin earring found in a corner of the living room mean anything to the investigation. Contacted by detectives a few days later, Latonya Wallace’s family members explained that they never recalled the young girl wearing a mixed set of earrings. If she had a star-shaped pin in one lobe, it was safe to assume that a star-shaped pin was missing from the other. To be sure, Pellegrini borrowed a Cavalier and drove the blue pin earring up to the little girl’s mother; she seemed a little surprised that the case was still being worked after seven months, but confirmed that the blue earring did not belong to her daughter.

Around every corner of the maze, a fresh corridor began. A week after the second search of Whitelock Street, Pellegrini found himself tangled in a prolonged encounter with an auto thief arrested by Baltimore County police back in July. A disturbed young man with a history of mental illness, the thief had attempted suicide at the county detention center on three separate occasions, then blurted out to a county officer that he knew who had committed two murders in the city. One was a drug killing at a Northwest Baltimore bar. The other involved the death of a little girl in Reservoir Hill.

Howard Corbin went out to the county for the initial interview and came back with a story about a chance encounter in the alley behind the 800 block of Newington, where the auto thief said he had been snorting cocaine with his cousin. A little girl happened by the alley and the auto thief heard his cousin say something to the child. The girl-who carried a bookbag and wore her hair braided-said something back, and it seemed to the auto thief that they knew each other. But when his cousin jumped up and grabbed the girl, the auto thief became frightened and fled. Shown a picture of Latonya Wallace, the young man began crying.

Slowly, the scenario took on real life. The auto thief did indeed have a cousin at 820 Newington and the cousin did indeed have a substantial record, though nothing on it screamed sex offender. Still, Corbin was impressed that the young man had apparently remembered that the girl had her hair up in braids and was carrying a satchel. Those details had been released to the public early in the investigation, of course, but they helped establish some credibility for the thief ’s story.

Pellegrini and Corbin dutifully rechecked the vacant rowhouses in the 800 block of Newington and then towed a derelict Chevy Nova from the rear of an occupied house in that same block. The car had once belonged to the thief’s cousin, and the thief claimed that his relative routinely kept a buck knife and a switchblade in the trunk of the car. That car and another vehicle belonging to the cousin’s sister were both processed by lab techs at headquarters with negative results. Likewise, the auto thief was brought downtown for lengthy interviews.

Eventually, as facts began to get in his way, the thief’s story changed. He suddenly remembered, for instance, that his cousin had at one point opened the trunk of his sister’s car and shown him a zippered plastic bag. And then his cousin opened the zipper to reveal the face of the little girl. And then…

The auto thief was a mental case, no question about it. But his tale had been constructed with just enough detail to require a full investigation. The cousin would have to be confronted, and the story would have to be corroborated or knocked down. Eventually, the auto thief would have to be polygraphed.

Beyond that piece of business, Pellegrini also had another manila file on his desk with the name of a Park Avenue man on the heading-a raw mix of fact and rumor regarding a potential suspect known to have behaved strangely in recent months and on one occasion to have exposed himself to a schoolgirl. There were a few rape reports from the Central, too, along with notes from another five or six interviews with friends and former friends of the Fish Man.

All of that waits for Pellegrini as he pauses to work the shotgun murder of Theodore Johnson on Durham Street. And when that pause is over, he continues to wonder whether he should have kept working the drug killing rather than returning to obsess over Latonya Wallace. He tells himself that if he works the Durham Street murder hard, it might just go down. On the other hand, if he keeps on the dead little girl, there could be no telling when the case might break.

To every other detective on the shift, this is the worst kind of optimism. Latonya Wallace is history; Theodore Johnson is fresh. And in the minds of most of his colleagues, Pellegrini has gone over the hill on this one. Repeat warrants on a suspect’s apartment, prolonged background investigations, protracted statements from suicidal shitbirds-all of it is understandable of a young detective, they concede. Hell, with a dead little girl it may even be required, in a way. But, they tell each other, let’s not kid ourselves: Tom Pellegrini has lost it.

Then, a week after the murder of Theodore Johnson, this widely held opinion undergoes a sudden revision when a fresh lab report arrives on Pellegrini’s desk and its contents become known to the shift.

The author of the report: Van Gelder in the trace section. The subject: black smudge marks on the dead girl’s pants. The verdict: tar and soot with burned wood chips mixed in. Fire debris, plain and simple.

Taking its own sweet time, the trace lab has finally compared the black smudges on Latonya Wallace’s pants to the samples that Pellegrini lifted from the Fish Man’s burned-out store two months earlier. The report declares the two samples to be consistent, if not identical.

What can we say? Pellegrini asks, pressing the lab people. Is it similar or is it exactly the same? Can we say with any certainty that she was in that Whitelock Street store?

Van Gelder and the others in the trace section are equivocal. The samples can be sent to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lab in Rockville-one of the best in the country-and perhaps they can do more. But generally speaking, Van Gelder explains, the smudges on the pants and the samples from the store have the same class characteristics. They are very similar and yes, they could have come from the debris in that store. On the other hand, they could also have come from another fire scene in which the debris had a similar chemical composition.

A week after the cold depression of Durham Street, Pellegrini finds himself torn between elation and despair. Nine months into the Latonya Wallace investigation, the new lab report provides the first piece of substantive evidence in the file and the only piece of physical evidence to implicate the Fish Man. But if the lab analysts are willing to say only that the two samples are very similar, then that evidence still falls within the realm of reasonable doubt. It is a beginning, but unless the ATF lab can be more definitive, it is nothing more.

A few days after the lab report arrives on his desk, Pellegrini asks the captain to authorize a mainframe computer run of incident reports dating from January 1, 1978, to February 2, 1988. The information sought is the address for every fire or arson report in the area of Reservoir Hill bounded by North Avenue, Park Avenue, Druid Park Lake Drive and Madison Avenue.

The theory is simple enough: If the lab can’t say for certain that those smudges come from Whitelock Street, then perhaps a detective, working backward, can prove that they couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

The detective obsessed with the Latonya Wallace case may seem lost to everyone else in homicide, but to Pellegrini himself, the chaos of H88021 is slowly becoming order. After eight months, the file has fresh evidence, a viable suspect, a plausible theory.

Best of all, it has some direction.

“Well,” says McLarney, admiring the board, “Worden’s back.” And back in black.

Three straight nights of midnight shift in late September brought three straight murders for the Big Man and Rick James. Two are down, and the chalkboard on the other side of the coffee room is adorned with the evidence of progress on the third case: “Any calls about a prostitute named Lenore who works Pennsylvania Avenue, call Worden or James at home re H88160.”

Lenore, the mystery whore. By all accounts, she is the lone witness to the fatal stabbing of her ex-boyfriend, who was last seen arguing with Lenore’s current beau in the 2200 block of the Avenue before falling to the ground with an unsightly hole in his upper right chest. Now, two weeks later, the current boyfriend is conveniently dead from cancer, and therefore, if the elusive businesswoman will be so kind as to come downtown and make a truthful statement, case number three will also be black. To that end, McLarney’s squad has spent the last two weeks terrorizing the Avenue hookers, riding up to question every new face and scare away customers. It’s gotten so bad that the girls are waving them off even as they open the car doors.

“I ain’t Lenore,” one shouted to Worden a week ago, even before the detective had a chance to speak.

“I know that, hon. But have you seen her?”

“She’s not out tonight.”

“Well, tell her if she’ll just come in and talk to us, we’ll stop bothering you and her both. Will you do that for us?”

“If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you, dear.”

Straight police work, the kind that keeps you out in the city streets. No oily politicians, no treacherous bosses, no scared young cops saying they don’t know anything about the dead kid in the alley. The street gives you nothing worse than lying, thieving criminals and, hey, Worden has no complaints with that. It’s their job. And his, too.

The return to routine has allowed Worden a measure of satisfaction, not that the last three cases were exactly brimming with challenge and complexity. The first was pretty much an accidental: three teenage drug dealers in a west side rowhouse, marveling over their host’s new Saturday Night Special when it goes off with the barrel pointed at the youngest kid’s chest. The second was a Highlandtown beating, a manslaughter with a billy boy laid out in an alley behind Lakewood Avenue, dead after he fell back from a punch and hit his head on the cement. The third was the Pennsylvania Avenue stabbing, still waiting for Miss Lenore’s reappearance.

No, it wasn’t the quality of the cases that announced Worden’s return so much as the volume. Whether or not the case went down, the quality was always there with the Big Man; Monroe Street, in fact, was probably his best work in a long while. But a year ago, Worden had been nothing less than a machine, and McLarney remembered that time like an athlete remembers a championship season. Back then, the squad pretty much operated on the same principle as that cereal commercial: Give it to Worden. He’ll eat anything. Go ahead, give him this one, give him another, and then put him on the file that Dave Brown and Waltemeyer are still struggling with. See? He likes it.

This year has been very different. Monroe Street, the Larry Young business, the open murders from March and April-the year had unfolded as an agonizing exercise in frustration, and by summer there was nothing to suggest that Worden’s losing streak had an end.

In late August and early September, the cold, hard slap of reality was a fourteen-year-old shotgun victim by the name of Craig Rideout, stretched out in the early morning light on a Pimlico lawn, dead for hours before anyone found the body or called a cop. Worden labored for days to trace the shooting back to a crew doing shotgun robberies in the Northwest using a red Mazda. Talking to informants in his old district and checking other shotgun robbery reports eventually turned up one badass in particular, a non-taxpayer with a Cherry Hill address and a sheet that included arrests for armed robbery. Not only did Worden tie the kid to a red Mazda that had been seen all over the Northwest, but he learned that the boy was spending a lot of time with people around lower Park Heights near the murder scene.

For a couple of nights, Worden sat on the kid’s house, waiting for anything that looked like a robbery crew to assemble near that Mazda. With no physical evidence, Worden could only hope that his man would go back out on the street with the shotgun to try another robbery. But then an inexplicable act by another detective blew the case apart: Two weeks after the Rideout murder, Worden came into work on a four-to-twelve shift and learned that Dave Hollingsworth, the detective on Stanton’s shift handling another shotgun murder in the Northwest, had gone out to Cherry Hill and interviewed his suspect. Immediately the shotgun robberies in the Northwest came to an abrupt halt. No more red Mazdas, no more sightings of his suspect up around Park Heights.

Only several months later would Worden hear from his best suspect once more. On that occasion, the boy from Cherry Hill is on the other end of a 24-hour report. On that occasion, he’s the body on the pavement, shot down by persons unknown on a street off the Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Rideout murder stayed red, and in Worden’s mind it became a metaphor. Like everything else he touched, it was good police work with a bad ending, and like everything else in his year, it was unresolved.

But the Rideout case was only one jab in a left-right combination. In mid-September, the sucker punch landed in a crowded Central District courtroom, where state senator Larry Young went to trial for his well-publicized misdemeanor.

Trial is perhaps the wrong word for what actually happened. It was more of a spectacle, really, a public display by prosecutors and detectives who had no real interest in seeing the case pursued aggressively. Instead, Tim Doory of the state’s attorney’s office tried the case personally and with just enough vigor to lose by a judge’s verdict. In laying out the scenario by which the senator had falsely reported his own abduction, Doory made a point of not calling the politician’s aide as a witness, intentionally depriving the state’s case of any motive for the false report and thereby avoiding any on-the-stand revelations about the senator’s private life.

It was a gracious, honorable act and one that Worden understood and accepted. What he didn’t accept was that this public demonstration was even necessary; it infuriated him that the prosecutors’ office and police department were so eager to appear earnest in their pursuit of public misdeed that Larry Young had to be charged and tried and acquitted of a meaningless stupidity. Even so, when it came to his testimony, Worden fell on his sword with seeming indifference. Asked by the senator’s attorney about the key conversation in which Young admitted that no crime had occurred, the detective didn’t hesitate to punch the biggest possible hole in the prosecution’s case.

“So let me understand, detective, you told the senator that he would not be charged if he admitted to you that no crime had occurred?”

“I told him he would not be charged by me.”

“But he has been charged.”

“Not by me.”

Worden then acknowledged that the senator only admitted to the false report after being told that no investigation would proceed if he did just that. Worden also accurately described the conclusion of his conversation with Young, in which the senator declared that no crime had occurred and that he would look into the matter privately.

The senator’s attorney finished his cross-examination with a tight smile of satisfaction. “Thank you, Detective Worden.”

Thank you, indeed. With the senator’s admission portrayed as a coerced act and with the prosecutor reluctant to pursue the motive behind the false report, the District Court judge needed little time to arrive at the expected verdict.

Leaving the courtroom, Larry Young approached Donald Worden and offered his hand. “Thank you for not lying,” the senator said.

Worden looked up, surprised. “Why would I lie?”

In context, it was an extraordinary insult. After all, why would a detective lie? Why would he perjure himself? Why would he risk his own integrity, not to mention his job and his pension, to win a case like this? To nail some politician’s pelt to a wall? To earn the undying respect of Larry Young’s political enemies?

Like every cop, Worden had his cynical streak, but he wasn’t really much of a stoic. Open murders and open deceit-the two operant themes of this godforsaken year-still seemed to bother him more than many younger detectives. It didn’t often show, but there had always been a core of insistent anger inside Worden, a quiet rebellion against the inertia and politics of his own police department. Rarely were those emotions allowed to surface; instead, they festered deep inside, feeding his elevated and insubordinate hypertension. Only once, in fact, did Worden vent his rage during the Larry Young business, and that was a brief exchange in the coffee room, when Rick James tried to lighten his partner’s mood.

“Hey, it’s out of your hands,” said James. “What the fuck are you gonna do?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m ready to do,” growled Worden. “I’m ready to stick my gun inside somebody’s mouth, and that somebody is inside this headquarters building.”

James left it alone after that. What, after all, remained to be said?

At the same time, Terry McLarney went into a clinical depression after hearing a rumor that Worden had expressed interest in an open posting for an investigator with the medical examiner’s office. Worden’s gone, he told others in the squad. We’re losing him to this fucked-up year of his.

“Right now he just looks tired,” McLarney told others in the squad. “I’ve never seen Donald looking so tired.”

McLarney held tight to a slim thread of hope: Get Worden back out on the street with new murders. Good murders, good calls. McLarney believed that if anything could wipe the slate clean for a guy like Worden, it would be real police work.

But Monroe Street had been real police work; the Rideout case, too. They had just ended poorly. Even Worden himself wasn’t really sure what was wrong, and he had no idea where this tunnel was taking him, or whether it even had a light at its end. The best that could be said was that Donald Worden had gotten used to traveling in the dark.

Then, suddenly, a little light began to show. Late September brought that three-for-a-quarter performance on the midnight shift, when Worden worked every body that fell within his field of vision. And one week after those clearances he picked up yet another whodunit on daywork. The case was a loser: a nude woman found carved up behind an elementary school on Greenspring Avenue, discovered by the post officer a good twelve hours after the murder. No identification, no match to any missing persons report.

The beauty of Worden’s performance on that case would not come with its solution, although incredibly, he would come up with a suspect after staying with the file for more than a year. The beauty was that he refused to allow this woman to remain a Jane Doe- “a member of the deer family,” as he liked to put it-to be buried for $200 by the state without the knowledge of friends or family.

For six days Worden was out in the street, looking for a name. The television stations and newspapers wouldn’t run a photograph of the woman’s face: she was too obviously dead. Her fingerprints didn’t match up with anything in either the local computer or the federal data base available to the FBI. And though the body looked pretty clean-an indication that the woman had been living somewhere-no one ever came into a police district to say that their mother or sister or daughter had not come home. Worden checked the group home for homeless women on nearby Cottage Avenue. He checked with the detox and drug treatment centers, because the victim’s liver looked a little gray at autopsy. He canvassed the streets around the elementary school and along the nearest city bus route.

The break had come last night, when he paraded the photograph through every bar and carryout in Pimlico. Finally someone at the Preakness Bar remembered that the dead woman had a boyfriend named Leon Sykes who used to live over on Moreland Avenue. That address was vacant, but a neighbor told him to try 1710 Bentalou. There, a young girl listened to Worden’s story and took him to 1802 Longwood, where Leon Sykes looked at the photo and identified the dead woman as Barbara.

“What’s her last name?”

“I never knew.”

But Leon remembered where the dead woman’s daughter lived. And thus, by pure police work, did Jane Doe-a black female, late twenties-become Barbara Womble, thirty-nine years, of 1633 Moreland Avenue.

Those six circuitous days and nights in Pimlico left no one with any doubt: Worden was back, having outlasted his worst year.

The Big Man’s triumphant return was also marked by his renewed and unceasing torment of Dave Brown, whose abandonment of the Carol Wright case had not exactly gone unnoticed by the older detective. For at least a part of September, Brown’s excuse was the Nina Perry investigation, which began when a couple of dopers were arrested in the car of a woman reported missing from her Stricker Street rowhouse a week earlier. Working with McLarney, Brown put that case together in fine fashion, pressuring one of the suspects to confess fully to the murder and then lead detectives to the victim’s badly decomposed remains, which he had dumped in a Carroll County backwoods.

Worden watched the Nina Perry case unfold and thought that maybe, just maybe, a detective lurked somewhere within David John Brown. The Perry case was fine work, the kind that teaches a cop something about his craft. But Worden’s generosity went no further.

“Clayvon Jones and Carol Wright,” Worden declared in late September. “Let’s see him do something with one of those.”

But Clayvon Jones would not be the true test, not after Eddie Brown came strutting into the coffee room four days ago with a letter from the Baltimore City Jail in his right hand.

“Speak to yo’ daddy,” said the older detective, dropping the letter onto the desk with a flourish. Dave Brown read about three lines before turning in prayer to the green bulkhead wall.

“Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Do I take care of you?” asked Eddie Brown.

“You do. You mah daddy.”

The letter had arrived in the admin office that afternoon, a hastily scrawled missive from a prisoner who had witnessed the murder of Clayvon Jones in that east side courtyard back in June. Three months later, this witness needed to barter out from beneath a drug charge. Addressed to the homicide unit, his letter included details about the crime scene that only a bona fide witness could know.

No, the Clayvon Jones killing would not be much of an education. In Worden’s considered opinion, its easy solution became simply another laurel beneath the weight of Brown’s ass. That left Carol Wright, the woman run down on the South Baltimore parking lot. For a few weeks, Brown had at least talked about picking up the Carol Wright file again and sorting through the old leads. But as far as the board was concerned, the Carol Wright case still wasn’t a murder and therefore it didn’t exist. These days, he wasn’t even mentioning the case and, as Brown’s sergeant, McLarney wasn’t making much of a stink about it either. Indeed, with Nina Perry and Clayvon Jones both safely in the black, McLarney had a new appreciation for Dave Brown’s talents.

In McLarney’s mind, the Perry case in particular counted for a lot. Brown had worked hard and a tough case involving a genuine victim had gone down. That arrest had elevated Brown to hero-of-the-week status, and he was therefore entitled to a beer or two at Kavanaugh’s with his loving and devoted sergeant. In fact, McLarney was so pleased with the Perry case that he stayed with Brown through its aftermath, sharing the remaining paperwork and evidentiary details. He only balked when it came time to pick up the victim’s maggot-infested clothing at the ME’s office.

“Fuck this, Dave. I’ll give you a hand with this tomorrow,” McLarney said after getting a quick whiff of the stench. “Let’s come back for this stuff in the morning.”

Dave Brown readily agreed and drove back to headquarters a contented man, at least until he realized McLarney wasn’t scheduled to work the next day.

“Wait a second,” he said, parking the Cavalier in the garage. “You’re off tomorrow.”

McLarney giggled.

“You little Irish potatohead.”

“Potatohead?”

“You did me, you goddamn mick.” That was the new and improved Dave Brown talking, a far cry from the detective who had penned that please-keep-me-in-homicide missive the month before. A man has to feel fairly secure before he’s willing to call his immediate supervisor an Irish potatohead, even in the casual environment of a homicide office. And of course McLarney loved it. Sitting at an admin office typewriter that same evening, he immortalized the deed in a memo to the lieutenant:

To: Lt. Gary D’Addario, Homicide unit

From: Sgt. Terry McLarney, Homicide unit

Subject: Ethnic/Slurs Comments made by Det. David John Brown

Sir:

It is with sorrow and disappointment that I call to your attention the flagrant and wanton infliction of emotional distress which was wrought upon this supervisor on this date. It is something which I have never faced in this enlightened department, and hoped that I never would. However, you should know that on this date Det. David John Brown twice made vicious verbal attacks on my ancestry, once referring to me as “a little Irish potato head” and later calling me “a little mick head.”

You, being of negligible ancestry yourself, can certainly understand my shame and chagrin. As you know, my dear mother was born and raised in Ireland and my father is the issue of fine people who were forced to flee that sainted isle during the terrible potato famine, which made the potato head remark particularly painful.

Sir, I would prefer that this matter be handled in-house by you as I would like to avoid the anguish and shame that my family would endure as a result of publicity generated by trial boards and civil action. Thus, I have decided not to make a complaint with the department’s civil rights advisory board, though I reserve the right to file with the National Labor Relations Board should in-house remedies prove insufficient. Brown used to walk foot in the Inner Harbor; he knows the area. In fact, he knows most of Edmondson Avenue, also…

Funny stuff. A little too funny, thought Worden, reading a copy of the memo. McLarney’s obvious delight in Dave Brown was helping to turn Carol Wright into nothing worse than a vague and distant memory. If the Nina Perry case meant anything at all, Worden thought, then now was the time for Brown to show it. Did he really want to work murders? Did he even know exactly what that meant? Or was he up here to submit overtime slips and close Kavanaugh’s every other night? If McLarney wasn’t going to stick a finger in Dave Brown’s eye, then the Big Man would take that responsibility upon himself. For three weeks running, in fact, Worden had been knee deep in the younger detective’s shit, waiting to see some movement on a case that Brown would like to see disappear. It’s been the full Worden treatment-cold, demanding and a little bit vicious. For Dave Brown, a man who wants nothing more than to bask in the latest success, there is no joy, no mercy, and absolutely no chance of escape.

Now, on today’s quiet eight-to-four shift, the younger detective is actually foolish enough to be caught reading the new issue of Rolling Stone in the coffee room, an act of utter indolence. Worden needs only to enter the room and ascertain that the Carol Wright file is not visible on Dave Brown’s desk.

“De-tec-tive Brown,” says Worden, imbuing each syllable with contempt.

“What?”

“Detective Brown…”

“What do you want?”

“I’ll bet you like the sound of that, don’t you?”

“The sound of what?”

“Detective Brown. Detective David John Brown.”

“Go fuck yourself, Worden.” Worden stares at the younger detective intently and for so long that Brown can no longer concentrate on the magazine.

“Quit staring at me, you old bastard.”

“I’m not staring at you.”

“The fuck you aren’t.”

“It’s your conscience.” Brown looks at him, uncomprehending.

“Where’s the Carol Wright case?” says Worden.

“Hey, I’ve got to type the prosecution report for Nina Perry…”

“That was last month.”

“… and I got a warrant out this week on my boy Clayvon, so gimme a fucking break already.”

“My heart pumps purple piss for you,” says Worden.

“I didn’t ask you about Clayvon Jones, did I? What’s new with Carol Wright?”

“Nothing. I got my dick in my hands on that.”

“De-tec-tive Brown…”

Dave Brown pulls open his top right drawer and grabs the.38, pulling the gun halfway out of the holster. Worden doesn’t laugh.

“Gimme a quarter,” says the older detective.

“What the hell for?”

“Gimme a quarter.”

“If I give you a quarter, will you shut the fuck up and leave me alone?”

“Maybe,” says Worden. Dave Brown stands up and fishes a coin from his trouser pocket. He throws the quarter at Worden, then sits again, burying his face behind the magazine. Worden gives him a good ten seconds.

“De-tec-tive Brown…”