Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

NINE

At its core, the crime is the same.

This time she is shot, not stabbed or garroted. This time the small frame is just a bit heavier and the hair is down, not pulled back in braids with a brightly colored beret. This time the vaginal swabs will provide proof of the rape in the form of seminal fluid. This time she did not disappear while walking to a library but to a bus stop. And this time the dead girl will be a year older, twelve instead of eleven. But in every important way, it is the same.

Nine months after Latonya Kim Wallace was discovered behind a Reservoir Hill rowhouse, Harry Edgerton is once again staring at an act of unequivocal evil in a Baltimore alley. The body, fully clothed, is crumpled at the edge of an old brick garage foundation behind a vacant rowhouse in the 1800 block of West Baltimore Street. The single bullet wound is to the back of the skull-a.32 or.38 from the look of it-fired at close range.

Her name was Andrea Perry.

And her mother knows when she watches the evening news and catches a glimpse of the ME’s attendants carrying the gurney out of an alley a block away from her Fayette Street home. Andrea has only been missing since last night, and the unidentified victim on television is initially believed to be an older girl, possibly a young woman. But her mother knows.

The identification process at Penn Street is achingly painful, hard even for the ME’s attendants, who can do this sort of thing four or five times a day. Later that day in the homicide office, Roger Nolan has barely started to interview the mother when she breaks down uncontrollably.

“Go home,” he tells her. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

At about the same moment, Edgerton stands in the autopsy room and watches another postmortem of another murdered child. This time, however, Edgerton is the primary detective. In fact, he’s the only detective. And this time, he tells himself, it’s all going to end differently.

But if the Andrea Perry case is now the exclusive property of the homicide unit’s consummate loner, it is also a contradiction in terms: behold, the one-man red ball.

The Andrea Perry murder has all the earmarks of a major case-a dead child, a brutal rape and murder, a lead story on the six o’clock news-yet this time there are no special details, no herd of detectives at the crime scene, no second-day cadet searches. This time the brass is nowhere to be seen.

It might have gone this way even if someone other than Edgerton had taken the call. Because once already this year, D’Addario’s men had spent themselves in a communal fight, gathering the entire shift for an absolutely essential case. For one little girl, they had called in extra troops from the districts. For one righteous cause, they had pursued their best suspects for weeks and then months, sacrificing other cases in the campaign for a single, small life. And none of it had mattered. The Latonya Wallace case had gone sour, reminding every man on the shift that all the time and money and effort mean nothing when the evidence isn’t there. In the end, it was an open file like any other-a special tragedy, to be sure-but an open murder now in the care of one solitary detective.

Success is its own catalyst; failure, too. Without any arrest in the death of one child, the same shift of detectives had very little to deliver in the death of another. For Andrea Perry, there will be no general mobilization, no declaration of war. It is October; the arsenal is empty.

That it is Edgerton’s case simply makes all of this easier. Of all the men on D’Addario’s shift, he is the only one who would never think to ask for more troops. Nolan is with him, of course; Nolan is always with him. But beyond the sergeant, everyone else in the squad holds to his own cases. Even if Edgerton wants their help, he wouldn’t know how to ask. From the crime scene forward, he is on his own: So be it.

From those first moments at the scene, Edgerton tells himself he will not make the same mistakes that he believes are buried in the Latonya Wallace file, and if he does, they will be his alone to deal with. He has watched Tom Pellegrini waste most of a year kicking himself for investigative flaws, real and imagined. Much of that is the kind of second-guessing that accompanies any unsolved case, but some of it, Edgerton knows, has to do with Pellegrini’s feeling that the red-ball treatment had taken away control of the case. Landsman, Edgerton, Eddie Brown, the detail officers-every one of them had become a force for Tom to reckon with, particularly the veteran detectives who had so much more time than Pellegrini and, as a result, tended to influence the case to a greater degree. Well, thinks Edgerton, that was Tom. I won’t have that problem.

For one thing, he has a crime scene-not just a site where the child’s body has been dumped, but a bona fide murder scene. Edgerton and Nolan had taken the call alone, and for once they had taken their goddamn time with the body. They made sure to do everything in the proper order, to let the little girl be until they were absolutely ready to move her. They bagged the hands at the scene and carefully chronicled the exact array of clothing, noting that while she was fully dressed, her jacket and blouse seemed to have been improperly buttoned.

Working closely with the lab tech at the scene, Edgerton managed to pull several hairs from the victim’s blouse, and he carefully noted even the smallest scars and injuries. Walking the length of the alley, he found a single.22 casing, though the head wound appeared to be the result of a larger caliber. With a wound to a fleshy part of the body, a detective can’t really tell, because the skin expands at the point of contact and then returns to its shape after the bullet passes, leaving a smaller hole. But a head wound retains an accurate circumference; chances are good that the.22 casing had nothing to do with the murder.

There was no blood trail whatsoever. Edgerton carefully examined the victim’s head and neck at the scene, satisfying himself that she had done all of her bleeding right there against the low brick foundation. In all probability, she had been led into the alley, forced to kneel down, and then shot, execution style, in the back of the head. Nor was there an exit wound, and a clean, remarkably unmutilated.32 round is subsequently recovered at the autopsy. In addition, the vaginal swabs will later come back positive with the seminal fluid of a secreter-a male whose ejaculate contained sufficient blood to type or DNA-test against any potential suspect. In contrast to the Latonya Wallace case, the killer of Andrea Perry has left behind a wealth of physical evidence.

But the interviews with two young men brought downtown by the first uniforms provide little. Apparently, neither one was the first to discover the body. One tells detectives that he learned about it from the other; the second says only that he had been walking on Baltimore Street when an old woman told him that there was a body in the alley. He had not gone to investigate, he tells Edgerton, but had simply told the second man, who flagged down a cop. Who was the old woman? The first young man has no idea.

As the case develops, Edgerton works deliberately and at his own pace. The initial canvass by Western officers was carefully done, but Edgerton spends days creating his own schematic diagram of the surrounding blocks, listing residents at each rowhouse and matching them with criminal histories and alibis. It is a rough little neighborhood, hard by the Western District’s lower boundary with the Southern, and the Vine Street drug market a block away brought all kinds of trash into the area, greatly adding to any list of potential suspects. This is the kind of investigation that brings out the best in Edgerton, playing as it does to his strengths: More than any other detective in the unit, he can work a neighborhood until every other pedestrian is feeding him information.

Part of it is his appearance-black, reedy thin, and well groomed, with salt-and-pepper hair and thick mustache, Edgerton is attractive in a decidedly laid-back way. At crime scenes, the neighborhood girls actually line up on the other side of the police tape and giggle. Detective Edge, they call him. Unlike most of his colleagues, Edgerton maintains his own string of informants, and more often than not they are eighteen-year-old yoettes whose boyfriends are out in the streets shooting one another for drugs and gold chains. Time and again, some corner boy would be on his way to the Hopkins ER with holes in his torso and Edgerton’s beeper would go off before the ambo could even arrive, the digital readout displaying the number of an east side pay phone.

Edgerton is at ease in the ghetto in a way that even the best white detectives are not. And more than most of the black investigators, too, Edgerton can somehow talk his way past the fact that he’s a cop. Only Edgerton would have bothered to clean the blood from a wounded girl’s hands in a University Hospital emergency room. Only Edgerton could share a smoke with a drug dealer in the back of a radio car on Hollins Street and emerge with a complete statement. In corner carryouts, in hospital waiting rooms, in rowhouse vestibules, Edgerton makes sudden and lasting connections with people who have no reason ever to trust a homicide detective. And now, in the case of Andrea Perry, a true victim, those connections come even easier.

The family and the neighborhood tell him that the child was last seen at eight the night before, walking her eighteen-year-old sister to the bus stop on West Baltimore Street. The sister says that as she boarded her bus, she saw Andrea walking north toward the 1800 block of Fayette and home. When the sister returned home at eleven and found that her mother was already asleep, she too went to bed. Not until the following morning did the family realize that the child had never arrived home. They filed their missing person’s report and held out some hope until that evening news broadcast from just a block away.

But days after the murder, the media coverage has all faded away. The Andrea Perry murder isn’t getting anything like a red-ball treatment from the city, and as the days wear on, Edgerton has to wonder about that. Perhaps it is because the victim was a year older, perhaps because her neighborhood was less stable and less central to the city than Reservoir Hill. For whatever reason, the newspapers and TV crews don’t stay with this one and, as a result, there is no deluge of calls and anonymous tips such as those that accompanied the death of Latonya Wallace.

In fact, the only anonymous call on the case came a few hours after the body’s discovery: a high-pitched male voice gave the name of a West Baltimore woman, claiming that he had seen her running out of the alley after hearing shots. Edgerton immediately decided the story was bullshit. This wasn’t a woman’s crime; the semen tells them that much. As with Latonya Wallace, this was a crime of one man, acting alone and for a motive that he could never share with other men, much less a woman.

Was this mystery woman then a witness? More bullshit, Edgerton reasoned. The killer chose the alley and the remains of that garage for an anonymous murder. He killed that little girl to prevent her from identifying him as a rapist, so why the hell would he fire that shot with anyone else in the alley? Edgerton was absolutely convinced that his suspect walked the little girl around those back alleys until he was sure they were alone. Only then did he pull the girl down against the brick wall. Only then did he bring out the gun.

Gary Dunnigan, who took the anonymous phone call, wrote out an office report and gave it to Edgerton for the file. Edgerton absorbed the information and checked the woman’s name on the computer to assure himself that she wasn’t a serious suspect. He even interviewed the woman’s neighbors and relatives, learning enough about her to satisfy his curiosity, but in the first week of the investigation he does not pick the woman up.

After all, the story makes no sense, and besides, he’s getting better information from his neighborhood canvass. One story has the little girl’s murder as an act of retaliation against one of her relatives, the other as a predatory act by a dealer who simply wanted to show the neighborhood how hard he could be. There is talk about two drug traffickers in the area, and neither man seems to have much of an alibi.

For once, and to the amusement of the other detectives, Edgerton arrives in the homicide office early each day, grabbing the keys to a Cavalier and then disappearing into West Baltimore. Most afternoons, Edgerton works through the shift change, not returning until well into the evening. Some days Nolan is with him, other days he works alone, his whereabouts a mystery to the rest of the squad. Alone on the street, Edgerton can be more effective than any man who ever had a partner. Out on the street, he understands the special benefits of isolation; his critics do not. There are detectives in the homicide unit who never go anywhere in the ghetto alone, who always double up on any investigative trip to West Baltimore.

“You want company?” detectives routinely ask each other. And on those rare occasions when one investigator sets out for the slums alone, he is invariably cautioned: “Careful, bunk, don’t get yourself captured.”

From the outside looking in, Edgerton understands that the camaraderie of the unit can be a crutch. More often than not, Edgerton ventures into the high-rise projects alone and finds witnesses; more often than not, other detectives march through neighborhoods in twos and threes and find nothing. Edgerton learned long ago that even the best and most cooperative witnesses are more likely to talk to one detective than to a pair. And three detectives working a case are nothing short of a police riot in the eyes of a reluctant or untrusting witness. In truth, when all is said and done, the surest way for a cop to solve a murder is to get his ass out on the street and find a witness.

The better detectives all understand this: Worden often does some of his best work alone in a Cavalier, riding back out to a neighborhood to talk quietly with people who recoiled when it was Worden and James and Brown camped on their doorstep. But there are detectives in the unit who are genuinely fearful of riding alone.

Edgerton has no such fears; he wears his attitude like a shield. Two months ago, he was out at Edmondson and Payson working a drug murder and, without thinking twice, he wandered away from his crime scene and down the worst stretch of Edmondson Avenue alone, parting a block of corner boys as if he were Charlton Heston on the Universal Studio lot. He was looking for witnesses or, at the very least, for someone willing to whisper into a cop’s ear some truth about what happened on Payson Street an hour earlier. Instead, he got surly looks and silent rage from fifty black faces.

And yet he moved on, seemingly oblivious of the hostility until, at the corner of Edmondson and Brice, he watched a young kid, fourteen or fifteen years old, pass a paper bag to an older boy who ran around the block. For Edgerton, it was opportunity knocking. With the rest of the street watching coldly, he grabbed the kid by a shoulder and dragged him to a Cavalier around the corner, pressing the boy for details about the murder.

A Western uniform, watching from the crime scene two blocks away, later cautioned the detective.

“You shouldn’t have gone down there alone,” he told Edgerton. “What if some shit had started?”

To which Edgerton could only shake his head.

“I’m serious, man,” the uniform said. “You only got six bullets.”

“I don’t even have that.” Edgerton laughed. “I forgot my gun.”

“YOU WHAT?”

“Yeah. I left my gun in my desk.”

A cop at Edmondson and Brice with no gun. The Western uniforms were stunned; Edgerton was indifferent: “This job,” he told them, “is ninety percent attitude.”

Now, working the Andrea Perry murder, Edgerton is back in another West Baltimore neighborhood, mixing with the locals as few police can. He talks to the occupants of every rowhouse that backs up to his alley, he chats up the hangers-on at the carryouts and bars. Working from the bus stop toward his victim’s home on Fayette Street, he checks every address for a witness who may have seen the child walking with someone. When nothing comes from that effort, he begins checking other sexual assault reports from the Southern and Western districts.

In fact, Edgerton makes a point early on in the investigation of calling the operations unit officers from the Southern, Southwestern and Western districts downtown and briefing them on the case. He tells them to be looking for anyone involved in anything sexual with underage girls, or any report involving an abduction or a.32-caliber weapon. Edgerton urges the ops unit officers in all three districts to call him with information that seems even remotely related. That, too, differs from the approach taken in the Latonya Wallace case, where district officers had been detailed downtown to help with the investigation. For this little girl, Edgerton decides, the districts will not come to CID; CID will go into the districts.

Only once, on the day after the body’s discovery, is there any hint of the communal effort that normally accompanies a red-ball case, and it is prompted by Nolan, who for the sake of appearances asks McAllister, Kincaid and Bowman to give them a day’s help to expand the canvass.

Looking through the case file that day, the other detectives in the squad wonder aloud why Edgerton hadn’t immediately followed up on the anonymous call. At the very least, they argue, he should go out and grab the woman whom the male caller allegedly saw running from the alley.

“That’s the last thing I want to do,” says Edgerton, explaining his strategy to Nolan. “If I get her down here, what am I going to do? I have one question to ask her, and after that I’ve got nothing.”

To Edgerton’s way of thinking, it is another mistake that too many detectives make too often-the same mistake that they had made with the Fish Man in the Latonya Wallace case. You bring someone down and go at them in the interrogation room with no real ammunition. They walk out an hour later, more confident than before, and if you ever do get any leverage on them, you’ve only made it harder to come back and break them the second time.

“I ask her why she was running out of the alley, and she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about,” Edgerton explains to Nolan. “And she’s right. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He still doesn’t believe that the woman named by the caller actually ran from the alley after the murder. But even if he did believe it, he would not risk an interrogation until it had at least a chance of success.

“If all else fails, then I bring her down here and ask my one question,” the detective says, “and not before.”

Nolan agrees. “It’s your case,” he tells Edgerton. “Do it your way.”

Beyond his squad’s limited help with the expanded canvass, Edgerton’s isolation on the case is complete. Even D’Addario keeps his distance: He asks Nolan for regular progress reports and offers help if help is needed, but otherwise he is content to let Edgerton and his sergeant set their own pace.

The contrast with D’Addario’s response to the Latonya Wallace investigation is striking. Edgerton hopes that the lieutenant’s hands-off approach is, at least in part, a display of confidence in his investigator. More likely, the detective reasons, D’Addario has himself soured on the full-blown red-ball treatment. Throwing troops and money at a case had accomplished so little in Reservoir Hill that maybe the lieutenant is reluctant to travel the same road a second time. Or maybe, like everyone else on the shift, LTD is just too damn tired for another all-out campaign.

But Edgerton also knows that nothing happens in a vacuum. He is being left alone to work his case largely because D’Addario can afford to leave him alone. On the day that Andrea Perry was discovered, the clearance rate stood at a fat 74 percent, with five outstanding murder warrants still on the street-a rate that compares favorably to both the previous year’s totals and the national average. As a result, D’Addario can once again make decisions without worrying about public consumption or the perceptions of the command staff. From talking with Pellegrini, Edgerton knows that the lieutenant has already expressed some dissatisfaction with the tidal wave of investigation that followed Latonya Wallace’s death. At various stages in that probe, D’Addario had listened to Landsman and Pellegrini both argue that less could be more, and the lieutenant seemed to agree. If the clearance rate had been higher, if the department hadn’t also been publicly sweating the murders of all those women in the Northwest, then the case might have gone differently. Now, with the board showing more black than red, the homicide unit’s political equilibrium has been fully restored. Thanks to some hard work, some skillful maneuvering and not a little luck, D’Addario’s reign has survived the threat and been returned to its rightful glory. And if the rise in the clearance rate and D’Addario’s true feelings about the red-ball treatment aren’t reasons enough for Edgerton to be granted his distance, then Edgerton also understands that he is alone on this case simply because the murder has fallen to Nolan’s squad.

Not only does Nolan have absolute confidence in Edgerton’s methods, but he is the sergeant least likely to ask for help from the rest of the shift and from D’Addario in particular. Of the three sergeants, only McLarney and Landsman are now counted among LTD’s true disciples; Nolan had stayed on the fence during D’Addario’s year-long conflict with the captain. Lately, the lieutenant has taken some pleasure in bringing that out.

Two nights ago, all three squad sergeants were in the coffee room as D’Addario prepared to leave at the end of a four-to-twelve shift.

“I note by my watch that it’s nigh on twelve o’clock,” he declared dramatically. “And I know that before the cock crows thrice, one of you shall betray me…”

The sergeants laughed nervously.

“… but it’s okay, Roger, I understand. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

As Nolan’s man, Edgerton couldn’t really be sure exactly why he was being isolated on the Andrea Perry case. It may well be Dee’s faith in him, or it may be the lieutenant’s new philosophy about leaving red balls to the primary investigator. Then again, it may just be that Roger Nolan is the one sergeant who is not about to ask his lieutenant for anything. Maybe, Edgerton thinks, it’s a little of all three. For an outsider like himself, it’s always harder to get a handle on the office politics.

But whatever the reasons for D’Addario’s distance from the investigation, Edgerton understands that the effect is the same: He is on the longest possible leash. As a result, Andrea Perry will not become Latonya Wallace, just as Edgerton will not become another Pellegrini. Good-bye to the detail officers, to the FBI psych profiles, to the aerial photographs of the crime scene, to a hundred endless debates among a full squad of homicide detectives. Instead, this child’s murder will be one man out in the street, with time enough and room enough to solve his murder. Or, perhaps, hang himself.

Whichever comes first.

It is a beautiful courthouse, truly impressive in its classical form. The bronze doors, the varied Italian marbles, the deep redwoods and gilded ceilings-the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse on North Calvert Street is a work of great architecture, as fine and glorious as any structure ever built in the city of Baltimore.

If justice itself were measured by the grandeur of its house, then a Baltimore detective would have little to fear. If well-cut stone and hand-carved woods could guarantee a righteous vengeance, then the Mitchell Courthouse and its companion across the street-the old post office building now known as Courthouse East-might be places of sanctuary for a Baltimore law officer.

The city fathers spared little when they created these two exquisite buildings in the heart of downtown, and in the last several years their descendants have been equally generous in their ongoing effort to renovate and preserve the beauty of both structures. From the arraignment courts to the jury rooms, from front lobbies to back corridors, the courthouse complex exists so that generations of law officers and lawyers could walk the halls of justice and feel their spirits soar. Stepping lightly down the restored portico of the post office building, or walking into the elegance of Judge Hammerman’s paneled palace, a detective has every reason to hold his head high in the knowledge that he has arrived at a place where society can exact its price. Justice will be done here; all the hard, dirty work performed in the city’s rotten core will no doubt be gracefully shaped into a clean and solemn judgment of guilty. A jury of twelve respectable, thoughtful men and women will rise as one to render that verdict, imposing the law of a good and valiant people on an evil man.

So how is it that every Baltimore detective of this epoch enters his courthouse with his head down, his badge drawn with practiced boredom for the sheriff’s deputies who man the metal detector in the first-floor lobby? How can those detectives step so heavily toward the elevators, oblivious of the beauty all around them? How can they crush their cigarette butts into the stone with such seeming indifference, then knock on a prosecutor’s office door as if it were the very gate of purgatory? How can a homicide detective bring his best work to this, his final destination, wearing a look of utter resignation?

Well, for one thing, he’s probably been up all night working two fresh shootings and a cutting on the midnight shift. No doubt the same detective scheduled to testify in Bothe’s court this afternoon just finished his overnight paperwork in time to listen to a dayshift’s roll call. No doubt he then spent another hour downing four cups of black coffee and an Egg McMuffin. Now he’s probably lugging paper evidence bags from the ECU to some lawyer’s cubbyhole on the third floor, where he will be informed that his best witness hasn’t yet shown up for court and isn’t answering a sheriff deputy’s phone calls. Beyond those worldly concerns, this same detective-if he knows his business-is obligated to arrive in the legal arena with a mind clouded by something other than transcendent visions of moral victory. In his heart of hearts, a veteran detective is inspired not by the glories of the courthouse, but by Rule Number Nine in the lexicon, to wit:

9A. To a jury, any doubt is reasonable.

9B. The better the case, the worse the jury.

And, in addition to rules 9A and 9B:

9C. A good man is hard to find, but twelve of them, gathered together in one place, is a miracle.

A detective who ventures into the corridors of justice with anything less than a firm and familiar skepticism for the American legal process is a man leaning into the punches. It’s one thing, after all, to see some of your best work torn to shreds by twelve of Baltimore’s finest citizens, but it’s another thing entirely to watch it happen from a state of naive incredulity. Better to check your expectations at the courthouse doors and enter its glistening corridors in full, willful anticipation of the debacle to follow.

The rock-and it’s a fine, honorable rock-upon which our legal system is built states that a defendant is innocent until found guilty by the unanimous vote of a dozen peers. Better that a hundred guilty men should walk free before one innocent man is punished. Well, by that standard, the Baltimore court system is pretty much working to code.

Consider: In this particular year in the life of Baltimore’s criminal justice system, the names of 200 perpetrators will be brought to the state’s attorney’s office in connection with 170 solved homicides.

Of those 200 suspects:

Five cases will still be pending trial two years later. (In two of those instances, suspects were charged in warrants but never apprehended by detectives.)

Five will die before trial or in the course of arrest. (Three of these are suicides, one the victim of a fire she set to kill someone else, one the victim in a police shootout.)

Six will not be tried when prosecutors determine the killings to be justifiable by self-defense or a result of accidental causes.

Two defendants will be declared not criminally responsible and sent to a state mental hospital.

Three defendants age sixteen and younger will have their homicide charges remanded to juvenile court.

Sixteen will have their charges dismissed prior to indictment due to lack of evidence. (On occasion, an aggressive homicide detective with insufficient evidence to prove a case will play a long shot and nonetheless charge his best suspect in the hope that the incarceration will provide sufficient leverage to provoke a confession in subsequent interrogations.)

Twenty-four defendants will have their charges nol prossed or stetted by prosecutors after indictment. (A nol prosse represents the unequivocal dismissal of a grand jury indictment; a stet places the case on an inactive docket, though the prosecution can be revived within a year if additional evidence is forthcoming. In time, most stet cases become dismissals.)

Three defendants will have their charges dismissed or stetted when it becomes clear that they are, in fact, innocent of the crimes for which they have been accused. (The innocent-until-proven-guilty standard does indeed have some real meaning in Maryland’s largest city, where it’s not uncommon for the wrong man to be charged or even indicted for a violent crime. It happened, for example, in the shooting of Gene Cassidy, and it happened again in three separate murders handled by detectives on Stanton’s shift. In those cases, the wrong man was charged as a result of faulty witness identifications-one from the dying victim, the other two from bystanders-and the defendants were subsequently cleared through additional investigation. Charging the wrong man on mediocre evidence is not difficult, and getting a grand jury to indict him is only a little harder. But after that, the chances of putting the wrong man into prison become minimal. It is, after all, hard enough for prosecutors in Baltimore to convict the guilty; the only scenario by which an innocent man could be successfully prosecuted on weak evidence would be one in which a defense attorney failed to evaluate the case and force-fed a plea to a client.)

Guilty or innocent, living or dead, deranged or competent-the winnowing process removes 64 of the original 200 defendants, or nearly 30 percent, before a single case is ever brought to court. And of the 136 men and women remaining:

Eighty-one will accept plea agreements prior to trial. (Eleven of those defendants will plead to premeditated, first-degree murder, 35 to second-degree murder, 32 to manslaughter, and 3 to lesser charges.)

Fifty-five homicide defendants will risk trial before a judge or jury. (Of that number, 25 defendants will be acquitted in jury trials. Twenty of the remaining 30 defendants will be found guilty of first-degree murder, 6 of second-degree murder, and 4 of manslaughter.)

Add 30 trial convictions to 81 pleas and the cumulative deterrent to murder in Baltimore is evident: 111 citizens have been convicted for committing an act of homicide.

By the reckoning of this particular year, the chance of actually being convicted of a crime after being identified by authorities is about 60 percent. And if you factor in those unsolved homicides in which there are no arrests, the chance of being caught and convicted for taking a life in Baltimore is just over 40 percent.

All of which is not to say that this unlucky minority then suffers punishment commensurate with their crime. Of the 111 defendants convicted in this year’s homicides, 22 men and women-20 percent of the total-will be sentenced to less than five years’ incarceration. Another 16 defendants-14 percent of the total-will receive sentences of less than ten years in prison. Given that Maryland’s parole guidelines generally call for prisoners to serve about a third of their sentences, it can be said that three years after they committed their crimes, fewer than 30 percent of the Baltimore homicide unit’s Class of 1988 is still behind prison walls.

Prosecutors and detectives understand the statistics. They know that even with the best cases-those that a state’s attorney is willing to bring before a jury-the chance of success is only three in five. As a result, those prosecutions that are marginal, those in which there is any indication of justifiable self-defense, those in which the witnesses are unreliable or the physical evidence is ambiguous-all these cases soon fall by the side of the road, becoming dismissals or weak pleas.

But not every case that goes to plea is necessarily weak. In Baltimore, plea bargains can be had on reasonably strong cases-cases that no defendant and his attorney would dare risk taking to trial in the suburbs of Anne Arundel or Howard or Baltimore County. Yet in the city, prosecutors know that such cases, when brought to trial, are likely to result in acquittals.

The difference is, quite simply, Rule Number Nine.

The operant logic of a Baltimore city jury is as fantastical a process as any other of our universe’s mysteries. This one is innocent because he seemed so polite and well spoken on the stand, that one because there were no fingerprints on the weapon to corroborate the testimony of four witnesses. And this one over here is telling the truth when he says he was beaten into a confession; we know that, of course, because why else would anyone willingly confess to a crime if he wasn’t beaten?

In one particularly notable decision, a Baltimore jury found a defendant innocent of murder charges but guilty of assault with intent to murder. They believed the testimony of the eyewitness, who saw the defendant stab the victim in the back on a well-lit street, then run away to save himself. But they also believed the medical examiner, who explained that of all the stab wounds, a thrust to the chest had ultimately killed the victim. The jurors reasoned that they couldn’t be absolutely sure that the defendant stabbed the victim more than once. Presumably, some other enraged assailant could have wandered by afterward, picked up the knife and finished the job.

Juries do not like to argue. They do not like to think. They do not like to sit for hours at a time, wading through evidence and testimony and lawyers’ arguments. And in a homicide detective’s view, a criminal jury resists its obligation to judge another human being. It’s an ugly, painful business, after all, this process of labeling people murderers and criminals. Juries want to go home, to escape, to sleep it off. Our legal system prohibits a guilty verdict when there is reasonable doubt about a defendant’s culpability, but in truth, juries want to doubt, and in the stress of the jury room, all doubts become reasonable justification for acquittal.

Reasonable doubt is the weak link in every prosecutor’s chain and, with a complex case, the doubts multiply. Consequently, most of the battle-scarred veterans in the state’s attorney’s office prefer a straightforward, one- or two-witness homicide: It’s an easier argument to present and an easier argument for a jury to accept. They believe your witnesses or they don’t, but either way, you haven’t asked them to think very hard or to pay attention for very long. But the more developed case file-the one that a detective built over weeks and months, the one that presents a mountain of not-so-glaringly-obvious evidence, the one that requires the prosecutor to subtly piece the case together like a puzzle-it’s that kind of case on which a criminal jury can wreak real havoc.

Because in Baltimore, at least, the average juror doesn’t want to spend time contemplating the inconsistencies in a defendant’s statement, or the complex web of testimony that systematically destroys an alibi, or the discrepancies between a medical examiner’s testimony and a defendant’s self-defense claim. It’s too complicated, too abstract. The average juror wants three upstanding citizens to say that they were eyeball witnesses to the crime and another two who can assure them of the killer’s motivation. Throw in a recovered murder weapon, a few print hits and a positive DNA match and then, by God, you’ve got a jury ready to mete out some punishment.

To a detective, however, it’s the circumstantial prosecutions that often represent the best police work, and for that reason Rule 9B has profound meaning. In theory, the dunkers take care of themselves in court. But the best cases-the kind a cop takes pride in-always do seem to get the worst juries.

As with every other part of the criminal justice machine, racial issues permeate the jury system in Baltimore. Given that the vast majority of urban violence is black-on-black crime, and given that the pool of possible jurors is 60 to 70 percent black, Baltimore prosecutors take almost every case into court with the knowledge that the crime will be seen through the lens of the black community’s historical suspicion of a white-controlled police department and court system. The testimony of a black officer or detective is therefore considered necessary in many cases, a counterweight to the young defendant who, following his attorney’s advice, is wearing his Sunday best and carrying the family Bible to and from court. That the victims are also black matters less; after all, they’re not around to set such a good example in front of the jurors.

The effect of race on the judicial system is freely acknowledged by prosecutors and defense attorneys-black and white alike-although the issue is rarely raised directly in court. The better lawyers, whatever their color, refuse to manipulate jurors through racial distinctions; the others can do so with even the most indirect suggestions. Race is instead a tacit presence that accompanies almost every panel of twelve into a Baltimore jury room. Once, in a rare display, a black defense attorney actually pointed to her own forearm while giving closing arguments to an all-black panel: “Brothers and sisters,” she said, as two white detectives went out of their minds in the back row of the gallery, “I think we all know what this case is about.”

Still, it would be wrong to suggest that Baltimore’s juries have become more lenient simply because they have become more black. Suspicion of the legal system within the black community is a real phenomenon, but veteran prosecutors can tell you that some of the best panels they’ve ever had have been all-black, whereas some of the worst and most indifferent have had a white majority. More than color, what has crippled the jury system in Baltimore is a factor that crosses all racial boundaries: television.

Pick any twelve people from Baltimore-from the black sections of Ashburton and Cherry Hill, from all-white Highlandtown or Hamilton-and chances are, you will come up with a few intelligent, discerning citizens. Some may have finished high school, one or two may have been to college. Most will be working folk, only a few will be skilled professionals. Baltimore is a blue-collar town, a stretch of the East Coast rust belt that never recovered when American steel and shipping began their downward spirals. Its population is underemployed, and it remains one of America’s most undereducated cities. Taxpayer flight has continued for more than two decades, and the vast majority of Baltimore’s white and black middle and upper classes now reside outside the city proper. They are, in essence, the stuff from which county juries are made.

As a result, most city folk go into a jury room with no greater sophistication about crime and punishment than can be gleaned from a 19-inch television screen. More than anything else, it’s the cathode-ray tube-not the prosecutor, not the defense attorney, certainly not the evidence-that gives a Baltimore juror his mind-set. Television ensures that criminal juries are empaneled with ridiculous expectations. Jurors want to see the murder-see it played out in front of their eyes on videotape in slow motion or, at the very least, see the guilty party fall to his knees at the witness stand, begging for mercy. Never mind that fingerprints are recovered in less than 10 percent of criminal cases, the average juror wants fingerprints on the gun, fingerprints on the knife, fingerprints on every door handle, window and house key. Never mind that the trace lab rarely makes a case, a juror nonetheless wants to see hairs and fibers and shoe prints and every other shard of science gleaned from Hawaii Five-O reruns. When a case does come complete with an excess of witnesses and physical evidence, then jurors demand a motive, a reason, a meaning to a murder that has otherwise been proven. And on those rare occasions when jurors are satisfied that the right man has actually been locked up for the right murder, they want to be assured that the defendant is truly a bad person and that they themselves are not bad people for doing this terrible thing to him.

To provide, in real life, the utter certainty about crime and culpability that pervades television is impossible. Nor is it easy to rid a juror of such expectations, although veteran prosecutors never lack for trying. In Baltimore, state’s attorneys routinely call fingerprint experts to the stand in those cases in which no fingerprint evidence exists:

If you would, please explain to the jury how often fingerprints are recovered at crime scenes and how often they are not recovered. Explain how it is that many people, depending on their biochemistry at the time of the incident, do not leave detectable fingerprints. Explain how fingerprints can be obliterated and smudged. Explain how atmospheric conditions affect fingerprints. Explain just how rare it is to pull a fingerprint off a knife hilt or gun butt.

Similarly, the detectives themselves come to the stand to fight a losing battle with the last six episodes of L.A. Law and other network fare in which the lawyers-better-looking lawyers than we have in court today, mind you-always parade before the jury with guns and knives bagged and tagged and labeled Exhibit 1A.

A good defense attorney can blow ten minutes of smoke by glaring at a detective who tries to explain that weapons have a nasty habit of leaving the crime scene before the police arrive.

You mean you never recovered the murder weapon? This jury is supposed to convict my client without a murder weapon? What do you mean, it could be anywhere? Are you trying to tell us that after committing an act of murder, the defendant might have actually run away? And taken the gun with him? And then hidden it? Or thrown it from the Curtis Bay bridge?

On Columbo, the gun is always in the liquor cabinet behind the vermouth. But you didn’t check behind the defendant’s vermouth, did you, detective? No, you don’t have the murder weapon. Your honor, I move that we unshackle this poor innocent waif and send him back to his loving family.

In the minds of Baltimore’s prosecutors and detectives, at least, television has utterly shattered the notion of a thinking jury, strangled it with plot lines in which all ambiguity is obliterated and all questions answered. As a result, those charged with punishing the act of murder in Baltimore no longer believe in all that Norman Rockwell business about twelve angry men in shirtsleeves, arguing in sticky heat over the essential evidence. In the real world, it’s more like a dozen brain-deads telling each other that the defendant seems like a nice, quiet young man, then laughing at the prosecutor’s choice of tie. Defense attorneys are quick to call such thinking sour grapes, but in truth, the faithlessness that veteran prosecutors and detectives feel for the jury system goes deeper than that. The argument isn’t that the government should win every murder trial; the system isn’t built that way. But does anyone really believe that 45 percent of the homicide defendants brought to a court trial-the last stretch of the legal system’s long, thinning bottleneck-are in fact innocent?

As a consequence, city juries have become a deterrent of sorts to prosecutors, who are willing to accept weaker pleas or tolerate dismissals rather than waste the city’s time and money on cases involving defendants who are clearly guilty, but who have been charged on evidence that is anything less than overwhelming. Naturally, a competent defense attorney or public defender understands that in most cases, a jury trial is the last thing a city prosecutor wants, and he uses this leverage when he bargains for his client.

For the detectives, the decision to plea or dismiss a case is the flashpoint in their ongoing love-hate relationship with the state’s attorney’s office. True, thinks a detective, these people are on our side. True, they’re working to put bad guys in prison at half the salary they might get at an outside firm. True, they’re looking for the same justice we are. But brotherly feelings are out the window when a young assistant state’s attorney, two years out of the University of Baltimore School of Law, gives up on a drug murder that took three weeks to develop. When that happens, the chip goes right back on the shoulder: I busted my ass to get reluctant witnesses into the grand jury, and what for? Just so this goof with pinstripes and a power tie could dump it on the stet docket? Hell, he didn’t even have balls enough to pick up a phone and call me, much less ask how the damn file might be salvaged.

Some of the cases are weak and should be dumped, no doubt about that. Some of them arrived at the courthouse as viable prosecutions, only to self-destruct once the witnesses started backing up. Any homicide detective knows that most basic truth: Shit happens. But he also believes that too many borderline cases, and even a few that are healthy, manage to slip through the cracks, particularly with less experienced attorneys.

A good detective will excuse some of it as understandable and inevitable. As is true elsewhere, the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office is chronically understaffed and underfunded; its trial division is manned by a core of competent veterans and a slew of recent arrivals-younger lawyers who have worked their way up to felony violence after a few years in the district courts. Some will be good trial lawyers, some could go either way, and a few are genuinely dangerous in a courtroom. A detective hopes for a competent prosecutor, but he understands that the system runs by triage. The homicides are parceled out with an eye toward keeping the major cases-those involving true victims or those in which the defendant is suspected or charged with multiple crimes-in the hands of veteran attorneys. The hope is that in the most critical cases, the prosecutor will not be outclassed or intimidated by the coterie of experienced defense attorneys who by private retainer or court appointment always gravitate to city homicide cases.

Every detective also understands the need to take pleas on at least two-thirds or more of the viable murder prosecutions. Although most everyone outside the legal system regards “plea bargain” as a dirty word, those who make their living at the courthouse recognize it as a structural necessity. Without plea agreements, the system would lurch to a halt, with cases waiting for courtrooms the way commuter flights wait for runways in Atlanta. Even with the current ratio of pleas to trials, the delay between a murder indictment and the court trial averages between six and nine months.

But in a detective’s mind, there is a vast difference between a good plea and a bad one. Second-degree and thirty is always a respectable plea, except for truly evil acts such as, say, child abuse cases or robbery murders. If the case is borderline, second-degree and twenty isn’t too shabby, although it’s not exactly the iron fist of justice when you consider that the parole board puts most of them back on the street after about seven to ten. In a true manslaughter case-a domestic murder that was the act of fear or impulse, though it could in no way be called an accident-anything from two to ten is reasonable. But what’s hardest for a detective to swallow is a prosecutor allowing a particularly bad murder to go as second-degree, or calling a murder a manslaughter, or a manslaughter an accidental. Even in those instances, most detectives won’t speak their piece unless they’re asked, and the prosecutors don’t usually ask. In the homicide unit, the time-worn philosophy is that it’s on the prosecutor; you did your job, fuck him if he won’t do his. Occasionally, however, a detective will cross the emotional boundary.

Worden, for instance, has been known to say something to a young prosecutor who’s giving up on a file too quickly, or seems afraid to take a decent case into court. Landsman will sometimes do the same, and Edgerton, if you give him a chance, will tell a prosecutor how to try the case and then write out the closing argument. A lot of men in homicide carry around a case or two that still burns them. Garvey, for one, still isn’t saying much to the ASA who turned the Myeisha Jenkins murder into a second-degree plea-Myeisha, who was all of nine when her mother let her boyfriend beat the child to death and dump her on the shoulder of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Garvey told the lawyer he was a piece of shit for taking that plea, told it to him in such a way that the man didn’t even try to argue.

If he cares enough about a case, a detective can lobby or even argue for a particular strategy. But in the end, decisions about the legal approach to a case are not his to make. From crime scene to conviction, the courthouse is the only part of the process in which the detective becomes a passive participant, a player wholly dependent on the decisions of others. A detective is there to testify and otherwise serve the lawyers in any way he can. The lawyers, meanwhile, regard that service with varying amounts of appreciation. Some prosecutors consult the investigators on evidence and presentation, asking the opinions of veteran detectives who have been through the process more often than the attorneys. Others view the detectives as little more than props and gofers, responsible for showing up on time with the right evidence and the right witnesses.

Homicide detectives are further distanced from their cases because, as witnesses, they are sequestered and therefore prohibited from attending court and listening to other witnesses. Detectives in Baltimore spend 90 percent of their court time sitting on hard wooden benches in corridors, or running bags of evidence between the courtroom and the prosecutor’s office, or chasing down a witness who’s supposed to testify in the afternoon session but hasn’t shown up, or maybe bullshitting with the secretaries upstairs in the Violent Crimes Unit. Court time for a detective is a strange limbo, a period of nonexistence that is only briefly interrupted when he is called to testify.

The stand is the last point in the process in which a detective’s expertise counts for something. In most cases, the testimony of civilian witnesses-primed and prepared by the prosecutor before trial-will produce the most critical evidence. But in every case, the testimony of the detective, concerning the crime scene, the discovery of witnesses, the statements made by the defendant, lays the groundwork for the prosecution’s case. Among prosecutors, there is a theory that says a detective’s performance on the stand can rarely win a case, but it can be enough to wreck a prosecution.

Before taking the oath, a detective who knows his business makes a point of reading through the case file. After all, it’s been six months and a lot of bodies between the arrest and trial. In 1987, a city detective-no longer in the homicide unit-responded to a prosecutor’s question with an elaborate description of the crime scene and subsequent investigation. After a minute or two, he saw that the prosecutor was making strange faces. Even the defendant looked a little curious.

“Um, wait one second,” said the detective, coming to grips with the disaster. “Your honor, I think I’m remembering the wrong murder…”

That spells mistrial with a capital M.

Many detectives prefer to take the file onto the stand, but with some judges that can be dangerous. A typical case file contains notes and reports on potential suspects and blind alleys that were eventually discarded, and a few judges will allow a defense attorney, on cross-examination, to take hold of the file and go fishing. Given an alternate suspect from a police file and a tolerant judge, a defense attorney can run for miles in front of a jury.

One detective, Mark Tomlin, makes a point of copying his trial notes onto the back of the defendant’s computerized arrest sheet. Once, when Tomlin was testifying, a defense attorney asked to see his notes and began to suggest that they be admitted into evidence. He then turned the sheet over, looked at his client’s priors, and returned it without another word.

Veteran detectives also go into court knowing the strengths and weaknesses of their cases; they can anticipate a defense attorney’s line of questioning and answer accordingly. This doesn’t mean responding with answers that are grandly deceptive, but tailoring answers so that they do the least damage. If, for example, the defense counsel knows that your witness picked his client from a lineup but failed to do so in a photo array the previous day, he’s almost certainly going to ask about that. Anticipating, a good detective will, in the course of his answer, manage to work in the fact that the array used a picture of the suspect that was six years old, that the suspect’s hair was different, that he had no mustache and whatever else can be said before the lawyer stops him from talking. Defense attorneys have now endured untold generations of slick, manipulative police witnesses; one consequence is the just-answer-yes-or-no style of cross-examination, which requires a detective to wait for the prosecutor’s redirect to fully shape his answers.

On the other hand, if a detective is on the stand and not sure just where a defense attorney is going, his answers will become cautious and a little less specific, though not inaccurate in any detectable sense. A professional witness doesn’t needlessly back himself into corners with blanket declarations and assurances, because a good attorney will then manage to produce an exception.

“Detective, you say that after Mr. Robinson was arrested for this crime, the robberies in the area of North and Longwood ceased.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Detective, may I call your attention to a police report dated…”

Experienced detectives take one other rule to the stand with them: They don’t lie. The good ones don’t, anyway, not about anything that could ever be directly contradicted in open court. Perjury can destroy a career, steal a pension, and maybe, if the lie is big enough and stupid enough, lead to some jail time. For a detective to falsify evidentiary material, to wrongly attribute statements to suspects and witnesses, carries a risk far greater than the reward. How much does it matter-really matter-to the detective if any one suspect charged with any one murder goes to prison? He does fourteen of these guys a year, a couple hundred in a career. For what reason is he going to start believing that the world ends when he doesn’t win a case? If it’s a police shooting, or if it’s someone the cop knows, then some corners might be cut, but not for something that happened in the 1900 block of Etting Street on a Saturday night last summer.

The one notable exception to the marked honesty of a good police witness, the only point in the legal process where law officers can be expected to lie routinely or, at the very least, exaggerate, is probable cause.

For narcotics or vice detectives in particular it’s become a ridiculous game, this business of establishing the correct legal prerequisites for a search or arrest. Not surprisingly, it isn’t enough to say that the suspect was a squirrel who’d been out on that corner about ten minutes too long. No, the law of the land requires that the arresting officer had the opportunity to observe the defendant operating in a suspicious manner on a corner known for drug trafficking and that upon closer inspection, the officer noticed a glassine envelope sticking out of a sweatshirt pocket as well as a bulge in the front waistband indicative of a weapon.

Yeah. Right.

Probable cause on a street search is and always will be a cosmic joke, a systemic deceit. In some parts of Baltimore, PC means looking at a passing radio car for two seconds longer than an innocent man would. The courts can’t acknowledge it, but in the real world you watch a guy until you’re sure he’s dirty, then you jack him up, find the dope or the gun and then create a legal justification for the arrest.

In homicide, where the name of the game is search-and-seizure, with affidavits written in advance for specific addresses, the PC generally has to be straight up. After all, you need the judge’s signature on the warrant just to get you inside. A detective with a talent for the written word may be able to get some weak or exaggerated PC past a duty judge, but at least he’s required to put something in the affidavit.

For the homicide detective, the only real moment of equivocation on the stand occurs not over the issue of probable cause, but when a defense attorney asks whether his defendant’s statements were coerced, or whether his client asked for a lawyer before making those statements. In his heart of hearts, a good detective knows that every statement is, to some degree, the result of coercion if not outright fraud. But, holding to a strict legal definition, he can answer in the negative and call his testimony something other than perjury. After all, the defendant got his rights, he signed his Form 69. He had his chance.

“But did he want a lawyer?”

Well, a detective could ask, how do you define want? Probably half of all suspects get into an interrogation room and say they want a lawyer, or they might need a lawyer, or maybe they should talk to a lawyer. If they stick to it, if they really want that lawyer and they don’t want to talk, then the interrogation is over. But any detective worth his salt tries-for a time, at least-to convince them otherwise, content in the knowledge that there isn’t a Supreme Court justice standing outside the interrogation room door.

“Did my client ask for a lawyer?”

“No, he did not.”

On the stand, the last rule for a homicide detective is that nothing is personal-nothing between the detective and the defendant, nothing between the detective and the lawyers. On the stand, demeanor counts. A cop who loses his cool long enough to display contempt or malice for the defendant or his counsel provides the jury with the image of a malevolent system, of a crusade rather than a prosecution. The defense attorney calls you a liar, you impassively deny that. He declares your investigation to be incompetent, you deny that, too. His client eyefucks you from the trial table, you ignore it.

For a veteran detective, there is nothing hard in any of that. After all, if it’s the ordinary homicide case, the indifference is probably genuine. But even when the case matters, a veteran doesn’t do anything to make the defendant believe that he cares, or that the outcome of this case has any relevance in any world that rates. In its way, it’s an attitude that offers the defendant even less than anger or contempt. In court, a detective’s message to the defendant is clear and unmistakable: Win or lose, you’re still a piece of shit living on the margins. If the jury comes back guilty, you’re down for some years; if the jury doesn’t do the job, you still don’t count. Six months from now, you’ll be back in city jail on another charge, says the attitude. Either that or someone on my shift will be out there one night chalking your ass off.

Strangely, the defendants rarely take it personally. They come into the courtroom from the heat of the basement lockup; shackled and cuffed, they look around and catch the eye of the detective. More often than not, they nod or acknowledge the loyal opposition in some small way. In the course of a long trial, a few actually reach out and shake the detective’s hand or mutter a senseless thank-you for no reason that can be discerned, as if the detective was doing them some kind of favor by showing up.

But on rare occasion, when a defendant is talking shit-performing in the courtroom, signifying, passing wolf tickets to the judge and prosecutor-a detective will step through the psychological barrier. Only then will the defendant be acknowledged in any real way; only then does a detective let anyone suspect that he may actually care about the legal outcome.

Earlier in the year, Dave Brown happened to be in a courtroom for the jury’s verdict on two of his defendants-west-siders, age twenty-two and fourteen, charged with murdering an elderly minister in a street robbery near University Hospital the previous spring. Brown remained silent as the jury forewoman read out first-degree verdicts, but the older defendant suddenly lost his chill.

“You happy now, bitch?” he shouted, turning to glare at the detective.

The gallery fell into silence.

“Yes,” said Brown quietly. “I’m pleased.”

Inside a courtroom, it’s as much as a detective allows himself.

At his cluttered desk on the fourth floor of Courthouse West, Lawrence C. Doan rearranges a stack of legal pads and runs one finger along the bottom of his dark bangs and then back over the top, carefully reassuring himself that all is in place. No cowlicks today. No antigravitational shift in the tie’s Windsor. No lint on the lapels. No problem whatsoever, save for the fact that today he’s going to try to prosecute a murder in the city of Baltimore, which is a little like trying to drive a Winnebago through the eye of a needle.

And now, when Doan wishes only to be left alone to review notes and prepare his opening, a homicide detective bounds through the door to yank his prosecutor’s chain over matters large and small-a deliberate act of sadism, born of the same impulse that causes small children to pull the wings off flies.

“Are we ready?” asks Garvey.

“Are we ready,” says Doan. “You come in here ten minutes before court and ask me that?”

“Just don’t fuck up my case, Larry.”

“How can I?” asks Doan. “It came to me prefucked.”

Garvey ignores him. “The photos come in with me, right?” he asks, wondering about evidentiary order.

“No,” says Doan, trying to think bigger thoughts, “I’ll get those in with Wilson. Where’s Wilson? Did you call the crime lab?”

“And the bullets?” asks Garvey, ignoring him. “Do you need the bullets today?”

“Which bullets? Where’s Wilson, does he-”

“The bullets from the trunk of the car.”

“Um, no. Not today. You can take those back to evidence control,” says Doan, preoccupied. “Does Wilson know he’s on this afternoon?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?” says Doan. “You think so? What about Kopera?”

“What about him?”

Doan begins to change colors.

“You’re not going to get to Kopera this afternoon, right?” asks Garvey.

Doan buries his head in his hands, contemplating the known realities. The federal budget deficit is out of control, the ozone layer is being depleted, twenty pissant countries have nuclear weapons and I, Lawrence Doan, am trapped in a small room with Rich Garvey, ten minutes away from opening arguments.

“No, I don’t need Kopera,” says Doan, regaining his calm. “I’ll need Wilson probably.”

“You want me to call him?” asks Garvey, now playful.

“Yes,” says Doan. “Yes. Please. Call him.”

“Well, Larry, if it’ll help you relax…”

Doan shoots Garvey a look.

“Don’t you look at me that way, motherfucker,” says the detective, pushing back the suit jacket to reach his waist holster and grab the butt of his gun. “I’ll shoot you full of holes right here and now and everyone in this courthouse will rule it justifiable.”

The prosecutor responds with his middle finger, and the detective lifts the gun a few inches from the holster, then laughs.

“F. Lee Doan,” says Garvey, smiling. “You better not lose this case, motherfucker.”

“Well, if you’d do your fucking job and get me some witnesses…”

The standard prosecutorial lament, heard a thousand times a day by a thousand police officers in a thousand distant courthouses.

“You’ve got witnesses,” counters Garvey. “Romaine Jackson, Sharon Henson, Vincent Booker…”

At the mention of Booker’s name, Doan gives the detective another look.

“Well,” says Garvey, shrugging, “he’s definitely a witness…”

“We’ve been through this, goddammit,” says Doan, growing irritated. “I do not want to put Vincent Booker on the witness stand. That’s the last thing I want to do.”

“Okay,” says Garvey, shrugging. “But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Yeah,” says Doan, “I know you do. And I’m sure when we lose this case you’ll be the first one to say I told you so.”

“I sure as shit will be,” says Garvey.

The prosecutor rubs his temples, then looks down at the pile of paper on his desk that represents the state’s case against Robert Frazier in the murder of Lena Lucas. For the sake of giving Garvey grief, he has overstated the matter just a bit: The case against Frazier is solid and he does indeed have witnesses. But it is nonetheless a circumstantial prosecution, and therefore-as prosecutors enjoy pointing out-it is subject to circumstances beyond control. Without an eyeball witness or the murder weapon, without a full confession or an obvious motive, the web that connects Frazier to the death of his lover will be thin. To Garvey, who has built the case, Vincent Booker is part of that web; to avoid his testimony as a trial tactic is to weaken the case. But to Doan, Vincent Booker is a loose cannon rolling around on the deck of the ship, a witness who might be seen as an alternate suspect by the jurors.

After all, Vincent did sell Frazier’s cocaine. He knew Lena Lucas and already admitted to his knowledge of the events that preceded his father’s murder. Garvey himself believed that Vincent was probably present when Frazier demanded that old man Booker return the drugs he had taken from his son’s room. Vincent probably stood there dumbstruck as Frazier used that knife to cut his father repeatedly in the face, demanding to know where the package was. He could still have been standing there when Frazier finally used the gun. Given those probable truths, no one could say where Vincent’s trial testimony might lead.

No, thinks Doan again, the risks of Vincent Booker’s testimony are greater than the benefits, though trying to argue the point with Garvey is futile. The detective is convinced that Frazier’s attorney, Paul Polansky, will use Vincent Booker as an alternate suspect in any event. In Garvey’s view, keeping Booker in the background will only play into the opposition’s strategy.

That difference of opinion, coupled with the usual concerns about all the logistics involving evidence and witnesses, is enough to ruin whatever quiet reflection Doan had hoped for before this morning’s arguments. Instead, a detective and his prosecutor begin the day in each other’s faces.

Doan smiles, then waves his tormentor out of the cubicle for a few moments of silence. A veteran of the Baltimore courthouse, Larry Doan is short and stocky, with dark hair, pale skin, wire-rims, and an eye that wanders just enough to deny his face symmetry. In the courtroom, Doan’s appearance and demeanor often suggest a near-permanent state of woe; at times he seems to embody every stereotype about the underpaid, overworked big-city prosecutor, his briefcase crammed with motions, answers to motions and stipulations, his values crowded by the rising tide of human despair. If the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office ever needed a poster boy, Doan would be the odds-on favorite.

Among the other lawyers in the trial division, Doan’s reputation is reasonably good. He is said to be fair, reasoned and methodical with both evidence and witnesses. He preps hard for trials and his closing arguments are always competent, often skillful, though sometimes not nearly as strong or emotional as some think they could be. But in one respect, he is a rare prize for any homicide detective who happens to care about a case: Doan will fight. Assured that a defendant is guilty and that no reasonable plea can be taken, Doan isn’t afraid to take a borderline or marginal case to a jury. Like any trial lawyer, he hates to lose, but he is willing to lose if the only alternative is a stet or dismissal.

Garvey is counting on this: He knows Doan will fight, just as he knows that the evidence against Robert Frazier is sufficient but not overwhelming. Kidding aside, he’s glad to have Doan for this one.

Leaving the prosecutor’s cubicle, the detective walks down the side stairwell to the third-floor hallway outside Cliff Gordy’s courtroom. There are two benches in the hall and a third in the carpeted anteroom just outside Gordy’s court. Because he is a sequestered witness, Garvey will make the three benches his office for the next week, as a prosecution that he worked hard to prepare unfolds without him.

For Garvey, the relegation to prosecutor’s assistant is always hard to accept. Doan isn’t one of those lawyers who wants a cop to be seen and not heard; he’s willing to take advice. On the other hand, he’s going to listen to that advice, evaluate it, and then try the case his way. Garvey, who knows the Lena Lucas case better than any man, is not exactly known for his abundant tact; in fact, he’s never met an opinion he’d be unwilling to venture. Yet Doan must walk through Judge Gordy’s double doors and try the case on the merits; Garvey must sit outside and play shepherd to the state’s evidence and witnesses. The morning banter in Doan’s office suggests the change in status: In February, it was Garvey who was sweating this case, scratching for every available piece of evidence. Now Garvey has the time to joke and tease. Now he can pretend not to know whether Wilson from the crime lab is going to show up for trial. Now he can criticize the trial strategy and demand victory. Now it’s Larry Doan’s turn to carry the weight.

Yet Garvey wants very much to win this case. For one thing, he has never lost a case that has gone to a jury trial and he’d like to keep that admirable record intact. For another, he would like to see Lena Lucas avenged. She was using cocaine and helping Frazier to deal; still, she was a good enough mother to her daughters and she never hurt anyone but herself. Both of Lena’s daughters and her sister are scheduled as state’s witnesses, and all three are waiting with Garvey. The rest of the family is already inside the court, but earlier that morning, they greeted Garvey in the corridor as if he were Moses down from Sinai. Good people, thinks Garvey, settling in on the bench. They deserve to win this.

The man of the hour, Robert Frazier, is already inside the courtroom and behind the defense table, sitting next to his lawyer with a hardbound copy of the New Testament in front of him, a cardboard marker pressed inside the Book of Luke. Frazier is wearing a well-tailored dark suit and a crisp white shirt, but somehow there’s no mistaking his line of work. Just before the jury files in, Frazier stretches his tall frame, pushes his chair back and yawns like a man at ease in courtrooms. He turns to look at the members of the Lucas family in the back row, stares for a moment, then turns away.

The motions hearings were yesterday morning, with Doan successfully fighting off some routine efforts by Paul Polansky, who tried to have the identification of his client by Romaine Jackson-the young girl who saw Frazier enter Lena’s building from her third-floor window-ruled inadmissible. Polansky argued that Frazier’s photo had been given greater prominence in the photo array shown to the girl because it was in the upper left corner and because the other men seemed younger and less thin. Gordy denied the motion, as well as one that challenged a search warrant that Garvey and Donald Kincaid had written for Frazier’s Chrysler after the arrest. Live.38 ammunition had been found in the trunk.

The rest of the day was spent on the selection of a jury-voir dire-the elaborate process by which potential jurors are screened for bias by the court. Voir dire is, in itself, an essential part of the trial strategy, with prosecutors using their limited number of “strikes” to keep out those potential jurors who have been beaten by police, have relatives in the prison system, or generally regard the criminal courts of the United States as a sham perpetrated by running dog capitalist jackals. At the same time, the defense attorney endeavors to use his strikes to remove all who are related to a law enforcement officer, who were ever the victims of a crime, or who truly believe that if the man seated at the defense table is accused of the crime, he must be guilty. Because the population of Baltimore generally holds membership in one or more categories, voir dire in the Lucas case took quite a while-at least until the lawyers exhausted the allowable strikes.

From his seat at the trial table, Doan now watches the product of yesterday’s effort walk in from the jury room. A typical Baltimore jury-predominantly black, predominantly female. Polansky didn’t exactly go out of his way to find white jurors willing to sit in judgment on his black client; nor, for that matter, did Larry Doan strike any white strays from the jury box. Still, watching the jurors file in, Doan is generally satisfied. Most are working people, but with the sole exception of the girl in the front row, all seem sharp and attentive, which matters for a case such as this one. The girl in the front row, however, is trouble. Doan watches her slump into her seat, arms crossed, staring at the floor. She’s bored already; God knows what she’ll be like after four days of testimony.

Judge Clifton Gordy calls the court to order and begins his preamble, explaining the legal arena to the jurors. Tall, quiet, serious, Gordy cuts quite a figure on the bench. His language is precise, his humor is sharp, and his manner often seems, to lawyers at least, well suited to tyranny. Attorneys who fail to rise when stating their objections in Gordy’s court generally find themselves ignored. Gordy knows his law and he knows his lawyers; Doan, for example, worked for Gordy when the judge was heading the trial division. One other thing about the judge suits Doan in this case: Cliff Gordy is black, and that takes some of the edge off the fact that two white Jewish guys will be arguing the question of a black man’s freedom. It will certainly help the black jurors to believe that the criminal justice system actually represents them.

As Gordy finishes his introduction and Doan rises to begin his opening, Garvey sits in the anteroom, struggling with the morning Sun crossword.

“British gun,” says Garvey. “Four letters.”

“S-T-E-N,” says Dave Brown from the other end of the bench, where he waits in case the trial testimony turns to the Purnell Booker case. “A British gun is always Sten in crosswords.”

“You’re right,” says Garvey.

Lost to them is Doan’s greeting to the jury, his warning that this is a murder case, a nasty, ugly, gruesome murder case that involves the willful taking of human life. That accomplished, Doan begins the long, labored process by which jurors are shorn of preconceptions.

“This is not television,” he assures the jury. “Unlike TV shows, motive is not an element of the crime of first-degree murder. You don’t know exactly why it happened. It’s something you would like to know, it’s something the person trying the case would like to know, but it’s not necessary to know it to prove the crime.”

And then, following a standard script, Doan pulls out the jigsaw puzzle, the courtroom metaphor used by nearly every American prosecutor to earn his pay. You see, Doan tells the jury, this case is like a jigsaw puzzle. And like a puzzle that’s been around the house for a while, some of the pieces might be missing. “But, ladies and gentlemen, even with the missing pieces, when you assemble that jigsaw puzzle, you can still determine what the puzzle is about and what it shows.”

Doan launches into the story of Charlene Lucas. He touches all of the essentials: her relationship with Robert Frazier, her involvement in drugs, the crime scene itself and the investigation that followed. Doan tells the jurors about Romaine Jackson, who identified Frazier as the man who came home with Lena the night of the murder; he talks about Frazier’s initial interview with Garvey in which the defendant offered an alibi and promised to come in with his own.38; he tells them about Sharon Denise Henson, “Nee-Cee,” who failed to corroborate Frazier’s alibi. He tells them about the nested clothes and the victim’s nudity and the lack of forced entry-indications that Lena was murdered by someone she knew intimately.

“Give Mr. Frazier his fair day in court,” Doan tells the jury. “Give him his trial and give Charlene Lucas her fair day in court and her family, who are here today, their day in court. And after you put it all together and you finish the puzzle, you are going to see a picture and that picture is going to be the defendant killing Charlene Lucas. Thank you.”

The prosecutor does not mention the murder of Purnell Booker and that the ballistics report links that murder to the Lucas killing. He does not mention Vincent Booker, who admitted to supplying Frazier with.38 wadcutter reloads before both murders and told the detectives that his father was killed for taking Frazier’s drugs. By the court’s ruling on a pretrial motion, the Booker murder is prejudicial and not to be mentioned in the jury’s presence-a ruling that appeals to both attorneys. Because just as Doan knows that Vincent Booker is a risk, so does Polansky. A good lawyer never asks any question without knowing the answer, and with Vincent Booker, Polansky can’t be sure what the answers might be. As Frazier’s attorney, he needs to raise the specter of Vincent Booker just enough to suggest an alternate suspect to the jury. But he, too, has decided not to risk calling Booker as a court witness. Loose cannons roll both ways.

During his opening, Polansky assures the jurors that Robert Frazier “has been fighting in the Baltimore City Jail for the last eight months to come here and tell you his story of Lena’s death, to tell you that because of perhaps a poorly run police investigation they have the wrong man, to tell you that he is in no way, no shape, no form, guilty of this crime.”

My client is not a saint, Polansky tells the jury. Drugs? Yes, he sold drugs. A.38-caliber handgun. Yes, he had a gun. You will hear good things and bad things about Robert Frazier, Polansky declares, but does any of that make him guilty of the murder?

“On a number of occasions in this case,” says Polansky, “there is a man named Vincent Booker who is involved with Charlene Lucas and has access to her apartment… Well, this is not Perry Mason and people will not jump up in court and confess to murder. But the story that Robert Frazier is here to tell you will indicate that Vincent Booker committed this crime.”

Polansky continues his rebuttal, explaining that Frazier cooperated in the police investigation, that he voluntarily came forward, but that it soon became clear that the detectives were focusing on him as a suspect to the exclusion of everything else. He didn’t bring in the weapon, true; he was fearful of a handgun charge and these detectives were obviously trying to put the murder on him. And they were doing this after he tried to help them find Lena’s killer.

“Mr. Doan told you about a puzzle and he is right,” says Polansky, finding common ground. “You can tell a picture without seeing all of the pieces, if you’re missing three, or four, or five pieces. But if you’re missing too many pieces…”

In the anteroom, Garvey is vexed by puzzles of a different sort. When the court breaks for lunch, he is deep into the Evening Sun crossword, having battled the morning paper’s puzzle to a draw. Dave Brown is asleep sitting up, the Booker case file in his lap.

Justice pauses for lunch. The detectives leave, they eat, they return to the bench to watch a steady parade of state’s witnesses going in and out of the afternoon session: Lena Lucas’s older daughter, to testify about Frazier’s relationship with her mother and to shoot down the notion that Vincent Booker had access to the apartment; the upstairs neighbor at 17 North Gilmor, to testify to his discovery of the body and place the time of death; the first officer from the Western District, to testify to the preservation of the scene and the recovery of evidence; Wilson, from the crime lab, to bring the scene photos and testify to the attempt to lift fingerprints; Purvis, from the trace section, to testify about the comparison of latent prints and the inability to match any of the lifts from Gilmor Street to anyone other than Charlene Lucas.

When the bailiff finally comes for Garvey, he’s just about done with the Evening Sun, having been stumped by some five-letter French river. Leaving the paper on the bench, Garvey moves toward the witness stand clothed in dark blue pinstripes, the power suit according him the required confidence. The Republican tie, the eyeglasses-ladies and gentlemen of the jury, meet the police department’s vice president for sales and marketing.

“Good afternoon,” says Doan in a stage voice. “How long have you been with the Baltimore City Police Department?”

“Over thirteen years,” says Garvey, straightening his tie.

“Of that thirteen years, how long have you been with the homicide unit?”

“The last three and a half.”

“And would you care to tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how many murder cases you’ve handled during that period of time.”

“I’ve been assigned personally to slightly over fifty cases.”

“And,” says Doan, leading, “I assume you have been involved in one way or another in parts of other cases.”

“Numerous investigations,” says Garvey.

Slowly, Doan begins to take the detective through the crime scene at 17 North Gilmor. Garvey describes the apartment, giving special attention to the security features, including the burglar alarm that had been turned off. He provides a detailed description of the scene, and the jury again hears about the lack of forced entry, the nested pile of clothes, the scratches on the headboard suggesting that she was stabbed while lying in bed. Then, at Doan’s direction, Garvey walks over to the jury box, where Doan takes him through the crime scene photos already admitted to evidence.

The photos themselves are always the source of considerable courtroom conflict, with defense attorneys arguing that the depiction of the bloodied victim is unnecessarily prejudicial and prosecutors arguing that the photos have probative value for a jury. Prosecutors usually win the argument, as Doan has in this case. Thus Lena Lucas and her wounds are displayed for the jurors in glossy splendor from a variety of camera angles over Polansky’s continuing objection. The jurors seem impressed.

Garvey is at the jury box for ten minutes before returning to the witness stand, where Doan takes him through the search of the crime scene and the interviews with neighbors. The prosecutor makes a point of asking about street lighting outside the Gilmor Street rowhouse and Garvey describes the sodium vapor light in the middle of the block-an essential foundation for the coming testimony from Romaine Jackson.

“At this time, I have no further questions of Detective Garvey,” says Doan after twenty-five minutes of testimony. “However, I wish to recall him later.”

“You may,” says Gordy. “Cross-examination, Mr. Polansky.”

“For the same reasons, I will restrict my cross-examination to the testimony elicited on direct.”

Fine with me, thinks Garvey, calm and collected on the stand. With just the boilerplate of the crime scene to worry about, he reasons, there won’t be much in the way of controversy this afternoon.

Polansky goes into some detail on the pattern of wounds, prompting the detective to agree that the stab wounds came before the gunshot wound to the head; the defense wounds to the hands prove as much. The defense attorney also spends some time dealing with the empty purse, the broken bag of rice and the empty gelatin capsules on the bedroom floor. “So it would appear, would it not, sir, that whatever assailants attacked and killed Ms. Lucas probably took whatever drugs she had in that pocketbook?”

“Objection,” says Doan.

The judge agrees that the defense attorney’s question is too speculative, but the image of Vincent Booker hovers over the courtroom. Why, after all, would Frazier murder someone to take drugs that were already his? No reason unless, of course, he wanted to make the killing seem like a drug robbery.

Polansky moves forward, chronicling the drug paraphernalia scattered around the crime scene in an effort to make his point another way. He brings Garvey back to the nested clothes. The apartment was very tidy, was it not? Very neat, Garvey agrees.

“The kind of individual who would not take off her clothes and throw them on the floor but would take them off, fold them up and put them away. Would you agree?”

Oh my, thinks Garvey, you tricky bastard, you. “No,” says the detective. “I would not agree.”

Polansky leaves that seeming contradiction with the jury and moves on to state’s exhibit 2U, a photograph of the bedroom floor after the bed had been lifted. The defense attorney points out a soft pack of Newport cigarettes visible on the floor.

“And there is an ashtray?” he adds.

“Yes, sir,” says Garvey.

“Did you ever determine Ms. Lucas was a smoker?”

Aw shit, thinks Garvey. He’s going to run wild with this crap. “I can’t recall if I did or not.”

“Do you think that might have been of some significance?”

“I’m sure the question came up during the investigation,” says Garvey, trying to tiptoe around the minefield. “Obviously, the answer didn’t have any significance.”

“Did you ask her daughters or anyone close to her whether she was a smoker?”

“I don’t recall specifically doing that.”

“If she wasn’t a smoker, do you agree that finding a pack of cigarettes would have been worth looking into?”

“I would agree the cigarette pack would have been,” says Garvey, his voice clipped.

“To find out who was close to her and was a smoker,” Polansky continues. “Because you assumed someone close to her was in there because there was no forced entry, correct?”

“That is correct,” says Garvey.

“So it might be significant to find out if anyone close to her or any of the possible suspects which we’ll talk about at some later time may have been a smoker and specifically a smoker of Newports.”

“Objection,” says Doan, trying for a broken field tackle. “Is there a question?”

“Yes,” says Polansky. “Would you agree it is significant?”

“No,” says Garvey, regrouping. “Because we don’t know when the cigarette pack was placed there. It was beneath the bed. It certainly would have been something to look into, but it would have been something I wouldn’t base an investigation on.”

“Well,” says Polansky, “except for the fact, sir, wouldn’t you agree that Ms. Lucas was a very neat person and not likely to have left a pack of cigarettes on the floor for some long period of time?”

“Objection,” says Doan.

“Isn’t it much more likely the pack was left there the night of the murder?”

“Objection.”

Gordy intervenes. “Can you answer that question to a reasonable degree of certainty? Yes or no?”

From the prosecution table, Doan is staring at the detective, his head moving back and forth in a slight, barely discernible shaking motion. Take the out, he wants to say. Take the out.

“I can answer,” says Garvey.

“Overruled,” says Gordy.

“Underneath the bed there appeared to be a fair amount of debris. The overall visible areas in the house were neat and tidy, but underneath the bed I would not characterize it as being neat and tidy.”

“Was the phone under the bed?” asks Polansky.

“Yes,” says Garvey, looking at the photo. “We moved that back to take the photograph.”

“It is fair to say the phone wasn’t lying there a long period of time?”

“I don’t know when the phone was placed there,” says Garvey.

A partial save by a veteran detective. Polansky counts his winnings and moves on, asking about the human hairs that were recovered from the sheet by the lab tech and sent to the trace section. Were they ever compared to anyone?

“You can’t tell from a hair who it belongs to,” says Garvey, now on his guard.

“They can’t tell you anything more than that about hair. There is no scientific test that is at all helpful in a homicide investigation?”

“There is no way they can tell you that a particular hair can come from a particular person.”

“Can they narrow it down to a white man’s or black man’s?” asks Polansky.

Garvey grants the point: “But they can’t go too much farther.”

The detective and defense attorney circle each other for several more questions until Polansky’s point is clear: The hair recovered at the scene was never compared to anyone else’s hair. Even though such a comparison would be pointless, Polansky leaves the impression that Garvey’s investigation was less than thorough.

So far Polansky has earned his money. Garvey proves as much at the end of the cross-examination, when the defense attorney asks him about time-of-death.

“Rigor mortis had been fully set and she was coming out of rigor mortis,” says the detective. “Also, with the dried bloodstains underneath her head-the blood was thick and coagulated and the outer edges of the blood were dried into the carpet-it seemed to me she had been there probably for twenty-four hours.”

Polansky and Doan both look up. Twenty-four hours would put time of death at late afternoon the previous day.

“She had been dead for twenty-four hours?” asks Polansky.

“That’s correct,” says Garvey.

Doan looks hard at the witness, trying to make Garvey think the answer through.

“So it would have been your conclusion she had to have been killed at least at five P.M. on the twenty-first?” says Polansky.

Garvey realizes. “I take that back. No, I’m sorry. I got confused. I meant at least twelve hours.”

“I thought that’s what you meant,” says Polansky. “Thank you. No further questions.”

On redirect, Doan goes back to the recovered hairs, but that only allows Polansky, in his follow-up questions, to suggest again that the detective was not interested in pursuing all the evidence: “If you checked those hairs, you would have been able to determine whether they belonged to Mr. Frazier or Ms. Lucas or someone else. Is that not true?”

“If we did a comparison between their hairs we can tell if they were similar,” repeats Garvey wearily.

“Which you had the ability to do, but you didn’t do it,” says Polansky.

“I felt no need to do it,” says Garvey.

“That’s a pity, sir. Thank you.”

The last comment gets to Doan, who turns in his chair to look at Polansky. “Come on,” he says sarcastically. Then Doan looks up at the judge. “I have no further questions.”

“You may step down, sir,” says Gordy.

The first day ends. In the corridor five minutes later, Garvey encounters Polansky and feigns anger, cocking a fist as if ready to throw a punch. “You miserable shyster,” he says, smiling.

“Hey, now,” says Polansky, a little defensive. “Nothing personal, Rich. I’m just doing the job.”

“Oh, I know it,” says Garvey, hitting the defense attorney’s shoulder. “I got no complaint.”

But Doan is not so easily mollified. Walking back to his office with Garvey, he issues a few choice epithets for his worthy adversary.

The hairs, the Newports-that was smoke, the raw material of any good defense attorney. Smoke is the theory that says: When you don’t want to argue the state’s evidence, create your own. No doubt Robert Frazier is ready to take the stand and declare that Vincent Booker buys Newports.

Garvey knows the cigarette pack could be a problem and he apologizes to Doan. “I’m sure I dealt with it out at the scene. I just couldn’t remember the specifics, though.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Doan charitably. “But can we-”

“I’ll check with Jackie or Henrietta right away,” says Garvey, ahead of him. “Larry, I’m sure it was Lena’s cigarettes, but I just don’t remember who told me.”

“Okay,” says Doan. “The bullshit about the hair, I could care less, but he made some points on the cigarettes. We’ve got to shoot that down.”

On the second day of the trial, Larry Doan moves quickly to make up for lost ground.

“Your honor,” says Doan, as court comes to order. “The state at this time will recall Henrietta Lucas for two questions.”

Polansky can see what is coming.

“Miss Lucas,” asks the prosecutor, “were you aware at the time of the death of your mother whether she smoked?”

“Yes,” says Lena’s older daughter.

“Do you know, approximately, when she started smoking?”

“Around the beginning of this year.”

“And,” asks Doan, “whatbrand of cigarettes did she smoke, if you know?”

“Newports.”

Polansky, sitting at the defense table, shakes his head. But he is not quite ready to give in. On the cross, he works hard to suggest that Robert Frazier spent more time with his lover than her grown daughter did and that he would be in a better position to know whether Lena was smoking or not. He tries to suggest that it was oddly coincidental that a forty-year-old woman would start smoking two months before her death. He asks the daughter whether she had discussed her testimony in detail with the prosecutor, suggesting to the jury that she may have been led to her answers. It is a good effort; once again, Polansky earns his money. Still, when Henrietta Lucas leaves the stand after five minutes’ testimony, the cigarette pack is no longer a real threat.

Doan follows her with John Smialek, who describes the autopsy and the nature of the wounds and brings in as evidence a series of black-and-white photos depicting the injuries in detail. More than the scene photos, the antiseptic shots from the overhead camera on Penn Street catch the excess of violence: three gunshot wounds-one with thick powder burns to the left side of the face, one to the chest, one to the left arm; eleven stab wounds to the back, plus superficial cuts to the neck and lower jaw; defense wounds to the palm of the right hand. In the form of ten graphic pictures, admitted over the continuing objection of Robert Frazier’s attorney, Lena Lucas is allowed her day in court.

But the morning’s testimony is merely prelude to the real battle-a war of credibility that begins later in the day when a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, obviously terrified, walks past Robert Frazier and takes the stand.

Romaine Jackson is literally shaking as she takes the oath; the jurors can see that. She sits demurely, hands in her lap, face locked on Doan, eyes unwilling to acknowledge the tall, dark man at the defendant’s table. In Doan’s worst nightmare, he sees this witness-this essential witness-collapsing from fear. He sees her unable to answer, unable to tell the truth about what she saw from her window on Gilmor Street that night, unable to recall the things that they had talked about in the pretrial interviews. All of which would be understandable, even forgivable: The state of Maryland will not allow her to cast a vote or buy a beer, but the state’s attorney will nonetheless ask her to identify a murder suspect in open court.

“My name is Romaine Jackson,” she says softly, responding to the clerk’s questions. “I live at Sixteen-o-six West Pratt Street.”

“Miss Jackson,” says Doan soothingly, “try to keep your voice up so the ladies and gentlemen of the jury can hear you.”

“Yes, sir.”

As slowly, as calmly as possible, Doan takes her through the foundation questions and back to that night on Gilmor Street, back to the moment when she happened to be looking out of that third-floor window before falling off to sleep. The girl’s answers are close to monosyllabic; the court clerk reminds her once again to speak into the microphone.

“At some point, did you have an occasion to see your neighbor Charlene Lucas outside of your apartment?” asks Doan.

“Yes.”

“Would you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury approximately what time it was when you saw her?”

“Eleven o’clock going onto twelve.”

“Was she by herself or with someone else?”

“Yes,” says the girl. “A man.”

“Do you see that individual in court today?”

“Yes, sir,” says the girl.

“Would you point that individual out?”

Romaine Jackson’s eyes break from the prosecutor for half a second, just long enough to follow her right hand in the direction of Robert Frazier.

“Him,” she says quietly, her eyes once again riveted on Doan.

The prosecutor moves forward slowly. “Would you describe what the defendant looked like on that evening?”

“Tall, dark and slim,” she says.

“What was he wearing that evening?”

“A black coat. A black jacket like this one.”

“Was he wearing anything on his head?”

“A hat.”

“What color was it?”

“A white hat,” she says, a hand to her forehead, “with a snap on it.”

She is crying now, just enough for it to show, not enough for Doan to think of stopping. Following the prosecutor’s lead, she tells the court about how Lena and the tall man walked toward Lena’s rowhouse next door and then disappeared from her view, how she fell asleep to the sound of an argument coming from a lower floor of the adjacent house, how she later heard about the murder.

“Miss Jackson,” asks Doan, “after you discovered or learned that Charlene Lucas had been murdered, did you go to the police with the information you had?”

“No,” she says, crying again.

“Why was that, ma’am?”

Polansky objects.

“Overruled,” says Gordy.

“Scared,” the girl says. “I didn’t want to get involved.”

“Are you still scared?”

“Yes,” she says, her voice little more than a whisper.

Frightened but firm, Romaine Jackson holds to her testimony throughout Polansky’s cross. The defense attorney works the edges of her story: the lighting on the street that night; the time that she was looking out the window; her reasons for looking out the window; her ability to hear the argument in the house next door. Polansky can’t run roughshod over this young girl; even if harsh tactics could rattle her story, the jury would resent such treatment. Instead, he can only suggest that she is mistaken, that perhaps she cannot be sure she saw Robert Frazier when she says she saw him. Polansky works the corners of the girl’s testimony for half an hour, prolonging her agony but doing little to change the essentials of her story. By the time she leaves the stand in the late afternoon, Romaine Jackson’s quiet embrace of the truth is a powerful force.

“Whoa… Romaine, honey,” says Garvey, catching her as she races out the rear doors of the courtroom. “Hey, now, tell the truth. That wasn’t all that bad now, was it?”

“Yes,” she says, now crying and laughing in the same breath. “It was.”

“Oh, come on,” says the detective, wrapping an arm around her. “I’ll bet you got to like it a little at the end, didn’t you?”

“No,” she says, laughing. “No, I did not.”

Half an hour later, when Doan emerges from the courtroom, Garvey buttonholes him in the third-floor corridor: “How’d my girl do in there?”

“She was great,” says Doan without exaggeration. “Scared, but great.”

But it is far from over. The next day’s testimony brings the end of the state’s case, with both attorneys skirmishing over the ballistic evidence and the.38 ammunition recovered in the case. With Dave Brown on the witness stand, Doan tries to limit the testimony to the.38 bullets recovered from Frazier’s car after his arrest; Polansky, laboring hard not to violate the pretrial motions prohibiting any mention of the Purnell Booker slaying, probes Brown on cross about the issue of the earlier search warrant, when the detectives recovered the.38 wadcutter ammo and knives from beneath Vincent Booker’s bed. It is a sensitive issue-neither attorney wants to cross the line that brings the Booker murder into testimony-and it requires four bench conferences with Gordy before Brown’s testimony is successfully negotiated. On redirect, Doan makes sure to have Brown testify that the knives recovered from Vincent Booker were tested and found to be free of blood, but still Polansky has managed once again, with a few questions, to raise the specter of an alternate suspect.

He does so yet again when Joe Kopera, from the firearms unit, follows Brown to the stand. Doan leads Kopera through the examination of bullets used to kill the victim, as well as the.38 cartridges found in Frazier’s car after his arrest. The bullets are all of the same caliber, Kopera agrees. But that testimony, although limited, opens the door to Polansky, who follows up by noting that the bullets that killed Lena Lucas are.38 wadcutters, and the bullets recovered from his client’s car are.38 round-noses.

“So what you are saying,” says Polansky, “is that while the bullets that came from Robert Frazier’s car are indeed thirty-eights, they weren’t the same kind of thirty-eights that were recovered from the crime scene.”

“Yes, sir, that is correct.”

“And some of the bullets-twelve of the bullets recovered from Vincent Booker’s residence-were not only thirty-eight caliber but were also wadcutter. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” says Kopera.

If Rich Garvey could hear this, if he could hear Polansky propping up the shadowy figure of Vincent Booker in front of the jury, he might be inclined to wring Doan’s neck. The only way to counter Polansky is to make the link between the bullets taken from Vincent Booker and Robert Frazier, and the only way to do that is to put Vincent Booker on the stand. Booker himself could testify that he gave the wadcutters to Frazier on the night of the murder; that Frazier had told him they were going to get the drugs back from his father and had asked him for ammunition. But that kind of testimony might raise more questions than it would answer; in Doan’s mind, the only reasoned alternative is to cut bait.

As the state nears the end of its presentation, the courtroom observers are divided in their opinion about which side is winning. Doan has laid his foundation and guided Romaine Jackson successfully through her precious testimony. But Polansky has done well at points, too, and his deft use of Vincent Booker may be enough to sway the jury. But Doan isn’t quite finished. He surprises Polansky with one last witness, a witness the defense attorney did not expect to see used against his client.

“Your honor,” says Doan, after the jurors have been dismissed for the day’s lunch hour, “I would request that Sharon Denise Henson, once she is called, be called as a court’s witness.”

“Objection!” says Polansky, almost shouting.

“Your reasons for saying, Mr. Doan,” asks Gordy, “in light of the objection?”

The prosecutor recounts Robert Frazier’s attempt to use his second girlfriend as an alibi in the murder of his first, as well as the detectives’ subsequent interrogation of Nee-Cee Henson, in which she admitted that Frazier had left her dinner party early and then failed to return until morning. Henson signed a written statement to that effect and then gave similar testimony to the grand jury; now, with Frazier looking at the possibility of life without parole, she is backing up, telling Doan that she remembers the dinner party more clearly now. Frazier, she says, left for only a few moments early in the evening and then stayed with her until morning.

The woman began backing away from her testimony weeks ago, when she first signed a written statement for a private investigator employed by Polansky. Her behavior does not surprise Doan, who has learned that she has repeatedly visited Frazier at the city jail. Now he asks Gordy to call her to the stand as a hostile witness. To the prosecutor, Sharon Henson is valuable precisely because her testimony will not be credible.

“It would be an injustice for this jury to be deprived of seeing her and hearing from her,” says Doan, “and it would put the state in an impossible position to actually call her as its own witness.”

“Mr. Polansky?” asks Gordy.

“Your honor, would it be possible to respond… to respond to Mr. Doan’s argument after the break so I can have an opportunity to absorb this?”

“Denied.”

“Can I have a minute to look at this?” he says, scanning a copy of the state’s motion.

“You may,” says Gordy, the very picture of bored irritation. “While Mr. Polansky is looking at that, I will note for the record this issue has been anticipated in this trial, according to conversations between counsel and the court, since the beginning of this trial.”

Polansky takes a few more minutes, then attempts a response, arguing that Miss Henson’s current version of events doesn’t differ dramatically from her earlier testimony. It doesn’t seem, Polansky argues, that the statements are so inconsistent as to justify calling her as a court’s witness.

“Do you intend to call her as a witness in the defense case?”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Polansky. “I can’t make that commitment at this point, your honor.”

“Because if you were, these questions would be moot.”

“I agree,” says the defense attorney. “I think the likelihood is I will not call her.”

Gordy then announces his decision: Although she is lying to save her man, Sharon Henson will testify against him. The woman takes the stand after the lunch break and begins an ordeal that lasts well over an hour. If a man’s freedom wasn’t at issue, if a family wasn’t seated in the gallery, praying for vengeance, Henson’s performance in service of her boyfriend might count as comedy. Black velvet evening dress, pillbox hat, fur wrap-her appearance alone makes it difficult to take her testimony seriously. Conscious of her big moment in this drama, she takes the oath and crosses her legs in the witness box as if to mimic the femme fatales of every Grade B film noir. Even the jury begins to giggle.

“How old are you, ma’am?” asks Doan.

“Twenty-five.”

“Do you know an individual by the name of Robert Frazier?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you see that individual in the courtroom today?”

“Yes.”

“Point him out, please.”

The woman points to the defense table, then, for just a moment, smiles softly at the defendant. Frazier looks back impassively.

Doan establishes Sharon Henson’s relationship with Frazier for the jury’s benefit, then takes her back to the night of her party and the murder. In her statements to Garvey and the grand jury, Henson acknowledged that she had been drinking and using drugs, but she had unequivocally stated that Frazier had left the party late that evening and not returned until morning. Now, she is remembering something altogether different.

“Do you still consider yourself Mr. Frazier’s girlfriend today?” asks Doan.

“Do I really have to answer that?”

“Yes,” says Gordy. “Answer the question.”

“Yes, I do.”

“And during the time that Mr. Frazier has been incarcerated you have visited him at the jail, have you not?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Now, how many times have you visited him there?”

“Three times.”

Doan heaps it on, asking Henson to list the Valentine’s Day gifts she received from Frazier before the murder. Then he turns abruptly to the issue of the.38 revolver that Frazier had given her to hold after the killing, the weapon that Frazier had taken back from her four days before Garvey and Kincaid showed up to interview her.

“And when he asked you for the weapon,” says Doan, his voice even, “did he tell you why he wanted it?”

“Yes, he did.”

“What did he say, ma’am?”

“That the police would be coming to talk to me, and he told them that I had the gun for him, but he didn’t ask me for it.”

“And?” asks Doan, looking up from his notes.

Sharon Henson glowers at the prosecutor before answering. “Not to give it to them,” she says, then glances apologetically toward her boyfriend.

“He told you that the police would be coming looking for it. He didn’t want you to give it to them?” asks Doan.

“I remember that, yeah.”

So far, so good. Doan pushes on to the night of the party. He has the woman recite the guest list and the menu, and when she claims poor memory, Doan reminds her that they spoke only ten days earlier in his office.

“At that time, did you tell me that you had ham and cheese, collard greens, corn on the cob, lobster and wine?”

“Yes,” she says, unperturbed.

Doan leads her into the events of the party: Frazier’s arrival, his departure to pick up the lobster, his wardrobe on the night of the party.

“What was Mr. Frazier wearing?”

“Beige.”

“Beige?”

“Beige,” she repeats.

“He had beige slacks on?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Beige shirt?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he have a jacket that he was wearing?”

“Coat,” she says.

“What kind of coat?” asks Doan.

“Beige,” she says.

“Was he wearing anything else beige?”

The jury laughs. Henson glares at them.

“His hat?” asks Doan.

“It’s like a golf cap.”

“The kind with a brim around the front?” asks Doan.

“Snaps on it,” she says, nodding in agreement.

Suddenly, Larry Doan turns the corner on Sharon Henson. He brings out her statement to the detectives as well as her grand jury statement.

“When you spoke to police, didn’t you tell them he was wearing a black waist-length jacket?”

“I spoke to the police,” she says, the change in Doan’s voice making her wary.

“Ma’am, is the answer yes or no?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“Do you remember telling the grand jury what he was wearing?”

“Objection, your honor,” says Polansky.

Gordy overrules him. “Yes or no?” says the judge.

“They might have asked me,” she says bitterly. “I don’t remember.”

And so it goes for half an hour, with Doan reading from the transcripts and Sharon Henson claiming to remember nothing.

“Isn’t it true, ma’am, that during the course of the party you had an argument with Mr. Frazier?”

“Yes.”

“And after the argument he left your apartment?”

“No.”

“He never left your apartment?”

“He left for about twenty minutes, yes.”

“And when he came back, what did he do?”

“He continued to mingle with the guests.”

“And he stayed the whole night. This is what you are telling the ladies and gentlemen of the jury?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“And you want them to believe that, right?”

Polansky is on his feet with the objection.

“Overruled,” says Gordy.

At which point Sharon Henson looks across the courtroom at Larry Doan and smiles sweetly. It’s as if she actually believes she’s destroying the state’s case; in fact, she is turning all of Paul Polansky’s lawyering to dust.

“Is that right, ma’am?” asks Doan. “You want them to believe that he stayed the whole night with you. Is that right?”

“Well he did.”

“Is your memory of the events of the twenty-second of February clearer today than it would have been on March seventeenth or March tenth of this year?”

“March? No. Yes.”

“Is it clearer today?” says Doan, showing his irritation.

“I mean, I have talked it over with the people that was at the party.”

Doan looks at the jury, giving them an honest-to-God double take. “Okay,” he says, shaking his head. “You talked to some people at the party, and that made your recollections clearer?”

“It made me see a few more things about that night that I didn’t see that night or whatever.”

“You mean like how long your boyfriend stayed at your apartment? You needed someone else to tell you how long your boyfriend stayed at your apartment?”

“Excuse me, sir,” hisses the woman. “I was under the influence of drugs and alcohol that night.”

“So how,” asks Doan, saying each word slowly, “do you remember it now?”

At the defense table, Polansky sits with his hand to his forehead, presumably thinking about the case that might have been. Subtle strategies have suddenly been rendered obsolete by simple vaudeville. The Newport cigarettes, the unchecked hairs and the ghost of Vincent Booker-all of that is out the window now that Doan is blowing holes in Sharon Henson for the courtroom’s amusement. At times, the jurors laugh so loudly that Gordy uses the gavel.

Outside the courtroom, Rich Garvey fidgets as Henson’s time on the stand lengthens. Only when Doan emerges is the true scope of the victory made clear to him.

“What happened with Nee-Cee?” he asks the prosecutor as they walk down the third-floor corridor. “How’d she go over?”

Doan smiles as if he had a dorsal fin sticking through the back of his pinstripes. “I killed her. I destroyed her,” he tells the detective. “There’s blood all over the floor in there.”

“She was terrible?”

“She was a fucking joke. The jury was laughing at her,” says Doan, unable to conceal his delight. “I’m serious. I fucking murdered her.”

From here forward, it is a downhill ride. If Sharon Henson had held to the truth, if she had been willing to give the state what she gave them in March, she could have counted herself as nothing worse than one piece of the circumstantial puzzle. Instead, she chose to perjure herself and as a result, she exists in every juror’s mind as evidence of Robert Frazier’s desperation.

On Monday, the testimony begins again with Rich Garvey’s return to the stand and the blow-by-blow of the investigative steps that led to Frazier’s arrest. On the cross-examination, Polansky works hard to emphasize his client’s early cooperation in the probe, Frazier’s willingness to come downtown and be interviewed without a lawyer. At one particularly telling moment, Polansky asks about the wounds from both knife and gun, suggesting that the use of two weapons indicates that two suspects are involved.

“How many years have you been a police officer?” he asks Garvey.

“Thirteen.”

“And you’ve investigated many, many homicide cases either directly or-”

“That’s right,” says Garvey.

“Have you ever had a case where the victim died by a stab wound and gun wound and there was only one perpetrator?” asks Polansky.

“Yes,” says Garvey calmly.

“How many cases? What case? Name it.”

“We had indications in the case of Purnell Booker that there was one perpetrator.”

Take that, thinks Garvey. With one sweet little answer, the same jury that has been asked to worry about the mysterious Vincent Booker can now wonder about the fact that somewhere in this case another Booker exists as a victim. Polansky asks to approach the bench.

“I am not even sure what to do, whether to ask for a mistrial or not,” he tells Gordy.

The judge smiles, shaking his head. “You’re not going to do anything since you asked him.”

“I didn’t ask him,” Polansky protests.

“He answered your question,” says Gordy. “What is your request? What do you want me to do? Why did you come up here?”

“I don’t know,” says Polansky. “Now I’m wondering whether I should open the whole thing.”

“I’m not going to let him open up the whole can of worms based on that answer.”

“Thank you,” says Polansky, still a little dazed. “I am not… I have no requests then.”

Garvey’s second trip to the stand is a carefully crafted piece of work and a redemption of sorts for his performance on the first day of the trial, but it is almost beside the point. So, too, is the testimony of Robert Frazier, who takes the stand the following day to explain himself to the jury and declare that he had no reason or desire to kill Charlene Lucas. Frazier’s day in court has already been clouded by Sharon Henson; she has colored everything to which the jury is subsequently exposed. More than that, Henson’s testimony provided a stark contrast to the other essential testimony in the case: Romaine Jackson was young and frightened and reluctant when she identified Robert Frazier as the man she saw with Lena on the night of the murder; Sharon Henson was hard and bitter and contemptuous when she took the same stand to deny her own words.

That is precisely the comparison that Doan makes in his closing argument to the jury. Rich Garvey, now permitted in the courtroom as an observer, watches several jurors nod in agreement as Doan paints a vivid picture of each woman-one is an innocent truth-teller, the other, a corrupt prevaricator. Once again he returns to Henson’s testimony about her boyfriend’s clothing. He gives special attention to one small piece of testimony, one tiny fragment gleaned from a week of legal argument. When Romaine Jackson testified, she was asked to describe the defendant’s hat. A cap, she says, a white cap.

“She’s got her hands up here and she says it has a snap on it,” recalls Doan, hands to his head. “Has a snap on it… And when did that become significant?”

Sharon Henson, he tells the jury. A day later, Sharon Henson is on the stand trying to help her boyfriend. Oh, says Doan, in imitation, he was wearing all beige. Beige trench coat. Beige slacks. Beige shoes. Probably beige underwear and a beige golf cap…

The prosecutor pauses.

“… with a snap on it.”

By now, even the juror in the front row-the one who had Doan worried at the beginning of the trial-is nodding in agreement.

“Ladies and gentlemen, after seeing and listening to Romaine Jackson and then hearing that description from a woman who is doing her very best to help this defendant, can there be any question that the person that Romaine Jackson says she saw is the defendant?”

A helluva connect, thinks Garvey, as Doan moves on through the rest of the evidence, urging the jury to use common sense. “When you put it all together, that jigsaw puzzle we talked about will be clear. You will clearly see that this man-”

Doan wheels and points at the defense table.

“-despite all his protestations to the contrary is the man who brutally murdered Charlene Lucas in the early morning hours of February 22, 1988.”

Polansky responds with his strongest stuff, listing the state’s evidence on a nearby drawing board and then crossing off each item as he tries to explain away the circumstances. He does his best to knock down Romaine Jackson and to resurrect Vincent Booker as the logical alternative. He steers clear, however, of Sharon Henson.

In his final response to the jury, Larry Doan actually has the temerity to go to Polansky’s drawing board and begin writing his own comments above his opponent’s visual aid.

“Objection, your honor,” says Polansky, tired and angry. “I would appreciate it if Mr. Doan wrote on his own board.”

Doan shrugs with feigned embarrassment. The jury laughs.

“Overruled,” says Gordy.

Polansky shakes his head; he knows the game is up. And no one is surprised when, only two hours after arguments, the courtroom is reconvened and the jurors file back into the box.

“Mr. Foreman, please stand,” says the clerk. “How do you find the defendant Robert Frazier in indictment number 18809625 as to murder in the first degree, not guilty or guilty?”

“Guilty,” says the foreman.

In the gallery, only the Lucas family reacts. Garvey stares blankly as the jury is polled. Doan shoots a look at Polansky, but the defense attorney continues to take notes. Robert Frazier stares straight ahead.

In the third-floor corridor ten minutes later, Jackie Lucas, the younger daughter, finds Garvey and wraps her arm around his shoulder.

Garvey is momentarily surprised. There are occasions like this, moments when the survivors and the detectives share whatever kind of belated victory comes from a courtroom. Too often, however, the family doesn’t even show for court, or if they do, they regard the defendant and the authorities with equal shares of contempt.

“We did it,” says Jackie Lucas, kissing Garvey lightly on the cheek.

“Yes, we did,” says Garvey, laughing.

“He’s going to the Pen, right?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Gordy’ll hammer him.”

Doan follows the family out of the court, and Garvey and Dave Brown both congratulate him again on the closing argument. Writing on Polansky’s board, he tells Doan, that was a nice touch.

“You liked that?” says Doan.

“Oh yeah,” says Garvey, laughing. “That was real class.”

Their voices rattle down the corridor as the highlights are told and retold. For the first time, Garvey and Brown are given a full account of the disaster that befell Sharon Henson. They are laughing loudly when Robert Frazier enters the corridor, his hands cuffed behind him, two sheriff ’s deputies trailing behind.

“Shhhhh,” says Brown. “The man of the hour.”

“Are we ready for the ceremonial eyefuck?” asks Garvey. “I definitely think we’ve earned it.”

Brown nods in agreement.

Larry Doan shakes his head, then walks quietly to the stairwell and up to his office. The detectives wait a few more seconds as Frazier and the deputies approach. Slowly, silently, the defendant passes them with his head down, his hands gripping a stack of rolled-up court papers behind him. There is no eye contact. There are no angry words.

“Fuck it,” says Garvey, grabbing his briefcase from the hallway bench. “He was no fun at all.”

Once more across the same stale ground, once more into the breach. Once more into the gaping maw of that alley, that hellacious piece of pavement that had never done right by him in the past.

Tom Pellegrini parks the car on Newington, then walks down a cross alley cluttered with garbage and dead leaves. Fall has changed the rear of Newington Avenue again, making it seem a little more as it should be. To Pellegrini, the alley only looks right in colder weather-the bleak and pale vision to which he had grown accustomed months ago. The seasons shouldn’t change in this alley, he thinks. Nothing should change until I know what happened here.

Pellegrini walks down the common alley and through the gate at the rear of 718 Newington. He stands where the body had been, looking yet again at the back of the house, at the kitchen door and the window frame and the metal fire stair running down from the roof.

Red-orange. Red-orange.

The colors of the day. Pellegrini checks the wood trim on the rear of the house carefully, looking for something, anything, that can be called red-orange.

Nothing.

Looking over the chain-link fence, Pellegrini scans the house next door. The yard of 716 Newington is empty now; Andrew and his shitbrown Lincoln are both long gone, the latter permanently repossessed by the finance company, the former tossed out of the house by his long-suffering churchwoman of a wife.

Red-orange. Red-orange.

The back door of 716 is painted red, about the right shade, too. Pellegrini crosses over to the adjacent yard for a closer look. Yes, indeed. Red paint is the outer coat, with orange paint underneath.

Sonofabitch, thinks Pellegrini, scraping a sample off the door. The combination of the red and orange together is distinctive enough for the detective to believe he’s found a match. Eight months after his original interrogation, Andrew is suddenly back in the running, and no one is more surprised than Pellegrini.

If not for the paint on the back door of 716 Newington, the detective wouldn’t believe it. Andrew is a piece of work, to be sure, and Jay Landsman’s original theory about the Lincoln being used to store the body had its merits. But there is nothing on Andrew’s sheet that screams sex offender, nor had their lengthy interrogation of the man produced any doubts. For his part, Pellegrini had gone soft on Andrew as soon as the trunk of the Lincoln had come up clean. And later, when Andrew passed a state police polygraph on his statement, Pellegrini had all but put the man out of his mind. But the red-orange chip was physical evidence and somehow had to be explained. On that basis alone, Andrew was back onstage.

The paint chip was new, a belated bit of evidence that might have seemed comical to Pellegrini if the circumstances hadn’t been so utterly aggravating. The damn thing had been down there in the evidence control unit since day one of the investigation, and it would still be down there if he and Landsman hadn’t gone down to look over the collection of evidence one last time.

The trip downstairs had been routine. For weeks, Pellegrini had been reviewing the Latonya Wallace case file and the existing evidence, trying to come up with something new. Initially, Pellegrini hoped to find something that would lead to a fresh suspect, something that had been overlooked the first and second times through the file. Then, after the chemical analysis of the smudges on the little girl’s pants had been tenuously linked to the Fish Man’s burned-out store, Pellegrini had returned to the existing evidence in the more concrete hope that something else would link the store owner to the murder.

Instead, he got the paint chip. He and Landsman had discovered it yesterday afternoon after the little girl’s clothes had gone to the trace lab for another examination. Van Gelder from the lab was with them and, in fact, it was he who first noticed the colored flake clinging to the inside of the yellow tights.

It seemed to be a semigloss paint in separate coats, with the red layered over the orange. A single color would have been harder to track, but how many objects in Reservoir Hill had been painted orange and then red? And what was the paint chip doing inside the dead girl’s hose? And how the hell had they failed to notice it the first couple of times around?

Even as Pellegrini was elated to have a new piece of evidence, he was angry that it had not been discovered at the outset. Van Gelder offered no explanation, nor did Pellegrini want one. The Latonya Wallace murder was the year’s most important investigation; how could the trace analysis have been anything but flawless?

Now, standing in the rear of Newington Avenue, Pellegrini’s frustration is complete. Because from every outward indication the paint chip leads nowhere near the Fish Man-and it is toward the Fish Man that Pellegrini wants to go. It is the Fish Man who failed the polygraph, it is the Fish Man who knew Latonya and had paid her to work in his store, and it is the Fish Man who never managed any kind of alibi for the night of the child’s disappearance. The Fish Man: Who else could the killer be?

For months, Pellegrini had spent every available moment delving into the old store owner’s life, preparing himself for one last confrontation with his best suspect. In a way that was almost amusing, the Fish Man had long ago become inured to the pursuit. At every corner of his life, there stood an obsessed police detective-learning, gathering, waiting. In every crevice of the man’s quiet little existence, there hovered Tom Pellegrini, rooting around for information.

They knew each other now. Pellegrini knew more about the Fish Man than he cared to remember, more about this wretched old guy than anyone outside his family. The Fish Man knew his pursuer by name; he knew Pellegrini’s voice and manner, knew the ways in which the detective began a conversation or framed a question. Most of all, he knew-he had to know-exactly what Pellegrini was after.

Any other man would have raised some hell. Any other man would have called a lawyer who would have called the police department with a harassment complaint. Any other man, Pellegrini reasoned, would have eventually looked him in the eye and delivered the expected message: You and that badge can go fuck yourselves if you think I kill little girls. But none of that had ever happened.

Since that second interrogation at the homicide office, the two men had gone through a series of strange conversations, each more amiable than the last, each predicated on the Fish Man’s initial assertion that he knew nothing about the murder. Pellegrini ended each discussion by reminding the store owner that the investigation was continuing and that detectives would probably need to speak with him again. Without fail, the Fish Man would assure him of continued cooperation. Earlier this month, Pellegrini had broached the idea of another visit to the homicide office in the near future. The suspect was obviously less than thrilled with the idea, but he didn’t try to decline.

The more the detective learned about the Fish Man, the more the old man seemed capable of a child’s murder. There was nothing definitive in his history, nothing you could point a finger to as evidence that the man was dangerous, if not psychotic. Instead, the old man’s past revealed a fairly ordinary pattern of failed relationships with women. Over weeks, the detective had located and interviewed relatives and old girlfriends and the Fish Man’s former wife-all of whom agreed that the man had problems relating with women. A few even suggested that he had a thing for younger girls, but the stories were short on specifics. Pellegrini also interviewed Latonya Wallace’s playmates again, as well as the children who had worked for the Fish Man or ventured into his shop after school. Sure enough, they had all talked about the Fish Man’s roving eye. He was fresh, they told the detective, you have to be careful around him.

The one woman whom Pellegrini had not been able to find was the alleged victim from the Fish Man’s old rape charge in the 1950s. Pellegrini had pulled those reports off the microfilm and digested every page, but the teenage girl who had supposedly been attacked had never testified in court, and the charges had apparently been dropped. Using everything from the telephone book to social service records, Pellegrini mounted a feverish search to locate the woman, who would now be in her late forties and, if she still lived in Baltimore, probably listed under something other than her maiden name. But his search went nowhere, and finally Pellegrini allowed himself to be interviewed on a local television show so that he could mention the woman’s name and last known address and ask anyone with information about her to come forward or call the homicide unit.

During the broadcast, Pellegrini was careful not to explain the woman’s relationship to the case, nor did he mention the Fish Man by name. But he did acknowledge to the host of the show that he had developed a suspect in the case. Pellegrini immediately realized his mistake when the host turned to the television camera and declared, “City homicide detectives believe they now know who killed little Latonya Wallace…” That brief sortie into the public eye kept Pellegrini writing explanatory memos for days, and the police department was forced to issue a one-paragraph press release noting that while Detective Pellegrini had identified one possible suspect in the murder, other investigators were working on other leads. Worst of all, the long-lost rape victim never did come forward.

Beyond everything else Pellegrini had learned about his best suspect, one item in particular stood out in his mind. It was a coincidence perhaps, but a chilling one, and he had stumbled across it while checking back through a decade of open missing persons reports for young girls. In February, the investigators compared the Latonya Wallace case to other open child murders, but only recently did it occur to Pellegrini that missing persons cases should probably be examined as well. Checking the reports from one 1979 case, he found that a nine-year-old girl had disappeared from her parents’ home on Montpelier Street, never to be seen alive again. And Montpelier Street rang a bell: Pellegrini had just been out to interview a man whose family had once been partners with the Fish Man in an earlier grocery store. The family had lived on Montpelier Street for the last twenty years; the Fish Man had visited them often.

The old missing persons file contained no photographs, but a couple of days later Pellegrini drove over to the Baltimore Sun building and asked permission to check the newspaper’s photo morgue. The paper still had two pictures of the missing child, both black-and-white copies of her grade school portraits. Standing in the newspaper’s library, Pellegrini looked down at the photographs and felt the strangest sensation. From every angle, the child was a dead ringer for Latonya Wallace.

Maybe that uncanny resemblance was coincidence; maybe each apparently insignificant detail stood alone, unrelated to anything else. But the prolonged research into the Fish Man’s background was enough to convince Pellegrini that he needed to challenge the man one last time. After all, the old man had been given every opportunity to make himself less of a suspect, yet he had failed to do so. Pellegrini reasoned that he owed himself one more crack at the guy. Even as Pellegrini prepared himself for that last interrogation, a tiny paint chip materialized on the dead girl’s stocking, taunting him with another suspect and another direction.

The taunt grows louder when Pellegrini returns from Reservoir Hill and visits the trace evidence lab with fresh samples from the rear door of 716 Newington. Sure enough, Van Gelder has no trouble matching them to the chip found inside the hose. Suddenly, Andrew elbows the Fish Man aside.

A short talk that same afternoon with Andrew’s former wife yields the information that his suspect is still working with the city’s Bureau of Highways, so Pellegrini visits the Fallsway garage, arriving just as the suspect’s shift is ending. Asked if he would mind coming down to the homicide office for further questioning, Andrew becomes visibly upset, almost hostile.

No, he tells Pellegrini. I want a lawyer.

Later that same week, the detective returns to Reservoir Hill with a lab technician for a three-hour search of 716 Newington, concentrating on the basement room where Andrew had his bar and his television and spent most of his free time. Nine months is a long time for evidence to stay put; in the end, Pellegrini leaves with nothing more than a carpet sample that may or may not have something resembling a bloodstain.

Still, Andrew has suddenly started behaving like a suspect with things to hide, and that paint chip seems to Pellegrini like a tiny shard of irrevocable truth: Somewhere along the line, Latonya Wallace got a little portion of Andrew’s back door wedged between her leg and her stocking.

For a brief time, it is hard not to be a little cheered by the developments. But less than a week later Pellegrini makes another trip to Newington Avenue and, as he once again walks that alley, he notices that there are red-orange paint chips from Andrew’s back door all over the adjacent yards. On the last visit, he had noticed right away that the paint on the door had been peeling badly, but now, looking carefully at the pavement behind 716 and 718 and 720 Newington, he sees red-orange chips scattered everywhere by the rain and wind, flashing up at him like fool’s gold. The chip from the tights must have already been on the ground when the little girl’s body was dumped behind 718 Newington. But Pellegrini isn’t quite ready to let go. How, he asks himself, did the chip get inside the stockings? How could it be between the leg and the hose unless it got there after the child had been undressed?

Van Gelder soon provides the answer. Checking the evidence yet again, the lab analyst notes that the stockings are now insideout, as they surely were during the recent examination by Landsman and Pellegrini. Chances are, the tights were rolled off the little girl’s body at the autopsy and had remained inside-out ever since. Though it seemed for a time otherwise, the paint chip had been on the outside of the hose all along.

Given Van Gelder’s explanation, Pellegrini immediately sees the rest of the story for what it is: Andrew became nervous, but who wouldn’t be nervous when questioned yet again by a homicide detective? As for the carpet sample, Pellegrini knows that it doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of coming back positive for human blood. To hell with Andrew, he thinks. He isn’t a suspect, he’s a wasted week.

The Fish Man, as durable a murder suspect as ever existed, once again returns to center stage.

Donald Waltemeyer grabs the dead girl by both arms, feeling for any tension in the hands and fingers. The girl’s hands follow his freely, giving the appearance of a bizarre, horizontal dance.

“She’s wet,” he says.

Milton, the junkie on the sofa, nods.

“What’d you do? Put her in cold water?”

Milton nods again.

“Where? In the bath?”

“No. I just splashed her with water.”

“From where? That bathtub?”

“Yeah.”

Waltemeyer walks into the bathroom, where he satisfies himself that the tub is still covered with droplets. It is an old wives’ tale among the junkies: Overdoses can be brought back by putting them in cold water, as if a bath can somehow rid them of whatever they’ve put in their veins.

“Lemme ask you this, Milton,” says Waltemeyer. “Did you and her use the same works or did you fire your shit using something else?”

Milton gets up and moves toward the closet.

“Don’t fucking show it to me,” says Waltemeyer. “If you show it to me, I gotta lock you up.”

“Oh.”

“Just answer the question. Did you use the same needle?”

“No. I got my own.”

“Okay then. Sit down and tell me again what happened.”

Milton runs down the tale again, leaving nothing out. Waltemeyer hears again about how the white girl came by to fire up, about how she often came up here to shoot because her husband didn’t like her using.

“Like I said, she brought me that box of noodles ’cause she used some last time she was here.”

“This macaroni here?”

“Yeah. She brought that with her.”

“She had her own dope?”

“Yeah. I had mine and then she came with hers.”

“Where was she sitting when she fired?”

“This chair here. She fired up and then fell asleep. I looked over after a while and she wasn’t breathing.”

Waltemeyer nods. The call is straight up, and for that reason alone he feels good. After three months of tracking Geraldine Parrish and her missing relatives, even a simple overdose can be something of a reprieve. Waltemeyer had told himself that if he didn’t get back into the rotation on this midnight shift, he would lose his mind. McLarney had agreed.

“Your run sheets have been getting messier and messier,” the sergeant told him a week ago. “It’s like a cry for help.”

Maybe so. Waltemeyer had taken the Parrish case as far as he could, though there would be more work to come as trial preparation got under way. And he still hadn’t figured out exactly what had happened to Geraldine’s last husband, the aged Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, who died after a few weeks of marriage. A relative was now telling them that Miss Geraldine had ground two dozen Valium into the Reverend Gilliard’s tuna salad, then watched as the old man slowly succumbed to a seizure. The story was solid enough that Doc Smialek and Marc Cohen, the assistant state’s attorney handling the case, were willing to try for an exhumation order. Some days, Waltemeyer truly believed that the case had no end.

All of which makes this little overdose quite pleasing. One body, one witness, one page of a 24-hour report on the admin lieutenant’s desk-police work as Waltemeyer remembers it. The lab tech is hard at work and the ME is on the way. The witness is even cooperative and apparently truthful. All is flowing gracefully toward a resolution until the first officer appears in the doorway to say that the dead girl’s husband is downstairs.

“Do we need him for an ID?” asks the uniform.

“Yeah,” says Waltemeyer, “but not if he’s going to come up here and lose it. I don’t want that.”

“I’ll warn him about that.”

The husband comes to the bottom of the stairs, wearing an expression of incredible grief. He is a good-looking man, thirty or so, tall with long sandy brown hair.

“If you’re going to go up there, you have to be calm,” says the officer.

“I understand.”

Hearing footsteps on the stairs, Waltemeyer turns back toward the young woman and notices that the left bra strap and part of the cup are exposed, with the sweater pulled back down the arm in the search for the fresh track. Leaning over at the last second, he pulls the sweater gently over her shoulder.

For a detective, it is a small but extraordinary act-extraordinary because the notion of privacy loses most of its meaning after a few months of working murders. What, after all, could be less private than a stranger, an interloper, evaluating a human being’s last moments on earth? What could be less private than a body taken apart at autopsy, or a bedroom emptied of its contents by a search warrant, or a suicide note read and Xeroxed and stapled to the face sheet of a police incident report? After a year or two in the trenches, privacy is something that every detective learns to mock. More than compassion or sincerity or empathy, it is the first casualty of police work.

Two months ago, Mark Tomlin caught the year’s first and only autoerotic death. It was an engineer in his late thirties, trussed up on his bed in leather underwear, suffocated by a plastic bag that the victim had placed on his own head. There were pulleys and levers that controlled the cords by which the victim was bound, and by moving an arm in a certain direction, the man could have freed himself. But long before he could do that, he passed out from lack of oxygen-a consequence of the plastic bag, which he had used to induce hypoxia, an ethereal, oxygen-deprived state in which masturbation supposedly becomes more erotic. That bedroom was a strange sight, and Tomlin, of course, couldn’t help but show Polaroids to a few thousand other cops. After all, the poor guy looked damned silly decomposing in his leather shorts, arms trussed up over his head, toes clamped together by thumbcuffs, bondage magazines scattered across the dresser. Bizarre stuff, and no one would have believed it without the photographs. Neither privacy nor dignity had much of a chance on that one.

Almost every detective has encountered two or three scenes where some relative tried, for reasons of propriety more than deception, to dress a dead body. Likewise, almost every detective has handled a dozen overdoses in which mothers and fathers had felt compelled to hide the needle and cooker before the ambulance arrived. One suicide prompted a parent to painstakingly rewrite the victim’s note in the desire to exclude one especially embarrassing admission. The world never stops insisting on values and standards, although such things no longer matter to the dead. The world never stops calling for a little dignity, a little propriety, but the cops never stop calling for the morgue wagon; between the two lies an abyss that can never be bridged.

In the Baltimore homicide office, privacy is a stillborn idea. The unit, after all, is a locker room of sorts, a male-dominated purgatory in which thirty-six detectives and detective sergeants wander in and out of each other’s lives, cracking jokes as this detective’s marriage implodes and that detective shows the unmistakable signs of alcohol addiction.

A homicide detective isn’t any more or less degenerate than any other middle-aged American male, but since he spends his life prying up other men’s secrets, he has little regard for his own. And in a world where the act of premeditated murder becomes routine, any more subtle sin has trouble competing. Any man can drink too much and wreck his station wagon on an upcounty road, but a homicide detective can tell the rest of his squad the story in a voice that betrays equal shares of bravado and embarrassment. Any man can pick up a woman in a downtown bar, but a homicide detective will later entertain his partner with a comedic soliloquy that describes in detail all the later action at the motel. Any man can lie to his wife, but a homicide detective will sit in the middle of the coffee room yelling into a phone extension that he has to work late on a case and if she doesn’t believe that, she can go to hell. And then, after convincing her, he will slam down the receiver and stalk over to the coat rack.

“I’m down at the Market Bar,” he will tell five other detectives, all of whom are fighting back laughter. “But if she calls back, I’m on the street.”

A detective understands that another world is out there, another universe in which discretion and privacy still have meaning. Somewhere far from Baltimore, he knows, there are taxpayers who hold dear the idea of a good and secret death-a well-lived life, becalmed at its end, extinguished in some private, comfortable place with equal measures of grace and solitude. They’ve heard a lot about that kind of death, but they rarely see it. To them, death is violence and miscalculation, mindlessness and cruelty. And what, a detective can ask, does privacy matter amid that kind of carnage?

Several months ago, Danny Shea from Stanton’s shift drove to a high-rise apartment house near the Hopkins campus for an unattended death. She was an elderly music teacher, fully rigored on her daybed, with the score of a Mozart concerto still open on the piano. The FM radio was playing quietly in the living room, tuned to a classical station at the end of the dial. Shea recognized the piece.

“You know what that is?” he asked a uniform, a young man writing his report at the kitchen table.

“What’s what?”

“The piece on the radio.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Ravel,” said Shea. “‘Pavane to a Dead Princess.’”

It was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection. Shea suddenly felt himself an intruder in the old woman’s apartment, a violator of a genuinely private act.

A similar feeling now comes over Donald Waltemeyer when he looks at a dead addict and listens to her husband walking up the stairs. There is nothing beautiful or poignant in the death of Lisa Turner: Waltemeyer knows that she was twenty-eight years old, that she was from North Carolina and that she was married. And for reasons beyond his comprehension, she came up to this second-floor shithole to fire heroin until it killed her. End of story.

And still, something clicks for just a moment, some long-lost switch in Waltemeyer’s brain is suddenly thrown to overload. Perhaps it’s because she was young, perhaps because she looks pretty in the light blue sweater. Perhaps it’s because a price must be paid for all this privacy, because you can only be a bystander for so long without paying some of the cost yourself.

Waltemeyer looks down at the girl, listens to the husband struggle up the stairs, and suddenly, almost without thinking, reaches for the falling shoulder of a dead woman’s sweater.

When the husband appears at the door, Waltemeyer asks the question immediately: “Is that her?”

“Oh God,” the man says. “Oh my God.”

“Okay, that’s it,” says Waltemeyer, motioning to the uniform. “Thank you, sir.”

“Who the hell is he?” says the husband, glaring at Milton. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“Get him out of here,” says Waltemeyer, blocking the husband’s view. “Take him downstairs now.”

“Just tell me who he is, goddammit.”

Both uniforms grab the husband and begin pushing him out of the apartment. Easy, they tell him. Take it easy.

“I’m okay. I’m all right,” he tells them in the hallway. “I’m okay.”

They guide him to the other end of the hall, standing with him as he leans into the plasterboard and catches his breath.

“I just want to know what that guy was doing in there with her.”

“It’s his apartment,” says one of the uniforms.

The husband shows his pain, and the uniform volunteers the obvious information: “She just went in there to fire up. She wasn’t fucking the guy or anything like that.”

Another small act of charity, but the husband shakes it off.

“I know that,” says the husband quickly. “I just wanted to know if he was the guy that got her the drugs, that’s all.”

“No. She brought hers with her.”

The husband nods. “I couldn’t get her to stop,” he tells the cop. “I loved her, but I couldn’t get her to stop it. She wouldn’t listen. She told me where she was going tonight because she knew I couldn’t stop her…”

“Yeah,” says the cop, uncomfortable.

“She was such a beautiful girl.”

The cop says nothing.

“I loved her.”

“Uh-huh,” says the cop.

Waltemeyer finishes the scene and drives back to the office in silence, the entire event now confined to a page and a half of his notebook. He catches every light on St. Paul Street.

“What did you get?” asks McLarney.

“Nothing much. An OD.”

“Junkie?”

“It was a young girl.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Pretty.”

Very pretty, thinks Waltemeyer. You could see how, if she had cleaned herself up, she would have been special. Long dark hair. Big traffic-light eyes.

“How old?” asks McLarney.

“Twenty-eight. She was married. I thought she was a lot younger at first.”

Waltemeyer walks to a typewriter. In five minutes, it will all be just another 24-hour report. In five minutes, you can ask him about that loose sweater and he won’t know what you’re talking about. But now, right now, it’s real.

“You know,” he tells his sergeant. “The other day my boy comes home from school, and he’s sitting there in the living room with me and he says, ‘Hey, Dad, someone offered me coke in school today…’”

McLarney nods.

“And I’m thinking, aw shit, here it comes. And then he just smiles and tells me, ‘But I asked for Pepsi instead.’”

McLarney laughs softly.

“Some nights you go out and see shit that’s no good for you,” says Waltemeyer suddenly. “You know what I mean? No fucking good at all.”

Roger Nolan picks up the phone and begins shuffling through the admin office card file for Joe Kopera’s home number. The department’s best ballistics man will be working late tonight.

From the hallway comes the sound of loud banging on the large interrogation room door.

“Hey, Rog,” says one of Stanton’s detectives, “is that your man making all that noise?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a second.”

Nolan finds the number and reaches Kopera, explaining the situation quickly. He finishes the call to even louder banging.

“Hey, Rog, shut this motherfucker up, will you?”

Nolan walks through the fishbowl and out into the hallway. The devil himself has his face pressed against the window in the door, hands cupped around his eyes, trying to peer through the one-way glass.

“What’s your problem?”

“I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“The bathroom, huh? I bet you want a drink of water too.”

The devil needs to take a leak. Evil incarnate wants a drink of water. Nolan shakes his head and opens the metal door. “I’ll be damned,” he tells the suspect. “Every time you put one of these motherfuckers in the box, they lose control of their bladder and start getting dizzy from thirst… Okay, c’mon, let’s get it over with…”

The suspect steps slowly from the room, a thirty-one-year-old black man, thinly built, with receding, close-cropped hair and deep brown eyes. His face is rounded, his wide mouth marked by gap teeth and a long overbite. His sweatsuit is a size too big, his high-top tennis shoes well worn. Nothing in his appearance gives truth to his abominable deed: There is nothing in the face to inspire fear, nothing in the eyes to call extraordinary. He is altogether ordinary, and for that reason, too, he inspires contempt.

His name is Eugene Dale, and the computer sheet on Harry Edgerton’s desk provides enough history for two murderers. Most of the arrests involve rape, attempted rape and handgun violations; in fact, Dale is now on parole, having just been released by the state corrections department after serving nine years for sexual assault.

“If you’re not out here in three minutes,” Nolan tells him at the men’s room door, “I gotta come in there after you. Understand?”

Eugene Dale walks out of the men’s room two minutes later, looking sheepish. Nolan points him back down the hallway.

“My drink,” says the suspect.

“So?” says Nolan. “Drink.”

Dale stops at the water cooler, then wipes the wetness from his face with his sleeve. The suspect is returned to his cubicle, where he waits for Edgerton, who is at this moment in another interview room, talking with the people who know Dale best, absorbing all of the available background for the coming interrogation.

It would have been a better piece of drama if an act of rare investigative genius had produced Eugene Dale. For the detectives who suffered through Latonya Wallace, it would have been a perfectly righteous moment if some subtle connection in the Andrea Perry case file had caused this man to materialize in an interrogation room. And for Harry Edgerton, it would have been pure vindication if some brilliant discovery during his lonely and methodical pursuit had given them the name.

But, as usual, poetic justice has no place here. Edgerton did everything possible to find his suspect, but in the end, the suspect found him. Wanted for the cold-blooded murder of one child, the man fidgeting in the large interrogation room waited all of two weeks before he went out and raped another.

Still, when the second rape report came in, everyone in the unit knew immediately what it meant. Edgerton had laid the groundwork for that, meeting with the operations people in three districts and warning them to be looking for anything sexual or anything involving a.32-caliber firearm. So when the second rape report was copied to the Southern District’s operations unit, a female officer there, Rita Cohen, knew exactly what was what. The second victim was a thirteen-year-old who had been lured by Dale to a vacant rowhouse on South Mount Street, then threatened with a “silver-looking” handgun and raped. Dale let this girl live, though he warned her that if she told anyone about the attack he would find her again and shoot her in the back of the head. The young victim promised not to tell, but did precisely the opposite when she returned home to her mother. As it happened, she knew her attacker by name and address both-her best friend was the young daughter of Dale’s girlfriend.

The crime was as stupid as it was evil. The girlfriend’s daughter had even seen Dale walking the victim home just before the assault, which may have been why he did not murder the thirteen-year-old after raping her. He knew there was a witness, yet he abandoned all caution to satisfy his compulsion with another child.

After calling homicide and taking the rape victim’s statement, the Southern plainclothes officers wrote a warrant for Dale’s address on Gilmor Street, no more than a few blocks from the alley in which Andrea Perry had been murdered. The raid had been set for today, and though Edgerton was scheduled to be off, Nolan accompanied the Southern officers to the house and assured Edgerton that if the warrant produced any evidence or a viable suspect, he was back on the clock.

Less than half an hour after arriving at the Gilmor Street address, Nolan was on the phone to his detective, telling him, as he would tell Kopera later, to come back downtown. Eugene Dale wasn’t home when the raiding party came through his front door, but in an upstairs closet the Southern officer found a.32-caliber revolver loaded with automatic shells. That was all Nolan needed to know: Not only was Andrea Perry murdered with a.32, but the ballistics report showed light rifling marks on the bullet, suggesting automatic ammo fired through a revolver. And when Nolan spoke with the other occupants of the Gilmor Street home, they, too, matched with the case file.

Dale’s girlfriend, Rosalind, was strangely cooperative when questioned by Nolan, as was her girlfriend, Michelle, who happened to be dating Rosalind’s ex-boyfriend. Both expressed some initial surprise at the possibility of Eugene being connected to either the rape or the murder; eventually, however, in a later interview with Edgerton, they would agree that Dale just might be the kind of guy who would do something like that. And once the detective learned a little more about Rosalind, they were convinced they were on the right track. Recalling the anonymous call that came into the homicide office right after Andrea Perry’s murder-the call in which a male voice had claimed to see a woman run from the murder scene at the sound of gunshots-Edgerton mentioned the mystery woman’s name to Michelle and Rosalind.

“Loretta?” said Rosalind. “She’s my ex-boyfriend’s sister. We’re good friends.”

But Loretta Langley was not good friends with Eugene Dale; they had disliked each other from the very start, Rosalind explained. At that moment, Edgerton had little doubt that the unidentified caller was none other than Eugene Dale, attempting in the clumsiest fashion to blame his girl’s best friend for a rapemurder.

Days later, to satisfy himself that he had been right not to pick up Loretta Langley for questioning on the strength of the anonymous call, Edgerton will interview Langley and tell her, for the first time, of the allegation that they had received in the earliest hours of the investigation. Asked if she would have thought of her best friend’s boyfriend if told about the male caller, she will say no. If he’d talked to her three weeks ago, Loretta Langley would have been nothing more than another dead end; now she is yet another link between Eugene Dale and a child’s murder.

Edgerton arrived at the homicide unit well before Nolan and began to go through the Southern district’s paperwork on the rape report. Later that afternoon, well after Nolan had returned to the office from the raid, Eugene Dale sauntered up to the Gilmor Street address. Before he was grabbed by a waiting district operations unit, he had time to learn of the search-and-seizure warrant and to ask his girlfriend one very telling question: “Did they find the gun?”

He came to rest in the large interrogation room and remained there, ignored for hours, as Edgerton proceeded to interview Michelle and Rosalind. He stayed there long after Kopera arrived and took the revolver-an H &R.32, serial number AB 18407, a weapon now caked in fingerprint dust-downstairs to his lab.

Long after Roger Nolan escorts him to the bathroom, Eugene Dale is still sitting in the box, bored and irritated. Enough time passes so that when Edgerton finally enters the room, his suspect-true to the rule-is on the verge of sleep. As the interrogation begins just after 10:00 P.M., there is no banter and salesmanship; indeed, Edgerton treats his suspect with undisguised contempt.

“You want to talk to me, I’ll listen,” the detective says, pushing the rights form toward Dale. “You don’t want to say anything, I just charge you with the murder and go home. I don’t really care.”

“What do you mean?” says Dale.

Edgerton blows cigarette smoke across the table. With any other murder, all this stupidity might be amusing. With Andrea Perry, it sticks in his throat.

“Look at me,” says Edgerton, raising his voice. “You know that gun in your linen closet, right?”

Dale nods slowly.

“Where do you think that gun is right now?”

Dale says nothing.

“Where is it? Think hard, Eugene.”

“You all got it.”

“We got it,” says Edgerton. “That’s right. And right now, even as I’m talking to you, there are experts downstairs who are matching up that gun to the bullet we took out of that girl’s head.”

Eugene Dale shakes his head at the logic. Suddenly, both men feel a loud thump. A floor below, almost immediately beneath them, Joe Kopera is firing the.32 into a deep canister of water to produce the necessary slugs for comparison.

“That’s your gun right there,” says Edgerton. “Hear it? They’re testing it right now.”

“It’s not my gun.”

“It’s in your fucking closet. Whose gun is it? Rosalind’s? If we show that gun to the other little girl you messed with, she’s going to say it was your gun, isn’t she?”

“It’s not my gun.”

Edgerton stands up, his patience entirely leveled by five minutes in a room with this man. Dale looks up at the detective, his face a mixture of fright and sincerity.

“You’re wasting my fucking time, Eugene.”

“I didn’t-”

“Who do you think you’re fucking dealing with here?” asks Edgerton, his voice rising. “I don’t have the time to listen to your stupid bullshit.”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

Why am I yelling at you? Edgerton is tempted to tell the man the truth, to explain a little of the civilized world to a man living off its fringe. But that would be wasted breath.

“You don’t like people yelling at you?”

Dale says nothing.

Edgerton walks out of the interrogation room with a small kernel of rage growing inside him, a heat that few murderers ever manage to spark inside a detective. Part of it is the stupidity of Dale’s first attempt at a statement, part of it his childlike denial, but in the end what angers Harry Edgerton most is simply the magnitude of the crime. He sees Andrea Perry’s school picture inside the binder and it stokes the rage; how could such a life be destroyed by the likes of Eugene Dale?

Edgerton’s usual response toward a guilty man was a mild contempt bordering on indifference. In most instances, he didn’t go out of his way to hassle his suspects; hell, they had enough problems. Like most detectives, Edgerton believed that you can talk to a murderer. You can share your cigarettes with him and walk him to the bathroom and laugh at his jokes when they’re funny. You can even buy him a can of Pepsi if he’s willing to initial each page of the statement.

But this is different. This time Edgerton didn’t want to breathe the same air as his suspect. In truth, his anger ran deep enough to be called hate, a feeling that on this case could only come from a black detective. Edgerton was black, and Eugene Dale was black, and Andrea Perry, too: the usual barriers of race had been removed. Given that truth, it made sense that Edgerton could talk to people on the street and learn things, that he could go into the West Baltimore projects and come out knowing things that a white detective might never know. Even the best white cop feels the distance when he works with black victims and black suspects; to him they are otherworldly, as if their tragedy is the result of a ghetto pathology against which he is fully immunized. Working in a city where nearly 90 percent of all murder is black-on-black, a white detective might understand the nature of a black victim’s tragedy, he might carefully differentiate between good people to be avenged and bad people to be pursued. But, ultimately, he never responds with the same intensity; his most innocent victims bring empathy, not anguish; his most ruthless suspects bring contempt, not rage. Edgerton, however, was not encumbered by such distinctions. Eugene Dale could be utterly real for him, just as Andrea Perry could be real; his rage at the crime could be personal.

Edgerton’s response to Dale set him apart from the rest of his squad, but this time there was nothing unique about it: to be a black detective in homicide required a special sense of balance, a willingness to tolerate the excesses of many white colleagues, to ignore the cynical assessments and barbed humor of men for whom black-on-black violence represented a natural order. To them, the black middle class was simply a myth. They had heard about it, they had read about it, but damned if they could find it in the city of Baltimore. Edgerton, Requer, Eddie Brown-they were black, they were essentially middle class-but they proved nothing. They were cops and therefore, whether they knew it or not, they were all honorary Irishmen. That logic allowed the same detective who could comfortably partner with Eddie Brown to watch a black family move into the house next door, then go to the police computer the next day and run his new neighbors.

The prejudice ran deep. A man had only to stand in the coffee room and listen to a veteran white detective’s scientific analysis of homeboy head shapes: “… Now your bullet head, he’s a stone killer, he’s dangerous. But your peanut heads, they’re just dope dealers and sneak thieves. Now your swayback, he’s generally a…”

Black detectives lived and worked around those limitations, tacitly offering themselves as contradictions to the ghetto scenes that greeted their white colleagues every night. If a white guy still insisted on missing the point, then fuck him. What was a black police going to do? Call the NAACP? For Edgerton and the other black detectives, there was no way to win the argument, and consequently, no argument.

But Edgerton does have an argument with Eugene Dale, one that he knows he can win. And when he walks out of the interrogation room the first time, he is as eager to give himself a break as to let Dale stew before going after a second, full statement.

Downstairs in the ballistics lab, Joe “No Compare ’em” Kopera, the dean of Baltimore’s firearms examiners, has both bullets under the microscope and is slowly turning each slug in the positioning clay, lining up the rifling marks and striations in the split screen viewer. From the most obvious gouges on each bullet, Kopera determines almost immediately that they are both from.32-caliber projectiles from the same class of weapon, in this case a six with a left twist. This means that the rifling grooves on the inside of the barrel-which differ for each mode of firearm-carve a total of six deep channels around the back end of the projectile, each channel twisting to the left.

Knowing that much, Kopera can say that the bullet that killed Andrea Perry was fired from the same or similar make of.32 revolver seized in that afternoon’s raid on Dale’s house. But to say that the bullet was fired from that gun requires more; the striation marks-thin scrapings caused by imperfections and debris inside the gun barrel-also have to be matched. Leaving the microscope on, Kopera walks upstairs for coffee and a conference with the detectives.

“What’s the verdict?” asks Nolan.

“Same type of weapon, same ammo. But it’s going to take me a little while to be sure.”

“Would it help if we tell you he’s guilty?”

Kopera smiles and wanders into the coffee room. Edgerton is already back inside the large box, suffering through Dale’s second statement. This time Edgerton mentions the possibility of fingerprints on the weapon, though in fact the lab tech couldn’t lift any latents before the gun went downstairs to Kopera.

“If it’s not your gun, then what will you say when we find your fingerprints all over it?”

“It is my gun,” says Dale.

“It is your gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

Edgerton can almost hear the sound of Dale’s brain lurching around in the dark. The Out. The Out. Where’s my Out? Edgerton already knows which window his suspect will reach for.

“I mean it’s my gun. But I didn’t kill anyone.”

“It’s your gun but you didn’t kill anyone.”

“No. I let a couple guys borrow it that night. They said they needed it to scare someone.”

“You let a couple guys borrow it. I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

“I didn’t know what they needed it for…”

“And these guys went out and raped this little girl,” says Edgerton, glaring at the suspect, “and then they took her down the alley and shot her in the head, right?”

Dale shrugs. “I don’t know what they did with it.”

Edgerton looks at him coldly. “What’s your friends’ names?”

“Names?”

“Yeah. They’ve got names, right? You lent them your gun, so you had to at least know who they were.”

“If I tell you that, then they’re in trouble.”

“Fuck yeah, they’re in trouble. They’re going to be charged with the murder, aren’t they? But it’s either them or you, Eugene, so what’s the names?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Edgerton’s had enough. “You’re about to be charged in a death penalty murder case,” he says in a voice rising with anger, “but you’re not going to tell me the names of the mysterious friends who borrowed your gun ’cause it might get them in trouble. That’s your story?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Because they don’t exist.”

“No.”

“You don’t have any friends. You don’t have a friend in the fucking world.”

“If I tell you, he’ll kill me.”

“If you don’t tell me,” shouts Edgerton, “I’m going to put you on Death Row. Your choice…”

Eugene Dale looks down at the table, then back at the detective. He shakes his head and raises his arms, a gesture of surrender, a plaintive appeal.

“Fuck it,” says Edgerton, getting up again. “I don’t even know why I’m bothering with you.”

Edgerton slams the door to the large interrogation room, then greets his sergeant with a half-smile. “He’s innocent.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Some friends borrowed the gun and then forgot to tell him they’d raped and killed a girl.”

Nolan laughs. “Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

“I swear I’m ready to hit this guy.”

“That bad, huh?”

Edgerton wanders into the coffee room for a fresh cup, but after five minutes, Eugene Dale has something more to say. He bangs loudly on the door, but Edgerton ignores him. Eventually, Jay Landsman comes out of his office to check on the racket.

“Detective, sir, can I have a word with you?”

“With me?”

“Yes, sir. That other officer won’t listen to me and I…”

Landsman shakes his head. “You don’t want to talk to me,” he says. “The only thing I want to do is kick the living shit out of you for what you did to that girl. You don’t-”

“But I didn’t-”

“Hey,” says Landsman. “If you want to talk to me you’re gonna do it without teeth, you understand that? You’re better off with the other detective.”

Dale retreats into the interrogation room as Landsman slams the door and walks back to his office, his day now considerably brighter than it had been.

Five minutes later, Edgerton returns to the hallway outside the interrogation room, now cool enough for one more sortie. As he opens the metal door, Kopera brushes past him on his way from the stairwell.

“It’s a winner, Harry.”

“Way to be, Dr. K.”

“The striation is a little light, but I don’t have any real problem.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Edgerton slams the door behind him and lays it down for Eugene Dale one last time: A living rape victim who will identify him as well as the gun. A ballistics match to the murder weapon. And, oh yeah, those fingerprints all over the gun…

“I’d like to tell you my friend’s name.”

“Okay,” says Edgerton. “Tell me.”

“But I don’t know his name.”

“You don’t know his name.”

“No. He told me but I forgot. But his nickname is Lips. He lives in West Baltimore.”

“You don’t know his name, but you let him borrow your gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lips, from West Baltimore.”

“That’s what they call him.”

“What’s the other guy’s name.”

Dale shrugs.

“Eugene, do you know what I think?”

Dale looks at him, the picture of earnest cooperation.

“I think you’re going back to prison.”

Nonetheless, Edgerton works through the nonsensical story, emerging in the early morning hours with an eleven-page statement in which Dale, in a near-final version of events, lends the murder weapon to Lips and another east side man whom Dale actually names. Presumably, the second man is someone who has done wrong by Eugene Dale somewhere in his past. Dale admits to seeing Andrea Perry playing with his cousin, and he admits to being out on the street and hearing the gunshot from the alley. He even goes so far as to suggest that although his friends returned the gun with one shell spent, and although he believed that they had raped and killed the girl, he didn’t go to the police because he couldn’t get involved.

“I’m on parole,” he reminds Edgerton.

As dawn arrives in the homicide office, Edgerton is at an admin office typewriter, working up the two-page charging documents for his suspect. But when he takes the papers into the interrogation room to show Dale, the suspect reads them quickly and then tears them to pieces, further endearing himself to Edgerton, whose typing skills are less than stellar.

“You don’t need this,” Dale says, “because I’m going to tell you the truth. I didn’t kill that girl. In fact, I don’t know who it was that killed her.”

Edgerton listens to version number three.

“I don’t know who really killed her. The reason I told you the other things was to protect my girlfriend and her family. I work every day while her relatives are always in and out of the apartment all hours. All of her sisters and brothers use the apartment while I’m sleeping in the bedroom.”

Edgerton says nothing. At this point, why bother to say anything at all?

“One of them must have kept the gun in the linen closet. One of them must have killed that girl.”

“Did you know the gun was kept in your linen closet?” asks Edgerton, almost bored.

“No I didn’t. I know you can get five years for having a gun. I don’t know who had that gun in the house. I really don’t.”

Edgerton nods, then walks out of the interrogation room and back to the admin office typewriter.

“Hey, Roger, look at what this asshole did,” he says, holding up the shreds of the charging papers. “This took me forty minutes.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah,” says Edgerton, laughing. “He said I didn’t need them ’cause he was going to tell me the truth.”

Nolan shakes his head. “That’s what you get for letting him hold on to the paperwork.”

“Maybe I can tape it together,” says Edgerton, more tired than hopeful.

The last statement by Eugene Dale concludes as the dayshift detectives are taking roll call in the main office, and many of those men are out on the street before Edgerton can retype the arrest sheets.

The Southern District wagon arrives an hour or so later, and Dale is cuffed for the ride back to the district bail hearing. Walking down the corridor, he asks again for Edgerton and the chance to make another statement. This time he is ignored.

But there will be one last encounter. A week or so after the arrest, Edgerton checks his gun at the Eager Street entrance of the Baltimore City Jail and follows a guard to the second-floor hellhole that prison administrators call an infirmary. It is a long walk up a set of metal stairs and down a hall cluttered with human failure. The inmates fall silent, staring as Edgerton passes through to the medical unit’s administrative area.

A heavyset nurse waves him down. “He’s on the way up from the tier.”

Edgerton shows her the warrant, but she barely bothers to look at it. “Head hairs, chest hairs, pubic hairs and blood,” he says. “I guess you’ve done this before.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

Eugene Dale rounds the corner slowly, then stops at the sight of Edgerton. As the nurse waves the inmate toward an examination room, Dale moves close enough for Edgerton to notice the bruises and contusions, obvious signs of a bad beating. Even inside the city jail, the man’s crimes merit special attention.

Edgerton follows his suspect into the examination room and watches as the nurse prepares a needle.

Dale looks at the syringe, then back at Edgerton. “What’s this for?”

“A search-and-seizure warrant for your person,” says Edgerton. “We’re going to match your blood and hairs to semen and hairs we got from the girl.”

“I already gave them blood.”

“This is different. This is a court order for evidence.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I want to talk to a lawyer.”

Edgerton shoves the paper into Dale’s hands, then points to the judge’s signature at the bottom of the page. “You don’t get to talk to a lawyer for this. It’s signed by a judge-see that? We have a right to your blood and your hair.”

Eugene Dale shakes his head. “Why do you need my blood?”

“For DNA testing. We’re going to match it to the girl,” says Edgerton.

“I want to talk to a lawyer.”

Edgerton moves closer to his suspect, his voice low. “Either you let her take some blood and some hairs the easy way or I’m going to take it myself, because that warrant says I can. And I can tell you that you’d definitely rather have her do it.”

Eugene Dale sits silently, almost in tears as the nurse brings the needle up to his right arm. Edgerton watches from the opposite wall as blood is drawn and then hairs plucked from his suspect’s head and body. The detective is on the way out the door, samples in hand, when Eugene Dale speaks again.

“Don’t you want to talk to me again?” he asks. “I want to tell the truth.”

Edgerton ignores him.

“You want to hear the truth?”

“No,” says Edgerton. “Not from you.”

Rich Garvey stands shivering in the predawn emptiness of Fremont Avenue, staring at a pile of blood-soaked clothing, two spent.38 casings and a blue plastic lunch pail containing two submarine sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. So much for physical evidence.

Robert McAllister stands shivering next to Garvey, scanning the length of Fremont Avenue and its tributaries for any trace of human endeavor. It’s not bad enough that the streets are empty, there aren’t even any lights in the rowhouse windows. So much for witnesses.

In the few seconds before anyone speaks, Garvey looks at McAllister and McAllister looks at Garvey, each of them wordlessly communicating the same thought:

Hell of a case you got, Mac.

Whoa, you caught a tough one here, Garv.

And yet before anything unseemly can pass between two partners, the first officer-a kid by the name of Miranda, an earnest young soldier still basking in the wonder of it all-approaches them to offer up one little detail: “He was talking when we got here.”

“He was talking?”

“Oh yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he told us who shot him…”

If this universe is truly balanced, if there is a negative and positive to the order of things, then somewhere exists a yin to balance Rich Garvey’s yang. Somewhere there exists another career cop, an Irishman no doubt, with wire-rim glasses and a dark mustache and a back problem. He is standing over his eleventh straight drug murder in silent suffering, bargaining with an indifferent God for one shred of physical evidence, for one ignorant, evasive witness. The anti-Garvey is a good cop, a good detective, but lately he has entertained a few doubts about his abilities, as has his sergeant. He is drinking a little too much and he is yelling at his kids. He knows nothing of balance and order, of Tao logic, of his alter ego in the city of Baltimore who is wantonly solving homicides with the good fortune of two men.

“Oh do tell,” says Garvey.

“He said Warren Waddell shot him.”

“Warren Waddell?”

“Yeah, he said his buddy Warren shot him in the back for no reason. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe he shot me. I can’t believe it.’”

“You heard all this?”

“I was standing right over him. Me and my side partner heard it all. He said this guy Warren works with him at a place called Precision Concrete.”

Way to go, my man, way to go. Everything was going from gray to black in the rear of Medic 15, but you got it done, you said what had to be said. You left a little something behind for a homicide detective to remember you by, and for that Rich Garvey thanks you.

A dying declaration, the lawyers call it-admissible evidence in a Maryland courtroom if the victim is informed by competent medical personnel that he is dying or otherwise indicates that he believes himself to be dying. And while it’s not uncommon for homicide victims to make dying declarations, it is a rare and special moment when those utterances are at all helpful to a detective, not to mention relevant.

Every homicide detective has a favorite story involving a murdered man’s last words. Many of these tales center on the code of the street and its observance even at life’s end. One involves the last moments of a West Baltimore doper, who was still talking when officers arrived.

“Who shot you?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” the victim declared, presumably unaware that he had about forty seconds left to live.

Having suffered deep stab wounds to the chest and face, one dying man claimed to have cut himself shaving. Another victim, shot five times in the chest and back, assured officers with his last breath that he would take care of the problem himself.

But perhaps the most classic dying declaration story belongs to Bob McAllister. Back in ’82, during his first weeks as a homicide detective, Mac had worked a long detail case with other detectives and had been a secondary on a few calls, but otherwise he was pretty green. In the hope that he’d learn from a veteran, they paired him with Jake “the Snake” Coleman, alias the Polyester Prince, a gravel-voiced, bantamweight detective of legendary proportions. And so, when the call came in for a shooting on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jake Coleman was out the door with McAllister in tow.

The dead man at Pennsie and Gold was named Frank Gupton. McAllister can remember the name without hesitation; he also remembers that the case is still as open as the day is long.

“He was alive when we got here,” said the first officer at the scene.

“Oh yeah?” said Coleman, encouraged.

“Yeah. We asked him who shot him.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘Fuck you.’”

Coleman slapped McAllister on the back. “Well, brother,” he growled, imparting an early lesson to the younger detective, “looks like you got your first murder.”

Now, standing out on Fremont Avenue, Garvey and McAllister both know enough about their victim, one Carlton Robinson, to say that whatever else he was, he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Frank Gupton. He wanted to be avenged.

An hour after clearing the scene, both detectives are in a west side rowhouse, talking with Carlton’s girlfriend, who had packed the victim’s lunch pail and kissed him good-bye as he left to catch an early morning ride to work.

The interview is hard. The girlfriend is pregnant with Carlton’s child, and he was supporting her and talking about marriage. She knows that he usually caught his ride to work at Pennsylvania and North and she knows the name Warren Waddell as a co-worker who sometimes caught the same ride. But Garvey and McAllister have only a few minutes to talk with her before the sound of a ringing telephone fills the small apartment. The hospital, thinks Garvey, already aware of what the news will be.

“No,” she wails, dropping the receiver on the floor and falling into a girlfriend’s arms. “No, goddammit. No…”

Garvey stands up first.

“Why is this happening to me?”

Then McAllister.

“Why…”

Both detectives leave their cards in the kitchen and find their own way to the door. Everything so far-from the lunch pail to Carlton’s willingness to name his killer to his girlfriend’s tears-tells them they have a real victim here.

A few hours later, at a doughnut shop off Philadelphia Road in eastern Baltimore County, the site manager of Precision Concrete confirms as much: “Carlton was just a great guy, a really great guy. He was one of my best guys.”

“And Waddell?” asks Garvey.

The manager rolls his eyes. “I mean, I’m amazed he actually killed him. I’m amazed he did it, but I’m not surprised he did it, you know?”

Warren was crazy, the manager says. He came to work every other day with a semiautomatic pistol tucked into his jeans, showing off his flash money and telling everyone about how good his drug connections were.

“Did he have drug connections?”

“Oh yeah.”

It was hard getting Waddell to do work out at a site, the manager says. He’d rather spend time telling everyone else on the crew how dangerous he was and how he had killed people before.

Well, thought Garvey, listening to the manager ramble on, that much was true anyway. Back at the office an hour ago, the detectives had run Waddell’s name and come up with an impressive sheet that culminated in a second-degree murder conviction twelve years ago. In fact, Waddell had just made parole.

“He’s a mental case,” says the manager, a sawed-off billy with dirty blond hair. “You know, I’d be scared to deal with him sometimes… I can’t believe he killed Carlton.”

For the regulars in the morning rush at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, the conversation is a startling diversion. The manager chose the spot because it was near the day’s construction site; now, the businessmen at the counter are ordering refills and staring over their newspapers at the spectacle of two plainclothes detectives working a murder.

“What was Carlton like?”

“Carlton was a real good worker,” says the manager. “I’m not sure, but I think it was Carlton who got Waddell his job with us. I know they came to work together all the time.”

“Tell me what happened yesterday at work,” says Garvey.

“Yesterday,” says the manager, shaking his head. “Yesterday was just a joke. They were joking around, you know, teasing Warren.”

“What about?”

“Different stuff, you know. The way he acted and how he didn’t do any work.”

“Was Carlton teasing him?”

“They all were. They called him a dickhead and he didn’t like that.”

“Why’d they call him a dickhead?”

“Because, you know,” says the manager, shrugging off the question, “he’s a dickhead.”

Garvey laughs.

At one point, the manager tells them, Waddell flashed his semiauto and declared cryptically that tomorrow was election day and people always get killed on election day. Garvey has heard the summer heat wave theory and the full moon theory of inner-city mortality, but never the election day postulate. This is a new one.

“Tell me about this gun.”

The manager describes the weapon as a 9mm semiauto with a clip of eighteen rounds. The casings at the scene were.38, but both Garvey and McAllister know that most people can’t tell a.38 from a 9mm on first sight. Warren was proud of the gun, the manager says, recalling that Waddell had explained that he always mixed hollow-point and roundnose ammunition together in the clip, alternating between the two. “That’s the way to kill a man,” Waddell told anyone willing to listen.

That, too, matches up when both detectives return to the city to watch an assistant medical examiner pull bullets out of Carlton Robinson’s body. It is a slow morning on Penn Street-a double suicide or murder-suicide from Montgomery County, another suicide from Anne Arundel, two probable overdoses, an unexplained collapse, and a ten-year-old girl run down by a truck. The detectives don’t have to wait more than an hour to confirm that half the recovered slugs are hollow-point, the rest, standard roundnosed ammo.

The ballistic evidence is tinged with irony. Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state’s vaunted Saturday Night Special law takes effect. Passed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the National Rifle Association, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city’s homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer-even the dickheads of the world, Warren Waddell included, are carrying quality weapons. And though Maryland’s landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.

On the day after Carlton Robinson’s murder, Warren Waddell calls the manager to say he won’t be coming to work. He also asks if his employer can pick up tomorrow’s paycheck and meet him across town. Anticipating such a request, the detectives told supervisors at the construction company to explain to Waddell that he has to come to the office in Essex and sign for the check in person. The manager gives him that story and then asks if he really killed Carlton.

“I can’t talk right now,” Waddell says.

Then, to the amazement of all concerned, Waddell shows up the next morning to claim his paycheck, eyes the secretaries suspiciously, then leaves abruptly. He and the friend who drove him are arrested at a county police roadblock a mile or two away. Searched by the county officers, Waddell is found to be carrying a large amount of cash, an American Express card and a U.S. passport. Upon his arrest, he makes no statement, then further endears himself to Garvey and McAllister by faking a stomach ailment on the trip downtown, wasting two hours of the detectives’ time at Sinai Hospital.

Everything about the case puts Waddell’s signature on the murder-the victim’s dying words, the fight and threats at work the previous day, the mixture of hollow-point and standard ammo, the suspect’s behavior after the murder. Yet when Garvey brings the case into the state’s attorney’s office, he’s told that it’s an easy indictment but a loser in court.

The centerpiece of the case-Carlton Robinson’s dying words-may prove inadmissible simply because the officers at the scene did not inform the victim that he was dying. Nor did Robinson specifically tell the officers that he believed his life was ending. Instead, the officers did the natural thing. They called for the ambo and leaned close to the victim, telling Robinson to hang on, assuring him that if he remained conscious he would make it.

Without an acknowledgment of imminent death by either the victim or his attendants, Robinson’s accusation could well be knocked down by a defense attorney who knows his Maryland code.

And without the dying declaration, they have weak circumstance and little more. Having been through the murder mill once before, Waddell shows no interest in the interrogation process, nor does a subsequent search warrant produce the murder weapon.

Garvey, of course, has no choice but to charge the murder. For one thing, he knows that Warren Waddell murdered Carlton Robinson. For another, he owes it to himself to close the case in this Perfect Year. But even as Waddell is trundled off to city jail for pretrial detention, the detective knows that this is one case for the lawyers to salvage.

Frustrated by the initial reaction from the state’s attorney’s office, Garvey asks Don Giblin, his golfing buddy in the violent crimes unit, to shop around for a veteran prosecutor. Garvey has seen enough of the trial division to know that half the ASAs in the office will look at a file like this and immediately pronounce the legal problem insurmountable. As with the Lena Lucas murder, he needs a fighter.

“Get me a good one, Don,” he tells Giblin over the telephone. “That’s all I’m asking.”