Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

TEN

Deck the halls with boughs of holly,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Throw that stiff up on the dolly,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Talk to us and if you’re willing,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Tell us who did all this killing,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Tell us how you want forgiveness,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

You don’t know we’ve got a witness,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la,

Talk to us, you’ve nothing to lose,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Why is blood upon your gym shoes?

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Want to make a good impression?

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

Make yourself a fast confession,

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

– Homicide unit Christmas song

Mostly for his own amusement, Donald Waltemeyer watches Mark Cohen watching the hole get deeper. The process-such as it is-consists of two distinct stages and Cohen’s disposition changes noticeably between the two. The first four feet with the backhoe are quick and painless, and Cohen barely squirms; the next eighteen inches require hand shovels, and Waltemeyer sees the lawyer’s face crease with something more than expectation.

Pale and wire-thin, with spectacles and curly blond locks, Cohen looks like an innocent straight man standing next to the side of beef that is Waltemeyer, a professorial, three-piece Hardy propped up beside a muscular, working-class Laurel. Cohen is a good man, among the best of the city prosecutors, and Waltemeyer can’t think of a better trial attorney for the sprawling colossus that began as the Geraldine Parrish murder-for-hire case. But Cohen is a lawyer, not a cop, and as the shovels work deeper into clay, he begins to look less and less comfortable. Mercifully, Waltemeyer gives him his out.

“Kinda cold out here,” the detective says.

“Sure is,” agrees Cohen, his collar turned up to the winter wind. “I’m going back to the car awhile.”

“You want the keys for the heater?”

“No, I’ll be okay.”

Waltemeyer watches Cohen negotiate his way across the muddy field, made worse by an inch or two of recently melted snow. The lawyer steps lightly in his L. L. Bean duck boots, both hands hiking up the seams of his slacks an extra couple of inches. Waltemeyer knows the cold isn’t the only thing the man is feeling: The stench-faint but foul in the frigid air-was there from about four feet down. Cohen couldn’t help but get a whiff of it.

At the sound of something solid, the detective turns back toward the hole, taking a step forward to peer down over the edge. “What was that?”

“That’s the top,” says the cemetery manager. “You got the top of the box right there.”

The two men in the hole concentrated their shovels on the edges of the wood, trying to free the top of the casket from the surrounding dirt. But at the first real stress, the pressed wood cracks and collapses.

“Just pull that shit up,” says the manager. “Don’t even mess with it.”

“Not much of a casket,” says Waltemeyer.

“I’m telling you,” agrees the manager, a gravel-voiced, pear-shaped man. “She buried the man cheap as she could.”

I’ll bet she did, thinks Waltemeyer. Miss Geraldine wasn’t about to be spending hard-won money on funerals, what with all the dearly departed she had to contend with. Even now, from inside the city jail, Geraldine Parrish was fighting hard to remain the sole heir of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard’s money and property, with a civil suit by the reverend’s family still to be decided by a circuit court judge.

As for the good reverend himself, he is somewhere under this godforsaken mud slope, this potter’s field just below the city’s southern edge. Mount Zion, they called it. A consecrated cemetery; hallowed ground.

Bullshit, thinks Waltemeyer. The place is a small stretch of barren wetness running down off Hollins Ferry Road, owned and operated by one of the larger inner-city funeral homes, a volume business that can still scratch profit from even the cheapest burials. To the south is a low-income housing project, to the north, the Lansdowne Senior High School. At the top of the hill, near the cemetery entrance, is a convenience store; at the bottom, a polluted creek. Two hundred and fifty dollars gets the customer a plain pressed-wood box and a six-foot sliver of mud. If the body is unclaimed, if the state of Maryland has to serve as the sponsor, the price drops to a mere $200. Hell, thinks Waltemeyer, Mount Zion doesn’t even look like a cemetery-only a few headstones mark what had to be the graves of thousands.

No, Geraldine hadn’t exactly gone all out for her last husband, but then again, she had two more like him living with her over on Kennedy Street. The Black Widow’s last conquest got a cheap coffin, no vault and no headstone. Still, the cemetery manager seemed to have no problem finding the spot a half an hour ago, walking across the barren plain with an air of practiced certainty.

“Right here,” he said.

Row 78, grave 17.

“You sure it’s him?” asked Waltemeyer.

“It oughta be,” said the manager, surprised at the question. “Once you put ’em down there, they supposed to stay put.”

If, in fact, the grave held the remains of the right Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, age seventy-eight, then the doctors on Penn Street could still do something with this case. Even with a body that had been in the ground for ten months, an adulterant could still be detectable. Twenty prescription Valium, ground into a last meal of tunafish-yes indeed, Smialek told Waltemeyer as they agreed to get the exhumation order, if that’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we’ll find.

Still, the Reverend Gilliard had been in the ground since February and Waltemeyer has to wonder what’s even left down there. The cemetery manager said the winter burials would freeze in the ground, then decomp slower than those buried in warmer weather. It made some sense to the detective, but who even thinks about such things? Not Waltemeyer if he can help it. However much he enjoyed watching Mark Cohen squirm, he had to admit a private truth: This bothered him.

You find a body in the street and it’s a murder. You sketch him, take his picture, check his pockets, roll him over. In that instant and for a few hours afterward, he’s all yours, so much so that after a couple of years you don’t think about it anymore. But once he’s in the ground, once a preacher says some words and the dirt is on top of him, it’s just different. Never mind that this is nothing more than a muddy field, never mind that the exhumation is a necessary investigative act-for Waltemeyer, it’s still hard to believe that he has any right messing with a body in its final repose.

Naturally, his colleagues reacted to such doubts with all the warm sincerity for which Baltimore cops are known and admired. All the way through roll call this morning they had piled it on: Christ, Waltemeyer, what the fuck kind of asshole are you? We don’t have enough murders to deal with in this fucking town, you got to go prancing around the goddamn cemeteries like Bela fucking Lugosi, digging up skeletons?

And Waltemeyer knew they had a point: In terms of criminal culpability, the exhumation seemed a bit redundant. They had Geraldine and her contract killer, Edwin, on three homicides and the repeated attempts on Dollie Brown. They had Geraldine and another triggerman charged with a fourth murder in the death of Albert Robinson, the old drunk from New Jersey found by the Clifton Park railbed back in ’86. Waltemeyer had driven Corey Belt and Mark Cohen up to Bergen County for a few days to interview witnesses and nail down that charge. Four murders, five murders-at what point does another charge no longer matter?

Watching the gravediggers pry at the broken pieces of the casket top, Waltemeyer wonders whether it’s worth it. Miss Geraldine will be going to prison in any case, and what happens today certainly isn’t going to give Gilliard’s family any peace of mind. On the other hand, the detective has to concede that, like the doctors on Penn Street, he, too, is a little curious.

Tossing the curled, rotting wood out of the hole, the gravediggers stand against the edges of the box. Waltemeyer leans over and looks down.

“Well?” says the manager.

Waltemeyer looks at the photograph of Gilliard, then down at the coffin. The dead man looks pretty good, considering the circumstances.

“He’s a little small,” says the detective. “The photo looks like a bigger man.”

“They thin out when they in the ground,” says the manager, impatient. “You know the motherfuckers don’t stay too fat down there.”

No, thinks Waltemeyer. I guess they don’t.

It’s hell trying to lift the bottom of the box out of the mud, and after ten minutes, the gravediggers give up, deferring instead to the ME’s attendants, who simply lift the remains up and out using a plastic tarp.

“Way to go, Waltemeyer,” the attendant says as he climbs from the grave, covered in mud. “You just went to the top of my list.”

The body claimed, Waltemeyer and the gravediggers begin the slow, muddy trek back to the dirt road that divides Mount Zion. Stepping carefully toward the Cavalier, the detective watches the attendants load the black van, then looks through the car windshield at Mark Cohen. The prosecutor is looking down, seemingly preoccupied.

“You see him?” he asks Cohen in the car.

Cohen barely looks up, his face buried deep inside his briefcase, his hands working through the files inside.

“Mark, did you see him?”

“Yeah,” says Cohen. “I saw him.”

“Pretty ghoulish, huh?” says Waltemeyer. “I feel like I’m in a horror movie or something.”

“Let’s get downtown,” says Cohen. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

Oh yeah, thinks Waltemeyer. He saw him.

The detective chooses to skip the actual autopsy, but it goes without a hitch-the cutters gathering tissue and organ samples for the toxicology, then checking the remains for any other overt signs of trauma. A perfectly straightforward piece of medical work, the examination could be a case study for the forensic pathology tests. At least it seems that way until an attendant is sewing up the chest cavity and notices the hospital identification bracelet on the cadaver’s wrist. The ink is faded, but the name, clearly legible, is not Rayfield Gilliard.

Twenty minutes later, the telephone in the homicide unit bleats. A detective answers and then yells into the coffee room: “Waltemeyer, medical examiner on line one.”

Sitting at Dave Brown’s desk, Waltemeyer picks up the receiver and leans forward. After a second or two, his hand goes to his head and his fingers pinch the skin at the bridge of his nose.

“You’re not kidding me, are you?” He leans back in the chair and stares up at the yellowing ceiling tile. His face is contorted, comical in its cartoon-like approximation of woe. He pulls a pencil from Brown’s desk and begins writing on the back of a pawn shop card, sounding each word as he writes: “Hospitalbracelet… Eugene… Dale… black, male…”

Great.

“No one noticed it until after the autopsy?” asks the detective.

Just great.

Waltemeyer hangs up the phone and gives himself half a minute before punching the intercom button on the phone extension.

“Captain?”

“Yes,” says the voice on the phone.

“This is Waltemeyer, sir,” says the detective, still holding the bridge of his nose. “Captain, are you sitting down?”

“Why?”

“Captain, I got goods news and bad news.”

“Good news first.”

“The autopsy went well.”

“And the bad news?”

“We dug up the wrong guy.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, I’m serious.”

“Jesus.”

Eugene Dale. Some poor soul who had the misfortune to be chucked into the same potter’s field at about the same time as the Reverend Gilliard. Now he’s down on a gurney on Penn Street, looking a little worse for the day’s events. Not much in this world can truly upset a homicide detective, but for Waltemeyer, disturbing the slumber of the innocent dead comes damn close. Waltemeyer wonders whether this Dale has relatives. And that name: Why does it sound familiar?

“You got the wrong guy?” asks a detective from Stanton’s shift, working overtime on a court appearance. “Who’d you get?”

“Some poor bastard named Eugene Dale.”

“Eugene Dale?”

“Yeah.”

“D-A-L-E?”

Waltemeyer nods.

The other detective points at the board and the last couple of names under Rodger Nolan’s section. “That’s the same name as Edgerton’s suspect.”

“Who?”

“Eugene Dale.”

“Who is?” asks Waltemeyer, still confused.

“The guy that Edgerton locked up for killing the little girl,” says the detective. “He’s got the same name as the guy you just dug up.”

Waltemeyer looks at the board. “Eugene Dale,” he says, reading the black ink. “I’ll be damned.”

“Where’s Edgerton now?” asks the other detective.

“Off today,” says Waltemeyer, absorbed in thought. What the hell does it matter who they dug up? It isn’t Rayfield Gilliard; they know that much. Waltemeyer listens impassively as the other detective gets Edgerton on the phone and then runs through the preamble.

“Harry, was your guy a junior? Was his name Eugene Dale, Jr., or Eugene Dale the third, or something like that?”

The other detective nods, listening to the answer. Without hearing a word, Waltemeyer can imagine Edgerton’s confusion.

“And did Dale’s father die recently… Yeah, like February or so… Yeah, right… Well guess what, Harry, you’re not gonna believe this, but Waltemeyer just dug up your suspect’s father and had the guys at the morgue cut him open… Yeah, I’m serious.”

Enough, thinks Waltemeyer, walking out of the coffee room. I’m not about to sit around here all day listening to this crap. Never mind that Edgerton is on the other end of the phone line absorbing this bizarre coincidence and fantasizing about a fresh trip to the city jail. Never mind that Edgerton imagines himself confronting the younger Dale with the information that the Baltimore Police Department dug up his father and played with him for no reason other than his son killed a little girl and lied about it. Never mind that Stanton’s detective will be running over to Mark Tomlin’s desk at the shift change, telling Tomlin about Waltemeyer’s morning so Tomlin can draw one of his cartoons that every so often grace the coffee room wall. Never mind all that.

This, to Waltemeyer, is not funny.

Leaving the other detective on the phone with Edgerton, Waltemeyer borrows a Cavalier and takes another ride to Mount Zion.

“You back?” asks a gravedigger at the Hollins Ferry entrance.

“I’m back,” says Waltemeyer. “Where’s Mr. Brown right now?”

“He’s in the office.”

Waltemeyer walks across the driveway toward a small, one-room caretaker’s shack. The cemetery manager, on his way out the door, meets him halfway.

“Mr. Brown, you and me got some talking to do,” says Waltemeyer, looking at the ground.

“Why’s that?”

“Because that body you dug up and gave us this morning…”

“What about it?”

“That was the wrong man.”

The manager doesn’t miss a beat. “Wrong man?” he says. “How could they tell?”

Waltemeyer hears that and thinks about grabbing the old man by his throat. How could they tell? Obviously, the manager figures that after lying in the ground ten months, one corpse looks a lot like another. Just so long as you pull the lid off and it ain’t wearing a dress, right?

“He had an ID bracelet from the hospital,” says Waltemeyer, fighting his temper. “It says he’s Eugene Dale, not Rayfield Gilliard.”

“Jesus,” says the manager, shaking his head.

“Let’s go inside and have a look at whatever records you got.”

Waltemeyer follows the old man into the shack, then watches as he pulls three sets of 3-by-5 cards from a metal file drawer-January, February and March burials-and begins thumbing through them.

“What you say the name was?”

“Dale. D-A-L-E.”

“Not in February,” says the manager. He begins checking the March burials, stopping at the fourth card in the pile. Eugene Dale. Died March 10. Buried March 14. Section DD, Row 83, Grave 11. Waltemeyer picks up the February cards and finds Rayfield Gilliard. Died February 2. Buried February 8. Section DD, Row 78, Grave 17.

Not even close. Waltemeyer gives the manager a hard stare.

“You were five rows away.”

“Well, he ain’t in the right place.”

“I know that,” says Waltemeyer, his voice rising.

“I mean, we was at the right place, but he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”

Waltemeyer looks at the floor.

“I didn’t work that day,” says the old man. “Someone else messed up.”

“Someone else?”

“Yeah.”

“You think if we dig where Eugene Dale is supposed to be, we’re gonna find Gilliard?”

“Maybe.”

“Why? They’re buried a month apart.”

“Maybe not,” the manager agrees.

Waltemeyer picks up the burial cards and begins sorting through the lot, looking for burials on or near the eighth of February. To his amazement, the names are strangely familiar. Every other card seems to correspond to a 24-hour report.

Here is James Brown, Gilbert’s murder, that kid who got stabbed to death on New Year’s. And Barney Erely, the old drunk Pellegrini found bludgeoned in the alley off Clay Street a few weeks after Latonya Wallace, the derelict killed when he chose the wrong place to defecate. And Orlando Felton, that decomp from North Calvert Street, the overdose that McAllister and McLarney handled back in January. And Keller’s drug killing from March, that homeboy with the unlikely last name of Ireland who made a bucket of money selling east side dope. Christ, all that cash and his family just dumps him in a potter’s field. Dunnigan’s drug murder from the Lafayette Court projects… the three little babies killed in Steinhice’s arson case… Eddie Brown’s fatal shooting from Vine Street. Waltemeyer reads on, both awed and amused. This one was Dave Brown’s, this one was Shea’s. Tomlin handled this one…

“You really don’t know where he is,” says Waltemeyer, putting down the cards, “do you, Mr. Brown?”

“No. Not exactly. Not right now.”

“I didn’t think so.”

At that moment, Waltemeyer is ready to cut his losses and give up on Rayfield Gilliard; the medical examiners, however, are still insistent. They have a probable homicide and an exhumation order signed by a Baltimore County judge, and therefore Mount Zion is obligated to find the body.

Three weeks later they try again, digging down into the mud a full six rows from the spot where the state reburied Eugene Dale, Sr., in a better box than the one it tore apart. This time Waltemeyer does not ask for the logic behind the manager’s insistence on the new location, in part for fear that there is no logic. They use the same backhoe, the same gravediggers, the same ME’s attendants, who haul the second, heavier corpse to the surface, then check the wrists carefully for any identification.

“This one looks more like him,” Waltemeyer says with hope, checking the photograph.

“Told you so,” the manager says proudly.

Then the ME’s man pulls a sock from the left foot to reveal half of a hospital toe tag. W-I-L are the only visible letters. Wilson? Williams? Wilmer? Who knows and who the hell cares if it isn’t Rayfield Gilliard?

“Mr. Brown,” Waltemeyer says to the manager, shaking his head in genuine amazement, “you are a piece of work.”

The manager shrugs, saying that it looks like the right man to him. “Maybe the tag is wrong,” he adds.

“Jesus Christ,” says Waltemeyer. “Get me away from here before I lose my mind.”

Leaving the cemetery grounds, Waltemeyer finds himself walking with a gravedigger. The workman quietly confirms his worst fears, explaining that back in February, when the ground was frozen and the snow deep, the manager had them dig a mass grave down by the creek; they could get the backhoe down there without getting it stuck. Then they dumped eight or nine coffins into that same hole. Easier this way, the manager told them.

Waltemeyer squints in the morning sunlight as the gravedigger finishes his story, his eyes narrowing across the bleak landscape. From the cemetery entrance at the top of the hill, a good part of the city skyline can be seen: the trade center, the USF &G building, the Maryland bank tower. The spires of mobtown, the harbor city, the land of pleasant living. The natives like to tell one another that if you can’t live in Bawlmer, you can’t live anywhere.

So where does that leave Barney Erely? And Orlando Felton? And Maurice Ireland? What was so wrong, so irrelevant, about them that they could end here beneath this wretched patch of county mud, wasted souls, with their city’s gleaming skyscrapers just close enough to mock them? Drunks, addicts, dope peddlers, numbers men, children born to the wrong parents, battered wives, hated husbands, robbery victims, an innocent bystander or two, sons of Cain, victims of Cain-these were the lives lost by the city in a single year, the men and women who cluttered crime scenes and filled Penn Street freezers, leaving little more than red or black ink on a police department tally board. Birth, poverty, violent death, then an anonymous burial in the mud of Mount Zion. In life, the city could muster no purpose for these wasted souls; in death, the city had lost them entirely.

Gilliard and Dale and Erely and Ireland-they were all beyond reach. Even if someone wanted to rescue a loved one and preserve the memory with a real headstone, in a real cemetery, it was no longer possible. The unmarked graves and the manager’s pathetic card file had seen to that. By rights, the city ought to build some kind of monument to its own indifference-Tomb of the Unknown Victim, it could be called. Set it up at Gold and Etting with a police honor guard. Drop a few shell casings in front of it and then chalk off a fresh human silhouette every half hour. Get the Edmondson High School band to play taps and charge the tourists a buck and a quarter.

Lost in life, lost in death. The brain-deads running Mount Zion had pretty much seen to that, thinks Waltemeyer, giving the muddy slope a last look. For $200 a pop, this alleged manager was willing to use any hole he could find, because what the hell, it was ridiculous to think that anyone was ever going to ask for one of them back. Waltemeyer thinks of their first encounter with the cemetery manager. The poor bastard probably shit blue when we showed up with that exhumation order.

After the second attempt, there will be no further excavations for the lost Reverend Gilliard. With a spate of murder charges already filed under Miss Geraldine’s name, this one will have to slip away. The pathologists, the lawyers, the cops-no one has the stomach to risk disturbing any more graves. For Waltemeyer, however, such sentiments come too late. True, the Geraldine Parrish investigation has been his career case, and his unstinting pursuit of it has secured his reputation as one of the homicide unit’s seasoned veterans. Nonetheless, his adventures in Mount Zion mark him with repute of an altogether different kind.

As if disinterring the odd, innocent body isn’t hard enough for a Catholic conscience, he will return to the office one day in January to find a new nameplate on his desk, the kind of thing you can order from any office supply store.

“Det. Digger Waltemeyer,” it reads.

“I don’t like the way he’s laying,” says Donald Worden, leaning over the bed. “Up on his side like that… like somebody rolled him.”

Waltemeyer nods in agreement.

“I think,” adds Worden, looking over the rest of the room, “that this one’s gonna come back from the medical examiner as a murder.”

“I think you’re right,” says Waltemeyer.

There is no overt trauma to the body, no bulletholes, no knife wounds, no bruises or contusions. A little bit of dried blood is visible around the mouth, but that could be the result of decomp. There is also no sign of struggle or ransacking in the motel room. But the old man is on his right side beneath the sheets, his back arched at an awkward angle, as if someone had pushed him into that strange position to check for signs of life.

He was sixty-five and white, a Southern Maryland man well known to the employees at the Eastgate Motel, a $25-a-night collection of double beds and bad wall prints on old Route 40 in East Baltimore. Once a week, Robert Wallace Yergin would drive to Baltimore from his home in Leonardtown, check into the Eastgate for a night, then spend the evening bringing young boys to and from the room.

For that purpose, at least, the Eastgate was situated perfectly. A few blocks from where Pulaski dead-ends into East Fayette Street, the motel is only blocks from the edges of Patterson Park, where $20 will pay for the services of a blond-haired billy kid anywhere from twelve to eighteen years old. The pedophile trade along Eastern Avenue is an old phenomenon, known to men up and down the East Coast. A few years back, when the vice squad wrote a warrant on a child pornography ring, they actually recovered some guidebooks to homosexual prostitution in major American cities. In Baltimore, the guides noted, the most promising locales were Wilkens near Monroe Street and Patterson Park along Eastern Avenue.

Not only is Robert Yergin’s affinity for boys under the age of majority known to the desk men and cleaning crew at the Eastgate, but the employees are able to identify and describe the sixteen-year-old who has been Yergin’s constant companion for the last several months. The kid is a Baltimore boy, the employees tell Worden, a street waif who for a pound or two of flesh had found a home with the old pervert down in the country. When Yergin came to Baltimore to troll for teenagers, he’d bring the kid, who would spend his time visiting friends from the old neighborhood.

“Maybe the boy is the one who took the car,” says the twenty-five-year-old employee from housecleaning who found the body. “He might have just borrowed it or something.”

“Maybe,” says Worden.

“When you came in here and found him,” asks Waltemeyer, “did you touch him or roll him over or anything to see if he was okay?”

“No way,” says the employee. “I saw he was dead right away and just left him be.”

“Did you touch anything in the room?” asks Worden. “Anything at all?”

“No, sir.”

Worden gestures to the young man, drawing him across the room for a private conversation. Quietly, and in a way that the employee immediately recognizes as truthful, Worden explains that this death is going to be a murder. Worden tries to reassure him: We only care about the murder.

“Don’t be offended,” the detective says, “but if you touched anything from the room, if you took anything from the room, tell us now and it won’t go any further…”

The employee understands. “No,” he says. “I didn’t steal nothin’.”

“Okay, then,” says Worden.

Waltemeyer waits for the young man to leave, then looks at Worden. “Well, if he didn’t get the wallet,” says Waltemeyer, “then someone else must’ve.”

That’s what it’s beginning to look like: Man meets boy, man gets undressed, boy strangles man, steals cash, credit cards and Ford Thunderbird and drives off into the Baltimore sunset. Unless, of course, the kid who lived with him did it. Then it’s man meets boy, man lives with boy, boy finally gets sick of playing grabass and chokes the living shit out of the landlord. That would play, too, thinks Worden.

The lab tech on call is Bernie Magsamen-good man, Bernie is, one of the best-and so they take their time with the scene, pulling fingerprints off the nightstand and the used drinking glasses near the bed and in the bathroom sink. They get a good sketch and several photographs of the body in that bizarre position. They go through the old man’s belongings carefully, looking for what is missing, what may be missing, or what is there that shouldn’t be.

They do this because they know they’ve caught a murder; they know it and act on it with the same resolve by which other men would declare the scene to be a motel room or its occupant to be dead. To Worden and Waltemeyer, the death of Robert Yergin is a murder even though the victim is sixty-five and overweight, fully primed for a heart attack, a stroke or some other natural death. To them it’s a murder, though there isn’t a suggestion of any struggle or any trauma to the body; it’s a murder, though there isn’t a hint of petechial hemorrhaging in the whites of the eyes-the postmortem telltale that so often occasions strangulation. To them it’s a murder even after Worden finds the victim’s wallet still fat with cash and credit cards in a jacket pocket, suggesting that anyone who killed the old man did a lousy job of robbing him. It’s a murder because Robert Yergin, who takes to bed young boys he barely knows, is lying there in a weird position without his 1988 Ford Thunderbird. What else does a good detective need to know?

Little more than three hours later, Donald Worden is standing next to Donald Kincaid on the opposite side of town, staring at a thirty-foot smear of drying blood that ends in a red-purple lake after traveling the full length of a vacant West Lexington Street rowhouse. And although the man whose carotid artery painted this picture is still clinging to life at Bon Secours, this, too, will come back a murder. Worden knows it, not only because so much blood has been sprayed across the dirty hallway tile, but also because he has no viable suspect.

Two whodunits in one night-the new standard by which a Baltimore detective can be judged. Any professional can work a series of mysteries on successive nights or handle dunkers in tandem on a rough midnight shift. But what prompts a man who inherits one open case file to then answer the telephone three hours later, grab a fresh pair of plastic gloves and a flashlight, and leave out for a West Baltimore shooting call?

“Well, well,” muses McLarney the morning after, as he stares at the fresh names on the board, “I guess it’s finally reached that point where Donald won’t trust anyone else with a murder.”

This is the Donald Worden around whom Terry McLarney built a squad, the Worden that Dave Brown can never please, the Worden that Rick James loves to call his partner. Two crime scenes, two autopsies, two family notifications, two sets of interviews, two batches of paperwork, two trips to the police computer for sheets on two separate sets of players-and not a word of complaint from the Big Man. Not even the barest suggestion that Waltemeyer may want to go it alone on the Eastgate murder, or that Kincaid will have to make do without a secondary for Lexington Street.

No, sir, Worden’s got himself a fresh pack of cigars, a full pot of coffee and McLarney’s signature on the bottom of a departmental overtime slip. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours and if he gets a break in either case, he won’t get near a bed for twelve more. It’s a hard road, a long haul-a ridiculous way for a grown man to earn a living. It’s also about as close to a feeling of immortality as a career cop ever gets.

In the end, he resurrected himself. In the end, he simply waited his anger out, waited for that phone line to light up with the cure that was bound to come. Straight murders, one after another, each one a unique variation of that same eternal evil; just crime and punishment, meted out to a working cop in roughly equal shares. God knows Worden had talked enough about quitting; in this job, he liked to tell colleagues, you eat the bear until the bear eats you, and I’m going to walk before that bad boy gets hungry.

Tough-guy talk. But no one really believed that Donald Worden would loosen his grip on that silver shield. It would have to be the other way around.

Three days after Worden picks up two murders on a single shift, both cases are in the black. The break in the Yergin case comes as a direct result of Worden’s prolonged interrogation of the victim’s teenage companion, a conversation that makes it clear enough that in the absence of any other suspect, the old man’s housemate will remain at the top of Worden’s list. Two days later the kid-still frightened-calls the homicide unit to say he’s heard that some white boys are driving the dead man’s Thunderbird around Pigtown and Carroll Park.

Worden and Waltemeyer drive down to the upper end of the Southern District, where Waltemeyer talks to a few of the older hands with whom he served for so long. The Southern troops are already known for reading homicide teletypes, but for their old bunky Waltemeyer they’ll go so far as to tow every T-bird in the district down to headquarters. An hour after the detectives’ visit, two Southern men stop the right car at Pratt and Carey and take the driver, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, into custody. Worden and Waltemeyer tag-team the suspect in the large interrogation room until he admits to being in the motel room; unaware that the autopsy proved the death to be suffocation, he claims the old man died of a seizure. When the two detectives complete the statement and leave the room, the kid stands up and uses the two-way window in the door as a mirror, breaking pimples and fretting over his complexion as if he’s still an ordinary teenager, contemplating a Friday night date.

The Lexington Street murder, a dispute over a small narcotics sale, is solved on a recanvass of the shooting scene, when Worden’s photographic memory matches the face of an old man who answers a door in the 1500 block with the face of a bystander he saw hanging out on a corner the night of the murder. Sure enough, the old man admits to being a witness and identifies the shooter from a photo array. But it’s still a weak, one-witness case until the suspect arrives downtown, whereupon Worden lets loose with the full blue-eyed, white-haired father-figure treatment and persuades the shooter to give up everything. So effective is Worden’s method that the suspect actually calls the detective from the city jail two weeks later with secondhand gossip about an unrelated murder.

“Detective Worden, I also just wanted to call and wish you a Merry Christmas,” he tells the man who has jailed him. “For you and your family both.”

“Thank you very much, Timmy,” says Worden, a little touched. “My best to you and yours for the holidays.”

Two up and two down. For Worden, the last weeks of a year that was so utterly frustrating now roll effortlessly onward, as if scripted for some cops-and-robbers television show in which all the crimes will be solved and explained before the last commercial break.

Three days before Christmas, the Big Man and Rick James go out on an East Baltimore shooting call, driving away from headquarters on a December night so unseasonably humid that the city is layered in thick, blinding fog. As the Cavalier lurches up Fayette Street, both detectives squint through the mist at the vaguest outline of rowhouses on either side of the street.

“This is fucking soup,” says James.

“I always wanted to work a murder in fog,” says Worden, almost wistful. “Like Sherlock Holmes.”

“Yeah,” agrees James. “That guy was always finding bodies in this shit…”

“ ’Cause it was London,” says Worden, pulling slowly through the light at Broadway.

“And it was always some motherfucker named Murray who did it. Murray something…”

“Murray?” says Worden, confused.

“Yeah, the killer was always named Murray.”

“Moriarty, you mean. Professor Moriarty.”

“Yeah,” says James. “That’s it. Moriarty. If we get a murder tonight, we gotta try and find a yo boy named Moriarty.”

They do get a murder, a street shooting that stays a whodunit for only as long as it takes Worden to wade into a sea of black faces, a pale wanderer waiting for the crowd’s natural hostility to dissipate, a patient, civil cop listening for the anonymous mention of a criminal’s name.

Just before dawn on that same midnight shift, when the paperwork is complete and the office television offers nothing better than a test pattern, Donald Worden, strangely wired, wanders through the quiet looking for something else to occupy his time. James is asleep in the coffee room; Waltemeyer, pecking away at a 24-hour report in the admin office.

While making a fresh pot of coffee, the Big Man pries the plastic top from an unopened coffee can. Then, with the look of raw science filling his face, he sends the disk spinning through the stagnant air of the main office.

“Watch this,” he says, walking over to pick up his new toy. He sends it back across the room, this time with a perfect ricochet off the tile floor.

“For my next trick,” he says, preparing another launch, “we go off the ceiling.”

Worden sends the plastic soaring. From the admin office, Waltemeyer looks up from the typewriter, momentarily distracted by what appears in the corner of his eye as a sort of thin, airborne blur. He looks over at Worden curiously, then back down at his report, as if dismissing the illusion.

“C’mon, Donald,” yells Worden. “Get your ass out here…”

Waltemeyer looks up.

“C’mon, Donald. C’mon out and play.”

Waltemeyer continues typing.

“Hey, Mrs. Waltemayer, can Donald come out and play today?”

Worden sends the disk soaring toward the plate glass that separates the two offices just as the admin lieutenant, an hour early for the coming dayshift, walks through the fishbowl toward his office. The plastic glances off the outer glass and sails gracefully past a wall column and into the open door of Nolan’s office. The lieutenant stops in the doorway, marveling at the rare and extraordinary sight of Donald Worden, happy.

“Well?” asks the lieutenant, mystified.

“It’s in the wrists, lieutenant,” says Worden, smiling. “It’s all in the wrists.”

Rule Ten in the homicide handbook: There is too such a thing as a perfect murder. Always has been, and whoever tries to claim otherwise merely proves himself naive and romantic, a fool who is ignorant of rules one through nine.

A case in point: Here lies a black male by the name of Anthony Morris, twenty-one years of age, shot dead in the western half of Baltimore, Maryland. A young man of suddenly declining status in the local drug trade, Mr. Morris is found by Western uniforms in an empty courtyard of the Gilmor Homes, where a person or persons repeatedly compressed the trigger of a.38-caliber weapon and thus caused several small pieces of metal alloy to rip holes in Mr. Morris’s body.

When removed from the corpse tomorrow morning, every one of these metal pieces will be splintered and mutilated, rendering them useless for comparison purposes. And because the weapon is a revolver, there aren’t any spent casings lying around either. Even then, without a recovered weapon or a bullet or casing from a related crime-anything to which ballistic evidence might be compared-these problems are academic. Moreover, the crime scene is an asphalt courtyard in dead winter, barren of fingerprints, hairs, synthetic fibers, footprints, or anything else that could be mistaken as physical evidence. Nor is there anything in the pockets of the victim that constitutes a clue. Nor did Mr. Morris have anything illuminating to say to the first officers and paramedics-hardly surprising given that he was dead upon discovery.

Witnesses? On this midnight shift, in fact, there are no human beings whatsoever in this section of the Gilmor Homes projects. Emptied of its inhabitants for a pending renewal project, the courtyard into which Anthony Morris wandered is dark, cold and utterly devoid of human endeavor. No lights on the street, no lights in the boarded-up units, no pedestrians, no neighbors, no corner groceries or bars.

A helluva place to kill someone, thinks Rich Garvey, staring up and down the deserted courtyard. A perfect place, in fact. Anthony Morris is gunned down in a city of 730,000 and for all practical purposes, the crime scene could be the Nevada desert or the Arctic tundra or some other uncharted wilderness.

The original, anonymous call was for shots fired. Not even the report of a shooting or a body, not even a chance to talk to some people who found the victim. No passersby, no grieving relatives, no homeboys signifying from the corners. With McAllister working the crime scene, Garvey stands there shivering in the early hours of a winter morning, waiting, for any remote suggestion of life from the surrounding city-any warm, lighted place where a detective’s first question could be asked.

Nothing. The silence is complete; the scene, vacant. There is only Garvey and his partner and the usual Western District faces in a swirl of blue-top emergency lights, alone with a corpse in a sleeping city. Garvey tells himself that it doesn’t matter, that someone, somewhere, is ready and waiting to talk to him, to tell him about Anthony Morris and his enemies. Maybe the family, or a girlfriend, or some childhood buddy from the other end of the projects. Maybe an anonymous call to the homicide office, or a letter from some informant locked up on some pissant charge.

Because when you’re the man with the perfect year, no scene can be too bleak. After all, what would he have been left with on Winchester Street if Biemiller hadn’t grabbed the girlfriend at the scene? Or with the Fairfield bar robbery if the kid on the parking lot hadn’t remembered the tag on that getaway car? Or the Langley murder up in Pimlico, the one where the uniforms made a drug arrest a half-block away and the guy turned out to be an eyeball witness?

Yeah, Garney tells himself, I don’t have shit on this one. So what else is new? Except for the simplest kind of dunkers, they all look like weak sisters when you first get to the scene.

“Maybe you’ll get a call on this one,” says a Western uniform.

“Maybe,” says Garvey, agreeable.

True to that hope, he and McAllister are in a rowhouse living room an hour later, a room brimming with survivors. The victim’s mother, sisters, brothers and cousins are all arrayed at the edges of the room while the detectives stand in the center, exerting a certain centripetal force.

In the dry heat of the crowded room, Garvey watches McAllister launch into his standard exposition on what the grieving family should and shouldn’t do in this, Their Time of Loss. Garvey never stops marveling at Mac’s artistry with the families: Head tilted slightly, hands folded together at the waist, he’s a parish priest, expressing his most heartfelt sorrow in slow, measured tones. Mac’s even got a slight, endearing stutter that kicks in during moments of stress and adds a hint of vulnerability. At the scene an hour earlier, standing over the dead man, McAllister was as quick with a joke as any of them. Now, with the dead man’s mother, he’s Mr. Sharing and Caring. Phil fucking Donahue in a trenchcoat.

“Now there’s absolutely no need for you to go down to the medical examiner’s office. In fact, even if you wanted to go down there, they wouldn’t let you in…”

“Where’s that?” says the mother.

“At the medical examiner’s,” says McAllister slowly. “But you don’t need to worry about that. All you have to do is contact the funeral home of your choice and tell them that the body is at the medical examiner’s office at Penn and Lombard streets. They’ll know exactly what to do. Okay?”

The mother nods.

“Now, we’re going to try to find out who did this, but we’re going to need the family’s help… That’s what we’ve come here to ask for…”

The sales pitch. McAllister gives it his best shot, his you-can’t-bring-him-back-but-you-can-avenge-him soliloquy that leaves the mother nodding in agreement. Garvey looks around the room for some sign from the multitude, some small discomfort exhibited by a family member carrying a little bit of knowledge. The younger men and women seem distant, detached, but a few take the business cards, assuring the detectives that they know nothing but will call if there is so much as a rumor in the neighborhood.

“Again,” says McAllister at the door, “let us express our condolences for your loss…”

Garvey looks at a room full of blank faces. Mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends-all of them seem to be ignorant of any reason for the murder. The phone in the homicide office won’t exactly be lighting up on this one, he concedes.

“Again, don’t hesitate to call us if you have any questions or any information at all,” says McAllister, winding up.

Garvey moves toward the front door, leading the way out of the rowhouse. As the two detectives step outside, Garvey turns to his partner and prepares to explain why McAllister ought to become the primary investigator in this lost campaign. But he says nothing; instead, he looks over Mac’s shoulder at a young man, a cousin of the victim, who has furtively pursued them out the door.

“Excuse me, officer…”

McAllister turns as well, increasing the cousin’s apparent discomfort. The young man has something to say and he will not be denied.

“Excuse me,” he says, his voice a whisper.

“Yes?” says Garvey.

“Can I… um…”

Here it comes, thinks Garvey. Here comes the moment when a grieving relative steps away from the rest of the family and bravely imparts a little truth. The cousin extends his hand and McAllister takes it first. Garvey follows suit, warming to the knowledge that he is truly golden, that he has somehow transcended reality and become the Midas of ghetto homicides.

“Can I…”

Yes, thinks Garvey, you can. You most certainly can tell us everything, every last little thing you know about your cousin Anthony. Tell us about the drugs he was firing, or the drugs he was dealing, or the beef he had with a customer last night. Tell us about some money problem that left a supplier handing out wolf tickets, swearing to get even. Tell us about the girls he was fooling with or the other boyfriends who threatened to light him up. Tell us what you heard on the street after the murder, or maybe even the name of the guy you heard bragging about the murder in some bar. You can tell us everything.

“Can I… um… ask a question?”

A question? Of course you can. I’ll bet you want to remain anonymous. Hell, unless you’re an eyewitness or something, you can even stay monogamous if you really want. We’re your friends. We like you. We’ll take you downtown for free coffee and doughnuts. We’re cops. Trust us. Tell us everything.

“What is it?” asks McAllister.

“Is what you tryin’ to tell me…”

“Yes?”

“Is what you tryin’ to tell me that my cousin Anthony is dead?”

Garvey looks at McAllister, and McAllister looks at his shoes to keep from laughing aloud.

“Um, yes,” says McAllister. “I’m afraid he’s been fatally wounded. That’s what we were talking about inside…”

“Damn,” says the cousin, truly amazed.

“Anything else you wanted to tell us?”

“No,” says the cousin. “Not really.”

“Well, sorry again.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

“Okay.”

It’s over. It’s history. It was a helluva run-ten cases in a row beginning with Lena Lucas and old man Booker back in February. But now, with every fiber of his being, Garvey understands that the rocket scientist on the porch is nothing if not a messenger-a walking, talking presignification of all that is true to a murder police.

The words from the wayward cousin’s mouth were all thickness and incoherence, but to Garvey they confirm every rule in the book. He didn’t have a suspect, so of course his victim didn’t survive. And with no suspect, there isn’t likely to be any lab evidence or any chance of the victim surviving his wounds. And if Garvey ever does locate a witness to this crime, the witness will lie because everyone lies. And if he ever does get his hands on a suspect, that man will undoubtedly sleep in the interrogation room. And if this weak case ever manages to get within arm’s length of a jury panel, every doubt will seem reasonable. And most especially: It’s good to be good, but it’s better to be lucky.

The brain-dead on the porch is an unmistakable divination, a reminder that the rules still apply-even for the likes of Rich Garvey. Never mind that ten days from now he’ll be working a fresh drug murder on the east side, charging through a rowhouse door to grab the shooter beneath the colored lights of a decorated Christmas tree. Never mind that next year will be a crusade as successful as any other. Now, at this moment, Garvey can watch Anthony Morris’s cousin slip back indoors and know, with the faith and certainty of a religion, that there is nothing coming back on this one-no telephone calls to the homicide office, no snitching from the city jail, no talk on the streets of the Western. The case will never go black; it will be open long after Garvey is soaking in his pension.

“Mac, did I imagine that conversation?” he asks, laughing, on the return trip to the office. “Or did it really happen?”

“No, no,” says McAllister. “You must’ve imagined it. Put it out of your mind.”

“Dee-tective,” says Garvey, in bad imitation. “Is what you tryin’ to say is that my cousin is dead?”

McAllister laughs.

“Next case,” says Garvey.

In any man’s work, perfection is an elusive, ethereal goal, an idea that does constant battle with the daily grind. But to a homicide detective, perfection is not even a possibility. On the streets of a city, the Perfect Year is a mere wisp of a thing, a dying fragment of hope, pale and starved and weak.

The Perfect Murder will kick its ass every time.

“Look,” says Terry McLarney, watching the Bloom Street corners with mock innocence. “There’s a criminal.”

Half a block ahead of them, the kid on the corner seems to hear him say it. He turns abruptly from the Cavalier’s headlights, moving down the street, one hand reaching back to pull a rolled newspaper from his pants pocket. McLarney and Dave Brown can both see the newspaper fall softly into the gutter.

“Patrol was so easy,” says McLarney wistfully. “You know?”

Dave Brown knows. If the unmarked Chevy were a radio car, if they were wearing uniforms, if Bloom and Division was in their sector, they’d have a lockup just that easy. Throw the weasel against a wall, cuff him up good, then walk his ass back to that little stick of newsprint, that homemade sheath wrapped around a knife or a syringe or both.

“There used to be these two guys in my squad when I was in the Western,” says McLarney, nostalgic. “They had this running bet over who could go out and get a lockup in the shortest time possible.”

“In the Western,” says Brown, “five minutes.”

“Less,” says McLarney. “After a while, I told them that they ought to make it more challenging. You know, something better than a Part Two arrest. But they didn’t like that… too much work.”

Brown turns onto Bloom and then turns again at Etting. They watch more corner boys drop glassine packets or run into rowhouses.

“See that house there,” says McLarney, pointing to a two-story pile of painted brick. “I got thumped in there. Right in the hallway… Did I ever tell you that story?”

“I don’t think so,” says Brown, polite.

“It was a call for a man with a knife, and when I pulled up this guy just takes one look at me and runs into the house…”

“PC in my book,” says Brown, turning right and cruising back toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

“So I run in after him and there’s this convention of healthy black males in the living room. It was bizarre; we all just kinda looked at each other for a second.”

Dave Brown laughs.

“So then I grab hold of my guy and they’re all over me. Like five or six of ’em.”

“What’d you do?”

“I got hit,” says McLarney, laughing. “But I didn’t let go of my guy either. By the time my bunkies answered the thirteen, everyone had run out the back except for my guy, who ended up getting beat for all his missing friends. I kinda felt sorry for him.”

“What about you?” asks Brown.

“Stitches in my head.”

“Was this before or after you got shot?”

“Before,” says McLarney. “This was when I was in the Central.”

One story after another spills from Terry McLarney’s brain, his mood lightened by a night on the West Baltimore streets. A car ride through the west side never fails to have that effect on McLarney, who can roll through the ghetto remembering a strange thing that happened on this corner, a funny comment overheard down that street. On the surface, it all resembles a nightmare, but dig a little deeper and McLarney can show you the perverse eloquence of the thing, the unending inner-city comedy of crime and punishment.

That corner there, for instance, the one where Snot Boogie got shot.

“Snot Boogie?” asks Brown, disbelieving.

“Yeah,” says McLarney. “And that’s what his friends called him.”

“Nice.”

McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players.

“So we’re interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they’re saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they’d finally gotten sick of it…”

Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression.

“And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money.”

McLarney pauses for effect.

“And?” asks Brown.

“He just looked at me real bizarre,” says McLarney. “And then he says, ‘You gotta let him play… This is America.’”

Brown laughs loudly.

“I love that,” says McLarney.

“Great story. Did it really happen?”

“Fuck yes.”

Brown laughs again. McLarney’s mood is contagious, even if the reason for tonight’s jaunt was wearing thin.

“I don’t think she’s out tonight,” says Brown, coasting up Pennsylvania Avenue for the fifth or sixth time.

“She’s never out,” says McLarney.

“Fuck this cocksucking bitch,” says Brown, slamming a hand on the steering wheel. “I’m tired of this fucking shit.”

McLarney looks at his detective with newfound delight, as if to encourage this sudden rant.

“I mean, we’re the homicide unit, the murder police, the highly trained investigative elite who always get their man…”

“Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”

“And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is…”

Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:

“She was out walking last night…”

“Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago…”

“She came out the carryout and went that way…”

Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?

“Maybe she’s not real,” says McLarney. “Maybe it’s a hoax and all the derelicts out here made her up. It’s a test to see how long we’ll ride around looking.”

McLarney smiles, warm with the thought of a $20 cockhound defying every law of metaphysics. A translucent wraith, she walks the streets of West Baltimore immune to the forces of authority. Some paid their $20 and swear her to be real, but to generations of homicide detectives, she is but the stuff of dreams, destined to be Baltimore’s contribution to the treasure chest of American folklore: Paul Bunyan, the Headless Horseman of Tarrytown, the ghost ship Mary Celeste; Lenore, the Mystery Whore.

“So why does James have her sheet in the file?” counters Brown. “And why do I have her B of I photo in my pocket?”

“Whoa,” says McLarney. “A clever hoax at that.”

“Fuck this bitch,” says Brown, still irritated. “She’s not out here.”

“What the hell,” says McLarney. “Let’s go ’round once more and then call it a night.”

They don’t have a prayer of finding her, of course. But McLarney loves being out on the street, out in the Western working a case that doesn’t matter to anyone. Not to Worden or James or Brown. Not to the dead man and, in this case, not to the killer either. Not even to McLarney. Tonight is police work with neither pain nor pressure, conducted at no emotional cost by men who have no real stake in the outcome.

For McLarney especially, the hunt for Lenore is a pleasing distraction, just as the murder he worked last month with Waltemeyer was pleasing. What could matter less than a drug robbery in a Pimlico alley, with the victim a doper and the witness talking bullshit? And then a young suspect, Fat Danny by name, claiming total innocence, crying for justice in his grandparents’ living room as detectives stalked through the house in search of the murder weapon?

“C’mon, stop crying,” McLarney told the suspect, a bruiser of a kid with at least six inches on him. “Calm down-”

“I DIDN’T KILL NO ONE!” screams Fat Danny, sliding away until McLarney backs him against the kitchen sink, one hand wrapped around the kid’s throat.

“C’mon, already,” McLarney said. “You’re gonna make it so we have to hurt you.”

“I DIDN’T-”

“Look at me,” said McLarney, glaring. “You’re under arrest. Do you want us to hurt you?”

And then a Northwestern DEU officer, one of the raiders, silenced the frantic, struggling suspect with an offhand remark: “For Chrissakes, kid, you did a man’s crime. Now act like a man.”

Later that night, after McLarney brought a Coke and candy bar into the interrogation room and made friends with the fat kid, he sat at his desk and thought about how simple and strangely enjoyable it all was. When nothing mattered, McLarney told himself, he could actually love this job.

Same thing tonight, he muses. If we never find Lenore, if she stays a mystery, then we live forever, rolling across West Baltimore in a four-cylinder go-cart, telling stories and cracking jokes and watching brain-dead homeboys drop their dope. But if we somehow find her, we gotta go back. We gotta go back and pick up the phone on something else, something that might just be real: a woman raped and carved up, an infant beaten, a cop you worked with and called a friend shot twice in the head.

That one was anything but pleasing. That one was real and brutal and unforgiving. The Cassidy shooting had stayed with McLarney as no other case could, bleeding him a little more every time he thought about it. All of his effort had been repaid with the proper result; Butchie Frazier at a sentencing hearing in Judge Bothe’s courtroom a couple of months ago, cuffed and sneering for the last time at life plus twenty, parole in no less than twenty-five. The verdict and sentence counted for something in McLarney’s mind; God knows where he would be now if the outcome had been different. But life and twenty was a courtroom victory, one that seemed sufficient for only as long as Gene Cassidy was in the courtroom.

No, in the end it was simply not enough-not for McLarney, certainly not for Gene. After learning to handle his guide dog at a school in New Jersey, Cassidy had returned to his alma matter, enrolling at York College in a graduate teaching program. These were the first sure steps on a long road back, and yet the recovery had been repeatedly, almost routinely, hampered by a city that somehow found it possible to treat a blind police officer as if he were just one among hundreds. Bills for specialists and physical therapy went unpaid for months at a time, with doctors complaining to Cassidy and Cassidy unable to do anything more than refer them to the city. Requests for special equipment-such as a sight-reading computer to aid with Cassidy’s studies-moved through the bureaucracy at an arthritic crawl. At one point, a friend of Patti Cassidy’s actually called a radio talk show to confront the visiting mayor, asking whether or not the computer was going to be purchased before the next semester of classes.

It took more than a year, in fact, before there was an award ceremony for Cassidy, something that McLarney thought should have happened within weeks of his return from the hospital. A dead cop would have received the splendor of full honors at the funeral-the color guard, the twenty-one-gun salute, the folded flag offered to the widow by the commissioner of police. But a wounded cop seemed to paralyze the department; the brass had a hard time deciding what to say, much less cutting through its own red tape.

To McLarney, the departmental response to Cassidy’s ordeal was a little bit obscene, and in the months that followed the shooting, he made himself a promise. If I ever get killed line-of-duty, McLarney told several other detectives, there shouldn’t be anyone above the rank of sergeant at the funeral-except maybe D’Addario, who was a friend. Yeah, Dee could be there. But no color guard, no bagpipes, no command staff, no delegations from a dozen other departments. Just Jay Landsman calling the men to attention by shouting “Present arms,” after which a hundred Baltimore cops would produce cold cans of Miller Lite and simultaneously pull the poptops.

Gene Cassidy’s ceremony, when it finally occurs, is only a bit more formal. On the night after the latest search for the missing Lenore, McLarney once again finds himself back in the Western District, this time in the roll call room at the Riggs Avenue station house, watching from the edge of the room as the four-to-twelve shift collects in front of two dozen evenly spaced chairs. Gene himself asked that the ceremony be held here at the district, just as his old shift prepared to go out on the street. McLarney scans the uniforms and realizes that most of the men Cassidy worked with are now gone-some to other shifts and other districts, others to better-paying police departments in the surrounding counties. Still, there is some power to the moment when the shift lieutenant barks attention and the entire shift snaps rigid; Cassidy, sitting in a front-row seat with Patti beside him, rises too.

McLarney watches the brass and the television reporters crowd around the edge of the room as the police commissioner says some words and steps from the podium to give Cassidy the Medal of Valor and the Medal of Honor, the department’s highest honors.

Then the majors and colonels drift away until Gene is alone in the recreation room with his family and his friends from the Western. McLarney, Belt, Biemiller, Tuggle, Wilhelm, Bowen, Lieutenant Bennett, maybe a dozen others hovering around two trays of cold cuts, listening to old rock ’n’ roll on a tape player. Jokes are told and stories exchanged and soon Cassidy and his dog are wandering from the party, leading a young niece on an impromptu tour of the station house that ends, strangely enough, in the holding cells.

“Hey, Gene,” says the turnkey, opening the front cage, “how you doing?”

“I’m all right. You busy tonight?”

“Not really.”

Cassidy stands with his dog just inside the lockup while the turnkey fingerprints his niece and shows her an empty cell. The demonstration is interrupted by a rattle from the last row of cages.

“Yo, somebody take mah handcuffs off!”

“Who’s that?” yells Cassidy, turning his head toward the sound.

“Why the fuck I need to be cuffed if I’m in the fuckin’ cell?”

“Who’s talking?”

“I’m talking, yo.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a fucking prisoner.”

“What’d you do?” asks Cassidy, amused.

“I ain’t done shit. Who are you?”

“I’m Gene Cassidy. I used to work here.”

“Fuck you then.”

And Gene Cassidy laughs loudly. For one last moment, he is home.

They ring the tiled room in crisp blue uniforms, their faces still smooth and unmarked. They are nineteen, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old at the outside. Their devotion is complete, their virginity, uncompromised. Protect and Serve still rattles around in the uncluttered expanse of their minds. They are cadets, a class from nearby Anne Arundel County. Twenty-five police-to-bes, primed and polished for this morning’s field trip from an academy classroom to hell’s innermost circle.

“You all like what you see?” says Rick James, acknowledging the gallery. The cadets laugh nervously from the edges of the autopsy room-some watching, others trying not to watch, a few watching but not believing.

“You a detective?” asks a kid in the front row.

James nods.

“Homicide?”

“Yep. Baltimore city.”

“Do you have a case down here?”

No, thinks James, I spend every morning in the autopsy room. The sights, the sounds, the ambiance-I love it all. James is tempted to have some fun with the class, but lets it drop.

“Yep,” he says. “One of ’em’s mine.”

“Which one?” asks the kid.

“He’s out in the hall.”

An attendant, finishing with one cadaver, looks up. “Who you here for, Rick?”

“The little one.”

The attendant looks out into the corridor, then turns his attention back to the work at hand. “We get to him next. Okay?”

“Hey, no problem.”

James walks between two open bodies to say hello to Ann Dixon, the deputy ME and a hero to working detectives everywhere. Dixie comes complete with a clipped British accent and an American detective’s view of the world. Not only that, she can hold her own at Cher’s or Kavanaugh’s. You got a body that needs cutting in the state of Maryland, you can’t do any better than Dixie.

“Dr. Dixon, how are you this fine morning?”

“Fine, thank you,” she says from the vivisection table.

“What’s up with you?”

Dixie turns around holding a long-blade knife in one hand and a metal sharpening roll in the other. “You know me,” she says, scraping one against the other. “I’m just looking for Mr. Right.”

James smiles and wanders back to a rear office for coffee. He returns to find his victim’s gurney in the center of the autopsy room, the body naked and stiff on the center tray.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” says the attendant, putting scalpel to skin. “I’d like to take a knife to the motherfucker that did this.”

James looks over at the cadet class to see two dozen stunned, silent faces. After a half-hour or so in the autopsy room, they probably thought that they were ready, that they were slowly acclimating to the sights and sounds and smells of Penn Street. Then the cutters wheel this one out of the freezer, and they realize they aren’t even close. From the center of the room, James can see some of the kids trying hard not to look, others trying to watch and then failing to contain their horror. In the corner of the room, a female cadet hides her face in the back of a taller companion, unwilling to look out for even a moment.

And no wonder. The body is little more than a small, brown island floating on a sea of stainless steel, a child’s form with tiny hands reaching up, fingers curled. A two-year-old, beaten to death by a mother’s boyfriend, who found it in himself to dress the swollen, lifeless body and then carry it to the ER at Bon Secours.

“What happened?” the hospital doctors asked the boyfriend.

“He was playing in the bathtub and fell.”

He said it with a calm that bordered on bravado, and he kept on saying it when James and Eddie Brown arrived at the hospital. All that night, he repeated it like a mantra in the interrogation room. Michael was in the tub. Michael fell.

“Why did you dress him? Why didn’t you rush him to the hospital?”

I didn’t want him to be cold.

“If he was taking a bath, how come there was no water in the tub?”

I let it out.

“You let it out? The baby is unconscious, but you stop to let the water out of the tub?”

Yes.

“You beat him to death.”

No. Michael fell.

But the doctors at Bon Secours weren’t fooled; Michael Shaw’s tiny body was more black and blue than brown, his injuries equivalent to those that a child might sustain if struck by an automobile traveling at thirty miles per hour. Nor do the examiners on Penn Street have any doubt: death by repeated blunt force trauma. The child literally had the life punched out of him.

Yet only when the pathologists begin their external examination of the child is Rick James completely revulsed.

“Did you see this?” asks the doctor, lifting the tiny legs. “He’s split wide.”

A true horror. The two-year-old boy had bled internally, his anus ripped apart by his twenty-year-old babysitter, his mother’s lover.

Mouths open, eyes glazed, the Anne Arundel cadets are trapped, forced to watch the child disassembled from the corner of the autopsy room. A day’s lesson.

On the ride back to headquarters, James says nothing; what in God’s name is there to say? It ain’t my kid, he tries to tell himself. It ain’t where I live. It ain’t nothing to me.

The standard defense, a homicide detective’s established refuge. Only this time it isn’t quite enough. This time, there is no dark hole in which to bury the anger.

Returning to the homicide office, James walks down the long blue hall away from the elevators, then peers through the wire mesh window in the door of the large interrogation room. The boyfriend is alone in there, leaning back in the middle chair, his sneakers up against the edge of the table.

“Look at him,” James says to a nearby uniform, called downtown for prisoner transport. “Just look at him.”

The boyfriend is whistling softly, replacing one tennis shoe after the other with elaborate precision, his reach limited by silver bracelets. He works with new laces-yellow and green-two for each high-top, inner-city style. Two hours from now, the turnkey at the Southwest lockup will pull out the same laces as a suicide precaution, but at the moment they are the sole focus of the boyfriend’s shrinking universe.

“Look at him,” says James. “Don’t it just make you want to kick his ass?”

“Hey,” says the uniform. “I’m with you.”

James looks at the patrolman, then peers back into the interrogation room. The boyfriend notices the shadow on the one-way glass and turns in the chair.

“Eh mon,” he says in a West Indian lilt. “I need gon to d’bathroom, yah know.”

“Look at him,” says James again.

He could beat him. He could beat this piece of shit until he was raw and bloody and no one in the office would say a damn thing. The uniforms would stay with their paperwork, the other detectives would block the hallway or maybe take a few shots themselves. And if the colonel came down the corridor to check on the commotion, he would only need to be told about little Michael Shaw, alone and silent on that long expanse of steel.

And could anyone really call it wrong? Could anyone believe that retribution so simple and swift could be less than just? Honor to a cop means that you don’t hit a man who’s wearing cuffs or is unable to fight back, you don’t hit a man to obtain a statement, and you don’t hit a man who doesn’t deserve it. Police brutality? To hell with that. Police work has always been brutal; good police work, discreetly so.

A year ago in this same interrogation room, Jay Landsman was the supervisor working an assault-on-police case from Fells Point, a drunken brawl in which several suspects had used a length of lead pipe to bludgeon an intervening Southeast patrolman to within an inch of his life.

“Now,” said Landsman, leading the main assailant into the box, “while you’re in here I’m going to take your handcuffs off because, you know, I’m not a tough guy or anything, but I know you’re a chickenshit asshole so it’s not going to be a problem, right?”

Landsman unlocked the cuffs and the suspect rubbed his wrists.

“See, I knew you were chickenshit-”

The guy came up out of the chair with a wild roundhouse that clipped the side of the sergeant’s head, after which Landsman stomped him so thoroughly that he would later keep a Polaroid of the bloodied suspect in his top desk drawer as a keepsake. Landsman walked out of the interrogation room just as the duty officer came down the hall.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Hey,” Landsman told the captain, shrugging, “the motherfucker swung on me.”

James could say the same thing now: This bastard sodomized and murdered a two-year-old child, then he swung on me and I fucked him up good. End of report.

“Go ahead,” says the uniform, thinking the same thought. “I’ll cover your back, man. I’d fucking love to see it.”

James turns, looks at the uniform strangely, then lets go with an awkward, embarrassed smile. It would feel good to take the cuffs off this kid and make him feel some pain. Hell, with the cuffs off the guy would have a better opportunity than he gave that child. Simple justice would argue for something more than the life sentence awaiting Alvin Clement Richardson; simple justice argued for the bastard to be helpless, immobile, unable to ward off the blows.

And then what? After one sadist had been reduced to a bloody pulp in one interrogation room, where would that leave Rick James? The kid was dead. Nothing was going to bring him back. The mother? Judging from her behavior in the early morning interviews, she could’ve cared less. It was a murder, they told her. He beat your baby so bad the doctors are saying he could’ve been hit by a car. He killed your child.

“I don’t think he’d do that,” she replied. “He loves Michael.”

James could beat him, but what the hell for? For peace of mind? For satisfaction? Alvin Richardson is just one sadistic bastard in a city full of sadistic bastards, and his crime is similarly common. Keller and Crutch-field had worked the suffocation of a two-year-old girl back in August; that same month, Shea and Hagin caught a one-year-old scalded to death by a babysitter. In September, Hollingsworth had a nine-month-old infant, strangled by her mother.

No, thinks James. I could beat this prick half to death and then dump him in the city jail infirmary and it wouldn’t mean shit. Come Monday, I’ll be back at work, looking through the wire mesh window at some other sociopath. James smiles again at the uniform, shakes his head and walks back into the main office.

“Eddie Brown,” he says, moving toward the coffee machine, “will you take this guy for a piss? If I do it I’m liable to fuck him up.”

Brown nods, walks over to the mailboxes and pulls the interrogation room key off its nail.

Jay Landsman bounces back and forth across the homicide office, comparing three separate stories from three separate squirrels. He had hoped for a quiet night, maybe even a chance to hit a bar with Pellegrini after the shift change, but now he has a full house: one in the large interrogation box, one in the small box, one on the couch in the fishbowl waiting his turn. To Landsman’s eye, each looks more guilt-ridden and culpable than the last.

Donald Kincaid steps out of the largest cubicle with a few pages of interview notes in his hand. He shuts the door before speaking to Landsman.

“He seems like he’s being helpful,” says Kincaid.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. So far.”

“I think he’s being too helpful,” says Landsman. “I think this motherfucker’s pissing all over us and callin’ it rain.”

Kincaid smiles. Good one, Jay.

“Well, his pal over there on the couch is the one trying to put him in, right?” says Kincaid. “And he’s definitely the one that was interested in the girl, you know? I wonder if she just pissed him off.”

Landsman nods.

The girl isn’t saying. She’s all cut up inside a men’s room at the Lever Brothers detergent plant over on Broening Highway. Overkill on the wounds, too, which makes the murder look like something personal, like a domestic. But that would be too easy; besides, the victim’s husband is soon accounted for-he was waiting down in the parking lot, listening to the car radio, waiting for his wife to come off her shift. The plant guards had to go down there and get him after they found the body.

So, figures Landsman, cross off the husband and go a little lower on the list. Boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? Wanted-to-be-a-boyfriend? She’s young enough and pretty enough, married a year or so, but that doesn’t mean much; she could still be getting some on the side down at the plant. Maybe it got out of hand.

“I mean, what the fuck is she doing in the men’s room anyway?” says Kincaid. “You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah,” says Landsman. “That’s what I’m thinking too, Donald.”

Landsman looks again into the large interrogation room to see Chris Graul sitting across the table from Squirrel No. 1, taking more notes, running through his weak shit one more time. Graul is new to Landsman’s squad from the check and fraud unit, a replacement for Fahlteich, who has been over in the sex offense unit for a few months now. After a couple of years following kited checks around town, Graul wanted to see about homicide work; after six years in Landsman’s squad, Dick Fahlteich had seen enough murders for one career. With its nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday routine, the rape unit was, for Fahlteich, a little like retirement with a paycheck.

Landsman watches through the wire mesh window as his new detective works around the edges of the kid’s story. Graul for Fahlteich, Vernon Holley for Fred Ceruti-it had been a year of changes for his squad, but Landsman wasn’t complaining. With all that time in robbery to his credit, Holley hit the ground running and was now handling murders on his own. Graul was a good find, too, though Landsman understood that since Graul was tight with Lieutenant Stanton from their time together in narcotics, the new detective would probably jump to the other shift at the first opportunity. Still, if that happened after Graul had proved himself, Landsman would be able to ask Stanton for a good detective in trade.

Suspects, victims, detectives-the players kept changing, yet the machine still managed to sputter and lurch forward. In fact, D’Addario’s troops had steadily improved their clearance rate and were now virtually even with the other shift. The unit as a whole was posting a rate of 72 percent, just above the national average for murder clearance. All the complaints about the rate earlier in the year, all that hysteria about the overtime cap and the Northwest murders and the Latonya Wallace case refusing to drop-all of it didn’t mean much at year’s end. Somehow, the numbers always manage to be there come December.

And Landsman is a big part of the story: His squad’s rate is above 75 percent, the highest for D’Addario’s shift. Nolan’s squad and McLarney’s men had both gone through hot streaks earlier in the fall; now Landsman’s crew was finishing the year with one closed case after another.

Indeed, for two months they could do no wrong. Dunnigan began it by putting down that drug ambush from Johnston Square, and Pellegrini followed with a manslaughter case from up on the Alameda, an accidental shooting in which some idiot killed a fourteen-year-old while doing tricks with his new semiautomatic. Then Holley, Requer and Dunnigan tag-teamed a pair of domestics and a week later, Requer followed with a hard-fought clearance on a drug murder in the Gold and Etting marketplace. Over the next month, everyone in the squad put down at least one more case, clearing each file within a day or two. With that much luck following the squad around, a little of the stuff even rubbed off on Pellegrini, who picked up the phone one winter evening and was treated to a second consecutive accidental shooting death. Fate itself seemed to feel obliged to offer an apology.

Tonight, if he has time, Landsman can saunter over to his section of the board and stare contentedly at a thick block of black ink. Twelve closed cases in a row, and this one-this bizarre stabbing inside a Broening Highway factory while three hundred employees worked the evening shift-well, he isn’t going to allow such a sillyass case to end his streak. A girl gets killed inside a factory during working hours and it comes up a whodunit? No fucking way, thinks Landsman. There’s a dunker in here somewhere; all I have to do is find it.

Arriving at the Lever Brothers plant earlier that night, Graul and Kincaid were ushered to the second floor of the main building to find the body of Ernestine Haskins, the thirty-year-old cafeteria manager, lying dead in a nearby men’s room. A series of wounds riddled the torso, but the most lethal cut had slashed the jugular. The blouse and brassiere were pulled up, suggesting sex as a motive, just as blood spatter on a bathroom stall partition and defense wounds to the hands suggested a brief struggle. The weapon, probably a long kitchen blade, was missing.

The cafeteria had closed after serving dinner, although the area wasn’t locked and it was accessible to anyone in the building. Just before the discovery of the murder, Haskins and two male employees were cleaning up and preparing to leave; for that reason alone the cafeteria employees deserved some special attention. One had discovered the body, the other had been with Haskins in the kitchen only minutes earlier.

Waiting for the factory shift to end, the two detectives processed the scene, walked the length of the cafeteria and checked the rest of the second floor, looking for a blood trail or anything else out of the ordinary. At the shift change shortly before midnight, Kincaid walked down to the plant’s outer gate to watch the entire workforce sign out at the security gate and parade past him. He looked every male employee directly in the face, then down at the worker’s shoes and pants cuffs, hoping for a few telltale specks of reddish brown.

Meanwhile, Graul acted on a tip provided by one of the cafeteria employees in an initial interview at the scene. Asked if Ernestine Haskins had any boyfriends or suitors at the plant, the employee offered the name of one man who, sure enough, happened to be on shift at that moment. Summoned by security guards, the man appeared in the cafeteria and expressed no immediate surprise at being informed of the murder. That alone didn’t mean much: word of the killing had raced through the plant even before the detectives’ arrival. More intriguing, however, was his willingness to admit that he had been interested in Ernestine Haskins. He knew she was married; still, she had seemed a little more than friendly and he thought she might go for something.

Kincaid and Graul gave the man’s clothes a close inspection but found no stains or tears. His hands were clean and uncut, his face unscratched. Even so, he would have had time to clean up before the body was found. A radio car was called; the suitor and both cafeteria employees were sent downtown.

After more than two hours at the crime scene, the two detectives drove back to the office. Landsman had deposited the three arrivals in separate rooms, where in Landsman’s considered opinion they had all displayed rodent-like behavior.

Squirrel No. 1, the cafeteria employee who had given Graul the tip about the woman’s suitor, remained solicitous of the investigators and continued to suggest all kinds of motives that could have inspired the man to murder. The second cafeteria worker, Squirrel No. 2, seemed to know damn little about the murder of his boss other than that it happened. And Squirrel No. 3, the plant employee who had lusted for Ernestine, was now strangely indifferent to her violent death, as if it were just something else that happened at work that day.

Having spent an hour or so traveling between the offices and interrogation rooms, balancing one story against another, Landsman has already formed some opinions. Squirrel No. 2 in the large interrogation room? Brain-dead, thinks Landsman. Maybe brain-dead and guilty. Squirrel No. 1 in the small interrogation room? Too fucking helpful. Color him helpful and guilty. And Squirrel No. 3, waiting in the fishbowl, is an asshole, probably a guilty asshole at that.

Now, three hours into the investigation, Landsman watches Kincaid return to the room where Graul is still listening patiently to lies. It’s into early morning now, and Landsman has so far been the very picture of earnest patience. No shouting. No wild rant. No twisted homicide humor amid the chaos of criminal investigation.

Landsman’s restraint comes in small part because this is Graul’s second case and Landsman is trying hard not to crowd a new detective, and in larger part because Ernestine Haskins-like Latonya Wallace-appears to be a real victim. And whatever else two decades in the department have done to Landsman, they have at least taught him that difference between a killing and a murder. It’s one thing, after all, for a detective to cut up with the uniforms when they’re gathered around some dead yo; it’s another entirely to behave that way when the case involves a young wife with her blouse pulled up, her throat slit open and her husband waiting in the company lot. Even for Landsman, certain things remain decidedly unfunny. Likewise, despite his reputation, he does understand that there are moments when a rant does more harm than good. For hours, he lets Graul and Kincaid lead the charge, waiting until they’ve run out of fresh questions before beginning his own pursuit. Only in the earliest hours of the morning, when the cafeteria company officials call the homicide unit to reveal that the day’s receipts are missing from the kitchen strongbox-only then does Landsman revert to form.

“What the fuck is this bullshit I’ve been listening to?” he mutters, storming back down the hall.

Squirrel No. 1 looks up in dismay as Landsman bursts into the small interrogation room.

“Hey, what the hell are you telling us?”

“What?”

“This is a robbery.”

“What is?”

“This fucking murder. The cashbox is missing.”

The employee shakes his head. Not me, he assures Landsman, though you might want to talk to that other boy who works in the kitchen. He was always talking about stealing that money. He tried to talk me into it.

Landsman takes that in, pivots, then charges past the large interrogation room, where the dead girl’s suitor-now suddenly forgotten-is banging on the door, asking to go to the bathroom.

“Hey officer…”

“One minute,” yells Landsman, turning the corner into the fishbowl, where the second cafeteria employee has been sitting between interviews.

“You,” he tells Squirrel No. 2. “Get up.”

The man follows Landsman back down the corridor and into the small interrogation room, now vacant because Graul has returned the first employee to the fishbowl through the main office. Musical witnesses.

“What happened to the money?” says Landsman, full of menace.

“What money?”

Wrong question. Landsman jumps in the face of Squirrel No. 2, railing on about how much they know about the robbery, about how serious a crime this is, about how they’ve already heard about how he wanted to steal that strongbox, about how Ernestine Haskins discovered the theft and confronted the thief in the men’s room and was killed for the trouble.

“I didn’t take the money.”

“That’s not what your friend says.”

The man looks around the room for comfort. Kincaid and Graul stare back, impassive.

“What are you, stupid?” asks Landsman. “He put you in.”

“What?”

“He’s telling us you killed her.”

“I… what?”

What the fuck, thinks Landsman. Do we need some kind of visual aid in here? Slowly, painfully, Squirrel No. 2 catches on.

“He’s telling you that?”

“Sure is,” says Kincaid.

“He’s the one did it,” says the man angrily. “He’s the one.”

Fine, thinks Landsman, storming back down the hall. I can live with this. After all, a stone whodunit has just been reduced to a simple either-or proposition. Now there’s nothing better for a detective to do than put Squirrels No. 1 and 2 into the same cage.

But turning the corner into the aquarium, Landsman comes up too quickly on the Number One Squirrel, arriving just as the man is stuffing wad after wad of greenbacks inside the lining of his fellow employee’s winter jacket.

“WHAT… WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

The young man freezes, his hand caught very deep inside one very big cookie jar.

“WHAT THE FUCK… GIMME THAT!” sputters Landsman, grabbing the guy by the arm and tossing him out into the corridor.

The jacket lining is fat with fives and tens and twenties; the rest of the money is still in the man’s own jacket pockets. He looks at Landsman sheepishly as Graul and Kincaid come running, having heard the commotion.

Landsman shakes his head, amazed. “While we’re in there talking to one guy, this goofy motherfucker is sitting here on the couch stuffing the money into the other guy’s coat. I just walked in, and he’s shoving the fucking money into the lining like this…”

“Just now?” says Kincaid.

“Yeah, I walk up and he’s shoving bills into the lining.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Yeah,” says Landsman, laughing for the first time all night. “Can you believe it?”

Hours later, after the guilty man has confessed to murder in his fashion (“I had the knife to her throat, but I didn’t cut her. She must have moved or something”), Landsman sits in the main office and dissects the case as Graul types his warrant.

“All that bullshit he was telling us about this guy and that guy,” Landsman tells Kincaid. “I should have jumped on that earlier.”

Maybe so, and maybe there’s a lesson in that. When you’re working murders, preparation and patience and subtlety take you only so far; sometimes anything more than the usual amount of conscientious precision becomes its own crippling burden. Witness Tom Pellegrini, who spends the night of Ernestine Haskins’s murder as he has spent so many others in the last two months-searching for a rational approach to that which is unapproachable, for scientific exactitude in places where nothing is ever exact. The method to Landsman’s madness is a hard, tight logic formed in a crucible of impulse and sudden anger. Pellegrini’s madness, on the other hand, takes the form of an obsessively rational pursuit of the Answer.

In the annex office, Pellegrini’s desk is adorned with a dozen or so milestones from this lonely, quixotic campaign. Reading material on new interrogation techniques, résumés of professional interviewers and private companies that specialize in criminal interrogative planning, paperback books on subliminal messages and body language, even a few reports from a meeting with a psychic that Pellegrini arranged in the hope that extrasensory investigative techniques would yield more than the usual strategies-all of that has now joined the paper storm of the Latonya Wallace case file.

In Pellegrini’s mind, the other side of the argument holds sway: Instinct is not enough; emotion defies precision. Twice they had the Fish Man closeted in one of these soundproof boxes, twice they chose to rely on their own talents and instincts, twice he went home in a Central District radio car. Yet without a confession, Pellegrini knows, there is nothing left for this murder investigation. The witnesses will never come forward, or they never existed to begin with. The crime scene will never be found. The physical evidence will never be recovered.

For his last chance at the Fish Man, the primary detective in the Latonya Wallace case places all hope in reason and science. Landsman can break twenty more suspects as he broke the killer of Ernestine Haskins and it won’t matter to Pellegrini. He has read and he has studied and he has carefully reviewed the previous interrogations of his best suspect. And in his heart of hearts, he believes that there ought to be some certainty to the thing, some method by which the confession of a guilty man can be derived from an algebra that the Baltimore detectives have not yet learned.

And yet, a month ago, back when Pellegrini was chewing on the second of those two accidental shootings, Landsman proved again that cautious rationality was often useless to a detective. On that occasion, too, Landsman had held back for a time, waiting quietly in the wings while his detective listened to three witnesses offer separate explanations for a rowhouse shooting that left a Lumbee Indian teenager dead. They were drinking beer and playing video games in the living room, the witnesses claimed. All of a sudden there was a knock on the apartment door. And then a hand coming through the open door. And then a gun in the hand. And then a single, unexplained gunshot.

Pellegrini had the two teenagers repeat their stories over and over, watching each witness for subliminal indications of deceit, the way the interrogation manuals teach you. He noticed that one guy’s eyes broke right when he answered; according to the textbook, he was probably lying. Another guy backed up when Pellegrini got close to him; by the book, an introvert, a witness who can’t be pressured too quickly.

With his sergeant in tow, Pellegrini worked through the kids’ stories for more than an hour, catching a few contradictions and pursuing them to a few obvious lies. It was patient and it was methodical. It was also getting them nowhere.

Sometime after midnight, Landsman finally decided he’d had enough. He dragged a fat, pimply-faced white kid into his office, slammed the door hard and wheeled around in a rage, knocking his desk lamp to the floor. The fluorescent bulb shattered against the linoleum and the kid covered himself, waiting for a rain of blows that never came.

“I’M DONE FUCKING AROUND WITH YOU!”

The kid looked at the wall, terrified.

“YOU HEAR ME? I’M DONE FUCKING AROUND. WHO SHOT HIM?”

“I don’t know. We couldn’t see-”

“YOU’RE LYING! DON’T LIE TO ME!”

“No…”

“GODDAMN YOU! I’M WARNING YOU!”

“Don’t hit me.”

In the aquarium, the fat boy’s friend and the third witness, a black teenager from the Southeast projects, could hear everything. And when the Landsman blitzkrieg came rolling down the hall, the black kid’s worst fear owned him. The detective grabbed the kid, tossed him into the admin lieutenant’s office and began spitting out profanity. It was all over in thirty seconds.

Returning to his own office a few minutes later, Landsman confronted the fat kid again. “You’re done lying. Your buddy just gave you up.”

And the fat kid simply nodded, almost relieved. “I didn’t mean to shoot Jimmy. The gun just went off in my hand. I swear, it just went off.”

Landsman smiled grimly.

“You broke your lamp,” said the fat kid.

“Yeah,” said Landsman, leaving the room. “How ’bout that?”

Outside, in the annex office, Pellegrini greeted his sergeant with a smile and a look that suggested regret. “Thanks, Sarge.”

Landsman shrugged and smiled.

“You know,” said Pellegrini, “I’d still be talking to them if you hadn’t done that.”

“Fuck it, Tom, you’d have done the same thing eventually,” Landsman told him. “You were getting there.”

But Pellegrini said nothing, uncertain. Then and now, Landsman teaches a truth that is a contradiction, an unnerving counterweight to Pellegrini’s methodical pursuit of empirical answers. Landsman’s lesson says that science, deliberation and precision are not enough. Whether he likes it or not, a good detective eventually has to pull the trigger.

Season’s greetings from the Baltimore homicide unit, where a Styrofoam Santa Claus is taped to the annex office door, its visage marred by a deep, bloody, close-range gunshot wound carved into the old saint’s forehead. The wound track was created with a penknife, the blood with a red felt-tipped pen, but the message is clear: Yo, Santa. This is Baltimore. Watch your back.

Along the metal bulkhead walls of the main office, Kim and Linda and the other sixth-floor secretaries have applied a few lonely strips of red and gold trim, some cardboard reindeer and a few candy canes. In the northeast corner of the office stands the unit’s tree, sparingly decorated this year but otherwise unmarked by the cynical displays of holidays past. A few years back, some of the detectives retrieved a few morgue photos from the files-mostly shots of dead drug dealers and contract killers, a few of whom had beat out murder charges of their own. With some careful cutting, the detectives liberated the bullet-riddled bodies from the photo background and, overcome by the Yule spirit, pasted hand-drawn wings on the shoulders of the dead. In a way it was touching: Hard-core players like Squeaky Jordan and Abraham Partlow looked positively angelic hanging from those polyurethane branches.

Even the decorations that began as sincere gestures seem small and defeated in this place, where phrases such as “peace on earth” and “goodwill towardmen” have no apparent connection to the work at hand. Onthe anniversary of their savior’s birth, the men who work homicides are decidedly unsaved, stuck as they are in the usual rotation of shootings and cuttings and overdose cases. Still, the holiday will be acknowledged if not celebrated by the squads working the four-to-twelve and overnight on Christmas Eve. What the hell, this much irony ought to be marked in some meaningful way.

A year ago, there wasn’t much Christmas mayhem at all, a shooting or two on the west side. But two years ago, the phone lines were all lit up, and the year before that was also a hellacious piece of work, with two domestic homicides and a serious shooting that kept Nolan’s squad running until the light of day. On that Christmas, the early relief arrived to find Nolan’s men suffering from a strange holiday fever, acting out a series of holiday homicides in the main office.

“Bitch,” yelled Nolan, pointing his finger at Hollingsworth. “You got me the same thing last year… BANG!”

“You bastard, I already got a toaster,” said Hollingsworth, turning his finger on Requer. “POW!”

“Oh yeah?” says Requer, firing a round in Nolan’s direction. “Well, you burned the stuffing again this year.”

Their little dramas weren’t all that farfetched, either: On a legendary Christmas shift back in the early 1970s, a father killed his son in a dark meat-light meat argument at the family dinner table, plunging the carving knife into the kid’s chest to assure himself of the first crack at the serving plate.

True, the captain always remembers to have a respectable deli spread brought up for the night crew. True, also, that the Christmas shift is the one night of the year when a detective can pull a bottle out of his desk without worrying about being caught by a roving duty officer. Even so, the holiday shift in homicide remains the most depressing duty imaginable. And as luck would have it this year, the three-week shift change for D’Addario’s men falls on the morning of December 25. Landsman and McLarney will work their squads on the Christmas Eve four-to-twelve shift, followed by Nolan’s men on midnight, followed by McLarney’s men again for the Christmas dayshift relief.

No one is happy about the schedule, but Dave Brown, for one, has found a way around its rigors. He always makes a point of putting in early for vacation on the holidays, and this year, with a one-year-old daughter and fervent dreams of domestic bliss, he plans to be nowhere near headquarters on Christmas morning. Naturally, this absurd notion of Brown’s becomes yet another item on Donald Worden’s list of things for which the younger detective requires abuse, to wit:

1. Brown hasn’t done shit with the Carol Wright case, which is still nothing more than a questionable death by automobile.

2. He has just finished five weeks of medical for a leg operation at Hopkins, a procedure allegedly made necessary by some sort of mysterious nerve damage or muscle spasms that any real man would ignore after a second beer.

3. His abilities as a homicide detective have yet to be truly tested.

4. He won’t be around to drive to Pikesville for garlic bagels on the Sunday dayshift, since that happens to be Christmas Day.

5. Worse, he now has the nerve to be off on holiday while the rest of his squad has to work both ends of a shift change.

6. He’s a piece of shit to begin with.

Worden, with his remarkable memory, has no need to write down this healthy little list. Instead, he keeps it on the tip of his tongue, so as to better reacquaint the younger man with the essential facts of life.

“Brown, you are a piece of shit,” Worden declared on the elevator one evening a week ago. “As long as I’ve been on, do you know how many days I missed on medical?”

“Yes, you miserable bastard, I know,” answered Brown, his voice rising. “You’ve never missed one lousy, stinking day for medical. You only told me about a thousand times, you…”

“Not one day,” said Worden, smiling.

“Not one day,” said Brown in falsetto imitation. “Give me a fuckin’ break already, will you?”

“But your leg hurt a little so you-”

“It was a serious medical condition,” yelled Brown, losing all patience. “There was an operation-a dangerous, life-threatening operation…”

Worden only smiled. He had the poor boy right where he wanted him; in fact, he’d had him there for weeks. Worden had become so utterly insufferable that the day after the encounter on the elevator, the Carol Wright folder suddenly and magically returned from the oblivion of the file cabinets to occupy a more prominent place on David Brown’s desk.

“It has nothing to do with Worden,” Brown insisted at the time. “This case has bothered the shit out of me for months and I always planned to come back on it as soon as I came off medical.”

Probably so. But now, from the other side of the coffee room, Worden watches with a measure of personal satisfaction as the younger detective spends another day reacquainting himself with the dead billy girl on the gravel lot.

Brown picks through the pieces of the file, reacclimating himself to the office reports, scene photos, follow-ups and BPI shots of a dozen suspects who never panned out. Once again he reads the witness statements from Helen’s Hollywood Bar, the woozy statements of drunks who wanted to believe that the killer was driving a Lotus custom through the streets of Baltimore. Once again he glances through the reports from all those random car stops of black sports cars and compacts in the southern districts of the city.

There is nothing worse than a billy murder, thinks Brown, contradicting any earlier assessments. I hate billies: They talk when they’re not supposed to, they fuck up your investigation, they waste your time by prattling on about everything they know. Fuck this case, he tells himself. Gimme a drug murder in the projects where nobody saw a thing, he muses. Gimme something I can work with.

Brown rereads the various descriptions of the suspect provided by bar patrons, the contradictory statements about hair length and style and eye color and everything else. He lines up the ident photos collected from every old lead and looks for anything that comes close to matching, but without better descriptions it’s hopeless. Not only that, but the ident photos all seem disturbingly similar. Every billy boy seems to stare out at the camera with one of those oh-so-this-is-my-mug-shot expressions; every one seems to sport tattoos, bad teeth and a tanktop shirt so dirty it could stand up on its own.

Look at this piece of work, thinks Brown, pulling one photo from the pile-a billy if ever there was one. The kid is an obvious motorhead, his shag of jet black hair parted in the middle and running halfway down to his ass. He’s got fucked-up teeth-big surprise there-and weird blond eyebrows. Christ, the kid’s got an expression so vacant that it qualifies as probable cause for a drug warrant…

Whoa. He’s got blond eyebrows. Blond as can be, thinks Brown, stunned.

The detective holds the ident photo close, his eyes bouncing back and forth between the kid’s hair and eyebrows. Black, blond. Black, blond. Gimme a fucking break here; they’re right there in the photograph, plain as day. How the hell did I miss that the first time? he wonders, searching for the report that was once stapled to the photo.

Sure enough, the kid’s name came from a car stop over by Pigtown, a follow-up by a Southern District officer on that lookout they had teletyped to patrol back in August. Brown finds the report and remembers it immediately: The guy was driving a black Mustang with a sunroof. Not exactly a T-top, not exactly a Lotus. But it was in the ballpark. A Mustang could have those low-to-the-ground performance tires, just as the traffic man had described. But the first time Brown read the report he had discounted it. The district officer stated unequivocally that the driver of the car had dark hair, and the one thing every witness agreed on was that Carol Wright’s companion was blond. Only a week ago, after reopening the file, did he bother to ask the ident section to send him photos of the long shots like this one. And only now was he noticing the mismatched eyebrows.

“Donald, look at this.”

Worden steps over, expecting something lame.

“This photo is from an arrest a couple weeks after my murder. Check out his eyebrows.”

The older detective scans the ident photo and raises an eyebrow of his own. Why in hell would a blond billy boy dye his hair black? You might go the other way, but blond to black? How often does a kid do that?

A good catch, Worden admits to himself. A helluva good catch.

Given the four-month delay, there isn’t a lot of hope for recovering any physical evidence, and it will be after the holidays before Brown and Worden get back on the street to chase this one. But when they do pluck the kid from his girlfriend’s house in Pigtown on a January morning, Jimmy Lee Shrout’s hair will be dyed red and he will act as though he’s been waiting for them since August. The battered Mustang, found in front of the girlfriend’s house that same day, will be towed to the Fallsway garage, where Worden is waiting with a lab tech. With the car up on a jack, the detective and tech begin by pulling greasy debris from the bottom, and for the first ten minutes or so they find dirt and shards of paper and pieces of leaves, until the lab tech is scoffing at the idea that anything will be left on the undercarriage after all this time.

“Well,” Worden replies, pulling at the edge of a thin strand, trying to pry it from the front crossbar, “what do we call this, then?”

“I’ll be damned.”

Worden gently unwraps the strand from the crossbar, traversing the metal three times. Finally, a long, reddish hair slides into his hand.

“What color hair did she have?” the tech asks.

“Red,” says Worden. “She had red hair.”

Later that day, Jimmy Lee Shrout will wait for the detectives in the large interrogation room, and when the wait gets a little long, he will go to sleep. Later still, he will be shown a picture of Carol Wright and he will tell Brown and Worden that he remembers picking her up as she hitchhiked on Hanover Street. He also remembers that she went to see someone at the Southern District and afterward he took her to a bar in Fell’s Point. Yeah, Helen’s-that was the name. They drank a little, she danced. Then he offered to drive her home, but she took him instead to this parking lot in South Baltimore, where she smoked his dope. He wanted to go home and sleep and he told her so. She got mad and left thecar, after which he fell asleep behind the wheel. He woke up a short time later and drove away.

“Jimmy, she was run over on that lot.”

“I didn’t do that.”

“Jimmy, you ran her down.”

“I’d been drinking. I can’t remember.”

Later, in a second interview, Jimmy Shrout admits to remembering that he hit a slight bump as he drove off the gravel lot. He tells the detectives that he thought he’d hit a curb or something.

“Jimmy, there’s no curb on that lot.”

“I don’t remember,” the kid insists.

Brown is especially curious about one particular detail: “Later on, did you ever find a single sandal anywhere in your car?”

“A sandal?”

“Like a woman’s summer thong.”

“Yeah, a few weeks later. I came across something like that. I thought it was my girlfried’s and I threw it out.”

In the end, it will be nothing better than manslaughter by auto, which is nothing better than two or three years of state time, tops. The problem with homicide by auto is the same as homicide by arson: Without witnesses, no jury can be made to believe that someone killed that way isn’t the victim of an accident.

Both Worden and Brown understand that, but Sprout’s story will make it clear to them what actually happened in that parking lot. It wasn’t Shrout who wanted to go home, it was Carol Wright. She wanted to go and Shrout was upset. After all, she’d driven across Baltimore with him, she’d smoked his shit, and now she wasn’t going for anything. They argued and she got angry or maybe scared; either way, Brown and Worden cannot imagine that Carol Wright left that car of her own volition and walked across that gravel lot with only one shoe. No question about it: She left that car in a hurry.

All that waits in the future, but today, at the moment that Dave Brown notices the bad dye job in Jimmy Lee Sprout’s ident photo, the case is solved, and it’s solved as a murder, not an accidental death by auto, not a case pended by the medical examiner. Dave Brown has every reason to be satisfied: Regardless of what any prosecutor or jury wants to say about it later, today the death of Carol Wright is going down as a crime. Black hair, blond eyebrows, case closed.

Another case closes as well. A few hours after Brown shows him the ident photo, telling him to check the hair color, Worden watches Brown pack up his desk and walk to the coffee room coat rack.

“Sergeant,” says Brown to McLarney, who sits across the aisle from Worden, “unless you need me for anything, I’m going to start my holiday.”

“No, go ahead, Dave,” agrees McLarney.

“Donald,” says Brown, acknowledging the older detective, “have a good one.”

“You too, David,” answers Worden. “Merry Christmas to you and yours.”

Brown stops in his tracks. David? Not Brown? And merry Christmas? Not “Season’s greetings, you piece of shit”? Or even “Happy holidays, you worthless fuck”?

“That’s it?” Brown asks, turning back to Worden. “‘Merry Christmas, David’? You’re not going to give me shit? Last month I walked out of here and it was ‘Happy Thanksgiving, you piece of shit.’”

“Merry Christmas, David,” says Worden again.

Brown shakes his head and McLarney begins to laugh.

“You want me to call you a piece of shit,” says Worden, “I’ll call you a piece of shit.”

“No, hey. I’m just confused.”

“Oh, you’re confused,” says Worden, now smiling. “In that case, give me a quarter.”

“You’re always giving him quarters,” says McLarney. “Why is Worden always taking quarters from you?”

Dave Brown shrugs.

“You don’t know?” asks Worden.

“I have no fucking idea,” says Brown, fishing out a coin and tossing it to the older detective. “He’s Donald Worden. If he wants a quarter, I give him a quarter.”

Worden smiles strangely at this particular gap in Dave Brown’s education.

“Well,” asks Brown, looking at Worden, “is there a reason?”

Still smiling, Worden holds Brown’s latest contribution between thumb and forefinger, his arm extended upward so that the coin catches a little shine from the fluorescent lights.

“Twenty-five cents,” says Worden.

“Yeah. So?”

“How long have I been a poh-leece?” asks Worden, giving it the full Hampden drawl.

And at last Dave Brown understands. Twenty-five cents, twenty-five years. Worden’s small, symbolic affirmation.

“Pretty soon,” says Worden, smiling, “I’m gonna have to ask for a nickel too.”

Brown smiles as the logic settles in his mind. He’s learned something he never even wondered about, the answer to a question he never thought to ask. Worden wants a quarter, you give him a quarter. He’s the Big Man, for Chrissakes, the last natural police detective in America.

“Here, Brown,” offers Worden, tossing the quarter back to the younger detective. “Merry Christmas to you.”

Brown stands in the center of the coffee room, holding the quarter in his right hand, his face creased by confusion.

“You need a quarter, Donald, take it,” he says, throwing the coin back.

Worden catches it and tosses it back in one fluid motion. “I don’t want your money. Not today.”

“You can have it.”

“David,” Worden says, tiring, “keep your fucking quarter. A merry Christmas to you and yours and I’ll see you after the holidays.”

Brown looks at Worden oddly, as if the entire contents of his mind had suddenly been rearranged like furniture. He hesitates in the doorway, waiting for God knows what.

“What’re you hanging around for?” asks Worden.

“Nothing,” Brown answers finally. “Merry Christmas, Donald.”

He leaves as a free man, debts canceled and dues paid.

Tom Pellegrini sits like Ahab himself at the corner of the colonel’s sixth-floor conference table, staring hard at the white whale of his own making.

Across the table is, in his opinion, Latonya Wallace’s murderer, but the Fish Man doesn’t look like a child-killer; he never has, really. The aging store owner is an everyman for West Baltimore, his dull, dark jacket, baggy trousers and work boots a statement of quiet surrender understood by any working man. Less typical is the smoking pipe he carries in a jacket pocket, an item that never made much sense to Pellegrini. For a Whitelock Street denizen, it seemed something of an affectation, a small island of rebellion speckling this sea of human conformity. On several occasions over the past year, Pellegrini had been tempted to grab the stinking, smoldering thing and send it soaring.

Today, he has done as much.

Amid so many greater issues to be decided, it is a small point, but to Pellegrini even the small points matter now. The Fish Man likes his pipe, and for that reason alone he cannot have it. During previous interrogations, the store owner had, at critical moments, drawn on his pipe as if it were its own answer, and Pellegrini had come to associate the smell of the Fish Man’s weed with the man’s unflappable calm and indifference. And so, when the Fish Man reaches for his pouch not five minutes after taking his seat at the table, Pellegrini tells him to put the pipe away.

This time, everything has to be different. This time, the old store owner has to be made to believe that he is truly beaten, that they know his darkest secret even before he reveals it. He has to be made to forget about those other trips downtown; he has to be denied the comfort of that history, and to the extent that the pipe was part of that history, he has to be denied that as well.

And other things, Pellegrini tells himself, will be different. The man sitting on the other side of the table, across from the Fish Man, is proof enough of that.

During the months of preparation for this final confrontation, the idea of interrogation as a clinical science has become a religion for Pellegrini, and the firm of Interrotec Associates Inc., in particular, a priestly class. Pellegrini has digested the firm’s written material as well as its history of successful interviews in a variety of military and government security probes as well as criminal investigations. The company was good; the police departments who had worked with its interrogators said as much when he called them for references. The officers of the firm described themselves as “interrogational specialists, consultants and publishers dedicated to the research, development and enhancement of the art of interview.” A mouthful, to be sure, but Pellegrini argued that in the Latonya Wallace case, as in no other, the quality and precision of this last interrogation was paramount.

Pellegrini had crafted his memo requesting the interrogator with that argument at its center, and he was careful to dwell on the reputation of the firm rather than the suggestion that the Baltimore unit lacked any necessary expertise. The use of the company’s interviewers for one weekend would cost about a thousand dollars, and for a department as impoverished as the Baltimore force-where no real money is budgeted to pay street informants, much less contract out for investigative talent-Pellegrini’s request was an extraordinary one.

Landsman backed him, of course. Not out of any great belief in the science of the thing, but simply because Pellegrini was the primary investigator. It was his murder, and this was a suspect he had pursued and developed for ten months. In Landsman’s mind, the issue was clear: His detective had a right to see this thing through in whatever way he saw fit.

The captain also gave the proposal support, and as Pellegrini’s memo traveled from gold braid to gold braid on the eighth floor, it met with surprisingly little resistance. More than anything else that year, the Latonya Wallace case had been a true crusade for the department as a whole, and in this rare instance, the bosses seemed to feel as their detectives did.

The money was allocated. The Interrotec people were contacted and the date set. A week ago, and then yesterday as well, Pellegrini had visited Whitelock Street and the Fish Man, reminding his suspect that he would probably need to talk with him again on Friday and suggesting that the store owner’s cooperation was in every way required.

And now they begin.

“You understand why you’re here,” says the man on the other side of the table. The words are quiet but hard, and the voice speaking them somehow manages to impart conflicting emotions in every syllable-behind the voice is anger and empathy, unyielding patience and raging impulse.

To Pellegrini’s eye, Glenn Foster has a real talent for interrogation, and the detective is satisfied to let the man lead this last charge. As the vice president of Interrotec and an acknowledged expert in the craft of criminal interrogation, Foster was sold to Pellegrini as something of a magic bullet-an interrogator who had been used by police agencies in eighteen criminal investigations and who had emerged with results every time. The Pentagon had used Foster for sensitive security interviews; veteran prosecutors and detectives who had worked with the Interrotec people swore by him.

In addition to his hired gun, Pellegrini can also count on the leverage being different than in the past. This time, he has the tar and burned wood samples-the virtual match between the smudges on the dead girl’s pants and the debris from the Fish Man’s gutted Whitelock Street store. That is evidence, to be sure, and more of it than they had for the first two interrogations of the store owner.

On the other hand, Pellegrini’s attempt to isolate the store as the only logical source of the burned material had proved futile. The computer run he requested two months ago for Reservoir Hill arson and fire calls over the last several years has turned up a hundred or more separate addresses that had been damaged by fire. Now, months after the murder, there was no conceivable way for Pellegrini to eliminate many of those locations from consideration, or for him even to be sure which burned buildings were actually gutted back in February. Some had since been repaired; others had been vacant for years; still others-small structures or parts of structures that burned in small, unreported fires-might not even be on the computer list. No, the chemical analysis was leverage for this interrogation and nothing more. Still, leverage used properly could mean everything.

Granted his request for interrogative expertise, Pellegrini had told himself that if this last confrontation failed, he could close the file knowing that he had done everything conceivable. He told himself that there would be no more recrimination, that he would leave this bastard of a case in a file drawer and go back into the rotation-really go back this time-and work the murders hard. No more Theodore Johnsons. No more Barney Erelys. He told that to himself and to Landsman as well, but Pellegrini was more confident than he let on; in fact, he had a hard time imagining that this final assault on the Fish Man would fail. They had a quality interrogator lined up, a man who had taught criminology at universities and lectured at police academies nationwide. They had the chemical match. And still, after all these months, they had a suspect who knew the victim, who had blown his lie detector, who had no alibi, who matched the FBI’s psychological profile of the killer, who had a history of sex offenses, whose willingness to subject himself to harsh, prolonged investigation was proven. This time, Pellegrini believed, they could win. He could win.

From the other side of the conference room table, Pellegrini listens to Foster circling like some calculating predator, probing for every weakness.

“Listen to me,” says Foster.

“Hmmm,” says the Fish Man, looking up.

“You understand why you’re here.”

“You brought me here.”

“But you know why, don’t you?”

The Fish Man says nothing.

“Why are you here?” asks Foster.

“It’s about the girl,” says the Fish Man, uncomfortable.

“The girl,” says Foster.

“Yeah,” says the Fish Man after a pause.

“Say her name,” says Foster.

The Fish Man looks across the table.

“Say her name.”

“Her name?” says the Fish Man, visibly upset.

“You know her name.”

“Latonya.” The store owner lets go of the name as though it’s the very confession itself. With each answer, Pellegrini can feel the Fish Man losing a little bit of control. Foster is good, thinks Pellegrini. Damn good. Making the Fish Man say the little girl’s name, for example: What better technique to bring an introvert like the old store owner out of his shell.

Born and bred deep in the Bible Belt, Foster had come to law enforcement after a stint as a Baptist minister, an experience that marked the pattern and delivery of his speech. His voice could be at one moment a blunt instrument, heavy with accusation, and at the next a faint whisper, hinting at broken secrets.

“Let me tell you why I’m here,” Foster says to the Fish Man. “I’m here because I’ve seen your kind before. I know about your kind…”

The Fish Man looks up, curious.

“I’ve seen a thousand like you.”

Pellegrini watches his suspect, trying to gauge his body language. The Fish Man’s downward gaze at the table or at the floor is a sure sign of deception, according to the Kinesic Interviewing texts, just as the folded arms and backward lean in the chair suggest an introvert unwilling to accept control. To Pellegrini, all of the reading and preparation of the last three months now seems relevant to the moment-all of the science would now be put to the test.

“… and you’ve never met anyone like me,” Foster tells the Fish Man. “No, you haven’t. You may have had people talk to you before, but not the way I’m going to talk to you. I know you, mister…”

Pellegrini listens as the lead interrogator begins an unyielding monologue, an endless rant in which Foster transforms himself from a merely mortal form into a towering figure of omnipotent authority. It is the standard prelude to any prolonged interrogation, the beginning of the soliloquy in which a detective establishes his own myth of expertise. For the Baltimore detectives, the speech usually consists of assuring a suspect that he’s dealing with the reincarnation of Eliot Ness and that everyone who was ever foolish enough to sit in this box and talk shit to God’s own detective is now marking time on Death Row. But to Pellegrini, Foster seems to be giving the standard lecture a little more dramatic intensity.

“… I know all about you…”

Foster is good, all right, but he’s only one weapon in the arsenal. Looking around the conference room, Pellegrini can take additional satisfaction, knowing that for this last interrogation, he is firing every gun.

As with the second interrogation of the Fish Man-the February encounter staged in the captain’s office-this confrontation has also been choreographed. Once again, photographs of the dead girl have been placed directly in front of the suspect. This time, however, Pellegrini is using everything in the case file-not only the color photographs from the crime scene but also the larger black-and-white shots from the overhead camera at Penn Street. Every last insult to Latonya Wallace-the ligature across the neck; the thin, deep puncture wounds; the long, jagged tear of the final evisceration-is arrayed in front of the man that Pellegrini believes to be the killer. The photographs have been selected for maximum effect, yet Pellegrini knows that such a brutal psychological ploy can itself damage any confession.

It is a risk that every detective runs when he gives up too much of his case in the interrogation room, and in the case at hand, the risk is doubled. Not only could a defense attorney later claim that the Fish Man had confessed only after being shocked and awed by the horror of the photographs, but that same lawyer could argue that the confession itself included no independent corroboration. After all, even those facts that the detectives kept secret back in February-the ligature strangulation, the vaginal tearing-are now tacked to the conference room wall. Even if the Fish Man does break down and recount his murder of the child, no one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that such a confession is genuine-unless the Fish Man’s statement contains some additional details that can be independently corroborated.

Pellegrini knows all that; still, the photographs have been tacked to the bulletin boards, one glossy obscenity after another, each staring back at the store owner, each a terrifying appeal to conscience. There will be no interrogation after this one, the detective reasons, no other opportunity for which the last secrets of the murder need be preserved.

At the center of one bulletin board, Pellegrini has placed his trump cards. First there is the chemical analysis of the burned tar and wood chips from both the little girl’s pants and the Fish Man’s store. Each sample is represented by a long bar graph and the two graphs are remarkably similar. Prepared by the trace laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the analysis of the samples was an exacting piece of work, and the lab added a veteran analyst to its report. If Pellegrini needs some instant expertise, the man is outside the room now, ready and willing. So, too, are Jay Landsman and Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the Violent Crimes Unit, who would evaluate the results of the interrogation and make the ultimate decision of whether to charge the murder.

Above the cross-tab charts on the bulletin board, Pellegrini has fixed a blue line zoning map of the Reservoir Hill area, with between eighty and one hundred structures highlighted in yellow-each noting the location of a fire call within the past five years. The Fish Man’s store on Whitelock Street, however, is marked in darker orange. The map is in every real sense a lie-a deception that Pellegrini can use without any fear of discovery. In truth, he has been unable to eliminate the vast majority of those yellow marks on the map; any one of them can theoretically have been the site at which the little girl’s pants had been smudged. And yet, for the purpose of this interrogation, nothing like that can possibly be true. For this interrogation, Pellegrini will tell the Fish Man that the chemical analysis has left no doubt: The black smudges on the dead girl’s pants came from the darker orange square at the elbow of Whitelock Street.

The chemical analysis-the linchpin of this interrogation-gave them real leverage, but it also gave them the Out. Maybe you didn’t kill her, Foster can tell him. Maybe you didn’t touch her and violate her and then choke the life from her. Maybe you weren’t the one who took a kitchen knife to her afterward, emptying her until you were sure she was dead. But, Foster can say, you know who did do it. You know because she was killed on that Tuesday night and then left in your burned-out fish store all day Wednesday. She was left there to wait for the rainy darkness of early Thursday morning. She was in that store and the soot and burned wood on her pants proves it. If you didn’t kill her, maybe someone else-someone you know, or someone whose name you don’t remember-hid the little girl inside your store.

Beyond the snare of the chemical analysis, Pellegrini has little else: the failed polygraph, the acknowledged prior relationship with the dead girl, the absence of any verifiable alibi. The case is motive, opportunity and apparent deception, coupled with one lonely piece of physical evidence. A final trump card to be played at a key moment lies deep in Pellegrini’s jacket pocket, where he carries one last photograph. But that old picture can’t be called evidence; it is, the detective knows, no better than a hunch.

Foster meanders through the opening monologue. After spending half an hour establishing his own expertise, the veteran interrogator proceeds to lionize Pellegrini as well. Foster acknowledges that the Fish Man and his principal pursuer have met in the past, but, he explains, Pellegrini did not give up on this case after those earlier confrontations. No, Foster says, he continued to work on you. He continued to gather evidence.

The Fish Man remains impassive.

“What’s going to happen here today is different from what happened when you talked to Detective Pellegrini before,” says Foster.

The store owner nods slightly. A strange gesture, thinks Pellegrini.

“You’ve been here before, but you didn’t tell the truth,” says Foster, turning the corner and launching into the first confrontation. “We know that.”

The Fish Man shakes his head.

“I’m telling you we know that.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Yes,” says Foster quietly. “You do.”

Very slowly and very deliberately, Foster begins to explain the chemical comparison of the dead girl’s pants and the samples from the Whitelock Street store. At the appropriate moment, Pellegrini reaches down and pulls the soiled pants from a brown evidence bag, then lays the garment on the table, pointing to the black smudges near the knees.

The Fish Man doesn’t react.

Foster presses on, pointing to a photograph of the dead girl behind Newington Avenue, showing the store owner that the black smudges were there on the pants when they found her.

“Now look at this,” he says, pointing to the ATF report. “These lines here show what these stains are made of, and these over here, they show what it is that Detective Pellegrini took from your store.”

Nothing. No reaction.

“See this map,” says Pellegrini, pointing to the bulletin board. “We checked every building in Reservoir Hill where there has ever been a fire and none of them match these stains.”

“None of them except yours,” adds Foster.

The Fish Man shakes his head. He is not angry. He is not even defensive. To Pellegrini, his lack of response is unnerving.

“She was in your store and she got that stuff on her pants,” says Foster. “Either just before or just after she was killed, she got that stuff on her pants in your store.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” says the Fish Man.

“Yes, you do,” says Foster.

The Fish Man shakes his head.

“Well, then what is this stuff from your store doing on her pants?”

“It can’t be. I don’t know how that can be.”

Somehow they’re not getting through. The interrogators return to their visual aids, covering the same ground a second time. Foster leads the store owner through it slowly enough so that there can be no mistaking the logic.

“Look at these lines here,” says Foster, pointing to the ATF report. “It’s exactly the same. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t… I don’t know.”

“You do know,” says Foster. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Well then how do you explain it?”

The Fish Man shrugs.

“Maybe,” suggests Foster, “maybe you didn’t kill her. But maybe you know who did. Maybe you let someone else hide her in your store. Is that what you’re hiding?”

The Fish Man looks up from the floor.

“Maybe someone else asked to put something in your store and you didn’t even know what it was,” says Foster, probing. “There’s got to be some explanation because Latonya was in your store.”

The Fish Man shakes his head, a little at first, then firmly. He backs up in his chair, folding his arms. He isn’t buying. “She couldn’t be in my store.”

“But she was. Did someone else put her there?”

The Fish Man hesitates.

“What’s his name?”

“No. No one put her there.”

“Well, she was there. This report says that.”

“No,” says the Fish Man.

A dead end. Instinctively, Foster veers away from the confrontation and the two detectives begin leading their suspect through a complete statement. Pellegrini, in particular, probes for even the faintest suggestion of an alibi and asks all the requisite background questions once again. Slowly, painfully, the same answers-about his relationship with Latonya, his vague alibi, his feeling about women-come back across the table, and for the first time in ten months the Fish Man begins to show some impatience. And his answer to one question changes.

“When did you last see Latonya?” asks Pellegrini for perhaps the tenth time.

“When did I last see her?”

“Before she was killed.”

“On Sunday. She came by the store.”

“Sunday?” asks Pellegrini, startled.

The Fish Man nods.

“The Sunday before she disappeared?”

The Fish Man nods again.

It is a crack in the wall. In the earlier interrogations, the store owner swore that he hadn’t seen the little girl for two weeks before the murder and Pellegrini had found no witness who could refute the claim definitively. Now, on his own, the Fish Man is putting the little girl in his store two days before the murder and only days after the fire that gutted the Whitelock Street shop.

“What did she come to the store about?”

“She came to see if she could help after the fire.”

Pellegrini wonders. Is he lying to compensate for the chemical evidence, thinking that an earlier visit to the burned-out store could explain the stains on the pants? Or was he lying in the earlier interviews, when he was trying to distance himself from any contact with the dead girl? Is he telling the truth now with no memory of his earlier answers? Is he confused? Is he remembering this for the first time?

“When we talked to you before, you said you hadn’t seen Latonya for two weeks before she disappeared,” says Pellegrini. “Now you say you saw her the Sunday before.”

“Two weeks?”

“You said you hadn’t seen her for two weeks.”

The Fish Man shakes his head.

“That’s what you told us every other time. We wrote it down.”

“I don’t remember.”

Something is happening here. Slowly, carefully, Foster leads the store owner back to the edge of the cliff, back to the ATF report and the insistent logic of the chemical samples.

“If you didn’t have her in the store,” asks the interrogator, “then who did?”

The Fish Man shakes his head. Pellegrini looks at his watch and realizes that they’ve been going at it for five full hours. Time matters here: A confession obtained within six or seven hours is of far greater evidentiary value than one produced in ten or twelve hours of interrogation.

Now or never, thinks Pellegrini as he pulls the last trick from his sleeve. From a jacket pocket comes the photograph of the little girl from Montpelier Street, the look-alike to Latonya who disappeared in the late 1970s. He has saved a copy of the photo he found in the newspaper library months earlier; he has saved it for just this moment.

“Tell me,” says Pellegrini, handing the old picture to his suspect, “do you know who this is?”

Already in some distress from Foster’s challenges, the Fish Man looks down at the photograph and suddenly seems to crumble. Pellegrini watches him pitch forward; his head drops, his hands grip the edges of the conference table.

“You know this girl?”

“Yes,” says the Fish Man quietly, “I know her.” He nods, his pain visible. He is falling apart in front of them, this man who had been nothing more than stone in every prior encounter. Now he is at the cliff’s edge, looking over, ready to leap.

“How do you know this girl?”

The Fish Man hesitates for a moment, his hands still gripping the edges of the table.

“How do you know her?”

Then, just as suddenly, the moment passes. Whatever shock comes from that old photograph is abruptly gone. The Fish Man sits back in his chair and crosses his arms, and for just a moment he meets Pellegrini’s eyes with a look of unmistakable menace. If you want me, the look seems to say, you’re going to need more. If you want me, you’re going to have to take me all the way.

“I thought,” says the Fish Man, “you were showing me a picture of Latonya.”

Like hell you did, thinks Pellegrini. Both interrogators share a look and Foster launches into another assault, this one delivered in nothing more than a whisper, his face only inches from the store owner.

“Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” says Foster. “I’m going to tell you the truth now. I’m going to tell you what I know…”

The Fish Man stares back intently.

“I’ve seen your kind before-many, many times before. I know what you’re about; we all know what you’re about. Tom over here knows you. Every one of us knows you because we’ve seen your kind before. You like the young girls and they like you, don’t they? And that’s fine as far as it goes, and as long as they can keep quiet about things, then you don’t have any problem…”

Pellegrini looks at his suspect, stunned. The Fish Man is slowly nodding his head in seeming agreement.

“But you’ve got this one rule, don’t you? You’ve got this one rule that you have to follow, this one rule that has to be obeyed, and we both know what that rule is, don’t we?”

Again, the Fish Man nods his head.

“If you cry, you die,” says Foster. “If you cry, you die.”

The Fish Man is silent.

“That’s the one rule you have, isn’t it? If they cry out, then they’ve got to die. You like them a lot and you like it when they like you, but if they cry, they die. That’s what happened with Latonya, and that’s what happened with this girl right here,” says Foster, pointing to the old photograph. “She cried and she died.”

To Pellegrini, it seems an eternity before the suspect regains his composure, before he manages to stop nodding his head and respond. When at last he does, it is definitive, unshakable.

“No,” says the man firmly. “I didn’t hurt Latonya.”

The steel in the Fish Man’s voice forces Pellegrini to make his own confession: It’s gone. They’ve lost him. They had come close; Pellegrini knew that. Foster’s methods and talents and secrets were powerful and their plan had been carefully drawn and executed, but in the end, the case file is what it is. There exists, Pellegrini now knows, no magic bullet, no hidden science yet to be learned. Ultimately, the Answer is always evidence, plain and simple.

Before the interrogation began, in fact, Foster had tried to get Tim Doory to charge the murder on the basis of the ATF report alone, arguing that with the charge already on him, the Fish Man would be more inclined to confess. Possibly, but what if he didn’t confess? What would they do with the charge then? Dismiss it prior to indictment? Issue a stet? This was a high-profile case, the kind that no prosecutor wants to lose. No, Doory told him, we charge when the evidence is there. Foster accepted the decision, but the question itself had unnerved both Pellegrini and Landsman; it was the first suggestion that their interrogator couldn’t walk on water. Now, Doory paces in the hall outside the conference room with Landsman, periodically checking his watch. Six hours and counting.

“Hey, Jay,” says the prosecutor. “It’s been more than six. I’ll hang around for another hour or so, but after that I don’t know what we can do with it even if he does break.”

Landsman nods, then walks to the conference room to listen for voices. He can tell by the long silences that things are no longer going well.

After seven straight hours of interrogation, Pellegrini and Foster slide out for a cigarette and a twenty-minute break. Doory grabs his overcoat and walks Pellegrini toward the elevator, telling the detective to call him at home if anything develops.

Landsman and the ATF analyst replace the two primary interrogators in the conference room, trying hard to pick up the thread.

“Let me ask you something,” says Landsman.

“What’s that?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Do I believe in God?” asks the Fish Man.

“Yeah. I don’t mean are you religious. I mean do you believe there’s a God?”

“Oh yeah. I believe there’s a God.”

“Yeah,” says Landsman. “Me, too.”

The Fish Man nods in agreement.

“What do you think God might do to the person who killed Latonya?”

A shot in the dark from Landsman, but the Fish Man is now a veteran of the interrogation room and the ploy seems thin and transparent.

“I don’t know,” says the Fish Man.

“Do you think he feels like God will punish him for what he did to that girl?”

“I don’t know,” says the Fish Man coldly. “You’d have to ask him.”

When Pellegrini and Foster return to the conference room, Landsman is still firing random salvos. But whatever tension had been created in the first six hours is now completely dissipated. Pellegrini is chagrined to see that Landsman is dragging on a cigarette; worse, the Fish Man is smoking his pipe.

Still, they give it the rest of the afternoon and early evening-fourteen hours in all-pressing their suspect longer and harder than most judges would permit. They know this, but in frustration, in anger, in certainty that there will be no further chance, they do it nonetheless. When the interrogation finally grinds to a halt, the Fish Man is sent at first to the fishbowl, then to a desk in the homicide office, where he watches the television screen blankly while waiting for a Central District radio car to return him to Whitelock Street.

“Are you watching this?” he asks Howard Corbin, who looks up to see a sitcom.

“No, I’m not,” says Corbin.

“Is it all right if I change the channel then?” says the store owner.

“Sure,” says Corbin. “Go ’head.”

Corbin is comfortable with the man; he always was. Through the long months of working on the Latonya Wallace file, the aging detective never believed that the Fish Man had anything to do with the murder. Neither did Eddie Brown, and even Landsman had for a time shared their doubts. In the end, the Fish Man was Pellegrini’s obsession alone.

“Is it all right if I smoke my pipe?” the store owner asks.

“I don’t mind,” says Corbin, turning to Jack Barrick across the room. “Sergeant, do you mind if he smokes?”

“Naw,” says Barrick. “I don’t give a damn.”

There is no final scene for Tom Pellegrini and the Fish Man, no last words, no parting shots. In victory, a detective can be amusing and gracious, even generous; in defeat, he will try his damnedest to make believe you’re no longer there. The long day ends as separate scenes in separate rooms. In one, a man celebrates freedom by changing channels on a television set and stuffing a pipe with cheap tobacco. In another, a detective clears his desk of a bloated, dog-eared file, gathers up his gun, briefcase and overcoat, and steps heavily into a corridor that leads only to an elevator and a dark city street.

They own you.

From the moment you thought the thought, you were their property. You don’t believe it; hell, you didn’t even imagine it. You were sure they’d never catch you, sure you could draw heart’s blood twice and just walk away. But you should have saved yourself some trouble, called 911 yourself. Right from the start, you were a gift.

But hey, it looked like a good move when you made it, didn’t it now? You got Ronnie in the back bedroom, stuck him good in a dozen places with that kitchen blade before he knew what was what. Ronnie did some screaming, but his brother didn’t hear a thing with that box beat going so loud in the other bedroom. Yeah, you had Ronnie all to yourself, and when you came down the hallway toward the other bedroom, you figured Ronnie’s brother deserved more of the same. The boy was still in bed when you walked in on him, looking up at the blade like he didn’t know what it was for.

So you got them both. You got Ronnie and Ronnie’s brother and getting them meant getting the package. Yeah, you got that shit the old-fashioned way, yo, you killed for it, and right now you should be out the door and halfway across Pimlico and smoking some of that hard-won product.

But no, you’re still right here, staring at your killing hand. You fucked it up, cut the hand bad when Ronnie was oozing life and your knife got wet and slippery. You were sticking it to him when your hand just rode up over the hilt and the blade went deep into your palm. So now, when you should be across town practicing your don’t-know-nothin’ speech, you’re sitting here in a house full of dead men, waiting for your hand to stop bleeding.

You try cleaning up in the bathroom, running cold water in the wound. But that doesn’t really help, just makes you bleed a little slower is all. You try wrapping your hand in a bath towel, but the towel becomes a wet crimson mess on the bathroom floor. You walk down to the living room, your hand smearing red on the stairway wall, the banister and the downstairs light switch. Then you wrap your right hand in the sleeve of your sweatshirt, shrug on your winter coat and run.

All the way to your girlfriend’s place, the throbbing in your hand tells you that there’s no choice, that you’re just going to keep bleeding unless you take the risk. You stash the package and even change your clothes, but the blood still keeps coming. When you hit West Belvedere just before daylight, you start running toward the hospital, trying to think your story through.

But it doesn’t matter. They own you, bunk.

You don’t know it, but you were theirs when they came in early to relieve the Friday overnight shift as daylight broke on the last day of this godforsaken year. They hadn’t changed the coffeepot when the phone rang, and it was the older one, the white-haired police, who scrawled out the particulars on a used pawn shop card. A double, the dispatcher told them, so all three decided to ride up to Pimlico to look over your handiwork.

To the pale, dark-haired Italian, the younger one, you’re a blessing. He works your crime scene the way he wishes he had worked another: He follows every blood trail and pulls samples from every room; he takes his time with the bodies before having each wrapped in sheets, preserving the trace evidence. He works that scene like it’s the last one on earth, like these aren’t the Fullard brothers but two victims who matter. He’s hungry again, bunk, and he needs a clearance the same way you needed that cocaine.

You’re about to become the property of that other one, too, the bear of a police with the white hair and the blue eyes. He hires on as a secondary, helps with the crime scene before wandering off to work the crowd. He’s glad to be working murders, content to be back in the Northwest on a case. The Big Man began this year in a hole and then clawed his way out, so it’s your bad luck to be on the wrong side of the curve.

And don’t forget that sergeant, the joker in the leather jacket, who’s been riding a streak since late October. He stalks all over your murder scene, sizing up your deeds and fitting together the first pieces of your sad little puzzle. He takes it personal, declaring that there is no way in hell his squad will end the year with an open double.

Here’s the morning line, bunk: The three of them have their hooks into you deep and they haven’t even met you yet. By now, they’ve marked your blood trail out of the bathroom and down the second-floor stairs. They’re already on a Northwest patrolman’s radio, asking citywide to have area hospital admissions checked for stabbing and cutting victims. They’re working back on the Fullard brothers, learning who they hang with and who hangs with them. They got your number good.

If you understood that, if you understood anything about how they work, you might have caught a cab and gone to a hospital out in the county. At the very least, you might have come up with some story a little better than that garbage you gave the admitting nurse. Cut your hand climbing a fence, you told her. One of those chain-link jobs over by the middle school off Park Heights. Yeah, right: You slipped.

But anyone can see that the cut didn’t come from no fence. Not when it’s that deep and that straight. You think that’ll play? You think the police who has just walked up to the nurses station is going to believe such weak shit?

“Landsman, from homicide,” the cop tells the charge nurse, looking your way. “Is this the one?”

You’re not about to panic or anything. They still don’t know shit: You made sure both those bad boys were dead. You ditched the knife. You didn’t leave witnesses. You’re good to go.

“Lemme see your hand,” says the cop in the leather jacket.

“Cut it on a fence.”

He checks your palm for a good ten seconds. Then he looks at the blood on your coat sleeve.

“The fuck you did.”

“I ain’t lyin’.”

“You cut it on a fence?”

“Yeah.”

“What fence?”

You tell him what fence. Motherfucker, you think, he don’t believe I got brains enough to think of a fence.

“Yeah,” he says, looking right at you. “I know where that is. Let’s go there and see.”

See? See what?

“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” he tells you. “There better be some blood around the fence, right?”

Blood around the fence? You didn’t think of that and he knows you didn’t think of it.

“No,” you hear yourself say. “Wait.”

Yeah, he’s waiting. He’s standing there in the Sinai emergency room listening to your little world crumble. Now he’s calling you a lying motherfucker, telling you that it won’t take but a couple hours before they match the blood stains on that stairwell to the blood staining the new bandage on your hand. You didn’t think of that either, did you?

“Okay, I was there,” you say. “But I didn’t kill them.”

“Oh yeah?” says the cop. “Who did?”

“A Jamaican.”

“What’s his name?”

Think it through, bunk. Think it through. “I don’t know his name. But he cut me, too. He said he’d kill me too if I said anything about him.”

“He told you that. When did he tell you that?”

“He drove me to the hospital.”

“He drove you here?” he asks. “He kills them, but he only cuts you and then gives you a lift to the hospital.”

“Yeah. I ran away at first, but…”

He looks away, asking the resident if he’s ready to discharge you. The cop looks back at you, smiling strangely. If you knew him, if you knew anything, then you’d know that he’s already laughing at you. He’s made you for a murdering little shitbird, tossing you into this year’s pile with about a hundred others. The Fullard brothers, crimson and rigored in the morning light of their bedrooms, are already black names on Jay Landsman’s section of the board.

You ride downtown to headquarters in a cage car, clinging to that story of yours, thinking that you can still pull this off. You’re thinking-if it can be called thinking-that you can somehow get them to believe in a mystery Jake who cut your hand and drove you to Sinai.

“Tell me about this Jamaican,” says the older, white-haired detective after dumping you in one of the lockboxes. “What’s his name?”

He sits across the table from you, staring at you with those blue eyes like some kind of walrus.

“I only know his street name.”

“So? What is it?”

And you give it up. A real street name for a real Jake, a homeboy in his late twenties who you know lives maybe a block or so from the Fullards. Yeah, you’re thinking now, bunk. You’re giving them just enough to be real, not enough for them to work with.

“Hey, Tom,” says the white-haired detective, talking to the younger cop who came into the box with him. “Let me get with you for a second.”

You can see their shadows on the other side of the one-way window in the interrogation room, watch them talking in the corridor outside. The old walrus walks away. The doorknob turns and the younger police, the Italian, comes back with pen and paper.

“I’m going to take your statement,” he says. “But first, I need to advise you of these rights…”

The cop talks and writes slowly, giving you time to get the story straight. You were over there getting high with Ronnie and his brother, you tell him. Then they invited the Jamaican in, and a little later there was an argument. No one saw the Jake go into the kitchen and come out with a knife. But you saw him use that knife to kill Ronnie, then Ronnie’s brother. You tried to grab the knife but got cut and ran away. Later, when you were walking home, the Jamaican drove up and told you to get in his car. He told you his beef was with the other two, that he wouldn’t mess with you as long as you kept your mouth shut.

“That’s why I lied about the fence at first,” you tell him, looking at the floor.

“Hmmm,” the young cop says, still writing.

And then the white-haired walrus is back in the room, carrying a black-and-white mug shot-a photograph of the Jamaican kid whose street name you gave up not ten minutes earlier.

“Is this the guy?” he asks you.

Christ. Goddamn. You can’t believe it.

“That’s him, ain’t it?”

“No.”

“You’re a lying piece of shit,” says the walrus. “That’s the guy you described and he lives right at the corner house you described. You’re pissing up my leg here.”

“No, that’s not him. It’s another guy looks like him…”

“You thought we wouldn’t even know who you were talking about, didn’t you?” he says. “But I used to work that area. I’ve known the family you’re talking about for years.”

The man gets a street name and comes back ten minutes later with a fucking photograph. You can’t believe it, but you don’t know about the walrus, about the memory he carries around like a weapon. You don’t know or you wouldn’t have said a word.

Months from now, when an assistant state’s attorney gets her hands on this case, she’ll be told by the head of her trial team that it’s a sure loser, that it’s a circumstantial prospect. Which might give you a little hope if the names on the prosecution report were anything other than Worden and Landsman and Pellegrini. Because Worden will pull rank to make a direct appeal to the head of the trial division, and Pellegrini will brief the ASA on just how this case can be won. And in the end it will be Landsman on the stand in Bothe’s court, sliding everything but the kitchen sink past your public defender, packing every answer with so much background and speculation and hearsay that at one point you’ll actually turn and look at your own lawyer in dismay. In the end, it won’t matter that the trace lab let every blood sample putrefy before the trial, and it won’t matter that the prosecutors argued against taking the case, and it won’t matter when you take the stand to tell the jury that horseshit about your murdering Jamaican. It won’t matter, because from the very moment you picked up that kitchen knife, they owned you. And if you don’t know that now, then you’ll know it when your lawyer snaps his briefcase shut and tells you to stand and swallow double-life consecutive from an irritated Elsbeth Bothe.

But now, right now, you’re still fighting it; you’re working hard to remain the very picture of tormented innocence in that lockbox. You didn’t kill them, you plead when the wagon man comes with the cuffs, the Jamaican did it. He killed them both; he cut your hand. On the way to the elevators, you scan the hallway and the office inside, staring at the men who are doing this to you: the white-haired cop; the younger, dark-haired one; the sergeant who leaned on you at the hospital-all three of them now certain and sure. You’re still shaking your head, pleading, trying hard to look like a victim. But what could you possibly know about being a victim?

In four months, you’ll be a trivia question to these men. In four months, when the carbon-sheet court notices show up in their mailboxes, the men who took your freedom will look down at your name in computer-embossed type and wonder who the hell you are: Wilson, David. Jury trial in part six. Christ, they’ll think, which one is Wilson? Oh yeah, the double from Pimlico. Yeah, that brain-dead with the story about the Jake.

In time, your tragedy will be consigned to an admin office file drawer, and later to a strip of microfilm somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters building. In time, you will be nothing more than a 3-by-5 index card in the suspect name file, packed into the T-Z drawer with about ten thousand others. In time, you will mean nothing.

But today, as the wagon man checks your cuffs and checks his paperwork, you are the precious spoils of one day’s war, the Holy Grail of one more ghetto crusade. To the detectives watching you leave, you are living, breathing testimony to a devotion that the world never sees. To them, you are validation for honorable lives spent in service of a lost cause. On this fading December afternoon, you are pride itself.

If the shift had been quiet, they might have gone straight home, eaten a little supper and slept until morning. But now it won’t be an early night; you’ve killed two people and lied about it, proving to Donald Worden that he was born into this life to be nothing more or less than a homicide detective. You’re the first step in Tom Pellegrini’s long road back, the first opportunity for a young detective’s redemption. You’ve become two black names beneath Jay Landsman’s nameplate, the last entries of the year for a veteran sergeant who once again has the best rate on his shift.

And now, with the paperwork done, they might just head for Kavanaugh’s or the Market Bar or some other hole where a cop can drink a murder down. It’s New Year’s Eve and they might raise a glass or two and toast themselves, or each other, or whatever remains of the one true brotherhood. But they won’t raise a glass for you tonight. You’re a murdering piece of shit; why would they want to drink to that? And yet they will think of you. They’ll think about how perfectly they read the crime scene, how they had you backing up on your story at the hospital, how they even came up with the photo of the Jake you tried to put it on and how they made you eat that story too. They’ll think of you and know, as only a detective can, that police work done well can be a fine and beautiful thing. They’ll think of you and drink a little more, maybe laugh a little louder when Landsman tells the stories about his oatmeal box radar gun or Phyllis Pellegrini on Riker’s Island.

Hell, they might even close Kavanaugh’s and spend the rest of the night out on the parking lot, matching war stories, trying to sober themselves before daybreak and the drive home to a wife already up and putting on her makeup, to the sound of kids already bouncing around the house. Home to the smell of breakfast in the kitchen, to a bedroom with the shades pulled tight and the sheets disturbed by someone else’s night. Another morning when the world spins along without them, another day of another year, measured for those who walk in light and deal with the living.

They sleep until dark.