Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

THREE

It has been 111 days since Gene Cassidy was shot down at the corner of Appleton and Mosher streets, and for 111 days Terry McLarney has been walking around with the weight of the Baltimore Police Department on his back. Never has there been an open file in the murder or wounding of a Baltimore police officer; never has there been a failed prosecution. Yet McLarney knows, as does every other cop in the department, that a day of reckoning is coming. For years, city juries have been willing to award second-degree verdicts in the shooting of police officers; the boy who shot Buckman six times in the head got second-degree and was already on parole. The doper who killed Marty Ward, shot him in the chest in a drug raid gone bad, also walked with second-degree. McLarney knows, as does every other detective, that it’s only a matter of time before the unthinkable happens and one gets away. McLarney tells himself it is not going to be on him, and it is not going to be on Cassidy.

But the days are bleeding away without any fresh leads, without anything to corroborate a case that the prosecutors say is still too weak to give to a jury. The folder for the Cassidy shooting is thick with office reports, but in truth, McLarney has no more on his suspect than he did back in October. In fact, he has less. In October, at least, he was convinced that the man locked up for shooting Gene Cassidy had actually done the crime.

Now he can’t be sure. Now, as the case edges closer to a May trial date, he has moments when he actually catches himself in silent prayer. The appeals are short, petitional and blunt: prayers offered on street corners or in the back of the office coffee room, prayers to a Roman Catholic God who did not hear from Terry McLarney when he himself was out there bleeding on Arunah Avenue. Now, at odd moments, McLarney finds himself muttering the kind of single-issue requests with which He is forever deluged. Dear God, help me put together a case against the man who shot Gene and, rest assured, you will not be burdened with my problems again. Respectfully submitted, Detective Sergeant T.P. McLarney, CID Homicide, Baltimore, Maryland.

The late night calls from Gene only added to the pressure. Unaccustomed to a permanent darkness, Cassidy would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was morning or afternoon. Then he would call the homicide unit to learn what was new, what else they had on this boy Owens. McLarney would tell him the truth, tell him that the case against Anthony Owens was still nothing more than two reluctant, underage witnesses.

“What do you want, Gene?” McLarney asked in one such conversation.

“I think,” Cassidy replied, “that for every day I’m blind, he should be in prison.”

“Can you live with fifty?”

Yes, said Cassidy. If I have to.

Fifty wasn’t enough; both of them knew that. Fifty years meant parole before twenty. But right now McLarney couldn’t even think about fifty or any other kind of plea. Right now, McLarney could look at the most important case file in his life and see nothing but a loser. Hell, if Cassidy wasn’t a cop, this thing would be stetted before it ever got near a courtroom.

There could be no stet on this case, no acquittal, no half-assed plea agreement. Gene Cassidy had to walk away from this with nothing less than a first-degree verdict from a city jury. The department owes him that, and for all practical purposes McLarney is now the personification of the department. As Cassidy’s friend, as the supervisor responsible for the case, as the man who has shaped and guided the investigation, it is on Terry McLarney to deliver, to set the thing right.

The pressure is further compounded by a strange, unspoken guilt. Because on that warm night in October, when the call first came to homicide, McLarney wasn’t in the office. He had left the four-to-twelve shift after the midnight relief began arriving and heard of the shooting only when he called back to the office from a downtown bar.

Officer down in the Western.

Head shots.

Cassidy.

It’s Cassidy.

McLarney raced back to the office. To him, it was more than a police shooting. Cassidy was a friend, an up-and-coming patrolman whom McLarney had tutored during his brief tour as a sector sergeant in the Western. The kid was a prodigy-smart, hard, fair-the kind of cop the department wanted out on the street. Even after McLarney had transferred back to homicide, he and Gene had stayed close. And now, suddenly, Cassidy was down, maybe dying.

They had found him sitting up at the northeast corner of Appleton and Mosher. Jim Bowen, walking foot a few blocks from the district, was the first to arrive and was shocked that he couldn’t immediately recognize a fellow Western man. The face was a bloody pulp, and Bowen knelt to read the breastplate on the uniform: Cassidy. Bowen also saw that Gene’s gun was holstered, his nightstick inside the radio car, which was idling a few feet from the curb. Other Western men began arriving, each more shocked than the last.

“Gene, Gene… Oh man.”

“Gene, can you hear me?”

“Gene, do you know who shot you?”

Cassidy spoke only one word.

“Yes,” he said. I know.

The ambulance sped less than a mile to the shock-trauma unit at University Hospital, where doctors calculated a 4 percent chance of survival. One bullet had entered the left cheek, boring upward across the front of the skull and severing the right eye’s optic nerve. The second slug smashed through the left side of the face, shattering the other eye and plunging Gene Cassidy into darkness before continuing on its path, lodging in the brain beyond reach of a surgeon’s knife. That second bullet left the doctors discussing the worst possibility, that even if the twenty-seven-year-old officer survived, he might suffer severe brain damage.

A vigil began at the trauma unit when Cassidy’s young wife arrived with two other Western men. Then came the parade of white hats and gold trim-colonels and deputy commissioners-followed by detectives, surgeons, a Catholic priest who offered last rites.

In its earliest hours, the investigation traveled the time-honored path of all police shootings. Enraged detectives and Western uniforms flooded the area around Mosher and Appleton, grabbing anyone and everyone hanging on the corners. Residents, street dealers, addicts, derelicts-everything that walked was jacked up, intimidated, threatened. Two bullets fired at point-blank range were a declaration of war, and whatever lines of demarcation had once existed between police and the Western locals were suddenly swept aside.

More than any other supervisor in homicide, McLarney led the charge on that first, miserable night, raging from one possible witness to the next, ranting, raving, throwing the fear of God, the devil and T. P. McLarney into the hearts of everyone and everything in his path. When a police officer gets shot, the I-ain’t-seen-nuthin’ routine doesn’t play anymore; even so, McLarney’s intensity on that first night bordered on recklessness. It was viewed by the detectives under him almost as an act of contrition, a wild-eyed attempt to compensate for the simple fact that when the call came, he had been drinking beer.

In truth, McLarney’s early departure in the late hours of his shift meant nothing. Homicide work is largely flex time, with one shift blending into another as paperwork is completed and fresh troops arrive. Some men leave early, some late, some work overtime on fresh cases, some are at the bar a few minutes after the relief comes walking off the elevators. No one can anticipate the arrival of a red ball, but in McLarney’s heart of hearts that kind of rationalization meant little. This was more than a red ball, and it mattered to McLarney that when Gene Cassidy got shot down in the street, he was not on post.

The sergeant’s uncontrolled rage on that first night made the other detectives cautious. Several men-including Lieutenant D’Addario-tried to calm him, to tell him that he was too close to the situation, to suggest that he go home, that he leave the case to detectives who had not served with Cassidy, detectives who could work the shooting as if it were a crime-a vicious crime, but not a personal wound.

In one confrontation on the street, McLarney actually threw a punch that shattered the bones of his fist. Months later, in fact, it would become a standard joke in the unit: McLarney broke his hand in three places on the night Cassidy was shot.

In three places?

Yeah, in the 1800 block of Division Street, in the 1600 block of Laurens, in the…

McLarney was out of control, but he couldn’t leave. Nor did anyone really expect him to. Whatever else they felt about his involvement in that first night’s investigation, the men who worked with McLarney understood his rage.

At 2:00 A.M., about three hours after the shooting, an anonymous caller dialed 911 and told police to go to a North Stricker Street house, where they would find the gun used to shoot the officer. No weapon was discovered, but the detectives nonetheless grabbed a sixteen-year-old at that address and took him downtown, where he began by denying any involvement in the incident. The questioning was both prolonged and heated, especially after detectives did a leuco malachite test on the bottom of the kid’s sneakers and came up positive for blood. At that point, it was all the detectives could do to keep McLarney away from the terrified, beleaguered kid who, after several hours of heated interrogation, finally gave up one Anthony T. Owens as the gunman. A second man, Clifton Frazier, was named as being present at the time of the shooting but otherwise uninvolved. The young witness put himself within a few feet of the shooting and declared that he had seen the officer wade into a crowded drug corner before being shot without provocation by the eighteen-year-old Owens, a small-time narcotics dealer.

Detectives working around the clock typed up arrest and search warrants for Owens, got them signed by the duty judge, then hit Owens’s apartment in Northwest Baltimore at six-thirty that evening. The raid produced little, but before detectives left the address, another anonymous caller said that the man who shot the police was inside a Fulton Street rowhouse. Police raced to that address and failed to find Owens. They did, however, discover twenty-four-year-old Clifton Frazier, the man named as a witness. Frazier was taken downtown, where he refused to make a statement and demanded a lawyer. Wanted on a seemingly unrelated assault warrant, Frazier was taken to the city jail, but bailed out hours after his hearing with a court commissioner.

Late that evening, the younger sister of the reluctant sixteen-year-old witness showed up at the homicide unit and declared that she, too, had been on Appleton Street with several young girlfriends and had seen the police get shot when he walked onto the crowded corner. She claimed that just before the shooting, she had seen Clifton Frazier nudge Owens and say something. The girl also insisted that after the shooting, Owens fled in a black Ford Escort driven by Frazier. Based on that statement, detectives again began looking for Frazier; they found that after being released on bail, he had gone on the wing. They issued a second warrant for him and continued the search for Owens. Later that same night, as the thirteen-year-old girl was initialing the pages of her statement, Anthony Owens walked up to the deskman at the Central District.

“I’m the man they say shot the police.”

He had gone to the Central for fear that he would be beaten, or even killed, if he was taken on the streets of the Western, a fear that was in no way unjustified. The other detectives managed to keep McLarney away from the suspect, but Owens was not about to make it through processing, the district lockup and the ride to the city jail without taking some licks. It was brutal, of course, but not indiscriminate, and perhaps Anthony Owens understood that it was in some way required when a police gets shot twice in the head. He took the blows that came his way and made no complaint.

For days after surgery, Gene Cassidy drifted between life and death, lying in a semicomatose state in the intensive care unit with his wife, mother and brother at his bedside. The brass had disappeared after the first night’s vigil, but the family was joined by friends and officers from the Western. Each day, the doctors adjusted and readjusted the odds, but it was two full weeks before Cassidy gave them a clue, squirming restlessly as a trauma unit nurse worked with his bandages.

“Oh, Gene,” said the nurse, “life’s a bear.”

“Yeah,” said Cassidy, struggling with each word, “a… real… bear.”

He was blind. The bullet in his brain had also destroyed his senses of smell and taste. Beyond that permanent damage, he would have to learn to talk again, to walk, to coordinate his every movement. Once their patient’s survival was assured, the surgeons proposed a four-month hospital stay followed by months of physical therapy. But, incredibly, by the third week, Cassidy was walking with the help of an escort and relearning vocabulary in sessions with a speech therapist, and it became increasingly clear that his brain functions were intact. He was discharged from the trauma unit at the end of a month.

As Cassidy returned to the world of the living, McLarney and Gary Dunnigan, the primary on the case, were there with questions, hoping Cassidy could strengthen the case against Owens by recalling details of the shooting independently, perhaps even identifying or describing the shooter in some way. But to his great frustration, the last thing Cassidy could remember was eating a hot dog at his father-in-law’s house before going to work that day. With the exception of a brief image of Jim Bowen’s face leaning over him in the ambo-a scene the doctors believe he could not have witnessed-he recalled nothing.

When they told him the story about the Owens kid, about being shot without provocation as he tried to clear a drug corner, Cassidy drew a blank. Why, he asked them, would I leave my nightstick in the radio car if I’m clearing a corner? And since when was Appleton and Mosher a drug corner? Cassidy had worked that post for a year and couldn’t remember anybody dealing off Appleton. To Cassidy, the story didn’t mesh, but try as he might, Cassidy simply couldn’t remember.

And yet there was something else Gene Cassidy couldn’t recall, an incident that had occurred one night in a hospital room, when his mind was still veiled in a gray haze. Something, some hidden vein of Western District ethic, perhaps, prompted Cassidy to get up and walk on his own for the first time since Appleton Street. Slowly, he made his way to the bedside of another patient, a fifteen-year-old boy injured in an auto accident.

“Hey,” said Cassidy.

The kid looked up at a terrifying apparition clothed only in a hospital smock, its eyes swollen and unseeing, its head shaved and scarred from surgery.

“What?” asked the kid.

“You’re under arrest.”

“What?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“Mister, I think you better go back to bed.”

The ghost seemed to consider this for a moment before turning away. “Okay,” Cassidy said.

In the weeks after the shooting, McLarney and other detectives gathered narcotics officers from CID and the Western District’s drug enforcement unit and began surveillance of the drug markets near Appleton Street. The assumption was simple: If Cassidy was shot because he had tried to clear a drug corner, then every dealer in the sector would know about it. Some of those dealers would be witnesses; others would know witnesses. More than a dozen traffickers were, in fact, locked up, then interviewed from a position of strength by detectives who could demand information while offering a chance to deal with prosecutors on the drug charges. Incredibly, none had useful information.

Likewise, the night of the shooting had been brisk but not particularly cold, and there was every reason to believe that the locals would have been out on rowhouse stoops well into the evening. Yet a second canvass of Mosher and Appleton streets produced little in the way of witnesses. A lengthy search for the black Ford Escort that was supposed to be the getaway vehicle yielded nothing at all.

In late January, the case was shifted to the career criminals unit of the state’s attorney’s office, where two veteran prosecutors, Howard Gersh and Gary Schenker, reviewed the indictments and the witness statements. Owens and Frazier were still being held without bail, but as a prosecution, the case was a disaster. For witnesses, they had a reluctant sixteen-year-old delinquent and his thirteen-year-old sister, whose penchant for running away from home made her unreliable and almost impossible to find. Moreover, the statements from the two children, though similar, differed on key points, and only the girl’s statement implicated Frazier as an accomplice. Meanwhile, there was no weapon, no physical evidence, no motive that might placate a juror asked to consider weak evidence.

McLarney felt real fear. What if there was still a lack of evidence at the point of trial? What if they never found another witness? What if they went to court and lost this thing on the merits? What if the shooter went free? In one particularly bad moment of doubt, McLarney actually called Cassidy and, at the suggestion of prosecutors, asked about a thirty-year plea for Owens on a second-degree attempted murder. That meant parole in ten.

No, said Cassidy. Not thirty.

Good for him, thought McLarney. It was obscene even to be thinking about a plea agreement. Cassidy was blind, his career finished. And although Patti Cassidy’s employers had offered to hold her position, she had given up her job as an accountant to be with Gene through the months of therapy. Two lives would never be the same-more than two, thought McLarney, correcting himself.

It was just before Christmas when Patti Cassidy’s persistent ailments were properly diagnosed. Her nausea and exhaustion were not, as she had believed, the result of stress following the shooting. She was pregnant. Conceived only days before Gene was wounded, the couple’s first child was a wonderful blessing, a living, breathing claim to the future. But no one needed to mention that the pregnancy, too, was bittersweet; that this was a child Gene Cassidy would never see.

Patti’s pregnancy only fueled McLarney’s obsession with the case. But some detectives believed that McLarney’s intensity could be attributed in part to something else, something that had nothing to do with Cassidy or the baby, but something that happened in a back alley off Monroe Street, little more than two blocks from where Cassidy fell.

For McLarney, the investigation into the death of John Randolph Scott had become an obscenity. For him, the pursuit of other police officers was unthinkable. There was no way that he could reconcile a world in which Gene Cassidy is shot down in the street and less than a month later, the homicide unit-McLarney’s squad, in fact-is out in the districts chasing the men who worked with Gene, putting beat cops on a polygraph, checking service revolvers and searching station house lockers.

It was absurd, and in McLarney’s opinion, the John Scott case was still open because the suspects were cops. In McLarney’s world, a cop would not shoot someone and leave the body in an alley, not the men he had worked with anyway. That was where Worden had gone off course. Worden was a helluva cop, a good investigator, but if he really believed a police murdered that kid then he was just wrong. Dead wrong. McLarney didn’t really blame his detective directly. Worden, in his eyes, was a product of the old school, a cop who followed a superior’s orders, no matter how ass-backward. The blame therefore belonged, not to Worden, but to the command staff, and especially to the admin lieutenant and the captain who had taken the Monroe Street probe out of the regular chain of command. Too early in the investigation they discarded the possibility of a civilian suspect, McLarney thought, too early they sent Worden after the cops on the street. The admin lieutenant wasn’t an investigator, neither was the captain; for that reason alone McLarney believed they should never have taken the Scott case from him and D’Addario. More to the point, McLarney had been in the Western and they had not. He knew what could happen on the street and what couldn’t. And he believed that Monroe Street was lost the moment everyone involved decided that a cop had done the murder.

It all made for a helluva speech, and among the detectives on his shift, no one was ready to deny that McLarney believed every word of it. Then again, he had to believe it. Because more than anything else in his life, what Terrence McLarney felt about the Western, about himself, could not be compromised. In McLarney’s mind, anyone who wanted the truth need not look farther than Gene Cassidy bleeding at the corner of Appleton and Mosher.

That was police work in the Western District. And if everyone else in the police department couldn’t see that, well, McLarney could give eloquent expression to his feelings: fuck it and fuck them. He decided he would have nothing to do with the Monroe Street case. Instead, he would do something much more productive and satisfying: He would fix the Cassidy file.

It was just after the news about Patti’s pregnancy that McLarney sent a note to the captain, requesting a detail of two men from the Western District beginning February 1, telling himself that if necessary, they would work the case right up to the May trial date. There was nothing else to do; to lose a police shooting, this police shooting, was too much to contemplate.

The captain had given him the detail and the Western had sent him two of their best. They were a Mutt and Jeff pair: Gary Tuggle, a short, wiry black kid who worked in the district’s plainclothes unit, and Corey Belt, a tall, thick-necked monolith with the appearance and temperament of a defensive end, attributes that appealed to the varsity lineman in McLarney’s past. Both were smart, both were healthy and both were aggressive even by Western standards. Out on the street, McLarney took a certain amount of delight in the sheer spectacle of his new detail, the obvious contrast between a thickening thirty-five-year-old sergeant and the two well-proportioned carnivores in his charge.

“We pull up to a corner and I get out of the car,” mused McLarney after a day’s adventures on the west side. “The criminals just look at me and figure, ‘No problem, I can outrun this derelict.’ Then these two get out of the car and automatically everyone just turns and puts their hands against the wall.”

McLarney, Belt, Tuggle-since the first of the month, the trio had spent every working day on the streets of the Western, canvassing the streets near the shooting scene, jacking up witnesses, running down even the vaguest rumor.

But now, after nine days, McLarney and his detail have nothing to show for the effort. No fresh witnesses. Still no weapon. Nothing beyond what they learned in October. There wasn’t even talk on the street about a shooting now four months old.

Preparing to go back into the district again this morning, McLarney can feel his fear grow a little bit larger. Having once served as Cassidy’s sergeant, having called him a friend, he can regard the case as nothing less than a crusade. Not only because of what the case means to Cassidy, but because of what it means to McLarney, a man defined and obsessed by the badge as few men are anymore, a true believer in the brotherhood of cops, as pagan a religion as an honest Irishman may find.

Terrence Patrick McLarney recognized his obsession years ago, the day he was working a Central District radio car and drew a bank alarm at Eutaw and North. Was there any greater feeling than racing up Pennsylvania Avenue with that blue strobe light show on top of the car and “Theme from Shaft” blasting from a tape player on the front seat? Was there a bigger kick than charging past stunned patrons into the bank lobby, a twenty-six-year-old centurion living by the big stick and the.38 bouncing around on his belt? Never mind that the alarm was sounded in error; it was the sheer spectacle of the thing. In a world of gray, weightless equivocation, McLarney was a good man in a city besieged by bad men. What other job could offer anything as pure as that?

In time, McLarney grew into the part in a way that few men do, becoming a street-worn, self-mocking, hard-drinking cop of almost mythic proportions. He looked, laughed, drank and swore like some retrograde Irish patrolman whose waistline was losing a rearguard action against the weighty properties of domestic beer. Before his form congealed into that of a 230-pound detective sergeant, McLarney had played college football, and only over a period of years had the muscular contours of an offensive lineman succumbed to a daily regimen of radio car, barstool and bed.

His wardrobe accelerated the suggestion of physical decline, and among his detectives there was a consensus that McLarney wouldn’t come to work until the family dog had a chance to drag his shirt and sport coat across the front lawn. McLarney repeatedly claimed to have no understanding of the phenomenon, insisting that his wife had ventured into a well-kept suburban mall and emerged with acceptable menswear. Within the confines of his Howard County home and for the first few miles of Interstate 95, the garments would appear attractive and well tailored. But somewhere between the Route 175 interchange and the city line, a sort of spontaneous explosion would occur. McLarney’s shirt collar would crease at an unspeakable angle, causing the knot of his tie to execute a contorted half twist. The cuffs of the sport coat would suddenly fray and jettison buttons. The jacket lining above the right hip would catch the butt of his revolver and begin tearing itself free. An ulcer would form on the bottom of one shoe.

“I can’t control it,” McLarney would insist, acknowledging no dereliction except on those days when he was late for work and had ironed only the front of his shirt, confident that “it’s the only part that people are gonna look at anyhow.”

Stout, fair-haired and possessed of a quick, chipped-tooth smile, Terry McLarney didn’t look like much of a thinker or even much of a wit. Yet to those who knew him well, McLarney’s appearance and behavior often seemed calculated to obscure his true character. He was a product of the middle-class suburbs of Washington, the son of a Defense Department analyst with a high GS rating. As a patrolman, McLarney had studied for a law degree out of the passenger seat of a Central District radio car, yet he had never bothered to take the Maryland bar exam. Among cops, some vague taint has always been attached to the title of lawyer, some grounded ethic that believes even the best and most devoted attorneys to be little more than well-paid monkey wrenches hurled into the criminal justice machine. Despite his legal training, McLarney adhered to that ethic: He was a cop, not a lawyer.

Yet McLarney was also one of the most intelligent, self-aware men in homicide. He was the unit’s Falstaff, its true comedic chorus. Elaborate practical jokes and bizarre profanity were Jay Landsman’s steady contributions, but McLarney’s humor, subtle and self-effacing, often caught the peculiar camaraderie that results from police work. Generations from now, homicide detectives in Baltimore will still be telling T. P. McLarney stories. McLarney, who as a sergeant spent a single day sharing an office with Landsman before deadpanning a confidential memo to D’Addario: “Sgt. Landsman stares at me strangely. I am concerned that he views me as a sex object.” McLarney, who after four beers spoke in football metaphors and would always offer his detectives the same shred of advice: “My men should go into the game with a plan. I don’t want to know what it is, but they should have one.” McLarney, who once drove home on a busy shift to rescue his wife and son by using his.38 to shoot a rampaging mouse in the bedroom closet. (“I cleaned it up,” he explained on his return to the office. “But I thought about leaving it there as a warning to others.”)

At the same time, McLarney was also a tireless investigator who worked cases with care and precision. His best moment came in 1982, as the lead investigator on the Bronstein murders, an unspeakable crime in which an elderly Jewish couple was repeatedly stabbed and left on the living room floor of their Pimlico home. The two killers, their girlfriends, even a thirteen-year-old cousin, returned to the house time and again to step over the bodies and carry off another armful of valuables. McLarney worked the case for weeks, tracing some of the stolen items to a fence in the Perkins Homes housing project, where he learned the names of two suspects who would later be sentenced to death and life without parole, respectively.

As in the Bronstein investigation, McLarney’s best efforts came in those cases where a woman was the victim. It was a prejudice that endured long after he returned to homicide as a sergeant. In McLarney’s squad, detectives who caught a case with a female victim were routinely prodded and henpecked by their sergeant, a cop governed by the traditional, sentimental judgment that while men might violate the law by killing each other, the murder of a woman constituted real tragedy.

“This one,” he would say, staring at the scene photos and oblivious of the melodrama, “has got to be avenged.”

He graduated from the academy in March 1976 and went to the Central, but even then he was thinking seriously about a law degree, maybe even a prosecutor’s salary-an alternative that Catherine, his wife, readily encouraged. McLarney enrolled in the University of Baltimore law program about the same time that his sector sergeant paired him with Bob McAllister in a two-man car on the Pennsylvania Avenue post. It was a bizarre, schizophrenic existence: days spent in a freshman law class discussing torts and contracts, nights spent handling calls in the Lexington Terrace and Murphy Homes, the city’s worst high-rise projects. On a post where every other incident seemed to call for nightsticks, both men learned that they could fight when fighting was the order of the day. The west side high-rises were a world unto themselves, eight towers of decay and despair that served as the city’s twenty-four-hour supermarket for heroin and cocaine. And, as if the terrain wasn’t bad enough, the two men were together throughout the ’79 riots, an event known to BPD veterans as simply the Winter Olympics, when a snowbound Baltimore was robustly looted by its inhabitants. It was McAllister who kept them on an even keel; more often than not he was the calming influence, the voice of reason. In the early morning hours, the two would park the car in a Central hole, where McAllister would read McLarney questions from a legal text, bringing him back to earth after a long night in the projects. Quiet, sensible and self-mocking, Mac was the bridge between worlds, the only thing that stopped McLarney from getting up in a second-year law class to explain that Plaintiff A was trying to fuck over Defendant B and that Judge C should have both of them locked up if they don’t cut the shit.

Both men eventually took the entrance test for the Criminal Investigations Division. McAllister was sick of the projects and wanted, more than anything else, to get to homicide, but death investigation held little appeal for McLarney. He wanted simply to be a robbery detective, for the childlike reason that even after two years on the street, he viewed armed robbery- “You’re short on cash, so you go to a bank with a gun and just take it?”-as truly amazing, a comic book concept.

Both scored high on the CID exam for two years running, but when positions finally opened up, Mac had to settle for burglary while McLarney eventually landed in the homicide unit by way of the police academy, where he did a brief stint as a legal instructor. To his surprise, he immediately fell in love with homicide-the work, the people. It was an elite unit, an investigative unit-the best in the department-and McLarney had always imagined himself as an investigator. The Maryland bar exam and a legal career were both dim memories from the moment he was handed a detective’s shield and assigned a desk.

Then, after two of the happiest years of his life, McLarney made what he later considered his gravest mistake: He passed the sergeant’s test. The stripes on his sleeve brought a slightly better pay scale and a transfer to the Western, where they gave him Sector 2 and a squad of fresh-faced, healthy kids to fill the radio cars, twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-old specimens who made him feel like a fossil at the advanced age of thirty-one. Suddenly it was McLarney who had to be the calm, reasoned one. Every night for his two years as a sector sergeant, he would assign the cars and send his flock out into a violent, unforgiving section of the city, a district where a man trusted no one but himself and the others on his shift. Too much happened too quickly in the Western, where every uniform spent the shift alone in a one-man car, dependent on his side partners to hear his call, to get there in time, to keep control.

McLarney came to differentiate the weak from the strong, those who would fight and those who would not, those who knew the street and those who were casualties waiting to happen. Pope, a good man. Cassidy, very good. Hendrix, a fighter. But McLarney knew others shouldn’t be out there, and yet the same post cars had to be filled. Every night he would spend an hour or two racing through the required paperwork, then take his own car out into the sector and roam for the rest of the shift, trying to back every call. McLarney spent those two years wondering, not whether one of his men would fall, but how it would happen. In the Western, a cop didn’t have to screw up to get hurt, and McLarney wondered if that was how it would be. Or would that godawful moment involve a man who lacked the training, who couldn’t control his post, who should never have been in the goddamn car. Above all, McLarney wondered whether it would be something he could live with.

The day, when it came, was beautiful, the first day of September in fact. McLarney remembered the weather because it marked the end of another Baltimore summer, and he hated wearing the Kevlar vest in higher temperatures. He heard the radio call while checking the city pumps on Calverton, several blocks farther west, and he hit the bluetop and raced across Edmondson, arriving in the neighborhood about the same time as a second call for a sighting of the suspect on Bentalou. McLarney tried the first cross street north, rolling slowly. On a shaded porch in the middle of the block, an old couple sat quietly, and when McLarney looked at them, they both turned their eyes to the ground. Maybe they just didn’t want to talk to a police; then again, maybe they had seen something. McLarney got out of the car and walked to the porch, where the old man greeted him with a strange, pensive expression.

“You didn’t see a man run by here, did you? The gas station got robbed.”

The old man seemed to know about the gas station and mentioned almost casually that he had seen a man run down the street, fall, get up again and dart around the corner into a thick clump of bushes.

“Those bushes there?”

From the porch, McLarney couldn’t see very much at all. He called for a backup; Reggie Hendrix showed first. McLarney watched his officer walk up an incline into the corner lot and yelled for him to be careful, the suspect might still be in the bushes. Both men had their revolvers out as another resident came off his front porch to ask what was going on, and McLarney turned away to order the man back inside.

“There he is,” shouted Hendrix.

McLarney couldn’t see. He ran up the small incline toward the other officer, figuring that the best thing to do was to stay close to Hendrix so that the suspect couldn’t get between them.

Hendrix kept shouting, but McLarney saw nothing until the man was already out in the open, moving fast across the yard but still facing them. McLarney saw the gun, saw the man shooting, and began firing back. Hendrix fired as well. This is bizarre, thought McLarney, somehow detached, marveling that they seemed to be just standing there shooting each other-which was, in fact, exactly what they were doing. He felt both bullets hit, each one knocking him a bit, and at almost the same moment watched the other man flinch and stagger down the incline toward the street.

McLarney turned and tried to run back across the yard, but his leg was useless. He had fired four and was now stumbling toward the street, where he expected to let the last two go in whatever direction the gunman happened to be running. But when McLarney came down the incline, he saw the man stretched out on the sidewalk, silent, his gun on the pavement near him. McLarney staggered down to the sidewalk and lay down on his stomach a few feet away. He kept one arm outstretched, the gunsight aimed at the other man’s head. Next to him on the pavement, the gunman looked over at McLarney and said nothing. Then he lifted his hand enough to manage a weak, waving motion. No more, it said. Enough.

Half the Western was standing over them by then and McLarney let go of his own gun when he saw Craig Pope’s.38 in the other man’s face. Then came the pain-sharp, shooting pain in his abdomen-and he began to wonder where he’d been hit. The leg was fucked up; but, he thought, what’s a leg? He guessed that the second bullet had caught him in the gut, underneath the edge of the vest. Good again, thought McLarney, nothing vital down there.

He felt wetness on his back. “Mike, roll me and see if it came through the other side.”

Hajek pushed up on the shoulder blade. “Yeah, it did.”

Through and through. A helluva way to find out that the Kevlar vests weren’t worth a shit, but McLarney was at least relieved to know the bullet was out.

Separate ambulances took both men to the same trauma unit, with McLarney telling the medics in his ambo that he felt as if he was falling, as if he was going to fall off the litter. When he felt that way, the pain seemed to let up.

“Don’t go out,” they began screaming at him. “Don’t go out.”

Oh yeah, thought McLarney. Shock.

In the surgery prep area, he could hear the man he shot making all kinds of noise on the litter beside him and could watch as the trauma team poked at his own body with IVs and catheters. Phillips, another man from his sector, went to tell Catherine, who took it the way any reasonable person would, expressing an unequivocal concern for her husband’s wellbeing and an equally unequivocal conviction that even in a city like Baltimore, most lawyers go through life without being hit by gunfire.

This is it, she told him later. What other reason do you need? McLarney had no right to argue with her; he knew that. He was thirty-two years old, with a family, making half of what most other college graduates do and getting shot down like a dog in the street for the privilege. Boiled to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing, and yeah, McLarney had to admit, there was no percentage in being a cop. None at all. And yet nothing about that shooting could change his mind; things had somehow gone too far for that.

He didn’t return to active duty for eight months, and for much of that time he was using a colostomy bag until his digestive system healed enough to permit the reversal surgery. After each operation, the abdominal cramps were so bad that he would get down on the floor at night, and after the reversal surgery, a bout of hepatitis prolonged the recovery. Gene Cassidy came by to visit a couple of times and once took his sergeant out to lunch. And when McLarney attempted to cut corners on his rehabilitation by ordering a proscribed beer, Cassidy chewed ass. Good man, Cassidy.

A standing tradition in the Baltimore department dictates that a man shot in the line of duty, upon returning to duty, can take any posting for which he is qualified. That summer, as McLarney was preparing to go back into uniform, Rod Brandner was taking his pension, leaving behind a reputation as one of the best sergeants the homicide unit had ever seen. Brandner had put together a good squad and he worked for D’Addario, which meant that McLarney would also be serving under a lieutenant known to be human.

He returned to the sixth floor expressing little pride at having been shot and little interest in telling and retelling the story. At times, he would express amusement at the status it accorded him. Whenever a shitstorm was breaking, McLarney would simply smile and shake his head. “They have to leave me alone,” he would say. “I’m a sworn member who got shot in the line.”

In time, it became a standard joke in the unit. McLarney would emerge stone-faced from a meeting in the captain’s office and Landsman would play straight man.

“Captain shit on you, Terr?”

“Nah, not really.”

“What’d you do? Show him your wounds?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuckin’-A right. Every time the captain gets wound up, McLarney just unbuttons his shirt.”

But he was not proud of those scars. And over time, he began to talk about getting shot as if it were the most irresponsible thing he had ever done. His son, Brian, had been eight years old and was told only that his father had slipped and fallen on the stairs. But a day or so later the boy heard McLarney’s father talking to a family friend on the phone, then went back into his room and began throwing things around. A kid that age, McLarney would later tell friends, I had no right getting shot.

In the end, he rested his pride on a smaller, lesser point. When the bullets hit him on Arunah Avenue, Terrence McLarney did not fall. He stood there, firing his own weapon until he brought his man down. Raeford Barry Footman, twenty-nine years old, died two days after the incident of complications from a gunshot wound to the chest. When they compared the bullet recovered at autopsy, they found that it had come from McLarney’s service revolver.

Some time after the shooting, a detective brought McLarney a printout of the dead man’s priors, which ran for several pages. McLarney scanned the sheet until he was satisfied, noting in particular that Footman had only recently been paroled from a felony conviction. He did not want to see an ident photo of the dead man, nor did he want to read the case folder. To McLarney, that seemed to go too far.

McLarney sits behind Dunnigan’s desk in the annex office, listening to the steady rhythm of a young girl sobbing disconsolately behind the interrogation room door. The tears are real. McLarney knows that.

He leans across the desk, listening to the girl trying to collect herself as the men inside the room go through her statement one more time. Her voice is breaking, her nose running. The girl feels pain, a sense of loss even, as genuine as any felt for Gene Cassidy. And that, to McLarney, is a little obscene.

D’Addario comes out of his office, walks to the interrogation room door and stares through the mirrored window. “How’s it going?”

“It’s down, lieutenant.”

“Already?”

“She gave up Butchie.”

Butchie. Tears for Butchie Frazier.

The crying jag began a half hour before, when they finally broke through to Yolanda Marks and the truth began slipping from her in fits and starts. In the interrogation room, McLarney listened to the sobbing until the contradictions, the fractured morality, became too much. A little speech forced its way up into his throat, and then he told a young West Baltimore girl that she was doing the right thing. He told her what Butchie Frazier was, what he had done, and why it needed to end this way. He told her about Gene and Patti Cassidy and the child not yet born, about a darkness that would not go away.

“Think about those things,” he told her.

There was silence after that, a minute or two when someone else’s tragedy took shape in the young girl’s mind. But then McLarney left the room and she was sobbing again, and the tears had nothing to do with Gene Cassidy. The simple truth was that Yolanda Marks loved Butchie Frazier, and she had given him up.

“Is she talkin’ in there?” asks Landsman, walking through the annex.

“Yeah,” says McLarney, absentmindedly opening Dunnigan’s top drawer. “We’re getting ready to write up the statement.”

“What’s she saying?”

“It’s down.”

“Hey, way to go, Terr.”

Landsman disappears into his office, and McLarney pulls a handful of paper clips from the drawer, lines them up on the desk and begins torturing the first, twisting it back and forth between stubby fingers.

The last two days had made all the difference, and this time they had it right. This time, the investigation had been temperate and clinical, precise in a way that it never could have been in the hours after the shooting. Rage and frustration had marked those first days, but those emotions had finally been sublimated by time and necessity. For McLarney, the Cassidy detail was still a crusade, but one now fueled more by deliberate reason than raw vengeance.

Yolanda Marks’s journey to the interrogation room actually began more than a week ago, when McLarney and the two detail men brought their two reluctant eyewitnesses-the sixteen-year-old and his younger sister-downtown to the state’s attorney’s office. There, detectives and prosecutors began a series of pretrial interviews to elicit additional details about the shooting, details that might then be corroborated to strengthen the existing testimony or, better still, that might lead to additional witnesses. In particular, McLarney wanted to identify and locate the young girlfriends who were supposedly with the thirteen-year-old witness when the crime occurred.

Given the youth of their witness and the intimidating confines of the state’s attorney’s office, the investigators found it surprising that they had to press the young girl to reveal the names of her friends. When she finally began talking, McLarney and the others were provided with only given or street names-Lulu, Renee, Tiffany and Munchkin-all of whom supposedly lived in the Murphy Homes high-rises. McLarney, Belt and Tuggle went to the projects, finding a variety of young girls who answered to the names provided, but none knew about the shooting. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to know anything about the thirteen-year-old witness.

Once again, McLarney also sent the detail in search of the black Ford Escort that Clifton Frazier had supposedly used to drive Owens away from the shooting scene. But no such car could be in any way connected to either Frazier or Owens, although the men spent several days watching and following several black Escorts they found near the shooting scene.

The effort to confirm the statements of their two witnesses was going nowhere. Moreover, the defense attorneys appeared to be lining up a series of alibi witnesses who were ready to testify that Anthony Owens wasn’t even on Appleton Street when the shooting occurred. Something was clearly wrong and McLarney, sensing a dead end, went back to square one. Three days ago, he pulled out the case file and began reviewing the initial statements provided by neighborhood residents who had been standing in the crowd at the shooting scene and who were grabbed by uniforms and sent downtown. There were several such witnesses, all of whom had claimed that they knew nothing and had merely joined the spectators after the shooting. With nothing left to lose, McLarney decided it wouldn’t hurt to begin poking through those statements a second time, so the detail began interviewing each of the witnesses again. After another day on the street, they finally came upon a twenty-year-old resident of Mosher Street named John Moore.

On the night of the shooting, Moore had been yanked off a corner by uniforms and sent downtown, where he told detectives that he had heard the shots but seen nothing. This time, after several hours of friction in the large interrogation room, however, the story changed.

In fact, Moore didn’t see the shooting, but he saw everything leading up to it. He was out on his stoop on the night of October 22, watching Clifton “Butchie” Frazier and a young girl he didn’t know walking west on Mosher toward Appleton. Frazier and the girl were halfway down the block when a marked police car began rolling slowly down the street. Moore saw the radio car come abreast of the couple, then roll around the corner onto Appleton. A few seconds later, Frazier and the girl rounded the corner as well.

Then came the gunshots. Three of them.

Asked whether there had been a crowd at the corner of Mosher and Appleton, Moore said that the corner was empty at the time of the shooting. He further confirmed his story by leading detectives to a nineteen-year-old friend who had been with him on the stoop.

The second witness recounted the same sequence of events as Moore, adding two more facts to the record. First, the friend remembered that when the radio car came abreast of the couple on Mosher Street, the officer behind the wheel and Butchie Frazier had eyed each other for a moment or two. Second, and more important, the girl with Frazier was named Yolanda. She lived around the corner on Monroe Street. And yeah, if he had to, he could point out the house.

Earlier this morning, McLarney and the two detail officers gathered in the vestibule of that West Baltimore rowhouse, waiting for Yolanda Marks to gather her things and walk to the waiting Cavalier. She was a sad-faced thing, seventeen years old, with deep brown eyes that began to tear as soon as they took her downtown and closed the door to the interrogation room. Yolanda was a juvenile, of course, so her mother came to the office as well, and that proved fortunate. Because after every moral appeal and veiled threat fell short of the mark, it was the mother who went into the room and told her teenage daughter to get it over with, to do the right thing.

Yolanda wiped her eyes, then cried some more, then daubed her eyes again. Then, for the first time, McLarney learned the truth about the attempted murder of Officer Eugene Cassidy.

“Butchie shot the police.”

According to the girl, the whole thing happened in less than a minute. Cassidy was already out of the radio car and waiting for the couple when they turned the corner onto Appleton.

“Hey, I want to talk to you.”

“What for?”

“Put your hands against the wall.”

Butchie Frazier began to assume the position, then suddenly pulled a handgun from his right jacket pocket. A southpaw, Cassidy grabbed Frazier’s weapon with his left hand; as a result, he was unable to pull his own revolver from the holster on his left hip. With Cassidy still grappling for the gun, Frazier compressed the trigger. The first shot went wide. Seconds later, the gun was flush against the left side of Cassidy’s face and Frazier fired two more rounds.

Cassidy fell to the sidewalk a few feet from his radio car as Frazier fled with the gun through a back alley. Yolanda screamed, backed into the street, then wandered around the block to her house on Monroe Street, where she told her mother what had happened. At that point, neither mother nor child entertained thoughts about calling the police. Nor, for that matter, did John Moore, who had claimed no knowledge of the event on the night of the shooting. Moore’s friend also refused to volunteer himself as a witness until detectives confronted him. And yet another couple, who had been walking on Appleton Street and witnessed the struggle between Frazier and the officer, failed to come forward and were only located after Moore and his companion began naming others who were on the street at the time of the shooting.

West Baltimore. You sit on your stoop, you drink Colt 45 from a brown paper bag and you watch the radio car roll slowly around the corner. You see the gunman, you hear the shots, you gather on the far corner to watch the paramedics load what remains of a police officer into the rear of an ambulance. Then you go back to your rowhouse, open another can, and settle in front of the television to watch the replay on the eleven o’clock news. Then you go back to the stoop.

McLarney knows the Western, knows the code. But even after all those years on the street, it still seems incredible that a cop can be shot twice in the head and get no response from an entire neighborhood. And so, when Yolanda Marks finally begins to break, McLarney stops beating up on paper clips and returns to the interrogation room like a true innocent, speaking to her about human tragedy, about lives that can never be made whole. Then he leaves, knowing that nothing he said will stop those tears.

Later that night, when McLarney calls Cassidy at home to tell him the story of Appleton Street, Cassidy suddenly realizes that he knew the man who tried to kill him. Clifton Frazier was the neighborhood badass on Cassidy’s post, an arrogant dope peddler who had only a week earlier beaten an elderly man senseless. The old man lost the use of an eye in that attack, a beating inflicted because the victim had seen Frazier slapping a young woman on the street and had the temerity to tell the younger man to let the girl alone. Cassidy knew about the beating because he had been trying for days to find and arrest Frazier on the outstanding warrant.

To Cassidy, Appleton Street now made sense; more than that, it meant something. In the end, he had not been shot down because he wandered onto a crowded drug corner like some brainless academy product. He had been shot doing his job, trying-as he had tried with a fifteen-year-old in a hospital recovery room-to arrest a wanted man. He could live with that. He would have to.

Three days after her interrogation, Yolanda Marks is taken to a nearby Maryland State Police barracks, where a polygraph examiner determines that her statement is truthful. The same day, the sixteen-year-old witness who had implicated Anthony Owens as the shooter is also taken to the same barracks, but just before undergoing the test the teenager recants his earlier statement, admitting that he did not witness the shooting and that he only repeated what he heard on the street, hoping to end his own interrogation. The polygraph is then administered and the examiner concludes that in recanting his story, the teenager shows no deception. When the detectives confront his thirteen-year-old sister, she, too, acknowledges the lie, telling them that she had gone down to homicide and told her story because she was afraid her brother would be charged.

The case is down.

McLarney knows that the Cassidy detail still has weeks of work before it will be fit for trial. For one thing, the wrong man had been indicted, and his innocence will now have to be firmly established or a defense attorney could use him to wreak havoc. Likewise, the case will be bolstered immensely if investigators can find the gun or some other physical evidence to link Frazier with the crime. But it is down.

On the night that Yolanda passes the box, there is a homecoming of sorts when McLarney returns to Kavanaugh’s, the city’s predominant Irish cop watering hole, and stands his ground at the end of the bar. He leans against the wooden rail, centered between the pinball machine and the St. Francis Center poor box. It is a slow weekday night, with only a handful of detectives in the place, along with a few uniforms from Central and Southern and a couple guys from the tac sections. Corey Belt stops in for a little while but slips out after drinking a soda or two, leaving McLarney to wonder aloud what has become of the vaunted Western District when its best men don’t even drink beer. McAllister shows up, too, and stays, bellying up on the stool next to McLarney. This in itself makes the occasion special, because Mac doesn’t get out as much anymore, not since he and Sue moved from the city to a new home they built in the rural greenery of northern Baltimore County. To McLarney’s distress, his old Central District partner has in recent years been spinning in a more sensible, suburban orbit.

On this February night, however, when McLarney’s very universe has been righted by a rare, precious victory, when the brotherhood of cops has once again been affirmed in McLarney’s mind, the arrival of McAllister at Kavanaugh’s is serendipity itself. Good old Mac. Miracles have been marked on the streets of Baltimore, and Mac, a true pilgrim, has no doubt traveled many dangerous leagues to pay proper homage at this, the true shrine of Celtic sheriffry. McLarney sidles down the bar to wrap a beefy arm around his old partner’s shoulder.

“Mac,” says McLarney.

“T.P.”

“Mac,” McLarney says again.

“Yes, T.P.”

“My partner.”

“Your partner.”

“My bunky.”

McAllister nods, wondering how long this can possibly go on.

“You know, when we were working together you taught me a lot of shit.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, all kinds of important stuff.”

“Like what, T.P.?”

“You know, all kinds of shit.”

“Oh,” says McAllister, laughing. Nothing is so amusingly pathetic as when one cop tries to bond with another. Conversations descend into vague mutterings. Compliments are transformed into insults. Words of genuine affection become comically perverted.

“Really, you taught me a lot,” says McLarney. “But that’s not why I respect you. I respect you for one thing.”

“What’s that, Terry?”

“When it was time for you to fuck me,” says McLarney soberly, “you were very gentle.”

“Of course I was,” says McAllister without hesitation.

“You could have just bent me over the hood of the car and had your way, but you were gentle with me. And very patient.”

“Well, I knew it was your first time,” says McAllister. “I wanted it to be special.”

“And it was, Mac.”

“I’m glad.”

The brotherhood understands, the tribe hears the words unsaid. And when the two detectives finally let go of their deadpan and begin to laugh, all of Kavanaugh’s laughs with them. Then they kill off what’s left in their cans and argue briefly over the next round, each pulling his wallet and telling the other to take his money off the bar.

As old partners always should.

On the day that marks the end of two full weeks in the Latonya Wallace probe, Jay Landsman manages to slip away from the office in late evening. He drives west into the county, where a wife and five kids are beginning to forget what a husband and father looks like.

The route is so familiar that Landsman’s mind drifts free, and in the solitude of the car’s dark interior he tries to pull away from the details of the case and view the entire puzzle. He thinks about the terrain on Reservoir Hill, about the alley behind Newington Avenue, about the location of the body. What, he asks himself, are we missing?

The sergeant couldn’t argue with the logic behind Edgerton’s rooftop theory, its explanation for the placement of the child’s body. But he never believed that the warrant on 702 Newington would yield anything. For one thing, there were nearly two dozen people living in that shithole. Even if one homicidal child molester managed to lure the kid into the house, kill her and keep the body in his room for a prolonged period of time, how could he have kept eighteen other occupants from knowing about it? Landsman was certain that the murder was the work of one man, acting alone, but the house at 702 Newington looked as though it were hosting the citywide convention for Baltimore’s underclass. Landsman wasn’t surprised when the lab reports on the clothing and sheets from the raid came back positive for blood, but negative for the victim’s blood type, just as none of the latent prints taken from the house matched those of the victim.

The outcome of the raid on 702 Newington left both Landsman and Tom Pellegrini wishing that they had spent more time searching the Fish Man’s store and apartment. Their haste at the Whitelock Street addresses-like everything else with this case-was particularly upsetting to Pellegrini, who worried about what may have been missed. Edgerton’s theory had been so sound, so sensible, and given the earlier child abuse report from 702 Newington, Pellegrini had been convinced. With the raid a bust, he had returned with Landsman to the old store owner.

Their interest in the Fish Man had increased since the raids, not only because of the outcome on Newington Avenue, but also because of a profile of Latonya Wallace’s killer prepared by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit. On the day after the raids, Rich Garvey and Bob Bowman had been dispatched to the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they provided raw data from the crime scene and autopsy to federal agents trained in psychological profiling.

The FBI’s characterization of a likely suspect had considerable detail. He would be “a nocturnal individual who will feel more comfortable at night… the offender will be known to young kids in the neighborhood and will be considered strange but nice to children. The offender may have already been interviewed by investigators or he may interject himself into the investigation… In most cases the offender will follow press accounts of the investigation and will make some effort to establish an alibi. The offender, who probably has been involved in similar crimes previously, will show no remorse over having killed the victim, but will be concerned over the possibility of being apprehended.”

The analysis further noted that “offenders of this type are difficult to interview and as time goes on, the events which occurred will be altered in the offender’s mind, making it difficult for him to relate to the crime. It is possible that the offender killed the victim within a short period of time of coming in contact with her… The victim in this instance may not have responded to the offender as he thought initially she would have responded. His difficulty in controlling her may have led to the victim’s death. Possibly the victim may have initially felt safe or comfortable with the offender and gone willingly with him into a residence or building.”

The profile described the probable offender as fifty years of age, probably unmarried and with a history of problems involving female relationships: “The offender most likely had earlier encounters with young girls in this neighborhood. The death of Latonya Wallace is not believed to be a stranger murder.”

To Landsman and Pellegrini, the FBI profile seems to match the Fish Man. But without any substantive evidence, the only option is to hammer on the old man in another long interrogation in the hope that something new will be revealed. For this very reason, Edgerton and Pellegrini are still at the office as Landsman drives home; they plan to work late into the night preparing for a second confrontation with the Fish Man scheduled for the weekend.

But Landsman isn’t optimistic about the coming interrogation either. The FBI analysis also made it clear that a violent sex offender is among the most difficult suspects to break. There was no Out to offer such people, no reasonable suggestion that the murder could be mitigated in some way. Moreover, the crime was genuinely sociopathic: An absence of remorse would probably be coupled with rationalizations in the suspect’s mind. All that had to be coupled with the fact that the Fish Man had previously walked out a free man after one interrogation; he would be less intimidated by a second attempt. And still there is the missing crime scene, the absence of any physical evidence with which to link a suspect to the crime. The detectives have rumors, suspicions, and now a psychological profile. But working without a scene, they have nothing that can argue against the Fish Man’s story, nothing that can be used as leverage in an interrogation.

It is a bastard of a case, and again Landsman asks himself: What are we missing? Maneuvering through the evening traffic on Liberty Road, he runs two weeks of investigation through his mind. Every day since February 4, the detectives had marched into Reservoir Hill, questioning locals, checking garages and vacant apartments in an ever-growing radius from Newington Avenue. With the consent of the occupants, detectives had managed to perform plain-view searches of every one of the thirteen occupied rowhouses on the north side of Newington, as well as many of the properties on the Callow and Park Avenue sides of the block. They had checked alibis and living quarters for every male suspect identified in the early canvassing.

The dead girl’s clothes and belongings were still being checked for trace evidence; but excepting those black smudges on her pants, nothing looked especially promising. The blue satchel and its contents had been sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory, thirty-five miles away in Rockville, Maryland, for laser fingerprinting, an examination that yielded a few latent prints on the library texts. Those prints were now on the fifth floor of headquarters, running through a Printrak computer that electronically searches for possible matches among the fingerprint files of everyone with a previous arrest in Baltimore.

On the chance that the little girl had left something more than an earring at the crime scene, Edgerton had checked with the library for the titles of the books she checked out that Tuesday afternoon. And when the library system explained that such information could not be released without infringing on the borrower’s privacy, Edgerton actually called the mayor himself; Hizzoner made it easy for the librarians to change their minds. Meanwhile, Pellegrini had gone back more than a decade in the old homicide files, looking for any unsolved murder or disappearance involving young girls. Landsman had checked the sex offense unit for any recent reports in the Reservoir Hill area. Then, with the family’s permission, Pellegrini had walked through the little girl’s room, read through her pink and blue diary, even developed the film in her Polaroid camera in search of a suspect. And all of the detectives and detail officers had spent hours running down the telephone tips that followed any TV broadcast that mentioned the case:

“I have the killer of Latonya Wallace in my house.”

“The family was involved with drugs. The little girl was killed as a warning.”

“My boyfriend killed her.”

When one ninety-two-year-old woman with failing eyesight claimed to have seen a little girl in a red raincoat enter a Park Avenue church on the afternoon of February 2, Pellegrini dutifully arranged to check inside the building and interview the minister. When a detail officer asked what questions would be put to the clergyman, Pellegrini simply shrugged and offered a Landsman-like deadpan: “How about, ‘Why did you kill her?’”

Like every corridor in the Latonya Wallace labyrinth, the anonymous calls and false sightings led nowhere. Landsman wonders which part of the maze has been overlooked, which portal has yet to be explored. What the hell are they missing?

The sergeant is nearly home when a fresh thought forces its way to the surface, suddenly breaking through the thick crust of detail: the car. Right next door. A cool, dry place.

The neighbor’s goddamn Lincoln, the only fucking car that anyone ever saw in the alley. And it was parked just on the other side of the fence from the rear yard of 718 Newington. Hell yes.

Landsman pulls to the slow lane of Liberty Road, looking for a pay phone so that he can call and tell Pellegrini and Edgerton to stay put. He’s going back in.

Twenty minutes later the sergeant storms into the annex office, still cursing himself for not seeing it earlier. “It’s right there in front of us,” he tells Pellegrini. “This is it. It’s gonna go down.”

Landsman lays it out for the two detectives: “If she’s killed Tuesday, he needs to put the body in a cool, dry place or we’re going to have decomp, right? So he gets the body out the back door and into the car trunk, thinking he’s gonna drive it somewhere at night. But for some reason he’s unable to dump the body. Or maybe when he goes out, he gets scared…”

“This is the guy who lives at seven-sixteen?” asks Edgerton.

“Yeah, the husband of Ollie’s neighbor. What’s-his-name.”

“Andrew,” says Pellegrini.

“Yeah, Andrew. Ollie doesn’t like him a little bit.”

Landsman recalls the first hours of the investigation, when Ollie’s husband, the old man who lives at 718 Newington and found the child’s body, was asked whether anyone parked a car in the alley. The man had mentioned his neighbor, a middle-aged man who had recently married the churchgoing woman who lived at 716 and often left his Lincoln Continental in the back yard. In fact, the car had been out back for most of the previous week.

“When he told me, he even walked to his back window and looked out, like he expected it to be there.” Landsman cuts to the chase: “The motherfucker moved it. He parks back there all the time. Why all of a sudden, on that morning, is the Lincoln parked out in front of the house on Newington?”

Edgerton finds the arrest sheet for the man who lives at 716 Newington: no sex offenses, but someone who at certain points in his life would not have been mistaken for a civic asset.

“That’s the other thing,” says Landsman. “This guy Andrew, he don’t fit. What’s a guy with a record doing married to a churchgoing woman? It’s fucked up.”

It is closing on nine o’clock, but Landsman is now too wired to call it a night. Instead, the trio barter the keys to a Cavalier and drive back up to Newington Avenue. They check front and back, but the Lincoln isn’t on the block. Landsman knocks on the front door of 718, where a sad-faced woman answers the door in a worn cotton nightgown.

“Hey, Ollie,” says Landsman, “is your husband around? We just need to check a couple things.”

“He’s lying down.”

“We just need a minute or two.”

The woman shrugs and leads the way to the rear bedroom on the first floor. Stretched out on his back beneath a gray sheet, the old man who found the little girl’s body in his back yard watches the parade of detectives with mild curiosity.

“He got sick this week,” says the woman, retreating to the corner of the room.

“Sorry to hear that. What’re you sick with?”

“Cold or somethin’,” the old man says in a low mumble. “Y’know the hawk’s been out.”

“Yeah it has, um, hey, listen,” says Landsman, shifting gears suddenly. “You remember that day you found the body and we were talking? You remember when I asked you if anyone parked in the alley and you told me about Andrew next door?”

The old man nods.

“I remember you even walked over to the kitchen window, like you were gonna show me his car, but it wasn’t there that morning, remember?”

“Yeah, I thought he had it there.”

“What we need to know is if Andrew had his car parked out there earlier in the week, like on Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“It’s a while back now,” the old man says.

“Yeah it is, but can you think on it…”

The old man drops his head back against a pillow and stares at the cracked ceiling. The room waits.

“Think he did, yeah.”

“You think so, huh?”

“He park it back there a lot, you know,” says the old man.

“Yeah, that’s what I remember you telling me,” says Landsman. “Listen, what do you know about Andrew?”

“Don’t know nuthin’, really.”

“I mean what kind of a guy is he?”

The old man looks nervously at his wife. “I really don’t know…”

Landsman looks at Ollie and catches something on her face. She has something to say she doesn’t want her husband to hear.

“Well, listen, thanks a lot for helping,” says Landsman, moving toward the bedroom door. “You take care of yourself now, okay?”

The old man nods and watches his wife follow the detectives out of the room. She closes the door and follows Landsman to the other end of the hall.

“Hey, Ollie,” Landsman says to her, “remember what you were saying about Andrew?”

“I don’t…”

“About how he’s like a gigolo living off…”

“Well,” says Ollie, a little embarrassed, “I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He’s gone every night.”

“Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?”

“Yeah, he likes young girls,” she says, disapproving.

“I mean, real young.”

“Well, that I can’t really say…”

“Okay, that’s all right,” Landsman says. “Where’s the car now? Do you know?”

“He say the repo man came an’ took it.”

Pellegrini and Edgerton look at each other. It’s almost too perfect.

“It was repossessed?” asks Landsman. “He told you that?”

“She told my husband that.”

“Your neighbor did? Andrew’s wife?”

“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. “She say Johnny’s Cars came an’ got it.”

“Johnny’s? Up on Harford Road?”

“I guess.”

The detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny’s in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew’s wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.

“This motherfucker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo’d. Fuck it, we need to talk to this motherfucker tonight.”

It is after 11:00 P.M. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the basement. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.

“Hey, Andrew, I’m Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We’re working on the little girl’s murder. How you doin’ tonight?”

“Awright.”

“Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car.”

“My car?” asks Andrew, curious.

“Yeah. The Lincoln.”

“They took that away,” he says, as if that should end any discussion.

“Who did?”

“The car dealer.”

“Johnny’s?”

“Yeah.’ Cause my wife, she didn’t make the payment on it,” he adds, a little put out.

Landsman steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl’s disappearance.

“I remember it ’cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me.”

Landsman, startled, looks hard at the man.

“How’s that again?”

“I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me,” he repeats.

Landsman gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-what-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. Hell, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the fuck wouldn’t be nervous carrying a little girl’s body from their back door to a car trunk?

“Why were you nervous?”

Andrew shrugs. “I just got a strange feeling, you know…”

Edgerton begins walking the length of the basement room, looking for red-brown stains or a child’s gold earring. The basement is a poor version of a bachelor’s lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the hell is it about Newington Avenue that makes people piss into buckets?

“This is kind of your place down here, huh?” asks Edgerton.

“Yeah, this is where I hang.”

“Your wife don’t come down here much?”

“No, she leaves me be.”

Landsman brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: “What did you go out to the car for?”

“I can’t remember. Something in the glove compartment.”

“You didn’t go in the trunk?”

“The trunk? No, the glove compartment… I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, damn, I’ll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside.”

Landsman looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. “Did you know the little girl?”

“Me?” The question startles him. “The girl that got killed? I haven’t been here that long, you know. I don’t know most people around here.”

“What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?” asks Landsman, smiling strangely.

“Hey,” says Andrew, “do what you have to do. Make sure it’s the right guy and then you don’t even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I’d take care of it myself… I have friends who would help me take care of it.”

Edgerton takes Pellegrini out of earshot to ask if the detectives and detail officers doing the consent searches on Newington Avenue have checked the basements. Pellegrini doesn’t know. That was the trouble with a sprawling red ball; between five detectives and a dozen detail officers, progress is dependent on too many people.

“Andrew,” says Landsman, “we’re gonna need to talk to you downtown.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. We’ll bring you back up when we’re done.”

“I been sick. I can’t really leave the house.”

“We really need to talk to you. It could help us out with the little girl’s murder.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know nothing about that, you know. I’m sick…”

Landsman ignores the protestations. Short of arrest, which requires both a crime and probable cause, there is no law that can make a man go against his will to an interrogation room in the middle of the night. It’s one of the small joys of American police work that few people ever argue the point.

Andrew comes to rest in the large interrogation room fifteen minutes later, with Landsman standing on the other side of the door in the sixth-floor corridor, telling Pellegrini and Edgerton to find that Lincoln.

“I’ll take a long statement and keep him here,” says the sergeant. “We gotta know if his car was really repo’d.”

Pellegrini’s call to old Johnny wakes him up. It’s now the middle of the night, but the detective asks the auto dealer to go down to the sales office and dig out the paperwork. Johnny and Mrs. Johnny are already there when the two detectives get to Harford Road. The dealer finds a record of the sale and the payment schedule, but nothing to indicate a repossession order. Maybe, he suggests, the paperwork hasn’t yet come from the finance company.

“If it was repossessed, where would they tow it?”

“They got one lot over on Belair Road.”

“Can you show us?”

Johnny and Mrs. Johnny pile back into their Cadillac Brougham and pull out of the lot. The detectives follow them to a fenced impound lot near the city’s northeastern edge. The car isn’t there. Nor is it at a second lot out in Rosedale, in eastern Baltimore County. And at 3:00 A.M., when the two detectives learn of a third lot in the northeast county near the Parkville police precinct, they head north with growing confidence that no one has towed Andrew’s shit-brown Lincoln Continental anywhere, that the lying bastard ditched the car somewhere on his own.

The third impound lot is protected by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Pellegrini walks up to one corner and stares through the metal mesh at a row of cars parked along the far end, hopeful that Andrew’s car isn’t among them. But the next to the last car in the row is a Lincoln Continental.

“There it is,” he says, his voice flat with disappointment.

“Where?” asks Edgerton.

“Near the end there. The brown one.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, it’s a brown Lincoln.”

Pellegrini scans the lot for any sign of life. They do not need a warrant for the car; Andrew no longer has any claim to ownership. But the front gate is chained and padlocked.

“Well,” says Pellegrini, “here goes nothing.” The detective digs the tip of one black Florsheim into the metal links and begins pushing himself up the front of the fence. Two large Dobermans race the length of the impound lot, yelping and growling and baring their teeth. Pellegrini jumps down.

“Go on, Tom,” says Edgerton, laughing. “You can take ’em.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“They’re just animals. You’re a man with a gun.”

Pellegrini smiles.

“Go on. Show ’em your badge.”

“I think we can wait,” says Pellegrini, walking back to the car.

Four hours later, Pellegrini is headed back toward the lot with Landsman, who finished taking Andrew’s statement a little before 6:00 A.M. Although neither detective has slept in twenty-eight hours, there is little sign of fatigue when they roll out Perring Parkway toward the county, or when they follow a bored attendant across the dirt lot to the Lincoln. So it really was repo’d, thinks Pellegrini, so what. Maybe Andrew gave up the car figuring that it was clean, that there was nothing to link him to the murder.

“This the one?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The two detectives check the car’s interior first, searching the upholstery and carpeting for red-brown stains, hairs or fibers. Landsman finds a piece of imitation gold chain, a woman’s bracelet, above the dashboard. Pellegrini points to a small dark brown stain on the passenger seat.

“Blood?”

“Nah. I don’t think so.”

Landsman pulls a leuco malachite kit from his pocket, treats a cotton swab with chemical and runs it across the stain. Dull gray.

Pellegrini finishes checking the back seat, then both men walk around to the trunk. Landsman turns the key, but hesitates for just a moment before opening the top.

“C’mon, you mother,” he says, coming as close to genuine prayer as Jay Landsman ever does.

The trunk is clean. He treats seven or eight leuco swabs with chemical and drags them into every one of the trunk’s indentations and crevices. Dull gray.

Pellegrini exhales slowly, his breath clouding in the frigid air. Then he walks to the Cavalier and sits in the driver’s seat. He holds up the bracelet and looks carefully at the gold strand, sensing that it, too, leads nowhere, that within a day or two the family of Latonya Wallace will answer no, they have never seen the chain before. Pellegrini waits silently as Landsman scrapes two more swabs along the interior before closing the trunk, sticking his hands deep into his jacket pockets and walking back to the Chevrolet.

“Let’s go.”

Suddenly, the exhaustion is overpowering, and both detectives are squinting in the morning light as the car rolls south on Harford Road and then west on Northern Parkway. For fifteen solid days, they have worked sixteen- and twenty-hour shifts, living on a roller-coaster ride from one suspect to another, bouncing wildly between moments of elation and hours of despair.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Landsman.

“What?”

“I think we need a day off. We gotta get some sleep, wake up and think on it.”

Pellegrini nods.

Somewhere near the Jones Falls interchange, Landsman speaks again.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” he says, “it’ll go down.”

But Pellegrini is awash in fatigue and doubt, and he says nothing.

In Jay Landsman’s office, the Latonya Wallace probe is spreading like a cancer. Crime scene photos, lab reports, diagrams, office reports, aerial photographs of Reservoir Hill taken from the police helicopter-the paper pours out of the case folder and marches across the sergeant’s desk and file cabinets. A second column of documents begins a flanking maneuver, attacking Pellegrini’s work area in the annex office, then overwhelming a cardboard box behind the detective’s chair. The case has become a world unto itself, spinning in an orbit of its own.

But for the rest of the homicide unit, it’s business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit’s institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state’s shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve. On Friday afternoons, the nightshift detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders-88041, 88042, 88043-and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: Hell, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor fuck would change his name, lock himself in his basement, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.

Of course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight shift, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible. In late February, as the Latonya Wallace detail stretches into its third week, the homicide unit begins one such period when detectives on both shifts are hit with fourteen murders in thirteen days.

It is two weeks of mayhem, with bodies stacked like firewood in the ME’s freezer and detectives arguing over the office typewriters. On one particularly bad night, two men from McLarney’s squad find themselves acting out a scene that could only occur in the emergency room of an urban American hospital. The green-smocked vanguard of medical science is at stage right, struggling to repair a man with holes in his body. At stage left is Donald Waltemeyer, playing the role of First Detective. Enter Dave Brown, the Second Detective, who has come to assist his partner in the investigation of a Crime of Violence.

“Yo, Donald.”

“David.”

“Yo, brother, what’s up? Is this our boy here?”

“This is the shooting.”

“That’s what we’ve got, right?”

“You got the stabbing, right?”

“I came up here looking for you. McLarney thought you might want help.”

“Well, I got the shooting.”

“Okay. Great.”

“Well, who’s gonna take the stabbing?”

“Whoa. The shooting and stabbing are separate?”

“Yeah. I got the shooting.”

“So where’s the stabbing?”

“Next room over, I think.”

The Second Detective moves stage right, where another team of green-smocked technicians is now visible, struggling to repair another man with even larger holes.

“Okay, bunk,” says the Second Detective impassively. “I’ll take it.”

A night after Waltemeyer and Dave Brown trade bleeders at the Hopkins trauma unit, Donald Worden and Rick James catch their first fresh murder since Monroe Street, a picture-perfect domestic from the kitchen of a South Baltimore townhouse: a thirty-two-year-old husband is stretched across the linoleum, blood leaking from.22-caliber holes in his chest, undigested rum and cola leaking from his open mouth. It started with an argument that progressed to a point where the wife called police just after midnight, and the responding uniform graciously drove the very drunk husband to his mother’s house and told him to sleep it off. This meddlesome action, of course, violates the inalienable right of every drunken South Baltimore redneck to beat his estranged wife at one in the morning, and the husband responds by shaking off his stupor, calling a taxi and kicking down the kitchen door, whereupon he is shot dead by his sixteen-year-old stepson. Called at home that morning, the state’s attorney on duty asks for manslaughter charges in juvenile court.

Two days later, Dave Brown picks up a drug murder from the open-air market at North and Longwood, and when it shakes out three days later, Roddy Milligan is credited with another notch on his gun. At the tender age of nineteen, Roderick James Milligan has become something of a pest to the homicide unit, what with his penchant for shooting every competing street dealer in the Southwestern. A small, elfin thing, Milligan had previously been sought on two 1987 murder warrants and was a suspect in a fourth slaying. His whereabouts unknown, young Roderick was beginning to irritate the detectives; Terry McLarney, in particular, takes as an insult the youthful offender’s decision to shoot more people rather than surrender.

“Can you believe a little shithead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?” McLarney declares, returning from yet another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. “You shoot a guy, hey,” the sergeant adds with a shrug. “You shoot another guy-well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it’s time to admit you have a problem.”

Although Milligan has taken a line from Cagney, telling relatives he’ll never be taken alive, he’s eventually picked up in a raid a month later, caught dirty at a girlfriend’s house with heroin still in his pocket. His reputation suffers when it later gets out that after being tossed into an interrogation room, he cries uncontrollably.

For Stanton’s shift, there is the thirty-nine-year-old Highlandtown native who goes with a friend to buy PCP in a blighted section of Southeast Washington, where he is instead robbed and shot in the head by a street dealer. The friend then takes the wheel of the car and drives the thirty-five miles back up the Baltimore-Washington Expressway with the victim a bloody, dying wreck in the passenger seat. He takes the corpse to an east side hospital, claiming to have been attacked and robbed by a hitchhiker on nearby Dundalk Avenue.

There is the argument at a West Baltimore bar that begins with words, then escalates to fists and baseball bats until a thirty-eight-year-old man is lingering in a hospital bed, where three weeks later he rolls the Big Seven. The argument is between two Vietnam veterans, one declaring that the 1st Air Cavalry was the war’s premier fighting unit, the other advocating for the 1st Marine Division. In this particular instance, the Air Cav carries the day.

And there can be no forgetting the Westport mother who shoots her boyfriend, then tells her teenage daughter to confess to the crime, arguing that she would be charged only as a juvenile. And the young drug dealer from the Lafayette Courts projects who is abducted and shot by a competitor, then dumped in a Pimlico gutter, where he is mistaken for a dead dog by passersby. And the twenty-five-year-old East Baltimore entrepreneur who is shot in the back of the head as he weighs and dilutes heroin at a kitchen table. And the is-this-a-great-city-or-what homicide that Fred Ceruti handles in a Cathedral Street apartment, where one prostitute plunges a knife into the chest of another for a $10 cap of heroin, then fires the drugs before the police arrive. The key witness to the crime, a businessman from the Washington suburbs who fled to his wife and children at the first sign of blood, is chagrined to be called at 4:00 A.M. by a detective who learns his identity from credit card slips left behind on Baltimore’s Block, the downtown erogenous zone where he met the whores.

“Is Frank home?”

“Yes,” says a woman’s voice, “who is this?”

“Tell him it’s his friend Fred,” says Ceruti with genuine charity, adding, a few seconds later, “Frank, this is Detective Ceruti from the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. We have a problem here, don’t we?”

In contrast, there is a rare, refreshing moment of civic responsibility displayed by one James M. Baskerville, who flees after shooting his young girlfriend in her Northwest Baltimore home, then calls the crime scene an hour later and asks to talk with the detective.

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is Detective Tomlin.”

“Detective Tomlin?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“This is James Baskerville. I’m calling to surrender to you for killing Lucille.”

“Goddammit Constantine, you bald-headed motherfucker, I’m up here trying to do a crime scene and all you can find to do is fuck with me. Either come up here and help or-”

Click. Mark Tomlin listens to a dead phone line for a moment, then turns to a family member. “What did you say was the name of Lucille’s boyfriend?”

“Baskerville. James Baskerville.”

When the second call comes, Tomlin catches it on the first ring. “Mr. Baskerville, listen, I’m real sorry about that. I thought you were someone else… Where are you now?”

Later that night, in the large interrogation room, James Baskerville-who would later agree to life plus twenty years at his arraignment-offers no excuses and readily initials each page of his statement of confession. “I’ve committed a serious crime and I should be punished,” he says.

“Mr. Baskerville,” asks Tomlin, “are there any more like you at home?”

And like Latonya Wallace, there are those rare victims for whom death is not the inevitable consequence of a long-running domestic feud or a stunted pharmaceutical career. Poor souls like Henry Coleman, a forty-year-old cab driver who picks up the wrong fare at Broadway and Chase; and Mary Irons, age nineteen, who leaves a downtown dance club with the wrong escort and is found cut up behind an elementary school; and Edgar Henson, thirty-seven, who is leaving an east side 7-Eleven when a group of teenagers announce a robbery and then, without warning, begin blasting away. The gang takes two dollars in food stamps, leaving behind a quart of milk and a can of Dinty Moore stew.

And Charles Frederick Lehman, fifty-one, a Church Home hospital employee whose last moments on earth are consumed by the carry-out purchase of a two-piece extra crispy dinner from the Kentucky Fried outlet on Fayette Street. Lehman doesn’t make the twenty feet between the restaurant door and his Plymouth; he is found spread-eagled on the rain-soaked parking lot, his wallet gone, the contents of one pocket spread across the asphalt, the chicken dinner lying in a puddle near his head. From inside the restaurant, another customer watched the brief struggle with three teenagers, heard the gunshot and saw the victim fall. He stared as one kid leaned over the stricken man, methodically rifled his pants pockets, then raced his two companions across Fayette Street into the Douglass Homes project. But the sixty-seven-year-old witness is nearsighted, and he can provide no description better than three black males. The dead man’s car is towed to headquarters for processing in the hope that one of the three kids touched the car and left a clear print. When that fails, there is only the anonymous caller with a white male’s voice who tells Donald Kincaid that a black co-worker had talked about watching three kids-one of whom he knew by name-running through the Douglass Homes after the shooting. But the co-worker doesn’t want to be a witness. Neither, for that matter, does the caller.

“He doesn’t have to give his name. He can just talk to me like you’re talking to me now,” pleads Kincaid. “You got to get him to call because I’ll tell you the truth, this is the only clue I got.” The voice on the other end promises to try, but Kincaid has been in homicide for a dozen years, and he drops the receiver into its cradle knowing that in all probability, he is waiting for a call that will never come.

They take a page from the book written by the FBI’s psychological analysts, with Pellegrini and Landsman bringing the Fish Man down to the homicide office in the early morning-a time when a supposedly nocturnal suspect would be least comfortable. Then they do everything conceivable to make him believe that he is not in control, that their precision, their persistence, the sheer weight of their technologies, are certain to wear him down.

On the way upstairs to the interrogation, they walk him past the trace evidence lab. Normally locked on a Sunday morning, the fifth-floor laboratory has been opened and the equipment turned on by the detectives themselves. An elaborate show has been prepared to intimidate the suspect, to break him down before he even reaches the interrogation room. On one counter, the little girl’s bloodied clothes have been carefully laid out in a graphic display; on another table, her school books and satchel.

Hovering over the dead girl’s clothes, Terry McLarney and Dave Brown are dressed in white lab coats, their faces bathed in studious, professorial intensity. They seem to be amassing a collection of microscopic clues as they putter back and forth between the clothing and the lab equipment.

As Pellegrini marches the suspect past the lab windows, he watches the Fish Man intently. The old man seems to be taking it all in, but he offers no reaction. The detective ushers the suspect into the back stairwell and up one flight to the homicide office, through the aquarium and into the greater authority of the captain’s office. With its expansive desk and high-backed chair, its sweeping view of the Baltimore skyline, the office seems to add even more prestige to the process. Before beginning with the Miranda, Pellegrini and Edgerton make sure the Fish Man gets a good long look at the maps and the aerial photos and the impersonal, black-and-white shots of the dead girl’s face, taken by the overhead camera at the ME’s office-all of it arrayed on the bulletin boards and blackboards that clutter the room. They let him see his own face, an ident photograph, affixed to the same board as the child’s picture. They do every conceivable thing to make this, their best suspect in the death of Latonya Wallace, believe that they have or will soon have the physical evidence, that they are dealing from a position of strength, that exposure and punishment are inevitable.

Then they go at him. First Pellegrini, then Edgerton. Talking loud and fast, then whispering, then droning on laconically, then shouting, then asking questions, then asking the same questions again. Just outside the door, Landsman and the others listen to the assault, waiting for something to provoke the grizzled old man, something that will strike a chord and bring the beginning of the story up out of the Fish Man’s throat. One at a time the detectives leave the room, return, leave again, then come back again, each time bringing new questions, new tactics, suggested by those listening in silence just outside.

The confrontation is perfectly choreographed, so much so that many of the detectives allow themselves to believe that for once, the entire shift has pulled together around a single red ball, doing everything humanly and legally possible to squeeze a murder confession from a suspect. Yet the old man in the captain’s office remains unimpressed. He is a stone, a solid, stoic mass without fear, without any sense of distress, without any rage at being made a suspect in the molestation and murder of a child. He meets every argument with only abject denial and provides nothing more than the vague outline of his earlier statements. He will give no alibi for Tuesday. He will admit nothing.

In the early hours of the interrogation, Pellegrini defers once again to Edgerton, who has done this so many times before. With a certain unease, he listens to Edgerton lay everything they have in front of their suspect. Trying to convince him of their omniscience, Edgerton tells the Fish Man that they know about the little girls, that they told us how you could be fresh. We know about the old rape charge, Edgerton assures him. We know why you still don’t have an alibi.

Pellegrini listens to the veteran detective shovel his best stuff onto the old man’s lap with little effect and realizes, too late, that it isn’t enough. Hour after hour, Edgerton is spitting out words and phrases in that double-time New York cadence, but Pellegrini can almost feel the old man’s indifference growing. The detectives have their suspicions, they have probabilities, they have the mere beginnings of a circumstantial case. What they do not have is evidence: raw evidence, real evidence. The kind that breaks a man down to his smallest parts and makes him admit to that which no man will ever willingly admit. They’re in the room, firing their guns, and they don’t have it.

If they are right-if the Fish Man molested and killed Latonya Wallace-then they have only one or two chances to break him, one or two sessions to bring the man to a confession. Last Saturday was the first bite of the apple and now, with nothing else on their plate, they are wasting the rest of the meal.

As Edgerton begins to tire, Pellegrini picks up what few threads remain untouched. He asks the old man open-ended questions, hoping to arouse something other than monosyllabic answers. He tries to probe the old man’s feelings for the dead girl. But they are random questions, a few shots in the dark delivered independent of any plan or science. Pellegrini watches the old man’s unchanging face and curses himself. He is locked in this room with his best, most enduring suspect, and yet he has no trump card, no tool with which to pry into the man’s soul.

Once again, Pellegrini feels that insistent regret, that same unnerving notion that his case is running away from him. When it came to this, the investigation’s most critical confrontation thus far, he had given the helm to Edgerton. But Edgerton had no plan; hell, none of them did.

Everything had rested on the forlorn hope that the Fish Man would fear their expertise, their knowledge and their authority-fear all of it enough to give up his darkest secrets. Pellegrini wonders whether their suspect even understands enough to feel that kind of fear. The walk by the lab didn’t even faze him; neither had the morgue photos. The Fish Man was either a true innocent or a true sociopath.

After eight hours, they call for a Central District radio car as first Pellegrini, then Edgerton, surrenders to both frustration and exhaustion. The store owner waits quietly on the green vinyl sofa in the aquarium until a uniform arrives to shuttle him back to Whitelock Street. Then the Fish Man collects himself slowly and shuffles down the sixth-floor corridor, once again a free man.

Two nights later, Pellegrini shows up for a midnight shift, checks the roll book, and learns he’s the only detective on active duty. Fahlteich’s on vacation, Dunnigan and Ceruti are off, and Rick Requer, just off medical from a broken arm, is still working light duty.

“You all can head out,” he tells Kincaid and the others on the four-to-twelve crew after getting a cup of coffee.

“Where’s the rest of the relief?” asks Kincaid.

“I’m it.”

“Just you?”

“Hey,” says Pellegrini. “One city, one detective.”

“Shit, Tom,” says Kincaid. “I sure hope that fuckin’ phone don’t ring.”

But ring it does. And at 5:00 A.M., Pellegrini finds himself standing in the piss stench of a small, dark passageway between two downtown buildings on Clay Street, looking at the earthly remains of a street person, a homeless derelict with his head crushed and his pants pulled below his knees. He wanted nothing more than a warm place to defecate and got beaten to death for that simple ambition. A more meaningless murder cannot be committed.

Later that morning, the admin lieutenant makes it clear to Pellegrini that he’s the primary investigator on Latonya Wallace and orders him to dump 88033, the murder of Barney Erely, age forty-five, of no fixed address, on Roger Nolan’s squad. This decision somehow fails to make Nolan the most contented sergeant in homicide.

Transferring the case solves nothing. This is a world with more murders than detectives, a city in which time will not stand still, not even for Latonya Wallace. One week later, Pellegrini and Gary Dunnigan are alone in the office on a midnight shift when the phone rings with a fatal stabbing from the Southeast.

And Pellegrini goes back in the rotation.