Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

FOUR

No witnesses, no motive, and a forty-year-old woman stabbed, stabbed some more, and then, it would seem, shot once in the head at close range. At least, Rich Garvey tells himself, she’s dead in a house.

Wilson, the lab tech, stops flashing pictures long enough to reload his camera and Garvey uses the respite to walk through the bedroom one more time, running through mental lists. You can almost hear file cards turning inside his head.

“Hey, where’s your buddy?” Wilson asks.

The detective looks up, distracted. “Who’s my buddy?”

“You know, your partner, McAllister.”

“He’s off tonight.”

“Left you all alone, huh?”

“That’s right, stick ol’ Garvo with the tough ones… You got a shot of the clothes, right here by the door?”

“I took a few.”

Garvey nods.

Charlene Lucas was found by a neighbor, a middle-aged man who lives in the upstairs apartment. On leaving for work at 5:00 A.M., he noticed that the door to her apartment was ajar, and when he came back from work, just after 4:00 P.M., the door to the second-floor apartment was still open. Calling his neighbor’s name, he wandered far enough into the back bedroom to see the woman’s legs stretched across the floor.

The paramedics pronounced her at 4:40 P.M. and Garvey pulled up on Gilmor Street fifteen minutes later. The scene was secure, with the Western uniforms keeping everyone but the other residents outside the red brick building. The three-story rowhouse had been recently renovated into a cluster of small, one-bedroom apartments and, from all appearances, the contractor had done a respectable job. Nestled in one of the more ragged west side sections, the building in which Lena Lucas lived could only be called a credit to the neighborhood. Fully rehabbed, the apartments were each equipped with burglar alarms and dead-bolt locks as well as intercoms connected to the front door buzzer.

Making his way into the building and up to the second-floor landing, Garvey notes right away that there is no sign of forced entry, either at the front door or at the door of the victim’s apartment. In both the living room and back bedroom, the windows are secure.

Lena Lucas is on her back, centered in a pool of coagulated blood that has stained the beige carpeting in a wide circle. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is parted slightly and, except for a pair of white panties, she is nude. The blood pool suggests that there are serious wounds to the back, but Garvey also notices matted blood around the left ear, a possible gunshot wound. The woman’s neck and jaw are further marred by perhaps a dozen shallow cuts-some of them little more than scratches.

Head north, feet south, the body rests just beside a double bed in the cramped rear room. On the floor near the bedroom door are the rest of the victim’s clothes; Garvey notes that they are nested in a small pile, as if she had undressed from a standing position, leaving the garments at her feet. Lena Lucas had no problem taking her clothes off in front of her killer, Garvey reasons. And if she had undressed prior to the murderer’s arrival, she had apparently opened her apartment door without bothering to put anything on.

The bedroom itself, as well as the rest of the apartment, is largely intact. Only a metal dressing locker has been ransacked, its doors flung wide and a handful of garments and purses dumped on the floor. In one corner of the room, a bag of uncooked rice has been broken and strewn across the carpet; near the rice lies a small amount of white powder, probably cocaine, and about a hundred empty gelatin capsules. This makes sense to Garvey; rice retains moisture and is often packed with cocaine to prevent the powder from crystallizing.

Garvey examines the wooden headboard of the bed. Near the corner closest to the victim’s head is a series of vertical, jagged scratches, fresh damage that is consistent with the downward thrusts of a sharp edge. There is also a small amount of blood spatter near that corner of the sheet, and on the floor near the bed is a kitchen knife with a broken blade.

Theory: The woman was lying on her back in bed, head north, when the knife attack began. The killer struck at her from directly above, his wayward thrusts damaging the headboard. Either from the force of the attack or from her own efforts to escape, the victim rolled off the side of the bed and onto the floor.

Near the dead woman’s head are a pillow and pillowcase blackened with what looks like gunpowder residue. But it isn’t until the ME’s people arrive to roll the body that Garvey finds the small, irregular lump of dull gray metal, surrounded on the carpet by a small amount of blood spatter where the victim’s head came to rest. The coup de grâce was no doubt delivered with the victim prone on the bedroom floor and with the pillow wrapped around the gun to muffle the shot.

The bullet itself is a strange piece of work. Garvey looks at it closely: medium-caliber, probably a.32 or.38, but it’s some ass-backwards type of semi-wadcutter design he hasn’t seen before. The projectile is pretty much intact, with little evidence of splintering or mutilation, and therefore suitable for ballistics comparisons. Garvey drops the slug into a manila evidence envelope and hands it over to Wilson. In the kitchen, the utensil drawer containing the knives is pulled partly open. Otherwise, little outside the bedroom is disturbed. The living room and the bathroom appear untouched.

Garvey has the lab tech concentrate on lifting latent prints from the rear bedroom, as well as the apartment and bedroom doors. The tech also spreads the sooty print dust along the kitchen counters and the open utensil drawer, then across the sink tops in the kitchen and bathroom, on the chance that the killer touched something while trying to wash his hands. Whenever the black dust reveals the outline of a usable print, the tech presses an ordinary piece of transparent tape against the print and backs the tape against a white 3-by-5 card. The collection of lift cards begins to grow as the tech moves from the bedroom to the kitchen. After finishing the counters, he gestures to the other end of the hallway.

“You want me to do anything with the front room?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like he left that alone.”

“I don’t mind…”

“Nah, fuck it,” says Garvey. “If it’s somebody who has access to the apartment, the prints aren’t going to mean much to us anyway.”

In his mind, the detective catalogues the evidence that needs to go downtown: The bullet. The knife. The nested pile of clothes. The dope. The gelatin capsules. A small purse, now marred by print dust, that probably held the cocaine, the rice and the capsules. The pillow and pillowcase, stained with gunpowder residue. The bedsheet, lifted carefully off the mattress and folded slowly so as to keep any loose hairs or fibers intact. And, of course, the photos of the apartment rooms, of the death scene, of the bed with the damage to the headboard, of each piece of evidence in its original location.

News travels fast in a city neighborhood and the dead woman’s family-mother, brother, uncle, young daughters-shows up on Gilmor Street even before the ME’s attendants load the body litter into the black van. Garvey sends the crowd down to homicide in radio cars; other detectives will compile the necessary background information.

Two hours later, some of Lena Lucas’s family begin drifting back to the murder scene. Nearly finished there, Garvey walks downstairs to find the dead woman’s younger daughter leaning against a radio car. She is a thin, wiry thing, not yet twenty-three, but level-headed and shrewd. Experience teaches a homicide detective that there is always one member of the victim’s family who can be trusted to keep calm, to listen, to answer questions correctly, to deal with the raw details of a murder when everyone else is wailing with grief or arguing over who should get the victim’s ten-speed blender. Garvey had talked with Jackie Lucas before sending the family downtown and that brief conversation marked the young woman as the detective’s best and brightest family contact.

“Hey, Jackie,” says Garvey, motioning for her to follow him down the sidewalk a respectable distance from the crowd outside the apartment house.

Jackie Lucas catches up to the detective, who then walks a few more yards down the pavement.

The conversation begins where such conversations always do, with the dead woman’s boyfriend, habits and vices. Garvey has already learned some things about his victim and the people in her life from earlier conversations with family members; the details from the crime scene-the absence of forced entry, the pile of clothes, the rice and gelatin caps-add to the knowledge. As he begins asking questions, Garvey touches the young woman’s elbow lightly, as if to emphasize that only the truth should pass between them.

“Your mother’s boyfriend, this boy Frazier, he’s selling drugs…”

Jackie Lucas hesitates.

“Did your mom deal for Frazier?”

“I don’t…”

“Listen, nobody cares about that now. I just need to know this if I’m going to find out who killed her.”

“She just held the drugs for him,” she says. “She didn’t sell none, not that I know about anyway.”

“Did she use?”

“Marijuana. Now and then.”

“Cocaine?”

“Not really. Not that I know of.”

“Does Frazier use?”

“Yeah, he do.”

“You think Frazier could have killed your mother?”

Jackie Lucas pauses, focusing the image in her mind. Slowly, she shakes her head sideways.

“I don’t think he did it,” she says. “He always treated her nice, you know, never beat her or anything.”

“Jackie, I have to ask this…”

The daughter says nothing.

“Was your mother, you know, kind of loose about men?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“I mean, did she have a lot of boyfriends?”

“Jus’ Frazier.”

“Just Frazier?”

“Jus’ him,” she says, insistent. “She was seeing another man a while back, but only Frazier for a long time since.”

Garvey nods, lost for a moment in thought.

Jackie breaks the silence. “The policeman downtown say we shouldn’t say nothing to Frazier,’ cause if we do he might run.”

Garvey smiles. “If he runs, then at least I know who did it, right?”

The young woman takes in the logic.

“I don’t think he’s your man,” she says finally.

Garvey tries a different tack. “Did your mom let anyone else up into her apartment? If she was alone, would she let anyone besides Frazier come up?”

“Only this boy named Vincent,” she says. “He works for Frazier, and he been up there before for the drugs.”

Garvey lowers his voice. “You think she would fool around with this Vincent?”

“No, she wouldn’t. I don’t think Vincent ever been up there without Frazier being there, too. I don’t think she would let him in,” she adds, changing her mind.

“You know Vincent’s name?”

“Booker, I think.”

“Jackie,” says Garvey, turning to one last detail. “You told me before about Frazier keeping a gun in the bedroom.”

The daughter nods. “She has a twenty-five, and sometimes Frazier keeps a thirty-eight there.”

“We can’t find them.”

“She keeps them in that cabinet,” the daughter says. “Up on the back of the shelf.”

“Listen,” says Garvey, “if I let you go up there and look for the guns, do you think you’ll be able to find them?”

Jackie nods, then falls in behind him.

“Is it bad?” she asks on the way upstairs.

“Is what bad?”

“The room…”

“Oh,” says Garvey. “Well, she’s gone… but there’s some blood.”

The detective leads the young woman into the rear bedroom. Jackie looks briefly at the red stain, then walks to the metal dressing cabinet and pulls the.25 from the rear of the top shelf.

“The other one ain’t here.”

From a shelf in the closet directly behind the bed, she also produces a case containing a little more than $1,200 in cash, money that her mother had collected from a recent insurance settlement.

“Did Frazier know she had that money?”

“Yeah he did.”

“Did he know where it was?”

“Yeah.”

Garvey nods, giving this fact a moment of thought. Then a Western uniform bounds up the stairwell and into the hall of the apartment, looking for the detective.

“What’s up?” asks Garvey.

“The rest of the family wants to come up.”

Garvey looks at the lab tech. “You have everything you need?”

“Yeah, I’m just packing my stuff.”

“Yeah, go ’head,” says Garvey to the uniform, who goes downstairs to open the front door of the building. Seconds later, half a dozen relatives, including the victim’s mother and older daughter, move quickly into the apartment, creating instant pandemonium.

The older family members busy themselves with taking stock of the kitchen appliances, the color television, the stereo system. For places like Gilmor Street, the reclamation of a victim’s valuables is a postmortem imperative, less from greed than from the certain knowledge that as soon as word of the murder hits the street, any number of break-in artists will plan to acquire the worldly wealth of the newly departed, providing they can get into the place after the police leave and before the family has a chance to think. Grief may come later, but tonight the victim’s mother has no intention of leaving to the wolves that multichannel home entertainment center.

The rest of the family is curious in a morbid way. A cousin points to the coagulated red pool on the bedroom carpet. “That Lena’s blood?”

A Western uniform nods, and the cousin turns to the victim’s older daughter.

“Lena’s blood,” he says again. Bad thought. Because now Jackie’s older sister is wailing for all she’s worth, making a bee-line for the red stain, her arms extended, palms open wide.

“MOMMY, MOMMY, I SEE MOMMY.” The kid is rubbing her hands through the pool, gathering up as much of the wetness as she can. “MOMMY. I SEE MOMMY…”

Garvey watches as the cousin and another relative grab the older daughter and lift her away from the blood.

“… MOMMY, DON’T GO, MOMMY…”

The girl comes up screaming with her forearms extended, both palms covered with blood. Sensing an ugly dry cleaning bill, Garvey steps back, then moves toward the door.

“All right, Jackie,” he says. “Thank you, honey. You’ve got my phone number, right?”

Jackie Lucas nods, then turns away to comfort her sister. As the screaming reaches a still higher pitch, Garvey makes his escape, following the lab tech down the steps and crawling into the cold interior of the Cavalier. He has spent a little less than four hours working the scene.

Before returning to the homicide office, Garvey makes a point of driving another twelve blocks north to see if an extra hand is needed on a suspicious death call that came in three hours after the call for Gilmor. Earlier, Garvey telephoned the office and heard from Dave Brown that the second call might also be a murder and might in some way be related to Gilmor Street. Garvey arrives on the second floor of a Lafayette Avenue rowhouse to find Rick James and Dave Brown working the murder of a fifty-year-old man.

Like Lena Lucas, the Lafayette Avenue victim has been shot in the head and stabbed repeatedly, this time in the chest. And like Lena Lucas, there is a pillow near the victim’s head, marred by a large amount of gunshot residue. Moreover, the face of this victim is also covered by the same series of shallow cuts-more than twenty this time. Obviously dead for some time, the victim was found by several family members who had become concerned and entered through an unlocked rear door. Here, too, there was no sign of forced entry, but this time the room where the victim was found had been ransacked.

The two cases become unequivocally joined when Garvey learns that the dead man is Purnell Hampton Booker, the father of one Vincent Booker, who is the same entrepreneurial lad who works for Robert Frazier, who sells dope and sleeps with Lena Lucas. Standing in the dead man’s bedroom, Garvey knows that the same hand almost certainly took both lives.

Leaving Brown and James to work their scene, Garvey returns to the homicide office and buries himself in paperwork at a back desk. He’s still there when the detectives return from Lafayette Avenue.

As if the immediate similarities between both crime scenes aren’t enough to link the killings, the spent bullet pulled from Purnell Booker’s brain at the next morning’s autopsy is a.38 ass-backward wadcutter. Later that evening, Dave Brown, the primary on Lafayette Avenue, saunters over to Garvey’s desk with an ident photo of young Vincent Booker.

“Yo bunk, looks like we be working together.”

“Looks like.”

As it happens, already that afternoon Garvey has heard from an anonymous tipster, a woman who called the homicide office to say she heard talk at a West Pratt Street bar. One man was telling another that the same gun was used to kill Lena Lucas and the old man on Lafayette.

Interesting rumor. A day later, ballistics says the same thing.

A week has passed since Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker were found dead on the same night, yet the two cases are still moving slowly, inexorably, forward. Fresh reports clutter both files, and in the Baltimore homicide unit, where one day’s violence is overwhelmed by that of the next, a thick file is regarded as a healthy sign. Time itself mocks the most careful investigations, and a detective-conscious of that fact-spends his precious hours working the best angles, bringing the likely witnesses and suspects downtown, hoping that something will fall. For he knows that well before he has a chance to play long shots or, better still, to embark on a prolonged, detailed investigation, another case folder will arrive on his desk. But somehow, in some special way, the law of diminishing returns has never applied to Rich Garvey.

“He’s like a dog with a bone,” Roger Nolan once told another sergeant with pride. “If he gets a case and there’s anything there at all, he won’t let go of it.”

Of course, Nolan only says that to other sergeants; to Garvey he says nothing of the sort, cleaving instead to the fiction that it’s normal for a detective to drop a case only when there’s nothing left to give up on. It is, in truth, anything but normal. Because after fifty or sixty or seventy homicides, the reality is that the dead-yo-in-the-alley scenario begins to wear thin. And nothing deflates a detective more than going back to the office, punching a victim’s name into the admin office terminal and pulling out five or six computer pages of misbehavior, a criminal history that reaches from eye level to the office floor. Burnout is more than an occupational hazard in the homicide unit, it is a psychological certainty. A contagion that spreads from one detective to his partner to a whole squad, the who-really-gives-a-shit attitude threatens not those investigations involving genuine victims-such cases are, more often than not, the cure for burnout-but rather those murders in which the dead man is indistinguishable from his killer. An American detective’s philosophical cul-de-sac: If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?

After four years in homicide and thirteen on the force, Garvey is one of the few residents of the unit still unafflicted with the virus. It is telling that while most detectives can’t keep the cases straight in their minds after a few years in the trenches, Garvey can immediately tell you that out of twenty-five or twenty-six cases in which he was the primary, the number of open files can be counted on one hand.

“How many exactly?”

“Four, I think. No, five.”

Vanity isn’t what prompts Garvey to keep such a statistic in his head; it’s simply his central frame of reference. Determined, aggressive, persistent to a fault, Garvey likes working murders; more than that, he still takes an open murder or a weak plea bargain personally. That alone is enough to make him seem like a relic, a surviving piece of shrapnel from an ethic that crashed and burned a generation or two back, when the “if at first you don’t succeed” platitude was replaced in all Baltimore municipal offices by the more succinct “that’s not my job,” then, later, by the more definitive “shit happens.”

Rich Garvey is an anachronism, a product of a Middle American childhood in which the Little Engine That Could was taken seriously. It’s Garvey who will readily abandon decorum and diplomacy to jump in a prosecutor’s shit when second-degree and twenty just isn’t good enough, telling an assistant state’s attorney that any lawyer with hair on his ass wouldn’t take anything less than first-degree and fifty. It’s Garvey who shows up for work with a raging flu, then works a Pigtown bludgeoning because, what the hell, if he’s on the clock he may as well handle a call. And it’s Garvey who photocopies the “Remember, we work for God” quote by Vernon Geberth, the New York police commander and homicide expert, then posts one above his desk and distributes the rest around the office. Blessed with an acute sense of humor, Garvey is aware that as credos go, Geberth’s is both maudlin and pompous. He can’t help it; in fact, that makes him like it all the more.

He was born in an Irish, working-class neighborhood of Chicago, the only son of a sales executive for the Spiegel catalogue retailing company. At least until the end of his career, when the company judged his position to be expendazble, Garvey’s father had prospered, and his family had enough to escape to the suburbs when the old neighborhood began going bad in the late 1950s. The elder Garvey applied his own ambition to his son, whom he liked to imagine as a future sales executive, maybe even for Spiegel; Garvey thought otherwise.

He spent a couple of years at a small Iowa college, then finished up with a degree in criminology at Kent State. In 1970, when National Guardsmen fired their lethal volley into a crowd of Vietnam protestors on the Ohio campus, Garvey was walking away from the disturbances. Like many students, he had doubts about the war, but he also happened to have a class that day and, if the shootings hadn’t closed the campus, Garvey would have been front and center, taking notes. A young man out of step with his times, he was looking to a police career in an era when law enforcement did not exactly stir the imagination of America’s young. Garvey had his own way of looking at things. Police work would always be interesting, he believed. And even in the worst economic recession, there would always be a job for a cop.

Upon graduation, however, that last bit of logic was not so easily demonstrated. Open positions were hard to come by in the mid-1970s, with many urban police departments retrenching in an inflationary economy. Newly married to his college sweetheart, Garvey fell into a security job with Montgomery Ward. It was nearly a year later, in 1975, when he heard that the Baltimore department was hiring patrolmen, offering pay and benefit incentives for college graduates. He and his wife drove down to Maryland, then toured the city and surrounding counties. Driving through the gentle, contoured valleys and sprawling horse farms in northern Baltimore County, they fell in love with the Chesapeake region. It was, they reasoned, a fine place to raise a family. Then Garvey took his own tour of the city’s slums-east side, west side, lower Park Heights-scouting the places in which he would earn a living.

He went from the academy to the Central District, where he drew the post at Brookfield and Whitelock. Business was brisk; Reservoir Hill in the late 1970s was as ragged a neighborhood as when Latonya Wallace turned up in an alley there a decade later. McLarney, for one, could remember Garvey from the years when both men were in the Central; he could remember, too, that Garvey was without doubt the best man in his squad. “He answered calls and he would fight,” McLarney would say, commending the two qualities that truly matter in a radio car.

Given his hunger for work, Garvey’s career ran a steady course: six years in the Central, then another four as one of the most reliable burglary detectives in CID’s property crimes section, then the transfer to homicide. Arriving in June 1985, Garvey soon became the centerpiece of Roger Nolan’s squad. Kincaid was the veteran, Edgerton the artful loner, but it was Garvey who worked the lion’s share of the calls, readily teaming himself with McAllister, Kincaid, Bowman or any other warm body that happened on a fresh murder. Tellingly, when other detectives in the squad began ranting about Edgerton’s workload, Garvey would often remind everyone, without any sarcasm, that he had no complaint.

“Harry’s going to do what he’s going to do,” Garvey would offer, as if murder had somehow become a precious commodity in Baltimore. “That just means there’s more for me.”

Garvey genuinely loved being a murder police. He loved the scenes, he loved the feeling of pursuit, the adolescent rush of hearing handcuffs click. He even loved the sound of the word itself; that much was evident every time he returned from a scene.

“What’d you have out there?” Nolan would ask.

“Murder, mister.”

Give the man a fresh one every three weeks and he’s content. Give him more than that, he’s downright pleased. During one midnight tour in the summer of 1987, Garvey and Donald Worden worked five murders in five days, three of them on a single night. It was the sort of midnight shift when a detective has trouble remembering which witnesses came downtown from which homicide. (“Okay now, everyone who’s here from Etting Street raise your right hand.”) Still, four of the five went down, and both Garvey and the Big Man relished that week as a pleasant memory.

Yet ask other detectives to name the best men at a crime scene and they’ll mention Terry McLarney, Eddie Brown, Kevin Davis from Stanton’s shift, and Garvey’s partner, Bob McAllister. Ask about the best interrogators and the list will include Donald Kincaid, Kevin Davis, Jay Landsman and maybe Harry Edgerton if his co-workers are feeling generous enough to include known subversives in the balloting. The best men to testify in open court? Landsman, Worden, McAllister and Edgerton are the usual nominees. The best man out on the street? Worden, hands down, with Edgerton a close second.

So what about Garvey?

“Oh Christ, yeah,” his colleagues will say, suddenly reminded. “He’s a helluva detective.”

Why?

“He stays with them.”

For a homicide detective, staying with them is half the battle, and tonight, with the arrival of Robert Frazier in the homicide office, the battle over Lena Lucas and Purnell Booker is yet another step closer to being won.

Frazier is tall and thin, dark complected, with deep-set brown eyes beneath a high, sloping forehead, above which a layer of close-cropped hair is just beginning to recede. He moves like a man who has spent his years on street corners, gliding down the sixth-floor corridor toward the interrogation rooms in a practiced pimp roll, shoulders and hips pushing the body forward in a slow, locomotive fashion. Frazier’s face rarely breaks from an unsettling stare, a gaze all the more unnerving because he rarely blinks his eyes. His voice is a deep monotone, and his sentences are braced by an economy of language that suggests words being chosen with care or, perhaps, few words from which to choose. At thirty-six, Robert Frazier is a part-time steelworker and state parolee who can look upon his shoestring cocaine enterprise as a second career of sorts; a previous apprenticeship at armed robbery was curtailed abruptly by a six-year sentence.

The total package pleases Garvey immensely, for the simple reason that Robert Frazier looks exactly like a murderer.

It is a small satisfaction, but one that always makes the chase seem a little more worthwhile. By and large, what sits at the defendant’s table in a Baltimore circuit court rarely seems at first glance to be sufficient to the wanton destruction of human life, and even after forty or fifty cases, there is still something in the heart of every detective that registers disappointment when the person responsible for an extraordinary act of evil turns out to resemble nothing more sinister than the counterman at a midtown 7-Eleven. Alcoholics, dopers, welfare mothers, borderline mental cases, adolescent yos and yoettes in designer sweatsuits-with only a handful of exceptions, those who claim a place on Baltimore’s murderers row aren’t the most visually threatening crew ever assembled. But with a low rumble to his voice and that thousand-yard stare, Frazier adds a little something to the melodrama. Here is a man for whom large-caliber handguns were created.

All of which seems to go to waste the minute he hits the interrogation room door. Because once Frazier comes to rest across the table from Garvey, he shows a complete willingness to discuss his girlfriend’s violent death. More to the point, he is now able to provide a suspect more plausible than himself.

Of course, Frazier was only convinced of the need for a voluntary appearance in the homicide office after a week’s legwork by both Garvey and Donald Kincaid, who signed on as a secondary when Dave Brown was himself tied up with an unrelated murder. Looking for a little leverage, the two detectives put Frazier’s dirty laundry out on the street, visiting the man’s home on Fayette Street and asking his wife a series of questions about her husband’s work hours, habits and drug involvement before dropping the Big One.

“Did you know he had a thing going with Lena?”

Whether the news affected the woman to any great degree was uncertain; she conceded that the marriage had seen rough times recently. Either way, she made no effort to alibi her husband on the night of the murder. And the next day, plant officials at Sparrows Point told the detectives that Frazier had not been on his shift for the two days before the killing.

Then, last night, Frazier telephoned Garvey at the homicide office, declaring that he had information about Lena’s murder and wanted to meet with detectives right away. But by midnight he had failed to post and Garvey headed home. An hour later, Frazier wandered up to the garage security booth and asked to speak with detectives. Rick Requer talked to him, long enough to determine that Frazier was wired tight, and judging from his pupils, which were dancing a mad Bolivian samba, the wire of choice was probably cocaine. Requer called Garvey at home and the two men agreed to abort the interview and tell Frazier to come back clean.

Before leaving the floor, however, Frazier asked a question that Requer found curious: “Do you know if she was shot and stabbed?”

Maybe he picked it up on the street. Maybe not. Requer wrote a report for Garvey that included the statement.

Now, on his return visit to headquarters, Frazier seems not only cognizant of his surroundings but genuinely curious about his girlfriend’s death. Over the hour-and-a-half interview with Garvey and Kincaid, he asks as many questions as he answers and volunteers a good bit of information on his own. Leaning back in his chair, tipping it slightly with every stretch of his legs, Frazier tells the detectives that although he has a wife and a second girlfriend, who lives in the Poe Homes, he had been seeing Lena Lucas for some time. He also claims they rarely fought and says that he, as much as the police, would like to know who killed Lena and stole his cocaine from the bedroom dresser.

Yeah, he admits, Lena often kept cocaine for him in the Gilmor Street apartment. Kept it in that stand-up dresser, in a purse in a bag of rice. He had already heard from the family that whoever killed Lena took what she was holding at the time.

Yeah, he dealt cocaine and a little heroin, too, when he wasn’t working down at the Sparrows Point plant. He wasn’t going to waste time lying about that. He sold enough to make a living, most of it down by the Poe Homes low-rises, but it wasn’t like he was working out all the time.

Yeah, he had a gun. A.38 revolver, but it wasn’t even loaded. He kept it at his other girlfriend’s house on Amity Street. She held it for him, and that’s where it was now.

Yeah, he had heard about Vincent Booker’s father, too. Didn’t know Purnell Booker, but he had heard on the street that the same gun had been used in both murders. True, the boy Vincent had worked for him for a while, selling dope on consignment. But the boy often fucked up the money, and he had a bad habit of snorting up profit, so Frazier had found it necessary to let him go.

Yeah, Vincent had access to Lena’s place. In fact, Frazier would often send him there for dope, or bags, or cut. Lena would let him in because she knew he worked for Frazier.

Garvey moves to the meat of the interview: “Frazier, tell me what you can about that night.”

Here, too, Frazier is more than helpful, and why shouldn’t he be? After all, he last saw Lena alive on Saturday, the evening before the night of the murder, when he stayed with her on Gilmor Street. On Sunday, he spent the entire evening ten blocks away in the projects on Amity Street, where his new girlfriend threw a dinner party for several friends. Lobster, crabs, corn on the cob. He was there all night, from seven or eight o’clock on. Slept in the back bedroom, didn’t leave until morning. He went by Lena’s on the way to work that day and saw that the front door of the rowhouse was open, but he was late, and when Lena didn’t answer the buzzer, he didn’t go in. That afternoon, he tried calling Lena’s house a couple of times but got no answer, and by early evening, the police were already over there about the murder.

Who, Garvey asks, can confirm your whereabouts on Sunday night?

Nee-Cee-Denise, that is, his new girl. She was on Amity Street with him all night. And of course, the people at the dinner party saw him there. Pam, Annette, a couple others.

Here, Frazier puts in another good word for young Vincent Booker, who, he says, showed up on Amity Street at the height of the party, knocking on the door just after ten o’clock and asking to speak with Frazier. The two men talked on the stoop for a few minutes, Frazier says, long enough for him to see that the boy was all nervous and wild-eyed. Frazier asked what was the matter, but Vincent ignored the question, asking instead for some cocaine. Frazier asked him if he had any money; the boy said no.

Frazier then told him that there would be no more drugs, not when he kept fucking up the money. At which point, according to Frazier, young Vincent got mad and stormed off into the night.

As the interview winds to a close, Frazier offers one last observation about Booker: “I don’t know how things were between him and his father, but since they found the old man dead, Vincent hasn’t been real upset about it.”

Was Vincent sleeping with Lena?

Frazier looks surprised at the question. No, he answers, not that he knew about.

Did Vincent know where Lena kept the dope?

“Yeah,” says Frazier, “he knew.”

“Would you be willing to take a lie detector test, a polygraph?”

“I guess. If you want.”

Garvey doesn’t know what to think. Unless Vincent is fooling around with Lena Lucas, there is nothing to explain her nudity or the nested clothes at the bottom of the bed. On the other hand, there isn’t any obvious connection between Frazier and old man Booker, though it’s certain that both murders were committed by the same hand, wielding the same gun.

The detective asks a few more questions, but there isn’t much you can do when a man answers everything put to him. As a measure of good faith, Garvey asks Frazier to bring in his.38 handgun.

“Carry it down here?” Frazier asks.

“Yeah. Just bring it in.”

“I’ll get a charge.”

“We won’t charge you with that. You got my word on it. Just make sure the gun’s unloaded and bring it down here so we can get a look at it.”

Reluctantly, Frazier agrees.

At the end of the interview, Garvey gathers up his notepaper and follows Frazier out into the hall. “All right, Frazier, thanks for coming down.”

The man nods, then holds the yellow visitor pass issued to him by building security. “What…”

“You just give that to the man at the booth on your way out of the garage.”

Garvey begins walking his witness toward the elevator, then stops near the water cooler. Almost as an afterthought, he leaves Frazier with something that is part warning and part threat.

“I’ll tell you, Frazier, if anything you’re saying isn’t right, now’s the time for you to deal with that,” Garvey says, looking impassively at the man. “Because if this is bullshit, it’s going to come back on you in a bad way.”

Frazier takes this in, then shakes his head. “Told you what I know.”

“All right, then,” says Garvey. “See you ’round.”

The man catches the detective’s eyes briefly, then turns down the corridor. His first few steps are short, uncertain movements, but those that follow gather speed and rhythm until he’s moving hip to shoulder, shoulder to hip, sailing forward in a full roll. By the time he clears the headquarters garage, Robert Frazier is once again ready for the street.

D’Addario turns page after page on a cluttered clipboard, his voice locked in the monotone of another morning’s roll call:

“… is wanted in connection with a homicide in Fairfax, Virginia. Anyone with information about the suspects or the vehicle should call the Fairfax department. Number is on the teletype.

“What’s next here?” says the lieutenant, scanning a fresh printout. “Oh yeah, we got another teletype from Florida… No… um, check that. It’s three weeks old.

“Okay, one last item here… As a result of the ISD inspection, I’m informed that you need to write down the number of the gas cards on your run sheets, even if the cards aren’t used.”

“What for?” asks Kincaid.

“They need the number of the gas card.”

“Why?”

“It’s policy.”

“Jesus, come on twenty-year pension,” cracks Kincaid, disgusted.

D’Addario breaks up the laughter. “Okay, the colonel would like to say a couple words to you all.”

Well, thinks every cop in the room, the shit must have really caught the fan. As CID commander, Dick Lanham rarely has call to address any particular unit on any particular case; God made captains and lieutenants and sergeants for that exact purpose. But a homicide clearance rate that is reaching new depths with every passing day is apparently enough to make even full colonels wince.

“I just wanted to say a few words to you all,” Lanham begins, looking around the room, “to let you know that I’ve got absolute confidence in this unit… I know that this has been a rough time for you people. In fact, the whole year has been rough, but that’s nothing new for this unit, and I don’t have any doubt that it will bounce back.”

As the detectives rustle uncomfortably and stare at their shoes, Lanham presses on with his pep talk, carefully straddling the fence between high praise and open acknowledgment of an ugly truth understood by everyone in the room: The Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit is getting thumped.

Never mind the Latonya Wallace probe or, for that matter, the Monroe Street investigation, both of which are still as open as the days are long. At least in those cases, the department could say that it reacted properly, pouring men and overtime into the search for suspects, and Lanham, looking for silver linings, can’t help but bring that up.

“Anyone who knows anything about those investigations knows how hard they’ve been worked,” he tells the gathering.

And never mind the newspaper articles this morning, in which the NAACP, in a letter to the mayor’s office, has roundly criticized the Baltimore department for failing to curb racial abuses and-a charge unsupported by the evidence-for being slow to solve crimes involving black victims.

“I don’t want to tell you what I think about those allegations,” the colonel assures his detectives.

“But let’s face it,” he says, turning the corner, “the clearance rate is very low, and unless we get you all some help we’re going to have a hard time bringing it back up to where we want it. Particularly if we have another night like the last one… Most of all, we got to crack some of these goddamn killings of women in the Northwest.”

The room stirs uncomfortably.

“After talking with the captain, we’ve decided to bring in some extra men from around the sixth floor to work with the primary detectives on those cases… But I want you to understand that this is to help you in a rough time. Everyone has absolute confidence in the detectives assigned to those cases.

“At least,” says the colonel, trying to close on a positive note, “at least it’s not as bad as what’s going on in Washington.” Lanham then nods to D’Addario, who opens the floor to the robbery and sex offense supervisors.

“Is that it?” says D’Addario. “Lieutenant, you have anything to add? Joe?… All told.”

Roll call ends and the homicide unit’s dayshift breaks down into smaller clusters of detectives, some arguing and bartering for one of the Cavaliers, some heading for city court, some cracking jokes by the coffee machine. A day like any other, but every man on D’Addario’s shift now understands that things have scraped bottom.

The clearance rate-murders closed by arrest-is now 36 percent and falling, a statistic that doesn’t begin to explain the threat to Gary D’Addario’s tenure. The board that gave His Eminence reason for concern six weeks ago has continued to fill with open murders, and it is on D’Addario’s side of the wall that the names of the victims are writ in red. Of the twenty-five homicides handled by Dee’s three squads, only five are down; whereas Stanton’s shift has cleared ten of sixteen.

Of course, there are reasons for any statistical variation, but in the last analysis, the only fact that matters to the command staff is that Stanton’s detectives know who killed their victims; D’Addario’s men do not. There is no point in explaining that three fifths of D’Addario’s homicides happen to be drug-related, just as seven of those solved by Stanton’s shift are domestics or other arguments. Nor does it do any good to note that two or three case files were sacrificed to free men for the Latonya Wallace detail, or to point out that Dave Brown has a warrant out for one of the Milligan murders, while Garvey has a decent shot at clearing both the Lucas and Booker files.

All of that is commentary, and a Talmudic, murder-by-murder analysis of the board doesn’t mean a damn thing to anyone when it comes to the clearance rate. It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. Captains become majors who become colonels who become deputies when the numbers stay sweet; the command staff backs up on itself like a bad stretch of sewer pipe when they don’t. Against that truth, which everyone above the rank of sergeant holds to be self-evident, D’Addario is in deep water-not only because his rate compares poorly to Stanton’s, but because it compares poorly to expectations.

The clearance rate for murders in Baltimore has been slipping for seven years, from 84 percent in 1981 to 73.5 percent registered in 1987. Fortunately for the careers of several commanders, at no point in the decade did the homicide unit ever post a solve rate lower than the national average for murder clearances, which has also fallen-from a high of 76 percent in 1984 to a low of 70 in 1987.

The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, damn lies and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department’s planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn’t mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department’s desire for a budget increase. The homicide clearance rate is equally vulnerable to subtle forms of manipulation-all of which are permitted under the FBI’s guidelines for uniform crime reporting.

Consider the fact that a case is regarded to be cleared whether it arrives at the grand jury or not. As long as someone is locked up-whether for a week or a month or a lifetime-that murder is down. If the charges are dropped at the arraignment for lack of evidence, if the grand jury refuses to indict, if the prosecutor decides to dismiss the case or place it on the inactive, or stet, docket, that murder is nonetheless carried on the books as a solved crime. Detectives have a tag line for such paper clearances: Stet ’em and forget ’em.

Consider, too, that the federal guidelines allow a department to carry a previous year’s clearance as a solved crime. This, of course, is as it should be: The mark of any good homicide unit is its ability to work back on open cases that are two, three or five years old; the clearance rate should reflect that persistence. On the other hand, the guidelines don’t require departments to include the crime itself in the current year’s statistics; clearly, the crime itself actually occurred in a prior year. Theoretically therefore, an American homicide unit can solve 90 of 100 fresh murders, then clear twenty cases from previous years and post a clearance rate of 110 percent.

Such card-up-the-sleeve tactics make every year’s end an adventure in statistical brinksmanship. If the clearance rate is high enough, a shift commander or squad sergeant who knows his business can save an arrest on a December case until January to get a jump on the new year. Alternatively, if the clearance rate is a bit low, a commander might allow a two-or three-week grace period in which January clearances of December cases are credited to the prior year. The paper clearances and calendar tricks can give a homicide unit an extra 5 to 10 points on the sheet, but when the true solve rate takes a dive, no amount of statistical massage can help.

This was D’Addario’s predicament and, over the last twenty-four hours, bad had become worse. His detectives clocked five fresh murders-only one of which was a dunker. That case, Kincaid’s, featured a fifty-two-year-old man stretched out on the floor of a Fulton Avenue apartment. His skull had been crushed in an argument with a younger man, a boarder who used a steam iron to demonstrate the law of physics that allows no two objects to occupy the same space at the same instant. But things were not so tidy on the earlier midnight shift, when McAllister and Bowman caught a bludgeoning in the Northeast, only hours before Bowman learned that his shooting victim from three nights earlier had rolled a seven at University Hospital. There was no hint of a suspect in either case, and Fahlteich faced much the same problem later that same evening when he caught a fatal shooting off Wabash Avenue.

But all this was just a prelude to the one that really mattered: They’d found the body of another taxi driver in a wooded park on the city’s northwest edge. As the fifteenth murder of a cab driver in eight years, the beating death of a Checker Cab employee got the full red-ball treatment, not only because it looks bad for a city to permit an open season on its taxi drivers, but because the hack was a woman. Found nude from the waist down. Murdered. In Northwest Baltimore.

That made six dead women in that district since December, all of them unsolved. The Northwest murders were decidedly unrelated: two were rape-murders with markedly different characteristics, two were drug killings, one an apparent argument, and this latest a cab robbery and possible rape. But the string of open cases was beginning to attract newspaper headlines and therefore dead women in the Northwestern District had suddenly acquired real prestige with the department brass.

As if to acknowledge his sudden vulnerability, D’Addario himself went to the scene of the cabbie murder. So, too, did the captain. Not to mention the district commander from the Northwest and the police department’s chief spokesman. Donald Worden was off, but the rest of McLarney’s squad took the call, with Rick James as the primary and Eddie Brown as secondary investigator. Never mind that he would be without the Big Man on this call, James was a man who counted his overtime, and by that reckoning alone he was due for a fresh murder. For three weeks he had wallowed at his desk near the front of the office, cursing every phone extension, silently willing the communications unit to send him a major case, a red ball with many hours involved.

“Incoming… I got it,” he shouted time and again, grabbing every call on the first bleat. And then, in a mood blackened by poverty: “Edgerton, pick up line one. Sounds like your wife.”

The ancient Greeks were fond of saying that the gods punish a man most by answering his prayers, and on Powder Mill Road, James was saddled with a stone whodunit. Face down at the edge of a wooded trail was a black woman in her thirties, wearing only a brown jacket with “Checker Cab” and “Karen” on either side of the chest. There was no wallet, purse, or identification, although her shoes, pants and panties lay near the body. Three hours after she was discovered, a Baltimore County unit found Checker Cab 4 in a garden apartment parking lot in Owings Mills, six to eight miles west of the city line. Abandoned with its hazard lights flashing, the cab caught the attention of neighbors; when contacted, cab company officials confirmed that neither cab 4, nor its driver, Karen Renee Smith, had been seen or heard from since nine o’clock that morning. The positive ID followed soon after.

Nothing about the murder of Karen Smith resembled any of the previous Northwest killings, but to argue such subtleties in the face of a departmental mood swing is futility defined. Now, a day later, the colonel is calling in the troops, ordering special details for each of the open murders of Northwest women while trying to avoid suggesting a lack of confidence in the homicide unit. Within twenty-four hours, a dozen fresh uniforms and detectives from other CID sections will be assigned to homicide-two for each of the six primary investigators in the Northwest murders. The annex office interrogation room will be converted into a cramped command post of sorts, with maps and charts, photographs of the victims, in and out boxes for the paperwork generated by the detail. Reward sheets for information on each of the murders will be printed for distribution in the neighborhoods near each crime scene.

The primary detectives are to use the extra manpower to generate new leads and run down any loose ends in the case files. They are to make the Northwest murders their first priority and, with a nod to a recent newspaper article that began the campaign by hinting at the possibility of a serial killer, they are to be especially vigilant for anything that might link these murders.

One of the six cases-the murder of Brenda Thompson, stabbed to death in the back of a Dodge in early January-runs into a conflicting priority: Latonya Wallace. Harry Edgerton is the primary detective in the Thompson murder, the secondary in the slaying of the little girl. As a result, the Thompson case is farmed out to Bertina Silver.

Edgerton and his sergeant, Roger Nolan, argue briefly with both D’Addario and the captain against the change, maintaining that it serves no purpose to change the primary detective in the middle of an investigation for the sake of creating some immediate activity. Edgerton knows the case file and the players, and most important, he has spent hours creating a working relationship with his best suspect, a young street dealer who sold for Brenda Thompson and owed her money. The kid has already been willing to subject himself to a couple of long interrogations. Edgerton argues that the Thompson murder is already two months old, and anything the special detail may do now can just as easily be done two or three or four weeks down the road, after the Latonya Wallace case has resolved itself.

Edgerton has on his side the prevailing wisdom and tradition of the homicide unit, both of which argue that no one can know a murder as well as the detective who handles the scene and its aftermath. The bosses, however, are adamant. A police department is a reactive beast, and with the newspapers and television both crowing about the possibility of multiple murders in the Northwest, tradition and wisdom are both being sold off at basement prices. The Thompson case goes to Bert Silver.

In happier times, Edgerton might have appealed personally to D’Addario, but now that the lieutenant has problems of his own, that appeal would be pointless. Latonya Wallace, the subterranean clearance rate, the Northwest murders-any and all are reason enough for D’Addario to feel vulnerable. Already there has been one meeting with the colonel and Deputy Mullen on the Latonya Wallace detail, an hour-long summary in which Jay Landsman outlined the efforts undertaken by the detectives and then fielded questions until the bosses seemed mollified. The meeting was a seamless piece of departmental politics, but D’Addario has to know that unless the solve rate rises, Landsman’s performance is no more than a temporary reprieve.

If D’Addario had stayed tight with the captain, the threat wouldn’t be so severe. Lately, however, a conflict that had been percolating for months has suddenly come to full boil. Simply put, the captain doesn’t want D’Addario as one of his shift lieutenants; to D’Addario, the decision to bypass him on the Monroe Street probe said as much. And now, with his solve rate so low, the captain has leverage with which he can press the point-unless D’Addario can, like a cat with a canary locked in its jaw, go to the colonel with a fresh victory in one of the major cases, or at least a hint that the solve rate is turning around. It matters not at all that D’Addario has done the job for eight years; the consciousness of the command staff rarely strays beyond the latest red ball and as a result, the departmental hierarchy often expresses itself in that timeless query of practical politics: What have you done for me lately?

If the rate is good, if the red balls fall, it doesn’t matter how D’Addario runs his shift. You say your detectives and sergeants are told to follow their own judgment on cases? Obviously, a fine example of a leader emphasizing confidence and responsibility. You say you leave it to the sergeants to train and discipline their men? Obviously, a man who knows the value of delegated responsibility. You say your overtime is running 90 percent over budget? That’s fine, you’ve got to break some eggs for that omelette. Court time, too? Well, that just proves that more of these murders are going to trial. But let the rate slip and the lieutenant’s image is suddenly transformed into that of a man incapable of directing and disciplining his men, a commander who leaves too much in the hands of his subordinates, a manager who can’t control his budget.

On the midnight shift just before the colonel’s brief oratory, five or six detectives were adrift in the admin office, floating on a sea of paperwork from the fresh spate of open murders. Eddie Brown, James, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Nolan-a fair cross section, a gathering of veterans who had all seen both good times and bad in the homicide unit. Inevitably, the talk turned to whether this year would really turn out any worse. Some argued that it always evened out, that for every stretch of stone whodunits there was a supply of dunkers waiting to take up the slack. Others pointed out that the rate would be higher if the shift had bothered to save a few December clearances to pump up the current year’s stats. But for all of their talk, none of the detectives could remember a rate as low as 36 percent.

“And I’ll tell you something,” said Fahlteich, “I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

“Oh, it’s going to get a helluva lot worse,” Nolan agreed. “We’ve been coasting around here for a long time and now it’s catching up to us.”

Suddenly no one in the room was typing or collating anymore as voices competed with one another in a recitation of longstanding grievances. They complained about the equipment, about cars without radios and about a major urban department that still doesn’t provide a polygraph examiner suitable for criminal investigations, requiring detectives to use the state police facilities. They complained about the cutbacks in overtime, about the department’s reluctance to pay for pretrial preparation so that good cases wouldn’t come unglued in the months between arrest and trial. They complained about the lack of money to pay informants and, consequently, the lack of informants. They complained about the inability of the trace and ballistics labs to keep up with the violence, about how the state’s attorney’s office no longer charged anyone with perjury when they lied to a grand jury, about how too many prosecutors allowed witnesses to back up on their grand jury testimony. They complained about the growing number of drug-related murders, about how the days of the domestic dunker and 90-plus clearance rates were long gone. They complained that the phone didn’t ring the way it used to after a murder, that fewer people were willing to drop a dime and risk becoming a witness to an act of violence.

As a bitch-and-moan session, it was entirely satisfying. After a good forty minutes, the group was still thumping on dead horseflesh: “Look at Washington,” said Brown. “That ain’t but thirty miles away from us.”

For a police detective, a detail with the District of Columbia’s homicide unit had suddenly become synonymous with being assigned to hell itself. Washington was well on the way to becoming the U.S. murder capital in 1988; only two years earlier, the capital and Baltimore had posted similar rates and fought for whatever distinction comes with being the nation’s tenth deadliest city. Now, in the wake of a cocaine epidemic and a series of Jamaican drug wars in the capital’s Northeast and Southeast quadrants, the District’s police department was contending with an incidence of homicide double that of Baltimore. As a result, Washington’s homicide squad-once one of the best-trained investigative units in the nation-was now posting a clearance rate in the low 40s. Awash in a deluge of violence, there was no time for follow-up investigation, no time for pretrial preparation, no time for anything but picking up bodies. From what the Baltimore detectives gathered in passing encounters, morale in the D.C. unit was nonexistent.

“The same thing’s going to happen here and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it,” said Brown. “Wait until we start seeing some of that crack up here. We already got the Jamaican problem up in the Northwest, but does anyone give a damn about that? Hell, no. This town’s gonna break wide open and this department isn’t even gonna know what hit it.”

Fahlteich pointed out that in some ways the homicide unit was its own worst enemy: “Every year we give them a clearance rate above the average, so every year they figure we can make do with what we have.”

“That’s it exactly,” said Nolan.

“So,” Fahlteich continued, “when we come back and ask for more detectives, or better cars or radios or training or whatever, the bosses can look at the rate and say, ‘Shit on that, they don’t need anything more than they got last year.’”

“We’ve done with so little for so long that now it’s coming back to haunt us,” Nolan said. “I’ll tell you, if we get two more nights like this last one, we’ll never climb out of the hole.”

“We might not climb out anyway,” said Fahlteich. “We’ll be lucky to get above sixty percent from where we are now.”

“Hey, if we don’t,” said Ed Brown, “it won’t just stop with the lieutenant. They’ll go and have themselves a housecleaning, and a lot of people up here are gonna be out the damn door.”

“No shit,” agreed Fahlteich.

Then Nolan brought the room to silence. “I think this just might be the year,” he said with the barest of smiles, “when the wheels fall off the cart.”

You are a citizen of a free nation, having lived your adult life in a land of guaranteed civil liberties, and you commit a crime of violence, whereupon you are jacked up, hauled down to a police station and deposited in a claustrophobic anteroom with three chairs, a table and no windows. There you sit for a half hour or so until a police detective-a man you have never met before, a man who can in no way be mistaken for a friend-enters the room with a thin stack of lined notepaper and a ballpoint pen.

The detective offers a cigarette, not your brand, and begins an uninterrupted monologue that wanders back and forth for a half hour more, eventually coming to rest in a familiar place: “You have the absolute right to remain silent.”

Of course you do. You’re a criminal. Criminals always have the right to remain silent. At least once in your miserable life, you spent an hour in front of a television set, listening to this book-’em-Danno routine. You think Joe Friday was lying to you? You think Kojak was making this horseshit up? No way, bunk, we’re talking sacred freedoms here, notably your Fifth Fucking Amendment protection against self-incrimination, and hey, it was good enough for Ollie North, so who are you to go incriminating yourself at the first opportunity? Get it straight: A police detective, a man who gets paid government money to put you in prison, is explaining your absolute right to shut up before you say something stupid.

“Anything you say or write may be used against you in a court of law.”

Yo, bunky, wake the fuck up. You’re now being told that talking to a police detective in an interrogation room can only hurt you. If it could help you, they would probably be pretty quick to say that, wouldn’t they? They’d stand up and say you have the right not to worry because what you say or write in this godforsaken cubicle is gonna be used to your benefit in a court of law. No, your best bet is to shut up. Shut up now.

“You have the right to talk with a lawyer at any time-before any questioning, before answering any questions, or during any questions.”

Talk about helpful. Now the man who wants to arrest you for violating the peace and dignity of the state is saying you can talk to a trained professional, an attorney who has read the relevant portions of the Maryland Annotated Code or can at least get his hands on some Cliff’s Notes. And let’s face it, pal, you just carved up a drunk in a Dundalk Avenue bar, but that don’t make you a neurosurgeon. Take whatever help you can get.

“If you want a lawyer and cannot afford to hire one, you will not be asked any questions, and the court will be requested to appoint a lawyer for you.”

Translation: You’re a derelict. No charge for derelicts.

At this point, if all lobes are working, you ought to have seen enough of this Double Jeopardy category to know that it ain’t where you want to be. How about a little something from Criminal Lawyers and Their Clients for $50, Alex?

Whoa, bunk, not so fast.

“Before we get started, lemme just get through the paperwork,” says the detective, who now produces an Explanation of Rights sheet, BPD Form 69, and passes it across the table.

“EXPLANATION OF RIGHTS,” declares the top line in bold block letters. The detective asks you to fill in your name, address, age, and education, then the date and time. That much accomplished, he asks you to read the next section. It begins, “YOU ARE HEREBY ADVISED THAT:” Read number one, the detective says. Do you understand number one?

“You have the absolute right to remain silent.”

Yeah, you understand. We did this already.

“Then write your initials next to number one. Now read number two.”

And so forth, until you have initialed each component of the Miranda warning. That done, the detective tells you to write your signature on the next line, the one just below the sentence that says, “I HAVE READ THE ABOVE EXPLANATION OF MY RIGHTS AND FULLY UNDERSTAND IT.”

You sign your name and the monologue resumes. The detective assures you that he has informed you of these rights because he wants you to be protected, because there is nothing that concerns him more than giving you every possible assistance in this very confusing and stressful moment in your life. If you don’t want to talk, he tells you, that’s fine. And if you want a lawyer, that’s fine, too, because first of all, he’s no relation to the guy you cut up, and second, he’s gonna get six hours overtime no matter what you do. But he wants you to know-and he’s been doing this a lot longer than you, so take his word for it-that your rights to remain silent and obtain qualified counsel aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Look at it this way, he says, leaning back in his chair. Once you up and call for that lawyer, son, we can’t do a damn thing for you. No sir, your friends in the city homicide unit are going to have to leave you locked in this room all alone and the next authority figure to scan your case will be a tie-wearing, three-piece bloodsucker-a no-nonsense prosecutor from the Violent Crimes Unit with the official title of assistant state’s attorney for the city of Baltimore. And God help you then, son, because a ruthless fucker like that will have an O’Donnell Heights motorhead like yourself halfway to the gas chamber before you get three words out. Now’s the time to speak up, right now when I got my pen and paper here on the table, because once I walk out of this room any chance you have of telling your side of the story is gone and I gotta write it up the way it looks. And the way it looks right now is first-fucking-degree murder. Felony murder, mister, which when shoved up a man’s asshole is a helluva lot more painful than second-degree or maybe even manslaughter. What you say right here and now could make the difference, bunk. Did I mention that Maryland has a gas chamber? Big, ugly sumbitch at the penitentiary on Eager Street, not twenty blocks from here. You don’t wanna get too close to that bad boy, lemme tell you.

A small, wavering sound of protest passes your lips and the detective leans back in his chair, shaking his head sadly.

What the hell is wrong with you, son? You think I’m fucking with you? Hey, I don’t even need to bother with your weak shit. I got three witnesses in three other rooms who say you’re my man. I got a knife from the scene that’s going downstairs to the lab for latent prints. I got blood spatter on them Air Jordans we took off you ten minutes ago. Why the fuck do you think we took ’em? Do I look like I wear high-top tennis? Fuck no. You got spatter all over ’em, and I think we both know whose blood type it’s gonna be. Hey, bunk, I’m only in here to make sure that there ain’t nothing you can say for yourself before I write it all up.

You hesitate.

Oh, says the detective. You want to think about it. Hey, you think about it all you want, pal. My captain’s right outside in the hallway, and he already told me to charge your ass in the first fuckin’ degree. For once in your beshitted little life someone is giving you a chance and you’re too fucking dumb to take it. What the fuck, you go ahead and think about it and I’ll tell my captain to cool his heels for ten minutes. I can do that much for you. How ’bout some coffee? Another cigarette?

The detective leaves you alone in that cramped, windowless room. Just you and the blank notepaper and the Form 69 and… first-degree murder. First-degree murder with witnesses and fingerprints and blood on your Air Jordans. Christ, you didn’t even notice the blood on your own fucking shoes. Felony murder, mister. First-fucking-degree. How many years, you begin to wonder, how many years do I get for involuntary manslaughter?

Whereupon the man who wants to put you in prison, the man who is not your friend, comes back in the room, asking if the coffee’s okay.

Yeah, you say, the coffee’s fine, but what happens if I want a lawyer?

The detective shrugs. Then we get you a lawyer, he says. And I walk out of the room and type up the charging documents for first-degree murder and you can’t say a fucking thing about it. Look, bunk, I’m giving you a chance. He came at you, right? You were scared. It was self-defense.

Your mouth opens to speak.

He came at you, didn’t he?

“Yeah,” you venture cautiously, “he came at me.”

Whoa, says the detective, holding up his hands. Wait a minute. If we’re gonna do this, I gotta find your rights form. Where’s the fucking form? Damn things are like cops, never around when you need ’em. Here it is, he says, pushing the explanation-of-rights sheet across the table and pointing to the bottom. Read that, he says.

“I am willing to answer questions and I do not want any attorney at this time. My decision to answer questions without having an attorney present is free and voluntary on my part.”

As you read, he leaves the room and returns a moment later with a second detective as a witness. You sign the bottom of the form, as do both detectives.

The first detective looks up from the form, his eyes soaked with innocence. “He came at you, huh?”

“Yeah, he came at me.”

Get used to small rooms, bunk, because you are about to be drop-kicked into the lost land of pretrial detention. Because it’s one thing to be a murdering little asshole from Southeast Baltimore, and it’s another to be stupid about it, and with five little words you have just elevated yourself to the ranks of the truly witless.

End of the road, pal. It’s over. It’s history. And if that police detective wasn’t so busy committing your weak bullshit to paper, he’d probably look you in the eye and tell you so. He’d give you another cigarette and say, son, you are ignorance personified and you just put yourself in for the fatal stabbing of a human being. He might even tell you that the other witnesses in the other rooms are too drunk to identify their own reflections, much less the kid who had the knife, or that it’s always a long shot for the lab to pull a latent off a knife hilt, or that your $95 sneakers are as clean as the day you bought them. If he was feeling particularly expansive, he might tell you that everyone who leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs does so charged with first-degree murder, that it’s for the lawyers to decide what kind of deal will be cut. He might go on to say that even after all these years working homicides, there is still a small part of him that finds it completely mystifying that anyone ever utters a single word in a police interrogation. To illustrate the point, he could hold up your Form 69, on which you waived away every last one of your rights, and say, “Lookit here, pistonhead, I told you twice that you were deep in the shit and that whatever you said could put you in deeper.” And if his message was still somehow beyond your understanding, he could drag your carcass back down the sixth-floor hallway, back toward the sign that says Homicide Unit in white block letters, the sign you saw when you walked off the elevator.

Now think hard: Who lives in a homicide unit? Yeah, right. And what do homicide detectives do for a living? Yeah, you got it, bunk. And what did you do tonight? You murdered someone.

So when you opened that mouth of yours, what the fuck were you thinking?

Homicide detectives in Baltimore like to imagine a small, open window at the top of the long wall in the large interrogation room. More to the point, they like to imagine their suspects imagining a small, open window at the top of the long wall. The open window is the escape hatch, the Out. It is the perfect representation of what every suspect believes when he opens his mouth during an interrogation. Every last one envisions himself parrying questions with the right combination of alibi and excuse; every last one sees himself coming up with the right words, then crawling out the window to go home and sleep in his own bed. More often than not, a guilty man is looking for the Out from his first moments in the interrogation room; in that sense, the window is as much the suspect’s fantasy as the detective’s mirage.

The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.

In truth, catharsis in the interrogation room occurs for only a few rare suspects, usually those in domestic murders or child abuse cases wherein the leaden mass of genuine remorse can crush anyone who is not hardened to his crime. But the greater share of men and women brought downtown take no interest in absolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly noted that for those responsible, the act of murder “is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or frighten him from his ordinary notice of trifles.” And while West Baltimore is a universe or two from Emerson’s nineteenth-century Massachusetts hamlet, the observation is still useful. Murder often doesn’t unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually doesn’t even ruin his day.

As a result, the majority of those who acknowledge their complicity in a killing must be baited by detectives with something more tempting than penitence. They must be made to believe that their crime is not really murder, that their excuse is both accepted and unique, that they will, with the help of the detective, be judged less evil than they truly are.

Some are brought to that unreasoned conclusion by the suggestion that they acted in self-defense or were provoked to violence. Others fall prey to the notion that they are less culpable than their colleagues-I only drove the car or backed up the robbery, I wasn’t the triggerman; or yeah, I raped her, but I stayed out of it when them other guys started strangling her-unaware that Maryland law allows every member of the conspiracy to be charged as a principal. Still others succumb to the belief that they will get a better shake by cooperating with detectives and acknowledging a limited amount of guilt. And many of those who cannot be lured over the precipice of self-incrimination can still be manipulated into providing alibis, denials and explanations-statements that can be checked and rechecked until a suspect’s lies are the greatest evidentiary threat to his freedom.

For that reason, the professionals say nothing. No alibis. No explanations. No expressions of polite dismay or blanket denials. In the late 1970s, when men by the names of Dennis Wise and Vernon Collins were matching each other body for body as Baltimore’s premier contract killers and no witness could be found to testify against either, things got to the point where both the detectives and their suspects knew the drill:

Enter room.

Miranda.

Anything to say this time, Dennis?

No, sir. Just want to call my lawyer.

Fine, Dennis.

Exit room.

For anyone with experience in the criminal justice machine, the point is driven home by every lawyer worth his fee. Repetition and familiarity with the process soon place the professionals beyond the reach of a police interrogation. Yet more than two decades after the landmark Escobedo and Miranda decisions, the rest of the world remains strangely willing to place itself at risk. As a result, the same law enforcement community that once regarded the 1966 Miranda decision as a death blow to criminal investigation has now come to see the explanation of rights as a routine part of the process-simply a piece of station house furniture, if not a civilizing influence on police work itself.

In an era when beatings and physical intimidation were common tools of an interrogation, the Escobedo and Miranda decisions were sent down by the nation’s highest court to ensure that criminal confessions and statements were purely voluntary. The resulting Miranda warning was “a protective device to dispel the compelling atmosphere of the interrogation,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion. Investigators would be required to assure citizens of their rights to silence and counsel, not only at the moment of arrest, but at the moment that they could reasonably be considered suspects under interrogation.

In answer to Miranda, the nation’s police officials responded with a veritable jeremiad, wailing in unison that the required warnings would virtually assure that confessions would be impossible to obtain and conviction rates would plummet. Yet the prediction was soon proved false for the simple reason that those law enforcement leaders-and, for that matter, the Supreme Court itself-underestimated a police detective’s ingenuity.

Miranda is, on paper, a noble gesture which declares that constitutional rights extend not only to the public forum of the courts, but to the private confines of the police station as well. Miranda and its accompanying decisions established a uniform concept of a criminal defendant’s rights and effectively ended the use of violence and the most blatant kind of physical intimidation in interrogations. That, of course, was a blessing. But if the further intent of the Miranda decision was, in fact, an attempt to “dispel the compelling atmosphere” of an interrogation, then it failed miserably.

And thank God. Because by any standards of human discourse, a criminal confession can never truly be called voluntary. With rare exception, a confession is compelled, provoked and manipulated from a suspect by a detective who has been trained in a genuinely deceitful art. That is the essence of interrogation, and those who believe that a straightforward conversation between a cop and a criminal-devoid of any treachery-is going to solve a crime are somewhere beyond naive. If the interrogation process is, from a moral standpoint, contemptible, it is nonetheless essential. Deprived of the ability to question and confront suspects and witnesses, a detective is left with physical evidence and in many cases, precious little of that. Without a chance for a detective to manipulate a suspect’s mind, a lot of bad people would simply go free.

Yet every defense attorney knows that there can be no good reason for a guilty man to say anything whatsoever to a police officer, and any suspect who calls an attorney will be told as much, bringing the interrogation to an end. A court opinion that therefore requires a detective-the same detective working hard to dupe a suspect-to stop abruptly and guarantee the man his right to end the process can only be called an act of institutional schizophrenia. The Miranda warning is a little like a referee introducing a barroom brawl: The stern warnings to hit above the waist and take no cheap shots have nothing to do with the mayhem that follows.

Yet how could it be otherwise? It would be easy enough for our judiciary to ensure that no criminal suspect relinquished his rights inside a police station: The court could simply require the presence of a lawyer at all times. But such a blanket guarantee of individual rights would effectively end the use of interrogation as an investigative weapon, leaving many more crimes unsolved and many more guilty men and women unpunished. Instead, the ideals have been carefully compromised at little cost other than to the integrity of the police investigator.

After all, it’s the lawyers, the Great Compromisers of our age, who have struck this bargain, who still manage to keep cuffs clean in the public courts, where rights and process are worshiped faithfully. It is left for the detective to fire this warning shot across a suspect’s bow, granting rights to a man who will then be tricked into relinquishing them. In that sense, Miranda is a symbol and little more, a salve for a collective conscience that cannot reconcile libertarian ideals with what must necessarily occur in a police interrogation room. Our judges, our courts, our society as a whole, demand in the same breath that rights be maintained even as crimes are punished. And all of us are bent and determined to preserve the illusion that both can be achieved in the same small room. It’s mournful to think that this hypocrisy is the necessary creation of our best legal minds, who seem to view the interrogation process as the rest of us look upon breakfast sausage: We want it on a plate with eggs and toast; we don’t want to know too much about how it comes to be.

Trapped in that contradiction, a detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter-or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law’s spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding-more so, in fact, when you consider that he’s selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product.

The fraud that claims it is somehow in a suspect’s interest to talk with police will forever be the catalyst in any criminal interrogation. It is a fiction propped up against the greater weight of logic itself, sustained for hours on end through nothing more or less than a detective’s ability to control the interrogation room.

A good interrogator controls the physical environment, from the moment a suspect or reluctant witness is dumped in the small cubicle, left alone to stew in soundproof isolation. The law says that a man can’t be held against his will unless he’s to be charged with a crime, yet the men and women tossed into the interrogation room rarely ponder their legal status. They light cigarettes and wait, staring abstractedly at four yellow cinderblock walls, a dirty tin ashtray on a plain table, a small mirrored window and a series of stained acoustic tiles on the ceiling. Those few with heart enough to ask whether they are under arrest are often answered with a question:

“Why? Do you want to be?”

“No.”

“Then sit the fuck down.”

Control is the reason a suspect is seated farthest from the interrogation room door, and the reason the room’s light switch can only be operated with a key that remains in possession of the detectives. Every time a suspect has to ask for or be offered a cigarette, water, coffee or a trip to the bathroom, he’s being reminded that he’s lost control.

When the detective arrives with pen and notepaper and begins the initial monologue to which a potential suspect or witness is invariably subjected, he has two goals in mind: first, to emphasize his complete control of the process; second, to stop the suspect from opening his mouth. Because if a suspect or witness manages to blurt out his desire for a lawyer-if he asks for counsel definitively and declines to answer questions until he gets one-it’s over.

To prevent that, a detective allows no interruption of his soliloquy. Typically, the speech begins with the detective identifying himself and confiding that this is some serious shit that the two of you have to sort out. In your favor, however, is the fact that he, the detective, is a fair and reasonable man. A great guy, in fact-just ask anyone he works with.

If, at this moment, you try to speak, the detective will cut you off, saying your chance will come in a little while. Right now, he will invariably say, you need to know where I’m coming from. Then he’ll inform you that he happens to be very good at what he does, that he’s had very few open cases in his long, storied career, and a whole busload of people who lied to him in this very room are now on Death Row.

Control. To keep it, you say whatever you have to. Then you say it over and over until it’s safe to stop, because if your suspect thinks for one moment that he can influence events, he may just demand an attorney.

As a result, the Miranda warning becomes a psychological hurdle, a pregnant moment that must be slipped carefully into the back-and-forth of the interrogation. For witnesses, the warning is not required and a detective can question those knowledgeable about a crime for hours without ever advising them of their rights. But should a witness suddenly say something that indicates involvement in a criminal act, he becomes-by the Supreme Court’s definition-a suspect, at which point he must be advised of his rights. In practice, the line between a potential suspect and a suspect can be thin, and a common sight in any American homicide unit is a handful of detectives standing outside an interrogation room, debating whether or not a Miranda warning is yet necessary.

The Baltimore department, like many others, uses a written form to confirm a suspect’s acknowledgment of Miranda. In a city where nine out of ten suspects would otherwise claim they were never informed of their rights, the forms have proven essential. Moreover, the detectives have found that rather than drawing attention to the Miranda, the written form diffuses the impact of the warning. Even as it alerts a suspect to the dangers of an interrogation, the form co-opts the suspect, making him part of the process. It is the suspect who wields the pen, initialing each component of the warning and then signing the form; it is the suspect who is being asked to help with the paperwork. With witnesses, the detectives achieve the same effect with an information sheet that asks three dozen questions in rapid-fire succession. Not only does the form include information of value to the investigators-name, nickname, height, weight, complexion, employer, description of clothing at time of interview, relatives living in Baltimore, names of parents, spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend-but it acclimates the witness to the idea of answering questions before the direct interview begins.

Even if a suspect does indeed ask for a lawyer, he must-at least according to the most aggressive interpretation of Miranda-ask definitively: “I want to talk to a lawyer and I don’t want to answer questions until I do.”

Anything less leaves room for a good detective to maneuver. The distinctions are subtle and semantic:

“Maybe I should get a lawyer.”

“Maybe you should. But why would you need a lawyer if you don’t have anything to do with this?”

Or: “I think I should talk to a lawyer.”

“You better be sure. Because if you want a lawyer then I’m not going to be able to do anything for you.”

Likewise, if a suspect calls a lawyer and continues to answer questions until the lawyer arrives, his rights have not been violated. If the lawyer arrives, the suspect must be told that an attorney is in the building, but if he still wishes to continue the interrogation, nothing requires that the police allow the attorney to speak with his client. In short, the suspect can demand an attorney; a lawyer can’t demand a suspect.

Once the minefield that is Miranda has been successfully negotiated, the detective must let the suspect know that his guilt is certain and easily established by the existing evidence. He must then offer the Out.

This, too, is role playing, and it requires a seasoned actor. If a witness or suspect is belligerent, you wear him down with greater belligerence. If the man shows fear, you offer calm and comfort. When he looks weak, you appear strong. When he wants a friend, you crack a joke and offer to buy him a soda. If he’s confident, you are more so, assuring him that you are certain of his guilt and are curious only about a few select details of the crime. And if he’s arrogant, if he wants nothing to do with the process, you intimidate him, threaten him, make him believe that making you happy may be the only thing between his ass and the Baltimore City Jail.

Kill your woman and a good detective will come close to real tears as he touches your shoulder and tells you how he knows that you must have loved her, that it wouldn’t be so hard for you to talk about if you didn’t. Beat your child to death and a police detective will wrap his arm around you in the interrogation room, telling you about how he beats his own children all the time, how it wasn’t your fault if the kid up and died on you. Shoot a friend over a poker hand and that same detective will lie about your dead buddy’s condition, telling you that the victim is in stable condition at Hopkins and probably won’t press charges, which wouldn’t amount to more than assault with intent even if he does. Murder a man with an accomplice and the detective will walk your co-conspirator past the open door of your interrogation room, then say your bunky’s going home tonight because he gave a statement making you the triggerman. And if that same detective thinks you can be bluffed, he might tell you that they’ve got your prints on the weapon, or that there are two eyewitnesses who have picked your photo from an array, or that the victim made a dying declaration in which he named you as his assailant.

All of which is street legal. Reasonable deception, the courts call it. After all, what could be more reasonable than deceiving someone who has taken a human life and is now lying about it?

The deception sometimes goes too far, or at least it sometimes seems that way to those unfamiliar with the process. Not long ago, several veteran homicide detectives in Detroit were publicly upbraided and disciplined by their superiors for using the office Xerox machine as a polygraph device. It seems that the detectives, when confronted with a statement of dubious veracity, would sometimes adjourn to the Xerox room and load three sheets of paper into the feeder.

“Truth,” said the first.

“Truth,” said the second.

“Lie,” said the third.

Then the suspect would be led into the room and told to put his hand against the side of the machine. The detectives would ask the man’s name, listen to the answer, then hit the copy button.

Truth.

And where do you live?

Truth again.

And did you or did you not kill Tater, shooting him down like a dog in the 1200 block of North Durham Street?

Lie. Well, well: You lying motherfucker.

In Baltimore, the homicide detectives read newspaper accounts of the Detroit controversy and wondered why anyone had a problem. Polygraph by copier was an old trick; it had been attempted on more than one occasion in the sixth-floor Xerox room. Gene Constantine, a veteran of Stanton’s shift, once gave a mindless wonder the coordination test for drunk drivers (“Follow my finger with your eyes, but don’t move your head… Now stand on one foot”), then loudly declared that the man’s performance indicated obvious deception.

“You flunked,” Constantine told him. “You’re lying.”

Convinced, the suspect confessed.

Variations on the theme are limited only by a detective’s imagination and his ability to sustain the fraud. But every bluff carries a corresponding risk, and a detective who tells a suspect his fingerprints are all over a crime scene loses all hope if the man knows he was wearing gloves. An interrogation room fraud is only as good as the material from which it was constructed-or, for that matter, as good as the suspect is witless-and a detective who underestimates his prey or overestimates his knowledge of the crime will lose precious credibility. Once a detective claims knowledge of a fact that the suspect knows to be untrue, the veil has been lifted, and the investigator is instead revealed as the liar.

Only when everything else in the repertoire falls does a detective resort to rage. It might be a spasm limited to a well-chosen sentence or two, or an extended tantrum punctuated by the slamming of a metal door or the drop kick of a chair, perhaps even a rant delivered as part of a good-cop, bad-cop melodrama, although that particular routine has worn thin with the years. Ideally, the shouting should be loud enough to suggest the threat of violence but restrained enough to avoid any action that could jeopardize the statement: Tell the court why you felt threatened. Did the detective hit you? Did he attempt to hit you? Did he threaten to hit you? No, but he slammed his hand down on the table, real loud.

Oh my. Motion to suppress denied.

What a good detective will not do in this more enlightened age is beat his suspect, at least not for the purpose of obtaining a statement. A suspect who swings on a homicide detective, who raves and kicks furniture, who tries to fight off a pair of handcuffs, will receive as comprehensive an ass-kicking as he would out on the street, but as a function of interrogation, physical assault is not part of the arsenal. In Baltimore, that has been true for at least fifteen years.

Simply put, the violence isn’t worth the risk-not only the risk that the statement obtained will later be ruled inadmissible, but the risk to a detective’s career and pension. It would be another thing entirely in those instances in which an officer or an officer’s family member is the victim. In those cases, a good detective will anticipate the accusation by photographing a suspect after interrogation, to show an absence of injuries and to prove that any beating received prior to the suspect’s arrival at the city jail had nothing to do with what occurred in the homicide unit.

But those are rare cases and, for the vast majority of murders, there is little for a detective to take personally. He doesn’t know the dead man, he just met the suspect and he doesn’t live anywhere near the street where the violence occurred. From that perspective, what civil servant in his right mind is going to risk his entire career to prove that on the night of March 7, 1988, in some godforsaken tract of West Baltimore, a drug dealer, Stinky, shot a dope fiend, Pee Wee, over a $35 debt?

Still, circuit court juries often prefer to think in conspiratorial terms about back rooms and hot lights and rabbit punches to a suspect’s kidneys. A Baltimore detective once lost a case because the defendant testified that his confession was obtained only after he had been mauled by two detectives who beat him with a phone book. The detective was sequestered and did not hear that testimony, but when he took the stand, the defense attorney asked what items were in the room during the interrogation.

“The table. Chairs. Some papers. An ashtray.”

“Was there a phone book in the room?”

The detective thought about it and remembered that yes, they had used a phone book to look up an address. “Yeah,” he acknowledged. “A yellow pages phone book.”

Only when the defense attorney looked approvingly at the jury did the cop realize that something was wrong. After the not guilty verdict, the detective swore he would never again begin an interview until he had cleared the room of every unnecessary item.

The passage of time can also damage the credibility of a confession. In the privacy of the interrogation room, it requires hours of prolonged effort to break a man to a point where he’s willing to admit a criminal act, yet at some point those hours begin to cast doubt on the statement itself. Even under the best conditions, four to six hours of interrogation are required to break a suspect down, and eight or ten or twelve hours can be justified as long as the man is fed and allowed the use of a bathroom. But after a suspect has spent more than twelve hours in an isolated chamber without benefit of counsel, even a sympathetic judge will have qualms about calling a confession or statement truly voluntary.

And how does a detective know he has the right man? Nervousness, fear, confusion, hostility, a story that changes or contradicts itself-all are signs that the man in an interrogation room is lying, particularly in the eyes of someone as naturally suspicious as a detective. Unfortunately, these are also signs of a human being in a state of high stress, which is pretty much where people find themselves after being accused of a capital crime. Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception:

Uncooperative.

Too cooperative.

Talks too much.

Talks too little.

Gets his story perfectly straight.

Fucks his story up.

Blinks too much, avoids eye contact.

Doesn’t blink. Stares.

And yet if the signs along the way are ambiguous, there can be no mistaking that critical moment, that light that shines from the other end of the tunnel when a guilty man is about to give it up. Later, after he’s initialed each page and is alone again in the cubicle, there will be only exhaustion and, in some cases, depression. If he gets to brooding, there might even be a suicide attempt.

But that is epilogue. The emotive crest of a guilty man’s performance comes in those cold moments before he opens his mouth and reaches for the Out. Just before a man gives up life and liberty in an interrogation room, his body acknowledges the defeat: His eyes are glazed, his jaw is slack, his body lists against the nearest wall or table edge. Some put their heads against the tabletop to steady themselves. Some become physically sick, holding their stomachs as if the problem were digestive; a few actually vomit.

At that critical moment, the detectives tell their suspects that they really are sick-sick of lying, sick of hiding. They tell them it’s time to turn over a new leaf, that they’ll only begin to feel better when they start to tell the truth. Amazingly enough, many of them actually believe it. As they reach for the ledge of that high window, they believe every last word of it.

“He came at you, right?”

“Yeah, he came at me.”

The Out leads in.

“Sixty-four thirty-one.”

Garvey listens to ten seconds of silence, then keys the mike a second time: “Sixty-four thirty-one.”

More dead air. The detective cranks the volume control on the Cavalier’s radio, then leans over to check the frequency indicator on the front of the set. Channel 7, just as it should be.

“Sixty-four thirty-one,” he says again, releasing the key on the hand mike before adding the less procedural “oooh, yoo-hoo… Anybody home in the Western? Helloooo…”

Kincaid laughs from the passenger seat.

“Sixty-four thirty-one,” repeats the dispatcher, acknowledging the detective in a mumble that suggests only mild irritation. It’s a known fact that those assigned to a police communications unit are carefully screened to ensure that they will sound as if they’ve been watching televised bowling tournaments for a month. Perhaps it’s the job, perhaps it’s the metallic squawk of the broadcast itself, but the speaking voice of the average police dispatcher falls somewhere between tedium and slow death. In Baltimore, at least, the world will not end with a bang but with the weary, distracted droning of a forty-seven-year-old civil servant who will ask a patrol unit for the 10-20 on that mushroom cloud, then assign the incident a seven-digit complaint number.

Garvey keys the mike again. “Yeah, we’re in your district and we’re gonna need uniforms for a paper,” he says, “and also a DEU at Calhoun and, ah, Lexington.”

“Ten-four. When do you need them?”

Unbelievable. Garvey suppresses an impulse to ask if the weekend after Labor Day is convenient for everyone involved.

“We need them as soon as possible.”

“Ten-four. What’s your ten-twenty again?”

“Calhoun and Lexington.”

“Ten-four.”

Garvey returns the radio mike to its metal retainer and settles back into the driver’s seat. He slips a pair of wide-framed glasses down the bridge of his nose, then begins rubbing his dark brown eyes with one thumb and forefinger. The glasses are an incongruous accessory. Without them, Garvey looks like a Baltimore cop; wearing them, he looks for all the world like the proper businessman his father wanted him to be.

Garvey’s appearance is, on the whole, decidedly corporate: dark blue suit, blue dress shirt, a necktie of red and blue Republican stripes, well-shined Bostonians-a businessman’s ensemble made whole by the addition of a dark brown briefcase that travels between home and office, crammed with files and reports. Tasteful, nondescript, the clothes cover a tall but well-proportioned frame that is at first glance equal to the wardrobe in its ordinariness. Like his body, the detective’s face is long and thin, with a well-trimmed mustache and high forehead that ascends to a carefully combed crop of thinning black hair.

Except for the small lump that a.38 revolver produces on the back of one hip, Garvey fairly reeks of sales manager or, on a day when his blue pinstripe suit has been deployed, vice president for marketing. At first encounter, an untutored visitor to the homicide office might reasonably mistake Garvey for something from the police department’s planning and research department, a middle-management type who at any moment will begin pulling flow charts and quarterly projections from his briefcase, explaining that domestics and robbery shootings are down, but drug-related futures will continue to ascend through the last quarter. This image would shatter, of course, at the very moment Mr. Clean opens his mouth and emits the usual station house effluence. For Garvey, as for nearly all of the detectives in the unit, obscenities roll off the tongue in that practiced, fucking-this-motherfucker cadence that becomes, against a backdrop of violence and despair, a kind of strange poetry.

“Where are these motherfucking uniforms?” Garvey says, replacing his glasses and looking in both directions on Calhoun. “I don’t want to spend all fucking day hitting this house.”

“Sounded like you fuckin’ had to wake that goddamn dispatcher up,” Kincaid says from the passenger seat. “Now he’s trying to wake up some other poor motherfucker.”

“Well,” says Garvey, “a good police officer is never cold, tired, hungry or wet.”

The Patrolman’s Creed. Kincaid laughs, then jerks open the passenger door and pushes himself up and out to stretch his legs on the sidewalk. Two more minutes pass before one radio car, then another, then a third, pull behind the Cavalier. Three uniforms gather on the corner, conferring briefly with the detectives.

“Anybody here know where your DEU is today?” asks Garvey. It would help to have the district drug enforcement unit around in the event the raid produces dope for the simple, selfish reason that submitting narcotics to evidence control, even in small quantities, is a pain-in-the-ass process.

“Dispatch said they won’t be available,” says one officer, the first to arrive at the intersection. “Not for an hour or so.”

“Fuck it then,” says Garvey. “But that means somebody here is going to have to submit whatever drugs we find in there.”

“So let’s not find any,” says the first officer’s side partner.

“Well, I wanna take it if it’s there, just to have something on the guy,” says Garvey. “Normally, I wouldn’t care-”

“I’ll take the dope,” says the second patrolman. “I gotta run by headquarters anyway.”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” says a third uniform, smiling. “I don’t care what them other guys say about you.”

“Which house is it?” asks the first officer.

“Fifth house in. North side of the street.”

“Three-seven?”

“Yeah, one family in there. Mother, daughter and a young boy named Vincent. He’s the only one we might have to worry about.”

“Is he getting locked up?”

“No, but if he’s there, he’s going downtown. We’re here for search and seizure.”

“Gotcha.”

“Which one of you is taking the back of the house?” Garvey asks.

“I got the back.”

“Okay, then you two go in the front with us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s do it.”

And then the district men are back in their cars, wheeling around the corner and onto Fayette. The first car rolls around the block and into the back alley that leads to the rear of the rowhouse; the other two screech to a halt in front of the stoop, with the Cavalier in between. Garvey and Kincaid race the younger patrolmen up to the marble stoop.

If this were an arrest warrant, if Vincent Booker were now charged with the murders of his father and Lena Lucas, the detectives would be wearing their vests, their guns drawn, and the front door to Vincent’s home would be answered on the first knock or it would come down hard under a steel maul or patrolman’s boot. So, too, would the raid be an act of controlled violence if the warrant had been written by a narcotics detective. But at this moment there is no reason to think Vincent Booker will play the role of desperado. Nor is the evidence sought in this warrant likely to be swallowed or flushed down a toilet.

Loud knocking brings a young girl to the door.

“Police. Open up.”

“Who’s there?”

“Police officers. Open this door now.”

“What you want here?” asks the girl angrily, opening the door halfway. The first uniform pushes the door full open and a crowd rushes past the girl.

“Where’s Vincent?”

“Upstairs.”

The uniforms race up the center steps to meet a lanky, wide-eyed young man at the second-floor landing. Vincent Booker says nothing and takes the handcuffs without protest, as if he long ago readied himself for this moment.

“What you want to arrest him for?” shouts the girl. “You supposed to be arresting the man done killed his father.”

“Calm down,” says Garvey.

“Why you lockin’ him up?”

“Just take it easy. Where’s your mother?”

Kincaid gestures toward the middle room on the first floor. The matriarch of the Booker clan is a fragile, diminutive woman sitting in one corner of a worn, flower-print sofa. She is watching beautiful people coupling and uncoupling on a black-and-white television. Against the background noise of a soap opera, Garvey introduces himself, shows the warrant and explains that Vincent is going downtown.

“I don’t know nothing about all that,” she says, waving the paper away.

“This just says that we can search the house.”

“Why you want to search my house?”

“It’s here in the warrant.”

The woman shrugs. “I don’t see why you got to search my house for anything.”

Garvey gives up, leaving a target copy on an endtable. Upstairs, in Vincent Booker’s room, drawers are jerked open and mattresses upended. By now, Dave Brown, the primary on the Booker murder, has arrived, and the three detectives move slowly, methodically, through the room. Brown guts the boy’s dresser as Garvey begins pushing each ceiling tile upward, probing for any objects hidden above. Kincaid takes apart the closet, pausing only to leaf through a skin magazine hidden on the top shelf.

“This thing didn’t get much use,” says Kincaid, laughing. “Ain’t but a couple pages stuck together.”

They strike gold after a little less than fifteen minutes, lifting the box spring of the double bed and shoving it against the long wall to reveal a locked metal tackle box. Garvey and Brown begin scanning every key ring discovered in the search, looking for anything that might match the small padlock.

“This one here.”

“No, that’s too big.”

“How ’bout the brown one next to it?”

“Shit on this,” says Brown. “I’m about to open this bitch up with a thirty-eight bullet.”

Kincaid and Garvey laugh.

“Did he have any keys on him?”

“Those are them right here.”

“How ’bout this one?”

“No, try the silver one.”

The padlock slips open, and the tackle box comes apart to reveal several banded packages of glassine bags, a portable scale, some cash, a small amount of marijuana, a healthy collection of jackknives, and a plastic soap dish. Pried open carefully, the knives show not a sign of red-brown residue, but the soap dish opens to reveal a dozen or more.38-caliber rounds, most of them ass-backward wadcutters.

When the detectives are nearly ready to leave, Garvey takes the knives and the soap dish down to Mother Booker, who remains bathed in the blue-gray glow from the television.

“I just want you to see what we’re taking with us. So there’s no problem later.”

“What is that you got?”

“These knives,” says Garvey, “and these here in the dish are bullets.”

The woman briefly contemplates the contents of the plastic dish, glancing for a second or two at stubby lead lumps of the same sort used not a dozen blocks from here to murder her estranged husband, the father of her children. The same type of bullets that killed a mother of two in a rowhouse just around the corner.

“You takin’ those with you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

“Evidence.”

“Well,” asks the woman, returning her attention to the television, “he gonna get them back, ain’t he?”

The warrant for the Booker home has brought Garvey to within a step of turning two murders from red to black on D’Addario’s side of the board, but ironically, Vincent Booker-if he plays his cards right-is no longer the target of the last seventeen days of pursuit. Instead, he is the weakest link in Robert Frazier’s jerry-rigged story.

Straight legwork took them half the distance: Garvey and Kincaid have run down every element of Frazier’s statement and found, among other things, that the alibi of the dinner party wasn’t worth much. Frazier’s second girlfriend, Denise, the party’s hostess, was decidedly unwilling to go the distance for her man; she readily recalled that on the night of the murder, Frazier had left the party before eleven o’clock after an argument. She also said that Vincent Booker had come by the projects not once, but twice; the second time Frazier left with the boy and didn’t return until morning. Denise remembered this because she had slept alone that night, upset about the party. She had planned all week, buying lobster and Chesapeake blue crabs and corn on the cob. Frazier had ruined her evening.

Denise even volunteered that Frazier kept his.38 revolver at her Amity Street rowhouse and further appalled the detectives by mentioning that she hid the loaded weapon in her children’s toy box in the back bedroom. The gun wasn’t there now, she assured them; Frazier had come by and taken it a week ago, telling her that he was afraid she would be weak and give it to the police.

The detectives also learned that Frazier hadn’t shown up for work at the Sparrows Point plant on the morning after the murder, although he had claimed that he didn’t bother entering Lena’s open apartment door because he was already late for work that morning. Nor had Frazier carried through on his promise to bring in his.38. Garvey wondered why Frazier would even mention that he owned such a gun or, for that matter, why he would offer the police any story at all. Pop quiz: You’ve just killed two people and there is no physical evidence or witness that can link you directly to either crime. Do you: (A) Shut your mouth or (B) Visit the homicide unit and lie your ass off?

“The only answer,” mused Garvey as he typed the warrant for Vincent Booker’s house, “is that crime makes you stupid.”

Frazier’s story was further shattered by the arrival of one additional piece of evidence, a break that owed as much to luck as to legwork.

On the Sunday night of the murder, a sixteen-year-old high school student in the rowhouse next door to Lena Lucas had been staring out of her third-floor window, watching the traffic on Gilmor Street slow to a trickle in the late evening. At about 11:15-she was sure because she had been watching the local news for several minutes-the girl saw Lena and a tall, dark-skinned man wearing a brimmed cap walking from a red sports car parked on the other side of Gilmor Street. The couple walked toward her, toward Lena’s rowhouse, though the young girl couldn’t see much more than that because of the angle from her window. But she heard Lena’s front door close, and an hour later, through the common wall, she heard what sounded like a brief argument between a man and a woman. The noise sounded as if it was coming from below, perhaps from one of the apartments on the second floor of the adjacent house.

For a time, the girl told no one about what she had seen. And when she did finally speak, it was not to the police but to an employee at her school’s cafeteria who she happened to know was Lena’s sister. Upon hearing the story, the woman urged the young girl to call the police. But the witness was reluctant and so, the following day, the woman herself called the homicide unit. The young girl was named Romaine Jackson, and for all her fear, she needed only a little prodding to do the right thing. When the detectives showed her the array of six photographs, she hesitated for only a moment or two before picking out Robert Frazier. Then, after the young girl read and signed her statement, Rich Garvey drove her back to West Baltimore, letting her out of the Cavalier a block or two from Gilmor Street so that no one would see her with a detective. The following day, Garvey and Kincaid cruised the streets near Frazier’s Fayette Street home and found a red car similar to the one described by Romaine. It was registered to Frazier’s mother.

Even with the arrival of a living witness, however, Vincent Booker remained an open door, an escape hatch for Robert Frazier. As much as he was now convinced of Frazier’s guilt, Garvey had to admit that any good defense lawyer could take Vincent’s connections to the case and run wild in front of a city jury. Vincent was somehow involved-the.38 wadcutters in the soap dish made that clear-but as the killer, he simply didn’t add up.

For one thing, there were the nested clothes and the blade marks on the headboard above the bed in Lena’s room; the woman would not have undressed casually and stretched out on the bed for anyone but a lover. That played not to Vincent, but to Frazier. On the other hand, the same gun used to shoot Lena also killed Purnell Booker. What possible connection was there between Frazier and the father of a boy who sold Frazier’s cocaine? Why would anyone want to kill old man Booker? The man who killed Lena took cocaine from that bag of rice hidden in the bureau, but for what did he ransack Purnell Booker’s apartment?

Vincent is the key, and Garvey, looking at the boy beneath the barren white light of the large interrogation room, doesn’t see someone capable of the act. No way did this kid do what was done to his father. Murder, maybe. But not the dozen or more superficial blade wounds to the old man’s face. Even if Vincent could manage something like that with Lena, Garvey is certain that the kid doesn’t have ice enough in his veins to conduct a prolonged torture of his father. Few people do.

Vincent has been stewing in the cubicle for more than an hour when Garvey and Kincaid finally walk into the room and begin the monologue. Wadcutters in the soap dish, drug paraphernalia, jackknives, and your man Frazier’s putting you in for both these murders. Deep shit, Vincent, deep shit. Five minutes of this talk produce the desired level of fear, ten minutes produce a completed rights form, signed and witnessed.

The detectives carry the form out of the room and confer briefly in the hall.

“Hey, Rich.”

“Hmm?”

“That boy don’t stand a chance,” says Kincaid in a stage whisper. “You’re wearing your power suit.”

“That’s right. I am.”

Kincaid laughs.

“The dark blue pinstripe,” says Garvey, lifting one lapel. “He won’t know what the fuck hit him.”

Kincaid shakes his head and gives Garvey’s attire a last look. A Kentucky native, Donald Kincaid addresses the world in a loud, backwoods drawl and sports a tattoo of his initials above his left wrist. Garvey plays golf at Hilton Head and speaks of power suits; Kincaid trains hunting dogs and dreams of deer season in West Virginia. Same squad, different world.

“You want to have a go at him alone?” asks Kincaid as the two move back toward the interrogation room.

“Nah,” says Garvey, “we’ll gang-bang him.”

Vincent Booker waits for the second round with his back against the near wall, his hands cupped in the folds of his sweatshirt. Kincaid takes the far seat, facing the kid. Garvey sits between the two, closer to Vincent’s end of the table.

“Son, lemme tell you something,” says Garvey in a tone that suggests the interrogation is already over. “You have one shot here. You can tell us what you know about these murders and we’ll see what we can do. I know you’re involved in some way, but I don’t know how much, and the thing for you to think about is whether you want to become a witness or a defendant.”

Vincent says nothing.

“Are you listening to me, Vincent? You better start thinking about every fucking thing I’m saying here because a lot of shit is going to be coming down.”

Silence.

“Are you worried about Frazier? Listen to me, son, you better start worrying about yourself. Frazier’s been in here already. He’s trying to fuck you. He’s telling us about you.”

That gets it. Vincent looks up. “What’s Frazier sayin’?”

“What do you think?” says Kincaid. “He’s trying to put you in for these murders.”

“I didn’t…”

“Vincent, I don’t believe this motherfucker Frazier,” says Garvey. “Even if you’re involved in one or the other, I don’t believe you killed your father.”

Garvey pushes his chair closer to Vincent’s corner of the room and drops his voice to little more than a whisper. “Look, son, I’m just trying to give you a chance on this. But you’ve got to tell us the truth now and we’ll see what we can do with that. You can be at the defense table, or you can be on the prosecution side. That’s what we can do. We do a few favors now and then and we’re doing you one right now. Are you smart enough to see that?”

Probably not, thinks Garvey. And so the two detectives begin to lay it out to young Vincent Booker. They remind him that his father and Lena were both shot with the same kind of ammunition, that both murder scenes are identical. They explain that right now, he’s the only suspect who was known to both victims. After all, they ask him, what was your father to Robert Frazier?

At this, the boy looks up, puzzled, and Garvey stops talking long enough to reduce this abstraction to paper. On the back of a lined statement sheet, he draws one circle on the left-hand side of the page, then writes “Lena” inside the circle. On the right-hand side he draws a second circle with “Purnell Booker” written inside. Garvey then draws a third circle that intersects the circles of the two victims. Inside that third circle he writes “Vincent.” It’s a crude little creation, something any algebra teacher would know as a Venn Diagram, but it gets Garvey’s point across.

“This is our case. Look at it,” he says, pushing the sheet in front of the boy. “Lena and your father are killed by the same gun, and right now the only person who has any connection to both of the victims is Vincent Booker. You’re right in the fuckin’ middle of this thing. You think about that.”

Vincent says nothing and the two detectives leave the room long enough to allow the geometry to sink in. Garvey lights a cigarette and watches through the one-way window in the door as Vincent holds the crudely drawn diagram to his face and traces the three circles with his finger. Garvey shakes his head, watching Vincent turn the diagram upside down, then right side up, then upside down again.

“Look at this fuckin’ Einstein in here, will you?” he says to Kincaid. “He’s about the dumbest motherfucker I ever seen.”

“You ready?” says Kincaid.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Vincent doesn’t look up from the diagram when the door opens, but his body gives an involuntary shake when Garvey enters and immediately begins another rant, his voice louder this time. Vincent can no longer manage eye contact; he grows smaller, more vulnerable with each accusation, a bleeder in the corner of the shark tank. Garvey sees his opening.

“You’ve got a knot in your fuckin’ stomach, don’t you?” Garvey asks abruptly. “You’re feeling like you’re going to be sick. I’ve seen a hundred or so just like that in here.”

“I seen ’em throw up,” says Kincaid. “You ain’t gonna throw up in here, are you?”

“No,” says Vincent, shaking his head. He is sweating now, one hand clutching the end of the table, the other wrapped tight in the hem of his sweatshirt. Part of the sickness is the fear of being pegged for two murders; part is the fear of Robert Frazier. But the greater share of what’s holding Vincent Booker on the precipice is a fear of his own family. Right here and now, Garvey can look at Vincent Booker and know, with even greater certainty than before, that there is no way this boy killed his father. He doesn’t have that in him. Yet the bullets connect him to the crime, and his rapid reduction to a speechless wreck in less than an hour of interrogation testifies to guilty knowledge. Vincent Booker is no killer, but he played a role in the death of his father, or at the very least, he knew the murderer and said nothing. Either way, there is something that cannot be faced.

Sensing that the boy needs one more good shove, Garvey walks out of the interrogation room and grabs the plastic soap dish from Vincent’s bedroom.

“Gimme one of these,” he says, taking a.38 cartridge from the dish. “This motherfucker needs some show-and-tell.”

Garvey walks back into the cubicle and deposits the.38 round in Kincaid’s left hand. The older detective needs no further prompting; he stands the round on its end in the center of the table.

“See this here bullet?” Kincaid asks.

Vincent looks at the cartridge.

“This isn’t your ordinary thirty-eight ammunition, is it? Now we can get them to type this for us at the FBI lab, and it usually takes ’em two or three months, but on a rush job they can have it back in two days. And they’re gonna be able to tell us which box of fifty this bullet came from,” says Kincaid, pushing the round slowly toward the boy. “So, you tell me, is it going to be just coincidence if the FBI says this bullet comes from the same box as the one that killed your daddy and Lena both? You tell me.”

Vincent looks away, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. A perfect deceit: even if the FBI could narrow the.38 ammunition to the same manufacturer’s lot number of a couple hundred thousand boxes or more, the process would probably take half a year.

“We’re just trying to lay it out for you, son,” says Garvey. “What do you think a judge is going to do with evidence like that?”

The boy is silent.

“Death penalty case, Vincent.”

“And I’m gonna be the one to testify,” adds Kincaid in his Kentucky drawl, “ ’cause that’s my thing.”

“Death penalty?” asks Vincent, startled.

“No contest,” says Kincaid.

“Honest, son, if you’re lying to us…”

“Even if we let you leave here today,” says Kincaid, “you’ll never know the next time there’s a knock on your door whether it’s us coming back to lock you up.”

“And we will come back,” says Garvey, pulling his chair closer to Vincent. Wordlessly, he brings himself face-to-face with the boy, leaning forward until their eyes are less than a foot apart. Then, softly, he begins describing the murder of Purnell Booker. An argument, a brief struggle, perhaps, then the wounds. Garvey moves closer still to Vincent Booker and tells of the twenty or so blade wounds to the face; as he does so, he taps the boy’s cheek lightly with his finger.

Vincent Booker sickens visibly.

“Get this off your chest, son,” says Garvey. “What do you know about these murders?”

“I gave the bullets to Frazier.”

“You gave him bullets?”

“He asked me for bullets… I gave him six.”

The boy comes close to crying but quickly steadies himself, resting both elbows on the table and hiding his face behind his hands. “Why did Frazier ask for bullets?”

Vincent shrugs.

“Dammit, Vincent.”

“I didn’t…”

“You’re holdin’ back.”

“I…”

“Get it off your chest, son. We’re trying to help you to start over here. This’ll be the only chance you’re going to have to start over.”

Vincent Booker breaks.

“My daddy…” he says.

“Why would Frazier kill your father?”

First he tells them about the drugs, the packaged cocaine that was in his room at his mother’s house, ready for street sale. Then he tells about his father finding the dope and taking it away. He tells them about the argument, about how his father wouldn’t listen and drove off to his apartment on Lafayette Avenue with the cocaine in the car. Vincent’s cocaine. Frazier’s cocaine.

He tells them about how he went to Denise’s house on Amity Street to tell Frazier, to admit that he’d fucked up, to reveal that his father had stolen their dope. Frazier listened angrily, then asked for bullets, and Vincent, afraid to refuse, gave him six wadcutters that he had taken from the tobacco can on top of the bureau in his father’s apartment. Frazier went alone to Lafayette Avenue, Vincent tells them.

He expected his father would be threatened, he tells them, just as he expected that Frazier would get back the drugs. He did not expect a murder, he says, and he does not know what happened at his father’s apartment.

Shit on that, Garvey thinks as he listens to the story. We know damned well what happened. I know it, you know it, Kincaid here knows it. Robert Frazier showed up at your daddy’s house wired tight on cocaine from Denise’s party, armed with a loaded.38 and a short blade and desirous of some missing drugs. Your daddy must have told Frazier to go to hell.

That scenario explained the ransacking of Purnell Booker’s apartment as well as the repeated superficial stab wounds to the old man’s face. The torture was inflicted to make Purnell Booker talk; the ransacking suggested he didn’t.

But why kill Lena that same night? And in the same way? Vincent claims no knowledge of that murder, and from everything he’s learned, Garvey has no idea either. Maybe Frazier was led to believe that Lena was somehow involved in the missing drugs. Maybe she was dipping into some of the dope Frazier kept on Gilmor Street. Maybe she answered the door saying something Frazier didn’t particularly like. Maybe the cocaine rush got good to Frazier and he just kept on killing. Maybe A and B, or B and C, or all of the above. Does it matter? Not to me, thinks Garvey. Not anymore.

“You were there, weren’t you, Vincent? You went with Frazier to your father’s.”

Vincent shakes his head and looks away.

“I’m not saying you were involved in the murder, but you went there, didn’t you?”

“No,” the boy says, “I just gave him those bullets.”

Bullshit, thinks Garvey. You were there when Robert Frazier killed your father. Why else would this be so hard? It’s one thing to live in fear of a man like Frazier, another to be afraid of telling the truth to your own family. Garvey pushes the boy for a half hour or more, but it’s no use; Vincent Booker has come as close to the cliff as he dares. It is, Garvey reasons, close enough.

“If you’re holding out on us, Vincent…”

“No, I ain’t.”

“ ’Cause you will go before a grand jury, and if you lie to them, it’ll be the worst mistake you ever make.”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Now I’m gonna write this up and have you sign it as a statement,” says Garvey. “We’re gonna start at the beginning and go slow so I can write this down.”

“Yes sir.”

“What is your name?”

“Vincent Booker.”

“Your date of birth…”

The official version, short and sweet. Garvey exhales softly and puts pen to paper.

With his right hand, Garvey pulls the.38 from his waist holster and drops it down against his trouser leg, shielding it from view.

“Frazier, open up.”

The uniform closest to the detective motions toward the front door of the Amity Street rowhouse.

“Kick it?” he asks.

Garvey shakes his head. No need. “Frazier, open the door.”

“Who is it?”

“Detective Garvey. I got to ask you a couple questions.”

“Now?” says a voice behind the door. “I got to-”

“Yeah, now. Open the damn door.”

The door opens halfway and Garvey slips through, the gun still tight against his thigh.

“What’s up,” says Frazier, stepping back.

Suddenly, Garvey brings the snubnose up to the left side of the man’s face. Frazier looks at the black hole of the barrel, then back at Garvey strangely, squinting through a cocaine haze.

“Get the fuck up against that wall.”

“Wha…”

“MOVE, MOTHERFUCKER. AGAINST THAT FUCKING WALL BEFORE I BLOW YOUR FUCKIN’ HEAD OFF.”

Kincaid and two uniforms follow Garvey through the opening as Frazier is shoved roughly against a living room wall. Kincaid and the younger uniform check the back rooms as the older patrolman, a veteran of the Western, cocks his own weapon against Frazier’s right ear.

“Move,” says the uniform, “and your brains are on the floor.”

Christ, thinks Garvey, staring at the cocked weapon, if that bad boy goes off we’ll all be writing reports for the rest of our careers. But the threat works: Frazier stops bucking and leans into the plasterboard. The uniform uncocks and reholsters his.38 and Garvey once again begins to breathe air.

“What’s this about?” says Frazier, working hard to approximate a picture of innocent confusion.

“What do you think it’s about?”

Frazier says nothing.

“What do you think, Frazier?”

“I don’t know.”

“Murder. You’re charged with murder.”

“Who’d I murder?”

Garvey smiles. “You killed Lena. And the old man, Booker.”

Frazier shakes his head violently as Howe opens one ring of his handcuffs and pulls Frazier’s right arm off the wall. Suddenly, at the first touch of the metal bracelet, Frazier begins to buck again, pushing away from the wall and pulling his arm away from Howe. With surprising speed, Garvey moves a step and a half across the living room and lands a punch hard against Frazier’s face.

The suspect looks up, stunned.

“What was that for?” he asks Garvey.

For a second or two, Garvey lets himself think about the question. The official answer, the one required for the reports, is that this detective was required to subdue a homicide suspect who attempted to resist arrest. The righteous answer, the one that is soon lost to any detective with time on the street, is that the suspect was struck because he is a cold-blooded piece of shit, a murderous bastard who in a single evening took the lives of an old man and a mother of two. But Garvey’s own answer falls somewhere in between.

“That,” he tells Frazier, “is for lying to me, motherfucker.” Lying. To a detective. In the first degree.

Frazier says nothing more, offering no resistance as Howe and Kincaid guide him to the sofa, where he sits with his hands cuffed behind him. On the off chance that Frazier’s.38 might be lying around, the detectives do a quick, plain-view search of the apartment. The murder weapon remains unaccounted for, but on the kitchen table is a night’s work for Robert Frazier: a small amount of rock cocaine, quinine cut, a couple dozen glassine bags, three syringes.

The detectives look at the uniforms and the uniforms look at each other.

“You guys want to take it?” asks the younger uniform.

“Nah,” says Garvey. “We’re charging him with two murders. Besides, we don’t have a warrant for this place.”

“Hey,” says the patrolman, “fine by me.”

They leave it on the kitchen table, a West Baltimore still life waiting for the successor to Frazier’s squalid, street-corner business. Garvey walks back into the living room and asks the younger uniform to radio for a wagon. Frazier finds his voice again.

“Officer Garvey, I didn’t lie to you.”

Garvey smiles.

“You ain’t never told the truth,” says Kincaid. “You ain’t got the truth in you.”

“I ain’t lyin’.”

“Sheeeet,” says Kincaid, pushing the word to two and a half syllables. “You ain’t got the truth in you, son.”

“Hey, Frazier,” says Garvey, smiling, “remember how you promised to bring me that thirty-eight? What ever happened to that gun anyway?”

“That’s right,” says Kincaid, picking up on it. “If you’re so fuckin’ honest, how come you never brought that gun in for us?”

Frazier says nothing.

“You ain’t got the truth in you, son,” says Kincaid again. “No sir. It ain’t in you.”

Frazier simply shakes his head, seeming to gather his thoughts for a moment or two. Then he looks up at Garvey, genuinely curious. “Officer Garvey,” he asks, “am I the only one charged?”

The only one. If ever Garvey wondered whether Vincent Booker had anything to do with these murders, that utterance alone was enough to answer the question.

“Yeah, Frazier. You’re it.”

Vincent was involved, no doubt about it. But Vincent wasn’t the triggerman-not for Lena, not for his father. And in the end, it was a hell of a lot better to keep Vincent Booker as a witness than give him a charge and let Frazier use him in front of a jury. Garvey saw no point in providing Frazier’s attorney with an alternative suspect, a living, breathing piece of reasonable doubt. No, thought Garvey, for once they had told the truth in the interrogation room: You can either be a witness or a suspect, Vincent. One or the other.

Vincent Booker gave it up-or at least gave as much of it as he dared-and went home as a result. Robert Frazier lied his ass off and now he’s going to the Western District lockup. In Garvey’s mind, there is a certain symmetry to all this.

At the booking desk of the Western, the contents of Frazier’s pockets are arrayed on the counter, then catalogued by the desk sergeant. From a front pocket comes a thick roll of drug money.

“Christ,” says the sergeant, “there’s more than fifteen hundred dollars here.”

“Big fuckin’ deal,” says Garvey. “I make that in a week.”

Kincaid shoots Garvey a look. The governor, the mayor and half of the British royal family would have to be bludgeoned to death in the men’s room of the Fayette Street bus station before a Baltimore detective would see that kind of money. The desk sergeant understands.

“Yeah,” he tells Garvey, loud enough for Frazier to hear. “And you didn’t have to sell no dope for your paycheck, did you?”

Garvey nods.

“Officer Garvey…”

“Hey, Donald,” says Garvey to Kincaid. “How ’bout I buy you a beer.”

“Officer Garvey…”

“I might just have one tonight,” says Kincaid. “I might just take you up on that.”

“Officer Garvey, I ain’t lied to you.”

Garvey wheels around, but the turnkey is leading Frazier toward the rear cage door of the Western lockup.

“Officer Garvey, I ain’t lied.”

Garvey looks impassively at his suspect. “Bye, Frazier. See you ’round.”

For a few moments, Robert Frazier is framed by the cage door, waiting at the edge of the lockup as the turnkey prepares a fingerprint card. Garvey finishes playing with the paperwork on the booking desk and walks toward the back door of the station house. He glides past the lockup without looking inside, and so doesn’t see the final, unmistakable expression on Robert Frazier’s face.

Pure, murderous hate.