Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

FIVE

A detective’s prayer: Blessed be the truly unwise, for they bring hope to those obligated to pursue them. Blessed be those of dim understanding, for by their very ignorance they bring light to those who labor in darkness. Blessed be Dennis Wahls, for though he believes otherwise, he is cooperating fully in the campaign to put him in prison for the month-old murder of Karen Renee Smith, the cab driver beaten to death in Northwest Baltimore.

“This house right here?” says Eddie Brown.

“Next one.”

Brown nods and Wahls tries to open the back door of the Cavalier. The detective, sitting next to him in the rear seat, reaches over and pulls the door shut. Harris, one of the officers assigned to the Northwest detail, walks from his own car to Brown’s window.

“We’ll stay here,” says Brown. “You and Sergeant Nolan go up and get him to come out.”

Harris nods, then walks with Roger Nolan to the front of the red brick building. The Madison Avenue address is a downtown group home for those charged with delinquency, which in Baltimore means anything up to and including armed robbery and manslaughter. Inside that home is Dennis Wahls’s younger brother, on whose person is a wristwatch that belonged to Karen Smith.

“How do you know he still has the watch?” asks Brown as he watches Nolan and the detail officer make their way up the front steps.

“I saw him yesterday and he had it then,” says Wahls.

Thank God, thinks Brown. Thank God they’re so stupid. If they were smart, if they regarded murder as a secret and heinous act, if they told no one, if they got rid of the clothing and the weapon and the possessions taken from the victim, if they refused to listen to bullshit in the interrogation rooms, what the hell would a detective do?

“This is giving me a headache,” says Wahls.

Brown nods.

“I’m going to need a lift home after we get finished with this.”

A lift home. This kid actually thinks he’s going to go home and sleep it off, as if it were some kind of hangover. O.B. McCarter, another detail officer from the Southwest, bites his tongue in the driver’s seat, trying hard not to laugh.

“You think you all could get me a lift home?”

“We’ll see what happens,” says Brown.

What happens is this: The younger brother of Dennis Wahls, a fourteen-year-old urchin with twice the sense of his sibling, comes out of the group home and is escorted to the side of the Chevrolet. He looks into the car, looks at his brother, looks at Eddie Brown and manages to assess the situation for what it really is. He nods.

“Hey,” says Dennis Wahls.

“Hey,” says his brother.

“I told them about the watch-”

“What watch?”

“Hey,” Brown interrupts. “Your ass is going to be in this if you don’t listen to your brother.”

“Man, c’mon,” says Dennis Wahls. “You got to give it up. They gonna let me go if you give it to him. If you don’t, they gonna put a murder charge on me.”

“Hmm,” says the kid, obviously wondering how this can be. If they don’t get the evidence, they charge you, but if they get the evidence, you go free. Yeah. Right.

“Go on,” says Roger Nolan, standing beside the car.

The boy looks at his brother. Dennis Wahls nods and the young boy races back into the red brick building, returning three minutes later with a woman’s timepiece on a black leather band. The boy tries to hand the watch to his brother, but Brown interjects his own hand. The boy takes a step away from the car.

“See you soon, yo,” says Dennis Wahls.

The boy nods again.

They proceed to Reservoir Hill, where the two cars pull to the curb outside the Section 8 housing on Lennox Avenue. Again Brown and Wahls wait in the Cavalier; this time, Nolan pays a visit to Wahls’s young girlfriend, who received a gift of Karen Smith’s gold necklace.

In the driver’s seat, McCarter plays with the radio. Eddie Brown, still in the back seat with his prisoner, watches Nolan bullshitting with the girlfriend’s mother in the project parking lot. When Nolan gets wound up, he can talk your ear off.

“C’mon, Roger,” mutters Brown. “What the fuck are you doing there anyway?”

A minute or two more and the girl returns from her apartment with the jewelry, walking across the lot to Nolan waving nervously at Wahls, who is peering out the rear passenger window.

“Man, I wish she hadn’t seen me like this.”

The detective grunts.

“Her momma’s gonna be upset with me now.”

McCarter pushes the radio buttons until rock ’n’ roll spills out in a crackling AM static: the Bobby Fuller Four from about a dozen years back. The detail officer listens to the song for a moment; suddenly, he’s dying in the front seat, trying hard not to laugh aloud.

“Oh man,” says McCarter.

“Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun…”

McCarter starts snapping two fingers, mugging for Brown and Harris, who is standing at the driver’s window.

“… I fought the law and the law won.”

Brown steals a look at Wahls, but the kid is oblivious.

“Robbin’ people with a six-gun…”

McCarter keeps time on the steering wheel.

“… I fought the law and the law won.”

“Can you believe it?” says McCarter.

“Believe what?” asks Wahls.

McCarter shakes his head. On the night when he has greatest need of a functioning mind, Dennis Wahls is suddenly struck deaf, dumb and blind. The radio could be playing back his own confession and he wouldn’t notice.

Which is not to say that Wahls, at the age of nineteen, has a deep reservoir of intelligence from which to draw. First of all, he let some other brain-dead talk him into killing a woman cabbie for a few dollars and some jewelry, and then he settled for the jewelry, letting his partner keep the cash. Next, he gave away the jewelry and began bragging about being right there when the woman was pulled into the woods and beaten to death. He didn’t kill her, no sir. He watched.

The first few people within earshot didn’t believe it; either that or they didn’t much care. But eventually some young thing that Dennis Wahls tried hard to impress went to school and told a friend, who told someone else, who finally decided that maybe some sort of authority figure ought to hear about it. And when line 2100 lit up in the homicide unit, Rick James was there to take the call.

“I did one thing right in this whole investigation,” James, the primary for the Smith murder, will later declare. “I picked up the phone.”

In truth, he did a lot more than that. With the detail officers to help him, James ran down every lead that came in, checking and rechecking the stories provided by Karen Smith’s coworkers, boyfriends and relatives. He spent days going over the cab company’s service logs, looking for fares or locations that seemed out of the ordinary. He sat at his desk for hours, listening to tapes of the cab dispatcher’s calls, trying to pick up a location where Karen Smith may have gone before she disappeared into the woods of Northwest Baltimore. He checked every recent robbery or assault report involving a taxi driver anywhere in the city or county, as well as the robbery reports from anywhere close to the Northwest. When he found out that one of the victim’s boyfriends had a cocaine habit, he went at him hard in a series of interviews. The alibi was checked. The boyfriend’s acquaintances were all interviewed. Then they brought the man downtown and went at him again: Things weren’t so good between you two, right? She made a lot of money, didn’t she? You spend a lot of money, don’t you?

Even Donald Worden, as harsh a judge of the younger detectives as any, was impressed with his partner’s effort.

“James is learning,” Worden said, watching the case from a distance, “what it means to be a detective.”

Rick James did everything conceivable to solve the case, yet when the phone finally rang, the two binders of office reports from the cabbie killing contained not a single mention of Dennis Frank Wahls. Nor was Clinton Butler, the twenty-two-year-old wonder who conceived the slaying and struck the fatal blow, a name in the file. There was nothing new to that kind of twist, no lesson to be learned by the detective. It was merely a textbook example of Rule Five in the homicide lexicon, which states:

It’s good to be good; it’s better to be lucky.

James was actually on his way to the airport, waiting for a morning flight and a week’s vacation, when detectives finally located Wahls and brought him downtown. Wahls gave up the murder in little more than an hour of interrogation, during which Eddie Brown and two detail officers offered him the most obvious out. You didn’t hit her; Clinton did, they assured him, and Wahls went for the whole apple. No sir, he didn’t even want to do the robbery. That was Clinton’s idea, and Clinton called him names when he didn’t initially agree. He didn’t even get any of the money; Clinton took that, arguing that he was the one who had done all the work, leaving Wahls only the jewelry. After she fainted from fear, it was Clinton who dragged the cabbie out of her taxi and down the wooded path, Clinton who found the tree branch, Clinton who challenged him to do it, then teased him when he did not. So it was Clinton Butler who finally smashed the wooden limb against the woman’s head.

In the end, the only thing that Wahls would admit was that it was he, not Clinton, who pulled off the woman’s pants and attempted oral sex with their unconscious victim. Clinton was homosexual, Wahls assured the detectives. He didn’t want none of that.

When Wahls had signed and initialed the statement, the detectives asked about the jewelry. We believe what you’re telling us, Brown said, but we need a show of good faith. Something that proves you’re telling us the truth. And Wahls nodded his understanding, suddenly confident that the return of the dead woman’s watch and necklace would buy his freedom.

Solved by chance rather than perseverance, the Karen Smith case was as much a message for Tom Pellegrini as anything else. Just as he was replaying the Latonya Wallace murder in his mind like a tape loop, James had lost himself in the details of the cabbie slaying. And to what end? Sweat and logic can solve a case in those precious days that follow a murder, but after that, who the hell knows? Sometimes a late phone call can break a case. Sometimes a fresh connection to another crime-a ballistics match or print hit-can change the outcome. More often, however, a case that stays open a month will stay open forever. Of the six female slayings that provoked the department brass to create the Northwest detail, the Karen Smith case would be only one of two to end in arrest and the only case to reach trial. By the end of March, the detail officers in the other five cases had returned to their districts; the case files were back in the cabinets-a little thicker than before, perhaps, but no better for all the effort.

But Pellegrini has no time for any lesson offered by the Northwest cases. He spends the night of Dennis Wahls’s confession handling shooting calls and rereading portions of the Latonya Wallace office reports. In fact, he is out on a call when they bring Wahls back into the homicide unit and begin typing the warrant for Clinton Butler. And he is long gone in the early hours of the morning when Eddie Brown, flush with the victory, sends the recovered jewelry down to the ECU and offers up for bid the opportunity to tell Dennis Wahls that he, too, will be charged with first-degree murder.

“Hey,” says Brown, standing at the interrogation room door, “someone’s got to go in there and tell this fool he ain’t leaving. He’s still asking about a ride home.”

“Let me do it,” says McCarter, smiling.

“Go ’head.”

McCarter walks into the large interrogation room and closes the door. From the wire mesh window, the scene becomes a perfect pantomime: McCarter’s mouth moving, his hands on his hips. Wahls, shaking his head, crying, pleading. McCarter waving one arm in the air, reaching for the door handle, smiling, turning back into the hallway.

“Ignorant motherfucker,” he says, closing the door behind him.

Two months after the murder of Latonya Wallace, only Tom Pellegrini remains.

Harry Edgerton, the secondary investigator, left to help Bertina Silver pursue another interrogation of his best suspect in the January murder of Brenda Thompson, the woman found stabbed in the car on Garrison Boulevard. Eddie Brown was swallowed up by the sudden break in the Karen Smith case and has now moved on to fresh murders. And Jay Landsman, as much an investigator on the Latonya Wallace murder as any of them, he’s gone too. No one expected otherwise: Landsman has a squad to run, and come the next three weeks of nightwork, all of his detectives are working a fresh spate of murders.

The detail men are also gone, back to the tactical section or to the district commanders who loaned them to homicide for the murder of a little girl. First the tac units were sent down, then the youth section detectives, then the Central men, and then, finally, the two plainclothesmen on loan from Southern District operations. Slowly, inexorably, the Latonya Wallace investigation has become the exclusive preserve of one detective.

Beached by the ebbing tide, Pellegrini sits at his desk in the annex office, surrounded by three cardboard crates of office reports and photographs, lab examinations and witness statements. Against the wall behind his desk is the bulletin board that the men on the detail created but never found the time to hang on a wall. Pinned to its center is the best and most recent photograph of the child. On the left is Edgerton’s rooftop diagram of Newington Avenue. On the right, a map of the Reservoir Hill area and a series of aerial photographs taken from the police helicopter.

On this dayshift as on two dozen others, Pellegrini moves slowly through one of the bound case folders, reading reports that are weeks old, searching for any loose fragment of information that he failed to digest the first time around. Some of the reports are his own, others are signed by Edgerton or Eddie Brown, Landsman or the detail men. That’s the trouble with the red-ball treatment, Pellegrini tells himself, scanning one typewritten page after another. By virtue of their importance, red balls have the potential to become David O. Selznick productions, four-star departmental clusterfucks beyond the control of any single investigator. From almost the moment the body was found, the Latonya Wallace case became the property of the entire police department, until door-to-door canvasses were being done by patrolmen and witness statements were being taken by detail officers with no more than a few days’ experience in death investigation. Knowledge of the case file was soon scattered among two dozen people.

On one level, Pellegrini accepts the logic of unlimited manpower. In the weeks after the little girl’s murder, the red-ball express made it possible to cover the longest piece of ground in the shortest stretch of time. By the end of February, the men on the detail had twice canvassed a three-block radius from the crime scene, had interviewed nearly two hundred people, had executed warrants for three addresses and had done walkthrough consent searches in every rowhouse on the north side of Newington Avenue. But now, the paperwork from that massive campaign has congealed on Pellegrini’s desk. The witness statements alone fill one file, while information about the Fish Man-still the best suspect-is relegated to a manila folder all its own.

Leaning forward in his chair, Pellegrini looks through the scene photos for what must be the three hundredth time. The same child stares out across the rainy pavement with that same lost look. Her arm is still extended in that same reaching motion, palm open, fingers slightly curled.

For Tom Pellegrini, the 3-by-5 color shots no longer produce anything that remotely resembles an emotion. In fact, he concedes to himself, they never really did. In some strange way that only a homicide detective can understand, Pellegrini psychologically stepped away from his victim at the very outset. It was not a conscious decision; it was more the absence of a decision. In some elemental, almost preordained way, the switch in his mind was thrown when he walked into that yard behind Newington Avenue.

The detachment came naturally enough, and Pellegrini still has no reason to question it. If he did, the easy answer would be that a detective can only function properly by accepting the most appalling tragedies on a clinical level. On that basis, the sight of a young child sprawled across the pavement-her torso gutted, her neck contorted-becomes, after an initial moment of shock, a matter of evidence. A good investigator, leaning over a fresh obscenity, doesn’t waste time and effort battering himself with theological questions about the nature of evil and man’s inhumanity to man. He wonders instead whether the jagged wound pattern is the result of a serrated blade, or whether the discoloration on the underside of the leg is indeed an indication of lividity.

On the surface, that professional ethos is part of what keeps any detective from the horror, but Pellegrini knows there is something more to it, something that has to do with the act of bearing witness. After all, he never knew the little girl. He never knew her family. Most important, perhaps, he never really felt their loss. On the day the body was found, Pellegrini left the crime scene to go directly to the ME’s offices, where the autopsy of a little girl demanded the most clinical kind of mind-set. It was Edgerton who told the mother, who watched the family suddenly dissolve in anguish, who represented the homicide unit at the funeral. Since then, Pellegrini had spoken to members of the Wallace family on occasion, but only about details. At those moments, the survivors were both helpful and numb, their pain no longer apparent to a visiting detective. That Pellegrini had not borne witness to their grief somehow kept him from truly seeing the photographs in front of him.

And maybe, Pellegrini concedes, maybe there was distance because he was white and the little girl was black. It made the slaying no less a crime, Pellegrini knew, but it was in some way a crime of the city, of Reservoir Hill’s ghetto, of a world to which he had no ties. Pellegrini could try to make himself believe that Latonya Wallace could have been his little girl, or Landsman’s, or McLarney’s, but the distinctions of race and class were always there, unspoken but acknowledged. Hell, for the past year and a half Pellegrini has listened to his sergeant say as much at dozens of ghetto crime scenes.

“Hey, it don’t matter to me,” Landsman would tell the locals when witnesses refused to come forward. “I don’t live around here.”

Well, it was true; Pellegrini didn’t live in Reservoir Hill. Given that distance, he can tell himself that as an investigator, his interest is limited to that of the technician. From that view, the death of Latonya Wallace is nothing more or less than a crime, a singular event that with two beers and a warm dinner will seem a universe away from a brick ranch house, a wife and two children in the Anne Arundel suburbs south of the city.

Once, talking with Eddie Brown about the case, Pellegrini actually caught hold of his own detachment. He and Brown had been bouncing theories back and forth when the strangest word slipped out, falling like a brick on the conversation.

“She had to know this guy in the first place, we know that much. I think this broad…”

This broad. Pellegrini stopped almost immediately, then began searching for some other word.

“… this girl let her killer take her off the street because she knew him from somewhere else.”

Pellegrini’s sergeant was no different, of course. When one of the detail officers was looking at scene photos and asking questions, Landsman suddenly slipped into his standard deadpan.

“Who found her?” the detail officer asked.

“Post officer from the Central.”

“Did the guy rape her?”

“The officer?” asked Landsman, feigning confusion. “Um, I don’t think so. Maybe. We didn’t ask him ’cause we figured the guy who killed her did that.”

In any other world, the comedy would be appalling. But this is the annex office of CID homicide in the city of Baltimore, where everyone-Pellegrini included-manages to laugh at the cruelest kind of humor.

In his heart, Pellegrini knows that solving the Latonya Wallace case will not be a response to the death of a young girl as much as a matter of personal vindication. His obsession is not with the victim but with the victimizer. A child-any child-had been murdered on a February dayshift and, as the man who took the call, Pellegrini accepted the murder as a professional challenge. If the Latonya Wallace case goes down, then a child-killer has been beaten. The alibis, the deceit, the hiding-all of it means nothing at the point of arrest. At the sweet instant that those metal bracelets click, Pellegrini will know he has truly arrived, that he is-like any other man in that unit-worth a detective’s shield and 120 hours of paid overtime. But if the case stays open, if somewhere in this world the killer lives to know he has beaten the detective, then Pellegrini will never be quite the same. Watching him sink into the case files day after day, the other men in the unit know that.

For the first month of the investigation, he had come as close to working around the clock as possible: sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes he left for work with the sudden awareness that for several days running, he had come home only to sleep and shower, that he hadn’t really spoken to his wife or enjoyed the new baby. Christopher had been born in December, the second son in three years, but Pellegrini had done little to help with the child in the last two months. He felt guilty about that, but a little bit relieved as well. At least the infant kept his wife occupied; Brenda had every right to insist on something more than an absentee husband, but so far, between feedings and diapers and everything else, little had been said.

His wife knew he was working the Latonya Wallace case, and somehow, in a year’s time, she had accustomed herself to a detective’s hours. In fact, the whole household seemed to revolve around the little girl. Once, as Pellegrini was walking out the door on a Saturday morning, heading downtown for the third consecutive weekend, his older boy ran up to him.

“Play with me,” Michael said.

“I have to go to work.”

“You’re working on Latonya Wallace,” the three-year-old said.

By the middle of March, Pellegrini saw his health begin to suffer. He coughed in fits: a deep, rasping hack, worse than his usual smoker’s wheeze, and it stayed with him through the day. At first he blamed the cigarettes; later, he complained about the aging ventilation system in the headquarters building. The other detectives were quick to join in: Never mind the cigarettes, they told him, the asbestos fibers set loose by cracking acoustic tile were enough to kill a man.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” Garvey told him after one morning roll call. “I hear that cancer you get from breathing asbestos is slow and lingering. You’ll have plenty of time to work the case.”

Pellegrini tried to laugh, but a thin wheeze gave way to the hacking. Two weeks later, he was still coughing. Worse, he was having trouble getting out of bed and more trouble staying awake at the office. No matter how much he slept, he managed to wake up exhausted. A short visit to the doctor yielded no obvious reasons, and the other detectives, armchair psychiatrists one and all, were quick to blame the Latonya Wallace file.

Veterans on the shift told him to forget the goddamn thing, to get back in the rotation and pick up a fresh murder. But the cutting in the Southeast only pissed him off-all that argument and aggravation just to prove that some Perkins Homes dope dealer cut up a customer over $20. Likewise that dunker from the Civic Center, the one where the maintenance employee responded to complaints about his tardiness by killing his boss.

“Yeah, I stabbed him,” the guy says, covered with the victim’s blood. “He hit me first.”

Christ.

A little girl has been raped and killed and the detective charged with solving the crime is in some other part of the city putting handcuffs on the most mindless shitbirds. No, Pellegrini tells himself, the cure is not the next case, or the next case after that.

The cure is on his desk.

As the dayshift ends and the rest of D’Addario’s detectives drift toward the elevators, Pellegrini stays put in the annex office, turning the stack of color photos in his hand and scanning the collection one more time.

What has he missed? What has been lost? What is still waiting for him up on Newington Avenue?

Holding one of the straight-on photographs of the body, Pellegrini stares at a thin metal rod resting on the sidewalk a few feet from the child’s head. It isn’t the first time he’s looked at that metal rod and it won’t be the last. To Pellegrini, that particular detail has come to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with the case.

Pellegrini noticed the metal rod almost immediately after the photographs came upstairs from the crime lab, two days after the body was discovered. There was no doubt about it: the metal rod in the picture was the same one that Garvey had recovered during the trainees’ second-day search on Newington Avenue. When Garvey pulled the tubing out of that rear yard, it still carried a hair and a clot of coagulated blood-blood that had since been matched to the victim. Yet the day the body was found, the metal tubing had somehow been overlooked.

Pellegrini remembers that morning at the scene and the vague premonition that warned him to slow everything down. He remembers that moment when the ME’s people came for the body and asked if everyone was ready. Yeah, they were ready. They had walked every inch of that yard and checked every detail twice. So what is that goddamn piece of metal doing in the photographs? And how the hell had they missed it in those early hours?

Not that Pellegrini has any idea what the metal tubing has to do with his murder. Maybe it was dumped there with the body. Maybe it was used by the killer, perhaps to simulate sexual intercourse. That would explain the blood and hair, as well as the vaginal tearing discovered at autopsy. Or maybe the damn thing was lying in the yard earlier, jetsam from a broken television stand or curling iron that somehow got mixed up in his crime scene. Perhaps the blood and hair were swept into the tube when the old man came out to clean his yard after the body was removed. There was no way of knowing, but the fact that a piece of evidence had not been noticed for twenty-four hours was unnerving. What else had they missed?

Pellegrini reads further into the case file, reviewing some of the reports from the canvass of the 700 block. Some of the interviews seemed to have been carefully performed, with detectives or detail men asking follow-up questions or encouraging witnesses to elaborate on answers. Others, however, seem perfunctory and halfhearted, as if the officer involved had already convinced himself that the interview was a wasted effort.

Pellegrini reads the reports and thinks of questions that could have been asked, should have been asked, in those first days, when memories are fresh. A neighbor says she doesn’t know anything about the murder. Fine, but does she remember any noise in the alley that night? Voices? Cries? Automobile sounds? Car headlights? Nothing that night? What about in the past? Any problems with anyone in the neighborhood? You’ve got a couple of people living nearby that make you nervous, right? Why’s that? Did your children ever have any problems with these people? Who don’t you want them going near?

Pellegrini includes himself in this critical assessment. There are things he wished he had done in those early days. For example, the pickup truck that the Fish Man used the week of the murder to carry junk from his burned-out store-why hadn’t they taken a better look at that vehicle? Too quickly they had bought into the argument that the little girl had been carried into the alley, presumably by someone traveling no more than a block. But what if the Fish Man had done the murder up on Whitelock Street? That was too far away to carry the body, but it was the same week that he had access to a neighbor’s truck. And what might a careful search of the truck have yielded? Hairs? Fibers? The same tarlike substance that stained the little girl’s pants?

Landsman had left the investigation believing that the Fish Man was not the killer, that they would have broken the store owner in the long interrogation if he were indeed their man. Pellegrini still isn’t sure. For one thing, the Fish Man’s story has too many inconsistencies and not enough alibi-a combination sure to keep a man on any detective’s list. And then, five days ago, he had blown his polygraph.

They performed the lie detector test at the State Police barracks in Pikesville-their first opportunity to schedule it since the investigation had centered on the store owner. Incredibly, the Baltimore department did not have a qualified polygraph examiner of its own; although it handled close to half the homicide investigations in Maryland, the BPD had to rely on the State Police to accommodate its cases on an ad hoc basis. Once the test had been scheduled, they needed to find the Fish Man and convince him to take the examination voluntarily. In a manner as convenient as it was coercive, this was accomplished by locking the old man up on an outstanding marital support warrant-now several years old-that Pellegrini had discovered in the computer. The warrant had never been served and the legal issue was very likely moot; nonetheless, the Fish Man was soon in police custody. And once a man lands at City Jail, even a lie detector test begins to seem like a reasonable diversion.

At the State Police barracks, the Fish Man proceeded to blow the box, sending the polygraph needle soaring on every key question about the murder. The polygraph result was not, of course, admissible as evidence, nor did every homicide detective believe in lie detection as an exact science. Still, the result added to Pellegrini’s suspicions.

So, too, did the arrival of an unexpected, if not entirely credible, witness. The man was a smokehound all right, as unbelievable a character as a detective might find. Arrested for assault in the Western District six days ago, he tried to make friends by assuring the booking officer that he knew who killed Latonya Wallace.

“And how do you know that?”

“He told me he did it.”

When Pellegrini got to the Western District that day, he heard a story about two old acquaintances drinking at a west side bar, about one acquaintance saying that he had recently been picked up and questioned for the murder of a little girl, about the other acquaintance asking whether he had committed the crime.

“No,” the first man said.

But later in the conversation the liquor got good to that man, who turned to his companion and said he would tell the truth. He did kill the child.

In the course of several interviews, the new witness related the same story to the detectives. He had known the man with whom he had been drinking for years. The man ran a store up on Whitelock Street, a fish store.

And so a second polygraph was scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Leaning back in his chair, Pellegrini reads the reports of the new witness’s interrogation with a mind balanced between serene hope and committed pessimism. In two days, he is sure, the man will also blow his box, failing the polygraph just as miserably as the Fish Man did. He will do this because his story is so perfect, so valuable, that it can’t possibly be true. A barroom confession, Pellegrini tells himself, is almost too easy for this case.

Pellegrini knows, too, that soon he will have a separate suspect file on the new witness as well. Not only because the willingness to implicate someone in a child killing is unusual behavior, but also because the new man himself knows the Reservoir Hill area and has a police record. For rape. With a knife. Nothing, Pellegrini tells himself again, is ever easy.

Closing the file with the office reports, Pellegrini reads through a draft report of his own, a four-page missive to the captain outlining the status of the case and arguing for a complete, prolonged review of the existing evidence. Without any primary crime scene or physical evidence, the report argued, there wasn’t much point in looking at any particular suspect and then attempting to connect him to the murder.

“This tactic might be successful in certain circumstances,” Pellegrini had written, “but not in a case where physical evidence is lacking.”

Instead, the memo urged a careful review of the entire file:

Since the collection of that data was accomplished by no less than twenty detail officers and detectives, it is reasonable to believe that a significant piece of information may exist, but has not yet been developed. It is the intent of your investigator to limit the number of investigators to the primary and secondary detectives.

In simple terms, Pellegrini wants more time to work the case and he wants to work it alone. His report to the captain is clear, yet bureaucratic; generally succinct, yet written in the departmental prose that makes anyone with a rank higher than lieutenant feel warm and fuzzy all over. Still, it could be better, and if he is going to get the time to review the case properly, the captain will have to be on board.

Pellegrini pulls the staple from the top page and spreads the draft on his desk, prepared to spend another hour or so at the typewriter. But Rick Requer has other ideas. On his way out of the annex office, he catches Pellegrini’s attention and cups his hand to his mouth in a repetitive, arclike motion-the international hand signal for uninhibited alcohol consumption.

“C’mon, bunk, let’s go have a couple.”

“You leaving?” asks Pellegrini, looking up from the file.

“Yeah, I’m out of here. Barrick’s squad is already in on four-to-twelve.”

Pellegrini shakes his head, then waves at the sea of paper on his desk. “I got some stuff here I wanted to go through.”

“You working over on that case?” asks Requer. “It’ll wait ’til tomorrow, won’t it?”

Pellegrini shrugs.

“C’mon, Tom, give it a night off.”

“I don’t know. Where you going to be?”

“At the Market. Eddie Brown and Dunnigan are already down there.”

Pellegrini nods, mulling it over. “If I get a few things done,” he says finally, “I might see you down there.”

No way, thinks Requer, walking toward the elevators. No way are we going to see Tom Pellegrini at the Market Bar when he could just as easily spend four hours beating himself up over Latonya Wallace. So when Pellegrini sidles up to the bar a half hour later, Requer is momentarily startled. Suddenly, without warning, Pellegrini has let go of the Case Without Pity and come up for a little air. By any reckoning, a drinking session at the Market Bar is a fine time and place for some back slapping and confidence building; Requer, already half-smoked on good Scotch, is just the man for the job.

“My man Tom,” Requer says. “What are you drinking, bunk?”

“A beer.”

“Hey, Nick, gave this gentleman what he wants on me, man.”

“What’re you drinking there?” asks Pellegrini.

“Glenlivet. Good shit. You want one?”

“No. Beer’s fine.”

And so they settle down, one round after another, until other detectives arrive and the scene photos and witness statements and office reports seem a little less real, and Latonya Wallace becomes more cosmic joke than tragedy. Sisyphus and his rock. De Leon and his fountain. Pellegrini and his little dead girl.

“I’ll tell you this,” says Requer, holding court and bringing the liquor to his lips. “When Tom first got up there, I thought he wasn’t any good at all. I mean that…”

“And now that you seen me work,” says Pellegrini, half serious, “you know you were right.”

“No, bunk,” says Requer, shaking his head, “I knew you were all right when you put down that case in the projects. What was that boy’s name?”

“Which case?”

“The one from high-rise. East side.”

“George Green,” says Pellegrini.

“Yeah, right, Green,” agrees Requer, waving the empty shot glass in a brief semaphore at Nicky the bartender. “Everyone told him that the case was a loser. I even told him that. I told him to…” Requer pauses as Nicky pours, downs half the shot and tries to continue. “What was I sayin’?”

Pellegrini shrugs, smiling.

“Oh yeah, this case was no fuckin’ good, no fuckin’ good at all. Drug murder up in the high-rises, right. Black kid over on Aisquith Street, so nobody’s gonna give a damn anyway. No witnesses, no nothing. I told him to forget the motherfucker and go on to something else. He doesn’t listen to me or anyone else. Stubborn motherfucker didn’t listen to Jay neither. He just goes out on his own and works the case for two days. Didn’t listen to none of us and guess what happened?”

“I dunno,” says Pellegrini sheepishly. “What happened?”

“You solved the motherfucker.”

“I did?”

“Stop fuckin’ with me,” says Requer, turning back to an audience of CID detectives. “He went out and solved the motherfucker on his own. That’s when I knew Tom was going to work out.”

Pellegrini says nothing, embarrassed.

Requer gives a quick glance over his shoulder and realizes that even with half a drink on, the younger detective isn’t buying any of it.

“No, seriously, Tom, seriously.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Listen to me.”

Pellegrini sips his beer.

“Fuck it, I’m not sayin’ this ’cause you’re here, bunk. I’m sayin’ it for the truth. When you came up, I thought you were gonna be bad, I mean no good at all. But you’ve done a helluva job. Really.”

Pellegrini smiles and hails Nicky for one last one, pushing his empty across the bar and pointing to the shot glass in front of Requer. The other detectives turn to another conversation.

“I wouldn’t say the same thing about Fred,” says Requer quietly enough so that the comment goes no farther than Pellegrini. “I wouldn’t.”

Pellegrini nods, but he is suddenly uncomfortable. He and Fred Ceruti had transferred into Landsman’s squad together, filling vacancies that occurred within weeks of each other. Like Requer, Ceruti is black, but unlike Requer-who had six years’ seasoning in narcotics before the transfer to homicide-Ceruti is fresh from the Eastern District with only four years on the force. He has been pushed up to the sixth floor of headquarters by the captain, who saw him do good plainclothes work at the district level. But to Requer, those credentials aren’t enough.

“I mean I like Fred. I really do,” says Requer. “But he isn’t ready for homicide. We’ve walked him through cases and shown him what needs to be done but it doesn’t get through. He’s not ready yet.”

Pellegrini says nothing, aware that Requer is the veteran investigator in his squad and one of the most tenured black detectives in the homicide unit; he made his way up to CID at a time when black officers were still hearing racial jokes in the district roll call rooms. Pellegrini knows for a guy like that to sit here and punch the Italian kid’s dance card while letting Ceruti pass is not an easy thing.

“I’ll tell you this,” Requer tells the other CID men at the bar. “If someone in my family got killed, if I got killed, I’d want Tom to work it.” A detective’s compliment.

“You really must be drunk,” says Pellegrini.

“No, bunk.”

“Well, Rick,” says Pellegrini, “thank you for that vote of confidence. I might not solve your murder, but I’d definitely make some overtime on it.”

Requer laughs, then calls for Nicky. The bartender pours one last shot, on the house, and the detective sends the Scotch sailing down his throat in one fluid, practiced motion.

The two men leave the bar, walking through the restaurant and out the double doors on the Water Street side. In three months, the Market Bar and Seafood Restaurant will become Dominique’s, a French restaurant of considerable means. The clientele will be dressed better, the food more expensive, the menu a little less comprehensible to the average homicide detective. Nicky will be gone, the price of a drink will climb into the four-dollar range and the departmental crowd that frequents the bar will be told that their patronage no longer suits the restaurant’s image. But for now, the Market Bar is as much BPD territory as Kavanaugh’s or the FOP lodge.

Pellegrini and Requer turn on Frederick Street and saunter down the same stretch of pavement where Bob Bowman made his legendary midnight ride. No homicide detective can pass the spot without smiling at the thought of a drunken Bowman, borrowing a mounted man’s horse long enough to parade back and forth in front of the Market Bar’s plate glass windows, through which a half-dozen other detectives could be seen losing control. On a good day, Bo was five-foot-six. Perched on that stallion, he looked like a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte and Willie Shoemaker.

“You all right to drive?” asks Pellegrini.

“Yeah, bunk, I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Okay then.”

“Hey, Tom,” says Requer before crossing to the Hamilton Street lot, “if the case is gonna go, then it’s gonna go. Don’t let it get you down.”

Pellegrini smiles.

“I mean that,” says Requer.

“Okay, Rick.”

“Really.”

Pellegrini smiles again, but with the look of a drowning man no longer willing to fight against the current.

“Really, bunk. You do what you can do and that’s it. If the evidence ain’t there, you know, it ain’t there. You do what you can…”

Requer hits the younger detective’s shoulder with an open hand, then fishes in a pants pocket for his car keys. “You know what I mean, bunk.”

Pellegrini nods, smiles, then nods again. But he keeps his silence.

“Brown, you piece of shit.”

“Sir?”

“I called you a piece of shit.”

Dave Brown looks up from the current issue of Rolling Stone and sighs. Donald Worden is on a tear, and nothing good can come from that.

“Gimme a quarter,” says Worden, palm open.

“Let me understand this,” says Brown. “I’m here at my desk reading a magazine-”

“One of them art school magazines,” Worden interjects.

Brown shakes his head wearily. Although his most recent creations have been limited to renderings of dead stickmen in his crime scene sketches, David John Brown is indeed the product of the Maryland Institute of Art. In Worden’s mind, this fact alone makes suspect his credentials as a homicide detective.

“Reading a magazine of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture,” Brown continues, “interfering with no one, and you walk through the door and address me as fecal matter.”

“Fecal matter. What the hell is that? I didn’t go to college. I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.”

Brown rolls his eyes.

“Gimme a quarter, bitch.”

This has been going on ever since Dave Brown arrived in homicide. Time and time again, Worden demands 25-cent pieces from younger detectives, then simply pockets the money. No trip to the Macke machines downstairs, no donation to the coffee fund-the money is taken as tribute, plain and simple. Brown digs in his pocket, then tosses a quarter at the older detective.

“What a piece of shit,” Worden repeats, catching the coin. “Why don’t you start handling some calls, Brown?”

“I just handled a murder.”

“Yeah?” says Worden, strutting over to Brown’s desk. “Well, handle this.”

The Big Man leans over Brown’s chair, his crotch even with the younger detective’s mouth. Brown screams in mock hysteria, bringing Terry McLarney into the room.

“Sergeant McLarney, sir,” shouts Brown, with Worden now almost on top of him. “Detective Worden is forcing me to engage in sexual acts prohibited by law. As my immediate supervisor, I appeal to your…”

McLarney smiles, salutes, then turns on his heel. “Carry on, men,” he says, walking back into the main office.

“Get off me, goddammit,” yells Brown, tiring of the joke. “Leave me alone, you polar-bear-looking bitch.”

“Oooooooo,” says Worden, backing off. “Now I know what you really think of me.”

Brown says nothing, trying hard to return to the magazine.

The Big Man won’t let him. “Piece… of…”

Brown glares at the older detective, his right hand making a furtive move toward a shoulder holster burdened by the long barrel.38. “Careful,” says Brown. “I brought the big gun today.”

Worden shakes his head, then walks to the coat rack, looking for his cigars. “What the hell are you doing with that magazine, Brown?” he says, lighting up. “Why aren’t you out there working on Rodney Tripps?”

Rodney Tripps. Dead drug dealer in the driver’s seat of his luxury car. No witnesses. No suspects. No physical evidence. What the hell was there to work on?

“You know, I’m not the only person around here with an open one,” says Brown, exasperated. “I see a couple names up there in red ink that belong to you.”

Worden says nothing, and for just a second Brown wishes he could take back the last two sentences. The office banter always has an edge, but every now and then the line gets crossed. Brown knows that for the first time in three years the Big Man is truly slumping, carrying two consecutive open cases; more important, the mayhem that is the Monroe Street investigation is dragging on interminably.

As a consequence, Worden spends his days shepherding two dozen witnesses into the grand jury room on the second floor of the Mitchell Courthouse, then waiting outside while Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the case, does his best to recreate the mysterious slaying of John Randolph Scott. Worden, too, has been called before the same panel, with several of the grand jurors asking pointed questions about the actions of the officers involved in the pursuit of Scott-particularly after those jurors listened to the Central District radio tape. And Worden has no answers; the case begins and ends with a young man’s body in a West Baltimore alley and a cast of Western and Central District officers, all claiming no knowledge of the event.

Not surprisingly, Worden’s only civilian witness-the man identified in newsprint as a potential suspect-has gone before the grand jury and refused to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Sergeant Wiley, the officer who found the body and who would be made to explain his prior radio transmission canceling the suspect’s description, has not been called as a witness.

We call Wiley as a last resort, Doory explained to Worden at one point, because if he’s culpable, he’ll also take the Fifth. And at that point, the prosecutor argued, there are few options left: If we let him refuse to testify, he walks out of the grand jury room, leaving us with insufficient evidence for any kind of indictment. But if we offer him immunity to compel his testimony, then what? What if John Wiley, under a grant of immunity, tells us he shot that kid? Then, Doory explained, we’ve solved a crime we can’t prosecute.

Returning from the courthouse every weekday afternoon, Worden’s nights are spent in the rotation, handling shootings, suicides and, ultimately, fresh murders. And for the first time since his transfer to homicide, Worden has no answers for those either.

Given that his squad is built around Worden, even McLarney is a little unnerved by the trend. Every detective gets his share of unsolved cases, but for Worden, two consecutive open files simply don’t happen.

During a recent midnight shift, McLarney pointed to the red names on the board and announced: “One of those is going down,” adding, as much to hear himself say it as to convince anyone else, “Donald won’t stand for two in a row like that.”

The first case was a drug murder from Edmondson Avenue back in March, a street shooting in which the only potential witness was a fourteen-year-old runaway from a juvenile detention center. Whether the kid could be found and whether he would tell his story was uncertain. But the second murder, an argument up on Ellamont which escalated into the slaying of a thirty-year-old man-that one ordinarily should have been a dunker. Dwayne Dickerson had been shot once in the back of the head when he tried to intervene in a street dispute, and when everyone involved had been shipped downtown and interviewed, Worden was left with one depressing truth: No one seemed to know the shooter or, for that matter, what he was doing in Baltimore with a gun in his hand. By all accounts-and the witnesses were consistent-the shooter had nothing to do with the original argument.

McLarney may like to think that Worden isn’t capable of letting two murders stay red, but unless the phone rings on the Dickerson murder, there isn’t much left for an investigator to do but check other assault-by-shooting reports from the Southwest and hope something matches. Worden has told his sergeant just that, but McLarney heard instead the echo of Monroe Street. To his way of thinking, the department had used his best detective to go after other cops, and God knows that kind of thing has an effect on a man like Worden. For two months, McLarney has been trying to get his best detective away from the Scott murder, easing him back into the rotation. Get the man back on his horse with some fresh murders, McLarney figures. Get him back on the street and he’ll be the same.

But Worden is not the same. And when Brown lets slip the comment about the red names on the wall, Worden suddenly lapses into cold silence. The banter, the bitching, the locker room humor, give way to brooding.

Brown senses this and changes tone, trying to bait the Big Man rather than fight him off. “Why are you always fucking with me?” he asks. “Why don’t you ever go after Waltemeyer? Does Waltemeyer go out to Pikesville on Saturday dayshifts to get you bagels?”

Worden says nothing.

“Why the hell don’t you ever fuck with Waltemeyer?”

Brown knows the answer, of course. Worden isn’t going to fuck with Waltemeyer, who has more than two decades in the trenches. He’s going to fuck with Dave Brown, who has a mere thirteen years on the force. And Donald Waltemeyer isn’t going to drive up to Pikesville at seven A.M. to get bagels for the same reason. Brown gets the bagels because Brown is the new man and Worden is breaking him in. And when the likes of Donald Worden wants a dozen bagels and half a pound of veggie spread, the new man gets in a Cavalier and drives to Philadelphia if need be.

“This is the thanks I get,” says Brown, still goading the older detective.

“What do you want me to do, kiss you?” says Worden, finally responding. “You didn’t even get garlic for me.”

Brown rolls his eyes. Garlic bagels. Always with the goddamn garlic bagels. They’re supposed to be better for the Big Man’s blood pressure, and when Brown brings back onion or poppy on weekend dayshifts, he never hears the end of it. Excluding the image of Waltemeyer locked in the large interrogation room with six drunken Greek stevedores, Brown’s most fully formed fantasy delivers him to Worden’s front lawn at five on a Saturday morning to lob sixty or seventy garlic bagels against the master bedroom windows.

“They didn’t have garlic,” says Brown. “I asked.”

Worden looks at him with contempt. It is the same expression he carries in that crime scene photograph from Cherry Hill, the one that Brown liberated for his personal collection, the one that said, “Brown, you piece of shit, how can you possibly believe those beer cans have anything to do with your crime scene.” One day, Worden just may retire and Dave Brown just may become the next centerpiece of McLarney’s squad. But until then, the younger man’s life is consigned to any hell of Worden’s choosing.

For Worden, however, the hell is entirely the creation of his own mind. He has loved this job-loved it too much, perhaps-and now, finally, he seems to be running out of time. That it is hard for Worden to accept this is understandable; for twenty-five years, he came to work every day armed with the knowledge that wherever the department decided to put him, he would shine. It had always been so, beginning with all those years in the Northwest, an extended tour that made working that district second nature to him. Hell, he still can’t work a homicide up there without making some connection to places and people he knew back when. From the beginning, he had never been much on writing the reports, but damned if there was anyone better at reading the street. Nothing happened on his post that escaped Worden’s notice: his memory for faces, for addresses, for incidents that other cops had long forgotten, is simply amazing. Unlike every other detective in the unit, Worden never carries notepaper to his crime scenes for the simple reason that he remembers everything; a standard joke in the unit was that Worden needed a single matchbook to record the particulars of three homicides and a police shooting. On the witness stand, attorneys would often ask to see Worden’s notes, then be incredulous when he claimed to have none.

“I just remember things,” he told one defense attorney. “Ask your question.”

On slow nights, Worden would take out a Cavalier and ride through a drug market, or downtown through the Meat Rack on Park Avenue, where hustlers sold themselves outside the gay pickup bars. Each tour provided another four or five faces for his memory bank, another four or five victims or victimizers who might one day matter to a case file. It wasn’t a purely photographic memory but it was mighty close, and when Worden finally brought it downtown to the old escape and apprehension unit, it was clear to everyone that he would never go back to Northwest plainclothes. The man was born to be a detective.

It wasn’t just his superb memory that kept him in CID, though that asset alone was formidable enough when someone was trying to track a prison escapee, or match up a string of city and county robberies, or remember which west side shootings involved a.380 automatic. But the elephant’s memory was part and parcel of Worden’s whole approach to police work, his clarity of thought and purpose, his insistence on dealing with people directly and demanding, in a quiet and formidable way, that they do the same.

Worden had fought his share of battles but his size had never marked him for violence, and his gun-which time and again he threatened to pawn-had been almost irrelevant to his career. His bluster, his taunting insults in the squadroom, were as much an act as anything else, and everyone-from Brown to McLarney-knew it.

His size could be intimidating, of course, and Worden used that fact on occasion. But ultimately he did the job using his mind, with a thought process as fluid as it was refined. At a crime scene, he absorbed not only the physical evidence, but everything and everyone on the periphery. Often, Rick James would be doing the boilerplate work at a scene only to look up and see Worden standing a block away, a mass of whiteness in a sea of black faces. And damned if he didn’t always come back with some piece of information about the dead man. Any other detective would get eyefucked and maybe cursed, but Worden somehow managed to take the corner boys beyond that, to make it clear that he was there to put something right. If they had any respect for the victim, if they ever even thought about saying anything that a police detective might like to overhear, this was their chance.

Some of it was Worden’s gruff, paternalistic manner. Those blue eyes, those jowls, that thinning white hair-Worden looked like the father whose respect no man could bear to lose. During interviews and interrogations he spoke softly, wearily, with a look that made lying seem like an inexplicable sin. That held true for black or white, man or woman, gay or straight; Worden carried a credibility that somehow transcended the excesses of his profession. On the street, people who had contempt for every other law officer often made a separate peace with Donald Worden.

Once, when he was already downtown, working robberies with Ron Grady, the mother of a boy they had arrested was threatening to file a brutality complaint with the internal affairs division. Grady, she was told, had beat the kid in the district lockup.

“Grady didn’t hit your boy,” Worden told the mother. “I did.”

“Awright, Mr. Donald,” the woman declared. “If you had to hit him, then I knowed he needed it.”

But he rarely hit anyone. He rarely needed to. Unlike many of the cops he came on with-and a good many younger officers, too-he was no racist, though any kid born and raised in the white, working-class enclave of Hampden had ample opportunity to acquire the taste. Nor was the Baltimore department the most tolerant environment in which to come of age; there were cops twenty years younger who reacted to what they saw on the streets by crawling into a psychological cave, damning every nigger and liberal faggot to hell for screwing up the country. Yet somehow, with nothing more than a high school education and his Navy training, Worden grew with the job. His mother had something to do with that; she was not the kind of woman to bring prejudice into a house. His long partnership with Grady also had good effect; he could not, on the one hand, respect and care for a black detective, then go dropping words like nigger and toad as if they meant nothing.

That sensitivity was another strength. Worden was one of the few white detectives in homicide who could sit across the desk from a fifteen-year-old black kid and make it clear-with nothing more than a look and a word or two-that they were both beginning with a blank page. Respect brought respect, contempt the same. Anyone with eyes could see that the bargain being offered was a fair one.

It was Worden, for example, who won the gay community’s trust when a series of homosexual murders began plaguing the Mount Vernon neighborhood downtown. The department as a whole was still shunned by many in the gay community for a history of harassment, both real and perceived. But Worden could walk into any Park Avenue club, show a bartender a series of BPI photos and get some truthful answers. His word was his bond and it wasn’t his job to judge or threaten. He didn’t need anyone to come out of any closets or file any official report of crimes. He just needed to know: Is the guy in the photo the same one out hustling in the bars, the same one who’s been beating and robbing the men who pick him up? When the Mount Vernon murders went down, Worden made his point by taking his whole squad to a gay bar on Washington Boulevard, where he bought one round for the place and then, to the delight of the other detectives, drank free for the rest of the night.

Even in the homicide unit, where a measure of talent and intelligence was assumed, Worden was recognized as a precious commodity-a cop’s cop, a true investigator. For his three years in homicide, he had worked the midnight shifts and double shifts beside younger men. He showed them what twenty-five years can teach and, at the same time, he learned the new tricks that homicide work could teach him. Until Monroe Street, Worden seemed indestructible if not infallible. Until Monroe Street, it had seemed as if the man would go on handling calls forever.

John Scott, dead in an alley with a handful of Western men standing over his body, was, quite simply, the one that got away. Beyond the emotional cost of investigating other cops, of having them lie to you like any other shithead off the street, the Monroe Street probe had become for Worden what the Latonya Wallace murder was for Pellegrini. A man solves ten consecutive murders and begins to believe that he can stay out on the edge forever. Then comes the red ball, the one with a bad bounce, and the same man suddenly begins to wonder where it ends-all the case files, all the reports, all the wounds on all the dead men from all the scenes-so many crimes that the names and faces lose their meaning, until those deprived of liberty and those deprived of life blur into the same sad image.

That alone might be reason enough for Worden to quit, but there were others too. For one thing, he no longer had a family to support. His children were grown, and his wife was long accustomed to what had become a ten-year separation. They had reached an equilibrium: Worden had never filed for a divorce; his wife, he knew, would never file either. As far as his own finances were concerned, Worden was guaranteed a 60 percent pension as soon as he put in his retirement papers, so he was actually earning less than half of his paystub. On his days off, he made better money delivering furs to customers from summer storage, or he worked on the home he had bought down in Brooklyn Park. He was good with his hands and tools, and there was certainly money to be made in home improvements. No less a homicide fixture than Jay Landsman was making thousands of dollars from a company he operated in his spare time; the joke was that Landsman could solve your mother’s murder in a week-or four days if you also wanted to run a new deck off the back patio.

On the other side of the ledger were two good reasons to stay. First there was Diane, the red-headed secretary from the Special Investigations Section down the hall, who by bravely endeavoring to domesticate Worden had won the awe and sympathy of the entire homicide unit. The truth was that Worden was hooked; the gold “D &D” signature ring on his left hand said as much. But even if they got married tomorrow-and Worden was still coming to terms with the idea of something permanent-Diane would not be eligible for full benefits unless he stayed with the department for another year. As a forty-nine-year-old cop with hypertension, Worden had to think about that sort of thing.

Less practically, there was also the small, clear voice in the back of Worden’s head that told him he was meant for this job and no other, the voice that told him that he was still having a helluva time. In his heart of hearts, Worden wanted very much to keep hearing that voice.

A week ago, Waltemeyer had pulled a 1975 murder case out of the back files, a Highlandtown bar robbery in which the shooter had been charged in a warrant but never apprehended. Who would have believed that thirteen years could pass before the suspect finally surfaced in Salt Lake City, telling a friend about a crime he thought everyone had forgotten? Who would have believed that the case file would still contain a photograph of an identification lineup from 1975, a lineup in which five detectives stood shoulder-to-shoulder with one genuine suspect? And check out the face on that heavyset young man, the one with thick blond hair and deep blue eyes, the one staring at the camera, trying hard to look more felon than robbery detective? Donald Worden was thirty-six in that photograph-harder, thinner, gaudily dressed in the kind of checked pants and polyester sport coat that marked an up-and-coming Baltimore detective of an earlier epoch.

Waltemeyer, of course, paraded the photograph around the squad-room, as if he had unearthed the mummified remains of some ancient king. No, Worden told him, I don’t want it for a goddamn souvenir.

The only thing that saved him that day was a ringing phone line and a west side cutting. Worden, like any old fire dog, was out at the sound of the bell. He grabbed the index card with the address and time-of-dispatch and was halfway to the elevators before any other detective could even think about taking the call.

Appropriate to the moment, his partner on the call was Kincaid, another twenty-year man, and together they worked the scene on Franklin-town Road. It was a straight-up domestic stabbing, with the knife on the front lawn and a blood trail leading all the way back into the rowhouse. On the living room floor, immersed in a ten-foot-wide lake of purple-red blood, was the phone used by the husband to call for help.

“Christ, Donald,” said Worden. “This bad boy must’ve caught a vein.”

“Aw yeah,” said Kincaid. “Must have.”

Outside on the stoop, the first officer was writing down particulars for his report with an expected air of indifference. But when he got to the two detectives’ sequence numbers-the departmental code that identifies officers in chronological order-he looked up in wonder.

“A-seven-o-three,” Worden told him.

“A-nine-o-four,” said Kincaid.

To make the A sequence, a man had to come on the force no later than 1967. The uniform, a D sequence himself, shook his head. “Isn’t there anyone up there in homicide with less than twenty years on?”

Worden said nothing and Kincaid went right to work. “This guy’s at University?” he asked.

“Yeah. The ER.”

“How was he doing?”

“They were trying to get him stabilized when I got here.”

The detectives walked back toward the Cavalier, but turned abruptly when another uniform, accompanied by a six-year-old boy, motioned them over to the spot where the knife had been found.

“This young man saw what happened,” said the uniform, loud enough for the child to hear, “and he would like to tell us about it.”

Worden knelt down. “You saw what happened?”

The boy nodded.

“GET AWAY FROM THAT BOY,” screamed a woman from the other side of the street. “YOU CAN’T TALK TO HIM WITHOUT NO LAWYER.”

“Are you his mother?” asked the uniform.

“No, but she don’t want him talkin’ to no police. I know that. Tavon, don’t you say nothin’.”

“So you’re not the mother?” asked the uniform, now seething.

“No.”

“Then get the hell out of here before I lock your ass up,” muttered the patrolman, soft enough to be out of the boy’s earshot. “You hear me?”

Worden turned back to the child. “What did you see?”

“I saw Bobby run out after Jean.”

“You did?”

The boy nodded. “And when he got up close she cut him.”

“Did he run into the knife? Did he run into it by accident or did Jean try to cut him?”

The boy shook his head. “She went like this,” he said, holding his hand steady.

“She did? Well, what’s your name?”

“Tavon.”

“Tavon, you’ve helped us a lot. Thank you.”

Worden and Kincaid liberated their Cavalier from a growing mass of patrol cars and drove east to the emergency room at University, both of them certain in the knowledge that Rule Six in the homicide lexicon now applied. To wit:

When a suspect is immediately identified in an assault case, the victim is sure to live. When no suspect has been identified, the victim will surely die. Indeed, the rule was confirmed in this instance by the subsequent discovery of Cornell Robert Jones, age thirty-seven, lying on his back in a rear examination room, conscious and alert, as a blonde surgical resident-an especially attractive blonde surgical resident-applied pressure to the wound on his inner left thigh.

“Mr. Jones?” asked Worden.

Wincing with pain, the victim nodded briefly from beneath an oxygen mask.

“Mr. Jones, I’m Detective Worden from the police department. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said the victim, his voice almost muzzled by the mask.

“We’ve been down to your house and the people there say your girlfriend, or is it your wife…”

“My wife.”

“They say your wife cut you. Is that what happened?”

“Goddamn right she cut me,” he said, wincing again.

“You didn’t just run into the knife or anything like that?”

“Hell no. She stabbed me.”

“So if we tell the officer to get a warrant on your wife, you’re not going to change your mind about this tomorrow?”

“No I ain’t.”

“All right, then,” said Worden. “Do you have any idea where your wife might be now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a girlfriend’s house or something.”

Worden nodded, then looked at Kincaid, who had spent the last five minutes undertaking as comprehensive a review of the surgical resident as could be accomplished under the circumstances.

“I’ll say this, Mr. Jones,” drawled Kincaid. “You’re in good hands now. Real good hands.”

The resident looked up, irritated and a little embarrassed. And then Worden was smiling wickedly at his own thoughts. He leaned low to the victim’s ear. “You know, Mr. Jones, you’re a lucky man,” he said in a stage whisper.

“What?”

“You’re a lucky man.”

Wincing with pain, the victim looked sideways at the detective. “How the hell you figure that?”

Worden smiled. “Well, from the look of things, your wife was going for your Johnson,” said the detective. “And from what I can see, she only missed by a couple inches.”

Suddenly, from beneath the oxygen mask, Cornell Jones was laughing uproariously. The resident, too, was losing it, her face contorted as she struggled against herself.

“Yeah,” said Kincaid. “A big guy like yourself, you was pretty damn close to singin’ soprano, you know that?”

Cornell Jones rocked up and down on the gurney, laughing and wincing at the same time.

Worden held up his hand, signing off with a short wave. “You have a good one.”

“You too, man,” said Cornell Jones, still laughing.

The shit you see out here, thought Worden, driving back to the office. And my God, he had to admit, there are still moments when I love this job.

“Something’s gone wrong,” says Terry McLarney.

Eddie Brown answers without looking up, his mind fully absorbed by mathematical endeavors. Statistical charts and spread sheets arrayed in front of him, Brown will figure a way to predict tomorrow night’s four-digit lotto number or he will die trying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look around,” says McLarney. “The phone is ringing with information on every kind of case and we’re getting double-dunkers left and right. Hey, even the lab is coming up with print hits.”

“So,” says Brown, “what’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not like us,” says McLarney. “I get the feeling that we’re going to be punished. I have this feeling that there’s a rowhouse somewhere with about a dozen skeletons in the basement, just waiting for us.”

Brown shakes his head. “You think too much,” he tells McLarney.

A criticism rarely leveled at a Baltimore cop, and McLarney laughs at the absurdity of the notion. He’s a sergeant and an Irishman; by that reckoning alone, it’s his responsibility to rip the silver linings out of every last little cloud. The board is going from red to black. Murders are being solved. Evil is being punished. Good Lord, thinks McLarney, how much is this going to cost?

The streak began a month ago up on Kirk Avenue, in the gutted remains of a torched rowhouse, where Donald Steinhice watched firefighters pull at the cracked and blackened debris until all three bodies were distinguishable. The oldest was three, the youngest, five months; their remains were discovered in an upstairs bedroom, where they stayed after every adult fled from the burning house. For Steinhice, a veteran of Stanton’s shift, the accelerant pour-patterns on the first floor-identifiable as darker splotches on the floors and walls-told the story: Mother dumps boyfriend, boyfriend returns with kerosene, children pay the price. In recent years, the scenario had become strangely common to the inner city. Four months back, in fact, Mark Tomlin caught a rowhouse arson that claimed two children; then, little more than a week ago and less than a month after the Kirk Avenue tragedy, another boyfriend torched another mother’s home, murdering a twenty-one-month-old toddler and his seven-month-old sister.

“The adults always make it out,” explained Scott Keller, the primary on the most recent case and a veteran of the CID arson unit. “The kids always get left behind.”

More than most homicides, the Kirk Avenue arson had an emotional cost; Steinhice, a detective with perhaps a thousand crime scenes behind him, suffered nightmares about a murder for the first time-graphic images of helplessness in which the dead children were at the top of a row-house stairway, crying, terrified. Nonetheless, when the boyfriend came downtown in handcuffs, it was Steinhice who mustered empathy enough to prompt a full confession. And it was Steinhice who intervened when the boyfriend tore apart an aluminum soda can after his confession and tried to use the rough edges against his wrists.

Kirk Avenue was hard for Steinhice to swallow, but it was nonetheless medicine for what ailed both shifts of the homicide unit. Three dead, one arrest, three clearances-a stat like that can start a trend all by itself.

Sure enough, the following week brought Tom Pellegrini his dunker at the Civic Center, the labor dispute that became a one-sided knife fight. Rick Requer followed that case with two more clearances: a double murder-suicide from the Southeastern in which an emotionally distraught auto mechanic shot his wife and nephew in the kitchen, then wrapped things up tidily by reloading the.44 Magnum and shoving the barrel in his mouth. In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a massacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams.

One week more and the trend was clear: Dave Brown and Worden caught a poker game dispute in the Eastern in which a sixty-one-year-old player, arguing over the proper ante, suddenly grabbed a shotgun and blew up a friend. Garvey and Kincaid followed suit, taking a shooting call on Fairview and getting a father murdered by his son, killed in an argument over the boy’s unwillingness to share drug profits. Barlow and Gilbert again hit the jackpot for Stanton’s shift in the Southwest, where yet another angry young boyfriend fatally wounded both the woman he loved and the infant daughter in her arms, then trained the same weapon on himself.

Five nights later, Donald Waltemeyer and Dave Brown clocked in with yet another death-by-argument, a bar shooting from Highlandtown in which the subsequent performance of the two suspects in the homicide office resembled nothing so much as outtake from a B-grade Mafia film. They were Philly boys, short, dark Italians named DelGiornio and Forline, and they had killed a Baltimore man in a dispute that centered on the relative accomplishments of their respective fathers. The victim’s father ran an industrial firm; DelGiornio’s father, however, had done well in the Philadelphia Mafia until events beyond his control forced him to become a federal witness against the heads of the Philly crime family. This, of course, necessitated the relocation of family members from South Philly, which, in turn, explained the appearance of the younger DelGiornio and his friend in Southeast Baltimore. The Baltimore detectives were biting their lips when DelGiornio made his phone call to Dad.

“Yo, Dad,” mumbled DelGiornio, crying into the receiver in what appeared to the detectives to be a rank Stallone impersonation. “I fucked up. I really fucked up… Killed him, yeah. It was a fight… No, Tony… Tony shot him… Dad, I’m really in some trouble here.”

By morning, a herd of well-cropped FBI agents had arrived at the Formstone rowhouse that the government had rented for the DelGiornio kid only forty-eight hours earlier. The kid’s belongings were crated up, his bail was set at a ridiculously low amount and by the following evening he was living in some other city at the government’s expense. For his role in the death of a twenty-four-year-old man, Robert DelGiornio will eventually receive probation; Tony Forline, the shooter in the incident, will get five years. Both plea agreements will be set only weeks before the elder DelGiornio testifies as the key government witness in the federal conspiracy trial in Philadelphia.

“Well, we taught him a lesson,” declared McLarney, after the Italian kids were given light bails by a court commissioner and herded out of Maryland. “They’re probably up in Philly now, warning all their little Mob friends not to do a murder in Baltimore. We might not lock them up for it, but hey, we’ll take away their guns and refuse to give them back.”

Regardless of the outcome, the DelGiornio case was another clearance in what had suddenly become a month of clearances. For Gary D’Addario, it was a good sign, but one that could only be called belated. In a world ruled by statistics, he had been exposed for far too long and, as a result, his conflict with the captain had made its way down the sixth-floor hall to Dick Lanham, the CID commander. D’Addario wasn’t surprised to find out that in conversations with Lanham, his captain had attributed the low clearance rate and other problems to D’Addario’s management style. Things were getting ugly, so ugly in fact that one late April morning, the captain approached Worden, arguably D’Addario’s best detective.

“I’m afraid the colonel is talking about making changes,” said the captain. “How do you think the men would feel about working for another lieutenant?”

“I think you’d have a mutiny on your hands,” answered Worden, hoping to shoot down the trial balloon. “Why are you asking?”

“Well, I want to know how the men feel,” explained the captain. “Something may be in the works.”

In the works. Within an hour, D’Addario had heard about that exchange from Worden and three other detectives. He went directly to the colonel, with whom he believed he had credibility. Eight successful years as a homicide supervisor, he reasoned, had to count for a little something.

To D’Addario, the colonel confirmed that the pressure to move him was coming from the captain. Moreover, the colonel seemed noncommittal and expressed concern about the low clearance rate. D’Addario could hear the unasked question: “If you aren’t the problem, then what is?”

The lieutenant returned to his office and typed a long memo that sought to explain the statistical difference between Stanton’s rate and his own. He noted that more than half of the murders taken by his shift were drug-related, noting further that some of those cases had been sacrificed to staff the Latonya Wallace probe. Moreover, he argued, one critical reason for the low rate was that neither lieutenant managed to save any December clearances for the new year-something that always gives the unit a January cushion. The rate will rise, D’Addario predicted, it’s rising now. Give it some time.

To D’Addario, the memo seemed to convince the colonel; others on his shift weren’t sure. The choice of a shift lieutenant as a likely scapegoat might not be so much the work of the captain as the result of criticism from above, perhaps the colonel and maybe even the deputy. If that was the case, then D’Addario was being pressured by more than the clearance rate. It was Monroe Street, too. And the Northwest murders and Latonya Wallace. Especially Latonya Wallace. By itself, D’Addario knew, the absence of charging documents in the little girl’s murder could be enough to send the brass on a head-hunting sortie.

Shorn of political allies, D’Addario had two options: He could accept a transfer to another unit and learn to live with the taste that such a transfer would leave. Or he could tough it out, hoping the clearance rate would continue to climb and a red ball or two would get solved in the process. If he stayed on, his superiors could try to force a transfer, but that, he knew, was a messy process. They would have to show cause, and that would result in a nasty little paper war. He would lose, of course, but it would not be pretty-and the colonel and captain both had to know that.

D’Addario also understood that there would be another cost if he remained in homicide. Because as long as that rate stayed low, he would no longer be able to protect his men from the whims of the command staff, at least not to the extent he had protected them in the past. Appearances would count: Every detective would have to toe closer to the line, and D’Addario would have to make it appear that he was the one compelling them to do so. The overtime would no longer flow as freely; the detectives handling fewer calls would have to pick up their pace. Most important, the detectives would have to cover themselves, writing follow-ups and updates to every case file so that no supervisor could come behind them, arguing that leads had not been pursued. This, D’Addario knew, was pure departmental horseshit. The make-work required for a half-dozen cover-your-ass office reports would waste valuable time. Still, that was the game, and now the game would have to be played.

The most complicated part of that game would be the crack-down on the unit’s overtime pay, a ritual that often marked the end of a budget year in the Baltimore department. The homicide unit consistently came in almost $150,000 over budget on straight overtime and courtside pay for its detectives. Just as consistently, the department tried to crack the whip in April and May, exerting a minimal effect on the unit that disappeared entirely in June, when the new budget year began and the money once again flowed freely. For two or three months each spring, captains told lieutenants who told sergeants to authorize as little OT as possible so that the numbers would look a little better to the brass upstairs. This was possible in a district where, on any given night, one or two fewer radio cars might be handling calls during an overtime crunch. In the homicide unit, however, the practice created surreal working conditions.

The overtime cap was premised on a single rule: Any detective who reached 50 percent of his base pay in accumulated OT and court time was taken out of the rotation. The logic made perfect sense to fiscal services: If Worden hits his limit and is put on permanent daywork, he can’t handle calls. And if he can’t handle calls, he can’t earn overtime. But in the opinion of the detectives and their sergeants, the rule had no logic. After all, if Worden is out of the rotation, then the other four detectives in his squad are catching more calls on the nightshift. And if, God forbid, Waltemeyer is also near his OT limit, then this squad is down to three men. In CID homicide, a squad that goes into a midnight shift with no more than three detectives is asking to be punished.

More important, the overtime cap was a frontal assault on quality. The best detectives were inevitably those who worked their cases longest, and their cases were inevitably those that were strong enough to go to court. Granted, an experienced detective could milk any case for extra hours, but it usually cost a great deal more money to solve a murder than to keep it open, and even more money to actually win that case in court. A cleared homicide is a money tree, a truth recognized by Rule Seven in the pantheon of homicide wisdom.

In reference to the color of money, and the colors by which open and solved murders are chronicled on the board, the rule states: First, they’re red. Then they’re green. Then they’re black. But now, because of D’Addario’s vulnerability, there would be less green in the equation. This spring, the 50 percent overtime rule threatened to do some real damage.

Gary Dunnigan hit the 50 percent mark first and suddenly found himself on a permanent dayshift, working follow-ups to old cases and nothing else. Then Worden hit the wall, then Waltemeyer, then Rick James began edging up over 48 percent. Suddenly, McLarney was looking at three weeks of nightwork with two detectives to call on.

“There’s no limit to how many they can kill,” said Worden cynically. “There’s only a limit to how long we can work them.”

D’Addario played the game as it had to be played, sending warning letters-copied to the colonel and captain-to the detectives approaching the 50 percent cap, then benching those who exceeded the limit. Remarkably, his sergeants and detectives were willing to cooperate in this nonsense. Any one of them could have thwarted the restrictions by calling in more detectives to help with a bad midnight shift and then claiming that events overran policy. Murder, after all, is one of the least predictable things in this world.

Instead, the sergeants sidelined detectives and juggled the schedules because they understood the risk to D’Addario and, beyond that, to themselves. There were a lot of lieutenants in the department and in the estimate of McLarney and Jay Landsman, at least, a good 80 percent of them had the ability, the will and the ambition to do a superior job of screwing up the CID homicide unit if ever given any chance.

But if McLarney and Landsman played the game out of genuine loyalty to D’Addario, Roger Nolan’s reasons were altogether different.

Nolan took seriously his role as a sergeant and he clearly enjoyed working in what was essentially a paramilitary organization. More than most of the men in homicide, he took satisfaction in the protocols of police work-the deference to rank, the institutional loyalty, the chain of command. This peculiarity did not necessarily make him a company man; Nolan protected his detectives as well or better than any other supervisor in homicide, and a detective who worked for him could be assured that only his sergeant would mess with him.

Even so, Nolan was an enigma to his own men. A product of the West Baltimore ghetto with twenty-five years on the force, he was said to be the only practicing black Republican in the city of Baltimore. He repeatedly denied this, to little avail. Heavyset and bald, with wide, expressive features, Nolan looked very much like an aging boxer or perhaps the aging ex-Marine that he truly was. Growing up had not come easy to him; his parents had been tormented by alcoholism, other relatives had become players in the West Baltimore drug trade. To a great extent, it was the Marines that saved Nolan, plucking him off North Carrollton Street and providing him with a surrogate family, a bed of his own and three balanced meals a day. He served in both the Pacific and Mediterranean, but then put in his papers before Vietnam heated up. Semper Fi shaped him: Nolan spent his spare time leading a Boy Scout troop, reading military history and watching reruns of Hopalong Cassidy movies. This was not, to any detective’s thinking, a behavior pattern consistent with that of the average West Baltimore native.

Still, Nolan’s perspective was unique to the homicide unit. Unlike Landsman and McLarney, Nolan had never been a homicide detective; in fact, he had spent much of his career in patrol, working as a sector supervisor in the Northwestern and Eastern districts-a lengthy exile from headquarters that began when, as a promising young plainclothesman, he crossed the powers-that-be in a celebrated corruption case in the early 1970s.

Those were the years when the Baltimore department was truly rough-and-tumble. In 1973, almost half of the entire Western District and its commander were either indicted or fired for taking protection for the local gambling action. The CID vice unit met with a similar fate, and in the tactical section, rumors were swirling about the ranking black officer on the force, Major James Watkins, who was otherwise a rising candidate for the commissioner’s post. Watkins had grown up with several of Pennsylvania Avenue’s more notable narcotics dealers and, before the end of the decade, he would stand trial as a full colonel, charged with accepting protection from the drug trade.

Nolan was working plainclothes under Watkins’s command, and he knew that things weren’t right in the tac unit. On one occasion, when one of his raids netted more than five hundred glassine bags of heroin, other plainclothesmen offered to take the contraband to evidence control. Nolan balked. He counted the bags himself, photographed them, then got his own voucher for the submission. Sure enough, the heroin-$15,000 worth-disappeared from the ECU a short time later and two tac officers were ultimately indicted. But for all of that, Nolan didn’t believe that Watkins knew about the corruption or was in any way involved. Against all advice and the wishes of the police commissioner, he testified as a character witness for Watkins at the subsequent trial.

The colonel was convicted, then granted a retrial on appeal, then acquitted. The verdict on Nolan’s career was equally divided: before his testimony, he had been a sergeant assigned directly to the state’s attorney’s investigative unit; afterward, he was running a patrol sector in the Northwest with no hope of seeing the headquarters building for as long as the current department administration held office. The exile, the political machinations, the unwarranted taint of other men’s corruption-all of that shaped Nolan, so much so that the men in his squad would groan in unison whenever their sergeant began another retelling of the missing heroin story.

That Nolan had made his way back to CID after so many years in the trenches was something of a personal testament to human perseverance. And although he had no experience with death investigation, it made sense that his ultimate destination would be homicide, where organized corruption was never much of an issue. Over the last fifteen years, the Baltimore department had stayed generally clean-remarkably so when compared to its counterparts in New York, Philadelphia and Miami. But even if a cop had it in mind to make real money, the place to do that was CID narcotics or gambling enforcement or any other unit in which a detective might kick in a door and find $100,000 under a mattress. In homicide, the only recognized scam was overtime pay; no one ever figured out how to make dead bodies pay serious money.

More than anything else, Nolan was a survivor, proud of his rank and his position in the homicide unit. Consequently, he took the supervisory aspects of his job seriously and was frustrated when Landsman, McLarney or D’Addario seemed less interested in the rituals of command. Supervisors’ meetings on the shift inevitably began with Nolan proposing new ideas for the operation of the shift-some good, some bad, but all of them involving a more formal process of supervision. The meetings would never last long: Landsman would respond to Nolan’s ideas by recommending either serious psychological help or a better grade of marijuana. Then McLarney would make a joke about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand and, to Nolan’s dismay, D’Addario would adjourn the session. Basically, Landsman and McLarney would rather be working the cases; Nolan preferred the role of full-time supervisor.

As a result, D’Addario’s sudden tactical shift toward closer supervision was, from Nolan’s vantage point, both correct and belated. The lieutenant, he reasoned, should take control of his sergeants, and the sergeants, in turn, should get a rein on the men. In Nolan’s mind, D’Addario had not only abdicated much of his own authority, but that of his sergeants as well.

And yet Nolan’s detectives-Garvey, Edgerton, Kincaid, McAllister, Bowman-were operating with as much or more freedom than the men in the other squads. Documentation, administrative issues, personnel problems-Nolan held sway over such matters. But the essential purpose of CID homicide was to solve murders, and for that, chain of command mattered no more to Nolan and his men than anyone else. Nolan’s detectives worked their cases in their own speed and fashion, and Nolan would never demand otherwise. Edgerton’s personality required that kind of approach, but even the methodical Garvey would respond to a hovering, micromanaging sergeant by delivering twelve clearances a year. With no sergeant at all, he’d manage an even dozen.

“I wouldn’t want to work for any other sergeant up there,” conceded Garvey, explaining the squad dynamics to another detective. “It’s just that every now and then, you’ve got to slap the shit out of Roger and bring him back down to earth.”

For the detectives themselves, the OT cutbacks and scheduling changes were tolerable only because they, too, understood D’Addario’s predicament. And when D’Addario began trailing behind the detectives, checking the case files and asking for additional paperwork, no one took any real offense. Working a midnight shift one man short, Rick Requer summed up the sentiment sweetly:

“If it wasn’t for Dee,” he told two other detectives, “we wouldn’t be putting up with any of this fuckin’ bullshit.”

Yet they continued to put up with it all through April and into May as D’Addario tried to come to terms with the required pain-in-the-ass persona. The extra paperwork and scheduling changes were cosmetic and could be suffered for as long as it took the lieutenant to weather the storm. As for the overtime, that would flow again in mid-June, when the new budget year began. They cursed, they grumbled, but they played out D’Addario’s string. Most important, they continued to do the one thing absolutely essential to their lieutenant’s future: They solved murders.

Ceruti contributed with a lockup on a fatal beating from the Southwestern, and Waltemeyer put down a shooting in a house on North Wolfe Street, near the Hopkins hospital complex. On Stanton’s shift, Tomlin caught a cutting that ended with the arrest of a new police cadet, a man scheduled to attend the academy the following month.

“Do you think I should call the personnel office about this?” the man asked after confessing.

“Might be a good idea,” Tomlin told him. “Although I’m sure they’ll hear about it somehow.”

Garvey and Kincaid caught one up on Harlem Avenue, where they were blessed with witnesses and a suspect still lingering at the scene. Arriving at University Hospital to check on their victim, the two detectives watched surgeons crack the kid’s chest in a desperate effort at open-heart massage. The line on the EKG was irregular, and blood was pouring out of the chest cavity onto the white tile floor. Ten-seven within an hour or two, the ER resident predicted, morning at the latest. No shit, thought the detectives, who weren’t exactly strangers to the medical aspects of violent death. A surgeon who cracks the chest is on the last roll of the dice; any detective knows that 97 percent of all such efforts fail. Rule Six had been upended and Garvey arrived back at the office unable to contain his wonder.

“Hey, Donald,” shouted Garvey, bounding across the office and then waltzing Kincaid around a metal desk. “He’s gonna die! He’s gonna die and we know who did it!”

“You,” said Nolan, shaking his head and laughing, “are one cold motherfucker.” Then the sergeant turned crisply on his heel and danced a jig into his own office.

A week later, Waltemeyer and an assistant state’s attorney caught a flight for Salt Lake City, where an upstanding, pillar-of-the-community type had confessed to his closest friend about being wanted for a murder committed in Baltimore thirteen years earlier. Daniel Eugene Binick, age forty-one, had been in Utah for a dozen years, married for most of that time and working as a drug and alcohol counselor under an assumed name. And though his photograph still adorned the “Wanted for Homicide” poster in the homicide unit’s main office, it was a picture of a much younger, reckless man. The Daniel Binick of 1975 had long, stringy hair, a thick mustache and a respectable police record; the late eighties version wore his hair close-cropped and ran the local AA chapter. Even after a week’s investigation, Waltemeyer found only one living witness to the bar robbery and shooting. But one was enough, and a clearance by any name still smelled as sweet.

By early May, the clearance rate is a fatter, happier 60 percent. Likewise, the flow of overtime and court pay will be at least temporarily staunched to a point that the brass can’t help notice. If not entirely secure, D’Addario’s position has stabilized, or so it seems to his men.

During one brief encounter in the homicide office, Landsman acknowledges the lighter mood on the shift by risking a joke at the lieutenant’s expense-something that even Landsman would not have attempted a month earlier.

Late one afternoon, D’Addario, Landsman and McLarney are huddled in front of the television, the lieutenant and McLarney checking the roll book, Landsman absorbing gynecological mysteries from a skin magazine. Wandering across the sixth floor, Colonel Lanham happens to step into his homicide unit and all three supervisors snap to attention.

Landsman waits a good three seconds before handing the magazine, centerfold splayed open, to Gary D’Addario.

“Here’s your magazine, lieutenant,” he says. “I appreciate you letting me look at it.”

D’Addario, unthinking, holds out his hand.

“Fucking Jay,” says McLarney, shaking his head.

Even the colonel has to laugh.

Harry Edgerton needs a murder.

He needs a murder today.

Edgerton needs a human body, any human body, still and stiff and void of all life force. He needs that body to fall within the established limits of Baltimore city. He needs that body shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, battered or otherwise rendered inoperative through any act of human intervention. He needs a 24-hour homicide report with his name typed at the bottom, a red-brown case binder that declares Harry Edgerton to be the primary investigator. You say Bowman is handling a shooting call up in the Northeast? Tell him to hang on to that crime scene, because Harry Edgerton, his friend and personal savior, is already in a Cavalier and racing up Harford Road. You say the county police are working a murder in Woodlawn? Well, drag that poor bastard back over the city line and let Edgerton work on him. You got a questionable death in an apartment with no overt trauma or forced entry? No problem. Give the Edge a chance to write on that bad boy and it can be a murder before the next morning’s autopsy.

“If I don’t get one soon,” says Edgerton, jumping red lights on Frederick Road in the early morning darkness, “I’m going to have to kill someone.”

For two full weeks, Edgerton’s name has been affixed to the board’s wooden frame with a thumbtack, scrawled with a certain infamy on sheets of yellow legal paper that list the squad and detective expected to handle the next homicide call. The daily postings are another indication of D’Addario’s change in demeanor; detectives who have handled fewer murders are now being identified and designated as candidates for the next call. Most especially that means Edgerton. Having handled only two homicides this year, the veteran’s pace is not only a controversy within his squad but a loaded issue for D’Addario as well. For the last two weeks, every one of his postings began and ended with Edgerton’s name. It has become something of a daily joke in the coffee room:

“Who’s up today?”

“Harry’s up.”

“Christ. Harry’s gonna be up ’til October.”

For days now, Edgerton has bounced from shootings to stabbings to questionable deaths to overdoses, waiting earnestly for something-anything-to come back as a murder.

And it hasn’t worked. On days when he has handled three or four calls, running from one end of the city to the other looking at bodies, other detectives have picked up the phone and been blessed with double-dunker massacres. Edgerton handles a shooting call and the victim is guaranteed to survive. He works an apparent bludgeoning and the ME is guaranteed to rule the cause of death an overdose, followed by injuries sustained when the victim collapsed on the cement floor. Edgerton goes to the scene of an unattended death and it’s A-1-guaranteed to be an eighty-eight-year-old retiree with a chronic heart condition. None of which means a thing to D’Addario. Edgerton is up until he gets a murder, the lieutenant repeats. If it takes the rest of his career, fine.

This makes for one very irritable homicide detective. It’s one thing, after all, to be considered the resident flake on the shift and the problem child in the squad. And to have Kincaid and Bowman and God knows who else bitching about sharing the workload-normally Edgerton can handle that, too. But, he thinks, normal can be tossed out a window when I’m being made to handle three calls a day every goddamn day for what is beginning to seem like the rest of my life.

Edgerton’s urgent need for a murder was evident a week ago, when he began cursing at an overdose victim in the Murphy Homes, demanding from the cadaver a little more cooperation and consideration than had thus far been shown to him.

“You degenerate motherfucker,” Edgerton said, berating the dead man as two housing authority cops stared on in amazement. “Where the fuck did you fire up? I don’t have all fucking day to look at your fucking arms. Where the fuck is that fresh track?”

It wasn’t just the aggravation of a missing needle mark, but the frustration that had been building with each successive call. And at that moment, standing over yet another body in a Murphy Homes stairwell, Edgerton was deeply disturbed that the dead man had done nothing more than kill himself with heroin. What the hell, he pleaded silently, was a murder too much to ask anymore? This was Baltimore, for Chrissakes. This was a dead man in a stairwell at the George B. Murphy Homes housing project. What better place to be shot down with a high-caliber weapon like a dog? What the fuck is this asshole doing with a syringe by his left hand, staring up from the cement floor with that ridiculous half-grin on his face?

“What are you, left-handed?” said Edgerton, rechecking the right arm. “Where the fuck did you shoot your shit?”

The dead man answered with his grin.

“Why,” Edgerton asked the corpse, “are you doing this to me?”

A week later and Edgerton is still the point man for D’Addario’s shift, racing across Southwest Baltimore to yet another shooting call that will, if bad luck holds, be nothing more than a grazing. There will be no crime scene, no suspect, no dead man sprawled at the intersection of Hollins and Payson. Edgerton conjures up not a corpse, but an eighteen-year-old sitting on a gurney in the ER at Bon Secours, fully alert, talking, with nothing more than an Ace bandage wrapped around one arm.

“The El Supremo’s gonna have to give me a break already,” he says, weaving between two lanes in the emptiness of Frederick Avenue. “I just can’t buy a murder.”

He does a Texas stop at the Monroe Street signal, then wheels right onto Payson. Blue strobes from the radio cars greet him, but Edgerton immediately notices the absence of fire department cherry tops. No body on the ground, either. If there was an ambo, Edgerton tells himself, it’s long gone.

The detective marks his time of arrival and slams the driver’s door. A Southwest uniform, a young white kid, sidles up with an earnest look on his face.

“He’s alive, right?” Edgerton says.

“Who? The victim?”

No, thinks Edgerton, Elvis fucking Presley. Of course the victim. The detective nods.

“I don’t think so,” says the uniform. “Not for long anyway. He looked pretty bad in the ambo.”

The detective shakes his head. The kid doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with. I don’t do murders, Edgerton wants to tell him. I just handle calls.

“We got you a witness, though.”

A witness. Now it’s definitely not a murder.

“Where’s this witness?”

“Over there by my car.”

Edgerton looks across the intersection at a short, wire-thin doper who stares back and nods with what appears to be mild interest. This strikes Edgerton immediately, because eyewitnesses forced to remain at the scene of a murder are generally uncooperative and sullen.

“I’ll be over there in a minute. Where’s the victim?”

“Bon Secours. I think.”

“This is the scene right here?”

“This here, and over that way you’ve got some more shell casings. Twenty-twos, I think.”

Edgerton moves slowly into the street, carefully gauging his own steps. Ten shell casings-.22 rifle by the look of them-are scattered across the asphalt, each circled by a yellow chalk mark. The pattern of the spent shells seems to travel west across the center of the intersection, with most of the casings lying near the southwest corner. And at that corner, two more chalk marks note the location of the body when the paramedics arrived. Head east. Feet west at the curb’s edge.

The detective walks the scene for another ten minutes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. No blood trail. No fresh scuff marks. No tire patches. Truly an unremarkable crime scene. In the gutter near the northeast corner, he finds a broken gelatin cap with traces of white powder. No surprise here-the intersection of Hollins and Payson is a drug market after dark. Moreover, the capsule is yellowed and dirty enough to make Edgerton believe it’s been in the street for several days and has nothing to do with his shooting.

“Do you have this post?” he asks the uniform.

“Not usually. But I’m in the sector, so I know this corner pretty well. What do you need to know?”

What do I need to know. Edgerton is beginning to like this kid, who not only knows enough to grab hold of anything at the scene that resembles a witness but is also talking like he knows the area he’s working. In the Baltimore department, this is a situation worthy of nostalgia. Ten or fifteen years ago, a homicide detective could ask a uniform a question and expect an answer. Those were the days when a good man owned his post and one dog couldn’t fuck another at Hollins and Payson without word getting back to the Southwest station house. In that era, a patrolman who worked a post and caught a murder could expect to be asked who hung on that corner and where they could be located. And if he didn’t know, he found out in a hurry. Nowadays, Edgerton tells himself, we’re lucky if the post man can get the street names right. This kid here is a real police. A throwback.

“Who lives in that corner house there?”

“Bunch of drug dealers. It’s a fucking shooting gallery is what it is. Our DEU hit it last week and locked up about a dozen of those fuckers.”

Fuck that. No likely witnesses there.

“What about that corner?”

“Corner house has junkies. Junkies and an old wino. No, the wino lives one house down.”

Priceless, Edgerton thinks. The kid is priceless.

“What about over there?”

The uniform shrugs. “I’m not sure on that one. That might be a real person living there.”

“Did you canvass?”

“Yeah, we did half the block. No answer at that house, and the assholes over there say they didn’t see shit. We can lock ’em up if you want.”

Edgerton shakes his head, writing a few lines in his notepad. The uniform leans over to get a look, just a little bit curious.

“You know this guy you grabbed?” Edgerton asks.

“Not by name, but I’ve seen him around. He sells off this corner and he’s been locked up, I know that. He’s a piece of shit, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Edgerton smiles briefly, then crosses the intersection. The wire-thin dealer is leaning against the radio car, a black beret pulled down straight across his forehead. High-top Air Jordans, Jordache jeans, Nike sweatshirt-a walking pile of ghetto status. He actually smiles when Edgerton walks up to the car.

“I guess I hung too long,” the dealer says.

Edgerton smiles. A homeboy who knows the drill.

“I guess you did. What’s your name?”

The dealer gives it up in a mumble.

“Any ID?”

The dealer shrugs, then pulls out a state proof-of-age card. The name checks.

“This your right address?”

The dealer nods.

“What was the shooting about?”

“I can probably say what it’s about. And I can say what it looked like from down the street, but I didn’t see who it was did it.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see them?”

“I mean I was too far. I was down in the middle of the block when they came up shooting. I didn’t-”

Edgerton cuts him off as another radio car, cruising south on Payson, pulls to the curb. O.B. McCarter, having returned to Southwest patrol after being detailed to homicide for the Karen Smith case, leans out the driver’s window and laughs.

“Harry Edgerton,” he says, unable to contain himself, “is this your call, man?”

“Yeah,’ fraid so. You been to the hospital?”

“Yeah, I been there.”

Fucking McCarter, thinks Edgerton. He’s been gone from homicide three weeks and I haven’t missed him even a little bit.

“So? Is he dead?”

“You got a suspect?”

“No.”

McCarter laughs. “He’s dead. You got yourself a murder, Harry.”

Edgerton turns back to the dealer, who is shaking his head at the news. The detective wonders whether his witness is putting on appearances or is genuinely upset about the murder.

“Did you know the guy?”

“Pete? Yeah, I knew him.”

“I got his name as Greg Taylor,” says Edgerton, checking his notes.

“Naw man,’ round here, he was Pete. I just talked to him a couple hours ago. This is some shit.”

“What was he about?”

“He was selling burn bags, you know. He was selling people shit. I told him that shit would get his ass killed…”

“You told him, huh?”

“Yeah. You know.”

“You kind of liked the guy, didn’t you?”

The dealer smiles. “Yeah, Pete was okay.”

Almost despite himself, Edgerton is amused. His victim was working out on Payson Street, selling baking soda to junkies at $10 a cap-an act of unrestrained capitalism guaranteed to bring a man more enemies than can ever be put to good use. Christ, Edgerton tells himself, my luck is turning. Every doper along Frederick Avenue must have hated this sonofabitch and I find the one guy who’s a little sorry to see him dead.

“Was he out here tonight selling burn bags?” Edgerton asks.

“Yeah. Off an’ on, you know.”

“Who’d he sell to?”

“Boy named Moochie bought some. And a girl with Moochie, she lives over on Pulaski. And then these other two came by in a car. I didn’t know them. Quite a few people paid money for that shit.”

“What happened with the shooting?”

“I was down the block. Didn’t really see from where I was at, you know.”

Edgerton shakes his head, then gestures to the back seat of the radio car. The dealer climbs in and Edgerton follows, slamming the right rear door behind him. The detective cracks the window, lights one cigarette and offers another to the dealer. The kid takes the offering with a soft grunt.

“You been doing all right with me so far,” says Edgerton. “Don’t start fucking up now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve been straight with me up to this point, so I haven’t dragged your ass downtown like I normally would. But if you’re gonna hold back…”

“No, man, no,” says the dealer. “It’s not like that. I told you I saw the shooting, but I was down the street coming up from where my girl lives. I saw them chasing Pete and I heard the shots, but I can’t tell you who they were.”

“How many were there?”

“I saw two. But only one was shooting.”

“Was it a handgun?”

“No,” says the dealer, stretching his arms to the length of a long gun. “It was one of these.”

“A rifle?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d he come from?”

“I don’t know. He was right there when I first seen him.”

“Where’d he go afterward?”

“After?”

“After Pete got shot. Where’d the boy with the rifle run?”

“Back down Payson.”

“South? That way? What’d he look like? What was he wearing?”

“Dark coat and hat, I think.”

“What kind of hat?”

“You know, like with a brim.”

“Baseball cap?”

The dealer nods.

“How was he built?”

“Average. Six feet, you know.”

Edgerton throws the last third of his cigarette out the window and reads through the last two pages in his notepad. The dealer breathes deep, then sighs.

“Ain’t this some shit.”

Edgerton grunts. “What?”

“I just talked to him a couple hours back. I told him that this shit was gonna get his ass killed. He just laughed, you know? He laughed and said he was gonna make a little money and then go buy his own shit.”

“Well,” says Edgerton, “you were right.”

At the sound of voices on the adjacent sidewalk, the dealer slumps down inside the car, suddenly aware that he has been talking on the street with a police detective for a quarter of an hour. Two young boys glide past the car and turn the corner onto Hollins Street, eyefucking the uniforms but never bothering to look into the back seat. Except for the uniforms, the intersection is once again empty.

“Let’s hurry this up,” the dealer says, suddenly uncomfortable. “A lot of people know me around here and this don’t look right.”

“Tell me this,” says Edgerton, still scanning his notes. “There had to be some people out on that corner, right?”

The dealer nods almost gratefully, content to know the price of his own noninvolvement.

“There were five or six people around,” he tells the detective. “A couple girls that live over that way on Hollins with some other boy I don’t know. I don’t know their names but I see them around. And there was another guy who I do know. He was right there when it happened.”

Edgerton flips to a fresh page of his notepad and clicks the top of his city-issue pen. With nothing else said, both men understand that the price of anonymity will be another witness’s identity. The dealer asks for another cigarette, then a light, then expels both the smoke and the name.

“John Nathan,” Edgerton repeats, writing it down. “Where’s he live?”

“I think Catherine Street, right off Frederick.”

“He deals?”

“Yeah. You all have locked him up.”

The detective nods, then closes the notepad. There is only so much cooperation that a detective can expect at the scene of a drug murder, and this kid has just exceeded Edgerton’s monthly quota. Instinctively, the dealer reaches over to close the bargain with a handshake. A strange gesture. Edgerton responds, then offers a last warning before opening the car door.

“If this doesn’t check out,” he says, sliding off the seat with the kid following him out of the car, “I know where to find you, right?”

The dealer nods agreement, then pulls the beret down on his forehead and disappears into the darkness. Edgerton takes another ten minutes to sketch his crime scene and asks the Southwest uniforms a few questions about the name he has just been given. If you see him on the street, he tells the patrolmen, pick his ass up and call homicide.

At half past three in the morning, Edgerton finally manages to get free for the four-block drive to Bon Secours and a visit with his dead man. He’s a big one, too-six-foot-one or so with a linebacker’s upper body and a tailback’s legs. A thirty-year-old addict who lived not a block from where he was shot, Gregory Taylor looks up at the ceiling of the ER through one glazed eye, the other having swollen shut from the fall on Payson Street. Catheters and tubes hang limply from every appendage, lifeless as the body to which they were attached. Edgerton notes the needle tracks on both arms as well as gunshot wounds to the right chest, left hip and upper right arm. All of the wounds appear to be entrances, though with a.22 slug, Edgerton knows, it’s hard to tell.

“He looks pretty mean, doesn’t he?” says the detective to a nearby uniform. “Big and mean. I guess that explains why there were two of them. I wouldn’t want to go out looking for this guy alone, even with a rifle. I’d definitely bring a friend.”

The physical evidence suggests two other things to the detective. One: The killing was an act of impulse rather than premeditation. Edgerton knows that from the weapons involved; no shooter with any semblance of professionalism would carry something as cumbersome as a.22 rifle to a planned drug killing. Two: The shooter was mightily pissed off at Gregory Taylor, ten shots fired being an obvious indication of displeasure.

Leaning over the dead man’s torso, Edgerton draws a human form on a fresh page of his notepad and begins marking wound sites. As he does, a heavyset trauma nurse, her face locked in that unmistakable get-out-of-my-emergency-room expression, walks across the ER, closing the plastic curtain behind her.

“Are you the detective for this one?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need his clothes?”

“Yeah, we do, thanks. There should be a uniformed officer here to bag those. I’ll see-”

“There’s one out in the waiting room with the mother,” says the nurse, obviously torn between the joys of irritation and the satisfactions of efficiency. “We’re going to need this bed soon.”

“The mother is here?”

The nurse nods.

“Okay, then. I need to see her,” says Edgerton, opening the curtain. “One other thing. He didn’t say anything in the ambulance or once he got here?”

“A-D-A-S-T-W,” says the nurse.

“What?”

“A-D-A-S-T-W,” she says with a certain pride. “Arrived dead and stayed that way.”

Beautiful. Is it any wonder that the easiest extramarital affair for a cop is with an emergency room nurse? What other relationship could be so psychologically symbiotic, so happily diseased in its perspective? Hell, if they ever get bored with the sex, they can always go to a motel room and give each other attitude. A-D-A-S-T-W.

Edgerton swallows his smile before pushing through the double doors to find the fifty-eight-year-old mother in the waiting room.

Pearl Taylor takes the detective’s hand but says nothing. Edgerton is usually good with the grieving mothers. An attractive, well-dressed man with carefully coifed salt-and-pepper hair and a rich, sonorous voice, he is a walking, talking reminder of the son they never managed to raise. Faced with black male defendants and juries of black women, city prosecutors love to get Edgerton on the witness stand for that very reason.

“I’m very sorry about your son.”

The mother shakes her head quickly, then releases the detective’s hand.

“We think this happened,” says Edgerton, choosing his words with care, “because of an argument that might have had to do with-”

“Drugs,” she says, finishing the sentence. “I know it.”

“Is there anyone your son might have had a disagreement…”

“I don’t know anything about his business,” she says. “I can’t help you with that.”

Edgerton contemplates another question, but the woman’s plaintive expression changes his mind. It’s as if she’s waited for this moment for years, waited so long that its arrival can be greeted with familiarity as much as grief.

“I’ll do my best,” Edgerton tells her, “to find the person responsible.”

She looks at him strangely, then shrugs a shoulder before turning away.

“Homicide,” says Edgerton. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going,” says the desk sergeant, unimpressed. “Nah, fuck that. It’s more than going. It’s gone. It’s fuckin’ history.”

“That bad, huh?”

“What can I do you for?”

“Got a writ for a prisoner,” says Edgerton, pulling out a custody form signed by a state’s attorney and tossing it on the Southwestern booking desk. Peering at the writ over the top of his reading glasses, the desk sergeant grunts, coughs, then grinds a cigarette into an overburdened ashtray. He takes the paper slip and steps back, checking the name against the cellblock prisoner log.

“Gone to city jail,” the sergeant says.

“You all just called and told me he was here,” says Edgerton. “When was your wagon run?”

The sergeant rechecks the name, then walks over to the cellblock door. Calling for the turnkey, he passes the paper through the bars, nods an acknowledgment to the man on the other side, then walks back toward the detective. Edgerton watches each labored movement, caught between amusement and exasperation. The Midnight Dance of the Universal Desk Sergeant, a performance that is somehow the same whether the precinct house is in Boston or Biloxi. Was there ever a desk sergeant who didn’t peer out over reading glasses? Was there ever a desk man who wanted to be bothered with police work at three in the morning? Was any station house desk ever manned by anything but aging civil servants, six months from their pensions, whose every movement seemed slower than death itself?

“Yeah, John Nathan. We got him,” the sergeant says finally. “He gave us a slightly different name.”

“Okay then.”

“You want him carryout, right?”

“Yeah, he’s going downtown.”

Five minutes more and the cage door opens for a dark-skinned, pear-shaped kid, who steps slowly into the light of the booking area. Edgerton looks at the bloated little wonder that is his eyewitness and knows immediately that the Hollins Street murder is going down. He knows this from the kid’s demeanor. Because not only was this brain-dead corner boy clever enough to get locked up on a drug charge two hours after the shooting, he’s now standing here looking more sheepish than sullen. Three A.M. and the boy can’t even manage a decent eyefuck; when Edgerton pulls out his cuffs, the kid actually pushes his arms forward, palms up.

“Don’t keep him out too late,” says the desk sergeant. “It’s a school night.”

An old station house line, and Edgerton doesn’t laugh. The fat kid says nothing for a moment, then manages a sentence that is more of a statement than a question:

“You want to talk to me about Pete, too, man.”

“I’m the one who’s gonna talk to you for real,” says Edgerton, walking his prisoner out the booking area door and into the back seat of the Cavalier. Heading west on Lombard Street, Edgerton makes a point of gesturing toward the medical examiner’s building at the intersection of Penn Street.

“You want to wave to your friend?”

“Who’s my friend?”

“Pete. The boy from Payson and Hollins.”

“He ain’t my friend.”

“No, huh?” says Edgerton. “So I guess you don’t want to wave to him?”

“Where he now?”

“Right there. The white building.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Not a helluva lot,” says Edgerton. “That’s the morgue, yo.”

The detective checks the rearview mirror and satisfies himself that there isn’t a trace of surprise in the fat kid’s face. He’s been locked up at the Southwest since early yesterday morning, but he knows about the murder.

“I don’t know no more about that shit,” the kid offers after a five-second delay. “Don’t know why you got to take me from the Southwest District to talk to me.”

Edgerton slows the Cavalier to the curb lane, then wheels around in his seat and glares hard at the kid’s dark, bloated face. The kid looks back evenly, but Edgerton can already sense some small kernel of fear.

“You don’t need to know,” says Edgerton coldly, turning back and speeding up again. “We’re going to start over like you never met another cop in your whole life. Just forget you ever dealt with a cop any other time in your life because they ain’t never talked to you like I’m gonna talk to you.”

“You gonna talk to me.”

“You got it.”

“I don’t know shit.”

“You were there,” says Edgerton.

“I wasn’t nowhere.”

Edgerton slows the car and turns around again. The kid actually flinches a bit.

“You were there,” says Edgerton slowly.

This time the fat kid says nothing, and Edgerton drives the remaining six blocks in cold silence. Two hours, the detective tells himself. One hour and forty minutes for fat boy here to tell me everything that happened on Payson Street; twenty minutes to write it up and initial each page.

Predictions don’t mean much in the interrogation room; Edgerton proved as much to himself three weeks ago when he went at his best suspect in the Brenda Thompson killing in a third and final interview. That day, Edgerton went into the box predicting a confession and emerged six hours later with nothing but lies. Still, he can’t help but be optimistic this time around. For one thing, the kid in the back seat isn’t the target but merely a witness. For another, he has managed to collect a drug charge that can be used for leverage. Lastly, John Nathan has no heart; he proved as much a minute ago.

Back at the homicide office, Edgerton shepherds the kid into the large interrogation room, then goes into his monologue. Twenty minutes later, the boy is nodding in semiagreement. In all, it requires a little more than ninety minutes before Edgerton has a viable account of the shooting on Payson Street, an account that conforms to everything he learned at the scene.

By Nathan’s account, Gregory Taylor was indeed burning customers with fake dime bags, then firing the profits into his own arms. Even judged against the fleeting standards of the urban drug trade, this was not exactly a long-term career move. Taylor eventually burned a couple boys from down by the Gilmor Homes, then made the mistake of staying out on the corner too long. The boys came back in an old pickup, jumped on Taylor with rifles and demanded their money back. Sizing up the situation correctly, the victim coughed up two $10 bills, but one customer was still unsatisfied. He opened up with the rifle, chasing Taylor across the intersection, firing one round after another as the victim collapsed on the asphalt. The two gunmen then ran back to the pickup and drove south on Payson toward Frederick.

During the brief interrogation, Nathan gives up real names, street names, physical descriptions and approximate addresses-every last little detail. When Edgerton walks back into the main office, he has everything he needs for a pair of search and seizure warrants.

And yet none of that seems to matter the following morning when the administrative lieutenant-the supervisor who serves as a direct aide to the captain-reads the 24-hour report and learns that Edgerton questioned a witness at the scene without bringing the man downtown. Inappropriate, the lieutenant complains. Irregular. Against standard procedure. Such behavior shows bad judgment, perhaps even laziness.

“What the fuck does he know about investigation?” says Edgerton angrily when Roger Nolan tells him of the complaints on the following midnight shift. “He sits in that office and does arithmetic. When did he ever get out on the street and work a case?”

“Easy, Harry. Easy.”

“I got everything I needed from that guy at the scene,” storms Edgerton. “What the fuck does it matter whether I talk to him there or here?”

“I know…”

“I’m sick of these fucking politicians.”

Nolan sighs. As Edgerton’s sergeant, he’s caught between the captain and D’Addario, for whom Edgerton has become ammunition in a shooting war. If Edgerton handles calls and solves murders, he vindicates his shift lieutenant; if he doesn’t, he serves the captain and the admin lieutenant as prima facie evidence of lax supervision on D’Addario’s shift.

But now the situation is even worse. Not only does Nolan have to contend with the external politics, but he’s also got serious problems in his squad. Edgerton has become a lightning rod; Kincaid, in particular, can’t abide the younger detective.

A veteran investigator of the old school, Kincaid puts stock in the way a man serves his unit. By that reckoning, a good detective shows up early for work to relieve the previous shift; he answers the phone, handling as many calls as come his way; he covers for his partner and his squad members, helping them with witnesses or even scenes without having to be asked. It is a gratifying portrait of the investigator as a cooperative entity, a team player, and Kincaid has spent twenty-two years fashioning himself in that image. For seven of those years, he worked murders with Eddie Brown, an interracial team made especially amusing by Kincaid’s hillbilly drawl. And for the last two years, he has partnered with anyone and everyone on D’Addario’s shift willing to share a call with him.

All of which makes Edgerton simply incomprehensible to Kincaid. It isn’t so much a personal dislike, the older detective tells others in the office. After all, not two weeks ago he spent time with Edgerton at McAllister’s squad party, a summer barbecue to which Edgerton brought his wife and young son. Harry was good company that afternoon, even a little bit charming, Kincaid had to concede. Granting the differences in youth, in race, in his New York urbanity, Edgerton might not be Kincaid’s first choice for a drinking buddy, but in the end, the feud had less to do with personalities than with Edgerton’s lack of any communal instinct, his indifference to the station house camaraderie that had always been so valuable to Kincaid.

To Edgerton, the consummate loner, homicide investigation is an isolated, individual pursuit. It is, in his mind, a singular contest between one detective and his killer, a contest in which the other detectives, the sergeants, the lieutenants and every other organism in the police department have no appropriate role beyond getting out of the primary detective’s path. This was, in essence, Edgerton’s strength and at the same time his weakness. Share and share alike would never be his credo, and consequently Edgerton would always be a source of discontent to his squad. But when he did catch a murder, he wouldn’t shirk. Unlike many detectives who learn to work a murder only until the phone rings with the next dispatcher’s call, Edgerton would bury himself in a case file until a sergeant came along to drag him kicking and screaming to the next assignment.

“It’s hell getting Harry to take a case,” explained Terry McLarney on one occasion. “You’ve got to grab him by the shoulders and yell, ‘Harry. This one’s yours.’ But once you do that, he’ll work it to death.”

No, Edgerton will not handle his share of suicides, overdose deaths, or cellblock hangings. He will not take orders for anyone else when traveling to Crazy John’s for a cheesesteak, and if asked to bring something back, he will surely forget. No, he will not be a workhorse like Garvey or Worden, a central force around whom the rest of a squad establishes its orbit. And it is true that when some rookie cop fires six-on-the-whistle at the scene of some gas station robbery, Edgerton will probably not volunteer to help sort through witness statements and collate reports. But, if left alone, he will give a squad eight or nine good clearances a year.

Having supervised Edgerton when the two were in the Eastern District, Nolan has for a long time understood the necessary tradeoff. Edgerton was one of the most talented, intelligent patrolmen in Nolan’s sector-even if the rest of the uniforms didn’t know what to make of him. He could be inconsiderate, at times even a little irresponsible, but nothing happened on that Greenmount Avenue post that he didn’t know about. The same was true up in homicide; Edgerton may drift off into the ether for a day or two, but Nolan could be assured that in the end, Harry’s cases would get worked. Hard.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nolan told Edgerton after one of Kincaid’s angry tirades. “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

For Nolan, the trick was to keep his squad together by keeping the friction points apart. Everyone to his proper orbit: Kincaid with Bowman and Garvey, Edgerton, alone or with Nolan himself when he occasionally needed a secondary. Suddenly, however, that had become impossible.

Twice in the last week, Nolan had overheard Kincaid and Bowman ranting about Edgerton in the main office. That fact alone was unremarkable; everyone threw shit on everyone else in the squadroom. But it was notable that the administrative lieutenant-a pipeline to the captain-was present on each occasion.

A boss was a boss. For one detective to talk trash about another in front of a lieutenant was going too far. And while Nolan, alone among the sergeants, had no great love for D’Addario, he had no intention of seeing Edgerton used as ammunition in any prolonged power struggle.

At least one detective in the squad, Rich Garvey, was equally uncomfortable with that notion. As the man who handled the most calls in Nolan’s squad, Garvey was less than impressed by Edgerton’s work ethic. But he also didn’t want to see a fellow detective, a competent detective, burned over things that should never go further than the squad. Three days ago, at a quiet lunch in a Fells Point diner, he had said as much to Kincaid.

“Nolan lets him get away with too much,” Kincaid said bitterly. “Last midnight shift, that motherfucker was late every day but one.”

Garvey shook his head. “I know it. I know you’re pissed off, Donald,” he told the older detective. “But you have to remember that Nolan would do the same for you. He’d cover for you, too.”

Kincaid nodded, understanding. “I know what you’re saying,” he said finally. “But I’ll tell you, if I was his sergeant, I’d bust his ass so quick he wouldn’t know what hit him.”

“I know you would, Donald.”

The lunch discussion helped establish a temporary truce; there would be no additional scenes in front of the admin lieutenant or any other boss. But Garvey and Nolan both knew that with Edgerton and Kincaid as the players, the problem wasn’t really solved. Sure enough, things are ugly again today, with the admin lieutenant asking questions about Edgerton’s performance on the Payson Street murder. By Nolan’s reckoning, the lieutenant wouldn’t even know to ask about Edgerton’s questioning of that witness at the scene. Not unless some other detective mentioned it.

Edgerton is still fuming about the lieutenant’s comment: “I’d like to hear what it is that he knows about investigating a murder. He wasn’t even there and he’s going to come out of that office and tell me how to do my job.”

“Harry…”

“I got more out of that guy out on the street than he’d get if he brought him in here and talked to him for two days.”

“I know, Harry, just…”

Nolan spends another five minutes trying to placate his detective, but to little effect. When Edgerton goes ballistic, nothing can bring him back down for a few hours, at the minimum. Reaching a pause in his rant, Edgerton wanders off to a typewriter, where he begins pecking brutally at his search warrants.

It doesn’t matter that the PC in both warrants will be strong enough to obtain a judge’s signature. It doesn’t matter that the house on Laurens Street will yield.22 cartridges of a similar make and composition to those found at the scene. It doesn’t matter that when Edgerton and Nolan confront the young man living at that address and take out a pair of handcuffs, the suspect will nod knowingly and say, “I was wondering when you’d come.”

It doesn’t even matter when the same young man breaks down after three hours’ interrogation, implicating himself as the shooter in a full, seven-page statement. Somehow, none of that matters.

Because less than a week after Edgerton’s arrests in the Payson Street murder, the same argument is still raging on. This time it’s Bob Bowman, who shares Kincaid’s opinions when it comes to Edgerton, sitting in the coffee room, telling five or six other detectives that Harry’s case isn’t going to court.

“He has one murder that’s gone down this whole year,” he says. “And I heard from Don Giblin that the case is so weak they’re not even going to take it into a grand jury.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“That’s what I heard from Giblin.”

Only it isn’t true. The grand jury does indeed indict two men for shooting down Gregory Taylor on Payson Street, even after he tried to compensate them for the burn bags. And a prosecutor from the trial division is assigned to bring the case into court. And come fall, a circuit court judge will accept a twenty-year sentence and second-degree plea from the shooter, along with five years and fifteen suspended from the codefendant.

Even so, all of that is irrelevant to the politics. Because in the homicide unit, in his own squad especially, Harry Edgerton has become the accepted target. For the captain, he is ammunition; for D’Addario, a potential liability; for his fellow detectives, an aloof, enigmatic pain in the ass.

On the same morning that the Taylor case goes into the black, Edgerton arrives for roll call to find that his lieutenant has posted a new sheet of yellow legal paper next to the board.

“Hey, Harry,” says Worden, pointing to the slip of paper. “Guess what?”

“Aw no,” moans Edgerton. “Say it ain’t so.”

“It’s so, Harry. You’re still up.”