Jimmy Breslin once wrote of Damon Runyon, “He did what all good journalists do-he hung out.” But in Homicide, his year-in-the-life chronicle of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, David Simon didn’t just hang out; he pitched a tent. As both a reporter and a dramatist Simon has always held the conviction that God is a first-rate novelist and to be there when He’s strutting his stuff is not only legitimate but honorable, part and parcel of fighting the good fight. Simon is a great collector and interpreter of facts, but he’s also junkie and his addiction is to bearing witness.

I say this with authority (it takes one to know one), and the addiction plays itself out like this: whatever we see out on the street-with the police, with the corner boys, with people who are just trying to survive with their families intact in a world sewn with every kind of land mine-only whets our desire to see more, to hang and to hang and to hang with whoever will have us in an endless quest for some kind of urban Ur-Truth. Our bedside prayer: Please, Lord, just one more day, one more night, let me see something, hear something that will be the key, the golden metaphor for all of it, which, as any degenerate gambler knows, is in the very next roll of the dice. Truth is right around the next corner, in the next bit of throwaway street commentary, the next radio call, the next hand-to-hand drug transaction, the next unfurling of crime scene tape, as the beast that is Baltimore, is New York, is urban America, like some insatiable Sphinx whose riddles aren’t even intelligible, continues to gobble up one benighted soul after another.

Or maybe it’s just our inability to meet deadlines…

I first met Simon on April 29, 1992, the night of the Rodney King riots. We had both just published Big Books: Simon’s was the book in your hands; mine was a novel, Clockers. We were brought together by our mutual editor, John Sterling. The moment was almost comical: “David this is Richard; Richard, David. You guys should be friends-you have so much in common.” And so of course the first thing we did was make a beeline over the river to Jersey City, one of the hot spots that night, where we were met by Larry Mullane, a Hudson County Homicide detective and my ace Virgil for the previous three years of my writing life. David’s father had grown up in JC, the Mullanes and Simons had likely crossed paths over the generations, and so it went. The JC riots themselves proved elusive, perpetually around the corner but offstage, and my main recollection of that night is Simon’s compulsion to be there, which for me was like running into my long-lost Siamese twin.

Our second encounter was a few years later when, in the aftermath of the Susan Smith horror in South Carolina, I was on something of a Medea tour laying the groundwork for my novel Freedomland. There had been a vaguely similar tragedy in Baltimore: the white mother of two biracial girls had torched her rowhouse while her young daughters were asleep. Her alleged motive was to clear any obstacles from the path of true love with her new boyfriend, who she said was less than thrilled about her two kids (a suggestion he later denied).

Working the phones, David hooked me up with whatever principals were available to be interviewed-the arresting detectives, the mother’s boyfriend, the thrice-bereaved grandmother, the Arab who owned the corner store across the street where the mother had fled, ostensibly to call 911. (Her first call, the store owner said, was to her mother, her c to report the fire.) Journalistically, the story was past its expiration date, but Simon, in his willingness to get me the story, reverted to work mode. It was the first time I ever had to keep pace with a street reporter both mentally and physically; in addition to securing all the interviews, this also involved unsuccessfully trying to jive and con our way past the uniform still guarding the crime scene; shrugging off the straight-arm and working an end run; circling around and scaling backyard fences until we found ourselves inside the blackened rowhouse; and climbing what was left of the stairs to enter the small bedroom where the two girls died of smoke inhalation. At last we were there, and it was like standing inside the gut of a translucent tiger, the two of us staring everywhere-walls, ceiling, floor-at the charred striations left by the flames. A devastating little chip of hell.

But let’s go back to that first night in Jersey City. At one point during the evening there were rumors that the rioters were stringing piano wire across the streets to decapitate motorcycle cops, and Larry Mullane, an ex-motorcycle cop himself, abruptly had to leave us. We found ourselves alone in an unmarked police car (an oxymoron if there ever was one), with me behind the wheel and Simon in the passenger seat. Mullane’s advice to us was, “Keep it moving-and if anybody comes up on you, just try to look pissed off and floor it.” That’s basically what we did, which brings me to a question that has always plagued me: Are writers like us, writers who are obsessed with chronicling in fact and fiction the minutiae of life in the urban trenches of America, writers who are dependent in large part on the noblesse of the cops to see what we have to see, are we (oh shit…) police buffs?

And the answer I’ve come to believe is: No more than we are criminal buffs or civilian buffs. But for whoever allows us to walk a mile in their shoes, on either side of the law, we do feel an unavoidable empathy-in essence we become “embedded.” But it’s not as sinister as it sounds as long as your Thank You mantra goes something like this: As a chronicler I will honor you with the faithful reporting of what I see and hear while a guest in the house of your life. As for how you come off, you dig your own grave or build your own monument by being who you are, so good luck and thanks for your time.

Simon writes with great thoroughness and clarity about the impossibility of the job of homicide investigator. For the murder police in the field, it’s not only the body lying before them that has to be dealt with but also what they carry on their backs, which is the entire hierarchy of bosses who answer to bosses-the weight of bureaucratic self-preservation. Despite the overpopularization of CSI-style forensic advances, at times it must seem like the only reliable science for these investigators at the bottom of the food chain is the physics of careerism, which simply and reliably states that once a murder hits the papers or touches any kind of political nerve, the shit will always roll downhill. The best of them-those who more often than not, under great if superfluous pressure, turn the red names on the board to black-are left with an air of world-weariness and well-earned elitist pride.

Homicide is a day-in, day-out journal, an intermingling of the mundane and the biblically heinous, and Simon’s eagerness and avidity to absorb, to digest, to be there and convey the world before his eyes to the universe beyond, runs through every page. There is a love for everything he witnesses, an implicit belief in the beauty of simply stating that whatever he sees playing itself out in real time is “The Truth” of a world-this is how it is, this is how it works, this is what people say, how they act, act out, dissociate, justify, where they come up short, transcend themselves, survive, go under.

Simon also exhibits a knack for keying in on the enormity of little things: the quality of mild surprise in the half-closed eyes of the freshly dead, the ineffable poetry of a throwaway non sequitur, the physical ballet of aimlessness on the corners, the unconscious dance of rage and boredom and joy. He documents the gestures, the rueful misnomers, the way the eyes cut, the mouth tightens. He records the unexpected civilities between adversaries, the gallows humor that allegedly saves one’s sanity or humanity or whatever the excuse is for making jokes at the expense of the recently murdered, the breathtaking stupidity that propels most homicidal actions, the survival strategies adopted by people living in the most dire circumstances in order simply to make it through one more day. He captures how the streets themselves are a narcotic for the cops as well as the street soldiers (and the occasional writer), everyone jacked for the next predictable yet unexpected bit of drama that will put both sides in motion and send the innocents caught in the middle dropping for cover beneath the bedroom window or huddling in the supposedly bulletproof bathtub-the family that ducks together stays together. And time after time he hammers home the fact that there’s very little Black and White out there, and a hell of a lot of Gray.

Homicide is a war story, and the theater of engagement stretches from the devastated rowhouses of East and West Baltimore to the halls of the state legislature in Annapolis. It reveals with no small irony how survival games on the streets mirror survival games in city hall, how all who engage in the drug war live and die by the numbers-kilos, ounces, grams, pills, profits for one side; crimes, arrests, solve rates, and budget cuts for the other. The book is a realpolitik examination of a municipality in the midst of a slow-motion riot, but through the steadfastness of Simon’s presence Homicide offers us the patterns hidden within the chaos. Baltimore, in fact, is Chaos Theory incarnate.

With the success of the television adaptation of this book, Simon has been able to branch out into drama-the brilliant six-part miniseries based on his follow-up book, The Corner (co-written with Ed Burns), and the Russian novel of an HBO series, The Wire. With these later projects he gets to kick out the jams a little, to nudge and mastermind the truth into a slightly artificial shapeliness to heighten the big-ticket social issues. But even with the creative freedom of fiction, his work remains an exaltation of nuance, a continuing exploration of how the smallest external act can create the greatest internal revolution-in the life of a single marginalized person or in the spiritual and political biorhythm of a major American city.

All of which is to say that if Edith Wharton came back from the dead, developed a bent for municipal power brokers, cops, crackheads and reportage, and didn’t really care what she wore to the office, she’d probably look a little something like David Simon.

Pulling one hand from the warmth of a pocket, Jay Landsman squats down to grab the dead man’s chin, pushing the head to one side until the wound becomes visible as a small, ovate hole, oozing red and white.

“Here’s your problem,” he said. “He’s got a slow leak.”

“A leak?” says Pellegrini, picking up on it.

“A slow one.”

“You can fix those.”

“Sure you can,” Landsman agrees. “They got these home repair kits now…”

“Like with tires.”

“Just like with tires,” Landsman says. “Comes with a patch and everything else you need. Now a bigger wound, like from a thirty-eight, you’re gonna have to get a new head. This one you could fix.”

Landsman looks up, his face the very picture of earnest concern.

Sweet Jesus, thinks Tom Pellegrini, nothing like working murders with a mental case. One in the morning, heart of the ghetto, half a dozen uniforms watching their breath freeze over another dead man-what better time and place for some vintage Landsman, delivered in perfect deadpan until even the shift commander is laughing hard in the blue strobe of the emergency lights. Not that a Western District midnight shift is the world’s toughest audience; you don’t ride a radio car for any length of time in Sector 1 or 2 without cultivating a diseased sense of humor.

“Anyone know this guy?” asks Landsman. “Anyone get to talk to him?”

“Fuck no,” says a uniform. “He was ten-seven when we got here.”

Ten-seven. The police communication code for “out of service” artlessly applied to a human life. Beautiful. Pellegrini smiles, content in the knowledge that nothing in this world can come between a cop and his attitude.

“Anyone go through his pockets?” asks Landsman.

“Not yet.”

“Where the fuck are his pockets?”

“He’s wearing pants underneath the sweatsuit.”

Pellegrini watches Landsman straddle the body, one foot on either side of the dead man’s waist, and begin tugging violently at the sweatpants. The awkward effort jerks the body a few inches across the sidewalk, leaving a thin film of matted blood and brain matter where the head wound scrapes the pavement. Landsman forces a meaty hand inside a front pocket.

“Watch for needles,” says a uniform.

“Hey,” says Landsman. “Anyone in this crowd gets AIDS, no one’s gonna believe it came from a fucking needle.”

The sergeant pulls his hand from the dead man’s right front pocket, causing perhaps a dollar in change to fall to the sidewalk.

“No wallet in front. I’m gonna wait and let the ME roll him. Somebody’s called the ME, right?”

“Should be on the way,” says a second uniform, taking notes for the top sheet of an incident report. “How many times is he hit?”

Landsman points to the head wound, then lifts a shoulder blade to reveal a ragged hole in the upper back of the dead man’s leather jacket.

“Once in the head, once in the back.” Landsman pauses, and Pellegrini watches him go deadpan once again. “It could be more.”

The uniform puts pen to paper.

“There is a possibility,” says Landsman, doing his best to look professorial, “a good possibility, he was shot twice through the same bullethole.”

“No shit,” says the uniform, believing.

A mental case. They give him a gun, a badge and sergeant’s stripes, and deal him out into the streets of Baltimore, a city with more than its share of violence, filth and despair. Then they surround him with a chorus of blue-jacketed straight men and let him play the role of the lone, wayward joker that somehow slipped into the deck. Jay Landsman, of the sidelong smile and pockmarked face, who tells the mothers of wanted men that all the commotion is nothing to be upset about, just a routine murder warrant. Landsman, who leaves empty liquor bottles in the other sergeants’ desks and never fails to turn out the men’s room light when a ranking officer is indisposed. Landsman, who rides a headquarters elevator with the police commissioner and leaves complaining that some sonofabitch stole his wallet. Jay Landsman, who as a Southwestern patrolman parked his radio car at Edmondson and Hilton, then used a Quaker Oatmeal box covered in aluminum foil as a radar gun.

“I’m just giving you a warning this time,” he would tell grateful motorists. “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.”

And now, but for the fact that Landsman can no longer keep a straight face, there might well be an incident report tracked to Central Records in the departmental mail, complaint number 88-7A37548, indicating that said victim appeared to be shot once in the head and twice in the back through the same bullethole.

“No, hey, I’m joking,” he says finally. “We won’t know anything for sure until the autopsy tomorrow.”

He looks at Pellegrini.

“Hey, Phyllis, I’m gonna let the ME roll him.”

Pellegrini manages a half-smile. He’s been Phyllis to his squad sergeant ever since that long afternoon at Rikers Island in New York, when a jail matron refused to honor a writ and release a female prisoner into the custody of two male detectives from Baltimore; the regulations required a policewoman for the escort. After a sufficient amount of debate, Landsman grabbed Tom Pellegrini, a thick-framed Italian born to Allegheny coal miner stock, and pushed him forward.

“Meet Phyllis Pellegrini,” Landsman said, signing for the prisoner. “She’s my partner.”

“How do you do?” Pellegrini said with no hesitation.

“You’re not a woman,” said the matron.

“But I used to be.”

With the blue strobe glancing off his pale face, Tom Pellegrini moves a step closer to take stock of what half an hour earlier had been a twenty-six-year-old street dealer. The dead man is sprawled on his back, legs in the gutter, arms partly extended, head facing north near the side door of a corner rowhouse. Dark brown eyes are fixed under half-lids in that expression of vague recognition so common to the newly and suddenly departed. It is not a look of horror, consternation, or even distress. More often than not, the last visage of a murdered man resembles that of a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed.

“If you’re okay here,” says Pellegrini, “I’m gonna go across the street.”

“What’s up?”

“Well…”

Landsman moves closer and Pellegrini lowers his voice, as if the spoken suggestion that there may be a witness to this murder would be an embarrassing display of optimism.

“There’s a woman who went into a house across the street. Someone told one of the first officers she was outside when the shooting started.”

“She saw it?”

“Well, supposedly she told people it was three black males in dark clothes. They ran north after the shots.”

It isn’t much, and Pellegrini can read his sergeant’s mind: three yos wearing black, a description that narrows the list to about half the fucking city. Landsman nods vaguely and Pellegrini begins making his way across Gold Street, stepping carefully around the patches of ice that cover much of the intersection. It is early morning now, half past two, and the temperature is well below freezing. A bracing wind catches the detective in the center of the street, cutting through his overcoat. On the other side of Etting, the locals have gathered to mark the event, younger men and teenagers signifying, scoping the unexpected entertainment, each one straining to catch a glimpse of the dead man’s face across the street. Jokes are exchanged and stories whispered, but even the youngest knows to avert his eyes and fall silent at a first question from a uniform. There is no good reason to do otherwise, because in a half hour the dead man will be laid out on a table for one at the ME’s chop shop on Penn Street, the Western men will be stirring coffee at the Monroe Street 7-Eleven and the dealers will be selling blue-topped caps again at this godforsaken crossroads of Gold and Etting. Nothing said now is going to change any of that.

The crowd watches Pellegrini cross the street, eyefucking him in a way that only the west side corner boys can as he walks to a painted stone stoop and hits a wood door with a rapid, three-beat motion. Waiting for a response, the detective watches a battered Buick roll west on Gold, idling slowly toward and then past him. Brake lights flash for a moment as the car approaches the blue strobes on the other side of the street. Pellegrini turns to watch the Buick roll a few blocks farther west to the Brunt Street corners, where a small coterie of runners and touts have resumed work, selling heroin and cocaine a respectful distance from the murder scene. The Buick shows its taillights again, and a lone figure slips from one corner and leans into the driver’s window. Business is business, and the Gold Street market waits for no man, certainly not the dead dealer across the street.

Pellegrini knocks again and steps close to the door, listening for movement inside. From upstairs comes a muffled sound. The detective exhales slowly and raps again, bringing a young girl to a second-floor window in the next rowhouse.

“Hey there,” Pellegrini says, “police department.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know if Katherine Thompson lives next door?”

“Yeah, she do.”

“Is she home now?”

“Guess so.”

Heavy pounding on the door is answered at last by a light from upstairs, where a frame window is suddenly and violently wrenched upward. A heavyset, middle-aged woman-fully dressed, the detective notes-pushes head and shoulders across the sill and stares down at Pellegrini.

“Who the hell is knocking on my door this late?”

“Mrs. Thompson?”

“Yeah.”

“Police.”

“Poh-leece?”

Jesus Christ, Pellegrini thinks, what else would a white man in a trenchcoat be doing on Gold Street after midnight? He pulls the shield and holds it toward the window.

“Could I talk to you for a moment?”

“No, you can’t,” she says, expelling the words in a singsong, slow enough and loud enough to reach the crowd across the street. “I got nothing to say to you. People be trying to sleep and you knocking on my door this late.”

“You were asleep?”

“I ain’t got to say what I was.”

“I need to talk with you about the shooting.”

“Well, I ain’t got a damn thing to say to you.”

“Someone died…”

“I know it.”

“We’re investigating it.”

“So?”

Tom Pellegrini suppresses an almost overwhelming desire to see this woman dragged into a police wagon and bounced over every pothole between here and headquarters. Instead, he looks hard at the woman’s face and speaks his last words in a laconic tone that betrays only weariness.

“I can come back with a grand jury summons.”

“Then come on back with your damn summons. You come here this time a night telling me I got to talk to you when I don’t want to.”

Pellegrini steps back from the front stoop and looks at the blue glow from the emergency lights. The morgue wagon, a Dodge van with blacked-out windows, has pulled to the curb, but every kid on every corner is now gazing across the street, watching this woman make it perfectly clear to a police detective that under no circumstances is she a living witness to a drug murder.

“It’s your neighborhood.”

“Yeah, it is,” she says, slamming the window.

Pellegrini shakes his head gently, then walks back across the street, arriving in time to watch the crew of the morgue wagon roll the body. From a jacket pocket comes a wristwatch and keys. From a rear pants pocket comes an identification card. Newsome, Rudolph Michael, male, black, date of birth 3/5/61, address 2900 Allendale.

Landsman pulls the white rubber gloves from his hands, drops them in the gutter and looks at his detective.

“Anything?” he asks.

“No,” says Pellegrini.

Landsman shrugs. “I’m glad it’s you that got this one.”

Pellegrini’s chiseled face creases into a small, brief smile, accepting his sergeant’s declaration of faith for the consolation prize it is. With less than two years in homicide, Tom Pellegrini is generally regarded to be the hardest worker in Sergeant Jay Landsman’s squad of five detectives. And that matters now, because both men know that Baltimore’s thirteenth homicide of 1988, handed to them on the second leg of a midnight shift at the corner of Gold and Etting, is an exceptionally weak sister: a drug killing with no known witnesses, no specific motive and no suspects. Perhaps the only person in Baltimore who might have managed some real interest in the case is at this moment being shoveled onto a body litter. Rudy Newsome’s brother will make the identification later that morning outside a freezer door across from the autopsy room, but after that the boy’s family will offer little else. The morning newspaper will print not a line about the killing. The neighborhood, or whatever is left around Gold and Etting that resembles a neighborhood, will move on. West Baltimore, home of the misdemeanor homicide.

All of which is not to say that any man in Landsman’s squad wouldn’t give Rudy Newsome’s murder a shake or two. A police department is fueled by its own stats, and a homicide clearance-any clearance-will always earn a detective some court time and a few attaboys. But Pellegrini is playing the game for more than that: He’s a detective still in the process of proving things to himself, hungry for more experience and fresh to the daily grind. Landsman has watched him build cases on murders about which nothing should have been learned. The Green case from the Lafayette Court projects. Or that shooting outside Odell’s up on North Avenue, the one where Pellegrini walked up and down a bombed-out alley, kicking trash until he found a spent.38 slug that put the case down. To Landsman, the amazing thing is that Tom Pellegrini, a ten-year veteran of the force, came to homicide straight from the City Hall security detail only weeks after the mayor became the odds-on favorite for governor in a Democratic primary landslide. It was a political appointment, plain and simple, handed down from the deputy commissioner for services as if the governor himself had poured the oil on Pellegrini’s head. Everyone in homicide assumed that the new man would need about three months to prove himself an absolute hump.

“Well,” says Pellegrini, squeezing behind the wheel of an unmarked Chevy Cavalier, “so far so good.”

Landsman laughs. “This one will go down, Tom.”

Pellegrini shoots back a look that Landsman ignores. The Cavalier slips past block after block of rowhouse ghetto, rolling down Druid Hill Avenue until it crosses Martin Luther King Boulevard and the Western District gives way to the early morning emptiness of downtown. The chill is keeping them in; even the drunks are gone from the Howard Street benches. Pellegrini slows before running every light until he catches the red signal at Lexington and Calvert, a few blocks from headquarters, where a lone whore, unmistakably a transvestite, gestures furtively at the car from the doorway of a corner office. Landsman laughs. Pellegrini wonders how any prostitute in this city could fail to understand the significance of a Chevy Cavalier with a six-inch antenna on its ass.

“Look at this pretty motherfucker,” says Landsman. “Let’s pull over and fuck with him.”

The car eases through the intersection and pulls to the curb. Landsman rolls down the passenger window. The whore’s face is hard, a man’s face.

“Hey, sir.”

The whore looks away in cold rage.

“Hey, mister,” yells Landsman.

“I ain’t no mister,” the whore says, walking back to the corner.

“Sir, would you have the time?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Landsman laughs malevolently. One of these days, Pellegrini knows, his sergeant will say something bizarre to someone who matters and half the squad will be writing reports for a week.

“I think you hurt his feelings.”

“Well,” says Landsman, still laughing, “I didn’t mean to.”

A few minutes later, the two men are backed into a parking space on the second tier of the headquarters garage. On the bottom of the same page recording the particulars of Rudy Newsome’s death, Pellegrini writes the number of the parking space and the mileage on the odometer, then circles the two figures. Murders come and go in this town, but God forbid you should forget to write the correct mileage on your activity sheet or, worse yet, forget to note the parking space so that the next man out spends fifteen minutes walking up and down the headquarters garage, trying to figure out which Cavalier matches the ignition key in his hand.

Pellegrini follows Landsman across the garage and through a metal bulkhead door to the second-floor hallway. Landsman punches the elevator button.

“I wonder what Fahlteich got from Gatehouse Drive.”

“Was that a murder?” asks Pellegrini.

“Yeah. It sounded like it on the radio.”

The elevator slowly ascends, opening on another, similar corridor with waxed linoleum and hospital blue walls, and Pellegrini follows his sergeant down the long hall. From inside the aquarium-the soundproof room of metal and plate glass where witnesses sit before being interviewed-comes the sound of young girls laughing softly.

Hail Mary. Here be witnesses from Fahlteich’s shooting at the city’s other end-living, breathing witnesses brought forth by the gods from the scene of the new year’s fourteenth homicide. What the hell, thinks Pellegrini, at least somebody in the squad had a little luck tonight.

The voices in the aquarium slip away as the two men move down the hall. Just before turning the corner into the squadroom, Pellegrini looks into the darkened aquarium’s side door and glimpses the orange glow of a cigarette and the outline of the woman seated closest to the door. He sees a hard face, the deep brown features fixed like granite, the eyes offering only seasoned contempt. Helluva body, too: nice chest, good legs, yellow miniskirt. Someone probably would have said something by now if she wasn’t all attitude.

Mistaking this casual assessment for genuine opportunity, the girl saunters from the aquarium to the edge of the office, then knocks lightly on the metal frame.

“Can I make a call?”

“Who do you want to talk to?”

“My ride.”

“No, not now. After you’re interviewed.”

“What about my ride?”

“One of the uniformed officers will take you home.”

“I’ve been here an hour,” she says, crossing her legs in the doorway. The woman has the face of a teamster, but she’s giving this her best shot. Pellegrini is unimpressed. He can see Landsman smiling at him wickedly from the other side of the office.

“We’ll get to you as fast as we can.”

Abandoning any thought of seduction, the woman walks back to join her girlfriend on the fishbowl’s green vinyl couch, crosses her legs again and lights another cigarette.

The woman is here because she had the misfortune to be inside a garden apartment in the Purnell Village complex on Gatehouse Drive, where a Jamaican drug dealer named Carrington Brown played host to another Jake by the name of Roy Johnson. There was some preliminary talk, a few accusations delivered in a lilting West Indian accent, and then a considerable amount of gunfire.

Dick Fahlteich, a balding, bantam-size veteran of Landsman’s squad, got the call minutes after the dispatcher sent Pellegrini and his sergeant to Gold Street. He arrived to find Roy Johnson dead in the living room with more than a dozen gunshot wounds afflicting every conceivable part of his body. His host, Carrington Brown, was on the way to the University Hospital emergency room with four chest wounds. There were bullet-holes in the walls, bullet-holes in the furniture, automatic.380 casings and hysterical women scattered across the apartment. Fahlteich and two crime lab techs would spend the next five hours pulling evidence out of the place.

That leaves Landsman and Pellegrini to sort through the witnesses sent downtown. Their interviews begin reasonably and orderly enough; taking turns, the detectives escort each witness into a separate office, fill out an information sheet and write out a statement of several pages for the witness to sign and date. The work is routine and repetitive; in the last year alone, Pellegrini has probably debriefed a couple hundred witnesses, most of them liars, all of them reluctant.

The process abruptly enters its second, more intensive phase a half hour later when an enraged Landsman hurls a four-page statement to the floor of a back office, slams his hand on a desk, and screams for the girl in the yellow miniskirt to get her ugly, untruthful, drug-ridden self out of his office. Well, thinks Pellegrini, listening at the other end of the hall, it isn’t taking Landsman long to get down to business.

“YOU’RE A LYING BITCH,” Landsman shouts, slamming the office door against its rubber stop. “DO YOU THINK I’M STUPID? DO YOU FUCKING THINK I’M STUPID?”

“What did I lie about?”

“Get the fuck out of here. You’re charged.”

“Charged with what?”

Landsman’s face contorts into pure rage.

“YOU THINK THIS IS BULLSHIT? DO YOU?”

The girl says nothing.

“You just got a charge, you lying piece of shit.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Fuck you. You’re charged.”

The sergeant points the woman toward the small interrogation room, where she slumps into a chair and stretches her legs up over a Formica table. The miniskirt rides down toward her waist, but Landsman is in no mood to enjoy the fact that the woman wears nothing under her skirt. He leaves the door slightly ajar as he yells to Pellegrini across the squadroom.

“NEUTRON THIS BITCH,” he shouts before closing the soundproof door to the small interrogation room, leaving the girl to wonder what sort of technological torture awaits. A neutron activation test requires only a painless swab of the hands to determine the presence of barium and antimony, elements deposited after a handgun is fired, but Landsman wants to leave her stewing on it, hoping she’s in that box imagining that someone’s about to irradiate her until she glows. The sergeant slams his open palm against the metal door one last time for proper emphasis, but the rage is gone even as he walks back into the main office. A staged performance-more vintage Landsman-delivered with gusto and sincerity for the lying bitch in the yellow miniskirt.

Pellegrini comes out of the coffee room and closes the door.

“What does yours say?”

“She didn’t see it,” says Pellegrini. “But she said your girl knows what happened.”

“I fucking know she does.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Take the statement from your girl,” says Landsman, bumming a cigarette from his detective. “I’m gonna let this one sit for a while, then go back in and fuck with her.”

Pellegrini returns to the coffee room and Landsman slumps into a desk chair. Cigarette smoke slips from the side of his mouth.

“Fuck this,” says Jay Landsman to no one in particular. “I’m not gonna swallow two open cases in one night.”

And so a graceless, nocturnal ballet resumes, with witnesses gliding past one another beneath the washed-out glare of tube lighting, each flanked by a tired, impassive detective cradling black coffee and enough blank statement forms to record the next round of half-truths. Pages are collated, initialed, and signed, Styrofoam coffee cups are refilled and cigarettes bartered until the detectives again assemble in the squadroom to compare notes and decide who’s lying, who’s lying more, and who’s lying the most. In another hour, Fahlteich will return from the murder scene and hospital with enough details to vouch for the one honest witness brought downtown that night-a woman who happened to be walking across the parking lot and recognized one of the two gunmen as he entered the apartment. The woman knows what it means to talk about a drug murder and soon wishes she could take back everything she said to Fahlteich at the scene. Sent downtown immediately, she has been kept at a distance from the occupants of the apartment and is interviewed by Landsman and Fahlteich only after the detective returns from Gatehouse Drive. She shakes violently when the detectives bring up the subject of grand jury testimony.

“I can’t do that,” she says, breaking into tears.

“There’s no choice.”

“My children…”

“We’re not going to let anything happen.”

Landsman and Fahlteich leave the office to talk softly in the hallway.

“She’s fucking terrified,” says Landsman.

“No shit.”

“We gotta grand jury her first thing tomorrow, before she has a chance to start backing up.”

“We also got to keep her separate from the others,” says Fahlteich, throwing a finger toward the witnesses in the fishbowl. “I don’t want any of them to get a look at her.”

By morning, they will have a nickname and general description for the missing gunman, and by the end of the week, his full name, police identification number, mug shot and the address of the North Carolina relatives who are hiding him. A week more and the kid is back in Baltimore, charged with first-degree murder and a weapons violation.

The story of Roy Johnson’s murder is brutal in its simplicity, simple in its brutality. The shooter is Stanley Gwynn, an eighteen-year-old moon-faced kid who served as bodyguard to Johnson, a New York cocaine connect who had armed his true and loyal subordinate with an Ingram Mac-11.380 machine pistol. Johnson visited the Gatehouse Drive apartment because Carrington Brown owed him money for cocaine, and when Brown wouldn’t pay, Gwynn ended the negotiations with a long burst from the Ingram, a weapon capable of firing six rounds a second.

It was an impulsive, awkward performance, the sort of thing to be expected from a teenager. The attack was so clearly telegraphed that Carrington Brown was afforded more than enough time to grab Roy Johnson and use him as a shield. Before the scene in front of him registered in Stanley Gwynn’s brain, he had machine-gunned the man he was supposed to protect. The intended target, Carrington Brown, lay bleeding from four bullets that had somehow found their way past the dead man, and Stanley Gwynn-who will later take a second-degree plea and twenty-five years-ran in panic from the apartment building.

When the dayshift detectives bring early relief at 6:30, the Roy Johnson murder, case H88014, is tucked neatly inside a manila folder on the administrative lieutenant’s desk. An hour later, Dick Fahlteich is headed home for a quick shower before returning downtown to attend the autopsy. For his part, Landsman will be in his own bed by 8:00 A.M.

But as sunlight and the sounds of the morning rush hour seep through the sixth-floor windows, the flotsam and jetsam of H88013-the murder at Gold and Etting-are still scattered in front of Tom Pellegrini, a coffee-logged wraith who stares vacantly at the first officer’s report, at supplementals, evidence submission slips, body custody and fingerprint forms for the person of Rudolph Newsome. Fifteen minutes either way and Pellegrini could have been dispatched to the Gatehouse Drive shooting, where a living victim and living witnesses were waiting to give up a murder and add one more to the list of clearances. Instead, Pellegrini went to Gold and Etting, where a twenty-six-year-old dead man stared up at him with sudden, silent comprehension. Luck of the draw.

After Landsman’s departure, Pellegrini works the edges of his little disaster for another ten hours-pulling the paperwork together, calling an assistant state’s attorney about a grand jury summons for the Thompson woman and submitting the victim’s effects to the evidence control unit in the basement of headquarters. Later that morning, a Western District patrolman calls the homicide unit about some corner boy who got locked up for drugs by the midnight shift and claimed to know about the Gold Street shooting. Seems the kid is willing to talk if he can make a lower bail on the drug charge. Pellegrini finishes his fifth cup of coffee before going back out to the Western to take a brief statement from the boy, who claims to have seen three men running north off Gold Street after hearing shots. The kid says he knows one of the men, but only by the name Joe-a statement just specific enough to match the true scenario, just vague enough to be of no practical use to the detective. Pellegrini wonders whether the kid was even there or whether he picked up what he could about the Gold Street murder while sitting in the lockup overnight, then did his best to turn the information around and try to barter out from under the drug charge.

Back in homicide, the detective slips the notes from the interview inside the case file for H88013 and then slides the folder underneath the Roy Johnson file on the desk of the administrative lieutenant, who has come and gone on the eight-to-four shift. Good news before bad. Then Pellegrini gives a man on four-to-twelve the keys to his Cavalier and goes home. It is a little after 7:00 P.M.

Four hours later, he’s back for the midnight shift, hovering like a moth around the red pilot light of the coffee machine. Pellegrini takes a full cup into the squadroom, where Landsman begins playing with him.

“Hey, Phyllis,” says the sergeant.

“Hey, Sarge.”

“Your case is down, isn’t it?”

“My case?”

“Yeah.”

“Which case would that be?”

“The new one,” says Landsman. “From Gold Street.”

“Well,” says Pellegrini, the words rolling out slowly, “I am ready to get a warrant.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmmm,” says Landsman, blowing cigarette smoke at the television screen.

“Only one problem, though.”

“What’s that,” says the sergeant, now smiling.

“I don’t know who the warrant is for.”

Landsman laughs until the cigarette smoke makes him cough.

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

This is the job:

You sit behind a government-issue metal desk on the sixth of ten floors in a gleaming, steel-frame death trap with poor ventilation, dysfunctional air conditioning, and enough free-floating asbestos to pad the devil’s own jumpsuit. You eat $2.50 pizza specials and Italian cold cuts with extra hots from Marco’s on Exeter Street while watching reruns of Hawaii Five-O on the communal nineteen-inch set with insubordinate horizontal hold. You answer the phone on the second or third bleat because Baltimore abandoned its AT &T equipment as a cost-saving measure and the new phone system doesn’t ring so much as it emits metallic, sheeplike sounds. If a police dispatcher is on the other end of the call, you write down an address, the time, and the dispatcher’s unit number on a piece of scratch paper or the back of a used three-by-five pawn shop submission card.

Then you beg or barter the keys to one of a half-dozen unmarked Chevrolet Cavaliers, grab your gun, a notepad, a flashlight and a pair of white rubber gloves and drive to the correct address where, in all probability, a uniformed police officer will be standing over a cooling human body.

You look at that body. You look at that body as if it were some abstract work of art, stare at it from every conceivable point of view in search of deeper meanings and textures. Why, you ask yourself, is this body here? What did the artist leave out? What did he put in? What was the artist thinking of? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

You look for reasons. Overdose? Heart attack? Gunshot wounds? Cutting? Are those defense wounds on the left hand? Jewelry? Wallet? Pockets turned inside out? Rigor mortis? Lividity? Why is there a blood trail, with droplets spattering in a direction away from the body?

You walk around the edges of the scene looking for spent bullets, casings, blood droplets. You get a uniform to canvass the houses or businesses nearby, or if you want it done right, you go door-to-door yourself, asking questions that the uniforms might never think to ask.

Then you use everything in the arsenal in the hope that something-anything-will work. The crime lab technicians recover weapons, bullets and casings for ballistic comparisons. If you’re indoors, you have the techs take prints from doors and door handles, furniture and utensils. You examine the body and its immediate surroundings for loose hairs or fibers on the off chance that the trace evidence lab might actually put down a case now and then. You look for any other signs of disturbance, anything that doesn’t appear to conform to its surroundings. If something strikes you-a loose pillowcase, a discarded beer can-you have a technician take it down to evidence control as well. Then you have the techs measure key distances and photograph the entire scene from every conceivable angle. You sketch the death scene in your own notebook, using a crude stickman for the victim and marking the original location of every piece of furniture and every piece of evidence recovered.

Assuming that the uniforms, upon arriving at the scene, were sharp enough to grab anyone within sight and send them downtown, you then go back to your office and throw as much street-corner psychology as you can at the people who found the body. You do the same thing with a few others who knew the victim, who rented a room to the victim, who employed the victim, who fucked, fought or fired drugs with the victim. Are they lying? Of course they’re lying. Everyone lies. Are they lying more than they ordinarily would? Probably. Why are they lying? Do their half-truths conform to what you know from the crime scene or is it complete and unequivocal bullshit? Who should you yell at first? Who should you scream at loudest? Who gets threatened with an accessory to murder charge? Who gets the speech about leaving the interrogation room as either a witness or a suspect? Who gets offered the excuse-The Out-the suggestion that this poor bastard needed to be murdered, that anyone in their circumstance would have murdered him, that they only killed the bastard because he provoked them, that they didn’t mean it and the gun went off accidentally, that they only fired in self-defense?

If all goes well, you lock someone up that night. If all goes not so well, you take what you know and run with it in the most promising direction, kicking a few more facts loose in the hope that something will give. When nothing gives, you wait a few weeks for the lab work to come back with a positive on the ballistics or the fibers or the semen. When the lab reports come back negative, you wait for the phone to ring. And when the phone doesn’t ring, you let a little piece of you die. Then you go back to your desk and wait for another call from the dispatcher, who sooner or later will send you out to look at another body. Because in a city with 240 murders a year, there will always be another body.

Television has given us the myth of the raging pursuit, the high-speed chase, but in truth there is no such thing; if there were, God knows the Cavalier would throw a rod after a dozen blocks and you’d be writing a Form 95 in which you respectfully submit to your commanding officer the reasons why you drove a city-owned four-cylinder wonder into an early grave. And there are no fistfights or running gun battles: The glory days of thumping someone on a domestic call or letting a round or two fly in the heat of some gas station holdup ended when you came downtown from patrol. The murder police always get there after the bodies fall and a homicide detective leaving the office has to remind himself to take his.38 out of the top right desk drawer. And, most certainly, there are no perfectly righteous moments when a detective, a scientific wizard with uncanny powers of observation, leans down to examine a patch of bloody carpet, plucks up a distinctive strand of red-brown caucasoid hair, gathers his suspects in an exquisitely furnished parlor, and then declares his case to be solved. The truth is that there are very few exquisitely furnished parlors left in Baltimore; even if there were, the best homicide detectives will admit that in ninety cases out of a hundred, the investigator’s saving grace is the killer’s overwhelming predisposition toward incompetence or, at the very least, gross error.

More often than not, the murderer has left behind living witnesses or even bragged to someone about the crime. In a surprising number of cases, the killer-particularly one unfamiliar with the criminal justice system-can be manipulated into a confession in the interrogation rooms. On rare occasions, a latent print taken from a drinking glass or knife hilt will match up with someone’s print card on the Printrak computer, but most detectives can count on one hand the number of cases made by lab work. A good cop goes to the crime scene, gathers the available evidence, talks to the right people and with any luck discovers the murderer’s most glaring mistakes. But in that alone there is talent and instinct enough.

If the pieces do fall into place, some unlucky citizen gets a pair of silver bracelets and a wagon ride to an overcrowded tier of the Baltimore City Jail. There he sits as his trial date is postponed for eight or nine months or however long it takes your witnesses to change addresses two or three times. Then an assistant state’s attorney, who has every intention of maintaining a better than average conviction rate so that he can one day come to rest in a better than average criminal law firm, calls you on the telephone. He assures you that this is the weakest homicide indictment he has ever had the misfortune to prosecute, so weak that he cannot believe it to be the work of a legitimate grand jury, and could you please round up the brain-dead cattle you call witnesses and bring them down for pretrial interviews because this thing is actually going to court on Monday. Unless, of course, he can convince the defense attorney to swallow manslaughter with all but five years suspended.

If the case isn’t plea-bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free.

Once both sides have loudly argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America ’s most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgment, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher’s Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state’s attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer.

And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you’ll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don’t think the Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.

It goes beyond academic degrees, specialized training or book learning, because all the theory in the world means nothing if you can’t read the street. But it goes beyond that, too. In every ghetto precinct house, there are aging patrolmen who know everything a homicide man knows, yet somehow they spend their careers in battered radio cars, fighting their battles in eight-hour installments and worrying about a case only until the next shift change. A good detective begins as a good patrolman, a soldier who has spent years clearing corners and making car stops, breaking in on domestics and checking the back doors of warehouses until the life of a city becomes second nature to him. And that detective is further honed as a plainclothesman, working enough years of burglary or narcotics or auto until he understands what it means to do surveillance, to use and not be used by an informant, to write a coherent search and seizure warrant. And of course there is the specialized training, the solid grounding in forensic science, in pathology, criminal law, fingerprints, fibers, blood typing, ballistics, and DNA-genetic coding. A good detective also has to fill his head with enough knowledge of the existing police information data base-arrest records, jail records, weapons registrations, motor vehicle information-to qualify for a minor in computer science. And yet, given all that, a good homicide man has something more, something as internalized and instinctive as police work itself. Inside every good detective are hidden mechanisms-compasses that bring him from a dead body to a living suspect in the shortest span of time, gyroscopes that guarantee balance in the worst storms.

A Baltimore detective handles about nine or ten homicides a year as the primary investigator and another half dozen as the secondary detective, although FBI guidelines suggest half that workload. He handles fifty to sixty serious shootings, stabbings and bludgeonings. He investigates any questionable or suspicious death not readily explained by a victim’s age or medical condition. Overdoses, seizures, suicides, accidental falls, drownings, crib deaths, autoerotic strangulations-all receive the attention of the same detective who has, at any given moment, case files for three open homicides on his desk. In Baltimore, investigations of all shootings involving police officers are conducted by homicide detectives rather than internal affairs men; a sergeant and a squad of detectives are assigned to probe every such incident and present a comprehensive report to the departmental brass and the state’s attorney’s office the following morning. Any threat on any police officer, state’s attorney or public official is channeled through the homicide unit, as is any report of an attempt to intimidate a state’s witness.

And there is more. The homicide unit’s proven ability to investigate any incident and then document that investigation means that it is likely to be called on to handle politically sensitive investigations: a drowning at a city swimming pool where civil liability might result, a series of harassing phone calls to the mayor’s chief of staff, a lengthy probe of a state legislator’s bizarre claim that he was abducted by mysterious enemies. In Baltimore, the general rule is that if something looks like a shitstorm, smells like a shitstorm and tastes like a shitstorm, it goes to homicide. The headquarters food chain demands it.

Consider:

Commanding the homicide unit’s two shifts of eighteen detectives and detective sergeants are a pair of long-suffering lieutenants who answer to the captain in charge of the Crimes Against Persons section. The captain, who wishes to retire with a major’s pension, does not want his name associated with anything that gives pain to the colonel in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division. That is not just because the colonel is well liked, intelligent and black, and stands a good chance of getting kicked upstairs to a deputy commissioner’s post or higher in a city with a new black mayor and a majority black population that has little faith in, or regard for, its police department. The colonel is also shielded from pain because whatever may arouse his displeasure requires only a brief elevator ride before it reaches the attention of Yahweh himself, Deputy Commissioner for Operations Ronald J. Mullen, who sits like a colossus astride the Baltimore Police Department, demanding to know everything about anything five minutes after it happens.

To mid-level supervisors, the deputy is simply the Great White Mullen, a man whose consistent escalation in rank began after a brief stint in Southwestern District patrol and continued unabated until he came to rest on the eighth floor of headquarters. It is there that Mullen has made his home for nearly a decade as the department’s second-in-command, secured in his post by unswerving caution, good political sense and genuine administrative gifts, yet denied the police commissioner’s office because he is white in a city that is not. The result is that commissioners have come and gone, but Ronald Mullen remains to keep track of who put which skeletons in which closet. Every link in the chain, from sergeant on up, can tell you that the deputy knows much of what goes on in the department and can guess most of the rest. With one phone call, he can have what he doesn’t know and can’t guess reduced to a memorandum and brought upstairs before lunch. Deputy Commissioner Mullen is therefore a pain in the ass to street police everywhere and an invaluable resource to Police Commissioner Edward J. Tilghman, a veteran cop who spent three decades amassing enough political capital to warrant appointment by his mayor to a five-year term. And, in a one-party town such as Baltimore, the mayor’s office at City Hall is a heaven-kissed summit, a place of unfettered political power currently occupied by one Kurt L. Schmoke, a black, Yale-educated incumbent blessed with an overwhelmingly Democratic, overwhelmingly black metropolis. Naturally, the commissioner is only permitted to breathe air after first responding to the needs of the mayor, who can better contemplate reelection when His police department causes Him no humiliation or scandal, serves Him in whatever manner He sees fit, and fights crime for the common good, in approximately that order.

Underneath this towering pyramid of authority squats the homicide detective, laboring in anonymity over some bludgeoned prostitute or shot-to-shit narcotics trafficker until one day the phone bleats twice and the body on the ground is that of an eleven-year-old girl, an all-city athlete, a retired priest, or some out-of-state tourist who wandered into the projects with a Nikon around his neck.

Red balls. Murders that matter.

In this town, a detective lives or dies on the holy-shit cases that make it clear who runs the city and what they want from their police department. Majors, colonels and deputy commissioners who never uttered a word when bodies were falling all over Lexington Terrace in the summer drug war of ’86 are now leaning over the shoulder of a detective sergeant, checking the fine print. The deputy wants to be briefed. The mayor needs an update. Channel 11 is on line 2. Some asshole from the Evening Sun is on hold for Landsman. Who’s this guy Pellegrini working the case? New guy? Do we trust him? Does he know what he’s doing? Do you need more men? More overtime? You do understand that this thing is a priority, right?

In 1987, two parking attendants were murdered at 4:00 A.M. in the garage of the Hyatt Hotel at the Inner Harbor-the glittering waterfront development on which Baltimore has pinned its future-and by early afternoon the governor of Maryland was barking loudly at the police commissioner. An impatient man given to sudden, spectacular histrionics, William Donald Schaefer is generally regarded to be the most consistently annoyed governor in the nation. Elected to Maryland’s highest office in no small part because of the restored harbor’s symbolic appeal, Schaefer made it clear in a brief phone call that people are not to be killed at the Inner Harbor without his permission and that this crime would be solved instantly-which, in fact, it pretty much was.

A red-ball case can mean twenty-hour days and constant reports to the entire chain of command; it can become a special detail, with detectives pulled out of the regular rotation and other cases put on indefinite hold. If the effort results in an arrest, then the detective, his sergeant, and his shift lieutenant can rest easy until the next major case, knowing that their captain’s ear will not be gnawed upon by the colonel, who is no longer worried about turning his back on the deputy, who at this very moment is on the phone to City Hall telling Hizzoner that all is well in the harbor town. But a red-ball case that won’t go down creates the opposite momentum, with colonels kicking majors kicking captains until a detective and his squad sergeant are covering themselves with office reports, explaining why someone the colonel thinks is a suspect was never questioned further about some incoherent statement, or why a tip from this brain-dead informant was discounted, or why the technicians weren’t ordered to dust their own assholes for fingerprints.

A homicide man survives by learning to read the chain of command the way a Gypsy reads tea leaves. When the brass is asking questions, he makes himself indispensable with the answers. When they’re looking for a reason to reach down somebody’s throat, he puts together a report so straight they’ll think he sleeps with a copy of the general orders. And when they’re simply asking for a piece of meat to hang on the wall, he learns how to make himself invisible. If a detective has enough moves to still be standing after the occasional red ball, the department gives him some credit for brains and leaves him alone so he can go back to answering the phone and staring at bodies.

And there is much to see, beginning with the bodies battered by two-by-fours and baseball bats, or bludgeoned with tire irons and cinder blocks. Bodies with gaping wounds from carving knives or from shotguns fired so close that the shell wadding is lodged deep in the wounds. Bodies in public housing project stairwells, with the hypodermic still in their forearm and that pathetic look of calm on their faces; bodies pulled out of the harbor with reluctant blue crabs clinging to hands and feet. Bodies in basements, bodies in alleys, bodies in beds, bodies in the trunk of a Chrysler with out-of-state tags, bodies on gurneys behind a blue curtain in the University Hospital emergency room, with tubes and catheters still poking out of the carcasses to mock medicine’s best arguments. Bodies and pieces of bodies that fell from balconies, from rooftops, from marine terminal loading cranes. Bodies crushed by heavy machinery, suffocated by carbon monoxide or suspended by a pair of sweatsocks from the top of a Central District holding cell. Bodies on crib mattresses surrounded by stuffed animals, tiny bodies in the arms of grieving mothers who can’t understand that there is no reason, that the baby just stopped breathing air.

In the winter, the detective stands in water and ash and smells that unmistakable odor as firefighters pry rubble off the bodies of children left behind when a bedroom space heater shorted. In the summer, he stands in a third-floor apartment with no windows and bad ventilation, watching the ME’s attendants move the bloated wreck of an eighty-six-year-old retiree who died in bed and stayed there until neighbors could no longer stand the smell. He steps back when they roll the poor soul, knowing that the torso is ripe and ready to burst and knowing, too, that the stench is going to be in the fibers of his clothes and on the hairs of his nose for the rest of the day. He sees the drownings that follow the first warm spring days and the senseless bar shootings that are a rite of the first July heat wave. In early fall, when the leaves turn and the schools open their doors, he spends a few days at Southwestern, or Lake Clifton, or some other high school where seventeen-year-old prodigies come to class with loaded.357s, then end the school day by shooting off a classmate’s fingers in the faculty parking lot. And on select mornings, all year long, he stands near the door of a tiled room in the basement of a state office building at Penn and Lombard, watching trained pathologists disassemble the dead.

For each body, he gives what he can afford to give and no more. He carefully measures out the required amount of energy and emotion, closes the file and moves on to the next call. And even after years of calls and bodies and crime scenes and interrogations, a good detective still answers the phone with the stubborn, unyielding belief that if he does his job, the truth is always knowable.

A homicide detective endures.

It is the illusion of tears and nothing more, the rainwater that collects in small beads and runs to the hollows of her face. The dark brown eyes are fixed wide, staring across wet pavement; jet black braids of hair surround the deep brown skin, high cheekbones and a pert, upturned nose. The lips are parted and curled in a slight, vague frown. She is beautiful, even now.

She is resting on her left hip, her head cocked to one side, her back arched, with one leg bent over the other. Her right arm rests above her head, her left arm is fully extended, with small, thin fingers reaching out across the asphalt for something, or someone, no longer there.

Her upper body is partially wrapped in a red vinyl raincoat. Her pants are a yellow print, but they are dirty and smudged. The front of her blouse and the nylon jacket beneath the raincoat are both ripped, both blotted red where the life ran out of her. A single ligature mark-the deep impression of a rope or cord-travels the entire circumference of her neck, crisscrossing just below the base of the skull. Above her right arm is a blue cloth satchel, set upright on the pavement and crammed with library books, some papers, a cheap camera and a cosmetic case containing makeup in bright reds, blues and purples-exaggerated, girlish colors that suggest amusement more than allure.

She is eleven years old.

Among the detectives and patrol officers crowded over the body of Latonya Kim Wallace there is no easy banter, no coarse exchange of cop humor or time-worn indifference. Jay Landsman offers only clinical, declarative statements as he moves through the scene. Tom Pellegrini stands mute in the light rain, sketching the surroundings on a damp notebook page. Behind them, against the rear wall of a rowhouse, leans one of the first Central District officers to arrive at the scene, one hand on his gun belt, the other absently holding his radio mike.

“Cold,” he says, almost to himself.

From the moment of discovery, Latonya Wallace is never regarded as anything less than a true victim, innocent as few of those murdered in this city ever are. A child, a fifth-grader, has been used and discarded, a monstrous sacrifice to an unmistakable evil.

Worden had first crack at the call, which came in from communications as nothing more specific than a body in the alley behind the 700 block of Newington Avenue, a residential block in the Reservoir Hill section of the city’s midtown. D’Addario’s shift had gone to daywork the week before, and when the phone line lit up at 8:15 A.M., his detectives were still assembling for the 8:40 roll call.

Worden scrawled the particulars on the back of a pawn shop card, then showed it to Landsman. “You want me to take it?”

“Nah, my guys are all here,” the sergeant said. “It’s probably some smokehound laid out with his bottle.”

Landsman lit a cigarette, located Pellegrini in the coffee room, then grabbed the keys to a Cavalier from a departing midnight shift detective. Ten minutes later, he was on the radio from Newington Avenue, calling for troops.

Edgerton went. Then McAllister, Bowman and Rich Garvey, the workhorse of Roger Nolan’s squad. Then Dave Brown, from McLarney’s crew, and Fred Ceruti, from Landsman’s squad.

Pellegrini, Landsman and Edgerton all work the scene. The others fan out from the body: Brown and Bowman walking slowly in the light rain through adjacent yards and trash-filled alleys, eyes fixed on the ground for a blood trail, a knife, a piece of quarter-inch rope to match the ligature on the neck, a shred of clothing; Ceruti, and then Edgerton, crawling up a wooden ladder to the first-and second-floor tar roofs of adjacent rowhouses, checking for anything not visible from the alley itself; Garvey and McAllister splitting away from the scene to work back on the young girl’s last known movements, checking first the missing persons report that had been filed two days earlier, then interviewing teachers, friends and the librarian at the Park Avenue branch, where Latonya Wallace had last been seen alive.

Just inside the rear door of 718 Newington, a few feet from the body, Pellegrini deposits the rain-soaked satchel on a kitchen table surrounded by detectives, patrolmen and lab technicians. Landsman carefully opens the top flap and peers inside at a schoolgirl’s possessions.

“Mostly books,” he says after a few seconds. “Let’s go through it at the lab. We don’t want to get into this stuff out here.”

Pellegrini lifts the blue bag off the table and carefully hands it to Fasio, the lab tech. Then he returns to his notebook and reviews the raw details of a crime scene-time of call, unit numbers, times of arrival-before walking out the rear door and staring for a few more moments at the dead child.

The black Dodge morgue wagon is already parked at the end of the alley and Pellegrini watches Pervis from the ME’s office make his way down the pavement and into the yard. Pervis looks briefly at the body before finding Landsman in the rear kitchen.

“Are we ready to go?”

Landsman glances over at Pellegrini, who seems to hesitate for a moment. Standing in that kitchen doorway on Newington Avenue, Tom Pellegrini feels a fleeting impulse to tell the ME to wait, to keep the body where it is-to slow the entire process and take hold of a crime scene that seems to be evaporating before his eyes. It is, after all, his murder. He had arrived first with Landsman; he is now the primary detective. And although half the shift is now snaking through the neighborhood in search of information, it will be Pellegrini alone who stands or falls with the case.

Months later, the detective will remember that morning on Reservoir Hill with both regret and frustration. He will find himself wishing that for just a few minutes he could have cleared the yard behind 718 Newington of detectives and uniforms and lab techs and ME attendants. He will sit at his desk in the annex office and imagine a still, silent tableau, with himself at the edge of the rear yard, seated in a chair, perhaps on a stool, examining the body of Latonya Wallace and its surroundings with calm, rational precision. Pellegrini will remember, too, that in those early moments he had deferred to the veteran detectives, Landsman and Edgerton, abdicating his own authority in favor of men who had been there many times before. That was understandable, but much later Pellegrini will become frustrated at the thought that he was never really in control of his case.

But in the crowded kitchen that morning, with Pervis leaning into the doorway, Pellegrini’s discomfort is nothing more than a vague feeling with neither voice nor reason behind it. Pellegrini has sketched the scene in his notebook and, along with Landsman and Edgerton, has walked every inch of that yard and much of the alley as well. Fasio has his photos and is already measuring the key distances. Moreover, it is now close to nine. The neighborhood is stirring, and in the bleak light of a February morning, the presence of a child’s body, eviscerated and splayed on wet pavement under a slow drizzle, seems more obscene with each passing moment. Even homicide detectives must live with the natural, unspoken impulse to bring Latonya Kim Wallace in from the rain.

“Yeah, I think we’re ready,” says Landsman. “What do you think, Tom?”

Pellegrini pauses.

“Tom?”

“No. We’re ready.”

“Let’s do it.”

Landsman and Pellegrini follow the morgue wagon back downtown to get a jump on the postmortem while Edgerton and Ceruti pilot separate cars to a drab pillbox of an apartment building on Druid Lake Drive, about three and a half blocks away. Both men drop cigarette butts outside the apartment door, then step quickly to the first-floor landing. Edgerton hesitates before knocking and looks at Ceruti.

“Lemme take this one.”

“Hey, it’s all yours, Harry.”

“You’ll bring her down to the ME, okay?”

Ceruti nods.

Edgerton puts his hand to the door and knocks. He pulls out his shield and then inhales deeply at the sound of footsteps inside apartment 739A. The door opens slowly to reveal a man in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing denims and a T-shirt. He acknowledges and accepts the two detectives with a slight nod even before Edgerton can identify himself. The young man steps back and the detectives follow him across the threshold. In the dining room sits a small boy, eating cold cereal and turning the pages of a coloring book. From a back bedroom comes the sound of a door opening, then footsteps. Edgerton’s voice falls close to a whisper.

“Is Latonya’s mother home?”

There is no chance to answer. The woman stands in a bathrobe at the edge of the dining room, beside her a young girl, just into her teens perhaps, with the same flawless features as the girl on Newington Avenue. The woman’s eyes, terrified and sleepless, fix on Harry Edgerton’s face.

“My daughter. You found her?”

Edgerton looks at her, shakes his head sideways, but says nothing. The woman looks past Edgerton to Ceruti, then to the empty doorway.

“Where is she? She… all right?”

Edgerton shakes his head again.

“Oh God.”

“I’m sorry.”

The young girl stifles a cry, then falls into her mother’s embrace. The woman takes the child in her arms and turns toward the dining room wall. Edgerton watches the woman fight a wave of emotion, her body tensing, her eyes closing tight for a long minute.

The young man speaks. “How did…”

“She was found this morning,” says Edgerton, his voice barely audible. “Stabbed, in an alley near here.”

The mother turns back toward the detective and tries to speak, but the words are lost in a hard swallow. Edgerton watches her turn and walk toward the bedroom door, where another woman, the victim’s aunt and the mother of the boy eating cereal, holds out her arms. The detective then turns to the man who opened the door, who, though dazed, still seems to understand and accept the words thrown at him.

“We’ll need her to go to the medical examiner’s office, for a positive identification. And then, if it’s at all possible, we’d like you all to come to headquarters, downtown. We’re going to need your help now.”

The young man nods, then disappears into the bedroom. Edgerton and Ceruti stand alone in the dining room for several minutes, awkward and uncomfortable, until the silence is broken by an anguished wail from the back bedroom.

“I hate this,” says Ceruti softly.

Edgerton walks over to a set of dining room shelves and picks up a framed photograph of two young girls seated side by side in pink bows and lace, carefully posed before a blue backdrop. Toothy, say-cheeseburger smiles. Every braid and curl in place. Edgerton holds up the photograph for Ceruti, who has slumped into a dining room chair.

“This,” says Edgerton, looking over the photo, “is what this motherfucker gets off on.”

The teenage girl closes the bedroom door softly and walks toward the dining room. Replacing the picture frame, Edgerton suddenly recognizes her as the older girl in the photograph.

“She’s getting dressed now,” the girl says.

Edgerton nods. “What’s your name?”

“Rayshawn.”

“And you’re how old?”

“Thirteen.”

The detective looks again at the picture. The girl waits a few moments for another question; when none is forthcoming, she wanders back into the bedroom. Edgerton walks softly through the dining room and living room, then into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. The furnishings are spare, the furniture mismatched, and the living room sofa worn around the edges. But the place is well kept and clean-very clean, in fact. Edgerton notices that most of the shelf space is devoted to family photographs. In the kitchen, a child’s painting-big house, blue sky, smiling child, smiling dog-is taped to the refrigerator door. On the wall is a mimeographed list of school events and parent association meetings. Poverty, perhaps, but not desperation. Latonya Wallace lived in a home.

The bedroom door opens and the mother, fully dressed and followed by her older daughter, steps into the hallway. She walks wearily through the dining room to the front closet.

“Ready?” Edgerton asks.

The woman nods, then pulls her coat from its hanger. Her boyfriend takes his own jacket. The thirteen-year-old hesitates at the closet door.

“Where’s your coat?” her mother asks.

“In my room, I think.”

“Well, go find it,” she says softly. “It’s cold out.”

Edgerton leads the procession from the apartment, then watches as the mother, boyfriend and sister squeeze into Ceruti’s Cavalier for the slow ride to Penn Street, where a silver gurney will be waiting in a tiled room.

Meanwhile, on the southwestern edge of Reservoir Hill, Rich Garvey and Bob McAllister are tracing the last movements of Latonya Wallace. A report of the child’s disappearance had been filed by the family about 8:30 on the evening of February 2, two days earlier, but it read like dozens of other reports filed every month in Baltimore. The paperwork had not yet reached homicide, and any investigation had been limited to routine checks by the missing persons unit at Central District.

The two detectives head first to Latonya’s school to interview the principal, several teachers, and a nine-year-old playmate of the victim as well as the playmate’s mother, who had both seen Latonya on the afternoon of her disappearance. The interviews confirm the substance of the missing persons report:

On the afternoon of Tuesday, February 2, Latonya Wallace returned home from Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School. She arrived about three o’clock and left the house less than a half hour later with her blue bookbag, telling her mother she wanted to visit the city library branch on Park Avenue, about four blocks from the family apartment. Latonya then walked to the building next door, knocking on the door of the playmate’s apartment to see if she, too, wanted to go to the library. When the younger girl’s mother decided to keep her daughter home, Latonya Wallace set out on her own.

Garvey and McAllister pick up the chronology at the Park Avenue library branch, where the afternoon librarian remembers the visit by the girl in the red raincoat. The librarian recalls that the child stayed only a few minutes, picking out a series of books almost at random, giving little or no thought to the titles or subjects. Thinking back, the librarian also tells the detectives that the young girl had seemed preoccupied or troubled, and had paused in thought at the library door just before leaving.

Then Latonya Wallace carried her bookbag into the daytime bustle of a Baltimore street and vanished, her passing unseen by any known witness. The child had remained hidden for a day and a half before being dumped in that back alley. Where she had been taken, where she had stayed for more than thirty-six hours-the primary crime scene-was still not known. The detectives would begin their pursuit of Latonya Wallace’s killer with little more physical evidence than the body itself.

Indeed, that is where Tom Pellegrini begins. He and Jay Landsman wait in the basement autopsy room of the medical examiner’s offices on Penn Street, watching the cutters extract cold, clinical data from the earthly remains of Latonya Wallace. The facts initially seem to suggest a prolonged abduction: The victim’s stomach is determined to contain one fully digested meal of spaghetti and meatballs followed by a partially digested meal of hot dogs and a shredded, stringy substance believed to be sauerkraut. A detective calls the school cafeteria and is told that the lunch menu on February 2 was spaghetti, and yet Latonya Wallace did not eat anything at home before heading for the library later that afternoon. Had the murderer kept the child alive long enough to provide her with a last meal?

As the detectives stand at the edge of the autopsy room and confer with the medical examiners, Pellegrini’s foreboding at the crime scene begins to take solid form: Newington Avenue had indeed been cleared too soon. At least one piece of evidence was forever lost.

Informed of the child’s murder even as the detectives were finishing their work at the scene, the state’s chief medical examiner, John Smialek, rushed from his office to Reservoir Hill only to arrive after the body was removed. Lost was an opportunity for Smialek to use an internal thermometer to calibrate the body temperature, which would have allowed him to narrow the time of death based on a degrees-lost-per-hour formula.

Without a time-of-death estimate based on body temperature, a medical examiner is aided only by the degree of rigor mortis (the stiffening of the muscles) and lividity (the settling and solidification of blood in the dependent parts of the body). But the rate at which any postmortem phenomenon occurs can vary widely, depending on the size, weight and build of the victim, the external temperature of the body at the time of death and the temperature or conditions of the death scene. Moreover, rigor mortis sets and then disappears, then sets again in the first hours after death; a pathologist would have to examine the body more than once-and hours apart-to assess the true status of rigor correctly. As a result, detectives seeking time-of-death estimates have become accustomed to working within a spread of six, twelve, or even eighteen hours. In cases where decomposition has begun, the ability of a pathologist to determine time of death is further impaired, although the onerous task of sizing individual maggots taken from the body can often bring the estimate to within a two-or three-day span. The truth is that medical experts can often provide no more than a rough guess as to a victim’s time of death; coroners capable of telling Kojak that his victim stopped breathing between 10:30 and 10:45 P.M. are always a source of amusement for cops slumped in front of the tube on a slow nightshift.

When Pellegrini and Landsman press the pathologists for the best possible estimate, they are told that their victim appears to be coming out of first-stage rigor and has therefore been dead for at least twelve hours. Given the absence of any decomposition and the extra meal in her stomach, the detectives make their first assumption: Latonya Wallace was probably held captive for a day, killed on Wednesday night, and then dumped on Newington Avenue in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The remainder of the autopsy is unambiguous. Latonya Wallace had been strangled with a piece of cord or rope, then brutally disemboweled with a sharp instrument, probably a serrated table knife. She sustained at least six deep wounds to the chest and abdomen, suggesting a level of violence and intensity that detectives categorize as overkill. Although the victim was discovered fully clothed, a fresh vaginal tear indicates some type of molestation, but vaginal, anal and oral swabs come up negative for semen. Finally, the pathologists note that a tiny star-shaped earring is present in one earlobe but missing from the other. The family would later confirm that she wore two such earrings to school on Tuesday.

Examining the wounds in detail, Pellegrini and Landsman are convinced that the rear of Newington Avenue is not the site of the murder. There was little blood at the death scene, even though the child’s wounds were severe and bleeding would have been pronounced. The first and most essential question for the detectives is clear: Where was the child murdered, if not in the back alley? Where is the primary crime scene?

As the detectives working the case gather in the homicide office late that afternoon to compare notes, Jay Landsman outlines a scenario increasingly obvious to most of the men in the room:

“She’s found between the library and her house,” says the sergeant, “so whoever took her is from the neighborhood, and she probably knew him if he was able to get her off the street in the middle of the day. He has to take her inside someplace. If you grabbed her off the street in a car, you’d drive her somewhere else; you wouldn’t bring the body back into the neighborhood after you killed her.”

Landsman also suggests, to general agreement, that the girl was probably murdered within a block or two of where she was dumped. Even in the early morning hours, he reasons, someone carrying the bloody body of a child, concealed in little more than a red raincoat, would not want to travel in the open for any great distance.

“Unless he takes her to the alley in a car,” adds Pellegrini.

“But then you’re back to asking yourself why the guy, if he’s already got her in a car, would go and dump her in an alley where anyone could look out a window and see him,” argues Landsman. “Why not just drive her out into the woods somewhere?”

“Maybe you’re dealing with a goof,” says Pellegrini.

“No,” says Landsman. “Your crime scene is right in that fucking neighborhood. It’s probably going to be someone who lives in one of the houses in that block who took her right out of his back door… or it’s a vacant house or a garage or something like that.”

The meeting, such as it is, breaks down into smaller groups of detectives, with Landsman putting men to work on small, insulated parts of the whole.

As the primary detective, Pellegrini begins reading through the key statements of relatives taken by half a dozen detectives earlier in the day, digesting pieces of the puzzle that fell to the other investigators. Q-and-A sheets from the victim’s family members, from some of the child’s schoolmates, from the fifty-three-year-old resident of 718 Newington who, on taking out the trash that morning, had discovered the body-Pellegrini scans each page with an eye for an unusual phrase, an inconsistency, anything out of the ordinary. He was there for some of the interviews; others took place before he returned from the autopsy. Now, he is playing catchup, working to stay on top of a case that is expanding geometrically.

At the same time, Edgerton and Ceruti sit in the annex office, surrounded by a collection of brown paper evidence bags containing the jetsam from the morning autopsy: shoes, bloodied clothes, scrapings from the victim’s fingernails for possible DNA or blood typing, samples of victim’s blood and hair for possible future comparisons, and a series of hairs, both negroid and caucasoid, which were discovered on the victim and might or might not have anything to do with the crime.

The presence of foreign hairs is carefully noted, but in Baltimore at least, homicide detectives have come to regard that kind of trace evidence as the least valuable. For one thing, the crime lab can only on rare occasions-usually those involving distinctly colored caucasoid hairs-match beyond any reasonable doubt a recovered strand with a suspect. Particularly with negroid and darker caucasoid hairs, the best that forensic science can do is declare that the same class characteristics exist between a suspect’s hair and the recovered strand. DNA-genetic coding, which can unambiguously link trace evidence to a single suspect by matching gene characteristics, is now becoming more widely available to law enforcement, but the process works best with blood and tissue samples. To match the DNA coding of human hair to a suspect, at least one entire hair, with its root intact, is needed. Moreover, Landsman and many other detectives have strong doubts about the integrity of trace evidence at the medical examiner’s office, where the number of autopsies performed daily in cramped conditions can produce a less than pristine environment. Hairs recovered from Latonya Wallace could just as easily have come from the plastic wrap on the body litter or a towel used to clean the victim prior to the internal examination. They may be hairs from the ME’s attendants and investigators, or the paramedics who pronounced the victim, or from the last body carted away on the body litter or laid out on the examination gurneys.

Edgerton begins filling in the blanks on the first of a series of lab forms: One red raincoat, bloodstained. One red waist jacket, bloodstained. One pair blue rain shoes. Request blood and trace evidence analysis. Special latent print analysis.

Other detectives collate and catalogue witness statements for the case file or work the typewriters in the admin office, pounding out one report after another on the day’s activity. Still other detectives are clustered around the computer terminal in the admin office, punching up criminal records for nearly every name obtained in a preliminary canvass of the north side of Newington’s 700 block-a stretch of sixteen rowhouses that back up against the alley where the body was found.

The result of the computer check is itself an education in city living, and Pellegrini, after digesting the witness statements, begins reading each printout. He soon grows weary at the repetition. More than half of the four dozen names typed into the computer generate a couple of pages of prior arrests. Armed robbery, assault with intent, rape, theft, deadly weapon-in terms of criminal endeavor, there seem to be few virgins left in Reservoir Hill. Of particular interest to Pellegrini are the half dozen males who show priors for at least one sex offense.

Also punched through the computer is one name that the victim’s family gave to the police, the name of the proprietor of a fish store on Whitelock Street. Latonya Wallace occasionally worked at the store for pocket change until her mother’s boyfriend-the quiet young man who opened the apartment door for Edgerton that morning-became suspicious. The Fish Man, as he has long been known in the neighborhood, is a fifty-one-year-old living alone in a second-floor apartment across the street from his store. A one-story, single-room affair near the elbow bend of Whitelock Street, Reservoir Hill’s short commercial stretch, the store itself is about two blocks west of the alley where the body was dumped. The Fish Man, a grizzled, timeworn piece of work, was quite friendly with Latonya-a little too friendly, as far as the child’s family was concerned. There had been some talk among the schoolchildren and their parents, and Latonya was told explicitly to avoid the Whitelock Street store.

Pellegrini finds that the Fish Man also has some history in the computer, which can scan city arrests going back to 1973. But the old man’s sheet shows nothing exceptional, mostly a few arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, and the like. Pellegrini reads the sheet carefully, but he pays at least as much attention to the brief, insubstantial record for the boyfriend of the victim’s mother. Homicide work offers no respite from cynical thoughts, and only with reluctance does a detective delete the nearest and dearest from his list of suspects.

The clerical work continues through the four o’clock shift change and into early evening. Six of D’Addario’s detectives are working overtime for no other reason than the case itself, giving little thought to their pay stubs. The case is a classic red ball, and as such it has the attention of the entire department: Youth division has assigned two detectives to assist homicide; the tactical section has put another eight plainclothes officers into the detail; special investigations across the hall sends two men from the career criminals unit; the Central and Southern districts each add two men from their operations units. The office is crowded with the growing herd of warm bodies-some involved in specific aspects of the investigation, some drinking coffee in the annex office, all dependent on Jay Landsman, the squad sergeant and case supervisor, for guidance and purpose. The nightshift detectives offer assistance, then take stock of the growing crowd and gradually retreat to the shelter of the coffee room.

“You can tell a little girl got killed today,” says Mark Tomlin, an early arrival from Stanton ’s shift, “because it’s eight P.M. and the entire police department doesn’t want to go home.”

Nor do they want to stay in the office. As the core group of Pellegrini, Landsman and Edgerton continue to sort through the day’s accumulated information and plan the next day’s effort, other detectives and officers newly detailed to the case gradually drift toward Reservoir Hill until radio cars and unmarked Cavaliers are crisscrossing every alley and street between North Avenue and Druid Park Lake.

Tactical plainclothes officers spend much of the late evening jacking up street dealers at Whitelock and Brookfield, driving away, and then returning an hour later to jack them up again. Central District radio cars roll through every back alley, demanding identification from anyone who strays close to Newington Avenue. Foot patrolmen clear the Whitelock corners from Eutaw to Callow, questioning anybody who looks even a little out of place.

It is an impressive parade, a reassuring performance to those in the neighborhood who crave reassurance. And yet this is not a crime of cocaine dealers or heroin users or stickup artists or streetwalkers. This is an act undertaken by one man, alone, in the dark. Even as they are tossed off their corners, the Whitelock Street homeboys are willing to say as much:

“I hope you catch the cocksucker, man.”

“Go get his ass.”

“Lock that motherfucker up.”

For one February evening the code of the street is abandoned and the dealers and dopers readily offer up to the police whatever information they have, most of it useless, some of it incoherent. In truth, the cavalry maneuvers in Reservoir Hill speak not to the investigation itself but to a territorial imperative, a showing of the colors. It announces to the inhabitants of one battered, beleaguered rowhouse slum that the death of Latonya Wallace has been marked from its earliest hours, elevated above the routine catalogue of sin and vice. The Baltimore Police Department, its homicide unit included, is going to make a stand on Newington Avenue.

And yet for all the swagger and bravado tendered on that first night after Latonya Wallace is found, there is an equal and opposing spirit in the streets and alleys of Reservoir Hill, something alien and unnatural.

Ceruti feels it first, when he walks two steps from a Cavalier on Whitelock and some fool tries to peddle him heroin. Then it touches Eddie Brown, who walks into the Korean carryout on Brookfield for cigarettes only to be confronted by a wild-eyed smokehound, half in the bag, who tries to shove the detective back out the door.

“Get the hell away from me,” growls Brown, hurling the drunk onto the sidewalk. “Are you out of your damn mind?”

And a half hour later, the spirits reveal themselves again to a whole carload of detectives, who roll through the rear of Newington Avenue for one last look at the death scene. As the car creeps down the garbage-strewn alley, its headlights fix upon a rat the size of a small dog.

“Jesus,” says Eddie Brown, getting out of the car. “Lookit the size of that thing.”

The other detectives spill from the unmarked car for a closer look. Ceruti picks up a piece of broken brick and throws it half the length of the block, missing the rat by a few feet. The animal stares back at the Chevrolet with seeming indifference, then wanders farther down the alley, where it corners a large black and white alley cat against a cinder block wall.

Eddie Brown is incredulous. “Did you see the size of that monster?”

“Hey,” says Ceruti. “I saw all I needed to.”

“I been a city boy for a long time,” says Brown, shaking his head, “and I never, ever seen a rat back up a cat like that.”

But on that night, in that alley, behind that ragged stretch of rowhouses on Newington Avenue, the natural world has been vanquished. Rats are chasing cats, just as glassine bags of heroin are thrust upon police detectives, just as schoolchildren are used for a moment’s pleasure, then torn apart and thrown away.

“Fuck this place,” says Eddie Brown, climbing into the Chevrolet.

On paper, at least, the prerogatives of a Baltimore homicide detective are few in number. His expertise accords him no greater rank and, unlike counterparts in other American cities, where detective grades and gold shields offer better pay and more authority, a Baltimore detective carries a silver shield and is regarded by the chain of command as a patrolman in plainclothes, a distinction that brings only a small wardrobe allowance. Regardless of training or experience, he is governed by the same pay scale as other officers. Even granting a homicide detective’s ability to earn-whether or not he so desires-a third or half of his salary again in overtime and court pay, the union scale still begins at only $29,206 after five years of service, $30,666 after fifteen, and $32,126 after a quarter century.

Departmental guidelines display a similar indifference to the special circumstances of the homicide detective. The BPD’s general orders manual-to the brass, a well-reasoned treatise of authority and order; to the working cop, an ever-amended tome of woe and suffering-does little to distinguish between patrolmen and detectives. The one critical exception: A detective owns his crime scene.

Whenever and wherever a body falls in the city of Baltimore, no authority exceeds that of the primary detective on the scene; no one can tell that detective what should or shouldn’t be done. Police commissioners, deputy commissioners, colonels, majors-all are under the authority of the detective within the confines of a crime scene. Of course, this is not to say that many detectives have countermanded a deputy commissioner with a dead body in the room. In truth, no one is really sure what would happen if a detective did so, and the general consensus in the homicide unit is that they’d like to meet the crazy bastard who would try. Donald Kincaid, a veteran detective on D’Addario’s shift, made history ten years back by ordering a tactical commander-a mere captain-to get the hell out of a downtown motel room, an action necessitated by the commander’s willingness to allow a dozen of his herd to graze unimpeded over Kincaid’s yet-to-be-processed scene. The action prompted memos and administrative charges, then more memos, then letters of response, then responding letters of response until Kincaid was summoned to a meeting in the deputy commissioner’s office, where he was quietly assured that he had interpreted the general orders correctly, that his authority was unequivocal and he was absolutely right to invoke it. Unswervingly right. And if he chose to fight the pending charges at a trial board, he would probably be vindicated and then transferred out of homicide to a foot post near the southern suburbs of Philadelphia. On the other hand, if he was willing to accept the loss of five vacation days as punishment, he could remain a detective. Kincaid saw the light and yielded; logic is rarely the engine that propels a police department forward.

Still, the authority granted to a detective on that small parcel of land where a body happens to fall speaks to the importance and fragility of a crime scene. Homicide men are fond of reminding one another-and anyone else who will listen-that a detective gets only one chance at a scene. You do what you do, and then the yellow plastic police-line-do-not-cross strips come down. The fire department turns a hose on the bloodstains; the lab techs move on to the next call; the neighborhood reclaims another patch of pavement.

The crime scene provides the greater share of physical evidence, the first part of a detective’s Holy Trinity, which states that three things solve crimes:

Physical evidence.

Witnesses.

Confessions.

Without one of the first two elements, there is little chance that a detective will find a suspect capable of providing the third. A murder investigation, after all, is an endeavor limited by the very fact that the victim-unlike those who are robbed, raped or seriously assaulted-is no longer in a position to provide much information.

The detective’s trinity ignores motivation, which matters little to most investigations. The best work of Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie argues that to track a murderer, the motive must first be established; in Baltimore, if not on the Orient Express, a known motive can be interesting, even helpful, yet it is often beside the point. Fuck the why, a detective will tell you; find out the how, and nine times out of ten it’ll give you the who.

It’s a truth that goes against the accepted grain and court juries always have a hard time when a detective takes the stand and declares he has no idea why Tater shot Pee Wee in the back five times, and frankly, he could care less. Pee Wee isn’t around to discuss it, and our man Tater doesn’t want to say. But, hey, here’s the gun and the bullets and the ballistics report and two reluctant witnesses who saw Tater pull the trigger and then picked the ignorant, murdering bastard from a photo array. So what the hell else you want me to do, interview the goddamn butler?

Physical evidence. Witnesses. Confessions.

Physical evidence can be anything from a usable latent print on a water glass to a spent bullet pulled from the drywall. It can be something as obvious as the fact that a house has been ransacked, something as subtle as a number on the victim’s telephone pager. It can be the victim’s clothes, or the victim himself, when the small, dark specks of stipplin against fabric or skin show that the wound was inflicted at close range. Or a blood trail that shows the victim was attacked first in the bathroom, then pursued into the bedroom. Or the what’s-wrong-with-this-picture game, in which a witness is claiming that no one else was home, but there are four used plates on the kitchen counter. Physical evidence from a crime scene can also be measured by what is not present: the absence of any forced entry to a house; the lack of blood from a gaping neck wound, suggesting that the victim was killed elsewhere; a dead man in an alley with the trouser pockets pulled inside-out, indicating that robbery was the motive.

There are, of course, those sacred occasions when physical evidence itself identifies a suspect. A spent bullet is recovered intact and with little apparent mutilation, so that it can be matched ballistically against a recovered weapon or against same-caliber projectiles from another shooting in which a suspect has been identified; a semen sample recovered in a vaginal swab is DNA-matched to a possible assailant; a footprint found near a body in the dirt of a railroad bed is paired with a sneaker worn by a suspect into the interrogation room. Such moments offer clear evidence that the Creator has not yet shelved his master plan and that, for one fleeting moment, a homicide detective is being used as an instrument of divine will.

More often, however, the physical evidence gathered at the crime scene provides the detective with information that is less absolute, but nonetheless essential. Even if the evidence doesn’t lead directly to a suspect, the raw facts provide a rough outline of the crime itself. The more information that a detective brings away from the scene, the more he knows what is possible and what is not. And in the interrogation rooms, that counts for a great deal.

In the soundproof cubicles used by the homicide unit, a witness will readily claim he was asleep in bed when the shooting started in the next room, and he will maintain the deceit up to the point when a detective confronts him with the fact that the sheets were not disturbed. He will tell the detectives that the shooting could not have been over drugs, that he knows nothing about drugs, until the detective tells him they’ve already found 150 caps of heroin under his mattress. He will claim that only the lone assailant was armed and there was no shootout until the detective makes it clear that.32 and 9mm casings were both recovered in the living room.

Denied the knowledge provided by physical evidence, a detective walks into the interrogation room without leverage, without any tool to pry truth from suspects or reluctant witnesses. The bastards can lie themselves blind and the detectives, disbelieving and frustrated, can scream at them for lying themselves blind. Without physical evidence, there is only stalemate.

Beyond those who don’t want to talk, the physical evidence keeps honest those who willingly volunteer information. Seeking to cut deals on their own charges, inmates at the city jail routinely claim to have heard fellow prisoners boast about or confess to murders, but detectives seriously pursue only those statements that include details from the crime scene that only a perpetrator could know. Likewise, a confession obtained from a suspect that includes details of the crime known only to the killer is inherently more believable in court. For these reasons, a detective returns from every crime scene with a mental list of essential details that he plans to withhold from newspaper and television reporters who will be calling the homicide office half an hour after the body hits the ground. Typically, a detective will hold back the caliber of the weapon used, or the exact location of the wounds, or the presence of an unusual object at the scene. If the murder occurred inside a house rather than on a street where a crowd can gather, the investigator may try to withhold a description of the clothes worn by the victim or the exact location of the victim’s body in the house. In the Latonya Wallace case, Landsman and Pellegrini were careful not to mention the ligature marks on the victim’s neck or that a cord or rope was used in the strangulation. They also kept the evidence of sexual molestation, or at least they tried to keep it-a week after the murder, a colonel felt the need to reveal the motive for the slaying to concerned parents at a Reservoir Hill community meeting.

From a detective’s point of view, no crime scene is better than a body in a house. Not only does a murder indoors mean that details can be kept from gathering crowds or prying reporters, but the house itself offers immediate questions. Who owns or rents the house? Who’s living there? Who was inside at the time? Why is my victim inside this house? Does he live here? Who brought him here? Who was he visiting? And call for a wagon, because everyone in the place is going downtown.

To murder someone in a house, a killer has first got to gain entry, either at the invitation of the victim or by forcing a door or window. Either way, something is gained by the investigator. The absence of forced entry suggests that the victim and assailant were probably known to each other; forced entry allows for the possibility that the killer has left fingerprints on a windowpane or door frame. Once inside a house, the killer may well touch a variety of utensils and smooth surfaces, leaving more latent prints. If the killer sprays some bullets around, most of the stray shots will appear as holes in the walls, in the ceiling, in the furniture. If the victim struggles and the assailant is injured, blood spatter or pulled hairs will be more easily discovered in the limited confines of a living room. The same thinking applies to loose fibers and other trace evidence. A lab tech can take a vacuum to a three-bedroom house in under an hour, then turn the vacuum bag’s contents over to the whitecoats for sifting in the fifth-floor labs.

But a body in the street offers less. Kill a man while he’s walking to the liquor store and you can rest assured that no civil servant is going to suck the lint from the 2500 block of Division Street. Shoot a man outside and there’s a good chance that most of the projectiles will not be recovered. Kill someone in the street and often the crime scene will provide a detective with little more than some blood spatter and a couple of spent casings. Not only are the opportunities for recovering physical evidence fewer, but the spatial relationship between the killer, the victim and the scene is obscured. With an indoor murder, the killer and victim can both have discernible connections to the location; out in the street, a detective can’t check utility bills or rental agreements to learn the names of people associated with his crime scene. He can’t collect the photographs and loose paper, telephone messages and notes scrawled on pieces of newspaper that would be waiting for him at an indoor murder.

Of course, a detective knows that a street murder carries its own advantages, notably the possibility of witnesses, the second element of the investigative triad. For this reason, one alternative has long held a special place in the catalogue of urban violence, particularly in a rowhouse city such as Baltimore, where every block has a rear promenade. Kill someone in an alley and you minimize the risks of both physical evidence and witnesses. In Baltimore, the report of a body in an alley is bound to bring groans and other guttural noises from the throat of a responding homicide detective.

Only one scenario, in fact, offers less hope than a body in an alley. When a Baltimore homicide detective is called to the woods and brambles along the far western edge of the city, it can only mean that one of the city’s inhabitants has done a very bad thing and done it very, very well. For two generations, Leakin Park has been Baltimore ’s favored dumping ground for those who depart this vale by bullet or blade. A sprawling, thickly wooded wilderness surrounding a small stream known as the Gywnns Falls, the park has been the scene of so many unlicensed interments as to warrant consideration as a city cemetery. In New York, they use the Jersey marshes or the city’s rivers; in Miami, the Everglades; in New Orleans, the bayou. In Baltimore, the odd, inconvenient corpse is often planted along the winding shoulders of Franklintown Road. Police department legend includes one story, apocryphal perhaps, in which a class of trainees searching one quadrant of the park for a missing person was reminded by a Southwestern District shift commander, with tongue planted in cheek, that they were looking for one body in particular: “If you go grabbing at every one you find, we’ll be here all day.”

Veteran detectives declare that even the most unremarkable crime scenes offer some information about the crime. After all, even a body in an alley leaves a detective with questions: What was the dead man doing in that alley? Where did he come from? Who was he with? But a dump job, in Leakin Park or in an alley, in a vacant house or a car trunk, offers nothing. It stands mute to the relationship between the killer, the victim and the scene itself. By definition, a dump job strips a murder of any meaningful chronology and-with the exception of whatever items are abandoned with the body-of physical evidence.

Whatever and wherever the scene, its value as the baseline of a murder investigation depends entirely on the detective-his ability to keep out the rabble and maintain the scene itself; his capacity for observation, for contemplating the scene in its totality, in its parts, and from every conceivable angle; his willingness to perform every task that could possibly yield evidence from a particular scene; his common sense in avoiding those procedures that would be meaningless or futile.

The process is subjective. Even the best investigators will admit that no matter how much evidence is pulled from a scene, a detective will invariably return to the homicide office with the discomforting knowledge that something was missed. It is a truth that veterans impress upon new detectives, a truth that emphasizes the elusive quality of the crime scene itself.

Whatever happens before the scene is secured can’t be controlled and in the wake of a shooting or stabbing, no one objects to the behavior of uniformed officers, paramedics or bystanders who alter a scene in an effort to disarm the participants or administer aid to the victim. But apart from such necessary actions, the first uniform at the site of a murder is supposed to preserve the scene from being trampled, not only by the locals, but by his fellow officers as well. For the first officer and those who arrive after him, good police work also means grabbing hold of any potential witnesses who happen to be standing around.

The first officer’s duties end upon the arrival of a downtown detective, who, if he knows his business, will start by slowing everything down to a crawl, making it much more difficult for anyone to express stupidity in any truly meaningful way. The more complex the scene, the slower the process, giving the detective some semblance of control over the uniforms, the civilian witnesses, the bystanders, the crime lab technicians, the ME’s attendants, the secondary detectives, the shift commanders and every other human being in the vicinity. With the exception of the civilians, most of this crowd will know the drill and can be trusted to do their jobs, but as in everything else, assumption is mother and midwife to the most egregious mistakes.

Before this year is out, a detective on Stanton ’s shift will arrive at a scene to find that a novice team of paramedics has taken a dead person-a very dead person-for a last ride to a nearby emergency room. There they will be told that it is hospital policy to accept only those patients who are at least clinging to life. The flustered paramedics will mull this over and then decide to take the body back to the street. Upon their return to the death scene, this plan will be given tentative approval by the uniforms, who assume that the ambulance crew must know its business. No doubt the officers would then have done their best to place the cadaver in its original position had not the detective arrived to say thank you, but no thank you. Let’s just say the hell with it and take the poor guy down to the autopsy room.

Likewise, Robert McAllister, a seasoned detective and a veteran of several hundred crime scenes, will soon find himself standing in a Pimlico kitchen above the blood-soaked body of an eighty-one-year-old man, stabbed forty or fifty times in a brutal housebreaking. On a dresser in a back bedroom is the bent-blade murder weapon, caked with dried blood. So preposterous is it that anyone would disturb such a glaring evidentiary item that McAllister will think it unnecessary to warn against doing so. This crime of omission ensures that a young officer, fresh to the street, will wander into the bedroom, pick up the knife by its hilt and carry it into the kitchen.

“I found this in the bedroom,” she will say. “Is it important?”

Assuming that such calamities are avoided and the scene preserved, what remains for the detective is to find and extract the available evidence. This is not done by vacuuming every room, fingerprinting every flat surface, and taking every beer can, ashtray, shred of paper and photo album down to evidence control. Discretion and common sense are valued as much as diligence, and a detective unable to discern the differences among probabilities, possibilities and the weakest kind of long shots soon finds that he risks overloading the evidence recovery process.

Remember, for instance, that the overworked examiners in the ballistics lab are weeks behind on projectile comparisons. Do you want them to compare your.32 slug with other.32-caliber shootings this year, or should they go back another year? Likewise for the fingerprint examiners, who in addition to the open murders are handling latents from burglaries, robberies and half a dozen other types of crime. Do you tell the lab techs to dust surfaces in rooms that seem to be undisturbed and apart from the scene, or do you have them concentrate on objects that appear to be moved and that are close to the death scene? When an elderly woman is strangled in bed, do you vacuum every room in the house, knowing how long it will take the trace lab to go through one room’s worth of dirt and lint, hair and fiber? Or, knowing that there wasn’t any far-flung, room-by-room struggle, do you instead have the ME’s people carefully wrap the body in the sheets, preserving any hairs or fibers that came loose during the action near the bed?

With only a few available on each shift to process evidence, the lab techs themselves are a limited resource. The tech working your scene may have been pulled off a commercial robbery to work this homicide or may be needed a half hour later to work another shooting on the opposite side of town. And your own time is equally precious. On a jumping midnight shift, the hours you could spend at one scene might be divided between two homicides and a police shooting. And even with a single murder, hours spent at a scene have to be measured against time that could be spent interviewing witnesses who are waiting downtown.

Every scene is different, and the same detective who requires twenty minutes at a street shooting may spend twelve hours to process a double stabbing inside a two-story rowhouse. A sense of balance is required at both scenes, an understanding of what has to be done and what can reasonably be done to produce evidence. Also required is the persistence to oversee the essentials, to make sure that what’s being done is done correctly. On every shift, there are those lab techs who arrive at complex crime scenes and provoke sighs of relief from detectives, just as there are others who can’t lift a usable print if a suspect’s hand is attached to it. And if you want the photos to show the location of critical pieces of evidence, you better say as much, or the five-by-eight glossies will come back with every angle but the one you need.

These are the basic requirements. But there is something else about crime scenes, an intangible on the continuum between honed experience and pure instinct. An ordinary person, even an observant person, looks at a scene, takes in many of the details and manages a general assessment. A good detective looks at the same scene and comprehends the pieces as part of a greater whole. He somehow manages to isolate the important details, to see those items that conform to the scene, those that conflict, and those that are inexplicably absent. He who speaks of Zen and the Art of Death Investigation to a Baltimore homicide detective is handed a Miller Lite and told to stop talking communist hippie bullshit. But some of what happens at a crime scene, if not exactly antirational, is decidedly intuitive.

There is little else to explain Terry McLarney staring at the seminude body of an elderly woman, rigored in her bed with no apparent trauma, and deciding correctly-on the basis of an open window and a single stray pubic hair on the sheet-that he is working a rape-murder.

Or Donald Worden, walking down an empty East Baltimore street minutes after a fatal shooting, putting his hand on the hood of one parked car out of twenty and feeling the heat of an engine-a sure sign that the car was recently occupied by persons who fled rather than be identified as witnesses. “There was some condensation on the back window,” he says later, shrugging. “And it was a little ways from the curb, like the driver parked it in a hurry.”

Or Donald Steinhice, a veteran from Stanton’s shift, who is entirely convinced that the woman hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom has taken her own life, but somehow can’t leave the room until one last detail is settled in his mind. He sits there in the shadow of the dead woman for half an hour, staring at a pair of bedroom slippers on the floor below the body. The left slipper is below the right foot, the right below the left. Was she wearing the slippers on the wrong feet? Or did someone else, someone who staged the scene, place the slippers there?

“It was the only thing about that scene that really bothered me, and it bothered me for a good long while,” he later recalls, “until I thought about how a person takes off their bedroom slippers.”

Steinhice finally imagines the woman crossing her legs so as to wrap the toe of one slipper around the heel of the other, prying the slipper off from the back-a common maneuver that would leave the slippers on opposite sides.

“After that,” he says, “I could leave.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you live with fifty?”

Yes, said Cassidy. If I have to.

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

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

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

Officer down in the Western.

Head shots.

Cassidy.

It’s Cassidy.

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

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

“Gene, Gene… Oh man.”

“Gene, can you hear me?”

“Gene, do you know who shot you?”

Cassidy spoke only one word.

“Yes,” he said. I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In three places?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey,” said Cassidy.

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

“What?” asked the kid.

“You’re under arrest.”

“What?”

“You’re under arrest.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, said Cassidy. Not thirty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those bushes there?”

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

“There he is,” shouted Hendrix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yeah, thought McLarney. Shock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Captain shit on you, Terr?”

“Nah, not really.”

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know, your partner, McAllister.”

“He’s off tonight.”

“Left you all alone, huh?”

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

“I took a few.”

Garvey nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t mind…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackie Lucas hesitates.

“Did your mom deal for Frazier?”

“I don’t…”

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

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

“Did she use?”

“Marijuana. Now and then.”

“Cocaine?”

“Not really. Not that I know of.”

“Does Frazier use?”

“Yeah, he do.”

“You think Frazier could have killed your mother?”

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

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

“Jackie, I have to ask this…”

The daughter says nothing.

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

“No, she wasn’t.”

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

“Jus’ Frazier.”

“Just Frazier?”

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

Garvey nods, lost for a moment in thought.

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

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

The young woman takes in the logic.

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

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

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

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

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

“You know Vincent’s name?”

“Booker, I think.”

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

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

“We can’t find them.”

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

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

Jackie nods, then falls in behind him.

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

“Is what bad?”

“The room…”

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

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

“The other one ain’t here.”

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

“Did Frazier know she had that money?”

“Yeah he did.”

“Did he know where it was?”

“Yeah.”

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

“What’s up?” asks Garvey.

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

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

“Yeah, I’m just packing my stuff.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… MOMMY, DON’T GO, MOMMY…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks like.”

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

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

A 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.

By measured steps, Patti Cassidy walks her husband into the crowded courtroom, where all is suddenly silence. The jury, the judge, the lawyers-the entire assembly sits transfixed as Police Agent Gene Cassidy stretches his right hand, touches a wooden beam, then guides himself into the witness stand. Patti touches his shoulder, whispers, then retreats to a seat behind the prosecution table.

The clerk rises. “Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth?”

“I do,” says Cassidy, his voice clear.

In a place where partial victories and gray equivocations always seem to dominate, Gene Cassidy’s appearance on the witness stand is a startling moment. Cassidy did not see Terry McLarney and Corey Belt and the other Western men in the hallway, gripping his shoulders with a few attaboys and go-get-’ems before the courtroom doors opened. He cannot see his wife, primly dressed and eight months’ pregnant, in the gallery’s front row. He cannot see one of the jurors, the young white girl, crying softly in the back tier. He cannot see the cold rage on the judge’s face, and he cannot see Butchie Frazier, the man who blinded him with two.38 rounds, staring with strange fascination from the defense table a few feet away.

The courtroom is crowded, the gallery packed with Western officers in uniform, a show of solidarity that does not extend to the departmental brass. The Western District commander is not in attendance, nor is the chief of patrol or any of the deputy commissioners-a fact noted with some bitterness by the rank and file. Take a bullet for the company and you’re on your own; the bosses may show up at the hospital and they’ll definitely be on hand for the funeral, but the departmental memory is short. Cassidy’s appearance in court will be witnessed by no one above the rank of sergeant. The space remaining in the gallery is occupied by the Cassidy family, a handful of reporters, curious courthouse regulars and a few friends and relatives of Butchie Frazier’s.

At one point during the jury selection, his younger brother, Derrick, appeared in the corridor just outside the courtroom, where prosecution witnesses are seated before their testimony. He eyefucked one, talked trash to another and then was suddenly confronted by McLarney and two Western men, who offered him an opportunity to leave as a free man. Given the alternative of becoming a projectile launched into the rear of a police wagon, Derrick Frazier issued a few more obscenities and then turned on his heel toward the St. Paul Street exit.

“Okay,” said McLarney to a Western officer. “I guess we put him on the list, too.”

The uniform shook his head. “That motherfucker…”

“Fuck him,” said McLarney, unsmiling. “One of these days, we’ll be chalking him off.”

For McLarney, the Cassidy trial was unrelieved agony, an ordeal of empty hours spent in courtroom hallways and prosecutors’ offices. Because he was at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse as a witness, McLarney was sequestered, and whatever happened behind the thick double doors of that second-floor courtroom was lost to him. As the most important criminal trial of his life lurched toward a verdict, McLarney could only watch a parade of witnesses from a bench in the hall, then buttonhole the prosecutors, Howard Gersh and Gary Schenker, during breaks:

“How’s it going in there?”

“Are we winning?”

“How’d Gene do?”

“Is Butchie gonna testify?”

Yesterday, McLarney spent the hours pacing the length of the second-floor hall and trying to calculate the odds. A 40 percent chance for first-degree, maybe 50 percent if Yolanda sticks to the grand jury testimony she gave against Butchie in February after passing the polygraph. Another 40 percent for second-degree attempted murder or attempted manslaughter. Maybe 20 percent for a hung jury or acquittal. At least, McLarney reasoned, they managed to land a decent judge. If you were a lawyer, Elsbeth Bothe could drive you crazy with her penchant for questioning witnesses from the bench, and, true, she had a few convictions reversed on appeal for commentary from the bench. But more important, from McLarney’s point of view, Bothe never got soft at the point of sentencing. If Butchie Frazier lost on points, Bothe would surely bang him.

Like any other appointee to the Baltimore circuit court, Bothe could judge men with the confidence that comes from incumbency and an elective term of fifteen years. Her voice was a quiet rasp, a perfect vehicle to express an undying irritation with prosecutors, attorneys, defendants and the criminal justice system in general.

From the bench, she was master of all she saw, and what she saw was a courtroom carved from the northwestern corner of the ornate courthouse, a paneled courtroom with high ceilings and portraits of long-dead judges glaring down from the walls. At first glance, it was not the sort of place where questions of life and death ought to be decided; whatever dignity was conveyed by the dark woods of the judge’s bench and trial tables was utterly corrupted by the jumble of insulated pipe and metal ventilation work suspended from the ceiling. From certain angles, the judge appeared to preside in a courtroom created from a government office building’s basement.

Elsbeth Bothe came to the Baltimore bench from the defense bar, where she had been one of the most talented attorneys in what was then a fledgling public defenders office. Many a man walked free of the Baltimore City Jail because Bothe had been his advocate, yet she could recall only one client among the hundreds she had defended whom she actually knew with any certainty to be innocent. It was, on reflection, the most appropriate history for a judge whose courtroom had become a cluttered stage for a large share of Baltimore’s homicide prosecutions. Black, or brown, or on select occasions an occasional white stray, they were brought to the Calvert Street courthouse in dull, dirty jail vans, then led in handcuffs and legchains from lockup to courtroom and back again to lockup. Poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, they were the daily feed for the trough, and whether by plea or verdict, they existed only to be consumed. Day after day, the lawyers were fed, the prisons were filled, the machine rattled forward. By choice and circumstance, Bothe was one of three city judges who, among them, handled more than 60 percent of the hundred and fifty or so murder prosecutions that made their way to circuit court each year. It was a grim, pathetic parade, a chain of human misery for which Bothe was psychologically as well as temperamentally suited.

Her chambers said as much: Amid the Maryland code books and legal texts rested a collection of human skulls-mostly manufactured caricatures, one the real McCoy-to rival any anthropologist’s closet. On the walls were original front pages from old turn-of-the-century Police Gazettes, each one recounting the details of some shocking spasm of violence. To homicide detectives, such a peculiarity was especially comforting, assuring them that Elsbeth Bothe-like any self-respecting cop-was capable of enjoying the best parts of a good murder.

Not that Bothe was some kind of hanging judge. Like everyone else compelled to deal with murder on wholesale basis, she was not above taking a light plea if it helped clear a crowded court docket of a cheap murder or two. This is the reality in Baltimore and every other American jurisdiction, where plea bargaining is the only way to keep the criminal justice system from strangling on its own caseload. The trick-for prosecutors as well as judges-is knowing which cases cannot be pled down.

By any reasoning, the case against Butchie Frazier could not be pled-not for anything that Butchie’s attorney could in good conscience accept. Prosecuting the case in tandem, Gersh and Schenker had offered fifty years, knowing that the maximum for first-degree attempted murder and a handgun charge would be life and twenty, which shakes out to about eighty years in all. Given the state’s parole guidelines, the ultimate difference to Butchie was maybe five years or so, but with any career criminal that kind of margin isn’t worth talking about. Guys like Butchie Frazier hear prosecutors talking double digits and their eyes glaze over.

As a result, the case went to a jury of twelve: eleven women, one man; nine black, three white. It was a fairly typical city panel, which, if it did nothing else of note, had managed to at least stay awake throughout the state’s case-no small accomplishment in a courthouse where judges are occasionally obliged to have a sheriff’s deputy nudge juror number three back into lucidity.

The jurors were downright fascinated by Yolanda Marks, who was a picture of both anger and fear on the witness stand. Yolanda had tried time and again to back away from her grand jury testimony in her pretrial interviews with prosecutors. Her courtroom answers to Schenker’s questions were all cold and monosyllabic and much of her testimony was laced with tears. Still, she gave up Appleton Street as Butchie glared at her from a few feet away.

Yolanda was followed by others, by McLarney testifying about the crime scene and Gary Tuggle, one of the two detail officers, testifying to the search for a suspect. Young, black, attractive, Tuggle was a necessity for this jury-a racial counterweight to Butchie Frazier, a subtle suggestion to black jurors that the system itself wasn’t altogether white. Then came the couple who had been walking south on Appleton Street from the corner bar, both of whom recounted the same shooting scenario as Yolanda, though both testified that they were too far away to identify the gunman. Still, they confirmed Yolanda’s account.

Finally, there was the kid from the City Jail, another murder defendant who had quarreled with Butchie when both were in pretrial detention. Butchie had told him about the shooting, offering details that only the shooter could know.

“What else did the defendant tell you?” asked Schenker.

“He said the police was roughing him up, so he pulled out his gun and shot him in the head. He said he wished he would have killed the bitch.”

The ultimate ghetto insult, it hung there in the courtroom for a moment and then fell on dead silence. A young man, blind for life, so casually denigrated by the man who had held the gun. Cassidy. A bitch.

Gary Schenker paused for effect as two jurors shook their heads and Bothe lifted a hand to her mouth. Asked whether he was offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony, the kid shook his head. This, he told the jury, was personal.

“I showed him a picture of my girl,” the kid explained. “He said when he got out he was going to have her.”

That was their case. Everything that could be done had been done before Gene Cassidy made his way to the stand. Cassidy was the emotional kicker, the unspoken appeal to a jury of Butchie Frazier’s peers, a jury that now sits staring at the young man on the witness stand, a young man who cannot stare back. Gene Cassidy is the psychological culmination of the state’s case, the last tug on the jury’s heartstring before the defense takes over.

Already the jury has heard the University of Maryland surgeon describe the path of each bullet in clinical detail and assess the slim chance of anyone’s surviving such wounds. Yet here is Cassidy, back from the grave in his dark blue suit to face the man who failed to kill him.

“Agent Cassidy,” says Bothe, solicitous, “there’s a microphone in front of you… if you could speak into it.”

Cassidy reaches forward and touches the metal.

Schenker then asks the preliminary questions. “Agent Cassidy, how long have you been a Baltimore city police officer…”

As Schenker continues, the eyes of several jurors bounce from Cassidy to Frazier, then back to Cassidy. The two men are close to each other, separated by no more than six feet, and Frazier is staring with genuine curiosity at the side of Cassidy’s head. Jet black hair covers the temple wound, and the facial injuries have healed perfectly. Only the eyes reveal the damage: one blue and vacant, the other translucent and distorted.

“And you are totally blind, correct?” asks Schenker.

“Yes, I am,” says Cassidy. “I’ve also lost my senses of smell and taste.”

It is the most precious kind of testimony. In every murder trial, the victim exists for the jury as an abstract entity, as a part of the process represented by nothing more than an autopsy report and some 3-by-5 crime scene photographs. The defendant, however, remains flesh and blood for the duration of the trial. In the hands of a competent defense attorney, his humanity is better displayed than the inhumanity of the crime, his ordinariness is more apparent than the extraordinary acts of which he is accused. A good defense attorney sits close to his client, touches him on the shoulder to get his attention, puts an arm around him to show the jurors that he likes this man, that he believes in him. Some lawyers go so far as to give defendants mints or hard candies, telling clients to pull them out at a quiet moment and offer one to the lawyer, perhaps even to the prosecutor, seated a few feet away. See, ladies and gentlemen, he’s human. He likes mints. He can share.

But Gene Cassidy denies Butchie Frazier the advantage. In this courtroom he, too, is flesh and blood.

Schenker continues: “On that particular evening, what if anything do you recall…”

Cassidy grimaces slightly before answering. “I have no recollection of the incident… the shooting,” he says slowly. “The last thing I remember is being at my father-in-law’s house in Pennsylvania earlier that afternoon.”

“Can you recall going to work that day?”

“I know that I must have,” says Cassidy. “But I can’t remember anything after my father-in-law’s house. They tell me that’s pretty common with these kinds of injuries-”

“Officer Cassidy,” asks Bothe, interrupting. “I take it that’s your wife who escorted you to the stand.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“And by the look of things,” the judge says, unwilling to let the moment pass, “I would say that she’s expecting…”

“Yes. Due on the Fourth of July.”

The Fourth of July. The defense attorney shakes his head.

“Is this your first child?” asks the judge, glancing toward the jury box.

“Yes it is.”

“Thank you, Officer Cassidy. I was curious.”

The beleaguered defense counsel has nowhere to go. What do you do with the testimony of a blinded police officer whose pregnant wife waits on a nearby bench? What do you ask on cross examination? Where do you make your points? Where, in such a scene, do you find a place for your client to breathe?

“No questions, your honor.”

“The witness is excused. Thank you, Agent Cassidy.”

Out in the corridor, McLarney watches the double doors open at the recess. The jurors are already upstairs in the jury room, Bothe is already back in chambers. Patti walks out with Gene on her arm, followed by Schenker.

“Hey, Gene, how’d it go?” asks McLarney.

“Okay,” says Cassidy. “I think I was good. What’d you think, Patti?”

“You were great, Gene.”

“What did Butchie do? Did he look at me?”

“Yeah, Gene,” says a friend from the Western. “He was staring right at you.”

“Staring? Was he eyefucking me?”

“No,” says the officer. “He just looked real strange, you know.” Cassidy nods.

“You hurt him, Gene,” says a Western man. “You got him good.”

McLarney claps Cassidy on the back, then walks down the hall with Patti and Gene’s mother and brother, both down from New Jersey for the trial. As the family heads upstairs to the law library to wait out the defense case, McLarney puts a hand on Cassidy’s arm and asks a string of questions about the testimony.

“I wish I could have been in there, Gene,” McLarney tells him on the stairs.

“Yeah,” says Cassidy. “I think I did okay, though. What did you think, Patti?”

Patti Cassidy reassures her husband again, but McLarney is too nervous to be satisfied by one opinion. Minutes later, he’s again pacing the courthouse corridor, buttonholing every lawyer, spectator and sheriff ’s deputy who walks out of Bothe’s court.

“How’d Gene do? What was the jury’s reaction?”

McLarney frowns at every assurance. The cost of following the most important jury trial of your life from a corridor is that you’re never willing to believe what you hear. Cassidy endured months of speech therapy, McLarney reminds the others. Did he hear the questions? How was his speech?

“He did great, Terry,” says Schenker.

“What’d Butchie do?” asks McLarney.

“He just kept staring at him,” says a Western man. “He kept staring at the side of Gene’s face.”

The side of Gene’s face. The wound track. Butchie Frazier staring at his handiwork, wondering what the hell went wrong. That son of a bitch, thinks McLarney, frowning at the image.

The defense takes the rest of the afternoon, calling a couple of witnesses who insist that Butchie Frazier is the wrong man, that he wasn’t out there at Mosher and Appleton on that fall night. But Frazier himself does not take the stand; his criminal history makes such an act problematic.

“What happened to Officer Cassidy is a tragedy,” declares the defense attorney in his closing argument. “But it is a tragedy we can do nothing about. It would be adding to that tragedy to convict Clifton Frazier based on the evidence the state presented.”

For their own closing, Schenker and Gersh counter in tandem, with Schenker taking the high road and Gersh going low. The high road asks for an impartial examination of the evidence; the low road calls to a communal instinct that may or may not exist.

“Don’t convict Clifton Frazier because the victim in this case is a police officer,” Schenker tells the jurors. “Do so because the evidence demands it… Because Clifton Frazier did not want to go to jail, he shot Officer Cassidy.”

Yet ten minutes later, Gersh stands before the same jury, reminding them that “when a police officer is shot, a little bit of each of us is killed.”

The “thin blue line” speech, thinks McLarney, listening to the closing arguments from the back bench. Every time a cop is shot, the prosecutors wheel out the protect-and-serve imagery. Does the jury believe it? Does anyone believe it anymore? McLarney looks at the twelve faces. They’re listening, at least-all except number nine. She’s looking right through Gersh, McLarney thinks. She’s going to be trouble.

“We can send a message to the Butchie Fraziers of the world that they cannot go out on the street and shoot police officers…”

And then it’s over. Walking single file, the jurors move past the prosecutors, past the defense attorney, past Butchie Frazier, to climb the stairwell to the deliberation room.

Standing with Gersh and Schenker near the courtroom doors, McLarney suddenly encounters Frazier as the defendant, in handcuffs and leg irons, is under escort to the basement lockup. Frazier actually sneers as the two face each other at the edge of the hallway.

“Yeah. Right,” McLarney mutters, fighting hard for control. “Who the…”

Gersh pulls McLarney away. “I think we’ve got it,” the prosecutor tells him. “It’ll take a few hours, but I think we’ve got it. How’d you like our closing?”

McLarney ignores him, staring instead at the procession of Butchie Frazier and his two guards out the courtroom doors and down the second-floor stairs.

“C’mon,” says Gersh, with a light touch on McLarney’s shoulder. “Let’s go find Gene.”

Cassidy is already settled in for the wait, seated with his wife, his mother and his older brother in the back of the nearby jury assembly room. Western uniforms, fresh from their eight-to-four shift, hover around the family, issuing congratulations on the victory sure to come. Out in the hallway, Gersh and Schenker accept congratulations from spectators. As the evening sky fades outside the courtroom windows, two of the Western men organize a pizza run.

“Gene, what do you want on yours?”

“I don’t care, as long as it’s anchovy.”

“What’s the name of the place again?”

“Marco’s. On Exeter Street.”

“We better order now,” says one officer, smiling. “We’ll not be hanging around here long.”

For an hour or so, they are the picture of confidence. For an hour, they are laughing and joking and telling stories from the streets of the Western, stories that always manage to end with someone in handcuffs. Waiting for a verdict they are sure will come quickly, they busy themselves by recounting the best parts of the closing arguments and the details of Gene’s testimony.

But suddenly their optimism is shattered by the news that shouting can be heard near the door to Bothe’s courtroom, shouting that comes from the jury room upstairs. At times, the loudest voices carry out into the courthouse hallway, just outside the room where Gene Cassidy and his family sit amid empty pizza boxes and Styrofoam cups. The mood of the Western men darkens.

Two hours go by, then three. The shouting in the jury room continues, and the wait becomes agonizing.

“I don’t know what to say, Gene,” says Gersh, losing faith. “I gave it my best and I’m afraid it wasn’t enough.”

Four hours brings only a note from the jury forewoman, indicating that the panel is hopelessly deadlocked. Bothe reads the note to the attorneys, then brings the jury downstairs and gives a standard instruction, urging the jurors to return and attempt to reach a verdict.

More shouting.

“This is a crime, Gene,” says Corey Belt. “I can’t believe it.”

Raw doubt is sticking in their throats as the angry voice of one juror carries above the others and is heard at the bottom of the jury room stairs. They always lie, shouts the juror. You got to convince me.

They always lie. Who does? The police? The witnesses? The defendants? Butchie didn’t even testify, so it can’t be him. So who in hell is she talking about? McLarney hears about the remark from a clerk and immediately thinks of juror number nine, the woman who seemed to be looking through Gersh during the closings. It’s her voice, he tells himself. Goddammit, she’s the one.

McLarney swallows hard and retreats to the second-floor corridor, where he paces back and forth in a smoldering rage. There wasn’t enough, he tells himself. I’m losing this jury because I didn’t give them enough. An eyewitness. Corroboration. A jail-house confession. Somehow, it wasn’t enough. As late evening arrives, McLarney finds it harder and harder to go back into the room where Gene is waiting. As he walks back and forth in the marble hallway, several men from the Western come outside to assure him that it doesn’t matter either way.

“Guilty, he goes to prison,” declares one uniform, aman who once served under McLarney in Sector 2. “Not guilty, he goes back out on the street.”

“If he comes back to the Western, he’s dead,” says another, agreeing. “That piece of shit will wish he’d been found guilty.”

Reckless words, but McLarney nods in agreement. In truth, there would be no need for a plan, no elaborate conspiracy. It would simply happen. Butchie Frazier was a stone criminal, and a criminal is nothing if not predictable. Back on the streets of the Western, he would surely do his dark little deeds, and just as surely, every last uniform would be there waiting. No trial, no lawyers, no jury. If Butchie Frazier is set free today, McLarney tells himself, he’ll be dead within a year.

Back in the courtroom, Gersh and Schenker contemplate the alternatives. Fearing the worst, they could go to Frazier’s attorney and offer a plea before the jury returns. But what kind of plea? Frazier already balked at fifty. Thirty? Thirty means parole in as little as ten. Cassidy said from the outset he couldn’t live with ten. But can he live with an acquittal? In the end, the entire discussion is academic; sensing perhaps the same thing as the prosecutors, Butchie Frazier turns down any notion of a negotiated plea.

But the six-hour mark brings another, different note from the forewoman, this one inquiring about the difference between first- and second-degree attempted murder. Guilty. They’re talking guilty in there.

Hearing the latest, the cops in the jury assembly room are suddenly breathing again; a few sidle up to Cassidy and offer congratulations. He shrugs them off. Second-degree, he says, shaking his head. How can they be thinking about second-degree?

“Never mind that, Gene,” says Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who has been through this wait a hundred times. “They’ve turned the corner. They’re coming around.”

Cassidy smiles at the thought. As if to lighten his mood, he asks permission to tell his joke.

“Which joke is this?” asks Belt.

“You know,” says Cassidy. “My joke.”

“Your joke? The one you told before?”

“Yeah,” says Cassidy. “That one.”

Belt shakes his head, smiling. “What do you want to do, Gene? Clear the room?”

“What the hell,” says Biemiller, another Western man. “Tell the joke, Gene.”

Cassidy launches into an unlikely tale of three pieces of string standing outside a barroom, all of whom are thirsty and in want of a beer. A sign on the door says no string will be served.

“The first piece of string goes into the bar and orders a beer,” explains Cassidy, “and the bartender says, ‘Hey, are you a piece of string?’”

The string answers in the affirmative and is escorted from the premises. Some of the cops offer loud, audible yawns. Ignoring them, Cassidy recounts the plight of the second piece of string, which happens to be markedly similar to the first.

“So then the third piece of string rolls around on the ground and ties himself up and gets all messed up before going into the bar, right?”

McLarney wanders in from the hallway, just in time for a punch line he can’t possibly understand.

“And the bartender asks him, ‘Are you a piece of string?’ And the string says, ‘ ’Fraid not.’”

Groans all around.

“Christ, that’s a terrible joke, Gene,” says one of the Western men. “Even for a blind guy, that’s a terrible joke.”

Cassidy laughs. Inside the jury assembly room the tension is gone, the pall of defeat lifted suddenly by the jury forewoman’s casual question. McLarney, too, is relieved, though the idea of a second-degree verdict still doesn’t sit well. As Cassidy launches into another joke, McLarney wanders back into the corridor and slumps onto a hallway bench, his head resting against the cold marble wall. Belt follows him out.

“Butchie’s going to prison,” says McLarney, as much to hear himself say it as for any other reason.

“We need first-degree, bunk,” says Belt, leaning over the bench. “Second-degree don’t cut it.”

McLarney nods in agreement.

Upon the arrival of the forewoman’s note, Gersh and Schenker immediately withdrew any and all plea offers. Judge Bothe tells the prosecutors in her chambers that she’s ready to take a second-degree finding right now if the jurors are unanimous.

“No,” says Gersh with a trace of anger. “Let them do their job.”

The deliberations stretch to more than eight hours, and it is closing on 10:00 P.M. when the courtroom reconvenes and Butchie Frazier is returned from the basement lockup. Cassidy sits in the front bench with his wife, directly behind the prosecutors. McLarney and Belt find seats in the second bench, closer to the door. The jurors come downstairs silently. They do not look at the defendant-a good sign. They do not look at Cassidy-a bad sign. McLarney watches them settle into the jury box, his hands gripping the crease of his pants at both knees.

“Madam forelady,” asks the clerk. “Have you reached a unanimous verdict on the charge of attempted murder in the first degree?”

“Yes we have.”

“How say you to that charge?”

“We find the defendant guilty.”

Gene Cassidy nods slowly, gripping his wife’s hand, as each juror is polled and the Western uniforms give up a soft cheer from the gallery. Several jurors begin to cry. From the trial table, Gersh turns around to scan the crowd, then gives McLarney a thumbs-up sign; McLarney smiles, shakes Belt’s hand and then pumps a fist in the air and leans forward, exhausted by the moment. Butchie Frazier shakes his head, then begins a careful examination of his fingernails.

As Bothe sets a sentencing date and then concludes the proceedings, McLarney is out of his seat and moving toward the hallway, hoping to grab a juror or two and find out what the hell happened up in that room. Near the top of the stairs, a black juror, a younger woman still trying to control her tears, looks at the badge and shrugs off his question.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

McLarney moves on and catches one of the three white jurors; he recognizes her as the girl who was crying during Cassidy’s testimony.

“Miss… miss.”

The girl looks back.

“Miss,” says McLarney, catching up. “I was one of the investigators in the case and I was wondering what happened with the jury.”

The girl nods.

“Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

Reluctantly, the girl agrees.

“I was the lead investigator,” McLarney tells her, a little embarrassed at the intensity he can in no way conceal. “What was it that hung you all up for so long?”

The girl shakes her head. “A lot of them didn’t care. I mean not at all. It was crazy.”

“They didn’t care?”

“Not at all.”

“What didn’t they care about?”

“The entire thing. They didn’t care about any of it.”

McLarney is stunned. Bombarding the young girl with questions, he begins piecing together eight hours of rancorous debate in which race and indifference played dominant roles.

The girl explains that two of the three white jurors argued from the beginning for a first-degree verdict, just as two of the younger black jurors had insisted on acquittal, contending that the police had put every witness up to testifying in an effort to convict someone-anyone-of shooting a white officer. That, they explained, was why all the police were sitting in court. Frazier’s girlfriend had cried because she had been forced to lie. The other two witnesses were probably drunk, coming from the bar. The kid from the city jail testified because he had cut a deal for himself.

The girl remembers that a younger black juror declared at one point that she didn’t like police, which prompted another juror to ask what that had to do with anything. I just don’t like them, the first juror replied, adding that anyone who lived in her neighborhood wouldn’t like them either.

The other eight jurors offered little opinion except to say that they would vote for whatever was agreed upon, the young girl tells McLarney. It was Friday, they pointed out, and the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. They wanted to go home.

McLarney listens in amazement. “What brought you all around to first-degree?” he asks.

“I wasn’t going to budge and that other woman, the one in the back row, she wasn’t going to change her mind either. She was for first-degree from the very beginning, too. After a while, everyone wanted to go home, I guess.”

McLarney shakes his head, incredulous. He has been a cop long enough to know that there is no understanding juries, but this is somehow more than he can take. The man who tried to kill Gene Cassidy has been given the right verdict for the wrong reasons.

The girl seems to read his mind. “I swear,” she says, “if that’s the way the system works, you can have it.”

Two hours later at the Market Bar, the beer gets good to McLarney and he asks the girl to tell him the whole sordid story again. The girl obliges. A nineteen-year-old waitress at a downtown sports bar, she came to the Market with the cops and prosecutors and the Cassidy family at McLarney’s insistence. She was a hero, he told her, and she deserved a beer. He listens to her alone for a few minutes, then begins calling over others from the Western to add to the audience.

“Vince, c’mere.”

Moulter walks over from the bar.

“This is Vince Moulter,” he says to the young juror. “He worked with Gene. Tell him the part about how the one juror said she thought Butchie was cute.”

Two tables away, Gene Cassidy sips quietly at a soda, laughing at the occasional joke. He and Patti will be there for an hour or two, long enough for McLarney to bring the young juror by for an introduction an hour or so later.

“Thank you,” says Cassidy to the girl. “You know you did the right thing.”

“I know it,” she says, a little unnerved. “Good luck to you, with the baby and all.”

McLarney listens to the exchange and smiles from the bar, already a little bit drunk. The gathering plays out until it is soon a little after one in the morning and Nicky comes out from behind the bar to begin cleaning tables. Cassidy is gone, followed by Belt and Tuggle and Gersh. McLarney, Moulter, Biemiller and a few others remain as the young juror finally gathers up her things.

“We’re going down to Clinton Street after we close this place,” McLarney tells her. “You’re welcome to come.”

“What’s Clinton Street?”

“Hallowed ground,” jokes another cop.

Even before the girl can answer, McLarney feels the awkwardness of his own suggestion. The end of Clinton Street is the best hole in the Southeastern District, but it’s nothing more than a rotting wharf. This girl here is normal. A civilian.

“Clinton Street is this pier a few minutes from here,” McLarney explains, embarrassed. “Vince is going to go get some beer and we’re going to meet him there. It’s no big deal.”

“I’ve got to get home,” she says, uncomfortably. “Really.”

“Okay, then,” says McLarney, relieved in a way. “Vince can drive you to your car.”

“Thanks for the beer,” she says. “I’ve got to say, I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but it’s been an interesting experience. Thanks.”

“No,” says McLarney. “Thank you.”

Vince Moulter leaves with the girl. McLarney finishes his beer and drops a tip on the bar for Nicky. He checks himself for car keys, wallet, badge, gun-the usual barroom inventory that tells McLarney he’s good to go.

“You thought she’d want to go to Clinton Street?” asks Biemiller, looking at him with raised eyebrows.

“You don’t get it,” McLarney tells him, irritated. “She’s a hero.”

Biemiller smiles.

“Who’s coming?” asks McLarney.

“You, me, Vince, maybe a couple of the others. I told Vince to get a couple cases.”

They leave in separate cars, driving east and south through the rowhouse neighborhoods of Fells Point and Canton. They pick up Clinton Street at the harbor’s edge, then drive south for a quarter mile, where the road dead-ends in the shadow of the Lehigh Cement towers. To the right, as they spill from their cars, is a corrugated iron warehouse. To the left, a battered shipping terminal. The night is warm and the harbor water gives off a slight, garbage scow stench.

Ten minutes behind the others, Moulter shows up with two cases of Coors Light. McLarney and the other Western hands pick up where they left off, their voices growing louder, less restrained, in the warm spring night. Moulter finds an FM station and cranks the car stereo. An hour passes with nothing more than shop talk and station house humor; McLarney does his bit, tossing a few amusing homicide tales into the kitty.

Soon there are two dozen silver empties bobbing in the harbor waters or lying dead against the metal side of the warehouse.

“A toast,” says Biemiller.

“To the Western.”

“No. To Gene.”

“To Gene.”

They drink and Moulter cranks the radio higher. It is several minutes before they notice a lone figure, a foreman perhaps, near the warehouse gate.

Biemiller sees him first.

“Sarge. Over there.”

McLarney pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. The foreman is just standing there, staring at them.

“Don’t worry about it,” McLarney tells them. “I’ll handle this.”

McLarney grabs a fresh can-a peace offering of sorts-and walks toward the warehouse gate. Leaning over the railing of a metal landing, the foreman stares down with undisguised contempt. McLarney smiles back apologetically. “How’s it going?” he says.

The man spits. “Ain’t you assholes got nothing better to do than come down here all drunk and raising hell? Who the hell you think you are?”

McLarney looks down at his shoes, then back up at the foreman’s face. His voice is only a little bit better than a whisper. “I don’t suppose,” he says, “that you’d want to come down here and say that.”

The foreman doesn’t move.

“I didn’t think so.”

“Fuck you,” the man replies, turning back through the gate. “I’m calling the cops.”

McLarney saunters back to the end of the pier, where the other revelers look at him quizzically.

“What’d he say?” asks Moulter.

McLarney shrugs. “We reached an understanding. He’s calling the police and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Somewhere close.”

“Calverton?”

“Calverton.”

The beers are quickly divided and they pile into three cars. At the sound of the engines, the foreman runs back to the gate, checking license tags. They race up Clinton Street with their headlights out, fugitives in their own city.

“Terry, maybe we ought to go home,” says a younger officer in McLarney’s car. “We keep going like this and we’ll get an IID number. Hell, we might even get locked up at this rate.”

McLarney offers a look of contempt. “No one’s gonna get locked up,” he says, wheeling his Honda Civic west along the Boston Street waterfront. “Have you forgotten that you’re in Baltimore? Nobody ever gets locked up in this fucking city. Why should we get treated different than any other criminal?”

McLarney laughs at his own logic, then guns the Civic through the streets just south of Little Italy, then west across the early morning vacancy of the city’s downtown. Street cleaners and newspaper delivery trucks own the streets now, and the traffic signals have gone from green and red to flashing yellow. Across from the Omni on Fayette, a lone derelict is dissecting the contents of a trashcan.

“It’s four A.M., Terry.”

“Yes,” says McLarney, checking his watch. “It is.”

“Where the hell are we going?”

“Where every wanted criminal goes to hide.”

“The Western?”

“The Western District,” says McLarney, triumphant. “They’ll never find us there.”

And soon enough, it is 5:00 A.M. and eight or nine more 16-ounce cans are lying spent in a Calverton Road gutter. The party is down to a foursome now, the others having fled before the threat of sunrise. Of the group, only Bob Biemiller is still a Western man. McLarney has been downtown in homicide ever since he took that bullet on Arunah Avenue; Moulter has transferred to Southeastern patrol. But they are together again on Calverton Road because it is the morning after the night after a city jury brought the Cassidy case to an end. And even after being chased off the Clinton Street pier, they still cannot go home.

McLarney rolls another empty into the pile, where it clatters against its brethren. Biemiller grabs a replacement from the back seat and hands it to McLarney, who shifts his weight against the car’s front fender.

“So, So, Vince, what do you think?” McLarney says, pulling the metal tab. White foam races around the rim of the can and down its sides. The sergeant mumbles an obscenity and shakes the wetness from his hand.

Moulter smiles vaguely. “What do I think?”

“About Gene.”

About Gene. All this drinking, all this bullshitting, all this riding around Baltimore like a pack of motorized Gypsies but McLarney still isn’t satisfied. Somehow the damn thing is still there to be reckoned with. At this moment, Appleton Street is the only station house story worth telling, and at this moment it demands some kind of moral.

Moulter shrugs, staring at the undergrowth and trash that mark the dead end of Calverton Road and the edge of the Amtrak railbed. The place has long been the favored hole in Sector 2 of the Western-a deserted spot to drink coffee and write reports, or share a six-pack, or maybe get a little sleep if you were scheduled for court in the morning.

McLarney turns to Biemiller. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” asks Biemiller.

“Yeah. We won it for him, didn’t we?”

“No,” says Biemiller. “We didn’t win.”

Moulter nods his head in agreement.

“I don’t mean it like that,” McLarney says, backing up. “I mean we got the verdict. Gene’s got to be pleased with that.”

Biemiller says nothing; Moulter heaves an empty can into the underbrush. From the railbed comes a sudden flourish of noise and light as a metroliner races east along the center track. The train disappears in a long wail that sounds very much like a human voice.

“It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” says McLarney after a time.

“Yeah, it is.”

“I mean here’s a guy that’s like a war hero,” says McLarney. “This is a war and he’s a hero. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Vince, you see what I’m saying?”

“What do you mean, Terry?”

“Lemme tell you something,” says McLarney, his voice catching up to his anger, “and this is something that I told Gene. I told him he has to see that he didn’t get shot for Appleton Street. Fuck Appleton Street. Fuck that. Fuck Baltimore. He didn’t get shot for Baltimore.”

“What did he get shot for?”

“It’s like this,” says McLarney, “and I told this to Gene. I told him that there’s this war going on in America. It’s a fucking war, right? And Gene was a soldier who got shot. He was defending his country and he got shot. Like any other fucking war.”

Biemiller throws an empty can toward the undergrowth. Moulter rubs his eyes.

“What I’m saying is that you have to forget it’s Baltimore,” says McLarney, very angry now. “This city is fucked up and it will always be fucked up, but that isn’t normal. Fuck Baltimore. Gene was a police in America who got shot and there are places where he would get treated like a war hero. Do you see that?”

“No,” says Biemiller. “Not really.”

McLarney slowly deflates, unable to sustain the rage without help. “Well, Gene does,” he says quietly, staring across the railbed. “That’s the important thing. Gene does and I do, too.”

McLarney wanders back toward the other side of the car as sunrise streaks the eastern sky red. An early work crew opens the gates to the city yard on Calverton Road; ten minutes later, a public works truck rumbles down to the pumps. At the sound of the truck, Biemiller looks across the asphalt, squinting through an alcohol haze.

“Who the fuck is that?”

A lone figure in blue is standing a few feet from the city yard entrance, glaring at them.

“Security guard,” says McLarney.

“Christ. Not again.”

“What the fuck does he want?”

“He saw the beer.”

“So what? Why should he give a fuck?”

The man in blue pulls a notepad and pencil, then begins writing. The cops respond with obscenity.

“Christ, he’s taking tag numbers.”

“Well,” says Biemiller. “Party’s over. See you boys around.”

“No point waiting around for the IID number,” says another. “Let’s get gone.”

They toss the last few cans in the underbrush, then climb into their cars. Two cars and a pickup peel off and run a gauntlet past the security guard and out onto Edmondson Avenue. Back behind the wheel of his Honda, McLarney gauges the effects of the beer, then calculates the number of state troopers between his current location and his home in Howard County. The resulting odds seem improbable, so he drives east through the scattered Saturday morning traffic, turning south on Martin Luther King Boulevard and arriving minutes later at the South Baltimore rowhouse that is the home of a friend who had been among them on Calverton Road. McLarney stands on the stoop in the new day’s light, the morning paper rolled in his right hand. The friend arrives a few minutes later.

“Got a beer?” asks McLarney.

“Jesus, Terry.”

McLarney laughs, handing the younger man the paper. The two make their way through the door and McLarney wanders into the first-floor living room.

“What a dump,” says McLarney. “You need to get a maid or something.”

The younger man comes back from the refrigerator with the paper and two bottles of Rolling Rock. McLarney sits on the sofa and pulls apart the newspaper, looking for a story about the Cassidy verdict. He scatters sections across the table before finding the article on the front of the local section, below the fold. The story is brief, maybe a dozen paragraphs.

“Kind of short,” he says, reading slowly.

He finishes the story, then rubs his eyes and takes a long drag on his beer. Suddenly, finally, he is exhausted. Very drunk and very exhausted.

“It’s so fucked up,” he says. “You know what I’m saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?”

Normal people. Citizens. Human beings. Even among the believers, there is a pathology to being a cop.

“Fuck, I’m tired. I got to get home.”

“You can’t drive.”

“I’m okay.”

“Terry, you’re fucking blind.”

McLarney looks up, startled at the word. Again he picks up the local section. Again he scans the story, looking for the things that never manage to find their way into newspaper accounts.

“I thought they’d do more,” he says finally. McLarney tries to fold the paper, crushing it awkwardly in his left hand.

“Gene did good though, didn’t he?” he says after a pause. “He was good on the stand.”

“He was.”

“He got respect.”

“He did.”

“Good,” says McLarney, his leaden eyes closing. “That’s good.”

The sergeant leans his head back against the wall behind the sofa. His eyes close at last.

“Gotta go,” he says in a slur. “Wake me in ten…”

He sleeps like a still life, sitting up, his right ankle to his left knee. The crushed newspaper is in his lap, the half-empty beer can is surrounded by the meat of his right hand. The sport coat stays on. The tie is twisted but intact. The wire-frame eyeglasses, bent and battered from a half dozen near-misses, have slipped down his nose. The badge remains in the upper right coat pocket. The gun, a silver.38 snubnose, stays holstered to his belt.

At its core, the crime is the same.

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

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

Her name was Andrea Perry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which Edgerton could only shake his head.

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

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

“YOU WHAT?”

“Yeah. I left my gun in my desk.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sergeants laughed nervously.

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

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

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

Whichever comes first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of those 200 suspects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The difference is, quite simply, Rule Number Nine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That spells mistrial with a capital M.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Right.

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

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

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

“But did he want a lawyer?”

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

“Did my client ask for a lawyer?”

“No, he did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gallery fell into silence.

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

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

DAVID SIMON

Baltimore

May 2006

TERRY MCLARNEY

Lieutenant, Homicide

Baltimore

May 2006