“I have the killer of Latonya Wallace in my house.”
“The family was involved with drugs. The little girl was killed as a warning.”
“My boyfriend killed her.”one ninety-two-year-old woman with failing eyesight claimed to have seen a little girl in a red raincoat enter a Park Avenue church on the afternoon of February 2, Pellegrini dutifully arranged to check inside the building and interview the minister. When a detail officer asked what questions would be put to the clergyman, Pellegrini simply shrugged and offered a Landsman-like deadpan: “How about, ‘Why did you kill her?’”every corridor in the Latonya Wallace labyrinth, the anonymous calls and false sightings led nowhere. Landsman wonders which part of the maze has been overlooked, which portal has yet to be explored. What the hell are they missing?sergeant is nearly home when a fresh thought forces its way to the surface, suddenly breaking through the thick crust of detail: the car. Right next door. A cool, dry place.neighbor’s goddamn Lincoln, the only fucking car that anyone ever saw in the alley. And it was parked just on the other side of the fence from the rear yard of 718 Newington. Hell yes.pulls to the slow lane of Liberty Road, looking for a pay phone so that he can call and tell Pellegrini and Edgerton to stay put. He’s going back in.minutes later the sergeant storms into the annex office, still cursing himself for not seeing it earlier. “It’s right there in front of us,” he tells Pellegrini. “This is it. It’s gonna go down.”lays it out for the two detectives: “If she’s killed Tuesday, he needs to put the body in a cool, dry place or we’re going to have decomp, right? So he gets the body out the back door and into the car trunk, thinking he’s gonna drive it somewhere at night. But for some reason he’s unable to dump the body. Or maybe when he goes out, he gets scared…”
“This is the guy who lives at seven-sixteen?” asks Edgerton.
“Yeah, the husband of Ollie’s neighbor. What’s-his-name.”
“Andrew,” says Pellegrini.
“Yeah, Andrew. Ollie doesn’t like him a little bit.”recalls the first hours of the investigation, when Ollie’s husband, the old man who lives at 718 Newington and found the child’s body, was asked whether anyone parked a car in the alley. The man had mentioned his neighbor, a middle-aged man who had recently married the churchgoing woman who lived at 716 and often left his Lincoln Continental in the back yard. In fact, the car had been out back for most of the previous week.
“When he told me, he even walked to his back window and looked out, like he expected it to be there.” Landsman cuts to the chase: “The motherfucker moved it. He parks back there all the time. Why all of a sudden, on that morning, is the Lincoln parked out in front of the house on Newington?”finds the arrest sheet for the man who lives at 716 Newington: no sex offenses, but someone who at certain points in his life would not have been mistaken for a civic asset.
“That’s the other thing,” says Landsman. “This guy Andrew, he don’t fit. What’s a guy with a record doing married to a churchgoing woman? It’s fucked up.”is closing on nine o’clock, but Landsman is now too wired to call it a night. Instead, the trio barter the keys to a Cavalier and drive back up to Newington Avenue. They check front and back, but the Lincoln isn’t on the block. Landsman knocks on the front door of 718, where a sad-faced woman answers the door in a worn cotton nightgown.
“Hey, Ollie,” says Landsman, “is your husband around? We just need to check a couple things.”
“He’s lying down.”
“We just need a minute or two.”woman shrugs and leads the way to the rear bedroom on the first floor. Stretched out on his back beneath a gray sheet, the old man who found the little girl’s body in his back yard watches the parade of detectives with mild curiosity.
“He got sick this week,” says the woman, retreating to the corner of the room.
“Sorry to hear that. What’re you sick with?”
“Cold or somethin’,” the old man says in a low mumble. “Y’know the hawk’s been out.”
“Yeah it has, um, hey, listen,” says Landsman, shifting gears suddenly. “You remember that day you found the body and we were talking? You remember when I asked you if anyone parked in the alley and you told me about Andrew next door?”old man nods.
“I remember you even walked over to the kitchen window, like you were gonna show me his car, but it wasn’t there that morning, remember?”
“Yeah, I thought he had it there.”
“What we need to know is if Andrew had his car parked out there earlier in the week, like on Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“It’s a while back now,” the old man says.
“Yeah it is, but can you think on it…”old man drops his head back against a pillow and stares at the cracked ceiling. The room waits.
“Think he did, yeah.”
“You think so, huh?”
“He park it back there a lot, you know,” says the old man.
“Yeah, that’s what I remember you telling me,” says Landsman. “Listen, what do you know about Andrew?”
“Don’t know nuthin’, really.”
“I mean what kind of a guy is he?”old man looks nervously at his wife. “I really don’t know…”looks at Ollie and catches something on her face. She has something to say she doesn’t want her husband to hear.
“Well, listen, thanks a lot for helping,” says Landsman, moving toward the bedroom door. “You take care of yourself now, okay?”old man nods and watches his wife follow the detectives out of the room. She closes the door and follows Landsman to the other end of the hall.
“Hey, Ollie,” Landsman says to her, “remember what you were saying about Andrew?”
“I don’t…”
“About how he’s like a gigolo living off…”
“Well,” says Ollie, a little embarrassed, “I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He’s gone every night.”
“Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?”
“Yeah, he likes young girls,” she says, disapproving.
“I mean, real young.”
“Well, that I can’t really say…”
“Okay, that’s all right,” Landsman says. “Where’s the car now? Do you know?”
“He say the repo man came an’ took it.”and Edgerton look at each other. It’s almost too perfect.
“It was repossessed?” asks Landsman. “He told you that?”
“She told my husband that.”
“Your neighbor did? Andrew’s wife?”
“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. “She say Johnny’s Cars came an’ got it.”
“Johnny’s? Up on Harford Road?”
“I guess.”detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny’s in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew’s wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.
“This motherfucker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo’d. Fuck it, we need to talk to this motherfucker tonight.”is after 11:00 P.M. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the basement. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.
“Hey, Andrew, I’m Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We’re working on the little girl’s murder. How you doin’ tonight?”
“Awright.”
“Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car.”
“My car?” asks Andrew, curious.
“Yeah. The Lincoln.”
“They took that away,” he says, as if that should end any discussion.
“Who did?”
“The car dealer.”
“Johnny’s?”
“Yeah.’ Cause my wife, she didn’t make the payment on it,” he adds, a little put out.steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl’s disappearance.
“I remember it ’cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me.”, startled, looks hard at the man.
“How’s that again?”
“I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me,” he repeats.gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-what-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. Hell, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the fuck wouldn’t be nervous carrying a little girl’s body from their back door to a car trunk?
“Why were you nervous?”shrugs. “I just got a strange feeling, you know…”begins walking the length of the basement room, looking for red-brown stains or a child’s gold earring. The basement is a poor version of a bachelor’s lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the hell is it about Newington Avenue that makes people piss into buckets?
“This is kind of your place down here, huh?” asks Edgerton.
“Yeah, this is where I hang.”
“Your wife don’t come down here much?”
“No, she leaves me be.”brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: “What did you go out to the car for?”
“I can’t remember. Something in the glove compartment.”
“You didn’t go in the trunk?”
“The trunk? No, the glove compartment… I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, damn, I’ll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside.”looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. “Did you know the little girl?”
“Me?” The question startles him. “The girl that got killed? I haven’t been here that long, you know. I don’t know most people around here.”
“What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?” asks Landsman, smiling strangely.
“Hey,” says Andrew, “do what you have to do. Make sure it’s the right guy and then you don’t even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I’d take care of it myself… I have friends who would help me take care of it.”takes Pellegrini out of earshot to ask if the detectives and detail officers doing the consent searches on Newington Avenue have checked the basements. Pellegrini doesn’t know. That was the trouble with a sprawling red ball; between five detectives and a dozen detail officers, progress is dependent on too many people.
“Andrew,” says Landsman, “we’re gonna need to talk to you downtown.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah. We’ll bring you back up when we’re done.”
“I been sick. I can’t really leave the house.”
“We really need to talk to you. It could help us out with the little girl’s murder.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know nothing about that, you know. I’m sick…”ignores the protestations. Short of arrest, which requires both a crime and probable cause, there is no law that can make a man go against his will to an interrogation room in the middle of the night. It’s one of the small joys of American police work that few people ever argue the point.comes to rest in the large interrogation room fifteen minutes later, with Landsman standing on the other side of the door in the sixth-floor corridor, telling Pellegrini and Edgerton to find that Lincoln.
“I’ll take a long statement and keep him here,” says the sergeant. “We gotta know if his car was really repo’d.”’s call to old Johnny wakes him up. It’s now the middle of the night, but the detective asks the auto dealer to go down to the sales office and dig out the paperwork. Johnny and Mrs. Johnny are already there when the two detectives get to Harford Road. The dealer finds a record of the sale and the payment schedule, but nothing to indicate a repossession order. Maybe, he suggests, the paperwork hasn’t yet come from the finance company.
“If it was repossessed, where would they tow it?”
“They got one lot over on Belair Road.”
“Can you show us?”and Mrs. Johnny pile back into their Cadillac Brougham and pull out of the lot. The detectives follow them to a fenced impound lot near the city’s northeastern edge. The car isn’t there. Nor is it at a second lot out in Rosedale, in eastern Baltimore County. And at 3:00 A.M., when the two detectives learn of a third lot in the northeast county near the Parkville police precinct, they head north with growing confidence that no one has towed Andrew’s shit-brown Lincoln Continental anywhere, that the lying bastard ditched the car somewhere on his own.third impound lot is protected by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Pellegrini walks up to one corner and stares through the metal mesh at a row of cars parked along the far end, hopeful that Andrew’s car isn’t among them. But the next to the last car in the row is a Lincoln Continental.
“There it is,” he says, his voice flat with disappointment.
“Where?” asks Edgerton.
“Near the end there. The brown one.”
“Is that it?”
“Well, it’s a brown Lincoln.”scans the lot for any sign of life. They do not need a warrant for the car; Andrew no longer has any claim to ownership. But the front gate is chained and padlocked.
“Well,” says Pellegrini, “here goes nothing.” The detective digs the tip of one black Florsheim into the metal links and begins pushing himself up the front of the fence. Two large Dobermans race the length of the impound lot, yelping and growling and baring their teeth. Pellegrini jumps down.
“Go on, Tom,” says Edgerton, laughing. “You can take ’em.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“They’re just animals. You’re a man with a gun.”smiles.
“Go on. Show ’em your badge.”
“I think we can wait,” says Pellegrini, walking back to the car.hours later, Pellegrini is headed back toward the lot with Landsman, who finished taking Andrew’s statement a little before 6:00 A.M. Although neither detective has slept in twenty-eight hours, there is little sign of fatigue when they roll out Perring Parkway toward the county, or when they follow a bored attendant across the dirt lot to the Lincoln. So it really was repo’d, thinks Pellegrini, so what. Maybe Andrew gave up the car figuring that it was clean, that there was nothing to link him to the murder.
“This the one?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”two detectives check the car’s interior first, searching the upholstery and carpeting for red-brown stains, hairs or fibers. Landsman finds a piece of imitation gold chain, a woman’s bracelet, above the dashboard. Pellegrini points to a small dark brown stain on the passenger seat.
“Blood?”
“Nah. I don’t think so.”pulls a leuco malachite kit from his pocket, treats a cotton swab with chemical and runs it across the stain. Dull gray.finishes checking the back seat, then both men walk around to the trunk. Landsman turns the key, but hesitates for just a moment before opening the top.
“C’mon, you mother,” he says, coming as close to genuine prayer as Jay Landsman ever does.trunk is clean. He treats seven or eight leuco swabs with chemical and drags them into every one of the trunk’s indentations and crevices. Dull gray.exhales slowly, his breath clouding in the frigid air. Then he walks to the Cavalier and sits in the driver’s seat. He holds up the bracelet and looks carefully at the gold strand, sensing that it, too, leads nowhere, that within a day or two the family of Latonya Wallace will answer no, they have never seen the chain before. Pellegrini waits silently as Landsman scrapes two more swabs along the interior before closing the trunk, sticking his hands deep into his jacket pockets and walking back to the Chevrolet.
“Let’s go.”, the exhaustion is overpowering, and both detectives are squinting in the morning light as the car rolls south on Harford Road and then west on Northern Parkway. For fifteen solid days, they have worked sixteen- and twenty-hour shifts, living on a roller-coaster ride from one suspect to another, bouncing wildly between moments of elation and hours of despair.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Landsman.
“What?”
“I think we need a day off. We gotta get some sleep, wake up and think on it.”nods.near the Jones Falls interchange, Landsman speaks again.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” he says, “it’ll go down.”Pellegrini is awash in fatigue and doubt, and he says nothing.Jay Landsman’s office, the Latonya Wallace probe is spreading like a cancer. Crime scene photos, lab reports, diagrams, office reports, aerial photographs of Reservoir Hill taken from the police helicopter-the paper pours out of the case folder and marches across the sergeant’s desk and file cabinets. A second column of documents begins a flanking maneuver, attacking Pellegrini’s work area in the annex office, then overwhelming a cardboard box behind the detective’s chair. The case has become a world unto itself, spinning in an orbit of its own.for the rest of the homicide unit, it’s business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit’s institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state’s shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve. On Friday afternoons, the nightshift detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders-88041, 88042, 88043-and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: Hell, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor fuck would change his name, lock himself in his basement, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight shift, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible. In late February, as the Latonya Wallace detail stretches into its third week, the homicide unit begins one such period when detectives on both shifts are hit with fourteen murders in thirteen days.is two weeks of mayhem, with bodies stacked like firewood in the ME’s freezer and detectives arguing over the office typewriters. On one particularly bad night, two men from McLarney’s squad find themselves acting out a scene that could only occur in the emergency room of an urban American hospital. The green-smocked vanguard of medical science is at stage right, struggling to repair a man with holes in his body. At stage left is Donald Waltemeyer, playing the role of First Detective. Enter Dave Brown, the Second Detective, who has come to assist his partner in the investigation of a Crime of Violence.
“Yo, Donald.”
“David.”
“Yo, brother, what’s up? Is this our boy here?”
“This is the shooting.”
“That’s what we’ve got, right?”
“You got the stabbing, right?”
“I came up here looking for you. McLarney thought you might want help.”
“Well, I got the shooting.”
“Okay. Great.”
“Well, who’s gonna take the stabbing?”
“Whoa. The shooting and stabbing are separate?”
“Yeah. I got the shooting.”
“So where’s the stabbing?”
“Next room over, I think.”Second Detective moves stage right, where another team of green-smocked technicians is now visible, struggling to repair another man with even larger holes.
“Okay, bunk,” says the Second Detective impassively. “I’ll take it.”night after Waltemeyer and Dave Brown trade bleeders at the Hopkins trauma unit, Donald Worden and Rick James catch their first fresh murder since Monroe Street, a picture-perfect domestic from the kitchen of a South Baltimore townhouse: a thirty-two-year-old husband is stretched across the linoleum, blood leaking from.22-caliber holes in his chest, undigested rum and cola leaking from his open mouth. It started with an argument that progressed to a point where the wife called police just after midnight, and the responding uniform graciously drove the very drunk husband to his mother’s house and told him to sleep it off. This meddlesome action, of course, violates the inalienable right of every drunken South Baltimore redneck to beat his estranged wife at one in the morning, and the husband responds by shaking off his stupor, calling a taxi and kicking down the kitchen door, whereupon he is shot dead by his sixteen-year-old stepson. Called at home that morning, the state’s attorney on duty asks for manslaughter charges in juvenile court.days later, Dave Brown picks up a drug murder from the open-air market at North and Longwood, and when it shakes out three days later, Roddy Milligan is credited with another notch on his gun. At the tender age of nineteen, Roderick James Milligan has become something of a pest to the homicide unit, what with his penchant for shooting every competing street dealer in the Southwestern. A small, elfin thing, Milligan had previously been sought on two 1987 murder warrants and was a suspect in a fourth slaying. His whereabouts unknown, young Roderick was beginning to irritate the detectives; Terry McLarney, in particular, takes as an insult the youthful offender’s decision to shoot more people rather than surrender.
“Can you believe a little shithead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?” McLarney declares, returning from yet another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. “You shoot a guy, hey,” the sergeant adds with a shrug. “You shoot another guy-well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it’s time to admit you have a problem.”Milligan has taken a line from Cagney, telling relatives he’ll never be taken alive, he’s eventually picked up in a raid a month later, caught dirty at a girlfriend’s house with heroin still in his pocket. His reputation suffers when it later gets out that after being tossed into an interrogation room, he cries uncontrollably.Stanton’s shift, there is the thirty-nine-year-old Highlandtown native who goes with a friend to buy PCP in a blighted section of Southeast Washington, where he is instead robbed and shot in the head by a street dealer. The friend then takes the wheel of the car and drives the thirty-five miles back up the Baltimore-Washington Expressway with the victim a bloody, dying wreck in the passenger seat. He takes the corpse to an east side hospital, claiming to have been attacked and robbed by a hitchhiker on nearby Dundalk Avenue.is the argument at a West Baltimore bar that begins with words, then escalates to fists and baseball bats until a thirty-eight-year-old man is lingering in a hospital bed, where three weeks later he rolls the Big Seven. The argument is between two Vietnam veterans, one declaring that the 1st Air Cavalry was the war’s premier fighting unit, the other advocating for the 1st Marine Division. In this particular instance, the Air Cav carries the day.there can be no forgetting the Westport mother who shoots her boyfriend, then tells her teenage daughter to confess to the crime, arguing that she would be charged only as a juvenile. And the young drug dealer from the Lafayette Courts projects who is abducted and shot by a competitor, then dumped in a Pimlico gutter, where he is mistaken for a dead dog by passersby. And the twenty-five-year-old East Baltimore entrepreneur who is shot in the back of the head as he weighs and dilutes heroin at a kitchen table. And the is-this-a-great-city-or-what homicide that Fred Ceruti handles in a Cathedral Street apartment, where one prostitute plunges a knife into the chest of another for a $10 cap of heroin, then fires the drugs before the police arrive. The key witness to the crime, a businessman from the Washington suburbs who fled to his wife and children at the first sign of blood, is chagrined to be called at 4:00 A.M. by a detective who learns his identity from credit card slips left behind on Baltimore’s Block, the downtown erogenous zone where he met the whores.
“Is Frank home?”
“Yes,” says a woman’s voice, “who is this?”
“Tell him it’s his friend Fred,” says Ceruti with genuine charity, adding, a few seconds later, “Frank, this is Detective Ceruti from the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. We have a problem here, don’t we?”contrast, there is a rare, refreshing moment of civic responsibility displayed by one James M. Baskerville, who flees after shooting his young girlfriend in her Northwest Baltimore home, then calls the crime scene an hour later and asks to talk with the detective.
“Who am I talking to?”
“This is Detective Tomlin.”
“Detective Tomlin?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“This is James Baskerville. I’m calling to surrender to you for killing Lucille.”
“Goddammit Constantine, you bald-headed motherfucker, I’m up here trying to do a crime scene and all you can find to do is fuck with me. Either come up here and help or-”. Mark Tomlin listens to a dead phone line for a moment, then turns to a family member. “What did you say was the name of Lucille’s boyfriend?”
“Baskerville. James Baskerville.”the second call comes, Tomlin catches it on the first ring. “Mr. Baskerville, listen, I’m real sorry about that. I thought you were someone else… Where are you now?”that night, in the large interrogation room, James Baskerville-who would later agree to life plus twenty years at his arraignment-offers no excuses and readily initials each page of his statement of confession. “I’ve committed a serious crime and I should be punished,” he says.
“Mr. Baskerville,” asks Tomlin, “are there any more like you at home?”like Latonya Wallace, there are those rare victims for whom death is not the inevitable consequence of a long-running domestic feud or a stunted pharmaceutical career. Poor souls like Henry Coleman, a forty-year-old cab driver who picks up the wrong fare at Broadway and Chase; and Mary Irons, age nineteen, who leaves a downtown dance club with the wrong escort and is found cut up behind an elementary school; and Edgar Henson, thirty-seven, who is leaving an east side 7-Eleven when a group of teenagers announce a robbery and then, without warning, begin blasting away. The gang takes two dollars in food stamps, leaving behind a quart of milk and a can of Dinty Moore stew.Charles Frederick Lehman, fifty-one, a Church Home hospital employee whose last moments on earth are consumed by the carry-out purchase of a two-piece extra crispy dinner from the Kentucky Fried outlet on Fayette Street. Lehman doesn’t make the twenty feet between the restaurant door and his Plymouth; he is found spread-eagled on the rain-soaked parking lot, his wallet gone, the contents of one pocket spread across the asphalt, the chicken dinner lying in a puddle near his head. From inside the restaurant, another customer watched the brief struggle with three teenagers, heard the gunshot and saw the victim fall. He stared as one kid leaned over the stricken man, methodically rifled his pants pockets, then raced his two companions across Fayette Street into the Douglass Homes project. But the sixty-seven-year-old witness is nearsighted, and he can provide no description better than three black males. The dead man’s car is towed to headquarters for processing in the hope that one of the three kids touched the car and left a clear print. When that fails, there is only the anonymous caller with a white male’s voice who tells Donald Kincaid that a black co-worker had talked about watching three kids-one of whom he knew by name-running through the Douglass Homes after the shooting. But the co-worker doesn’t want to be a witness. Neither, for that matter, does the caller.
“He doesn’t have to give his name. He can just talk to me like you’re talking to me now,” pleads Kincaid. “You got to get him to call because I’ll tell you the truth, this is the only clue I got.” The voice on the other end promises to try, but Kincaid has been in homicide for a dozen years, and he drops the receiver into its cradle knowing that in all probability, he is waiting for a call that will never come.take a page from the book written by the FBI’s psychological analysts, with Pellegrini and Landsman bringing the Fish Man down to the homicide office in the early morning-a time when a supposedly nocturnal suspect would be least comfortable. Then they do everything conceivable to make him believe that he is not in control, that their precision, their persistence, the sheer weight of their technologies, are certain to wear him down.the way upstairs to the interrogation, they walk him past the trace evidence lab. Normally locked on a Sunday morning, the fifth-floor laboratory has been opened and the equipment turned on by the detectives themselves. An elaborate show has been prepared to intimidate the suspect, to break him down before he even reaches the interrogation room. On one counter, the little girl’s bloodied clothes have been carefully laid out in a graphic display; on another table, her school books and satchel.over the dead girl’s clothes, Terry McLarney and Dave Brown are dressed in white lab coats, their faces bathed in studious, professorial intensity. They seem to be amassing a collection of microscopic clues as they putter back and forth between the clothing and the lab equipment.Pellegrini marches the suspect past the lab windows, he watches the Fish Man intently. The old man seems to be taking it all in, but he offers no reaction. The detective ushers the suspect into the back stairwell and up one flight to the homicide office, through the aquarium and into the greater authority of the captain’s office. With its expansive desk and high-backed chair, its sweeping view of the Baltimore skyline, the office seems to add even more prestige to the process. Before beginning with the Miranda, Pellegrini and Edgerton make sure the Fish Man gets a good long look at the maps and the aerial photos and the impersonal, black-and-white shots of the dead girl’s face, taken by the overhead camera at the ME’s office-all of it arrayed on the bulletin boards and blackboards that clutter the room. They let him see his own face, an ident photograph, affixed to the same board as the child’s picture. They do every conceivable thing to make this, their best suspect in the death of Latonya Wallace, believe that they have or will soon have the physical evidence, that they are dealing from a position of strength, that exposure and punishment are inevitable.they go at him. First Pellegrini, then Edgerton. Talking loud and fast, then whispering, then droning on laconically, then shouting, then asking questions, then asking the same questions again. Just outside the door, Landsman and the others listen to the assault, waiting for something to provoke the grizzled old man, something that will strike a chord and bring the beginning of the story up out of the Fish Man’s throat. One at a time the detectives leave the room, return, leave again, then come back again, each time bringing new questions, new tactics, suggested by those listening in silence just outside.confrontation is perfectly choreographed, so much so that many of the detectives allow themselves to believe that for once, the entire shift has pulled together around a single red ball, doing everything humanly and legally possible to squeeze a murder confession from a suspect. Yet the old man in the captain’s office remains unimpressed. He is a stone, a solid, stoic mass without fear, without any sense of distress, without any rage at being made a suspect in the molestation and murder of a child. He meets every argument with only abject denial and provides nothing more than the vague outline of his earlier statements. He will give no alibi for Tuesday. He will admit nothing.the early hours of the interrogation, Pellegrini defers once again to Edgerton, who has done this so many times before. With a certain unease, he listens to Edgerton lay everything they have in front of their suspect. Trying to convince him of their omniscience, Edgerton tells the Fish Man that they know about the little girls, that they told us how you could be fresh. We know about the old rape charge, Edgerton assures him. We know why you still don’t have an alibi.listens to the veteran detective shovel his best stuff onto the old man’s lap with little effect and realizes, too late, that it isn’t enough. Hour after hour, Edgerton is spitting out words and phrases in that double-time New York cadence, but Pellegrini can almost feel the old man’s indifference growing. The detectives have their suspicions, they have probabilities, they have the mere beginnings of a circumstantial case. What they do not have is evidence: raw evidence, real evidence. The kind that breaks a man down to his smallest parts and makes him admit to that which no man will ever willingly admit. They’re in the room, firing their guns, and they don’t have it.they are right-if the Fish Man molested and killed Latonya Wallace-then they have only one or two chances to break him, one or two sessions to bring the man to a confession. Last Saturday was the first bite of the apple and now, with nothing else on their plate, they are wasting the rest of the meal.Edgerton begins to tire, Pellegrini picks up what few threads remain untouched. He asks the old man open-ended questions, hoping to arouse something other than monosyllabic answers. He tries to probe the old man’s feelings for the dead girl. But they are random questions, a few shots in the dark delivered independent of any plan or science. Pellegrini watches the old man’s unchanging face and curses himself. He is locked in this room with his best, most enduring suspect, and yet he has no trump card, no tool with which to pry into the man’s soul.again, Pellegrini feels that insistent regret, that same unnerving notion that his case is running away from him. When it came to this, the investigation’s most critical confrontation thus far, he had given the helm to Edgerton. But Edgerton had no plan; hell, none of them did.had rested on the forlorn hope that the Fish Man would fear their expertise, their knowledge and their authority-fear all of it enough to give up his darkest secrets. Pellegrini wonders whether their suspect even understands enough to feel that kind of fear. The walk by the lab didn’t even faze him; neither had the morgue photos. The Fish Man was either a true innocent or a true sociopath.eight hours, they call for a Central District radio car as first Pellegrini, then Edgerton, surrenders to both frustration and exhaustion. The store owner waits quietly on the green vinyl sofa in the aquarium until a uniform arrives to shuttle him back to Whitelock Street. Then the Fish Man collects himself slowly and shuffles down the sixth-floor corridor, once again a free man.nights later, Pellegrini shows up for a midnight shift, checks the roll book, and learns he’s the only detective on active duty. Fahlteich’s on vacation, Dunnigan and Ceruti are off, and Rick Requer, just off medical from a broken arm, is still working light duty.
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