“This one,” he would say, staring at the scene photos and oblivious of the melodrama, “has got to be avenged.”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.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.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., 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.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.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.”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?”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.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.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.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.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.felt wetness on his back. “Mike, roll me and see if it came through the other side.”pushed up on the shoulder blade. “Yeah, it did.”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.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.”yeah, thought McLarney. Shock.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.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.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.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.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.”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.”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.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.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.sits behind Dunnigan’s desk in the annex office, listening to the steady rhythm of a young girl sobbing disconsolately behind the interrogation room door. The tears are real. McLarney knows that.leans across the desk, listening to the girl trying to collect herself as the men inside the room go through her statement one more time. Her voice is breaking, her nose running. The girl feels pain, a sense of loss even, as genuine as any felt for Gene Cassidy. And that, to McLarney, is a little obscene.’Addario comes out of his office, walks to the interrogation room door and stares through the mirrored window. “How’s it going?”
“It’s down, lieutenant.”
“Already?”
“She gave up Butchie.”. Tears for Butchie Frazier.crying jag began a half hour before, when they finally broke through to Yolanda Marks and the truth began slipping from her in fits and starts. In the interrogation room, McLarney listened to the sobbing until the contradictions, the fractured morality, became too much. A little speech forced its way up into his throat, and then he told a young West Baltimore girl that she was doing the right thing. He told her what Butchie Frazier was, what he had done, and why it needed to end this way. He told her about Gene and Patti Cassidy and the child not yet born, about a darkness that would not go away.
“Think about those things,” he told her.was silence after that, a minute or two when someone else’s tragedy took shape in the young girl’s mind. But then McLarney left the room and she was sobbing again, and the tears had nothing to do with Gene Cassidy. The simple truth was that Yolanda Marks loved Butchie Frazier, and she had given him up.
“Is she talkin’ in there?” asks Landsman, walking through the annex.
“Yeah,” says McLarney, absentmindedly opening Dunnigan’s top drawer. “We’re getting ready to write up the statement.”
“What’s she saying?”
“It’s down.”
“Hey, way to go, Terr.”disappears into his office, and McLarney pulls a handful of paper clips from the drawer, lines them up on the desk and begins torturing the first, twisting it back and forth between stubby fingers.last two days had made all the difference, and this time they had it right. This time, the investigation had been temperate and clinical, precise in a way that it never could have been in the hours after the shooting. Rage and frustration had marked those first days, but those emotions had finally been sublimated by time and necessity. For McLarney, the Cassidy detail was still a crusade, but one now fueled more by deliberate reason than raw vengeance.Marks’s journey to the interrogation room actually began more than a week ago, when McLarney and the two detail men brought their two reluctant eyewitnesses-the sixteen-year-old and his younger sister-downtown to the state’s attorney’s office. There, detectives and prosecutors began a series of pretrial interviews to elicit additional details about the shooting, details that might then be corroborated to strengthen the existing testimony or, better still, that might lead to additional witnesses. In particular, McLarney wanted to identify and locate the young girlfriends who were supposedly with the thirteen-year-old witness when the crime occurred.the youth of their witness and the intimidating confines of the state’s attorney’s office, the investigators found it surprising that they had to press the young girl to reveal the names of her friends. When she finally began talking, McLarney and the others were provided with only given or street names-Lulu, Renee, Tiffany and Munchkin-all of whom supposedly lived in the Murphy Homes high-rises. McLarney, Belt and Tuggle went to the projects, finding a variety of young girls who answered to the names provided, but none knew about the shooting. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to know anything about the thirteen-year-old witness.again, McLarney also sent the detail in search of the black Ford Escort that Clifton Frazier had supposedly used to drive Owens away from the shooting scene. But no such car could be in any way connected to either Frazier or Owens, although the men spent several days watching and following several black Escorts they found near the shooting scene.effort to confirm the statements of their two witnesses was going nowhere. Moreover, the defense attorneys appeared to be lining up a series of alibi witnesses who were ready to testify that Anthony Owens wasn’t even on Appleton Street when the shooting occurred. Something was clearly wrong and McLarney, sensing a dead end, went back to square one. Three days ago, he pulled out the case file and began reviewing the initial statements provided by neighborhood residents who had been standing in the crowd at the shooting scene and who were grabbed by uniforms and sent downtown. There were several such witnesses, all of whom had claimed that they knew nothing and had merely joined the spectators after the shooting. With nothing left to lose, McLarney decided it wouldn’t hurt to begin poking through those statements a second time, so the detail began interviewing each of the witnesses again. After another day on the street, they finally came upon a twenty-year-old resident of Mosher Street named John Moore.the night of the shooting, Moore had been yanked off a corner by uniforms and sent downtown, where he told detectives that he had heard the shots but seen nothing. This time, after several hours of friction in the large interrogation room, however, the story changed.fact, Moore didn’t see the shooting, but he saw everything leading up to it. He was out on his stoop on the night of October 22, watching Clifton “Butchie” Frazier and a young girl he didn’t know walking west on Mosher toward Appleton. Frazier and the girl were halfway down the block when a marked police car began rolling slowly down the street. Moore saw the radio car come abreast of the couple, then roll around the corner onto Appleton. A few seconds later, Frazier and the girl rounded the corner as well.came the gunshots. Three of them.whether there had been a crowd at the corner of Mosher and Appleton, Moore said that the corner was empty at the time of the shooting. He further confirmed his story by leading detectives to a nineteen-year-old friend who had been with him on the stoop.second witness recounted the same sequence of events as Moore, adding two more facts to the record. First, the friend remembered that when the radio car came abreast of the couple on Mosher Street, the officer behind the wheel and Butchie Frazier had eyed each other for a moment or two. Second, and more important, the girl with Frazier was named Yolanda. She lived around the corner on Monroe Street. And yeah, if he had to, he could point out the house.this morning, McLarney and the two detail officers gathered in the vestibule of that West Baltimore rowhouse, waiting for Yolanda Marks to gather her things and walk to the waiting Cavalier. She was a sad-faced thing, seventeen years old, with deep brown eyes that began to tear as soon as they took her downtown and closed the door to the interrogation room. Yolanda was a juvenile, of course, so her mother came to the office as well, and that proved fortunate. Because after every moral appeal and veiled threat fell short of the mark, it was the mother who went into the room and told her teenage daughter to get it over with, to do the right thing.wiped her eyes, then cried some more, then daubed her eyes again. Then, for the first time, McLarney learned the truth about the attempted murder of Officer Eugene Cassidy.
“Butchie shot the police.”to the girl, the whole thing happened in less than a minute. Cassidy was already out of the radio car and waiting for the couple when they turned the corner onto Appleton.
“Hey, I want to talk to you.”
“What for?”
“Put your hands against the wall.”Frazier began to assume the position, then suddenly pulled a handgun from his right jacket pocket. A southpaw, Cassidy grabbed Frazier’s weapon with his left hand; as a result, he was unable to pull his own revolver from the holster on his left hip. With Cassidy still grappling for the gun, Frazier compressed the trigger. The first shot went wide. Seconds later, the gun was flush against the left side of Cassidy’s face and Frazier fired two more rounds.fell to the sidewalk a few feet from his radio car as Frazier fled with the gun through a back alley. Yolanda screamed, backed into the street, then wandered around the block to her house on Monroe Street, where she told her mother what had happened. At that point, neither mother nor child entertained thoughts about calling the police. Nor, for that matter, did John Moore, who had claimed no knowledge of the event on the night of the shooting. Moore’s friend also refused to volunteer himself as a witness until detectives confronted him. And yet another couple, who had been walking on Appleton Street and witnessed the struggle between Frazier and the officer, failed to come forward and were only located after Moore and his companion began naming others who were on the street at the time of the shooting.Baltimore. You sit on your stoop, you drink Colt 45 from a brown paper bag and you watch the radio car roll slowly around the corner. You see the gunman, you hear the shots, you gather on the far corner to watch the paramedics load what remains of a police officer into the rear of an ambulance. Then you go back to your rowhouse, open another can, and settle in front of the television to watch the replay on the eleven o’clock news. Then you go back to the stoop.knows the Western, knows the code. But even after all those years on the street, it still seems incredible that a cop can be shot twice in the head and get no response from an entire neighborhood. And so, when Yolanda Marks finally begins to break, McLarney stops beating up on paper clips and returns to the interrogation room like a true innocent, speaking to her about human tragedy, about lives that can never be made whole. Then he leaves, knowing that nothing he said will stop those tears.that night, when McLarney calls Cassidy at home to tell him the story of Appleton Street, Cassidy suddenly realizes that he knew the man who tried to kill him. Clifton Frazier was the neighborhood badass on Cassidy’s post, an arrogant dope peddler who had only a week earlier beaten an elderly man senseless. The old man lost the use of an eye in that attack, a beating inflicted because the victim had seen Frazier slapping a young woman on the street and had the temerity to tell the younger man to let the girl alone. Cassidy knew about the beating because he had been trying for days to find and arrest Frazier on the outstanding warrant.Cassidy, Appleton Street now made sense; more than that, it meant something. In the end, he had not been shot down because he wandered onto a crowded drug corner like some brainless academy product. He had been shot doing his job, trying-as he had tried with a fifteen-year-old in a hospital recovery room-to arrest a wanted man. He could live with that. He would have to.days after her interrogation, Yolanda Marks is taken to a nearby Maryland State Police barracks, where a polygraph examiner determines that her statement is truthful. The same day, the sixteen-year-old witness who had implicated Anthony Owens as the shooter is also taken to the same barracks, but just before undergoing the test the teenager recants his earlier statement, admitting that he did not witness the shooting and that he only repeated what he heard on the street, hoping to end his own interrogation. The polygraph is then administered and the examiner concludes that in recanting his story, the teenager shows no deception. When the detectives confront his thirteen-year-old sister, she, too, acknowledges the lie, telling them that she had gone down to homicide and told her story because she was afraid her brother would be charged.case is down.knows that the Cassidy detail still has weeks of work before it will be fit for trial. For one thing, the wrong man had been indicted, and his innocence will now have to be firmly established or a defense attorney could use him to wreak havoc. Likewise, the case will be bolstered immensely if investigators can find the gun or some other physical evidence to link Frazier with the crime. But it is down.the night that Yolanda passes the box, there is a homecoming of sorts when McLarney returns to Kavanaugh’s, the city’s predominant Irish cop watering hole, and stands his ground at the end of the bar. He leans against the wooden rail, centered between the pinball machine and the St. Francis Center poor box. It is a slow weekday night, with only a handful of detectives in the place, along with a few uniforms from Central and Southern and a couple guys from the tac sections. Corey Belt stops in for a little while but slips out after drinking a soda or two, leaving McLarney to wonder aloud what has become of the vaunted Western District when its best men don’t even drink beer. McAllister shows up, too, and stays, bellying up on the stool next to McLarney. This in itself makes the occasion special, because Mac doesn’t get out as much anymore, not since he and Sue moved from the city to a new home they built in the rural greenery of northern Baltimore County. To McLarney’s distress, his old Central District partner has in recent years been spinning in a more sensible, suburban orbit.this February night, however, when McLarney’s very universe has been righted by a rare, precious victory, when the brotherhood of cops has once again been affirmed in McLarney’s mind, the arrival of McAllister at Kavanaugh’s is serendipity itself. Good old Mac. Miracles have been marked on the streets of Baltimore, and Mac, a true pilgrim, has no doubt traveled many dangerous leagues to pay proper homage at this, the true shrine of Celtic sheriffry. McLarney sidles down the bar to wrap a beefy arm around his old partner’s shoulder.
“Mac,” says McLarney.
“T.P.”
“Mac,” McLarney says again.
“Yes, T.P.”
“My partner.”
“Your partner.”
“My bunky.”nods, wondering how long this can possibly go on.
“You know, when we were working together you taught me a lot of shit.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, all kinds of important stuff.”
“Like what, T.P.?”
“You know, all kinds of shit.”
“Oh,” says McAllister, laughing. Nothing is so amusingly pathetic as when one cop tries to bond with another. Conversations descend into vague mutterings. Compliments are transformed into insults. Words of genuine affection become comically perverted.
“Really, you taught me a lot,” says McLarney. “But that’s not why I respect you. I respect you for one thing.”
“What’s that, Terry?”
“When it was time for you to fuck me,” says McLarney soberly, “you were very gentle.”
“Of course I was,” says McAllister without hesitation.
“You could have just bent me over the hood of the car and had your way, but you were gentle with me. And very patient.”
“Well, I knew it was your first time,” says McAllister. “I wanted it to be special.”
“And it was, Mac.”
“I’m glad.”brotherhood understands, the tribe hears the words unsaid. And when the two detectives finally let go of their deadpan and begin to laugh, all of Kavanaugh’s laughs with them. Then they kill off what’s left in their cans and argue briefly over the next round, each pulling his wallet and telling the other to take his money off the bar.old partners always should.the day that marks the end of two full weeks in the Latonya Wallace probe, Jay Landsman manages to slip away from the office in late evening. He drives west into the county, where a wife and five kids are beginning to forget what a husband and father looks like.route is so familiar that Landsman’s mind drifts free, and in the solitude of the car’s dark interior he tries to pull away from the details of the case and view the entire puzzle. He thinks about the terrain on Reservoir Hill, about the alley behind Newington Avenue, about the location of the body. What, he asks himself, are we missing?sergeant couldn’t argue with the logic behind Edgerton’s rooftop theory, its explanation for the placement of the child’s body. But he never believed that the warrant on 702 Newington would yield anything. For one thing, there were nearly two dozen people living in that shithole. Even if one homicidal child molester managed to lure the kid into the house, kill her and keep the body in his room for a prolonged period of time, how could he have kept eighteen other occupants from knowing about it? Landsman was certain that the murder was the work of one man, acting alone, but the house at 702 Newington looked as though it were hosting the citywide convention for Baltimore’s underclass. Landsman wasn’t surprised when the lab reports on the clothing and sheets from the raid came back positive for blood, but negative for the victim’s blood type, just as none of the latent prints taken from the house matched those of the victim.outcome of the raid on 702 Newington left both Landsman and Tom Pellegrini wishing that they had spent more time searching the Fish Man’s store and apartment. Their haste at the Whitelock Street addresses-like everything else with this case-was particularly upsetting to Pellegrini, who worried about what may have been missed. Edgerton’s theory had been so sound, so sensible, and given the earlier child abuse report from 702 Newington, Pellegrini had been convinced. With the raid a bust, he had returned with Landsman to the old store owner.interest in the Fish Man had increased since the raids, not only because of the outcome on Newington Avenue, but also because of a profile of Latonya Wallace’s killer prepared by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit. On the day after the raids, Rich Garvey and Bob Bowman had been dispatched to the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they provided raw data from the crime scene and autopsy to federal agents trained in psychological profiling.FBI’s characterization of a likely suspect had considerable detail. He would be “a nocturnal individual who will feel more comfortable at night… the offender will be known to young kids in the neighborhood and will be considered strange but nice to children. The offender may have already been interviewed by investigators or he may interject himself into the investigation… In most cases the offender will follow press accounts of the investigation and will make some effort to establish an alibi. The offender, who probably has been involved in similar crimes previously, will show no remorse over having killed the victim, but will be concerned over the possibility of being apprehended.”analysis further noted that “offenders of this type are difficult to interview and as time goes on, the events which occurred will be altered in the offender’s mind, making it difficult for him to relate to the crime. It is possible that the offender killed the victim within a short period of time of coming in contact with her… The victim in this instance may not have responded to the offender as he thought initially she would have responded. His difficulty in controlling her may have led to the victim’s death. Possibly the victim may have initially felt safe or comfortable with the offender and gone willingly with him into a residence or building.”profile described the probable offender as fifty years of age, probably unmarried and with a history of problems involving female relationships: “The offender most likely had earlier encounters with young girls in this neighborhood. The death of Latonya Wallace is not believed to be a stranger murder.”Landsman and Pellegrini, the FBI profile seems to match the Fish Man. But without any substantive evidence, the only option is to hammer on the old man in another long interrogation in the hope that something new will be revealed. For this very reason, Edgerton and Pellegrini are still at the office as Landsman drives home; they plan to work late into the night preparing for a second confrontation with the Fish Man scheduled for the weekend.Landsman isn’t optimistic about the coming interrogation either. The FBI analysis also made it clear that a violent sex offender is among the most difficult suspects to break. There was no Out to offer such people, no reasonable suggestion that the murder could be mitigated in some way. Moreover, the crime was genuinely sociopathic: An absence of remorse would probably be coupled with rationalizations in the suspect’s mind. All that had to be coupled with the fact that the Fish Man had previously walked out a free man after one interrogation; he would be less intimidated by a second attempt. And still there is the missing crime scene, the absence of any physical evidence with which to link a suspect to the crime. The detectives have rumors, suspicions, and now a psychological profile. But working without a scene, they have nothing that can argue against the Fish Man’s story, nothing that can be used as leverage in an interrogation.is a bastard of a case, and again Landsman asks himself: What are we missing? Maneuvering through the evening traffic on Liberty Road, he runs two weeks of investigation through his mind. Every day since February 4, the detectives had marched into Reservoir Hill, questioning locals, checking garages and vacant apartments in an ever-growing radius from Newington Avenue. With the consent of the occupants, detectives had managed to perform plain-view searches of every one of the thirteen occupied rowhouses on the north side of Newington, as well as many of the properties on the Callow and Park Avenue sides of the block. They had checked alibis and living quarters for every male suspect identified in the early canvassing.dead girl’s clothes and belongings were still being checked for trace evidence; but excepting those black smudges on her pants, nothing looked especially promising. The blue satchel and its contents had been sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory, thirty-five miles away in Rockville, Maryland, for laser fingerprinting, an examination that yielded a few latent prints on the library texts. Those prints were now on the fifth floor of headquarters, running through a Printrak computer that electronically searches for possible matches among the fingerprint files of everyone with a previous arrest in Baltimore.the chance that the little girl had left something more than an earring at the crime scene, Edgerton had checked with the library for the titles of the books she checked out that Tuesday afternoon. And when the library system explained that such information could not be released without infringing on the borrower’s privacy, Edgerton actually called the mayor himself; Hizzoner made it easy for the librarians to change their minds. Meanwhile, Pellegrini had gone back more than a decade in the old homicide files, looking for any unsolved murder or disappearance involving young girls. Landsman had checked the sex offense unit for any recent reports in the Reservoir Hill area. Then, with the family’s permission, Pellegrini had walked through the little girl’s room, read through her pink and blue diary, even developed the film in her Polaroid camera in search of a suspect. And all of the detectives and detail officers had spent hours running down the telephone tips that followed any TV broadcast that mentioned the case:
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