“Where was Glen?” asks Garvey.
“Behind McKesson.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“I think so. But it was McKesson who I seen shoot the boy.”stood his ground, a true stoic, refusing to run even when the men poured from the Volvo. The victim’s younger brother, Michael, was with him when the shooting started, but ran screaming when Cornelius hit the pavement.
“Did Langley have a gun?”
“Not that I seen,” says Reds, shaking his head. “He should’ve though. Them boys from North and Pulaski don’t play.”runs through the scenario a second time slowly, picking up a few more details and committing the story to eight or nine sheets of interview paper. Even if they weren’t going to get rid of his dope charge, Reds wouldn’t make much of a court witness, not with his long arrest sheet and the HO-scale tracks running up and down each arm. Michael Langley, however, will be another story. McAllister goes downstairs and brings Reds a soda, and the man stretches his thin frame back from the table, his chair scraping across the tile floor.
“All this dopin’ is running me down,” he says. “You all took my shit and now I got to deal with that. Hard life, you know?”smiles. In a half hour, the papers come downtown from the Northwest District Court and Reds signs the personal recog sheet and squeezes his gangly body into the cramped back seat of a Cavalier for the short trip up the Jones Falls Expressway. At Cold Spring and Pall Mall, he slumps down, head below the window’s edge, so as not to be seen in an unmarked car.
“You want to get out at Pimlico Road or somewhere else?” Garvey asks, solicitous. “Is this safe for you?”
“I’m fine right here. Ain’t nobody around. Just pull up on that side of the street.”
“Take care, Reds.”
“You too, man.”then he is gone, sliding out of the car so quickly that he is a half block away and moving fast before the traffic light changes. He does not look back.next morning, after the autopsy, McAllister gives his patented do-right-by-the-victim speech to the dead man’s mother, delivering it with so much apparent sincerity that as usual it makes Garvey want to throw up and has him wondering whether McAllister is going to finish by falling to one knee. No doubt about it, Mac is an artist with a grieving mother.time, the plea is for Michael Langley, who has not stopped running since the gunshots on Woodland Avenue. Rather than stand up as the eyewitness to his brother’s murder, the boy raced two blocks to his room, packed a bag and headed south for the Langley ancestral lands in Carolina. Bring him back to us, McAllister will ask the mother. Bring him back and avenge your son’s death.it works. A week later, Michael Langley returns to the city of Baltimore and its homicide unit, where he wastes no time identifying Glen Alexander and Walter McKesson from two photo arrays. Soon Garvey is back in the admin office, pecking out two more warrants on a secretary’s IBM Selectric.cases, eight clearances. While summer bleeds the rest of the shift dry, Rich Garvey is once again communing with an electric typewriter, building the Perfect Year.Night is three men on a midnight shift that never ends, with the office phones bleating and the witnesses lying and the bodies stacking up in the ME’s freezer like commuter flights over La Guardia. It arrives without pity at a quarter before midnight, little more than a half hour after Roger Nolan’s crew started walking through the door. Kincaid showed up first, then McAllister, and then Nolan himself. Edgerton is late, as usual. But before anyone can finish even one cup of coffee, the first call is on them. And this time it’s a little more than the usual corpse. This time it’s a police-involved shooting from the Central.calls Gary D’Addario at home; protocol dictates that regardless of the hour, the shift lieutenant is to return to the office to supervise the investigation of any police-involved shooting. Then he calls Kim Cord-well, one of two secretaries assigned to the homicide unit. She, too, will have to come in on overtime so that the 24-hour report will be typed to perfection and copied for every boss by morning.sergeant and his two detectives then head for the shooting scene, leaving the phones to be answered downstairs in the communications center until Edgerton arrives to staff the office. No sense holding a man back, Nolan reasons. A police-involved shooting is by definition a red ball and, by definition, a red ball requires every warm body.take two Cavaliers, arriving at a vacant parking lot off Druid Hill Avenue, where half the Western District’s plainclothes vice unit is standing around a parked Oldsmobile Cutlass. McAllister takes in the scene and experiences a moment of déjà vu.
“Maybe it’s just me,” he tells Nolan. “But this looks a little bit too familiar.”
“I know what you mean,” says the sergeant.a brief conversation with the Western’s vice sergeant, McAllister walks back to Nolan, quietly wrestling with the humor of it all.
“It’s another ten seventy-eight,” says McAllister, dryly creating a new 10 code for the occasion. “Your basic blowjob-in-progress interrupted by police gunfire.”
“Damn,” says Kincaid. “It’s gettin’ so a man can’t even get blowed without gettin’ himself shot.”
“This is one tough town,” agrees Nolan.months ago, the same scene was played out on Stricker Street; McAllister was the primary detective for that one as well. The scenario in each case is the same: Suspect picks up a Pennsylvania Avenue prostitute; suspect parks at isolated spot, drops his pants and consigns his nether regions to $20 worth of fellatio. Suspect is approached by plainclothes vice officers from the Western District; suspect panics, doing something that seems to threaten the arresting officers; suspect is hit with a.38-caliber bullet and ends the evening in a downtown ER, reflecting on the relative joys of marital fidelity.law enforcement goes, it’s downright ugly. And yet with the right amount of talent and finesse, both incidents will be ruled justifiable by the state’s attorney’s office. In a strictly legal sense, they can certainly be justified; before firing their weapons at the two men, both officers may well have believed they were in jeopardy. When ordered to surrender, the suspect on Stricker Street reached for something in the back of his truck and a plainclothes officer fired one shot into his face, fearing that he was trying to grab a weapon. The officer in tonight’s incident fired one shot through the windshield after the suspect, attempting to drive away from the plainclothesmen, struck one of the officers with the car’s bumper.homicide detectives, however, a justified police shooting means only that there was no criminal intent behind the officer’s actions and that at the time he used deadly force the officer genuinely believed himself or others to be in serious danger. From a legal standpoint, this is a hole large enough for the proverbial truck, and in the case of these two vice squad shootings from the Western, the homicide unit will feel no qualms about using every inch of that chasm. The equivocation inherent in every police-involved shooting probe is understood by any cop with a year or two on the street: If Nolan or McAllister or Kincaid were asked at the scene whether they truly believed the shooting to be justified, they would answer in the affirmative. But if they were asked whether that shooting represented good police work, they would provide an altogether different answer or, more likely, no answer at all.the realm of American law enforcement, the deceit has been standardized. Inside every major police department, the initial investigation of any officer-involved shooting begins as an attempt to make the incident look as clean and professional as possible. And in every department, the bias at the heart of such an investigation is seen as the only reasonable response to a public that needs to believe that good cops always make good shootings and that bad shootings are only the consequence of bad cops. Time and again, the lie must be maintained.
“I take it the lady in question is already downtown?” says Nolan.
“Yes indeed,” says McAllister.
“If it’s the same girl as on Stricker Street, I’m going to bust a gut hearing about how every time she goes down on a guy, he gets shot.”smiles. “If we’re all right here, I think I’m going to head for the hospital.”
“You and Donald can both go,” says the sergeant. “I’m going back to the office and get things started.”before he can do so, a nearby uniform overhears the citywide dispatch call for a multiple shooting in the Eastern. The uniform turns up the volume and Nolan listens as the call is confirmed and an Eastern officer asks the dispatcher to notify homicide. Nolan borrows a hand-held radio and assures communications that he’s responding from the shooting scene in the Central.
“We’ll meet you back at the office,” says McAllister. “Call if you need us.”nods, then heads across town as McAllister and Kincaid go to the emergency room at Maryland General. Twenty minutes later, the thirty-six-year-old suspect- “a working man,” he is quick to assure them, “a happily married working man”-is sitting up in a back room, his upper right arm bandaged and encased in a canvas sling.calls his name.
“Yes sir?”
“We’re with the police department. This is Detective Kincaid and I’m Detective-”
“Listen,” says the victim. “I’m really, really sorry, and like I wanted to tell the officer, I didn’t know he was a police-”
“We understand…”
“I had my glasses off and I just saw him coming up to the car waving somethin’ and I thought I was gettin’ robbed, you know?”
“That’s fine. We can talk later…”
“And I wanted to apologize to the officer but they wouldn’t let me see him, but really, sir, I didn’t know what-”
“That’s fine,” says McAllister. “We can talk about this later, but the important thing is that you and the officer are both all right.”
“No, no,” says the suspect, waving his sling in the air. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, great. They’ll be taking you down to our office and we’ll talk there, okay?”suspect nods and both detectives walk toward the emergency room exit.
“Nice guy,” says Kincaid.
“Very nice,” says McAllister.guy is telling the truth, of course. Both detectives couldn’t help but notice that the suspect’s eyeglasses were still sitting on top of the Oldsmobile’s dashboard. Parked in an isolated spot with his pants at his knees, the man probably felt particularly vulnerable at the sight of a young man in street clothes walking up to the car with something shiny in his hand. The victim on Stricker Street had the same fear of a robbery and, as a supermarket security guard, he impulsively reached for his nightstick in the back seat when the first officer jerked open the passenger door. Mistaking the stick for a long gun, the cop fired one round into the man’s face, and only by the grace of the University ER did the poor guy survive. To the department’s credit, the second shooting will be enough to prompt the deputy commissioner for operations to pull the district vice units off the street long enough to make changes in the prostitution detail procedures.on the east side, Roger Nolan is dealing with the fallout from a triple shooting. The scene on North Montford is a wild one, too, with a young girl shot dead and two other family members wounded. The wanted man is the dead girl’s estranged lover, who compensated for the end of the brief relationship by shooting everyone he could find in his girlfriend’s rowhouse and then running away. Nolan is at the scene for two hours, prying witnesses from the neighborhood and sending them downtown, where Kincaid begins to sort through the early arrivals.to the homicide office, Nolan checks the small interrogation room, satisfying himself that tonight’s streetwalker is not the same girl whose customer was shot on Stricker Street. He checks in with D’Addario, who has arrived, and with the twenty-six-year-old plainclothesman who pulled the trigger and is now a nervous wreck in D’Addario’s office. Then he scans the bustling activity in the office and does not see the face he is looking for.at Tomlin’s desk, he dials Harry Edgerton’s home number and listens patiently as the phone rings four or five times.
“Hullo.”
“Harry?”
“Uh-huh.”
“This is your sergeant,” says Nolan, shaking his head. “What the hell are you doing asleep?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re supposed to be working tonight.”
“No, I’m off. Tonight and Wednesday, I’m off.”grimaces. “Harry, I got the roll book right in front of me and your H-days are Wednesday-Thursday. You’re on tonight with Mac and Kincaid.”
“Wednesday and Thursday?’
“Yeah.”
“No way. You’re kidding me.”
“Yeah, Harry, I’m calling you up at one A.M. just to fuck with you.”
“You’re not kidding me.”
“No,” says Nolan, almost amused.
“Shit.”
“Shit is right.”
“Anything going on there?”
“A police shooting and a murder. That’s all.”curses himself. “You want me to come in?”
“Fuck it, go back to sleep,” says the sergeant. “We’ll be all right and you’ll work Thursday. I’ll pencil it in.”
“Thanks, Rog. I could swear I had Tuesday and Wednesday. I was sure of it.”
“You’re a piece of work, Harry.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Go back to sleep.”a few hours, when events again overtake the squad, Nolan will regret his generosity. Now, however, he has every reason to believe that he can make do until morning with two detectives. McAllister and Kincaid have returned from the hospital with the wounded suspect, his arm in a sling, and an interview is already under way in the admin office. From the look of things, it is going pretty much as expected, too. After giving a half-hour statement to Kincaid and McAllister, the victim’s most sincere desire is to apologize to the cop who shot him.
“If I could just see him for a moment, I’d like to shake his hand.”
“That might not be a good idea right now,” says Kincaid. “He’s a little upset right now.”
“I can understand that.”
“He’s very upset that he had to shoot you and all, you understand.”
“I just want him to know that-”
“We told him,” says McAllister. “He knows you didn’t think he was a police officer.”, McAllister lets the suspect use the admin office phone to call his wife, who last saw her husband an hour and a half earlier, when he was leaving for a five-minute ride to an all-night video store. The detectives will listen sympathetically as the poor man tries to explain that he’s been shot in the arm, arrested and charged with assault on a police officer and that it’s all just a big misunderstanding.
“I’m going to have to wait to make bail,” he tells her, “but I’ll explain when I get home.”mention is made of the perverted sex charge, and the detectives assure him that they have no reason to want to wreck his marriage.
“Just make sure she don’t show up for court,” Kincaid tells him. “If you can do that, you’ll probably be all right.”in D’Addario’s office, the young plainclothesman is writing his own report of the incident, electing on the advice of his district commander to give a voluntary statement to the detectives. By law, any attempt to compel an officer’s statement makes that information inadmissible in court, and the detectives are under standing orders from prosecutors to do nothing more than request a statement from any officer involved in a shooting. Since the Monroe Street probe, however, the police union has been urging officers not to give any statements-a policy that in the long run is likely to breed trouble. After all, if a homicide detective can save another cop, he won’t hesitate to do so; but any cop who refuses to explain his actions is just asking for a grand jury investigation. On this night, however, the major from the Western manages to convince his man to consent to an interview, thereby giving the detectives room to work.officer’s report conforms to the suspect’s own statement that the plainclothesman fell on the hood of the car, after it jerked forward three or four feet, then fired a single shot through the windshield. The interview with the prostitute provides further corroboration. Not that she saw all that much, she tells the detectives, her field of vision at the time being somewhat limited., methodically, the five-page report begins to come together beneath the hum of Kim Cordwell’s word processor. Reading the draft, D’Addario pencils a change or two and suggests the rewording of a few critical sections. When it comes to police-shooting reports, D’Addario is something of an artist; eight years in homicide have trained him to anticipate the likely questions from the command staff. Rarely, if ever, has a shooting report bounced down the ladder after the lieutenant put his mark on it. As awkward and excessive as the use of deadly force might have seemed out on that parking lot, it reads squeaky clean in the finished product.watches the paperwork progress and again tells himself that they can do without Edgerton and that it’s better, after all, to get a full night’s work out of Harry on Thursday rather than call him downtown two hours into a shift.two hours later, just as the floodwaters have started to recede, the phone rings again, this time with a shooting call from North Arlington Avenue on the west side. Kincaid leaves the last of the paperwork from the police shooting behind, grabs the keys to a Cavalier and drives twenty or thirty blocks to watch the sun rise over a dead teenager, his long frame stretched across the white asphalt of a back alley. A stone whodunit.the dayshift detectives begin arriving a little after seven, they find an office in a state of siege. Nolan is at one typewriter, working on his 24-hour report as his witnesses wait in a back room for transport back to the Eastern. McAllister is down at the Xerox machine, copying and collating his police-shooting opus for everyone above the rank of major. Kincaid is in the fishbowl, haggling with three west-siders who are trying hard to avoid becoming witnesses to a disrespect shooting that happened right in front of their eyes.manages to slip out a little after eight, but Kincaid and Nolan end their day in the afternoon rush at the ME’s office, waiting for their respective bodies to be examined and disassembled. They wait together in the antiseptic sheen of the autopsy room corridor, and yet they are anything but together after this shift.issue, once again, is Edgerton. Earlier in the night, Kincaid overheard Nolan’s telephone call to the missing detective; if he hadn’t been knee deep in witnesses and incident reports, he would have boiled over on the spot. Several times during the night he had been ready to blast Nolan about it, but now, with the two of them alone in the Penn Street basement, he’s too tired to argue. For the moment, he satisfies himself with the bitter thought that in his whole career, he never managed to forget when the hell he was supposed to be working.Kincaid will have his say; that much is certain. The air of compromise, the teasing banter, the rough acknowledgment of Edgerton’s effort to handle more calls-all of that is out the window as far as Donald Kincaid is concerned. He’s had it with that crap. He’s had it with Edgerton and with Nolan and with his place in this goddamn squad. You’re scheduled to be in at 2340 hours, you’re in at 2340, no later. You’re scheduled to work the Tuesday shift, you come to work on Tuesday. He didn’t give the department twenty-two years to put up with this kind of bullshit.Nolan, for his part, simply doesn’t want to hear it anymore. To his way of thinking, Edgerton is a good man who works his cases harder than most of the men in homicide, and besides, he’s back to clearing murders. Okay, thinks Nolan, so every now and then Harry gets out there in the ozone. So he got his shifts wrong. So what should we do? Make him write a 95 explaining why he’s a space cadet? Maybe dock him some vacation days? What the hell good is that? That shit didn’t work in patrol and it sure wasn’t the way to do business in homicide. Everyone knew the story about the time a supervisor had demanded that Jay Landsman write a 95 explaining why he was late for a shift. “I was late for duty,” Landsman wrote, “because when I left the house to come to work there was a German submarine parked in my driveway.” For better or worse, that was homicide, and Nolan simply wasn’t going to jam it to one detective to make another feel better.middle ground is gone. On this, the morning after, Kincaid keeps the rein on his anger and says nothing. Nor does he give Edgerton more than a passing comment when both men show up for their shift on Friday.
“I don’t even blame Harry,” Kincaid tells the other squad members. “I fuckin’ blame Roger for not making him straighten up.”over the next few days, Kincaid’s anger becomes white heat, and the others-McAllister, Garvey, even Bowman, who is more likely than not to side with Kincaid in this dispute-know enough to leave it alone and stay out of the way. In the end, the inevitable explosion comes on a four-to-twelve shift that marks Edgerton’s next off-day. It’s a shift comprised entirely of yelling and cursing, of accusation and counteraccusation, that finishes with Nolan and Kincaid shouting at each other in the main office, emptying all their guns in the kind of firefight that leaves few pieces to be picked up. Nolan makes it clear that he regards Kincaid as more trouble than anything else, telling the detective to mind his own business and then accusing him of failing to work his cases hard enough or long enough. And while it’s true that Kincaid has a healthy share of open files over the last two years, it’s also fair to say that Nolan is offering up the kind of criticism that no veteran detective is willing to hear. As far as Donald Kincaid is concerned, he’s gone as soon as a vacancy opens up on either shift.showing its fault lines for more than a year, Roger Nolan’s squad is finally breaking apart.sights, the sounds, the smells-there is nothing else in a detective’s frame of reference to which that basement room on Penn Street can be matched. Even the crime scenes, no matter how stark and brutal, pale against the process by which the murdered are dissected and examined: that is truly the strangest vision.is a purpose to the carnage, a genuine investigative value to the gore of human autopsy. The legal necessity of the postmortem examination is understood by a detached and reasoning mind, yet the reality of the process is no less astonishing. To that part of the detective which calls itself professional, the medical examiner’s office is a laboratory. And yet to that other part, which defines itself in hard, but human terms, the place is an abattoir.autopsy brings home the absolute finality of the event. At the crime scenes, the victims are most certainly dead, but at the point of autopsy, they become for the detectives something more-or less. It is one thing, after all, for a homicide detective to detach himself emotionally from the corpse that forms the center of his mystery. But it’s another thing altogether to see that corpse emptied of itself, to see the shell reduced to bones and sinew and juices in the same way that an automobile is stripped of chrome and quarter panels before being hauled to the wrecker. Even a homicide detective-a jaded character indeed-has to witness his share of portmortems before death truly becomes a casual acquaintance.a homicide detective, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is both a legal necessity and an evidentiary asset. A pathologist’s autopsy forms the baseline for any homicide prosecution simply because, in every murder case, it must first be proven that the victim died from human intervention and not from some other cause. But beyond that basic requirement, a good cutter’s abilities can often mean the difference between an accident being mistakenly viewed as a homicide or, equally disastrous, a homicide being attributed to accidental or natural causes.the pathologist, every body tells a story.a gunshot wound, a medical examiner can determine from the amount and pattern of soot, burned powder and other debris whether a particular bullet was fired at contact range, close range or a distance greater than two to two and a half feet. More than that, a good cutter can look at the abraded edges of the entrance wound and tell you the approximate trajectory of the bullet at the point of entrance. Given a shotgun wound, that same pathologist can read the pellet pattern and gauge the approximate distance between the barrel of the weapon and its target. From an exit wound, an ME can tell whether the victim was standing free or if the wound was shored because the victim was against a wall, or on a floor, or in a chair. And when presented with a series of wounds, a good pathologist can tell you not only which projectile proved lethal but, in many cases, which projectiles were fired first, or which wounds were sustained postmortem and which were antemortem.that same doctor a knife wound and you’ll learn whether or not the blade had one edge or two, was serrated or straight. And if the stab wound is deep enough, a medical examiner can look at the markings made by the knife hilt and tell you the length and width of the murder weapon. Then there are the blunt trauma injuries: Was your victim hit by a car or a lead pipe? Did that infant fall in the bathtub or was he bludgeoned by his babysitter? In either case, an assistant medical examiner has the key to the corporeal vault.if a forensic pathologist can confirm that a murder has been committed, if he can further provide some basic information about how the crime was done, he is rarely if ever able to lead a homicide detective from the how of it to the who of it. Too often the dead man comes to the detective as little more than a vessel emptied of life by persons unknown in the presence of witnesses unknown. Then the pathologist can provide all the detail in the world: wound trajectories, the sequence of wounds, the distance between shooter and victim-and none of it means a thing. Without witnesses, autopsy results become filler for the office reports. Without a suspect to be interviewed, the medical facts can’t be used to contradict or confirm information gained in an interrogation room. And though a cutter may be an absolute pro at tracking wounds through a human body, though he may recover every piece of lead or copper jacketing left inside that body, it hardly matters when no gun has been recovered for a ballistics comparison.best, an autopsy provides information that can be used by an investigator to measure the veracity of his witnesses and suspects. An autopsy tells a detective a few things that definitely happened in the last moments of his victim’s life. It also tells him a few things that could not have happened. On a few blessed occasions in a detective’s career, those few somethings happen to matter.pathologist’s death investigation is therefore never an independent process; it exists in concert with everything the detective has already learned at the crime scene and in interviews. An assistant medical examiner who believes that cause and manner of death can be determined in all cases solely by the examination of the body is just asking for pain. The best pathologists begin by reading the police reports and looking at Instamatic photos taken by the ME’s attendants at the crime scene. Without that context, the postmortem examination is a meaningless exercise.is also the reason that the homicide detective is generally required to be present in the autopsy room. Ideally, cutter and cop impart knowledge to each other, and both leave the autopsy room with a greater sum of information. Often, too, the relationship creates its own tension, with the doctors arguing science and the detectives arguing from the street. Example: A pathologist finds no semen or vaginal tearing and concludes that a victim found nude in Druid Hill Park was not raped. Yet a detective knows that many sex offenders never manage to ejaculate. Moreover, his victim was a part-time prostitute and mother of three. So what if there isn’t any tearing? Alternatively, a detective looking at a body with a contact gunshot wound to the chest, a second contact wound to the head and multiple bruises and contusions to the torso may think that he’s got to be dealing with a murder. But the two gunshot wounds are not inconsistent with a suicide attempt. Pathologists have documented cases in which a person taking his own life has fired a weapon repeatedly into his chest or head with inconclusive results-perhaps because he jerked his hand at the last second, perhaps because the initial shots were far from lethal. Likewise, the chest bruising-though it may seem to be the work of an assailant-could be from the efforts of family members who, on hearing the gunshots, rushed into the room and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the victim. No suicide note? The truth is that in 50 to 75 percent of all cases, suicide is never accompanied by a written note.relationship between the detective and the medical examiner is necessarily symbiotic, but the occasional tension between the two disciplines produces its own stereotypes. The detectives genuinely believe that every new pathologist comes out of medical school with a by-the-textbook mentality that bears only a casual resemblance to what occurs in the real world. A new doctor must therefore be broken in like a new shoulder holster. Likewise, the pathologists consider the vast majority of homicide detectives to be glorified beat cops, untrained and unscientific. The less experienced the detective, the more likely they are to be perceived as amateurs in the art of death investigation.year or two back, Donald Worden and Rich Garvey happened to be in the autopsy room on a shotgun murder just as John Smialek, Maryland’s chief medical examiner, was leading a group of medical residents on the day’s rounds. Smialek had only recently arrived in Baltimore, by way of Detroit and Albuquerque, and consequently Worden probably seemed to him no more or less knowledgeable than any other police investigator.
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