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

"What a piece of s.h.i.t," Worden repeats, catching the coin. "Why don't you start handling some calls, Brown?"

"I just handled a murder."

"Yeah?" says Worden, strutting over to Brown's desk. "Well, handle this."

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

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

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

"Get off me, G.o.ddammit," yells Brown, tiring of the joke. "Leave me alone, you polar-bear-looking b.i.t.c.h."

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

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

The Big Man won't let him. "Piece ... of ..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brown senses this and changes tone, trying to bait the Big Man rather than fight him off. "Why are you always f.u.c.king with me?" he asks. "Why don't you ever go after Waltemeyer? Does Waltemeyer go out to Pikesville on Sat.u.r.day dayshifts to get you bagels?"

Worden says nothing.

"Why the h.e.l.l don't you ever f.u.c.k with Waltemeyer?"

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

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

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

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

"They didn't have garlic," says Brown. "I asked."

Worden looks at him with contempt. It is the same expression he carries in that crime scene photograph from Cherry Hill, the one that Brown liberated for his personal collection, the one that said, "Brown, you piece of s.h.i.t, how can you possibly believe those beer cans have anything to do with your crime scene." One day, Worden just may retire and Dave Brown just may become the next centerpiece of McLarney's squad. But until then, the younger man's life is consigned to any h.e.l.l of Worden's choosing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Grady didn't hit your boy," Worden told the mother. "I did."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Christ, Donald," said Worden. "This bad boy must've caught a vein."

"Aw yeah," said Kincaid. "Must have."

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

"A-seven-o-three," Worden told him.

"A-nine-o-four," said Kincaid.

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

Worden said nothing and Kincaid went right to work. "This guy's at University?" he asked.

"Yeah. The ER."

"How was he doing?"

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

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

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

Worden knelt down. "You saw what happened?"

The boy nodded.

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

"Are you his mother?" asked the uniform.

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

"So you're not the mother?" asked the uniform, now seething.

"No."

"Then get the h.e.l.l out of here before I lock your a.s.s up," muttered the patrolman, soft enough to be out of the boy's earshot. "You hear me?"

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

"I saw Bobby run out after Jean."

"You did?"

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

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

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

"She did? Well, what's your name?"

"Tavon."

"Tavon, you've helped us a lot. Thank you."

Worden and Kincaid liberated their Cavalier from a growing ma.s.s of patrol cars and drove east to the emergency room at University, both of them certain in the knowledge that Rule Six in the homicide lexicon now applied. To wit: When a suspect is immediately identified in an a.s.sault case, the victim is sure to live. When no suspect has been identified, the victim will surely die. Indeed, the rule was confirmed in this instance by the subsequent discovery of Cornell Robert Jones, age thirty-seven, lying on his back in a rear examination room, conscious and alert, as a blonde surgical resident-an especially attractive blonde surgical resident-applied pressure to the wound on his inner left thigh.

"Mr. Jones?" asked Worden.

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

"Mr. Jones, I'm Detective Worden from the police department. Can you hear me?"

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

"We've been down to your house and the people there say your girlfriend, or is it your wife ..."

"My wife."

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

"G.o.dd.a.m.n right she cut me," he said, wincing again.

"You didn't just run into the knife or anything like that?"

"h.e.l.l no. She stabbed me."

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

"No I ain't."

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

"I don't know. Maybe a girlfriend's house or something."