Worden nodded, then looked at Kincaid, who had spent the last five minutes undertaking as comprehensive a review of the surgical resident as could be accomplished under the circ.u.mstances.

"I'll say this, Mr. Jones," drawled Kincaid. "You're in good hands now. Real good hands."

The resident looked up, irritated and a little embarra.s.sed. And then Worden was smiling wickedly at his own thoughts. He leaned low to the victim's ear. "You know, Mr. Jones, you're a lucky man," he said in a stage whisper.

"What?"

"You're a lucky man."

Wincing with pain, the victim looked sideways at the detective. "How the h.e.l.l you figure that?"

Worden smiled. "Well, from the look of things, your wife was going for your Johnson," said the detective. "And from what I can see, she only missed by a couple inches."

Suddenly, from beneath the oxygen mask, Cornell Jones was laughing uproariously. The resident, too, was losing it, her face contorted as she struggled against herself.

"Yeah," said Kincaid. "A big guy like yourself, you was pretty d.a.m.n close to singin' soprano, you know that?"

Cornell Jones rocked up and down on the gurney, laughing and wincing at the same time.

Worden held up his hand, signing off with a short wave. "You have a good one."

"You too, man," said Cornell Jones, still laughing.

The s.h.i.t you see out here, thought Worden, driving back to the office. And my G.o.d, he had to admit, there are still moments when I love this job.

SUNDAY, MAY 1.

"Something's gone wrong," says Terry McLarney.

Eddie Brown answers without looking up, his mind fully absorbed by mathematical endeavors. Statistical charts and spread sheets arrayed in front of him, Brown will figure a way to predict tomorrow night's four-digit lotto number or he will die trying.

"What's wrong?"

"Look around," says McLarney. "The phone is ringing with information on every kind of case and we're getting double-dunkers left and right. Hey, even the lab is coming up with print hits."

"So," says Brown, "what's wrong with that?"

"It's not like us," says McLarney. "I get the feeling that we're going to be punished. I have this feeling that there's a rowhouse somewhere with about a dozen skeletons in the bas.e.m.e.nt, just waiting for us."

Brown shakes his head. "You think too much," he tells McLarney.

A criticism rarely leveled at a Baltimore cop, and McLarney laughs at the absurdity of the notion. He's a sergeant and an Irishman; by that reckoning alone, it's his responsibility to rip the silver linings out of every last little cloud. The board is going from red to black. Murders are being solved. Evil is being punished. Good Lord, thinks McLarney, how much is this going to cost?

The streak began a month ago up on Kirk Avenue, in the gutted remains of a torched rowhouse, where Donald Steinhice watched firefighters pull at the cracked and blackened debris until all three bodies were distinguishable. The oldest was three, the youngest, five months; their remains were discovered in an upstairs bedroom, where they stayed after every adult fled from the burning house. For Steinhice, a veteran of Stanton's shift, the accelerant pour-patterns on the first floor-identifiable as darker splotches on the floors and walls-told the story: Mother dumps boyfriend, boyfriend returns with kerosene, children pay the price. In recent years, the scenario had become strangely common to the inner city. Four months back, in fact, Mark Tomlin caught a rowhouse arson that claimed two children; then, little more than a week ago and less than a month after the Kirk Avenue tragedy, another boyfriend torched another mother's home, murdering a twenty-one-month-old toddler and his seven-month-old sister.

"The adults always make it out," explained Scott Keller, the primary on the most recent case and a veteran of the CID arson unit. "The kids always get left behind."

More than most homicides, the Kirk Avenue arson had an emotional cost; Steinhice, a detective with perhaps a thousand crime scenes behind him, suffered nightmares about a murder for the first time-graphic images of helplessness in which the dead children were at the top of a row-house stairway, crying, terrified. Nonetheless, when the boyfriend came downtown in handcuffs, it was Steinhice who mustered empathy enough to prompt a full confession. And it was Steinhice who intervened when the boyfriend tore apart an aluminum soda can after his confession and tried to use the rough edges against his wrists.

Kirk Avenue was hard for Steinhice to swallow, but it was nonetheless medicine for what ailed both shifts of the homicide unit. Three dead, one arrest, three clearances-a stat like that can start a trend all by itself.

Sure enough, the following week brought Tom Pellegrini his dunker at the Civic Center, the labor dispute that became a one-sided knife fight. Rick Requer followed that case with two more clearances: a double murder-suicide from the Southeastern in which an emotionally distraught auto mechanic shot his wife and nephew in the kitchen, then wrapped things up tidily by reloading the .44 Magnum and shoving the barrel in his mouth. In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a ma.s.sacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams.

One week more and the trend was clear: Dave Brown and Worden caught a poker game dispute in the Eastern in which a sixty-one-year-old player, arguing over the proper ante, suddenly grabbed a shotgun and blew up a friend. Garvey and Kincaid followed suit, taking a shooting call on Fairview and getting a father murdered by his son, killed in an argument over the boy's unwillingness to share drug profits. Barlow and Gilbert again hit the jackpot for Stanton's shift in the Southwest, where yet another angry young boyfriend fatally wounded both the woman he loved and the infant daughter in her arms, then trained the same weapon on himself.

Five nights later, Donald Waltemeyer and Dave Brown clocked in with yet another death-by-argument, a bar shooting from Highlandtown in which the subsequent performance of the two suspects in the homicide office resembled nothing so much as outtake from a B-grade Mafia film. They were Philly boys, short, dark Italians named DelGiornio and Forline, and they had killed a Baltimore man in a dispute that centered on the relative accomplishments of their respective fathers. The victim's father ran an industrial firm; DelGiornio's father, however, had done well in the Philadelphia Mafia until events beyond his control forced him to become a federal witness against the heads of the Philly crime family. This, of course, necessitated the relocation of family members from South Philly, which, in turn, explained the appearance of the younger DelGiornio and his friend in Southeast Baltimore. The Baltimore detectives were biting their lips when DelGiornio made his phone call to Dad.

"Yo, Dad," mumbled DelGiornio, crying into the receiver in what appeared to the detectives to be a rank Stallone impersonation. "I f.u.c.ked up. I really f.u.c.ked up ... Killed him, yeah. It was a fight ... No, Tony ... Tony shot him ... Dad, I'm really in some trouble here."

By morning, a herd of well-cropped FBI agents had arrived at the Formstone rowhouse that the government had rented for the DelGiornio kid only forty-eight hours earlier. The kid's belongings were crated up, his bail was set at a ridiculously low amount and by the following evening he was living in some other city at the government's expense. For his role in the death of a twenty-four-year-old man, Robert DelGiornio will eventually receive probation; Tony Forline, the shooter in the incident, will get five years. Both plea agreements will be set only weeks before the elder DelGiornio testifies as the key government witness in the federal conspiracy trial in Philadelphia.

"Well, we taught him a lesson," declared McLarney, after the Italian kids were given light bails by a court commissioner and herded out of Maryland. "They're probably up in Philly now, warning all their little Mob friends not to do a murder in Baltimore. We might not lock them up for it, but hey, we'll take away their guns and refuse to give them back."

Regardless of the outcome, the DelGiornio case was another clearance in what had suddenly become a month of clearances. For Gary D'Addario, it was a good sign, but one that could only be called belated. In a world ruled by statistics, he had been exposed for far too long and, as a result, his conflict with the captain had made its way down the sixth-floor hall to d.i.c.k Lanham, the CID commander. D'Addario wasn't surprised to find out that in conversations with Lanham, his captain had attributed the low clearance rate and other problems to D'Addario's management style. Things were getting ugly, so ugly in fact that one late April morning, the captain approached Worden, arguably D'Addario's best detective.

"I'm afraid the colonel is talking about making changes," said the captain. "How do you think the men would feel about working for another lieutenant?"

"I think you'd have a mutiny on your hands," answered Worden, hoping to shoot down the trial balloon. "Why are you asking?"

"Well, I want to know how the men feel," explained the captain. "Something may be in the works."

In the works. Within an hour, D'Addario had heard about that exchange from Worden and three other detectives. He went directly to the colonel, with whom he believed he had credibility. Eight successful years as a homicide supervisor, he reasoned, had to count for a little something.

To D'Addario, the colonel confirmed that the pressure to move him was coming from the captain. Moreover, the colonel seemed noncommittal and expressed concern about the low clearance rate. D'Addario could hear the unasked question: "If you aren't the problem, then what is?"

The lieutenant returned to his office and typed a long memo that sought to explain the statistical difference between Stanton's rate and his own. He noted that more than half of the murders taken by his shift were drug-related, noting further that some of those cases had been sacrificed to staff the Latonya Wallace probe. Moreover, he argued, one critical reason for the low rate was that neither lieutenant managed to save any December clearances for the new year-something that always gives the unit a January cushion. The rate will rise, D'Addario predicted, it's rising now. Give it some time.

To D'Addario, the memo seemed to convince the colonel; others on his shift weren't sure. The choice of a shift lieutenant as a likely scapegoat might not be so much the work of the captain as the result of criticism from above, perhaps the colonel and maybe even the deputy. If that was the case, then D'Addario was being pressured by more than the clearance rate. It was Monroe Street, too. And the Northwest murders and Latonya Wallace. Especially Latonya Wallace. By itself, D'Addario knew, the absence of charging doc.u.ments in the little girl's murder could be enough to send the bra.s.s on a head-hunting sortie.

Shorn of political allies, D'Addario had two options: He could accept a transfer to another unit and learn to live with the taste that such a transfer would leave. Or he could tough it out, hoping the clearance rate would continue to climb and a red ball or two would get solved in the process. If he stayed on, his superiors could try to force a transfer, but that, he knew, was a messy process. They would have to show cause, and that would result in a nasty little paper war. He would lose, of course, but it would not be pretty-and the colonel and captain both had to know that.

D'Addario also understood that there would be another cost if he remained in homicide. Because as long as that rate stayed low, he would no longer be able to protect his men from the whims of the command staff, at least not to the extent he had protected them in the past. Appearances would count: Every detective would have to toe closer to the line, and D'Addario would have to make it appear that he was the one compelling them to do so. The overtime would no longer flow as freely; the detectives handling fewer calls would have to pick up their pace. Most important, the detectives would have to cover themselves, writing follow-ups and updates to every case file so that no supervisor could come behind them, arguing that leads had not been pursued. This, D'Addario knew, was pure departmental horses.h.i.t. The make-work required for a half-dozen cover-your-a.s.s office reports would waste valuable time. Still, that was the game, and now the game would have to be played.

The most complicated part of that game would be the crack-down on the unit's overtime pay, a ritual that often marked the end of a budget year in the Baltimore department. The homicide unit consistently came in almost $150,000 over budget on straight overtime and courtside pay for its detectives. Just as consistently, the department tried to crack the whip in April and May, exerting a minimal effect on the unit that disappeared entirely in June, when the new budget year began and the money once again flowed freely. For two or three months each spring, captains told lieutenants who told sergeants to authorize as little OT as possible so that the numbers would look a little better to the bra.s.s upstairs. This was possible in a district where, on any given night, one or two fewer radio cars might be handling calls during an overtime crunch. In the homicide unit, however, the practice created surreal working conditions.

The overtime cap was premised on a single rule: Any detective who reached 50 percent of his base pay in acc.u.mulated OT and court time was taken out of the rotation. The logic made perfect sense to fiscal services: If Worden hits his limit and is put on permanent daywork, he can't handle calls. And if he can't handle calls, he can't earn overtime. But in the opinion of the detectives and their sergeants, the rule had no logic. After all, if Worden is out of the rotation, then the other four detectives in his squad are catching more calls on the nightshift. And if, G.o.d forbid, Waltemeyer is also near his OT limit, then this squad is down to three men. In CID homicide, a squad that goes into a midnight shift with no more than three detectives is asking to be punished.

More important, the overtime cap was a frontal a.s.sault on quality. The best detectives were inevitably those who worked their cases longest, and their cases were inevitably those that were strong enough to go to court. Granted, an experienced detective could milk any case for extra hours, but it usually cost a great deal more money to solve a murder than to keep it open, and even more money to actually win that case in court. A cleared homicide is a money tree, a truth recognized by Rule Seven in the pantheon of homicide wisdom.

In reference to the color of money, and the colors by which open and solved murders are chronicled on the board, the rule states: First, they're red. Then they're green. Then they're black. But now, because of D'Addario's vulnerability, there would be less green in the equation. This spring, the 50 percent overtime rule threatened to do some real damage.

Gary Dunnigan hit the 50 percent mark first and suddenly found himself on a permanent dayshift, working follow-ups to old cases and nothing else. Then Worden hit the wall, then Waltemeyer, then Rick James began edging up over 48 percent. Suddenly, McLarney was looking at three weeks of nightwork with two detectives to call on.

"There's no limit to how many they can kill," said Worden cynically. "There's only a limit to how long we can work them."

D'Addario played the game as it had to be played, sending warning letters-copied to the colonel and captain-to the detectives approaching the 50 percent cap, then benching those who exceeded the limit. Remarkably, his sergeants and detectives were willing to cooperate in this nonsense. Any one of them could have thwarted the restrictions by calling in more detectives to help with a bad midnight shift and then claiming that events overran policy. Murder, after all, is one of the least predictable things in this world.

Instead, the sergeants sidelined detectives and juggled the schedules because they understood the risk to D'Addario and, beyond that, to themselves. There were a lot of lieutenants in the department and in the estimate of McLarney and Jay Landsman, at least, a good 80 percent of them had the ability, the will and the ambition to do a superior job of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the CID homicide unit if ever given any chance.

But if McLarney and Landsman played the game out of genuine loyalty to D'Addario, Roger Nolan's reasons were altogether different.

Nolan took seriously his role as a sergeant and he clearly enjoyed working in what was essentially a paramilitary organization. More than most of the men in homicide, he took satisfaction in the protocols of police work-the deference to rank, the inst.i.tutional loyalty, the chain of command. This peculiarity did not necessarily make him a company man; Nolan protected his detectives as well or better than any other supervisor in homicide, and a detective who worked for him could be a.s.sured that only his sergeant would mess with him.

Even so, Nolan was an enigma to his own men. A product of the West Baltimore ghetto with twenty-five years on the force, he was said to be the only practicing black Republican in the city of Baltimore. He repeatedly denied this, to little avail. Heavyset and bald, with wide, expressive features, Nolan looked very much like an aging boxer or perhaps the aging ex-Marine that he truly was. Growing up had not come easy to him; his parents had been tormented by alcoholism, other relatives had become players in the West Baltimore drug trade. To a great extent, it was the Marines that saved Nolan, plucking him off North Carrollton Street and providing him with a surrogate family, a bed of his own and three balanced meals a day. He served in both the Pacific and Mediterranean, but then put in his papers before Vietnam heated up. Semper Fi shaped him: Nolan spent his spare time leading a Boy Scout troop, reading military history and watching reruns of Hopalong Ca.s.sidy movies. This was not, to any detective's thinking, a behavior pattern consistent with that of the average West Baltimore native.

Still, Nolan's perspective was unique to the homicide unit. Unlike Landsman and McLarney, Nolan had never been a homicide detective; in fact, he had spent much of his career in patrol, working as a sector supervisor in the Northwestern and Eastern districts-a lengthy exile from headquarters that began when, as a promising young plainclothesman, he crossed the powers-that-be in a celebrated corruption case in the early 1970s.

Those were the years when the Baltimore department was truly rough-and-tumble. In 1973, almost half of the entire Western District and its commander were either indicted or fired for taking protection for the local gambling action. The CID vice unit met with a similar fate, and in the tactical section, rumors were swirling about the ranking black officer on the force, Major James Watkins, who was otherwise a rising candidate for the commissioner's post. Watkins had grown up with several of Pennsylvania Avenue's more notable narcotics dealers and, before the end of the decade, he would stand trial as a full colonel, charged with accepting protection from the drug trade.

Nolan was working plainclothes under Watkins's command, and he knew that things weren't right in the tac unit. On one occasion, when one of his raids netted more than five hundred gla.s.sine bags of heroin, other plainclothesmen offered to take the contraband to evidence control. Nolan balked. He counted the bags himself, photographed them, then got his own voucher for the submission. Sure enough, the heroin-$15,000 worth-disappeared from the ECU a short time later and two tac officers were ultimately indicted. But for all of that, Nolan didn't believe that Watkins knew about the corruption or was in any way involved. Against all advice and the wishes of the police commissioner, he testified as a character witness for Watkins at the subsequent trial.

The colonel was convicted, then granted a retrial on appeal, then acquitted. The verdict on Nolan's career was equally divided: before his testimony, he had been a sergeant a.s.signed directly to the state's attorney's investigative unit; afterward, he was running a patrol sector in the Northwest with no hope of seeing the headquarters building for as long as the current department administration held office. The exile, the political machinations, the unwarranted taint of other men's corruption-all of that shaped Nolan, so much so that the men in his squad would groan in unison whenever their sergeant began another retelling of the missing heroin story.

That Nolan had made his way back to CID after so many years in the trenches was something of a personal testament to human perseverance. And although he had no experience with death investigation, it made sense that his ultimate destination would be homicide, where organized corruption was never much of an issue. Over the last fifteen years, the Baltimore department had stayed generally clean-remarkably so when compared to its counterparts in New York, Philadelphia and Miami. But even if a cop had it in mind to make real money, the place to do that was CID narcotics or gambling enforcement or any other unit in which a detective might kick in a door and find $100,000 under a mattress. In homicide, the only recognized scam was overtime pay; no one ever figured out how to make dead bodies pay serious money.

More than anything else, Nolan was a survivor, proud of his rank and his position in the homicide unit. Consequently, he took the supervisory aspects of his job seriously and was frustrated when Landsman, McLarney or D'Addario seemed less interested in the rituals of command. Supervisors' meetings on the shift inevitably began with Nolan proposing new ideas for the operation of the shift-some good, some bad, but all of them involving a more formal process of supervision. The meetings would never last long: Landsman would respond to Nolan's ideas by recommending either serious psychological help or a better grade of marijuana. Then McLarney would make a joke about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand and, to Nolan's dismay, D'Addario would adjourn the session. Basically, Landsman and McLarney would rather be working the cases; Nolan preferred the role of full-time supervisor.

As a result, D'Addario's sudden tactical shift toward closer supervision was, from Nolan's vantage point, both correct and belated. The lieutenant, he reasoned, should take control of his sergeants, and the sergeants, in turn, should get a rein on the men. In Nolan's mind, D'Addario had not only abdicated much of his own authority, but that of his sergeants as well.

And yet Nolan's detectives-Garvey, Edgerton, Kincaid, McAllister, Bowman-were operating with as much or more freedom than the men in the other squads. Doc.u.mentation, administrative issues, personnel problems-Nolan held sway over such matters. But the essential purpose of CID homicide was to solve murders, and for that, chain of command mattered no more to Nolan and his men than anyone else. Nolan's detectives worked their cases in their own speed and fashion, and Nolan would never demand otherwise. Edgerton's personality required that kind of approach, but even the methodical Garvey would respond to a hovering, micromanaging sergeant by delivering twelve clearances a year. With no sergeant at all, he'd manage an even dozen.

"I wouldn't want to work for any other sergeant up there," conceded Garvey, explaining the squad dynamics to another detective. "It's just that every now and then, you've got to slap the s.h.i.t out of Roger and bring him back down to earth."

For the detectives themselves, the OT cutbacks and scheduling changes were tolerable only because they, too, understood D'Addario's predicament. And when D'Addario began trailing behind the detectives, checking the case files and asking for additional paperwork, no one took any real offense. Working a midnight shift one man short, Rick Requer summed up the sentiment sweetly: "If it wasn't for Dee," he told two other detectives, "we wouldn't be putting up with any of this f.u.c.kin' bulls.h.i.t."

Yet they continued to put up with it all through April and into May as D'Addario tried to come to terms with the required pain-in-the-a.s.s persona. The extra paperwork and scheduling changes were cosmetic and could be suffered for as long as it took the lieutenant to weather the storm. As for the overtime, that would flow again in mid-June, when the new budget year began. They cursed, they grumbled, but they played out D'Addario's string. Most important, they continued to do the one thing absolutely essential to their lieutenant's future: They solved murders.

Ceruti contributed with a lockup on a fatal beating from the Southwestern, and Waltemeyer put down a shooting in a house on North Wolfe Street, near the Hopkins hospital complex. On Stanton's shift, Tomlin caught a cutting that ended with the arrest of a new police cadet, a man scheduled to attend the academy the following month.

"Do you think I should call the personnel office about this?" the man asked after confessing.

"Might be a good idea," Tomlin told him. "Although I'm sure they'll hear about it somehow."

Garvey and Kincaid caught one up on Harlem Avenue, where they were blessed with witnesses and a suspect still lingering at the scene. Arriving at University Hospital to check on their victim, the two detectives watched surgeons crack the kid's chest in a desperate effort at open-heart ma.s.sage. The line on the EKG was irregular, and blood was pouring out of the chest cavity onto the white tile floor. Ten-seven within an hour or two, the ER resident predicted, morning at the latest. No s.h.i.t, thought the detectives, who weren't exactly strangers to the medical aspects of violent death. A surgeon who cracks the chest is on the last roll of the dice; any detective knows that 97 percent of all such efforts fail. Rule Six had been upended and Garvey arrived back at the office unable to contain his wonder.

"Hey, Donald," shouted Garvey, bounding across the office and then waltzing Kincaid around a metal desk. "He's gonna die! He's gonna die and we know who did it!"

"You," said Nolan, shaking his head and laughing, "are one cold motherf.u.c.ker." Then the sergeant turned crisply on his heel and danced a jig into his own office.

A week later, Waltemeyer and an a.s.sistant state's attorney caught a flight for Salt Lake City, where an upstanding, pillar-of-the-community type had confessed to his closest friend about being wanted for a murder committed in Baltimore thirteen years earlier. Daniel Eugene Binick, age forty-one, had been in Utah for a dozen years, married for most of that time and working as a drug and alcohol counselor under an a.s.sumed name. And though his photograph still adorned the "Wanted for Homicide" poster in the homicide unit's main office, it was a picture of a much younger, reckless man. The Daniel Binick of 1975 had long, stringy hair, a thick mustache and a respectable police record; the late eighties version wore his hair close-cropped and ran the local AA chapter. Even after a week's investigation, Waltemeyer found only one living witness to the bar robbery and shooting. But one was enough, and a clearance by any name still smelled as sweet.

By early May, the clearance rate is a fatter, happier 60 percent. Likewise, the flow of overtime and court pay will be at least temporarily staunched to a point that the bra.s.s can't help notice. If not entirely secure, D'Addario's position has stabilized, or so it seems to his men.

During one brief encounter in the homicide office, Landsman acknowledges the lighter mood on the shift by risking a joke at the lieutenant's expense-something that even Landsman would not have attempted a month earlier.

Late one afternoon, D'Addario, Landsman and McLarney are huddled in front of the television, the lieutenant and McLarney checking the roll book, Landsman absorbing gynecological mysteries from a skin magazine. Wandering across the sixth floor, Colonel Lanham happens to step into his homicide unit and all three supervisors snap to attention.

Landsman waits a good three seconds before handing the magazine, centerfold splayed open, to Gary D'Addario.

"Here's your magazine, lieutenant," he says. "I appreciate you letting me look at it."

D'Addario, unthinking, holds out his hand.

"f.u.c.king Jay," says McLarney, shaking his head.

Even the colonel has to laugh.

MONDAY, MAY 9.

Harry Edgerton needs a murder.

He needs a murder today.

Edgerton needs a human body, any human body, still and stiff and void of all life force. He needs that body to fall within the established limits of Baltimore city. He needs that body shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, battered or otherwise rendered inoperative through any act of human intervention. He needs a 24-hour homicide report with his name typed at the bottom, a red-brown case binder that declares Harry Edgerton to be the primary investigator. You say Bowman is handling a shooting call up in the Northeast? Tell him to hang on to that crime scene, because Harry Edgerton, his friend and personal savior, is already in a Cavalier and racing up Harford Road. You say the county police are working a murder in Woodlawn? Well, drag that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d back over the city line and let Edgerton work on him. You got a questionable death in an apartment with no overt trauma or forced entry? No problem. Give the Edge a chance to write on that bad boy and it can be a murder before the next morning's autopsy.

"If I don't get one soon," says Edgerton, jumping red lights on Frederick Road in the early morning darkness, "I'm going to have to kill someone."

For two full weeks, Edgerton's name has been affixed to the board's wooden frame with a thumbtack, scrawled with a certain infamy on sheets of yellow legal paper that list the squad and detective expected to handle the next homicide call. The daily postings are another indication of D'Addario's change in demeanor; detectives who have handled fewer murders are now being identified and designated as candidates for the next call. Most especially that means Edgerton. Having handled only two homicides this year, the veteran's pace is not only a controversy within his squad but a loaded issue for D'Addario as well. For the last two weeks, every one of his postings began and ended with Edgerton's name. It has become something of a daily joke in the coffee room: "Who's up today?"

"Harry's up."

"Christ. Harry's gonna be up 'til October."

For days now, Edgerton has bounced from shootings to stabbings to questionable deaths to overdoses, waiting earnestly for something-anything-to come back as a murder.

And it hasn't worked. On days when he has handled three or four calls, running from one end of the city to the other looking at bodies, other detectives have picked up the phone and been blessed with double-dunker ma.s.sacres. Edgerton handles a shooting call and the victim is guaranteed to survive. He works an apparent bludgeoning and the ME is guaranteed to rule the cause of death an overdose, followed by injuries sustained when the victim collapsed on the cement floor. Edgerton goes to the scene of an unattended death and it's A-1-guaranteed to be an eighty-eight-year-old retiree with a chronic heart condition. None of which means a thing to D'Addario. Edgerton is up until he gets a murder, the lieutenant repeats. If it takes the rest of his career, fine.

This makes for one very irritable homicide detective. It's one thing, after all, to be considered the resident flake on the shift and the problem child in the squad. And to have Kincaid and Bowman and G.o.d knows who else b.i.t.c.hing about sharing the workload-normally Edgerton can handle that, too. But, he thinks, normal can be tossed out a window when I'm being made to handle three calls a day every G.o.dd.a.m.n day for what is beginning to seem like the rest of my life.

Edgerton's urgent need for a murder was evident a week ago, when he began cursing at an overdose victim in the Murphy Homes, demanding from the cadaver a little more cooperation and consideration than had thus far been shown to him.

"You degenerate motherf.u.c.ker," Edgerton said, berating the dead man as two housing authority cops stared on in amazement. "Where the f.u.c.k did you fire up? I don't have all f.u.c.king day to look at your f.u.c.king arms. Where the f.u.c.k is that fresh track?"

It wasn't just the aggravation of a missing needle mark, but the frustration that had been building with each successive call. And at that moment, standing over yet another body in a Murphy Homes stairwell, Edgerton was deeply disturbed that the dead man had done nothing more than kill himself with heroin. What the h.e.l.l, he pleaded silently, was a murder too much to ask anymore? This was Baltimore, for Chrissakes. This was a dead man in a stairwell at the George B. Murphy Homes housing project. What better place to be shot down with a high-caliber weapon like a dog? What the f.u.c.k is this a.s.shole doing with a syringe by his left hand, staring up from the cement floor with that ridiculous half-grin on his face?

"What are you, left-handed?" said Edgerton, rechecking the right arm. "Where the f.u.c.k did you shoot your s.h.i.t?"

The dead man answered with his grin.

"Why," Edgerton asked the corpse, "are you doing this to me?"

A week later and Edgerton is still the point man for D'Addario's shift, racing across Southwest Baltimore to yet another shooting call that will, if bad luck holds, be nothing more than a grazing. There will be no crime scene, no suspect, no dead man sprawled at the intersection of Hollins and Payson. Edgerton conjures up not a corpse, but an eighteen-year-old sitting on a gurney in the ER at Bon Secours, fully alert, talking, with nothing more than an Ace bandage wrapped around one arm.

"The El Supremo's gonna have to give me a break already," he says, weaving between two lanes in the emptiness of Frederick Avenue. "I just can't buy a murder."

He does a Texas stop at the Monroe Street signal, then wheels right onto Payson. Blue strobes from the radio cars greet him, but Edgerton immediately notices the absence of fire department cherry tops. No body on the ground, either. If there was an ambo, Edgerton tells himself, it's long gone.

The detective marks his time of arrival and slams the driver's door. A Southwest uniform, a young white kid, sidles up with an earnest look on his face.