Not sure. How can you not be sure? Theodore Johnson was. .h.i.t by a shotgun blast fired at point-blank range, blown apart in the center of a narrow rowhouse street. The sound itself had to be audible all the way up to North Avenue.

"You don't know if you were home?"

"I might have been."

So much for the door-to-door canva.s.s. Not that Pellegrini can blame the neighborhood for its reluctance to volunteer information. Word is out that the dead man crossed a local dealer on a drug debt and the dealer has just proven to everyone within earshot that he's a man to be reckoned with. The people behind these doors have got to live on Durham Street; Pellegrini is no more than an occasional tourist.

With nothing on the horizon even remotely resembling a witness, Pellegrini has a body on the way to Penn Street and a bloodstain on dirty asphalt. He's got a spent shotgun sh.e.l.l ejected by the shooter in the alley around the corner. He's got a street so dark that the emergency vehicle unit has been called to light up his scene for the photographs. An hour or so later, Pellegrini will have the sister of his victim sitting in Jay Landsman's office, feeding him a bit of rumor about some people that may or may not have had something to do with the shooting. He will have a headache, too.

Theodore Johnson joins Stevie Braxton and Barney Erely on the white rectangle in the coffee room. Braxton, the kid with a long sheet found stabbed up off Pennsylvania Avenue. Erely, the homeless man bludgeoned to death on Clay Street. Red names riding the board with Pellegrini's initial near them, casualties in the year-long campaign to close the Latonya Wallace murder. It's triage, plain and simple, but Pellegrini can live with that. After all, he's got an eleven-year-old raped and murdered, and neither Theodore Johnson nor a drug debt that has now been paid has any real weight when hung in the balance. Tonight's dead man will get one or two shakes from the homicide unit, one or two go-rounds in the interrogation rooms with a few reluctant witnesses. But then the primary investigator will set the file aside.

Months later, Pellegrini will feel some guilt about this, some concern about the number of cases sacrificed for the sake of one child. With much the same sort of self-recrimination that governs his thoughts on the Latonya Wallace murder, Pellegrini will wonder whether he should have pressed harder on that kid in the Western District lockup back in January, the one who claimed to know one of the shooters from Gold and Etting. He'll wonder about whether he should have gone harder at Braxton's girlfriend, who didn't seem all that upset about the murder. And he'll wonder, too, about the rumors that Theodore Johnson's sister is now feeding him-information that will never be fully checked.

True, he could dump this case on the secondary. Vernon Holley handled the scene with him and he would probably understand if Pellegrini ducked the call to stay focused on Latonya Wallace. Still, Holley is new to the squad, a veteran black detective transferred from the robbery unit to replace Fred Ceruti. He'd been out on one murder with Rick Requer a couple of weeks ago, but that wasn't enough to qualify as an orientation, even for an investigator as experienced as Holley. And the squad was a man short to begin with: d.i.c.k Fahlteich had voluntarily transferred to s.e.x offense after six years in homicide. The body count had finally got to Fahlteich, a talented detective who nonetheless was handling fewer calls each year, working at a pace that others in Landsman's squad were quick to compare to Harry Edgerton's. The workload and the hours-coupled with a gnawing aggravation about his being pa.s.sed over several times on the sergeant's lists-had at last pushed Fahlteich down to the other end of the sixth-floor hallway at about the same time that Ceruti traveled the same route. At least with Fahlteich it was a matter of choice.

No, Pellegrini reasons, with the squad down to three regulars and a fresh transfer, the Theodore Johnson case is his to eat. At the very least, he owes it to Holley to stay with the thing for a few days. A graphic display of job-related burnout isn't exactly the best lesson to be teaching a new man.

Bravely, Pellegrini fights his own impulses, doing a competent crime scene out on Durham Street, then canva.s.sing the entire block for witnesses that he knows in his heart will never come forward. Holley peels off early, heading back to the homicide office to begin interviewing family members and a couple of kids at the scene who were sent downtown only because they were out there acting like squirrels when the first uniforms arrived.

The sudden role reversal-with Pellegrini now the tired veteran, breaking in the latest prodigy-is accepted without comment by everyone else in Landsman's squad. Nine months of Latonya Wallace has changed Pellegrini: His metamorphosis from fresh-scrubbed recruit to battered trench rat is complete. To say that he can look at Holley and see himself a couple years ago goes too far: Holley already had the experience of CID robbery behind him; Pellegrini had come to homicide with no investigative background whatsoever. Still, Holley is working this Durham Street case as if it mattered, as if it were the only murder in the history of the world. He is fresh. He is confident. He makes Pellegrini feel one hundred years old.

The two detectives chase the murder on Durham Street through into late morning, gathering the information from the sister, then trying to check her story against that provided by a former police officer who has family living in the block. His family will not come forward, but the ex-cop, though fired from the force twenty years ago in a corruption case, has enough residual instinct to call in with the name of a possible partic.i.p.ant. Pellegrini and Holley find the kid that same morning, go at him in the large box for several hours and emerge with little to show for the effort. Then, slowly, after a few more laps around the case file, Holley accepts the unspoken verdict of his tutor. He drifts away, looking for better pickings with Gary Dunnigan and Requer.

He finds them, too, hooking up with Requer on a domestic from Bruce Street, a true tragedy in which a young girl has been bludgeoned to death by her c.o.kehead of a boyfriend and her orphaned infant is left crying on a policewoman's shoulder, wailing at the world as the officer's hand-held radio squawks out citywide dispatch calls. Holley follows that with another domestic from Cherry Hill that he works to completion with Dunnigan. Both cases are dunkers and both bring a certain confidence. By December, Holley will be handling calls as a primary.

For Pellegrini, however, the milestones marked by his squad mean little. Ceruti's fall from grace, Fahlteich's departure, Holley's education-they are scenes from a play in which Pellegrini has no real part. Time stands still for one detective, leaving him alone on a stage of his own, trapped there by the same few props and the same few lines from the same sad scene.

Three weeks ago, Pellegrini and Landsman hit the Fish Man's Whitelock Street apartment a second time, working through a search warrant that was written more for Pellegrini's peace of mind than anything else. Months had pa.s.sed and the chance of recovering any additional evidence from the apartment was minimal. Yet Pelligrini, now fixated on the store owner as his best suspect, was convinced that in their haste to hit the three-story s.h.i.thouse on Newington back in February, they had blown off the earlier searches on Whitelock. In particular, Pellegrini vaguely remembered seeing a remnant of red carpeting in the Fish Man's living room during the February raid; months later, he thought of the hairs and fibers taken from the young girl's body at the morgue and recalled that one of those fibers was red cloth.

Red carpet, red fiber: Pellegrini suddenly had another reason to kick himself. For Pellegrini, the contents of file H88021 had become nothing less than an ever-changing landscape in which every tree, rock and bush seems to be moving. And it was no use explaining to him that this could happen to any detective on any case-this pit-of-the-stomach feeling that everything was being missed, that evidence was disappearing faster than an investigator could perceive it. Every detective in the unit had lived through the sensation of seeing something at a crime scene or during a search warrant and then looking twice to see that it was no longer there. h.e.l.l, maybe it never was there. Or maybe it's still there, but now you've lost the ability to see it.

It was the stuff from which the Nightmare was made, the Nightmare being that recurring dream that occasionally ruins the sleep of every good detective. In the throes of the Nightmare, you are moving through the familiar confines of a rowhouse-you've got a warrant, perhaps, or maybe it's just a plain-view search-and from the corner of your eye you glimpse something. What the h.e.l.l is it? Something important, you know that. Something you need. A blood spatter. A sh.e.l.l casing. A child's star-shaped earring. You can't say for sure, but with every fiber of your being you understand that it's your case lying there. Yet you look away for a moment, and when you look back again, it's gone. It's an empty place in your subconscious, a lost opportunity that mocks you. The Nightmare scares the h.e.l.l out of young detectives; some of them even live the dream at their first crime scenes, convinced that the entire case is evaporating into the ether. As for the veterans, the Nightmare just p.i.s.ses them off. They've gone through it enough not to believe every voice that speaks from the back of the mind.

And yet on this case the Nightmare owns Pellegrini. It ordered him to write the second warrant for the Fish Man's apartment, it demanded that he collect enough probable cause to get back inside a door that had been opened to him once before. Not surprisingly, the September raid left the Fish Man as bored and indifferent as its predecessor. Nor did it produce a red cloth carpet fiber: Pellegrini found the remnant he remembered on the bedroom floor, but it proved to be plastic, an outdoor Astro-Turf carpet. Nor did a small blue pin earring found in a corner of the living room mean anything to the investigation. Contacted by detectives a few days later, Latonya Wallace's family members explained that they never recalled the young girl wearing a mixed set of earrings. If she had a star-shaped pin in one lobe, it was safe to a.s.sume that a star-shaped pin was missing from the other. To be sure, Pellegrini borrowed a Cavalier and drove the blue pin earring up to the little girl's mother; she seemed a little surprised that the case was still being worked after seven months, but confirmed that the blue earring did not belong to her daughter.

Around every corner of the maze, a fresh corridor began. A week after the second search of Whitelock Street, Pellegrini found himself tangled in a prolonged encounter with an auto thief arrested by Baltimore County police back in July. A disturbed young man with a history of mental illness, the thief had attempted suicide at the county detention center on three separate occasions, then blurted out to a county officer that he knew who had committed two murders in the city. One was a drug killing at a Northwest Baltimore bar. The other involved the death of a little girl in Reservoir Hill.

Howard Corbin went out to the county for the initial interview and came back with a story about a chance encounter in the alley behind the 800 block of Newington, where the auto thief said he had been snorting cocaine with his cousin. A little girl happened by the alley and the auto thief heard his cousin say something to the child. The girl-who carried a bookbag and wore her hair braided-said something back, and it seemed to the auto thief that they knew each other. But when his cousin jumped up and grabbed the girl, the auto thief became frightened and fled. Shown a picture of Latonya Wallace, the young man began crying.

Slowly, the scenario took on real life. The auto thief did indeed have a cousin at 820 Newington and the cousin did indeed have a substantial record, though nothing on it screamed s.e.x offender. Still, Corbin was impressed that the young man had apparently remembered that the girl had her hair up in braids and was carrying a satchel. Those details had been released to the public early in the investigation, of course, but they helped establish some credibility for the thief 's story.

Pellegrini and Corbin dutifully rechecked the vacant rowhouses in the 800 block of Newington and then towed a derelict Chevy Nova from the rear of an occupied house in that same block. The car had once belonged to the thief's cousin, and the thief claimed that his relative routinely kept a buck knife and a switchblade in the trunk of the car. That car and another vehicle belonging to the cousin's sister were both processed by lab techs at headquarters with negative results. Likewise, the auto thief was brought downtown for lengthy interviews.

Eventually, as facts began to get in his way, the thief's story changed. He suddenly remembered, for instance, that his cousin had at one point opened the trunk of his sister's car and shown him a zippered plastic bag. And then his cousin opened the zipper to reveal the face of the little girl. And then ...

The auto thief was a mental case, no question about it. But his tale had been constructed with just enough detail to require a full investigation. The cousin would have to be confronted, and the story would have to be corroborated or knocked down. Eventually, the auto thief would have to be polygraphed.

Beyond that piece of business, Pellegrini also had another manila file on his desk with the name of a Park Avenue man on the heading-a raw mix of fact and rumor regarding a potential suspect known to have behaved strangely in recent months and on one occasion to have exposed himself to a schoolgirl. There were a few rape reports from the Central, too, along with notes from another five or six interviews with friends and former friends of the Fish Man.

All of that waits for Pellegrini as he pauses to work the shotgun murder of Theodore Johnson on Durham Street. And when that pause is over, he continues to wonder whether he should have kept working the drug killing rather than returning to obsess over Latonya Wallace. He tells himself that if he works the Durham Street murder hard, it might just go down. On the other hand, if he keeps on the dead little girl, there could be no telling when the case might break.

To every other detective on the shift, this is the worst kind of optimism. Latonya Wallace is history; Theodore Johnson is fresh. And in the minds of most of his colleagues, Pellegrini has gone over the hill on this one. Repeat warrants on a suspect's apartment, prolonged background investigations, protracted statements from suicidal s.h.i.tbirds-all of it is understandable of a young detective, they concede. h.e.l.l, with a dead little girl it may even be required, in a way. But, they tell each other, let's not kid ourselves: Tom Pellegrini has lost it.

Then, a week after the murder of Theodore Johnson, this widely held opinion undergoes a sudden revision when a fresh lab report arrives on Pellegrini's desk and its contents become known to the shift.

The author of the report: Van Gelder in the trace section. The subject: black smudge marks on the dead girl's pants. The verdict: tar and soot with burned wood chips mixed in. Fire debris, plain and simple.

Taking its own sweet time, the trace lab has finally compared the black smudges on Latonya Wallace's pants to the samples that Pellegrini lifted from the Fish Man's burned-out store two months earlier. The report declares the two samples to be consistent, if not identical.

What can we say? Pellegrini asks, pressing the lab people. Is it similar or is it exactly the same? Can we say with any certainty that she was in that Whitelock Street store?

Van Gelder and the others in the trace section are equivocal. The samples can be sent to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lab in Rockville-one of the best in the country-and perhaps they can do more. But generally speaking, Van Gelder explains, the smudges on the pants and the samples from the store have the same cla.s.s characteristics. They are very similar and yes, they could have come from the debris in that store. On the other hand, they could also have come from another fire scene in which the debris had a similar chemical composition.

A week after the cold depression of Durham Street, Pellegrini finds himself torn between elation and despair. Nine months into the Latonya Wallace investigation, the new lab report provides the first piece of substantive evidence in the file and the only piece of physical evidence to implicate the Fish Man. But if the lab a.n.a.lysts are willing to say only that the two samples are very similar, then that evidence still falls within the realm of reasonable doubt. It is a beginning, but unless the ATF lab can be more definitive, it is nothing more.

A few days after the lab report arrives on his desk, Pellegrini asks the captain to authorize a mainframe computer run of incident reports dating from January 1, 1978, to February 2, 1988. The information sought is the address for every fire or arson report in the area of Reservoir Hill bounded by North Avenue, Park Avenue, Druid Park Lake Drive and Madison Avenue.

The theory is simple enough: If the lab can't say for certain that those smudges come from Whitelock Street, then perhaps a detective, working backward, can prove that they couldn't have come from anywhere else.

The detective obsessed with the Latonya Wallace case may seem lost to everyone else in homicide, but to Pellegrini himself, the chaos of H88021 is slowly becoming order. After eight months, the file has fresh evidence, a viable suspect, a plausible theory.

Best of all, it has some direction.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7.

"Well," says McLarney, admiring the board, "Worden's back." And back in black.

Three straight nights of midnight shift in late September brought three straight murders for the Big Man and Rick James. Two are down, and the chalkboard on the other side of the coffee room is adorned with the evidence of progress on the third case: "Any calls about a prost.i.tute named Lenore who works Pennsylvania Avenue, call Worden or James at home re H88160."

Lenore, the mystery wh.o.r.e. By all accounts, she is the lone witness to the fatal stabbing of her ex-boyfriend, who was last seen arguing with Lenore's current beau in the 2200 block of the Avenue before falling to the ground with an unsightly hole in his upper right chest. Now, two weeks later, the current boyfriend is conveniently dead from cancer, and therefore, if the elusive businesswoman will be so kind as to come downtown and make a truthful statement, case number three will also be black. To that end, McLarney's squad has spent the last two weeks terrorizing the Avenue hookers, riding up to question every new face and scare away customers. It's gotten so bad that the girls are waving them off even as they open the car doors.

"I ain't Lenore," one shouted to Worden a week ago, even before the detective had a chance to speak.

"I know that, hon. But have you seen her?"

"She's not out tonight."

"Well, tell her if she'll just come in and talk to us, we'll stop bothering you and her both. Will you do that for us?"

"If I see her, I'll tell her."

"Thank you, dear."

Straight police work, the kind that keeps you out in the city streets. No oily politicians, no treacherous bosses, no scared young cops saying they don't know anything about the dead kid in the alley. The street gives you nothing worse than lying, thieving criminals and, hey, Worden has no complaints with that. It's their job. And his, too.

The return to routine has allowed Worden a measure of satisfaction, not that the last three cases were exactly br.i.m.m.i.n.g with challenge and complexity. The first was pretty much an accidental: three teenage drug dealers in a west side rowhouse, marveling over their host's new Sat.u.r.day Night Special when it goes off with the barrel pointed at the youngest kid's chest. The second was a Highlandtown beating, a manslaughter with a billy boy laid out in an alley behind Lakewood Avenue, dead after he fell back from a punch and hit his head on the cement. The third was the Pennsylvania Avenue stabbing, still waiting for Miss Lenore's reappearance.

No, it wasn't the quality of the cases that announced Worden's return so much as the volume. Whether or not the case went down, the quality was always there with the Big Man; Monroe Street, in fact, was probably his best work in a long while. But a year ago, Worden had been nothing less than a machine, and McLarney remembered that time like an athlete remembers a championship season. Back then, the squad pretty much operated on the same principle as that cereal commercial: Give it to Worden. He'll eat anything. Go ahead, give him this one, give him another, and then put him on the file that Dave Brown and Waltemeyer are still struggling with. See? He likes it.

This year has been very different. Monroe Street, the Larry Young business, the open murders from March and April-the year had unfolded as an agonizing exercise in frustration, and by summer there was nothing to suggest that Worden's losing streak had an end.

In late August and early September, the cold, hard slap of reality was a fourteen-year-old shotgun victim by the name of Craig Rideout, stretched out in the early morning light on a Pimlico lawn, dead for hours before anyone found the body or called a cop. Worden labored for days to trace the shooting back to a crew doing shotgun robberies in the Northwest using a red Mazda. Talking to informants in his old district and checking other shotgun robbery reports eventually turned up one bada.s.s in particular, a non-taxpayer with a Cherry Hill address and a sheet that included arrests for armed robbery. Not only did Worden tie the kid to a red Mazda that had been seen all over the Northwest, but he learned that the boy was spending a lot of time with people around lower Park Heights near the murder scene.

For a couple of nights, Worden sat on the kid's house, waiting for anything that looked like a robbery crew to a.s.semble near that Mazda. With no physical evidence, Worden could only hope that his man would go back out on the street with the shotgun to try another robbery. But then an inexplicable act by another detective blew the case apart: Two weeks after the Rideout murder, Worden came into work on a four-to-twelve shift and learned that Dave Hollingsworth, the detective on Stanton's shift handling another shotgun murder in the Northwest, had gone out to Cherry Hill and interviewed his suspect. Immediately the shotgun robberies in the Northwest came to an abrupt halt. No more red Mazdas, no more sightings of his suspect up around Park Heights.

Only several months later would Worden hear from his best suspect once more. On that occasion, the boy from Cherry Hill is on the other end of a 24-hour report. On that occasion, he's the body on the pavement, shot down by persons unknown on a street off the Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Rideout murder stayed red, and in Worden's mind it became a metaphor. Like everything else he touched, it was good police work with a bad ending, and like everything else in his year, it was unresolved.

But the Rideout case was only one jab in a left-right combination. In mid-September, the sucker punch landed in a crowded Central District courtroom, where state senator Larry Young went to trial for his well-publicized misdemeanor.

Trial is perhaps the wrong word for what actually happened. It was more of a spectacle, really, a public display by prosecutors and detectives who had no real interest in seeing the case pursued aggressively. Instead, Tim Doory of the state's attorney's office tried the case personally and with just enough vigor to lose by a judge's verdict. In laying out the scenario by which the senator had falsely reported his own abduction, Doory made a point of not calling the politician's aide as a witness, intentionally depriving the state's case of any motive for the false report and thereby avoiding any on-the-stand revelations about the senator's private life.

It was a gracious, honorable act and one that Worden understood and accepted. What he didn't accept was that this public demonstration was even necessary; it infuriated him that the prosecutors' office and police department were so eager to appear earnest in their pursuit of public misdeed that Larry Young had to be charged and tried and acquitted of a meaningless stupidity. Even so, when it came to his testimony, Worden fell on his sword with seeming indifference. Asked by the senator's attorney about the key conversation in which Young admitted that no crime had occurred, the detective didn't hesitate to punch the biggest possible hole in the prosecution's case.

"So let me understand, detective, you told the senator that he would not be charged if he admitted to you that no crime had occurred?"

"I told him he would not be charged by me."

"But he has been charged."

"Not by me."

Worden then acknowledged that the senator only admitted to the false report after being told that no investigation would proceed if he did just that. Worden also accurately described the conclusion of his conversation with Young, in which the senator declared that no crime had occurred and that he would look into the matter privately.

The senator's attorney finished his cross-examination with a tight smile of satisfaction. "Thank you, Detective Worden."

Thank you, indeed. With the senator's admission portrayed as a coerced act and with the prosecutor reluctant to pursue the motive behind the false report, the District Court judge needed little time to arrive at the expected verdict.

Leaving the courtroom, Larry Young approached Donald Worden and offered his hand. "Thank you for not lying," the senator said.

Worden looked up, surprised. "Why would I lie?"

In context, it was an extraordinary insult. After all, why would a detective lie? Why would he perjure himself? Why would he risk his own integrity, not to mention his job and his pension, to win a case like this? To nail some politician's pelt to a wall? To earn the undying respect of Larry Young's political enemies?

Like every cop, Worden had his cynical streak, but he wasn't really much of a stoic. Open murders and open deceit-the two operant themes of this G.o.dforsaken year-still seemed to bother him more than many younger detectives. It didn't often show, but there had always been a core of insistent anger inside Worden, a quiet rebellion against the inertia and politics of his own police department. Rarely were those emotions allowed to surface; instead, they festered deep inside, feeding his elevated and insubordinate hypertension. Only once, in fact, did Worden vent his rage during the Larry Young business, and that was a brief exchange in the coffee room, when Rick James tried to lighten his partner's mood.

"Hey, it's out of your hands," said James. "What the f.u.c.k are you gonna do?"

"I'll tell you what I'm ready to do," growled Worden. "I'm ready to stick my gun inside somebody's mouth, and that somebody is inside this headquarters building."

James left it alone after that. What, after all, remained to be said?

At the same time, Terry McLarney went into a clinical depression after hearing a rumor that Worden had expressed interest in an open posting for an investigator with the medical examiner's office. Worden's gone, he told others in the squad. We're losing him to this f.u.c.ked-up year of his.

"Right now he just looks tired," McLarney told others in the squad. "I've never seen Donald looking so tired."

McLarney held tight to a slim thread of hope: Get Worden back out on the street with new murders. Good murders, good calls. McLarney believed that if anything could wipe the slate clean for a guy like Worden, it would be real police work.

But Monroe Street had been real police work; the Rideout case, too. They had just ended poorly. Even Worden himself wasn't really sure what was wrong, and he had no idea where this tunnel was taking him, or whether it even had a light at its end. The best that could be said was that Donald Worden had gotten used to traveling in the dark.

Then, suddenly, a little light began to show. Late September brought that three-for-a-quarter performance on the midnight shift, when Worden worked every body that fell within his field of vision. And one week after those clearances he picked up yet another whodunit on daywork. The case was a loser: a nude woman found carved up behind an elementary school on Greenspring Avenue, discovered by the post officer a good twelve hours after the murder. No identification, no match to any missing persons report.

The beauty of Worden's performance on that case would not come with its solution, although incredibly, he would come up with a suspect after staying with the file for more than a year. The beauty was that he refused to allow this woman to remain a Jane Doe- "a member of the deer family," as he liked to put it-to be buried for $200 by the state without the knowledge of friends or family.

For six days Worden was out in the street, looking for a name. The television stations and newspapers wouldn't run a photograph of the woman's face: she was too obviously dead. Her fingerprints didn't match up with anything in either the local computer or the federal data base available to the FBI. And though the body looked pretty clean-an indication that the woman had been living somewhere-no one ever came into a police district to say that their mother or sister or daughter had not come home. Worden checked the group home for homeless women on nearby Cottage Avenue. He checked with the detox and drug treatment centers, because the victim's liver looked a little gray at autopsy. He canva.s.sed the streets around the elementary school and along the nearest city bus route.

The break had come last night, when he paraded the photograph through every bar and carryout in Pimlico. Finally someone at the Preakness Bar remembered that the dead woman had a boyfriend named Leon Sykes who used to live over on Moreland Avenue. That address was vacant, but a neighbor told him to try 1710 Bentalou. There, a young girl listened to Worden's story and took him to 1802 Longwood, where Leon Sykes looked at the photo and identified the dead woman as Barbara.

"What's her last name?"

"I never knew."

But Leon remembered where the dead woman's daughter lived. And thus, by pure police work, did Jane Doe-a black female, late twenties-become Barbara Womble, thirty-nine years, of 1633 Moreland Avenue.

Those six circuitous days and nights in Pimlico left no one with any doubt: Worden was back, having outlasted his worst year.

The Big Man's triumphant return was also marked by his renewed and unceasing torment of Dave Brown, whose abandonment of the Carol Wright case had not exactly gone unnoticed by the older detective. For at least a part of September, Brown's excuse was the Nina Perry investigation, which began when a couple of dopers were arrested in the car of a woman reported missing from her Stricker Street rowhouse a week earlier. Working with McLarney, Brown put that case together in fine fashion, pressuring one of the suspects to confess fully to the murder and then lead detectives to the victim's badly decomposed remains, which he had dumped in a Carroll County backwoods.

Worden watched the Nina Perry case unfold and thought that maybe, just maybe, a detective lurked somewhere within David John Brown. The Perry case was fine work, the kind that teaches a cop something about his craft. But Worden's generosity went no further.

"Clayvon Jones and Carol Wright," Worden declared in late September. "Let's see him do something with one of those."

But Clayvon Jones would not be the true test, not after Eddie Brown came strutting into the coffee room four days ago with a letter from the Baltimore City Jail in his right hand.

"Speak to yo' daddy," said the older detective, dropping the letter onto the desk with a flourish. Dave Brown read about three lines before turning in prayer to the green bulkhead wall.

"Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

"Do I take care of you?" asked Eddie Brown.

"You do. You mah daddy."

The letter had arrived in the admin office that afternoon, a hastily scrawled missive from a prisoner who had witnessed the murder of Clayvon Jones in that east side courtyard back in June. Three months later, this witness needed to barter out from beneath a drug charge. Addressed to the homicide unit, his letter included details about the crime scene that only a bona fide witness could know.

No, the Clayvon Jones killing would not be much of an education. In Worden's considered opinion, its easy solution became simply another laurel beneath the weight of Brown's a.s.s. That left Carol Wright, the woman run down on the South Baltimore parking lot. For a few weeks, Brown had at least talked about picking up the Carol Wright file again and sorting through the old leads. But as far as the board was concerned, the Carol Wright case still wasn't a murder and therefore it didn't exist. These days, he wasn't even mentioning the case and, as Brown's sergeant, McLarney wasn't making much of a stink about it either. Indeed, with Nina Perry and Clayvon Jones both safely in the black, McLarney had a new appreciation for Dave Brown's talents.

In McLarney's mind, the Perry case in particular counted for a lot. Brown had worked hard and a tough case involving a genuine victim had gone down. That arrest had elevated Brown to hero-of-the-week status, and he was therefore ent.i.tled to a beer or two at Kavanaugh's with his loving and devoted sergeant. In fact, McLarney was so pleased with the Perry case that he stayed with Brown through its aftermath, sharing the remaining paperwork and evidentiary details. He only balked when it came time to pick up the victim's maggot-infested clothing at the ME's office.

"f.u.c.k this, Dave. I'll give you a hand with this tomorrow," McLarney said after getting a quick whiff of the stench. "Let's come back for this stuff in the morning."

Dave Brown readily agreed and drove back to headquarters a contented man, at least until he realized McLarney wasn't scheduled to work the next day.

"Wait a second," he said, parking the Cavalier in the garage. "You're off tomorrow."

McLarney giggled.

"You little Irish potatohead."

"Potatohead?"