"Was Carlton teasing him?"

"They all were. They called him a d.i.c.khead and he didn't like that."

"Why'd they call him a d.i.c.khead?"

"Because, you know," says the manager, shrugging off the question, "he's a d.i.c.khead."

Garvey laughs.

At one point, the manager tells them, Waddell flashed his semiauto and declared cryptically that tomorrow was election day and people always get killed on election day. Garvey has heard the summer heat wave theory and the full moon theory of inner-city mortality, but never the election day postulate. This is a new one.

"Tell me about this gun."

The manager describes the weapon as a 9mm semiauto with a clip of eighteen rounds. The casings at the scene were.38, but both Garvey and McAllister know that most people can't tell a .38 from a 9mm on first sight. Warren was proud of the gun, the manager says, recalling that Waddell had explained that he always mixed hollow-point and roundnose ammunition together in the clip, alternating between the two. "That's the way to kill a man," Waddell told anyone willing to listen.

That, too, matches up when both detectives return to the city to watch an a.s.sistant medical examiner pull bullets out of Carlton Robinson's body. It is a slow morning on Penn Street-a double suicide or murder-suicide from Montgomery County, another suicide from Anne Arundel, two probable overdoses, an unexplained collapse, and a ten-year-old girl run down by a truck. The detectives don't have to wait more than an hour to confirm that half the recovered slugs are hollow-point, the rest, standard roundnosed ammo.

The ballistic evidence is tinged with irony. Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state's vaunted Sat.u.r.day Night Special law takes effect. Pa.s.sed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the National Rifle a.s.sociation, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city's homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer-even the d.i.c.kheads of the world, Warren Waddell included, are carrying quality weapons. And though Maryland's landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.

On the day after Carlton Robinson's murder, Warren Waddell calls the manager to say he won't be coming to work. He also asks if his employer can pick up tomorrow's paycheck and meet him across town. Antic.i.p.ating such a request, the detectives told supervisors at the construction company to explain to Waddell that he has to come to the office in Ess.e.x and sign for the check in person. The manager gives him that story and then asks if he really killed Carlton.

"I can't talk right now," Waddell says.

Then, to the amazement of all concerned, Waddell shows up the next morning to claim his paycheck, eyes the secretaries suspiciously, then leaves abruptly. He and the friend who drove him are arrested at a county police roadblock a mile or two away. Searched by the county officers, Waddell is found to be carrying a large amount of cash, an American Express card and a U.S. pa.s.sport. Upon his arrest, he makes no statement, then further endears himself to Garvey and McAllister by faking a stomach ailment on the trip downtown, wasting two hours of the detectives' time at Sinai Hospital.

Everything about the case puts Waddell's signature on the murder-the victim's dying words, the fight and threats at work the previous day, the mixture of hollow-point and standard ammo, the suspect's behavior after the murder. Yet when Garvey brings the case into the state's attorney's office, he's told that it's an easy indictment but a loser in court.

The centerpiece of the case-Carlton Robinson's dying words-may prove inadmissible simply because the officers at the scene did not inform the victim that he was dying. Nor did Robinson specifically tell the officers that he believed his life was ending. Instead, the officers did the natural thing. They called for the ambo and leaned close to the victim, telling Robinson to hang on, a.s.suring him that if he remained conscious he would make it.

Without an acknowledgment of imminent death by either the victim or his attendants, Robinson's accusation could well be knocked down by a defense attorney who knows his Maryland code.

And without the dying declaration, they have weak circ.u.mstance and little more. Having been through the murder mill once before, Waddell shows no interest in the interrogation process, nor does a subsequent search warrant produce the murder weapon.

Garvey, of course, has no choice but to charge the murder. For one thing, he knows that Warren Waddell murdered Carlton Robinson. For another, he owes it to himself to close the case in this Perfect Year. But even as Waddell is trundled off to city jail for pretrial detention, the detective knows that this is one case for the lawyers to salvage.

Frustrated by the initial reaction from the state's attorney's office, Garvey asks Don Giblin, his golfing buddy in the violent crimes unit, to shop around for a veteran prosecutor. Garvey has seen enough of the trial division to know that half the ASAs in the office will look at a file like this and immediately p.r.o.nounce the legal problem insurmountable. As with the Lena Lucas murder, he needs a fighter.

"Get me a good one, Don," he tells Giblin over the telephone. "That's all I'm asking."

TEN Deck the halls with boughs of holly Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Throw that stiff up on the dolly Throw that stiff up on the dolly, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Talk to us and if you're willing Talk to us and if you're willing, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Tell us who did all this killing Tell us who did all this killing, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Tell us how you want forgiveness Tell us how you want forgiveness, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! You don't know we've got a witness You don't know we've got a witness, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, Talk to us, you've nothing to lose Talk to us, you've nothing to lose, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Why is blood upon your gym shoes? Why is blood upon your gym shoes? Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Want to make a good impression? Want to make a good impression? Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Make yourself a fast confession Make yourself a fast confession, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! -Homicide unit Christmas song -Homicide unit Christmas song FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2.

Mostly for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, Donald Waltemeyer watches Mark Cohen watching the hole get deeper. The process-such as it is-consists of two distinct stages and Cohen's disposition changes noticeably between the two. The first four feet with the backhoe are quick and painless, and Cohen barely squirms; the next eighteen inches require hand shovels, and Waltemeyer sees the lawyer's face crease with something more than expectation.

Pale and wire-thin, with spectacles and curly blond locks, Cohen looks like an innocent straight man standing next to the side of beef that is Waltemeyer, a professorial, three-piece Hardy propped up beside a muscular, working-cla.s.s Laurel. Cohen is a good man, among the best of the city prosecutors, and Waltemeyer can't think of a better trial attorney for the sprawling colossus that began as the Geraldine Parrish murder-for-hire case. But Cohen is a lawyer, not a cop, and as the shovels work deeper into clay, he begins to look less and less comfortable. Mercifully, Waltemeyer gives him his out.

"Kinda cold out here," the detective says.

"Sure is," agrees Cohen, his collar turned up to the winter wind. "I'm going back to the car awhile."

"You want the keys for the heater?"

"No, I'll be okay."

Waltemeyer watches Cohen negotiate his way across the muddy field, made worse by an inch or two of recently melted snow. The lawyer steps lightly in his L. L. Bean duck boots, both hands hiking up the seams of his slacks an extra couple of inches. Waltemeyer knows the cold isn't the only thing the man is feeling: The stench-faint but foul in the frigid air-was there from about four feet down. Cohen couldn't help but get a whiff of it.

At the sound of something solid, the detective turns back toward the hole, taking a step forward to peer down over the edge. "What was that?"

"That's the top," says the cemetery manager. "You got the top of the box right there."

The two men in the hole concentrated their shovels on the edges of the wood, trying to free the top of the casket from the surrounding dirt. But at the first real stress, the pressed wood cracks and collapses.

"Just pull that s.h.i.t up," says the manager. "Don't even mess with it."

"Not much of a casket," says Waltemeyer.

"I'm telling you," agrees the manager, a gravel-voiced, pear-shaped man. "She buried the man cheap as she could."

I'll bet she did, thinks Waltemeyer. Miss Geraldine wasn't about to be spending hard-won money on funerals, what with all the dearly departed she had to contend with. Even now, from inside the city jail, Geraldine Parrish was fighting hard to remain the sole heir of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard's money and property, with a civil suit by the reverend's family still to be decided by a circuit court judge.

As for the good reverend himself, he is somewhere under this G.o.dforsaken mud slope, this potter's field just below the city's southern edge. Mount Zion, they called it. A consecrated cemetery; hallowed ground.

Bulls.h.i.t, thinks Waltemeyer. The place is a small stretch of barren wetness running down off Hollins Ferry Road, owned and operated by one of the larger inner-city funeral homes, a volume business that can still scratch profit from even the cheapest burials. To the south is a low-income housing project, to the north, the Lansdowne Senior High School. At the top of the hill, near the cemetery entrance, is a convenience store; at the bottom, a polluted creek. Two hundred and fifty dollars gets the customer a plain pressed-wood box and a six-foot sliver of mud. If the body is unclaimed, if the state of Maryland has to serve as the sponsor, the price drops to a mere $200. h.e.l.l, thinks Waltemeyer, Mount Zion doesn't even look like a cemetery-only a few headstones mark what had to be the graves of thousands.

No, Geraldine hadn't exactly gone all out for her last husband, but then again, she had two more like him living with her over on Kennedy Street. The Black Widow's last conquest got a cheap coffin, no vault and no headstone. Still, the cemetery manager seemed to have no problem finding the spot a half an hour ago, walking across the barren plain with an air of practiced certainty.

"Right here," he said.

Row 78, grave 17.

"You sure it's him?" asked Waltemeyer.

"It oughta be," said the manager, surprised at the question. "Once you put 'em down there, they supposed to stay put."

If, in fact, the grave held the remains of the right Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, age seventy-eight, then the doctors on Penn Street could still do something with this case. Even with a body that had been in the ground for ten months, an adulterant could still be detectable. Twenty prescription Valium, ground into a last meal of tunafish-yes indeed, Smialek told Waltemeyer as they agreed to get the exhumation order, if that's what we're looking for, that's what we'll find.

Still, the Reverend Gilliard had been in the ground since February and Waltemeyer has to wonder what's even left down there. The cemetery manager said the winter burials would freeze in the ground, then decomp slower than those buried in warmer weather. It made some sense to the detective, but who even thinks about such things? Not Waltemeyer if he can help it. However much he enjoyed watching Mark Cohen squirm, he had to admit a private truth: This bothered him.

You find a body in the street and it's a murder. You sketch him, take his picture, check his pockets, roll him over. In that instant and for a few hours afterward, he's all yours, so much so that after a couple of years you don't think about it anymore. But once he's in the ground, once a preacher says some words and the dirt is on top of him, it's just different. Never mind that this is nothing more than a muddy field, never mind that the exhumation is a necessary investigative act-for Waltemeyer, it's still hard to believe that he has any right messing with a body in its final repose.

Naturally, his colleagues reacted to such doubts with all the warm sincerity for which Baltimore cops are known and admired. All the way through roll call this morning they had piled it on: Christ, Waltemeyer, what the f.u.c.k kind of a.s.shole are you? We don't have enough murders to deal with in this f.u.c.king town, you got to go prancing around the G.o.dd.a.m.n cemeteries like Bela f.u.c.king Lugosi, digging up skeletons?

And Waltemeyer knew they had a point: In terms of criminal culpability, the exhumation seemed a bit redundant. They had Geraldine and her contract killer, Edwin, on three homicides and the repeated attempts on Dollie Brown. They had Geraldine and another triggerman charged with a fourth murder in the death of Albert Robinson, the old drunk from New Jersey found by the Clifton Park railbed back in '86. Waltemeyer had driven Corey Belt and Mark Cohen up to Bergen County for a few days to interview witnesses and nail down that charge. Four murders, five murders-at what point does another charge no longer matter?

Watching the gravediggers pry at the broken pieces of the casket top, Waltemeyer wonders whether it's worth it. Miss Geraldine will be going to prison in any case, and what happens today certainly isn't going to give Gilliard's family any peace of mind. On the other hand, the detective has to concede that, like the doctors on Penn Street, he, too, is a little curious.

Tossing the curled, rotting wood out of the hole, the gravediggers stand against the edges of the box. Waltemeyer leans over and looks down.

"Well?" says the manager.

Waltemeyer looks at the photograph of Gilliard, then down at the coffin. The dead man looks pretty good, considering the circ.u.mstances.

"He's a little small," says the detective. "The photo looks like a bigger man."

"They thin out when they in the ground," says the manager, impatient. "You know the motherf.u.c.kers don't stay too fat down there."

No, thinks Waltemeyer. I guess they don't.

It's h.e.l.l trying to lift the bottom of the box out of the mud, and after ten minutes, the gravediggers give up, deferring instead to the ME's attendants, who simply lift the remains up and out using a plastic tarp.

"Way to go, Waltemeyer," the attendant says as he climbs from the grave, covered in mud. "You just went to the top of my list."

The body claimed, Waltemeyer and the gravediggers begin the slow, muddy trek back to the dirt road that divides Mount Zion. Stepping carefully toward the Cavalier, the detective watches the attendants load the black van, then looks through the car windshield at Mark Cohen. The prosecutor is looking down, seemingly preoccupied.

"You see him?" he asks Cohen in the car.

Cohen barely looks up, his face buried deep inside his briefcase, his hands working through the files inside.

"Mark, did you see him?"

"Yeah," says Cohen. "I saw him."

"Pretty ghoulish, huh?" says Waltemeyer. "I feel like I'm in a horror movie or something."

"Let's get downtown," says Cohen. "I've got to get back to the office."

Oh yeah, thinks Waltemeyer. He saw him.

The detective chooses to skip the actual autopsy, but it goes without a hitch-the cutters gathering tissue and organ samples for the toxicology, then checking the remains for any other overt signs of trauma. A perfectly straightforward piece of medical work, the examination could be a case study for the forensic pathology tests. At least it seems that way until an attendant is sewing up the chest cavity and notices the hospital identification bracelet on the cadaver's wrist. The ink is faded, but the name, clearly legible, is not Rayfield Gilliard.

Twenty minutes later, the telephone in the homicide unit bleats. A detective answers and then yells into the coffee room: "Waltemeyer, medical examiner on line one."

Sitting at Dave Brown's desk, Waltemeyer picks up the receiver and leans forward. After a second or two, his hand goes to his head and his fingers pinch the skin at the bridge of his nose.

"You're not kidding me, are you?" He leans back in the chair and stares up at the yellowing ceiling tile. His face is contorted, comical in its cartoon-like approximation of woe. He pulls a pencil from Brown's desk and begins writing on the back of a p.a.w.n shop card, sounding each word as he writes: "Hospitalbracelet ... Eugene ... Dale ... black, male ..."

Great.

"No one noticed it until after the autopsy?" asks the detective.

Just great.

Waltemeyer hangs up the phone and gives himself half a minute before punching the intercom b.u.t.ton on the phone extension.

"Captain?"

"Yes," says the voice on the phone.

"This is Waltemeyer, sir," says the detective, still holding the bridge of his nose. "Captain, are you sitting down?"

"Why?"

"Captain, I got goods news and bad news."

"Good news first."

"The autopsy went well."

"And the bad news?"

"We dug up the wrong guy."

"You're not serious."

"Oh, I'm serious."

"Jesus."

Eugene Dale. Some poor soul who had the misfortune to be chucked into the same potter's field at about the same time as the Reverend Gilliard. Now he's down on a gurney on Penn Street, looking a little worse for the day's events. Not much in this world can truly upset a homicide detective, but for Waltemeyer, disturbing the slumber of the innocent dead comes d.a.m.n close. Waltemeyer wonders whether this Dale has relatives. And that name: Why does it sound familiar?

"You got the wrong guy?" asks a detective from Stanton's shift, working overtime on a court appearance. "Who'd you get?"

"Some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d named Eugene Dale."

"Eugene Dale?"

"Yeah."

"D-A-L-E?"

Waltemeyer nods.

The other detective points at the board and the last couple of names under Rodger Nolan's section. "That's the same name as Edgerton's suspect."

"Who?"

"Eugene Dale."

"Who is?" asks Waltemeyer, still confused.

"The guy that Edgerton locked up for killing the little girl," says the detective. "He's got the same name as the guy you just dug up."

Waltemeyer looks at the board. "Eugene Dale," he says, reading the black ink. "I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"Where's Edgerton now?" asks the other detective.

"Off today," says Waltemeyer, absorbed in thought. What the h.e.l.l does it matter who they dug up? It isn't Rayfield Gilliard; they know that much. Waltemeyer listens impa.s.sively as the other detective gets Edgerton on the phone and then runs through the preamble.