"Yeah," says Landsman, laughing for the first time all night. "Can you believe it?"

Hours later, after the guilty man has confessed to murder in his fashion ("I had the knife to her throat, but I didn't cut her. She must have moved or something"), Landsman sits in the main office and dissects the case as Graul types his warrant.

"All that bulls.h.i.t he was telling us about this guy and that guy," Landsman tells Kincaid. "I should have jumped on that earlier."

Maybe so, and maybe there's a lesson in that. When you're working murders, preparation and patience and subtlety take you only so far; sometimes anything more than the usual amount of conscientious precision becomes its own crippling burden. Witness Tom Pellegrini, who spends the night of Ernestine Haskins's murder as he has spent so many others in the last two months-searching for a rational approach to that which is unapproachable, for scientific exact.i.tude in places where nothing is ever exact. The method to Landsman's madness is a hard, tight logic formed in a crucible of impulse and sudden anger. Pellegrini's madness, on the other hand, takes the form of an obsessively rational pursuit of the Answer.

In the annex office, Pellegrini's desk is adorned with a dozen or so milestones from this lonely, quixotic campaign. Reading material on new interrogation techniques, resumes of professional interviewers and private companies that specialize in criminal interrogative planning, paperback books on subliminal messages and body language, even a few reports from a meeting with a psychic that Pellegrini arranged in the hope that extrasensory investigative techniques would yield more than the usual strategies-all of that has now joined the paper storm of the Latonya Wallace case file.

In Pellegrini's mind, the other side of the argument holds sway: Instinct is not enough; emotion defies precision. Twice they had the Fish Man closeted in one of these soundproof boxes, twice they chose to rely on their own talents and instincts, twice he went home in a Central District radio car. Yet without a confession, Pellegrini knows, there is nothing left for this murder investigation. The witnesses will never come forward, or they never existed to begin with. The crime scene will never be found. The physical evidence will never be recovered.

For his last chance at the Fish Man, the primary detective in the Latonya Wallace case places all hope in reason and science. Landsman can break twenty more suspects as he broke the killer of Ernestine Haskins and it won't matter to Pellegrini. He has read and he has studied and he has carefully reviewed the previous interrogations of his best suspect. And in his heart of hearts, he believes that there ought to be some certainty to the thing, some method by which the confession of a guilty man can be derived from an algebra that the Baltimore detectives have not yet learned.

And yet, a month ago, back when Pellegrini was chewing on the second of those two accidental shootings, Landsman proved again that cautious rationality was often useless to a detective. On that occasion, too, Landsman had held back for a time, waiting quietly in the wings while his detective listened to three witnesses offer separate explanations for a rowhouse shooting that left a Lumbee Indian teenager dead. They were drinking beer and playing video games in the living room, the witnesses claimed. All of a sudden there was a knock on the apartment door. And then a hand coming through the open door. And then a gun in the hand. And then a single, unexplained gunshot.

Pellegrini had the two teenagers repeat their stories over and over, watching each witness for subliminal indications of deceit, the way the interrogation manuals teach you. He noticed that one guy's eyes broke right when he answered; according to the textbook, he was probably lying. Another guy backed up when Pellegrini got close to him; by the book, an introvert, a witness who can't be pressured too quickly.

With his sergeant in tow, Pellegrini worked through the kids' stories for more than an hour, catching a few contradictions and pursuing them to a few obvious lies. It was patient and it was methodical. It was also getting them nowhere.

Sometime after midnight, Landsman finally decided he'd had enough. He dragged a fat, pimply-faced white kid into his office, slammed the door hard and wheeled around in a rage, knocking his desk lamp to the floor. The fluorescent bulb shattered against the linoleum and the kid covered himself, waiting for a rain of blows that never came.

"I'M DONE f.u.c.kING AROUND WITH YOU!"

The kid looked at the wall, terrified.

"YOU HEAR ME? I'M DONE f.u.c.kING AROUND. WHO SHOT HIM?"

"I don't know. We couldn't see-"

"YOU'RE LYING! DON'T LIE TO ME!"

"No ..."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n YOU! I'M WARNING YOU!"

"Don't hit me."

In the aquarium, the fat boy's friend and the third witness, a black teenager from the Southeast projects, could hear everything. And when the Landsman blitzkrieg came rolling down the hall, the black kid's worst fear owned him. The detective grabbed the kid, tossed him into the admin lieutenant's office and began spitting out profanity. It was all over in thirty seconds.

Returning to his own office a few minutes later, Landsman confronted the fat kid again. "You're done lying. Your buddy just gave you up."

And the fat kid simply nodded, almost relieved. "I didn't mean to shoot Jimmy. The gun just went off in my hand. I swear, it just went off."

Landsman smiled grimly.

"You broke your lamp," said the fat kid.

"Yeah," said Landsman, leaving the room. "How 'bout that?"

Outside, in the annex office, Pellegrini greeted his sergeant with a smile and a look that suggested regret. "Thanks, Sarge."

Landsman shrugged and smiled.

"You know," said Pellegrini, "I'd still be talking to them if you hadn't done that."

"f.u.c.k it, Tom, you'd have done the same thing eventually," Landsman told him. "You were getting there."

But Pellegrini said nothing, uncertain. Then and now, Landsman teaches a truth that is a contradiction, an unnerving counterweight to Pellegrini's methodical pursuit of empirical answers. Landsman's lesson says that science, deliberation and precision are not enough. Whether he likes it or not, a good detective eventually has to pull the trigger.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22.

Season's greetings from the Baltimore homicide unit, where a Styrofoam Santa Claus is taped to the annex office door, its visage marred by a deep, b.l.o.o.d.y, close-range gunshot wound carved into the old saint's forehead. The wound track was created with a penknife, the blood with a red felt-tipped pen, but the message is clear: Yo, Santa. This is Baltimore. Watch your back.

Along the metal bulkhead walls of the main office, Kim and Linda and the other sixth-floor secretaries have applied a few lonely strips of red and gold trim, some cardboard reindeer and a few candy canes. In the northeast corner of the office stands the unit's tree, sparingly decorated this year but otherwise unmarked by the cynical displays of holidays past. A few years back, some of the detectives retrieved a few morgue photos from the files-mostly shots of dead drug dealers and contract killers, a few of whom had beat out murder charges of their own. With some careful cutting, the detectives liberated the bullet-riddled bodies from the photo background and, overcome by the Yule spirit, pasted hand-drawn wings on the shoulders of the dead. In a way it was touching: Hard-core players like Squeaky Jordan and Abraham Partlow looked positively angelic hanging from those polyurethane branches.

Even the decorations that began as sincere gestures seem small and defeated in this place, where phrases such as "peace on earth" and "goodwill towardmen" have no apparent connection to the work at hand. Onthe anniversary of their savior's birth, the men who work homicides are decidedly unsaved, stuck as they are in the usual rotation of shootings and cuttings and overdose cases. Still, the holiday will be acknowledged if not celebrated by the squads working the four-to-twelve and overnight on Christmas Eve. What the h.e.l.l, this much irony ought to be marked in some meaningful way.

A year ago, there wasn't much Christmas mayhem at all, a shooting or two on the west side. But two years ago, the phone lines were all lit up, and the year before that was also a h.e.l.lacious piece of work, with two domestic homicides and a serious shooting that kept Nolan's squad running until the light of day. On that Christmas, the early relief arrived to find Nolan's men suffering from a strange holiday fever, acting out a series of holiday homicides in the main office.

"b.i.t.c.h," yelled Nolan, pointing his finger at Hollingsworth. "You got me the same thing last year ... BANG!"

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I already got a toaster," said Hollingsworth, turning his finger on Requer. "POW!"

"Oh yeah?" says Requer, firing a round in Nolan's direction. "Well, you burned the stuffing again this year."

Their little dramas weren't all that farfetched, either: On a legendary Christmas shift back in the early 1970s, a father killed his son in a dark meatlight meat argument at the family dinner table, plunging the carving knife into the kid's chest to a.s.sure himself of the first crack at the serving plate.

True, the captain always remembers to have a respectable deli spread brought up for the night crew. True, also, that the Christmas shift is the one night of the year when a detective can pull a bottle out of his desk without worrying about being caught by a roving duty officer. Even so, the holiday shift in homicide remains the most depressing duty imaginable. And as luck would have it this year, the three-week shift change for D'Addario's men falls on the morning of December 25. Landsman and McLarney will work their squads on the Christmas Eve four-to-twelve shift, followed by Nolan's men on midnight, followed by McLarney's men again for the Christmas dayshift relief.

No one is happy about the schedule, but Dave Brown, for one, has found a way around its rigors. He always makes a point of putting in early for vacation on the holidays, and this year, with a one-year-old daughter and fervent dreams of domestic bliss, he plans to be nowhere near headquarters on Christmas morning. Naturally, this absurd notion of Brown's becomes yet another item on Donald Worden's list of things for which the younger detective requires abuse, to wit: 1. Brown hasn't done s.h.i.t with the Carol Wright case, which is still nothing more than a questionable death by automobile.

2. He has just finished five weeks of medical for a leg operation at Hopkins, a procedure allegedly made necessary by some sort of mysterious nerve damage or muscle spasms that any real man would ignore after a second beer.

3. His abilities as a homicide detective have yet to be truly tested.

4. He won't be around to drive to Pikesville for garlic bagels on the Sunday dayshift, since that happens to be Christmas Day.

5. Worse, he now has the nerve to be off on holiday while the rest of his squad has to work both ends of a shift change.

6. He's a piece of s.h.i.t to begin with.

Worden, with his remarkable memory, has no need to write down this healthy little list. Instead, he keeps it on the tip of his tongue, so as to better reacquaint the younger man with the essential facts of life.

"Brown, you are a piece of s.h.i.t," Worden declared on the elevator one evening a week ago. "As long as I've been on, do you know how many days I missed on medical?"

"Yes, you miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I know," answered Brown, his voice rising. "You've never missed one lousy, stinking day for medical. You only told me about a thousand times, you ..."

"Not one day," said Worden, smiling.

"Not one day," said Brown in falsetto imitation. "Give me a f.u.c.kin' break already, will you?"

"But your leg hurt a little so you-"

"It was a serious medical condition," yelled Brown, losing all patience. "There was an operation-a dangerous, life-threatening operation ..."

Worden only smiled. He had the poor boy right where he wanted him; in fact, he'd had him there for weeks. Worden had become so utterly insufferable that the day after the encounter on the elevator, the Carol Wright folder suddenly and magically returned from the oblivion of the file cabinets to occupy a more prominent place on David Brown's desk.

"It has nothing to do with Worden," Brown insisted at the time. "This case has bothered the s.h.i.t out of me for months and I always planned to come back on it as soon as I came off medical."

Probably so. But now, from the other side of the coffee room, Worden watches with a measure of personal satisfaction as the younger detective spends another day reacquainting himself with the dead billy girl on the gravel lot.

Brown picks through the pieces of the file, reacclimating himself to the office reports, scene photos, follow-ups and BPI shots of a dozen suspects who never panned out. Once again he reads the witness statements from Helen's Hollywood Bar, the woozy statements of drunks who wanted to believe that the killer was driving a Lotus custom through the streets of Baltimore. Once again he glances through the reports from all those random car stops of black sports cars and compacts in the southern districts of the city.

There is nothing worse than a billy murder, thinks Brown, contradicting any earlier a.s.sessments. I hate billies: They talk when they're not supposed to, they f.u.c.k up your investigation, they waste your time by prattling on about everything they know. f.u.c.k this case, he tells himself. Gimme a drug murder in the projects where n.o.body saw a thing, he muses. Gimme something I can work with.

Brown rereads the various descriptions of the suspect provided by bar patrons, the contradictory statements about hair length and style and eye color and everything else. He lines up the ident photos collected from every old lead and looks for anything that comes close to matching, but without better descriptions it's hopeless. Not only that, but the ident photos all seem disturbingly similar. Every billy boy seems to stare out at the camera with one of those oh-so-this-is-my-mug-shot expressions; every one seems to sport tattoos, bad teeth and a tanktop shirt so dirty it could stand up on its own.

Look at this piece of work, thinks Brown, pulling one photo from the pile-a billy if ever there was one. The kid is an obvious motorhead, his s.h.a.g of jet black hair parted in the middle and running halfway down to his a.s.s. He's got f.u.c.ked-up teeth-big surprise there-and weird blond eyebrows. Christ, the kid's got an expression so vacant that it qualifies as probable cause for a drug warrant ...

Whoa. He's got blond eyebrows. Blond as can be, thinks Brown, stunned.

The detective holds the ident photo close, his eyes bouncing back and forth between the kid's hair and eyebrows. Black, blond. Black, blond. Gimme a f.u.c.king break here; they're right there in the photograph, plain as day. How the h.e.l.l did I miss that the first time? he wonders, searching for the report that was once stapled to the photo.

Sure enough, the kid's name came from a car stop over by Pigtown, a follow-up by a Southern District officer on that lookout they had teletyped to patrol back in August. Brown finds the report and remembers it immediately: The guy was driving a black Mustang with a sunroof. Not exactly a T-top, not exactly a Lotus. But it was in the ballpark. A Mustang could have those low-to-the-ground performance tires, just as the traffic man had described. But the first time Brown read the report he had discounted it. The district officer stated unequivocally that the driver of the car had dark hair, and the one thing every witness agreed on was that Carol Wright's companion was blond. Only a week ago, after reopening the file, did he bother to ask the ident section to send him photos of the long shots like this one. And only now was he noticing the mismatched eyebrows.

"Donald, look at this."

Worden steps over, expecting something lame.

"This photo is from an arrest a couple weeks after my murder. Check out his eyebrows."

The older detective scans the ident photo and raises an eyebrow of his own. Why in h.e.l.l would a blond billy boy dye his hair black? You might go the other way, but blond to black? How often does a kid do that?

A good catch, Worden admits to himself. A h.e.l.luva good catch.

Given the four-month delay, there isn't a lot of hope for recovering any physical evidence, and it will be after the holidays before Brown and Worden get back on the street to chase this one. But when they do pluck the kid from his girlfriend's house in Pigtown on a January morning, Jimmy Lee Shrout's hair will be dyed red and he will act as though he's been waiting for them since August. The battered Mustang, found in front of the girlfriend's house that same day, will be towed to the Fallsway garage, where Worden is waiting with a lab tech. With the car up on a jack, the detective and tech begin by pulling greasy debris from the bottom, and for the first ten minutes or so they find dirt and shards of paper and pieces of leaves, until the lab tech is scoffing at the idea that anything will be left on the undercarriage after all this time.

"Well," Worden replies, pulling at the edge of a thin strand, trying to pry it from the front crossbar, "what do we call this, then?"

"I'll be d.a.m.ned."

Worden gently unwraps the strand from the crossbar, traversing the metal three times. Finally, a long, reddish hair slides into his hand.

"What color hair did she have?" the tech asks.

"Red," says Worden. "She had red hair."

Later that day, Jimmy Lee Shrout will wait for the detectives in the large interrogation room, and when the wait gets a little long, he will go to sleep. Later still, he will be shown a picture of Carol Wright and he will tell Brown and Worden that he remembers picking her up as she hitchhiked on Hanover Street. He also remembers that she went to see someone at the Southern District and afterward he took her to a bar in Fell's Point. Yeah, Helen's-that was the name. They drank a little, she danced. Then he offered to drive her home, but she took him instead to this parking lot in South Baltimore, where she smoked his dope. He wanted to go home and sleep and he told her so. She got mad and left thecar, after which he fell asleep behind the wheel. He woke up a short time later and drove away.

"Jimmy, she was run over on that lot."

"I didn't do that."

"Jimmy, you ran her down."

"I'd been drinking. I can't remember."

Later, in a second interview, Jimmy Shrout admits to remembering that he hit a slight b.u.mp as he drove off the gravel lot. He tells the detectives that he thought he'd hit a curb or something.

"Jimmy, there's no curb on that lot."

"I don't remember," the kid insists.

Brown is especially curious about one particular detail: "Later on, did you ever find a single sandal anywhere in your car?"

"A sandal?"

"Like a woman's summer thong."

"Yeah, a few weeks later. I came across something like that. I thought it was my girlfried's and I threw it out."

In the end, it will be nothing better than manslaughter by auto, which is nothing better than two or three years of state time, tops. The problem with homicide by auto is the same as homicide by arson: Without witnesses, no jury can be made to believe that someone killed that way isn't the victim of an accident.

Both Worden and Brown understand that, but Sprout's story will make it clear to them what actually happened in that parking lot. It wasn't Shrout who wanted to go home, it was Carol Wright. She wanted to go and Shrout was upset. After all, she'd driven across Baltimore with him, she'd smoked his s.h.i.t, and now she wasn't going for anything. They argued and she got angry or maybe scared; either way, Brown and Worden cannot imagine that Carol Wright left that car of her own volition and walked across that gravel lot with only one shoe. No question about it: She left that car in a hurry.

All that waits in the future, but today, at the moment that Dave Brown notices the bad dye job in Jimmy Lee Sprout's ident photo, the case is solved, and it's solved as a murder, not an accidental death by auto, not a case pended by the medical examiner. Dave Brown has every reason to be satisfied: Regardless of what any prosecutor or jury wants to say about it later, today the death of Carol Wright is going down as a crime. Black hair, blond eyebrows, case closed.

Another case closes as well. A few hours after Brown shows him the ident photo, telling him to check the hair color, Worden watches Brown pack up his desk and walk to the coffee room coat rack.

"Sergeant," says Brown to McLarney, who sits across the aisle from Worden, "unless you need me for anything, I'm going to start my holiday."

"No, go ahead, Dave," agrees McLarney.

"Donald," says Brown, acknowledging the older detective, "have a good one."

"You too, David," answers Worden. "Merry Christmas to you and yours."

Brown stops in his tracks. David? Not Brown? And merry Christmas? Not "Season's greetings, you piece of s.h.i.t"? Or even "Happy holidays, you worthless f.u.c.k"?

"That's it?" Brown asks, turning back to Worden. "'Merry Christmas, David'? You're not going to give me s.h.i.t? Last month I walked out of here and it was 'Happy Thanksgiving, you piece of s.h.i.t.'"

"Merry Christmas, David," says Worden again.

Brown shakes his head and McLarney begins to laugh.

"You want me to call you a piece of s.h.i.t," says Worden, "I'll call you a piece of s.h.i.t."

"No, hey. I'm just confused."