"Oh, you're confused," says Worden, now smiling. "In that case, give me a quarter."

"You're always giving him quarters," says McLarney. "Why is Worden always taking quarters from you?"

Dave Brown shrugs.

"You don't know?" asks Worden.

"I have no f.u.c.king idea," says Brown, fishing out a coin and tossing it to the older detective. "He's Donald Worden. If he wants a quarter, I give him a quarter."

Worden smiles strangely at this particular gap in Dave Brown's education.

"Well," asks Brown, looking at Worden, "is there a reason?"

Still smiling, Worden holds Brown's latest contribution between thumb and forefinger, his arm extended upward so that the coin catches a little shine from the fluorescent lights.

"Twenty-five cents," says Worden.

"Yeah. So?"

"How long have I been a poh-leece?" asks Worden, giving it the full Hampden drawl.

And at last Dave Brown understands. Twenty-five cents, twenty-five years. Worden's small, symbolic affirmation.

"Pretty soon," says Worden, smiling, "I'm gonna have to ask for a nickel too."

Brown smiles as the logic settles in his mind. He's learned something he never even wondered about, the answer to a question he never thought to ask. Worden wants a quarter, you give him a quarter. He's the Big Man, for Chrissakes, the last natural police detective in America.

"Here, Brown," offers Worden, tossing the quarter back to the younger detective. "Merry Christmas to you."

Brown stands in the center of the coffee room, holding the quarter in his right hand, his face creased by confusion.

"You need a quarter, Donald, take it," he says, throwing the coin back.

Worden catches it and tosses it back in one fluid motion. "I don't want your money. Not today."

"You can have it."

"David," Worden says, tiring, "keep your f.u.c.king quarter. A merry Christmas to you and yours and I'll see you after the holidays."

Brown looks at Worden oddly, as if the entire contents of his mind had suddenly been rearranged like furniture. He hesitates in the doorway, waiting for G.o.d knows what.

"What're you hanging around for?" asks Worden.

"Nothing," Brown answers finally. "Merry Christmas, Donald."

He leaves as a free man, debts canceled and dues paid.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23.

Tom Pellegrini sits like Ahab himself at the corner of the colonel's sixth-floor conference table, staring hard at the white whale of his own making.

Across the table is, in his opinion, Latonya Wallace's murderer, but the Fish Man doesn't look like a child-killer; he never has, really. The aging store owner is an everyman for West Baltimore, his dull, dark jacket, baggy trousers and work boots a statement of quiet surrender understood by any working man. Less typical is the smoking pipe he carries in a jacket pocket, an item that never made much sense to Pellegrini. For a Whitelock Street denizen, it seemed something of an affectation, a small island of rebellion speckling this sea of human conformity. On several occasions over the past year, Pellegrini had been tempted to grab the stinking, smoldering thing and send it soaring.

Today, he has done as much.

Amid so many greater issues to be decided, it is a small point, but to Pellegrini even the small points matter now. The Fish Man likes his pipe, and for that reason alone he cannot have it. During previous interrogations, the store owner had, at critical moments, drawn on his pipe as if it were its own answer, and Pellegrini had come to a.s.sociate the smell of the Fish Man's weed with the man's unflappable calm and indifference. And so, when the Fish Man reaches for his pouch not five minutes after taking his seat at the table, Pellegrini tells him to put the pipe away.

This time, everything has to be different. This time, the old store owner has to be made to believe that he is truly beaten, that they know his darkest secret even before he reveals it. He has to be made to forget about those other trips downtown; he has to be denied the comfort of that history, and to the extent that the pipe was part of that history, he has to be denied that as well.

And other things, Pellegrini tells himself, will be different. The man sitting on the other side of the table, across from the Fish Man, is proof enough of that.

During the months of preparation for this final confrontation, the idea of interrogation as a clinical science has become a religion for Pellegrini, and the firm of Interrotec a.s.sociates Inc., in particular, a priestly cla.s.s. Pellegrini has digested the firm's written material as well as its history of successful interviews in a variety of military and government security probes as well as criminal investigations. The company was good; the police departments who had worked with its interrogators said as much when he called them for references. The officers of the firm described themselves as "interrogational specialists, consultants and publishers dedicated to the research, development and enhancement of the art of interview." A mouthful, to be sure, but Pellegrini argued that in the Latonya Wallace case, as in no other, the quality and precision of this last interrogation was paramount.

Pellegrini had crafted his memo requesting the interrogator with that argument at its center, and he was careful to dwell on the reputation of the firm rather than the suggestion that the Baltimore unit lacked any necessary expertise. The use of the company's interviewers for one weekend would cost about a thousand dollars, and for a department as impoverished as the Baltimore force-where no real money is budgeted to pay street informants, much less contract out for investigative talent-Pellegrini's request was an extraordinary one.

Landsman backed him, of course. Not out of any great belief in the science of the thing, but simply because Pellegrini was the primary investigator. It was his murder, and this was a suspect he had pursued and developed for ten months. In Landsman's mind, the issue was clear: His detective had a right to see this thing through in whatever way he saw fit.

The captain also gave the proposal support, and as Pellegrini's memo traveled from gold braid to gold braid on the eighth floor, it met with surprisingly little resistance. More than anything else that year, the Latonya Wallace case had been a true crusade for the department as a whole, and in this rare instance, the bosses seemed to feel as their detectives did.

The money was allocated. The Interrotec people were contacted and the date set. A week ago, and then yesterday as well, Pellegrini had visited Whitelock Street and the Fish Man, reminding his suspect that he would probably need to talk with him again on Friday and suggesting that the store owner's cooperation was in every way required.

And now they begin.

"You understand why you're here," says the man on the other side of the table. The words are quiet but hard, and the voice speaking them somehow manages to impart conflicting emotions in every syllable-behind the voice is anger and empathy, unyielding patience and raging impulse.

To Pellegrini's eye, Glenn Foster has a real talent for interrogation, and the detective is satisfied to let the man lead this last charge. As the vice president of Interrotec and an acknowledged expert in the craft of criminal interrogation, Foster was sold to Pellegrini as something of a magic bullet-an interrogator who had been used by police agencies in eighteen criminal investigations and who had emerged with results every time. The Pentagon had used Foster for sensitive security interviews; veteran prosecutors and detectives who had worked with the Interrotec people swore by him.

In addition to his hired gun, Pellegrini can also count on the leverage being different than in the past. This time, he has the tar and burned wood samples-the virtual match between the smudges on the dead girl's pants and the debris from the Fish Man's gutted Whitelock Street store. That is evidence, to be sure, and more of it than they had for the first two interrogations of the store owner.

On the other hand, Pellegrini's attempt to isolate the store as the only logical source of the burned material had proved futile. The computer run he requested two months ago for Reservoir Hill arson and fire calls over the last several years has turned up a hundred or more separate addresses that had been damaged by fire. Now, months after the murder, there was no conceivable way for Pellegrini to eliminate many of those locations from consideration, or for him even to be sure which burned buildings were actually gutted back in February. Some had since been repaired; others had been vacant for years; still others-small structures or parts of structures that burned in small, unreported fires-might not even be on the computer list. No, the chemical a.n.a.lysis was leverage for this interrogation and nothing more. Still, leverage used properly could mean everything.

Granted his request for interrogative expertise, Pellegrini had told himself that if this last confrontation failed, he could close the file knowing that he had done everything conceivable. He told himself that there would be no more recrimination, that he would leave this b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a case in a file drawer and go back into the rotation-really go back this time-and work the murders hard. No more Theodore Johnsons. No more Barney Erelys. He told that to himself and to Landsman as well, but Pellegrini was more confident than he let on; in fact, he had a hard time imagining that this final a.s.sault on the Fish Man would fail. They had a quality interrogator lined up, a man who had taught criminology at universities and lectured at police academies nationwide. They had the chemical match. And still, after all these months, they had a suspect who knew the victim, who had blown his lie detector, who had no alibi, who matched the FBI's psychological profile of the killer, who had a history of s.e.x offenses, whose willingness to subject himself to harsh, prolonged investigation was proven. This time, Pellegrini believed, they could win. He could win.

From the other side of the conference room table, Pellegrini listens to Foster circling like some calculating predator, probing for every weakness.

"Listen to me," says Foster.

"Hmmm," says the Fish Man, looking up.

"You understand why you're here."

"You brought me here."

"But you know why, don't you?"

The Fish Man says nothing.

"Why are you here?" asks Foster.

"It's about the girl," says the Fish Man, uncomfortable.

"The girl," says Foster.

"Yeah," says the Fish Man after a pause.

"Say her name," says Foster.

The Fish Man looks across the table.

"Say her name."

"Her name?" says the Fish Man, visibly upset.

"You know her name."

"Latonya." The store owner lets go of the name as though it's the very confession itself. With each answer, Pellegrini can feel the Fish Man losing a little bit of control. Foster is good, thinks Pellegrini. d.a.m.n good. Making the Fish Man say the little girl's name, for example: What better technique to bring an introvert like the old store owner out of his sh.e.l.l.

Born and bred deep in the Bible Belt, Foster had come to law enforcement after a stint as a Baptist minister, an experience that marked the pattern and delivery of his speech. His voice could be at one moment a blunt instrument, heavy with accusation, and at the next a faint whisper, hinting at broken secrets.

"Let me tell you why I'm here," Foster says to the Fish Man. "I'm here because I've seen your kind before. I know about your kind ..."

The Fish Man looks up, curious.

"I've seen a thousand like you."

Pellegrini watches his suspect, trying to gauge his body language. The Fish Man's downward gaze at the table or at the floor is a sure sign of deception, according to the Kinesic Interviewing texts, just as the folded arms and backward lean in the chair suggest an introvert unwilling to accept control. To Pellegrini, all of the reading and preparation of the last three months now seems relevant to the moment-all of the science would now be put to the test.

"... and you've never met anyone like me," Foster tells the Fish Man. "No, you haven't. You may have had people talk to you before, but not the way I'm going to talk to you. I know you, mister ..."

Pellegrini listens as the lead interrogator begins an unyielding monologue, an endless rant in which Foster transforms himself from a merely mortal form into a towering figure of omnipotent authority. It is the standard prelude to any prolonged interrogation, the beginning of the soliloquy in which a detective establishes his own myth of expertise. For the Baltimore detectives, the speech usually consists of a.s.suring a suspect that he's dealing with the reincarnation of Eliot Ness and that everyone who was ever foolish enough to sit in this box and talk s.h.i.t to G.o.d's own detective is now marking time on Death Row. But to Pellegrini, Foster seems to be giving the standard lecture a little more dramatic intensity.

"... I know all about you ..."

Foster is good, all right, but he's only one weapon in the a.r.s.enal. Looking around the conference room, Pellegrini can take additional satisfaction, knowing that for this last interrogation, he is firing every gun.

As with the second interrogation of the Fish Man-the February encounter staged in the captain's office-this confrontation has also been ch.o.r.eographed. Once again, photographs of the dead girl have been placed directly in front of the suspect. This time, however, Pellegrini is using everything in the case file-not only the color photographs from the crime scene but also the larger black-and-white shots from the overhead camera at Penn Street. Every last insult to Latonya Wallace-the ligature across the neck; the thin, deep puncture wounds; the long, jagged tear of the final evisceration-is arrayed in front of the man that Pellegrini believes to be the killer. The photographs have been selected for maximum effect, yet Pellegrini knows that such a brutal psychological ploy can itself damage any confession.

It is a risk that every detective runs when he gives up too much of his case in the interrogation room, and in the case at hand, the risk is doubled. Not only could a defense attorney later claim that the Fish Man had confessed only after being shocked and awed by the horror of the photographs, but that same lawyer could argue that the confession itself included no independent corroboration. After all, even those facts that the detectives kept secret back in February-the ligature strangulation, the v.a.g.i.n.al tearing-are now tacked to the conference room wall. Even if the Fish Man does break down and recount his murder of the child, no one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that such a confession is genuine-unless the Fish Man's statement contains some additional details that can be independently corroborated.

Pellegrini knows all that; still, the photographs have been tacked to the bulletin boards, one glossy obscenity after another, each staring back at the store owner, each a terrifying appeal to conscience. There will be no interrogation after this one, the detective reasons, no other opportunity for which the last secrets of the murder need be preserved.

At the center of one bulletin board, Pellegrini has placed his trump cards. First there is the chemical a.n.a.lysis of the burned tar and wood chips from both the little girl's pants and the Fish Man's store. Each sample is represented by a long bar graph and the two graphs are remarkably similar. Prepared by the trace laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the a.n.a.lysis of the samples was an exacting piece of work, and the lab added a veteran a.n.a.lyst to its report. If Pellegrini needs some instant expertise, the man is outside the room now, ready and willing. So, too, are Jay Landsman and Tim Doory, the lead prosecutor in the Violent Crimes Unit, who would evaluate the results of the interrogation and make the ultimate decision of whether to charge the murder.

Above the cross-tab charts on the bulletin board, Pellegrini has fixed a blue line zoning map of the Reservoir Hill area, with between eighty and one hundred structures highlighted in yellow-each noting the location of a fire call within the past five years. The Fish Man's store on Whitelock Street, however, is marked in darker orange. The map is in every real sense a lie-a deception that Pellegrini can use without any fear of discovery. In truth, he has been unable to eliminate the vast majority of those yellow marks on the map; any one of them can theoretically have been the site at which the little girl's pants had been smudged. And yet, for the purpose of this interrogation, nothing like that can possibly be true. For this interrogation, Pellegrini will tell the Fish Man that the chemical a.n.a.lysis has left no doubt: The black smudges on the dead girl's pants came from the darker orange square at the elbow of Whitelock Street.

The chemical a.n.a.lysis-the linchpin of this interrogation-gave them real leverage, but it also gave them the Out. Maybe you didn't kill her, Foster can tell him. Maybe you didn't touch her and violate her and then choke the life from her. Maybe you weren't the one who took a kitchen knife to her afterward, emptying her until you were sure she was dead. But, Foster can say, you know who did do it. You know because she was killed on that Tuesday night and then left in your burned-out fish store all day Wednesday. She was left there to wait for the rainy darkness of early Thursday morning. She was in that store and the soot and burned wood on her pants proves it. If you didn't kill her, maybe someone else-someone you know, or someone whose name you don't remember-hid the little girl inside your store.

Beyond the snare of the chemical a.n.a.lysis, Pellegrini has little else: the failed polygraph, the acknowledged prior relationship with the dead girl, the absence of any verifiable alibi. The case is motive, opportunity and apparent deception, coupled with one lonely piece of physical evidence. A final trump card to be played at a key moment lies deep in Pellegrini's jacket pocket, where he carries one last photograph. But that old picture can't be called evidence; it is, the detective knows, no better than a hunch.

Foster meanders through the opening monologue. After spending half an hour establishing his own expertise, the veteran interrogator proceeds to lionize Pellegrini as well. Foster acknowledges that the Fish Man and his princ.i.p.al pursuer have met in the past, but, he explains, Pellegrini did not give up on this case after those earlier confrontations. No, Foster says, he continued to work on you. He continued to gather evidence.

The Fish Man remains impa.s.sive.

"What's going to happen here today is different from what happened when you talked to Detective Pellegrini before," says Foster.

The store owner nods slightly. A strange gesture, thinks Pellegrini.

"You've been here before, but you didn't tell the truth," says Foster, turning the corner and launching into the first confrontation. "We know that."

The Fish Man shakes his head.

"I'm telling you we know that."

"I don't know anything."

"Yes," says Foster quietly. "You do."

Very slowly and very deliberately, Foster begins to explain the chemical comparison of the dead girl's pants and the samples from the Whitelock Street store. At the appropriate moment, Pellegrini reaches down and pulls the soiled pants from a brown evidence bag, then lays the garment on the table, pointing to the black smudges near the knees.

The Fish Man doesn't react.

Foster presses on, pointing to a photograph of the dead girl behind Newington Avenue, showing the store owner that the black smudges were there on the pants when they found her.

"Now look at this," he says, pointing to the ATF report. "These lines here show what these stains are made of, and these over here, they show what it is that Detective Pellegrini took from your store."

Nothing. No reaction.

"See this map," says Pellegrini, pointing to the bulletin board. "We checked every building in Reservoir Hill where there has ever been a fire and none of them match these stains."

"None of them except yours," adds Foster.

The Fish Man shakes his head. He is not angry. He is not even defensive. To Pellegrini, his lack of response is unnerving.

"She was in your store and she got that stuff on her pants," says Foster. "Either just before or just after she was killed, she got that stuff on her pants in your store."

"I don't know nothing about that," says the Fish Man.

"Yes, you do," says Foster.

The Fish Man shakes his head.

"Well, then what is this stuff from your store doing on her pants?"

"It can't be. I don't know how that can be."

Somehow they're not getting through. The interrogators return to their visual aids, covering the same ground a second time. Foster leads the store owner through it slowly enough so that there can be no mistaking the logic.

"Look at these lines here," says Foster, pointing to the ATF report. "It's exactly the same. How do you explain that?"