Part 6 (1/2)

Roger Nolan only smiles. Edgerton could be a problem child, but Nolan knows him to be a good detective and is therefore tolerant of his idiosyncrasies. Besides, Edgerton has more than a simple suicide on his plate: He caught the first murder of the year for Nolan's squad, a particularly vicious stabbing from the Northwest that showed no sign of going down easily.

It was the first leg of a midnight s.h.i.+ft two weeks back that Edgerton met Brenda Thompson, an overweight, sad-faced woman who finished twenty-eight years in the rear seat of a four-door Dodge found idling at a bus stop and pay phone in the 2400 block of Garrison Boulevard.

The crime scene was largely the Dodge, with the victim slumped in the back seat, her s.h.i.+rt and bra hiked up to display a chest and stomach marked by a dozen or more vertical stab wounds. On the floor of the back seat, the killer had dumped the contents of the victim's purse, indicating an apparent robbery. Beyond that, there was no physical evidence in the car-no fingerprints, no hairs, no fibers, no torn skin or blood beneath the victim's fingernails, no nothing. Without witnesses, Edgerton was in for a long haul.

For two weeks, he had worked backward on Brenda Thompson's last hours, learning that on the night of her murder she was picking up money from a stable of young street dealers who sold her husband's heroin along Pennsylvania Avenue. The drugs were one motive, but Edgerton couldn't discount a straight-up robbery either. Just this afternoon, in fact, he had been across the hall in CID robbery, checking knife attacks in the Northwest, looking for even the slimmest of new leads.

That Edgerton has been working a fresh murder doesn't count for much. Nor does it matter to anyone in his squad that he took the suicide call with little complaint. Edgerton's workload remains a sore point with his colleagues, Bowman and Kincaid in particular. And as their sergeant, Roger Nolan knows that it can only get worse. It's Nolan's responsibility to keep his detectives from one another's throats, and so, more than anyone in the room, the sergeant listens to the banter with the understanding that every comment has an edge.

Bowman, for one, can't leave it alone. ”I don't know what we're coming to when Harry has to go out and handle a suicide.”

”Don't worry,” mutters Edgerton, pulling the report from the typewriter, ”after this one, I'm done for the year.”

At which point, even Bowman has to laugh.

TWO.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4.

It is the illusion of tears and nothing more, the rainwater that collects in small beads and runs to the hollows of her face. The dark brown eyes are fixed wide, staring across wet pavement; jet black braids of hair surround the deep brown skin, high cheekbones and a pert, upturned nose. The lips are parted and curled in a slight, vague frown. She is beautiful, even now.

She is resting on her left hip, her head c.o.c.ked to one side, her back arched, with one leg bent over the other. Her right arm rests above her head, her left arm is fully extended, with small, thin fingers reaching out across the asphalt for something, or someone, no longer there.

Her upper body is partially wrapped in a red vinyl raincoat. Her pants are a yellow print, but they are dirty and smudged. The front of her blouse and the nylon jacket beneath the raincoat are both ripped, both blotted red where the life ran out of her. A single ligature mark-the deep impression of a rope or cord-travels the entire circ.u.mference of her neck, crisscrossing just below the base of the skull. Above her right arm is a blue cloth satchel, set upright on the pavement and crammed with library books, some papers, a cheap camera and a cosmetic case containing makeup in bright reds, blues and purples-exaggerated, girlish colors that suggest amus.e.m.e.nt more than allure.

She is eleven years old.

Among the detectives and patrol officers crowded over the body of Latonya Kim Wallace there is no easy banter, no coa.r.s.e exchange of cop humor or time-worn indifference. Jay Landsman offers only clinical, declarative statements as he moves through the scene. Tom Pellegrini stands mute in the light rain, sketching the surroundings on a damp notebook page. Behind them, against the rear wall of a rowhouse, leans one of the first Central District officers to arrive at the scene, one hand on his gun belt, the other absently holding his radio mike.

”Cold,” he says, almost to himself.

From the moment of discovery, Latonya Wallace is never regarded as anything less than a true victim, innocent as few of those murdered in this city ever are. A child, a fifth-grader, has been used and discarded, a monstrous sacrifice to an unmistakable evil.

Worden had first crack at the call, which came in from communications as nothing more specific than a body in the alley behind the 700 block of Newington Avenue, a residential block in the Reservoir Hill section of the city's midtown. D'Addario's s.h.i.+ft had gone to daywork the week before, and when the phone line lit up at 8:15 A.M A.M., his detectives were still a.s.sembling for the 8:40 roll call.

Worden scrawled the particulars on the back of a p.a.w.n shop card, then showed it to Landsman. ”You want me to take it?”

”Nah, my guys are all here,” the sergeant said. ”It's probably some smokehound laid out with his bottle.”

Landsman lit a cigarette, located Pellegrini in the coffee room, then grabbed the keys to a Cavalier from a departing midnight s.h.i.+ft detective. Ten minutes later, he was on the radio from Newington Avenue, calling for troops.

Edgerton went. Then McAllister, Bowman and Rich Garvey, the workhorse of Roger Nolan's squad. Then Dave Brown, from McLarney's crew, and Fred Ceruti, from Landsman's squad.

Pellegrini, Landsman and Edgerton all work the scene. The others fan out from the body: Brown and Bowman walking slowly in the light rain through adjacent yards and trash-filled alleys, eyes fixed on the ground for a blood trail, a knife, a piece of quarter-inch rope to match the ligature on the neck, a shred of clothing; Ceruti, and then Edgerton, crawling up a wooden ladder to the first-and second-floor tar roofs of adjacent rowhouses, checking for anything not visible from the alley itself; Garvey and McAllister splitting away from the scene to work back on the young girl's last known movements, checking first the missing persons report that had been filed two days earlier, then interviewing teachers, friends and the librarian at the Park Avenue branch, where Latonya Wallace had last been seen alive.

Just inside the rear door of 718 Newington, a few feet from the body, Pellegrini deposits the rain-soaked satchel on a kitchen table surrounded by detectives, patrolmen and lab technicians. Landsman carefully opens the top flap and peers inside at a schoolgirl's possessions.

”Mostly books,” he says after a few seconds. ”Let's go through it at the lab. We don't want to get into this stuff out here.”

Pellegrini lifts the blue bag off the table and carefully hands it to Fasio, the lab tech. Then he returns to his notebook and reviews the raw details of a crime scene-time of call, unit numbers, times of arrival-before walking out the rear door and staring for a few more moments at the dead child.

The black Dodge morgue wagon is already parked at the end of the alley and Pellegrini watches Pervis from the ME's office make his way down the pavement and into the yard. Pervis looks briefly at the body before finding Landsman in the rear kitchen.

”Are we ready to go?”

Landsman glances over at Pellegrini, who seems to hesitate for a moment. Standing in that kitchen doorway on Newington Avenue, Tom Pellegrini feels a fleeting impulse to tell the ME to wait, to keep the body where it is-to slow the entire process and take hold of a crime scene that seems to be evaporating before his eyes. It is, after all, his murder. He had arrived first with Landsman; he is now the primary detective. And although half the s.h.i.+ft is now snaking through the neighborhood in search of information, it will be Pellegrini alone who stands or falls with the case.

Months later, the detective will remember that morning on Reservoir Hill with both regret and frustration. He will find himself wis.h.i.+ng that for just a few minutes he could have cleared the yard behind 718 Newington of detectives and uniforms and lab techs and ME attendants. He will sit at his desk in the annex office and imagine a still, silent tableau, with himself at the edge of the rear yard, seated in a chair, perhaps on a stool, examining the body of Latonya Wallace and its surroundings with calm, rational precision. Pellegrini will remember, too, that in those early moments he had deferred to the veteran detectives, Landsman and Edgerton, abdicating his own authority in favor of men who had been there many times before. That was understandable, but much later Pellegrini will become frustrated at the thought that he was never really in control of his case.

But in the crowded kitchen that morning, with Pervis leaning into the doorway, Pellegrini's discomfort is nothing more than a vague feeling with neither voice nor reason behind it. Pellegrini has sketched the scene in his notebook and, along with Landsman and Edgerton, has walked every inch of that yard and much of the alley as well. Fasio has his photos and is already measuring the key distances. Moreover, it is now close to nine. The neighborhood is stirring, and in the bleak light of a February morning, the presence of a child's body, eviscerated and splayed on wet pavement under a slow drizzle, seems more obscene with each pa.s.sing moment. Even homicide detectives must live with the natural, unspoken impulse to bring Latonya Kim Wallace in from the rain.

”Yeah, I think we're ready,” says Landsman. ”What do you think, Tom?”

Pellegrini pauses.

”Tom?”

”No. We're ready.”

”Let's do it.”

Landsman and Pellegrini follow the morgue wagon back downtown to get a jump on the postmortem while Edgerton and Ceruti pilot separate cars to a drab pillbox of an apartment building on Druid Lake Drive, about three and a half blocks away. Both men drop cigarette b.u.t.ts outside the apartment door, then step quickly to the first-floor landing. Edgerton hesitates before knocking and looks at Ceruti.

”Lemme take this one.”

”Hey, it's all yours, Harry.”

”You'll bring her down to the ME, okay?”

Ceruti nods.

Edgerton puts his hand to the door and knocks. He pulls out his s.h.i.+eld and then inhales deeply at the sound of footsteps inside apartment 739A. The door opens slowly to reveal a man in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing denims and a T-s.h.i.+rt. He acknowledges and accepts the two detectives with a slight nod even before Edgerton can identify himself. The young man steps back and the detectives follow him across the threshold. In the dining room sits a small boy, eating cold cereal and turning the pages of a coloring book. From a back bedroom comes the sound of a door opening, then footsteps. Edgerton's voice falls close to a whisper.

”Is Latonya's mother home?”

There is no chance to answer. The woman stands in a bathrobe at the edge of the dining room, beside her a young girl, just into her teens perhaps, with the same flawless features as the girl on Newington Avenue. The woman's eyes, terrified and sleepless, fix on Harry Edgerton's face.

”My daughter. You found her?”

Edgerton looks at her, shakes his head sideways, but says nothing. The woman looks past Edgerton to Ceruti, then to the empty doorway.

”Where is she? She ... all right?”

Edgerton shakes his head again.

”Oh G.o.d.”