Part 60 (1/2)

”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 fas.h.i.+on (”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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft in homicide remains the most depressing duty imaginable. And as luck would have it this year, the three-week s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft, followed by Nolan's men on midnight, followed by McLarney's men again for the Christmas days.h.i.+ft 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 days.h.i.+ft, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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?”