Homicide (43 page)

Even in the homicide unit, where a measure of talent and intelligence was assumed, Worden was recognized as a precious commodity—a cop’s cop, a true investigator. For his three years in homicide, he had worked the midnight shifts and double shifts beside younger men. He showed them what twenty-five years can teach and, at the same time, he learned the new tricks that homicide work could teach him. Until Monroe Street,
Worden seemed indestructible if not infallible. Until Monroe Street, it had seemed as if the man would go on handling calls forever.

John Scott, dead in an alley with a handful of Western men standing over his body, was, quite simply, the one that got away. Beyond the emotional cost of investigating other cops, of having them lie to you like any other shithead off the street, the Monroe Street probe had become for Worden what the Latonya Wallace murder was for Pellegrini. A man solves ten consecutive murders and begins to believe that he can stay out on the edge forever. Then comes the red ball, the one with a bad bounce, and the same man suddenly begins to wonder where it ends—all the case files, all the reports, all the wounds on all the dead men from all the scenes—so many crimes that the names and faces lose their meaning, until those deprived of liberty and those deprived of life blur into the same sad image.

That alone might be reason enough for Worden to quit, but there were others too. For one thing, he no longer had a family to support. His children were grown, and his wife was long accustomed to what had become a ten-year separation. They had reached an equilibrium: Worden had never filed for a divorce; his wife, he knew, would never file either. As far as his own finances were concerned, Worden was guaranteed a 60 percent pension as soon as he put in his retirement papers, so he was actually earning less than half of his paystub. On his days off, he made better money delivering furs to customers from summer storage, or he worked on the home he had bought down in Brooklyn Park. He was good with his hands and tools, and there was certainly money to be made in home improvements. No less a homicide fixture than Jay Landsman was making thousands of dollars from a company he operated in his spare time; the joke was that Landsman could solve your mother’s murder in a week—or four days if you also wanted to run a new deck off the back patio.

On the other side of the ledger were two good reasons to stay. First there was Diane, the red-headed secretary from the Special Investigations Section down the hall, who by bravely endeavoring to domesticate Worden had won the awe and sympathy of the entire homicide unit. The truth was that Worden was hooked; the gold “D&D” signature ring on his left hand said as much. But even if they got married tomorrow—and Worden was still coming to terms with the idea of something permanent—Diane would not be eligible for full benefits unless he stayed with the department for another year. As a forty-nine-year-old cop with hypertension, Worden had to think about that sort of thing.

Less practically, there was also the small, clear voice in the back of Worden’s head that told him he was meant for this job and no other, the voice that told him that he was still having a helluva time. In his heart of hearts, Worden wanted very much to keep hearing that voice.

A week ago, Waltemeyer had pulled a 1975 murder case out of the back files, a Highlandtown bar robbery in which the shooter had been charged in a warrant but never apprehended. Who would have believed that thirteen years could pass before the suspect finally surfaced in Salt Lake City, telling a friend about a crime he thought everyone had forgotten? Who would have believed that the case file would still contain a photograph of an identification lineup from 1975, a lineup in which five detectives stood shoulder-to-shoulder with one genuine suspect? And check out the face on that heavyset young man, the one with thick blond hair and deep blue eyes, the one staring at the camera, trying hard to look more felon than robbery detective? Donald Worden was thirty-six in that photograph—harder, thinner, gaudily dressed in the kind of checked pants and polyester sport coat that marked an up-and-coming Baltimore detective of an earlier epoch.

Waltemeyer, of course, paraded the photograph around the squad-room, as if he had unearthed the mummified remains of some ancient king. No, Worden told him, I don’t want it for a goddamn souvenir.

The only thing that saved him that day was a ringing phone line and a west side cutting. Worden, like any old fire dog, was out at the sound of the bell. He grabbed the index card with the address and time-of-dispatch and was halfway to the elevators before any other detective could even think about taking the call.

Appropriate to the moment, his partner on the call was Kincaid, another twenty-year man, and together they worked the scene on Franklin-town Road. It was a straight-up domestic stabbing, with the knife on the front lawn and a blood trail leading all the way back into the rowhouse. On the living room floor, immersed in a ten-foot-wide lake of purple-red blood, was the phone used by the husband to call for help.

“Christ, Donald,” said Worden. “This bad boy must’ve caught a vein.”

“Aw yeah,” said Kincaid. “Must have.”

Outside on the stoop, the first officer was writing down particulars for his report with an expected air of indifference. But when he got to the two detectives’ sequence numbers—the departmental code that identifies officers in chronological order—he looked up in wonder.

“A-seven-o-three,” Worden told him.

“A-nine-o-four,” said Kincaid.

To make the A sequence, a man had to come on the force no later than 1967. The uniform, a D sequence himself, shook his head. “Isn’t there anyone up there in homicide with less than twenty years on?”

Worden said nothing and Kincaid went right to work. “This guy’s at University?” he asked.

“Yeah. The ER.”

“How was he doing?”

“They were trying to get him stabilized when I got here.”

The detectives walked back toward the Cavalier, but turned abruptly when another uniform, accompanied by a six-year-old boy, motioned them over to the spot where the knife had been found.

“This young man saw what happened,” said the uniform, loud enough for the child to hear, “and he would like to tell us about it.”

Worden knelt down. “You saw what happened?”

The boy nodded.

“GET AWAY FROM THAT BOY,” screamed a woman from the other side of the street. “YOU CAN’T TALK TO HIM WITHOUT NO LAWYER.”

“Are you his mother?” asked the uniform.

“No, but she don’t want him talkin’ to no police. I know that. Tavon, don’t you say nothin’.”

“So you’re not the mother?” asked the uniform, now seething.

“No.”

“Then get the hell out of here before I lock your ass up,” muttered the patrolman, soft enough to be out of the boy’s earshot. “You hear me?”

Worden turned back to the child. “What did you see?”

“I saw Bobby run out after Jean.”

“You did?”

The boy nodded. “And when he got up close she cut him.”

“Did he run into the knife? Did he run into it by accident or did Jean try to cut him?”

The boy shook his head. “She went like this,” he said, holding his hand steady.

“She did? Well, what’s your name?”

“Tavon.”

“Tavon, you’ve helped us a lot. Thank you.”

Worden and Kincaid liberated their Cavalier from a growing mass of patrol cars and drove east to the emergency room at University, both of
them certain in the knowledge that Rule Six in the homicide lexicon now applied. To wit:

When a suspect is immediately identified in an assault case, the victim is sure to live. When no suspect has been identified, the victim will surely die. Indeed, the rule was confirmed in this instance by the subsequent discovery of Cornell Robert Jones, age thirty-seven, lying on his back in a rear examination room, conscious and alert, as a blonde surgical resident—an especially attractive blonde surgical resident—applied pressure to the wound on his inner left thigh.

“Mr. Jones?” asked Worden.

Wincing with pain, the victim nodded briefly from beneath an oxygen mask.

“Mr. Jones, I’m Detective Worden from the police department. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said the victim, his voice almost muzzled by the mask.

“We’ve been down to your house and the people there say your girlfriend, or is it your wife …”

“My wife.”

“They say your wife cut you. Is that what happened?”

“Goddamn right she cut me,” he said, wincing again.

“You didn’t just run into the knife or anything like that?”

“Hell no. She stabbed me.”

“So if we tell the officer to get a warrant on your wife, you’re not going to change your mind about this tomorrow?”

“No I ain’t.”

“All right, then,” said Worden. “Do you have any idea where your wife might be now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a girlfriend’s house or something.”

Worden nodded, then looked at Kincaid, who had spent the last five minutes undertaking as comprehensive a review of the surgical resident as could be accomplished under the circumstances.

“I’ll say this, Mr. Jones,” drawled Kincaid. “You’re in good hands now. Real good hands.”

The resident looked up, irritated and a little embarrassed. And then Worden was smiling wickedly at his own thoughts. He leaned low to the victim’s ear. “You know, Mr. Jones, you’re a lucky man,” he said in a stage whisper.

“What?”

“You’re a lucky man.”

Wincing with pain, the victim looked sideways at the detective. “How the hell you figure that?”

Worden smiled. “Well, from the look of things, your wife was going for your Johnson,” said the detective. “And from what I can see, she only missed by a couple inches.”

Suddenly, from beneath the oxygen mask, Cornell Jones was laughing uproariously. The resident, too, was losing it, her face contorted as she struggled against herself.

“Yeah,” said Kincaid. “A big guy like yourself, you was pretty damn close to singin’ soprano, you know that?”

Cornell Jones rocked up and down on the gurney, laughing and wincing at the same time.

Worden held up his hand, signing off with a short wave. “You have a good one.”

“You too, man,” said Cornell Jones, still laughing.

The shit you see out here, thought Worden, driving back to the office. And my God, he had to admit, there are still moments when I love this job.

S
UNDAY
, M
AY 1

“Something’s gone wrong,” says Terry McLarney.

Eddie Brown answers without looking up, his mind fully absorbed by mathematical endeavors. Statistical charts and spread sheets arrayed in front of him, Brown will figure a way to predict tomorrow night’s four-digit lotto number or he will die trying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look around,” says McLarney. “The phone is ringing with information on every kind of case and we’re getting double-dunkers left and right. Hey, even the lab is coming up with print hits.”

“So,” says Brown, “what’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not like us,” says McLarney. “I get the feeling that we’re going to be punished. I have this feeling that there’s a rowhouse somewhere with about a dozen skeletons in the basement, just waiting for us.”

Brown shakes his head. “You think too much,” he tells McLarney.

A criticism rarely leveled at a Baltimore cop, and McLarney laughs at the absurdity of the notion. He’s a sergeant and an Irishman; by that reckoning alone, it’s his responsibility to rip the silver linings out of every last little cloud. The board is going from red to black. Murders are being solved. Evil is being punished. Good Lord, thinks McLarney, how much is this going to cost?

The streak began a month ago up on Kirk Avenue, in the gutted remains of a torched rowhouse, where Donald Steinhice watched firefighters pull at the cracked and blackened debris until all three bodies were distinguishable. The oldest was three, the youngest, five months; their remains were discovered in an upstairs bedroom, where they stayed after every adult fled from the burning house. For Steinhice, a veteran of Stanton’s shift, the accelerant pour-patterns on the first floor—identifiable as darker splotches on the floors and walls—told the story: Mother dumps boyfriend, boyfriend returns with kerosene, children pay the price. In recent years, the scenario had become strangely common to the inner city. Four months back, in fact, Mark Tomlin caught a rowhouse arson that claimed two children; then, little more than a week ago and less than a month after the Kirk Avenue tragedy, another boyfriend torched another mother’s home, murdering a twenty-one-month-old toddler and his seven-month-old sister.

“The adults always make it out,” explained Scott Keller, the primary on the most recent case and a veteran of the CID arson unit. “The kids always get left behind.”

More than most homicides, the Kirk Avenue arson had an emotional cost; Steinhice, a detective with perhaps a thousand crime scenes behind him, suffered nightmares about a murder for the first time—graphic images of helplessness in which the dead children were at the top of a row-house stairway, crying, terrified. Nonetheless, when the boyfriend came downtown in handcuffs, it was Steinhice who mustered empathy enough to prompt a full confession. And it was Steinhice who intervened when the boyfriend tore apart an aluminum soda can after his confession and tried to use the rough edges against his wrists.

Kirk Avenue was hard for Steinhice to swallow, but it was nonetheless medicine for what ailed both shifts of the homicide unit. Three dead, one arrest, three clearances—a stat like that can start a trend all by itself.

Sure enough, the following week brought Tom Pellegrini his dunker at the Civic Center, the labor dispute that became a one-sided knife fight. Rick Requer followed that case with two more clearances: a double murder-suicide from the Southeastern in which an emotionally distraught auto mechanic shot his wife and nephew in the kitchen, then wrapped things up tidily by reloading the .44 Magnum and shoving the barrel in his mouth. In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a massacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams.