The body was already coming out of rigor. It was a humid night, and the temperature in that rowhouse had to be 110 on the upper floors: still, the two men refused to rush their scene. Several times, when the heat became too much for him, Worden stepped out onto the street and sat for a moment on the corner bench, sipping quietly on a convenience store soda. They stayed with that scene for hours, with James working the second floor and the area immediately surrounding the body. Worden wandered through the rest of the house, looking for anything out of place. In the third-floor bedroom, the killer had apparently yanked a VCR off its table and pushed the appliance halfway into a plastic garbage bag before giving up on the theft and fleeing. Was it really a robbery? Or was someone trying to make it look like a robbery?
Eventually, Worden got down to the kitchen, where he found the sink half-filled with dirty water. Reaching down gingerly, he pulled the drain and the sink emptied slowly, revealing a cutting knife with its blade broken. Lying next to the murder weapon was a hand towel still pink from the blood; the killer had washed up before leaving. Worden looked down the kitchen counter at a dozen or so unwashed dishes, glasses and utensils-jetsam, it seemed, from the previous night’s dinner. One glass, however, stood on the far edge of the counter, alone and distinct. Worden called the lab tech over and told him to check that glass in particular for prints. Hot as it was, Worden figured the killer might have wanted a drink of water before leaving.
The Jasper Street scene took five hours, after which James headed for the morgue and Worden locked himself in an interrogation room with the roommate of the victim, who also owned the house. The roommate had discovered the body after returning from his night job and told Worden that when he left to go to work, the victim was entertaining a friend he had met at a bar. He had never seen the guy before and didn’t know his name.
Worden rode the roommate hard, seizing on the fact that he was out working while his bunky was lazing around the house with some new man.
“You didn’t like that, did you?”
“I didn’t care.”
“You didn’t care?”
“No.”
“I know that would make me angry.”
“I wasn’t angry.”
The man held firm to his story and Worden was left with nothing, or so it seemed until later that afternoon, when the Printrak got a solid hit off the drinking glass. The latent print matched that of a twenty-three-year-old west-sider with a long sheet of priors. With considerable reluctance, the owner of the house returned once again to the homicide unit and made the ID of the suspect from a photo array. For that clearance, Worden’s eye-his ability to see that separate drinking glass as precious evidence-got the credit.
Four nights later, his remarkable memory sent another murder into the black when a tactical section officer locked up two east side men on auto theft charges and found that one of them, Anthony Cunningham, was wanted on a murder warrant written by Worden a month earlier. The warrant had been typed and signed shortly after detectives from the robbery unit locked up a crew of east-siders for a series of holdups centered around the Douglass Homes. Lew Davis, a long-time colleague of Worden’s in robbery, had wandered across the hall with the news.
“We’ve got one of them in there now going for a whole bunch of holdups,” Davis asked Worden. “You all have anything up there that might match up to these guys?”
Standing in front of the board, Worden needed exactly fifteen seconds before his elephantine memory settled on one name among fifty: Charles Lehman, the fifty-one-year-old killed on Fayette Street as he walked to his car with a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner. Kincaid’s whodunit from February.
“I got one right in that area,” said Worden. “You’re talking to this guy now?”
“Yeah, he’s in the big interrogation room. Christ, Donald, he’s already gone for about a dozen robberies.”
After a brief parley with the kid in the large box, Worden knew that the kid could indeed put the Lehman murder down. The duty prosecutor that night, Don Giblin, was called down and the negotiations began. The prosecutor’s bottom-line offer: for identifying and testifying against the shooter on the Lehman murder, eleven years on one of the robberies and no immunity if you’re linked to any other murders or shootings.
Worden watched the kid mull over the deal, then attempt a counteroffer: “Five years.”
“You’re no good to me with five years,” the prosecutor told the kid. “A jury won’t believe you unless you get at least ten.”
“Too much,” said the kid.
“Oh, you don’t think you should get any time,” said Worden, disgusted. “What about all them people you robbed? What about that old lady you all shot on Monument Street?”
“We’re not talkin’ about them,” the kid snapped. “This is me we’re talkin’ about.”
Worden shook his head and walked from the room, leaving Giblin to cement the deal. It was ugly, all right, but the warrant for twenty-five-year-old Anthony Cunningham went to a court commissioner that same night. Now, with Cunningham locked up, that case, too, was down.
Four nights, two murders. McLarney has to wonder how many other detectives would have noticed that one drinking glass was a little too far from the others? And how many detectives would have made the connection between the Lehman case and the other east side robberies? Hell, McLarney tells himself, most detectives can’t remember the cases worked by their own squad, much less those handled by some other squad five months back.
“You can’t leave,” McLarney tells Worden, renewing his appeal.
Worden shakes his head.
“You can’t,” says McLarney, laughing. “I won’t let you.”
“You’re just talking like this ’cause you’re losing a detective. That’s what you’re worried about, right? You just don’t want to have to spend the time to break in a new guy.”
McLarney laughs again and leans back against the front of his car. He reaches into the paper bag for the last can. “If you leave, there’ll be no one around to fuck with Dave Brown and he’ll go all derelict.”
Worden gives back a half-smile.
“If you quit, Donald, he’ll start thinking he knows what he’s doing. It’ll be dangerous. I’ll be writing long reports for the captain every other week.”
“Waltemeyer will keep on him.”
McLarney shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this…”
Worden shrugs. “You’re the one talking.”
“Donald, you…” says McLarney, pausing to stare down the cross street toward Monument. Worden fidgets, rolling the keys to his truck back and forth on their ring.
“You see him?” asks McLarney suddenly.
“The boy in the gray?”
“Yeah, the sweatshirt.”
“Yeah I seen him. He’s only walked by here four times now.”
“He’s marking us.”
“Yeah, he is.”
McLarney stares back up the cross street. The kid is wiry and dark-skinned, sixteen or seventeen, wearing spandex bike shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. It’s still eighty degrees or better and the kid has both hands in his pockets and the hoody zipped tight.
“He thinks we’re victims,” says McLarney, laughing under his breath.
“Two old white guys hanging in an empty lot at this hour,” snorts Worden. “I’m not surprised.”
“We’re not old,” says McLarney, objecting. “I’m not old anyway.”
Worden smiles, tosses the key ring and catches it with the other hand. He told himself that he would be going straight home after the four-to-twelve shift; instead, he spent two hours on a Kavanaugh’s barstool, hurting himself with Jack Black. But the last hour’s temperance-Worden had no taste for the Miller Lite that McLarney bought carryout-was bringing him back down to earth.
“I got to get up early,” he says.
McLarney shakes his head. “I don’t want to hear this, Donald. You’ve had a bad year, all right, so what? So you get back in the saddle on another case and things change. You know how it is.”