“Why should I, Donald?” she says, warming to the game. “You ain’t even got anything I’d want.”

“Oh yeah I do.”

“What?” she says, looking down disdainfully. “That little tiny thing?”

The entire squad cracks up. Twice a midnight shift, Kincaid talks dirty to Irene. Twice a midnight shift, Irene manages to keep up with him.

Beyond the darkness of the main unit office, the coffee room and the outer offices are brightening with the lighter blue of morning. And like it or not, every man in the room is now wide awake, rattled from sleep by Kincaid’s determined courtship.

But the phones stay quiet and Nolan cuts Bowman loose just after six; the rest of the squad sits quietly, trying not to move until the air conditioning kicks up again for the dayshift. The men lean back in their seats in some kind of communal trance. When the elevator bell rings at twenty after, it’s the sweetest sound in the world.

“Relief ’s here,” says Barlow, strutting into the room. “You all look like shit… Not you, Irene. You look as lovely as ever. I was talking to these ugly pieces of shit.”

“Fuck you,” says Garvey.

“Hey, mister, is that any way to talk to the man who’s giving you early relief?”

“Eat me,” says Garvey.

“Sergeant Nolan,” says Barlow, feigning indignation, “did you hear that? I just stated a simple fact by saying that these guys look like pieces of shit, which they do, and I’m subjected to all kinds of abuse. Was it this fuckin’ hot in here all night?”

“Hotter,” says Garvey.

“Proud to know you, mister,” says Barlow. “You know, you’re one of my personal heroes. What’d you have last night? Anything?”

“Nothing at all,” says Edgerton. “It was death up here.”

No, thinks Nolan, listening from the corner of the room. Not death. The absence of death, maybe. Death means being out on the streets of Baltimore, making money.

“You all can take off,” says Barlow. “Charlie’ll be in here in a couple.”

Nolan keeps Garvey and Edgerton waiting for the second dayshift man to arrive, letting Kincaid escape at half past.

“Thanks, Sarge,” he says, shoving a run sheet into Nolan’s mailbox.

Nolan nods, acknowledging his own mercies.

“See you Monday,” says Kincaid.

“Yeah,” says Nolan wistfully. “Daywork.”

“Aw Christ, another Bible.”

Gary Childs picks the open book up off a bureau and tosses it onto a chair with a dozen others. The bookmark holds the place even as pages flutter in the cool breeze of an air conditioner. Lamentations 2:21:

Young and old lie together

In the dust of the streets;

My young men and maidens

Have fallen by the sword.

You have slain them in the day of your anger;

You have slaughtered them without pity.

One thing about Miss Geraldine, she took her Good Book seriously, a fact confirmed not only by the Bible collection, but also by the framed 8-by-11 photographs of her in her Sunday finest, preaching the good news at storefront churches. If salvation is ours through faith rather than works, then perhaps Geraldine Parrish can find some contentment in the wagon ride downtown. But if works do count for anything in the next world, then Miss Geraldine will be arriving there with a few things charged to her account.

Childs and Scott Keller pull up the bed and begin riffling the stack of papers stuffed beneath it. Grocery notes, telephone numbers, social service forms and six or seven more life insurance policies.

“Damn,” says Keller, genuinely impressed. “Here’s a whole bunch more. How many does that make now?”

Childs shrugs. “Twenty? Twenty-five? Who the hell knows?”

The search warrant for 1902 Kennedy gives them the right to seek a variety of evidentiary items, but in this instance, no one is gutting a room in the hope of finding a gun or knife or bullets or bloody clothes. On this rare occasion, they are looking for the paper trail. And they are finding it.

“I got more of them in here,” says Childs, dumping the contents of a paper grocery bag onto the upended mattress. “Four more.”

“This,” says Keller, “is one murderous bitch.”

An Eastern District patrolman who has been downstairs for an hour, watching Geraldine Parrish and five others in the first-floor living room, knocks softly on the bedroom door.

“Sergeant Childs…”

“Yo.”

“The woman down there, she’s sayin’ she feels faint… You know, she’s sayin’ that she’s got some kind of heart condition.”

Childs looks at Keller, then back at the uniform. “Heart condition, huh?” he says, contemptuous. “She’s having a heart attack? I’ll be down in a minute and you can really watch her fall out of her chair.”

“Okay,” says the patrolman. “I just thought I’d tell you.”

Childs sorts through the jetsam from the grocery bag, then wanders downstairs to the front room. The occupants of the rowhouse are clustered together on a sofa and two chairs, staring up at him, waiting for answers. The sergeant stares back at the plump, sad-faced woman with the Loretta Lynn wig and red cotton dress, a genuinely comic vision under the circumstances.

“Geraldine?”

“Yes I am.”

“I know who you are,” says Childs. “Do you want to know why we’re here?”

“I don’t know why you’re here,” she says, patting her chest lightly. “I can’t sit like this. I need my medicine…”

“You don’t have any idea why we’re here?”

Geraldine Parrish shakes her head and pats her chest again, leaning back in her chair.

“Geraldine, this is a search-and-seizure raid. You’re now charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three attempted murders…”

The other occupants of the room stare as deep gurgling noises begin to rise in Geraldine Parrish’s throat. She falls to the carpet, clutching her chest and gasping for air.

Childs looks down, moderately amused, then turns calmly to the Eastern uniform. “I guess you might want to call for that medic now,” he says, “just to be on the safe side.”

The sergeant returns upstairs, where he and Keller continue dumping every document, every insurance policy, every photo album, every slip of paper into a green garbage bag-the better to sort through it all in the relative luxury of the homicide office. Meanwhile, the paramedics arrive and depart within minutes, having judged Geraldine Parrish healthy in body if not in mind. And across town, at the Division Street rowhouse of Geraldine Parrish’s mother, Donald Waltemeyer is executing a second warrant, digging out another thirty insurance policies and related documents.

It is the case to end all cases, the investigation that raises the act of murder to the level of theatrical farce. This case file has so many odd, unlikely characters and so many odd, unlikely crimes that it almost seems tailored for musical comedy.

But for Donald Waltemeyer, in particular, the Geraldine Parrish case is anything but comedic. It is, in effect, a last lesson in his own personal voyage from patrolman to detective. Behind Worden and Eddie Brown, the forty-one-year-old Waltemeyer is Terry McLarney’s most experienced man, having come to homicide in ’86 from the Southern District plainclothes unit, where he was a fixture of large if not legendary proportion. And though the last two years have taught Waltemeyer everything he needs to know about handling the usual run of homicide calls, this case is entirely different. Eventually, Keller and Childs and the other detectives assigned to the case will return to the rotation and it will be Waltemeyer’s lot to serve as primary investigator in the prosecution of Geraldine Parrish-a probe that will consume half a year in the search for victims, suspects and explanations.

In a unit where speed is a precious commodity, it’s the rare case that teaches a detective patience, providing him with those last few lessons that come only from the most prolonged and complex avenues of investigation. Such a case can transform a cop, allowing him to see his role as something more than that of an ambulance chaser whose task is to clean up one shooting after another in the shortest time possible. And after a month or two, or three, this sort of sprawling case file can also drive a cop to the brink of insanity-which for Waltemeyer isn’t all that long a journey in the first place.