It’s a summer afternoon in the Woodland Avenue drug market, and suddenly, with a body on the ground, race becomes the dominant theme. The dead kid is decidedly black and the police, standing over their daylight scene, are decidedly white. The crowd grows restless.

“This could get out of hand in a hurry,” says a young lieutenant, scanning the sea of angry faces on the other side of the police line. “I’d like to get that body outta here as soon as possible.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” says Rich Garvey.

“I only got about six guys here,” the lieutenant says. “I’d call for more, but I don’t want to empty the other sector.”

Garvey rolls his eyes. “Fuck them,” he says softly. “They’re not going to do shit.”

They never do. And after a few hundred crime scenes, Garvey doesn’t even hear the trash that gets thrown out from the crowd. The way a detective sees it, you just let the assholes run their mouths as long as they keep out of your way. And if one actually jumps into your scene, you throw his ass against a radio car and call for the wagon. No problem whatsoever.

“Why don’t you cover that boy up and show some respect for the dead,” shouts a fat girl on the other side of the Cavalier.

The crowd shouts its approval and the girl, encouraged, presses the point. “He just another dead nigger to you, right?”

Garvey turns to Bob McAllister, glowering, as a uniform pulls a white plastic sheet over the head and torso.

“Now, now,” says McAllister, anticipating his partner’s anger. “Let’s have a little decorum here.”

The body stays on the pavement, stranded there by the delayed arrival of a lab tech, who is rushing from another call on the other side of the city. A hot summer day in August and only four techs are working, one consequence of a municipal pay scale that doesn’t exactly encourage careers in the fast-growing field of evidentiary processing. And though this fifty-minute delay is being regarded as yet another public display of the white racist police conspiracy that runs rampant on the streets of Baltimore, Garvey is somehow unrepentant. Fuck them all, he thinks. The kid is dead and he ain’t getting any better and that’s all there is to it. And if they think a trained homicide detective is going to dismantle a crime scene to satisfy a half a block’s worth of agitated Pimlico squirrels, they don’t know the game.

“How long you gonna leave a black man out in the street?” shouts an older resident. “You don’t care who sees him like that, do you?”

The young lieutenant listens to all of this nervously, checking his watch, but Garvey says nothing. He takes his eyeglasses off, rubs both eyes and walks over to the body, slowly lifting the white sheet from the dead man’s face. He stares down for half a minute or so, then drops the cloth and walks away. A proprietary act.

“Where the hell is the crime lab?” says the lieutenant, fingering his radio mike.

“Fuck these assholes,” says Garvey, irritated that this is even being mistaken for an issue. “This is our scene.”

And not much of a scene at that. A young drug dealer by the name of Cornelius Langley has been gunned down in a daylight shooting on the sidewalk in the 3100 block of Woodland, and no one in this crowd is rushing forward to provide any information. Nonetheless, it’s the only crime scene around, and as such, it’s real estate that now belongs to Garvey and McAllister. What the hell else does anyone need to be told?

The lab tech is another twenty minutes in arriving, but true to form, the crowd eventually loses interest in the confrontation well before that. By the time the tech gets busy taking photos and bagging spent.32 auto casings, the locals on Woodland Avenue are back to signifying, staring down the proceedings with nothing more than casual curiosity.

But just as the detectives are putting the finishing touches on the scene, the crowd on the far side of the street parts for the hysterical mother, who is already wailing inconsolably even before glimpsing her son’s body. Her arrival ends the truce and gets the crowd going again.

“Why you got to make her watch?”

“Hey, that the mother, yo.”

“They don’t care. That’s some cold poh-leece shit there, yo.”

McAllister gets to the woman first, blocking her view of the street and imploring the relatives with her to go back home.

“There’s nothing you can do here, really,” he says over the mother’s screams. “As soon as we can, we’ll be down to the house.”

“He was shot?” asks an uncle.

McAllister nods.

“Dead?”

McAllister nods again and the mother goes into a half-faint, leaning heavily against another woman, who helps her back into the family’s double-parked Pontiac.

“Take her home,” McAllister says again. “That’s really the best thing right now.”

At the other end of Woodland, closer to Park Heights, the spectators provide even more dramatics. A young kid points to a tall, gangly bystander and blurts out a vague accusation.

“He was there,” the kid tells a friend, loud enough for a uniform to overhear. “He was right there and broke running when they shot the boy.”

The uniform takes half a step toward the man, who turns and runs down the sidewalk. Two other uniforms join the chase and catch up to their quarry at the corner of Park Heights. A body search produces a small amount of heroin and a wagon is called.

Half a block away, Garvey is told of the arrest and shrugs. No, not the shooter, he reasons. Why would the shooter be hanging around an hour after the body hits the pavement? A witness, perhaps. Or maybe just a bystander after all.

“Yeah, okay, have the wagon take him on down to our office,” says the detective. “Thanks.”

Ordinarily, the routine lockup of a drug addict on Woodland Avenue-Pimlico’s grand boulevard of drug addicts-would mean nothing to a detective’s case. Ordinarily, Garvey would have every reason to stand over his latest body feeling a little like a lost ball in tall grass. But in the context of his summer, a sudden shout and a foot chase and a little bit of dope in a glassine bag are all it takes. It’s everything required to make even the weakest sister get up and dance.

It began with the Lena Lucas case back in February and continued with a couple of misdemeanor homicides in April-one whodunit, two dunkers, but all of them cleared by arrest within a week or two. No deeper meanings there; every detective can expect a run of good luck now and then. But when the Winchester Street killing went down in late June, a pattern began to emerge.

Winchester Street was nothing more than a couple of blood smears and a mutilated bullet when Garvey and McAllister reached the scene, and undoubtedly there would have been little else if the first uniform there hadn’t been Bobby Biemiller, McLarney’s drinking buddy from the Western.

“I sent two down to your office,” Biemiller told the arriving detectives.

“Witnesses?”

“I dunno. They were here when I showed up, so I fuckin’ grabbed ’em.”

Bob Biemiller, friend of the little man, hero to the unwashed masses, and the patrolman voted Most Desirable First Officer for a Ghetto Shooting by three out of five Baltimore homicide detectives. That cabbie slaying on School Street a few years back-Garvey’s first case as a primary-also starred Biemiller as first officer. A happy memory for Garvey, too, because the case went down. Good man, Biemiller.

“So tell me,” said McAllister, amused, “who are these unfortunate citizens that you’ve managed to deprive of their liberty?”

“One is your guy’s girlfriend, I think.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She was hysterical.”

“Well, that’s a start,” said Garvey, a man of faint praise. “So where’s our boy?”

“University.”

Down at the emergency room entrance, the ambo was still backed up to the door. Garvey looked inside and nodded to a black medic who was washing blood from the floor of Medic 15.