“Uh, Rog,” says McAllister, “what cracked this case was the fact that the killer left the dead guy in his house.”

“Well, yeah,” says Nolan, laughing but a little disappointed. “That too.”

So Rich Garvey’s Perfect Year marches ever onward, a divine crusade seemingly impervious to the touch of reality, a campaign unfettered by the rules of homicide that somehow manage to afflict every other detective. Garvey is getting witnesses, he’s getting fingerprint hits, he’s getting the license tags off getaway cars. You do a murder in Baltimore when Rich Garvey’s working and you may as well have a lawyer meet you at the district lockup an hour later.

Not long after Jerry Jackson returns to earth and a city jail tier, Garvey again picks up a telephone extension and writes down an East Baltimore address. This time it is the worst kind of call a murder police can get. Garvey is so certain of unanimity on this opinion that he actually puts down the phone and asks the other detectives in the office to name the call they least like to handle. McAllister and Kincaid need about a half second to say “arson.”

For a homicide detective, an arson murder is a special type of torture because the police department is essentially stuck with whatever the fire department’s investigator says is arson. To this day, Donald Kincaid is still carrying an open murder for a fatal fire that almost certainly began with nothing more sinister than an electrical short. At the scene, Kincaid could see the burn pattern running up the rowhouse wall where the wiring was, but some goof from FIB insisted on calling it arson. So what was he going to do then, arrest the goddamn fuse box? Not only that, but when a detective gets a genuine arson murder in front of a jury, he can never convince them that the fire wasn’t an accident, not without a six-pack of witnesses, at least. Even if there’s a pour pattern from gasoline or some other accelerant, a good lawyer can suggest that someone spilled the stuff by mistake and then accidentally dropped a cigarette. Juries like dead people who have bulletholes or steak knives attached to them; anything less is not convincing.

Knowing all this, Garvey and McAllister once again steer an unmarked car to a crime scene with fear and loathing in their hearts. It’s a two-story dump on North Bond Street and, of course, there are no witnesses-just a bunch of burned furniture and one crispy critter in the middle room. Some smokehound, an old guy, maybe sixty.

The poor bastard is lying there like a piece of chicken that someone forgot to turn over, and the FIB investigator is showing Garvey a dark splotch on the other side of the room and calling it a textbook example of a pour pattern. Sure enough, when they clear all the soot away, the splotch really does look darker than the surrounding area. So Garvey has a dead guy and a pour pattern and some drunk woman who jumped out the rear window when the fire started and is now up at Union Memorial breathing from an oxygen tank. From the fire investigator, the detectives learn that the woman is supposedly the dead guy’s girlfriend.

Having satisfied themselves that North Bond Street is indeed their worst nightmare come true, Garvey and McAllister drive to the hospital with the understanding that this blessed year of his has finally reached its terminus. They walk into the Union Memorial ER and greet two detectives from the arson squad who are standing out at the nurses station like a pair of bookends, telling them the injured woman’s story is all bullshit. She’s got the fire starting by accident in an ashtray or some nonsense like that.

The woman told the arson guys that much while she was being treated in the ER, but now she can’t be interviewed further because she inhaled a lot of smoke and talking is a problem. Garvey may have his arsonist, but there’s absolutely no way to prove the case. Given that conflict, the idea of getting an assistant medical examiner to pend the case for a little while-like maybe a decade-becomes more and more appealing in the minds of both detectives. At the following morning’s autopsy, Garvey manages to accomplish this feat, whereupon he and McAllister return to the office with the sincere hope that if they just click their heels three times, the entire case will go away.

Given recent events, such thoughts in the mind of Rich Garvey can only suggest a certain lack of faith, a certain disregard for his own destiny. Because two weeks later, the woman at Union Memorial succumbs to smoke inhalation and related injuries; two days after that, Garvey pays a second visit to Penn Street and assures the good doctors that they can go ahead and rule the case a homicide. That done, he can immediately show the case as cleared due to the rather timely death of his solitary suspect. A good detective, after all, is never too proud to take a paper clearance.

The arson case makes it ten out of ten since February and the Lena Lucas murder. Drug murders, neighborhood disputes, street robberies, unprosecutable arson deaths-it matters not to Rich Garvey, the luckiest sonofabitch on D’Addario’s shift of fifteen. Apparently the Perfect Year, like any force of nature, cannot be denied.

Up and down the stoops he goes, a homicide detective banging on North Durham Street doors in search of a little cooperation, a little civic responsibility.

“Didn’t see it,” says the young girl at 1615.

“I heard a loud bang,” says the man at 1617.

No answer at 1619.

“Lord,” says the woman at 1621, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it.”

Tom Pellegrini presses a few additional questions on these people, trying hard to get himself interested in this case, to find something that might make a detective care about the bloodstain in the center of the 1600 block.

“Were you home when it happened?” he asks another girl, at the door of 1616.

“I’m not sure.”

Not sure. How can you not be sure? Theodore Johnson was hit by a shotgun blast fired at point-blank range, blown apart in the center of a narrow rowhouse street. The sound itself had to be audible all the way up to North Avenue.

“You don’t know if you were home?”

“I might have been.”

So much for the door-to-door canvass. Not that Pellegrini can blame the neighborhood for its reluctance to volunteer information. Word is out that the dead man crossed a local dealer on a drug debt and the dealer has just proven to everyone within earshot that he’s a man to be reckoned with. The people behind these doors have got to live on Durham Street; Pellegrini is no more than an occasional tourist.

With nothing on the horizon even remotely resembling a witness, Pellegrini has a body on the way to Penn Street and a bloodstain on dirty asphalt. He’s got a spent shotgun shell ejected by the shooter in the alley around the corner. He’s got a street so dark that the emergency vehicle unit has been called to light up his scene for the photographs. An hour or so later, Pellegrini will have the sister of his victim sitting in Jay Landsman’s office, feeding him a bit of rumor about some people that may or may not have had something to do with the shooting. He will have a headache, too.

Theodore Johnson joins Stevie Braxton and Barney Erely on the white rectangle in the coffee room. Braxton, the kid with a long sheet found stabbed up off Pennsylvania Avenue. Erely, the homeless man bludgeoned to death on Clay Street. Red names riding the board with Pellegrini’s initial near them, casualties in the year-long campaign to close the Latonya Wallace murder. It’s triage, plain and simple, but Pellegrini can live with that. After all, he’s got an eleven-year-old raped and murdered, and neither Theodore Johnson nor a drug debt that has now been paid has any real weight when hung in the balance. Tonight’s dead man will get one or two shakes from the homicide unit, one or two go-rounds in the interrogation rooms with a few reluctant witnesses. But then the primary investigator will set the file aside.