Months later, Pellegrini will feel some guilt about this, some concern about the number of cases sacrificed for the sake of one child. With much the same sort of self-recrimination that governs his thoughts on the Latonya Wallace murder, Pellegrini will wonder whether he should have pressed harder on that kid in the Western District lockup back in January, the one who claimed to know one of the shooters from Gold and Etting. He’ll wonder about whether he should have gone harder at Braxton’s girlfriend, who didn’t seem all that upset about the murder. And he’ll wonder, too, about the rumors that Theodore Johnson’s sister is now feeding him-information that will never be fully checked.
True, he could dump this case on the secondary. Vernon Holley handled the scene with him and he would probably understand if Pellegrini ducked the call to stay focused on Latonya Wallace. Still, Holley is new to the squad, a veteran black detective transferred from the robbery unit to replace Fred Ceruti. He’d been out on one murder with Rick Requer a couple of weeks ago, but that wasn’t enough to qualify as an orientation, even for an investigator as experienced as Holley. And the squad was a man short to begin with: Dick Fahlteich had voluntarily transferred to sex offense after six years in homicide. The body count had finally got to Fahlteich, a talented detective who nonetheless was handling fewer calls each year, working at a pace that others in Landsman’s squad were quick to compare to Harry Edgerton’s. The workload and the hours-coupled with a gnawing aggravation about his being passed over several times on the sergeant’s lists-had at last pushed Fahlteich down to the other end of the sixth-floor hallway at about the same time that Ceruti traveled the same route. At least with Fahlteich it was a matter of choice.
No, Pellegrini reasons, with the squad down to three regulars and a fresh transfer, the Theodore Johnson case is his to eat. At the very least, he owes it to Holley to stay with the thing for a few days. A graphic display of job-related burnout isn’t exactly the best lesson to be teaching a new man.
Bravely, Pellegrini fights his own impulses, doing a competent crime scene out on Durham Street, then canvassing the entire block for witnesses that he knows in his heart will never come forward. Holley peels off early, heading back to the homicide office to begin interviewing family members and a couple of kids at the scene who were sent downtown only because they were out there acting like squirrels when the first uniforms arrived.
The sudden role reversal-with Pellegrini now the tired veteran, breaking in the latest prodigy-is accepted without comment by everyone else in Landsman’s squad. Nine months of Latonya Wallace has changed Pellegrini: His metamorphosis from fresh-scrubbed recruit to battered trench rat is complete. To say that he can look at Holley and see himself a couple years ago goes too far: Holley already had the experience of CID robbery behind him; Pellegrini had come to homicide with no investigative background whatsoever. Still, Holley is working this Durham Street case as if it mattered, as if it were the only murder in the history of the world. He is fresh. He is confident. He makes Pellegrini feel one hundred years old.
The two detectives chase the murder on Durham Street through into late morning, gathering the information from the sister, then trying to check her story against that provided by a former police officer who has family living in the block. His family will not come forward, but the ex-cop, though fired from the force twenty years ago in a corruption case, has enough residual instinct to call in with the name of a possible participant. Pellegrini and Holley find the kid that same morning, go at him in the large box for several hours and emerge with little to show for the effort. Then, slowly, after a few more laps around the case file, Holley accepts the unspoken verdict of his tutor. He drifts away, looking for better pickings with Gary Dunnigan and Requer.
He finds them, too, hooking up with Requer on a domestic from Bruce Street, a true tragedy in which a young girl has been bludgeoned to death by her cokehead of a boyfriend and her orphaned infant is left crying on a policewoman’s shoulder, wailing at the world as the officer’s hand-held radio squawks out citywide dispatch calls. Holley follows that with another domestic from Cherry Hill that he works to completion with Dunnigan. Both cases are dunkers and both bring a certain confidence. By December, Holley will be handling calls as a primary.
For Pellegrini, however, the milestones marked by his squad mean little. Ceruti’s fall from grace, Fahlteich’s departure, Holley’s education-they are scenes from a play in which Pellegrini has no real part. Time stands still for one detective, leaving him alone on a stage of his own, trapped there by the same few props and the same few lines from the same sad scene.
Three weeks ago, Pellegrini and Landsman hit the Fish Man’s Whitelock Street apartment a second time, working through a search warrant that was written more for Pellegrini’s peace of mind than anything else. Months had passed and the chance of recovering any additional evidence from the apartment was minimal. Yet Pelligrini, now fixated on the store owner as his best suspect, was convinced that in their haste to hit the three-story shithouse on Newington back in February, they had blown off the earlier searches on Whitelock. In particular, Pellegrini vaguely remembered seeing a remnant of red carpeting in the Fish Man’s living room during the February raid; months later, he thought of the hairs and fibers taken from the young girl’s body at the morgue and recalled that one of those fibers was red cloth.
Red carpet, red fiber: Pellegrini suddenly had another reason to kick himself. For Pellegrini, the contents of file H88021 had become nothing less than an ever-changing landscape in which every tree, rock and bush seems to be moving. And it was no use explaining to him that this could happen to any detective on any case-this pit-of-the-stomach feeling that everything was being missed, that evidence was disappearing faster than an investigator could perceive it. Every detective in the unit had lived through the sensation of seeing something at a crime scene or during a search warrant and then looking twice to see that it was no longer there. Hell, maybe it never was there. Or maybe it’s still there, but now you’ve lost the ability to see it.
It was the stuff from which the Nightmare was made, the Nightmare being that recurring dream that occasionally ruins the sleep of every good detective. In the throes of the Nightmare, you are moving through the familiar confines of a rowhouse-you’ve got a warrant, perhaps, or maybe it’s just a plain-view search-and from the corner of your eye you glimpse something. What the hell is it? Something important, you know that. Something you need. A blood spatter. A shell casing. A child’s star-shaped earring. You can’t say for sure, but with every fiber of your being you understand that it’s your case lying there. Yet you look away for a moment, and when you look back again, it’s gone. It’s an empty place in your subconscious, a lost opportunity that mocks you. The Nightmare scares the hell out of young detectives; some of them even live the dream at their first crime scenes, convinced that the entire case is evaporating into the ether. As for the veterans, the Nightmare just pisses them off. They’ve gone through it enough not to believe every voice that speaks from the back of the mind.
And yet on this case the Nightmare owns Pellegrini. It ordered him to write the second warrant for the Fish Man’s apartment, it demanded that he collect enough probable cause to get back inside a door that had been opened to him once before. Not surprisingly, the September raid left the Fish Man as bored and indifferent as its predecessor. Nor did it produce a red cloth carpet fiber: Pellegrini found the remnant he remembered on the bedroom floor, but it proved to be plastic, an outdoor Astro-Turf carpet. Nor did a small blue pin earring found in a corner of the living room mean anything to the investigation. Contacted by detectives a few days later, Latonya Wallace’s family members explained that they never recalled the young girl wearing a mixed set of earrings. If she had a star-shaped pin in one lobe, it was safe to assume that a star-shaped pin was missing from the other. To be sure, Pellegrini borrowed a Cavalier and drove the blue pin earring up to the little girl’s mother; she seemed a little surprised that the case was still being worked after seven months, but confirmed that the blue earring did not belong to her daughter.