“I ain’t Lenore,” one shouted to Worden a week ago, even before the detective had a chance to speak.

“I know that, hon. But have you seen her?”

“She’s not out tonight.”

“Well, tell her if she’ll just come in and talk to us, we’ll stop bothering you and her both. Will you do that for us?”

“If I see her, I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you, dear.”

Straight police work, the kind that keeps you out in the city streets. No oily politicians, no treacherous bosses, no scared young cops saying they don’t know anything about the dead kid in the alley. The street gives you nothing worse than lying, thieving criminals and, hey, Worden has no complaints with that. It’s their job. And his, too.

The return to routine has allowed Worden a measure of satisfaction, not that the last three cases were exactly brimming with challenge and complexity. The first was pretty much an accidental: three teenage drug dealers in a west side rowhouse, marveling over their host’s new Saturday Night Special when it goes off with the barrel pointed at the youngest kid’s chest. The second was a Highlandtown beating, a manslaughter with a billy boy laid out in an alley behind Lakewood Avenue, dead after he fell back from a punch and hit his head on the cement. The third was the Pennsylvania Avenue stabbing, still waiting for Miss Lenore’s reappearance.

No, it wasn’t the quality of the cases that announced Worden’s return so much as the volume. Whether or not the case went down, the quality was always there with the Big Man; Monroe Street, in fact, was probably his best work in a long while. But a year ago, Worden had been nothing less than a machine, and McLarney remembered that time like an athlete remembers a championship season. Back then, the squad pretty much operated on the same principle as that cereal commercial: Give it to Worden. He’ll eat anything. Go ahead, give him this one, give him another, and then put him on the file that Dave Brown and Waltemeyer are still struggling with. See? He likes it.

This year has been very different. Monroe Street, the Larry Young business, the open murders from March and April-the year had unfolded as an agonizing exercise in frustration, and by summer there was nothing to suggest that Worden’s losing streak had an end.

In late August and early September, the cold, hard slap of reality was a fourteen-year-old shotgun victim by the name of Craig Rideout, stretched out in the early morning light on a Pimlico lawn, dead for hours before anyone found the body or called a cop. Worden labored for days to trace the shooting back to a crew doing shotgun robberies in the Northwest using a red Mazda. Talking to informants in his old district and checking other shotgun robbery reports eventually turned up one badass in particular, a non-taxpayer with a Cherry Hill address and a sheet that included arrests for armed robbery. Not only did Worden tie the kid to a red Mazda that had been seen all over the Northwest, but he learned that the boy was spending a lot of time with people around lower Park Heights near the murder scene.

For a couple of nights, Worden sat on the kid’s house, waiting for anything that looked like a robbery crew to assemble near that Mazda. With no physical evidence, Worden could only hope that his man would go back out on the street with the shotgun to try another robbery. But then an inexplicable act by another detective blew the case apart: Two weeks after the Rideout murder, Worden came into work on a four-to-twelve shift and learned that Dave Hollingsworth, the detective on Stanton’s shift handling another shotgun murder in the Northwest, had gone out to Cherry Hill and interviewed his suspect. Immediately the shotgun robberies in the Northwest came to an abrupt halt. No more red Mazdas, no more sightings of his suspect up around Park Heights.

Only several months later would Worden hear from his best suspect once more. On that occasion, the boy from Cherry Hill is on the other end of a 24-hour report. On that occasion, he’s the body on the pavement, shot down by persons unknown on a street off the Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Rideout murder stayed red, and in Worden’s mind it became a metaphor. Like everything else he touched, it was good police work with a bad ending, and like everything else in his year, it was unresolved.

But the Rideout case was only one jab in a left-right combination. In mid-September, the sucker punch landed in a crowded Central District courtroom, where state senator Larry Young went to trial for his well-publicized misdemeanor.

Trial is perhaps the wrong word for what actually happened. It was more of a spectacle, really, a public display by prosecutors and detectives who had no real interest in seeing the case pursued aggressively. Instead, Tim Doory of the state’s attorney’s office tried the case personally and with just enough vigor to lose by a judge’s verdict. In laying out the scenario by which the senator had falsely reported his own abduction, Doory made a point of not calling the politician’s aide as a witness, intentionally depriving the state’s case of any motive for the false report and thereby avoiding any on-the-stand revelations about the senator’s private life.

It was a gracious, honorable act and one that Worden understood and accepted. What he didn’t accept was that this public demonstration was even necessary; it infuriated him that the prosecutors’ office and police department were so eager to appear earnest in their pursuit of public misdeed that Larry Young had to be charged and tried and acquitted of a meaningless stupidity. Even so, when it came to his testimony, Worden fell on his sword with seeming indifference. Asked by the senator’s attorney about the key conversation in which Young admitted that no crime had occurred, the detective didn’t hesitate to punch the biggest possible hole in the prosecution’s case.

“So let me understand, detective, you told the senator that he would not be charged if he admitted to you that no crime had occurred?”

“I told him he would not be charged by me.”

“But he has been charged.”

“Not by me.”

Worden then acknowledged that the senator only admitted to the false report after being told that no investigation would proceed if he did just that. Worden also accurately described the conclusion of his conversation with Young, in which the senator declared that no crime had occurred and that he would look into the matter privately.

The senator’s attorney finished his cross-examination with a tight smile of satisfaction. “Thank you, Detective Worden.”

Thank you, indeed. With the senator’s admission portrayed as a coerced act and with the prosecutor reluctant to pursue the motive behind the false report, the District Court judge needed little time to arrive at the expected verdict.

Leaving the courtroom, Larry Young approached Donald Worden and offered his hand. “Thank you for not lying,” the senator said.

Worden looked up, surprised. “Why would I lie?”

In context, it was an extraordinary insult. After all, why would a detective lie? Why would he perjure himself? Why would he risk his own integrity, not to mention his job and his pension, to win a case like this? To nail some politician’s pelt to a wall? To earn the undying respect of Larry Young’s political enemies?

Like every cop, Worden had his cynical streak, but he wasn’t really much of a stoic. Open murders and open deceit-the two operant themes of this godforsaken year-still seemed to bother him more than many younger detectives. It didn’t often show, but there had always been a core of insistent anger inside Worden, a quiet rebellion against the inertia and politics of his own police department. Rarely were those emotions allowed to surface; instead, they festered deep inside, feeding his elevated and insubordinate hypertension. Only once, in fact, did Worden vent his rage during the Larry Young business, and that was a brief exchange in the coffee room, when Rick James tried to lighten his partner’s mood.