“Hey, it’s out of your hands,” said James. “What the fuck are you gonna do?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m ready to do,” growled Worden. “I’m ready to stick my gun inside somebody’s mouth, and that somebody is inside this headquarters building.”

James left it alone after that. What, after all, remained to be said?

At the same time, Terry McLarney went into a clinical depression after hearing a rumor that Worden had expressed interest in an open posting for an investigator with the medical examiner’s office. Worden’s gone, he told others in the squad. We’re losing him to this fucked-up year of his.

“Right now he just looks tired,” McLarney told others in the squad. “I’ve never seen Donald looking so tired.”

McLarney held tight to a slim thread of hope: Get Worden back out on the street with new murders. Good murders, good calls. McLarney believed that if anything could wipe the slate clean for a guy like Worden, it would be real police work.

But Monroe Street had been real police work; the Rideout case, too. They had just ended poorly. Even Worden himself wasn’t really sure what was wrong, and he had no idea where this tunnel was taking him, or whether it even had a light at its end. The best that could be said was that Donald Worden had gotten used to traveling in the dark.

Then, suddenly, a little light began to show. Late September brought that three-for-a-quarter performance on the midnight shift, when Worden worked every body that fell within his field of vision. And one week after those clearances he picked up yet another whodunit on daywork. The case was a loser: a nude woman found carved up behind an elementary school on Greenspring Avenue, discovered by the post officer a good twelve hours after the murder. No identification, no match to any missing persons report.

The beauty of Worden’s performance on that case would not come with its solution, although incredibly, he would come up with a suspect after staying with the file for more than a year. The beauty was that he refused to allow this woman to remain a Jane Doe- “a member of the deer family,” as he liked to put it-to be buried for $200 by the state without the knowledge of friends or family.

For six days Worden was out in the street, looking for a name. The television stations and newspapers wouldn’t run a photograph of the woman’s face: she was too obviously dead. Her fingerprints didn’t match up with anything in either the local computer or the federal data base available to the FBI. And though the body looked pretty clean-an indication that the woman had been living somewhere-no one ever came into a police district to say that their mother or sister or daughter had not come home. Worden checked the group home for homeless women on nearby Cottage Avenue. He checked with the detox and drug treatment centers, because the victim’s liver looked a little gray at autopsy. He canvassed the streets around the elementary school and along the nearest city bus route.

The break had come last night, when he paraded the photograph through every bar and carryout in Pimlico. Finally someone at the Preakness Bar remembered that the dead woman had a boyfriend named Leon Sykes who used to live over on Moreland Avenue. That address was vacant, but a neighbor told him to try 1710 Bentalou. There, a young girl listened to Worden’s story and took him to 1802 Longwood, where Leon Sykes looked at the photo and identified the dead woman as Barbara.

“What’s her last name?”

“I never knew.”

But Leon remembered where the dead woman’s daughter lived. And thus, by pure police work, did Jane Doe-a black female, late twenties-become Barbara Womble, thirty-nine years, of 1633 Moreland Avenue.

Those six circuitous days and nights in Pimlico left no one with any doubt: Worden was back, having outlasted his worst year.

The Big Man’s triumphant return was also marked by his renewed and unceasing torment of Dave Brown, whose abandonment of the Carol Wright case had not exactly gone unnoticed by the older detective. For at least a part of September, Brown’s excuse was the Nina Perry investigation, which began when a couple of dopers were arrested in the car of a woman reported missing from her Stricker Street rowhouse a week earlier. Working with McLarney, Brown put that case together in fine fashion, pressuring one of the suspects to confess fully to the murder and then lead detectives to the victim’s badly decomposed remains, which he had dumped in a Carroll County backwoods.

Worden watched the Nina Perry case unfold and thought that maybe, just maybe, a detective lurked somewhere within David John Brown. The Perry case was fine work, the kind that teaches a cop something about his craft. But Worden’s generosity went no further.

“Clayvon Jones and Carol Wright,” Worden declared in late September. “Let’s see him do something with one of those.”

But Clayvon Jones would not be the true test, not after Eddie Brown came strutting into the coffee room four days ago with a letter from the Baltimore City Jail in his right hand.

“Speak to yo’ daddy,” said the older detective, dropping the letter onto the desk with a flourish. Dave Brown read about three lines before turning in prayer to the green bulkhead wall.

“Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Do I take care of you?” asked Eddie Brown.

“You do. You mah daddy.”

The letter had arrived in the admin office that afternoon, a hastily scrawled missive from a prisoner who had witnessed the murder of Clayvon Jones in that east side courtyard back in June. Three months later, this witness needed to barter out from beneath a drug charge. Addressed to the homicide unit, his letter included details about the crime scene that only a bona fide witness could know.

No, the Clayvon Jones killing would not be much of an education. In Worden’s considered opinion, its easy solution became simply another laurel beneath the weight of Brown’s ass. That left Carol Wright, the woman run down on the South Baltimore parking lot. For a few weeks, Brown had at least talked about picking up the Carol Wright file again and sorting through the old leads. But as far as the board was concerned, the Carol Wright case still wasn’t a murder and therefore it didn’t exist. These days, he wasn’t even mentioning the case and, as Brown’s sergeant, McLarney wasn’t making much of a stink about it either. Indeed, with Nina Perry and Clayvon Jones both safely in the black, McLarney had a new appreciation for Dave Brown’s talents.

In McLarney’s mind, the Perry case in particular counted for a lot. Brown had worked hard and a tough case involving a genuine victim had gone down. That arrest had elevated Brown to hero-of-the-week status, and he was therefore entitled to a beer or two at Kavanaugh’s with his loving and devoted sergeant. In fact, McLarney was so pleased with the Perry case that he stayed with Brown through its aftermath, sharing the remaining paperwork and evidentiary details. He only balked when it came time to pick up the victim’s maggot-infested clothing at the ME’s office.

“Fuck this, Dave. I’ll give you a hand with this tomorrow,” McLarney said after getting a quick whiff of the stench. “Let’s come back for this stuff in the morning.”

Dave Brown readily agreed and drove back to headquarters a contented man, at least until he realized McLarney wasn’t scheduled to work the next day.

“Wait a second,” he said, parking the Cavalier in the garage. “You’re off tomorrow.”

McLarney giggled.

“You little Irish potatohead.”

“Potatohead?”

“You did me, you goddamn mick.” That was the new and improved Dave Brown talking, a far cry from the detective who had penned that please-keep-me-in-homicide missive the month before. A man has to feel fairly secure before he’s willing to call his immediate supervisor an Irish potatohead, even in the casual environment of a homicide office. And of course McLarney loved it. Sitting at an admin office typewriter that same evening, he immortalized the deed in a memo to the lieutenant: