To: Lt. Gary D’Addario, Homicide unit

From: Sgt. Terry McLarney, Homicide unit

Subject: Ethnic/Slurs Comments made by Det. David John Brown

Sir:

It is with sorrow and disappointment that I call to your attention the flagrant and wanton infliction of emotional distress which was wrought upon this supervisor on this date. It is something which I have never faced in this enlightened department, and hoped that I never would. However, you should know that on this date Det. David John Brown twice made vicious verbal attacks on my ancestry, once referring to me as “a little Irish potato head” and later calling me “a little mick head.”

You, being of negligible ancestry yourself, can certainly understand my shame and chagrin. As you know, my dear mother was born and raised in Ireland and my father is the issue of fine people who were forced to flee that sainted isle during the terrible potato famine, which made the potato head remark particularly painful.

Sir, I would prefer that this matter be handled in-house by you as I would like to avoid the anguish and shame that my family would endure as a result of publicity generated by trial boards and civil action. Thus, I have decided not to make a complaint with the department’s civil rights advisory board, though I reserve the right to file with the National Labor Relations Board should in-house remedies prove insufficient. Brown used to walk foot in the Inner Harbor; he knows the area. In fact, he knows most of Edmondson Avenue, also…

Funny stuff. A little too funny, thought Worden, reading a copy of the memo. McLarney’s obvious delight in Dave Brown was helping to turn Carol Wright into nothing worse than a vague and distant memory. If the Nina Perry case meant anything at all, Worden thought, then now was the time for Brown to show it. Did he really want to work murders? Did he even know exactly what that meant? Or was he up here to submit overtime slips and close Kavanaugh’s every other night? If McLarney wasn’t going to stick a finger in Dave Brown’s eye, then the Big Man would take that responsibility upon himself. For three weeks running, in fact, Worden had been knee deep in the younger detective’s shit, waiting to see some movement on a case that Brown would like to see disappear. It’s been the full Worden treatment-cold, demanding and a little bit vicious. For Dave Brown, a man who wants nothing more than to bask in the latest success, there is no joy, no mercy, and absolutely no chance of escape.

Now, on today’s quiet eight-to-four shift, the younger detective is actually foolish enough to be caught reading the new issue of Rolling Stone in the coffee room, an act of utter indolence. Worden needs only to enter the room and ascertain that the Carol Wright file is not visible on Dave Brown’s desk.

“De-tec-tive Brown,” says Worden, imbuing each syllable with contempt.

“What?”

“Detective Brown…”

“What do you want?”

“I’ll bet you like the sound of that, don’t you?”

“The sound of what?”

“Detective Brown. Detective David John Brown.”

“Go fuck yourself, Worden.” Worden stares at the younger detective intently and for so long that Brown can no longer concentrate on the magazine.

“Quit staring at me, you old bastard.”

“I’m not staring at you.”

“The fuck you aren’t.”

“It’s your conscience.” Brown looks at him, uncomprehending.

“Where’s the Carol Wright case?” says Worden.

“Hey, I’ve got to type the prosecution report for Nina Perry…”

“That was last month.”

“… and I got a warrant out this week on my boy Clayvon, so gimme a fucking break already.”

“My heart pumps purple piss for you,” says Worden.

“I didn’t ask you about Clayvon Jones, did I? What’s new with Carol Wright?”

“Nothing. I got my dick in my hands on that.”

“De-tec-tive Brown…”

Dave Brown pulls open his top right drawer and grabs the.38, pulling the gun halfway out of the holster. Worden doesn’t laugh.

“Gimme a quarter,” says the older detective.

“What the hell for?”

“Gimme a quarter.”

“If I give you a quarter, will you shut the fuck up and leave me alone?”

“Maybe,” says Worden. Dave Brown stands up and fishes a coin from his trouser pocket. He throws the quarter at Worden, then sits again, burying his face behind the magazine. Worden gives him a good ten seconds.

“De-tec-tive Brown…”

NINE

At its core, the crime is the same.

This time she is shot, not stabbed or garroted. This time the small frame is just a bit heavier and the hair is down, not pulled back in braids with a brightly colored beret. This time the vaginal swabs will provide proof of the rape in the form of seminal fluid. This time she did not disappear while walking to a library but to a bus stop. And this time the dead girl will be a year older, twelve instead of eleven. But in every important way, it is the same.

Nine months after Latonya Kim Wallace was discovered behind a Reservoir Hill rowhouse, Harry Edgerton is once again staring at an act of unequivocal evil in a Baltimore alley. The body, fully clothed, is crumpled at the edge of an old brick garage foundation behind a vacant rowhouse in the 1800 block of West Baltimore Street. The single bullet wound is to the back of the skull-a.32 or.38 from the look of it-fired at close range.

Her name was Andrea Perry.

And her mother knows when she watches the evening news and catches a glimpse of the ME’s attendants carrying the gurney out of an alley a block away from her Fayette Street home. Andrea has only been missing since last night, and the unidentified victim on television is initially believed to be an older girl, possibly a young woman. But her mother knows.

The identification process at Penn Street is achingly painful, hard even for the ME’s attendants, who can do this sort of thing four or five times a day. Later that day in the homicide office, Roger Nolan has barely started to interview the mother when she breaks down uncontrollably.

“Go home,” he tells her. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

At about the same moment, Edgerton stands in the autopsy room and watches another postmortem of another murdered child. This time, however, Edgerton is the primary detective. In fact, he’s the only detective. And this time, he tells himself, it’s all going to end differently.

But if the Andrea Perry case is now the exclusive property of the homicide unit’s consummate loner, it is also a contradiction in terms: behold, the one-man red ball.

The Andrea Perry murder has all the earmarks of a major case-a dead child, a brutal rape and murder, a lead story on the six o’clock news-yet this time there are no special details, no herd of detectives at the crime scene, no second-day cadet searches. This time the brass is nowhere to be seen.

It might have gone this way even if someone other than Edgerton had taken the call. Because once already this year, D’Addario’s men had spent themselves in a communal fight, gathering the entire shift for an absolutely essential case. For one little girl, they had called in extra troops from the districts. For one righteous cause, they had pursued their best suspects for weeks and then months, sacrificing other cases in the campaign for a single, small life. And none of it had mattered. The Latonya Wallace case had gone sour, reminding every man on the shift that all the time and money and effort mean nothing when the evidence isn’t there. In the end, it was an open file like any other-a special tragedy, to be sure-but an open murder now in the care of one solitary detective.

Success is its own catalyst; failure, too. Without any arrest in the death of one child, the same shift of detectives had very little to deliver in the death of another. For Andrea Perry, there will be no general mobilization, no declaration of war. It is October; the arsenal is empty.