Gary Dunnigan, who took the anonymous phone call, wrote out an office report and gave it to Edgerton for the file. Edgerton absorbed the information and checked the woman’s name on the computer to assure himself that she wasn’t a serious suspect. He even interviewed the woman’s neighbors and relatives, learning enough about her to satisfy his curiosity, but in the first week of the investigation he does not pick the woman up.
After all, the story makes no sense, and besides, he’s getting better information from his neighborhood canvass. One story has the little girl’s murder as an act of retaliation against one of her relatives, the other as a predatory act by a dealer who simply wanted to show the neighborhood how hard he could be. There is talk about two drug traffickers in the area, and neither man seems to have much of an alibi.
For once, and to the amusement of the other detectives, Edgerton arrives in the homicide office early each day, grabbing the keys to a Cavalier and then disappearing into West Baltimore. Most afternoons, Edgerton works through the shift change, not returning until well into the evening. Some days Nolan is with him, other days he works alone, his whereabouts a mystery to the rest of the squad. Alone on the street, Edgerton can be more effective than any man who ever had a partner. Out on the street, he understands the special benefits of isolation; his critics do not. There are detectives in the homicide unit who never go anywhere in the ghetto alone, who always double up on any investigative trip to West Baltimore.
“You want company?” detectives routinely ask each other. And on those rare occasions when one investigator sets out for the slums alone, he is invariably cautioned: “Careful, bunk, don’t get yourself captured.”
From the outside looking in, Edgerton understands that the camaraderie of the unit can be a crutch. More often than not, Edgerton ventures into the high-rise projects alone and finds witnesses; more often than not, other detectives march through neighborhoods in twos and threes and find nothing. Edgerton learned long ago that even the best and most cooperative witnesses are more likely to talk to one detective than to a pair. And three detectives working a case are nothing short of a police riot in the eyes of a reluctant or untrusting witness. In truth, when all is said and done, the surest way for a cop to solve a murder is to get his ass out on the street and find a witness.
The better detectives all understand this: Worden often does some of his best work alone in a Cavalier, riding back out to a neighborhood to talk quietly with people who recoiled when it was Worden and James and Brown camped on their doorstep. But there are detectives in the unit who are genuinely fearful of riding alone.
Edgerton has no such fears; he wears his attitude like a shield. Two months ago, he was out at Edmondson and Payson working a drug murder and, without thinking twice, he wandered away from his crime scene and down the worst stretch of Edmondson Avenue alone, parting a block of corner boys as if he were Charlton Heston on the Universal Studio lot. He was looking for witnesses or, at the very least, for someone willing to whisper into a cop’s ear some truth about what happened on Payson Street an hour earlier. Instead, he got surly looks and silent rage from fifty black faces.
And yet he moved on, seemingly oblivious of the hostility until, at the corner of Edmondson and Brice, he watched a young kid, fourteen or fifteen years old, pass a paper bag to an older boy who ran around the block. For Edgerton, it was opportunity knocking. With the rest of the street watching coldly, he grabbed the kid by a shoulder and dragged him to a Cavalier around the corner, pressing the boy for details about the murder.
A Western uniform, watching from the crime scene two blocks away, later cautioned the detective.
“You shouldn’t have gone down there alone,” he told Edgerton. “What if some shit had started?”
To which Edgerton could only shake his head.
“I’m serious, man,” the uniform said. “You only got six bullets.”
“I don’t even have that.” Edgerton laughed. “I forgot my gun.”
“YOU WHAT?”
“Yeah. I left my gun in my desk.”
A cop at Edmondson and Brice with no gun. The Western uniforms were stunned; Edgerton was indifferent: “This job,” he told them, “is ninety percent attitude.”
Now, working the Andrea Perry murder, Edgerton is back in another West Baltimore neighborhood, mixing with the locals as few police can. He talks to the occupants of every rowhouse that backs up to his alley, he chats up the hangers-on at the carryouts and bars. Working from the bus stop toward his victim’s home on Fayette Street, he checks every address for a witness who may have seen the child walking with someone. When nothing comes from that effort, he begins checking other sexual assault reports from the Southern and Western districts.
In fact, Edgerton makes a point early on in the investigation of calling the operations unit officers from the Southern, Southwestern and Western districts downtown and briefing them on the case. He tells them to be looking for anyone involved in anything sexual with underage girls, or any report involving an abduction or a.32-caliber weapon. Edgerton urges the ops unit officers in all three districts to call him with information that seems even remotely related. That, too, differs from the approach taken in the Latonya Wallace case, where district officers had been detailed downtown to help with the investigation. For this little girl, Edgerton decides, the districts will not come to CID; CID will go into the districts.
Only once, on the day after the body’s discovery, is there any hint of the communal effort that normally accompanies a red-ball case, and it is prompted by Nolan, who for the sake of appearances asks McAllister, Kincaid and Bowman to give them a day’s help to expand the canvass.
Looking through the case file that day, the other detectives in the squad wonder aloud why Edgerton hadn’t immediately followed up on the anonymous call. At the very least, they argue, he should go out and grab the woman whom the male caller allegedly saw running from the alley.
“That’s the last thing I want to do,” says Edgerton, explaining his strategy to Nolan. “If I get her down here, what am I going to do? I have one question to ask her, and after that I’ve got nothing.”
To Edgerton’s way of thinking, it is another mistake that too many detectives make too often-the same mistake that they had made with the Fish Man in the Latonya Wallace case. You bring someone down and go at them in the interrogation room with no real ammunition. They walk out an hour later, more confident than before, and if you ever do get any leverage on them, you’ve only made it harder to come back and break them the second time.
“I ask her why she was running out of the alley, and she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about,” Edgerton explains to Nolan. “And she’s right. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
He still doesn’t believe that the woman named by the caller actually ran from the alley after the murder. But even if he did believe it, he would not risk an interrogation until it had at least a chance of success.
“If all else fails, then I bring her down here and ask my one question,” the detective says, “and not before.”
Nolan agrees. “It’s your case,” he tells Edgerton. “Do it your way.”
Beyond his squad’s limited help with the expanded canvass, Edgerton’s isolation on the case is complete. Even D’Addario keeps his distance: He asks Nolan for regular progress reports and offers help if help is needed, but otherwise he is content to let Edgerton and his sergeant set their own pace.
The contrast with D’Addario’s response to the Latonya Wallace investigation is striking. Edgerton hopes that the lieutenant’s hands-off approach is, at least in part, a display of confidence in his investigator. More likely, the detective reasons, D’Addario has himself soured on the full-blown red-ball treatment. Throwing troops and money at a case had accomplished so little in Reservoir Hill that maybe the lieutenant is reluctant to travel the same road a second time. Or maybe, like everyone else on the shift, LTD is just too damn tired for another all-out campaign.