Beyond everything else Pellegrini had learned about his best suspect, one item in particular stood out in his mind. It was a coincidence perhaps, but a chilling one, and he had stumbled across it while checking back through a decade of open missing persons reports for young girls. In February, the investigators compared the Latonya Wallace case to other open child murders, but only recently did it occur to Pellegrini that missing persons cases should probably be examined as well. Checking the reports from one 1979 case, he found that a nine-year-old girl had disappeared from her parents’ home on Montpelier Street, never to be seen alive again. And Montpelier Street rang a bell: Pellegrini had just been out to interview a man whose family had once been partners with the Fish Man in an earlier grocery store. The family had lived on Montpelier Street for the last twenty years; the Fish Man had visited them often.

The old missing persons file contained no photographs, but a couple of days later Pellegrini drove over to the Baltimore Sun building and asked permission to check the newspaper’s photo morgue. The paper still had two pictures of the missing child, both black-and-white copies of her grade school portraits. Standing in the newspaper’s library, Pellegrini looked down at the photographs and felt the strangest sensation. From every angle, the child was a dead ringer for Latonya Wallace.

Maybe that uncanny resemblance was coincidence; maybe each apparently insignificant detail stood alone, unrelated to anything else. But the prolonged research into the Fish Man’s background was enough to convince Pellegrini that he needed to challenge the man one last time. After all, the old man had been given every opportunity to make himself less of a suspect, yet he had failed to do so. Pellegrini reasoned that he owed himself one more crack at the guy. Even as Pellegrini prepared himself for that last interrogation, a tiny paint chip materialized on the dead girl’s stocking, taunting him with another suspect and another direction.

The taunt grows louder when Pellegrini returns from Reservoir Hill and visits the trace evidence lab with fresh samples from the rear door of 716 Newington. Sure enough, Van Gelder has no trouble matching them to the chip found inside the hose. Suddenly, Andrew elbows the Fish Man aside.

A short talk that same afternoon with Andrew’s former wife yields the information that his suspect is still working with the city’s Bureau of Highways, so Pellegrini visits the Fallsway garage, arriving just as the suspect’s shift is ending. Asked if he would mind coming down to the homicide office for further questioning, Andrew becomes visibly upset, almost hostile.

No, he tells Pellegrini. I want a lawyer.

Later that same week, the detective returns to Reservoir Hill with a lab technician for a three-hour search of 716 Newington, concentrating on the basement room where Andrew had his bar and his television and spent most of his free time. Nine months is a long time for evidence to stay put; in the end, Pellegrini leaves with nothing more than a carpet sample that may or may not have something resembling a bloodstain.

Still, Andrew has suddenly started behaving like a suspect with things to hide, and that paint chip seems to Pellegrini like a tiny shard of irrevocable truth: Somewhere along the line, Latonya Wallace got a little portion of Andrew’s back door wedged between her leg and her stocking.

For a brief time, it is hard not to be a little cheered by the developments. But less than a week later Pellegrini makes another trip to Newington Avenue and, as he once again walks that alley, he notices that there are red-orange paint chips from Andrew’s back door all over the adjacent yards. On the last visit, he had noticed right away that the paint on the door had been peeling badly, but now, looking carefully at the pavement behind 716 and 718 and 720 Newington, he sees red-orange chips scattered everywhere by the rain and wind, flashing up at him like fool’s gold. The chip from the tights must have already been on the ground when the little girl’s body was dumped behind 718 Newington. But Pellegrini isn’t quite ready to let go. How, he asks himself, did the chip get inside the stockings? How could it be between the leg and the hose unless it got there after the child had been undressed?

Van Gelder soon provides the answer. Checking the evidence yet again, the lab analyst notes that the stockings are now insideout, as they surely were during the recent examination by Landsman and Pellegrini. Chances are, the tights were rolled off the little girl’s body at the autopsy and had remained inside-out ever since. Though it seemed for a time otherwise, the paint chip had been on the outside of the hose all along.

Given Van Gelder’s explanation, Pellegrini immediately sees the rest of the story for what it is: Andrew became nervous, but who wouldn’t be nervous when questioned yet again by a homicide detective? As for the carpet sample, Pellegrini knows that it doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of coming back positive for human blood. To hell with Andrew, he thinks. He isn’t a suspect, he’s a wasted week.

The Fish Man, as durable a murder suspect as ever existed, once again returns to center stage.

Donald Waltemeyer grabs the dead girl by both arms, feeling for any tension in the hands and fingers. The girl’s hands follow his freely, giving the appearance of a bizarre, horizontal dance.

“She’s wet,” he says.

Milton, the junkie on the sofa, nods.

“What’d you do? Put her in cold water?”

Milton nods again.

“Where? In the bath?”

“No. I just splashed her with water.”

“From where? That bathtub?”

“Yeah.”

Waltemeyer walks into the bathroom, where he satisfies himself that the tub is still covered with droplets. It is an old wives’ tale among the junkies: Overdoses can be brought back by putting them in cold water, as if a bath can somehow rid them of whatever they’ve put in their veins.

“Lemme ask you this, Milton,” says Waltemeyer. “Did you and her use the same works or did you fire your shit using something else?”

Milton gets up and moves toward the closet.

“Don’t fucking show it to me,” says Waltemeyer. “If you show it to me, I gotta lock you up.”

“Oh.”

“Just answer the question. Did you use the same needle?”

“No. I got my own.”

“Okay then. Sit down and tell me again what happened.”

Milton runs down the tale again, leaving nothing out. Waltemeyer hears again about how the white girl came by to fire up, about how she often came up here to shoot because her husband didn’t like her using.

“Like I said, she brought me that box of noodles ’cause she used some last time she was here.”

“This macaroni here?”

“Yeah. She brought that with her.”

“She had her own dope?”

“Yeah. I had mine and then she came with hers.”

“Where was she sitting when she fired?”

“This chair here. She fired up and then fell asleep. I looked over after a while and she wasn’t breathing.”

Waltemeyer nods. The call is straight up, and for that reason alone he feels good. After three months of tracking Geraldine Parrish and her missing relatives, even a simple overdose can be something of a reprieve. Waltemeyer had told himself that if he didn’t get back into the rotation on this midnight shift, he would lose his mind. McLarney had agreed.

“Your run sheets have been getting messier and messier,” the sergeant told him a week ago. “It’s like a cry for help.”

Maybe so. Waltemeyer had taken the Parrish case as far as he could, though there would be more work to come as trial preparation got under way. And he still hadn’t figured out exactly what had happened to Geraldine’s last husband, the aged Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, who died after a few weeks of marriage. A relative was now telling them that Miss Geraldine had ground two dozen Valium into the Reverend Gilliard’s tuna salad, then watched as the old man slowly succumbed to a seizure. The story was solid enough that Doc Smialek and Marc Cohen, the assistant state’s attorney handling the case, were willing to try for an exhumation order. Some days, Waltemeyer truly believed that the case had no end.