“Get him out of here,” says Waltemeyer, blocking the husband’s view. “Take him downstairs now.”

“Just tell me who he is, goddammit.”

Both uniforms grab the husband and begin pushing him out of the apartment. Easy, they tell him. Take it easy.

“I’m okay. I’m all right,” he tells them in the hallway. “I’m okay.”

They guide him to the other end of the hall, standing with him as he leans into the plasterboard and catches his breath.

“I just want to know what that guy was doing in there with her.”

“It’s his apartment,” says one of the uniforms.

The husband shows his pain, and the uniform volunteers the obvious information: “She just went in there to fire up. She wasn’t fucking the guy or anything like that.”

Another small act of charity, but the husband shakes it off.

“I know that,” says the husband quickly. “I just wanted to know if he was the guy that got her the drugs, that’s all.”

“No. She brought hers with her.”

The husband nods. “I couldn’t get her to stop,” he tells the cop. “I loved her, but I couldn’t get her to stop it. She wouldn’t listen. She told me where she was going tonight because she knew I couldn’t stop her…”

“Yeah,” says the cop, uncomfortable.

“She was such a beautiful girl.”

The cop says nothing.

“I loved her.”

“Uh-huh,” says the cop.

Waltemeyer finishes the scene and drives back to the office in silence, the entire event now confined to a page and a half of his notebook. He catches every light on St. Paul Street.

“What did you get?” asks McLarney.

“Nothing much. An OD.”

“Junkie?”

“It was a young girl.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Pretty.”

Very pretty, thinks Waltemeyer. You could see how, if she had cleaned herself up, she would have been special. Long dark hair. Big traffic-light eyes.

“How old?” asks McLarney.

“Twenty-eight. She was married. I thought she was a lot younger at first.”

Waltemeyer walks to a typewriter. In five minutes, it will all be just another 24-hour report. In five minutes, you can ask him about that loose sweater and he won’t know what you’re talking about. But now, right now, it’s real.

“You know,” he tells his sergeant. “The other day my boy comes home from school, and he’s sitting there in the living room with me and he says, ‘Hey, Dad, someone offered me coke in school today…’”

McLarney nods.

“And I’m thinking, aw shit, here it comes. And then he just smiles and tells me, ‘But I asked for Pepsi instead.’”

McLarney laughs softly.

“Some nights you go out and see shit that’s no good for you,” says Waltemeyer suddenly. “You know what I mean? No fucking good at all.”

Roger Nolan picks up the phone and begins shuffling through the admin office card file for Joe Kopera’s home number. The department’s best ballistics man will be working late tonight.

From the hallway comes the sound of loud banging on the large interrogation room door.

“Hey, Rog,” says one of Stanton’s detectives, “is that your man making all that noise?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a second.”

Nolan finds the number and reaches Kopera, explaining the situation quickly. He finishes the call to even louder banging.

“Hey, Rog, shut this motherfucker up, will you?”

Nolan walks through the fishbowl and out into the hallway. The devil himself has his face pressed against the window in the door, hands cupped around his eyes, trying to peer through the one-way glass.

“What’s your problem?”

“I gotta go to the bathroom.”

“The bathroom, huh? I bet you want a drink of water too.”

The devil needs to take a leak. Evil incarnate wants a drink of water. Nolan shakes his head and opens the metal door. “I’ll be damned,” he tells the suspect. “Every time you put one of these motherfuckers in the box, they lose control of their bladder and start getting dizzy from thirst… Okay, c’mon, let’s get it over with…”

The suspect steps slowly from the room, a thirty-one-year-old black man, thinly built, with receding, close-cropped hair and deep brown eyes. His face is rounded, his wide mouth marked by gap teeth and a long overbite. His sweatsuit is a size too big, his high-top tennis shoes well worn. Nothing in his appearance gives truth to his abominable deed: There is nothing in the face to inspire fear, nothing in the eyes to call extraordinary. He is altogether ordinary, and for that reason, too, he inspires contempt.

His name is Eugene Dale, and the computer sheet on Harry Edgerton’s desk provides enough history for two murderers. Most of the arrests involve rape, attempted rape and handgun violations; in fact, Dale is now on parole, having just been released by the state corrections department after serving nine years for sexual assault.

“If you’re not out here in three minutes,” Nolan tells him at the men’s room door, “I gotta come in there after you. Understand?”

Eugene Dale walks out of the men’s room two minutes later, looking sheepish. Nolan points him back down the hallway.

“My drink,” says the suspect.

“So?” says Nolan. “Drink.”

Dale stops at the water cooler, then wipes the wetness from his face with his sleeve. The suspect is returned to his cubicle, where he waits for Edgerton, who is at this moment in another interview room, talking with the people who know Dale best, absorbing all of the available background for the coming interrogation.

It would have been a better piece of drama if an act of rare investigative genius had produced Eugene Dale. For the detectives who suffered through Latonya Wallace, it would have been a perfectly righteous moment if some subtle connection in the Andrea Perry case file had caused this man to materialize in an interrogation room. And for Harry Edgerton, it would have been pure vindication if some brilliant discovery during his lonely and methodical pursuit had given them the name.

But, as usual, poetic justice has no place here. Edgerton did everything possible to find his suspect, but in the end, the suspect found him. Wanted for the cold-blooded murder of one child, the man fidgeting in the large interrogation room waited all of two weeks before he went out and raped another.

Still, when the second rape report came in, everyone in the unit knew immediately what it meant. Edgerton had laid the groundwork for that, meeting with the operations people in three districts and warning them to be looking for anything sexual or anything involving a.32-caliber firearm. So when the second rape report was copied to the Southern District’s operations unit, a female officer there, Rita Cohen, knew exactly what was what. The second victim was a thirteen-year-old who had been lured by Dale to a vacant rowhouse on South Mount Street, then threatened with a “silver-looking” handgun and raped. Dale let this girl live, though he warned her that if she told anyone about the attack he would find her again and shoot her in the back of the head. The young victim promised not to tell, but did precisely the opposite when she returned home to her mother. As it happened, she knew her attacker by name and address both-her best friend was the young daughter of Dale’s girlfriend.

The crime was as stupid as it was evil. The girlfriend’s daughter had even seen Dale walking the victim home just before the assault, which may have been why he did not murder the thirteen-year-old after raping her. He knew there was a witness, yet he abandoned all caution to satisfy his compulsion with another child.

After calling homicide and taking the rape victim’s statement, the Southern plainclothes officers wrote a warrant for Dale’s address on Gilmor Street, no more than a few blocks from the alley in which Andrea Perry had been murdered. The raid had been set for today, and though Edgerton was scheduled to be off, Nolan accompanied the Southern officers to the house and assured Edgerton that if the warrant produced any evidence or a viable suspect, he was back on the clock.