But as with everything else in this case, even the time of death remained a moving target. Earlier in the evening before the raid on the old man’s rowhouse, Edgerton had argued briefly against the prevailing opinion: “What if she was killed on Tuesday night? Could she have been killed late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning?”
“Can’t be,” said Landsman. “She’s just starting to come out of rigor. And the eyes are still moist.”
“She could be coming out of rigor after twenty-four hours.”
“No fucking way, Harry.”
“Yeah she could.”
“No fucking way. It’s gonna happen faster for her because she’s smaller…”
“But it’s also cold out.”
“But we know the guy has her inside somewhere until he can dump her that morning.”
“Yeah, but…”
“No, Harry, you’re fucked up on this,” said Landsman, producing the office medical text on death investigation and turning to the section on rigor mortis. “Eyes not dry, no decomp. Twelve to eighteen hours, Harry.”
Edgerton scanned the page. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Twelve to eighteen. And if she’s dumped at three or four… that’s…”
“Middle of the day on Wednesday.”
Edgerton nodded. If she was killed on Wednesday, then the Fish Man was out and there was every reason to move Landsman’s candidate, the old drunk from across the street, to the top of the list.
“Hey, fuck it,” said Landsman finally. “We got no reason not to pick this guy up.”
No reason save that their suspect can barely hang on to his bottle, much less lure a young girl off the street and hold her captive for a day and a half. The interrogation lasts only long enough to establish that the old drunk had only heard of the murder on that Thursday morning from a neighbor who had heard it from the woman who lived at 718 Newington. He doesn’t know about the murder. He doesn’t know the little girl. He can’t remember much about his old charges except that whatever they were, he was innocent. He wants to go home.
A lab tech takes Edgerton’s samples to a detective’s desk and subjects each to a leuco malachite test, a chemical examination in which items are daubed with a cotton-tipped applicator that will turn blue if blood-animal or human-is present. Edgerton watches as each applicator turns a dull gray, an indication of dirt and nothing more.
A few hours before dawn, as the old man is returned to anonymity in a Central District radio car and the detectives collate and copy another day’s reports, Pellegrini dryly offers a fresh alternative.
“Ed, you wanna break this case?”
Brown and Ceruti both look up in surprise. Other detectives glance over as well, their curiosity piqued.
“Then I’ll tell you what you do.”
“What’s that?”
“Ed, you go prepare a statement of charges.”
“Yeah?”
“And Fred, you read me my rights…”
The room breaks up.
“Hey,” says Landsman, laughing. “What do you guys think? Is this case getting to Tom? I mean, he kinda looks like he’s beginning to molt.” Pellegrini laughs sheepishly; in truth, he is beginning to look a little played out. His features are almost classically Italian: dark eyes, sharp facial lines, stocky build, thick mustache, jet black hair cresting in a pompadour that on a good day seems an affront to gravity itself. But this is not a good day; his eyes are glazed, his hair a dark, unruly cascade over his pale forehead. His words come drag-ass out of his mouth in a mountain drawl slowed by lack of sleep.
Every man in the room has been there before, working 120-hour weeks as the primary investigator on a case that simply doesn’t add up, a set of facts that won’t solidify into a suspect no matter how long you stare at them. An open red ball is a torture tour, a ball-busting, blood-draining ordeal that always seems to shape and mark a detective more than the ones that go down. And for Pellegrini, still new to Landsman’s squad, the Latonya Wallace murder is proving to be the hardest rite of passage.
Tom Pellegrini had nine years on the force when his transfer to homicide was finally approved, nine years of wondering whether police work was truly a calling or merely the latest meandering in what had become a lifetime of detours.
He was born to a coal miner in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, but his father-himself the son of a miner-left the family when Pellegrini was a boy. After that, there was nothing to bind them. Once, as an adult, he had gone to see his father for a weekend, but the connections he had been looking for simply weren’t there. His father was uncomfortable, his father’s second wife unwelcoming, and Pellegrini left that Sunday knowing that the visit had been a mistake. His mother offered little solace. She had never expected much of him and from time to time she actually came right out and said so. For the most part, Pellegrini was raised by a grandmother and spent summers with an aunt, who took him down to Maryland to see his cousins.
His first choices in life seemed-like his childhood-uncertain, perhaps even random. Unlike most of the men in the homicide unit, Pellegrini had no prior connection to Baltimore and little in law enforcement when he joined the department in 1979. He arrived as something close to a blank tablet, as rootless and unclaimed as a man can be. In his past, Pellegrini could count a couple of frustrating years at Youngstown College in Ohio, where a few semesters were enough to convince him that he was not at all suited for academics. There was a failed marriage as well, along with six months in a Pennsylvania coal mine-enough for Pellegrini to know that the family tradition was something to walk away from. He signed on for a couple of years as the manager of a carnival, where he worked the towns and state fairs and kept the amusement rides running. Eventually, that job led to a more permanent position as manager of an amusement park on a lakeshore island between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, where he spent most of his time trying to keep the joyrides from rusting during the northern winters. When the amusement park owners refused to pay for better, safer maintenance, Pellegrini quit, convinced that he wanted to be nowhere near the place when the Tilt-A-Whirl altered its usual orbit.
The want ads led south-first to Baltimore, where he visited the aunt who had taken him in during those childhood summers. He stayed in Maryland for a week, long enough to answer a newspaper ad encouraging applications to the Baltimore Police Department. He had once worked for a brief time at a private security firm, and though the job offered nothing even remotely resembling police work, it left him with the vague feeling that he might enjoy being a cop. In the late 1970s, however, the prospects for a law enforcement career were uncertain; most every city department was dealing with budgetary retrenchment and hiring freezes. Still, Pellegrini was intrigued enough to attend the interview for the Baltimore department. But rather than wait for a reply, he pushed on to Atlanta, where he had been led to believe that the Sun Belt’s economic boom was a better guarantee of employment. He stayed overnight in Atlanta, reading the classifieds at a depressing diner in a ragged section of the city, then returning to the motel to hear from his aunt, who called to say he had been accepted by the Baltimore academy.
What the hell, he told himself. He didn’t know much about Baltimore, but what he’d seen of Atlanta couldn’t exactly be described as paradise. What the hell.
After graduation, he was assigned to Sector 4 of the Southern, a white enclave almost evenly divided between affluent urban homesteaders and an ethnic working class. It was hardly the most crime-ridden section of the city, and Pellegrini understood that if he stayed there ten years, he would never learn what he needed to know to rise in the department. If he was going to be any good at this, he told himself, he had to get to one of the rough-and-tumble districts like the Western or, better still, to a citywide unit. After less than two years in a radio car, his ticket out of the hinterlands came in the form of an approved transfer to the Quick Response Team, the heavily armed tactical unit responsible for handling hostage situations and barricades. Working out of headquarters, QRT was considered something of an elite unit, and the officers were divided into four-man teams that trained constantly. Day after day, Pellegrini and the rest of his squad would practice kicking in doors, fanning out across unfamiliar rooms and then mock-firing at cardboard cutouts of gunmen. There were cardboard cutouts of hostages as well, and after enough practice, a team could get to the point where, under optimal conditions, if every man did his job, they might hit a hostage no more than every fourth or fifth time.