That afternoon, Landsman had shown his affidavits to Howard Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who had wandered into the homicide unit earlier that day. “Hey, Howard, take a look at this.”
Gersh scanned the probable cause in less than a minute.
“It’ll fly,” he said, “but aren’t you giving up a hell of a lot?”
The question was one of tactics. When the warrant was served, the Fish Man would see the affidavit and would learn what detectives believed linked him to the crime. He could also learn where his alibi was weakest. Landsman pointed out that at least the affidavit withheld the identity of those who were contradicting the suspect’s initial story.
“We’re not giving up any witnesses.”
Gersh shrugged and handed the document back. “Good hunting.”
“Thanks, Howard.”
At ten that evening, Landsman had hurried the warrants to the home of the duty judge, and the detectives and detail officers gathered in the parking lot of the Park Avenue library, where Latonya Wallace had last been seen alive. The plan was to hit the Fish Man’s apartment and store first, but now, after finding so little on Whitelock Street, Pellegrini and Edgerton are suddenly impatient to pursue the new theory. They leave Landsman and a detail officer to finish the search of the Fish Man’s gutted store while they lead a second group a block and a half east to Newington Avenue.
Two Cavaliers and two radio cars pull in front of a three-story stone rowhouse on the north side of the street, where police tumble out and take the house in rough approximation of a Green Bay Packer sweep. Eddie Brown is through the door first with the lead block, followed by two of the Central District uniforms. Then Pellegrini and Edgerton, then Fred Ceruti and more uniforms.
A seventeen-year-old who meandered down the front hallway to answer the loud banging on the door frame is now pressed against the flaking plaster, a uniform shouting at him to shut the fuck up and keep still for the body search. A second kid in a gray sweatsuit steps through the doorway of the first floor’s middle room, assesses the interlopers for what they are, then races back across the threshold.
“Poh-leece,” he shouts. “Yo, man, yo, po-leeces comin’…”
Eddie Brown yanks Paul Revere out of the doorway and pushes him against an inside wall as Ceruti and more uniforms shove their way down the dark hall toward the light of the center room.
There are four of them in there, crowded around an aerosol cleaning product and a small box of plastic sandwich bags. Only one of them bothers to look up at the intruders and for that kid, there is a moment or two of nonrecognition before the gray ether parts and he begins shouting wildly, running for the rear door. One of the detail officers from the Southern catches him by the shirt in the kitchen, then bends him over the sink. The other three are lost to the world and make no effort to move. The oldest expresses his indifference by pressing the plastic bag to his face and sucking down a final blast. The chemical stench is overpowering.
“I’m gonna get sick breathing this shit,” says Ceruti, shoving one kid over a bureau.
“What do you think?” asks a uniform, pushing another captive into a chair. “Is Momma gonna be upset to find you been huffing on a school night?”
From the second-floor bedrooms comes the cacophony of cursing officers and screaming women, followed by more distant shouting from the third-floor rooms. In twos and threes, the occupants are roused from nearly a dozen bedrooms and marched down the wide, rotting stairwell in the center of the house-teenagers, small children, middle-aged women, grown men-until a full cast of twenty-three is assembled in the middle room.
The crowded room is strangely silent. It is almost midnight and a dozen police are parading through the rowhouse, but the beleaguered population of 702 Newington asks no questions about the raid, as if they have reached that point when police raids no longer require reasons. Slowly, the group settles in sedimentary layers throughout the room: younger children lying in the center of the floor, teenagers standing or sitting on the periphery with their backs against the walls, older men and women on the sofa, chairs and around the battered dining room table. A full five minutes pass before an older, heavyset man, wearing blue boxer shorts and bathroom slippers, asks the obvious question: “What the hell you doing in my house?”
Eddie Brown moves into the doorway, and the heavyset man gives him an appraising look. “You the man in charge?”
“I’m one of them,” says Brown.
“You got no right to come into my house.”
“I got every right. I got a warrant.”
“What warrant? What for?”
“It’s a warrant signed by a judge.”
“There ain’t no judge signing a warrant on me. I’ll go get a judge myself about you breakin’ into my home.”
Brown smiles, indifferent.
“Lemme see your warrant.”
The detective waves him off. “When we’re done we’ll leave a copy.”
“You ain’t got no damn warrant.”
Brown shrugs and smiles again.
“Cocksuckers.”
Brown jerks his head up and stares hard at the man in the blue boxer shorts, but the only thing coming back is a look of abject denial.
“Who the hell said that?” Brown demands.
The man turns his head slowly, looking across the room at a much younger occupant, the kid in the gray sweatsuit who shouted the warnings earlier. He is leaning against the inside of the open hallway door, eyefucking Eddie Brown.
“Did I hear you say something?”
“I say what I want,” the kid says sullenly.
Brown takes two steps into the room, yanks the kid off the door and drags him into the front hall. Ceruti and a Central District uniform step back to watch the show. Brown brings his face so close that there is nothing else in the kid’s universe, nothing else to think about but one aggravated, 6-foot-2, 220-pound police detective.
“What do you have to say to me now?” Brown asks.
“I didn’t say nothin’.”
“Say it now.”
“Man, I didn’t…”
Brown’s face creases into a sardonic smile as he wordlessly drags the kid back across the threshold of the room, where two of the detail officers are already at work, taking names and dates of birth.
“How long we got to sit like this?” asks the man in the blue boxer shorts.
“Until we’re done,” says Brown.
In a rear upstairs bedroom, Edgerton and Pellegrini are slowly, methodically, beginning to carve a path through rag piles and mildewed mattresses, paper trash and rancid food scraps, searching 702 Newington for the place where Latonya Kim Wallace was last alive.
The search and seizure raid on the glue sniffers of 702 Newington is the latest corridor in the week-old investigation, the test of a theory that Pellegrini and Edgerton have been piecing together over the past two days. The fresh scenario makes sense out of those things about the murder that seem most senseless. In particular, the theory appears to explain, for the first time, why Latonya Wallace had been dumped behind the back door of 718 Newington. The placement of the body was so illogical, so bizarre, that any argument that could justify that location was enough to bring new direction to the probe.
From the morning Latonya Wallace was found, every detective who had surveyed the death scene asked himself why the killer would risk carrying the child’s body into the fenced rear yard of 718 Newington, then deposit it within sight and hearing of the back door. If the murderer had, in fact, managed to enter the rear of Newington Avenue undetected, why not leave the body in the common alley and flee? For that matter, why not leave the body in a yard closer to either end of the block-the only points at which the killer could have entered the alley? And why, above all, would the killer risk entering the fenced yard of an occupied home, then carry the body 40 feet and deposit it so close to the rear door? Other yards were more accessible and three of the rowhouses that backed up to the alley were obviously vacant shells. Why risk being seen or heard by the residents of 718 Newington when the body could just as easily be left in the yard of a house where plywood covered the windows and no occupant would ever peer out to witness the act?