On the basis of their criminal histories, six older male occupants of 702 Newington and other residents of the block were brought to homicide on the day the body of the child was discovered-all part and parcel of the preliminary canvass. In those early interviews, the men offered nothing to arouse suspicion, but neither did they endear themselves to the homicide unit. Before being interviewed, the occupants of 702 Newington spent a full hour sitting in the fishbowl, laughing uproariously and challenging each other to perform feats of flatulence.

That performance seems almost understated now, as the detectives work their way through the rubble of 702. Once a stately Victorian home, the structure is now nothing more than a gutted shell without electricity or running water. Plates of food, piles of abandoned clothing and diapers, plastic buckets and metal pots filled with urine clutter the corners of the house. The stench of the squalor becomes more oppressive with every room, until both uniforms and detectives are going downstairs at regular intervals for a cigarette and a breath of winter air on the front steps. In every room, the occupants accommodated for the absence of running water by urinating in a communal container. And in every room, paper and plastic plates laden with food have been deposited in layers, one on top of the other, until a week’s feedings can be traced in archaeologic sequence. Cockroaches and water beetles bolt in every direction when debris is moved, and despite the heat in the upper floors of the house, no detective is willing to shed an overcoat or sport jacket for fear that the garment will be overrun.

“If this is where she was killed,” says Edgerton, moving through a room given over to discarded food and wet, mildewed rags, “imagine what her last hours were like.”

Edgerton and Pellegrini, and then Landsman, arriving later from Whitelock Street, begin to search in the rear second-floor bedroom that belongs to the older man suspected in the earlier rape of the six-year-old. Brown, Ceruti and the others work their way through the third floor and front rooms. Behind them come the lab techs, taking photographs of each room and any items recovered, dusting for fingerprints on any surface suggested by a detective, and administering leuco malachite tests to any stain that vaguely resembles blood.

It is slow going, made worse by the incredible amount of clutter and filth. The back bedrooms alone-those with direct access to the roof-take nearly two hours to cover, with the detectives moving each item individually until the rooms are slowly emptied and the furniture overturned. In addition to bloody clothes or bedsheets and a serrated knife, they are searching for the star-shaped gold earring, nothing less than the proverbial needle in the haystack. From the rear bedroom in which the window screen had been knocked out, they take two pairs of stained denim pants and a sweatshirt that shows positive on a leuco test, as well as a sheet with similar stains. These discoveries prod them to continue through the early morning hours, turning over rotting mattresses and moving battered dressers with broken drawers, in a methodical search for a buried crime scene.

The search and seizure raid that began a little before midnight stretches to three, then four, then five o’clock, until only Pellegrini and Edgerton are left standing and even the lab techs are beginning to balk. Dozens of latent prints have already been lifted from doorways and walls, dresser tops and banisters, in the unlikely chance that one will match those of the victim. But still Edgerton and Pellegrini are not content, and as they work their way to the third floor, they call for more items to be dusted.

At 5:30 A.M., the adult male occupants of the house are handcuffed together and herded single file into a Central District wagon. They will be taken downtown and dumped in separate rooms, where the same investigators who spent the night picking through the rowhouse will begin an unsuccessful effort to provoke each man into acknowledging a child murder. And though they have not yet been charged with any crime, the suspects from 702 Newington are treated with an almost exaggerated disdain by the detectives. Their contempt is both unspoken and unsubtle, and it has little to do with the murder of Latonya Wallace. Maybe one of the half-dozen men killed the little girl; maybe not. But what the detectives and uniforms know now, after six hours inside 702 Newington, is evidence enough for an indictment of an entirely different sort.

It isn’t about poverty; every cop with a year on the street has seen plenty of poverty, and some, like Brown and Ceruti, were themselves born into hard times. And it has little to do with criminality, despite the long arrest sheets, the sexual abuse report on the six-year-old and the teenagers huffing cleaning products in the living room. Every cop at 702 Newington has dealt with criminal behavior on a daily basis, until evil men are accepted without any excess of emotion as the necessary clientele, as essential to the morality play as the lawyers and judges, the parole officers and prison guards.

The contempt shown to the men of 702 Newington comes from a deeper place, and it seems to insist on a standard, to say that some men are poor and some men are criminals, but even in the worst American slum, there are recognizable depths beyond which no one should ever have to fall. For a homicide detective in Baltimore, every other day includes a car ride to some godforsaken twelve-foot-wide pile of brick where no taxpayer will ever again breathe air. The drywall will be rotted and stained, the floorboards warped and splintered, the kitchen filled with roaches that no longer bother to run from the glow of an electric light. And yet more often than not, the deprivation is accompanied by small symbols of human endeavor, of a struggle as old as the ghetto itself: Polaroid snapshots stapled to a bedroom wall showing a young boy in his Halloween costume; a cut-and-paste valentine from a child to his mother; school lunch menus on the ancient, round-top refrigerator; photographs of a dozen grandchildren collected in a single frame; plastic slipcovers on the new living room sofa, which sits alone in a room of battered, soiled remnants; the ubiquitous poster of The Last Supper or Christ with a halo; or the air-brushed portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., on posterboard, on paper, on black velvet even, his eyes uplifted, his head crowned by excerpts from the March on Washington speech. These are homes where a mother still comes downstairs to cry on the front steps when the police wagon pulls up outside, where the detectives know enough to use formal titles of address, where the uniforms ask the kid if the handcuffs are too tight and put a protective hand on his head when he negotiates his way into the back of a cage car.

But in one rowhouse on Newington Avenue, two dozen human beings have learned to leave food where it falls, to pile soiled clothes and diapers in a corner of the room, to lie strangely still when parasites crawl across the sheets, to empty a bottle of Mad Dog or T-Bird and then piss its contents into a plastic bucket at the edge of the bed, to regard a bathroom cleaning product and a plastic bag as an evening’s entertainment. Historians note that when the victims of the Nazi holocaust heard that the Allied armies were within a few miles of liberating the camps, some returned to scrub and sweep the barracks and show the world that human beings lived there. But on Newington Avenue the rubicons of human existence have all been crossed. The struggle itself has been mocked, and the unconditional surrender of one generation presses hard upon the next.

For the detectives inside the rowhouse, contempt and even rage are the only natural emotions. Or so they believe until the early morning hours of the search, when a ten-year-old boy in a stained Orioles sweatshirt and denims emerges from the clutter of humanity in the middle room to tug on Eddie Brown’s coat sleeve, asking permission to get something from his room.