The old man nods and watches his wife follow the detectives out of the room. She closes the door and follows Landsman to the other end of the hall.

“Hey, Ollie,” Landsman says to her, “remember what you were saying about Andrew?”

“I don’t…”

“About how he’s like a gigolo living off…”

“Well,” says Ollie, a little embarrassed, “I know she bought that car for him and now he uses it to go out on the town. He’s gone every night.”

“Yeah? Do you know if he likes young girls?”

“Yeah, he likes young girls,” she says, disapproving.

“I mean, real young.”

“Well, that I can’t really say…”

“Okay, that’s all right,” Landsman says. “Where’s the car now? Do you know?”

“He say the repo man came an’ took it.”

Pellegrini and Edgerton look at each other. It’s almost too perfect.

“It was repossessed?” asks Landsman. “He told you that?”

“She told my husband that.”

“Your neighbor did? Andrew’s wife?”

“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her robe tight in the chill of the front hall. “She say Johnny’s Cars came an’ got it.”

“Johnny’s? Up on Harford Road?”

“I guess.”

The detectives thank the woman, then head straight to Johnny’s in Northeast Baltimore, where they walk the entire lot looking for the car that Andrew’s wife said had been repossessed. No Lincoln. Landsman is now completely convinced.

“This motherfucker dumps the body, gets rid of his car, and when people ask him, he says it got repo’d. Fuck it, we need to talk to this motherfucker tonight.”

It is after 11:00 P.M. when they return to Newington Avenue and talk their way into 716. Andrew is a short, balding man with a face that is all hard angles. He is still awake, drinking warm beer and watching the local news in the basement. Three plainclothes detectives walking down the stairs do not seem to surprise him.

“Hey, Andrew, I’m Sergeant Landsman, this is Detective Edgerton and Detective Pellegrini. We’re working on the little girl’s murder. How you doin’ tonight?”

“Awright.”

“Listen, we want to ask you a couple questions about your car.”

“My car?” asks Andrew, curious.

“Yeah. The Lincoln.”

“They took that away,” he says, as if that should end any discussion.

“Who did?”

“The car dealer.”

“Johnny’s?”

“Yeah.’ Cause my wife, she didn’t make the payment on it,” he adds, a little put out.

Landsman steers the conversation toward the parking pad in the back alley. Andrew readily acknowledges his habit of keeping the car in the rear yard to prevent theft or vandalism, then further agrees that the car had been in the rear yard on the Tuesday night of the girl’s disappearance.

“I remember it ’cause I went out to the car for something and felt like someone was out there watching me.”

Landsman, startled, looks hard at the man.

“How’s that again?”

“I went out to the car that night to get something and I felt real nervous, like someone was out there watching me,” he repeats.

Landsman gives Pellegrini one of those did-I-hear-what-I-just-thought-I-heard stares. Three minutes into the conversation and the guy is already putting himself out in the alley on the night the child is abducted. Hell, he probably had reason to be nervous about being watched out there in the alley on Tuesday. Who the fuck wouldn’t be nervous carrying a little girl’s body from their back door to a car trunk?

“Why were you nervous?”

Andrew shrugs. “I just got a strange feeling, you know…”

Edgerton begins walking the length of the basement room, looking for red-brown stains or a child’s gold earring. The basement is a poor version of a bachelor’s lair, with a sofa and television in the center of the room and, against the long wall, five or six liquor bottles on top of an old dresser being used as a bar. Behind the sofa is a plastic laundry tub containing two to three inches of urine. What the hell is it about Newington Avenue that makes people piss into buckets?

“This is kind of your place down here, huh?” asks Edgerton.

“Yeah, this is where I hang.”

“Your wife don’t come down here much?”

“No, she leaves me be.”

Landsman brings Andrew back to the night in the alley: “What did you go out to the car for?”

“I can’t remember. Something in the glove compartment.”

“You didn’t go in the trunk?”

“The trunk? No, the glove compartment… I had the car doors open and I just felt like I was being watched. I was, you know, a little scared about it and said, well, damn, I’ll get whatever I need to get tomorrow morning. So I went back inside.”

Landsman looks at Pellegrini, then back at Andrew. “Did you know the little girl?”

“Me?” The question startles him. “The girl that got killed? I haven’t been here that long, you know. I don’t know most people around here.”

“What do you think they should do to the guy that killed her?” asks Landsman, smiling strangely.

“Hey,” says Andrew, “do what you have to do. Make sure it’s the right guy and then you don’t even need a trial. I have a daughter, and if it were her, I’d take care of it myself… I have friends who would help me take care of it.”

Edgerton takes Pellegrini out of earshot to ask if the detectives and detail officers doing the consent searches on Newington Avenue have checked the basements. Pellegrini doesn’t know. That was the trouble with a sprawling red ball; between five detectives and a dozen detail officers, progress is dependent on too many people.

“Andrew,” says Landsman, “we’re gonna need to talk to you downtown.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. We’ll bring you back up when we’re done.”

“I been sick. I can’t really leave the house.”

“We really need to talk to you. It could help us out with the little girl’s murder.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know nothing about that, you know. I’m sick…”

Landsman ignores the protestations. Short of arrest, which requires both a crime and probable cause, there is no law that can make a man go against his will to an interrogation room in the middle of the night. It’s one of the small joys of American police work that few people ever argue the point.

Andrew comes to rest in the large interrogation room fifteen minutes later, with Landsman standing on the other side of the door in the sixth-floor corridor, telling Pellegrini and Edgerton to find that Lincoln.

“I’ll take a long statement and keep him here,” says the sergeant. “We gotta know if his car was really repo’d.”

Pellegrini’s call to old Johnny wakes him up. It’s now the middle of the night, but the detective asks the auto dealer to go down to the sales office and dig out the paperwork. Johnny and Mrs. Johnny are already there when the two detectives get to Harford Road. The dealer finds a record of the sale and the payment schedule, but nothing to indicate a repossession order. Maybe, he suggests, the paperwork hasn’t yet come from the finance company.

“If it was repossessed, where would they tow it?”

“They got one lot over on Belair Road.”

“Can you show us?”

Johnny and Mrs. Johnny pile back into their Cadillac Brougham and pull out of the lot. The detectives follow them to a fenced impound lot near the city’s northeastern edge. The car isn’t there. Nor is it at a second lot out in Rosedale, in eastern Baltimore County. And at 3:00 A.M., when the two detectives learn of a third lot in the northeast county near the Parkville police precinct, they head north with growing confidence that no one has towed Andrew’s shit-brown Lincoln Continental anywhere, that the lying bastard ditched the car somewhere on his own.

The third impound lot is protected by a ten-foot chain-link fence. Pellegrini walks up to one corner and stares through the metal mesh at a row of cars parked along the far end, hopeful that Andrew’s car isn’t among them. But the next to the last car in the row is a Lincoln Continental.