“There it is,” he says, his voice flat with disappointment.

“Where?” asks Edgerton.

“Near the end there. The brown one.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, it’s a brown Lincoln.”

Pellegrini scans the lot for any sign of life. They do not need a warrant for the car; Andrew no longer has any claim to ownership. But the front gate is chained and padlocked.

“Well,” says Pellegrini, “here goes nothing.” The detective digs the tip of one black Florsheim into the metal links and begins pushing himself up the front of the fence. Two large Dobermans race the length of the impound lot, yelping and growling and baring their teeth. Pellegrini jumps down.

“Go on, Tom,” says Edgerton, laughing. “You can take ’em.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“They’re just animals. You’re a man with a gun.”

Pellegrini smiles.

“Go on. Show ’em your badge.”

“I think we can wait,” says Pellegrini, walking back to the car.

Four hours later, Pellegrini is headed back toward the lot with Landsman, who finished taking Andrew’s statement a little before 6:00 A.M. Although neither detective has slept in twenty-eight hours, there is little sign of fatigue when they roll out Perring Parkway toward the county, or when they follow a bored attendant across the dirt lot to the Lincoln. So it really was repo’d, thinks Pellegrini, so what. Maybe Andrew gave up the car figuring that it was clean, that there was nothing to link him to the murder.

“This the one?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The two detectives check the car’s interior first, searching the upholstery and carpeting for red-brown stains, hairs or fibers. Landsman finds a piece of imitation gold chain, a woman’s bracelet, above the dashboard. Pellegrini points to a small dark brown stain on the passenger seat.

“Blood?”

“Nah. I don’t think so.”

Landsman pulls a leuco malachite kit from his pocket, treats a cotton swab with chemical and runs it across the stain. Dull gray.

Pellegrini finishes checking the back seat, then both men walk around to the trunk. Landsman turns the key, but hesitates for just a moment before opening the top.

“C’mon, you mother,” he says, coming as close to genuine prayer as Jay Landsman ever does.

The trunk is clean. He treats seven or eight leuco swabs with chemical and drags them into every one of the trunk’s indentations and crevices. Dull gray.

Pellegrini exhales slowly, his breath clouding in the frigid air. Then he walks to the Cavalier and sits in the driver’s seat. He holds up the bracelet and looks carefully at the gold strand, sensing that it, too, leads nowhere, that within a day or two the family of Latonya Wallace will answer no, they have never seen the chain before. Pellegrini waits silently as Landsman scrapes two more swabs along the interior before closing the trunk, sticking his hands deep into his jacket pockets and walking back to the Chevrolet.

“Let’s go.”

Suddenly, the exhaustion is overpowering, and both detectives are squinting in the morning light as the car rolls south on Harford Road and then west on Northern Parkway. For fifteen solid days, they have worked sixteen- and twenty-hour shifts, living on a roller-coaster ride from one suspect to another, bouncing wildly between moments of elation and hours of despair.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Landsman.

“What?”

“I think we need a day off. We gotta get some sleep, wake up and think on it.”

Pellegrini nods.

Somewhere near the Jones Falls interchange, Landsman speaks again.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” he says, “it’ll go down.”

But Pellegrini is awash in fatigue and doubt, and he says nothing.

In Jay Landsman’s office, the Latonya Wallace probe is spreading like a cancer. Crime scene photos, lab reports, diagrams, office reports, aerial photographs of Reservoir Hill taken from the police helicopter-the paper pours out of the case folder and marches across the sergeant’s desk and file cabinets. A second column of documents begins a flanking maneuver, attacking Pellegrini’s work area in the annex office, then overwhelming a cardboard box behind the detective’s chair. The case has become a world unto itself, spinning in an orbit of its own.

But for the rest of the homicide unit, it’s business as usual. For much of the decade, homicide detectives in Baltimore have believed that the law of averages will guarantee somewhere between 200 and 250 murders a year, a total that shakes out to about two homicides every three days. The unit’s institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state’s shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders. For the last two years, the body count has edged slightly higher, cresting at 226 in 1987, but the trend is nothing that makes the act of murder in Baltimore seem like anything more than a point on the probability curve. On Friday afternoons, the nightshift detectives can watch Kim and Linda, the admin secretaries, stamp case numbers on empty red binders-88041, 88042, 88043-and know with fat, happy confidence that somewhere on the streets of the city, several victims-to-be are stumbling toward oblivion. The veteran detectives will joke about it: Hell, the case numbers are probably tattooed on the backsides of doomed men in ultraviolet ink. If you put one through a postage meter, if you showed him the 88041 stenciled on his right cheek and told him what it meant, the poor fuck would change his name, lock himself in his basement, or jump the first Greyhound to Akron or Oklahoma City or any other spot a thousand miles away. But they never do; the math remains absolute.

Of course, within the confines of the established rate, statistical fluctuation permits the slow weekend due to rain, snow or a pennant race in the American League East. Also permitted is the aberrant full-moon midnight shift, when every other right-thinking Baltimorean reaches for a revolver, or those occasional and unexplained homicidal binges in which the city seems hell-bent on depopulating itself in the briefest time span possible. In late February, as the Latonya Wallace detail stretches into its third week, the homicide unit begins one such period when detectives on both shifts are hit with fourteen murders in thirteen days.

It is two weeks of mayhem, with bodies stacked like firewood in the ME’s freezer and detectives arguing over the office typewriters. On one particularly bad night, two men from McLarney’s squad find themselves acting out a scene that could only occur in the emergency room of an urban American hospital. The green-smocked vanguard of medical science is at stage right, struggling to repair a man with holes in his body. At stage left is Donald Waltemeyer, playing the role of First Detective. Enter Dave Brown, the Second Detective, who has come to assist his partner in the investigation of a Crime of Violence.

“Yo, Donald.”

“David.”

“Yo, brother, what’s up? Is this our boy here?”

“This is the shooting.”

“That’s what we’ve got, right?”

“You got the stabbing, right?”

“I came up here looking for you. McLarney thought you might want help.”

“Well, I got the shooting.”

“Okay. Great.”

“Well, who’s gonna take the stabbing?”

“Whoa. The shooting and stabbing are separate?”

“Yeah. I got the shooting.”

“So where’s the stabbing?”

“Next room over, I think.”

The Second Detective moves stage right, where another team of green-smocked technicians is now visible, struggling to repair another man with even larger holes.

“Okay, bunk,” says the Second Detective impassively. “I’ll take it.”

A night after Waltemeyer and Dave Brown trade bleeders at the Hopkins trauma unit, Donald Worden and Rick James catch their first fresh murder since Monroe Street, a picture-perfect domestic from the kitchen of a South Baltimore townhouse: a thirty-two-year-old husband is stretched across the linoleum, blood leaking from.22-caliber holes in his chest, undigested rum and cola leaking from his open mouth. It started with an argument that progressed to a point where the wife called police just after midnight, and the responding uniform graciously drove the very drunk husband to his mother’s house and told him to sleep it off. This meddlesome action, of course, violates the inalienable right of every drunken South Baltimore redneck to beat his estranged wife at one in the morning, and the husband responds by shaking off his stupor, calling a taxi and kicking down the kitchen door, whereupon he is shot dead by his sixteen-year-old stepson. Called at home that morning, the state’s attorney on duty asks for manslaughter charges in juvenile court.