Two days later, Dave Brown picks up a drug murder from the open-air market at North and Longwood, and when it shakes out three days later, Roddy Milligan is credited with another notch on his gun. At the tender age of nineteen, Roderick James Milligan has become something of a pest to the homicide unit, what with his penchant for shooting every competing street dealer in the Southwestern. A small, elfin thing, Milligan had previously been sought on two 1987 murder warrants and was a suspect in a fourth slaying. His whereabouts unknown, young Roderick was beginning to irritate the detectives; Terry McLarney, in particular, takes as an insult the youthful offender’s decision to shoot more people rather than surrender.

“Can you believe a little shithead like this is able to stay on the run for so long?” McLarney declares, returning from yet another unsuccessful turn-up of a Milligan hideout. “You shoot a guy, hey,” the sergeant adds with a shrug. “You shoot another guy-well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it’s time to admit you have a problem.”

Although Milligan has taken a line from Cagney, telling relatives he’ll never be taken alive, he’s eventually picked up in a raid a month later, caught dirty at a girlfriend’s house with heroin still in his pocket. His reputation suffers when it later gets out that after being tossed into an interrogation room, he cries uncontrollably.

For Stanton’s shift, there is the thirty-nine-year-old Highlandtown native who goes with a friend to buy PCP in a blighted section of Southeast Washington, where he is instead robbed and shot in the head by a street dealer. The friend then takes the wheel of the car and drives the thirty-five miles back up the Baltimore-Washington Expressway with the victim a bloody, dying wreck in the passenger seat. He takes the corpse to an east side hospital, claiming to have been attacked and robbed by a hitchhiker on nearby Dundalk Avenue.

There is the argument at a West Baltimore bar that begins with words, then escalates to fists and baseball bats until a thirty-eight-year-old man is lingering in a hospital bed, where three weeks later he rolls the Big Seven. The argument is between two Vietnam veterans, one declaring that the 1st Air Cavalry was the war’s premier fighting unit, the other advocating for the 1st Marine Division. In this particular instance, the Air Cav carries the day.

And there can be no forgetting the Westport mother who shoots her boyfriend, then tells her teenage daughter to confess to the crime, arguing that she would be charged only as a juvenile. And the young drug dealer from the Lafayette Courts projects who is abducted and shot by a competitor, then dumped in a Pimlico gutter, where he is mistaken for a dead dog by passersby. And the twenty-five-year-old East Baltimore entrepreneur who is shot in the back of the head as he weighs and dilutes heroin at a kitchen table. And the is-this-a-great-city-or-what homicide that Fred Ceruti handles in a Cathedral Street apartment, where one prostitute plunges a knife into the chest of another for a $10 cap of heroin, then fires the drugs before the police arrive. The key witness to the crime, a businessman from the Washington suburbs who fled to his wife and children at the first sign of blood, is chagrined to be called at 4:00 A.M. by a detective who learns his identity from credit card slips left behind on Baltimore’s Block, the downtown erogenous zone where he met the whores.

“Is Frank home?”

“Yes,” says a woman’s voice, “who is this?”

“Tell him it’s his friend Fred,” says Ceruti with genuine charity, adding, a few seconds later, “Frank, this is Detective Ceruti from the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. We have a problem here, don’t we?”

In contrast, there is a rare, refreshing moment of civic responsibility displayed by one James M. Baskerville, who flees after shooting his young girlfriend in her Northwest Baltimore home, then calls the crime scene an hour later and asks to talk with the detective.

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is Detective Tomlin.”

“Detective Tomlin?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“This is James Baskerville. I’m calling to surrender to you for killing Lucille.”

“Goddammit Constantine, you bald-headed motherfucker, I’m up here trying to do a crime scene and all you can find to do is fuck with me. Either come up here and help or-”

Click. Mark Tomlin listens to a dead phone line for a moment, then turns to a family member. “What did you say was the name of Lucille’s boyfriend?”

“Baskerville. James Baskerville.”

When the second call comes, Tomlin catches it on the first ring. “Mr. Baskerville, listen, I’m real sorry about that. I thought you were someone else… Where are you now?”

Later that night, in the large interrogation room, James Baskerville-who would later agree to life plus twenty years at his arraignment-offers no excuses and readily initials each page of his statement of confession. “I’ve committed a serious crime and I should be punished,” he says.

“Mr. Baskerville,” asks Tomlin, “are there any more like you at home?”

And like Latonya Wallace, there are those rare victims for whom death is not the inevitable consequence of a long-running domestic feud or a stunted pharmaceutical career. Poor souls like Henry Coleman, a forty-year-old cab driver who picks up the wrong fare at Broadway and Chase; and Mary Irons, age nineteen, who leaves a downtown dance club with the wrong escort and is found cut up behind an elementary school; and Edgar Henson, thirty-seven, who is leaving an east side 7-Eleven when a group of teenagers announce a robbery and then, without warning, begin blasting away. The gang takes two dollars in food stamps, leaving behind a quart of milk and a can of Dinty Moore stew.

And Charles Frederick Lehman, fifty-one, a Church Home hospital employee whose last moments on earth are consumed by the carry-out purchase of a two-piece extra crispy dinner from the Kentucky Fried outlet on Fayette Street. Lehman doesn’t make the twenty feet between the restaurant door and his Plymouth; he is found spread-eagled on the rain-soaked parking lot, his wallet gone, the contents of one pocket spread across the asphalt, the chicken dinner lying in a puddle near his head. From inside the restaurant, another customer watched the brief struggle with three teenagers, heard the gunshot and saw the victim fall. He stared as one kid leaned over the stricken man, methodically rifled his pants pockets, then raced his two companions across Fayette Street into the Douglass Homes project. But the sixty-seven-year-old witness is nearsighted, and he can provide no description better than three black males. The dead man’s car is towed to headquarters for processing in the hope that one of the three kids touched the car and left a clear print. When that fails, there is only the anonymous caller with a white male’s voice who tells Donald Kincaid that a black co-worker had talked about watching three kids-one of whom he knew by name-running through the Douglass Homes after the shooting. But the co-worker doesn’t want to be a witness. Neither, for that matter, does the caller.

“He doesn’t have to give his name. He can just talk to me like you’re talking to me now,” pleads Kincaid. “You got to get him to call because I’ll tell you the truth, this is the only clue I got.” The voice on the other end promises to try, but Kincaid has been in homicide for a dozen years, and he drops the receiver into its cradle knowing that in all probability, he is waiting for a call that will never come.

They take a page from the book written by the FBI’s psychological analysts, with Pellegrini and Landsman bringing the Fish Man down to the homicide office in the early morning-a time when a supposedly nocturnal suspect would be least comfortable. Then they do everything conceivable to make him believe that he is not in control, that their precision, their persistence, the sheer weight of their technologies, are certain to wear him down.