“I don’t want to tell you what I think about those allegations,” the colonel assures his detectives.

“But let’s face it,” he says, turning the corner, “the clearance rate is very low, and unless we get you all some help we’re going to have a hard time bringing it back up to where we want it. Particularly if we have another night like the last one… Most of all, we got to crack some of these goddamn killings of women in the Northwest.”

The room stirs uncomfortably.

“After talking with the captain, we’ve decided to bring in some extra men from around the sixth floor to work with the primary detectives on those cases… But I want you to understand that this is to help you in a rough time. Everyone has absolute confidence in the detectives assigned to those cases.

“At least,” says the colonel, trying to close on a positive note, “at least it’s not as bad as what’s going on in Washington.” Lanham then nods to D’Addario, who opens the floor to the robbery and sex offense supervisors.

“Is that it?” says D’Addario. “Lieutenant, you have anything to add? Joe?… All told.”

Roll call ends and the homicide unit’s dayshift breaks down into smaller clusters of detectives, some arguing and bartering for one of the Cavaliers, some heading for city court, some cracking jokes by the coffee machine. A day like any other, but every man on D’Addario’s shift now understands that things have scraped bottom.

The clearance rate-murders closed by arrest-is now 36 percent and falling, a statistic that doesn’t begin to explain the threat to Gary D’Addario’s tenure. The board that gave His Eminence reason for concern six weeks ago has continued to fill with open murders, and it is on D’Addario’s side of the wall that the names of the victims are writ in red. Of the twenty-five homicides handled by Dee’s three squads, only five are down; whereas Stanton’s shift has cleared ten of sixteen.

Of course, there are reasons for any statistical variation, but in the last analysis, the only fact that matters to the command staff is that Stanton’s detectives know who killed their victims; D’Addario’s men do not. There is no point in explaining that three fifths of D’Addario’s homicides happen to be drug-related, just as seven of those solved by Stanton’s shift are domestics or other arguments. Nor does it do any good to note that two or three case files were sacrificed to free men for the Latonya Wallace detail, or to point out that Dave Brown has a warrant out for one of the Milligan murders, while Garvey has a decent shot at clearing both the Lucas and Booker files.

All of that is commentary, and a Talmudic, murder-by-murder analysis of the board doesn’t mean a damn thing to anyone when it comes to the clearance rate. It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. Captains become majors who become colonels who become deputies when the numbers stay sweet; the command staff backs up on itself like a bad stretch of sewer pipe when they don’t. Against that truth, which everyone above the rank of sergeant holds to be self-evident, D’Addario is in deep water-not only because his rate compares poorly to Stanton’s, but because it compares poorly to expectations.

The clearance rate for murders in Baltimore has been slipping for seven years, from 84 percent in 1981 to 73.5 percent registered in 1987. Fortunately for the careers of several commanders, at no point in the decade did the homicide unit ever post a solve rate lower than the national average for murder clearances, which has also fallen-from a high of 76 percent in 1984 to a low of 70 in 1987.

The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, damn lies and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department’s planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn’t mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department’s desire for a budget increase. The homicide clearance rate is equally vulnerable to subtle forms of manipulation-all of which are permitted under the FBI’s guidelines for uniform crime reporting.

Consider the fact that a case is regarded to be cleared whether it arrives at the grand jury or not. As long as someone is locked up-whether for a week or a month or a lifetime-that murder is down. If the charges are dropped at the arraignment for lack of evidence, if the grand jury refuses to indict, if the prosecutor decides to dismiss the case or place it on the inactive, or stet, docket, that murder is nonetheless carried on the books as a solved crime. Detectives have a tag line for such paper clearances: Stet ’em and forget ’em.

Consider, too, that the federal guidelines allow a department to carry a previous year’s clearance as a solved crime. This, of course, is as it should be: The mark of any good homicide unit is its ability to work back on open cases that are two, three or five years old; the clearance rate should reflect that persistence. On the other hand, the guidelines don’t require departments to include the crime itself in the current year’s statistics; clearly, the crime itself actually occurred in a prior year. Theoretically therefore, an American homicide unit can solve 90 of 100 fresh murders, then clear twenty cases from previous years and post a clearance rate of 110 percent.

Such card-up-the-sleeve tactics make every year’s end an adventure in statistical brinksmanship. If the clearance rate is high enough, a shift commander or squad sergeant who knows his business can save an arrest on a December case until January to get a jump on the new year. Alternatively, if the clearance rate is a bit low, a commander might allow a two-or three-week grace period in which January clearances of December cases are credited to the prior year. The paper clearances and calendar tricks can give a homicide unit an extra 5 to 10 points on the sheet, but when the true solve rate takes a dive, no amount of statistical massage can help.

This was D’Addario’s predicament and, over the last twenty-four hours, bad had become worse. His detectives clocked five fresh murders-only one of which was a dunker. That case, Kincaid’s, featured a fifty-two-year-old man stretched out on the floor of a Fulton Avenue apartment. His skull had been crushed in an argument with a younger man, a boarder who used a steam iron to demonstrate the law of physics that allows no two objects to occupy the same space at the same instant. But things were not so tidy on the earlier midnight shift, when McAllister and Bowman caught a bludgeoning in the Northeast, only hours before Bowman learned that his shooting victim from three nights earlier had rolled a seven at University Hospital. There was no hint of a suspect in either case, and Fahlteich faced much the same problem later that same evening when he caught a fatal shooting off Wabash Avenue.

But all this was just a prelude to the one that really mattered: They’d found the body of another taxi driver in a wooded park on the city’s northwest edge. As the fifteenth murder of a cab driver in eight years, the beating death of a Checker Cab employee got the full red-ball treatment, not only because it looks bad for a city to permit an open season on its taxi drivers, but because the hack was a woman. Found nude from the waist down. Murdered. In Northwest Baltimore.

That made six dead women in that district since December, all of them unsolved. The Northwest murders were decidedly unrelated: two were rape-murders with markedly different characteristics, two were drug killings, one an apparent argument, and this latest a cab robbery and possible rape. But the string of open cases was beginning to attract newspaper headlines and therefore dead women in the Northwestern District had suddenly acquired real prestige with the department brass.