“Are you his mother?” asked the uniform.

“No, but she don’t want him talkin’ to no police. I know that. Tavon, don’t you say nothin’.”

“So you’re not the mother?” asked the uniform, now seething.

“No.”

“Then get the hell out of here before I lock your ass up,” muttered the patrolman, soft enough to be out of the boy’s earshot. “You hear me?”

Worden turned back to the child. “What did you see?”

“I saw Bobby run out after Jean.”

“You did?”

The boy nodded. “And when he got up close she cut him.”

“Did he run into the knife? Did he run into it by accident or did Jean try to cut him?”

The boy shook his head. “She went like this,” he said, holding his hand steady.

“She did? Well, what’s your name?”

“Tavon.”

“Tavon, you’ve helped us a lot. Thank you.”

Worden and Kincaid liberated their Cavalier from a growing mass of patrol cars and drove east to the emergency room at University, both of them certain in the knowledge that Rule Six in the homicide lexicon now applied. To wit:

When a suspect is immediately identified in an assault case, the victim is sure to live. When no suspect has been identified, the victim will surely die. Indeed, the rule was confirmed in this instance by the subsequent discovery of Cornell Robert Jones, age thirty-seven, lying on his back in a rear examination room, conscious and alert, as a blonde surgical resident-an especially attractive blonde surgical resident-applied pressure to the wound on his inner left thigh.

“Mr. Jones?” asked Worden.

Wincing with pain, the victim nodded briefly from beneath an oxygen mask.

“Mr. Jones, I’m Detective Worden from the police department. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said the victim, his voice almost muzzled by the mask.

“We’ve been down to your house and the people there say your girlfriend, or is it your wife…”

“My wife.”

“They say your wife cut you. Is that what happened?”

“Goddamn right she cut me,” he said, wincing again.

“You didn’t just run into the knife or anything like that?”

“Hell no. She stabbed me.”

“So if we tell the officer to get a warrant on your wife, you’re not going to change your mind about this tomorrow?”

“No I ain’t.”

“All right, then,” said Worden. “Do you have any idea where your wife might be now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a girlfriend’s house or something.”

Worden nodded, then looked at Kincaid, who had spent the last five minutes undertaking as comprehensive a review of the surgical resident as could be accomplished under the circumstances.

“I’ll say this, Mr. Jones,” drawled Kincaid. “You’re in good hands now. Real good hands.”

The resident looked up, irritated and a little embarrassed. And then Worden was smiling wickedly at his own thoughts. He leaned low to the victim’s ear. “You know, Mr. Jones, you’re a lucky man,” he said in a stage whisper.

“What?”

“You’re a lucky man.”

Wincing with pain, the victim looked sideways at the detective. “How the hell you figure that?”

Worden smiled. “Well, from the look of things, your wife was going for your Johnson,” said the detective. “And from what I can see, she only missed by a couple inches.”

Suddenly, from beneath the oxygen mask, Cornell Jones was laughing uproariously. The resident, too, was losing it, her face contorted as she struggled against herself.

“Yeah,” said Kincaid. “A big guy like yourself, you was pretty damn close to singin’ soprano, you know that?”

Cornell Jones rocked up and down on the gurney, laughing and wincing at the same time.

Worden held up his hand, signing off with a short wave. “You have a good one.”

“You too, man,” said Cornell Jones, still laughing.

The shit you see out here, thought Worden, driving back to the office. And my God, he had to admit, there are still moments when I love this job.

“Something’s gone wrong,” says Terry McLarney.

Eddie Brown answers without looking up, his mind fully absorbed by mathematical endeavors. Statistical charts and spread sheets arrayed in front of him, Brown will figure a way to predict tomorrow night’s four-digit lotto number or he will die trying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look around,” says McLarney. “The phone is ringing with information on every kind of case and we’re getting double-dunkers left and right. Hey, even the lab is coming up with print hits.”

“So,” says Brown, “what’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not like us,” says McLarney. “I get the feeling that we’re going to be punished. I have this feeling that there’s a rowhouse somewhere with about a dozen skeletons in the basement, just waiting for us.”

Brown shakes his head. “You think too much,” he tells McLarney.

A criticism rarely leveled at a Baltimore cop, and McLarney laughs at the absurdity of the notion. He’s a sergeant and an Irishman; by that reckoning alone, it’s his responsibility to rip the silver linings out of every last little cloud. The board is going from red to black. Murders are being solved. Evil is being punished. Good Lord, thinks McLarney, how much is this going to cost?

The streak began a month ago up on Kirk Avenue, in the gutted remains of a torched rowhouse, where Donald Steinhice watched firefighters pull at the cracked and blackened debris until all three bodies were distinguishable. The oldest was three, the youngest, five months; their remains were discovered in an upstairs bedroom, where they stayed after every adult fled from the burning house. For Steinhice, a veteran of Stanton’s shift, the accelerant pour-patterns on the first floor-identifiable as darker splotches on the floors and walls-told the story: Mother dumps boyfriend, boyfriend returns with kerosene, children pay the price. In recent years, the scenario had become strangely common to the inner city. Four months back, in fact, Mark Tomlin caught a rowhouse arson that claimed two children; then, little more than a week ago and less than a month after the Kirk Avenue tragedy, another boyfriend torched another mother’s home, murdering a twenty-one-month-old toddler and his seven-month-old sister.

“The adults always make it out,” explained Scott Keller, the primary on the most recent case and a veteran of the CID arson unit. “The kids always get left behind.”

More than most homicides, the Kirk Avenue arson had an emotional cost; Steinhice, a detective with perhaps a thousand crime scenes behind him, suffered nightmares about a murder for the first time-graphic images of helplessness in which the dead children were at the top of a row-house stairway, crying, terrified. Nonetheless, when the boyfriend came downtown in handcuffs, it was Steinhice who mustered empathy enough to prompt a full confession. And it was Steinhice who intervened when the boyfriend tore apart an aluminum soda can after his confession and tried to use the rough edges against his wrists.

Kirk Avenue was hard for Steinhice to swallow, but it was nonetheless medicine for what ailed both shifts of the homicide unit. Three dead, one arrest, three clearances-a stat like that can start a trend all by itself.

Sure enough, the following week brought Tom Pellegrini his dunker at the Civic Center, the labor dispute that became a one-sided knife fight. Rick Requer followed that case with two more clearances: a double murder-suicide from the Southeastern in which an emotionally distraught auto mechanic shot his wife and nephew in the kitchen, then wrapped things up tidily by reloading the.44 Magnum and shoving the barrel in his mouth. In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a massacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams.

One week more and the trend was clear: Dave Brown and Worden caught a poker game dispute in the Eastern in which a sixty-one-year-old player, arguing over the proper ante, suddenly grabbed a shotgun and blew up a friend. Garvey and Kincaid followed suit, taking a shooting call on Fairview and getting a father murdered by his son, killed in an argument over the boy’s unwillingness to share drug profits. Barlow and Gilbert again hit the jackpot for Stanton’s shift in the Southwest, where yet another angry young boyfriend fatally wounded both the woman he loved and the infant daughter in her arms, then trained the same weapon on himself.