“I wasn’t nowhere.”

Edgerton slows the car and turns around again. The kid actually flinches a bit.

“You were there,” says Edgerton slowly.

This time the fat kid says nothing, and Edgerton drives the remaining six blocks in cold silence. Two hours, the detective tells himself. One hour and forty minutes for fat boy here to tell me everything that happened on Payson Street; twenty minutes to write it up and initial each page.

Predictions don’t mean much in the interrogation room; Edgerton proved as much to himself three weeks ago when he went at his best suspect in the Brenda Thompson killing in a third and final interview. That day, Edgerton went into the box predicting a confession and emerged six hours later with nothing but lies. Still, he can’t help but be optimistic this time around. For one thing, the kid in the back seat isn’t the target but merely a witness. For another, he has managed to collect a drug charge that can be used for leverage. Lastly, John Nathan has no heart; he proved as much a minute ago.

Back at the homicide office, Edgerton shepherds the kid into the large interrogation room, then goes into his monologue. Twenty minutes later, the boy is nodding in semiagreement. In all, it requires a little more than ninety minutes before Edgerton has a viable account of the shooting on Payson Street, an account that conforms to everything he learned at the scene.

By Nathan’s account, Gregory Taylor was indeed burning customers with fake dime bags, then firing the profits into his own arms. Even judged against the fleeting standards of the urban drug trade, this was not exactly a long-term career move. Taylor eventually burned a couple boys from down by the Gilmor Homes, then made the mistake of staying out on the corner too long. The boys came back in an old pickup, jumped on Taylor with rifles and demanded their money back. Sizing up the situation correctly, the victim coughed up two $10 bills, but one customer was still unsatisfied. He opened up with the rifle, chasing Taylor across the intersection, firing one round after another as the victim collapsed on the asphalt. The two gunmen then ran back to the pickup and drove south on Payson toward Frederick.

During the brief interrogation, Nathan gives up real names, street names, physical descriptions and approximate addresses-every last little detail. When Edgerton walks back into the main office, he has everything he needs for a pair of search and seizure warrants.

And yet none of that seems to matter the following morning when the administrative lieutenant-the supervisor who serves as a direct aide to the captain-reads the 24-hour report and learns that Edgerton questioned a witness at the scene without bringing the man downtown. Inappropriate, the lieutenant complains. Irregular. Against standard procedure. Such behavior shows bad judgment, perhaps even laziness.

“What the fuck does he know about investigation?” says Edgerton angrily when Roger Nolan tells him of the complaints on the following midnight shift. “He sits in that office and does arithmetic. When did he ever get out on the street and work a case?”

“Easy, Harry. Easy.”

“I got everything I needed from that guy at the scene,” storms Edgerton. “What the fuck does it matter whether I talk to him there or here?”

“I know…”

“I’m sick of these fucking politicians.”

Nolan sighs. As Edgerton’s sergeant, he’s caught between the captain and D’Addario, for whom Edgerton has become ammunition in a shooting war. If Edgerton handles calls and solves murders, he vindicates his shift lieutenant; if he doesn’t, he serves the captain and the admin lieutenant as prima facie evidence of lax supervision on D’Addario’s shift.

But now the situation is even worse. Not only does Nolan have to contend with the external politics, but he’s also got serious problems in his squad. Edgerton has become a lightning rod; Kincaid, in particular, can’t abide the younger detective.

A veteran investigator of the old school, Kincaid puts stock in the way a man serves his unit. By that reckoning, a good detective shows up early for work to relieve the previous shift; he answers the phone, handling as many calls as come his way; he covers for his partner and his squad members, helping them with witnesses or even scenes without having to be asked. It is a gratifying portrait of the investigator as a cooperative entity, a team player, and Kincaid has spent twenty-two years fashioning himself in that image. For seven of those years, he worked murders with Eddie Brown, an interracial team made especially amusing by Kincaid’s hillbilly drawl. And for the last two years, he has partnered with anyone and everyone on D’Addario’s shift willing to share a call with him.

All of which makes Edgerton simply incomprehensible to Kincaid. It isn’t so much a personal dislike, the older detective tells others in the office. After all, not two weeks ago he spent time with Edgerton at McAllister’s squad party, a summer barbecue to which Edgerton brought his wife and young son. Harry was good company that afternoon, even a little bit charming, Kincaid had to concede. Granting the differences in youth, in race, in his New York urbanity, Edgerton might not be Kincaid’s first choice for a drinking buddy, but in the end, the feud had less to do with personalities than with Edgerton’s lack of any communal instinct, his indifference to the station house camaraderie that had always been so valuable to Kincaid.

To Edgerton, the consummate loner, homicide investigation is an isolated, individual pursuit. It is, in his mind, a singular contest between one detective and his killer, a contest in which the other detectives, the sergeants, the lieutenants and every other organism in the police department have no appropriate role beyond getting out of the primary detective’s path. This was, in essence, Edgerton’s strength and at the same time his weakness. Share and share alike would never be his credo, and consequently Edgerton would always be a source of discontent to his squad. But when he did catch a murder, he wouldn’t shirk. Unlike many detectives who learn to work a murder only until the phone rings with the next dispatcher’s call, Edgerton would bury himself in a case file until a sergeant came along to drag him kicking and screaming to the next assignment.

“It’s hell getting Harry to take a case,” explained Terry McLarney on one occasion. “You’ve got to grab him by the shoulders and yell, ‘Harry. This one’s yours.’ But once you do that, he’ll work it to death.”

No, Edgerton will not handle his share of suicides, overdose deaths, or cellblock hangings. He will not take orders for anyone else when traveling to Crazy John’s for a cheesesteak, and if asked to bring something back, he will surely forget. No, he will not be a workhorse like Garvey or Worden, a central force around whom the rest of a squad establishes its orbit. And it is true that when some rookie cop fires six-on-the-whistle at the scene of some gas station robbery, Edgerton will probably not volunteer to help sort through witness statements and collate reports. But, if left alone, he will give a squad eight or nine good clearances a year.

Having supervised Edgerton when the two were in the Eastern District, Nolan has for a long time understood the necessary tradeoff. Edgerton was one of the most talented, intelligent patrolmen in Nolan’s sector-even if the rest of the uniforms didn’t know what to make of him. He could be inconsiderate, at times even a little irresponsible, but nothing happened on that Greenmount Avenue post that he didn’t know about. The same was true up in homicide; Edgerton may drift off into the ether for a day or two, but Nolan could be assured that in the end, Harry’s cases would get worked. Hard.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nolan told Edgerton after one of Kincaid’s angry tirades. “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”