McLarney wanders back toward the other side of the car as sunrise streaks the eastern sky red. An early work crew opens the gates to the city yard on Calverton Road; ten minutes later, a public works truck rumbles down to the pumps. At the sound of the truck, Biemiller looks across the asphalt, squinting through an alcohol haze.

“Who the fuck is that?”

A lone figure in blue is standing a few feet from the city yard entrance, glaring at them.

“Security guard,” says McLarney.

“Christ. Not again.”

“What the fuck does he want?”

“He saw the beer.”

“So what? Why should he give a fuck?”

The man in blue pulls a notepad and pencil, then begins writing. The cops respond with obscenity.

“Christ, he’s taking tag numbers.”

“Well,” says Biemiller. “Party’s over. See you boys around.”

“No point waiting around for the IID number,” says another. “Let’s get gone.”

They toss the last few cans in the underbrush, then climb into their cars. Two cars and a pickup peel off and run a gauntlet past the security guard and out onto Edmondson Avenue. Back behind the wheel of his Honda, McLarney gauges the effects of the beer, then calculates the number of state troopers between his current location and his home in Howard County. The resulting odds seem improbable, so he drives east through the scattered Saturday morning traffic, turning south on Martin Luther King Boulevard and arriving minutes later at the South Baltimore rowhouse that is the home of a friend who had been among them on Calverton Road. McLarney stands on the stoop in the new day’s light, the morning paper rolled in his right hand. The friend arrives a few minutes later.

“Got a beer?” asks McLarney.

“Jesus, Terry.”

McLarney laughs, handing the younger man the paper. The two make their way through the door and McLarney wanders into the first-floor living room.

“What a dump,” says McLarney. “You need to get a maid or something.”

The younger man comes back from the refrigerator with the paper and two bottles of Rolling Rock. McLarney sits on the sofa and pulls apart the newspaper, looking for a story about the Cassidy verdict. He scatters sections across the table before finding the article on the front of the local section, below the fold. The story is brief, maybe a dozen paragraphs.

“Kind of short,” he says, reading slowly.

He finishes the story, then rubs his eyes and takes a long drag on his beer. Suddenly, finally, he is exhausted. Very drunk and very exhausted.

“It’s so fucked up,” he says. “You know what I’m saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?”

Normal people. Citizens. Human beings. Even among the believers, there is a pathology to being a cop.

“Fuck, I’m tired. I got to get home.”

“You can’t drive.”

“I’m okay.”

“Terry, you’re fucking blind.”

McLarney looks up, startled at the word. Again he picks up the local section. Again he scans the story, looking for the things that never manage to find their way into newspaper accounts.

“I thought they’d do more,” he says finally. McLarney tries to fold the paper, crushing it awkwardly in his left hand.

“Gene did good though, didn’t he?” he says after a pause. “He was good on the stand.”

“He was.”

“He got respect.”

“He did.”

“Good,” says McLarney, his leaden eyes closing. “That’s good.”

The sergeant leans his head back against the wall behind the sofa. His eyes close at last.

“Gotta go,” he says in a slur. “Wake me in ten…”

He sleeps like a still life, sitting up, his right ankle to his left knee. The crushed newspaper is in his lap, the half-empty beer can is surrounded by the meat of his right hand. The sport coat stays on. The tie is twisted but intact. The wire-frame eyeglasses, bent and battered from a half dozen near-misses, have slipped down his nose. The badge remains in the upper right coat pocket. The gun, a silver.38 snubnose, stays holstered to his belt.

Print hit.

When the human mind has exhausted itself, technology flexes a muscle and creates a clue of its own. Diodes and transistors and silicon chips produce a connection as the swirl pattern on a right index finger is matched to a name and address. Each ridge, each curve, each imperfection is noted, catalogued and compared until the verdict of the Printrak computer is certain:

Kevin Robert Lawrence

D.O.B. 9/25/66

3409 Park Heights Avenue

Like any of its species, the Printrak is an unthinking beast. It knows nothing of the case file, nothing of the victim, and virtually nothing of any suspect it happens to identify. And it cannot ask the questions that necessarily follow from its discoveries. That is left to a detective, who stretches his cramped legs across a metal desk and stares at a printout sent upstairs from the lab’s ident section. Why, he wonders, does Kevin Robert Lawrence’s fingerprint appear on the inside cover of a library book on Afro-American heroes, Pioneers and Patriots? And how can it be, he inquires further, that this same book is somehow one of those found in the satchel of a murdered child in Reservoir Hill?

Good and simple questions, to which a detective can have no immediate response. The name of Kevin Robert Lawrence appears nowhere in the Latonya Wallace case file, nor does it stir the memory of any detective or detail officer involved in the case. And but for the fact that Mr. Lawrence was arrested yesterday for attempting to shoplift some veal cutlets from a Bolton Hill grocery store, his name would not correlate with any criminal history within easy reach of the Baltimore Police Identification computer.

This, the detectives must concede, is not a promising fact. Generally speaking, the ideal rape-murder suspect usually manages to post on his BPI sheet something more substantive than a single shoplifting charge. Yet this Lawrence kid managed to get his hands on a dead little girl’s library book without ever acquiring a police record. In fact, if it wasn’t for his little shopping spree, the name of Kevin Robert Lawrence would probably never be uttered by any homicide detective. But Mr. Lawrence wanted veal for dinner and he apparently wanted it on the cheap, and by that limited ambition alone, he is now the leading suspect in the murder of Latonya Wallace.

Caught by a store security guard and held for a Central District wagon, the twenty-one-year-old Lawrence was taken to the lockup late yesterday, where a turnkey applied the appropriate amount of ink and produced a fingerprint card with a freshly minted BPI number. Overnight, the card traveled the usual route to the fourth-floor records section at headquarters, where it got the requisite run through the Printrak, which can compare a latent print with the hundreds of thousands of print cards on file with the Baltimore department.

In a perfect world, this wondrous process would produce evidence on a regular and routine basis. But in Baltimore, a city that can in no way be called perfect, the Printrak-like any other technological marvel in the department’s crime laboratory-functions in accordance with Rule Eight in the homicide lexicon:

In any case where there is no apparent suspect, the crime lab will produce no valuable evidence. In those cases where a suspect has already confessed and been identified by at least two eyewitnesses, the lab will give you print hits, fiber evidence, blood typings and a ballistic match. And yet in the case of Latonya Wallace, a murder that genuinely matters, this rule seems not to apply. For once, the lab work has suddenly propelled a stalled investigation forward.

Not surprisingly, the sudden print hit found the Latonya Wallace case flat on its back because Tom Pellegrini was in precisely the same condition. His coughing had continued without respite, and the exhaustion seemed to leave him with less and less each day. One morning, trying to get out of bed, he felt as if his legs were barely moving. It was like one of those dreams in which you’re trying to run from something but you just can’t get started. Again, he went to a physician, who diagnosed the respiratory problem as an allergic reaction. But allergic to what? Pellegrini had never had an allergy before in his life. The doctor suggested that stress can sometimes trigger an allergy that might ordinarily be contained by the body’s defenses. Then: Have you been under any particular kind of stress lately?