Her name was Andrea Perry.
And her mother knows when she watches the evening news and catches a glimpse of the ME’s attendants carrying the gurney out of an alley a block away from her Fayette Street home. Andrea has only been missing since last night, and the unidentified victim on television is initially believed to be an older girl, possibly a young woman. But her mother knows.
The identification process at Penn Street is achingly painful, hard even for the ME’s attendants, who can do this sort of thing four or five times a day. Later that day in the homicide office, Roger Nolan has barely started to interview the mother when she breaks down uncontrollably.
“Go home,” he tells her. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
At about the same moment, Edgerton stands in the autopsy room and watches another postmortem of another murdered child. This time, however, Edgerton is the primary detective. In fact, he’s the only detective. And this time, he tells himself, it’s all going to end differently.
But if the Andrea Perry case is now the exclusive property of the homicide unit’s consummate loner, it is also a contradiction in terms: behold, the one-man red ball.
The Andrea Perry murder has all the earmarks of a major case-a dead child, a brutal rape and murder, a lead story on the six o’clock news-yet this time there are no special details, no herd of detectives at the crime scene, no second-day cadet searches. This time the brass is nowhere to be seen.
It might have gone this way even if someone other than Edgerton had taken the call. Because once already this year, D’Addario’s men had spent themselves in a communal fight, gathering the entire shift for an absolutely essential case. For one little girl, they had called in extra troops from the districts. For one righteous cause, they had pursued their best suspects for weeks and then months, sacrificing other cases in the campaign for a single, small life. And none of it had mattered. The Latonya Wallace case had gone sour, reminding every man on the shift that all the time and money and effort mean nothing when the evidence isn’t there. In the end, it was an open file like any other-a special tragedy, to be sure-but an open murder now in the care of one solitary detective.
Success is its own catalyst; failure, too. Without any arrest in the death of one child, the same shift of detectives had very little to deliver in the death of another. For Andrea Perry, there will be no general mobilization, no declaration of war. It is October; the arsenal is empty.
That it is Edgerton’s case simply makes all of this easier. Of all the men on D’Addario’s shift, he is the only one who would never think to ask for more troops. Nolan is with him, of course; Nolan is always with him. But beyond the sergeant, everyone else in the squad holds to his own cases. Even if Edgerton wants their help, he wouldn’t know how to ask. From the crime scene forward, he is on his own: So be it.
From those first moments at the scene, Edgerton tells himself he will not make the same mistakes that he believes are buried in the Latonya Wallace file, and if he does, they will be his alone to deal with. He has watched Tom Pellegrini waste most of a year kicking himself for investigative flaws, real and imagined. Much of that is the kind of second-guessing that accompanies any unsolved case, but some of it, Edgerton knows, has to do with Pellegrini’s feeling that the red-ball treatment had taken away control of the case. Landsman, Edgerton, Eddie Brown, the detail officers-every one of them had become a force for Tom to reckon with, particularly the veteran detectives who had so much more time than Pellegrini and, as a result, tended to influence the case to a greater degree. Well, thinks Edgerton, that was Tom. I won’t have that problem.
For one thing, he has a crime scene-not just a site where the child’s body has been dumped, but a bona fide murder scene. Edgerton and Nolan had taken the call alone, and for once they had taken their goddamn time with the body. They made sure to do everything in the proper order, to let the little girl be until they were absolutely ready to move her. They bagged the hands at the scene and carefully chronicled the exact array of clothing, noting that while she was fully dressed, her jacket and blouse seemed to have been improperly buttoned.
Working closely with the lab tech at the scene, Edgerton managed to pull several hairs from the victim’s blouse, and he carefully noted even the smallest scars and injuries. Walking the length of the alley, he found a single.22 casing, though the head wound appeared to be the result of a larger caliber. With a wound to a fleshy part of the body, a detective can’t really tell, because the skin expands at the point of contact and then returns to its shape after the bullet passes, leaving a smaller hole. But a head wound retains an accurate circumference; chances are good that the.22 casing had nothing to do with the murder.
There was no blood trail whatsoever. Edgerton carefully examined the victim’s head and neck at the scene, satisfying himself that she had done all of her bleeding right there against the low brick foundation. In all probability, she had been led into the alley, forced to kneel down, and then shot, execution style, in the back of the head. Nor was there an exit wound, and a clean, remarkably unmutilated.32 round is subsequently recovered at the autopsy. In addition, the vaginal swabs will later come back positive with the seminal fluid of a secreter-a male whose ejaculate contained sufficient blood to type or DNA-test against any potential suspect. In contrast to the Latonya Wallace case, the killer of Andrea Perry has left behind a wealth of physical evidence.
But the interviews with two young men brought downtown by the first uniforms provide little. Apparently, neither one was the first to discover the body. One tells detectives that he learned about it from the other; the second says only that he had been walking on Baltimore Street when an old woman told him that there was a body in the alley. He had not gone to investigate, he tells Edgerton, but had simply told the second man, who flagged down a cop. Who was the old woman? The first young man has no idea.
As the case develops, Edgerton works deliberately and at his own pace. The initial canvass by Western officers was carefully done, but Edgerton spends days creating his own schematic diagram of the surrounding blocks, listing residents at each rowhouse and matching them with criminal histories and alibis. It is a rough little neighborhood, hard by the Western District’s lower boundary with the Southern, and the Vine Street drug market a block away brought all kinds of trash into the area, greatly adding to any list of potential suspects. This is the kind of investigation that brings out the best in Edgerton, playing as it does to his strengths: More than any other detective in the unit, he can work a neighborhood until every other pedestrian is feeding him information.
Part of it is his appearance-black, reedy thin, and well groomed, with salt-and-pepper hair and thick mustache, Edgerton is attractive in a decidedly laid-back way. At crime scenes, the neighborhood girls actually line up on the other side of the police tape and giggle. Detective Edge, they call him. Unlike most of his colleagues, Edgerton maintains his own string of informants, and more often than not they are eighteen-year-old yoettes whose boyfriends are out in the streets shooting one another for drugs and gold chains. Time and again, some corner boy would be on his way to the Hopkins ER with holes in his torso and Edgerton’s beeper would go off before the ambo could even arrive, the digital readout displaying the number of an east side pay phone.
Edgerton is at ease in the ghetto in a way that even the best white detectives are not. And more than most of the black investigators, too, Edgerton can somehow talk his way past the fact that he’s a cop. Only Edgerton would have bothered to clean the blood from a wounded girl’s hands in a University Hospital emergency room. Only Edgerton could share a smoke with a drug dealer in the back of a radio car on Hollins Street and emerge with a complete statement. In corner carryouts, in hospital waiting rooms, in rowhouse vestibules, Edgerton makes sudden and lasting connections with people who have no reason ever to trust a homicide detective. And now, in the case of Andrea Perry, a true victim, those connections come even easier.