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.
As if to acknowledge his sudden vulnerability, D’Addario himself went to the scene of the cabbie murder. So, too, did the captain. Not to mention the district commander from the Northwest and the police department’s chief spokesman. Donald Worden was off, but the rest of McLarney’s squad took the call, with Rick James as the primary and Eddie Brown as secondary investigator. Never mind that he would be without the Big Man on this call, James was a man who counted his overtime, and by that reckoning alone he was due for a fresh murder. For three weeks he had wallowed at his desk near the front of the office, cursing every phone extension, silently willing the communications unit to send him a major case, a red ball with many hours involved.
“Incoming… I got it,” he shouted time and again, grabbing every call on the first bleat. And then, in a mood blackened by poverty: “Edgerton, pick up line one. Sounds like your wife.”
The ancient Greeks were fond of saying that the gods punish a man most by answering his prayers, and on Powder Mill Road, James was saddled with a stone whodunit. Face down at the edge of a wooded trail was a black woman in her thirties, wearing only a brown jacket with “Checker Cab” and “Karen” on either side of the chest. There was no wallet, purse, or identification, although her shoes, pants and panties lay near the body. Three hours after she was discovered, a Baltimore County unit found Checker Cab 4 in a garden apartment parking lot in Owings Mills, six to eight miles west of the city line. Abandoned with its hazard lights flashing, the cab caught the attention of neighbors; when contacted, cab company officials confirmed that neither cab 4, nor its driver, Karen Renee Smith, had been seen or heard from since nine o’clock that morning. The positive ID followed soon after.
Nothing about the murder of Karen Smith resembled any of the previous Northwest killings, but to argue such subtleties in the face of a departmental mood swing is futility defined. Now, a day later, the colonel is calling in the troops, ordering special details for each of the open murders of Northwest women while trying to avoid suggesting a lack of confidence in the homicide unit. Within twenty-four hours, a dozen fresh uniforms and detectives from other CID sections will be assigned to homicide-two for each of the six primary investigators in the Northwest murders. The annex office interrogation room will be converted into a cramped command post of sorts, with maps and charts, photographs of the victims, in and out boxes for the paperwork generated by the detail. Reward sheets for information on each of the murders will be printed for distribution in the neighborhoods near each crime scene.
The primary detectives are to use the extra manpower to generate new leads and run down any loose ends in the case files. They are to make the Northwest murders their first priority and, with a nod to a recent newspaper article that began the campaign by hinting at the possibility of a serial killer, they are to be especially vigilant for anything that might link these murders.
One of the six cases-the murder of Brenda Thompson, stabbed to death in the back of a Dodge in early January-runs into a conflicting priority: Latonya Wallace. Harry Edgerton is the primary detective in the Thompson murder, the secondary in the slaying of the little girl. As a result, the Thompson case is farmed out to Bertina Silver.
Edgerton and his sergeant, Roger Nolan, argue briefly with both D’Addario and the captain against the change, maintaining that it serves no purpose to change the primary detective in the middle of an investigation for the sake of creating some immediate activity. Edgerton knows the case file and the players, and most important, he has spent hours creating a working relationship with his best suspect, a young street dealer who sold for Brenda Thompson and owed her money. The kid has already been willing to subject himself to a couple of long interrogations. Edgerton argues that the Thompson murder is already two months old, and anything the special detail may do now can just as easily be done two or three or four weeks down the road, after the Latonya Wallace case has resolved itself.
Edgerton has on his side the prevailing wisdom and tradition of the homicide unit, both of which argue that no one can know a murder as well as the detective who handles the scene and its aftermath. The bosses, however, are adamant. A police department is a reactive beast, and with the newspapers and television both crowing about the possibility of multiple murders in the Northwest, tradition and wisdom are both being sold off at basement prices. The Thompson case goes to Bert Silver.
In happier times, Edgerton might have appealed personally to D’Addario, but now that the lieutenant has problems of his own, that appeal would be pointless. Latonya Wallace, the subterranean clearance rate, the Northwest murders-any and all are reason enough for D’Addario to feel vulnerable. Already there has been one meeting with the colonel and Deputy Mullen on the Latonya Wallace detail, an hour-long summary in which Jay Landsman outlined the efforts undertaken by the detectives and then fielded questions until the bosses seemed mollified. The meeting was a seamless piece of departmental politics, but D’Addario has to know that unless the solve rate rises, Landsman’s performance is no more than a temporary reprieve.