Beached by the ebbing tide, Pellegrini sits at his desk in the annex office, surrounded by three cardboard crates of office reports and photographs, lab examinations and witness statements. Against the wall behind his desk is the bulletin board that the men on the detail created but never found the time to hang on a wall. Pinned to its center is the best and most recent photograph of the child. On the left is Edgerton’s rooftop diagram of Newington Avenue. On the right, a map of the Reservoir Hill area and a series of aerial photographs taken from the police helicopter.
On this dayshift as on two dozen others, Pellegrini moves slowly through one of the bound case folders, reading reports that are weeks old, searching for any loose fragment of information that he failed to digest the first time around. Some of the reports are his own, others are signed by Edgerton or Eddie Brown, Landsman or the detail men. That’s the trouble with the red-ball treatment, Pellegrini tells himself, scanning one typewritten page after another. By virtue of their importance, red balls have the potential to become David O. Selznick productions, four-star departmental clusterfucks beyond the control of any single investigator. From almost the moment the body was found, the Latonya Wallace case became the property of the entire police department, until door-to-door canvasses were being done by patrolmen and witness statements were being taken by detail officers with no more than a few days’ experience in death investigation. Knowledge of the case file was soon scattered among two dozen people.
On one level, Pellegrini accepts the logic of unlimited manpower. In the weeks after the little girl’s murder, the red-ball express made it possible to cover the longest piece of ground in the shortest stretch of time. By the end of February, the men on the detail had twice canvassed a three-block radius from the crime scene, had interviewed nearly two hundred people, had executed warrants for three addresses and had done walkthrough consent searches in every rowhouse on the north side of Newington Avenue. But now, the paperwork from that massive campaign has congealed on Pellegrini’s desk. The witness statements alone fill one file, while information about the Fish Man-still the best suspect-is relegated to a manila folder all its own.
Leaning forward in his chair, Pellegrini looks through the scene photos for what must be the three hundredth time. The same child stares out across the rainy pavement with that same lost look. Her arm is still extended in that same reaching motion, palm open, fingers slightly curled.
For Tom Pellegrini, the 3-by-5 color shots no longer produce anything that remotely resembles an emotion. In fact, he concedes to himself, they never really did. In some strange way that only a homicide detective can understand, Pellegrini psychologically stepped away from his victim at the very outset. It was not a conscious decision; it was more the absence of a decision. In some elemental, almost preordained way, the switch in his mind was thrown when he walked into that yard behind Newington Avenue.
The detachment came naturally enough, and Pellegrini still has no reason to question it. If he did, the easy answer would be that a detective can only function properly by accepting the most appalling tragedies on a clinical level. On that basis, the sight of a young child sprawled across the pavement-her torso gutted, her neck contorted-becomes, after an initial moment of shock, a matter of evidence. A good investigator, leaning over a fresh obscenity, doesn’t waste time and effort battering himself with theological questions about the nature of evil and man’s inhumanity to man. He wonders instead whether the jagged wound pattern is the result of a serrated blade, or whether the discoloration on the underside of the leg is indeed an indication of lividity.
On the surface, that professional ethos is part of what keeps any detective from the horror, but Pellegrini knows there is something more to it, something that has to do with the act of bearing witness. After all, he never knew the little girl. He never knew her family. Most important, perhaps, he never really felt their loss. On the day the body was found, Pellegrini left the crime scene to go directly to the ME’s offices, where the autopsy of a little girl demanded the most clinical kind of mind-set. It was Edgerton who told the mother, who watched the family suddenly dissolve in anguish, who represented the homicide unit at the funeral. Since then, Pellegrini had spoken to members of the Wallace family on occasion, but only about details. At those moments, the survivors were both helpful and numb, their pain no longer apparent to a visiting detective. That Pellegrini had not borne witness to their grief somehow kept him from truly seeing the photographs in front of him.
And maybe, Pellegrini concedes, maybe there was distance because he was white and the little girl was black. It made the slaying no less a crime, Pellegrini knew, but it was in some way a crime of the city, of Reservoir Hill’s ghetto, of a world to which he had no ties. Pellegrini could try to make himself believe that Latonya Wallace could have been his little girl, or Landsman’s, or McLarney’s, but the distinctions of race and class were always there, unspoken but acknowledged. Hell, for the past year and a half Pellegrini has listened to his sergeant say as much at dozens of ghetto crime scenes.
“Hey, it don’t matter to me,” Landsman would tell the locals when witnesses refused to come forward. “I don’t live around here.”
Well, it was true; Pellegrini didn’t live in Reservoir Hill. Given that distance, he can tell himself that as an investigator, his interest is limited to that of the technician. From that view, the death of Latonya Wallace is nothing more or less than a crime, a singular event that with two beers and a warm dinner will seem a universe away from a brick ranch house, a wife and two children in the Anne Arundel suburbs south of the city.
Once, talking with Eddie Brown about the case, Pellegrini actually caught hold of his own detachment. He and Brown had been bouncing theories back and forth when the strangest word slipped out, falling like a brick on the conversation.
“She had to know this guy in the first place, we know that much. I think this broad…”
This broad. Pellegrini stopped almost immediately, then began searching for some other word.
“… this girl let her killer take her off the street because she knew him from somewhere else.”
Pellegrini’s sergeant was no different, of course. When one of the detail officers was looking at scene photos and asking questions, Landsman suddenly slipped into his standard deadpan.
“Who found her?” the detail officer asked.
“Post officer from the Central.”
“Did the guy rape her?”
“The officer?” asked Landsman, feigning confusion. “Um, I don’t think so. Maybe. We didn’t ask him ’cause we figured the guy who killed her did that.”
In any other world, the comedy would be appalling. But this is the annex office of CID homicide in the city of Baltimore, where everyone-Pellegrini included-manages to laugh at the cruelest kind of humor.
In his heart, Pellegrini knows that solving the Latonya Wallace case will not be a response to the death of a young girl as much as a matter of personal vindication. His obsession is not with the victim but with the victimizer. A child-any child-had been murdered on a February dayshift and, as the man who took the call, Pellegrini accepted the murder as a professional challenge. If the Latonya Wallace case goes down, then a child-killer has been beaten. The alibis, the deceit, the hiding-all of it means nothing at the point of arrest. At the sweet instant that those metal bracelets click, Pellegrini will know he has truly arrived, that he is-like any other man in that unit-worth a detective’s shield and 120 hours of paid overtime. But if the case stays open, if somewhere in this world the killer lives to know he has beaten the detective, then Pellegrini will never be quite the same. Watching him sink into the case files day after day, the other men in the unit know that.