For the first month of the investigation, he had come as close to working around the clock as possible: sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes he left for work with the sudden awareness that for several days running, he had come home only to sleep and shower, that he hadn’t really spoken to his wife or enjoyed the new baby. Christopher had been born in December, the second son in three years, but Pellegrini had done little to help with the child in the last two months. He felt guilty about that, but a little bit relieved as well. At least the infant kept his wife occupied; Brenda had every right to insist on something more than an absentee husband, but so far, between feedings and diapers and everything else, little had been said.
His wife knew he was working the Latonya Wallace case, and somehow, in a year’s time, she had accustomed herself to a detective’s hours. In fact, the whole household seemed to revolve around the little girl. Once, as Pellegrini was walking out the door on a Saturday morning, heading downtown for the third consecutive weekend, his older boy ran up to him.
“Play with me,” Michael said.
“I have to go to work.”
“You’re working on Latonya Wallace,” the three-year-old said.
By the middle of March, Pellegrini saw his health begin to suffer. He coughed in fits: a deep, rasping hack, worse than his usual smoker’s wheeze, and it stayed with him through the day. At first he blamed the cigarettes; later, he complained about the aging ventilation system in the headquarters building. The other detectives were quick to join in: Never mind the cigarettes, they told him, the asbestos fibers set loose by cracking acoustic tile were enough to kill a man.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” Garvey told him after one morning roll call. “I hear that cancer you get from breathing asbestos is slow and lingering. You’ll have plenty of time to work the case.”
Pellegrini tried to laugh, but a thin wheeze gave way to the hacking. Two weeks later, he was still coughing. Worse, he was having trouble getting out of bed and more trouble staying awake at the office. No matter how much he slept, he managed to wake up exhausted. A short visit to the doctor yielded no obvious reasons, and the other detectives, armchair psychiatrists one and all, were quick to blame the Latonya Wallace file.
Veterans on the shift told him to forget the goddamn thing, to get back in the rotation and pick up a fresh murder. But the cutting in the Southeast only pissed him off-all that argument and aggravation just to prove that some Perkins Homes dope dealer cut up a customer over $20. Likewise that dunker from the Civic Center, the one where the maintenance employee responded to complaints about his tardiness by killing his boss.
“Yeah, I stabbed him,” the guy says, covered with the victim’s blood. “He hit me first.”
Christ.
A little girl has been raped and killed and the detective charged with solving the crime is in some other part of the city putting handcuffs on the most mindless shitbirds. No, Pellegrini tells himself, the cure is not the next case, or the next case after that.
The cure is on his desk.
As the dayshift ends and the rest of D’Addario’s detectives drift toward the elevators, Pellegrini stays put in the annex office, turning the stack of color photos in his hand and scanning the collection one more time.
What has he missed? What has been lost? What is still waiting for him up on Newington Avenue?
Holding one of the straight-on photographs of the body, Pellegrini stares at a thin metal rod resting on the sidewalk a few feet from the child’s head. It isn’t the first time he’s looked at that metal rod and it won’t be the last. To Pellegrini, that particular detail has come to symbolize everything that has gone wrong with the case.
Pellegrini noticed the metal rod almost immediately after the photographs came upstairs from the crime lab, two days after the body was discovered. There was no doubt about it: the metal rod in the picture was the same one that Garvey had recovered during the trainees’ second-day search on Newington Avenue. When Garvey pulled the tubing out of that rear yard, it still carried a hair and a clot of coagulated blood-blood that had since been matched to the victim. Yet the day the body was found, the metal tubing had somehow been overlooked.
Pellegrini remembers that morning at the scene and the vague premonition that warned him to slow everything down. He remembers that moment when the ME’s people came for the body and asked if everyone was ready. Yeah, they were ready. They had walked every inch of that yard and checked every detail twice. So what is that goddamn piece of metal doing in the photographs? And how the hell had they missed it in those early hours?
Not that Pellegrini has any idea what the metal tubing has to do with his murder. Maybe it was dumped there with the body. Maybe it was used by the killer, perhaps to simulate sexual intercourse. That would explain the blood and hair, as well as the vaginal tearing discovered at autopsy. Or maybe the damn thing was lying in the yard earlier, jetsam from a broken television stand or curling iron that somehow got mixed up in his crime scene. Perhaps the blood and hair were swept into the tube when the old man came out to clean his yard after the body was removed. There was no way of knowing, but the fact that a piece of evidence had not been noticed for twenty-four hours was unnerving. What else had they missed?
Pellegrini reads further into the case file, reviewing some of the reports from the canvass of the 700 block. Some of the interviews seemed to have been carefully performed, with detectives or detail men asking follow-up questions or encouraging witnesses to elaborate on answers. Others, however, seem perfunctory and halfhearted, as if the officer involved had already convinced himself that the interview was a wasted effort.
Pellegrini reads the reports and thinks of questions that could have been asked, should have been asked, in those first days, when memories are fresh. A neighbor says she doesn’t know anything about the murder. Fine, but does she remember any noise in the alley that night? Voices? Cries? Automobile sounds? Car headlights? Nothing that night? What about in the past? Any problems with anyone in the neighborhood? You’ve got a couple of people living nearby that make you nervous, right? Why’s that? Did your children ever have any problems with these people? Who don’t you want them going near?
Pellegrini includes himself in this critical assessment. There are things he wished he had done in those early days. For example, the pickup truck that the Fish Man used the week of the murder to carry junk from his burned-out store-why hadn’t they taken a better look at that vehicle? Too quickly they had bought into the argument that the little girl had been carried into the alley, presumably by someone traveling no more than a block. But what if the Fish Man had done the murder up on Whitelock Street? That was too far away to carry the body, but it was the same week that he had access to a neighbor’s truck. And what might a careful search of the truck have yielded? Hairs? Fibers? The same tarlike substance that stained the little girl’s pants?
Landsman had left the investigation believing that the Fish Man was not the killer, that they would have broken the store owner in the long interrogation if he were indeed their man. Pellegrini still isn’t sure. For one thing, the Fish Man’s story has too many inconsistencies and not enough alibi-a combination sure to keep a man on any detective’s list. And then, five days ago, he had blown his polygraph.
They performed the lie detector test at the State Police barracks in Pikesville-their first opportunity to schedule it since the investigation had centered on the store owner. Incredibly, the Baltimore department did not have a qualified polygraph examiner of its own; although it handled close to half the homicide investigations in Maryland, the BPD had to rely on the State Police to accommodate its cases on an ad hoc basis. Once the test had been scheduled, they needed to find the Fish Man and convince him to take the examination voluntarily. In a manner as convenient as it was coercive, this was accomplished by locking the old man up on an outstanding marital support warrant-now several years old-that Pellegrini had discovered in the computer. The warrant had never been served and the legal issue was very likely moot; nonetheless, the Fish Man was soon in police custody. And once a man lands at City Jail, even a lie detector test begins to seem like a reasonable diversion.