Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 10

Pomerleau's arrival marked the end of the Baltimore department's Paleozoic era. Almost overnight, the command staff began stressing community relations, crime prevention and modern law enforcement technology. A series of citywide tactical units was created and multichannel radios replaced the call boxes still used by most patrolmen. Shootings by police officers were for the first time investigated systematically, and those reviews made some difference; together with community pressure, they discouraged some of the most blatant brutality. But it was Pomerleau himself who successfully fought a prolonged battle against the creation of a civilian review board, a.s.suring that in cases of alleged brutality the Baltimore department would continue to monitor itself. As a result, the men on the street in the late sixties and early seventies understood that a bad shooting could be made to look good and a good shooting could be made to look better.

In Baltimore, the drop piece became standard issue in the police districts, so much so that one particular shooting in the early 1970s has become a permanent part of department lore, a touchstone for a particular era in Maryland's largest city. It happened on one of the side streets off Pennsylvania Avenue, when a sudden spasm of violence struck as five narcotics detectives were preparing to hit a rowhouse. From the darkness of an adjacent alley someone started shouting, yelling to another cop about the man behind him, the man with a knife.

In a rush of adrenaline, one detective fired all six, though he later swore-until he checked his gun-that he pulled the trigger once. He ran into the alley to find the suspect lying on his back, surrounded by five knives.

"Here's his knife, here," said one cop.

"Man, that ain't my f.u.c.kin' knife," the wounded man declared, then pointed to another switchblade a few feet away. "That's my knife."

But the drop weapons were little more than a temporary solution, one that became less effective and more dangerous as the general public became aware of the ploy. In the end, the department could do little more than fight a rearguard action as complaints of excessive force multiplied and police brutality became a catchphrase. In Donald Worden's mind, the end of the old Baltimore Police Department could be marked with precision. On April 6, 1973, a twenty-four-year-old patrolman named Norman Buckman was shot six times in the head with his own service revolver on a Pimlico street. Two fellow officers about a block away heard the shots and raced down Quantico Avenue. They found a young suspect standing over the dead officer's body, the murder weapon on the ground beside him.

"Yeah," said the man, "I shot the motherf.u.c.ker."

Instead of emptying their guns, the arresting officers merely cuffed the shooter and took him downtown. Where once on the streets of Baltimore there had been a code, now there were dead police and living cop killers.

Worden was torn. A part of him knew the old ways could not be defended or even sustained, but still, Buckman had been a friend, a young patrolman who had been busting his a.s.s to make Worden's operations squad in the Northwest District. Called at home by his s.h.i.+ft lieutenant, Worden dressed quickly and arrived at the station house with a dozen other officers at about the same moment that Buckman's murderer was transferred to the lockup. The official story was that the suspect complained of abdominal pains while being processed and photographed, but everyone in the city understood the source of that pain. And when Baltimore's black newspaper, the Afro-American Afro-American, sent a photographer to Sinai Hospital in the hope of depicting the suspect's injuries, it was Worden himself who locked the man up on a trespa.s.sing charge. When the NAACP demanded an inquiry, department officials simply stonewalled, insisting that no beating had occurred.

But it was a small, pathetic victory, and in the roll call rooms and radio cars there were hard words for the two officers who, with a .38 already on the ground, had allowed Buckman's killer to surrender. The words became harder still after the trial, when the man slipped away with a second-degree verdict and a sentence that would allow parole in little more than ten years.

The Buckman murder was one milestone, but the journey was far from over. Seven years later, in an East Baltimore carryout, the department once again came to terms with its future. And once again Worden stood on the periphery, helpless, as another cop, another friend, was sacrificed in an altogether different way.

In March 1980, the victim was a seventeen-year-old kid with the unlikely monicker of Ja-Wan McGee; the shooter, a thirty-three-year-old detective named Scotty McCown. A nine-year veteran who was then working with Worden in CID robbery, McCown was off duty and in plainclothes at a sub shop on Erdman Avenue, ordering a pizza, when McGee and a companion entered and walked to the counter. McCown had already been watching the two teenagers for a few minutes, glimpsing them as they returned several times to the window, scoping the store's interior, apparently waiting for something. Only when most of the customers left did the two walk inside and make their way toward the counter. McCown had been a robbery detective for five years, and the scene he was witnessing seemed a little familiar. This is it, he thought, slipping his off-duty weapon from its holster and into his raincoat pocket.

And when the flash of silver came out of Ja-Wan McGee's coat pocket at the counter, McCown was more than ready. He fired three without warning, wounding McGee in the upper back. The detective ordered the other teenager to stay where he was, then shouted for the counterman to call for the police and an ambulance. Then he leaned over the p.r.o.ne victim. On the floor was a black and silver cigarette lighter.

The shooting of Ja-Wan McGee came only weeks after a similarly questionable shooting by a white officer had sparked race riots in Miami. When the picketing began in earnest outside City Hall, everyone in the department could see the writing on the wall. Everyone but Scotty McCown.

Worden had come to the robbery unit in 1977, two years after Mc-Cown, and he knew the younger man to be a good cop who was about to be destroyed by a bad shooting. Worden dug out a couple of fresh reports from the Eastern District, robberies in which the suspect had used a small pistol, a chrome .25-caliber.

"Maybe these will help," Worden offered.

"Thank you, Donald," the younger detective told him, "but I'll be okay."

But he would not be okay. The protests, the whispered threat of riots, grew louder after the state's attorney's office declined to present the case to a grand jury, citing a lack of criminal intent on the part of the detective. Three months later, a departmental trial board convened to hear testimony from McCown, who insisted that he fired his weapon because he feared for his own safety and the safety of others. The five-member panel heard from the victim's companion in the carryout, who explained that he and his friend were not casing the store, that they repeatedly looked through the window before entering because the shop was crowded and they didn't want to wait in line to buy sodas. Most important, the panel heard from Ja-Wan McGee, now paralyzed at the waist, who testified from a wheelchair that he "was walking in the door, and the guy took two steps and started firing." The trial board deliberated for an hour, then found the detective guilty of violating three departmental rules involving the use of a firearm as well as acting "in a manner which reflected discredit on the department." A week later, the police commissioner declined to consider any lesser punishment or rehabilitation for the detective. Instead, Pomerleau accepted the trial board's recommendation and fired the detective.

"Miami brought justice for us," declared the regional head of the NAACP, but to police on the street the case against Scotty McCown made it clear that a department that had once refused to discipline even the most wanton acts of brutality was now sounding a general retreat. The question was not whether the Ja-Wan McGee shooting was good or bad; every cop who ever felt the need to draw his weapon winced at the thought of a cigarette lighter on the linoleum and a seventeen-year-old crippled for life. The question was whether the department was going to sacrifice its own rather than confront one of the most unavoidable truths about police work: the inst.i.tutionalized conceit that says in every given circ.u.mstance, a good cop will give you a good shooting.

A heavily armed nation p.r.o.ne to violence finds it only reasonable to give law officers weapons and the authority to use them. In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with . 38-caliber Smith & Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academy firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer's judgment, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time.

It is a lie.

It is a lie the police department tolerates because to do otherwise would shatter the myth of infallibility on which rests its authority for lethal force. And it is a lie that the public demands, because to do otherwise would expose a terrifying ambiguity. The false certainty, the myth of perfection, on which our culture feeds requires that Scotty McCown should have shouted a warning before firing three shots, that he should have identified himself as a police officer and told Ja-Wan McGee to drop what he believed was a weapon. It demands that McCown should have given the kid time to decide or, perhaps, should have used his weapon only to wound or disarm the suspect. It argues that a detective who fails to do these things is poorly trained and reckless, and if the detective is white, it allows for the argument that he is very possibly a racist capable of viewing every black teenager with a s.h.i.+ny lighter as an armed robbery in progress. It doesn't matter that a shouted warning concedes every advantage to the gunman, that death can come in the time it takes for a cop to identify himself or demand that a suspect relinquish a weapon. It doesn't matter that in a confrontation of little more than a second or two, a cop is lucky if he can hit center ma.s.s from a distance of twenty feet, much less target extremities or shoot a weapon from a suspect's hand. And it doesn't matter whether a cop is an honorable man, whether he truly believes he is in danger, whether the shooting of a black suspect sickens him no less than if the man were white. McCown was a good man, but he let go of a .38 round a moment or two before he should have, and in that short span both victim and shooter became entwined in the same tragedy.

For the public, and the black community in particular, the shooting of Ja-Wan McGee became a long-awaited victory over a police department that had for generations devalued black life. It was, in that sense, the inevitable consequence of too much evil justified for too long. It made no difference that Scotty McCown was neither incompetent nor racist; in Baltimore, as in other police departments nationwide, the sons would be made to pay for their fathers' crimes.

For cops on the street, white and black, the McGee shooting became proof positive that they were now alone, that the system could no longer protect them. To preserve its authority, the department would be required to destroy not only those men who used and believed in brutality, but also those who chose wrongly when confronted with a sudden, terrifying decision. If the shooting was good, you were covered, though even the most justified use of force could no longer occur in Baltimore without someone, somewhere, getting in front of a television camera to say that police murdered the man. And if the shooting was borderline, you were probably still covered, provided you knew how to write the report. But if the shooting was bad, you were expendable.

For the department, for the city itself, the consequences were predictable, inevitable. And now, every cop who knew his history could look at Monroe Street and see the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of an earlier tragedy in an east side carryout. Maybe John Scott was killed by a police, and maybe it was a calculated murder, though it was hard for Worden or anyone else to imagine a cop consciously risking both his career and his freedom to ace a car thief. More likely, the death of John Scott was nothing more or less than a chase, a scuffle and a half-second of fearful deliberation in a dark alley. Perhaps the gun was leveled and the trigger squeezed by a mind haunted by memories of Norman Buckman or any other cop who hesitated and lost. Perhaps, in the echo of a gunshot, a cop wondered in panic how it could be written, how it would play. Perhaps, before driving away from Monroe Street with headlights dimmed, a Baltimore cop thought of Scotty McCown.

"Roger Twigg done put our s.h.i.+t out on the street," says Rick James, reading the article a second time and lapsing into west side vernacular. "Somebody 'round here been doin' some talking, yo."

Donald Worden looks at his partner but says nothing. In the main office, D'Addario is finis.h.i.+ng up with the last items on his clipboard. Two dozen detectives-homicide, robbery, s.e.x offense-are cl.u.s.tered around him, listening to another morning's allotment of teletypes, special orders and departmental memoranda. Worden listens without hearing any of it.

"That's the problem with this whole investigation," he says finally, rising for a second pa.s.s at the coffeepot. "This place leaks like a f.u.c.king sieve."

James nods, then tosses the newspaper on Waltemeyer's desk. D'Addario ends the roll call and Worden wanders out of the coffee room, looking at the faces of at least a half-dozen men who were tight with some of the Western and Central District officers now under investigation for the Scott killing. Worden allows himself a hard thought: Any of them could be a source for the newspaper story.

h.e.l.l, Worden feels some obligation to put his own sergeant on the list. Terry McLarney had no stomach for chasing other cops, particularly those he had worked with in the Western District. He had made that much clear from the moment John Scott hit the pavement, and it was for that reason that the Monroe Street probe had been taken away from him.

For McLarney, the notion that his own detectives were being used to pursue his old bunkies from the Western was obscene. McLarney had been a sector sergeant in that G.o.dforsaken district before returning to homicide in '85. He was d.a.m.n near killed in that district, shot down like a dog while chasing a holdup man on Arunah Avenue, and he'd seen the same thing happen to some of his men. If you were going after cops in the Western, you were going without McLarney. His world did not allow for that much gray. The cops were good, the criminals bad; and if the cops weren't good, they were still cops.

But would McLarney leak? Worden doubts it. McLarney might b.i.t.c.h and moan and keep his distance from the Scott case, but Worden doesn't believe he would undercut his own detectives. In truth, it was hard to imagine any detective consciously leaking details to thwart an investigation.

No, thinks Worden, dismissing the thought. The newspaper story came from within the department, but probably not directly from a homicide detective. A more likely source would be the police union lawyers, trying hard to portray the fresh witness as a suspect so as to take the heat off any officers. That made sense, particularly since one of those lawyers was quoted by name near the end of the article.

Still, Worden and James both know that the newspaper story is largely accurate and up to date-a bit leaden in its suggestion that the new civilian witness is a suspect, but otherwise on the mark. And both men know, too, that Twigg's source is therefore close enough to the investigation to get the facts straight. Even if the union lawyers are the reporter's primary source, they're still getting inside information on the status of the investigation.

For Worden, the newspaper article is part and parcel of the larger problem with the Monroe Street probe: the investigation is taking place in a fishbowl. And no wonder. When cops investigate other cops, it's usually the work of an internal investigations unit, a squad of detectives committed to prosecuting fellow officers. An IID detective is trained for the adversarial role. He works out of a separate office on a separate floor of the building, reporting to separate supervisors who are being paid to make cases against sworn members of the department. An IID detective is unaffected by station house loyalty, by the brotherhood itself; his allegiance is with the system, the department. He is, in patrolman's parlance, a cheese-eating rat.

Because the uniforms who chased John Scott were all potential suspects, the Monroe Street probe was, for all practical purposes, an internal investigation. And yet because John Scott was murdered, the investigation could not go to IID. It was a criminal case and therefore the responsibility of the homicide unit.

Worden had to contend with his own divided loyalties as well. A quarter century was no small thing in any profession, but for Worden, the years in uniform meant everything. He carried a little bit of Norman Buckman with him, a little bit of Scotty McCown, too. Yet he was committed to the Monroe Street investigation because it was his letter up on the board, written in red next to the name of John Scott. It was a murder-his murder. And if some cop out there didn't have brains and b.a.l.l.s enough to turn in that body, then Worden was willing to write him off.

It somehow made it easier on Worden that many of the officers involved had behaved like witnesses in any other murder. Some had willfully lied to him, some had been purposely ambiguous; all were reluctant. For Worden and James both, it hurt to sit there in an interrogation room and have men wearing the uniform p.i.s.s up your leg, then tell you it's raining. Nor was there any outside cooperation coming in from the districts. The phone wasn't ringing off the hook from uniforms who feared being jammed up in another cop's shooting, who might be trying to keep out of a jackpot or cut deals for themselves. Clearly, Worden realized, the word on the street was that homicide didn't have enough to charge anyone. If a cop was responsible for this murder, no one would come forward as long as it was believed that the probe had bottomed out.

That, too, was a result of too much talk, too many connections between the homicide unit and the rest of the department. For two months, Worden and James had conducted a criminal investigation in full view of the potential suspects and witnesses, their every move telegraphed through the department grapevine. Today's newspaper account was only the most graphic example.

What the h.e.l.l, thinks Worden, walking toward the men's room with a cigar clenched between his teeth. At least the bosses can't ignore the problem. When half your f.u.c.king case file is floating around in newsprint, it's time to change tactics. Already that morning, Tim Doory has called twice from the state's attorney's office to set up a morning meeting with Worden and James at the Violent Crimes Unit offices.

Still pus.h.i.+ng pieces around in his mind, Worden walks out of the bathroom just as d.i.c.k Lanham, the colonel in command of CID, rounds the corner on his way back to his office. Lanham, too, is in high dudgeon, a copy of the newspaper rolled up tight in one fist.

"I'm sorry, Donald," says the colonel, shaking his head. "You've got your work cut out for you now."

Worden shrugs. "Just one more thing to deal with."

"Well, I'm sorry you have to deal with it," says Lanham. "I tried like h.e.l.l to get Twigg to hold off on this thing and I thought he was gonna do that."

Worden listens pa.s.sively as the colonel launches into an extended account of his efforts to delay the news article-an account punctuated by his a.s.sertion that Roger Twigg is the most stubborn, arrogant, pain-in-the-a.s.s reporter he has ever known.

"I told him what it would do to us if he put that stuff in the paper," the colonel says. "I asked him to wait onit for a couple weeks, and what does he do?"

As a major, Lanham himself ran the IID and in that post had dealt with Twigg on a series of sensitive stories. So it is no surprise to Worden that the colonel and the reporter had a long conversation before the article was published. But would the colonel purposely leak this investigation? Probably not, Worden reasons. As the CID commander, Lanham doesn't want an unsolved police shooting on the books, and as a former IID man, he certainly doesn't have any problem with investigating other cops. No, Worden thinks, not the colonel. If Lanham was talking to Twigg, it was only to try to stall the story.

"Well," Worden says, "I'd sure like to know who his source is."

"Oh yeah," says Lanham, turning toward his office, "I'd like to know that myself. Whoever it is knows what he's talking about."

Three hours after digesting the newspaper article, Worden and James walk the three blocks from headquarters to the Clarence M. Mitch.e.l.l Jr. Courthouse on Calvert Street, where they badge their way past sheriff's deputies and take the elevator to the third floor of the city's judicial palace.

There, they walk through a cramped labyrinth of offices which houses the Violent Crimes Unit and settle in the largest cubicle, the office of Timothy J. Doory, a.s.sistant state's attorney and the head of the VCU. On Doory's desk is, of course, a copy of the Sun Sun's metro section, folded to Roger Twigg's exclusive.

The meeting is a long one, and when the two detectives return to the homicide unit, they are carrying a list of a dozen witnesses, civilians and officers who are to be issued witness summonses.

Fine with me, thinks Worden, walking back toward headquarters. I've been lied to on this case, I've been stonewalled, I've seen my best evidence spread across a newspaper page. So what the h.e.l.l, if they're gonna lie about this shooting, they may as well do it under oath. And if they're gonna be leaking the case file to reporters, they're gonna have to get their information out of the courthouse.

"f.u.c.k it, Donald," James tells his partner, hanging his coat in the main office. "If you ask me, Doory should've done this weeks ago."

Before the Monroe Street probe is further compromised-by Twigg or anyone else-it will be brought out of the homicide unit. It will go to a grand jury.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 10.

The Fish Man comes to the door, fork in hand, wearing a worn flannel s.h.i.+rt and corduroy pants. His unshaven face is impa.s.sive.

"Step back," says Tom Pellegrini. "We're coming in."

"Am I under arrest?"

"No. We got a warrant for your place, though."

The Fish Man grunts, then walks back into the kitchen. Landsman, Pellegrini and Edgerton lead a half-dozen others into the three-room, second-floor apartment. The place is dirty, but not unbearably so, and spa.r.s.ely furnished. Even the closets are almost empty.

As each of the detectives takes a room and begins searching, the Fish Man returns to his barbecued chicken, greens and Colt 45. He uses his fork to tear the meat from a thigh, then picks up a chicken leg with his fingers.

"Can I see it?" he asks.

"See what?" says Landsman.

"Your warrant. Can I see it?"

Landsman walks back into the kitchen and drops the target copy on the table. "You can keep that one."

The Fish Man eats his chicken and reads slowly through Landsman's affidavit. The warrant offers a mechanical summary of reasons for the raid: Known to victim. Employed victim at store. Misled investigators about alibi. Unaccounted for on day of disappearance. The Fish Man reads without any suggestion of emotion. His fingers leave grease marks on a corner of each page.

Edgerton and Pellegrini meet Landsman in the back bedroom as other detectives and detail officers poke through the store owner's few possessions.

"Not much here, Jay," says Pellegrini. "Why don't we take some guys and hit Newington while you go across the street and do the store."

Landsman nods. Newington Avenue is the second of two raids planned for this night. The separate warrants for separate addresses reflect a divergence of opinion in the Latonya Wallace case. Earlier this afternoon, the lead investigators were at opposite ends of the admin office, playing at dueling typewriters-Pellegrini and Edgerton collecting their probable cause for a new set of suspects at 702 Newington; Landsman putting everything he knew about the store owner into a pair of warrants for the Fish Man's apartment and the sh.e.l.l of his Whitelock Street store, which had been gutted by fire shortly before the child's disappearance. It was a little bit ironic: Landsman had come back to the Fish Man even as Pellegrini and Edgerton-who a few days earlier had argued that the store owner was their best hope-had come around to the new theory.

Landsman's refusal to give up on the Fish Man was also a marked change from his earlier arguments, when his own estimates on the time of death had seemingly eliminated the store owner. But in a later consultation with the medical examiners, Landsman and Pellegrini went through the calculations one more time: body still coming out of rigor, eyes moist and no signs of decomposition; twelve to eighteen hours. Most probably, agreed the MEs, unless, of course, the killer was able to store the body in a cool place, which, given the season, could be a vacant rowhouse, a garage, an unheated bas.e.m.e.nt. That might delay the postmortem processes.

How much of a delay? Landsman asked.

Up to twenty-four hours. Maybe more.

d.a.m.ned if Edgerton hadn't been right in arguing the time-of-death estimates two nights ago. With twenty-four to thirty-six hours to work with, the detectives could consider the possibility of a Tuesday abduction followed by a murder that night or early Wednesday morning. The Fish Man still had no alibi for that period of time. a.s.suming he had a way to keep the body cool, the new calculation left him exposed. Pellegrini's legwork dislodged the other fact that had led the detectives to a.s.sume a prolonged abduction and Wednesday night murder: the extra meal of hot dogs and sauerkraut in the child's stomach. That disappeared when Pellegrini happened to interview a Reservoir Hill local who worked in the Eutaw-Marshburn school cafeteria. Taking the opportunity to double-check the material in the case file, the detective asked the employee if the meal on February 2 was, in fact, spaghetti and meatb.a.l.l.s. The employee checked the old menus and called Pellegrini the following day; the February 2 lunch was actually hot dogs and sauerkraut. The spaghetti was a previous night's meal. Somehow, the detectives had been misinformed; now, too, the victim's stomach contents suggested a Tuesday night murder.

To Pellegrini, it was unnerving that such basic a.s.sumptions made in the earliest hours of the case were still being questioned or knocked down by new information. It was as if they had pulled on a single thread and half the case file had unraveled. In Pellegrini's mind, the quickest way for a case to become a quagmire was for the investigators to be sure of nothing, to feel compelled to question everything. The time-of-death estimate, the stomach contents-what else was waiting in that file to turn on them?

At least, in this instance, the changing scenario allowed them to keep one of their best suspects. While it was true that the Fish Man's apartment and store were a long block and a half from Newington Avenue-contradicting Landsman's theories about the proximity of the crime scene-it was also true that the store owner had access to at least one vehicle, a pickup truck that he routinely borrowed from another Whitelock Street merchant. In checking his Wednesday alibi, the detectives learned that he was in possession of the truck on the night the body had been dumped behind Newington Avenue. So far, the working theory had been that if the killer had the body in a vehicle, he'd drive to an isolated spot rather than a nearby alley. But what if he was scared? And what if the body was covered in the back of a pickup truck, relatively exposed?

And why the h.e.l.l didn't the Fish Man make any attempt in that first interrogation to account for his whereabouts on Tuesday and early Wednesday? Was he merely a marginally employed merchant unable to distinguish one day from the next? Or was he making a conscious effort to avoid a false alibi that detectives would be able to knock down? In the first interrogation, the Fish Man had mentioned the errands he ran with a friend on Wednesday as an alibi. Was that a simple failure of memory or a conscious effort to mislead investigators?

In the weeks since the murder, the rumors of the Fish Man's interest in young girls had pervaded Reservoir Hill to the point where the detectives were regularly receiving fresh allegations of past molestation attempts. The allegations were largely unsubstantiated. But when the detectives ran the store owner's name through the National Crime Index Computer they did come up with a relevant charge that predated his record in the Baltimore computer: a statutory rape charge from 1957, when the Fish Man was in his early twenties. The charge involved a fourteen-year-old girl.

Pellegrini pulled the microfilm of the police reports from storage, and the records showed a conviction and a sentence of nothing more than a year. The ancient history offered little more detail, but it gave the detectives some hope that they were dealing with a s.e.x offender. More than that, it gave Landsman a little more meat to hang on the dry bones of his search warrants.

That afternoon, Landsman had shown his affidavits to Howard Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who had wandered into the homicide unit earlier that day. "Hey, Howard, take a look at this."

Gersh scanned the probable cause in less than a minute.

"It'll fly," he said, "but aren't you giving up a h.e.l.l of a lot?"

The question was one of tactics. When the warrant was served, the Fish Man would see the affidavit and would learn what detectives believed linked him to the crime. He could also learn where his alibi was weakest. Landsman pointed out that at least the affidavit withheld the ident.i.ty of those who were contradicting the suspect's initial story.

"We're not giving up any witnesses."

Gersh shrugged and handed the doc.u.ment back. "Good hunting."

"Thanks, Howard."

At ten that evening, Landsman had hurried the warrants to the home of the duty judge, and the detectives and detail officers gathered in the parking lot of the Park Avenue library, where Latonya Wallace had last been seen alive. The plan was to hit the Fish Man's apartment and store first, but now, after finding so little on Whitelock Street, Pellegrini and Edgerton are suddenly impatient to pursue the new theory. They leave Landsman and a detail officer to finish the search of the Fish Man's gutted store while they lead a second group a block and a half east to Newington Avenue.

Two Cavaliers and two radio cars pull in front of a three-story stone rowhouse on the north side of the street, where police tumble out and take the house in rough approximation of a Green Bay Packer sweep. Eddie Brown is through the door first with the lead block, followed by two of the Central District uniforms. Then Pellegrini and Edgerton, then Fred Ceruti and more uniforms.

A seventeen-year-old who meandered down the front hallway to answer the loud banging on the door frame is now pressed against the flaking plaster, a uniform shouting at him to shut the f.u.c.k up and keep still for the body search. A second kid in a gray sweatsuit steps through the doorway of the first floor's middle room, a.s.sesses the interlopers for what they are, then races back across the threshold.

"Poh-leece," he shouts. "Yo, man, yo, po-leeces comin'..."

Eddie Brown yanks Paul Revere out of the doorway and pushes him against an inside wall as Ceruti and more uniforms shove their way down the dark hall toward the light of the center room.

There are four of them in there, crowded around an aerosol cleaning product and a small box of plastic sandwich bags. Only one of them bothers to look up at the intruders and for that kid, there is a moment or two of nonrecognition before the gray ether parts and he begins shouting wildly, running for the rear door. One of the detail officers from the Southern catches him by the s.h.i.+rt in the kitchen, then bends him over the sink. The other three are lost to the world and make no effort to move. The oldest expresses his indifference by pressing the plastic bag to his face and sucking down a final blast. The chemical stench is overpowering.

"I'm gonna get sick breathing this s.h.i.+t," says Ceruti, shoving one kid over a bureau.

"What do you think?" asks a uniform, pus.h.i.+ng another captive into a chair. "Is Momma gonna be upset to find you been huffing on a school night?"

From the second-floor bedrooms comes the cacophony of cursing officers and screaming women, followed by more distant shouting from the third-floor rooms. In twos and threes, the occupants are roused from nearly a dozen bedrooms and marched down the wide, rotting stairwell in the center of the house-teenagers, small children, middle-aged women, grown men-until a full cast of twenty-three is a.s.sembled in the middle room.

The crowded room is strangely silent. It is almost midnight and a dozen police are parading through the rowhouse, but the beleaguered population of 702 Newington asks no questions about the raid, as if they have reached that point when police raids no longer require reasons. Slowly, the group settles in sedimentary layers throughout the room: younger children lying in the center of the floor, teenagers standing or sitting on the periphery with their backs against the walls, older men and women on the sofa, chairs and around the battered dining room table. A full five minutes pa.s.s before an older, heavyset man, wearing blue boxer shorts and bathroom slippers, asks the obvious question: "What the h.e.l.l you doing in my house?"

Eddie Brown moves into the doorway, and the heavyset man gives him an appraising look. "You the man in charge?"

"I'm one of them," says Brown.

"You got no right to come into my house."

"I got every right. I got a warrant."