Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 13

"Yeah," says McLarney, absentmindedly opening Dunnigan's top drawer. "We're getting ready to write up the statement."

"What's she saying?"

"It's down."

"Hey, way to go, Terr."

Landsman disappears into his office, and McLarney pulls a handful of paper clips from the drawer, lines them up on the desk and begins torturing the first, twisting it back and forth between stubby fingers.

The last two days had made all the difference, and this time they had it right. This time, the investigation had been temperate and clinical, precise in a way that it never could have been in the hours after the shooting. Rage and frustration had marked those first days, but those emotions had finally been sublimated by time and necessity. For McLarney, the Ca.s.sidy detail was still a crusade, but one now fueled more by deliberate reason than raw vengeance.

Yolanda Marks's journey to the interrogation room actually began more than a week ago, when McLarney and the two detail men brought their two reluctant eyewitnesses-the sixteen-year-old and his younger sister-downtown to the state's attorney's office. There, detectives and prosecutors began a series of pretrial interviews to elicit additional details about the shooting, details that might then be corroborated to strengthen the existing testimony or, better still, that might lead to additional witnesses. In particular, McLarney wanted to identify and locate the young girlfriends who were supposedly with the thirteen-year-old witness when the crime occurred.

Given the youth of their witness and the intimidating confines of the state's attorney's office, the investigators found it surprising that they had to press the young girl to reveal the names of her friends. When she finally began talking, McLarney and the others were provided with only given or street names-Lulu, Renee, Tiffany and Munchkin-all of whom supposedly lived in the Murphy Homes high-rises. McLarney, Belt and Tuggle went to the projects, finding a variety of young girls who answered to the names provided, but none knew about the shooting. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to know anything about the thirteen-year-old witness.

Once again, McLarney also sent the detail in search of the black Ford Escort that Clifton Frazier had supposedly used to drive Owens away from the shooting scene. But no such car could be in any way connected to either Frazier or Owens, although the men spent several days watching and following several black Escorts they found near the shooting scene.

The effort to confirm the statements of their two witnesses was going nowhere. Moreover, the defense attorneys appeared to be lining up a series of alibi witnesses who were ready to testify that Anthony Owens wasn't even on Appleton Street when the shooting occurred. Something was clearly wrong and McLarney, sensing a dead end, went back to square one. Three days ago, he pulled out the case file and began reviewing the initial statements provided by neighborhood residents who had been standing in the crowd at the shooting scene and who were grabbed by uniforms and sent downtown. There were several such witnesses, all of whom had claimed that they knew nothing and had merely joined the spectators after the shooting. With nothing left to lose, McLarney decided it wouldn't hurt to begin poking through those statements a second time, so the detail began interviewing each of the witnesses again. After another day on the street, they finally came upon a twenty-year-old resident of Mosher Street named John Moore.

On the night of the shooting, Moore had been yanked off a corner by uniforms and sent downtown, where he told detectives that he had heard the shots but seen nothing. This time, after several hours of friction in the large interrogation room, however, the story changed.

In fact, Moore didn't see the shooting, but he saw everything leading up to it. He was out on his stoop on the night of October 22, watching Clifton "Butchie" Frazier and a young girl he didn't know walking west on Mosher toward Appleton. Frazier and the girl were halfway down the block when a marked police car began rolling slowly down the street. Moore saw the radio car come abreast of the couple, then roll around the corner onto Appleton. A few seconds later, Frazier and the girl rounded the corner as well.

Then came the gunshots. Three of them.

Asked whether there had been a crowd at the corner of Mosher and Appleton, Moore said that the corner was empty at the time of the shooting. He further confirmed his story by leading detectives to a nineteen-year-old friend who had been with him on the stoop.

The second witness recounted the same sequence of events as Moore, adding two more facts to the record. First, the friend remembered that when the radio car came abreast of the couple on Mosher Street, the officer behind the wheel and Butchie Frazier had eyed each other for a moment or two. Second, and more important, the girl with Frazier was named Yolanda. She lived around the corner on Monroe Street. And yeah, if he had to, he could point out the house.

Earlier this morning, McLarney and the two detail officers gathered in the vestibule of that West Baltimore rowhouse, waiting for Yolanda Marks to gather her things and walk to the waiting Cavalier. She was a sad-faced thing, seventeen years old, with deep brown eyes that began to tear as soon as they took her downtown and closed the door to the interrogation room. Yolanda was a juvenile, of course, so her mother came to the office as well, and that proved fortunate. Because after every moral appeal and veiled threat fell short of the mark, it was the mother who went into the room and told her teenage daughter to get it over with, to do the right thing.

Yolanda wiped her eyes, then cried some more, then daubed her eyes again. Then, for the first time, McLarney learned the truth about the attempted murder of Officer Eugene Ca.s.sidy.

"Butchie shot the police."

According to the girl, the whole thing happened in less than a minute. Ca.s.sidy was already out of the radio car and waiting for the couple when they turned the corner onto Appleton.

"Hey, I want to talk to you."

"What for?"

"Put your hands against the wall."

Butchie Frazier began to a.s.sume the position, then suddenly pulled a handgun from his right jacket pocket. A southpaw, Ca.s.sidy grabbed Frazier's weapon with his left hand; as a result, he was unable to pull his own revolver from the holster on his left hip. With Ca.s.sidy still grappling for the gun, Frazier compressed the trigger. The first shot went wide. Seconds later, the gun was flush against the left side of Ca.s.sidy's face and Frazier fired two more rounds.

Ca.s.sidy fell to the sidewalk a few feet from his radio car as Frazier fled with the gun through a back alley. Yolanda screamed, backed into the street, then wandered around the block to her house on Monroe Street, where she told her mother what had happened. At that point, neither mother nor child entertained thoughts about calling the police. Nor, for that matter, did John Moore, who had claimed no knowledge of the event on the night of the shooting. Moore's friend also refused to volunteer himself as a witness until detectives confronted him. And yet another couple, who had been walking on Appleton Street and witnessed the struggle between Frazier and the officer, failed to come forward and were only located after Moore and his companion began naming others who were on the street at the time of the shooting.

West Baltimore. You sit on your stoop, you drink Colt 45 from a brown paper bag and you watch the radio car roll slowly around the corner. You see the gunman, you hear the shots, you gather on the far corner to watch the paramedics load what remains of a police officer into the rear of an ambulance. Then you go back to your rowhouse, open another can, and settle in front of the television to watch the replay on the eleven o'clock news. Then you go back to the stoop.

McLarney knows the Western, knows the code. But even after all those years on the street, it still seems incredible that a cop can be shot twice in the head and get no response from an entire neighborhood. And so, when Yolanda Marks finally begins to break, McLarney stops beating up on paper clips and returns to the interrogation room like a true innocent, speaking to her about human tragedy, about lives that can never be made whole. Then he leaves, knowing that nothing he said will stop those tears.

Later that night, when McLarney calls Ca.s.sidy at home to tell him the story of Appleton Street, Ca.s.sidy suddenly realizes that he knew the man who tried to kill him. Clifton Frazier was the neighborhood bada.s.s on Ca.s.sidy's post, an arrogant dope peddler who had only a week earlier beaten an elderly man senseless. The old man lost the use of an eye in that attack, a beating inflicted because the victim had seen Frazier slapping a young woman on the street and had the temerity to tell the younger man to let the girl alone. Ca.s.sidy knew about the beating because he had been trying for days to find and arrest Frazier on the outstanding warrant.

To Ca.s.sidy, Appleton Street now made sense; more than that, it meant something. In the end, he had not been shot down because he wandered onto a crowded drug corner like some brainless academy product. He had been shot doing his job, trying-as he had tried with a fifteen-year-old in a hospital recovery room-to arrest a wanted man. He could live with that. He would have to.

Three days after her interrogation, Yolanda Marks is taken to a nearby Maryland State Police barracks, where a polygraph examiner determines that her statement is truthful. The same day, the sixteen-year-old witness who had implicated Anthony Owens as the shooter is also taken to the same barracks, but just before undergoing the test the teenager recants his earlier statement, admitting that he did not witness the shooting and that he only repeated what he heard on the street, hoping to end his own interrogation. The polygraph is then administered and the examiner concludes that in recanting his story, the teenager shows no deception. When the detectives confront his thirteen-year-old sister, she, too, acknowledges the lie, telling them that she had gone down to homicide and told her story because she was afraid her brother would be charged.

The case is down.

McLarney knows that the Ca.s.sidy detail still has weeks of work before it will be fit for trial. For one thing, the wrong man had been indicted, and his innocence will now have to be firmly established or a defense attorney could use him to wreak havoc. Likewise, the case will be bolstered immensely if investigators can find the gun or some other physical evidence to link Frazier with the crime. But it is down.

On the night that Yolanda pa.s.ses the box, there is a homecoming of sorts when McLarney returns to Kavanaugh's, the city's predominant Irish cop watering hole, and stands his ground at the end of the bar. He leans against the wooden rail, centered between the pinball machine and the St. Francis Center poor box. It is a slow weekday night, with only a handful of detectives in the place, along with a few uniforms from Central and Southern and a couple guys from the tac sections. Corey Belt stops in for a little while but slips out after drinking a soda or two, leaving McLarney to wonder aloud what has become of the vaunted Western District when its best men don't even drink beer. McAllister shows up, too, and stays, bellying up on the stool next to McLarney. This in itself makes the occasion special, because Mac doesn't get out as much anymore, not since he and Sue moved from the city to a new home they built in the rural greenery of northern Baltimore County. To McLarney's distress, his old Central District partner has in recent years been spinning in a more sensible, suburban orbit.

On this February night, however, when McLarney's very universe has been righted by a rare, precious victory, when the brotherhood of cops has once again been affirmed in McLarney's mind, the arrival of McAllister at Kavanaugh's is serendipity itself. Good old Mac. Miracles have been marked on the streets of Baltimore, and Mac, a true pilgrim, has no doubt traveled many dangerous leagues to pay proper homage at this, the true shrine of Celtic sheriffry. McLarney sidles down the bar to wrap a beefy arm around his old partner's shoulder.

"Mac," says McLarney.

"T.P."

"Mac," McLarney says again.

"Yes, T.P."

"My partner."

"Your partner."

"My bunky."

McAllister nods, wondering how long this can possibly go on.

"You know, when we were working together you taught me a lot of s.h.i.+t."

"I did?"

"Yeah, all kinds of important stuff."

"Like what, T.P.?"

"You know, all kinds of s.h.i.+t."

"Oh," says McAllister, laughing. Nothing is so amusingly pathetic as when one cop tries to bond with another. Conversations descend into vague mutterings. Compliments are transformed into insults. Words of genuine affection become comically perverted.

"Really, you taught me a lot," says McLarney. "But that's not why I respect you. I respect you for one thing."

"What's that, Terry?"

"When it was time for you to f.u.c.k me," says McLarney soberly, "you were very gentle."

"Of course I was," says McAllister without hesitation.

"You could have just bent me over the hood of the car and had your way, but you were gentle with me. And very patient."

"Well, I knew it was your first time," says McAllister. "I wanted it to be special."

"And it was, Mac."

"I'm glad."

The brotherhood understands, the tribe hears the words unsaid. And when the two detectives finally let go of their deadpan and begin to laugh, all of Kavanaugh's laughs with them. Then they kill off what's left in their cans and argue briefly over the next round, each pulling his wallet and telling the other to take his money off the bar.

As old partners always should.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18.

On the day that marks the end of two full weeks in the Latonya Wallace probe, Jay Landsman manages to slip away from the office in late evening. He drives west into the county, where a wife and five kids are beginning to forget what a husband and father looks like.

The route is so familiar that Landsman's mind drifts free, and in the solitude of the car's dark interior he tries to pull away from the details of the case and view the entire puzzle. He thinks about the terrain on Reservoir Hill, about the alley behind Newington Avenue, about the location of the body. What, he asks himself, are we missing?

The sergeant couldn't argue with the logic behind Edgerton's rooftop theory, its explanation for the placement of the child's body. But he never believed that the warrant on 702 Newington would yield anything. For one thing, there were nearly two dozen people living in that s.h.i.+thole. Even if one homicidal child molester managed to lure the kid into the house, kill her and keep the body in his room for a prolonged period of time, how could he have kept eighteen other occupants from knowing about it? Landsman was certain that the murder was the work of one man, acting alone, but the house at 702 Newington looked as though it were hosting the citywide convention for Baltimore's undercla.s.s. Landsman wasn't surprised when the lab reports on the clothing and sheets from the raid came back positive for blood, but negative for the victim's blood type, just as none of the latent prints taken from the house matched those of the victim.

The outcome of the raid on 702 Newington left both Landsman and Tom Pellegrini wis.h.i.+ng that they had spent more time searching the Fish Man's store and apartment. Their haste at the Whitelock Street addresses-like everything else with this case-was particularly upsetting to Pellegrini, who worried about what may have been missed. Edgerton's theory had been so sound, so sensible, and given the earlier child abuse report from 702 Newington, Pellegrini had been convinced. With the raid a bust, he had returned with Landsman to the old store owner.

Their interest in the Fish Man had increased since the raids, not only because of the outcome on Newington Avenue, but also because of a profile of Latonya Wallace's killer prepared by the National Center for the a.n.a.lysis of Violent Crimes, the FBI's behavioral a.n.a.lysis unit. On the day after the raids, Rich Garvey and Bob Bowman had been dispatched to the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they provided raw data from the crime scene and autopsy to federal agents trained in psychological profiling.

The FBI's characterization of a likely suspect had considerable detail. He would be "a nocturnal individual who will feel more comfortable at night ... the offender will be known to young kids in the neighborhood and will be considered strange but nice to children. The offender may have already been interviewed by investigators or he may interject himself into the investigation ... In most cases the offender will follow press accounts of the investigation and will make some effort to establish an alibi. The offender, who probably has been involved in similar crimes previously, will show no remorse over having killed the victim, but will be concerned over the possibility of being apprehended."

The a.n.a.lysis further noted that "offenders of this type are difficult to interview and as time goes on, the events which occurred will be altered in the offender's mind, making it difficult for him to relate to the crime. It is possible that the offender killed the victim within a short period of time of coming in contact with her ... The victim in this instance may not have responded to the offender as he thought initially she would have responded. His difficulty in controlling her may have led to the victim's death. Possibly the victim may have initially felt safe or comfortable with the offender and gone willingly with him into a residence or building."

The profile described the probable offender as fifty years of age, probably unmarried and with a history of problems involving female relations.h.i.+ps: "The offender most likely had earlier encounters with young girls in this neighborhood. The death of Latonya Wallace is not believed to be a stranger murder."

To Landsman and Pellegrini, the FBI profile seems to match the Fish Man. But without any substantive evidence, the only option is to hammer on the old man in another long interrogation in the hope that something new will be revealed. For this very reason, Edgerton and Pellegrini are still at the office as Landsman drives home; they plan to work late into the night preparing for a second confrontation with the Fish Man scheduled for the weekend.

But Landsman isn't optimistic about the coming interrogation either. The FBI a.n.a.lysis also made it clear that a violent s.e.x offender is among the most difficult suspects to break. There was no Out to offer such people, no reasonable suggestion that the murder could be mitigated in some way. Moreover, the crime was genuinely sociopathic: An absence of remorse would probably be coupled with rationalizations in the suspect's mind. All that had to be coupled with the fact that the Fish Man had previously walked out a free man after one interrogation; he would be less intimidated by a second attempt. And still there is the missing crime scene, the absence of any physical evidence with which to link a suspect to the crime. The detectives have rumors, suspicions, and now a psychological profile. But working without a scene, they have nothing that can argue against the Fish Man's story, nothing that can be used as leverage in an interrogation.

It is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a case, and again Landsman asks himself: What are we missing? Maneuvering through the evening traffic on Liberty Road, he runs two weeks of investigation through his mind. Every day since February 4, the detectives had marched into Reservoir Hill, questioning locals, checking garages and vacant apartments in an ever-growing radius from Newington Avenue. With the consent of the occupants, detectives had managed to perform plain-view searches of every one of the thirteen occupied rowhouses on the north side of Newington, as well as many of the properties on the Callow and Park Avenue sides of the block. They had checked alibis and living quarters for every male suspect identified in the early canva.s.sing.

The dead girl's clothes and belongings were still being checked for trace evidence; but excepting those black smudges on her pants, nothing looked especially promising. The blue satchel and its contents had been sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory, thirty-five miles away in Rockville, Maryland, for laser fingerprinting, an examination that yielded a few latent prints on the library texts. Those prints were now on the fifth floor of headquarters, running through a Printrak computer that electronically searches for possible matches among the fingerprint files of everyone with a previous arrest in Baltimore.

On the chance that the little girl had left something more than an earring at the crime scene, Edgerton had checked with the library for the t.i.tles of the books she checked out that Tuesday afternoon. And when the library system explained that such information could not be released without infringing on the borrower's privacy, Edgerton actually called the mayor himself; Hizzoner made it easy for the librarians to change their minds. Meanwhile, Pellegrini had gone back more than a decade in the old homicide files, looking for any unsolved murder or disappearance involving young girls. Landsman had checked the s.e.x offense unit for any recent reports in the Reservoir Hill area. Then, with the family's permission, Pellegrini had walked through the little girl's room, read through her pink and blue diary, even developed the film in her Polaroid camera in search of a suspect. And all of the detectives and detail officers had spent hours running down the telephone tips that followed any TV broadcast that mentioned the case: "I have the killer of Latonya Wallace in my house."

"The family was involved with drugs. The little girl was killed as a warning."

"My boyfriend killed her."

When one ninety-two-year-old woman with failing eyesight claimed to have seen a little girl in a red raincoat enter a Park Avenue church on the afternoon of February 2, Pellegrini dutifully arranged to check inside the building and interview the minister. When a detail officer asked what questions would be put to the clergyman, Pellegrini simply shrugged and offered a Landsman-like deadpan: "How about, 'Why did you kill her?'"

Like every corridor in the Latonya Wallace labyrinth, the anonymous calls and false sightings led nowhere. Landsman wonders which part of the maze has been overlooked, which portal has yet to be explored. What the h.e.l.l are they missing?

The sergeant is nearly home when a fresh thought forces its way to the surface, suddenly breaking through the thick crust of detail: the car. Right next door. A cool, dry place.

The neighbor's G.o.dd.a.m.n Lincoln, the only f.u.c.king car that anyone ever saw in the alley. And it was parked just on the other side of the fence from the rear yard of 718 Newington. h.e.l.l yes.

Landsman pulls to the slow lane of Liberty Road, looking for a pay phone so that he can call and tell Pellegrini and Edgerton to stay put. He's going back in.

Twenty minutes later the sergeant storms into the annex office, still cursing himself for not seeing it earlier. "It's right there in front of us," he tells Pellegrini. "This is it. It's gonna go down."

Landsman lays it out for the two detectives: "If she's killed Tuesday, he needs to put the body in a cool, dry place or we're going to have decomp, right? So he gets the body out the back door and into the car trunk, thinking he's gonna drive it somewhere at night. But for some reason he's unable to dump the body. Or maybe when he goes out, he gets scared ..."

"This is the guy who lives at seven-sixteen?" asks Edgerton.

"Yeah, the husband of Ollie's neighbor. What's-his-name."

"Andrew," says Pellegrini.

"Yeah, Andrew. Ollie doesn't like him a little bit."

Landsman recalls the first hours of the investigation, when Ollie's husband, the old man who lives at 718 Newington and found the child's body, was asked whether anyone parked a car in the alley. The man had mentioned his neighbor, a middle-aged man who had recently married the churchgoing woman who lived at 716 and often left his Lincoln Continental in the back yard. In fact, the car had been out back for most of the previous week.

"When he told me, he even walked to his back window and looked out, like he expected it to be there." Landsman cuts to the chase: "The motherf.u.c.ker moved it. He parks back there all the time. Why all of a sudden, on that morning, is the Lincoln parked out in front of the house on Newington?"

Edgerton finds the arrest sheet for the man who lives at 716 Newington: no s.e.x offenses, but someone who at certain points in his life would not have been mistaken for a civic a.s.set.

"That's the other thing," says Landsman. "This guy Andrew, he don't fit. What's a guy with a record doing married to a churchgoing woman? It's f.u.c.ked up."

It is closing on nine o'clock, but Landsman is now too wired to call it a night. Instead, the trio barter the keys to a Cavalier and drive back up to Newington Avenue. They check front and back, but the Lincoln isn't on the block. Landsman knocks on the front door of 718, where a sad-faced woman answers the door in a worn cotton nightgown.

"Hey, Ollie," says Landsman, "is your husband around? We just need to check a couple things."

"He's lying down."

"We just need a minute or two."

The woman shrugs and leads the way to the rear bedroom on the first floor. Stretched out on his back beneath a gray sheet, the old man who found the little girl's body in his back yard watches the parade of detectives with mild curiosity.

"He got sick this week," says the woman, retreating to the corner of the room.

"Sorry to hear that. What're you sick with?"

"Cold or somethin'," the old man says in a low mumble. "Y'know the hawk's been out."

"Yeah it has, um, hey, listen," says Landsman, s.h.i.+fting gears suddenly. "You remember that day you found the body and we were talking? You remember when I asked you if anyone parked in the alley and you told me about Andrew next door?"

The old man nods.

"I remember you even walked over to the kitchen window, like you were gonna show me his car, but it wasn't there that morning, remember?"

"Yeah, I thought he had it there."