Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 41

"I can understand that."

"He's very upset that he had to shoot you and all, you understand."

"I just want him to know that-"

"We told him," says McAllister. "He knows you didn't think he was a police officer."

Eventually, McAllister lets the suspect use the admin office phone to call his wife, who last saw her husband an hour and a half earlier, when he was leaving for a five-minute ride to an all-night video store. The detectives will listen sympathetically as the poor man tries to explain that he's been shot in the arm, arrested and charged with a.s.sault on a police officer and that it's all just a big misunderstanding.

"I'm going to have to wait to make bail," he tells her, "but I'll explain when I get home."

No mention is made of the perverted s.e.x charge, and the detectives a.s.sure him that they have no reason to want to wreck his marriage.

"Just make sure she don't show up for court," Kincaid tells him. "If you can do that, you'll probably be all right."

Back in D'Addario's office, the young plainclothesman is writing his own report of the incident, electing on the advice of his district commander to give a voluntary statement to the detectives. By law, any attempt to compel an officer's statement makes that information inadmissible in court, and the detectives are under standing orders from prosecutors to do nothing more than request a statement from any officer involved in a shooting. Since the Monroe Street probe, however, the police union has been urging officers not to give any statements-a policy that in the long run is likely to breed trouble. After all, if a homicide detective can save another cop, he won't hesitate to do so; but any cop who refuses to explain his actions is just asking for a grand jury investigation. On this night, however, the major from the Western manages to convince his man to consent to an interview, thereby giving the detectives room to work.

The officer's report conforms to the suspect's own statement that the plainclothesman fell on the hood of the car, after it jerked forward three or four feet, then fired a single shot through the winds.h.i.+eld. The interview with the prost.i.tute provides further corroboration. Not that she saw all that much, she tells the detectives, her field of vision at the time being somewhat limited.

Slowly, methodically, the five-page report begins to come together beneath the hum of Kim Cordwell's word processor. Reading the draft, D'Addario pencils a change or two and suggests the rewording of a few critical sections. When it comes to police-shooting reports, D'Addario is something of an artist; eight years in homicide have trained him to antic.i.p.ate the likely questions from the command staff. Rarely, if ever, has a shooting report bounced down the ladder after the lieutenant put his mark on it. As awkward and excessive as the use of deadly force might have seemed out on that parking lot, it reads squeaky clean in the finished product.

Nolan watches the paperwork progress and again tells himself that they can do without Edgerton and that it's better, after all, to get a full night's work out of Harry on Thursday rather than call him downtown two hours into a s.h.i.+ft.

But two hours later, just as the floodwaters have started to recede, the phone rings again, this time with a shooting call from North Arlington Avenue on the west side. Kincaid leaves the last of the paperwork from the police shooting behind, grabs the keys to a Cavalier and drives twenty or thirty blocks to watch the sun rise over a dead teenager, his long frame stretched across the white asphalt of a back alley. A stone whodunit.

When the days.h.i.+ft detectives begin arriving a little after seven, they find an office in a state of siege. Nolan is at one typewriter, working on his 24-hour report as his witnesses wait in a back room for transport back to the Eastern. McAllister is down at the Xerox machine, copying and collating his police-shooting opus for everyone above the rank of major. Kincaid is in the fishbowl, haggling with three west-siders who are trying hard to avoid becoming witnesses to a disrespect shooting that happened right in front of their eyes.

McAllister manages to slip out a little after eight, but Kincaid and Nolan end their day in the afternoon rush at the ME's office, waiting for their respective bodies to be examined and disa.s.sembled. They wait together in the antiseptic sheen of the autopsy room corridor, and yet they are anything but together after this s.h.i.+ft.

The issue, once again, is Edgerton. Earlier in the night, Kincaid overheard Nolan's telephone call to the missing detective; if he hadn't been knee deep in witnesses and incident reports, he would have boiled over on the spot. Several times during the night he had been ready to blast Nolan about it, but now, with the two of them alone in the Penn Street bas.e.m.e.nt, he's too tired to argue. For the moment, he satisfies himself with the bitter thought that in his whole career, he never managed to forget when the h.e.l.l he was supposed to be working.

But Kincaid will have his say; that much is certain. The air of compromise, the teasing banter, the rough acknowledgment of Edgerton's effort to handle more calls-all of that is out the window as far as Donald Kincaid is concerned. He's had it with that c.r.a.p. He's had it with Edgerton and with Nolan and with his place in this G.o.dd.a.m.n squad. You're scheduled to be in at 2340 hours, you're in at 2340, no later. You're scheduled to work the Tuesday s.h.i.+ft, you come to work on Tuesday. He didn't give the department twenty-two years to put up with this kind of bulls.h.i.+t.

Roger Nolan, for his part, simply doesn't want to hear it anymore. To his way of thinking, Edgerton is a good man who works his cases harder than most of the men in homicide, and besides, he's back to clearing murders. Okay, thinks Nolan, so every now and then Harry gets out there in the ozone. So he got his s.h.i.+fts wrong. So what should we do? Make him write a 95 explaining why he's a s.p.a.ce cadet? Maybe dock him some vacation days? What the h.e.l.l good is that? That s.h.i.+t didn't work in patrol and it sure wasn't the way to do business in homicide. Everyone knew the story about the time a supervisor had demanded that Jay Landsman write a 95 explaining why he was late for a s.h.i.+ft. "I was late for duty," Landsman wrote, "because when I left the house to come to work there was a German submarine parked in my driveway." For better or worse, that was homicide, and Nolan simply wasn't going to jam it to one detective to make another feel better.

The middle ground is gone. On this, the morning after, Kincaid keeps the rein on his anger and says nothing. Nor does he give Edgerton more than a pa.s.sing comment when both men show up for their s.h.i.+ft on Friday.

"I don't even blame Harry," Kincaid tells the other squad members. "I f.u.c.kin' blame Roger for not making him straighten up."

But over the next few days, Kincaid's anger becomes white heat, and the others-McAllister, Garvey, even Bowman, who is more likely than not to side with Kincaid in this dispute-know enough to leave it alone and stay out of the way. In the end, the inevitable explosion comes on a four-to-twelve s.h.i.+ft that marks Edgerton's next off-day. It's a s.h.i.+ft comprised entirely of yelling and cursing, of accusation and counteraccusation, that finishes with Nolan and Kincaid shouting at each other in the main office, emptying all their guns in the kind of firefight that leaves few pieces to be picked up. Nolan makes it clear that he regards Kincaid as more trouble than anything else, telling the detective to mind his own business and then accusing him of failing to work his cases hard enough or long enough. And while it's true that Kincaid has a healthy share of open files over the last two years, it's also fair to say that Nolan is offering up the kind of criticism that no veteran detective is willing to hear. As far as Donald Kincaid is concerned, he's gone as soon as a vacancy opens up on either s.h.i.+ft.

After showing its fault lines for more than a year, Roger Nolan's squad is finally breaking apart.

EIGHT.

The sights, the sounds, the smells-there is nothing else in a detective's frame of reference to which that bas.e.m.e.nt room on Penn Street can be matched. Even the crime scenes, no matter how stark and brutal, pale against the process by which the murdered are dissected and examined: that is truly the strangest vision.

There is a purpose to the carnage, a genuine investigative value to the gore of human autopsy. The legal necessity of the postmortem examination is understood by a detached and reasoning mind, yet the reality of the process is no less astonis.h.i.+ng. To that part of the detective which calls itself professional, the medical examiner's office is a laboratory. And yet to that other part, which defines itself in hard, but human terms, the place is an abattoir.

The autopsy brings home the absolute finality of the event. At the crime scenes, the victims are most certainly dead, but at the point of autopsy, they become for the detectives something more-or less. It is one thing, after all, for a homicide detective to detach himself emotionally from the corpse that forms the center of his mystery. But it's another thing altogether to see that corpse emptied of itself, to see the sh.e.l.l reduced to bones and sinew and juices in the same way that an automobile is stripped of chrome and quarter panels before being hauled to the wrecker. Even a homicide detective-a jaded character indeed-has to witness his share of portmortems before death truly becomes a casual acquaintance.

For a homicide detective, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is both a legal necessity and an evidentiary a.s.set. A pathologist's autopsy forms the baseline for any homicide prosecution simply because, in every murder case, it must first be proven that the victim died from human intervention and not from some other cause. But beyond that basic requirement, a good cutter's abilities can often mean the difference between an accident being mistakenly viewed as a homicide or, equally disastrous, a homicide being attributed to accidental or natural causes.

To the pathologist, every body tells a story.

Given a gunshot wound, a medical examiner can determine from the amount and pattern of soot, burned powder and other debris whether a particular bullet was fired at contact range, close range or a distance greater than two to two and a half feet. More than that, a good cutter can look at the abraded edges of the entrance wound and tell you the approximate trajectory of the bullet at the point of entrance. Given a shotgun wound, that same pathologist can read the pellet pattern and gauge the approximate distance between the barrel of the weapon and its target. From an exit wound, an ME can tell whether the victim was standing free or if the wound was sh.o.r.ed because the victim was against a wall, or on a floor, or in a chair. And when presented with a series of wounds, a good pathologist can tell you not only which projectile proved lethal but, in many cases, which projectiles were fired first, or which wounds were sustained postmortem and which were antemortem.

Give that same doctor a knife wound and you'll learn whether or not the blade had one edge or two, was serrated or straight. And if the stab wound is deep enough, a medical examiner can look at the markings made by the knife hilt and tell you the length and width of the murder weapon. Then there are the blunt trauma injuries: Was your victim hit by a car or a lead pipe? Did that infant fall in the bathtub or was he bludgeoned by his babysitter? In either case, an a.s.sistant medical examiner has the key to the corporeal vault.

But if a forensic pathologist can confirm that a murder has been committed, if he can further provide some basic information about how the crime was done, he is rarely if ever able to lead a homicide detective from the how of it to the who of it. Too often the dead man comes to the detective as little more than a vessel emptied of life by persons unknown in the presence of witnesses unknown. Then the pathologist can provide all the detail in the world: wound trajectories, the sequence of wounds, the distance between shooter and victim-and none of it means a thing. Without witnesses, autopsy results become filler for the office reports. Without a suspect to be interviewed, the medical facts can't be used to contradict or confirm information gained in an interrogation room. And though a cutter may be an absolute pro at tracking wounds through a human body, though he may recover every piece of lead or copper jacketing left inside that body, it hardly matters when no gun has been recovered for a ballistics comparison.

At best, an autopsy provides information that can be used by an investigator to measure the veracity of his witnesses and suspects. An autopsy tells a detective a few things that definitely happened in the last moments of his victim's life. It also tells him a few things that could not have happened. On a few blessed occasions in a detective's career, those few somethings happen to matter.

A pathologist's death investigation is therefore never an independent process; it exists in concert with everything the detective has already learned at the crime scene and in interviews. An a.s.sistant medical examiner who believes that cause and manner of death can be determined in all cases solely by the examination of the body is just asking for pain. The best pathologists begin by reading the police reports and looking at Instamatic photos taken by the ME's attendants at the crime scene. Without that context, the postmortem examination is a meaningless exercise.

Context is also the reason that the homicide detective is generally required to be present in the autopsy room. Ideally, cutter and cop impart knowledge to each other, and both leave the autopsy room with a greater sum of information. Often, too, the relations.h.i.+p creates its own tension, with the doctors arguing science and the detectives arguing from the street. Example: A pathologist finds no s.e.m.e.n or v.a.g.i.n.al tearing and concludes that a victim found nude in Druid Hill Park was not raped. Yet a detective knows that many s.e.x offenders never manage to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. Moreover, his victim was a part-time prost.i.tute and mother of three. So what if there isn't any tearing? Alternatively, a detective looking at a body with a contact gunshot wound to the chest, a second contact wound to the head and multiple bruises and contusions to the torso may think that he's got to be dealing with a murder. But the two gunshot wounds are not inconsistent with a suicide attempt. Pathologists have doc.u.mented cases in which a person taking his own life has fired a weapon repeatedly into his chest or head with inconclusive results-perhaps because he jerked his hand at the last second, perhaps because the initial shots were far from lethal. Likewise, the chest bruising-though it may seem to be the work of an a.s.sailant-could be from the efforts of family members who, on hearing the gunshots, rushed into the room and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the victim. No suicide note? The truth is that in 50 to 75 percent of all cases, suicide is never accompanied by a written note.

The relations.h.i.+p between the detective and the medical examiner is necessarily symbiotic, but the occasional tension between the two disciplines produces its own stereotypes. The detectives genuinely believe that every new pathologist comes out of medical school with a by-the-textbook mentality that bears only a casual resemblance to what occurs in the real world. A new doctor must therefore be broken in like a new shoulder holster. Likewise, the pathologists consider the vast majority of homicide detectives to be glorified beat cops, untrained and unscientific. The less experienced the detective, the more likely they are to be perceived as amateurs in the art of death investigation.

A year or two back, Donald Worden and Rich Garvey happened to be in the autopsy room on a shotgun murder just as John Smialek, Maryland's chief medical examiner, was leading a group of medical residents on the day's rounds. Smialek had only recently arrived in Baltimore, by way of Detroit and Albuquerque, and consequently Worden probably seemed to him no more or less knowledgeable than any other police investigator.

"Detective," he asked Worden in front of the group, "can you tell me if those are entrance wounds or exit wounds?"

Worden looked down at the dead man's chest. Small entrance-big exit is the rule of thumb for gunshot wounds, but with a 12-gauge, the entrances can also be pretty fearsome. At close range, it's never easy to say for sure.

"Entrance wounds."

"Those," said Smialek, turning to the residents with proof of a police detective's fallibility, "are exit wounds."

Garvey watched the Big Man go into a slow boil. It was, after all, Smialek's job to know any and all entrances from any and all exits, whereas it was Worden's to find out who put the holes there in the first place. Given the divergence in perspectives, several months and a dozen or so bodies are often required before a detective and a pathologist can work well together. After that initial encounter, for example, it took quite a while before Worden could see Smialek as a good cutter and investigator. Likewise, it took that long before the doctor began to regard Worden as something more than a poor dumb white boy from Hampden.

Because a medical examiner's report is required on any case in which murder is probable, the autopsy room has long been part of a Baltimore detective's daily routine. On any given day, the morning rounds may bring to Penn Street a state trooper handling a Western Maryland drowning or a Prince George's County detective with a drug murder from the D.C. suburbs. But the sheer volume of city violence has established the Baltimore cops as fixtures at the ME's office, and as a result, the relations.h.i.+p between veteran detectives and the more experienced pathologists has grown close with time. Too close, to Smialek's way of thinking.

Smialek arrived in Baltimore with the belief that the natural ties to the homicide unit had allowed the medical examiner's office to sacrifice some of its status as an independent agency. Detectives, particularly those from the city, had too much influence over the manner-of-death rulings, too much say in whether something would be called a murder or a natural death.

Before Smialek's arrival, the autopsy room was indeed a less formal place. Coffee and cigarettes were bartered and shared in the cutting room and a few detectives had been known to show up on Sat.u.r.day mornings with a six-pack or two, treating the cutters to some early relief from the weekend rush that always began with Friday night's violence. Those were the days when practical jokes and raw banter were an established part of morning rounds. Donald Steinhice, a detective on Stanton's s.h.i.+ft who long ago had learned to throw his voice, was responsible for some notable feats, and many an ME or a.s.sistant began an autopsy by pausing for what seemed to be a dead man's complaint about cold hands.

Nonetheless, the casual ease of these years also had a down side. Worden, for one, could remember visiting the autopsy room and noticing the clutter and disorganization; sometimes, when the weekend rush used up all the metal gurneys, bodies were even laid out on the floor. Nor was it uncommon for evidence to get lost, and the integrity of trace evidence was often suspect, with the detectives unsure whether hairs and fibers found on the bodies were from the crime scene or from the ME's own freezer. Most important, to Worden's way of thinking, there had simply been a lot less respect for the dead.

In a campaign for investigative independence and better conditions, Smialek ended all that, although he did so in a way that damaged the camaraderie of Penn Street and made the place a h.e.l.l of a lot less fun in the process. As if to emphasize the professionalism of the office, he insisted on being addressed as a doctor and would not tolerate even a pa.s.sing reference to his office as a "morgue." To avoid acrimony, detectives learned to call the place-in Smialek's presence, at least-the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Subordinates who were used to less formal arrangements, many of them talented pathologists, soon ran afoul of the new chief, as did those detectives who couldn't sense the change in the weather.

Walking into the autopsy room on one occasion, Donald Waltemeyer made the mistake of wis.h.i.+ng all the ghouls in the chopshop a fine good morning. Whereupon Smialek told other detectives that if Waltemeyer continued on that path, he would do so with a new and larger a.s.shole. They were not ghouls, he declared, they were doctors; it was not a chopshop, it was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And the sooner Waltemeyer learned these things, the happier a warrior he'd be. Ultimately, the detectives' verdict on the Smialek regime was divided: the ME's office certainly seemed to be better organized and more professional in some respects; on the other hand, it was a fine morning when you could share a cold one with Dr. Smyth while listening to Steinhice speak for the dead.

Of course, the application of criteria such as comfort and amus.e.m.e.nt to the autopsy room is-in and of itself-ample proof of a homicide man's peculiar and sustaining psychology. But for the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment, and Penn Street, even on a good day, was one h.e.l.l of a vision. In fact, quite a few detectives came close to being ill the first couple times around, and two or three aren't ashamed to say they still have a problem every now and then. Kincaid can handle anything unless it's a decomp, in which case he's the first one out the loading dock door. Bowman's okay until they pop the skull to remove the brain; the sight doesn't bother him so much as the clipped sound of the snapping bone. Rick James still gets a little unnerved when he sees a young child or an infant on the table.

But beyond those occasional hard moments, the daily routine at the ME's office is, for a detective, exactly that. Any investigator with more than a year in the unit has witnessed the postmortem examination so often that it has become utterly familiar. If they absolutely had to do it, half the men on the s.h.i.+ft could probably pick up a scalpel and break a corpse down to parts, even if they didn't have any idea what, if anything, they were actually looking for.

The process begins with the external examination of the body, as important as the autopsy itself. Ideally, the cadavers are supposed to arrive at Penn Street in the same condition as they appeared on the scene. If the victim was dressed when found, he remains dressed, and the clothes themselves will be examined with great care. If there were indications of a struggle, the victim's hands will have been encased at the scene in paper bags (plastic bags produce condensation when the body is later removed from the freezer) to preserve any hairs, fibers, blood or skin beneath the fingernails or between the fingers. Likewise, if the crime scene was in a house or some other location where trace evidence could be recovered, the ME's attendants will wrap the body in a clean white sheet before removal, trapping any hairs, fibers or other trace material for later recovery.

At the beginning of the external examination, each body is removed from the walk-in freezer and weighed, then rolled on a metal gurney to the overhead camera that provides the photographs of record before the autopsy. Next, the body is rolled into the autopsy area, a long expanse of ceramic tile and metal that can accommodate as many as six examinations simultaneously. The Baltimore facility does not have, like many autopsy rooms, overhead microphones that allow the pathologists to record findings for later transcription. Instead, the doctors take notes periodically using clipboards and ball-points left on a nearby shelf.

If the victim was clothed, the pathologist will try to match the holes and tears in each item of clothing to the corresponding wounds: Not only does this help confirm that the victim was killed in the presumed manner-a good pathologist can spot a body that has been dressed after being shot or stabbed-but in the case of gunshot wounds, the clothes can then be checked visually or chemically tested for ballistic residue.

Once the victim's clothes have received a preliminary examination, each article is then removed carefully to preserve any trace evidence. As with a crime scene, precision is preferable to speed. Bullets and bullet fragments, for example, often manage to leave the body only to lodge in the victim's clothing, and often that evidence will be recovered as the body is slowly undressed.

In cases where s.e.xual a.s.sault is suspected, the external examination includes a careful search for any internal trauma, as well as v.a.g.i.n.al, oral or a.n.a.l swabs for e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, because s.e.m.e.n recovered at the point of autopsy may be used later for comparison to link a suspect to the crime.

Other trace evidence can be extracted from the victim's hands. In a murder that follows a struggle or s.e.xual a.s.sault, fingernail clippings may produce fragments of skin, hair or even the blood of the a.s.sailant. If the struggle involved a knife, defense wounds-a pattern of straight incisions, often relatively small-may be visible on the victim's hands. Likewise, if at any point the victim fired a weapon, particularly a large-caliber handgun, chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits on the back of each hand might yield proof of that fact. The examination of a victim's hands may also mean the difference between a ruling of homicide or suicide; in about 10 percent of all self-inflicted gunshot wounds, the shooting hand will be speckled by blood and tissue particles-"blowback" from the wound track.

Just as a detective stares at a crime scene and tries to see those things that are out of place or missing entirely, a pathologist conducts an autopsy with a similar eye. Any mark, any lesion, any unexplained trauma to the body is carefully noted and examined. For that reason, hospital trauma teams are told to leave catheters, shunts and other tools of medical intervention intact so that the pathologist can differentiate between physical alterations that occurred in the effort to save the victim and those that occurred prior to the emergency room.

Once the external examination is complete, the actual autopsy begins: the pathologist makes a Y-shaped incision across the chest with a scalpel, then uses an electric saw to cut through the ribs and remove the breastplate. In the case of penetrating wounds, the doctor will follow the wound track at each level of the body's infrastructure, noting the trajectory of the bullet or the direction of the blade wound. The process continues until the full extent of the wound is known and, in the case of gunshot wounds, until either the entrance wounds are matched with exits or the spent projectile is recovered from the body.

The wounds are further evaluated in terms of their likely effect on the victim. A through-and-through wound to the head no doubt caused immediate collapse, but another wound, a chest shot that pierced a lung and the vena cava, might not have resulted in death for perhaps five to ten minutes, though it would have ultimately proven just as lethal. By this process, a pathologist can speculate about what actions may have been physiologically possible after a wound was inflicted. This is always a difficult guessing game, however, because shooting victims do not demonstrate the same reliable and consistent behavior depicted in television and film. Unfortunately for homicide detectives, a badly wounded person often refuses to limit the crime scene by simply falling down at the first wound and then waiting for the ambulance or morgue wagon.

The distortion of television and popular culture is nowhere more apparent than in the intimate relations.h.i.+p of bullets and bodies. Hollywood tells us that a Sat.u.r.day Night Special can put a man on the pavement, yet ballistic experts know that no bullet short of an artillery sh.e.l.l is capable of knocking a human being off his feet. Regardless of a bullet's weight, shape and velocity and regardless of the size of the handgun from which it was fired, it is too small a projectile to topple a person by the impact of its own ma.s.s. If bullets truly had such power, the laws of physics would require that the shooter would also be knocked off his feet in similar fas.h.i.+on when he discharged the weapon. Even with the largest firearms, this doesn't occur.

In fact, a bullet stops a human being by doing one of two things: striking the brain, brain stem or spinal cord, causing immediate damage to the central nervous system; or damaging enough of the cardiovascular system to cause ma.s.sive blood loss to the brain and eventual collapse. The first scenario has an immediate result, though the average shooter's ability to intentionally strike the brain or spinal cord of a target is largely limited to luck. The second scenario takes longer to play out because there is an awful lot of blood for a human body to lose. Even a gunshot wound that effectively destroys the victim's heart leaves enough blood to supply the brain with oxygen for ten to fifteen seconds. Although the popular belief that many people fall down upon being shot is generally accurate, experts have determined that this occurs not for physiological reasons, but as a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do. Proof of the phenomenon is evident in its opposite: There are countless cases in which people-often people whose mental processes are impaired by drugs or alcohol-are shot repeatedly, sustaining lethal wounds; yet despite the severity of their injuries, they continue to flee or resist for long periods of time. An example is the 1986 shootout between FBI agents and two bank robbery suspects in Miami, a prolonged gun battle in which both suspects and two federal agents were killed and five other agents wounded. Pathologists later discovered that one of the gunmen sustained a lethal heart wound in the first minutes of the incident yet managed to remain ambulatory for close to fifteen minutes, firing at agents and attempting to escape by restarting two cars before finally collapsing. People with bullets in them, even a considerable number of bullets, do not always perform to expectations.

Neither, for that matter, do the bullets themselves. Once loosed upon the innards of a human being, these little lead bits also tend toward the unpredictable. For one thing, bullets often lose their shape. Hollow-point and wadcutter rounds tend to flatten out against tissue, and all ammunition can shatter against bone. Likewise, most projectiles do a lot less spinning and drilling after encountering resistance inside the body; instead, they yaw and tumble, battering tissue and organs along the way. As bullets enter a body, they also become less directional, glancing off bone and sinew and following the altered trajectories of their own changing shape. This is as true for the smallest slugs as for the larger ones. Out on the street, the big guns-the .38s, .44s and .45s-still get the greatest respect, but the lowly .22 pistol has acquired a reputation all its own. Any West Baltimore homeboy can tell you that when a .22 roundnose gets under a man's skin, it bounces around like a pinball. And every pathologist seems to have a story about a .22 slug that entered the lower left back, clipped both lungs, the aorta and the liver, then cracked an upper rib or two before finding its way out the upper right shoulder. It's true that a man who gets. .h.i.t with a .45 bullet has to worry about a larger piece of lead cleaving through him, but with a good .22 round, he has to worry that the little b.u.g.g.e.r is in there for the grand tour.

Most big-city medical examiners employ a fluoroscope or X-ray to hunt down the tiny shards of metal alloy that travel to all sorts of unexpected destinations. In Baltimore, that technology is readily available and is occasionally used by a cutter in situations where multiple gunshot wounds or shattered bullets have complicated the recovery effort. For the most part, however, the veterans on Penn Street take pride in being able to locate most of the bullets and fragments without resorting to the scope, relying instead on a careful examination of the wound track and an understanding of a bullet's dynamics inside the body. For example, a bullet fired into the skull of a victim might not leave the head but instead ricochet off the inside of the skull at a point roughly opposite from the entrance wound; that much would be obvious from the absence of any exit wound. But an experienced pathologist begins his search knowing that projectiles bouncing off the interior skull rarely ricochet at acute angles. On the contrary, such a slug is more apt to strike the bone and then skate along the inside of the skull in a long arc, often coming to rest just inside the bone and a good distance from any point along the original trajectory. It's esoteric stuff and, in a perfect world, nothing that a human being should ever need to know. Such is the c.u.mulative knowledge of the autopsy room.

The process continues with the removal of the breastplate and the examination of the internal organs. Linked together in the body's central cavity, the organ tree is lifted out as a single ent.i.ty and placed on the steel sinks at the other end of the room. A careful vivisection of the heart, lungs, liver and other organs is then conducted, with the pathologist checking for any signs of disease or deformity while continuing to follow wound paths through the affected organs. With the organs removed, the remaining wound tracks can be followed into the posterior tissue of the body, and projectiles that have lodged in those muscles can also be removed. Bullets and bullet fragments, a critical category of physical evidence, are of course handled with great care, and they are removed by hand or with soft implements that cannot scratch the outer surface and thereby interfere with later ballistic comparisons of rifling marks.

In the final phase of the internal exam, the pathologist uses the electric saw to cut the circ.u.mference of the skull, the top of which is then popped upward with a lever-like tool. Pulling from behind the ears, the skin of the victim's scalp is then folded forward across the face so that any head wound can be tracked and the brain itself can be removed, weighed and examined for disease. For observers, the detectives included, this last stage of the autopsy is perhaps the hardest. The sound of the saw, the cranial pop from the lever, the image of the facial skin being covered by scalp-nothing makes the dead seem quite so anonymous as when the visage of every individual is folded in upon itself in a rubbery contortion, as if we've all been wandering this earth wearing dimestore Halloween masks, so easily and indifferently removed.

The examination concludes with a sampling of bodily fluids-blood from the heart, bile from the liver, urine from the bladder-to be used for toxicology tests that can identify poisons or measure alcohol and drug consumption. More often than not, a detective will request a second blood sample as well in order to identify blood at the crime scene or any bloodstained items that are seized in a later search warrant. Toxicology results take several weeks, as does neutron activation testing for gunshot residue, which is a.n.a.lyzed at the FBI lab in Was.h.i.+ngton. DNA testing, another aid to identification that was introduced in the late 1980s, can credibly match samples of the human genetic code using blood, skin or hair samples and has therefore become the new frontier for trace forensics. But the process is beyond the lab capabilities of both the medical examiner's office and the Baltimore department. When relevant to a case and requested by a detective, samples are instead sent to one of a handful of private labs used by Maryland authorities, but the backlog can be as bad as six months-a long time to wait for critical evidence.

A single autopsy can take less than an hour, depending on the complexity of the case and the extent of the wounds or injuries. When it is finished, an a.s.sistant returns the internal organs to the chest cavity, replaces the brain and skull top and closes the incisions. The body is then returned to the freezer to await a funeral home's hea.r.s.e. The gathered evidence-blood samples, swabs, nail clippings, bullets, bullet fragments-is then marked and bagged for the detective, who will take it to the evidence control unit or the ballistics lab, ensuring a clear chain of custody.

By its very efficiency, the process manages somehow to become less and less extraordinary. But what still has emotional force for even veteran detectives is the autopsy room as a panoramic vision, a sort of Grand Central Station of lifelessness in which human bodies are at varying stops along the disa.s.sembly line. On a busy Sunday morning, the hallway outside the cutting room might be filled with eight or nine metal tables and the freezer may hold a half dozen more. To stand amid the overnight acc.u.mulation of homicides and auto accidents, drownings and burnings, electrocutions and suicides, overdoses and seizures-that is always a little overwhelming. White and black, male and female, old and young, all come to Penn Street with no common denominator save that their deaths are officially unexplained occurrences within the geographic confines of the Old Line State. More than any other visual image, the weekend display in the tiled room reminds a homicide detective that he deals in a wholesale market.

Every visit to the autopsy room reaffirms a detective's need for a psychological buffer between life and death, between the horizontal forms on the gurneys and the vertical forms moving between the metal. The detectives' strategy is simple and it can be presented as an argument: We are alive; you are not.

It is a philosophy unto itself, a religion worthy of its own rites and rituals. Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are breathing and laughing and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, while you are stripped bare and emptied of vital pieces. We are wearing blue and brown and arguing with the attendant about last night's Orioles game, insisting that the Birds can't win without another RBI man in the lineup. Your clothes are torn and soaked with blood and you are refres.h.i.+ngly free of all opinion. We are contemplating a late breakfast on company time; you are having the contents of your stomach examined.

By that logic alone, we are ent.i.tled to a little arrogance, a little distance, even within the close confines of the autopsy room. We are ent.i.tled to walk among the dead with a false confidence, with a deceitful wit, with the self-sustaining a.s.surance that it's still the greatest of chasms that separates us from them. We will not mock the sh.e.l.ls of the dead, sprawled on their wheeled alloy cots; but neither will we humanize them, growing solemn and mortal at the very sight. We can laugh and joke and bear witness in this place only because we will live forever, and if we don't live forever, we will at least manage to avoid leaving this vale as an unattended death in the state of Maryland. In the safety of our imagination, we will only depart in wrinkled skin and a soft bed, with a signed death certificate from a licensed physician. We will not be bagged and weighed and photographed from above so that Kim or Linda or some other secretary in the Crimes Against Persons section can glance at the 8-by-10 glossy and remark that Landsman looked better with his clothes on. We will not be split and spliced and sampled only to have a civil servant note on a government-issue clipboard that our heart was moderately enlarged, our gastrointestinal system, unremarkable.

"Table for one," says an attendant, sliding a cadaver into an empty slot in the autopsy room. An old joke, but he, too, is alive and therefore ent.i.tled to an old joke or two.

Likewise for Rich Garvey, taking note of a rather well-endowed male cadaver: "Oh, my goodness, I'd hate to see that thing angry."

Or Roger Nolan, noticing a random racial configuration: "Hey Doc, how is that the white guys got their tables right away and the black guys are all waiting in the hall?"

"I think this is one time," muses an attendant, "when the black guys would rather see the white guys go first."

Only on rare occasions is the veil lifted, with the living compelled to acknowledge the dead honestly. It happened to McAllister five years back, when the body on the metal table was Marty Ward, a narcotics detective killed in a Frederick Street drug front when a hand-to-hand sale went bad. Ward was Gary Childs's partner back then and one of the most popular detectives on the sixth floor. McAllister was chosen to work that autopsy because someone in the unit had to do it, and the other homicide detectives had been closer to Ward. None of that made it easier, of course.

For the detectives, the rule of thumb is that if you think about it, if you allow the imagery to be about human beings rather than evidence, you will be led to some strange and depressing places. Insisting on this distance is an acquired skill, and for new detectives, an established rite of pa.s.sage. New men are measured by their willingness to watch a body disa.s.sembled and then adjourn to the Penn Restaurant, on the other side of Pratt Street, for the three-egg special and a beer.

"The real test of a man," says Donald Worden, reading the menu one morning, "is whether or not he's willing to subst.i.tute that nasty pork roll for the bacon."

Even Terry McLarney, the closest thing to a philosopher in the homicide unit, has trouble finding anything more than black comedy in the autopsy room. When it is his turn to walk in that small s.p.a.ce between the living and the dead, his empathy for the forms on the metal tables is largely limited to his ongoing and thoroughly unscientific survey of livers.

"I like to look for the more derelict-looking guys, the ones who look like they've had a hard life," explains McLarney, deadpan. "If they open 'em up and the liver is all hard and gray, I get depressed. But if it's pink and puffy, hey, I'm happy all day."

On one discomfiting occasion, McLarney was in the autopsy room when one case appeared on the rounds sheet with the explanation that although the victim had no medical history, he was known to drink beer every day. "I read that and figured, What the f.u.c.k," McLarney mused. "I might as well just find an empty table, lie down and unb.u.t.ton my s.h.i.+rt."

Of course, McLarney knows better than to think it can all be laughed off. The line between life and death isn't so thick and straight that a man can stand on it every morning, cracking jokes with impunity as the doctors wield scalpel and knife. Once, in a rare moment, McLarney even tries to find words for something deeper.

"I don't know about anyone else," he says, serving up a plat.i.tude to the others in the homicide office one afternoon, "but whenever I'm down there for an autopsy, I can pretty much convince myself that there is a G.o.d and there is a heaven."

"The morgue makes you believe in G.o.d?" asks Nolan, incredulous.

"Yeah, well, if not heaven, then someplace where your mind or your soul goes after you die."

"Ain't no heaven," says Nolan to the rest of the group. "You look around that room down there and you know we're all just meat."

"No," says McLarney, shaking his head. "I believe we go somewhere."

"Why's that?" asks Nolan.

"Because when the bodies are all laid out like that, all the life is just gone and you know that there's nothing left. They're so empty. You can look at their faces and know they're completely empty ..."

"So?"

"So, it's got to go somewhere, right? It doesn't just disappear. They've all got to have somewhere else to go."

"So their souls go to heaven?"

"Hey," says McLarney, laughing, "why not?"

And Nolan smiles and shakes his head, giving McLarney time to wander off with his seminal theologies intact. After all, only the living can argue for the dead, and McLarney is alive; they are not. By virtue of that one undeniable fact, he is ent.i.tled to win with the weakest argument.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 19.

Dave Brown pilots the Cavalier to within a block of the blue emergency lights, close enough to observe the general outline of the scene.

"I'll take this one," he says.

"You really are a piece of s.h.i.+t," says Worden from the pa.s.senger seat. "Why don't you just drive up and take a look at it first before deciding?"