Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets Part 9

He was born to a coal miner in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, but his father-himself the son of a miner-left the family when Pellegrini was a boy. After that, there was nothing to bind them. Once, as an adult, he had gone to see his father for a weekend, but the connections he had been looking for simply weren't there. His father was uncomfortable, his father's second wife unwelcoming, and Pellegrini left that Sunday knowing that the visit had been a mistake. His mother offered little solace. She had never expected much of him and from time to time she actually came right out and said so. For the most part, Pellegrini was raised by a grandmother and spent summers with an aunt, who took him down to Maryland to see his cousins.

His first choices in life seemed-like his childhood-uncertain, perhaps even random. Unlike most of the men in the homicide unit, Pellegrini had no prior connection to Baltimore and little in law enforcement when he joined the department in 1979. He arrived as something close to a blank tablet, as rootless and unclaimed as a man can be. In his past, Pellegrini could count a couple of frustrating years at Youngstown College in Ohio, where a few semesters were enough to convince him that he was not at all suited for academics. There was a failed marriage as well, along with six months in a Pennsylvania coal mine-enough for Pellegrini to know that the family tradition was something to walk away from. He signed on for a couple of years as the manager of a carnival, where he worked the towns and state fairs and kept the amus.e.m.e.nt rides running. Eventually, that job led to a more permanent position as manager of an amus.e.m.e.nt park on a lakesh.o.r.e island between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, where he spent most of his time trying to keep the joyrides from rusting during the northern winters. When the amus.e.m.e.nt park owners refused to pay for better, safer maintenance, Pellegrini quit, convinced that he wanted to be nowhere near the place when the Tilt-A-Whirl altered its usual orbit.

The want ads led south-first to Baltimore, where he visited the aunt who had taken him in during those childhood summers. He stayed in Maryland for a week, long enough to answer a newspaper ad encouraging applications to the Baltimore Police Department. He had once worked for a brief time at a private security firm, and though the job offered nothing even remotely resembling police work, it left him with the vague feeling that he might enjoy being a cop. In the late 1970s, however, the prospects for a law enforcement career were uncertain; most every city department was dealing with budgetary retrenchment and hiring freezes. Still, Pellegrini was intrigued enough to attend the interview for the Baltimore department. But rather than wait for a reply, he pushed on to Atlanta, where he had been led to believe that the Sun Belt's economic boom was a better guarantee of employment. He stayed overnight in Atlanta, reading the cla.s.sifieds at a depressing diner in a ragged section of the city, then returning to the motel to hear from his aunt, who called to say he had been accepted by the Baltimore academy.

What the h.e.l.l, he told himself. He didn't know much about Baltimore, but what he'd seen of Atlanta couldn't exactly be described as paradise. What the h.e.l.l.

After graduation, he was a.s.signed to Sector 4 of the Southern, a white enclave almost evenly divided between affluent urban homesteaders and an ethnic working cla.s.s. It was hardly the most crime-ridden section of the city, and Pellegrini understood that if he stayed there ten years, he would never learn what he needed to know to rise in the department. If he was going to be any good at this, he told himself, he had to get to one of the rough-and-tumble districts like the Western or, better still, to a citywide unit. After less than two years in a radio car, his ticket out of the hinterlands came in the form of an approved transfer to the Quick Response Team, the heavily armed tactical unit responsible for handling hostage situations and barricades. Working out of headquarters, QRT was considered something of an elite unit, and the officers were divided into four-man teams that trained constantly. Day after day, Pellegrini and the rest of his squad would practice kicking in doors, fanning out across unfamiliar rooms and then mock-firing at cardboard cutouts of gunmen. There were cardboard cutouts of hostages as well, and after enough practice, a team could get to the point where, under optimal conditions, if every man did his job, they might hit a hostage no more than every fourth or fifth time.

The work was precise and demanding, but Pellegrini felt no more at ease in QRT than he had anywhere else in his life. For one thing, his relations.h.i.+p with the other members of his team was difficult, primarily because the unit was short one sergeant and Pellegrini was selected by the other supervisors to serve as the officer-in-charge. An OIC is accorded a little extra pay, Pellegrini learned, but little extra respect from the men under him. After all, it was one thing for the rest of his team to take orders from a sergeant with real stripes on his sleeve, it was another to have those orders coming from a temporary supervisor with no more rank than the men under him. But more important to Pellegrini than the office politics was his memory of one particular encounter in the spring of 1985, an incident that gave him his first look at the kind of police work that truly appealed to him.

For almost a week that year, the QRT took its orders directly from the CID homicide unit, hitting several dozen locations in East Baltimore in a search for a wanted man. Those raids came in the wake of a police shooting in which Vince Adolfo, an Eastern District patrolman, was murdered while trying to stop a stolen car. An east side boy was quickly identified as the shooter, but in the hours after the slaying the suspect managed to stay on the wing. As quickly as the homicide detectives identified an address as a possible hideout, the QRT was there with a maul and s.h.i.+eld, taking down the front door. It was the first time that Pellegrini got a chance to watch the homicide unit up close, and when the Adolfo detail ended, one thing was certain in his mind: He wanted to be one of the people who live by finding the right door. Some other cop could have the job of kicking it down.

He acted on that thought by doing something extraordinary-at least by the standards of the average police department. Armed with a carefully prepared resume and letter of introduction, he took the elevator to the sixth floor of headquarters and walked into the administrative offices next to the homicide unit, where the commander of the Crimes Against Persons section makes his home.

"Tom Pellegrini," he said, extending a hand to the captain in charge. "I'd like to be a homicide detective."

The captain, of course, looked upon Pellegrini as if he were the citizen of some other planet, and with good cause. In theory, an officer could apply for posted openings in any section; in practice, the appointment process for CID detectives was both subtle and politicized-even more so in the years since the department had abandoned standardized testing for detectives.

For older hands like Donald Worden and Eddie Brown, and even Terry McLarney, who arrived as late as 1980, there was an entrance examination for CID-a test that managed to weed out those applicants incapable of writing a respectable warrant, but also to promote a good many people who were simply good at taking tests. Moreover, the test results-though they implied a quant.i.tative approach-had always been subject to politics: an applicant's score on his oral exam was usually only as good as his departmental connections. Then, in the early 1980s, testing was discontinued and appointment to detective became purely political. In theory, police officers were supposed to make homicide by distinguis.h.i.+ng themselves elsewhere in the department, preferably in some other investigative unit on the sixth floor. Although most of the applicants did indeed manage that prerequisite, the final decision usually had more to do with other factors. In a decade of affirmative action, it helped to be black; it also helped to have a lieutenant colonel or deputy commissioner as a mentor.

Pellegrini and the captain had a brief and inconclusive conversation. He was a good cop with a respectable performance sheet, but he was neither black nor the disciple of any particular boss. But Jay Landsman heard about this brief meeting and was impressed with Pellegrini's approach. To walk into a commander's office with nothing more than some typewritten pages and a handshake required stones. Landsman told Pellegrini that if he made it to homicide, he'd be welcome as a member of his squad.

In the end, Pellegrini had only one card to play: a well-connected lawyer for whom he had once done a favor during his time in the Southern. If there's ever anything I can do, the guy had said. That was a few years earlier, but Pellegrini called in the marker. The lawyer agreed to do what he could, then called him back two days later. There were no openings in Crimes Against Persons, but through a connection with one of the deputy commissioners, he could get Pellegrini into William Donald Schaefer's security detail. It wasn't homicide, the lawyer said, but if you can last a year or two in the service of Mayor Annoyed, you can pretty much name your poison.

Reluctantly, Pellegrini took the transfer and thereafter spent nearly two years following Hizzoner from community meetings to fund-raisers to Preakness Parades. Schaefer was a tough man to work for, a machine-bred politician who prized loyalty and a willingness to eat s.h.i.+t above all other human attributes. There were several days when Pellegrini left work with mayoral insults ringing in his ears, and several more when he went home suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to cuff the city's highest elected official to a radio car b.u.mper.

Once, at a March of Dimes event where Schaefer was serving as master of ceremonies, Pellegrini made the mistake of intervening in the mayor's performance. As Schaefer waxed prolific on everything from birth defects to Baltimore's new aquarium, an event organizer pointed out that the March of Dimes poster child, a little girl confined to her wheelchair, was not being included. Sensing disaster, Pellegrini reluctantly wheeled the child closer to the mayor, speaking in a soft stage whisper.

"Uh, Mr. Mayor."

Schaefer ignored him.

"Mr. Mayor, sir."

Schaefer waved him away.

"Mr. Mayor ..."

When the mayor finished his speech, he wasted no time wheeling around on the plainclothes detective.

"Get the f.u.c.k away from me," said Schaefer.

Still, Pellegrini played the good soldier, knowing that in Baltimore a machine politician's word is gold. Sure enough, when Schaefer was elected Maryland's governor in 1986, the people in his entourage got their pick of the lot. Within days of each other, there were two appointments to CID homicide: Fred Ceruti, a black plainclothesman from the Eastern, and Tom Pellegrini. Both men went to Jay Landsman's squad.

Once there, Pellegrini surprised everyone, including himself, by doing the job. Handling those early calls, he could not yet rely on natural instinct or experience; the City Hall detail wasn't exactly a noted breeding ground for competent homicide detectives. But what he lacked in savvy, he made up for in a willingness to learn. He enjoyed the work, and more important, he began to feel as though there was something in this world that suited him. Landsman and Fahlteich led him through the early calls, just as Dunnigan and Requer tried to break in Ceruti by sharing their cases.

Orientation to CID homicide wasn't all that sophisticated. There was no training manual; instead, a veteran detective would hold your hand for a few calls and then, suddenly, let go to see if you could walk on your own. Nothing was more terrifying than your first time as primary, with the body stretched out on the pavement and the corner boys eyef.u.c.king you and the uniforms and ME's attendants and lab techs all wondering if you know half of what you should. For Pellegrini, the turning point was the George Green case from the projects, the one where no one else in his squad expected a suspect, much less an arrest. Ceruti and Pellegrini handled that call together, with Ceruti off for a long weekend the following day. When Ceruti returned on Monday, he asked casually if anything was new on their homicide.

"It's down," Pellegrini told him.

"What?"

"I locked up two suspects over the weekend."

Ceruti couldn't believe it. The Green case was nothing out of the ordinary, a straight drug murder with no initial witnesses or physical evidence. Given a new detective as a primary, it was precisely the kind of case that everyone expected to stay open.

Pellegrini solved it by legwork alone, by bringing in people and talking to them for hours on end. He soon found that he had the temperament for long interrogations, a patience that even the other detectives found exasperating. With his slow, laconic manner, Pellegrini could spend three minutes recounting what he had for breakfast that morning or a full five minutes telling the joke about the priest, the minister and the rabbi. While that might drive the likes of Jay Landsman to distraction, it was perfectly suited to interviewing criminals. Slowly, methodically, Pellegrini mastered more and more of the job, and he began to close a healthy majority of his cases. His success, he realized, was important to him only. His second wife, a former trauma unit nurse, had no problem with the morbidity that surrounded homicide work, but she had little interest in the intricacies of the cases. His mother expressed only general pride in her son's success; his father was lost to him entirely. In the end, Pellegrini had to accept that this victory was something that he would celebrate alone.

He thought it was a victory, at least, until Latonya Wallace showed up dead in that alley. For the first time in a long while, Pellegrini began to question his own ability, deferring to Landsman and Edgerton, allowing the more experienced investigators to chart the course.

This was understandable; after all, he had never handled a true red ball. But the blend of personalities, of individual styles, also contributed to Pellegrini's doubt. Landsman was not only loud and aggressive but supremely confident as well, and when he worked a case he tended to become its center, drawing other detectives toward him by centripetal force. Edgerton, too, was the picture of confidence, quick to put his ideas forward or argue with Landsman about one theory or another. Edgerton had the New York att.i.tude, the inner sense that tells a city boy to speak first in a crowded room, before someone else opens his mouth and the opportunity is gone.

Pellegrini was different. He had his ideas about the case, to be sure, but his manner was so restrained, his speech so casual and slow, that in any debate the veteran detectives tended to run over him. At first, it was only moderately irritating, and how much did it matter, anyway? He really didn't disagree with either Landsman or Edgerton in his choice of direction. He had been with them when they first focused on the Fish Man as a suspect and he had been with them when Landsman offered the theory that the killer had to live in that same block of Newington. He agreed with them when they had jumped on the old drunk living across the street. It all sounded reasoned, and whatever else you could say about Jay and Harry, you had to admit that they knew their business.

It will be months before Pellegrini begins to chastise himself for being so una.s.sertive. But eventually the same thoughts that plagued him at the crime scene-the feeling that he is not completely in control of his case-will bother him again. Latonya Wallace was a red ball, and a red ball brings the whole s.h.i.+ft into a case for better or worse. Landsman, Edgerton, Garvey, McAllister, Eddie Brown-all of them had a hand in the pie, all of them were intent on turning over the stone that would reveal a child killer. True, they were covering a lot of ground that way, but in the end, it wouldn't have Landsman's or Edgerton's or Garvey's name on the case file.

Landsman is definitely right about one thing: Pellegrini is tired. They all are. That night, as the fifth day of the investigation ends, every one of them leaves the office at 3:00 A.M A.M. knowing they will be back in five hours and knowing, too, that the sixteen-and twenty-hour s.h.i.+fts they have been working since Thursday are not going to end soon. The obvious, unspoken question is how long can they keep it up. Dark ridges have already become fixed below Pellegrini's eyes, and whatever sleep the detective does get is often punctuated by nocturnal declarations from his second son, now three months old. Never much on appearances as a plainclothesman, Landsman is now shaving every other day, and his attire has spiraled down from sport coats to wool sweaters to leather jackets and denims.

"Hey, Jaybird," McLarney tells Landsman the following morning, "you look a little beat."

"I'm okay."

"How's it going? Anything new?"

"This one'll go down," says Landsman.

But in truth, there is little cause for optimism. The red binder on Pellegrini's desk, number 88021, has grown thick with canva.s.s reports, criminal histories, office reports, evidence submission slips and handwritten statements. The detectives have canva.s.sed the entire block surrounding the alley and are beginning to cover adjacent blocks; most of those identified in the first canva.s.s as having any criminal history have already been eliminated. Other detectives and detail officers are checking out every report in which an adult male so much as looks at any girl under the age of fifteen. And though several phone calls have come in with tips about possible suspects-Landsman himself spent half a day tracking one mental case mentioned by a Reservoir Hill mother-no one has come forward to say they saw the little girl walking home from the library. As for the Fish Man, he is accounted for on the critical Wednesday. And the old drunk is now, in fact, an old drunk. Worst of all, Landsman pointed out, they still haven't found their murder scene.

"That's what's killing us," Landsman tells them. "He knows more than we do."

Edgerton, for one, is aware of the long odds.

On Tuesday, the night after they jack up the old drunk, Edgerton finds himself at a red brick Baptist church on upper Park Avenue, around the corner from Newington, walking slowly through the stifling heat of a packed sanctuary. The small coffin, off-white with gold trim, is at the far end of the center aisle. The detective makes his way to the front of the church, then hesitates for a moment, touching the corner of the casket with his hand before turning to face the front row of mourners. He takes the mother's hand and bends down, his voice a whisper.

"When you pray tonight, please say a prayer for me," he tells her. "We're going to need it."

But the woman's face is broken, empty. She nods abstractedly, her eyes was.h.i.+ng over the detective to fix again on the floral arrangement in front of her. Edgerton walks to the side of the church and stands with his back to the wall, eyes closed more from fatigue than spiritual conviction, listening to the deep, gospel tones of the young minister: "... though I walk through the valley of the shadow ... and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying ... no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has pa.s.sed away."

Listening to the city's mayor, whose voice breaks as he stumbles through his words: "To the family and friends ... I, uh ... this is a terrible tragedy, not only for your family ... for the entire city ... Latonya was Baltimore's child."

Listening to the U.S. Senator: "... the poverty, the ignorance, the greed ... all the things that kill little girls ... she was an angel to us all, the angel of Reservoir Hill."

Listening to small, brief details of a child's life: "... attended this school from age three until the present time with a perfect attendance record ... such involvements as student council, school choir, modern dance, majorette ... Latonya's goal was to become a great dancer."

Listening to a eulogy, to reasons that never sounded more hollow, more empty: "She is home now ... because we are not judged by the fleetest of foot or the strongest, but those that endure."

Edgerton follows the crowd that gathers behind the white casket as it is carried toward the front door. Already back at work, he corners a white-gloved usher to ask about obtaining a copy of the mourners' book, signed by those in attendance. From a surveillance van on the opposite side of Park Avenue, a technician begins discreetly taking photographs of the departing crowd in the hope that the killer might muster enough remorse to risk an appearance. Edgerton stands at the base of the church steps, scanning the male faces as the crowd files slowly into the street.

"'Not the fleetest of foot or the strongest, but those that endure,'" he says, pulling out a cigarette. "I like that part ... I hope he was talking about us."

Edgerton watches the last of the mourners leave the church before walking back to his car.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8.

Donald Worden sits in the coffee room and scans the metro section of the paper, half listening to the roll call taking place in the outer office. Wordlessly, he sips his coffee and takes in the headline: LEADS ELUSIVE IN DEC. SLAYING OF FLEEING SUSPECT; FOCUS ON OFFICERS s.h.i.+FTS TO CIVILIAN. LEADS ELUSIVE IN DEC. SLAYING OF FLEEING SUSPECT; FOCUS ON OFFICERS s.h.i.+FTS TO CIVILIAN. The article itself begins with a question: The article itself begins with a question: Who killed John Randolph Scott, Jr.? Who killed John Randolph Scott, Jr.? Baltimore homicide detectives have asked the question hundreds of times since December 7, when Mr. Scott, 22, was shot in the back while being pursued on foot by police. Baltimore homicide detectives have asked the question hundreds of times since December 7, when Mr. Scott, 22, was shot in the back while being pursued on foot by police. For several weeks, the investigation appeared to be focusing on officers who had been in the area when the young man-fleeing from a stolen car that had been chased by police-was gunned down in the 700 block of Monroe Street. For several weeks, the investigation appeared to be focusing on officers who had been in the area when the young man-fleeing from a stolen car that had been chased by police-was gunned down in the 700 block of Monroe Street. But now, investigators appear to be considering another possible suspect-a civilian who lives in that neighborhood, and whose mother, girlfriend and son have been questioned before the city grand jury, according to police sources. But now, investigators appear to be considering another possible suspect-a civilian who lives in that neighborhood, and whose mother, girlfriend and son have been questioned before the city grand jury, according to police sources.

Worden lets his eyes drift slowly down the entire column, then turns the page and begins reading the jump on 2D. It only gets worse: A police source said that a man living near Monroe Street has been extensively interrogated in connection with the death .... The same man-pointed out to police by another resident of the area-had told investigators that he saw a police car leaving Monroe Street the morning of the shooting at a high rate of speed, with its lights out. A police source said that a man living near Monroe Street has been extensively interrogated in connection with the death .... The same man-pointed out to police by another resident of the area-had told investigators that he saw a police car leaving Monroe Street the morning of the shooting at a high rate of speed, with its lights out. No evidence was found to substantiate that claim, the source said, and now investigators believe the man may somehow be responsible for the shooting-or at least know more than he has been willing to divulge. No evidence was found to substantiate that claim, the source said, and now investigators believe the man may somehow be responsible for the shooting-or at least know more than he has been willing to divulge.

Worden finishes his coffee and hands the newspaper to Rick James, his partner, who rolls his eyes and grabs the newspaper from the older detective.

Wonderful. For the first time in two months they catch a break in this star-crossed case, only to have Roger f.u.c.king Twigg, the morning paper's veteran police reporter, spray it across the front page of the city section. Lovely. For two months, no one in the neighborhood around Fulton and Monroe will admit to knowing anything about the murder of John Scott. Then, a week ago, Worden finally digs out a reluctant witness-possibly an eyewitness-for the grand jury. But before prosecutors can lean on this man, pressuring him to testify under threat of a perjury charge, the Baltimore Sun Baltimore Sun calls him a suspect. Now it'll be h.e.l.l getting this guy's story into the grand jury room, because if he reads the newspapers-if his lawyer reads the newspapers-prudence suggests that he invoke the Fifth Amendment and remain silent. calls him a suspect. Now it'll be h.e.l.l getting this guy's story into the grand jury room, because if he reads the newspapers-if his lawyer reads the newspapers-prudence suggests that he invoke the Fifth Amendment and remain silent.

Twigg, you miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d, thinks Worden, listening to D'Addario run through the day's teletypes. You did me. You really did me on this one.

That Worden has come up with any kind of witness is testament to how hard he has worked the case. Since the discovery of John Scott's body in early December, he has conducted four separate door-to-door canva.s.ses of the area around the 800 block of Monroe Street, with the first three efforts producing little. It was only on the fourth canva.s.s that Worden learned from a neighbor the name of a possible eyewitness, a resident of the 800 block who had parked his car on Monroe Street next to the mouth of the alley and had told several others that he had been outside when the shooting occurred. When Worden got to the man, he found a middle-aged laborer who lived with his girlfriend and elderly mother on Monroe Street. Nervous and reluctant, the man denied that he was on the street when the incident occurred, but he admitted that he heard a gunshot, then from his window saw a police car leaving the 800 block with its lights out. He then saw a second police car turn onto Monroe Street from Lafayette and stop near the mouth of the alley.

The man also told Worden that after police began gathering in the alley, he had called his son to tell him what was happening. Worden then interviewed the son, who remembered the phone call and remembered further that his father had been quite specific: He had seen a police officer shoot a man in an alley across the street from his house.

Worden went back at the witness, confronting him with his son's statement. No, said the man, I never told him that. He stood by his previous account involving the two cars.

Worden suspected that his newfound witness had seen a good deal more than the arrival and departure of the radio cars, and the detective had two possible explanations for the man's obvious reluctance. First, the witness was genuinely afraid of testifying against a police officer in a murder trial. Second, there never was a radio car that fled down Monroe Street with its headlights out. The witness had instead seen a confrontation between John Scott and another civilian, a neighbor or friend, perhaps, whom the witness was now trying to protect. For that matter, the confrontation could have involved the witness himself, who had parked his own car at the mouth of the alley a few minutes before the shooting.

Technically then, this morning's newspaper article is correct in a.s.serting that the witness can also be considered a potential suspect. But what Roger Twigg does not know-or has not been told by his sources-is that this new witness was not discovered in a vacuum; other evidence is leading Worden back in the opposite direction, back toward the police.

It's more than the s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.tons found at the edge of the alley. And it's more than the fact that too many of the officers involved seem to be having trouble keeping their stories straight. The most unnerving piece of evidence in Worden's case file is a copy of the Central District radio tape, which had been sent to the FBI for audio enhancement. Deciphered by the detectives and transcribed weeks after the murder, it revealed a strange sequence of radio transmissions.

At one point on the tape, a Central officer can be heard broadcasting a description of the suspect seen running from the pa.s.senger seat of the stolen car.

"It's a number one male, six foot, six-foot-one, dark jacket, blue jeans ... last seen at Lanvale and Payson ..."

Then, a Central District sergeant, a seven-year veteran named John Wylie, cuts in. Having followed the chase into the Western District, it is Wylie who first found the body of John Scott.

"One-thirty," Wylie says, giving his unit number. "Cancel that description at the eight-hundred block of Fulton ... or Monroe."

One of the officers involved in the early chase breaks in, a.s.suming that the suspect is in custody: "One twenty-four. I can ID that guy ..."

Moments later, Wylie comes back on the radio. "One-thirty. I heard a gunshot before I found this guy."

"One-thirty, where is that, the eight-hundred block Monroe?"

"Ten-four."

Then, several moments later, Wylie can again be heard on the radio tape, acknowledging for the first time that there is a "possible shot victim in the alley."

The transmissions presented Worden with an obvious question: Why would the sergeant cancel the description for the suspect unless he believed the man was already in custody? The b.u.t.tons, the radio tape-such evidence led not toward a civilian suspect but toward the pursuing officers. And yet for every officer working a post anywhere near Monroe Street, Worden and James had checked and rechecked the run sheets-required departmental paperwork that chronicles every uniform's entire tour of duty from one call to the next. But all of the radio cars in the Central, Western and Southern districts appeared to be accounted for at the time of the shooting. The officers involved in the chase of the stolen Dodge Colt and the subsequent bailout had already given an account of their movements in supplemental reports, and the two detectives reviewed those as well. The investigators had found that most of the officers had encountered one another during the incident and could confirm each other's reports.

If the shooter was another police officer who fled before Sergeant Wylie arrived, there was nothing in the paperwork that could identify him. In all, fifteen Western and Central officers had been interviewed, but they could offer little, and Wylie, for his part, insisted that he had seen nothing before or after hearing the gunshot. Several officers-including Wylie and two others who were among the first to arrive at the shooting scene-were ordered to undergo lie detector tests. The results showed no deception for all officers with the exception of Wylie and one other, whose results were deemed inconclusive.

The polygraph results, coupled with Wylie's premature broadcast canceling the description for the suspect, led both Worden and James to conclude that, at the very least, the Central District sergeant had seen something before he discovered the body. But in a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the detectives, Wylie insisted that he had heard only the single gunshot and had seen no other officers near the alley on Monroe Street. He did not know why he would have canceled the description of the suspect, nor did he recall doing so.

Wylie asked the detectives if he was a suspect.

No, he was told.

Nonetheless, it was during that interview that the detectives asked the sector sergeant to consent to a voluntary search of his house. Wylie agreed, and the detectives confiscated his uniforms, service weapon and off-duty revolver for examinations that would also prove inconclusive.

Am I a suspect? the sergeant asked again. If so, I want to be advised of my rights.

No, they told him, you are not a suspect. Not now. With the sergeant insistent that he had seen or heard nothing apart from the gunshot, what had remained for the investigators was the possibility that some other cop or a civilian had witnessed the shooting or its aftermath. Now, just as that possibility had become very real, a single column of newsprint was threatening to drive their only witness back underground.

Still, if it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident probably added up to something less than intentional murder. It was, he reasoned, a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman-rightly or wrongly-used his weapon, or perhaps another .38 he grabbed from John Scott. A second or two later, the suspect is on the ground, a gunshot wound to the back, and the cop is spitting up adrenaline, panicking, wondering how in the h.e.l.l he's going to write his way out of this one.

If that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from that alley because he had no faith in the department's ability to protect him, then it was an inevitable act. If that was the case, then Monroe Street was the last, twisted curve on a piece of bad road on which the Baltimore department had been traveling for a long time. Donald Worden had been there for the beginning of the journey, and he had seen the full swing of the pendulum.

Only once in that long career did Worden himself fire a weapon in the line of duty. It was a wayward shot, a .38 round-nose with an almost vertical trajectory, spinning high above any conceivable target. That was twenty years earlier, on a summer day when he and his partner caught a robbery on view in Pimlico, witnessing the ever-elusive communion of a criminal with his crime. After they had duly chased the perpetrator for a greater distance than the average cop considers reasonable, Worden's partner began firing. Worden, feeling an obscure need to show solidarity, then sent his own missile into the ether.

Worden knew the man they were chasing, of course, just as the man knew Worden. For these were the halcyon days of the Big Man's twelve-year tour in the Northwest, when a rough cordiality still existed among the players and Worden was on a first-name basis with anyone in the district who was worth arresting. When the gunfire ended the foot chase and they caught up to their suspect, the man was shocked.

"Donald," he said, "I can't believe it."

"What?"

"You tried to kill me."

"No, I didn't."

"You shot at me."

"I fired over your head," Worden said, chastened. "But look, I'm sorry about it, okay?"

Worden never did manage a taste for gunplay, and the embarra.s.sment of that one stray round never left him. For him, the real authority was a cop's s.h.i.+eld and his reputation on the street; the gun had very little to do with it.

Still, it was entirely appropriate that Worden was the detective a.s.signed to the murder of John Randolph Scott. In more than a quarter century on the street, he had borne witness to more than his share of police-involved shootings. Most were good, some were not so good, a few were genuinely malevolent. More often than not, the outcome was decided in seconds. Often, too, the act of compressing the trigger was precipitated by little more than instinct. Usually the suspect needed to be lit up, sometimes he didn't, and sometimes there was room for debate. Sometimes, too, the suspect should have been shot and shot repeatedly, but somehow wasn't.

The decision to use lethal force was inevitably subjective, defined not so much by empirical standards as by what an officer was willing to justify in his own mind and on paper. But regardless of the circ.u.mstances, one ethic remained constant: When a cop shoots someone, he stands by it. He picks up a radio mike and calls it. He turns in the body.

But times had changed. A quarter century ago, an American law officer could fire his weapon without worrying whether the entrance wound would be anterior or posterior. Now, the risk of civil liability and possible criminal prosecution settles on a cop every time he unholsters a weapon, and what could once be justified by an earlier generation of patrolmen is now enough to get the next generation indicted. In Baltimore, as in every American city, the rules have changed because the streets have changed, because the police department isn't what it used to be. Nor, for that matter, is the city itself.

In 1962, when Donald Worden came out of the academy, the code was understood by the players on both sides. Break bad on a police, and there was a good chance that the cop would use his gun and use it with impunity. The code was especially clear in the case of anyone foolish enough to shoot a police. Such a suspect had one chance and one chance only. If he could get to a police district, he would live. He would be beaten, but he would live. If he tried to run and was found on the street in circ.u.mstances that could be made to look good on paper, he would not.

But that was a different era, a time when a Baltimore cop could say, with conviction, that he was a member of the biggest, toughest, best-armed gang on the block. Those were the days before the heroin and cocaine trade became the predominant economy of the ghetto, before every other seventeen-year-old corner boy could be a walking sociopath with a 9mm in the waistband of his sweats, before the department began conceding to the drug trade whole tracts of the inner city. Those were also the days when Baltimore was still a segregated city, when the civil rights movement was little more than an angry whisper.

In fact, most of the police-involved shootings of that time had racial overtones, the deadliest proof of the notion that for the black, inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, the presence of the city's finest was for generations merely another plague to endure: poverty, ignorance, despair, police. Black Baltimoreans grew up with the understanding that two offenses-talking up to a city cop or, worse, running from one-were almost guaranteed to result in a beating at best, gunfire at worst. Even the most prominent members of the black community were made to endure slights and insults, and well before the 1960s, the contempt felt for the department was close to universal.

Things within the department weren't much better. When Worden came on the force, black officers (among them two future police commissioners) were still prohibited from riding in radio cars-legally prohibited; the Maryland legislature had yet to pa.s.s the first law allowing blacks access to public accommodations. Black officers were limited in rank, then quarantined on foot posts in the slums or used as undercovers in the fledgling narcotics unit. On the street, they endured the silence of white colleagues; in the station houses, they were insulted by racial remarks at roll calls and s.h.i.+ft changes.

The transformation came slowly, prompted in equal part by increased activism in the black community and by the arrival of a new police commissioner in 1966, an ex-Marine named Donald Pomerleau, who took the helm with a mandate to clean house. The year before, Pomerleau had written a scathing report on the BPD, issued under the independent aegis of the International a.s.sociation of Chiefs of Police. The study declared the Baltimore force to be among the nation's most antiquated and corrupt and characterized its use of force as excessive and its relations with the city's black community as nonexistent. The Watts riot that had shaken Los Angeles in 1965 was still fresh in every civic leader's mind, and with all of the nation's cities living under threat of summer violence, Maryland's governor and Baltimore's mayor took the IACP a.s.sessment seriously: They hired the man who wrote it.