Homicide. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ fix on Harry Edgerton’s face.

      “My daughter. You found her?”

      Edgerton looks at her, shakes his head sideways, but says nothing. The woman looks past Edgerton to Ceruti, then to the empty doorway.

      “Where is she? She … all right?”

      Edgerton shakes his head again.

      “Oh God.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      The young girl stifles a cry, then falls into her mother’s embrace. The woman takes the child in her arms and turns toward the dining room wall. Edgerton watches the woman fight a wave of emotion, her body tensing, her eyes closing tight for a long minute.

      The young man speaks. “How did …”

      “She was found this morning,” says Edgerton, his voice barely audible. “Stabbed, in an alley near here.”

      The mother turns back toward the detective and tries to speak, but the words are lost in a hard swallow. Edgerton watches her turn and walk toward the bedroom door, where another woman, the victim’s aunt and the mother of the boy eating cereal, holds out her arms. The detective then turns to the man who opened the door, who, though dazed, still seems to understand and accept the words thrown at him.

      “We’ll need her to go to the medical examiner’s office, for a positive identification. And then, if it’s at all possible, we’d like you all to come to headquarters, downtown. We’re going to need your help now.”

      The young man nods, then disappears into the bedroom. Edgerton and Ceruti stand alone in the dining room for several minutes, awkward and uncomfortable, until the silence is broken by an anguished wail from the back bedroom.

      “I hate this,” says Ceruti softly.

      Edgerton walks over to a set of dining room shelves and picks up a framed photograph of two young girls seated side by side in pink bows and lace, carefully posed before a blue backdrop. Toothy, say-cheeseburger smiles. Every braid and curl in place. Edgerton holds up the photograph for Ceruti, who has slumped into a dining room chair.

      “This,” says Edgerton, looking over the photo, “is what this motherfucker gets off on.”

      The teenage girl closes the bedroom door softly and walks toward the dining room. Replacing the picture frame, Edgerton suddenly recognizes her as the older girl in the photograph.

      “She’s getting dressed now,” the girl says.

      Edgerton nods. “What’s your name?”

      “Rayshawn.”

      “And you’re how old?”

      “Thirteen.”

      The detective looks again at the picture. The girl waits a few moments for another question; when none is forthcoming, she wanders back into the bedroom. Edgerton walks softly through the dining room and living room, then into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. The furnishings are spare, the furniture mismatched, and the living room sofa worn around the edges. But the place is well kept and clean—very clean, in fact. Edgerton notices that most of the shelf space is devoted to family photographs. In the kitchen, a child’s painting—big house, blue sky, smiling child, smiling dog—is taped to the refrigerator door. On the wall is a mimeographed list of school events and parent association meetings. Poverty, perhaps, but not desperation. Latonya Wallace lived in a home.

      The bedroom door opens and the mother, fully dressed and followed by her older daughter, steps into the hallway. She walks wearily through the dining room to the front closet.

      “Ready?” Edgerton asks.

      The woman nods, then pulls her coat from its hanger. Her boyfriend takes his own jacket. The thirteen-year-old hesitates at the closet door.

      “Where’s your coat?” her mother asks.

      “In my room, I think.”

      “Well, go find it,” she says softly. “It’s cold out.”

      Edgerton leads the procession from the apartment, then watches as the mother, boyfriend and sister squeeze into Ceruti’s Cavalier for the slow ride to Penn Street, where a silver gurney will be waiting in a tiled room.

      Meanwhile, on the southwestern edge of Reservoir Hill, Rich Garvey and Bob McAllister are tracing the last movements of Latonya Wallace. A report of the child’s disappearance had been filed by the family about 8:30 on the evening of February 2, two days earlier, but it read like dozens of other reports filed every month in Baltimore. The paperwork had not yet reached homicide, and any investigation had been limited to routine checks by the missing persons unit at Central District.

      The two detectives head first to Latonya’s school to interview the principal, several teachers, and a nine-year-old playmate of the victim as well as the playmate’s mother, who had both seen Latonya on the afternoon of her disappearance. The interviews confirm the substance of the missing persons report:

      On the afternoon of Tuesday, February 2, Latonya Wallace returned home from Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School. She arrived about three o’clock and left the house less than a half hour later with her blue bookbag, telling her mother she wanted to visit the city library branch on Park Avenue, about four blocks from the family apartment. Latonya then walked to the building next door, knocking on the door of the playmate’s apartment to see if she, too, wanted to go to the library. When the younger girl’s mother decided to keep her daughter home, Latonya Wallace set out on her own.

      Garvey and McAllister pick up the chronology at the Park Avenue library branch, where the afternoon librarian remembers the visit by the girl in the red raincoat. The librarian recalls that the child stayed only a few minutes, picking out a series of books almost at random, giving little or no thought to the titles or subjects. Thinking back, the librarian also tells the detectives that the young girl had seemed preoccupied or troubled, and had paused in thought at the library door just before leaving.

      Then Latonya Wallace carried her bookbag into the daytime bustle of a Baltimore street and vanished, her passing unseen by any known witness. The child had remained hidden for a day and a half before being dumped in that back alley. Where she had been taken, where she had stayed for more than thirty-six hours—the primary crime scene—was still not known. The detectives would begin their pursuit of Latonya Wallace’s killer with little more physical evidence than the body itself.

      Indeed, that is where Tom Pellegrini begins. He and Jay Landsman wait in the basement autopsy room of the medical examiner’s offices on Penn Street, watching the cutters extract cold, clinical data from the earthly remains of Latonya Wallace. The facts initially seem to suggest a prolonged abduction: The victim’s stomach is determined to contain one fully digested meal of spaghetti and meatballs followed by a partially digested meal of hot dogs and a shredded, stringy substance believed to be sauerkraut. A detective calls the school cafeteria and is told that the lunch menu on February 2 was spaghetti, and yet Latonya Wallace did not eat anything at home before heading for the library later that afternoon. Had the murderer kept the child alive long enough to provide her with a last meal?

      As the detectives stand at the edge of the autopsy room and confer with the medical examiners, Pellegrini’s foreboding at the crime scene begins to take solid form: Newington Avenue had indeed been cleared too soon. At least one piece of СКАЧАТЬ