Homicide. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ thing to deal with.”

      “Well, I’m sorry you have to deal with it,” says Lanham. “I tried like hell to get Twigg to hold off on this thing and I thought he was gonna do that.”

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

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

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

      “Well,” Worden says, “I’d sure like to know who his source is.”

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

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

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

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

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

      “Fuck it, Donald,” James tells his partner, hanging his coat in the main office. “If you ask me, Doory should’ve done this weeks ago.”

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

      WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10

      The Fish Man comes to the door, fork in hand, wearing a worn flannel shirt and corduroy pants. His unshaven face is impassive.

      “Step back,” says Tom Pellegrini. “We’re coming in.”

      “Am I under arrest?”

      “No. We got a warrant for your place, though.”

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

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

      “Can I see it?” he asks.

      “See what?” says Landsman.

      “Your warrant. Can I see it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

      How much of a delay? Landsman asked.

      Up to twenty-four hours. Maybe more.

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

      To Pellegrini, it was unnerving that such basic assumptions made in the earliest hours of the case were still being questioned or knocked down by new information. It was as if СКАЧАТЬ