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murder at Gold and Etting—are still scattered in front of Tom Pellegrini, a coffee-logged wraith who stares vacantly at the first officer’s report, at supplementals, evidence submission slips, body custody and fingerprint forms for the person of Rudolph Newsome. Fifteen minutes either way and Pellegrini could have been dispatched to the Gatehouse Drive shooting, where a living victim and living witnesses were waiting to give up a murder and add one more to the list of clearances. Instead, Pellegriniwent to Gold and Etting, where a twenty-six-year-old dead man stared up at him with sudden, silent comprehension. Luck of the draw.
    After Landsman’s departure, Pellegrini works the edges of his little disaster for another ten hours—pulling the paperwork together, calling an assistant state’s attorney about a grand jury summons for the Thompson woman and submitting the victim’s effects to the evidence control unit in the basement of headquarters. Later that morning, a Western District patrolman calls the homicide unit about some corner boy who got locked up for drugs by the midnight shift and claimed to know about the Gold Street shooting. Seems the kid is willing to talk if he can make a lower bail on the drug charge. Pellegrini finishes his fifth cup of coffee before going back out to the Western to take a brief statement from the boy, who claims to have seen three men running north off Gold Street after hearing shots. The kid says he knows one of the men, but only by the name Joe—a statement just specific enough to match the true scenario, just vague enough to be of no practical use to the detective. Pellegrini wonders whether the kid was even there or whether he picked up what he could about the Gold Street murder while sitting in the lockup overnight, then did his best to turn the information around and try to barter out from under the drug charge.
    Back in homicide, the detective slips the notes from the interview inside the case file for H88013 and then slides the folder underneath the Roy Johnson file on the desk of the administrative lieutenant, who has come and gone on the eight-to-four shift. Good news before bad. Then Pellegrini gives a man on four-to-twelve the keys to his Cavalier and goes home. It is a little after 7:00 P.M .
    Four hours later, he’s back for the midnight shift, hovering like a moth around the red pilot light of the coffee machine. Pellegrini takes a full cup into the squadroom, where Landsman begins playing with him.
    “Hey, Phyllis,” says the sergeant.
    “Hey, Sarge.”
    “Your case is down, isn’t it?”
    “My case?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Which case would that be?”
    “The new one,” says Landsman. “From Gold Street.”
    “Well,” says Pellegrini, the words rolling out slowly, “I am ready to get a warrant.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hmmm,” says Landsman, blowing cigarette smoke at the television screen.
    “Only one problem, though.”
    “What’s that,” says the sergeant, now smiling.
    “I don’t know who the warrant is for.”
    Landsman laughs until the cigarette smoke makes him cough.
    “Don’t worry, Tom,” he says finally. “It’ll go down.”
    This is the job:
    You sit behind a government-issue metal desk on the sixth of ten floors in a gleaming, steel-frame death trap with poor ventilation, dysfunctional air conditioning, and enough free-floating asbestos to pad the devil’s own jumpsuit. You eat $2.50 pizza specials and Italian cold cuts with extra hots from Marco’s on Exeter Street while watching reruns of Hawaii Five-O on the communal nineteen-inch set with insubordinate horizontal hold. You answer the phone on the second or third bleat because Baltimore abandoned its AT&T equipment as a cost-saving measure and the new phone system doesn’t ring so much as it emits metallic, sheeplike sounds. If a police dispatcher is on the other end of the call, you write down an address, the time, and the dispatcher’s unit number on a piece of