Homicide (33 page)

The clearance rate for murders in Baltimore has been slipping for seven years, from 84 percent in 1981 to 73.5 percent registered in 1987. Fortunately for the careers of several commanders, at no point in the decade did the homicide unit ever post a solve rate lower than the national average for murder clearances, which has also fallen—from a high of 76 percent in 1984 to a low of 70 in 1987.

The Baltimore unit has maintained its rate both through good, solid police work and through a gentle manipulation of the clearance rate itself. Whoever declared that there are lies, damn lies and statistics could just as easily have granted law enforcement data a category unto itself. Anyone who ever spent more than a week in a police department’s planning and research section can tell you that a burglary clearance doesn’t mean that anyone was actually arrested, and that a posted increase in the crime rate can have less to do with criminal proclivity than with the department’s desire for a budget increase. The homicide clearance rate is equally vulnerable to subtle forms of manipulation—all of which are permitted under the FBI’s guidelines for uniform crime reporting.

Consider the fact that a case is regarded to be cleared whether it arrives at the grand jury or not. As long as someone is locked up—whether for a week or a month or a lifetime—that murder is down. If the charges are dropped at the arraignment for lack of evidence, if the grand jury refuses to indict, if the prosecutor decides to dismiss the case or place it on the inactive, or stet, docket, that murder is nonetheless carried on the books as a solved crime. Detectives have a tag line for such paper clearances: Stet ’em and forget ’em.

Consider, too, that the federal guidelines allow a department to carry a previous year’s clearance as a solved crime. This, of course, is as it should be: The mark of any good homicide unit is its ability to work back on open cases that are two, three or five years old; the clearance rate should reflect that persistence. On the other hand, the guidelines don’t
require departments to include the crime itself in the current year’s statistics; clearly, the crime itself actually occurred in a prior year. Theoretically therefore, an American homicide unit can solve 90 of 100 fresh murders, then clear twenty cases from previous years and post a clearance rate of 110 percent.

Such card-up-the-sleeve tactics make every year’s end an adventure in statistical brinksmanship. If the clearance rate is high enough, a shift commander or squad sergeant who knows his business can save an arrest on a December case until January to get a jump on the new year. Alternatively, if the clearance rate is a bit low, a commander might allow a two-or three-week grace period in which January clearances of December cases are credited to the prior year. The paper clearances and calendar tricks can give a homicide unit an extra 5 to 10 points on the sheet, but when the true solve rate takes a dive, no amount of statistical massage can help.

This was D’Addario’s predicament and, over the last twenty-four hours, bad had become worse. His detectives clocked five fresh murders—only one of which was a dunker. That case, Kincaid’s, featured a fifty-two-year-old man stretched out on the floor of a Fulton Avenue apartment. His skull had been crushed in an argument with a younger man, a boarder who used a steam iron to demonstrate the law of physics that allows no two objects to occupy the same space at the same instant. But things were not so tidy on the earlier midnight shift, when McAllister and Bowman caught a bludgeoning in the Northeast, only hours before Bowman learned that his shooting victim from three nights earlier had rolled a seven at University Hospital. There was no hint of a suspect in either case, and Fahlteich faced much the same problem later that same evening when he caught a fatal shooting off Wabash Avenue.

But all this was just a prelude to the one that really mattered: They’d found the body of another taxi driver in a wooded park on the city’s northwest edge. As the fifteenth murder of a cab driver in eight years, the beating death of a Checker Cab employee got the full red-ball treatment, not only because it looks bad for a city to permit an open season on its taxi drivers, but because the hack was a woman. Found nude from the waist down. Murdered. In Northwest Baltimore.

That made six dead women in that district since December, all of them unsolved. The Northwest murders were decidedly unrelated: two were rape-murders with markedly different characteristics, two were drug killings, one an apparent argument, and this latest a cab robbery and possible rape. But the string of open cases was beginning to attract news
paper headlines and therefore dead women in the Northwestern District had suddenly acquired real prestige with the department brass.

As if to acknowledge his sudden vulnerability, D’Addario himself went to the scene of the cabbie murder. So, too, did the captain. Not to mention the district commander from the Northwest and the police department’s chief spokesman. Donald Worden was off, but the rest of McLarney’s squad took the call, with Rick James as the primary and Eddie Brown as secondary investigator. Never mind that he would be without the Big Man on this call, James was a man who counted his overtime, and by that reckoning alone he was due for a fresh murder. For three weeks he had wallowed at his desk near the front of the office, cursing every phone extension, silently willing the communications unit to send him a major case, a red ball with many hours involved.

“Incoming … I got it,” he shouted time and again, grabbing every call on the first bleat. And then, in a mood blackened by poverty: “Edgerton, pick up line one. Sounds like your wife.”

The ancient Greeks were fond of saying that the gods punish a man most by answering his prayers, and on Powder Mill Road, James was saddled with a stone whodunit. Face down at the edge of a wooded trail was a black woman in her thirties, wearing only a brown jacket with “Checker Cab” and “Karen” on either side of the chest. There was no wallet, purse, or identification, although her shoes, pants and panties lay near the body. Three hours after she was discovered, a Baltimore County unit found Checker Cab 4 in a garden apartment parking lot in Owings Mills, six to eight miles west of the city line. Abandoned with its hazard lights flashing, the cab caught the attention of neighbors; when contacted, cab company officials confirmed that neither cab 4, nor its driver, Karen Renee Smith, had been seen or heard from since nine o’clock that morning. The positive ID followed soon after.

Nothing about the murder of Karen Smith resembled any of the previous Northwest killings, but to argue such subtleties in the face of a departmental mood swing is futility defined. Now, a day later, the colonel is calling in the troops, ordering special details for each of the open murders of Northwest women while trying to avoid suggesting a lack of confidence in the homicide unit. Within twenty-four hours, a dozen fresh uniforms and detectives from other CID sections will be assigned to homicide—two for each of the six primary investigators in the Northwest murders. The annex office interrogation room will be converted into a cramped command post of sorts, with maps and charts, photographs of
the victims, in and out boxes for the paperwork generated by the detail. Reward sheets for information on each of the murders will be printed for distribution in the neighborhoods near each crime scene.

The primary detectives are to use the extra manpower to generate new leads and run down any loose ends in the case files. They are to make the Northwest murders their first priority and, with a nod to a recent newspaper article that began the campaign by hinting at the possibility of a serial killer, they are to be especially vigilant for anything that might link these murders.

One of the six cases—the murder of Brenda Thompson, stabbed to death in the back of a Dodge in early January—runs into a conflicting priority: Latonya Wallace. Harry Edgerton is the primary detective in the Thompson murder, the secondary in the slaying of the little girl. As a result, the Thompson case is farmed out to Bertina Silver.

Edgerton and his sergeant, Roger Nolan, argue briefly with both D’Addario and the captain against the change, maintaining that it serves no purpose to change the primary detective in the middle of an investigation for the sake of creating some immediate activity. Edgerton knows the case file and the players, and most important, he has spent hours creating a working relationship with his best suspect, a young street dealer who sold for Brenda Thompson and owed her money. The kid has already been willing to subject himself to a couple of long interrogations. Edgerton argues that the Thompson murder is already two months old, and anything the special detail may do now can just as easily be done two or three or four weeks down the road, after the Latonya Wallace case has resolved itself.

Edgerton has on his side the prevailing wisdom and tradition of the homicide unit, both of which argue that no one can know a murder as well as the detective who handles the scene and its aftermath. The bosses, however, are adamant. A police department is a reactive beast, and with the newspapers and television both crowing about the possibility of multiple murders in the Northwest, tradition and wisdom are both being sold off at basement prices. The Thompson case goes to Bert Silver.

In happier times, Edgerton might have appealed personally to D’Addario, but now that the lieutenant has problems of his own, that appeal would be pointless. Latonya Wallace, the subterranean clearance rate, the Northwest murders—any and all are reason enough for D’Addario to feel vulnerable. Already there has been one meeting with the colonel and Deputy Mullen on the Latonya Wallace detail, an hour-long summary in
which Jay Landsman outlined the efforts undertaken by the detectives and then fielded questions until the bosses seemed mollified. The meeting was a seamless piece of departmental politics, but D’Addario has to know that unless the solve rate rises, Landsman’s performance is no more than a temporary reprieve.

If D’Addario had stayed tight with the captain, the threat wouldn’t be so severe. Lately, however, a conflict that had been percolating for months has suddenly come to full boil. Simply put, the captain doesn’t want D’Addario as one of his shift lieutenants; to D’Addario, the decision to bypass him on the Monroe Street probe said as much. And now, with his solve rate so low, the captain has leverage with which he can press the point—unless D’Addario can, like a cat with a canary locked in its jaw, go to the colonel with a fresh victory in one of the major cases, or at least a hint that the solve rate is turning around. It matters not at all that D’Addario has done the job for eight years; the consciousness of the command staff rarely strays beyond the latest red ball and as a result, the departmental hierarchy often expresses itself in that timeless query of practical politics: What have you done for me lately?

If the rate is good, if the red balls fall, it doesn’t matter how D’Addario runs his shift. You say your detectives and sergeants are told to follow their own judgment on cases? Obviously, a fine example of a leader emphasizing confidence and responsibility. You say you leave it to the sergeants to train and discipline their men? Obviously, a man who knows the value of delegated responsibility. You say your overtime is running 90 percent over budget? That’s fine, you’ve got to break some eggs for that omelette. Court time, too? Well, that just proves that more of these murders are going to trial. But let the rate slip and the lieutenant’s image is suddenly transformed into that of a man incapable of directing and disciplining his men, a commander who leaves too much in the hands of his subordinates, a manager who can’t control his budget.

On the midnight shift just before the colonel’s brief oratory, five or six detectives were adrift in the admin office, floating on a sea of paperwork from the fresh spate of open murders. Eddie Brown, James, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Nolan—a fair cross section, a gathering of veterans who had all seen both good times and bad in the homicide unit. Inevitably, the talk turned to whether this year would really turn out any worse. Some argued that it always evened out, that for every stretch of stone whodunits there was a supply of dunkers waiting to take up the slack. Others pointed out that the rate would be higher if the shift had bothered to save a few
December clearances to pump up the current year’s stats. But for all of their talk, none of the detectives could remember a rate as low as 36 percent.

“And I’ll tell you something,” said Fahlteich, “I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

“Oh, it’s going to get a helluva lot worse,” Nolan agreed. “We’ve been coasting around here for a long time and now it’s catching up to us.”

Suddenly no one in the room was typing or collating anymore as voices competed with one another in a recitation of longstanding grievances. They complained about the equipment, about cars without radios and about a major urban department that still doesn’t provide a polygraph examiner suitable for criminal investigations, requiring detectives to use the state police facilities. They complained about the cutbacks in overtime, about the department’s reluctance to pay for pretrial preparation so that good cases wouldn’t come unglued in the months between arrest and trial. They complained about the lack of money to pay informants and, consequently, the lack of informants. They complained about the inability of the trace and ballistics labs to keep up with the violence, about how the state’s attorney’s office no longer charged anyone with perjury when they lied to a grand jury, about how too many prosecutors allowed witnesses to back up on their grand jury testimony. They complained about the growing number of drug-related murders, about how the days of the domestic dunker and 90-plus clearance rates were long gone. They complained that the phone didn’t ring the way it used to after a murder, that fewer people were willing to drop a dime and risk becoming a witness to an act of violence.

As a bitch-and-moan session, it was entirely satisfying. After a good forty minutes, the group was still thumping on dead horseflesh: “Look at Washington,” said Brown. “That ain’t but thirty miles away from us.”

For a police detective, a detail with the District of Columbia’s homicide unit had suddenly become synonymous with being assigned to hell itself. Washington was well on the way to becoming the U.S. murder capital in 1988; only two years earlier, the capital and Baltimore had posted similar rates and fought for whatever distinction comes with being the nation’s tenth deadliest city. Now, in the wake of a cocaine epidemic and a series of Jamaican drug wars in the capital’s Northeast and Southeast quadrants, the District’s police department was contending with an incidence of homicide double that of Baltimore. As a result, Washington’s homicide squad—once one of the best-trained investigative units in the nation—was now posting a clearance rate in the low 40s. Awash in a del
uge of violence, there was no time for follow-up investigation, no time for pretrial preparation, no time for anything but picking up bodies. From what the Baltimore detectives gathered in passing encounters, morale in the D.C. unit was nonexistent.