LITMIR.BIZ

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Ceruti, shoving one kid over a bureau.

      “What do you think?” asks a uniform, pushing another captive into a chair. “Is Momma gonna be upset to find you been huffing on a school night?”

      From the second-floor bedrooms comes the cacophony of cursing officers and screaming women, followed by more distant shouting from the third-floor rooms. In twos and threes, the occupants are roused from nearly a dozen bedrooms and marched down the wide, rotting stairwell in the center of the house—teenagers, small children, middle-aged women, grown men—until a full cast of twenty-three is assembled in the middle room.

      The crowded room is strangely silent. It is almost midnight and a dozen police are parading through the rowhouse, but the beleaguered population of 702 Newington asks no questions about the raid, as if they have reached that point when police raids no longer require reasons. Slowly, the group settles in sedimentary layers throughout the room: younger children lying in the center of the floor, teenagers standing or sitting on the periphery with their backs against the walls, older men and women on the sofa, chairs and around the battered dining room table. A full five minutes pass before an older, heavyset man, wearing blue boxer shorts and bathroom slippers, asks the obvious question: “What the hell you doing in my house?”

      Eddie Brown moves into the doorway, and the heavyset man gives him an appraising look. “You the man in charge?”

      “I’m one of them,” says Brown.

      “You got no right to come into my house.”

      “I got every right. I got a warrant.”

      “What warrant? What for?”

      “It’s a warrant signed by a judge.”

      “There ain’t no judge signing a warrant on me. I’ll go get a judge myself about you breakin’ into my home.”

      Brown smiles, indifferent.

      “Lemme see your warrant.”

      The detective waves him off. “When we’re done we’ll leave a copy.”

      “You ain’t got no damn warrant.”

      Brown shrugs and smiles again.

      “Cocksuckers.”

      Brown jerks his head up and stares hard at the man in the blue boxer shorts, but the only thing coming back is a look of abject denial.

      “Who the hell said that?” Brown demands.

      The man turns his head slowly, looking across the room at a much younger occupant, the kid in the gray sweatsuit who shouted the warnings earlier. He is leaning against the inside of the open hallway door, eyefucking Eddie Brown.

      “Did I hear you say something?”

      “I say what I want,” the kid says sullenly.

      Brown takes two steps into the room, yanks the kid off the door and drags him into the front hall. Ceruti and a Central District uniform step back to watch the show. Brown brings his face so close that there is nothing else in the kid’s universe, nothing else to think about but one aggravated, 6-foot-2, 220-pound police detective.

      “What do you have to say to me now?” Brown asks.

      “I didn’t say nothin’.”

      “Say it now.”

      “Man, I didn’t …”

      Brown’s face creases into a sardonic smile as he wordlessly drags the kid back across the threshold of the room, where two of the detail officers are already at work, taking names and dates of birth.

      “How long we got to sit like this?” asks the man in the blue boxer shorts.

      “Until we’re done,” says Brown.

      In a rear upstairs bedroom, Edgerton and Pellegrini are slowly, methodically, beginning to carve a path through rag piles and mildewed mattresses, paper trash and rancid food scraps, searching 702 Newington for the place where Latonya Kim Wallace was last alive.

      The search and seizure raid on the glue sniffers of 702 Newington is the latest corridor in the week-old investigation, the test of a theory that Pellegrini and Edgerton have been piecing together over the past two days. The fresh scenario makes sense out of those things about the murder that seem most senseless. In particular, the theory appears to explain, for the first time, why Latonya Wallace had been dumped behind the back door of 718 Newington. The placement of the body was so illogical, so bizarre, that any argument that could justify that location was enough to bring new direction to the probe.

      From the morning Latonya Wallace was found, every detective who had surveyed the death scene asked himself why the killer would risk carrying the child’s body into the fenced rear yard of 718 Newington, then deposit it within sight and hearing of the back door. If the murderer had, in fact, managed to enter the rear of Newington Avenue undetected, why not leave the body in the common alley and flee? For that matter, why not leave the body in a yard closer to either end of the block—the only points at which the killer could have entered the alley? And why, above all, would the killer risk entering the fenced yard of an occupied home, then carry the body 40 feet and deposit it so close to the rear door? Other yards were more accessible and three of the rowhouses that backed up to the alley were obviously vacant shells. Why risk being seen or heard by the residents of 718 Newington when the body could just as easily be left in the yard of a house where plywood covered the windows and no occupant would ever peer out to witness the act?

      Even before the old drunk from Newington Avenue had proven himself to be insufficient for murder, an answer began to take shape in the two detectives’ minds, an answer that dovetailed neatly with Landsman’s earliest theories.

      From the first day, Landsman contended that the murder had in all likelihood occurred in a house or garage close to where the body was dumped. Then, in the early morning hours, the murderer carried the dead child into the alley, laid her at the door of 718 and fled. Most likely, Landsman had argued, the crime scene was in one of the houses on Callow, Park or Newington avenues, which backed up on the alley from three sides. And if the crime scene was not in the immediate block, then it was at most a block in any direction; the detectives could not envision a murderer, an unconcealed body in his arms, wandering across several blocks of his neighborhood when, for disposal purposes, one alley was as good as another.

      There was, of course, a slim possibility that the murderer, fearful of driving very far with a dead girl’s body, had used a vehicle to bring the body a short distance to the alley behind Newington—a possibility that Landsman was considering in regard to the Fish Man, who lived blocks from the scene on Whitelock and therefore contradicted the working theory. One resident in 720 Newington had, in fact, told canvassing detectives that she had a vague memory of seeing headlights shine on her rear bedroom wall at four o’clock on the morning the body was discovered. But beyond that sleepy recollection, no resident recalled seeing a strange vehicle in the rear of Newington Avenue. In fact, with the exception of one man who often parked his Lincoln Continental in the rear yard of 716 Newington, no one could remember seeing any car or truck in the cramped back alley.

      The new gospel of the Latonya Wallace case—with Edgerton as its author and Pellegrini, his first convert—accepted all those earlier arguments and yet seemed to explain the strange, illogical placement of the body: The killer had not come through the alley. Nor had the child been carried through the premises of 718 Newington—the obvious alternative. The elderly couple who lived at that address and discovered the body were well accounted for and their home had been checked carefully by detectives. No one believed that they were involved, nor was it possible that the body could have been carried through the house without their knowledge.

      Only after looking at the scene from a dozen different angles did Edgerton seize on a third possibility: The killer had come from above.

      A week ago, when the body was discovered, several detectives had walked up and down the metal fire stair that began on the roof of 718 Newington and descended two flights to the back yard, ending a few feet from the kitchen door and

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