A half hour later, Worden is rechecking Derrick Allen’s bedroom and finds a hole in a back window and a spent bullet on an outside rear porch. He shows the slug and the window to the sixteen-year-old brother.

The kid shrugs. “I guess Derrick got shot in his room.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“Don’t know about no gun.”

It is a God-given truth: Everyone lies. And this most basic of axioms has three corollaries:

A. Murderers lie because they have to.

B. Witnesses and other participants lie because they think they have to.

C. Everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it, and to uphold a general principle that under no circumstances do you provide accurate information to a cop.

Derrick’s brother is living proof of the second corollary. A witness lies to protect friends and relatives, even those who have wantonly shed blood. He lies to deny his involvement in drugs. He lies to hide the fact that he has prior arrests or that he is secretly homosexual, or that he even knew the victim. Most of all, he lies to distance himself from the murder and the possibility that he may one day have to testify in court. In Baltimore, a cop asks you what you saw and the requisite reply, an involuntary motor skill bred into the urban population over generations, is delivered with a slow shake of the head and an averted stare:

“I ain’t seen nothing.”

“You were standing next to the guy.”

“I ain’t seen nothing.”

Everyone lies.

Worden gives the kid one last, steady look.

“Your brother was shot in this room with a gun that he was playing with. Why don’t we get that gun out of the house?”

The teenager barely misses a beat.

“I don’t know about no gun.”

Worden shakes his head. He could call for the crime lab and spend a couple hours tearing the place apart in a search for the damn thing; if it were a murder, he’d be doing just that. But for an accidental shooting, what’s the point? Pull a gun out of this house and there’ll be another in its place by the end of the week.

“Your brother’s in the hospital,” say Worden. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

The kid looks at the floor.

Fine, thinks Worden. I tried. I gave it a shot. So now keep the goddamn gun as a souvenir, and when you’ve shot yourself in the leg or put a round through little sister, you can call us again. Why, thinks Worden, should I waste time on your bullshit when there are people waiting in line to lie to me? Why hunt for your $20 pistol when I’ve got the quagmire that is Monroe Street on my desk?

Worden drives back to the office empty-handed, his mood even darker than before.

On the long wall of the coffee room hangs a large rectangle of white paper, running most of the room’s length. It is covered by acetate and divided by black rules into six sections.

Above the three right-hand sections is a letterplate bearing the name of Lieutenant Robert Stanton, who commands the homicide unit’s second shift. To the immediate left, below the name of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario, are the three remaining sections. Underneath the nameplates of the two lieutenants, affixed to the top of each section, is the name of a detective sergeant: McLarney, Landsman and Nolan for D’Addario’s shift: Childs, Lamartina and Barrick for Stanton ’s command.

Below each sergeant’s nameplate are brief listings of dead people, the first homicide victims of the year’s first month. The names of victims in closed cases are written in black felt marker; the names of victims in open investigations, in red. To the left of each victim’s name is a case number-88001 for the year’s first murder, 88002 for the second, and so on. To the right of each victim’s name is a letter or letters-A for Bowman, B for Garvey, C for McAllister-which correspond to the names of the assigned detectives listed at the bottom of each section.

A sergeant or lieutenant trying to match a homicide with its primary detective, or the reverse, can scan the sections of the white rectangle and in a matter of moments determine that Tom Pellegrini is working the murder of Rudy Newsome. He can also determine, by noting that Newsome’s name is in red ink, that the case is still open. For this reason, supervisors in the homicide unit regard the white rectangle as an instrument necessary to assure accountability and clerical precision. For this reason, too, detectives in the unit regard the rectangle as an affliction, an unforgiving creation that has endured far beyond the expectations of the now-retired sergeants and long-dead lieutenants who created it. The detectives call it, simply, the board.

In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, shift commander Lieutenant Gary D’Addario-otherwise known to his men as Dee, LTD, or simply as His Eminence-can approach the board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun god, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his three sergeants has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. He can further check the coded letters beside the name of each case and make the same determination about his fifteen detectives. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug assassination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car.

The board that today greets the shift lieutenant is a wretched, bloody piece of work, with most of the names etched beneath D’Addario’s sergeants written in red. Stanton ’s shift began the new year at midnight, catching five murders in the early hours of January 1. Of those cases, however, all but one were the result of drunken arguments and accidental shootings, and all but one are in the black. Then, a week later, came the shift change, with Stanton ’s men going to daywork and D’Addario’s crew taking over on the four-to-twelve and midnight shifts and catching their first cases of the year. Nolan’s squad took the first murder for the shift on January 10, a drug-related robbery in which the victim was found stabbed to death in the back seat of a Dodge. McLarney’s squad picked up a whodunit the same night when a middle-aged homosexual was shotgunned as he opened his apartment door in lower Charles Village. Then Fahlteich caught the first murder of the year for Landsman’s squad, a robbery beating in Rognel Heights with no suspects, after which McAllister broke up the red ink with an easy arrest on Dillon Street, where a fifteen-year-old white kid was stabbed in the heart over a $20 drug debt.

But the murders were all wide open the following week, with Eddie Brown and Waltemeyer arriving at a Walbrook Junction apartment house to find Kenny Vines stretched out on his stomach in a first-floor hallway, a red puddle of wetness where his right eye used to be. Brown didn’t recognize the corpse at first, though he actually knew the forty-eight-yearold Vines from years back; hell, everyone who ever worked the west side knew Kenny Vines. The owner of a Bloomingdale Road body shop, Vines had for years been deep into numbers and stolen auto parts, but it was only when he started to move a lot of cocaine that he began making serious enemies. The Vines case was followed two nights later by Rudy Newsome and Roy Johnson, the split decision for Landsman’s crew, which was followed in turn by a double murder on Luzerne Street, where a gunman broke into a stash house in a dispute over drug territory and began firing wildly, killing two and wounding two more. Naturally, the survivors didn’t care to remember much.