wife had it.”
“Is the crime lab on the way?”
“My sergeant called them.”
“How about the medical examiner?”
“Lemme check on that,” says the officer, walking outside to key his radio. Edgerton throws his notepad on the dining room table and pulls off his overcoat.
He does not move directly toward the body but instead walks around the perimeter of the living room, looking along the floor, walls and furniture. For Edgerton, it has become second nature to begin at the periphery of the crime scene, moving toward the body in a slowly shrinking circle. It is a method born of the same instinct that allows a detective to walk into a room and spend ten minutes filling a notepad with raw data before taking a serious look at the corpse. It takes a few months for every detective to learn that the body is going to be there, stationary and intact, for as long as it takes to process the crime scene. But the scene itself—whether it happens to be a street corner, automobile interior or living room—begins to deteriorate as soon as the first person finds the body. Any homicide detective with more than a year’s experience has already collected one or two stories about uniformed men walking through blood trails or handling weapons found at a murder scene. And not just the uniforms: More than once a Baltimore homicide detective has arrived at a shooting scene to discover some major or colonel wandering through a fresh scene, pawing the shell casings or going through a victim’s wallet in a determined effort to put prints on every conceivable bit of evidence.
Rule Number Two in the homicide lexicon: The victim is killed once, but a crime scene can be murdered a thousand times.
Edgerton marks the direction of spatter from the body, reassuring himself that the spray of blood and brain matter is consistent with a single wound to the head. The long white wall behind the sofa and to the dead man’s right is marred by one red-pink arc extending upward from a half foot above the victim’s head to nearly eye level at the front door frame. It is a long, curled finger of individual spatters that seems to point, in its final trajectory, toward the piece of ear near the welcome mat. A smaller arc extends across the top cushions of the sofa. In the small space between the sofa and the wall, Edgerton finds a few shards of skull and, on the floor just below the dead man’s right side, much of what had once occupied the victim’s head.
The detective looks closely at several of the individual spatters and satisfies himself that the blood spray is consistent with a single wound, fired upwards, into the left temple. The calculation is a matter of simple physics: A blood droplet that strikes a surface from a 90-degree angle should be symmetrical, with tentacles or fingers of equal length extending in any and every direction; a droplet that strikes a surface at an odd angle will dry with the longest tentacles pointing in a direction opposite the source of the blood. In the case at hand, a blood trail or spatter with tentacles pointing in any direction other than from the victim’s head would be hard to explain.
“Okay,” says the detective, pushing back the coffee table to stand directly in front of the victim. “Let’s see what you’re about.”
The dead man is nude, his lower half wrapped in a checkered blanket. He is seated in the center of the couch, with what remains of his head resting on the back of the sofa. The left eye stares at the ceiling; gravity has pulled the other deep into its socket.
“That’s his federal tax form on the table,” says the red-faced uniform, pointing to the coffee table.
“Oh yeah?”
“Check it out.”
Edgerton looks down at the coffee table and sees the familiar cover page of a 1040.
“Those things drive me crazy, too,” says the uniform. “I guess he just lost his head.”
Edgerton moans loudly. It is still too early in the day for unchecked constabulary wit.
“He musta been itemizing.”
“Police,” Edgerton repeats, “are sick fucks.”
He looks at the shotgun between the victim’s legs. The 12-gauge is resting with its stock on the floor, barrel upward, with the victim’s left forearm resting on the upper barrel. The detective gives the weapon a once-over, but the crime lab will need a photograph, so he leaves the gun resting between the victim’s legs. He takes the dead man’s hands in his own. Still warm. Edgerton convinces himself that death was recent by manipulating the ends of the fingers. Every now and then, some irate husband or wife wins the argument by shooting the significant other and then spends three or four hours wondering what to do next. By the time they seize on the notion of staging a suicide, the victim’s body temperature has dropped and rigor mortis is evident in the shorter facial and finger muscles. Edgerton has had cases where the killers caused themselves much useless aggravation by attempting to push the rigid fingers of the not so recently departed inside the trigger guard of a weapon, an effort that fairly screams foul play by giving the body the appearance of a department store mannequin with a prop glued to its ungrasping hand. But Robert William Smith is one very fresh piece of meat.
Edgerton puts pen to paper: “V. braced gun between legs … muzzle to right cheek … large GSW to right side head. Warm to touch. No rigor.”
Both uniforms watch as Edgerton pulls on his overcoat and deposits the notepad in an outside pocket.
“You’re not staying for the crime lab?”
“Well, I’d love to but …”
“We’re boring you, aren’t we?”
“What can I say?” says Edgerton, his voice dropping to something approximating a matinee idol baritone. “My work here is done.”
The red-faced officer laughs.
“When the guy gets here, tell him I just need photos of this room, and tell him to get a good shot of the guy with the gun between his legs. We’re going to want to take the gun and that green sheet.”
“The discharge papers?”
“Yeah, that goes downtown. What about securing this place? Is the wife coming back?”
“She was pretty messed up when they took her out of here. I guess we’ll find a way to lock the place up.”
“Yeah, good.”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“No problem.”
Edgerton looks over at the female uniform, still seated at the dining room table.
“How’s your report coming?”
“It’s done,” she says, holding up the face sheet. “Do you want to see it?”
“No, I’m sure it’s fine,” says Edgerton, knowing a sector sergeant will review it. “How do you like the job so far?”
The woman looks first at the dead man, then at the detective. “It’s okay.”
Edgerton nods, waves to the red-faced officer and walks out, this time carefully sidestepping the ear.
Fifteen minutes later, he is at a typewriter in the homicide unit’s administrative office, converting the contents of three notepad pages into a single-page 24-hour crime report, Criminal Investigation Division form 78/151. Even with Edgerton’s hunt-and-peck typing skills, the details of Robert William Smith’s terminus are condensed to a manageable memorandum in little more than a quarter hour. Case folders are the essential documentation for homicides, but the 24-hour reports become the paper trail for the activities of the entire Crimes Against Persons section. By checking the log containing the twenty-fours, a detective can quickly familiarize himself with every ongoing case. For each incident, there is a corresponding one-or two-page missive with a brief, declarative heading, and a detective flipping through the log can look at those headings for a complete chronological account of Baltimore’s violence:
“… shooting, shooting, questionable