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Worden and his partner, Rick James, arrived at the scene minutes later, looked over the dead man, talked with the Central District sergeant and then inspected Pedrick’s service revolver. One round spent. The patrolman was relieved of the weapon and taken to the homicide unit, where he acknowledged that he had fired one shot but declined to make any other statement until he had talked with a police union lawyer. Worden knew what that meant.
A union lawyer has a standard response to a detective’s request to interview a police officer as part of a criminal investigation. If ordered to do so, the officer will submit a report explaining his actions during a shooting incident; otherwise, he will make no statement. Because when such a report is written in response to a direct order, it ca
For twelve hours, the Monroe Street investigation was certainty and cohesion, and it would have remained so except for one critical fact: Officer Pedrick did not shoot John Randolph Scott.
On the morning after the shooting, the medical examiner’s attendants undressed Scott’s body and found a spent.38 slug still lodged in the bloody clothing. That bullet was compared by the ballistics lab later that afternoon, but it could not be matched with Pedrick’s revolver. In fact, the bullet that killed Scott was a 158-grain roundnose, a common type of Smith & Wesson ammunition that hadn’t been used by the police department in more than a decade.
Worden and several other detectives then returned to the scene of the pursuit and in daylight carefully searched the alley where Pedrick was believed to have fired his weapon. Picking through trash in that alley off Raynor Avenue, they found a mark in the pavement that appeared to have lead residue from a bullet ricochet. The detectives followed the likely trajectory of the slug across the alley and came to an adjacent lot where, incredibly, a resident was cleaning debris on that very morning. Of all the trash-strewn lots in all the ghettos in all the world, Worden thought, this guy’s gotta be cleaning ours. Just as the detectives were about to begin emptying every one of the half-dozen trash bags filled by West Baltimore’s last Good Samaritan, they discovered the spent.38 slug, still partially buried in the dirt lot. Ballistics then matched that bullet to Brian Pedrick’s weapon.
But if Pedrick wasn’t the shooter, who was?
Worden had no taste for the obvious answer. He was a cop and he had spent his adult life in the brotherhood of cops-in station houses and radio cars, in courthouse corridors and district lockups. He didn’t want to believe that someone wearing the uniform could be so stupid as to shoot someone and then run away, leaving the body in a back alley like any other murdering bastard. And yet he couldn’t turn away from the fact that John Randolph Scott was killed with a.38 slug while ru
Worden being Worden, he had done precisely that, compelling nearly two dozen police from three districts to submit their service revolvers to evidence control in exchange for replacement weapons. But for each.38 submitted, a corresponding ballistics report indicated that the fatal bullet had not come from this officer’s duty weapon. Another dead end.
Was a cop carrying a secondary weapon, another.38 that had since been thrown off some Canton pier? Or maybe the kid was ru
Worden and Rick James had recovered four of them at or near the victim’s body. One button appeared to have nothing to do with the victim; three were determined to be from the dead man’s shirt. Two of those buttons were found near the body and were bloodied; the third was found near the mouth of the alley. To Worden and James both, the torn buttons indicated that the victim had been grabbed in a struggle, and the presence of the button near the mouth of the alley suggested that the struggle had begun only a few feet from where the victim fell. More than a straight shooting by a civilian suspect, that scenario suggested an attempted street arrest, an effort to grab or halt the victim.
For Donald Worden, the death of John Randolph Scott had become a dirty piece of business, with each possible outcome more unsettling than the last.
If the murder remained unsolved, it would resemble a departmental cover-up. But if a cop was indicted, Worden and James would become, as the men responsible for the prosecution, pariahs to the people in patrol. Already, the police union lawyers were telling members not to talk to homicide, that the Crimes Against Persons section was synonymous with IID. How the hell would they work murders with patrol against them? But in some ways the third alternative, the slim possibility of civilian involvement-that John Randolph Scott was shot by a local while trying to break into a home or steal a second car to elude the pursuing officers-was the worst of all. Worden reasoned that if he ever came up with a civilian suspect, the brass would go out of their minds trying to sell it to the city’s political leadership, not to mention the powers-that-be in the black community. Well, Mr. Mayor, we thought the white officers chasing Mr. Scott may have done it, but now we’re pretty much convinced that a black guy from the 1000 block of Fulton Street is responsible.
Yeah. Sure. No problem.
Twenty-five years in the Baltimore Police Department and Donald Worden was now being asked to put the crown on his career by solving a case that could put cops in prison. In the begi
“Uh-oh, Worden be looking at that nasty file.”
Worden’s partner stands in the doorway of the coffee room, holding a piece of scratch paper. Rick James is ten years younger than Donald Worden and has neither his instincts nor his savvy, but then again, few people in this world do. Worden works with the younger detective because James can manage a homicide scene and write a good, coherent report, and for all his virtues, Donald Worden would rather eat his gun than sit at a typewriter for two hours. In his better moments, Worden regards James as a worthy project, an apprentice on whom to bestow the lessons of a quarter century of policing.