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“Everything has gone to extremes,” says D.C. Homicide detective V.I. Smith. Follow him into the front-line trenches, at a time when Washington was known as the Homicide Capital of the nation, and you quickly see what he means—and understand the deadening weight of his sadness.

A MAN GOES 22 YEARS without being afraid, without giving his own death a glance, without worrying that the map of the city’s criminal ways and rhythms that he has always carried in his head might be obsolete. A man goes 22 years climbing the ladder from beat cop to blue-boy elite, to homicide detective. A man goes 22 years to earn a reputation as a “90 percenter”—a detective who puts the souls of nearly all his victims to rest by closing the book on their murders. A man goes 22 years, and then the waters he inhabits shift and roil with unpredictable currents, until murder isn’t murder anymore, isn’t a biblical sentence that friends and lovers and fathers and sons impose on each other in storms of rage and recrimination. A man goes 22 years and finds himself leaning casually over a corpse on Halley Terrace in Southeast Washington, about to be made aware. That man—Detective Victor “V.I.” Smith—flips back the dead man’s coat and sees a blue-black machine gun, an Uzi, cocked and ready to fire.

Detective V.I. Smith is fearless, at least his police buddies think he’s fearless. He has waltzed into Barry Farms, one of the roughest housing projects in Washington, at 4 in the morning, disappeared for an hour and returned with his suspect in tow. He has raided crack houses alone, lined up the drug heads and sweated them for reconnaissance on the spot. V.I.’s cop friends can’t imagine him being afraid of anything. But tonight, after Halley Terrace, V.I. talks and talks about his shock at seeing that Uzi. About how six of his last seven murder victims have been packing guns. He doesn’t reveal it to his comrades, but V.I. realizes that for the first time in 22 years as a Washington cop, he was afraid. Oh, maybe he’d been afraid before and hadn’t realized it, imagined his feeling was excitement or readiness or the flow of adrenaline. But there’s no mistaking or denying the emotion that surged through V.I. Smith on Halley Terrace tonight: It was fear.

Two years later . . . everything squeaks. The heavy doors squeak. The metal swivel chairs squeak. The drawers in the metal desks squeak. The file drawers squeak. The keys of the old manual upright squeak. The room—No. 5058, dubbed Homicide North because it is isolated two floors above D.C.’s other homicide offices in the city’s Municipal Center—is a concerto of squeaks. Its other noises—the hollering voices, the clamoring phones, the electric typewriters, Gilligan’s Island laugh-tracking on the beat-up TV, the two coffeepots spitting mud, the hand-held walkie-talkies belching static—all add layer upon layer of volume, creating finally a kind of jangled symphony.

What will stop this din and turn the entire room of nine men prayerfully silent are three words their ears are tuned to as if they were set on a private frequency: “stabbing” or “shooting” or “homicide.” When the police radio dispatcher speaks any of these words, everything stops, hands reach for tiny volume knobs on radios and everybody waits. Usually, it’s a false alarm and, just as abruptly, the noise once again envelops the momentary silence like a stadium cheer after the crack of a long ball.

The men in Homicide North are tonight “on the bubble”—cop talk meaning that their squad of detectives is on call to investigate the city’s next murder. Detective Jeff Mayberry, a short, wiry, close-cropped, jet-propelled 34-year-old in a tight blue sports coat, is riding the top of the bubble in his rotation as lead investigator on whatever horror is next offered up from the bowels of the city. He has ridden the bubble aloft for four duty days now—and no murder. At least none on his 3-to-11 shift.

“You believe it?” he asks in frustration. No murder in a town that sees almost four murders every three days!”

“You’re bad luck,” comes the rejoinder of his partner, Joe Fox, a respected and bearded 41-year-old bear of a detective who has a compulsive squint that constantly edges his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. He is called neither “Joe” nor “Fox.” He is called “Joefox.”

“Screw you, Joefox,” Mayberry says.

Seated at the end of a row of desks in a corner under a wash of fluorescent light in front of pale curtains that hang off their track is V.I. Smith, looking out of place in this seedy domain. At age 46, he’s quiet and self-contained, talking softly into the receiver of the old phone atop his desk, which isn’t unkempt like most of the others. He’s chatting with a woman who lives on W Street NW. She has been peeking out her window tonight to see if the drug boys V.I. wants to bust and shake down for tips about a recent murder are hanging on the street. They aren’t.

Leaning on his elbows at his desk, talking into the phone, V.I. looks less like a tough city cop than, say, a prosecuting attorney or an FBI agent. He’s 6 feet 4. Naked on the scale, he goes a trim and powerful 230, only 10 pounds over the weight he carried as a freshman basketball star at Howard University nearly three decades ago.

His face is wide and handsome, chiseled. It smiles rarely. In temperament, V.I. is terminally cool, never nervous or edgy. The more excited he gets, the more deliberately he speaks. And the more deliberately he speaks, the more trouble whomever he’s speaking to is probably in. Even V.I.’s laugh is deliberate, with each “hah” in his slow “hah-hah-hah” being fully enunciated. In dress and style, he resembles a new-breed jazz player: His hair and mustache are short and neat, his shirt is crisp, his tie is knotted tightly and never yanked loose at his neck, and his suit, usually bought at Raleigh’s, is always well-tailored and never cheap. Unlike some of his detective pals, V.I. would never wear brown shoes with a blue suit. He dresses to the nines because, having grown up on the streets of Black Washington, he knows that a man who dresses well is ascribed a dose of respect in that world, and every small advantage counts, especially these days.

The guys in the office call V.I. “the Ghost “because they rarely know what he’s doing from minute to minute. With his reputation as one of Washington’s best homicide detectives, V.I. comes and goes at Room 5058 pretty much as he pleases. But if the radio calls out a murder, he’s on the scene, appearing as if from nowhere, like an apparition. Of Washington’s 65 homicide detectives, V.I. Smith figures he’s the only one without a regular partner. That’s because Joefox, who came with V.I. to homicide seven years ago on the same cold Tuesday in February, used to be his partner, until the green and gung-ho Mayberry arrived from uniform four years ago and was assigned to Joefox for diapering.

Joefox and V.I. eventually took the kid aside and told him how it was going to be: The three of them would be partners, meaning that any one man’s case was also the case of the other two. If Mayberry listened and studied and showed respect, he would learn the art and science of unraveling the darkest of human behaviors from two of the masters. And that’s how it came down, with Mayberry now a fine detective in his own right. So when Mayberry is riding the bubble, Joefox and the Ghost are riding with him.

When the bubble seems to burst tonight, it’s no thriller. A man named Willis Fields, who lived in a Washington boarding house, died at the Washington Hospital Center burn unit today, and the death was passed on to Detective C.J. Thomas, whose job it is to investigate and certify natural deaths. But in the hospital file he discovered that the 56-year-old man had told a nurse that “they” had poured alcohol on him and set him afire. Willis Fields was in the hospital 10 days, but his story fell through the cracks. Nobody called the police about his allegation, which means the inquiry will start nearly two weeks cold, no leads, only an address.

“C.J., why is it every one a these things you do, you always get us?” asks Mayberry. “Remember that guy on Suitland Parkway? Been there two years? Six shots to the head?”

“And what did you tell me?” C.J. asks.

“Man, that’s a natural!”

“Well, here we go,” says V.I., in his smooth, lyrical baritone as he palms a radio, unconsciously pats his right breast coat pocket for evidence of his ID wallet, pats his left breast coat pocket for evidence of his notebook, and heads out the door in his athlete’s saunter, a stylized and liquid stroll, a modern cakewalk.

The address for Willis Fields is wrong—2119 11th St. NW is a vacant lot. “They probably got it turned around,” V.I. says, as the threesome mills about the grassy lot, looking lamely around, shrugging. It’s just before dusk and the hot summer day has begun to cool, but except for a man staring at them intently from the sidewalk in front of the Soul Saving Center Church of God across the street, the block is empty of people, quiet.

V.I. knows this neighborhood. He spent years living nearby as a kid, attending Garnet-Patterson Junior High over at 10th and U streets, Bell High School at Hiatt Place and Park Road and Cardozo High just up the hill at 13th and Clifton streets. This block of 11th Street isn’t Beverly Hills, but it’s a stable block that doesn’t fit V.I.’s image of the crime at hand. An old man is more likely to be set on fire on a block where guys hang out drinking liquor, where there’s a lot of street action. He nods down the road. That sounds more like the block back at 11th and U, with a corner market and a liquor store nearby. Sure enough, when the office checks the address the detectives were given, it’s wrong. Willis Fields lived at 1929—near the corner of 11th and U.

When the men arrive at Rhode Island Avenue and Brentwood Road NE, the scene, as it always does, seems not real, somehow outside of time and place, like a page brought to life from a paperback novel: The shooting ground is cordoned off in a triangle of yellow plastic tape (POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS), and squad cars and cruisers are parked every which way, as if they’d landed as randomly as dice thrown in a tornado’s game of craps. The crowd of mostly women and youngsters is congregated in the vague and dreamy light of street lamps beneath huge and gnarled trees in the scrub-grass yard of the L-shaped Brookland Manor apartments. A police helicopter flutters overhead, its searchlight scanning a block nearby. The cops know this stretch of Rhode Island as a drug market, and that’s the first scenario V.I.’s mind starts to build. One shot, large caliber left side of the head. That’s all he knows.

V.I. steps into the triangle and begins to think in the language of the scene before him. On the sidewalk begins the pool of blood, not red, but a thick, syrupy black. The blood has cascaded over the curb and run southwest with gravity for about five feet, where a pile of leaves and debris has dammed its flow. The young man who was shot was alive when the ambulance left, but this is a large pool of blood, and V.I. figures Mayberry is off the bubble. On the sidewalk is a footprint in blood. Could be that of the victim, the shooter, a witness, a passerby, an ambulance attendant. A few feet away is a lonely quarter, heads up. On a waist-high embankment, where the sidewalk meets the yard about six feet from the street, stand a Mountain Dew bottle and a can of Red Bull malt liquor.

The details seem trivial, but a homicide detective’s life is a sea of details, a collage of unconnected dots gathered and collated. In the end, most will turn out to be insignificant. But at the time, a detective cannot know the revelatory from the inconsequential. He must try to see them all, then hold them in his mind in abeyance until the few details that matter rise forth from the ocean to reveal themselves. V.I. begins to link the dots in the scene before him. For instance, a man who is shot at such close range was either hit by someone he trusted or by someone who sneaked up on him. Maybe the Mountain Dew and the Red Bull belonged to the victim and to one of his friends, who were sitting on the embankment looking toward the street, talking, laughing. From the darkened yard behind them the shooter moved in. The victim fell forward, his head landing at the curb and spurting blood with each heartbeat. His buddy bolted. If the dots are connected correctly, that buddy is a witness. If not, he could be the shooter.

Suddenly, from the crowd in the dreamy light on the scrub-grass yard, comes a long, awful scream. In five seconds, it comes again. And then a woman runs wildly through the crowd, crashing into people as she goes. She disappears into a door at the elbow of the L-shaped Brookland Manor. On the chance that this might be a drug-boy shooting, V.I., Mayberry and Joefox will not wander through the crowd or canvass the apartments looking for witnesses tonight. Until a few years ago, it was virtually unheard of for witnesses to be killed, but today they are crossed off like bad debts. Witnesses know it, cops know it, shooters know it. It’s simply too dangerous for witnesses to be seen talking to the cops after a shooting, especially at night when the drug boys are out. V.I. plans to return tomorrow afternoon to do his canvass. But after hearing the woman scream, he invokes another law of experience: “You get people cryin’, they gonna tell ya somethin’.”

With this in mind, V.I. saunters toward the door at the building’s elbow and the crowd parts and murmurs as he passes. On the darkened stairs up to the second floor, a place filled with the smells of a dozen dinners cooking, he finds the woman’s mother, who says her daughter knew the victim but doesn’t want to talk to the police. V.I. doesn’t push. He gets the daughter’s name, her apartment number. One of the problems these days is that victims and suspects are usually known on the streets only by nicknames that the cops don’t know. So V.I. asks if the victim had a nickname. The mother says, “K.K.”