The Killing Fields

This was more than Webb could take. "It's not a lack of manpower -- it's a lack of effort," she says darkly. "I have no faith that my son's case is gonna ever get solved."

She has tried channeling her fury into something positive. Last year, she gave away Thanksgiving turkey baskets in the neighborhood where he died. This year, hoping that people with information about the murder might be more likely to talk to friendly faces, she organized a community event with clowns for the kids and fatherhood counseling booths for dads.

On a recent Sunday, just before the anniversary of Devin's death, she called Detective Smith again.

"What do you want from us?" he asked.

Webb launched into her tirade. Devin's case isn't getting solved because his pigmentation was the wrong color, and he was a drug dealer. "It's black-on-black crime, and who cares?" she said.

The detective hung up.

It kills Smith to hear this. He grew up on the same street where kids now trade bullets. He's raised four daughters on the East Side, in a neighborhood where groups of young men eye every unfamiliar car with suspicion, their restlessness lingering like a curse in the air. There's nothing he'd like more than to take down another killer.

"I'm a black man, sweetheart," he says. "I'm a homicide detective. I believe what I do."

Slight and lean, like a boxer trained into the lowest possible weight class, Smith is not the kind of man whose dedication you question. A shaved head and the glint of a stud in one ear give him a Bruce Lee kind of authority. He speaks in a soothing tone that is at once wise and weary, burdened by knowledge he'd rather shield from the rest of us.

He has spent his life interrogating scumbags, chasing bullets, explaining to stricken parents that their children are dead. Yet grieving families still present a particular kind of torture.

They call every day, wanting to hear results. Having learned from CSI: Miami that every case can be solved in an hour, these families are certain you're not doing your job.

"They will beat you into the ground," Smith says. "Some of it is so harsh and so personal, you can't accept."

Dawn Webb is one of the worst. She calls wanting to talk for hours and is always eager to attack his work. "The nicer I get, the worse she gets," Smith says.

Yes, he admits to hanging up on her. But he warned her first, and even told her she should go to the media to complain. There's little else he can do.

He checked out her tips. He talked to the crackhead witness. But all he has is a nickname for a suspect. No one in the area knows the guy well, and they haven't seen him since the murder. Smith believes it was a crime of retaliation; the killer was either hired by -- or doing a favor for -- someone who had a beef with Devin. But he can't share all these details with Webb, because who knows whom she'll tell?

"It's bad policing to tell a family every move you make," Beaman says.

Besides, no one has time for even weekly check-ins with families. They're too busy running to the next crime scene. And if someone from the tiny squad is on vacation or sick, daily routines become a nightmare.

Beaman is a relic from another era, a former social worker who orders chocolate milk with breakfast and rails against gangsta rap. His body is round and solid, with hard-earned creases in the forehead and knuckles gnarled by a youth spent boxing and defending himself in the Garden Valley projects.

During his early days in a patrol car, he used to take off his gun and shoot hoops with guys in the rough neighborhoods, earning the trust of strangers by demonstrating concern for their kids. This paid off in a network of sources across the city. But even he gets worn down by the grind of homicide.

Some days, he arrives home from a 10-hour shift only to hear his pager scream, just as he's putting his keys in the door. He's on call 24 hours a day to investigate police shootings. No one cares if his wife is sick and he must leave her alone in the gray hours of early morning. If someone else dies that night and no one's available to handle the case, he might not get home again till 9 a.m., after a 25-hour shift.