BUSTED

AT FIRST glance, it looked like Greg Perdue was stretching. The 58-year-old sat cross-legged on the matted wall-to-wall carpet in his Aberdeen, Maryland, apartment, a head of shaggy, graying hair bent toward his knees. But when medical examiners gingerly turned him over, they found his bloated face was a deep purple, his nose and mustache covered with crusted blood. Next to a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table were three clear pill capsules: two empty, one containing an off-white powder that was later identified as heroin.

In a former life, Perdue was a mechanic, an avid hunter, a drinker, and a romantic who often drove to the tops of the hills nearby to watch the sunset. After being prescribed painkillers to treat a work injury, he started snorting heroin and became estranged from his friends and family. When the cops found him in April, they determined he’d likely been slumped in his apartment for a couple of days. His was the 113th overdose of the year in Harford County, a white, working-class suburb a half-hour up Interstate 95 from Baltimore. There was no funeral; his ashes sit uncollected at the morgue.

After Perdue’s quiet death, a lanky, affable 38-year-old cop named Brandon Underhill was assigned to investigate the dealer who had sold the fatal dose to Perdue. Underhill, a clean-cut churchgoer who grew out his wavy blond hair and got his ears pierced when he started doing undercover work 10 years ago, quickly zoomed in on a suspect: Zack Carter, a 35-year-old with a rap sheet including several drug charges and an attempted murder. For the next three months, he tracked Carter’s cellphone data, talked to “friendlies,” or informants, and met Carter behind the yellow home in J&K Mobile Home Park in Aberdeen, where Carter, whose name I have changed, would lean into Underhill’s car window and exchange glass vials of heroin for cash.

Underhill was surprised to find that Carter was likable, whether he was confidently breaking up neighborhood tiffs or laying into his underlings, whom he paid in drugs or money, if they tried to steal business. After hiding a GPS tracker under the bumper of Carter’s BMW 750, Underhill was able to track the car on his iPad as it traveled to Baltimore a few times a week and then back to Harford to flit among a handful of homes in the county’s housing developments and trailer parks. Meanwhile, overdoses kept mounting: In the wake of Perdue’s death, cops traced 11 back to Carter.

The investigation came to a head in predawn darkness four months after Perdue’s overdose, when about 60 officers