That one was anything but pleasing. That one was real and brutal and unforgiving. The Cassidy shooting had stayed with McLarney as no other case could, bleeding him a little more every time he thought about it. All of his effort had been repaid with the proper result; Butchie Frazier at a sentencing hearing in Judge Bothe’s courtroom a couple of months ago, cuffed and sneering for the last time at life plus twenty, parole in no less than twenty-five. The verdict and sentence counted for something in McLarney’s mind; God knows where he would be now if the outcome had been different. But life and twenty was a courtroom victory, one that seemed sufficient for only as long as Gene Cassidy was in the courtroom.

No, in the end it was simply not enough-not for McLarney, certainly not for Gene. After learning to handle his guide dog at a school in New Jersey, Cassidy had returned to his alma matter, enrolling at York College in a graduate teaching program. These were the first sure steps on a long road back, and yet the recovery had been repeatedly, almost routinely, hampered by a city that somehow found it possible to treat a blind police officer as if he were just one among hundreds. Bills for specialists and physical therapy went unpaid for months at a time, with doctors complaining to Cassidy and Cassidy unable to do anything more than refer them to the city. Requests for special equipment-such as a sight-reading computer to aid with Cassidy’s studies-moved through the bureaucracy at an arthritic crawl. At one point, a friend of Patti Cassidy’s actually called a radio talk show to confront the visiting mayor, asking whether or not the computer was going to be purchased before the next semester of classes.

It took more than a year, in fact, before there was an award ceremony for Cassidy, something that McLarney thought should have happened within weeks of his return from the hospital. A dead cop would have received the splendor of full honors at the funeral-the color guard, the twenty-one-gun salute, the folded flag offered to the widow by the commissioner of police. But a wounded cop seemed to paralyze the department; the brass had a hard time deciding what to say, much less cutting through its own red tape.

To McLarney, the departmental response to Cassidy’s ordeal was a little bit obscene, and in the months that followed the shooting, he made himself a promise. If I ever get killed line-of-duty, McLarney told several other detectives, there shouldn’t be anyone above the rank of sergeant at the funeral-except maybe D’Addario, who was a friend. Yeah, Dee could be there. But no color guard, no bagpipes, no command staff, no delegations from a dozen other departments. Just Jay Landsman calling the men to attention by shouting “Present arms,” after which a hundred Baltimore cops would produce cold cans of Miller Lite and simultaneously pull the poptops.

Gene Cassidy’s ceremony, when it finally occurs, is only a bit more formal. On the night after the latest search for the missing Lenore, McLarney once again finds himself back in the Western District, this time in the roll call room at the Riggs Avenue station house, watching from the edge of the room as the four-to-twelve shift collects in front of two dozen evenly spaced chairs. Gene himself asked that the ceremony be held here at the district, just as his old shift prepared to go out on the street. McLarney scans the uniforms and realizes that most of the men Cassidy worked with are now gone-some to other shifts and other districts, others to better-paying police departments in the surrounding counties. Still, there is some power to the moment when the shift lieutenant barks attention and the entire shift snaps rigid; Cassidy, sitting in a front-row seat with Patti beside him, rises too.

McLarney watches the brass and the television reporters crowd around the edge of the room as the police commissioner says some words and steps from the podium to give Cassidy the Medal of Valor and the Medal of Honor, the department’s highest honors.

Then the majors and colonels drift away until Gene is alone in the recreation room with his family and his friends from the Western. McLarney, Belt, Biemiller, Tuggle, Wilhelm, Bowen, Lieutenant Bennett, maybe a dozen others hovering around two trays of cold cuts, listening to old rock ’n’ roll on a tape player. Jokes are told and stories exchanged and soon Cassidy and his dog are wandering from the party, leading a young niece on an impromptu tour of the station house that ends, strangely enough, in the holding cells.

“Hey, Gene,” says the turnkey, opening the front cage, “how you doing?”

“I’m all right. You busy tonight?”

“Not really.”

Cassidy stands with his dog just inside the lockup while the turnkey fingerprints his niece and shows her an empty cell. The demonstration is interrupted by a rattle from the last row of cages.

“Yo, somebody take mah handcuffs off!”

“Who’s that?” yells Cassidy, turning his head toward the sound.

“Why the fuck I need to be cuffed if I’m in the fuckin’ cell?”

“Who’s talking?”

“I’m talking, yo.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a fucking prisoner.”

“What’d you do?” asks Cassidy, amused.

“I ain’t done shit. Who are you?”

“I’m Gene Cassidy. I used to work here.”

“Fuck you then.”

And Gene Cassidy laughs loudly. For one last moment, he is home.

They ring the tiled room in crisp blue uniforms, their faces still smooth and unmarked. They are nineteen, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old at the outside. Their devotion is complete, their virginity, uncompromised. Protect and Serve still rattles around in the uncluttered expanse of their minds. They are cadets, a class from nearby Anne Arundel County. Twenty-five police-to-bes, primed and polished for this morning’s field trip from an academy classroom to hell’s innermost circle.

“You all like what you see?” says Rick James, acknowledging the gallery. The cadets laugh nervously from the edges of the autopsy room-some watching, others trying not to watch, a few watching but not believing.

“You a detective?” asks a kid in the front row.

James nods.

“Homicide?”

“Yep. Baltimore city.”

“Do you have a case down here?”

No, thinks James, I spend every morning in the autopsy room. The sights, the sounds, the ambiance-I love it all. James is tempted to have some fun with the class, but lets it drop.

“Yep,” he says. “One of ’em’s mine.”

“Which one?” asks the kid.

“He’s out in the hall.”

An attendant, finishing with one cadaver, looks up. “Who you here for, Rick?”

“The little one.”

The attendant looks out into the corridor, then turns his attention back to the work at hand. “We get to him next. Okay?”

“Hey, no problem.”

James walks between two open bodies to say hello to Ann Dixon, the deputy ME and a hero to working detectives everywhere. Dixie comes complete with a clipped British accent and an American detective’s view of the world. Not only that, she can hold her own at Cher’s or Kavanaugh’s. You got a body that needs cutting in the state of Maryland, you can’t do any better than Dixie.

“Dr. Dixon, how are you this fine morning?”

“Fine, thank you,” she says from the vivisection table.

“What’s up with you?”

Dixie turns around holding a long-blade knife in one hand and a metal sharpening roll in the other. “You know me,” she says, scraping one against the other. “I’m just looking for Mr. Right.”

James smiles and wanders back to a rear office for coffee. He returns to find his victim’s gurney in the center of the autopsy room, the body naked and stiff on the center tray.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” says the attendant, putting scalpel to skin. “I’d like to take a knife to the motherfucker that did this.”