James looks over at the cadet class to see two dozen stunned, silent faces. After a half-hour or so in the autopsy room, they probably thought that they were ready, that they were slowly acclimating to the sights and sounds and smells of Penn Street. Then the cutters wheel this one out of the freezer, and they realize they aren’t even close. From the center of the room, James can see some of the kids trying hard not to look, others trying to watch and then failing to contain their horror. In the corner of the room, a female cadet hides her face in the back of a taller companion, unwilling to look out for even a moment.

And no wonder. The body is little more than a small, brown island floating on a sea of stainless steel, a child’s form with tiny hands reaching up, fingers curled. A two-year-old, beaten to death by a mother’s boyfriend, who found it in himself to dress the swollen, lifeless body and then carry it to the ER at Bon Secours.

“What happened?” the hospital doctors asked the boyfriend.

“He was playing in the bathtub and fell.”

He said it with a calm that bordered on bravado, and he kept on saying it when James and Eddie Brown arrived at the hospital. All that night, he repeated it like a mantra in the interrogation room. Michael was in the tub. Michael fell.

“Why did you dress him? Why didn’t you rush him to the hospital?”

I didn’t want him to be cold.

“If he was taking a bath, how come there was no water in the tub?”

I let it out.

“You let it out? The baby is unconscious, but you stop to let the water out of the tub?”

Yes.

“You beat him to death.”

No. Michael fell.

But the doctors at Bon Secours weren’t fooled; Michael Shaw’s tiny body was more black and blue than brown, his injuries equivalent to those that a child might sustain if struck by an automobile traveling at thirty miles per hour. Nor do the examiners on Penn Street have any doubt: death by repeated blunt force trauma. The child literally had the life punched out of him.

Yet only when the pathologists begin their external examination of the child is Rick James completely revulsed.

“Did you see this?” asks the doctor, lifting the tiny legs. “He’s split wide.”

A true horror. The two-year-old boy had bled internally, his anus ripped apart by his twenty-year-old babysitter, his mother’s lover.

Mouths open, eyes glazed, the Anne Arundel cadets are trapped, forced to watch the child disassembled from the corner of the autopsy room. A day’s lesson.

On the ride back to headquarters, James says nothing; what in God’s name is there to say? It ain’t my kid, he tries to tell himself. It ain’t where I live. It ain’t nothing to me.

The standard defense, a homicide detective’s established refuge. Only this time it isn’t quite enough. This time, there is no dark hole in which to bury the anger.

Returning to the homicide office, James walks down the long blue hall away from the elevators, then peers through the wire mesh window in the door of the large interrogation room. The boyfriend is alone in there, leaning back in the middle chair, his sneakers up against the edge of the table.

“Look at him,” James says to a nearby uniform, called downtown for prisoner transport. “Just look at him.”

The boyfriend is whistling softly, replacing one tennis shoe after the other with elaborate precision, his reach limited by silver bracelets. He works with new laces-yellow and green-two for each high-top, inner-city style. Two hours from now, the turnkey at the Southwest lockup will pull out the same laces as a suicide precaution, but at the moment they are the sole focus of the boyfriend’s shrinking universe.

“Look at him,” says James. “Don’t it just make you want to kick his ass?”

“Hey,” says the uniform. “I’m with you.”

James looks at the patrolman, then peers back into the interrogation room. The boyfriend notices the shadow on the one-way glass and turns in the chair.

“Eh mon,” he says in a West Indian lilt. “I need gon to d’bathroom, yah know.”

“Look at him,” says James again.

He could beat him. He could beat this piece of shit until he was raw and bloody and no one in the office would say a damn thing. The uniforms would stay with their paperwork, the other detectives would block the hallway or maybe take a few shots themselves. And if the colonel came down the corridor to check on the commotion, he would only need to be told about little Michael Shaw, alone and silent on that long expanse of steel.

And could anyone really call it wrong? Could anyone believe that retribution so simple and swift could be less than just? Honor to a cop means that you don’t hit a man who’s wearing cuffs or is unable to fight back, you don’t hit a man to obtain a statement, and you don’t hit a man who doesn’t deserve it. Police brutality? To hell with that. Police work has always been brutal; good police work, discreetly so.

A year ago in this same interrogation room, Jay Landsman was the supervisor working an assault-on-police case from Fells Point, a drunken brawl in which several suspects had used a length of lead pipe to bludgeon an intervening Southeast patrolman to within an inch of his life.

“Now,” said Landsman, leading the main assailant into the box, “while you’re in here I’m going to take your handcuffs off because, you know, I’m not a tough guy or anything, but I know you’re a chickenshit asshole so it’s not going to be a problem, right?”

Landsman unlocked the cuffs and the suspect rubbed his wrists.

“See, I knew you were chickenshit-”

The guy came up out of the chair with a wild roundhouse that clipped the side of the sergeant’s head, after which Landsman stomped him so thoroughly that he would later keep a Polaroid of the bloodied suspect in his top desk drawer as a keepsake. Landsman walked out of the interrogation room just as the duty officer came down the hall.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Hey,” Landsman told the captain, shrugging, “the motherfucker swung on me.”

James could say the same thing now: This bastard sodomized and murdered a two-year-old child, then he swung on me and I fucked him up good. End of report.

“Go ahead,” says the uniform, thinking the same thought. “I’ll cover your back, man. I’d fucking love to see it.”

James turns, looks at the uniform strangely, then lets go with an awkward, embarrassed smile. It would feel good to take the cuffs off this kid and make him feel some pain. Hell, with the cuffs off the guy would have a better opportunity than he gave that child. Simple justice would argue for something more than the life sentence awaiting Alvin Clement Richardson; simple justice argued for the bastard to be helpless, immobile, unable to ward off the blows.

And then what? After one sadist had been reduced to a bloody pulp in one interrogation room, where would that leave Rick James? The kid was dead. Nothing was going to bring him back. The mother? Judging from her behavior in the early morning interviews, she could’ve cared less. It was a murder, they told her. He beat your baby so bad the doctors are saying he could’ve been hit by a car. He killed your child.

“I don’t think he’d do that,” she replied. “He loves Michael.”

James could beat him, but what the hell for? For peace of mind? For satisfaction? Alvin Richardson is just one sadistic bastard in a city full of sadistic bastards, and his crime is similarly common. Keller and Crutch-field had worked the suffocation of a two-year-old girl back in August; that same month, Shea and Hagin caught a one-year-old scalded to death by a babysitter. In September, Hollingsworth had a nine-month-old infant, strangled by her mother.

No, thinks James. I could beat this prick half to death and then dump him in the city jail infirmary and it wouldn’t mean shit. Come Monday, I’ll be back at work, looking through the wire mesh window at some other sociopath. James smiles again at the uniform, shakes his head and walks back into the main office.