Part 58 (2/2)
Ca.s.sidy 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 Ca.s.sidy, turning his head toward the sound.
”Why the f.u.c.k I need to be cuffed if I'm in the f.u.c.kin' cell?”
”Who's talking?”
”I'm talking, yo.”
”Who are you?”
”I'm a f.u.c.king prisoner.”
”What'd you do?” asks Ca.s.sidy, amused.
”I ain't done s.h.i.+t. Who are you?”
”I'm Gene Ca.s.sidy. I used to work here.”
”f.u.c.k you then.”
And Gene Ca.s.sidy laughs loudly. For one last moment, he is home.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15.
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 cla.s.s from nearby Anne Arundel County. Twenty-five police-to-bes, primed and polished for this morning's field trip from an academy cla.s.sroom to h.e.l.l'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 cla.s.s, 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, finis.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.lo 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, sc.r.a.ping 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 motherf.u.c.ker that did this.”
James looks over at the cadet cla.s.s 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.
<script>