10 Chapter 10

Officer Jaime Reagan stood with his back resting against the door to the interview room, his black combat boot gently tapped against the white floor, "what a tough first patrol," he said out loud to himself. His thoughts drifting towards his partner who was probably anxiously bothering doctors and nurses trying to find out the condition of that little boy and if he was going to make it through the night. This wasn't the first time he had seen something so gruesome and it wouldn't be the last, Gotham bred a special kind of viciousness not found anywhere else in the world.

A large sob and some whimpering carried through the door his back was resting on, causing his thoughts to shift to the woman inside. There weren't many criminals that made him want to return to the old days. The days where interview rooms were called interrogation rooms. After witnessing his first interrogation he couldn't really find any other reason for phone books to exist other than smacking one across the face of rapists and child abusers. He was told to bring the women he arrested this morning in here and wait for a senior detective before he could write the rest of his reports and finally go home to sleep.

James Gordon could hear the tapping against the floor before he even exited the elevator. The rhythm of the tapping matched his pace as he walked out the elevator and down the hall. The folder his police chief handed him felt heavier in his hand than it should have. He spent the last few minutes in thought about what he meant when he told Chief Schrader he was going to throw the book at her. Gordon knows that when he was told to make sure she could walk out of the interview room it was meant literally, he was probably supposed to rough her up, maybe break a bone, but that always felt so inefficient. The tapping grew louder as he approached his destination, still lost in thought until it was broken from a fellow police officer.

"Detective Gordon, sir." Officer Reagan said to his approaching superior. Gordon looked up from the floor as his thoughts turned towards the present, he nodded his head in greeting. "Reagan, rough day for you, first you find a body then you run into something like this. I wouldn't be buying any lotto tickets today," Gordon remarked towards Officer Reagan. Officer Reagan hid his smile as his face turned serious, "yeah it's been a bad day, even for Gotham standards. My partner is still at the hospital waiting for the doctors to come out of surgery and list all the injuries. The ones in the report that I wrote up while she was being processed was just what my partner, the EMTs, and I were able to spot." Officer Reagan explains while gesturing to the folder in Detective Gordon's hand. "It's fine, let the new district attorney worry about that," Gordon responds as he reaches for the door, "I uh, don't faint at the sign of blood sir." Officer Reagan shyly insinuated to the detective before the door was opened. "I know where you are going with that, let me show you why words sting so much more than an uncreative punch," Detective Gordon said as he opened the door to the interview room.

Detective Gordon walked into the room as Officer Reagan trailed behind him. He took his first look at the woman sitting down on the metal chair with her hands cuffed to the steel table. Her face buried into her arms as she slouched over the table. He was always amazed at how well such a vile monster could don the skin of a human and walk amongst humanity. Gordon slowly walked around the table to face the monster as Officer Reagan posted up against the wall behind her. Gordon pulled out the chair accompanied by a screech as the chair was dragged against the floor, the noise brought the woman out of her stupor as she made eye contact with the detective sitting across from her. The folder Gordon has been holding onto since he left the police chief's office was gently set onto the table and opened. Gordon leafs through the papers neatly stacked in the folder as a heavy silence fills the room.

"Jessica Shann," Detective Gordon states as he looked up from the folder and into the red puffy eyes of the women in front of him. "To be blunt, there isn't a lot of legal reason for us to talk. We have more evidence than we know what to do with, you were caught high on crack cocaine, beating your starving infant son. You are going to be charged for half a dozen things, we just aren't sure if one of them is going to be attempted murder or murder." Gordon says as he closes the folder in front of him, sliding it to the side of the table. "We aren't here to make a deal for your confession, I don't think there is a single jury that won't convict you with what we already have," Gordon tells her as her puffy red eyes begin to tear up. "Do you, do you know, know how much time I'm looking at in there," Jessica stutters as tears trailed down her cheek. Gordon's chair skids across the room ramming into the wall behind him as he quickly stands as his fist pound onto the table to support his weight as he hunched over the table with his face inches from hers. "The amount of time doesn't matter, I doubt you will live long enough in there to be free ever again," Gordon jeered while looking into her eyes.

"Whatcha mean," Jessica blurted out as Gordon straightened his body, towering over her from across the table. "Do you know why people become police officers," Gordon asked rhetorically? "Most of them became cops because they were bullies with medium to low intelligence at school. When they got into the real world they realized that the nerds they bullied were going to be their boss. So they asked themselves, how can I hold power over people smarter and richer than myself?" Officer Reagan rose his eyebrow as Detective Gordon continued, "most of the cops here would probably break your face and squeeze a thumb through the gauze covering that wound on your shoulder and think they taught you a lesson. But we both know that someone like yourself is use to that, a broken bone or two, and some intense shoulder pain is something you can handle. I use to wonder why cops would beat people like you. But take an aggressive personality, and give him power over another human that raped a girl with the same characteristics as his daughter, and well, you end up with a rapist with a lot more broken bones when he left the room compared to when he entered." Gordon explained as Jessica started to frantically tug at the handcuffs, trying to free herself.

"But I was a little different than most of the people in the precinct, you see I wanted to be a detective since I was five, the first book I read was Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I dreamed of being the hero that protected the people in my city by locking away the bad guys, but after a few years of seeing the shittiest part of humanity, well, that tends to change who you are, who you wanted to be. I started to understand more of why cops beat down rapists in the interrogation room, but I kept asking myself, did that really teach the rapists anything? Gordon explained over the rattling of Jessica's handcuffs as he sat back down and mulled over his next few words.

"I read this book once," Detective Gordon stated as his body relaxed into the chair as he finally figured out what he was going to say. "It was about a detective that was everything I once inspired to be, he was hunting down this incredibly intelligent serial rapist named Thomas. About one hundred and fifty pages and a few plot twists later we find the detective holding his gun against the temple of the rapist. As the barrel of the gun grinds into his temple, the detective comes to a philosophical crossroad. Now, the detective knows how brilliant Thomas is, how he left barely any evidence behind, how the district attorney might lose the case. So he has a choice, do I put Thomas in the hands of the legal system and pray he doesn't escape justice only to begin to rape people again, or do I kill Thomas and potentially save a life in the future. When I finished the book I hated the detective for pulling the trigger, but the older I got and the more I witnessed people like you, I started to stop seeing the world in black and white and more in different shades of gray. As I experienced more things, the book kept popping up into my mind, the distaste I once had for that detective began to morph into a form of respect. But I kept asking myself why, why would a detective that could outsmart a brilliant villain have to sacrifice himself to stop him for good, there had to be a better way." Gordon confessed as Jessica begins to whimper, pleading for her life.

"Now I think someone like you, who was a prostitute and a druggie understands better than most how powerful words can be. So when I thought about what I would do about Thomas, I started to have an idea, what if I told his fellow prisoners that he wasn't just a rapist but a child rapist, what would happen. Although I would be lying, Thomas went after beautiful college girls but his fellow inmates wouldn't know that. Imagine how hard it would be to convince an inmate that is also a father who is holding a shank ready to kill you for raping a child, that you went after coeds, not children. You would have what, five seconds, maybe less before that man attacked you to explain your side. I just don't see how you get out of that situation alive. So you see Jessica, I'm not going to attack you, I'm not even going to touch you. What I am going to do, is go down to the prison you are in, find the meanest alpha bitch in the joint and show her what you have done to your own child. Every mother in that entire prison is going to want a piece of you, every night before they fall asleep they are going to think of two things, one, how are their children doing, and two, how badly they want to kill you. Every blind corner you walk down in the prison your breath is going to be caught in your throat as you wonder who is on the other side of that corner because you know that someday soon, it's going to be someone with a shank waiting for you. Every room you walk into you are going to stand with your back against the wall, every time you close your eyes before you go to sleep you are going to pray that your cellmate doesn't stab you in your sleep. When I said the amount of time you are going to serve won't matter, I meant it, you aren't going to make it out alive."