THAT NIGHT, Sampson and I were on duty in Southeast. We’re senior homicide detectives, and I’m also liaison between the FBI and the D.C. police. We got a call at about half past midnight telling us to go to the area of Washington called Shaw. There’d been a bad homicide.

A lone Metro squad car was at the murder scene, and the neighborhood psychos had turned out in pretty fair numbers.

It looked like a bizarre block party in the middle of hell. Fires were blazing nearby, throwing off sparks in two trash barrels, which made no sense, given the sweltering heat of the night.

The victim was a young woman, probably between fourteen and her late teens, according to the radio report.

She wasn’t hard to find. Her nude, mutilated body had been discarded in a clump of briar bushes in a small park less than ten yards off a paved pathway.

As Sampson and I approached the body, a boy shouted at us from the other side of the crime tape: “Yo, yo, she just some street whore!”

I stopped and looked at him. He reminded me of the boys we’d just transported to Lorton Prison. “Dime-a-dozen bitch. Ain’t worth your time, or mine, Dee-fectives,” he went on with his disturbing rap.

I walked up to the young wisecracker. “How do you know that? You seen her around?”

The boy backed off. But then he grinned, showing off a gold star on one of his front teeth. “She ain’t got no clothes on, an’ she layin’ on her back. Somebody stick her good. Sure sound like a whore to me.”

Sampson eyed the youth, who looked to be around fourteen but might have been even younger. “You know who she is?”

“Hell no!” The boy pretended to be insulted. “Don’t know no whores, man.”

The boy finally swaggered off, looking back at us once or twice and shaking his head. Sampson and I walked on and joined two uniformed cops standing by the body. They were obviously waiting for reinforcements. Apparently, we were it.

“You call Emergency Services?” I asked the uniforms.

“Thirty-five minutes ago and counting,” said the older-looking of the two. He was probably in his late twenties, sporting an attempted mustache and trying to look as if he were experienced at scenes like this one.

“That figures.” I shook my head. “You find any I.D. anywhere around here?”

“No I.D. We looked around in the bushes. Nothing but the body,” said the younger one. “And the body’s seen better days.” He was perspiring badly and looked a little sick.