Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson trudged along the residential street in Roxbury towards his car. He had a load of typing to do back at the station before he could go home. He was tired, so tired: he hadn’t slept properly for a week. Which was perhaps why the smell had hit him so badly.
It was a familiar smell: raw beef a week past its sell-by date tinged with a metallic edge. He had experienced it many times in his years with the Boston Police Department’s Homicide Unit.
Maria Campanelli, white female, twenty-seven.
She had been dead thirty-six hours, stabbed by her boyfriend after an argument and left to decompose in her apartment. They were out looking for him now, and Magnus was confident he would be found. But to be certain of a conviction they needed to make sure they got the paperwork one hundred per cent accurate. A bunch of people to be interviewed; a bunch of forms to be filled out. The department had suffered a scandal a few years back with a series of slip-ups in the chain of evidence, documents misfiled, court exhibits lost. Since then defence lawyers had jumped on any mistakes.
Magnus was good at the paperwork, which was one of the reasons he had recently been promoted to sergeant. Perhaps Colby was right, perhaps he should go to law school.
Colby.
For the twelve months they had been living together she had gradually turned up the pressure: why didn’t he quit the department and go to law school, why didn’t they get married? And then, six days ago, when they were walking arm in arm back from their favourite Italian restaurant in the North End, a Jeep had driven past with its rear window wound down. Magnus had thrown Colby to the sidewalk just as a rapid succession of shots rang out from a semi-automatic rifle. Maybe the shooters thought they had hit their target, maybe there were too many people around, but the Jeep had driven off without finishing the job.
That was why she had kicked him out of her apartment. That was why he had spent sleepless nights in the guest room of his brother’s house in Medford. That was why the smell had gotten to him: for the first time in a long time the smell of death had become personal.
It could have been him splayed out on the floor of that apartment. Or Colby.
It was the hottest day of the year so far, which had, of course, made the smell worse, and Magnus was sweating in his suit jacket. He felt a touch on his elbow.
It was a guy of about fifty, Latin, bald, short and overweight, unshaven. He was wearing a large blue shirt which hung out over jeans.
‘Detective?’
Magnus stopped. ‘Yeah?’
‘I think I saw something. The night the girl was stabbed.’ The man’s voice was gruff, urgent.
Magnus was tempted to tell the guy to beat it. They had a witness who had seen the boyfriend come, another who had seen him leave six hours later, three who had heard a loud argument, one who had heard a scream. But you could never have enough witnesses. Another statement to type up when he got back to the station.
Magnus sighed as he reached for his notebook. There were still several hours to go before he could go home and take the run and shower he needed to get the smell out of his system. If he wasn’t too exhausted for a run by then.
The man looked nervously up and down the street. ‘Not here, I don’t want nobody to see us talking.’
Magnus was about to protest – the victim’s boyfriend was a cook at the Boston Medical Center, hardly someone to be scared of – but then he shrugged and followed the man as he hurried down a small side street, between a dilapidated grey clapboard house and a small red-brick apartment building. Little more than an alley, with some kind of construction site with a high wire fence at the end. A heavily tattooed kid with a yellow T-shirt stood at the street corner. He smoked a cigarette, his back to Magnus.
As they entered the alleyway, the bald guy seemed to speed up. Magnus lengthened his stride. He was about to yell to the guy to slow down, when he stopped himself.
Magnus had been asleep. Now he was awake.
Among the forest of tattoos on the kid’s arms, Magnus had noticed a small dot above one elbow, and a pattern of five dots above the other. One five, fifteen, the tattoo of the Cobra-15 gang. They didn’t operate in Roxbury. This kid was way outside of his territory, by at least three miles, maybe four. But the Cobra-15 were customers of Soto’s operation, local distribution agents. The guys in the Jeep in the North End had been working for Soto, Magnus was sure.
Magnus’s instinct was to straighten up and turn, but he forced himself not to break his stride and alert the kid. Think. Think fast.
He could hear footsteps behind him. Gun or knife? The sound of a gun would be risky this close to the crime scene – there were still one or two cops milling around. But the kid knew Magnus was armed and no one brings a knife to a gunfight. Which meant gun. Which meant the kid was probably pulling it out of the waistband of his pants right then.
Magnus dived to the left, grabbed a garbage can and threw it to the ground. As he hit the ground he rolled once, reached for his gun and pointed it towards the kid, who was raising his own weapon. Magnus’s finger curled around the trigger, and then his training kicked in. He hesitated. The rule was clear: don’t fire if there is a chance of hitting a civilian.
In the mouth of the alleyway stood a young woman, grocery bags in both arms, staring at Magnus, her mouth open. She was wide, real wide, and directly behind the kid in the yellow T-shirt in Magnus’s line of fire.
The hesitation gave the kid time to raise his own gun. Magnus was looking straight down the barrel. A stand off.
‘Police! Drop your weapon!’ Magnus shouted, even though he knew the kid wouldn’t.
What would happen next? If the kid fired first, he might miss Magnus, and then Magnus could get away his own shot. Although he was six foot four and weighed over two hundred pounds, Magnus was lying prone on the street, partially hidden by the dislodged trash can, a smallish target for a panicked kid.
Perhaps the kid would back off. If only the woman would move. She was still rooted to the spot, her mouth open, trying to scream.
Then Magnus saw the kid’s eyes flick upwards and behind Magnus. The bald guy.
The kid wouldn’t have taken his eyes off Magnus’s gun if the bald guy was holding back. He would only risk that if the bald guy was relevant to the situation, if he was his saviour, if he had his own gun and was approaching Magnus from behind. Hold off for a couple of seconds until the bald guy shot Magnus in the back, that was the kid’s plan.
Magnus pulled his trigger, just once, not the twice he had been trained. He wanted to keep the numbers of bullets flying towards the fat woman to a minimum. The kid was hit in the chest; he jerked and fired his own gun, missing Magnus.
Magnus reached out to the trash can and flung it behind him. He turned to see the empty container hitting the bald guy in the shins. The man was reaching under his belly for his own gun, but doubled over as he tripped on the can.
Magnus fired twice hitting the guy each time, once in the shoulder and once in the bald crown of his head. A mess.
Magnus pulled himself to his feet. Noise kicked in. The fat woman had dropped her groceries and was screaming now, loud, very loud. It turned out there was nothing wrong with her lungs. A police siren started up somewhere close. There was the sound of shouting and running feet.
The bald guy was still, but the kid was sprawled on his back on the ground, his chest heaving, his yellow T-shirt now stained red. His fingers were curled around his gun as he tried to summon up the strength to point it towards Magnus. Magnus stamped hard on his wrist and kicked the gun out of the way. He stood panting over the boy who had tried to kill him. Seventeen or eighteen, Hispanic, close-cropped black hair, a broken front tooth, a scar on his neck. Taut muscles under swirls of ink on his arms and chest, intricate gang tattoos. A tough kid. A kid his age in Cobra-15 could already have several dead bodies to his name.
But not Magnus’s. At least not today. But tomorrow?
Magnus could smell gunpowder and sweat and fear and once again the metallic bite of blood. Too much blood for one day.
‘I’m taking you off the street.’
Deputy Superintendent Williams, the chief of the Homicide Unit, was firm. He was always firm, that was one of the things Magnus appreciated about him. He also appreciated that he had come all the way from his office on Schroeder Plaza in downtown Boston to make sure that one of his men was safe. They were in an anonymous motel room in an anonymous motel somewhere off I-91 between Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut, chaperoned by FBI agents with Midwestern accents. Magnus hadn’t been allowed back in the station since the shooting.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Magnus said.
‘Well, I do.’
‘Are we talking Witness Protection Programme?’
‘Possibly. This is the second time someone has tried to kill you within a week.’
‘I was tired. I let my guard down. It won’t happen again.’
Williams raised his eyebrows. His black face was deeply lined. He was small, compact, determined, a good boss, and honest. That was why Magnus had gone to him six months before when he had overheard his partner, Detective Lenahan, talking on his cell phone to another cop about tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation.
They were on a bullshit stakeout. Magnus had gone for a walk and was returning to the car when he stopped in the fall sunshine just behind the passenger window. The window was open a crack. Magnus could hear Lenahan clearly, wheedling, cajoling and threatening a Detective O’Driscoll to do the right thing and smudge the fingerprint evidence on a gun.
Magnus and Lenahan had not been partners for long. At fifty-three, Lenahan was twenty years older than Magnus. He was experienced, smart, popular, and he seemed to know everyone in the Boston Police Department, especially those with Irish last names. But he was lazy. He used his three decades of experience and knowledge of police methods to do as little work as possible.
Magnus saw things differently. As soon as he had closed one case he was eager to move on to the next; his determination to nail the perp was legendary within the department. Lenahan thought there were good guys and there were bad guys, there always were and there always would be. There was not very much that he or Magnus or the whole Boston police force could do about that. Magnus thought that every victim, and every victim’s family, deserved justice, and Magnus would do his very best to get it for them. So the Jonson-Lenahan partnership was hardly made in heaven.
But until that moment, Magnus had not imagined that Lenahan was crooked.
There are two things that a cop hates more than anything else. One is a crooked cop. Another is a cop who rats on one of his colleagues. For Magnus the choice was easy – if people like Lenahan were allowed to get away with destroying evidence of a homicide, then everything he had devoted his career towards was worthless.
Magnus knew that most of his colleagues would agree with him. But some would turn a blind eye, convince themselves that Magnus had misheard, that good old Sean Lenahan could not be one of the bad guys. And others would think that if good old Sean got himself a little retirement nest egg by taking money off one bad guy who had just killed another, then good luck to him. He deserved it after serving the citizens of Boston so loyally for thirty years.
Which is why Magnus had gone straight to Williams and only Williams. Williams had understood the situation. A couple of weeks later Magnus’s promotion came through and he and Lenahan were split up. An undercover team from the FBI was brought in from out of state. A major investigation was launched and Lenahan was linked with two other detectives, O’Driscoll and Montoya. The Feds discovered the gang that was paying them off; it was Dominican, led by a man named Pedro Soto, who operated out of Lawrence, a faded mill town just outside Boston. Soto supplied cocaine and heroin wholesale to street gangs all over New England. The three crooked detectives were arrested and charged. Magnus was billed as the star witness when the case eventually came to trial.
But the FBI hadn’t yet amassed enough evidence to charge Soto. He was still out there.
‘Your guard slips once, it can slip again,’ said Williams. ‘If we don’t do something you’ll be dead within two weeks. They want your ass and they’ll get it.’
‘But I don’t see why they want to kill me,’ Magnus said. ‘Sure, my testimony will nail Lenahan, but I can’t point to Soto or the Dominicans. And you said Lenahan isn’t cooperating.’
‘The FBI thinks it’s figured out Lenahan’s angle. The last thing he wants is to wind up in a maximum-security prison with a bunch of convicted killers, no cop would want that, he’d be better off dead. But without your testimony, he’ll walk. Our guess is that he has given the Dominicans an ultimatum: they get rid of you or he’ll give them to us. And if he doesn’t, his buddy Montoya will. If you die, Lenahan and the other two go free, and Soto’s operation continues as if nothing has happened. But if you live to testify, Lenahan does a deal with the FBI, and Soto and his boys will have to close down business and head home to the Dominican Republic. If we don’t get to them first.’
Williams looked Magnus right in the eye. ‘Which is why we have to figure out what to do with you.’
Magnus saw Williams’s point. But full witness protection would mean starting up a new life with a new identity on the other side of the country. He didn’t want that. ‘Got any ideas?’ he asked Williams.
‘Matter of fact, I do.’ Williams smiled. ‘You’re an Icelandic citizen, right?’
‘Yes. As well as US. I have dual.’
‘Do you speak the language?’
‘Some. I spoke it as a child. I moved here with my dad when I was twelve. But I haven’t spoken it since he died.’
‘Which was when?’
‘When I was twenty.’
Williams allowed a brief pause to express his sympathy. ‘Well, I guess you speak it better than most of the rest of us, then.’
Magnus smiled. ‘I guess so. Why?’
‘An old buddy in the NYPD called me a couple months ago. Said he’d heard I had someone who spoke Icelandic in my unit. He’d just had a visit from the National Police Commissioner of Iceland. He was looking for the NYPD to loan him a detective as an advisor. He didn’t necessarily want someone senior, just someone experienced in the many and varied crimes that our great country has to offer. Apparently, they don’t get many homicides in Iceland, or at least they didn’t until recently. Obviously, if that detective happened to speak Icelandic, that would be a bonus.’
‘I don’t remember anybody telling me about this,’ Magnus said.
Williams smiled. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Same reason I’m telling you now. You’re one of my best detectives and I don’t want to lose you. Except now I would rather have you alive in an igloo in Iceland than dead on a sidewalk in Boston.’
Magnus had given up long ago telling people that there were no igloos in Iceland. Nor were there any Eskimos, and only very rarely polar bears. He hadn’t been to Iceland since just after his father’s death. He had his doubts about going back, severe doubts, but at that moment it seemed like the least bad option.
‘I called the Icelandic Police Commissioner an hour ago. He’s still looking for an advisor. He sounded very excited by the idea of a detective who speaks the language. So, what do you think?’
There really was no choice.
‘I’ll do it,’ Magnus said. ‘On one condition.’
Williams frowned. ‘Which is?’
‘I take my girlfriend with me.’
Magnus had seen Colby angry before, but never this angry.
‘What do you think you are doing, getting your goons to kidnap me? Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of weird romantic gesture where you think I’m going to take you back? Because if it is, I can tell you right now it’s not going to work. So tell these men to take me back to the office!’
They were sitting in the back seat of an FBI van in the parking lot of a Friendly’s restaurant. Two agents had cruised by the offices of the medical-equipment company where Colby was in-house counsel and whisked her away. They were gathered around their car fifty feet away, with the two agents who had driven Magnus.
‘They tried to kill me again,’ Magnus said. ‘Almost succeeded this time.’
He still couldn’t believe how stupid he had been, how he had let himself be led off the main street down an alley. Since the shooting he had been interviewed at great length by two detectives from the Firearm Discharge Investigative team. They had been told they would only have one chance to talk to him, so they had been very thorough, focusing especially on his decision to pull the trigger when there was an innocent civilian in the line of fire.
Magnus didn’t regret that decision. He had traded the near certainty of his own death for a small probability that the woman would be harmed. But he had a better answer for the detectives. If the gangsters had shot him, they would probably have shot the woman next, as a witness. The Firearms Discharge guys liked this idea. They were careful not to ask him whether he had thought of that before or after he had pulled the trigger. They were going to do things by the book, but they were on his side.
This was the second time he had shot and killed someone while on duty. After the first, when he was a rookie patrol officer in uniform two months into the job, he had suffered weeks of guilt-filled sleepless nights.
This time he was just glad to be alive.
‘Too bad they failed,’ muttered Colby. Two tiny red dots of anger sizzled on each cheek; the corners of her brown eyes glistened with fury. Her mouth was set firm. Then she bit her lip, pulling strands of dark curly hair back behind her ears in a familiar gesture. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But it’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t want it to have anything to do with me, that’s the whole point.’
‘It already does have to do with you, Colby.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The chief wants me to go. Leave Boston. He doesn’t think the Dominicans will stop until they’ve killed me.’
‘That sounds like a good idea.’
Magnus took a deep breath. ‘And I want you to come with me.’
The expression on Colby’s face was a mixture of shock and contempt. ‘Are you serious?’
‘It’s for your own safety. If I’m gone they might go after you.’
‘What about my work? What about my job, dammit?’
‘You’ll just have to leave that. It’ll only be for a few months. Until the trial.’
‘Was I right the first time? Is this just some weird way for you to get me back?’
‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s because I’m worried for you if you stay.’
Colby bit her lip again. A tear ran down her cheek. Magnus reached out and touched her arm. ‘Where would we go?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you until I know you will say yes.’
‘Will I like it?’ She glanced at him.
He shook his head. ‘Probably not.’ They had discussed Iceland many times during their relationship, and Colby had been consistent in her distrust of the country, its volcanoes and its bad weather.
‘It’s Iceland, isn’t it?’
Magnus just shrugged.
‘Wait a minute, let me think.’ Colby turned away from him and stared out over the parking lot. A large family of four waddled out to their car carrying tubs of ice cream, smiles of anticipation on their faces.
Magnus waited.
Colby turned and stared him right in the eye. ‘Do you want to get married?’
Magnus returned her stare. He couldn’t believe she was serious. But she was very serious.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know,’ Magnus hesitated. ‘We could talk about it.’
‘No! I don’t want to talk about it, we’ve talked about it for months. I want to decide right now. You want me to decide to drop everything and go away with you. Fine. I’ll do it. If we get married.’
‘But this is totally the wrong way to make a decision like that.’
‘What do you mean? Do you love me?’
‘Of course I love you,’ Magnus replied.
‘Then let’s get married. We can go to Iceland and live happily ever after.’
‘You’re not thinking clearly,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re angry.’
‘You bet I’m angry. You’ve asked me to commit to going away with you, and I’ll do it if you commit to me. Come on, Magnus, decision time.’
Magnus took a deep breath. He watched the family climb into the car which sagged on its axles. They pulled out past the other FBI vehicle, the one that had picked up Colby. ‘I want you to come with me for your own safety,’ he said.
‘So that’s a no, then?’ Her eyes bored into his. Colby was a determined woman, that was one of the things Magnus loved about her, but he had never seen her this determined. ‘No?’
Magnus nodded. ‘No.’
Colby pursed her lips and reached for the door handle. ‘OK. We’re done here. I’m going back to work.’
Magnus grabbed her arm. ‘Colby, please!’
‘Get your hands off me!’ Colby shouted and threw open the door. She walked rapidly over to the four agents standing around the other car and muttered something to them. Within a minute the car was gone.
Two of the agents returned to the van and climbed in.
‘I guess she’s not going with you,’ said the driver.
‘I guess she’s not,’ said Magnus.