Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

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