Brian McGrory - Strangled

Maybe this one would finally be his last. Of course, thats what he thought two weeks before when he stood over the decomposing body of a prematurely aged and prematurely dead heroin addict who was found shot to death in an abandoned two-decker in Dorchester. By the time the cops got to the guys body, the coroner had a tough time telling the needle marks from the rat bites up and down his toothpick arms.

He had as much a chance of solving that homicide as he had of retiring to an oceanfront estate on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Speaking of which, how the hell was he going to make it all work not that case, not any case, but the retirement? Thats what kept flashing through Detective Mac Foleys mind as he glided through the quiet city on the way to another murder scene, this one maybe the last of his forty-five-year career.

He should have been able to make it work thats for sure. The pension wasnt bad (actually, he knew it was pretty damned good). The savings should have been there. Then theres Social Security, for whatever thats worth. But he and Sandy had to go off and have a kid late in life. What the hell were they thinking? Now he was sixty-five years old and with a daughter in college, and no, she wouldnt go to UMass like all the other kids in the neighborhood. She needed to go private, and not just any private, but what is it that her high school guidance counselor had so proudly called it? an elite school. Elite meant there was ivy clinging to the brick buildings and half his salary went to tuition. It meant that he had to take out a second mortgage on their small house. It meant that come next week, the retirement that should have been so comfortable wasnt going to be so comfortable after all.

Not all her fault, though he knew that. She was a good kid, just getting what was hers. It was him that was the problem, or maybe his damned job. He should have been making more money. Four and a half decades as a cop, and he still held the vaunted title of detective. No captain, no lieutenant, not even a damned sergeant. Just detective. It didnt matter shit that he was known by anyone who was anyone as the best homicide cop on the force, that he had put eighty-six men and three women killers all behind bars for life, that city hall itself once demanded that Mac Foley be put on a case when the mayors cousin was killed. What mattered was how much money he had in the bank, and right now, staring down the barrel of retirement, he didnt have enough.

He thought again of Hal Harrison, the commissioner. When he wasnt thinking of his own pathetic retirement, he was thinking about the commissioner. They had the same birthday, they started at the police academy on the same day forty-five years ago, they were both elevated to detective the same month, and now they had the same retirement day. After spending his entire career keeping Foley down, making him eat four decades worth of shit, Harrison was going out on top, with all sorts of fanfare and probably more money than he could ever spend for the rest of his life. And he was probably about to be mayor.

Mac Foley knew the lies that Harrison told to get to where he was. And now he could taste the bile in his own throat.

Mac, good to see you, old pal. I thought youd already been led from the stable out to the pasture.

That was Lieutenant Dan Eldrich greeting him as Mac stepped out of his unmarked car on stately Charles Street on Bostons Beacon Hill. Mac took a quick look around at the typical scenery of his job the three or four double-parked squad cars with their blue and white flashers cutting through the cold night air and reflecting off the glass storefronts, the foreboding medical examiners truck idling in the street, the yellow tape, the small crowd of people craning their necks from a nearby street corner to see what was going on.