Even with snapping on her lights at every intersection, it still took Brand forty-five minutes in midday traffic to slog across the entire borough of Brooklyn and arrive in Williamsburg. She showed up at the Nine-Four precinct house to arrest Richie Miles on suspicion of rape, kidnapping and official misconduct.
◆◆◆
A cop arresting another cop is always problematic. No matter that Brand was just doing her duty. The tribe interpreted any challenge as a betrayal. But at first it looked as if things might go her way. Nothing of any serious weight fell on her. Miles and Berline were suspended. The NYPD brass convened a departmental hearing.
Slowly, though, the tables turned. Bad things started to happen. Her cell phone would go off in the middle of the night. The caller would hang up when she answered. An incident with a dead rat served as a sign the situation was escalating. She swung open her locker one morning to find the stiffened fat rodent staring all blank-eyed at her.
Her standing in the department slid headlong downhill from there. A chill settled in among her fellow cops. Her duty log shrank. She felt herself marked as a traitor to the department. She called her original partner in the NYPD, Willie Urrico. He had retired to New Jersey, working security for Teeterboro Airport.
“How’d you think they were going to react?” Urrico asked. “You came after a couple of their own.”
“Pointing out the obvious, Miles and Berline were bad cops.”
“I don’t know about Berline, but I do know Richie Miles is seriously connected. You know how it is. There’s the department, then there’s the cliques and factions within the department. It’s like a shadow government. And he’s the pope of that church.”
Over the next weeks Brand watched the case against Miles and Berline fall apart. Cell tower pings turned up discrepancies in the testimony of Bristol Chambers. The phone records indicated the victim wasn’t where she said she was at the time of the assault.
Ever since she had been promoted to anti-crime, Brand had worked solo. She drove a seven-year old Chrysler sedan, a motor pool reject. The vehicle was dinged and dented from its years on the mean streets. Despite that, Brand had a great deal of affection for it. The car was her refuge, her sanctuary, her private office.
In heavy traffic on the Bruckner Expressway, Brand felt her brakes go mushy. She pumped them frantically. The pedal went to the floor. All stopping power totally vanished. The situation was brutal, with cars and trucks racing past on both sides. In panic she considered jamming the transmission into reverse.
Careening wildly at top speed, she managed to steer the runaway vehicle across two lanes and onto a grassy slope at the side of the highway. The Chrysler ploughed straight up the hillside. It rumbled and bucked and finally stalled to a stop.
Brand sat stunned in the driver’s seat. They’re trying to kill me, she thought. Tears of frustration threatened to pour out. She fought back her emotions.
The next day the prosecutor’s office dropped all charges against Miles and Berline. The victim’s testimony was judged unreliable.
Brand, the cop who initiated the arrest, felt herself exposed, vulnerable. She knew that victims simply did not manufacture claims of sexual assault. It didn’t happen. No one in their right mind would voluntarily enter into such a shitstorm unless the accusation had the weight of truth behind it.
Bristol Chambers might have stumbled when recounting the details. She was a young woman caught in a nightmare. The charge itself, Brand believed, was warranted.
None of that mattered in how the case shook out. Miles was free. Brand remained in the cross-hairs. She was guilty, not Richie Miles.
◆◆◆
You are not a police detective, are you? Was that how Hammar said it? Not anymore.
Ah, but my dear counselor Hammar, attorney at law, advocate for the weak and helpless against the strong and powerful, I’ve got news for you. The Catholics say that once a priest always a priest. The same is true for cops. Veronika Brand knew she could be suspended, retired, shot in a rocket to the moon—or show up halfway around the world, in Sweden—and she would still remain what she was.
She’d still bleed blue.
14.
Dollar Boy worked mostly at the Härjedalen faux hunting lodge, but occasionally elsewhere. He was allowed use of an old Scania-Vabis truck to transport farm animals to the veterinarian, though usually the vets traveled to the lodge and not the other way around.
The rattle-trap vehicle dated from the 1970s. Dollar Boy’s boss, the owner of the lodge, kept the thing alive out of pure stubbornness. Gösta Kron often avowed reverence for Sweden’s manufacturing past. From trucks to human beings, everything had been superior way back when.
Gösta Kron. More formally, Friherre Gösta Benedict Leijonhufvud Kron. Known familiarly as Gösta, though Dollar Boy could expect a stinging rebuke if he ever ventured to be in any way familiar. With the help, the boss was always “Baron,” capital “B,” an attempt to create superiority and prestige in the absence of any royal lineage. Years ago, in his early days at the estate, Dollar Boy endured a routine of willow stick canings. The punishment came for small mistakes and youthful misbehavior. Baron Kron himself, or his steward, Hugo Magnusson, conducted the whippings.
Although they stung like the scourging of Jesus, Dollar Boy counted the punishments as minor annoyances. He dismissed flogging of staff as another of the baron’s conservative idiosyncrasies. The man had great allegiance to tradition and bygone days and ways. After a few months, as Dollar Boy gained his employer’s trust, the practice tapered off and ended altogether.
Now eighteen years old, the young boy was
