It settled into routine, like it always did, men hardened to violent death encountering it yet again, going through the procedures but thinking of other things, like a ball game or a bar or being in bed with someone other than their wives. It had stopped raining, which was something.

There were three patrol cars strewn haphazardly, their roof-bar lights still bouncing reds and whites off the puddled ground. The tinned voice of the dispatcher echoed unheard from inside the empty cabs. The crews and uniformed patrolmen were trying to move the curious on, saying there was nothing to see and that it was all over, which was a verbal part of the routine. There was the gore-splattered body to see, so it wasn’t all over, and none of the onlookers moved. The yellow tapes, sometimes looped around the disused girders of the old overhead railway, marked off where it lay. The scene-of-crime technicians were inside the cordon under emergency arc-lights, each going through their preliminaries, forensic brushing and sifting, the examining coroner taking body temperatures and looking at the injuries.

‘The Mafia comes to Washington DC,’ declared Rafferty. There was a lot of blood and they couldn’t make out all the wounds, but the most obvious was where the bullet had been fired directly into the mouth.

‘They’re everywhere else: why leave us out?’ said his partner, Eric Johannsen.

‘Wonder what he did wrong?’ Michael Rafferty was a short, red-haired Irishman, with freckles and the hard-shell cynicism of a ten-year veteran of the homicide division. He and Johannsen had been counting down the minutes to the end of their shift when the call had come, and Rafferty was still angry at missing the Orioles game.

‘We’ll never know,’ said Johannsen philosophically. He was a big man, thick bodied as well as tall and with the white-blond hair of a proud Scandinavian ancestry.