“You mean a leopard.”
“Aye, whatever you say. Anyway, yeah, the Mawhinneys took to running whores.”
“What kind?” Lennon asked. “Trafficked?”
“Aye,” Roscoe said. “Dirty fuckers. I don’t hold with that carry-on. It’s a dodgy business, full of dodgy boys. Like I said, they had it coming.”
“These dodgy boys,” Lennon said. “Would they be Lithuanians?”
“That’s right.”
“One of them was Tomas Strazdas,” Lennon said. “You ever come across him?”
“A couple of times. Mouthy bastard, quick with his fists. Not anymore, though.”
“Not anymore,” Lennon echoed. “Sam Mawhinney cut his throat, so someone blew his brains out.”
“No he didn’t,” Roscoe said.
“What?”
“Sam Mawhinney didn’t cut your man’s throat,” Roscoe said. “Some girl did.”
“Some girl?” Lennon leaned close. “A prostitute?”
“Aye, some whore,” Roscoe said. “She cut your man’s throat and got away. The Liths held Sam responsible, so they popped him. Then Mark Mawhinney tries to get the Liths back for his brother. I heard he got his neck broke for his trouble.”
Roscoe stopped talking and started laughing. “Fuck me, you really don’t know shite, do you?”
“No,” Lennon said, not sharing his amusement. “Enlighten me.”
“Mark was mouthing all round the place he was going to get even. His mate Jim Pollock let him know that big fella was going to come over to buy some gear. Seems Mark wasn’t up to the job, so the big fella gave him a doing and got away.”
“Big fella?”
“Herkel or Hercules or something like that. Big fucker, looks like he could hammer you into the ground. Works for the dead fella’s brother.”
“Herkus,” Lennon said, remembering his conversation with Dan Hewitt.
“Aye, maybe. Anyway, he’s going mad looking for this girl. He’s put the word out through Gordie Maxwell, offering money and everything.”
“Any word on where she is?”
“They think she might be with some bloke who uses whores regular.” Roscoe smiled. “Maybe that’s you.”
Lennon ignored the jibe and dropped his cigarette in the snow to fizzle out. “I’d consider it a personal favor if you give me a shout as soon as you hear anything new.”
“Might do,” Roscoe said. “What’s in it for me?”
“I don’t tell your missus what you said about her cooking.”
Roscoe grinned. “Arsehole.”
“Keep in touch,” Lennon said as he trudged through the snow back to his car.
“Away and shite,” Roscoe called after him.
Lennon unlocked the Audi and climbed in. He inserted the key into the ignition, turned it, and flicked on the wipers to clear the snow that had settled on the windshield.
The dashboard clock read coming up on one o’clock. He had intended on calling back to Susan’s flat for lunch so he could see Ellen. But Gordie Maxwell’s office was all the way across town.
A girl, Roscoe had said. All this caused by a prostitute who escaped her captors. Lennon took the passport from his pocket and studied the photograph, even though he knew it was unlikely to be her. Was she still in the city? How close was Herkus to finding her?
He dialed the front desk at his station. Moffat answered.
“I need you to put a call out,” Lennon said. “Tell everyone to keep an eye out for Herkus Katilius. You can scare up the registration number on his car.”
“What do I tell them it’s about?” Moffat asked.
“Nothing, for the moment,” Lennon said. “Just tell them if they spot him, find some other reason to give him a tug. If anyone detains him, give me a call and I’ll go to them. And warn them he’s dangerous.”
“Will do,” Moffat said. “By the way, I heard some rumblings from the higher-ups. No press release, nothing official just yet, but they’re treating all four killings as one case.”
“That’s no surprise,” Lennon said.
“There’s more,” Moffat said. “Looks like it’s falling to DCI Thompson’s MIT.”
Lennon cursed. “Which means it falls to me,” he said.
“Merry Christmas,” Moffat said.
Lennon hung up and started the engine.
33
BILLY CRAWFORD WALKED directly to the trade section of the hardware superstore where they stocked building supplies. He hadn’t expected the girl to call so quickly or he would have been better prepared. Normally it took a week or two of abuse at the hands of their captors to make them desperate enough to find a way to call him.
But this girl was different.
If he’d known, he wouldn’t have made the contact so close to Christmas. Thankfully, it had occurred to him to double-check his tools before it was too late. On inspection, he realized he needed blades for his twelve-inch hacksaw, a new chisel bit for his handheld pneumatic drill, and ballast for mixing concrete.
The cellar of his house had a linoleum-covered floor beneath the toolbox and the few pieces of furniture that lay there. If a person were to remove those items, then pull back the linoleum, he would find a concrete surface. And if that person looked carefully, he would see five patches, each roughly a meter square, that had been dug up and filled in again.
There was room for perhaps five more such excavations. Once those were filled, he always had the backyard. Plenty of room.
The cellar’s concrete floor was only two to three inches thick, laid over packed earth. The first time he’d had to remove a square of the flooring, he’d used a concrete saw, but it had been difficult to work with in such an enclosed space, and far too powerful for what turned out to be a reasonably straightforward job. The second time, he simply used his pneumatic drill with a good chisel bit to cut the shape of a square, then set about breaking it. By the third occasion, it took less than an hour’s work to clear a patch of earth. Another couple of hours’ digging, and he was done. All that remained was to mix the concrete and refill the hole and its contents.
Even allowing for all the sawing to be done, he could start at nine in the morning and be finished by early afternoon. Tiring, certainly, but no more than a day’s work on a building site would be.
He wheeled a flatbed trolley to the trade section of the hardware superstore on the Boucher Road. Seasonal music played over the public-address system, interspersed with sales messages disguised as holiday greetings. Only a few other shoppers browsed the aisles, all middle-aged men with nothing better to do over the next few days but complete some DIY project or other.
Like him.
There were smaller, friendlier stores much closer to his home, but even if they had been open on Christmas Eve, he would still have come here. He favored the anonymity. Here, they had self-service checkouts where you could scan your own goods and pay without having to engage in conversation with anyone.
He exited the trade section with a twenty-kilogram bag of ballast, a mixture of sand and aggregate to which he would add cement powder and water to make concrete.
Next he went to the tools and accessories aisle and found a pack of heavy-duty hacksaw blades. When he’d first begun, he’d wondered if he would need a butcher’s saw for this kind of work, but the blades and frames were shockingly expensive, so he’d tried a regular good-quality hacksaw and found it to be perfectly adequate for the task. He dropped the pack of blades onto the trolley beside the ballast and went looking for the chisel bit.
He searched through dozens upon dozens of drill bits, all hung on pegs, an entire wall of them. Were they out of stock? This close to Christmas, it could be days before they’d have more. What would he do with the girl for all that time? He couldn’t keep her in his house for three or four days. Even if he saved her tonight, as he had planned, by Boxing Day the smell would ripen. That had been the case the first time, before he had planned out his procedure properly. Four days it had sat there, fest
ering, before he figured out what to do with it.
Calm, he told himself.
If they were out of stock here, they had another depot to the north of the city. He could simply drive there. The chances of their being out of stock in both places were slim.
As his heartbeat came back under control, he spotted the metallic shape in a bin of loose drill bits on the floor beneath the display. He knelt down, pulled the chisel bit from the bin, felt the heft of its thick shaft, the sharpness of its cutting edge through the thin latex skin of the surgical gloves he wore. It made a satisfying heavy clank as he dropped it on the trolley bed.
He scanned his purchases at the checkout, keeping his gaze downward, making eye contact with no one. He fed the machine paper money, waited for his receipt, and wheeled the trolley toward the exit.
As he reached his van, a voice called, “Sir? Sir!”
He stiffened, pretended he didn’t hear. He unlocked the sliding doors and heaved the bag of ballast up into the van.
The voice called again, a young woman, shrill and insistent. He tossed the hacksaw blades and the chisel bit in after the ballast.
Footsteps coming, the voice piercing.
He wheeled the trolley to the bay, wished the young woman would leave him be.
She would not.
“Sir, you forgot your change,” she said as she approached. He feigned startlement. “Did I?”
“Here you go,” she said, smiling, holding it out to him. She wore a bright orange bib that matched her poorly applied fake tan. Tinsel circled her neck like a snake, a Santa Claus hat on her head.
“Thank you,” he said, reaching for it.
She noticed the latex covering his skin.
“Eczema,” he said.
Her smile almost flickered out before she remembered the good manners her employers had taught her. She dropped the coins into his palm without touching him.
“Thank you,” he said. He checked her name tag. “Collette.” “S’okay,” she said, backing away. “Merry Christmas.”
“Same to you,” he said.
He watched her retreat to the store before he climbed into the van and started the engine. As he pulled on to the Boucher Road, he argued and counterargued the seriousness of what had just happened.
Yes, he had made her nervous.
Yes, she would remember him, the items he bought, and the surgical gloves on his hands.
Yes, she may even have noted the registration of his van.
All those things would be of concern if the police were to ask her any questions.
But what reason would the police have to question her? What crime would lead them to her door? What news item would cause her to remember the strange man in the car park and lift a telephone?
None at all.
There would be no crime.
That was why he chose them as he did. The stolen souls, the lost girls, the whores with no identities. Would the thieves of young women go to the police when in turn those same young women were stolen from them?
“I steal the stolen,” he said.
He coughed and reddened when he realized he had spoken out loud. It had been happening more often lately. At the oddest of times, a thought would fall from his mind and onto his tongue before he could catch it.
Sometimes he would follow it, respond to it, begin a conversation. He had been calling himself Billy for so long now that it seemed his old self was another person entirely. This other self and Billy would exchange ideas, concepts, argue the rights and wrongs of the world.
Occasionally, not often, but enough to be worrying, the conversations became heated. These incidents had become more frequent since he’d begun his work. Once, sometime between digging the second and third holes in his concrete floor, he had even come to blows with himself.
Such foolishness had to stop. He couldn’t afford to be unpredictable in his own mind. His work needed care and a steady hand. Rash actions would see him destroyed.
“Enough,” he said to himself.
Time to think of the now, the definite, not the maybes or the mights. It was afternoon already, and he still had a long day ahead of him. He had a young girl waiting for him, soft yellow hair on her pretty head, and two rows of lovely white teeth behind her lips.
He could almost feel them on his tongue.
34
HERKUS CURSED THE traffic as he fought his way back to the hotel. Christmas shoppers flooding the city center, too stupid to have bought their presents beforehand. He shouted at them, spittle dotting the inside of the windshield.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have taken that last hit of the cocaine he’d gotten from Maxwell. Two blasts should’ve been enough to shake the heavy murk from his brow, but still he took another.
He willed himself to be calm as he inched from Chichester Street on to Victoria Street. The hotel stood just a few hundred yards from one of the city’s biggest shopping centers. Horns blared as cars tried to enter and exit the underground car park. Two cops did their best to direct traffic, but were largely ignored by the motorists.
Herkus was stuck and could do little about it. He turned up the heat and shouted anyway. It made him feel better.
His phone rang.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s me,” Arturas said. “Where are you?”
“Not far, just down the road, but the traffic’s bad.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know,” Herkus said. “Might be a while. I’ve moved maybe ten feet in as many minutes. Fucking shoppers.”
A pause, then Arturas asked, “Do you have anything for me?”
“Yes, I’ve got something.”
“Get out and walk,” Arturas said.
“What?”
“Pull over and park,” Arturas said. “You can walk here if you’re so close.”
Herkus gave an exasperated laugh. “No, I can’t. There’s nowhere to pull over. Even if there was, I couldn’t get across the traffic. It’s too—”
“I don’t care. Just get here.”
“Listen, boss, I—”
The knock at the driver’s window almost caused Herkus to drop the phone.
“Hold on,” he said to Arturas.
The traffic cop bent down and looked through the glass at him, his pudgy cheeks red and wet from the snow. He knocked again and made a winding motion with his gloved hand.
Herkus gave a polite smile and hit the down button.
“Afternoon, sir,” the cop said.
Herkus nodded.
“Any idea why I came over and knocked your window?” the cop asked, a tired flatness to his voice.
Herkus shook his head.
“I came over and knocked your window because I saw you using your phone,” the cop said. “As I’m sure you’re aware, it’s an offense to operate a mobile phone when in charge of a motor vehicle.”
“Is it?” Herkus asked. He hung up, ignoring the tinny sound of Arturas’s voice, and dropped the phone onto the dashboard. Watching the policeman, he placed his hands in plain view on the steering wheel. The sweat on his palms slicked the leather.
“Yes it is,” the cop said. “I’ll not ask you to step out of the car because of the traffic, but I’ll have a look at your documents, if you don’t mind.”
“Dock-ment?” Herkus asked.
“License and insurance certificate,” the cop said, his pleasant demeanor growing more forced.
“I English no good,” Herkus said.
“License and insurance,” the cop said. “Now.”
Herkus shook his head. “No English.”
The cop opened the door, reached in, and took the key from the ignition, letting the car’s engine die. “Out,” he said. He jerked his thumb in a gesture that couldn’t be misunderstood, whatever the language.
Herkus let his right hand drop between his legs, his fingertips almost touching the floor of the car. The Glock and ammunition lay tucked into a compartment cut into the underside of the seat. He only needed to
reach down, pull back the fabric, and grab the pistol.
“Out,” the cop said again.
“No English,” Herkus said.
Possibilities raced through his mind, but he knew they were fueled by the cocaine. The packet was hidden along with the Glock. He breathed deep, felt the winter air tingle in his nasal passages.
Be calm, Herkus told himself. Be good. They can’t touch you. He lifted his hand from between his legs and got out of the car.
“Wasn’t so hard, was it?” the cop said.
Herkus shrugged. The other cop had stayed where he was, directing traffic, but kept an eye on his partner as he waved and signaled at the motorists.
“Documents,” the cop said to Herkus. “License. Insurance.”
“Okay,” Herkus said.
He reached inside the car, pulled down the sun visor, grabbed his Lithuanian license and company insurance certificate, and handed them over.
Herkus waited while the cop examined the plastic card and the sheet of paper. “European People Management?” he asked.
“My boss,” Herkus said. “He pay insurance.”
“Your English has improved,” the cop said. “Well, let’s see if you can understand this: We’re going to move your car to the side of the road so we can have a proper chat. Okay?”
“Okay,” Herkus said.
The cop whistled at his partner, a taller, thinner man, and beckoned him over. They huddled in conversation, agreed something, and the fat cop got into the Mercedes. He restarted the engine while the other began directing traffic around it.
“Why don’t you move over to the pavement, sir?” he asked.
Herkus did as he was told, but took his time about it. He ambled toward the footpath as if it were his own wish to do so. The cop resumed his directing, talking into a radio on his lapel at the same time. The Mercedes inched its way to the curb.
The phone in Herkus’s pocket rang. He pulled it out, looked at the display. Arturas, it said. He cursed and hit the reject button.
Let him wait, Herkus thought. Or he can come out here and talk to these cops.
Stolen Souls Page 13