Souls At Zero (A Dark Psychological Thriller) (12 page)

As Edger drove into the estate where Donna Lennon lived, he shook his head at the memory of O'Rourke. A man like that should have been in a mental hospital from the start. Edger had no idea if the man was still in prison, or if he was out, but he certainly wouldn't put it past him to go after Edger again, even after all these years. But if that was the case, why the hell would O'Rourke kidnap Edger's daughter and demand that he kill the Lord Mayor of Belfast? It made no sense, but then nothing about O'Rourke made sense to Edger at the time, so who the fuck knows?

Regardless of who was doing this to Edger, it didn't change the fact that they had his daughter, and they had forced him into a time sensitive kill mission that would spawn severe consequences for his daughter if it failed. For the time being at least, Edger knew his focus had to be less on who was doing this to him, and more on how he was going meet their demands.

Donna Lennon lived alone in a three bedroom semi in a quiet residential estate just of the main Belfast Road. It was the first time Edger had actually been to her home and he was surprised that she lived in such a large house, given that she lived alone. He had her pegged as an apartment type girl, but then he remembered that Donna's parents had died within six months of each other a few years ago, leaving the house to her.

Donna opened the front door as he was walking up the path. She stood waiting on him, dressed all in black, wearing heavy dark eye makeup, her shoulder length black hair more tousled than usual. The T-shirt she wore had an image of a large eye on it and above the eye was the word TOOL. "This better be important," she said as he reached the door. "Tool waits for no man."

"You look like a teenager," he said, as he stepped past her into the hallway.

"Some of us refuse to grow up. I'm only twenty-eight anyway. Still a spring chicken, unlike you, old man."

He forced a smile, not in the mood for the usual back and forth he often had with her. "You alone?"

"Yeah. I'm meeting my girlfriend at the train station. Soon, I might add."

Edger nodded. "I need your help, Donna."

"I gathered that," she said, heading into the living room. He followed behind her into the room. She obviously hadn't changed the decor since her parents died, because the walls still had flowery wallpaper on them, as well as flowery curtains on the windows. Donna however, had added her own flourishes here and there, in the form of skulls, a lamp made of bones and some very weird artwork on the walls that was totally at odds with the wallpaper. She sat down on the white fabric sofa and picked a glass up off the table which seemed to be full of Jack Daniel's if the bottle on the table was anything to go by. "You want a drink?"

He shook his head. "No. I need you to hack Belfast City Hall, Donna."

She nearly choked on her drink. "What? Are you kidding?"

"No, I'm not. I need information on Brian McGinty, the Lord Mayor."

"Why?"

Edger sat on the edge of the sofa beside her. "Fuck it, I'll take that drink." He reached over and grabbed the bottle of the table, put it to his lips and took a large swig.

"Help yourself," Donna said, as she lit a cigarette. "I'll not offer you one as I know you roll your own. What's going on, Harry? Why the hell would you need me to hack the fucking City Hall? What makes you think I can even do that?"

Edger put the bottle back on the table, the bourbon burning its way down into his stomach. "Are you saying you can't?"

"No, but…"

"But what?"

"It's fucking Belfast Council, Harry. Are you forgetting I nearly went to jail once for hacking Queens University? I try not to do anything illegal anymore, unless Rankin asks me to."

He had heard about her getting arrested for hacking the university system. Despite being a near genius when it comes to computers, Donna still manged to fail her degree in computer science because she spent all her student days partying. In a bid to change her final grade, she thought she would hack the system, and ended up getting herself caught. Only for the fact that her father was a well-connected barrister, she would have done time.

Edger stared straight at her. "My daughter's been kidnapped, Donna."

Donna stared back at him, incredulous. "Jesus, you're serious."

"Yes."

"Fuck, Harry." She put a hand to her mouth. "I'm so sorry. Do you know who took her?"

"Not yet."

"Do you know
why
she was taken?"

"I don't know that either. To get at me for some reason probably."

Donna sat back in the sofa, clearly dumbfounded.

"I need this information," Edger said. "Kaitlin's life depends on it."

"I don't get it, Harry. What does the Mayor have to do with this?"

"It's best you don't know, Donna."

She looked at him a moment, then drained the rest of her drink, putting the glass on the table. "Let me get my laptop."

She arrived back a moment later with her laptop, which she placed on the coffee table, moving the Jack Daniel's bottle and a pewter skull ashtray to one side to make room. "What do you need to know?" she asked.

"First I need a schedule for McGinty. I need to know where he's going to be over the next eleven hours. I also need his home address."

Donna stopped typing and looked at him. "This doesn't sound good, Harry."

"Like I said, the less you know the better. I'm doing this to get Kaitlin back, that's all."

She nodded and started typing again. "This might take a while. I don't know what kind of security City Hall has."

"I don't have much time," he told her. "So as quick as you can manage. Can you get into the Mayor's personal computer as well?"

"What? Shit, Harry. I doubt it. If it's linked with the system, then maybe. I'll try."

"Good girl. I appreciate this, Donna."

"Hey, if it gets your daughter back…"

Edger left her to it while he went outside to the car again so he could call Gemma. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking for a minute, staring through the window at the steadily darkening sky, which seemed to be promising heavy rain soon, going by the bulbous grey clouds that were gathering.

When he finished his cigarette, he tossed the butt out the window and phoned Gemma on his mobile. "Gemma," he said when she answered. "Did the cops call yet?"

"Where are you?" she asked him, her voice full of anxiety. "What's happening?"

"I'm working to get our daughter back."

"How?"

"Look, Gemma, you have to trust that I'm doing all I can here."

She sniffed loudly, sounding like she was crying. "Is that going to be enough?"

He closed his eyes for a second. Edger knew she was in a dark place. So was he. But he needed to stay focused. He couldn't allow her to drag him into feeling as lost and helpless as she felt. "What did the cops say?"

"They know something's up. That Detective Black, he's not going to drop this."

"Did you tell him what I told you to tell him?"

"Yes," she snapped. "They didn't believe me."

"It doesn't matter. They have no evidence. As long as they stay away so I can do what I have to do."

"And what
are
you going to do, Harry?"

Edger was silent for a moment, then he said, "I'm not sure yet, but whatever I do, it's going be bad for the Lord Mayor, I guarantee you that."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Detective Inspector Paul Black sat at his desk in the CID incident room in Lisburn Station, a cup of lukewarm coffee in one hand and a pen in the other that he was tapping on his desk absentmindedly. Across from him sat Detective Sergeant Rosalind McKee. She was at her own desk, busy typing up a report on the unconfirmed abduction of twelve year old Kaitlin McGuire. She stopped typing for a moment and looked at him. "Let it go, Paul," she said. "If no one is co-operating, there's not much we can do."

"That girl was kidnapped from that cafe," he said, banging the end of his pen hard on the desk. "We shouldn't be letting this go."

McKee went back to typing. "Maybe not, but we've been told to concentrate on the other cases we have. We're understaffed here. Let's try and clear the cases we have evidence for."

Black nodded. "This case is still bothering me."

"Fuck them, if they don't want to be helped."

"It's easy to see you've no kids anyway."

"Fuck you, Paul. Don't make me out to be an uncaring bitch when I'm just following orders and doing my job."

Black shook his head at her without her seeing. She would go far in the job. Already had in her short career so far. "Right, then," he said. "My shift is over. I'm—" A sudden coughing fit forced him to stop. He put a fist to his mouth as his chest heaved and his lungs brought up fluid that he swallowed back down again. When he had finished, he sat a minute longer, getting his breath back, and then he noticed a few specks of red on his desk. He wiped them away with his sleeve before McKee noticed.

"Stop smoking, Paul," McKee said, without looking away from her computer screen.

"See you tomorrow, Rosalind."

Black made his way through the station and out to the car park inside the barracks. He paused, inhaling cold air into his burning lungs for a moment. Then he sighed deeply and walked to where his red Audi A3 was parked and got inside. He drove to the main security gate, waving at the uniformed officer manning the gate from inside the security booth. A few seconds later, the thick reinforced steel gates opened and Black drove out on to the busy Lisburn Road, heading for home.

As he sat in traffic, staring at the drizzling rain hitting the windshield, he thought about the empty house waiting for him in Dundonald, the TV dinner and the bottle of whiskey, the shitty television programs turned on only to kill the unbearable silence in the house, the inevitable depressing thoughts about the life that grew more empty by the day thanks to the fact that he no longer had a wife and two kids in the house with him. That and the other thing that he spent most of his time trying not to think about.

Fuck it.

Instead of heading for Dundonald, he drove towards Stranmillis, stopping to pick up a half bottle of Bushmills from an off licence on the way. From there, he drove to the Lockview Road where Mr Harry Edger lived. Black stopped the car by the security gates that led into Edger's apartment complex. There was no sign of Edger's car, so he drove on down the road a bit, did a U-turn and parked his red Audi behind a white transit van about fifty yards down from the apartment complex, where he would be able to see everything that came and went through the security gates, including Edger's silver Skoda, if it ever turned up. Black turned the heating on in the car, cracked open his bottle of whiskey and settled back into his seat.

Despite the bullshit Edger and his ex-wife tried to feed Black about their daughter being fine, Black had no doubt whatsoever that Kaitlin McGuire was in the hands of some kidnapper somewhere. There was also no doubt in his mind that Edger had been told by the kidnapper to keep the police out of the situation. The kidnapper had probably threatened to hurt the girl if Edger involved the police. Black could understand Edger doing as he was told, but at the end of the day, a major crime had been committed. A girl had been abducted. As a policeman and member of the Crimes Investigation Department, Black had a duty to investigate, despite what his superiors had said about concentrating on other cases. Black had two teenage daughters of his own. If either of them were kidnapped, God forbid, he would want to know that experienced people were trying to get them back. Not some half-baked private detective with a military background who probably thought he was fucking John Rambo.

Black had looked into Edger's background back at the station. Harrison Edger was an interesting character. His father was English, a cop with the London Metropolitan Police before coming to Belfast to live, where he worked in Special Branch. Black's own father had been in Special Branch also, so Black knew well the kind of work those guys did. Some of them were as shady as the paramilitaries and criminals they were supposed to be trying to stop. Their work also made them targets to Republican terrorists. Edger's father was blown up in a car bomb, lost both his legs. Ended up killing himself a year later with a bullet to the head from his service weapon. Black thought that must have been hard on Edger and the rest of his family. The mother died several years later after drinking herself to death.

Then there was Edger's brother, Declan. He was apparently abducted one night while he was walking home with his younger brother, Harry. Black read the reports on the incident, and the investigating officers had said in their report they considered the incident to be terrorist related. They posited that Declan Edger had been abducted for some reason by the Provos. Like a lot of such cases, Declan Edger was never heard from again. Classed as one of the missing, he was declared dead seven years later, his body probably buried in some bog somewhere in Black Mountain. It happened. The Provos did it all the time, often refusing to give up the location of the bodies they buried. Half the time, they refused to even admit responsibility for the disappearances at all, as in the case of Edger's brother.