Stolen Souls Read Online Free PDF

it’s torn, rather than cut? Something more jagged did this.”
    Lennon quietly hoped the case would not be assigned to Thompson’s MIT. The senior officer, or his deputy, would be required to attend the post mortem. Knowing Thompson, he would assign Lennon the duty of standing there while they cut this poor bastard up.
    “There’s tire tracks over there,” Connolly said.
    Lennon moved the torch’s beam over the loose stones and earth. They were faint, the ground frozen hard, but they were there all right. A car had been parked here tonight.
    He scanned the patch between the tracks and the body for footprints. All he saw were the slightest of impressions, nothing useful.
    “Care to amaze me with some logical deduction?” Lennon asked.
    Connolly shuffled his feet. “Well, I suppose someone maybe drove here to dump the body. The harbor cop disturbed them before they could get it in the water, he got a beating for his troubles, and they ran.”
    “I think that’s some pretty good supposing,” Lennon said.
    “There’s one thing, though,” Connolly said.
    Lennon stood. “What’s that, then?”
    “I think I know his face,” Connolly said.

7
    A RTURAS S TRAZDAS OPENED his laptop on the hotel suite’s desk and powered it up. He sat down in the leatherbound chair, a luxurious sofa to one side of the room. A few seconds later, he had connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. He called up the website for European People Management, a labor agency that was jointly owned by him, his brother, and his mother. Half a dozen such agencies operated in the British Isles and throughout the rest of the EU, and all of them were owned by some combination of his closest family members. But only he knew their inner workings.
    He logged in to the website’s secure admin area with a username and password he changed every seven days and followed the links until he found a list of migrants registered as having been assigned work within Northern Ireland. They were all listed as Polish, Czech, Lithuanian or Latvian nationals. He filtered the list down to females who had left employment in the last three weeks.
    One listing.
    It said she was Lithuanian and gave her name as Niele Gimbutiené. Strazdas knew this to be false. He clicked on the link to see her full profile. There were two images, one a scan of a Lithuanian passport, the other a head-andshoulders shot of the girl. A casual examination, such as a tired immigration official might give, would suggest the photographs matched, that this girl was indeed a Lithuanian national with every entitlement as an EU citizen to live and work legally in the United Kingdom.
    But if you looked closely at the eyes, the height of the cheekbones, the set of the mouth, you might suspect this girl was not the one pictured on the passport. And you’d be right. The notes said this girl had left her job at a mushroom farm in County Monaghan just over a week ago and was no longer associated with the agency. Strazdas knew this was not untrue, strictly speaking, but the reality was a little harder. If the notes were entirely accurate, they would say she had been purchased from the agency by another party, along with the passport on which she had travelled. Perhaps the passport would be used to gain passage for some other pretty young woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, and Slavic features. But this girl was still somewhere in Belfast.
    Strazdas knew in his gut that Tomas was in trouble. Did this skinny girl have something to do with it? He had no reason to suspect so, but he had learned over many years in business to be mindful of all possibilities.
    His mobile phone rang. He lifted it from the desktop, checked the display, and answered.
    “There’s no answer at the apartment,” Herkus said. “I can’t see any lights from outside. I don’t think they’re here. I’d break in, but all of these places have reinforced doors. I’d need a battering ram to get through.”
    “All right,” Strazdas said.