The Locker Read Online Free PDF Page A

before.
    As a member of a specialist police unit in New York, he’d been to more scenes of crime—especially kidnappings—than he cared to remember. Many of the houses and apartments had been trashed by ignorant and drugs-fuelled invaders looking for an easy score. In his experience, while these criminals—mostly from eastern European or Latin American gangs—were overly ambitious in scale and reach, they were rarely the hottest cards in the deck. They never imagined getting caught, so did little to bother hiding their tracks.
    Which was both good and bad.
    Good meant they usually got caught. Bad meant they didn’t really care.
    It was a measure of how they saw the miserable trajectory of their lives and most did nothing to break the pattern. They’d go in hard and brutal, prepared to kill regardless of consequences because to do it any other way simply never occurred to them. If the authorities were lucky, the perpetrators left enough forensic matter and sometimes personal crap that linked them as tight to a crime as a full reel of studio-quality photographic evidence.
    This, though, was different.
    No clues, no crap, no handy little personal belongings dropped in their haste. Whoever had snatched the little girl had come in clean and left the same way. In, lifted and out again, no damage, no fuss.
    Unless they had performed the lift on the outside and the house left open was to confuse the investigation. It wasn’t uncommon and the pick-up wouldn’t have needed much; a van or large car stopping on a quiet street, the driver smiling to ask directions of an unsuspecting woman and child.
    Then wham—all gone.
    Professional.
    There was always the other possibility: that the woman, Tiggi whatever her name was, had not been so unsuspecting; had in fact been complicit in the abduction.
    He sniffed at the pillow on her bed, picking up a trace of perfume to get a feel for her. It wasn’t a sexual thing; he was simply rolling through a database of smells and matching them to other women he had come across in years of criminal investigations. Sometimes the perfume a woman wore told you a whole lot more about her character and the people she mixed with than any other details.
    This one told him cheap but with some taste. A boyfriend, undoubtedly, but not over-generous or rich.
    Her room had been cleared. There should have been something left behind: underwear, wash gear, a change of clothes, lipstick, face-wipes —even something accidental like a bus ticket or a shop receipt. But the place had been sanitised, as devoid of character as a motel room.
    Strike one against the nanny.
    He moved into the main bedroom. Although shared by a man it was mostly a woman’s space, personal, soft and colourful with cushions and the light touches no man would ever consider. Well, most men. He’d known a cop in New York with ambitions as an interior designer whose apartment was like a repro of the Ziegfeld Follies. But he’d been a one-off .
    He listened to make sure the Hardman woman wasn’t going to come up after him, but all he could hear was Ruth’s voice, probing for information and clues. He hadn’t got the measure of her yet, only that she didn’t seem too keen to have been selected to show him around. Maybe it was the result of a previous pairing. There were partners he’d be pleased never to see again; it was always a danger in their line of work, being in close proximity to an opposite for several hours a day or night. Most of the time you got on and did the job because that’s what you had to do. Sometimes, though, it was easier to hope for a transfer out.
    He moved around the room, checking the dressing table, bedside cabinets and wardrobe, quickly flicking aside the corners of the carpets. He wasn’t sure why he did this here, only that in the past it had yielded results out of proportion to expectations. Some had revealed letters, recreational drugs,