Sean Black - Lockdown

Lock’s mind flashed back to Osnabruck. He’d never been able to let go of the sense of failure he’d felt after the Greer Price case. Even though he’d known when he was handed the investigation that Greer was almost certainly long dead, it still gnawed away at him.

It was the loneliness of her death that had got to him more than anything. The feeling of abandonment she must have experienced in her last moments had left him hollowed out. Even at the end of the rope there was no act of vengeance that came close to balancing the murder of a child; if there had been, he would have put a bullet through the skull of Greer’s killer himself.

He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and walked out of Josh’s room.

In a corner of Richard’s room, a twirling strand of DNA bounced around a twenty-inch flatscreen computer display, which sat atop a desk. Lock moved the mouse and it disappeared, defaulting to a log-in screen.

‘The FBI have already been through everything on there,’ said Richard, framed in the doorway. ‘But if you think they might have missed anything. .’

‘You mean, in case you’re involved?’

The notion seemed ludicrous but Lock knew he couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. It wouldn’t have been the first time a perpetrator had brought about his own discovery by trying to employ a private investigator as a smokescreen to bolster his appearance of innocence.

Richard looked shocked. ‘No, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, maybe there’s an email, something that might be a clue.’

It couldn’t hurt to look.

Richard pulled up Firefox. ‘I burned all my work emails to disk before I left.’

‘You have a copy?’

‘Here,’ Richard said, pulling a DVD from a carousel next to the computer.

‘Any other email account?’

‘Hotmail, but I hardly use it.’

‘Did the FBI look at your Hotmail account?’

‘Why would they? I didn’t get any threats through it.’

‘You mind if I do?’

‘Go right ahead.’

Richard opened Firefox, which defaulted to Hotmail. He typed in his username and password, handed Lock the disk with his work emails, and left him to it.

Lock doubted that the email threats would yield anything. Or the letters, for that matter. Anyone who went to the trouble of mailing a death threat wasn’t likely to sign their name, either directly or by licking the envelope and leaving their DNA all over it. And the emails would have been sent from an internet café or via multiple proxy servers. One of the things he’d learned about the animal rights people who’d targeted Meditech was that they were savvy as well as motivated. Many of them were college-educated and as up on the science involved as anyone Meditech had to offer.

A half-hour later, Lock was no further forward. There were no specific threats to anyone by name, apart from Richard. Family was mentioned in a catch-all manner; there was no reference to a son, or even a wife, deceased or otherwise. As poison-pen correspondence went, it was all fairly insipid.

He switched back to the web browser. Idly, he clicked on the deleted emails folder and scrolled through the spam offering to enhance the recipient’s sexual performance or asking to use their bank account to rest millions of dollars.

Then he spotted it. Unopened, like most of the rest of the spam. No subject line. A Gmail address. It had arrived the day of the shooting, maybe an hour before Josh was last seen with Natalya. He clicked it open.

Now you will feel the pain you have inflicted on others.

Lone Wolf

When he walked back into the living room, Richard was standing by the window with the lights off. Lock considered asking him about the email. Richard had been pretty adamant that the threats had ceased once he’d stopped working for the company so he decided to let it go. It had made no reference to Josh or the kidnapping, and crucially it registered as unopened.

A car drew up directly opposite the apartment block and Lock watched as a man got out. As he darted across the street and passed under a streetlight, Lock’s gut instinct was confirmed. It was Frisk.

Lock met the FBI agent at the door.

‘Get the hell out of here, Lock,’ Frisk grunted, ‘we can handle this.’

Lock was still riled from their encounter back at the hospital. When Frisk had given him that bullshit speech about no charges being pressed as if he was doing Lock some kind of personal favour.

‘You seem to be doing a bang-up job so far, Agent Frisk,’ observed Lock.

‘It’s early on.’

Lock pulled the door closed, so Richard wouldn’t hear the rest of the exchange. A pissing contest meant some hard facts might come to light, and Lock wasn’t sure Richard was ready for them.

‘Early’s when you put it to bed. You know that and I know that. But seeing as you’re here, Hulme came looking for me, not the other way round.’

‘Fifteen minutes of fame not enough for you, huh?’ said Frisk aggressively.

‘OK, we can stand out here and compare dicks, or we can try and help each other out,’ Lock said, lowering his voice.

‘And what possible help are you going to be?’

‘Well, for a start, you might want to take another look at his computer.’

‘One of our tech guys already did a data dump from the hard drive.’

‘Which wouldn’t help you with a web-based email account. Check the spam folder. You’re looking for an email from someone calling themselves Lone Wolf. Arrived the day it all went down at Meditech.’

Frisk’s stony face reddened. Some tech was going to get his ass chewed when he got back to Federal Plaza, Lock could tell.

‘Anything else?’

Lock shrugged. ‘That’s it. . for now.’

‘So what’s your take on all this? Come on, if you’ve got some dazzling insights, I’d love to hear them.’

‘Find the au pair and you find the boy.’

‘Get with the programme, Lock. We already did. The harbour unit pulled her out of the East River a half-hour ago.’

A visit to the morgue was a grim affair at the best of times, and this was a long way from the best of times. The fact that there was still no sign of Josh, dead or alive, counted as good under the circumstances, although the river could have been waiting to offer up its misery in instalments. The bad news was that the task of identifying Natalya’s body had fallen to Richard Hulme. As if the poor bastard didn’t have enough to deal with, thought Lock, as he listened to Frisk make the request.

Richard had been stoical about it, agreeing without argument. Even if he hadn’t already offered to help, Lock figured it was the least he could do to tag along as a shoulder to cry on. That, and there might be something to glean from Natalya’s recovery. Something that might just help them to find Josh. If he was still alive.

It was hot in the corridor outside where the identification took place. Lock’s head was still pounding. He found a solitary chair, sat down and made the mistake of closing his eyes.

He came to as Richard was led in, eyes rimmed red, hands trembling, the heavy weight of realizing that very bad things could happen to good people bearing down on him. Things that a person might never wholly recover from. Lock had seen that look before, when he’d stood across from the family of Greer Price as her coffin was lowered into the ground. He’d hoped never to see it again, but now here he was, offering a silent prayer that history wasn’t about to repeat itself.

From what little Frisk had told him about the FBI’s investigation, Lock had gathered that they’d garnered the same amount of significant information Lock had managed to glean in his few hours talking to Richard. Almost nothing. So, Lock did something which went against every fibre of his professional being: he made a phone call to a member of the media. A phone call which he knew in all likelihood would get him fired, and might even ensure that he never worked private security again.