Heated Beat 02 - Lucky Man Read Online Free Page B

crawled by. Danny couldn’t get Finn out of his head and found himself preoccupied even at work… especially at work, where he didn’t have time for distractions.
    Danny eyed the paperwork on his desk. Like most aspects of his life, it was stacked into orderly piles—neat, clinical, nothing out of place—but something was irking him, something that overrode even his fixation with a certain blond rock star. Danny opened a file and flipped through a few pages. The haggard faces of Nottingham’s prostitutes stared back at him, all with neatly written notes beneath them cataloguing their known habits and stomping grounds. Danny’s colleagues often laughed at him for his meticulous records, but he didn’t care. How would you notice something amiss if you didn’t know what it had been like to begin with? And on Danny’s patch, something had definitely changed: the dynamic; the vibe; the footfall. Something was off.
    “Evening, Danny. Got a minute?”
    Danny glanced up. Somehow he’d missed his boss, DCI Brown, taking a seat on the edge of his desk. “Guv?”
    “Memo from Greater Manchester. Thought it might be of interest to you.”
    “Yeah?” Danny scanned the e-mail detailing a spate of missing prostitutes, five in total. The link between them all was tenuous at present, but detectives working the case were concerned enough to alert every force in the country. “That’s a lot of missing persons.”
    “Certainly is. Have you noticed anything? Any toms you’re worried about? Girls gone walkabout?”
    Danny shrugged. As the newbie on the squad, his main role was the job no one wanted: monitoring the welfare of the city’s toms—the sex workers. An impossible task when the department as a whole had been charged with running them off the streets. How could he observe what he couldn’t see?
    But that was a debate for another day. As far as the DCI’s question was concerned, there wasn’t much Danny could say. Toms disappeared off his patch all the time, lost to drugs, trafficking, and God knew what else, and despite his anal approach to record keeping, Danny couldn’t keep track of them all. “I’ve got a few snouts I can ask. In fact there’s a source I’ve been meaning to touch base with for a while. I’ll head out tonight.”
    “Good idea. Take Bob with you. Get the old goat some fresh air.”
    The DCI retrieved his briefcase from the floor, shrugged into his coat, and bid Danny good night, done for the day while Danny was on shift until dawn.
    Danny glared after his retreating back. He wasn’t in the mood for company, at least not the kind Bob Jenkins had to offer. Bob was an old-school copper—conditioned to bust easy collars and wait for the real trouble to fall into his lap—and he’d made his opinion on Danny’s “newfangled” methods well known.
    An hour later, parked up in the city’s red-light district, he was still making them known.
    “This is a waste of time. Let’s go down Trinity Street and do a curb sweep.”
    Danny scowled. Busting johns for curb crawling did nothing but push the toms further into an underworld that was much harder to police, a world of poorly lit streets and dark alleys where Danny was as likely to come across a body as he was a crime. “Not yet. My snout doesn’t stick her head up till late. Give her a bit longer.”
    Bob grumbled under his breath but for once let Danny have his way. “Fine, but I’m not driving around this shithole all night. If she ain’t there, we’re heading back to the factory to finish that paperwork from that bollocks pimp bust you roped me into last week. Bloody youngbloods. Think you know it all.”
    Danny rolled his eyes. He was young to be a vice-squad detective, but he’d worked hard, slogged his way through uni and two years on the beat in Brixton before he’d made the jump to CID. He’d earned his place, and Bob knew it.
    And as luck would have it, Danny’s informant appeared on the streets just as he was running out