04-Mothers of the Disappeared by Russel D. McLean

Author:Russel D. McLean [McLean, Russel D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

I was at a dead end. No way forward.

All Burns had told me was that, like everyone else, once the monster was caged, he’d moved on with his life.

Anger and outrage only lasts so long. For most people.

I thought about Susan, about what she’d said earlier. Deliberately trying to provoke me into action, but for her own reasons.

Had she changed so much?

Could I blame her if she had?

The question of Ernie Bright’s guilt or innocence was thorny at best. But I did know that he had some kind of special relationship with Burns. Not quite friendship, but something else.

Utilitarian perhaps. Aristotelian.

I used to know a guy studied philosophy at university. Switched halfway through and became a solicitor, so maybe the ethics course didn’t take. He talked about how Aristotle defined friendship at different levels. Utilitarian friends hung out because it was to their mutual advantage. Perhaps, in his own way, Ernie had been trying to use Burns. He’d certainly tried to do so under the orders of his superiors back in the mid-nineties. Maybe he’d found something in the relationship that continued to be useful even when the operation had ended.

Or perhaps there had been something darker at work.

Not corruption. Ernie had been posthumously cleared of any charges of out-and-out corruption. But there were still lingering questions even a year after his death.

Without Ernie alive to talk, or Burns himself willing to say anything, no one would ever know the full truth. That had to be eating at Susan. She had almost killed a man to clear her father’s name, and now she would never really know the truth. She had to deal every day with the knowledge of who had killed her father. Not the trigger man, but the man who had screwed up Ernie Bright’s life so completely. She knew that Burns was walking around scot-free, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

Susan was a cop from a family of cops. Her father, her grandfather, had been on the force. It was all she knew, part of who she was. Which meant that anything she did had to be within the system. Unlike me, she couldn’t walk away from the world of rules and regulations. She heard the voice of her father, and even if he had not been the man she thought she knew, her memories were of the good copper, the man who insisted on everything being done within the restrictions of the law.

When she had come to me at the Howff, she was not looking for a friend or seeking to help me. She knew who I had been, and she wanted to satiate her desire for revenge through me. I could do the things she couldn’t bring herself to do.

I was no longer a friend. I was a tool; something she could use.

That was why she’d backed Griggs’s play to try and get me close to Burns.

Family.

Family.

Where was Jonathan Moorehead? What did he say to his son?

Back at the office, I dived back into the documents and transcripts.

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