Aftermath (22 page)

"
I
want
to reiterate this Pat--and I feel like I've had to say this time and time again. But the public needs to calm down about this investigation."

"Calm down, what do you mean?"

"It's great when a case can be resolved in a week. Fantastic! Everyone involved is much happier when that happens. But these things are hardly ever wrapped up so neatly. Many can take several months, even years. The public can't expect them to go tromping in and find the bad guy within days of a high profile crime."

"Why do you suppose that is the expectation?"

"We're fed it, I suppose. Hollywood taught us that crimes are solved within hours, using the best technology available. We've all seen
Law and Order, CSI
--all of these shows feature crime scenes and open and shut cases that wrap up neatly within forty-five minutes. That's not how these things work in reality. They take time. It can take weeks to get DNA results back. Months to get fingerprint matches. The expectations are way off here, Pat."

“The Gardai has so far made a very public high-profile arrest that turned out to be nothing."

"You see, that there is precisely the problem. When so much pressure is put on the investigators to close a case, they start rushing. They cut corners. They make mistakes. These things take time, Pat. We need to just shut up and let them do their jobs."

"Well, if we shut up, then we wouldn't have you on our program."

“Indeed, I understand that and I thank you for doing so."

"And thanks for joining us. Next, we'll replay that heartfelt speech Annabel Morrison gave last night at her husband's candlelight vigil. Stay tuned."

R
eilly stood
there after the Morrison interview, motionless, defeated. Deflated. She’d thought they’d had it; they were so close.

And now, after all that, there had never been a point in the case where they were further away.

All that evidence, all of those conjectures--how could she have missed it? She believed Tricia, but didn't do the grunt work.

And now it was over. She'd lost it; lost everything.

Worse, she’d taken Chris and Kennedy down with her.

She’d run away with her own suspicions and went out all guns blazing, assuming that even though the evidence wasn’t yet watertight, that the detectives could break her.

No matter that she was supposed to be emotionally detached, especially with regards to suspects. No matter she had no business forcing the hand of a detective on hunches and preliminaries, before ensuring all suspicions and allegations were court-worthy.

Now the case was lost. The evidence useless. The only suspect firewalled behind an expensive solicitor. The most high-profile case in recent memory was completely blundered because of her.

This failed interview could mean her career. It would certainly mean her relationships. Her credibility. Her standing in the department. All of it was crumbling around her.

The weight of Annabel Morrison’s laughter still descended so heavily in her mind, she couldn't even stand it.

How could she have been so obtuse?

The entire situation blind-sided her so much, she felt she was in her own sort of car accident. All of the things she thought to be true were now standing on their head and she was incapable of moving.

Reilly was not the crying type, but she wanted to just then. Standing alone behind the glass in front of the interview room, she looked at the empty seat where Annabel Morrison had sat. Clouds of emotion wafted through her, and her knees felt weak.

The door opened. She didn't look up. She was afraid to.

It was Chris.

He sat down opposite her and unconsciously fiddled with his phone like it was a stress toy. There was no eye contact.

"What you did. What Kennedy did. You went behind my back. And for what?"

She couldn't answer that.

"If you had a suspicion you should have told me first."

Reilly shook her head. "You wouldn't have believed me."

"I still don't. But that doesn't matter, does it? We still work as a team.”

She pushed back the emotion. It wouldn't help for Chris to see her fragile. But he was right. He was absolutely right. The whole point of having a team on the case was that everyone fulfilled their specific role.

What good was it if there were no contrary perspectives--if everyone fell right in line. She was so determined to move forward with this, she never gave a thought to what the contrary position would do. It would have required her to do her job. She would have had to hand over the conjectures to the detectives and just find the evidence.

Instead, she’d bulldozed this forward like she was queen of the goddamned force, and it had completely exploded in her face.

She couldn't even look at him. She was embarrassed, traumatized and still in shock. She needed to apologize. She needed to set this right. To get out of the self-pity pit and move forward. She still had a job to do.

"Now what we have to do,” he said, sincerely--not with sarcasm, "is start from ground zero."

"I'm sorry, Chris. I should have been more solid on this. I'm just--I can't explain it. Everything has been so off. I can't seem to control a single thing lately. My life is in a flat tailspin, and I can't figure out how to get it back under control. I can't even figure out why it's out of control. I thought I could bury myself in work, but the work wasn't good enough. I had to crack the case. I had to put the bad guy away. So I took risks. Made assumptions about things that weren’t water-tight.”

She shook her head, struggling now to keep the tears of frustration from exploding.

"Look, it's probably time for you to take some time off, OK? Maybe this whole thing with the baby, the Tony Ellis thing last month--maybe you're just... I don't know...maybe you just need some time."

"Just what, Chris? Say it. Just cracking up? Is that it?"

"Not the word I chose, Reilly."

She finally made eye contact with him. His eyes were soft. Concerned. There was an aura of helplessness around him. He too had been defeated and chastised.

"Chris," she said quietly. "I don't know, maybe you’re right. It's just, I had a clear idea of the rest of my life and now everything I know about--everything I'm sure of, has been brought into question. A few weeks ago, I was at the top of my game, fresh back from Florida and ready for anything. Now I'm a mother-to-be, recent target of a psychopath, and saboteur of the force's most-high profile case in years. And us …what was going on between us--if there was anything--I don't know which Reilly Steel that belongs to. The one who could handle anything, or the one who's been dismantled and left scrambling to put together the pieces."

He carefully covered her hands with his, "I don't care which one you are, because at the core you are still you. And so now what? You're in some sort of personal crisis, so you push away your friends? Your only support network? People who rely on you, and trust you?"

“I’m sorry I… don't know what else to say, Chris."

She left the interview room and into the hallway.

The small cubicles that held the other Store Street detectives revealed many of them standing, trying not to act like they heard the whole thing.

They looked down, aside, averted their vision to anywhere but her.

She saw Kenned then, head-lowered too. He exchanged an apologetic look, and then sat down with his arms crossed, staring at the floor, deflated.

Looking back one more time at Chris, she saw that he wore much the same expression, except he was still fiddling with his iPhone.

I
t was just
after one pm when Reilly took the short drive home to Ranelagh without music or thought, and holed herself up in the flat with the curtains closed.

She couldn't go back to the GFU and face the team after this.

It was still all too overwhelming. The severity of the situation was really too large to reconcile.

It felt like her entire life was in a flat spin, tumbling out of control.

Every thought she had lately seemed to betray her. Now all her colleagues would look at her differently, look at her suspiciously, warily.

Like they couldn't trust what she was capable of, or that she needed pity and help.

That was the worst part of this. The last thing she wanted to be was pitiful. She felt pitiful. She felt completely disenfranchised. Cold, alone and a failure.

Her life's work now lay in precarious balance.

Thoughts descended into despondency. She wanted to cry again, but what was the point?

Her emotions were raw and tangled and the fact remained she really messed up. The case could have fallen apart anyway without her and none of the weight of things would be on her.

Instead she took things too far and forgot her true role. She forgot to focus on the evidence--and only the evidence.

In a way this was worse than losing her job. She’d lost her dignity. The force already suspected she wasn’t operating with a full deck. Yet, from her point of view she was only ever on the right track.

How could things have gone so far off track?

All of a sudden, she longed to talk to her father, hear Mike’s chirpy voice, and maybe absorb some of that California sunlight, anything to help block out the dull ache in her brain.

But it was early afternoon here, so it would be the middle of the night on the West Coast.

Middle of the night on the West Coast…

The thought suddenly jumped out at her as if from nowhere.

She leapt off the couch and scurried over to her laptop. Quickly firing up the PC, she logged on to the database and clicked through to the Morrison witness transcript folder.

That Skype log Chris saved from his interview with Dylan Morrison. She checked the time stamp, becoming excited as she noted it, her subconscious firing on all cylinders.

She needed to watch that video log again, but it was taking a very long time to load.

Come on, come on…

Finally, it downloaded and she played it.

Dylan was on a train, and the ambient light in the picture was bright, very bright. Highly unlikely it would come from a warmer electric light.

Especially the sort of lights found on trains.

She looked carefully frame by frame.

Then after a few minutes more she found it. For just a split second in two frames of the video, when Dylan moved his head to a certain angle, there was a reflection on his glasses.

Daylight sky. And a cloud.

Dylan Morrison was allegedly in California on Friday night, and had told them he was on his way to a meeting when the detectives talked to him on Saturday.

But when they interviewed him it was early afternoon in Dublin, about the same time as now. So it should have been the middle of the night in California.

The reflections on this video showed that he was lying.

Reilly took a screenshot, wrote a quick message and emailed it to Chris. Then she dialed Gary.

"Hey, where are you?"

“Run those prints again - the callused ones - but this time use Dylan Morrison for a match. He’ll be in the system on account of his US visa."

She hung up and stared at her email until Chris responded.

He did, from his mobile.

Holy shit
, he wrote.
I’m on it.

A
ll of the
pieces started falling into place after that, very suddenly and overwhelmingly.

It became all too clear that Reilly’s suspicions were not in fact, unfounded. Annabel Morrison absolutely had something to do with the attack on her husband, and it certainly wasn't a random burglary gone wrong.

Dylan Morrison had been there that night with his father, and for some reason had carried out the attack on him.

He was the one fleeing the scene of the crime, and his mother was helping him. Covering for him. Whether or not she was there when the attack happened was now besides the point.

So the son had taken off through the back garden, jumped the wall and into the night, easily putting some distance between himself and the house - via DART perhaps, there was a station just down the hill.

At that hour of night, the trains would be quiet. And then possibly another train, somewhere else in the country on Saturday, which was where he was when the detectives had Skyped him.

She already had Rory trying to get hold of the transport system’s CCTV cameras.

He must be laying low for a while, waiting for the heat to die down, or maybe until his father woke up. But where would he have gone to? Other family members, outside the city, perhaps?

Then she thought of something; the holiday home in Kerry.

The phone buzzed and Reilly nearly tackled the table in order to grab it.

"Gary?"

"Got it. Reilly, it's a match."

The velocity of her delight caused her to throw up the handset in excitement. Then she scrambled to go pick it up.

“You’re sure?”

“Yep. The prints place Dylan Morrison at the scene. But wait, there's more. It seems the Americans have a file on him too, including DNA."

"What?"

"He has a record, violent offenses. Assault mostly."

"How in the hell did we not know that?"

“Why would we? He wasn't a suspect. But I mean, this Dylan--he's been in and out of medical facilities all his life. Juvvie medical records are sealed, but I have a statement from one of the assault cases in a more recent file, that says he's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder."

She started thumbing another message to Chris but it was taking too long so she picked up the phone.

The answer was quick. "What do you have?"

"Prints match and he has a history of assault. I think he might have taken off on the DART, then maybe onwards down the country somewhere. The Morrisons have a holiday home in Kerry.”

“Perfect, we’ll get in touch with the locals down there. Reviewed the video too, and you’re right.”

Julius started calling while he was still talking. "I'll call you back OK, this is Julius.” She hung up and answered.

"Got Morrison’s DNA, ran it through the system."

"And?"

"There's more than we first thought, the DNA is a partial match for Annabel Morrison."

"Of course, Dylan is one of their kids."

"No Reilly, you're not listening. Not one of their kids. One of
Annabel's
kids. Josh has no match."

She almost dropped the phone. "I'm coming in."