Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (30 page)

The air was bitter when they stepped outside, a blast from the east bringing a flurry of snowflakes. Ricky took off his jacket and wrapped it around Laura.

‘I think you might need this.’

She looked up at his dark eyes. ‘You really are a gentleman, aren’t you?’

He wrapped his arm around her. ‘Yep, a real gentleman, that’s me ...’

He steered her out of the nightclub and further down the street, Laura tottering along beside him on her high heels.

Their footsteps echoed on the quiet streets. ‘Is it much further?’ she asked as they turned onto a quiet backstreet a few minutes later. ‘These heels are killing me.’

‘Not long now,’ said Ricky. ‘My place is just down here.’

She suddenly stopped  as he made to turn down a dark alleyway. ‘What kind of stunt are you trying to pull?’

‘I told you,’ said Ricky evenly, ‘it’s just down here.’

She peered into the darkness. An articulated lorry passed on the street alongside them, drowning out her response.

‘What did you say?’

She tried to pull away. ‘I said you’re crazy if you think I’m going down there with you.’

‘You’d be right.’

Ricky suddenly frowned at the strange voice, and saw Laura’s attention turn to someone behind him. Then, without warning, something hard smashed down onto the back of his head.

She screamed as he slumped on the hard ground beside her. The figure quickly kneeled over Ricky, and Laura caught a brief glimpse of her savior. He was dressed all in black, and wore gloves and a black baseball cap, but his face was hidden by the shadows.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked her.

She nodded shakily. ‘Thanks, I wasn’t sure if—’

‘You’re welcome,’ he replied gently.  ‘You should go home now. I’ll take care of your friend.’

By then, Laura was only too happy to extricate herself from whatever issue was between the two, and she duly tottered quickly away down the street.

When she was gone, the man bent down over Ricky, and carefully sat him upright. He worked his hands up under Ricky’s armpits and, breathing a sigh of relief that he was a lightweight, hauled him to his feet.

For a moment they swayed forward, then the man steadied himself, bent down, and hoisted Ricky up into a fireman’s lift.

With Ricky draped across his shoulder, the man staggered up the alleyway. It was hard work, but he had been preparing for this for months, working out in the gym, squatting endlessly, practicing lifting and carrying heavy things.

Like dead bodies, for instance.

He soon reached the end of the alleyway, and cautiously looked out. There was no one around. He approached a white van, anonymously parked in the pool of shadows beneath a broken streetlight, slid the side door open, and dumped Ricky unceremoniously in the back of it.

His burden gone, the man straightened up, and arched his back to stretch it out. No one was around; no one had seen him except the girl, and she was too drunk to remember much.

He climbed into the driver’s seat, and slid the key into the ignition.  Drive carefully, attract no attention. He had it all planned and he wasn’t going to make any mistakes now.

As he pulled away, he heard Ricky groan from the back and couldn’t suppress a smile of quiet satisfaction. 

Better get used to pain, he thought.  It’s what will fill what little life you have left.

T
he following morning, Reilly was in her office, poring over Tony Coffey’s newspaper articles to help with the search for that elusive thread that bound all five killings together.

The answer was proving as difficult to find as anything else in the investigation. While Chris and Delaney had advised that there were plenty of cases involving Judge Morgan and Crowe, none of them seemed controversial enough to have attracted the journalistic attention of Coffey, or the influence of Fitzpatrick. And Jennings didn’t seem to fit in with anything at all.

The smell of old paper lodged in her nostrils, a musty aroma that made her think of old libraries, old offices.

‘You might have warned me ...’ Reuben stuck his head round the door, a cheeky grin on his chiseled face.

Reilly looked up, glad for any distraction from the tedium of reviewing the newspapers. ‘Warned you about what?’

He trotted in with a brisk step. ‘Coffey’s secretary.’

Reilly smiled, recalling Chris description of Kirsty Malone with her denim miniskirt and heavy eye make-up. O’Brien had requested that Reuben re-interview some of the key witnesses in order to help with the search for a link. True to form, he had chosen to begin with the most attractive one.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen so much of a woman’s cleavage since I was a baby.’

Reilly grinned. ‘So did you get anything out of her?’

He looked shocked. ‘Reilly Steel, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean—’

‘Any useful information then,’ she clarified, shaking her head indulgently.

‘Well, yes, as it happens.’ Reuben rummaged inside his manbag, and pulled out a stack of papers. ‘In addition to having a delectable bosom, Ms Malone is also rather well organized. It transpires that one of the things she did for Mr Coffey was catalog his articles all the way back to when he was writing for some socialist student rag ...’

Reilly picked up the top article. The title read: ‘Why Our Courts Are Broken, and How to Fix Them.’

‘He really was quite the populist,’ she commented, having briefly scanned the text.

Reuben nodded. ‘Not my reading choice. The man tends towards simplistic solutions to complex problems. I ignored all the earlier ones – they were more rants than anything else – but over the past ten years or so he’s written about the Irish courts, sentencing, justice, parole ... on a number of occasions.’  He patted the stack of articles. ‘Happy reading, my dear.’

She gave a wry smile, and indicated the massive piles of newspaper around her. ‘More reading, just what we need ...’

‘You can thank me later. Have fun!’ Reuben turned and headed for the door.

‘Well, I’m glad you made it out with your virtue intact at least,’ she called after him.

His head popped back inside the doorway and he grinned wickedly. ‘My darling, whoever said I did?’

Reilly thumbed idly through the articles Reuben had mentioned. If Coffey mentioned a particular case, it could shortcut the whole process of going through the case files.

She was halfway through reading them when Lucy showed up. It was her first time seeing the younger woman since her renegade trip the other day, and Reilly noted how she knocked politely on the door, waiting to be invited in.

She stood up and stretched, amazed at how much time had passed – it was almost ten a.m. already. ‘Hey there. Come on in.’

Lucy seemed reluctant to meet her gaze. ‘I just wanted to apologize ... about the other day.’

‘What were you thinking, Lucy?’ Reilly asked without preamble. ‘Going down there by yourself?’

‘I just wanted to try and pinpoint a location for the samples.’

Reilly ran a hand through her hair. ‘It was very irresponsible of you, sweetheart, not to mention above and beyond the call of duty. You can’t take chances like that. You should have told me; I could have arranged for a uniform to go down there with you; have gone myself, even.’

Lucy still didn’t look at her. ‘I know it was stupid, but I thought I’d just ask around, see if there were any abandoned barns nearby, any old stables, things like that. I wasn’t thinking ...’

‘And what would you have done if the killer had suddenly shown up while you were snooping around?’

‘That’s what my dad said. Look, I didn’t mean to get in trouble and I couldn’t believe it when the locals showed up. It was just supposed to be a fishing mission. There are dozens of similar farms out in that area. The chances of any of them being the right one—’

‘Yet Julian tells me that the samples you brought back are a match?’

Reilly had had mixed feelings when she heard about this. It seemed that Lucy had been a lot closer to the correct spot than she’d thought.

Fantastic if it helped them narrow down the doer’s location, but to think what could have happened if Lucy had stumbled across the right property ...

Lucy nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, a sample I took from one of the farms matches the others, but the same logic still applies. It just means I was in the right area.’

‘Well, there’s no denying that you got a result, but still ...’

‘I know, I know, I should have told somebody where I was going. But it was just a spur-of-the-moment decision, you know? We were getting so little in the case, and I thought if I could—’

‘I admire your initiative, but Dr Gorman, your dad ...’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Don’t mind him.’

‘Lucy, he’s your father. If anything happened to you—’

‘I know, but you don’t understand, he’s so bloody overprotective of me. As if what happened to Grace will happen to me too.’

Reilly looked up. ‘Grace?’

‘My older sister. She went missing fourteen years ago. When I was ten.’ Reilly’s face must have betrayed her surprise. ‘I’m sorry, I guess I thought everyone knew. Nobody mentions it any more really, but ...’ She shrugged and Reilly struggled to get her head around this.

And here she was, always wondering what made Jack Gorman so angry, so bitter ...

‘Your sister – she’s never been found?’

‘Not a sign,’ Lucy confirmed, her voice softening. ‘It’s silly really, but it’s sort of why I got into this job in the first place. I thought if I knew forensics I’d be able to follow the clues, and maybe find out what happened to her.’ She looked away. ‘Of course, it’s hard to follow clues when there aren’t any.’

‘It’s still an open case then,’ Reilly said.

Poor Lucy – and poor Jack. To think that she hadn’t been aware  of such a pertinent piece of information about her colleagues ...

She resolved to dig out the missing persons file as soon as she had a free moment. A fresh eye might do some good; maybe pick up on something that had been missed?

‘Yeah,’ Lucy continued, ‘but I think everyone knows by now, the police included, that she isn’t coming back. The first twenty-four hours are crucial they say. It’s been fourteen years.’

It was true. Reilly knew from experience with missing children cases back home that sadly there was little chance the girl would ever be found. ‘She ...Grace was your older sister, you said?’

‘Yes. She was fourteen. Would have been twenty-eight this year.’ She swallowed hard, and Reilly could tell that despite Lucy’s young age when it happened, she was still very much affected by her sister’s disappearance. How could she not be, when something like that would have shaped the family dynamic ever since?

She, perhaps better than most, could understand  what that was like.

Jack Gorman’s apparent overreaction about Lucy’s behavior the other day was suddenly making a whole lot of sense. Particularly the comment about an angry parent being preferable to a grieving one.  Poor Jack Gorman was that grieving parent, and had no doubt suffered the loss of his eldest daughter every day ... that horrific limbo of not knowing if she were dead or alive.

‘I suppose now you have a better idea of why Dad is on my case so much about working here,’ Lucy continued drily. ‘He went crazy when he heard I wanted to study forensics – and then when the new lab positions opened up here ...’

Upon her arrival at the GFU, Reilly had indeed been taken aback by Jack Gorman’s dismissive attitude towards his daughter, particularly as Lucy was hugely diligent and very capable. But of course she hadn’t seen it for what it was – parental protectiveness.

‘I guess it must have been tough on you, growing up?’ she queried. ‘I can’t imagine your folks were happy about you staying out late dancing, or that kind of thing.’

Lucy smiled tightly. ‘It was ... different,’ she said, and Reilly figured that family life had been one of two ways. Either the parents, crippled with grief over their missing child had (unintentionally) ignored the one remaining, or alternatively, smothered her. It was usually the way with the families of missing kids and in truth it was remarkable that Lucy had ended up the confident, well-adjusted person she was.

‘It’s understandable,’ Lucy continued. ‘After what happened to Grace, Mum and Dad have always been been terrified of losing me too.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s why Dad was so mad at me for what I did the other day. But sometimes ... I suppose I just felt the need to breakaway a little and do something spontaneous, something
useful
.’

Thinking about her own family setup, Reilly looked at Lucy, realizing that the two of them had much in common. Professional lives  driven by family tragedies, and perhaps in trying to overcome the helplessness of the past, they each felt the same strong desire to control the future.

Now Lucy was shifting from foot to foot, evidently anxious to end the topic of conversation. ‘Anyway, I get why you’re mad and I promise I won’t do anything like that again.’ She smiled guiltily. ‘So if you’re done reading me the riot act ...’

‘Of course,’ Reilly said, her thoughts still all over the place as she tried to process this new information.

Lucy held out two reports. ‘The labs findings from the Morgan scene, and Dr Thompson’s autopsy report.’

Reilly waved them away, trying to regain some focus. ‘I’ve done nothing but read all morning – tell me what we’ve got.’

Lucy perched on the edge of her desk. ‘Dr Thompson concludes that Morgan’s COD was blunt-force trauma to the head.’

Reilly pictured the poor naked man in the quarry. ‘Anything else of interest?’

‘No. He was naked, so nothing on the body, other than the holes those maggots left behind.’ She shuddered visibly. ‘Disgusting. We did get some more of that capsicum sauce in the sand, though.’

‘But nothing new otherwise?’

‘No.’ Lucy gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Seriously, what do we have to do to catch a break with this guy?’

‘I don’t know that we ever do,’ Reilly told her. ‘Most of the time, the only reason we catch these people is because of bad luck on their part, or because they do something stupid. This guy certainly isn’t stupid, and so far his luck has held.’