Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3) (2 page)

Why had the row gone from verbal to physical? Perhaps the wife had stood up to him, goaded him from behind the perceived shield of his child suckling on a bottle.

The reason didn’t matter; what did matter was hard conclusive evidence that would put this animal behind bars where he belonged.

She looked at the floor, the bottle of baby formula on its side, and a dried pool of milk around it where it had fallen. A white muslin cloth close by was covered in blood and yellow milky reflux. Reilly closed her eyes again, this time as an involuntary gesture, and she hoped the baby had done the same rather than witness the full horror of what had happened here.

She held up her camera and pressed the shutter button, the harsh flashlight briefly illuminating the room.

OK, so McGavin had flipped, she thought, continuing her inner monologue. He’d grabbed the bottle, smashed it across the table like he was in a barroom fight, and stabbed his wife in the stomach while the baby was still in her arms.

It was a parting shot; he wouldn’t have hung around, and he’d left the injured woman slumped on the floor, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood with her
hands while her baby,
their
baby, screamed in fear. Reilly could almost hear echoes of the infant’s desperate cries, and she tried to block it out and focus on the here and now. She glanced across at the kitchen door. It led out to a tiny back garden, a low fence separating it from an area of wasteland. The perfect escape route if you didn’t want to be seen. Or if you were carrying a blood-covered broken bottle …

She reached the back door. It was still open, revealing a patch of scrubby lawn, a rotary clothes line draped in tiny clothes, and an overturned rubbish bin, with its contents strewn across the dirt by local foxes.

She paused in the doorway, flashlight scanning up and down, following the doorframe … and then she saw it. It was small, easy to miss, but to Reilly’s trained eye it was unmistakable – a bloody partial.

As McGavin had barged out the door and fled the house, leaving his wife lying bleeding on the floor, his hand had glanced against the doorframe.

Reilly swung her camera around and took shot after shot of the incriminating print. She had him.

A small smile of satisfaction stole across her face as she pressed a thin film of tape on to the print, before gently easing a sample of the blood onto a cotton bud.

The shrill ring of her mobile phone startled her. Slipping the sample into its container, she slid her phone from her pocket and glanced at it.

Chris Delaney.

‘Chris. What’s up?’ She knew the detective wouldn’t be calling her at this time if it wasn’t urgent.

‘Hope I’m not disturbing you. I tried the lab first.’  He knew her habits – they had worked together for long enough. Still, there was a faint coolness in his tone.
They might have been good friends once, but there was a definite distance between them now.

Despite herself Reilly felt wounded by it. Since her arrival at the GFU almost a year and a half ago, she and Chris had  been to hell and back together in the course of the job, and until lately she would have considered him her closest friend.

But that was before he’d started hiding things from her.

It made it even more apparent that the longer Reilly lived in Dublin the fewer friends she seemed to have, such was the imbalance between her always hectic work schedule and non-existent social life. A sharp contrast to back home in California, where the work–life scales were generally tipped in the opposite direction with after work drinks and parties on the beach a common occurence.

‘Not a problem,’ she said, her tone neutral and professional. ‘I’m just at the McGavin house in Ballyfermot – the wife-beater?’

‘Not the best area to run a scene at this time of night,’ he commented, sounding like an overprotective father.

‘It’s fine. There’s a uniform stationed here in case one of his firefly cronies shows up to do a job on the place.’

‘So did you find anything to incriminate him?’

She mentally crossed her fingers. ‘I think so. We’ll have to have a chat with the wife when she’s able, let her know there’s a good chance we can put him away if she’ll testify.’ 

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Chris said ruefully, making Reilly suspect that her efforts might well be in vain.

Well, that would be his department. As far as forensics was concerned, her job was done.

‘So, I’m guessing this isn’t a social call,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Suspected fatal hit and run,’ Chris said flatly. ‘Rural area near Roundwood in County Wicklow. Just took the call from HQ. Not a lot of detail but by all accounts the locals seem a bit spooked.’

‘Spooked?’ Reilly repeated, frowning.

‘Like I said, few details so far. But seems there’s definitely something about this victim that needs a closer look.’ 

Chapter 3

Detective Pete Kennedy  climbed slowly out of the silver Ford Mondeo and looked around. ‘A lonely place to be wandering around at night,’ he said to no one in particular.

A younger cop hurried over to meet him. ‘Davis,’ he informed Kennedy.  ‘We were first on the scene.’

Kennedy nodded and pulled a packet of John Player Blue cigarettes from his pocket. He opened it and popped one between his lips. ‘Hit and run, we were told.’  The cigarette dangled as he talked. The driver’s side door opened and Delaney jumped out, slipping his arms into a crumpled waterproof jacket with ‘Garda’ written on the back of it.

‘Certainly looks that way,’ Davis replied. ‘Body’s just over here. You should take a look at … well, it’s just weird,’ he mumbled, leading them towards the scene of the accident, as the detectives exchanged glances.

They approached the body that was lying on the road. Chris bent down to look more closely at the dead girl, while Kennedy finished his cigarette, steeling himself for  yet another look at death in the face. 

‘Where do you think she might have come from?’ he asked Davis.

The other man shrugged.  ‘Not much around here, apart from a couple of farms. Roundwood village isn’t too far away.’

‘Are there ever any parties, raves, whatever you call them, out this direction?’

Davis couldn’t keep the smile from his face. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that out here.’

Kennedy nodded and puffed on his cigarette. ‘Well,  this is your home turf. Got any ideas?’

Davis wanted to say something insightful – it wasn’t every day that a city detective asked him for an opinion – but in truth he was as puzzled as anyone else. ‘To be honest, I don’t. The couple who found her say it was like she just appeared out of nowhere.’

Kennedy grunted.  ‘Of course they did.’ Carefully quenching his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, he placed the half-smoked butt back into the pack. ‘If there’s one thing we can be sure of,’ he said, standing straight and pulling up his trousers, ‘it’s that she didn’t fall out of the sky.’ He bent down to where his partner crouched beside the body. ‘Well, any ideas?’

Chris replied without looking up. ‘She may not have fallen from the sky but she sure did have wings,’ he said, gently pulling back the clothing on the dead girl’s shoulders to reveal a large, intricate tattoo. ‘I’m guessing this is what you meant by weird,’ he said to Davis, who nodded.

‘Christ, that’s a lot of ink.’  Kennedy’s gaze followed the beam of light from the other cop’s torch, revealing artwork which completely covered the girl’s upper back. The blueish tinged lines were fine, sweeping the wings upwards from near the base of her spine to fan outwards as they reached her waist, eventually covering almost the whole of her upper back.  ‘An out-and-out fallen angel.’

‘She certainly got hit by somebody,’ Chris commented, pointing out the contusions, tarmac burns and dirt etched into her skin. ‘The question is, was she alive or dead when she was hit?’

‘We’ll have to wait for the ME before we know that.’ Kennedy groaned as he got up from his haunches. ‘So did she walk here or was she dumped?’

Chris directed his flashlight down to the girl’s ankles, careful to touch nothing.  As the light played across her bare feet it revealed a layer of mud and gravel smeared across the soles, blades of grass sticking in places. ‘She’s certainly walked some way,’ he observed.

Kennedy was still gazing around. ‘Is there a hospital around here, a residential home, anything like that?’ he asked Davis.

The officer nodded.  ‘There’s a sheltered housing place over near Newtownmountkennedy. I think it’s a sort of respite facility for special needs people, Down’s Syndrome and the like.’

They all gazed at the dead girl’s face. There was no sign of the typical physical characteristics of Down’s – the flatter face, the upward slanting eyes. In fact she had elfin features, a small mouth, a dainty nose, chiseled cheekbones.  Combined with her flowing red hair you would have thought her quite beautiful had you seen her in any other circumstance. What would lead such a young woman to be wandering a lonely country road in the middle of the night in nothing but a thin cotton dress?  Her delicate features bore a look of deep sadness; it was hard to imagine that events leading up to her death had been anything other than tragic.

‘That would still be quite a walk,’ observed Kennedy.  ‘Even cross country it’s got to be what … five miles or more?’

‘And barefoot.’  Chris gently touched the edge of her nightdress and rubbed it between finger and thumb. ‘It’s pretty damp – she must have been out in the rain for quite some time.’

He looked out across the dark fields. Before she was hit, the dead girl could have come from anywhere, a hundred yards or five miles away. Out in the darkness lay hundreds of solitary houses, dozens of farms, several villages … and that was
assuming she had walked here. If she had been dumped then their search area expanded almost infinitely.

‘The ground is more damp than wet though, and it’s a mountain mist in the air rather than rain.’

Chris looked at Davis.  ‘Better check out the local houses. Some parent might wake in the morning not realising their kid has gone sleep-walking in the night.’

But something told him this was no accident.

Kennedy pulled out his unfinished cigarette again and tapped it thoughtfully against the packet. ‘So what now?’

‘Better talk to the couple who found her, then wait for Thompson to give us a COD. Forensics are on their way too so let’s see if Reilly and the crew come up with anything.’

Kennedy gave a deep sigh. ‘Is that what it’s come down to now? We just sit on our hands and wait for the science guys to throw us crumbs?’

Chris shrugged. His partner was old-school, and increasingly apprehensive about the more scientific bent to police investigation these days. He could understand his frustration, but there was no denying that developments in forensics and crime scene investigation helped considerably.

‘For the moment it would also be worth our while calling at houses within a couple of miles of here, to see if they saw or heard anything unusual while it’s still fresh in the memory. Like I said, maybe there’s a simple explanation.’

Kennedy gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You’re not serious about the sleep walking thing.’

‘There’s only one way to find out: some good old-fashioned detective work. Aren’t you the one constantly complaining about the lack of it?’

‘Let the locals handle that; at least they will know the neighbors. We roll up to some farmhouse at this hour in an unmarked car and we’ll be running the gauntlet of guard dogs and farmers with shotguns. People don’t live out here in the sticks because they want to be disturbed in the middle of the night, you know.’

Chris wrinkled his nose. ‘Fair point. But for the moment, the tattoo seems like the only decent lead we’ve got in terms of ID. Let the GFU in to take a photo, upload it to the lab, and within a few minutes one of the techs will be comparing it with every known piece of ink from Ballymun to Bangkok.’

Kennedy might decry the GFU’s ‘toys’, but an interactive device Reilly had been beta-testing for one of her old Quantico workmates had proved its worth on recent cases. The device, called iSPI, enabled fast and accurate re-enactment of crime scene details with 3D imagery, and provided a mine of information that sped up the investigative process.  iSPI  would almost certainly be able to indicate in which direction the girl was traveling at the time she was hit, and exactly where on the road the fatal impact had occurred. If she had indeed been killed this way.

It was merely one of many nifty gadgets the GFU had at their disposal. Now almost three years in existence, and with a propensity for indepth analysis and, more importantly, fast results, the  purpose-built forensic unit headed by Reilly Steel had improved the force’s abilities no end.

It wasn’t app
reciated by everyone, however.

Kennedy pulled his cigarette out of his mouth and stuffed it back into his pocket.  So much for trying to quit. ‘We’re becoming bloody errand boys you know, gofers for the scientists, that’s what we are,’ he grunted.  ‘They’ll be training monkeys to do our jobs soon, the way things are going …’ 

Chris watched him out the corner of his eye as they walked towards the couple who’d discovered the body. In the four years or so that they had worked together he knew Kennedy’s moods well and was pretty sure that something other than ‘the scientists’ was bothering him.