Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3) (5 page)

She flicked off the lights and massaged her neck to try and relieve the tension in her shoulders. She was tired – exhausted in fact – but she knew that at least she might actually be able to sleep now. She had done enough to allow her mind to switch off and grab an hour or two before starting all over again in the morning.

In the morning?  It was already morning, she reminded herself. By the time she reached home and got into bed it would be well after four.  No matter, a couple of hours’ sleep would have to do.  By now, Reilly was used to running on empty.

Too few hours later, Reilly was at the GFU lab, finalising a report on her findings from the McGavin house.

She then turned her attentions to processing the evidence from the hit and run scene, and from the victim herself.

Lucy greeted her arrival in the main lab with a groan. ‘You owe us big time,’ she complained, as Reilly entered the main lab, buttoning her labcoat as she walked.

‘I always do,’ she replied, ‘but why today in particular?’

‘Those ditches,’ the younger girl groaned.  ‘Cold, wet and nasty.’

Gary nodded.  ‘They weren’t a lot of fun.’

‘Perks of the job. Did you find anything?’

‘Quite a lot actually,’ Lucy told her, indicating the workstation. ‘Whether or not it’s of any use I can’t say yet.’

Reilly looked at the items spread out across Lucy’s bench, a collection of broken plastic, empty soft drink cans, a coffee cup, all the kinds of detritus that inevitably collected in a roadside ditch. Gary’s table was also covered, but with smaller items. Among them were several bits of plastic that looked like they might
have come from a car’s side lights and indicators, plus numerous glass and paint fragments.

‘Certainly looks like the debris from a collision of some sort.’

Gary nodded. ‘I’m going to analyze it now, and see if any of it comes from the same vehicle. Did you get anything from the body?’

‘Mostly what you would expect – gravel, traces of oil and so on. But there is one thing that is interesting…’

She reached for the dish containing the fine green fronds she’d picked out of the dead girl’s hair, and held it out for them to sniff.

‘You don’t smell it?’ she asked when neither reacted.

‘We don’t have your keen nose, boss.’

‘I picked this up on her right from the start, but I just can’t place it. Something about it reminds me of family picnics by the lake back home…’ Then she shrugged. ‘It might not even be relevant, who knows? But there is definitely something strange about this girl.’

‘Besides the massive tattoo of a pair of wings on her back?’ Lucy put in sardonically.

‘Not just that. How many teenagers do you know who wear no make-up, have no piercings, jewelry, or use hair coloring?’

Lucy pretended to think hard. ‘Let me see – none?’

‘Exactly. Apart from the tattoo, this girl looks like she could have just stepped out of the nineteenth century.’

Gary looked confused. ‘Because of the nightdress, and the fact that she wasn’t made-up to the nines?’

‘Lots of girls out my way walking the streets in their PJs, but usually with plenty of make-up and bling to boot,’ Lucy put in.

‘Perhaps, but I’ll bet you’ve never seen one in an ankle-length nightdress that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Jane Austen novel.’

But in truth it was difficult for Reilly to put her finger on what it was about this girl that had given her that sense. Perhaps it was the calm, almost ethereal aura about her.

              For the next hour or more the lab was silent as the small team worked on the physical evidence they’d gathered. They all knew each other well, and each was familiar with the working style of the others.

All three wore earbuds, each listening to background music while they worked. Lucy listened to the radio, liking the company the chatty DJ gave her; Gary had dance music on, his head bobbing to the beat as he went; while Reilly usually played classical music – Bach for his calm, methodical style, Mozart when she needed something to lift her mood, or Beethoven to stir her emotions and keep her engaged if she was working late into the night.

              She was so caught up in her work that it wasn’t until the other two came and stood in front of her that she noticed that they had been trying to get her attention. She slipped her headphones off and looked up, a sheepish smile on her face.

She followed them back over to their respective benches.

‘Like we said, most of it is just junk,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s either been there way too long to be connected with our crime,’ she picked up the faded soft drink cans, ‘or it’s completely random and unidentifiable.  These, however, might be of interest.’

The objects she pointed to were a relatively clean MegaCoffee branded coffee cup and some small pieces of black plastic.

Lucy indicated the cup. ‘This was the first thing I saw – it was floating in the water. It’s very new, and the coffee dregs inside are quite fresh.’

‘Any saliva traces on the rim?’

Lucy nodded.  ‘Fortunately, yes. First and foremost we’ll have to check that the couple that found her weren’t the source, but if they’re not and we find a suspect, it could tie them to the scene.’

‘How do you reckon it got there, though?’

‘I was thinking about that.
My
guess is that it was maybe rolling around on the floor of the vehicle that hit her, maybe the driver stopped and got out to see what he’d hit and it fell out and into the ditch.’

‘And these?’ Reilly pointed to the pieces of black plastic.

‘These look like they might have come off the front end of a vehicle – again, they weren’t covered in mud which suggests they’d not been in the ditch for very long.’

Reilly looked closely at the plastic scraps. ‘If we find the vehicle these could well be critical.’ She turned to Gary. ‘Anything from your end?’

He shook his head.  ‘Mostly junk, and the majority of it irrelevant.’

‘Hey, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a princess.’

‘No kidding. There was a whole army of frogs on that road. But I did pick up these close to where iSPI reckons the impact would have happened.’ Neatly arranged on the bench was a handful of safety glass, tiny crystal nuggets.

‘Fortunately for us, different motor companies use different types of glass. These, believe it or not, come from the front headlights of a commercial vehicle manufactured by Ford sometime between 1991 and 1997.’

‘Wow, that specific?’

Gary shrugged. ‘According to the database anyway.’

‘Good work. I’ll get this information to the detectives right away,’ Reilly said. 

‘Any luck with the green goo, boss?’

‘Actually yes.’ She held up a printout of the chemical analysis of the mysterious greenery. ‘It’s algae,’ she told him, still kicking herself for not figuring it out. ‘At some point before our victim was hit by the van, she must have been in a pond or a lake.’

‘Bizarre,’ Kennedy said when later that morning, Reilly arrived at Harcourt Street station to update him on the findings. ‘Why would a girl in a nightdress be swimming in a lake in the middle of the night?’

‘Why would she be wandering around
anywhere
in the middle of the night in bare feet and a thin nightdress?’ she countered.

‘Good point. Did I already mention that you look terrible?’ he teased, studying her.

‘Yes,’ she replied archly, ‘but the difference between you and me is that I only look this bad when I’ve had no sleep.’

‘Touché.’ Kennedy pulled a chair across from his cubbyhole
for her.

She sat back, and crossed her legs. ‘Where’s Chris?’

‘Meeting with the boss. Can I get you a coffee?’

‘I’d kill for one, thanks. So what’s he talking to O’Brien about?’

‘Statement to the press. We’re going to need help getting an ID on the girl.’

‘You’ve already canvassed the local area?’

He nodded.  ‘Local boys have been on it since the early hours. Nothing to report so far, but here’s hoping they turn up something that leads to an identification. At least then we can concentrate on catching the scumbag who left her dead in the road.’

              ‘I presume they’re going to —’

              ‘Widen the area?’ he finished for her. ‘Yeah. But you and I both know that just makes things harder.’ There was a mathematical relationship involved in widening a search area, and all too often the numbers quickly became unmanageable with so many personnel and subsequently much more information in the mix.

Chris arrived while they were talking, and Reilly immediately sat up on alert. She hated the way they both now always seemed so uncomfortable around one another. 

The current rift stemmed from a major difference of agreement. Chris was covering up something from his superiors – something important, which he’d reluctantly confided to Reilly in order to enlist her help. At the time, she’d assumed they had an understanding: she’d help him get to the bottom of the issue, and he’d deal with the implications. As far as Reilly was concerned, she’d held up her end of the deal, but he had not, and in refusing to come clean was potentially putting himself and others on the force at risk. She couldn’t condone that, no matter how much she liked him. She’d always believed Chris Delaney to be an honest and decent guy, someone to trust with her life. Now she knew he wasn’t as upstanding or truthful as she’d believed.

And the realisation had hit her much harder than she’d expected.

‘So what news from on high?’ Kennedy asked Chris.

‘We’ve got the go ahead,’ he said, nodded a brief greeting to Reilly. ‘We’ll put out a standard press release to all the local and national media, say it’s a hit and run, ask for help in identifying the girl, and appeal for possible witnesses.’

‘What about the tattoo?’

‘We should keep that to ourselves for now,’ replied Chris quickly, and Reilly could tell by his tone that this was a point of argument between them. ‘O’Brien agrees.’

Kennedy scowled.  ‘For Christ’s  sake … it’s so distinctive – if you’d ever seen it you wouldn’t forget it. I’m telling you, we
have
to use it.’

‘I agree with Chris actually,’ Reilly said tentatively. ‘If we can get an ID without revealing it, well, it’s a pretty personal thing…’

‘And if we mention it too soon but
don’t
get an ID, it’s the kind of thing the press will be all over,’ Chris pointed out. ‘Before we know it we’ll have another hyped-up circus on our hands like we did with the Dante thing last year.’

‘Still…’

‘We’ll know soon enough anyway,’ he continued. ‘Press release is scheduled to go out soon, so it’ll be on the lunchtime news.’ He picked up Reilly’s preliminary evidence report and scanned it. ‘I’ll pass the information about the Ford along to the locals. There are lots of farms, workshops, all sorts out there where someone might have a Transit van – we’ll just have to hope something shows up.  We’ll add the details to the press release too.’

‘That will just tip the guy off,’ Kennedy grumbled.

‘Maybe, but we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.’

‘Your call,’ his partner retorted grumpily, burying his face in his coffee cup.

Reilly glanced at Chris, wondering again what was up with Kennedy, but he was concertedly avoiding her gaze. ‘So what direction do you want to take with this lake information?’ she asked after a beat. ‘It seems strange that—’

He cut her off. ‘There are lakes, ponds and bogs for miles around in that particular area. It may not be that significant.’

‘Fine,’ Reilly said, feeling wounded by his attitude.  He was normally so receptive to her findings and willing to discuss options that the stone-walling made her feel like she was back at day one on the job, hoping to prove her worth to a suspicious, mostly hostile police force.

Back then Chris had been her biggest champion – why now had everything changed?

Chapter 6