Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (13 page)

Reilly switched on her torch and slowly pushed the door open.

Even with the uniformed officer waiting for her outside, the abandoned meat packing plant where John Crowe had been found was a creepy place.

Simply knowing that this was where a cop had died was disconcerting, but there was something more. The old building wore an air of sadness, as though the souls of all the animals who had been killed and dismembered there were haunting the place. The residue of killing lingered long after the blood stains have been washed away.

The building had been closed for ten years, and the pale concrete wore an air of decay, as though time itself were eating away at its fabric. Teenagers had daubed the gray concrete walls with graffiti in bold reds and blues, letters two meters tall proclaiming their various allegiances. The windows had all been smashed, relentless years of target practice leaving the edifice looking like a toothless old hag, weak and defenceless.

Reilly shoved against the broken door, and it yielded slowly, creaking loudly and scraping across the bare concrete floor. A chill raced up her spine and cobwebs brushed her face in moldering welcome.

She stepped inside what had once been the reception area. The filing cabinets had been ransacked long ago, the papers strewn across the floor like confetti from a distant wedding. There were still musty old office chairs at the desks, their seats ripped apart by sharp teeth and the stuffing evidently stolen by enterprising rats to line their nests.

Reilly found herself distracted, fascinated by the pictures on the walls.  One showed the plant when it was newly built, a concrete symbol of Ireland’s burgeoning economic prosperity. Another was of the plant’s founder, William Kelly, splendid in a dark suit. The pride in his eyes was touching, a sad contrast to the faded tones of the photograph now, tiny black dots of insects crushed between Kelly’s picture and the broken glass.

The early afternoon light streamed into the office from the broken windows, slanting beams that danced on the dust motes stirred up by Reilly’s feet.

She shook the cobwebs off her hair and flashed her torch around, looking for footprints in the dust, handprints on the counter, any signs of recent activity that might indicate the presence of Crowe’s killer. Nothing stirred, the thick dust yielded no clues. According to Gorman’s report, he was pretty certain the killer had not brought Crowe in this way, but Reilly wanted to approach it afresh, and tried to banish any preconceptions she might have picked up from her colleague’s initial sweep.

She crunched gingerly across broken glass towards the back of the room, her footsteps echoing loudly on the bare concrete floor as she approached another broken wooden door, leading from the office into the plant itself.

She hesitated a moment, listening. It was deathly quiet, but once her ears became attuned to the lack of noise she was able to pick out background sounds. From behind her there was the rumble of a car passing on the road outside. The wind could also be heard playing in the branches of the trees, whipping the last of the autumn leaves free to scatter them on the damp ground.  And finally one other noise, coming from inside the factory, a gentle cooing, which at first sounded creepy and a little out of kilter ... 

Then Reilly smiled.

Of course. Pigeons in the rafters, chattering back and forth to one another.

She pushed through the door from the reception area, and stepped into the plant itself. It was a large open space, crammed with mysterious machinery, illuminated by a row of skylights high overhead. She gazed at the derelict machines, iron skeletons from another time, like the remains of ancient beasts.  She could only imagine what function they had served – hooks and blades and scoops for tearing, cutting and separating meat into neat little plastic-wrapped packages, ready for consumption.

The light streaming through from above illuminated parts of the plant, but left others in darkness so that strange levers, bars and blades seemed to appear suddenly out of pockets of deep shadow as Reilly progressed through the room. A cloud passed overhead and the plant was plunged into gloom, the machines once more hiding their secrets.  Then, just as suddenly, the cloud passed and the rusting hulks were again revealed.

Some of the equipment seemed to have been stripped down, the valuable parts carried away by scavengers to be sold as scrap metal, leaving a maze of half-dismembered machines, the floor strewn with the discarded debris.

The cooing was louder here. Reilly looked up, and saw thirty or more pigeons roosting in the vaulted metal rafters. They would have seen it all; would have seen how the murderer had managed to get Crowe, a seventeen-stone ex-cop, into a bath of freezing water.

Stepping over the discarded parts and broken glass, Reilly picked her way carefully to the back of the vast work space, past the skeletal machines, towards the industrial freezer room where the body had been found.

She was usually composed around murder scenes – it went with the job – but right now she felt uneasy. Beneath the dust the smell of death lingered in the air. This had been a place of blood and guts, of animals being sliced and diced, flesh separated from bone and gristle. Even ten or so years after the place had last seen a carcass, the scent of blood still lurked in the dark corners. But there was another smell too: heavy and alkaline, yet sweet ...

Reilly stood still, every one of her senses alert. It was that smell again, she realized  the same one she’d come across in the church tower. Her heart galloped.

Not exactly tangible, but it was a connection ...

She bent down and sniffed the ground, trying to pinpoint the smell’s exact location. Was it the wall ... the ground? The scent was so pungent here it was impossible to tell exactly where it was strongest. Swabbing an area of the floor closest to the wall, she bagged the sample.

Moving on, Reilly made her way towards the rear of the building, her mind racing with this important find. 

The same smell at two different murder locations. It couldn’t be coincidence. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Crowe had been dumped in a bath of water and frozen to death in a heavy-duty freezer, Jennings strung up on a tree and left for dead and to the mercy of the elements. Her thoughts then turned to Tony Coffey, how the journalist had been kidnapped, bound, then dumped in the septic tank. It was all too weird ...

Trying to stop herself from getting distracted, and reaching for connections where there may well be none, she brought her focus back to this particular scene.

There were so many unanswered questions here too.  The first was the simple matter of logistics. How had the killer got Crowe into the plant in the first place?

He was a big man, and an ex-cop who knew how to defend himself.  Subduing him would not have been easy, let alone getting him into a bath of icy water.

The pigeons cooed softly. They weren’t revealing their secrets.

Reilly had reached the far end of the processing room, which was dominated by a large loading dock, metal shutters rolled down. Broken packing cases littered the floor, several of them scraped together into half-burned remnants of bonfires.

The door to the freezer room was just ahead.  Reilly shone her torch beam across the floor, all around the doorway, trying to separate out visually the footsteps of the police and the investigators from the older marks.

A sudden noise startled her, a movement half-glimpsed in her peripheral vision, something closing in fast on her.

Giving a little squeak of surprise, she dropped her torch as she instinctively put her hands up to protect her face. She turned quickly, and flinched as a pigeon flew past, its wings so close she could feel the draft. The bird swooped past her, and soared up into the rafters to join its companions. They jostled for position for a moment before settling down again.

‘Dammit!’ Feeling stupid, Reilly glanced around to see where her torch had landed. She scanned the floor, with only beams of daylight from above to help her. The torch was nowhere to be seen.

She bent down, and peered under the conveyor belt that ran past her.  It was broken, the belt hanging down creating deep shadows and pockets of darkness, but she could see no sign of her torch.  She turned the other way, towards the doorway to the freezer, her eyes gradually adjusting to the gloomy half-light. Then suddenly something caught her eye that she hadn’t seen before.

There were faint tracks in the dust leading into the freezer room.  Around the doorway they disappeared under footsteps, but there was no doubt that something had been wheeled in from the door towards the freezer.

Reilly stepped over, bent low and examined the tracks, then followed them visually towards the back door of the building. They were narrow – but not a bike or anything like that; maybe a trolley?  She looked again at the track impressions – no, not a shopping trolley; there were only two wheels. Suddenly an image popped into her mind. She knew exactly what had left the tracks: it was one of those hand dollies, the sort that delivery drivers used.

Significant?

Reilly followed the tracks as they disappeared into the footprints around the freezer door, and finally saw her torch.  It had rolled into the shadows that crept out of the freezer, as if telling her where she needed to go next. She went over, picked it up, and directed it towards the dust at her feet as she tried to pinpoint the faint tracks rolling into the freezer.

The freezer room itself was almost completely veiled in darkness.  No outside light came in except a faint beam through the doorway, illuminating a short strip of ground. The alkaline scent was in here too. What the hell was it?

Using her torch, Reilly followed the wheel tracks into the darkness – they kept appearing and disappearing until they were obliterated by all the footsteps around the area where Crowe had been found.

Reilly shivered, despite knowing that the freezer was turned off. Yet still she felt cold. There was something personal, intimate about this space. The killer had been in here with Crowe, one on one, just the two of them, their breaths steaming in the small, frozen room.

What had Crowe been thinking? Had he known his killer? Had he known he was going to die? We spend our whole lives avoiding death, eating the right foods, not smoking, going to the gym, kidding ourselves that we will live forever – but what is it like when we suddenly know, with absolute certainty, that we are about to die?

Reilly shone her torch around the freezer. The beam of light spotlighted parts of the room as she moved around. The shelving was still in place and, at the back of the room, the bath in which Crowe had been found.

Reilly stepped over to the bathtub. It was certainly not a place she would choose to die.  Crowe's last glimpse of life would have been this dirty, abandoned room, and perhaps the face of his killer leaning over him as cold water slowly turned to ice around him.

Trying to picture it threw up more questions for Reilly. How had the bath got there?  It would have taken some effort to get it in, but the place had been abandoned for so long that the investigators were unable to determine if it had been there when the plant was open. Maybe the bath had been wheeled in on the trolley?

Then there was the electricity. Whoever had killed Crowe had known how to hook the electricity back up to the freezer. In fact, he had turned on the electrics for the whole plant.  It was the lights suddenly blazing from the long-abandoned works that had attracted attention and led to Crowe’s discovery.

She thought back to the Coffey scene. The blockage in the septic tank, which iSPI had initially revealed, had turned out to be a piece of brick that was incongruous to the limestone surroundings of the drained tank.

Similarly, the killer here had gone to great lengths not only to execute the murder, but to make sure that the body was found quickly. A fresh chill ran down Reilly’s spine and she turned and headed out of the freezer.

Simply being back out in the main plant made her feel better.  The tight space and intimacy of the freezer had been disconcerting, and out here the alkaline smell seemed less cloying. Walking at a low crouch, Reilly followed the faint wheel tracks with her torch as they rolled towards the rear of the plant, all the way to the back door.

The door was old metal.  Reilly gave it a shove but it didn’t budge. She took a step back, raised her right leg, and gave a powerful kick. The door flew open, the rusty hinges screaming in protest. As it did it let in a gust of fresh air that was welcome, blowing Reilly’s hair back from her face. The sound of metal screeching echoed through the cavernous space, startling the pigeons and sending them flying in a flash of wings, swooping up and out through the broken skylights.

Reilly stepped outside and breathed in a lungful of the cold November air.

She wrapped her coat around her, enjoying the breeze and the sunlight on her face after the cold claustrophobia inside. The pigeons swooped and circled together, a tightly knit pack dark against the pale blue sky, then broke apart, and one by one slipped back in through the broken roof to resume their positions on the rusting metal beams.

Reilly looked around.  The back of the plant opened onto an overgrown car park, the grass and weeds thrusting up through the broken tarmac. The wheel marks ended here, lost on the hard ground, but it seemed obvious to her that this would have been where the killer had come in, the shortest, easiest route to the freezer. He would have known that, would have scoped out his territory, had his plan ready long before he seized Crowe and brought him here.

She walked across the uneven ground to the back of the property, picking her way though the tall weeds and the potholed tarmac. About fifty yards away from the plant there was a wire fence, tired and sagging, several holes punched in it where kids had broken in since the business had floundered.

Was this where the killer had scouted the building initially?  There were several trees, a line of shrubs, plenty of places for someone to hide out for a while, check out the layout of the building, make sure it was truly deserted.