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

‘Dead guy is a journalist, Tony Coffey, well known on the tabloid scene,’ Chris told her. ‘Plumber came to check on a blocked toilet this morning, opened up the septic tank and ...’ He grimaced.

Reilly’s eyes were wide. ‘The body was found in the septic tank?’

He nodded.  ‘I know. Nice, isn’t it? And a forensic nightmare for you, no doubt.’

‘I’ll say.’ Her mind was already racing with the inherent difficulties of processing a scene like that. Every piece of potential evidence soaked in filth ... ‘Well, seeing as we’re all here, I’m guessing the guy didn’t fall in there by accident.’

‘Right.’ Kennedy pinched the stub of his cigarette out between his fingers, and dropped the residue into his pocket – he knew better than to contaminate Reilly’s crime scene. He rubbed at his eyes. ‘Manhole cover was on and, according to the doc, the poor fucker was alive when he was put in there; may have been stewing in it for two or three days.’

Reilly winced. ‘What a way to make a guy suffer.’

‘I know.’ Chris agreed. ‘The question is, why?’

The answer was something that would have to wait for the moment, Reilly thought, looking again towards the golgothic pit that was the septic tank. She gulped. For possibly the first time in her career she wasn’t champing at the bit to start processing a scene.

Chris followed her gaze as if sensing her reluctance.

‘Body’s still in the tank. Karen reckons it’s going to take a bit of work to get him out.’ 

‘Well, good luck to whomever gets that task,’ Reilly muttered. ‘Have you talked to anyone yet?’

He shook his head. ‘We arrived only about ten minutes before you. We’re heading to the house now to talk to the wife, see what she knows. We’re thinking he was most likely brought in through the gate or from the house, but we need to cover all the options.’

Reilly nodded. ‘I’ll have my guys sweep the perimeter, let you know what we come up with.’

‘Thanks.’ 

‘The plumber’s still around too; I think I saw a van on the way in?’

‘Don’t miss a trick, do you?’ Kennedy grumbled good-naturedly. ‘All right, Steel, work your magic. We’re off to do the dirty work.’

Reilly looked again at the tank and shuddered. A gentle geyser of putrid mist spewed from the opening.

Nope, this time the dirty work was unquestionably all hers.

R
eilly hefted up her kitbag and headed back towards the opening of the tank. The November sky was darkening, and heavy rainclouds drifted menacingly across the fields from the east. 

She approached the tank and nodded a brief greeting to the ME before getting down to business. The stink from the opening was so strong that, for once, Reilly didn’t get a whiff of Karen Thompson’s favored perfume, Red Door by Elizabeth Arden.

Smells were Reilly’s thing.  She’d discovered a long time ago that her sensitive nose had some sort of weird talent for cataloging scents, particularly perfume. And while it often came in handy for the job, today she was cursing that particular ability.

‘How soon before you get the body out?’ she asked.

Despite the circumstances, Karen Thompson looked typically calm and unruffled, and Reilly marveled at the woman’s strong stomach. 

‘Shouldn’t be too much longer – I’ve got a team on their way now,’ the doctor replied, fixing her big, almost oversized eyes on Reilly. ‘I pretty much have to sit on my hands till then so if you want to get in there before they arrive, be my guest.’

Reilly nodded, grateful for the opportunity to inspect the area around the manhole before it got trampled even further. Between the uniforms, the wife and the plumber, there was already a lot of disturbance, to say nothing of what it would be like after they’d hauled the corpse out. But such contamination was nothing new and Reilly did love a challenge ... 

She bent down and peered closely at the ground. As expected, the area around the manhole opening showed signs of heavy traffic.  Blades of grass were bent and crushed into the damp earth by several sets of footsteps going back and forth across from the gate to the tank. There had been some heavy rain recently, and the various footprints had left deep indentations in the soft ground.  Reilly would have her GFU colleagues collect everyone’s shoeprints later for elimination, but for now she wanted to see if there was anything of immediate interest.

She cast her gaze around, trying to understand what had been done, get a feel for it. It seemed to her that there were several ways into the garden: from the house or the gate behind her; over the hedge from the road to her left; through the woods to her right; or across the orchard straight ahead.

She tried to put herself in the perpetrator’s shoes, tried to imagine what the murderer had been thinking. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to kidnap the journalist, never mind the effort of dropping him into a septic tank.  If the guy had been alive at the time, like Karen suggested, choosing to murder him in this way was making a point, a very visible one. The killer would have planned it all out, have known where the septic tank was, have had every detail figured. Reilly was prepared to put money on his coming in the normal way, through the gate.

She scooted round to the side of the lawn, took a new path out towards the septic tank, walking lightly, and checking the grass in front of her as she moved.  As she had expected, there were no signs of footprints from the direction she was travelling. She stopped about two meters from the limestone opening.

Trying to muster courage and steel herself for the inevitable, she paused for a moment and gazed up at the gray sky. She needed to be calm and composed when she looked at the body, her mind neutral, assessing everything ... unaffected.

She stepped closer to the opening and peered inside it.

Tony Coffey’s face floated gently on the scummy surface, framed by a thick, viscous soup of gray foam. His eyes were open, staring upwards, the moment of his death captured forever in his ghastly grimace.

What had the poor guy been thinking, Reilly wondered. What goes through your mind as you slowly drown in sewage or choke on lethal fumes, all alone in the dark confines of a tiny space surrounded by human filth? Did he know his murderer?  Did he have any idea why he was being subjected to such punishment?

She bent down to take a better look at the area below. The tank itself looked old  ancient, actually  and she figured it must have been there for decades, perhaps part of the original friary. The original waste system was just as old, as was often the way with these period houses, and the entire lower portion of the tank was hewn directly into living rock, with heavy limestone blocks stacked above it, creating large walls over which giant crosspieces were laid.

Between the layers of limestone were delicate frets of a soot-like substance, as if the whole thing had been constructed with burned or burning wood between the stones: plenty of dark little corners in which Reilly hoped trace evidence might lurk.

They’d be draining the tank once the body was removed, but until then ...

Catching a whiff of methane that almost made her dizzy, yet again Reilly bemoaned her delicate nose. Normally when working a scene all her senses were hyperaware, but this time she was definitely going to have to do without her trusty nose.

Taking one last gasp of fresh air, she slipped on a gas mask to shield her from the toxic fumes, and kneeled down properly on the damp grass. If she felt the cold wet ground through the knees of her contamination suit as she tried to look past the purple-splotched face of the body, she barely registered it. Her focus was now entirely on collecting evidence, finding clues as to how this had happened, and who might be responsible.

Not for the first time, Reilly wondered how in the world she had ended up here – on this occasion hovering over an open sewer with only a putrifying corpse for company – instead of spending her days sitting at a desk and exchanging pleasantries and coffee with colleagues, like most normal people.

Faced with a situation like this – with such a disgusting horrific mess –  wouldn’t most sane people throw up and run away screaming? That fact that she could face it all with such equanimity made her wonder what kind of person that made her. As bad as the killer if this was just another part of the day job? Or as bad as  ...?  A thought surfaced unbidden and, attempting to banish the notion from her mind, she flicked on her torch, and began carefully examining the rim of the manhole opening. It was wet, rusting and crusted with a thick layer of dried scum.

She knew that chemically, 99.9 percent of the dank gray soup in the tank consisted merely of water, yet it was amazing how that other tiny percentage of offensive fecal bacteria was responsible for the assailing reek, and the main reason Reilly was restricting the majority of her person to outside the tank.

She choked back a gag, and began searching along the rim. After a few minutes, a short hair clinging to the damp metal on the inside caught her attention. It looked to be human, with the follicle still attached, and while she knew it could be anyone’s (and being coarse and curly was likely to be a pubic hair that had passed through the Coffeys’ toilet) at least it was something. She gently lifted it with her tweezers and dropped it into an evidence bag.

She continued to scan the area, following the beam of the torch as it illuminated the dark interior, then leaned further inside the opening, her face just inches from the dead man’s. The putrid foam moved gently as the victim bobbed on the surface, the gases in his stomach keeping him there, but by now any last traces of disgust had left her – she was completely and utterly absorbed in her work.

Reilly felt a little
frisson
of excitement tickle her spine.

Despite the circumstances, she had to admit that these cases – the difficult ones  were what made the job for her. Intrigue, puzzlement, frustration ... these were all in a day’s work for a crime scene investigator.

Afterwards, Reilly checked on her fellow GFU techs. 

‘We’ve covered the perimeter,’ Lucy reported. She was in her mid-twenties, with curly fair hair cut into a stylish bob, and dark-framed glasses. Energetic and enthusiastic, she often provided the enthusiasm the team needed when energy levels flagged. ‘I went from the wall, Gary from the house, and we met up in the middle.’ She pointed to the fence line behind the septic tank, where the property ended and the woods began.

‘Anything?’  Reilly asked, although she suspected she already knew the answer.

‘No one has entered the property from those directions anytime recently,’ confirmed Lucy.

‘The ground is soft from all this rain,’Gary said.  He was older, late twenties with an open, appealing face, and a scruffy beard. He was more detail-oriented than Lucy, but lacked her intuitive skills, the ability to take disparate facts and make connections. ‘Anyone climbing over the fence would leave deep prints where they landed.’

Especially if they were hauling a body, Reilly thought. ‘Dr Thompson believes Coffey was still alive when he was put in the tank,’ she reminded them.

‘I know,’ Gary nodded. ‘But I can’t imagine he went in voluntarily, so I’m thinking he would need to have been bound or sedated.’

‘True. I don’t think anyone would be dumped in there without a fight.’ 

Lucy shuddered. ‘That’s got to be a horrible way to die – in the dark, flailing around in sewage, choking on all those fumes ...’

Reilly could see the discomfort in her face. She really was young to be doing this kind of work. But then again, there was no way of being fully prepared to deal with the things the GFU investigated.

‘That’s why we’re here,’ Reilly reminded her. ‘To act on behalf of those who can no longer defend themselves.’ Even as she said it, it sounded trite, but it seemed to have the desired effect. Lucy’s face lost its emotion, and she turned her focus back to the case, to the evidence.

She looked at Reilly, her bright-eyed enthusiasm returning. ‘Did you find anything in the tank?’ she asked. ‘I’ll bet that was fun.’

‘Nothing obvious. The whole area outside it is a mess of footprints – the plumber, Mrs Coffey, the uniforms ...’

‘Just once,’ Gary said frustratedly, ‘just once could we get an uncontaminated crime scene?’

‘And what would be the fun in that?’ Reilly said drily. She gazed out over the trampled sod. ‘No, this is what we get, and it’s down to us to make some sense of it.’ She paused. ‘But I did have an idea.’ She looked at Gary. ‘Can you do me a favor?’

‘Of course, what do you need?’

‘My iPhone’s back in the van, and because I can’t get down and dirty in the tank—’

‘I’ve got the camera here if you need to take some shots,’ Lucy interjected.

‘No, that’s not what I had in mind.’

Gary’s eyes widened. ‘iSPI? You’re going to use it?’ he asked, his enthusiasm almost palpable, as Reilly anticipated it would be.

‘iSPI’ – Investigative Scene Processing Integration – was a portable app Reilly had promised to beta-test for one of her old Quantico classmates, Jet Miller, a former master hacker, now working in the FBI’s forensic science division. The Academy had tasked Jet with researching the application of mobile computing technology to forensic field investigation, and he’d recently developed a suite of software designed to simplify and improve scene-processing by forensic technicians. Currently in development stage, the app was able to render a 3D image of a location using key photographic and video information, enabling investigators to ‘run the scene’ repeatedly after they’d finished doing so physically.

It was aimed at particularly challenging or potentially dangerous locations, such as the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, or a chemical fire. The Academy administration hoped the software could eventually be sold to investigative agencies throughout the world, and were making plans to begin negotiations for its commercial release once it was ready.

To this aim, Jet had recruited a number of guinea pig beta-testers from law enforcement friends in varying locations. And while Reilly had been hovering over the reeking septic tank and trying her best not to fall in, she figured this might be as good a time as any to give iSPI a try.