Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (39 page)

Colin was rigid, his knuckles white where he had gripped the steering wheel, his heart pounding in his chest, while beside him Fiona sat in shocked silence. The engine continued to purr quietly.

Finally Colin unpeeled his hands from the steering wheel and glanced around. They were sideways across the road, the front corner of his precious new car dangling over a ditch.

‘Fuck!’

He slammed his hands on the wheel, threw the door open and stepped into the chilly evening air.

Colin studied the front of the car. The headlights shone on the grassy bank at the side of the road and the reflected light was enough to show the damage. The front spoiler was crunched up beneath the car, the plastic split. Damn ... It was almost as if he himself had been violated – his new car was supposed to be perfect, a tonic for his midlife crisis.

The sound of Fiona opening the passenger door made him look up. ‘What was that?’ she asked, looking back down the road, her voice trembling. ‘What did we...?’

He stood up and peered in the same direction.  ‘Dead sheep I think.’

‘It didn’t look like—’

Colin sighed in exasperation. ‘What else would it be? Stupid animals are always wandering out into the road around here. Farmers ought to take better care of them.’ He removed his glasses and wiped the drizzle off them. ‘Jimmy hit one last month in his Land Rover. Made a right bloody mess of the front end, I can tell you.’  He put his glasses back on. ‘Where are you going?’

Fiona was already stumbling up the road on her high heels. ‘It didn’t look like a sheep to me,’ she continued doggedly.  ‘Even if it was, we need to get it out of the road before somebody else hits it.’

‘Forget about the bloody sheep,’ he growled. ‘How are we supposed to get the car out of this ditch?’

He crouched down again and examined the spoiler. It was already pretty messed up so, really, backing the car up could hardly do it any more damage ...

‘Oh, God, shit!’

Colin stood up again and stared down the road to where Fiona stood, her green dress almost ghostly against the dark hedgerows.  ‘What now?’ he called out irritably.

His wife said nothing, she just stood with her hands clamped to her mouth.

Colin squinted at her face as he approached, suddenly disconcerted by how pale she looked against the beams of the car’s headlights.

‘What is ...’  The words froze before he could finish his sentence, and his eyes locked on to what lay at her feet. 

‘Fuck ...’

For a moment neither of them moved, then Colin turned and vomited on to the road, the viscous liquid splattering his expensive shoes and the leg of his designer suit.

The body of a young woman lay on the road. Even in the darkness they could see that she was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pale nightdress and the only burst of color came from her thick, red, curly hair.  There were cuts and scrapes all over her body, a deep gash in her head, and a bone sticking out of her ankle at an unnatural angle. For a horrible moment, Colin worried that he had caused that, but then he remembered he’d swerved in time to avoid hitting her.

Or had he?

‘Is she...’

‘Dead ...?’  Fiona whispered, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘Without a doubt.’ 

The girl’s skin was pale, and she had an almost ethereal look as she lay on the dark road, her red hair framing her face, her body and white clothing seeming to glow against the darkness around them.

‘On this road, at this time of night, she could have been here hours without anyone seeing her...’

Fiona snapped open her handbag. ‘I’ll call 999.’

Colin glanced around. ‘Should we move her or ...?’

‘Better not.’ She glanced at him, her voice full of meaning. ‘Just in case.’

‘Oh Christ.’ Colin’s chest tightened. Surely nobody would think they’d run her over? He knew he hadn’t hit her, and despite the damage to the front of the car that should be easy to prove, shouldn’t it?

Bending down, he hovered over the girl’s body. As he glanced again at the extent of her injuries, he frowned, noticing something.

Her long hair was splayed across to one side, revealing the base of her neck. On the skin Colin could make out a strange pattern disappearing beneath the nightgown.

His eyes narrowed as he tried to process what he was looking at.

‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered. ‘What the hell is that?’

Chapter 2

The small kitchen was dark with just the ghostly orange glow of the street lights to illuminate the gloom.

Reilly Steel’s flashlight played across the room. At first a cursory glance around, then a more orderly scan. First impressions, then the methodical search.

The flashlight's beam revealed the details of what had happened here and the lives that had been played out: an overturned chair; a dark pool of blood on the torn linoleum floor; an overflowing ashtray on the table beside a baby’s bottle; the sink overflowing with dirty dishes.

Reilly hated domestic violence cases – the hidden years of tension, the secret beatings, the lies, the cover-ups. There were no winners, only losers, just another generation of damaged children growing up to believe that this was what relationships were like and how people treated each other.

This one was worse than most – the wife was currently in hospital, her stomach held together by a hundred staples after her husband had stabbed her with a broken bottle. 

The Garda Forensic Unit wasn’t usually called in on these cases, as they were generally cut and dried, but this one was different. Not only had the woman nearly died – the bottle had nicked her superior mesenteric artery – but the husband denied doing it and the wife was now insisting she’d simply fallen on broken glass.

The saddest part, Reilly mused, was that the poor woman feared further wrath from her demonic husband far more than she trusted the system to bring her justice and protection.

Her jaw clenched as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Attacking a defenseless woman with a broken bottle,  stabbing her in the gut, then running off and leaving her lying in a pool of blood and claiming that he wasn’t even
there?
What kind of man would do that? The kind that she was determined to see convicted.

She brushed aside a lock of her blond hair, tucking it in place behind her ear. Not for the first time, she wondered if she should get a short, functional haircut, something that would look sharp, professional and most importantly would never get in her way. Still, she liked the sensation of quite literally letting her hair down on her admittedly few days off.

She scanned the kitchen once again. The alleged attacker, Brian McGavin, had been thorough – he’d fled the scene, established an alibi with friends, taken the weapon with him. If Reilly couldn’t find anything to place him at the scene at the time of the attack, there was a good chance that he would get away with it.

She was not prepared to let that happen.

She had seen McGavin when the detectives brought him in for questioning. He had a cocky, brutal face –  a life-long bully who challenged any man with his eyes –  and a rap sheet as long as his Neanderthal arms.

She was of course supposed to be impartial, simply gathering the evidence that presented itself, but there were times when it was impossible not to get involved, not to have a personal investment in nailing someone.

The kitchen table told its own story. An ashtray full of cigarette butts, yesterday’s copy of
The Sun
open at the horse racing pages, and an empty can of Heineken. There were traces of McGavin everywhere, but could Reilly place him here at the house when the attack took place?

Sudden noises spooked her – kids outside shouting at each other, an empty can being kicked, the roar of a car – but just as quickly the street fell quiet once more and Reilly’s focus was back on the job.

She enjoyed working late in the evenings, liked the way the darkness naturally forced her to focus on nothing other than the small pool of light thrown up by the flashlight. With nothing to distract her, she was forced to focus on the minutiae and look for the little details that might otherwise be missed.

She aimed the flashlight on the floor and crouched down to look closer at the bloody pool. Reaching out with a gloved hand – the deeper parts were still slightly sticky – she realized that there was something else there. A faint glint of light caught the beam as it skipped across the floor.

She reached out with her tweezers and slowly lifted up a shard of blood-covered glass. A fragment of the weapon?  Something to go on at least.

She looked closer at the immediate surroundings. The floor hadn't been mopped in years, the once-white lino now stained a motley gray. And there, under the edge of the sink unit, was another thin sliver. Once again she picked it up and slipped it into an evidence bag. Taken alone, the pieces of glass meant nothing, but it was possible that they might have picked up the slightest glimpse of a fingerprint or a tiny piece of skin, anything that might link them to McGavin.

Reilly stood up, closed her eyes and took in a few deep breaths through her nose as she tried to imagine exactly what had happened here. Her sharp sense of smell filtered out individual odors from a cacophony of stench. She slowly edged forward toward the blood-stained couch, the metallic smell breaking through the more pungent whiff of baby vomit.

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.’