Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (8 page)

It took him about five minutes to complete the rest of the shave, and when he was finished he spritzed a little aftershave lotion into the palms of his hands and clapped both tight to his cheeks, reveling in the short, sharp sensation of the astringent tightening his pores.

If he didn’t feel like a dynamic detective at the peak of his health, the least he could do was try and look the part.

Pleased with his efforts, he shuffled out of the damp, clinging pyjamas and flung them in to the wicker clothes hamper next to the shower. Feeling too dizzy to risk a shower, instead he managed a brisk, thorough wash.

Ready to face the day, Chris walked back to the bedroom, where in the wardrobe a freshly laundered uniform awaited. He pulled off the plastic bag, trying to remember the last time he’d worn full blues – usually when working he got away with jeans and a succession of practically identical cotton shirts and a leather jacket. This morning was different, though: he was part of a guard of honour for Johnny Crowe’s final send-off, hence the formal threads.

With the uniform smartly enshrouding his tall frame, he went into the galley kitchen, which abutted his living room area. The linoleum floor hadn’t seen a mop in some time, and the counter tops were crowded with boxes, cartons and other remnants of too many takeaways.

He shook his head. He’d better be careful or he’d turn into one of those clichéd detectives that appeared in TV shows  the alcoholic workaholic, who spent his evenings alone surrounded by takeaway boxes and whiskey bottles. He laughed. Not likely. For one thing, he rarely drank other than socially, and for another he was actually quite a decent cook when he could find the time.

Chris sighed. As for the workaholic part, well, in the murder business that was non-negotiable.

T
he GFU building was almost deserted when at seven thirty Reilly arrived. She liked to get in early, and have some time to think in peace and quiet before the interdepartmental phone calls and questions started.

She settled in behind her desk with her coffee – black, no sugar. Today she’d decided to see if the iSPI software could reveal anything about the Coffey scene that the investigative team had missed.

Grabbing a cable with a mini-USB connector on the end, she plugged it into the recessed slot on the side of the iPhone, and the other into her PC.

The computer immediately sprang into life and displayed a password confirmation screen. Reilly keyed in ‘Cassandra’, her late mother’s first name, and the terminal hummed, a status bar indicating its progress as it downloaded the data from the iSPI app.

When that was complete, it displayed a second progress bar, under the words ‘aggregating image data’, and she waited patiently to see what would happen next.

Eventually the rendering engine displayed a ‘complete’ icon, and prompted her to enter a file name. Reilly saved it using the Coffey case file number and date, and then as directed, keyed in the command to begin a further render.

As the progress indicator began another maddeningly slow advance across the screen, Reilly went to the comfortable chair that sat next to a small table supporting two data gloves and a head-mounted display: the second piece of Jet Miller’s toy, and the stuff that really sent Gary into spasms of excitement. She’d let him try it out later, but first she wanted to see for herself how the software performed.

Relaxing back into the chair, she laced the display onto her brow like some sort of intricate hat. Two small viewing panels folded down over her eyes and reflected, through a series of prisms and mirrors, the visual output of two small high-resolution color LCD displays. Sliding the data gloves on to her arms, she made an ‘OK’ gesture with her right hand  as Jet’s instructions directed  and the terminal flared to life.

The goggles displayed a boot menu, and using subtle movements of her right hand, she reached across the screen through the network, and grasped the freshly rendered scene from the storage attached to the rendering engine. Turning her palm face up, she clenched a tight fist and then splayed her hand out open. As if by some miracle, the machine responded by unfurling a finely stitched virtual reality mosaic of the Coffey septic tank.

Whoah...
Reilly  felt goosebumps.

Poking around at the edges of the illusion, she was amazed to find that for a first attempt she had actually followed the instructional protocol fairly well, and all the vital data needed to reconstruct the scene seemed to have been properly captured.

In fact, it was so close to the real thing it was scary. OK, so there was no way a machine could replicate the sounds ... smells
... feel
of a crime scene for real, but in this situation that was a good thing. This time there was no stink, no toxic stew.

Nice work, Jet.

Reilly smiled, ran her hands over the gloves and prepared to walk the Coffey scene for the second time, iSPI-style.

––––––––

A
s she worked, the GFU building gradually came to life around her – footsteps in the corridor, voices and greetings, phones ringing, the buzz and the pace gradually picking up as people settled into their daily routine. 

Reilly ignored it all.  She had her door closed this morning, both to shut out sound and also discourage casual visitors.

‘Reilly?’ There was a brief knock before the door opened and she looked up to see Lucy leaning inside. Reilly glanced at the clock: it was after 10 a.m. and she had been working on the scene for over two hours. Lucy stared at her headgear. ‘Wow, that looks so ... futuristic.’

‘I guess that’s exactly what it is.’ Removing the headset, Reilly rocked back in her chair and stretched. Her neck and shoulders were tense from sitting still for so long. She picked up the remains of her coffee, now stone cold.

‘Is that the Coffey scene from the other day?’ Lucy moved closer to the computer screen, immediately interested.  Reilly had placed a virtual placemarker inside the rendering of the tank, similar to the ones they used to mark something of potential interest at a real-life crime scene. Lucy screwed up her eyes. ‘What’s this?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Reilly replied truthfully, ‘but I think it might be some form of blockage, and the real reason the tank backed up.’

She was slightly reluctant to conjure a theory until the ‘real’ tank had been fully drained, and she was able to examine it physically, but iSPI  through its molecular analysis of the tank  had identified an irregularity on one side of the pit about half a meter beneath the surface.

Had Coffey’s murderer purposely blocked up the offshoot pipe so that the tank would become backed up, and the journalist body would be found? The plumber had mentioned that the system automatically redistributed the effluent out beneath the orchard. If this had happened as it was supposed to, Tony Coffey’s body could have been stewing in the tank for weeks, even months before it was found. As it was, the corpse had been discovered within a couple of days.

Granted, it might be nothing, but Reilly was impressed at the software’s ability to pick up on potentially interesting evidence that might otherwise have taken considerable time to reveal itself, if at all.

‘Crikey, the software showed you that – deep down in the tank? That’s so cool.’  Now it was Lucy’s turned to be awed, making Reilly feel vaguely uncomfortable. If iSPI was that reliable, they could all be out of their jobs soon.

‘Like I said, I’m not sure what it is – it could be nothing. And it’s definitely nothing until we find physical evidence to support it. Anway,’ she turned her chair to Lucy, ‘what’s up?’

‘Well ...’ The younger woman couldn’t keep the enthusiasm out of her voice, ‘... we think we might have something from one of the soil samples from this very scene.’

‘Great. And you obviously think it’s of interest.’

Reilly felt relieved; she wasn’t pessimistic by nature, but given what little trace evidence they’d collected, it was a pleasant surprise to think that her team might have been able to isolate something potentially helpful from the sewage-soaked sludge.

‘Come take a look and see what you think,’ Lucy said, and Reilly followed her down the hallway to the lab.

The GFU laboratory was a brightly lit open space. Two long benches of equipment ran the length of the room, and in the corner at the far end was a pair of small desks with computers and printers for the lab techs to share.

Lucy led Reilly over to where she had an electron microscope set up.  She was talking quickly, almost tripping over her words to get them out. ‘We’ve gone through everything we brought back. Firstly, you were right: that hair sample was Mr Coffey’s.  It matched one of the pubic hairs we took from his corpse for comparison.’

Reilly nodded, expecting as much.

‘Most of the soil samples we collected were consistent with the type found in Coffey’s garden,’ Lucy continued. ‘But there was something different about one batch in particular.’

‘Go on.’

‘Not only is it a much more alkaline soil, but it also had traces of something rather interesting.’  She slid the microscope towards Reilly. ‘Take a look.’

Reilly swept her hair back off her forehead and leaned into the microscope, adjusted the setting so that the specimen was in focus. ‘So what am I looking at?’ she asked.

‘Traces of chloride, sodium, potassium, creatinine ...’

‘... and urea?’ Reilly straightened up. 

Lucy nodded.

‘So it’s urine. Not much of a find, considering,’ Reilly said, decidedly unimpressed. ‘This sample was taken from the region surrounding a septic tank, Lucy; what did you expect to find?’

She quickly assuaged her misgivings. ‘Of course. I was inclined to dismiss it at first too, but then I looked more closely at the composition. It’s not human.’

‘Oh. You caught me there,’ Reilly said quickly. ‘Well, if you know what it isn’t, I take it you also know what it is?’

Lucy smiled. ‘Would I drag you in here if I didn’t?’  She slid a printout towards Reilly. ‘This is what gave me the strongest clue. It’s the chemical composition of another substance we took from the very same sample.’

Reilly ran her gaze over the elements. Barley, wheat, bran, soybean, canola meal, molasses, vegetable oil, limestone, salt, dicalcium phosphate.  She racked her brains, trying to figure how such a seemingly random group of ingredients could relate to the urine sample.

‘OK,  I give up, what’s this then?’ she asked.

‘The ingredients commonly found in horse feed. Horse pellets, to be precise. What we got was most likely fine dust residue from the pellets. So I’m thinking that the urine has to be from a horse.’

‘I see.’ Something clicked in Reilly’s brain, and her mind raced to work out why this should be significant. Then she recalled something Chris had said about Coffey’s wife being part of the horsy set.

Which meant it may not be so significant after all.

When she mentioned this to Lucy, the younger woman frowned. ‘Yes, but that garden is pristine, not somewhere you’d ordinarily let horses loose to feed and pee. And the Coffeys don’t keep horses themselves, do they?’

‘No. That’s true.’

‘So while there’s a chance that Mrs Coffey or one of her horsy friends walked it in, there’s just as much of a chance that whoever put Mr Coffey in the tank might have done so,’ Lucy persisted.

‘OK, let’s go with that for the moment, until we discover otherwise. What about the samples from Mrs Coffey’s boots that you took for elimination? Any traces of it on those?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Not a sausage,’ she said, and Reilly smiled. It had taken her a while to get to grips with some of the team’s idiom, but she figured she could translate most of it by now.

‘Then we can probably count her out as the source for the moment. I’ll ask the detectives to find out if any of her friends were in the garden area recently; see if we can maybe isolate it to one of those. If not, then we may well have something.’

Lucy grinned but Reilly wasn’t convinced the new find gave them anything more to go on with the investigation. 

Cooking sauce, horse feed, and one hell of a load of shit.

How on earth was any of it going to help them find Tony Coffey’s killer?

K
ennedy set two pints of Guinness on the table and groaned as he lowered himself into a chair. ‘I hate days like today ...’

He and Chris were in a small city-center pub, and in a mood to blow off some steam after John Crowe’s funeral earlier.

Music blasted out way too loud from the jukebox in the corner. A gaggle of girls in micro-miniskirts stood in a cluster drinking alcopops, exchanging flirtatious glances with a bunch of young guys who were cranking loose change into the machine. Ninety percent of the people in there were under twenty.

Kennedy looked thoughtfully at his drink. ‘Ah, my friend in need ...’  He buried his face in stout, then looked around the pub as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Jesus, I’m getting old.  Look at this place. Remember when it had ratty old stags’ heads on the walls, and you got change back from a fiver when you bought a pint?’

Chris grinned.  ‘No, Granddad, I don’t.’

‘Ah, feck off.’ Kennedy slumped back in his seat. ‘I
am
getting old, though. Days like today sort of bring that home to you.’ He stuck his head in the glass again.

Chris wrapped his hands around his own pint, and took a long sip.

Although the funeral of a fellow cop always got you in the gut, he’d hadn’t known John Crowe personally, unlike Kennedy, who’d graduated from training college at the same time as him. And there was no doubt that funerals forced you to think about your own mortality. Especially when you weren’t feeling a hundred percent.

Chris swallowed hard, then raised his voice a little so as to be heard above the noise. ‘It’s never easy, is it? I always feel so sorry for the family in these situations. Sometimes I wonder if the whole guard of honour thing makes it even harder for them.’

When Kennedy finally came up for air he looked a little happier. ‘I know it would break my Josie’s heart, definitely.’