Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (9 page)

‘Well, luckily you’re not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. Are you?’ Chris added jokingly, trying not to think about the irony of that with regard to himself.

‘Not if I can help it. But sometimes you wonder, with all the shit that’s going down these days.’

‘Speaking of, erm, shit ... where are we on the Coffey murder?’

The smile quickly left his partner’s face. ‘Buggered if I know. Like I said, no clues, no suspects, no motive.’

Chris nodded in agreement. It was four days since the discovery of Tony Coffey’s body, and they needed something to move the investigation forward soon, an opening, something to give them direction. He gazed at his half-empty pint glass. The stout wasn’t bad, and it was definitely relaxing him a little, relieving some of the tension and worry he’d been experiencing these last few days about the tremors. Maybe the odd Guinness was the answer?

‘With regard to motive, did the editor have much to say yesterday?’ Kennedy asked.

Coffey’s editor at the
Sunday Herald
had shed little light on anything, other than to insist to Chris yet again that Tony was ‘a total arsehole, but he had a way with words. If you wanted someone to be provocative, to stir up a storm of controversy, then he was your man.’

Chris shook his head. ‘Sounds like everyone hated Coffey – the left, the right, old people, young people. The guy lived to wind people up.’

Kennedy sipped thoughtfully. ‘Did you ask the editor about death threats, irate call or letters in response to his articles, anything like that? Stalkers, even?’

‘He said there have been some inflammatory responses down the years, but no stalkers, no one who swore they’d kill him or whatever. What about the wife?’ he asked, referring to Kennedy’s second interview with Sandra Coffey in light of Kirsty Malone’s revelations.

The detective looked grim. ‘I tried beating about the bush, but she knew where I was coming from.’

Chris nodded sympathetically. There was no easy way to ask a woman about her dead husband’s affairs.

The music seemed to grow even louder, battling the chirping of the crowd.  Kennedy leaned towards Chris to make himself heard. ‘She admitted knowing that Coffey had had several “secretaries” throughout the years. She gave me a couple of names  I’ll follow up on them tomorrow, see if there was anything unseemly, unpleasant, whatever.’  He sighed. ‘We’re pissing in the dark, Chris, and I’m not sure we’re hitting anything except our own shoes. Think about it, a provocative middle-aged journalist with a string of affairs, and by all accounts an arsehole too. The question isn’t who would want him dead – it’s more like who
wouldn’t
?’

Chris nodded tiredly. This was making him feel drained yet again. ‘My guess is it’s more than that,’ he said. ‘I reckon we can forget the girlfriends, or any wounded husbands, to be honest. It’s the whole setup of the killing. This isn’t a crime of passion – it’s a carefully planned, meticulous job, and it’s intended to make a point.’ He picked up his glass again. ‘Think about it – you’re a killer, you’ve got it in for a guy for whatever reason.  Fair enough, we know that happens.’

‘All too often, unfortunately,’ Kennedy grunted.

Chris was warming to his theme. ‘But why do something so elaborate – sensational, even?’ he asked. ‘Stuffing a guy in a septic tank to drown in his own shit ... that’s pretty imaginative even by the standards of the low-lifes we come across.’

Kennedy picked up his own pint and knocked it back. ‘Ah, what the hell. We aren’t going to solve anything on this one without a lot of work and a little bit of luck. Right,’ he licked froth off his lips, ‘I’d better go home to the wife.’

‘Do – while your dinner is still warm and you can still walk.’

The older cop gave him a look. ‘Sneer all you like, but what do you go home to, eh? An empty flat and the Playboy channel?’

Chris grinned. ‘Admit it, you miss the bachelor’s life sometimes.’ As he spoke, two attractive women passed their table – one of them looked over and gave Chris an appraising glance.

Kennedy caught the look. ‘Some parts of it, yeah.’  His eyes followed the girls across the bar. ‘Trouble is, Romeo, I never got the kind of looks you just did.’ He stood up and shook his head. ‘Guess some women just have no taste.’

At the GFU lab, Reilly spread Tony Coffey’s clothes out for examination, the dried sewage-encrusted garments looking incongruous against the gleaming white counter top. 

Lucy and Rory, another lab tech, stood either side of her, face masks in place, although these weren’t much help in protecting them from the stink. Even a big strong rugby player like Rory, who was well used to getting down and dirty, was having trouble.

Reilly wore a mask too, not for protection from the smell – she’d become accustomed to that by now  but because they were going to get up close and personal with the victim’s clothes in the hope of finding some crucial piece of evidence on them that might have been trapped beneath the layer of sewage.

At the time of his death, the journalist had been wearing a dark blue shirt, a small-check-patterned tweed jacket, and gray woolen trousers. She slid the trousers towards Lucy and the jacket towards Rory.

‘So what are we looking for?’ Rory wore his usual slightly anxious look; he was aware of the increasing media coverage of the crime because of Coffey’s profession, and it was clearly weighing on him.

Reilly smiled and tried to look reassuring. The last thing she wanted was uptight lab techs who had trouble focusing on the job. She needed the team sharp, paying attention to every detail. 

‘The usual,’ she told them. ‘Anything goes – lint, fluff, skin flecks.  Basically anything that’s out of place, we want it.’

Rory nodded.  ‘So we’re focusing around the collar and cuffs to start with?’

‘Yes.’

For a few moments the three of them worked in silence, each going over the clothes meticulously using a hand-held magnifying glass.

This was one part of the job that Reilly loved. There was something soothing about focusing the mind on the most minute details, poring over a tiny area, searching in the nooks and crannies like a hunter creeping stealthily over a wooded hillside in search of prey.

At times like these she was able to clear her mind, let her worries and problems go, allow the creative side of her brain to roam free while her conscious mind was completely absorbed in a task. All she could hear on either side was Lucy and Rory’s steady breathing as they too concentrated on the job at hand.

Coffey’s jacket was a wool and synthetic blend. Under Rory’s magnifying glass – which increased the image fortyfold – it looked like a rolling hillside, a nightmare tangle of crossed threads running at ninety degrees to each other. There were literally thousands of little ridges and valleys, places where a microscopic piece of material could hide.

Every so often one of them would find a tiny particle of trace on the clothes. They would remove the particle with their tweezers, bag it, label it, then resume. They all knew from experience that there was no point getting excited at such times.  Unless they found something large or very obviously out of place, there was virtually no way of knowing what it was until it was analyzed. For every vital piece of evidence that they recovered in this way, they analyzed a hundred bits of household dirt and toast crumbs.

Reilly relaxed and enjoyed the hunt, hoping that somewhere out there she would find her elusive prey. And while she worked, she let her mind wander, speculating on what a sad lonely death Coffey’s must have been. Whoever had it in for him had conjured up one hell of a punishment.

Not that freezing to death in a bathtub of ice would have been a bed of roses either, she mused, thinking about John Crowe’s equally strange manner of death. The former policeman’s funeral had taken place early that day, and she knew that some of the older members of the GFU who’d worked alongside Crowe in the past,including Jack Gorman, had been in attendance.

The thinking was that Crowe’s death was all to do with punishment – revenge from one of his former collars, or payback from someone who’d borne him a grudge.

Reilly shivered. Criminals were getting more and more inventive these days, coming up with ways of sending out strong, defiant messages to their opponents.

What kind of message they were trying to send out by immersing a guy in ice was anyone’s guess. She shrugged, thinking that they’d probably picked the idea up from one of those TV cop shows; you got a lot of that these days – criminals styling themselves on hotshot mafia types.

‘Take a look at this.’ Rory’s voice broke into her thoughts. She turned and saw that he was delicately tweezing open a folded piece of paper. ‘From the inside pocket of his jacket,’ he told her. ‘Looks like a note.’

‘Seems to be in pretty good shape too,’ Reilly commented, pleased that whatever it was, it had escaped the sludge. The outside of the jacket would have got the worst of it, and while the paper still looked wet, Rory was slowly but expertly teasing the folds apart.

‘Generic lined notepaper  nothing distinctive,’ he continued, answering Reilly’s unspoken questions. ‘There’s something written on it all right ... just on a single line, from what I can see. Ink looks like blue ballpoint, but the words are blurry from the moisture.’

Reilly handed him the magnifying glass. ‘This might help.’

‘No, I think I can make it out actually.’ He seemed reluctant to accept assistance, and was being almost protective of his prize find. 

Reilly knew that feeling well. For the most part forensic work was tedious and mostly fruitless, so finding anything out of the ordinary was akin to uncovering buried treasure.

‘Oh. It’s not words, it’s numbers,’ he said.

‘Just numbers?’

‘Yes, a sequence, almost like ... yeah, that’s exactly what it is – ten digits. It’s a phone number,’ Rory confirmed, triumph in his face. ‘It starts with 086 so it’s a mobile number.’

‘Nice work.’ Reilly smiled. It might ultimately get them nowhere but for now it was at least something. ‘Is the rest of it legible?’

‘I think so ... just not sure if this one is a three or an eight.’ Now he accepted the magnifying class and peered closely at the sequence of numbers.

‘Want me to take a look and then we can compare?’

He nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

Reilly bent down and examined the blurred ink. Actually, the digits on the note were surprisingly legible, considering what the jacket had been through. But yes, it was difficult to tell whether the edges of the three had blurred into the shape of an eight, or if it had been an eight to begin with.

Reilly continued studying each digit and when she was finished, she wrote down the number sequence as she’d identified it.

When she compared it with what Rory had written, they realized they had the same mobile phone number. It was obviously relevant to Tony Coffey in some way, but the question was, was it relevant to his murder?

Leaving the others to continue the examination, Reilly removed her gloves and headed for her office.

From there she called the station but both Chris and Kennedy’s direct lines went to voicemail, so next she tried Chris’s mobile.

When he answered she could hear crowd noises in the background.

‘Hey there,’ he said, and Reilly thought his greeting sounded unusually chirpy.

‘Where are you?’ she asked, and was faintly surprised when he told her he and Delaney were in a pub. Then she remembered Crowe’s funeral and recalled that drinking after a burial was an Irish tradition. A wake, wasn’t it? Another quirky local custom Reilly couldn’t quite get her head round, despite being the daughter of an Irishman, not to mention one who’d never needed a funeral for an excuse to hit the bottle.

Unsure of the protocol surrounding a wake, especially a cop’s, she felt slightly wrong-footed. ‘Well, maybe this can wait till—’

‘No, whatever it is, fire ahead,’ Chris assured her. ‘We’re just about to head off now anyway.’

‘OK ...’ Reilly went on to tell them about the find in Coffey’s clothes.

Chris was impressed. ‘Nice one. Could you make out the number?’

‘Would I be calling if I didn’t?’ she replied, faintly teasing. ‘Got a pen handy?’

‘Hold on a sec, it’s a bit noisy in here, and we’re just going outside.’

There was a brief rustling and Reilly heard a creaking noise, which she guessed was the pub door opening. After that, the background din disappeared. 

‘OK, shoot,’ Chris said. ‘Kennedy has the notebook out.’ Reilly read out the number sequence and heard Chris recite it to Kennedy in turn.

‘It’s a cellphone number so should be easy enough to identify – unless of course it’s prepaid,’ she went on. ‘Whether it’s any good or not is anyone’s guess.’ When there was a brief silence at the other end she said, ‘Chris? Are you still there? I don’t know if the signal’s—’

‘I’m still here,’ he said in a strange voice. ‘That’s definitely the number you found in Tony Coffey’s pocket?’

‘No question. Why – does the sequence sound off to you or something?’

‘The sequence is fine.’ Chris’s voice was grim. ‘And seems we’ll have no trouble identifying it.’

‘What? How?’

‘Well, according to Kennedy, that’s Johnny Crowe’s number.’

C
hris sat in the back of a taxi, his thoughts filled with Reilly’s latest discovery and its significance or otherwise.

Why would Tony Coffey have had John Crowe’s mobile number?

There could be any number of reasons: the most obvious being that Crowe was Coffey’s source on a story he was researching for the
Herald
. Yet, Coffey wasn’t a crime reporter and, as a rule, didn’t write about drug dealers, organized criminals or the other unsavory types Crowe had been typically involved with.

More importantly, was there anything significant in the fact that the two men were now dead, both murdered in bizarre circumstances?

Kennedy, with his personal links to Crowe, was going to follow up on it tomorrow, talk to Crowe’s former colleagues and partner to see if any connection between him and the journalist was immediately apparent. If not, then it was simply another loose end in this increasingly frustrating case.