Taboo (21 page)

This time her father paid attention. ‘What do you mean? What the hell has that got to do with anything?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Reilly said, now almost sorry she’d started the conversation. ‘As I said, just keep an eye out for anyone watching you while you’re out and about or maybe in the pub. This guy is dangerous, Dad and I don’t want anything bad happening to you.’

Mike snorted. ‘A bit late for that now, don’t you think?’ he drawled and she winced. Chris had moved to the window, evidently sensing the tension and trying to give them some privacy.

‘Ah, fuck it,’ Mike said then, waving an arm in the air. ‘If you say so. I’ll do my best to watch my back.’ Then his gaze rose to meet Reilly’s and it was as clear and focused as she’d seen in years. ‘Just make sure you do the same. I already lost one of my girls and I don’t think I could handle it if it happened again.’

For Reilly it was an almost surreal experience. Within barely forty-eight hours of news of his arrival, Daniel Forrest was standing in the boardroom addressing the investigative team. The profiler had initially been reluctant to do so – concerned he might be treading on toes – but she had convinced him that diving right in was the only way.

She scanned the other’s faces as Daniel spoke, his warm southern tones, softly modulated, drawing the detectives in. That was another trick she’d learned from him – if you lectured to people, they tuned you out, but if you lowered your voice, they needed to pay attention in order to hear you.

Chris and Kennedy were certainly paying attention – despite their initial misgivings about having a stranger on the ground, they understood that the profiler was visiting royalty in the world of criminal investigation, and a chance to gain insight from the very best. Kennedy was wearing his usual dour expression, but was taking notes as Daniel spoke. Inspector O’Brien sat quietly but wasn’t missing a word. Chris looked the most relaxed – he was listening intently but clearly thinking too and Reilly figured he was the most likely to have questions.

‘By definition, the nature of this case changed when this person tricked his or her way into the lab,’ Daniel explained. ‘Up until that point you had yourself a suspect with a Freud fixation, but you were still very much fishing in the dark.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Once direct contact was made – and by that I mean targeting Reilly directly and
signaling a missing crime scene – now it looks like have a wild goose chase on our hands.’ Daniel stopped and let the significance of his last remark sink in, waiting for someone to rise to the bait.

Kennedy was first to respond.
predictably. ‘That sounds very negative,’ he said. ‘Almost like you’re giving up already.’

Daniel gave a wry smile. ‘Detective Kennedy, I presume?’

He nodded.

‘Of course you’ve got a good point – we should always expect to catch such a killer. But why won’t a standard manhunt work?’ He scanned the faces and saw that Chris was nodding thoughtfully. ‘What’s on your mind? You look like you agree.’

‘Because this guy’s not ready to be caught?’

Daniel exchanged a brief glance with Reilly. ‘Correct.’

‘Everything we have so far, he’s given us,’ Chris added and again Daniel agreed.

‘But surely Reilly walking in on him was a
mistake, maybe we’re giving this person too much credit?’ O’Brien suggested, looking almost apoplectic that the supposedly great Daniel Forrest hadn’t already produced their suspect on a plate.

‘Perhaps, but it was obviously a chance he was willing to take,’ Daniel replied. ‘After all, it wasn’t as if he had to run a gauntlet of high-tech security and armed guards. What we know about criminals as deeply organized as the taboo killer suggests that he’ll be extremely difficult to find. As I’m sure you know
, guys like this don’t operate by the same rules as you and I. Generally speaking, serial killers have disorders in their social make-up – they are antisocial. According to the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – that means they consistently display the following criteria.’ He ticked each point off on his fingers. ‘Firstly, they don’t conform to social norms – for example by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest. Secondly, they are deceitful; they repeatedly lie, use aliases, and con others for personal profit or pleasure.’ He paused. ‘Starting to sound like anyone we know?’

The team nodded solemnly.

‘They are also likely to have a reckless disregard for the safety of themselves or others and lack remorse – in particular they are able to rationalize having hurt or mistreated other people.’

Kennedy looked thoughtful. ‘So what you’re saying is that the guy will do anything to get what he wants – to achieve his goal.’

‘Exactly,’ Daniel replied. ‘But based on the recent escalation of not only the killings but the personal contact, he isn’t finished yet. And until he is, anything is fair game,’ he concluded somberly.

Reilly shivered involuntarily. ‘That’s a scary thought.’

‘It is, yes.’ He looked serious. ‘Which brings us to where we stand now. We have two goals at this point,’ he continued. ‘Firstly, we need to try and figure out what he’s going to do next.’ He turned to Reilly. ‘And from what you’ve told me about the arrangement of the files, it looks like there’s also a missing crime scene to find.’

O’Brien stood up. ‘Better get moving then. Delaney and Kennedy – keep going on the missing
persons reports and see if anything turns up there. Seems like a needle in a haystack to me but if that’s all we’ve got to go on at the moment—’

‘Actually there is something else,’ Chris said and the others looked at him with interest. ‘The hotline took a call this morning from someone who thinks they recognize Clare Ryan and Gerry Watson from the newspaper reports.’

Reilly raised an eyebrow. ‘Both of them?’

‘Yes.’

Her heart pounded. If the tip worked out, it could ascertain what had up to now been an elusive link between any of the victims.

‘Well, what are you doing sitting here then?’ O’Brien moaned. ‘Follow it up.’

‘We were just about to, before we were summoned to meet Agent Forrest here,’ Kennedy said sardonically, getting up out of his chair. ‘So if that’s all—’

‘Just put a lid on it and get a move on,’ the Inspector barked before turning to Reilly. ‘Steel, you review everything on the existing crime scenes and bring your friend up to speed on what we have so far. See if we’ve missed anything that might help us get ahead of this guy.’

‘What about the accomplice angle?’ Reilly asked. She’d told them about the blond hair and her belief that the killer might not be working alone.

‘That sort of speculation is Agent
Forrest’s department, I believe,’ the Inspector told her, his tone brusque. ‘For now, we can only work with what we’ve already got.’

‘Thank you for having me,’ Daniel told the other men, solicitously. ‘I promise I’ll do my utmost to help bring this to a satisfactory conclusion.’

Reilly gathered her things. While she was relieved to have Daniel on board she couldn’t help but wonder how, with so many people already dead, that this situation could ever be concluded satisfactorily.

Chris and Kennedy weren’t quite sure what to make of Mick Kavanagh, the 50-odd-year-old alcoholic, who from his miserable surroundings in the St Vincent de Paul shelter, told them how he knew Gerry Watson and Clare Ryan.

‘They were nice to you,’ Kennedy repeated with no small measure of frustration.

‘Yeah, not everyone is you know,’ Kavanagh said, eyeing the detectives suspiciously. In truth, Chris was amazed that the tip had come in at all; the homeless community were for the most part hugely distrustful of the law, and it was rare for them to offer a response to the most basic of questions, let alone offer help on something that didn’t concern them. But this case was big news. ‘I normally wouldn’t get involved in stuff like this, but the things that are going on, and to ordinary people … well, it’s terrible.’

‘We know,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘Tell us about Clare Ryan.’

‘The blond one? She was a bit of bleeding heart … you know the type, trying to get me to reconnect with my family and give up the gargle that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘Poor kid doesn’t know much about the real world, although I s’pose she does now,’ he added, shaking his head morosely. ‘She was a nice kid though and I liked talking to her; she reminded me of my own one when she was that age.’

‘What about Gerry Watson?’ Chris asked, pointing to a photograph of the young camper. ‘Now that fella never said much, but if he passed me on O’Connell Street in the mornings, he used to come back with cup of coffee,’ the older man replied. Chris recalled that Watson was a student at the Dublin Institute of Technology just off the city’s main thoroughfare. ‘Never gave me any money, though.’

‘So Clare Ryan tried to rescue you, and Watson gave you coffee?’ Kennedy clarified flatly, his tone of voice leaving Chris in no doubt that he thought this was an almighty waste of time.

‘Yep.
I’d prefer a few bob of course, but you take what you can get. And you tend to remember – not so much the people who are nice to you, but who actually
look
at you, you know? Some people might throw you a few coins but only ’cos they feel guilty, and then others pretend you’re not there and rush off in case you might infect them or something.’

‘I can imagine.’ Chris produced photos of Jim Redmond and the Miles women. ‘Do you happen to recognize any of these?’ he asked.

Kavanagh seemed to take a good long hard look at the photos but Chris could tell by his expression that nothing was registering. ‘Don’t think so,’ the man said, eventually.

‘You’re sure?’ Kennedy pressed.

He shrugged. ‘Well, unless they’re some of the ones I talked about who just threw me a few coins here and there, but the faces don’t ring any bells, you know what I mean?’

Chris did, and while it might be helpful to know that Gerry Watson and Clare Ryan had both been kind-hearted enough to help someone less fortunate than themselves, it didn’t do much toward establishing a conclusive link between them and the other murder victims.

Thanking Kavanagh, they left the shelter.

‘What do you reckon?’ Kennedy asked, lighting up a cigarette on the street. ‘We could ask around some more in there, show those pictures to some of the others and see if our victims showed the same sort of charity to anyone else.

Chris looked at him.
Charity …

Hadn’t Jim Redmond’s wife mentioned something about her husband going out of his way to do a good deed? His mind raced. And given Sarah Miles’ occupation as a nurse it was likely that she too could be involved in charitable causes in some shape or form.
Actually, now that he thought of it, didn’t Kennedy himself bemoan their neighbor’s trite comments about the Miles women being generous and kind-hearted?

Granted, it was a tenuous theory, but up to now had been the only one they had that might just link these victims.

‘I suppose it’s worth considering,’ Kennedy said when Chris outlined his thinking, ‘but even if our victims were all bleeding hearts, I still don’t know how it helps us catch this psycho.’ He dragged hard on his cigarette. ‘Unless these days being
nice
to people is some kind of taboo.’

Chris followed him back inside the shelter, his legs dragging behind him. Damn. Reilly was right; he’d have to see someone about this thing soon – otherwise it would start to get out of control. If things were quiet tomorrow, he’d try and slip in an appointment with a doctor in the morning, give a fake name and address and see how things went. He shook his head, not at all comfortable with this kind of underhanded thinking, but he figured it was necessary for the sake of keeping his job. And without that, without the one thing that gave his whole life meaning, Chris was afraid of ending up a charity case himself.

Daniel Forrest pored over the crime-scene photos with his magnifying glass. He moved slowly, methodically, taking his time to look at each detail of every picture.

Reilly watched him, admiring his thoroughness, his patience and his relentless attention to detail. She knew she was a decent investigator and for the most part thorough, but compared to Daniel she was an impatient novice. Fortunately, what she lacked in patience she made up for in instinct and ability to see patterns where others just saw a muddle.

He looked up and caught her watching him. He grinned. ‘This always did drive you crazy, didn’t it?’

‘I don’t know how you maintain such focus for so long,’ she admitted.

He shoved a picture toward her. It was from the Jim Redmond hanging. ‘You have to find ways to make the evidence come alive for you each and every time you look at it,’ he said. ‘Here, try this.’ He spun the photograph around so that it was upside down. ‘Does it look any different now?’

She leaned in to train her magnifying glass on it, and scanned the photograph, trying to see it through fresh eyes. ‘Any particular reason you gave me this one?’ she wondered.

‘This is the one that intrigues me the most,’ he admitted.

She looked up from the photograph and carefully put the magnifying glass down. ‘It seems the most straightforward to me,’ she observed.

‘Exactly.’

‘Ah.’ Reilly sighed. ‘So perhaps we were guilty of taking it for granted?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘I’m not sure if you did that,’ he replied. ‘But it does stand out – mostly because of what’s
not
there.’ He nodded toward the photograph, Jim Redmond suspended from the beam of his expensive home, the Italian cotton sheet round his neck. ‘The killer has shown more than once that he can handle two people at a time, so why not get Jim and his boyfriend together, make it a double suicide, a lovers’ pact?’

Reilly looked back at the photo, and considered this. ‘Maybe the killer didn’t know?’

Daniel looked at her dubiously. ‘About the lover?’

‘Yeah.
Maybe it was just a coincidence that he was in such a relationship, something we turned up that the killer didn’t know about.’ She knew that Chris and Kennedy had conducted a deep trawl of Redmond’s contacts and tried long and hard to establish a lover but to no avail. Of course, it was just as likely that the man frequented gay bars and had no one steady companion, but again a recent search of the city’s watering holes had turned up nothing. Yet the killer’s knowledge of Redmond’s secret life would have been a suitably powerful form of persuasion to coerce him into taking his own life.

Daniel looked at the photograph again. ‘It’s a lonely looking scene,’ he said, ‘and in the largest room too, as if the
killer  wanted to emphasize something … loneliness,’ he finished, eventually. ‘The loneliness of suicide.’

Reilly said nothing for a moment, letting him draw whatever conclusions he needed to establish a clear profile. ‘What do you make of the accomplice possibility?’ she asked, anxious to see if her own theory fit.

Daniel turned to look at her, his face expressionless. ‘Personally I feel it’s nothing more than that – a possibility. As for the hair, well … have you even considered that it might be yours?’

She stared at him, feeling like a scolded schoolchild. ‘Damn.’ She’d been so focused on the evidence taken from the scene that she had actually forgotten she’d been there, had in fact been part of it. Now she felt like an idiot for not thinking of this sooner. ‘I don’t think so, but I’ll get the lab to run it against my file controls,’ she mumbled, referring to the control blood and DNA samples all GFU staff were required to supply.

‘That might be a good idea,’ he said. Was she imagining it or did his casual tone sound forced?

She flicked through a pile of papers on her desk, afraid now that her little slip had somehow disappointed him.

‘So tell me, how is life in Dublin?’ he asked, deftly moving the conversation away from professional matters. Reilly knew for sure that she had disappointed him, or at least dropped the ball in some way.

‘It’s fine, busier than I expected, certainly.’ She tried to make her tone sound carefree. ‘I think I might have rattled a few cages at the beginning—’

‘Detective Kennedy, I take it?’ he interjected.

She smiled. ‘Yeah, but he’s actually OK behind it all.’

‘What about the younger one, Detective Delaney? He seems pretty sharp.’

‘He is.’ Reilly wondered now if Chris would keep his word and see someone about his blood condition. ‘Actually, you might be just the person to ask about—’

A soft knock on the door of her office cut off her question.

‘Reilly?
Sorry to bother you both,’ Julius gave a courteous nod toward Daniel, ‘but there’s something on those hair samples from the taboo killings I’d like you to see.’

‘The animal ones?
Sure.’ She followed Julius down the hallway to the lab, Daniel at her heels.

Inside, he led her to the microscope.

Leaning over it she peered at the slide. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘
Sus scrofa
,’ he informed her. ‘It’s our mystery animal.’

She looked up, puzzled. ‘It’s been a while since I took Latin …’

‘It’s boar hair,’ he informed her. ‘It took me a while to identify it, mostly because it’s not in its natural state.’

‘Boar hair?’
While she knew at first glance the hair wasn’t from a cat or a dog, she had certainly been expecting it to be from some form of domestic animal, perhaps a gerbil or guinea pig. ‘How would our suspect be coming into contact with
boar
hair?’

She looked around for Daniel, wanting him to hear this, and saw him at the farther end of the room talking to Lucy, who was gazing at him with a degree of respect that bordered on adoration. Reilly had seen that look before – hell, she was pretty sure she’d once looked at him that way herself. For a young investigator, the chance to work with someone so talented and insightful was something akin to a religious experience.

She turned back to Julius. ‘I’m sorry, you said something about it not being in its natural state?’

‘Yes,
which is why it took me so long to identify it. Classification was bothering me, so I kept at it, and upon closer inspection I realized it was indeed animal hair but it had been refined in some way, most likely through the manufacturing process.’ He put his glasses on, and slid them into position with one finger.

‘Manufacturing process for what?’

‘Boar hair is used in some paintbrushes,’ he told her. ‘Particularly those used for applying oil-based paint, like varnish or gloss.’

Reilly’s mind raced. ‘You’re saying the samples we found are actually paintbrush bristles?’

‘I believe so, yes. And coupled with the paint specks collected at the same time which are indeed from oil-based materials that you could pick up at any DIY store—’

‘It would suggest that either our killer has been doing his own spot of decorating or frequents a place where renovations have been taking place.’

‘That’s what I thought, but I wanted to consult with you first.’

She thought then about the calcium sulphate, what O’Brien had derisively referred to as ‘chalk dust’. But thinking about it now, perhaps it wasn’t chalk dust at all, but actually a form of gypsum used in plaster rendering, which would add weight to the renovations angle?

Reminding herself of Ockham’s razor, she glanced again over at Daniel, who was still talking to Lucy. ‘Good work, Julius – this kind of thing could be very well be the key to finding this guy’s workplace, or maybe even his hiding spot.’

‘No problem.’

She noticed Daniel signaling her over.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, approaching Lucy’s workstation.

‘Well, it appears one of your very clever team may have found something else of interest.’

Lucy
colored a little, thrilled by such esteemed praise.

‘What is it, Lucy?’ Reilly said, somewhat testily. She was much more interested in what the younger girl might have uncovered than this flattery.

‘Sorry, yes – well, as I was just explaining to Agent Forrest, in relation to the erm … food sample taken from the Watson scene, I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of contacting Dr Thompson’s office.’

‘You mean the cooked human flesh?’