TRACE - CSI Reilly Steel #5 (Forensic novel Police Procedural Series) (14 page)

Chapter 25

Such perfection, this time. No annoying phone calls, nothing left undone, or left behind. She was as beautiful as her pictures indicated, as ruthless as her conversations had suggested. Barely I was in the door before she told me what she wanted.

Cook for me, she said, and then feed me.

Gladly, I replied.

I took my time over the food, ensuring that the pork was cooked to perfection; that it would melt in the mouth like cotton candy. I mixed nightshade with the parsnip puree, then garnished the whole thing with those tiny, sweet flowers that are so absolutely deadly.

Why do you wear gloves when you cook, she asked. Don’t you want to be close to the food?

I told her that it was an old habit, that it allowed me to work faster.

Will you take the gloves off when you touch me?

Of course, I lied.

And then I kneeled before her and gently placed each forkful in her mouth. It took her slowly, before she even knew it was happening. Her eyes became unfocused, the blood began to recede from her face, leaving it numb. Her tongue and jaw stopped working effectively. I had to scoop the last mouthful from her mouth lest she choked, making her death ugly and violent. At the last moment she realized that something was wrong, and she looked up at me, pleading for something that I could not give, even if I wanted to. Please, she tried to say, and I put my gloved hand up to her lips.

No, I said, don’t talk.

As she was dying, unable to move, I went into her bedroom. I stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at the brightly pattered bedspread. I lay myself down on it carefully, and began to take in great gulps of her scent. I am searching for the smell of my mother and though I don’t find it in the beds of these low women, I come close.

When I got up, I tidied everything away. I left the dish for them to find. I want them to know of my handiwork.

She had closed her eyes. There was nothing else that I could do for her.

I donned my backpack and ran home, running with power, running with exhilaration.

When Reilly and Chris woke the next morning, there was no shyness or awkwardness between them. Reilly felt completely at home, wrapped in a blanket, drinking the orange juice he had brought her.

‘You know, we could just call in sick,’ he said. ‘The Armstrong case is wrapped up for the most part. And we could spend the day just…’

‘Two problems,’ she interjected lightly. ‘We can’t abandon Kennedy on his first day back, plus the gossip it would cause just isn’t worth it.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘I wish you weren’t, but you are.’

She smiled. ‘Aren’t I always? Besides, I have a ton of work to do.’ She felt a twinge at the thought of talking to Lucy. How would she even begin to impart such terrible news about what had likely happened to Grace? Whatever Lucy had suspected she was hiding from herself, it was nothing as awful as this.

Chris’s phone rang and while he talked in the kitchen, Reilly dressed quickly. She would have to get him to drop her home so she could put some work clothes on. She didn’t know where this was headed. She didn’t want to think about it.

They hadn’t slept together the night before, but things had been intense. Chris, gallant as ever, had put a stop to things before they got too heavy, protesting her vulnerability and state of mind over what she’d learned. Instead, he had simply held her and listened while she talked, and eventually until she fell asleep.

She checked her phone for messages. A couple of missed calls and a ton of emails. One caught her eye immediately: Todd.

“Hey, how are you doing? Just wanted to check in and see how you were since you got back to Dublin. We miss you over here.”

Great timing, she thought. Just perfect. As if her life wasn’t complicated enough. Of course, the message was completely innocuous, but it didn’t do anything to lessen her confusion.

Chris came into the room as she was arranging her hair into a high knot. ‘You’re right. Definitely no rest for us today - or the wicked. There’s been another murder.’

Chapter 26

Naomi Worthington had been a homewares designer on the cusp of major success, and her house looked like something straight out of a magazine. Unfortunately, it was just then completely overrun by cops and GFU techs.

‘Not a great start to my first day back,’ said Kennedy. ‘It seems as though whoever this guy was, it wasn’t Harry McMurty.’

‘As I tried, and failed, to convince O’Brien,’ said Reilly, grimly. ‘He’ll listen now, but he’ll also have a PR nightmare on his hands.’

Lucy and Gary were already at the scene. If Lucy noticed that Reilly was wearing the same casual dress as she had been the night before, she didn’t say anything. Reilly could only hope she would be too distracted by her own concerns to think too deeply about it.

She cleared everyone else from the room where the body was so that it was just herself, Chris, Kennedy and the forensic team. She didn’t need a bunch of uniforms fumbling around.

‘Gary, has anyone checked the bedroom yet?’

‘Yeah, it was the first thing I did.’

‘And?’

‘Same thing as the others,’ said Gary. ‘That weird rumpling disturbance of the bedspread.’

‘Photos?’

‘Of course. I’m going over it for trace now, then we’ll get Julius to work his magic on it.’

‘Good. Anything else stand out?’

‘It’s a tidier job than last time,’ said Kennedy. ‘He did the bloody dishes, the cheeky bugger.’

‘All but this one,’ said Reilly. Putting on a mask, she knelt down to inspect the leftover meal. She wasn't going to make the same mistake this time.

It was half eaten. The meat was congealing in a white puree, small flowers were limp and drowned in the oily film that had formed since it was cooked. Through her mask, she could still smell the meat, and she thought she could detect a hint of decay, the rottenness that is at the heart of dead things. It took all her strength to hold back her nausea. It was just her imagination, she knew. The meat definitely couldn’t be off yet, and there was no way the body had decomposed that fast.

‘There’s just a fork here,’ she commented.

‘We noticed some indentations in the carpet,’ said Gary. ‘It seems like someone was kneeling in front of her maybe?’

‘OK, get pressings of the carpet and the distribution of weight.’

She took off her mask and tried to get a sense of the room. It was, and had been filled with other people since the murder, so that didn’t help. There was the smell of cooking, certainly, behind that a certain sharpness. Maybe sweat? It was hard to tell after so much time. Added to everything else, the victim had favored placing little vanilla soy candles throughout the room and it was that smell, more than anything else, that was getting to Reilly.

‘It’s still so early,’ she said. ‘She lives alone. How was she discovered so early?’

‘Her masseuse,’ said Lucy. ‘They keep a regular appointment at this hour. He has a key, and he came in to find her like this.’

‘Did he touch the body?’

‘Well, yeah. He thought she was just passed out.’

‘Dammit. OK, I want you two back to the lab quick as you can to start processing whatever we have. Gary, I want you working overtime on the victim’s phone, her laptop. Whatever. My guess is that she used the same dating sites as Jennifer Armstrong.’

‘On it,’ said Gary.

‘Get the bedclothes and the food to Julius before it has time to break down any further.’

‘This could be something,’ said Kennedy from across the room. He held a small posy of flowers in his gloved hand. ‘I’m not going to smell these, I know how lethal this guy’s concoctions can be.’

‘They’re the same flowers that have been used to garnish the food,’ said Reilly. ‘My bet is that they’re highly poisonous.’

‘Right,’ said Kennedy. ‘Another thing for your guys, then.’

The others left, and Chris was outside talking to the masseuse who had been the first on the scene.

Reilly knelt down again to look at the body.

Naomi Worthington was a beautiful girl. According to her ID, she had just turned thirty, and her pale skin was flawless and her hair was long and lustrous, untouched by dye. She was slim, but not thin. She wore a low cut red dress and a gold chain hung loosely from her neck. Her feet were bare and her toes were painted a bright green. The color reminded Reilly of the shimmering wings of an insect.

Suddenly she remembered something. The plate, before it had been taken away, had shown the direction of the fork as being away from Naomi. As if someone else had handled it. It would have been incredibly awkward to feed herself from that angle, sitting where she was. She couldn’t be totally sure that her memory was being faithful, but she could check the photos later on if needs be. She was reasonably certain that someone had fed Naomi Worthington her final meal. The thought was a chilling one. To give yourself so trustingly to someone who wanted only to see you dead.

Chris came into the room and stood behind her.

‘Did you get anything out of the masseuse?’ she asked, without getting up.

‘He’s traumatized,’ said Chris. ‘He thought she was sleeping. He said he shook her, but he hasn’t moved her from where she is.’

‘Did you get a DNA sample for elimination? We need to exclude him from any samples we find here.’

‘Of course.’ He shrugged as if to say that her question was needless.

‘Could he shed any light on the kind of person she was?’

‘Like I said, he was traumatized. He just kept saying that she was “full of life”, the usual. We can interview him later. You’re going at this like a bat out of hell this morning. Slow down, you might miss something.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know I am. But we need to get this guy, Chris. Look at him, leaving little trophies around. I don’t care about being careful anymore. I just want to get him.’

‘Reilly. Being careful is what we do. You’ve told me a hundred times or more. Now, let’s go over all this again, top to bottom.’

Chris had calmed her down, slightly, and she was able to spend the next few hours going over the scene, taking more samples, checking for foot and fingerprints.

‘I’ve got a couple of clear shoe prints,’ she told him, ‘but no fingerprints. Just a couple of partials from where he touched the grease from the meat and then one of the surfaces. He was gloved up.’

‘No hair from the pillows, either.’

‘Julius said before he thought he was wearing a head covering of some kind,’ said Reilly. ‘Which makes sense if the guy is a chef. They wear those little caps.’

‘True. You’re pretty sure that’s what the guy does?’

‘I’m almost positive,’ said Reilly. ‘I think you need to go back to Hammer and Tongs today and check out Nico Peroni. Check his alibi for last night.’

‘Let’s get the results from the ME first,’ said Chris. ‘Might give us a bit more to go on.’ He was running a cotton bud over the surface of the bench. ‘I’ve got something interesting here.’

‘What is it?’

‘Hard to say. A yellow powder.’

‘Don’t touch it.’

He chuckled. ‘Reilly, I’ve been doing this job for almost two decades. What do you think I’m going to do, put it in my mouth or something?’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I am on edge today.’

‘You want to talk about it?’

‘Not now. And I can’t. I just don’t know what I’m going to say to Lucy though.’ She couldn't break Lucy’s confidence by telling him exactly what she’d heard, all he knew last night was how much it had affected her.

He nodded and looked around, in case they might be overheard. ‘And do you want to talk about…last night?’

‘No. I don’t think I can do that right now either. I’m sorry, Chris. Let’s just take each day as it comes.’

‘Of course,’ he said, but he couldn’t hide the faint disappointment in his voice.

‘I think we’re done here for the moment,’ she said, purposefully ignoring it.

She had a uniform drop her at home before going the lab, so she could collect herself a little better. Her flat seemed completely alien to her: someone else’s house. The dishes from her dinner with Lucy were still stacked in the sink. They would have to wait until later. Everything would have to wait until later. When had her life become such a mess?

She showered, washing the last traces of Chris’s woody scent down the drain and put on a sober suit, hoping it would make her feel more in control. She left the house with her hair still slightly damp and the circles round her eyes showing her lack of sleep.

On the way to work, she thought about what she had found out the night before. It seemed no less shocking in the morning light. It never ceased to sicken her the kind of cruelty that was present in the world, and how much of it was aimed at women. It was enough to make anyone feel completely vulnerable. Sometimes she thought that the whole world hated women and there was nothing that could be done about it. She was the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. She caught the bad guys, but couldn’t stop them from appearing in the first place. Get one, three more appear. A game of whack-a-mole. She remembered rambling on to Chris about much of this last night and wondered now if he thought she was losing it. Lately,
she
felt like she was losing it, out of control and she wondered what on earth was going on with her. Clearly events in Florida were having some after-effects on her. Seeing Todd on the railway tracks like that …

She pushed the thought away.

Jennifer Armstrong and Naomi Worthington were young, beautiful and successful. The phrase “she had it all” could be applied to them. They knew what they wanted, and it wasn’t to be held down to a life of marriage and children. Maybe Reilly needed to stop focusing on the killer and start focusing more on the similarities between these women. Wouldn’t that be the best way to lure him out? To predict where he would strike next? She needed to take another look at the dating profiles of these women. It was something she hadn’t paid close attention to in the Armstrong case. The lack of similarity to the Cooper girl had confused things. But it was time to go back to basics.

When she got to the office, Inspector O’Brien was pacing the floor beside her desk. It was a wonder he hadn’t worn right through the carpet.

‘We need to talk,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We do.’

In his office Reilly sat and folded her arms loosely. She watched as the chief put his glasses on, took them off again and fumbled with some papers.

‘I suppose you’re going to say: “I told you so.”’

‘I don’t think I have to, sir.’

‘No, you don’t. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. I know that you’re an asset to this team, but you can only be as good as I let you be. And I didn’t.’

Reilly was so surprised her mouth almost fell open. She had expected a brusque apology at best, but this was high praise indeed, coming from Inspector O’Brien.

‘I don’t always agree with your methods,’ he continued, ‘And God knows, you don’t always approve of mine, but I think we respect each other.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I respect you.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘This case has just got a whole lot harder. I’ve been talking to the press but they’re not going to hold back. One of the first uniforms on the scene has leaked details to one of the big newspapers. It’ll be everywhere. You know the kind of thing: “Killer chef strikes again”, “Useless gardai pin murders on wrong guy”. That kind of thing. My guess is that, by tonight, the death of Harry McMurty will have been turned into a huge tragedy that we could have prevented.’

‘A media circus, in other words,’ said Reilly. The chief’s least favorite thing.

‘That’s right. I need a solid lead, Steel. I need something to give these guys, to reassure the public that we have hope of solving this.’

‘Well, I
would
be further along if you had listened to me in the first place, sir’ said Reilly.

‘I thought we just put all that behind us.’

‘A woman is dead, sir. I can’t just put that behind me.’

‘Yes, and there will be more of them if we don’t get this case solved,’ he shot back. I need a lead Steel.’

‘I’ve think we’ve got one,’ said Reilly. ‘But in order to make this work, I need to know that you won’t stand in my way again. I want an absolute guarantee.’

‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘Do what you need and use what you need. Just bring me results.’