by Casey Hill
ENDGAME
CSI REILLY STEEL #7
CASEY HILL
CONTENTS
Copyright
Also by Casey Hill
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
TABOO - CSI Reilly Steel #1
Prologue
1
2
About the Author
Also by Casey Hill
Copyright © Casey Hill 2017
The right of Casey Hill to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. You must not circulate this book in any format.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
ALSO BY CASEY HILL
CSI REILLY STEEL SERIES
TABOO
INFERNO
HIDDEN
THE WATCHED
CRIME SCENE
TRACE
AFTERMATH
ENDGAME
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1
There was nothing quite like the stench of fresh vomit.
Standing in the early morning sunshine just outside the tidy four-bedroom house, Reilly Steel could smell the potent sickly odor from the front entrance.
Her sensitive nose caught it coming through the windows opened in an attempt to air the place and she’d picked up the distinctive funk almost as soon as she emerged from the Garda Forensic Unit van.
The detached house sported an elaborate red brick facade and a neatly trimmed front garden, though a few empty beer cans littered the lawn and were strewn through the hedges bordering the grass.
Neighbors had gathered in their pajamas up and down the road of the small housing estate in Churchtown - a staunchly middle class Dublin suburb - to watch the police and investigators at work, and though Reilly knew it was doubtful they could smell anything, she almost expected them to have their hands over their mouths and noses in disgust.
She made her way into the house, donning gloves and a mask that would in all likelihood end up being worn as head-covering. Face masks at a crime scene were like wearing sunglasses in a dark room; they dulled the senses.
She preferred to take in a scene fully, though lately she was unsure if she could depend on her usually trusty nose. Her blonde hair was already pulled back from her face in a tight ponytail she had fastened it into when she’d got the call earlier.
The night before had been one with which Reilly had recently become all too acquainted – she’d tossed and turned in her bed, trying every method she knew to fall asleep, but to no avail.
In the war against her insomnia, she could only claim to have won a few battles, so in the end the eight AM call had proved a welcome distraction.
The heads-up had come from Detective Chris Delaney, informing her that a high school kid (or secondary school as they called it in Ireland) had been attacked and killed in his bedroom following a party the night before. She heard the scratchy undertone of Chris’s deep voice and knew that her colleague hadn’t been awake long. The lucky bastard actually got to sleep at night.
The smell of vomit inside the house was even stronger, and while Reilly commended the first responders’ efforts to air the space out, the open windows were really doing little to alleviate the woeful stench.
Crossing the doorway, she readily took in the scene; the interior of the house was in a state of chaos. Reilly could easily visualize these kinds of teenage parties - she’d been witness to many back home in California growing up, and immediately recognized the disarray such gatherings caused.
And in the meantime of course, she had seen plenty of this kind of thing portrayed in the movies or on TV. Though in her experience, the depictions of real life situations, such as forensic work, on TV shows weren’t all that accurate, to say the least.
As she moved inside, the carpeted hallway soaked with spilled beer gave a little under her feet, and she had to step over the offending pile of vomit and a broken beer bottle to get to the stairs.
Lucy, her fellow GFU technician, was already in a room to the left swabbing surfaces, and the younger tech gave Reilly a smile in greeting as she passed by.
She made her way up the stairs, studying the framed pictures of the house’s inhabitants as she went. She noted that they depicted a happy and respectable-looking Irish family, professional parents and two ruddy faced boys - all bright eyes and happy smiles at the camera. From the look of the house and the occupants, this family was firmly middle class; there was money, but not too much.
As she came to the top of the steps, she was met by another forensic tech Gary, who was doing the same thing his colleague had been on the floor below.
He looked up at Reilly and while he normally would have smiled broadly in typical jocular fashion, today Gary just managed a welcoming nod, his mouth and nose concealed by his face mask as he focused on his work.
Detective Pete Kennedy was also standing on the landing, speaking to someone on the phone. The heavyset middle-aged detective apologized once, twice, and then again. Judging by his tone, if Reilly had to take a guess to save her life at the person on the other end of that line, it was his wife Josie.
He was still apologising as Reilly passed him. He looked at her with jaded eyes and shook his head before she made her way into the bedroom.
“Morning Goldilocks,” he murmured, looking speculatively at her, his gaze inevitably skipping down to her burgeoning stomach as it always did these days, before finding her face again.
Reilly’s ‘blob’ could no longer be called that; now in the middle of her second trimester, she was carrying a full-on Bumpasaurus.
“Ah sure, she’s used it,” Kennedy was saying to his wife, and Reilly guessed that Josie was telling her husband off for his by now customary greeting. She smiled indulgently. He was right; she was used to it and it never bothered her - far from being offensive, the older detective’s predictable bluster was now almost endearing. Almost.
Pausing a little before she entered the bedroom - the primary crime scene - Reilly steeled herself for what she would see when she went in. When Chris had called her that morn
ing, he’d used the word kid, something that instinctively made her stomach turn.
This was indeed a male teenager’s bedroom, that much was clear as soon as she walked in. The walls were painted a dark gray, and posters depicting various sports stars hung on the walls, intermingled with ‘come hither’ poses from busty models or whichever reality TV or Instagram star was in vogue these days.
The bed was messily unmade and a pile of laundry in the corner was threatening to break free and flood the rest of the room.
Reilly inhaled and was immediately assaulted with another odor of an altogether different kind; the metallic stench of blood, which was spattered across the wall as well as on the heavy oak desk, some of the laundry. She also detected the faint whiff lingering in a room when cologne or perfume was sprayed often, the kind of generic alcohol that stuck in the carpet and cloth surfaces like curtains, near wherever the person got ready.
Finally, she moved to take in the victim himself. She always waited a little until resting her gaze upon the corpse, as she didn’t want the victim’s state to influence her initial observations at the crime scene.
With so many years in CSI, Reilly was by now pretty much hardened to the harsh truths of the world - one of them being that people died in horrific and heinous ways.
So when she finally looked down at Graham Hackett, the seventeen year-old boy who had been beaten to death in his own bedroom, she hoped to remain calm and composed. But the sudden spike of nausea and all out revulsion that shot through her stomach made her take a step backward.
She stared at the boy; thrown a little by the angelic expression on his youthful face and how the blood surrounding his caved-in skull was caked into his sandy brown hair. He was on his side, arms curled under him almost like he was sleeping. His eyes were closed, and despite the violent way he’d died, he looked calm and content.
He really was just a kid.
This boy had met his end before he’d had a chance to do anything with his life, hadn’t gotten a chance to experience the best of what the world had to offer. Someone had stolen that from him.
But as she stepped backwards into a man’s hard chest, none of those logical thoughts were running through Reilly’s head. In fact, little tangible thought could be isolated - instead, she was overcome by fear and revulsion at the pitiful sight before her.
Detective Chris Delaney caught her, startled by the look on her face. He had seen that same look on countless newbie faces, freshly-trained uniforms who thought they would be grand the first time they saw a dead body, only to feel complete helplessness when they gazed down on someone who’d had their life brutally ended. Hence the welcoming pile at the bottom of the stairs.
Chris felt it every time he showed up at a crime scene actually. The feeling followed him around and there were only a few places in the world he could forget about what he’d seen for a while. Also, only a few people in the world that could help him forget.
Reilly Steel was one of them.
“Hey,” he said, gently grabbing her shoulders and stepping round her. “Are you okay?”
She quickly composed herself; nodded and set her gaze on the detective, catching a full whiff of his equally distinctive scent: a sharp, woody aftershave that lingered after him in an almost palpable wave to her sensitive nose.
“I’m fine, Chris,” she said, moving away from him to look at the body again. “It’s just …he’s so young.”
“I know. Barely out of school - finished his state exams only this week apparently.”
Reilly looked around again, at the walls and the blood spattered across them, trying to get a sense of what had happened.
The victim had been bludgeoned to death; that much was obvious. She frowned then, as looking at the surrounding wall, she noticed some strange circular marks beneath the blood spatter. All roughly the same shape and the circumference of a baseball, the marks seemed to occur in a rough pattern all the way up the wall as far as the ceiling.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, her eyes narrowing as she moved towards the wall.
Chris followed her gaze. “I can’t be sure but I’d hazard a guess they’re ball marks - sliotar marks probably.” He nodded at a couple of sports trophies on a nearby shelf.
“Sliotar?” she repeated, baffled.
“Irish word for the ball used in hurling - a GAA sport,” he told her.
“Right.” Reilly knew next to nothing about traditional Irish sport but had caught a clip of the game Chris was talking about one time on TV. Hurling was fastmoving and shockingly violent, sort of a cross between hockey and street fighting.
And this kid had won trophies for it.
“Looks like he might have been practicing against the wall,” Chris explained, indicating the markings, and while Reilly still didn't quite understand, she agreed that the markings did indeed look consistent with someone aiming a spherical object at the plaster. She’d keep an eye out for this ‘sliotar’ Chris had mentioned.
“Chris…” The sound of the other detective’s weathered voice made Reilly jump again, only disproving her assertion that she was fine. Pete Kennedy glanced at the two of them for the briefest moment before addressing Chris again. “The kid who called this in is outside - was at the party last night apparently. We’d better grill him while everything is still fresh in his mind.”
Chris took another glance around the room, before turning to his partner. “OK, be with you now.”
As he walked from the room, moving carefully so as not to contaminate any evidence, Kennedy commented to Reilly. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
2
The aforementioned kid who’d called in the incident was outside the house on the front step, leaning against one of the pillars beneath a canopy that sheltered the front door from the elements. He looked to be a year or two older than the victim, and his hair was the same sandy brown colour. His eyes were closed, but there were definitive bags under them, like he had gone days without sleep.
His clothes were wrinkled beyond redemption, as if he had just grabbed something off the floor and pulled it on, dirty or clean. The detectives could just about make out a high tempo rock song blaring through the earbuds snaking up to the boy’s ears.
Chris was about to ask his partner if the kid was sleeping off a bad hangover, and that they should maybe leave him to it for the moment until he came to, but Kennedy unceremoniously nudged the boy’s thigh with his heavy black shoe.
“Hey, mate. Detectives. We need to talk to you.”
The teen opened one eye and looked up at the men casting a shadow over his rumpled form. His eyes were bloodshot and his lids were heavy as he slowly pulled one earbud from his ear and raised an eyebrow at them.
“You’re the guy who called this in?” Chris affirmed.
The boy looked back and forth between the two detectives, before sighing and taking the other earbud out. After taking his sweet time in wrapping the cord up around the MP3 player and placing it securely back in his pocket, he said simply, “Yeah.”
Opening his notebook, Chris cleared his throat at his offhand demeanour given the gravity of the situation. Didn’t Kennedy say this guy knew the victim? “First up, can you please state your name as well as your relation to the deceased?”
The teenager yawned and looked over the bottle-littered lawn, scratching his head and running his hand through his hair a couple of times before settling against the pillar again. Running his hand through his hair didn’t help, Chris thought, because it now stood crazily on end and matched the rest of his bedraggled form.
He set a lazy gaze on the detectives and said in a highly insolent tone, “Someone already asked me this stuff. Twice. Do I really have to go through it all again?”
Chris gripped his pen, trying to level his voice out. Someone had died in this house last night - presumably a friend - and this cocky asshole was more concerned with his personal inconvenience? “Yes, but we need to hear it coming out of your own mouth. Be
cause you called this in, you’re now a part of our investigation.”
Another deep sigh. “Name’s Simon Hackett. Graham’s my brother.”
Chris’s shock might not have been apparent on his face, but it was patently obvious on Kennedy’s, who looked just as surprized at the guy’s admission. He knew, sure as you like, that if his brother had been murdered, he certainly wouldn’t be sitting outside the house, listening to rock tunes.
People displayed grief in all sorts of different ways though, he had to remind himself, as he looked at the kid’s impassive face. Still, Simon looked back at them as though he and Kennedy were nothing but an imposition.