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

by Casey Hill

  ‘Yes, we went home together. He was drunk. He fell asleep on the couch and was still there in the morning when the children got up. I don’t think he could have moved, to be honest. Not even to take his shoes off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this in the first place? You have taken up precious resources of this investigation by withholding,’ Kennedy chided.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Helena lifted her eyes in appeal. ‘I just wanted him to feel a tiny bit humiliated. Having the police show up at his restaurant…you can’t know what he’s put me through.’ The mask of perfection had slipped, and anyone could see how desperate and scared the wife really was. Reilly watched as Chris turned off the tape recorder.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ said Helena. ‘I’ve been with him since I was sixteen. I don’t have the first clue how to get by without him.’

  ‘He won’t change,’ said Kennedy.

  ‘I know,’ said Helena. ‘But if he keeps drinking, maybe he’ll die first. That’s what keeps me going.’

  Reilly thought it was a slim hope to live on. A life that was barely a life at all. She felt sad for the whole lot of them. Jennifer, Helena, Blair Burke: what kind of loneliness drove them to do the things they did?

  ‘Not a nice thing to end your days with,’ said Chris, when he got out of the interview room.

  ‘We’ve seen worse,’ said Reilly. ‘It’s just all so…sad. I used to be better at handling this kind of thing, letting it slip away. But at the moment I get home and feel it needling away at me. I think about it, and it keeps me up at night. Maybe the older I get, the softer I get.’

  Chris laughed. ‘I’m not sure it’s that. Maybe as you get older you start to realize how precious everything is, how fragile. It’s happening to me too. Things that used to be like water off of a duck’s back give me nightmares now.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe we’re just becoming more human.’

  ‘Well,’ said Reilly, ‘if it gets in the way of me doing my job, I’d rather be a robot, thanks.’

  ‘At least we’ve got dinner at Amuse Bouche to look forward to tomorrow,’ said Chris. ‘Bring your appetite. I haven’t looked forward to a work outing like this for a long time. Good food, good company… I even think Kennedy is starting to feel a little left out.’

  ‘You know, it’s not strictly protocol that we do this,’ said Reilly. ‘Actually dine at the restaurants serving Joker Fruit, I mean. I’m starting to feel a little guilty, not to mention nervous. I know what that stuff can do.’

  He grinned. ’What? Give up the opportunity for a slap-up meal on the job with the department picking up the tab? You must be nuts.’

  He left the station then, slinging his gym bag over his shoulder. She watched him go. Everything Chris did was so effortless. Watching him move was like watching a silverfish in water, or a bird gliding in the sky. He was in his natural element wherever he was. She wondered if he had been flirting with her just now. If he had, it was effortless too. Just enough to make her wonder.

  Chapter 8

  ‘No offense, Reilly,’ said Lucy, later that evening when they were finished at the lab, ‘but I can’t really see how this is going to be of any use. I wasn’t there when Grace disappeared. I can’t know for sure where it happened.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Reilly. ‘I just want to go over the route she would have taken home. It’s all important, especially if you remember something.’

  They drove through the leafy streets, slowly following the route that Grace would have taken the day she went missing. The houses were small and pretty, with gardens out front. A few kids were out playing in the front gardens or cycling around the paths outside their houses. It wasn’t hard to imagine Lucy and her sister living here and being happy, feeling protected. It wasn’t hard to imagine that if you lived here, you might think that nothing could hurt you.

  Lucy sighed. She seemed quite reluctant to do this, and while Reilly understood that it brought up painful memories for her, she was the one who had asked her for help. Well, she would get Reilly’s help, but on her terms.

  ‘OK,’ she said, walking around the neat suburban house estate they’d driven to. ‘This is Grace’s best friend’s house?’

  Lucy nodded. ‘Yeah, Georgina Davidson. They were really close.’

  ‘And did you know Georgina?’

  ‘I knew her,’ Lucy smiled a little bitterly. ‘But we weren’t friends.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She was a nasty sort, really. Whenever she saw me and Grace wasn’t around, she was mean to me. They called themselves “The Two G’s”. It was really stupid.’

  ‘What kind of stuff were they into? What did they like doing?’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘The normal kind of teenage stuff. They listened to music, went down town on Saturday and bought CDs. They liked older boys.’

  ‘Did Grace ever get into any trouble?’

  ‘Not really. Before she disappeared she had just started to act out, but it was normal teenage stuff. She would come home late or climb out our window. I had to swear to her not to tell mum and dad. After she left, Dad found out that his gin and vodka bottles had been emptied and filled with water. But all the kids drank down at the park. Not me, though. Can you imagine? I was barely able to walk to the shops on my own after Grace disappeared.’

  Reilly could picture it. She felt a fresh stab of pity for Lucy, who would have spent her teenage years being so heavily supervised, hardly able to go out and experiment like everyone else. Reilly knew how difficult it was to be the one who was left behind.

  ‘But she was good at hiding stuff, you know? Mum and Dad were totally convinced that if she got in trouble, it was someone else’s fault. She was so smart. She would have done something really good with her life, I know it.’

  ‘Did you ever spend time with Grace outside of the house and away from your parents at this time?’

  ‘A little bit. We would walk to the shops for ice creams or something and she would tell me about her boyfriend Darren. She was really into him.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘I saw him once, when I was walking home from hockey. They were standing by the side of the fields, talking. They didn’t see me. After she disappeared I would see him around with this older guy, maybe a brother, but if he knew who I was, he didn’t acknowledge me. Sometimes… sometimes she came home crying,’ said Lucy suddenly.

  Reilly didn’t say anything, it seemed like Lucy was almost in a trance, remembering things that she hadn’t thought of in years. ‘She would climb in our window after midnight and she would be crying. Once I asked her what was wrong and she said “Why does he have to say horrible things? Doesn’t he know how much I love him?” But she wouldn’t say anything else. I should have told my mum and dad. If I told them what she was doing, they would have grounded her and she wouldn’t have gone missing.’

  Tears began to run down Lucy’s face.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Reilly. ‘You know that, deep down. Even if your parents had found out, she would have rebelled against them anyway. It’s what teenagers do. None of this was in your control, Lucy.’

  She waited in silence until Lucy had stopped crying. They were pulled up outside the Gormans’ old house. The family had moved away soon after Grace’s disappearance. Reilly could see the window that Grace would have climbed through. The oak tree that used to stand next to the window had been cut down, probably to stop someone else’s daughter doing the same thing.

  ‘I know,’ said Lucy, once her tears had subsided. ‘I know that it’s not my fault. People have been telling me that for years. But I just feel so helpless.’

  ‘I want to ask you to do something,’ said Reilly. ‘Something that you may not be comfortable with. I’m not even convinced it will give results, but it’s worth a shot. I want you to undergo hypnotherapy, to see if there’s anything that you’ve blanked out. Talking to you now it seems as though you’ve repre
ssed your memories of that time. There might be something else.’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘I’ve told you everything I remember. I told the investigators right at the start what I knew. You’ve read the files. No way am I doing that, Reilly. I’m sorry, but it’s just not going to happen.’

  Reilly nodded. She wasn’t going to argue with Lucy yet. People were afraid of what their psyche held. She would be afraid. But she had a feeling that Lucy might change her mind. This was more important to her than anything else.

  She just needed some time.

  The following morning, Reilly went for a run before work. She liked the feeling of being among all the others at the park trying to outrun the mundanity of their lives, trying to outrun the grey Dublin day.

  Trying to feel something real before they were plunged into their lives, even if it was just the desperate beating of their heart. She knew she was in her element here. Her body soaked up the impact of her feet on the concrete, turned it into something powerful that she could use for the rest of the day. Her eyes focused on something ahead of her, something invisible and it cleared her mind, mad her feel like she was above everything, able to pick up on the smallest of details. She could smell those around her: clean, sharp sweat, deodorant, the smell of people. Their blood rushing to their skin. It was a good smell, a small of people being human. Not being monsters.

  None of this was easy. There was nothing easy about what she for a living did all day long. Her young GFU team might think they knew that now, but it was nothing compared to what you saw once you had been working forensics for years. Sometimes Reilly saw kids like Lucy, Gary and Rory and wanted to tell them to get out of this line of work. Go be a schoolteacher, she wanted to say, or work in a bookshop. Go do something useful that won’t leave you hurt and lonely.

  But that wasn’t her place, she knew. They all had their reasons for being there, just like she did. Her job was to make them the best she could, to attempt to guide them through the many obstacles that this job threw in your way.

  There would be times when they wanted to give up, when the darkness of the world seemed too much for them. She had been through it, and her mentor, Daniel Forrest had dragged her through. It had all made her stronger. If she was worried about losing her edge, she only had to look back at some of the hellish cases she had endured. She could do it again, she knew.

  So the run was a good way to start the day, before it got clouded with the mess that she dealt in. Today was a full day: interviews with Jennifer’s friends and family, and two of the men that she had dated that had come forward.

  They just had to find the killer before something else happened. Every morning Reilly woke up knowing it was one day closer to when he would feel brave enough to kill again. They needed to get ahead of him. She ran faster and faster, as though the killer was ahead of her and she was trying to catch him physically.

  When she reached the gates of the park she realized that she had almost run herself to exhaustion. She stretched up towards the sky, fighting the impulse to curl into a ball. As she fought to control her breath, she thought once more about the day ahead. They would make progress, today, she told herself.

  They just had to.

  ‘Reilly! You’re here, finally,’ Gary rushed her like an eager puppy as soon as she got in the door.

  ‘It’s 7:55am, Gary,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t say I overslept or anything.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just, last night I was thinking about the case and I couldn’t sleep. So I came in at around 5am…I know, I know, it’s crazy,’ he said in response to her stern look. ‘But I was thinking about the bed in our victim’s house. And I’d been going over cold cases for days and finding no similarities. But I just needed to have another look. It was playing on my mind. And Reilly,’ he said, ‘I think I found something.’

  Reilly, Chris and Kennedy waited patiently as Gary set up the viewing equipment. Crime scenes had only started being transformed into 3D a few years ago, so there was still something of the magical about it for Reilly and the two cops.

  But it was now just the everyday for Gary. He would never know what it was like to spend painstaking hours recreating an older crime scene from photos alone.

  Reilly could see that he was excited. She knew how it felt, early on, when you made a connection or discovery. It was a rush, a high. It was easy to believe you were simply solving a riddle sometimes, looking for clues. You had to forget that you were dealing with the minutiae of people’s lives, or you would go mad.

  ‘OK,’ said Gary. ‘Besides the Armstrong case and the previous one that knocked out Reilly, there have been no other antimine poisonings that we could find. So I started to look at poisonings with other substances, instead. Over the past few years, there has been a significant rise in people being injected with large amounts of heroin; trying to make murder look like a suicide. But I had this perp figured for something a little more sophisticated. Whoever this guy is, he’s not out trawling backstreets to score dope.’

  Reilly saw Kennedy surreptitiously slide a snack bar from his pocket. She and Chris exchanged a grin; Kennedy caught it and blushed, then shrugged. His colleagues knew his vices all too well.

  ‘But there was this one unsolved case that kept coming up when I ran a search for poisoning. A few months ago. A girl, living in a one room bedsit in Rathmines. Aspirations to be an actress, she had a couple of tiny parts in plays. 24 years old, she was found dead one day by her landlord. She worked part time as a waitress in town and she hadn’t shown for a week. But no one worried too much, because waitresses are always slipping the net. So she was in a pretty advanced state of decay. They couldn’t figure out if it was homicide or suicide.’

  He brought up two images side by side. The decomposing body of the girl on one side, and the recreation of her flat on the other. Reilly felt a stab of pity. Who would want four people dispassionately analyzing the contents of your life when you were dead? Everything this girl had was in this grimy little room. You could see her dreams in the theatre prints on the walls, her hopes in the obsessive neatness of the room.

  ‘They eventually landed on murder, because the pills she had taken hadn’t been swallowed whole, but crushed up and added to the food she was eating.’ He paused for a moment to let that fact set it. A third deadly dinner.

  ‘Added to that, it was clear that someone had been in the room with her. Neighbors had heard talking and laughter but no struggle of any kind. The place was clean. But, if you look here,’ He enlarged the recreation of the girl’s room and zoomed in on the bed. It was rumpled, indented. Someone had been lying there. ‘Same kind of thing as in the Armstrong case. Someone lay down in the bed. Someone that was heavier than the victim.’

  The victim herself lay neatly on the couch, as if slumbering.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got a repeat offender then,’ said Kennedy. ‘If there’s been three, and he’s got away with it, there’s probably more.’

  ‘And he’ll be looking to try again,’ Chris agreed.

  ‘We’ll look into the restaurant where she worked,’ said Kennedy, ‘see if we can make a few connections. Seems too good to be true that she worked in the restaurant business.’

  ‘This place doesn’t exactly match any of those that Jennifer Armstrong went to, though,’ said Reilly. ‘This is basically a burger joint.’

  ‘That’s why this one is mine,’ said Kennedy triumphantly. ‘The two of you can have your tiny pieces of duck liver or whatever it is. I’m going to eat some real food. And, if there’s information to be had, I’ll come back with it. Let’s see who has the most productive day, eh?’

  ‘You’re on,’ said Chris. ‘If you make it back to work, that is. You’ll probably give yourself killer indigestion.’

  Kennedy laughed. ‘Josie made me a salad for lunch,’ he said. ‘Anything’s better than suffering through that.’

  ‘We’ll meet you back here at 3pm,’ said Reilly. ‘Compare notes.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ken
nedy. ‘Just let me know if you want me to pick you up a burger. I get the feeling you won’t be quite satisfied.’

  Chapter 9

  It was a beautiful early summers day for a change, and Reilly and Chris had an outside terrace table at Amuse Bouche, the first restaurant on their list licensed to import and use Joker Fruit aka antimine.

  Reilly had changed out of her work clothes into a simple black shift dress and high heeled boots. The whole point of her and Chris visiting was to not look like law enforcement. Kennedy would have stood out like a sore thumb but Chris had scrubbed up too, replacing his usual work uniform of T-shirt and jeans for a light blue tailored shirt and chinos.

  ‘Nice to see a bit of sunshine for a change.’ said Reilly. ‘I don’t think we’ve had one sunny day since I got back.’

  ‘You Americans, always complaining about the weather,’ said Chris. He couldn’t help but admire how she looked under the golden sunlight, though, her hair falling in glossy waves, her skin soft and bright. Then he cursed his mind for straying in that direction again. You’re here for work, he reminded himself sternly.

  ‘What do you think of Gary’s little show this morning?’ he asked, determinedly steering the conversation towards work.

  ‘It looks promising,’ she said. ‘But it’s flimsy at best. Not admissible of course. We need a real, concrete lead.’

  ‘At least we’re building a decent psychological profile,’ said Chris. ‘Seems he has control issues. He’s a perfectionist. Cold and calculating. But obviously he’s needy too. Needs the comfort of a woman’s bed, but not sexually. It’s more of a nurturing thing.’

  Reilly raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe you should apply for the new profiler’s job, Chris. You seem pretty clued in on all this psych stuff.’

  He winked. ‘Must’ve learnt from the best then. But I do think this kind of thing is important. We’ll cover all avenues of course, but it lets us know that we should concentrate our efforts on more professional, educated possible suspects. This isn’t a case of a jealous lover, or a revenge killing.’