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

by Casey Hill

  He chuckled, realizing how it must have sounded. Then he unlocked Kennedy’s door, and sure enough, there was the burger, with a single neat bite taken out of it.

  Reilly put it into a specimen bag, ready to go to the lab.

  ‘Better get someone to come and get the car before it gets impounded,’ Chris said. ‘But right now, we’re both late for work.’

  In the car, they fell into the uneasy silence Reilly had been dreading. She bit her lip, and took a deep breath, deciding she might as well attack it head on. They were stuck in traffic. Neither of them could run away.

  ‘I’m really sorry about … the other day, Chris. I was upset. I didn’t mean…I didn’t mean…anything,’ she finished lamely.

  He took a long time to reply and when he did he wouldn’t meet her eyes; he kept looking straight ahead at the line of cars at the traffic lights in front of them.

  ‘Just a mistake - of course.’

  ‘Yes.’ A huge weight was suddenly taken from her shoulders. He got it, he knew it was something crazy, a huge spur of the moment thing. It didn't mean anything to either of them. ‘A huge mistake. A major mistake,’ she mumbled, laughing nervously. ‘So don’t worry, we can just be normal with each other again. The usual, OK?’

  ‘The usual,’ Chris repeated, his tone giving nothing away. ‘Of course. No worries.’

  ‘Great,’ said Reilly, feeling better than she had in days. ‘Sounds perfect.’

  Julius was running analysis on a burger that Reilly had practically shoved in his face first thing and told him to put before everything else. Not that he didn’t have a million other things to do, but when the boss said jump…

  He pulled apart the separate pieces of the burger, and extracted a small piece of the beef. It smelt rank. He didn’t know how people ate this stuff. Julius had recently converted to vegetarianism and had never looked back.

  He ran the morsel of beef through a simple solution that tested for poisons. It only picked up common substances, so if he didn’t find anything, he would have to do more intensive analysis. He did the same with the cheese and the bread. Then he turned to the mushroom, and took a closer look at that. Holy hell, he thought immediately taken aback. This was no run of the mill Portobello. Where exactly had this burger come from?

  All the tell-tale signs were there. The flesh of the cap was pink not white, and the cap itself was not curved and smooth, but bulbous and blemished. He was about to put a call through to Reilly when Gary came in.

  ‘Man, did you hear the news about Pete Kennedy? Guy almost died yesterday. Heart attack while he was eating a cheeseburger apparently. Not so much Batman but Elvis.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

  ‘Well, if happened to be this burger,’ Julius replied, his tone grave, ‘it was no heart attack.’

  Poor little fat man. He took it so trustingly, like a child. Only thinking of his own pleasure.

  It was so easy. All I did was walk into the place, and tell them I was picking up my uncle’s order, and they just handed it over. Such sloppiness. I slipped in the prize ingredient, wrapped the thing back up and knocked at the guy’s window. It was such a temptation to wait around and watch him gasp for air, stuck in his car like a thrashing fish. But I couldn't do that.

  Such a pleasure to know that the cops are running around, dealing with my chaos, while I calmly prepare for tonight. Chopping, slicing, marinading.

  Just because it will be her last meal doesn’t mean that I can afford to be lax. It should be perfect. She should die in a paroxysm of pleasure, only realizing at the last moment that the air is receding, that the edges of her vision are going black.

  Tonight will be perfect. No distractions, everything perfectly prepared. I have become good at this and I can only get better.

  Good isn’t good enough, she used to say to me. You have to do better.

  If only she could see me now, top of my game in all respects. I wonder does she think of me? Wonder what happened to the weakling she used to know. I think of her. I’m closing in on her.

  Soon I’ll know what became of her repulsive life after I left it.

  Chapter 20

  ‘But how would someone get the mushroom into the burger?’ Chris asked Reilly. ‘Wouldn’t the restaurant have delivered the food to the right customer?’

  ‘Well,’ interjected Julius. ‘I know the place. Restaurant is maybe too strong of a word for it. It’s a rat infested shit-hole, basically. I don’t think they would care who the food was delivered to, as long as they got their money.’

  ‘So,’ said Reilly. ‘It’s not a stretch to think that someone, maybe McMurty, maybe someone else, collected Kennedy’s burger, shoved a toxic mushroom in it and delivered it to him?’

  ‘We need to talk to Kennedy again,’ said Chris. ‘See if there was anything odd about the delivery. For all we know, the restaurant might just be so bad they don’t know their poisonous mushrooms from their button cups, or what have you.’

  Chris’s phone rang and he turned away to answer it. Reilly continued to talk to Julius. ‘I want you to test the oil used to cook the mushroom and compare it to the one used to cook the meat,’ she said. ‘We need to find out if they were prepared separately.’

  ‘That would be extremely difficult,’ said Julius. ‘It’ll be cross-contaminated once they’re put together.’

  ‘Just try it,’ she insisted. ‘You’re the best in the business. I know you’ll find a way.’

  Chris ended his call and turned back to her. ‘The guy Kennedy was watching, Harry McMurty? He’s just been found dead.’

  When Reilly and Chris pulled up to the apartment block not far from Sheriff Street, they could see police cars around the entrance. Residents milled about too, looking intrigued and slightly disturbed.

  ‘Delaney.’ A tall, sandy haired man waved at them from behind the police cordon. ‘Over here.’

  ‘Reilly, this is James Costello from the Narc Unit. Not sure if you’ve met.’

  ‘From Chris’s days down with us lowly bunch,’ the man finished. ‘Looks like we’ve got a suicide here, mate, but I called you in because it could be related to that murder case.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Chris. ‘The Armstrong girl?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Peter. ‘Come on up.’

  The elevators in Harry McMurty’s building smelt of spilt liquor, vomit and urine. Her nose was able to pinpoint each one with deadly precision and it was all Reilly could do to keep from throwing up.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Chris, looking sideways at her. He understood that her sense of smell could be both curse and gift.

  McMurty’s apartment was small and dim, much the same as Rose Cooper’s. It was a single room, with a bed that pulled down from the wall. The windows were not clear glass, but instead they were a kind of foggy fiberglass material. There was no view to be had, and with the lights off, only a dim and murky light filtered through.

  ‘Here you have it,’ said Costello. ‘A suicide note.’ He picked up a single sheet of paper that was bagged and put back in its original position. The note was badly written, in a cramped and ugly script. It read:

  ‘I did them murders. The girl Jennifer Armstrong and the other one Cooper. I hate women, those slags. I fed them poison and pills in their food. Killed the cop too.”

  After that, the note slid into incomprehensible scribbles. Chris and Reilly looked at each other. ‘Not exactly Shakespeare, was he?’ said Chris.

  ‘We need to find out what his reading and writing level was,’ said Reilly. ‘It looks like he could be semi-illiterate.’

  The corpse of Harry McMurty was slouched over the little formica table like a man gone to sleep at dinner. He was clutching his stomach. Reilly didn’t want to look too closely until she had scoped out the rest of the room.

  The walls were mostly bare, apart from a few pictures of Harry with different groups of people, male and female. Holiday shots, by the look of them. Young kids having fun in the sun. McMurty was always at the centre
of the action, with the prettiest girl on his arm. Reilly recognized Rose Cooper in one of them, her hand held under her chin like a starlet, her red lips pursed in a kiss. The last picture Reilly had seen of her, she had been a dead, sold corpse. If only she could reach back through time and warn her: Get out of there.

  The carpets stank. Dirt and filth had been ground into them. Cigarette burns littered the floor like gun casings.

  The bathroom was full of beauty products. Moisturizers, hair oils, cleansers, toners, concealer. The guy had more products that Reilly did, that was certain. McMurty may not have cared about what his apartment looked like, but he sure cared about his looks. Reilly guessed he probably stole these from the girls he was with. They were high end products, a lot of them.

  ‘We already did a quick sweep of the bed,’ she could hear Costello saying to Chris. ‘It looked as though he hadn’t washed his sheets in years. We found a stash of meth in the bathroom, and pills under the bed. He was a known dealer, but small time. We were watching him, seeing if he would lead us anywhere big.’

  ‘Did the neighbors hear anything last night?’

  ‘Haven’t talked to them yet. People here are pretty loathe to talk to cops. Plus, what would they hear from a suicide? The guy crying or something?’

  Reilly sighed. It was this kind of sloppiness that led to things being missed.

  ‘Let’s call in our guys,’ she said, coming out of the bathroom. ‘I want them to tag and bag this place.’

  Half an hour later, Lucy and Gary were at the flat, going over everything with a fine toothed comb. ‘We’re lucky those narc cops didn’t completely trash the scene,’ Reilly commented.

  ‘We’re lucky those narc cops called us,’ Chris pointed out. ‘And you’re going to have some explaining to do to the chief about why the GFU are here, cleaning up a suicide.’

  She looked at him speculatively. ‘You can tell me that you’re one hundred percent sure that this was suicide?’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Chris. ‘I’m not as convinced as you are, that’s all. But it’s not me that you have to convince.’

  ‘Leave O’Brien to me,’ said Reilly. She leaned over the body of Harry McMurty, trying to get a glimpse of his face, which was curled into the shadow of his chest. She saw something glinting in his dark hair. Taking a cotton bud, she dragged it over his scalp, then raised it to her eye and saw that it was a tiny speck of red glitter. It was present all through the hair. ‘Look,’ she said, ’he’s got glitter in his hair. So he goes to a party, then comes home and just kills himself?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Gary, who was dusting the floors and surfaces for prints.

  Reilly crouched down again and studied the dead man’s prone form. Karen Thompson would do an autopsy, of course, but Reilly wanted to know if the body could tell her anything from the outset. A bottle of pills lay prone on the table. The suspected suicide weapon.

  As she looked at the creamy smoothness of Harry McMurty’s skin, Reilly noticed something at his temple. A redness, an indentation.

  ‘Lucy,’ she called. ‘Get the camera.’

  She lifted Harry’s glossy hair while Lucy took some close ups of the marks.

  The forensic sweep of Harry McMurty’s flat was taking a long time. Chris, who was supposed to be concentrating, found himself distracted by Reilly. She was completely focused of course, going over the scene like it had something urgent to tell her, something that was just for her.

  And it did. She had found something.

  Last night, when he got the news about Kennedy, Chris had felt his whole world tilt on its side. He took Kennedy and his partner’s solidness, his humor and his reliability for granted. More than ever, he had wanted someone by his side to share his distress with, and the only person he could think of was Reilly.

  Since her return they had been growing closer, he knew it. He had always liked how tough she was, how smart, how you could joke around so easily with her.

  For a long time he had told himself that he simply admired and respected her, and that was it. But when she was away in Florida, he found that he had missed her. He missed their daily banter, the little glances they exchanged when they had both zeroed in on a clue or inconsistency in a case. Pete Kennedy had a heart of gold, but catching his eye didn’t give Chris quite the same thrill.

  When Reilly came back, he had cautioned himself not to be over eager. But he found that she seemed a little more open now, almost as if she was allowing him to get closer. Something had happened in Florida. He wasn’t sure exactly what, but he liked the effect it had.

  And then the other day … Whatever part of Chris that had still been trying to be careful, to hold something back, had been completely overwhelmed by that kiss. But then she had pulled back. He had more been disappointed than he cared to admit when she’d called it a “major mistake.” She had laughed about it, as if the mere thought of being with him was hilarious. Well, he would back off. He had never been in the habit of chasing women. If Reilly wanted to be friends, then he would be friendly.

  Now, she was on her hands and knees taking hair samples out of the carpet with Lucy. He didn’t envy them. That carpet was beyond the pale.

  Gary began spraying some of the hard surfaces with luminol. The chemiluminesence was visible to Chris from across the room. He had closed the curtains, so the rest of them stopped the work they were doing and watched instead. There were some smears on the wall next to the bathroom. ‘Ugh,’ said Gary. ‘Ten points for guessing what that is.’

  ‘Blood surely?’ said one of the narc cops standing nearby.

  ‘Well, my friend, you could be right. I would hope, actually, that you are. But luminol will show the presence of faecal matter in exactly the same way that it shows blood. From the placement and the patterning of this, I’m picking the former.’

  ‘That is so disgusting, Gary,’ said Lucy. ‘No need to be so graphic.’

  ‘Man’s just trying to learn something,’ muttered Gary and Chris felt sorry for him. It seemed as though he and Gary were in the same position: pining after women who didn’t want them.

  ‘But this,’ Gary continued, pointing to the countertop. ‘This is definitely blood. Or at least the sign of someone trying to clean up some.’ He turned to the other cop. ‘Luminol also reacts with bleach. So if someone has tried to clean this surface of blood, that could be what’s showing up.’

  Chris shook his head indulgently, wondering while all forensic investigators felt the need to show off their encyclopedic knowledge.

  ‘Looks like there’s been an accident in this spot for sure,’ said Reilly, examining the area that Gary had indicated. ‘But I imagine that lots of bad things happened here. Whatever the victim was, he was no saint.’

  They were at the crime scene until late in the evening. McMurty’s body was removed and taken to the city mortuary. The team packed up the hundreds of trace samples they had collected for analysis. The fingerprinting alone would take days. Hundreds of people had probably come through this flat, and all of them had left behind a tiny piece of evidence. It would be a difficult scene to wade through for that very reason. There was too much trace. It was like swimming through a cloudy pool, with millions of pieces of debris floating around you. Hard to know what to concentrate on.

  Chapter 21

  Chris checked in on Kennedy on his way home. He was feeling much better, but still a little sleepy.

  ‘I’ll be back on the job in no time,’ he said.

  Chris filled him in on the events of the past few hours: the results from the mushroom, and Harry McMurty’s supposed death by suicide.

  Kennedy shook his head. ‘I knew there was something off about that delivery guy,’ he said. ‘I should have listened to my gut.’ He laughed. ‘Actually, I was listening to my gut. And it told me to eat.’

  Chris frowned. ’What was wrong with the guy who delivered the food?’

  ‘He wasn’t in uniform. Just normal day to day clothes. The stuff before I
passed out is a little blurry, but I remember thinking it was weird.’

  ‘Do you remember his face?’

  ‘Not particularly. But I do remember noticing that his feet squeaked on the wet path as he walked off, like he was wearing something with plastic soles, runners or something.’

  ‘Let me know if you think of anything else. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m being discharged in the morning,’ said Kennedy. ‘But wait, why does this matter? Sure Harry’s the guy isn’t he? He just got one of his lackeys to deliver me the burger. And you said he wrote a confession.’

  ‘Reilly’s not convinced about the suicided and to tell you the truth, I’m not either. There’s definitely something off about it, the note in particular.’

  ‘For football sake’,’ said Kennedy. ‘Just when a man thinks it’s safe to come back to work ….

  Funny how your whole world can fall apart in just a few hours.

  Last night, still feeling the high from getting rid of the cop and Harry, I’m preparing a delectable meal, when the latest subject texts and says she has to postpone until Thursday. But the time is perfect now! What can I say, except: fine, see you then

  After scraping the food into the bin, wasting weeks of labour and skill, I went back to my laptop. Perhaps I could line up another subject, someone a bit easier. Ah. There was the email I had been waiting for from the man I had hired to seek out my past.

  Ruth Dell, it said. Born in Birmingham, England in 1949. Educated at Oxford University. Became a professor and expert in isolated tribes. Published nine non-fiction books on the subject, widely respected.

  Sister died when Ruth was 25. Boy was four when he was adopted by his aunt. He was –

  Blah, blah, blah. Yes, I knew this bit, only too well.

  Nephew ran away at age 16 (ran away? That’s hardly what happened. Maybe that’s the story she liked to give out. It sounds better than: ‘I threw him out onto the street without a penny.’)