by Casey Hill
Reilly sighed and shook her head. Even though this was exactly what she’d expected, she always held out a scintilla of faith – a tiny corner of her hoping that one day she would find her father, if not happy, then at least sober and clean-shaven. Something other than this usual passed-out drunk. But she guessed that was too much to expect. Even now, when she’d taken the job in Dublin to be closer to him and to try and help him.
She stepped over to the window and flung the curtains wide open. It was a sunny morning and the light flooded in, hitting Mike Steel full in the face. He grunted, stirred, and then tried to cover his eyes. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Hey Dad,’ Reilly checked the nearest armchair for debris and, deciding it was safe enough, sat primly on the edge of it.
Mike slowly hauled himself up, gradually registering her presence. ‘How the hell did you get in?’
‘You left the door open again. How many times have I got to tell you to be more careful?’
He reached an upright position and peered bleary-eyed at his daughter. ‘Did you just come around to nag me again?’
She shook her head. ‘I just wanted to see you.’
He finally looked at her for the first time, took in the smart dark blue suit, the black patent kitten heels. ‘You not at work?’ he grunted.
‘Just popped over on the way to the lab.’
‘So, have you saved the world yet?’ He grinned at his weak joke, looked around on the floor for his whiskey bottle, his face betraying his disappointment when he registered that it was empty. He licked his lips and looked up at Reilly. ‘You couldn’t lend us a twenty, could you?’
She ignored the question. By now this was an old game. He asked for money, she refused, knowing it would just be used to buy another bottle of booze. How he managed to drink as much as he did on benefits she didn’t know, but she certainly wasn’t about to facilitate his habit.
‘I was thinking of taking a tour of the old Bank of Ireland this weekend,’ she replied. ‘It’s supposed to be fascinating. You want to come with me?’
Her father stared at her. ‘Why the hell would I want to go there?’
‘Surely this city has more charms than just cheap booze?’
Mike leaned forward and made an abortive attempt to stand before falling back onto the couch, looking dizzy. ‘Ah, spare me the moralizing for once, will you.’
‘There are other places we could go then,’ she offered. ‘I just thought it might be nice to go out together, get some fresh air—’
Mike made a second attempt to stand up, and this time he managed to haul himself to his feet. ‘I need to take a piss.’
Reilly shook her head as she watched him stagger from the room, his tottering footsteps taking him down the hall and into the tiny bathroom.
He began peeing noisily. ‘Now if you wanted to visit the Guinness Brewery, I might be interested,’ he called back to her.
Reilly stood up, wanting to stay, yet at the same time hating every minute she was there. She stared at his back as he hunched over the toilet. ‘If you want to come with me, the offer’s open,’ she called.
‘Right.’
She took a last look around the flat, her face a mixture of pity and disgust. He was such a different man to the strong, funny, capable father she and her sister had known growing up. But a lot had happened since those days, stuff that would cause the best of men to seek refuge in the bottle. And no matter how much she tried to help him, how much she’d hoped that a return to the land of his birth would help him get over it – help him forget, Reilly knew that the specter of what had happened to Jess would never escape her father, in the same way that it never escaped her.
Later that day, Reilly was glad to be back in the lab. It provided a sanctuary, a place where everything was orderly and made sense.
But not right now.
She looked again at the printout in her hand. It was a mistake, she was sure of it. It had to be a mistake. Otherwise …
She felt like rubbing her eyes, like a character in one of those cartoons she used to watch when she was a kid. Maybe if she rubbed hard enough, when she looked at the results again, everything would look normal.
But no, the same results were there, written down in black and white, and seeing as she’d run these samples herself …
Momentarily worry-stricken, Reilly picked up and reviewed the evidence chain of custody card. Nope, she hadn’t made a mistake, there they were: Sample A and Sample B – one from the deceased female recently identified as Clare Ryan, the other from the also deceased and still unidentified male.
Although nobody was truly infallible, when it came to evidence she was pretty damn thorough, and she knew in her heart and soul that she hadn’t screwed up this sample; she hadn’t screwed up a sample in her entire life. There was always way too much at stake.
And again, as her Quantico tutors had taught her, no matter how weird some things looked, no matter how unlikely they seemed, results were results, and the evidence never lied.
Particularly when you ran a test twice.
As Reilly looked again at the two samples, she couldn’t help but recall how another one of her tutors, Daniel Forrest, had drilled the principles of Ockham’s razor into them.
‘People,’ he would say, addressing a group of trainee investigators. ‘Intuition is a valuable tool – but only when it is based on the evidence.’
She recalled the first time he’d introduced the concept to them. Most of the students had never even heard of it, but there was one guy – his name escaped her – who always had an answer for everything.
‘Anyone heard of Ockham’s razor?’ Daniel had queried.
‘Yes, sir. It means that the simplest theory is always right,’ Clever Clogs had replied.
‘Wrong.’
Clever Clogs looked devastated. ‘I thought—’
‘A lot of people mistakenly think that’s what it means,’ the profiler explained, the overhead lights twinkling off his glasses. ‘But what it actually says is far more subtle than that – and much more helpful to investigators.’ He motioned to the evidence they were reviewing – evidence that could lead to two different conclusions. ‘What Ockham’s razor says is that when faced with two theories, when the available data cannot distinguish between them, we should study in depth the simplest of the theories.’
He watched as light bulbs went on in his students’ brains.
‘So while it doesn’t guarantee that the simplest theory will be correct, it does establish priorities.’
Establishing priorities – that was the perspective Reilly needed right now. Given the results she’d got, there were two possible explanations. One was that all her testing was wrong, her methods flawed, her chain of custody compromised.
And the other …
Well, quite frankly, the other was no less difficult to comprehend.
Reilly had known there was something wrong with the blood samples when the tox screen had come back. While both samples had been clear of the usual irregular chemicals, upon comparison something that could only be described as unexpected had appeared. So, just to be sure, she’d run the test again herself again – this time using separate samples from both corpses. Sure enough, the same results appeared.
Unwilling to jump to conclusions too quickly, Reilly had eventually decided to settle the matter by running a genome scan. And it was those results that she now held in her hand, results that even to Reilly, who had seen a lot of weird things on the job, were pretty damn shocking.
‘Ockham’s razor,’ she muttered to herself as she cast her eye once again over her findings. She picked up the phone and dialed Chris Delaney’s cell phone.
When he answered, his voice sounded groggy.
‘Detective Delaney, it’s Reilly Steel,’ she began. When he didn’t reply immediately, she felt the need to clarify. ‘From GFU?’
‘Reilly, hi. What’s the matter?’
‘How’d you know there’s something the matter?’ she asked, fai
ntly surprised.
He yawned. ‘Because it’s 2.15 in the morning.’
‘It is?’ She peered at her watch, recalling visiting her father that morning and coming into the lab straight afterward. It only felt like a couple of hours ago. Had she really been here that long? ‘Oh hell, I’m sorry, Detective, I didn’t realize—’
‘Call me Chris, will you?’ She heard what sounded like him switching on a bedside lamp. ‘All this “detective” business is way too formal – especially when you’re calling me in the middle of the night.’
‘Sure, well – sorry for waking you … Chris. I honestly didn’t think to check the time.’
‘That’s OK. I’m a bad sleeper anyway. Are you still at the lab?’
‘Yes. There was something I wasn’t happy about so I kept at it until I could make sense of it and …’ she figured she might as well get straight to the point, ‘I’ve found something else on the Ryan case.’ She glanced again at the paper in her hand. ‘Something important.’
‘What did you find this time?’ Now he sounded fully alert.
‘Well, you know tox came back negative. But I noticed something else when the bloods came back. Something very unusual.’
‘OK.’ He sounded guarded now but Reilly suspected that unlike the common trace, he’d take this aspect a little more seriously.
‘So I did a couple more tests – different tests.’
‘Get to the point. What did you find?’
‘Both victims had the same blood type,’ she told him, clearing her throat before continuing. ‘Now, this isn’t unusual in itself until I tell you that they were both AB Negative.’
‘And?’
‘Well, only 0.6 per cent of the world’s entire population is AB Negative – the tiniest proportion imaginable. So, if finding one person of that blood type is unusual, finding two in the same place is damn near impossible.’
‘OK, so they’re both AB Neg,’ he said. ‘So it’s unusual. Really unusual. But it doesn’t really give us anything new, does it?’
You bet it does, Reilly thought. ‘That’s why I ran a further test, and this time I carried out a genome scan.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a DNA comparison,’ she explained.
Chris had gone very quiet. She took a deep breath. ‘Clare Ryan and that guy – the other victim? Well, according to their blood samples, they weren’t just a couple,’ Reilly paused and swallowed hard, ‘they were brother and sister.’
8
‘What the fuck?’ Kennedy was aghast. ‘What kind of sick …?’
‘I don’t know – maybe even they didn’t know. That’s what we’re here to find out.’
It was the following morning, and the detectives were once again heading to the Ryan household, hoping to get some answers.
Reilly’s recent findings were shocking, particularly in light of the pathologist’s earlier report confirming the sexual activity. It had never crossed Chris’s mind that Clare Ryan’s killer could have been a close relative – why would it? Close relatives didn’t usually end up naked in bed together. But if the dead pair were in fact, brother and sister – and more importantly knew it – well, this case had taken a very odd turn.
‘Well, it might be weird, but it brings the case to a fairly simple conclusion, doesn’t it?’ Kennedy said as they climbed out of the car in front of house.
‘What?’ Chris had tried to avoid speculating too much about what the implications of the results were but Kennedy was forcing him into it. ‘You think that they couldn’t live with the shame of incest so they took part in some kind of twisted suicide pact?’
‘Maybe.’ Kennedy drew hard on his cigarette, his face wreathed in smoke. ‘Or maybe he decided to end it and the girl was just a victim. Either way,’ he concluded, stubbing his cigarette out beneath his heel and pitching the butt into the carefully manicured flower beds, ‘we need to find out what the hell is up with this family.’
They headed up the path to the front door and rang the bell. The chimes rang clear through the huge house.
Clare Ryan’s mother opened the door, her eyes wide and hopeful. ‘Detectives?’
She urged them into the house and straight through to the living room.
Her husband was sitting ramrod straight on the sofa, his face full of half-hidden hopes and fears. ‘Is it Clare?’ Bernard Ryan asked as they walked in. ‘You have news? Have you found out who … who killed her?’
The detectives sank into the expensive leather couch and exchanged a brief glance. ‘The investigation is still ongoing,’ Kennedy said noncommittally, taking out his notebook.
‘We just need to ask you both a few more questions,’ Chris added.
‘Of course, if it helps we’d be happy to—’
‘But we’ve already told you everything we know,’ Bernard interjected, irritably. ‘If you don’t have any news for us, then why are you here? It’s been a dreadful time – and we haven’t even buried our daughter yet.’
‘Why is that, Mr Ryan?’ Delaney asked, glad that the man had raised this particular subject. He’d thought of little else since Reilly’s phone call. It was now a week since the murders and the Ryans still hadn’t buried Clare. They’d said that they were waiting to inform a family member who was difficult to locate. Difficult to locate because he was, in fact, lying on a cold slab in the morgue? ‘Who are you waiting for?’
Bernard paused, looked at his wife. ‘Our eldest, Justin, Clare’s older brother,’ he snapped. ‘He’s abroad somewhere traveling, and as usual we haven’t a clue where he is, let alone a means of contacting him.’
Ryan’s disapproval of his son was plain to see, but it wasn’t the kind of disapproval Delaney was looking for. Apparently the Ryans knew nothing of their children’s unusual closeness – or if they did, they were in denial, or doing a damn good job of hiding it.
Kennedy glanced at Chris for a moment before asking his next question. ‘Was Clare close to her brother, Mr Ryan?’
The man shrugged. ‘Of course they were close – they were brother and sister.’ He looked to Gillian for reassurance.
She nodded slowly. ‘We’ve tried everything to locate him, detectives.’ She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. ‘He’ll be devastated when he finds out.’
‘So, Clare and Justin are your only children?’
‘Yes,’ Bernard replied. ‘Justin is five years older than Clare.’
‘And when was the last time you spoke to your son?’
Mrs Ryan glanced worriedly at her husband.
‘It was a couple of months ago,’ Bernard answered, ‘before he left for Thailand or Vietnam or whatever godforsaken country took his fancy this time.’ He shook his head. ‘We had words about it at the time, and we haven’t heard from him since.’
Chris caught Kennedy’s eye. ‘Is there a chance he might have come back, maybe returned home since then without letting either of you know?’ he ventured. ‘Could he be in the country and you not know it?’
There was a sniff of disapproval from Bernard. ‘Anything is possible.’ He looked from one detective to the other. ‘What I mean is that it wouldn’t be unheard of. Justin tends to do what suits him first and foremost.’
Kennedy leaned forward, probing gently. ‘It sounds as though you disapprove of your son’s travels, Mr Ryan.’
‘The boy is twenty-six years old, Detective, and has never worked a day in his life. He’s irresponsible and to be perfectly honest, is—’ he caught himself, sorrow etched all over his face, ‘was a very bad influence on Clare.’
You can certainly say that again, Chris thought.
‘Even so, we can’t go ahead and bury his sister without him,’ the man continued. ‘It just wouldn’t be right. He adored Clare and, despite the fact that he was rarely at home, she adored him.’
The detectives exchanged a surreptitious glance.
‘Would Justin have ever stayed at Clare’s place when he came home from his travels?’ Chris asked. ‘Maybe wit
hout you knowing he was home? After all, her apartment is much closer to the city and the airport than here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ Torn between anger at his son and grief over his daughter’s death, Bernard Ryan’s emotions were clearly shot to pieces. ‘I suppose he could have – who knows what he might do? He may have preferred that to coming all the way out here. As you can probably tell, my son and I don’t always see eye to eye.’
Did that make Bernard Ryan a possible suspect then? Chris wondered. Did he find out that Justin had been corrupting Clare in the most deplorable way and, repulsed and ashamed by his children, decide that he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands?
Reilly had been trying from the start to convince them that something wasn’t right about this shooting. She was convinced that a third party was involved in both this, and the Jim Redmond suicide. But he and Kennedy weren’t yet in a position to share her view that the unexplained paint and animal fibers common to Clare Ryan’s apartment and Jim Redmond’s front room meant that these cases were somehow connected.
Still, he decided to try a bit of speculative fishing. ‘Mr Ryan, do you know a man called Jim Redmond?’ he asked, ignoring Kennedy’s surprised glance.
After a beat, Bernard replied. ‘You mean Johnny Redmond who plays bridge with us now and then?’
‘The person I’m referring to is a businessman from Donnybrook.’
‘No. Johnny lives just up the road from us here …’ Ryan looked blank, genuinely blank, and Chris knew instinctively that if there was a connection between Clare Ryan and Redmond’s death, it was unlikely it had anything to do with Clare’s father. Their Redmond clearly meant nothing to him.
‘Who is he?’ Bernard demanded, glancing in surprise at his wife. ‘And what has he got to do with my daughter’s murder?’
‘Nothing as far as we can tell,’ Kennedy interjected, smoothly. ‘We’re just making further enquiries, that’s all. But what we would like to do now is help you locate your son Justin. Have you reported him missing?’