Taboo

by Casey Hill

  ‘Reilly Steel.’

  ‘Reilly? Did I wake you?’ Chris Delaney’s calm tones brought her back to reality.

  ‘Chris. What time is it?’

  ‘Just after three. Sorry to wake you.’

  She sat up and brushed her hair back out of her eyes, trying to push the images out of her mind, and focus on what he was saying. Another disturbing dream. This wasn’t good.

  ‘It’s OK, I owe you one,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. ‘Did you get something on one of the cases?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ He paused and she could hear the weariness in his tone. ‘We have another murder – and while I hate to jump the gun, this one looks weird enough to be our guy again.’

  15

  Reilly drove through the dark streets, her mind spinning, disorientated not only by the unfamiliarity of the wrong side of the road but also by the peculiarities of this case. She thought about everything they had on the murders so far. What was the thread, what was the killer thinking, trying to tell them? Or was there any point at all?

  With the Freudian connection it seemed hard to imagine that there was not some other hidden message; the murders were all just too bizarre. But if the killer had struck again – and so soon – it meant they were still chasing, still simply reacting to the twisted whims of a madman.

  It was easy to find the house. Four or five police cars lit up the night with their flashing blue lights, illuminating a small crowd of onlookers who, even at that time of night, had been drawn to the scene, hoping to catch a glimpse of something gruesome. No doubt the press wouldn’t be far behind.

  Reilly parked behind the barrier of police cars, grabbed her bag from the back of her car, and then stopped to look around.

  The house was small, at the end of a quiet residential street. This was an older area of the city, probably inhabited by a lot of retired people – there were gardens full of rose bushes, neat lawns and old-fashioned floral curtains. Number forty-seven stood alone at the end of the cul-de-sac, a redbrick cottage with a well-tended garden, a black wrought-iron gate, and a narrow concrete path leading between the flower beds to the open front door.

  The uniforms parted like waves to let her through. Chris was waiting at the door. ‘Hey there,’ he said in greeting. ‘You were fast.’

  She looked up at him and frowned. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t I be? It’s after four in the bloody morning.’

  She followed him into the hallway, which was cool and quiet, almost serene after the melee outside. He pushed the door closed behind them, immediately shutting out the noise and the flashing blue lights. Two uniforms stood guard in front of a doorway.

  ‘We caught a break on this one,’ Chris began. ‘Unlike the last, the scene is almost completely undisturbed.’

  Reilly smelled the air. ‘They’ve been dead a while though.’

  He nodded. ‘Uniform came round to follow up a lead on a missing person, peered through the letterbox, caught a whiff of that stench and called it in.’ He led her toward the doorway. ‘Once they got inside they took one look and figured it was one of ours.’ Chris stopped at the door and nodded to the uniforms. They both reached up and covered their mouths with their hands, then one of them slowly pushed the door open.

  The smell, already strong in the house, flowed out of the room like a wave. Fighting back the nausea, Reilly stepped forward slowly. A garish red light bathed the scene.

  It was another bizarre tableau. The room was lit only by an electric fire, which produced stifling heat and had obviously contributed to the decomposition of the bodies. And decomposed they were, both bloated and sickly colored.

  Reilly stood in the doorway, struggling not to gag from the stench. There were two people sitting at a table and despite the advanced state of decomposition, she could immediately see that one was elderly – a thin, frail, old woman with wispy silver hair. The other was also female, dressed in a white uniform, well built, and from first impressions looked to be in her mid-forties though at this point it was hard to tell.

  Chris stood in the doorway, a troubled look on his face. ‘According to the neighbors the victims are—’

  Reilly put up a hand to cut him off. ‘Give me a minute – let me just take a look without knowing anything, before the rest of them get here.’

  He nodded. ‘OK. Should I …?’ He indicated the door.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  He closed the door behind him, leaving Reilly alone with the bodies. She slowly circled the scene, the red light of the fire making her own shadow dance on the opposite wall, her senses wide open, just taking everything in.

  There were no signs of trauma on the older woman, no stabs or gunshot wounds, no weapons, nothing to suggest cause of death. She didn’t even look distressed. In fact, she had an almost peaceful expression, as though her death was a relief to her. Clad in her flower-print dress and white cardigan, she looked like a hundred other little old ladies that you’d see tottering around Dublin every day.

  The younger woman was slumped over, leaning on the table, arms limp by her side, her dark hair draped across her face. The white clothes Reilly had noticed earlier looked on closer inspection to be a nurse’s uniform, and she wore sensible rubber-soled shoes and no jewelry.

  Despite the decomposition, Reilly could see that this woman had been killed by a gunshot to the head, at close range – just like Justin Ryan. But this time there seemed to be another gunshot wound, on her foot. What was that all about?

  She stepped back a little, looked around and sighed. Once again it seemed that these victims were no criminals, no drug-dealing lowlifes whose illegal activities helped bring about their own demise. Instead, they looked to be just normal people living normal lives who’d been deliberately sought out to play a part in this unspeakable horror. Chris was right; the mere ordinariness of the victims suggested that this was likely their killer again.

  Keeping this in mind, she scanned the room, searching for anything that would tie it to the other scenes. Anything obviously Freudian, or loosely related to Freud, anything at all.

  After a few minutes more, her gaze fell on a nearby couch that was littered with photos. Reilly moved closer. They looked to be very old; black and white family scenes from a long time ago. A father and a little girl walking along the street, another of the same people dressed up formally for a family portrait. Peering closer, Reilly noticed that several of the photos were damaged, torn, mutilated even. Had something or someone been removed from the photos – excised from the old lady’s life?

  Leaving them for the moment, she glanced back at the older woman, then around the room. It was clearly the old lady’s house – everything from the lace curtains to the traditional dark wood furniture, fine china teapot and doilies on the table screamed old lady.

  Reilly stepped over to the fireplace. A small collection of framed black-and-white photos were laid out on the mantelpiece – several were of the same family featured in the photos spread so artfully on the couch. So they had be related to the older woman, perhaps pictures of her family, her childhood.

  ‘Chris,’ Reilly called out and waited a moment before he re-entered. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

  He stepped into the room and followed her gaze to the photos on the couch. ‘You mean these photos? What about them?’

  ‘Take a look, but remember not to touch.’

  ‘Of course.’ Raising an eyebrow, he walked over to the couch and ran his gaze across the array of photographs. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  ‘Well, what do you see?’

  He shrugged. ‘Mostly old family shots – some of them seem very old, a couple are torn.’

  ‘Torn through age, or on purpose?’

  He looked closer. ‘Now that you say it, I’d wager on purpose. You think they’re the old woman’s?’ he said, moving away. She knew he was finding it almost impossible to resist picking them up.

  ‘Looks li
ke they could be of her childhood.’

  ‘Any idea why they’ve been torn like that?’

  Reilly moved over to the mantelpiece and pointed to a family portrait. ‘Look – this is the complete family, but in all of these,’ she indicated the ones on the couch, ‘someone’s been removed.’

  ‘The mother,’ she and Chris said in unison, and Reilly looked at him as he continued. ‘The mother has been ripped out of the photos.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s Freud again,’ she said. One of the pillars of Freud’s psychodynamic theory was that childhood had a profound effect on the things we do, the way we behaved as adults.’

  ‘Are you sure that isn’t too much of a leap? I mean, are we trying to make a Freud connection now? All this could very well be coincidence.’

  ‘I know.’ She sighed, having thought the very same thing. Perhaps she was just clutching at straws at this stage. Goodness knows, Daniel had cautioned her against that kind of thing, against trying to make the crime fit the circumstances rather than approaching it all with an open mind. It was a rookie mistake and she really should know better.

  A troubled expression crossed Chris’s face. ‘Look, we’ll take this thing with the photos on board, but I wouldn’t automatically assume we’re dealing with the same guy just yet.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re right. It’s just … well, all this has really gotten under my skin and I don’t like being played.’

  ‘It’s getting to me too – and I don’t think I need to tell you what it’s doing to Kennedy.’

  She gave a crooked smile. ‘Where is the miserable old bastard tonight anyway?’

  ‘Next door, interviewing some of the neighbors. I might as well warn you, he isn’t exactly over the moon about having this profiler guy treading on our toes—’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Reilly told him. ‘Daniel won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes. And despite what Kennedy – or anyone else might think,’ she added pointedly, ‘we’ve got a much better chance of catching this guy with him on board.’

  ‘Well, you know Kennedy, always suspicious of the touchy-feely stuff,’ Chris joked, and Reilly was heartened to think that he himself wasn’t nearly as dubious. Which was important given that they all needed to work together on this.

  He looked again at the photos. ‘And speaking of touchy-feely, let’s just assume for a moment that this thing with the missing mother is Freud related? Where does it get us?’

  ‘Absolutely nowhere,’ Reilly replied, feeling more disheartened by the minute.

  A while later she and Chris stepped out into the cool night air, both relieved to be out of the stifling heat of the house. Karen Thompson was just arriving.

  ‘Good luck with that one,’ Chris said. The ME gave him a quizzical look and he nodded to the house ‘The fire was left on, turned up full – it’s like a sauna in there. It’ll really mess up your time of death.’

  Karen shrugged. ‘Every case has its difficulties – that’s what makes the job so much fun, isn’t it?’ she added drily, shouldering her bag as she headed on in.

  ‘God help her husband is all I’ll say,’ Chris said under his breath.

  Reilly looked at him. ‘Whose?’

  ‘Well, I know if I woke in the middle of the night to see Karen Thompson’s face beside me, I’d be more than a little worried about having my organs weighed, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ Reilly said with a grin. ‘So what else do we know about the victims?’ she asked, wondering if Chris’s findings would concur with her first impressions.

  He sat on the bonnet of his car and took out his notebook. ‘The old lady was Vera Miles, eighty-seven years old. She owns the house.’ He flipped a page. ‘The younger woman was her niece, Sarah Miles, forty-five.’ He jammed the notebook into the pocket of his jacket. ‘Sarah’s a nurse, she was reported missing about a week ago, didn’t show up for work at the hospital one day apparently.’

  ‘Husband, boyfriend?’

  ‘Single, no kids, lived alone. As a missing person investigation it was a real dead end. Then last night someone reported her car had been parked here,’ he indicated back over his shoulder, ‘for a over a week, so the uniforms came around to check it out.’

  Reilly looked up and down the street. It was quiet, residential, the kind of street she imagined where everyone kept to themselves. ‘Any of the neighbors see anything suspicious?’

  ‘Nobody knows nothing,’ Kennedy growled, walking up behind them. He propped himself on the car beside Chris and the suspension instantly groaned. ‘Mrs O’Shaughnessy across the road says the car has been there for days. Says she thought nothing of it, because Sarah had parked it there a few times before when she was away on holiday. It’s a quiet street and close to the airport, so that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. In fact, I got all the usual guff about how these things didn’t happen around here, and you couldn’t meet a nicer more generous family who gave money to charity and everybody loved them, blah, blah, blah. It’s funny how these things only come out when somebody snuffs it.’

  ‘When did Sarah disappear?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘She was reported missing five days ago by a colleague,’ Kennedy told her.

  ‘So chances are whatever happened here was before then,’ she mused. ‘Maybe a week or so ago … that would certainly explain the decomp.’

  Kennedy looked at her. ‘Did you find anything useful inside?’

  ‘Team’s not here yet, so hard to know, but just out of interest …’ she glanced at Chris, who nodded, ‘I’m thinking there might be a clue, something related to the others.’

  ‘You’re joking.’ Kennedy stared from Reilly to Chris and back again. ‘You seriously think this is another one?’

  ‘Realistically, we can’t rule anything out,’ Chris said, quietly and Kennedy shook his head.

  ‘Look, Steel, call me old-fashioned, but from my experience physical evidence always trumps everything else.’ He squared his shoulders, and looked straight into her eyes, the doubt on his face accentuated by the orange glow of the sodium streetlights.

  ‘Actually, Detective—’ Reilly tried to interject, before he cut her off.

  ‘Look, all I’m saying is I worry there’s a danger of this investigation becoming too narrow. Where are we on those paint and hair traces you found before? Are we any closer to identifying those?’

  ‘I can assure you that my team is leaving no stone unturned,’ she replied. ‘We’re still processing trace evidence from the campsite, which was more difficult because it was out in the open. Of course, we have yet to run this scene for physical evidence, so all we have at the moment is what I’ve been able to establish from my initial run-through.’ While she took Kennedy’s point, deep down she had a very strong suspicion that this was another related murder.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he sighed, reluctantly playing along. ‘What was it this time?’

  She explained about the photographs and their potential significance. ‘Yes, I know it’s tenuous and I don’t blame you for being sceptical. Just let my team give the place a good going over and see what they find. Then maybe we can call it one way or another.’ She put her hands in her pockets. ‘But connection or not, we’re still collecting way too many dead bodies around here.’

  When the breakthrough finally came, it was again courtesy of the ME’s office a few days later.

  There was a brief tap on the door of Reilly’s office and she looked up to see Karen poking her head round the door. ‘Would you have a couple of minutes?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. Come on in.’

  Karen stepped into the room, somber as always in a dark gray suit. Her serious expression matched her choice of clothes. ‘I just wanted to tell you in person that we got the tox screens back on Vera Miles and it looks our cause of death is from barbiturate overdose.’

  Reilly frowned. ‘The old lady died of a drug overdose?’

  ‘Yes.’ Karen paused briefly before continuing. �
�But what’s interesting is that this particular drug was something that, in retrospect, was also present in the Ryan, Redmond and Watson results.’

  ‘What?’ Reilly was almost afraid to breathe.

  ‘To be honest, I’m really very cross that we missed it before, but there were only very small traces in the other cases and it’s really not the kind of thing you’d expect to find—’

  Reilly leaned forward, her head buzzing. ‘What is it, Karen?’

  ‘Barbiturates are common enough in sleeping pills, antidepressants and the comparatively miniscule amounts in the screens for the others weren’t exactly a red flag. But since we’ve had some overlap, I’ve been directing the lab to automatically crosscheck anything new with all most recent reports. Hence the result.’

  Reilly couldn’t get her head around it. ‘You mean the drug that killed Vera Miles was also present in the others? What was it?’

  Karen opened the folder and slid it toward Reilly. She pointed at a specific section of the report. ‘Pentobarbital.’ Reilly stared up at her, her mind racing. ‘Enough to kill Miles, but nowhere near as much for the others. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but it would certainly explain how the killer subdued them enough to—’

  But Reilly didn’t need to read through the report to know that Karen was right. Pentobarbital was the perfect choice.

  17

  ‘What the hell is pento—?’ Kennedy asked, frowning at the file.

  ‘Pentobarbital,’ Reilly explained carefully, ‘is a barbiturate. It’s occasionally used as a recreational drug – apparently you can get high off it in smaller doses – but it’s most often used by vets to put animals to sleep.’

  Chris rocked back in his chair and looked across at Reilly. ‘Does it help us in tracing our perp? I mean, is it something that’s restricted to the veterinary profession?’

  ‘Not particularly. They sometimes use it in general hospitals as an anesthetic, but I would guess anyone who really wanted to get hold of it would just have to break into their local vet’s and they’d find it there.’