TORN (9 page)

Lucy led Reilly over to where she had an electron microscope set up.  She was talking quickly, almost tripping over her words to get them out. ‘We’ve gone through everything we brought back. Firstly, you were right: that hair sample was Mr Coffey’s.  It matched one of the pubic hairs we took from his corpse for comparison.’

Reilly nodded, expecting as much.

‘Most of the soil samples we collected were consistent with the type found in Coffey’s garden,’ Lucy continued. ‘But there was something different about one batch in particular.’

‘Go on.’

‘Not only is it a much more alkaline soil, but it also had traces of something rather interesting.’  She slid the microscope towards Reilly. ‘Take a look.’

Reilly swept her hair back off her forehead and leaned into the microscope, adjusted the setting so that the specimen was in focus. ‘So what am I looking at?’ she asked.

‘Traces of chloride, sodium, potassium, creatinine …’

‘… and urea?’ Reilly straightened up. 

Lucy nodded.

‘So it’s urine. Not much of a find, considering,’ Reilly said, decidedly unimpressed. ‘This sample was taken from the region surrounding a septic tank, Lucy; what did you expect to find?’

She quickly assuaged her misgivings. ‘Of course. I was inclined to dismiss it at first too, but then I looked more closely at the composition. It’s not human.’

‘Oh. You caught me there,’ Reilly said quickly. ‘Well, if you know what it isn’t, I take it you also know what it is?’

Lucy smiled. ‘Would I drag you in here if I didn’t?’  She slid a printout towards Reilly. ‘This is what gave me the strongest clue. It’s the chemical composition of another substance we took from the very same sample.’

Reilly ran her gaze over the elements.
Barley, wheat, bran, soybean, canola meal, molasses, vegetable oil, limestone, salt, dicalcium phosphate.  She racked her brains, trying to figure how such a seemingly random group of ingredients could relate to the urine sample.

‘OK,  I give up, what’s this then?’ she asked.

‘The ingredients commonly found in horse feed. Horse pellets, to be precise. What we got was most likely fine dust residue from the pellets. So I’m thinking that the urine has to be from a horse.’

‘I see.’ Something clicked in Reilly’s brain, and her mind raced to work out why this should be significant. Then she recalled something Chris had said about Coffey’s wife being part of the horsy set.

Which meant it may not be so significant after all.

When she mentioned this to Lucy, the younger woman frowned. ‘Yes, but that garden is pristine, not somewhere you’d ordinarily let horses loose to feed and pee. And the Coffeys don’t keep horses themselves, do they?’

‘No. That’s true.’

‘So while there’s a chance that Mrs Coffey or one of her horsy friends walked it in, there’s just as much of a chance that whoever put Mr Coffey in the tank might have done so,’ Lucy persisted.

‘OK, let’s go with that for the moment, until we discover otherwise. What about the samples from Mrs Coffey’s boots that you took for elimination? Any traces of it on those?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Not a sausage,’ she said, and Reilly smiled. It had taken her a while to get to grips with some of the team’s idiom, but she figured she could translate most of it by now.

‘Then we can probably count her out as the source for the moment. I’ll ask the detectives to find out if any of her friends were in the garden area recently; see if we can maybe isolate it to one of those. If not, then we may well have something.’

Lucy grinned but Reilly wasn’t convinced the new find gave them anything more to go on with the investigation. 

Cooking sauce, horse feed, and one hell of a load of shit.

How on earth was any of it going to help them find Tony Coffey’s killer?

Kennedy set two pints of Guinness on the table and groaned as he lowered himself into a chair. ‘I hate days like today …’

He and Chris were in a small city-center pub, and in a mood to blow off some steam after John Crowe’s funeral earlier.

Music blasted out way too loud from the jukebox in the corner. A gaggle of girls in micro-miniskirts stood in a cluster drinking alcopops, exchanging flirtatious glances with a bunch of young guys who were cranking loose change into the machine. Ninety percent of the people in there were under twenty.

Kennedy looked thoughtfully at his drink. ‘Ah, my friend in need …’  He buried his face in stout, then looked around the pub as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Jesus, I’m getting old.  Look at this place. Remember when it had ratty old stags’ heads on the walls, and you got change back from a fiver when you bought a pint?’

Chris grinned.  ‘No, Granddad, I don’t.’

‘Ah, feck off.’ Kennedy slumped back in his seat. ‘I
am
getting old, though. Days like today sort of bring that home to you.’ He stuck his head in the glass again.

Chris wrapped his hands around his own pint, and took a long sip.

Although the funeral of a fellow cop always got you in the gut, he’d hadn’t known John Crowe personally, unlike Kennedy, who’d graduated from training college at the same time as him. And there was no doubt that funerals forced you to think about your own mortality. Especially when you weren’t feeling a hundred percent.

Chris swallowed hard, then raised his voice a little so as to be heard above the noise. ‘It’s never easy, is it? I always feel so sorry for the family in these situations. Sometimes I wonder if the whole guard of honour thing makes it even harder for them.’

When Kennedy finally came up for air he looked a little happier. ‘I know it would break my Josie’s heart, definitely.’

‘Well, luckily you’re not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. Are you?’ Chris added jokingly, trying not to think about the irony of that with regard to himself.

‘Not if I can help it. But sometimes you wonder, with all the shit that’s going down these days.’

‘Speaking of, erm, shit … where are we on the Coffey murder?’

The smile quickly left his partner’s face. ‘Buggered if I know. Like I said, no clues, no suspects, no motive.’

Chris nodded in agreement. It was four days since the discovery of Tony Coffey’s body, and they needed something to move the investigation forward soon, an opening, something to give them direction. He gazed at his half-empty pint glass. The stout wasn’t bad, and it was definitely relaxing him a little, relieving some of the tension and worry he’d been experiencing these last few days about the tremors. Maybe the odd Guinness was the answer?

‘With regard to motive, did the editor have much to say yesterday?’ Kennedy asked.

Coffey’s editor at the
Sunday Herald
had shed little light on anything, other than to insist to Chris yet again that Tony was ‘a total arsehole, but he had a way with words. If you wanted someone to be provocative, to stir up a storm of controversy, then he was your man.’

Chris shook his head. ‘Sounds like everyone hated Coffey – the left, the right, old people, young people. The guy lived to wind people up.’

Kennedy sipped thoughtfully. ‘Did you ask the editor about death threats, irate call or letters in response to his articles, anything like that? Stalkers, even?’

‘He said there have been some inflammatory responses down the years, but no stalkers, no one who swore they’d kill him or whatever. What about the wife?’ he asked, referring to Kennedy’s second interview with Sandra Coffey in light of Kirsty Malone’s revelations.

The detective looked grim. ‘I tried beating about the bush, but she knew where I was coming from.’

Chris nodded sympathetically. There was no easy way to ask a woman about her dead husband’s affairs.

The music seemed to grow even louder, battling the chirping of the crowd.  Kennedy leaned towards Chris to make himself heard. ‘She admitted knowing that Coffey had had several “secretaries” throughout the years. She gave me a couple of name
s
I’ll follow up on them tomorrow, see if there was anything unseemly, unpleasant, whatever.’  He sighed. ‘We’re pissing in the dark, Chris, and I’m not sure we’re hitting anything except our own shoes. Think about it, a provocative middle-aged journalist with a string of affairs, and by all accounts an arsehole too. The question isn’t who would want him dead – it’s more like who
wouldn’t
?’

Chris nodded tiredly. This was making him feel drained yet again. ‘My guess is it’s more than that,’ he said. ‘I reckon we can forget the girlfriends, or any wounded husbands, to be honest. It’s the whole setup of the killing. This isn’t a crime of passion – it’s a carefully planned, meticulous job, and it’s intended to make a point.’ He picked up his glass again. ‘Think about it – you’re a killer, you’ve got it in for a guy for whatever reason.  Fair enough, we know that happens.’

‘All too often, unfortunately,’ Kennedy grunted.

Chris was warming to his theme. ‘But why do something so elaborate – sensational, even?’ he asked. ‘Stuffing a guy in a septic tank to drown in his own shit … that’s pretty imaginative even by the standards of the low-lifes we come across.’

Kennedy picked up his own pint and knocked it back. ‘Ah, what the hell. We aren’t going to solve anything on this one without a lot of work and a little bit of luck. Right,’ he licked froth off his lips, ‘I’d better go home to the wife.’

‘Do – while your dinner is still warm and you can still walk.’

The older cop gave him a look. ‘Sneer all you like, but what do you go home to, eh? An empty flat and the Playboy channel?’

Chris grinned. ‘Admit it, you miss the bachelor’s life sometimes.’ As he spoke, two attractive women passed their table – one of them looked over and gave Chris an appraising glance.

Kennedy caught the look. ‘Some parts of it, yeah.’  His eyes followed the girls across the bar. ‘Trouble is, Romeo, I never got the kind of looks you just did.’ He stood up and shook his head. ‘Guess some women just have no taste.’

At the GFU lab, Reilly spread Tony Coffey’s clothes out for examination, the dried sewage-encrusted garments looking incongrous against the gleaming white counter top. 

Lucy and Rory, another lab tech, stood either side of her, face masks in place, although these weren’t much help in protecting them from the stink. Even a big strong rubgy player like Rory, who was well used to getting down and dirty, was having trouble.

Reilly wore a mask too, not for protection from the smell – she’d become accustomed to that by no
w
but because they were going to get up close and personal with the victim’s clothes in the hope of finding some crucial piece of evidence on them that might have been trapped beneath the layer of sewage.

At the time of his death, the journalist had been wearing a dark blue shirt, a small-check-patterned tweed jacket, and gray woolen trousers. She slid the trousers towards Lucy and the jacket towards Rory.

‘So what are we looking for?’ Rory wore his usual slightly anxious look; he was aware of the increasing media coverage of the crime because of Coffey’s profession, and it was clearly weighing on him.

Reilly smiled and tried to look reassuring. The last thing she wanted was uptight lab techs who had trouble focusing on the job. She needed the team sharp, paying attention to every detail. 

‘The usual,’ she told them. ‘Anything goes – lint, fluff, skin flecks.  Basically anything that’s out of place, we want it.’

Rory nodded.  ‘So we’re focusing around the collar and cuffs to start with?’

‘Yes.’

For a few moments the three of them worked in silence, each going over the clothes meticulously using a hand-held magnifying glass.

This was one part of the job that Reilly loved. There was something soothing about focusing the mind on the most minute details, poring over a tiny area, searching in the nooks and crannies like a hunter creeping stealthily over a wooded hillside in search of prey.

At times like these she was able to clear her mind, let her worries and problems go, allow the creative side of her brain to roam free while her conscious mind was completely absorbed in a task. All she could hear on either side was Lucy and Rory’s steady breathing as they too concentrated on the job at hand.

Coffey’s jacket was a wool and synthetic blend. Under Rory’s magnifying glass – which increased the image fortyfold – it looked like a rolling hillside, a nightmare tangle of crossed threads running at ninety degrees to each other. There were literally thousands of little ridges and valleys, places where a microscopic piece of material could hide.

Every so often one of them would find a tiny particle of trace on the clothes. They would remove the particle with their tweezers, bag it, label it, then resume. They all knew from experience that there was no point getting excited at such times.  Unless they found something large or very obviously out of place, there was virtually no way of knowing what it was until it was analyzed. For every vital piece of evidence that they recovered in this way, they analyzed a hundred bits of household dirt and toast crumbs.

Reilly relaxed and enjoyed the hunt, hoping that somewhere out there she would find her elusive prey. And while she worked, she let her mind wander, speculating on what a sad lonely death Coffey’s must have been. Whoever had it in for him had conjured up one hell of a punishment.

Not that freezing to death in a bathtub of ice would have been a bed of roses either, she mused, thinking about John Crowe’s equally strange manner of death. The former policeman’s funeral had taken place early that day, and she knew that some of the older members of the GFU who’d worked alongside Crowe in the past,including Jack Gorman, had been in attendance.

The thinking was that Crowe’s death was all to do with punishment – revenge from one of his former collars, or payback from someone who’d borne him a grudge.

Reilly shivered. Criminals were getting more and more inventive these days, coming up with ways of sending out strong, defiant messages to their opponents.

What kind of message they were trying to send out by immersing a guy in ice was anyone’s guess. She shrugged, thinking that they’d probably picked the idea up from one of those TV cop shows; you got a lot of that these days – criminals styling themselves on hotshot mafia types.

‘Take a look at this.’ Rory’s voice broke into her thoughts. She turned and saw that he was delicately tweezing open a folded piece of paper. ‘From the inside pocket of his jacket,’ he told her. ‘Looks like a note.’

‘Seems to be in pretty good shape too,’ Reilly commented, pleased that whatever it was, it had escaped the sludge. The outside of the jacket would have got the worst of it, and while the paper still looked wet, Rory was slowly but expertly teasing the folds apart.

‘Generic lined notepape
r
nothing distinctive,’ he continued, answering Reilly’s unspoken questions. ‘There’s something written on it all right … just on a single line, from what I can see. Ink looks like blue ballpoint, but the words are blurry from the moisture.’

Reilly handed him the magnifying glass. ‘This might help.’

‘No, I think I can make it out actually.’ He seemed reluctant to accept assistance, and was being almost protective of his prize find. 

Reilly knew that feeling well. For the most part forensic work was tedious and mostly fruitless, so finding anything out of the ordinary was akin to uncovering buried treasure.

‘Oh. It’s not words, it’s numbers,’ he said.

‘Just numbers?’

‘Yes, a sequence, almost like … yeah, that’s exactly what it is – ten digits. It’s a phone number,’ Rory confirmed, triumph in his face. ‘It starts with 086 so it’s a mobile number.’

‘Nice work.’ Reilly smiled. It might ultimately get them nowhere but for now it was at least something. ‘Is the rest of it legible?’

‘I think so … just not sure if this one is a three or an eight.’ Now he accepted the magnifiying class and peered closely at the sequence of numbers.

‘Want me to take a look and then we can compare?’

He nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

Reilly bent down and examined the blurred ink. Actually, the digits on the note were surprisingly legible, considering what the jacket had been through. But yes, it was difficult to tell whether the edges of the three had blurred into the shape of an eight, or if it had been an eight to begin with.

Reilly continued studying each digit and when she was finished, she wrote down the number sequence as she’d identified it.

When she compared it with what Rory had written, they realized they had the same mobile phone number. It was obviously relevant to Tony Coffey in some way, but the question was, was it relevant to his murder?

Leaving the others to continue the examination, Reilly removed her gloves and headed for her office.

From there she called the station but both Chris and Kennedy’s direct lines went to voicemail, so next she tried Chris’s mobile.