Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (25 page)

‘See something you like?’ she teased.

Caught unawares, he blushed. ‘Not my type.’ He opened the menu. ‘I was actually just wondering how she actually manages to walk in that.’

Reilly shook her head. ‘Hmm ...’ She buried her nose in the menu, suddenly aware of just how hungry she actually was. 

The waitress returned and they ordered their food, water, and a single glass of wine respectively as they were both driving. The drinks arrived quickly and for a moment neither of them said anything, both enjoying the cool liquid, and the feeling of temporary relaxation that washed over them as they sipped their drinks.

Reilly was the first one to break the silence. ‘So if the slinky Italian waitress isn’t your type, what is?’ she asked suddenly.

Chris looked up at her, evidently surprised. ‘That’s a very un-Reilly-like question,’ he observed.

She shrugged. ‘Hey, I can talk about shallow stuff just as well as the next woman.’

Chris sipped his wine. ‘So my personal life is shallow then?’ he teased.

‘You tell me.’

They both waited for a moment, but Chris didn’t elaborate.

‘I notice you dodged that question nicely; both of them, in fact,’ Reilly grinned, looking up as the waitress arrived with their food. ‘Did I hit a nerve?’

He couldn’t reply immediately as the waitress was fussing around with their food, and as soon as she had gone Reilly set to her dish like a hyena, shoveling cacciatore chicken and pasta into her mouth, and pausing barely long enough to wash it down with a sip of wine.

Eventually satisfied, she pushed her plate back and dabbed at her mouth with a crisp white cloth napkin.

‘As always, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.’ Chris nodded at the scattered remains on the table. ‘I’ve seen swarms of locusts do less damage than you do.’

She smiled. ‘I guess you’re just not used to being around a woman with a healthy appetite.’

‘I’ve certainly never been around a woman who looked like she could eat my arm for dessert,’ he countered.

Reilly sipped at her water, and looked at him. ‘So,’ she began, deciding to dive right in, ‘are you going to tell me what’s been going on with you lately?’

He looked up quickly, visibly tense. ‘What do you mean?’

“Hell, Chris ... I know this case is a bitch and it’s getting us all down, but you ... I can’t quite put my finger on it.’

‘On what?’

‘On why you’re so ... edgy these days,’ she said finally, and Chris looked away.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Look, I know Reuben can be ...challenging, but he’s harmless really. You nearly took his head off the other day.’

He wouldn’t meet her gaze. ‘I’m just frustrated that’s all. All these dead ends. We’re getting nowhere.’

‘Hey, come on – it’s me you’re talking to,’ she said, not believing a word of it. ‘Something’s bugging you at the moment and I don’t think it’s just the case.’ She glanced at his hands, clasped together on the table. ‘Is it that again? The thing from last year, the tremors and stuff ... has it come back?’

She had her suspicions; especially as more than once recently she’d noticed him put both hands in his pockets, as if trying to hide them.

‘What? No, everything’s fine.’

‘Yeah, and I’m Miss America,’ she said drolly.

‘You are according to Kennedy,’ he joked, but his heart wasn’t in it and she knew it.

She reached across the table and put her hand on top of his. ‘Chris, let me help you. I can run some more tests, maybe get Julius to take a look at—’

‘It’s fine, Reilly,’ he interjected, his face shuttering. ‘Honestly, it’s nothing. I’m just a bit stressed out with this case, that’s all.’

‘If you say so,’ she replied automatically, stung by his obvious stonewalling. 

It felt like a slap in the face. She’d trusted him, confided in him, and he knew all of her deepest, darkest secrets.

Was that part of it? she wondered, trying to figure out how the closeness they’d developed in the early days had all but disappeared lately. Did he blame her for last year - hold her responsible for what had happened?  After all, he was the one who’d ended up in hospital, bleeding from his injuries. Who could blame him if—

‘It’s nothing, honestly,’ he continued, his voice softening a little. ‘I’m just stressed out, we all are.’

‘I don’t know, Chris,’ she said, her eyes downcast. ‘Sometimes, you can be a bit like Area 51, a big no-fly zone, full of mysteries.’

Chris looked up and met her gaze for the first time. He seemed to be thinking hard, as if weighing something up.

At last, he exhaled, and cleared his throat.  ‘Remember last year, when you were doing your analysis of me in the restaurant, using your Jedi mindspell, or whatever weird thing you do,’ he said, referring to a dinner they’d shared in the early days of working together.

She nodded. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You said something about my not being married because I’d been—’

‘Burned in the past. Bigtime burned,’ she finished, recalling the conversation almost word for word. She raised an eyebrow, seriously wondering where he was going with this.

‘Well, you were right.’ There was a brief pause. ‘I was ... was engaged once.’

Reilly looked up, surprised, her eyes boring into his. ‘You were?’

He looked down at the table. ‘Yes, it ended a few years ago – almost three years now. I’d just graduated from training college when I proposed to Mel.  Melanie, her name was Melanie Adams.’

‘Melanie, that’s a sweet name,’ Reilly mumbled, unsure what to say, her voice echoing Chris’s somber tones.
Was?
Had his fiancée died? she wondered, horrified, her mind racing. If so, why hadn’t Kennedy ever said anything?

‘I’m sorry to pry,’ she mumbled quickly. ‘It’s just I never knew you were actually engaged to someone.  You never mentioned ... So what ...? Did something happen?’

He paused again. ‘It’s difficult to explain really,’ he said, and she breathed an inward sigh of relief. OK, if the girl had died it would be easy enough; he wouldn’t have to explain anything.

He looked up and saw her regarding him carefully. ‘It’s complicated,’ he continued finally. ‘I’ve never really talked to anyone about it before.’

She nodded. ‘Hey, that’s OK. Honestly, it’s really none of my business and—’

‘When we got engaged,’ he said, ‘it was a good time.  We were happy, had everything going for us, and I really thought we’d be spending the rest of our lives together.’

Reilly waited patiently to hear the rest.

‘But then ... not long after, something happened,’ he added, his face pained, and  his expression closed once again.

‘I see.’ Reilly figured her early analysis of him that time had been correct. Evidently this Melanie had hurt Chris deeply.

‘Was there somebody else?’ she asked gently, when he didn’t elaborate.

His hand tightened around his glass. ‘You could say that.’

‘Look, Chris, this is really none of my business,’ Reilly insisted, feeling unaccountably discomfited now. ‘I’m sorry for pressing the issue. It’s just ... I noticed you’ve been kind of testy this last while and ... is that it?’ she asked, a flash of inspiration hitting her.  ‘Has she – Melanie – been in touch recently, or something?’

It was a shot in the dark but if the ex-fiancée was preying on Chris’s mind, then maybe she’d come back into his life recently. And maybe he still held a candle for her, which was why he was so highly strung.

He gave a short laugh. ‘Not exactly. But I do know she’s getting married at the weekend.’

‘Oh.’

So that was it, Reilly realized. Chris had been prepared to commit his life to this Melanie, but for some reason she’d rejected him, tossed him aside, and now she was marrying someone else, perhaps the guy she’d left him for. That had gotta hurt.

She looked at him. ‘Sounds like you two might have some unfinished business,’ she said, trying to choose her words carefully.

‘Nah’. Chris sat back in his chair. ‘I know the fella she’s marrying, he’s a good guy. Peter  we used to be mates. Good luck to them.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m glad, actually – glad she’s getting on with her life,’ he added, and Reilly guessed he was trying his utmost to sound like he meant it.

She looked closely at him, but his expression remained unpenetrable.

Clearly a lot more had gone down between Chris and the ex-fiancée than he was prepared to admit.

And despite herself, Reilly was deathly curious to find out exactly what.

R
eilly was astonished the following day when she heard about Lucy’s little adventure.

First thing that morning, Jack Gorman stormed into her office, angrier than she’d ever seen him. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ he demanded. ‘Sending my daughter off to remote places like that all by herself?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘Lucy was cautioned for trespassing on some godforsaken farm in Kildare yesterday.  We’re lucky she wasn’t arrested!’

Reilly frowned. What the hell ...? Jack, I have no idea what you’re—’

‘Collecting soil samples, she told me. Seems you wanted her to get them so you could narrow down a location for this
Inferno
madman! My daughter is not your personal slave, Steel, nor should she be a sacrificial lamb!’

Reilly’s head spun. When had she asked Lucy, or indeed any of the techs, to go off and do something like that?

‘Jack, honestly I would never ask any one of my staff to—’

‘She may be only “staff” to you, but she’s my daughter,’ Gorman fumed, but the tremor in his voice betrayed to Reilly just how worried he’d been about Lucy, and rightly so. They might have a difficult relationship, but there was no doubting how much the older Gorman cared for his daughter.

‘I know that, and believe me when I say—’

‘She was wandering around an abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere,’ he blustered. ‘A local who knew the place was unoccupied passed by and saw the car in the driveway, reporting it as suspicious. Thank God he did.  Who knew what dangers she might have walked into?’

‘Jack, honestly, I had absolutely no idea that she’d taken it upon herself to go and investigate. I knew she’d isolated the samples to a particular area, and we were discussing looking into it further, but only in a general sense. I would never, ever ask something like that, let alone agree to it.’

He shook his head. ‘You and your fancy FBI career, making it all sound like some sort of snazzy Hollywood movie. It’s a tough fucking world out there, Steel, full of sick bastards who are only looking for an opportunity to—’

‘Where is she now?’

‘At home. Where I want her to stay until I get to the bottom of this. Can you imagine my horror when I got a call from the sergeant in Kildare yesterday evening? Can you just imagine?’

Reilly could imagine only too well the kind of terror Jack had felt, and the scenarios he’d been envisioning. Such nightmarish thoughts would be even more vivid for someone in this business, who knew only too well the dangers that lurked.

‘Let me just say again that I’m as surprised and upset about this as you are,’ she persisted. ‘Lucy is one of the most valuable members of my team, not to mention how much I admire her personally. I would never, ever, knowingly put her in harm’s way, Jack. If you feel I’m responsible for this, then I will happily take responsibility for it, but also for ensuring that it never happens again. Let me talk to her.’

The color on his face receded somewhat.  He looked at Reilly. ‘It’s all very well to show them the fun side of things, Steel, but we also need to remind them that fighting crime is nothing like it is on TV. All this virtual reality stuff too; they’re so focused on that that they’re completely ignoring the reality. You’ve been around the block long enough to know that they need to be aware of the dangers.’

Reilly nodded. Gorman had a point. She guessed she did have a tendency, particularly in training sessions, to lead the team towards the more interesting, sometimes more glamorous side of forensics. iSPI was a case in point.

But perhaps it was her way of shielding them in some small way from the harsh realities of the job. Hell knew she found these tough enough herself to deal with at times.

‘You’re right and I’m sorry,’ she conceded again. ‘I’ll talk to Lucy, and I promise that nothing like this will ever happen again.’

‘Good enough.’ Gorman seemed satisfied. He looked away into the distance. ‘Because believe me, Steel, dealing with an angry parent has nothing on dealing with a grieving one.’

Chris sat up, bleary-eyed and shivering. He was on the couch, a thin blanket half draped over him. The insistent ringing of his mobile phone had finally woken him. 

‘Chris, where the hell are you?’ Kennedy growled.

‘I’m ...’ He glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was ten a.m. ‘I’m running a bit late this morning.’

His partner sounded surprised. ‘Well, you picked a great day for it. A package arrived last night. I think we have a present from our man.’

Chris eyes widened. ‘The Punisher?’

‘Don’t you start ...’

Chris snapped his phone shut, and rubbed his hand across his face.

He felt like he’d taken a pounding from a group of hammer-wielding dwarfs the night before. Last night, he’d enjoyed the glass of wine in the restaurant so much that he’d picked up a bottle on his way home, hoping it would relax him, help him sleep a little. The wine bottle sat on the table; it was about empty.

There was no doubt that the alcohol was exacerbating the joint pain too. He looked at his hands, which were trembling as usual, and felt his bones ache as he sat up. He stared at the wine bottle.

Maybe he should have a quick one before he went to work, just to take the edge off?

Kennedy looked up as Chris hurried in. He’d shaved and put on a clean shirt but by his partner’s expression Chris figured his face still showed the ravages of the pain he’d been suffering the night before.

‘I thought
I
looked bad this morning.’

Chris forced a smile, hoping he wouldn’t push it. ‘Cheers ...’

‘Hey, I was just kidding.  Seriously, are you all right?’