Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (40 page)

Chapter 3

Detective Pete Kennedy  climbed slowly out of the silver Ford Mondeo and looked around. ‘A lonely place to be wandering around at night,’ he said to no one in particular.

A younger cop hurried over to meet him. ‘Davis,’ he informed Kennedy.  ‘We were first on the scene.’

Kennedy nodded and pulled a packet of John Player Blue cigarettes from his pocket. He opened it and popped one between his lips. ‘Hit and run, we were told.’  The cigarette dangled as he talked. The driver’s side door opened and Delaney jumped out, slipping his arms into a crumpled waterproof jacket with ‘Garda’ written on the back of it.

‘Certainly looks that way,’ Davis replied. ‘Body’s just over here. You should take a look at ... well, it’s just weird,’ he mumbled, leading them towards the scene of the accident, as the detectives exchanged glances.

They approached the body that was lying on the road. Chris bent down to look more closely at the dead girl, while Kennedy finished his cigarette, steeling himself for  yet another look at death in the face. 

‘Where do you think she might have come from?’ he asked Davis.

The other man shrugged.  ‘Not much around here, apart from a couple of farms. Roundwood village isn’t too far away.’

‘Are there ever any parties, raves, whatever you call them, out this direction?’

Davis couldn’t keep the smile from his face. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that out here.’

Kennedy nodded and puffed on his cigarette. ‘Well,  this is your home turf. Got any ideas?’

Davis wanted to say something insightful – it wasn’t every day that a city detective asked him for an opinion – but in truth he was as puzzled as anyone else. ‘To be honest, I don’t. The couple who found her say it was like she just appeared out of nowhere.’

Kennedy grunted.  ‘Of course they did.’ Carefully quenching his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, he placed the half-smoked butt back into the pack. ‘If there’s one thing we can be sure of,’ he said, standing straight and pulling up his trousers, ‘it’s that she didn’t fall out of the sky.’ He bent down to where his partner crouched beside the body. ‘Well, any ideas?’

Chris replied without looking up. ‘She may not have fallen from the sky but she sure did have wings,’ he said, gently pulling back the clothing on the dead girl’s shoulders to reveal a large, intricate tattoo. ‘I’m guessing this is what you meant by weird,’ he said to Davis, who nodded.

‘Christ, that’s a lot of ink.’  Kennedy’s gaze followed the beam of light from the other cop’s torch, revealing artwork which completely covered the girl’s upper back. The blueish tinged lines were fine, sweeping the wings upwards from near the base of her spine to fan outwards as they reached her waist, eventually covering almost the whole of her upper back.  ‘An out-and-out fallen angel.’

‘She certainly got hit by somebody,’ Chris commented, pointing out the contusions, tarmac burns and dirt etched into her skin. ‘The question is, was she alive or dead when she was hit?’

‘We’ll have to wait for the ME before we know that.’ Kennedy groaned as he got up from his haunches. ‘So did she walk here or was she dumped?’

Chris directed his flashlight down to the girl’s ankles, careful to touch nothing.  As the light played across her bare feet it revealed a layer of mud and gravel smeared across the soles, blades of grass sticking in places. ‘She’s certainly walked some way,’ he observed.

Kennedy was still gazing around. ‘Is there a hospital around here, a residential home, anything like that?’ he asked Davis.

The officer nodded.  ‘There’s a sheltered housing place over near Newtownmountkennedy. I think it’s a sort of respite facility for special needs people, Down’s Syndrome and the like.’

They all gazed at the dead girl’s face. There was no sign of the typical physical characteristics of Down’s – the flatter face, the upward slanting eyes. In fact she had elfin features, a small mouth, a dainty nose, chiseled cheekbones.  Combined with her flowing red hair you would have thought her quite beautiful had you seen her in any other circumstance. What would lead such a young woman to be wandering a lonely country road in the middle of the night in nothing but a thin cotton dress?  Her delicate features bore a look of deep sadness; it was hard to imagine that events leading up to her death had been anything other than tragic.

‘That would still be quite a walk,’ observed Kennedy.  ‘Even cross country it’s got to be what ... five miles or more?’

‘And barefoot.’  Chris gently touched the edge of her nightdress and rubbed it between finger and thumb. ‘It’s pretty damp – she must have been out in the rain for quite some time.’

He looked out across the dark fields. Before she was hit, the dead girl could have come from anywhere, a hundred yards or five miles away. Out in the darkness lay hundreds of solitary houses, dozens of farms, several villages ... and that was assuming she had walked here. If she had been dumped then their search area expanded almost infinitely.

‘The ground is more damp than wet though, and it’s a mountain mist in the air rather than rain.’

Chris looked at Davis.  ‘Better check out the local houses. Some parent might wake in the morning not realising their kid has gone sleep-walking in the night.’

But something told him this was no accident.

Kennedy pulled out his unfinished cigarette again and tapped it thoughtfully against the packet. ‘So what now?’

‘Better talk to the couple who found her, then wait for Thompson to give us a COD. Forensics are on their way too so let’s see if Reilly and the crew come up with anything.’

Kennedy gave a deep sigh. ‘Is that what it’s come down to now? We just sit on our hands and wait for the science guys to throw us crumbs?’

Chris shrugged. His partner was old-school, and increasingly apprehensive about the more scientific bent to police investigation these days. He could understand his frustration, but there was no denying that developments in forensics and crime scene investigation helped considerably.

‘For the moment it would also be worth our while calling at houses within a couple of miles of here, to see if they saw or heard anything unusual while it’s still fresh in the memory. Like I said, maybe there’s a simple explanation.’

Kennedy gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You’re not serious about the sleep walking thing.’

‘There’s only one way to find out: some good old-fashioned detective work. Aren’t you the one constantly complaining about the lack of it?’

‘Let the locals handle that; at least they will know the neighbors. We roll up to some farmhouse at this hour in an unmarked car and we’ll be running the gauntlet of guard dogs and farmers with shotguns. People don’t live out here in the sticks because they want to be disturbed in the middle of the night, you know.’

Chris wrinkled his nose. ‘Fair point. But for the moment, the tattoo seems like the only decent lead we’ve got in terms of ID. Let the GFU in to take a photo, upload it to the lab, and within a few minutes one of the techs will be comparing it with every known piece of ink from Ballymun to Bangkok.’

Kennedy might decry the GFU’s ‘toys’, but an interactive device Reilly had been beta-testing for one of her old Quantico workmates had proved its worth on recent cases. The device, called iSPI, enabled fast and accurate re-enactment of crime scene details with 3D imagery, and provided a mine of information that sped up the investigative process.  iSPI  would almost certainly be able to indicate in which direction the girl was traveling at the time she was hit, and exactly where on the road the fatal impact had occurred. If she had indeed been killed this way.

It was merely one of many nifty gadgets the GFU had at their disposal. Now almost three years in existence, and with a propensity for indepth analysis and, more importantly, fast results, the  purpose-built forensic unit headed by Reilly Steel had improved the force’s abilities no end.

It wasn’t appreciated by everyone, however.

Kennedy pulled his cigarette out of his mouth and stuffed it back into his pocket.  So much for trying to quit. ‘We’re becoming bloody errand boys you know, gofers for the scientists, that’s what we are,’ he grunted.  ‘They’ll be training monkeys to do our jobs soon, the way things are going ...’ 

Chris watched him out the corner of his eye as they walked towards the couple who’d discovered the body. In the four years or so that they had worked together he knew Kennedy’s moods well and was pretty sure that something other than ‘the scientists’ was bothering him.

The detectives briefly interviewed the couple who’d discovered the body before sending them to the local police station with Davis’s partner to obtain more detailed statements.

‘So are you going to tell me what’s got you so fired up today?’ he asked Kennedy eventually as they made their way back towards the body.

The detective said nothing, just took out the same cigarette and tapped it against the packet again. Chris was experienced enough as an interviewer and friend to allow him the space and time to organize his thoughts and answer when he was ready.

Kennedy relit the cigarette this time, took a puff and let out a deep sigh.  ‘Ah it’s nothing...’

Again Chris let the silence do its job, looking sideways at his partner as he fiddled with the filter of his cigarette.

‘It’s Josie.’

Josie was Kennedy’s wife, the bedrock upon which he rested, his safe haven after a day amongst the detritus of society. A few years older than her husband,  she had taken early retirement, and seemed happy to potter around the house and be there with a warm dinner and a pair of slippers when Kennedy came home from work more often than not drained and exhausted.

‘What’s up?’

‘She’s been having some stomach problems, they ran some tests...there’s something not right...’ He looked sideways at Chris, worry etched across his features.  ‘You always fear the worst, though, don’t you?’

Chris nodded.  ‘Human nature.  And the more the person means to you...’

Kennedy stared out across the dark field once more for a few moments, before turning abruptly back to Chris. ‘You hear that?’

Chris listened.  He could hear the faint sound of another vehicle approaching. ‘Car? So what?’

‘That’s not just a car, that’s a gearshift cranking one-eighty.’  He reached over and started straightening Chris’s leather jacket. ‘Miss Baywatch is on the way. Here, let me smarten you up a bit.’

‘Give it a rest.’ Chris immediately recognized the sharp switch in mood as a cue to drop the subject. It was characteristic of Kennedy to not let his guard drop for very long. Still, Chris made a mental note to keep an eye on his partner. Such concerns were potentially a dangerous distraction from the job, something he himself knew only too well.

‘I keep telling you,’ Kennedy was saying, ‘one of these days you might catch her in a weak moment, when she’s desperate and lowers her standards...’

Unlikely Chris thought, especially now. Right from the beginning, he and Reilly had had some kind of connection, and while at one point there might have been something brewing between them, he’d done something which disappointed her, and he knew it.

Back to his usual blustery self, Kennedy guffawed as the  headlights swept around the curves and Reilly Steel approached the scene. ‘Here comes trouble.’

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E
nd of excerpt

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Did you love
Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2)
? Then you should read
Hidden (CSI Reilly Steel #3)
by Casey Hill!

For fans of Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen and Patricia Cornwell

A Fallen Angel. A Devil on the Loose.

When a young girl is discovered dead on an isolated Irish country road, it seems at first glance to be a simple hit and run. Then the cops see the tattoo on her back - a pair of beautifully wrought angel wings that lend the victim a sense of ethereal innocence. Forensic investigator Reilly Steel is soon on the scene and her highly tuned sixth sense tells her there is more to this case than a straightforward murder.

But with almost zero evidence and no way to trace the girl's origin, Reilly and the police are at a loss. Then the angel tattoo is traced to other children - both dead and alive - who are similarly marked, and Reilly starts to suspect they have all been abducted by the same person. But why? And will Reilly get to the bottom of the mystery and uncover what links these children together before tragedy strikes again?