by Hill, Casey
That thought, at least, heartened her, although it didn’t do much to counter the feeling of not belonging that she was experiencing.
As the meeting broke up, Steve Jacobs caught up with her outside in the hallway. ‘Again, I’m sorry you ended up in that position yesterday,’ he said. ‘It really should have been me in there.’
She gave an embarrassed half-smile. ‘I’m sure you would have handled it very differently.’
‘Not really – we got everyone out alive which is always the best possible outcome. But it was a very difficult situation nonetheless. You have great natural instincts, Reilly. If you ever fancy a change of career, let me know.’
She shook her head. ‘No thanks, way too stressful. To be honest I much prefer the lab.’
As she and Jacobs said their goodbyes, she thought back to the case she’d been working on just before this one.
Based on her evidence, Brian McGavin had been arrested and charged with attempted murder for leaving his wife in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Following her examination of the house and the bloody fingerprint she had found, the local police had since uncovered the bloody end of a milk bottle underneath a patch of shrubs behind the house.
That felt like a win, and technically it was no different from following the evidence from the hit-and-run site and winding up with McAllister in custody and the girls in the hands of Social Services.
She tried reminding herself of what she had been taught from day one – her job had nothing to do with the morals of each case; nothing to do with right and wrong. She just followed the evidence, and let the judges and the courts decide who was guilty and who was innocent.
So why did it all feel so pointless?
As it was, the events of the last week had convinced her of one thing – she needed a break, needed to put some distance between herself and the job for a while, be it to join Mike and Maura on their trip back home next month or maybe take Daniel up on his offer of a visit to the Gulf Coast.
The question was, could she do it? Was she actually capable of turning her back, albeit temporarily, on the only thing that seemed to give her life meaning?
Reilly took a deep breath and got in the van to head back towards the GFU, where it seemed another conundrum awaited, this one at the home of a man who made a living out of making wigs out of human hair. Whether the donors were willing or otherwise was yet to be determined.
One investigation over, another already in the pipeline.
Story of her life.
Chapter 46
The following day, Reilly stood outside the small terraced house. She had driven out there on her own, the windows of the car rolled down, the throttle pushed hard despite the slick, wet roads. In truth she was glad to get back to the ‘normality’ of working a crime scene, even though it was still a mystery as to what crime had taken place.
The others would be along soon, but until they arrived she had a few minutes to herself. A uniformed officer opened the door for her, and she stepped inside.
As she looked around, as she breathed in, she felt everything else slowly wash away. Sarah Forde, Ellie and the other children … a possible vacation …Daniel’s offer … Chris … all of it just disappeared. She was ready.
The house was cold – it had stood vacant for a couple of days at least – but there was more to it than that. There was a cold that had seeped into the walls, a coldness of spirit. It was unloved, and despite its immaculate, clean condition, was also uncared for. Everything that had been done here had been done in a precise, clinical fashion.
Reilly stepped down the gloomy corridor, flashlight in her hand. She shone the beam down at the skirting boards. Gary was right – dust free. It was the cleanest house she had ever been in.
The strangeness of the scene that Lucy and Gary had described in the attic meant it would have to be her first port of call.
She climbed up the ladder that had been left in place, and seeing a hand lamp beside the hatch opening, she flicked the switch.
Even though their findings had been described in great detail by the others, it was still unsettling, the blank expressions and dead eyes of the heads making her feel uncomfortable.
She looked around and noticed something strange. The mannequin heads seemed to have been arranged in order of hair color: brown, blond and red from top shelf to bottom. Her eyes lingered on the bottom shelf, and her mind again turned to the three frightened red-haired girls now in state care. Reilly reached out and touched the hair on one of the heads, holding it between her latex-covered fingers.
It was indeed human.
Where had the hair come from, who had it come from, and why was the house practically wiped clean and yet the wigs left behind? If this guy knew they might come he must also have known they’d find these … his trophies?
She left the attic and headed downstairs to the living room, although that was a misnomer. No one had lived here for a very long time. Most houses took on the personality of the owner, but it was hard to see it in this one. Whoever this guy was, he had left little trace of himself here – no pictures, no CDs, or movies, just a couple of old books and magazines.
But in abandoning the house like this, he had also inadvertently left his imprint all over it. His cold and clinical hand was in every clean surface, every empty shelf, every bare cupboard.
The door opened and Lucy and Gary tumbled in, laughing at something or other – but as soon as they were inside, their laughter stopped.
The house did that to you.
They stepped into the living room, quiet, eager. ‘So what do you think … have you been up in the attic?’
‘Yes and I’ve taken some pictures. We’ll bag and tag each head separately so we know exactly their position on the shelves, just in case they’re in a specific order aside from the color. I just wanted to check out the rest of the house before starting into that.’
‘So what are we looking for?’ Gary asked. ‘We’ve already been through it and, like I said, it seems pretty clean.’
‘The things he doesn’t want us to find,’ Reilly replied, her face grim.
He raised his eyebrows and she looked at him. ‘Don’t you feel it?’
Gary didn’t reply but Lucy nodded.
‘Something happened here,’ Reilly continued, ‘even without the blood splatter Lucy found, we would have known that. This house has secrets, secrets it doesn’t want us to know about.’ She looked around the living room. ‘Just look at it. It’s not bad décor, but it’s deliberate, a deliberate attempt by somebody to separate himself from the house, from the things he did here.’
Lucy shivered. ‘I felt that too.’
Gary looked less convinced, but he knew Reilly well enough to trust her instincts – the fine attunement that had come from her experience and training. She was seeing things he wasn’t, even if she couldn’t yet identify what they were.
Somehow, at a subconscious level, the little things present in a house like this spoke to her. ‘So where do we begin to find the things like that?’
‘Under the floorboards, the cupboard under the stairs, the back of the wardrobes – where would you hide something in this house if you didn’t want people to find it?’
Gary nodded. ‘I’ll start in the kitchen.’
Reilly turned to Lucy. ‘Why don’t you show me the bathroom?’
Lucy led the way up the stairs, happy to show off her good work. They stopped in the doorway – there was a faint light coming in from the thick opaque window.
‘It was mostly up that wall,’ she said, ‘as though someone had hit their head on the sink, maybe?’
Reilly nodded. The photos Lucy had taken of the luminol were still clear in her mind, she could see them almost as clearly as if the blood was there, splattered up the tiled wall. ‘Thanks. Why don’t you help Gary downstairs? I’ll check out the bedrooms.’
Lucy duly trotted down the stairs and Reilly gave the bathroom one more glance before heading into the bedroom.
It was as bland as the rest of the house, faded wallpaper, sun-bleached curtains with a faint flower pattern on them, the small bed messed up where Lucy had already checked it for residual body fluids.
She opened the small wardrobe, empty now that all of the clothes had been taken away for processing. All that remained was the smell of mothballs. She touched the back panel, tapped lightly up and down, side to side. Nothing untoward. She checked the bottom of the wardrobe in the same manner; again nothing stood out.
Little by little she carried out her examination – checked for creaking floorboards, the underside of the bed, lost in the world she preferred most of all, thinking, assessing, searching…
Gary’s heavy footsteps disturbed her from her reverie. ‘Nothing in the kitchen, just like before,’ he reported. ‘Lucy’s checking the living room – I was wondering, should I check out the garage?’
Standing on the stairs, Reilly nodded. ‘Sure, why not. And at some point, when it’s not so wet, we’ll need to check the garden too.’
‘OK.’ He bounded off.
He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked back, something catching his eye beside where Reilly was standing.
‘Hey, that power socket beside you, it looks pretty clean … new, almost.’
She looked at the electrical socket.
‘And the screw heads are a little ‘used’ for a new socket.’ Gary came back up and took a flip-out screwdriver from his pocket.
Selecting the Phillips head, he gently started to turn the first screw anti-clockwise, and Reilly noted that the grooves in the head of the other screw was indeed damaged from either overuse or a incorrect driver being used.
He unscrewed the second screw and then gently gripped the double socket to pull it back, expecting to feel the resistance of the attached wires.
Instead it came away in his hands.
He set the socket cover down and tugged the carpet back further so that Reilly could see – there was a panel cut into the stair with a small metal handle recessed into it. Gary reached for it.
‘Gloves …’
He grabbed the gloves that Reilly tossed him, and waited while she repositioned herself and took several photos of the covering.
‘What have you guys got?’ Lucy stood in the doorway of the living room looking up at them.
‘A dummy socket on the landing,’ Reilly explained quickly. She leaned over the hole and shone her flashlight inside. Then she reached in and pulled out a clear plastic bag with items inside.
Gary was smiling. ‘Nice one…’
Lucy hurried up the stairs and stood behind them, eager to see what they had found.
Reilly opened the bag. It looked like a collection of various bits and pieces, perhaps nothing all that interesting after all.
Then, quickly realizing what she was looking at, she paused. ‘Looks like we were wrong about the wigs being trophies.’ She began sifting through the hidden items – a hairbrush, a mobile phone, a bracelet, a necklace …
But catching sight of one item in particular, she felt a cold shiver run down her spine. And just then Reilly wished she were anywhere else but here, looking at anything other than what she was seeing. Although ironically this very discovery meant that any vacation plans would have to be put on the back burner for a while.
Lucy was watching at her. ‘Reilly? Are you all right?’
Gary, too, was giving her strange looks; he had never seen her look so rattled. ‘What’s wrong?’
And as the details of the missing person document she had only recently read burned through her brain, she struggled to comprehend the implications of what she was holding in her hand.
A distinctive piece of jewelry …
‘Reilly?’
Her heart heavy, Reilly stared at the thin silver necklace, a single star-shaped pendant attached.
The same kind Grace Gorman had been wearing the day she disappeared.
THE END
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TABOO – Casey Hill
Forensic investigator Reilly Steel, Quantico-trained and California-born and bred, imagined Dublin to be a far cry from bustling San Francisco, a sleepy backwater where she can lay past ghosts to rest and start anew.
She's arrived in Ireland to drag the Irish crime lab into the 21st century, plus keep tabs on her Irish-born father who's increasingly seeking solace in the bottle after a past family tragedy.
But a brutal serial killer soon puts paid to that.
When a young man and woman are found dead in an apartment, the gunshot wounds on their naked bodies suggest a suicide pact.
But Reilly's instincts are screaming that something's seriously amiss, and as more bodies are discovered, the team soon realises that a twisted murderer is at work, one who seeks to upset society's norms in the most sickening way imaginable...
Download TABOO
INFERNO – Casey Hill
Read the clues. Decode the science. Reveal the murderer. That's Reilly Steel's mantra. Find the answers, solve the crime.
But the Quantico-trained forensic investigator is finding her skills aren't enough when a ferociously intelligent killer strikes Dublin.
The modus operandi is as perplexing as it is macabre. What connects the two seemingly disparate, high-profile victims?
Their corpses refuse to give up their secrets and the crime scenes prove a forensic investigator's worst nightmare. Reilly soon suspects that she may be dealing with a killer - or killers - who know all about crime scene investigation.
The police are just as frustrated by the crimes' impenetrable nature and it's only when a third murder occurs - equally graphic and elaborate in its execution - that they discover that this particular killer is using a very specific blueprint for his crimes.
Who is the killer's next victim, the real target? And what's his endgame?
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