by Casey Hill
His gaze scanned the photographs for any sign of her companion. ‘Who can tell?’
It was difficult to match any of the males in the photos to the dead guy, given that most of his head had been obliterated.
Kennedy studied the photos with him. ‘Once her ID is confirmed, it should make it easier to identify the boyfriend – he was probably a student too.’ He wandered over to the window, gazed out across the bay. ‘Who’d buy a college kid a swanky place like this?’
‘Good investment for the parents and they know their kid is living somewhere safe – or at least that’s what they would have hoped.’
He and Kennedy would need to talk to Clare Ryan’s college friends and fellow students. Hopefully they’d be able to shed some light on who the guy was and maybe why he had done what he did. The obvious theory was that he was the jealous type. Clare had been a good-looking girl, that much was evident from the photographs. Slim, with big brown eyes and an engaging smile, chances were the pretty brunette had turned more than a few heads on campus and that might have pissed off Prince Charming.
Or perhaps he’d been a previous Prince Charming and the guy had taken the break-up very badly. There were a few scenarios but no point in surmising at this stage, Chris thought, at least not until they found out more about Clare Ryan and her dead companion.
The detectives headed back toward the bedroom, but found their passage blocked by one of the uniforms.
‘Sorry, I can’t let you in,’ the officer said, his tone apologetic. ‘No one’s allowed in for the moment.’
‘What?’ Kennedy frowned. ‘What are you talking about? Of course we’re going in.’
The officer looked uncomfortable. ‘There’s nothing I can do for the minute,’ he said, giving a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘She’ll murder me.’
‘Who will?’ Chris asked. ‘Dr Thompson? She should be finished by now – she was almost done when I saw her a few minutes ago.’
‘No, not her,’ the uniform answered, ‘that new one from the crime lab – the American. She ordered everyone out and warned me not to let anyone into the room until she’s finished.’
‘Finished doing what?’ Kennedy asked, straining to see past him. Then his eyes widened as he caught sight of something through the doorway. ‘What the hell?’ he spat, turning to Chris in astonishment.
They peered inside. Reilly Steel was standing in the middle of the bedroom with her eyes closed and her arms wide open.
‘Looks like she’s doing some kind of yoga chant or something,’ Kennedy snorted in derision.
‘That’s not it,’ said a young female crime tech standing nearby. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘She does this all the time, draws on her instincts, uses her senses to see if she can recreate the scene in her mind.’ As she spoke, there was admiration in her voice.
‘Touchy-feely crap,’ Kennedy rolled his eyes.
‘I don’t think it is actually, Detective,’ the woman replied. ‘In the States her solve-assist rate was over 80 per cent.’
Chris had read this somewhere too. While Reilly Steel evidently had some unorthodox methods, her investigative record spoke for itself. Still, he thought with a grin, there was no getting away from the fact that this ‘touchy-feely crap’ would raise a few eyebrows in this neck in the woods, and it clearly wasn’t going down too well with Kennedy.
‘Yeah, well,’ his partner muttered, ‘if she thinks the rest of us are going to sniff our way through this investigation, she’s got another bloody think coming.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ a female voice replied from behind him. ‘Besides, I doubt that whiskey nose of yours can detect much these days.’
Realizing that Steel had left the bedroom and overheard him, Kennedy’s neck reddened and his face instantly turned a brighter shade of puce.
‘Yeah, well … we couldn’t get in …’ he babbled.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, extending a hand. ‘Reilly Steel, GFU. I take it you’re the assigned detective?’
‘We both are,’ Chris replied. ‘This is Pete Kennedy and I’m Chris Delaney. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Pleasure,’ she said with a bright smile.
OK, Chris thought, so he’d seen the press release photos and heard all the blond jokes but bloody hell … Considering her unglamorous occupation, Reilly Steel was a stunner. Her huge sea-blue eyes shone with a bright intensity and her lightly bronzed skin stood out in marked contrast to the white clinical cap she was wearing. Beneath it, he knew there was a mane of honey-blond hair, but despite her obvious beauty, or perhaps because of it, he could tell instantly that she was sharp and uncompromising.
‘Well, I’ve pretty much finished my erm … touchy-feely stuff,’ she said, a glint of amusement in her eye, ‘and the ME’s done her thing, but we’ve still got a bit of work to do in there.’ She moved back to the bedroom. ‘You guys can come in – as long as you don’t get in my way,’ she added, looking sideways at Kennedy.
‘No problem.’ The older detective remained uncharacteristically muted as they followed her back inside.
‘Have you found anything out of the ordinary?’ Chris asked.
She moved to the foot of the bed. ‘We won’t know for sure until autopsy, but judging by the entry wound …’ she indicated Clare Ryan, whose body was now being carefully zipped into a black polythene body bag, ‘… the girl was shot in the chest from less than two feet. Point-blank range.’
She moved around, re-enacting the crime as she did. ‘It looks like he was standing at the foot of the bed when he fired the first shot, then lay down beside her before finishing himself off. Chances are she was still breathing at the time.’
Chris agreed. The amount of blood that had pooled beneath the girl suggested that she hadn’t died instantly. ‘He seemed to do a much better job on himself, though,’ he added, his tone grim as he glanced at what was left of the young man’s head. ‘Not exactly Romeo and Juliet.’
‘No.’ Reilly bent down and picked up her forensic toolbox. ‘We’ll do a tox screen on the blood – see if it’s a case of a trip gone bad or something.’
‘Thanks, we’d be grateful for anything you could give us,’ he said, ignoring Kennedy’s disapproving gaze. His partner – like much of the force – was still largely sceptical about forensics, preferring instead to rely on good old-fashioned detective work and let the lab people back up their findings instead of the other way round.
‘Chances are it’s drug related, though. What isn’t these days?’ Kennedy grumbled.
‘Well, I’d rather reserve judgement until we know more,’ Reilly replied. ‘I’ll take a closer look at what we’ve got when we get back to the lab, though I’ll be honest, it doesn’t seem to be all that much. Of course, we’ve got a couple of cartridges to process, along with the weapon. Speaking of which …’ She snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and moved toward the gun, which could be safely retrieved now that the victims’ bodies had been removed.
A gaggle of police officers had gathered in the room, grateful for the chance to be around something more interesting. Bit by bit, the majority had drifted back in once the pathologist had left and the victims’ bodies were removed.
‘Hey, can you guys stand back and give me some room?’ Reilly asked, impatiently.
Realizing what she was about to do, Fitzgerald, the younger officer with whom the detectives had spoken earlier, quickly reached inside his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, proudly presenting a pencil to her, ‘you’ll need this.’
Kennedy chuckled. ‘What? Is she supposed to draw a picture of it or something?’
The younger man looked at him blankly. ‘But don’t you have to pick up the gun without handling it?’ he asked, no longer quite so confident. ‘In order to … you know … protect fingerprints and that?’
‘You’ve been watching way too much TV,’ Reilly said indulgently, taking the pencil and putting it aside. ‘If I used your pencil to pick it up, I might disturb any gunpowder deposits o
r dirt lodged in the barrel. Dislodged dirt could alter striation markings on test-fired bullets and we don’t want to do that, do we?’ she added, in the manner of someone speaking to a 5-year-old.
‘Um, no, I suppose not.’ Fitzgerald looked almost sorry he’d asked.
‘But you’re right, of course, we are worried about protecting prints,’ she went on, beckoning him forward to observe what she was doing, while the others kept out of her way. She knelt down by the bed and indicated for the officer to kneel beside her. ‘But if I hold the weapon there,’ she pointed to the butt of the gun, ‘see the chequered part of the grip?’ The rookie nodded, his attention firmly fixed on the weapon. ‘Now, this part has such an uneven striation that it won’t retain any identifiable prints, so it’s fine to handle it here. Not to mention that it’s the safest way to do it – I don’t want the damn thing to accidentally discharge on me, either.’ She slowly and cautiously lifted the gun up off the bed. Lesson over, she beckoned one of the others to help her safely prepare the gun for processing.
Fitzgerald looked at Reilly Steel with something approaching pure adoration. Chris smiled. Whatever the older guys in the force might think, the latest member of the GFU clearly had a set of fans amongst the younger generation.
3
Reilly sat at her desk, her features screwed up in an expression of intense concentration as she studied the crime-scene inventory for the Clare Ryan case. It was a couple of days after the shooting and nearly all the staff had long since left for the day.
To most people, the clinical setting and the oppressive silence – broken only by the low hum of the machinery – would feel eerie and discomfiting. For Reilly, however, the peace and quiet of late evening was her preferred time to work.
Now that everyone had gone home, she was free from the noisy distractions of twenty or so laboratory staff laboring all around her. The silence allowed her more time to work, more time to think, and tonight it might allow her uncover what it was about this shooting that had been niggling at her for the last two days.
She’d sensed from the start that something wasn’t right but so far had found nothing out of the ordinary amongst the evidence to back this feeling up. The two things she trusted most during an investigation were evidence and instinct. And since leaving that scene, Reilly’s instincts were screaming that something was seriously amiss.
Gorman would have laughed if she’d tried to explain this to him. The long-time incumbent, he was head of the old forensic department and hadn’t exactly been over the moon about her appointment, or the setting up of the new unit in general. She was glad that the old man would be away on vacation for a while; it gave her an opportunity to run this case the way she wanted – the way she was trained to do back home.
Since she’d arrived at the GFU, he’d tried to put her in her place, inferring that her job was just to oversee work in the lab, and that she should have little or no interference in what he was doing, or had done, up to now. While this was true to a degree, from what Reilly had seen, the older man’s current methods were pretty half-hearted and pedantic considering it was such an important role, and the old dog had no interest in new tricks.
On top of it, Gorman had an unbelievable ego – something she’d at least been forewarned about before she got here. Like many traditional scientists, he seemed to operate under the belief that his word was gospel and he was also a condescending old chauvinist – something she could handle were he not such a sloppy investigator with it. Still she resented the way he spoke to the female staff, particularly Lucy, who was a real sweetie and Reilly knew was routinely wounded by her superior’s dismissiveness.
But, office politics aside, Reilly also had to deal with the force’s natural resistance to an ‘outsider’, to say nothing of the inevitable dumb blond jokes. She shook her head, recalling how, on her very first day at the office, she’d come out of a morning meeting to find a crimson Baywatch-style swimsuit laid out on her desk. No doubt the culprit and his buddies found it hilarious but it was water off a duck’s back to Reilly; she’d had to deal with a lot worse back in her FBI student days.
She looked again at the evidence for the Ryan homicide. This was one of the first scenes she’d managed to co-ordinate entirely on her own, outside of Gorman’s interference. Without him breathing down her neck, she’d had as much time as she wanted to run the scene in as much detail as possible. And plenty of time to apply her ‘touchy-feely’ techniques, she thought, biting back a smile as she recalled the reaction that had gotten.
It was something she’d learned and perfected at Quantico. Her lecturer, Rob Crichton, one of the best forensic investigators in the business, had drilled into his recruits the importance of the three-dimensional crime scene. She smiled fondly, recalling the now deceased Crichton – an anti-personnel device at a perp’s apartment having put an end to the life of one of the best criminalists she’d ever had the fortune to work with. Although his death was a tragedy, she figured that Rob would have appreciated the irony of his body being blown to smithereens. He himself finally becoming the physical evidence he’d spent much of his life collecting.
‘Your senses are there for a reason, people,’ he used to say. ‘Never, ever discount them.’
While Reilly had initially been sceptical, she soon discovered when she applied Rob’s painstaking methods that she had an unusually keen sense of smell – something that had been invaluable in almost every case she worked. For some reason, she was particularly attuned to perfume and could draw easily on her inner database of various fragrance brands and body creams. For example, she knew that the ME, Karen Thompson, favored Red Door by Elizabeth Arden, and that Carol, the GFU receptionist, routinely wore CK One. Oddly, she’d noticed that Chanel No. 5, the American woman’s favourite had a far less fervent following on this side of the Atlantic.
Either way, her instincts had served her well in the past and she wasn’t about to discard them just because some red-nosed Irish cop thought they were dumb and irrelevant. All mouth and little substance; Reilly could eat a guy like Kennedy for breakfast – not that she wanted to, she thought, shuddering at the notion. He seemed OK, just old school. She’d heard his partner’s name mentioned a few times over the last couple of months; Chris Delaney seemed to have a good reputation within the force, and unlike some of his more conservative colleagues, also seemed to be well disposed toward the GFU. She figured that those dark, almost Mediterranean looks must work well when it came to extracting information – particular from the female side of the population – although from what little she knew about him, he didn’t seem the type to play on that. And in contrast to Kennedy, he certainly hadn’t given her any attitude that morning, and seemed happy to take on board anything significant the lab might come up with.
Which, at the moment, wasn’t exactly much.
They’d sent blood samples off for a toxicology screen which, if they came back positive, might – for the shooter at least – go some way toward explaining his actions. However, with the speed the labs worked at, who knew when she’d get those back.
They’d also collected the usual – fingerprints, trace, and fibers – which were now being analyzed. Ballistics were in possession of the gun and cartridges, and Reilly was planning on calling down there the following morning to see if they’d come up with anything of interest.
In the meantime, she was doing what she did best, going over the scene in her mind, trying to recreate the kill, taking into account the evidence they’d uncovered, and hoping for something, anything, that might just help move this case forward.
But so far, all Reilly could come up with was that something didn’t feel right.
She sat forward in her seat and for the umpteenth time picked up the photos of the victims taken at the scene before their removal. Again, she studied the blood and brain spatter on the headboard; much of the gray matter had spewed over the dead girl’s face and hair – some even landing as far away as the pile of books on her bedside table. The b
lowback blood droplets on the headboard and wall behind were to be expected, traveling in the opposite direction to the path of the bullet. Her gaze moved downward to the gun’s resting position on the bed where it had ended up after falling out of the dead shooter’s hand.
What was it? she thought, kneading her forehead in the vain hope that the answer might somehow be released. What was it that about this whole situation that was bothering her? Given the gun’s caliber, trajectory and shooting distance, as well as the residue found on the guy’s hand, the results all looked consistent, yet there was something telling her that there was more to this, that she was missing something. Something important.
But what?
Chasing evidence, hoping to find answers – sometimes Reilly felt it was all she’d been doing her whole life.
For some reason, Chris always felt like a naughty schoolboy talking to the state pathologist. Karen Thompson was typically so brusque and businesslike (and so damn creepy) that he felt intimidated in her presence.
When he stepped into her office, she was just finishing up a phone call and waved at him to sit down. Lowering himself into a chair, he looked around. Everything was immaculate, orderly, organized – he’d bet even the books were alphabetized.
The dead girl had been positively identified as Clare Ryan. She was twenty-two years old, in her final year studying psychology at UCD, and as far as her distraught parents were concerned, was ‘way too busy with her studies’ to have had time for a boyfriend.
‘Too busy studying. How many times have I heard that one?’ Kennedy muttered when they’d finished interviewing the parents the day after the shooting. ‘And what kind of numbskull parents would believe that a looker like her wouldn’t have guys sniffing round her?’
Chris shrugged. ‘So, they didn’t know everything that was going on in her life – it’s not that unusual. Not everyone has the same approach to parenting as you do.’ Kennedy had two teenage daughters and, from what Delaney had seen over the years, was a strict taskmaster. ‘Anyway, all we’ve established so far is that they didn’t think Clare had a boyfriend. And if she did have one, her college friends will likely know who she was seeing.’
