by Casey Hill
‘It’s certainly the most likely option, yes.’
Ockham’s razor …
‘And the other? Because I’ve known you long enough to tell that there’s something else on your mind, Daniel. Something you’re not telling me.’
Daniel’s voice was measured. ‘Whatever makes you say that? Clearly the killer has singled you out, dug up some information on your past and is using it to try and unsettle you. End of story.’
OK, so he wasn’t going to share his thoughts just yet, Reilly realized, at least not until he was sure of them. But there was something else Daniel was considering, she was certain of it. And whatever it was, she really hoped it wasn’t something that would necessitate digging up that troubled past and facing the pain of it afresh.
Two days later, Reilly was chomping at the bit to return to work. At the insistence of her lab boss, she’d taken a day off to recover from the attack and while she’d been adamant this wasn’t necessary, there was no arguing with him.
She hated having to cool her heels at home when there was a killer on the loose and had used much of the time researching Freud and taboos online. This morning she was itching to get back to the lab to find out what evidence the team had uncovered from the break-in but had been summoned to the incident room for an early meeting with Inspector O’Brien. She could hardly refuse given what had happened at the lab and. it was vital that communications and relationships between all strands of the investigative team were solid.
However, it was no secret that O’Brien was good friends with Jack Gorman, the senior forensic investigator, and was likely to find Reilly’s methods about as appealing as he did. Reilly just hoped Chris and Kennedy would be there to stick up for her.
Armed with a strong coffee and a stack of case files, she made her way to the main conference room at the station. She gave a sniff of disgust as she entered the room – even though a smoking ban had been in effect for a couple of years, decades of tobacco usage had permeated the carpet and the furniture and stained the ceiling yellow. The room stank of it.
As was her habit, Reilly was the first to arrive. She was a good ten minutes early, which gave her time to choose a seat on the far side of the room and get her files organized.
It was a little after eight-thirty when O’Brien rolled in, with Chris and Pete Kennedy right behind him. Reilly studied the older man as he made himself comfortable. She’d put him in his early fifties, thick salt and pepper hair, worn a little too long for his age. He’d probably had the same hairstyle since the Seventies, she mused. He had a round face, a country boy’s charm, but Reilly could tell that under the bluff exterior he was sharp – you didn’t get this far in the job without being something of a player. It took thick skin and good political skills to rise to the top.
He gave Reilly a charming smile. ‘Heard you had quite a week, Ms Steel. You feeling all right now?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
He turned straight to the detectives. ‘You boys turned up anything useful on the break-in?’
Kennedy shook his head. ‘Nope, the guy just disappeared, like a fucking ghost.’
‘No CCTV at street level?’
‘We’ve picked up about twenty seconds from the cameras in the street,’ Chris said. ‘The intruder left the lab and headed straight into the café across the road. No one matching that appearance reappeared.’
‘He would have been prepared,’ interjected Reilly.
O’Brien spun around on her. ‘Would he now? How do you figure that?’
‘Assuming he is our suspect, our perp is a meticulous planner – the murders tell us that.’ She leaned forward to make her point. ‘That little visit would have been planned for days – I would imagine there was a change of clothes stashed somewhere in that café, or a back door out of there, something along those lines.’
Chris nodded. ‘We checked out the café – it does have a back door, out past the loos. It was busy with breakfast trade at that time, anyone could have slipped out the back unnoticed.’
‘Where does the back door lead?’ O’Brien asked.
‘Back alleyway – again, no CCTV. From there, a person could have gone just about anywhere.’
O’Brien snorted in disgust. ‘I can’t believe we had a suspect right under our noses – in our own shaggin’ building – and we let him get away!’
‘Jesus Christ, Chief,’ Kennedy replied, defensively. ‘This person was armed, knew the territory, had the element of surprise in his favor—’
The rest of his sentence was cut off by a loud thump as O’Brien dropped a pile of newspapers on the table. Judging by the screaming headlines on the ones Reilly could see, the media had well and truly begun running with the serial killer angle.
‘Look at this shit!’ O’Brien thundered. ‘Taboo Killer! They even have a name for this gobshite now! And I’ll tell you one thing, if it gets out that there was a break-in at the lab, we’re in even deeper shit because they’ve the public thinking he’s running rings around us as it is.’
‘Sir—’
‘And what about the victims?’ he interjected, pointing at the front-page photographs of Gerry Watson and Clare Ryan. It could only have helped that these two victims in particular were younger and more attractive than poor old Sarah Miles and her aunt. There seemed to be no mention of Jim Redmond though, which meant that either they hadn’t realized his death was a part of this, or the manner of his death was simply not gratuitous enough for them. ‘What’s the connection?’ O’Brien thundered. ‘How is he finding them?’
Reilly looked at Chris. ‘We still don’t know that yet, sir,’ she replied. ‘Although based on what trace evidence we have, we’re thinking he might work in a vet’s practice, or maybe a lab somewhere – the lab identified traces of calcium sulphate at—’
‘Chalk dust?’ the older man sneered. ‘The state paid out millions for the fancy equipment the GFU have over there, and all you can come up with is feckin’ chalk dust?’
‘With respect, Chief,’ Kennedy began. ‘If it wasn’t for Steel we might not have made a link between the first two victims at all.’
Reilly looked at him, amazed at this concession. Meeting her eye, he gave her the briefest of winks.
‘Well that makes ye a shower of even worse imbeciles then, doesn’t it?’ He threw his pen down on top of the pile of newspapers. ‘Tell me,’ he demanded, his tone suddenly harsher, ‘if we know so much about this psycho how come we haven’t caught him yet?’ His gaze traveled the room, finally coming to rest on Reilly again. It was what she had been expecting.
‘We do seem to know a lot about the perpetrator—’ she began, but he cut her off.
‘Seem to! We’re paying this profiler guy you wanted a fortune, for Christ’s sake! How much more bloody information do we need!’
She stayed calm. ‘We should have Daniel’s profile by the end of the working day.’ At least, she hoped they would. ‘But what I was about to say was that we seem to know a lot about him for a reason,’ she went on. ‘What we know is exactly what he wants us to know – no more, no less. He’s made no mistakes, no slip-ups. The trace evidence is the best chance we have of finding out more about him, where he works, the places he frequents, or where he might be hiding out, that kind of thing. Everything else we know is based either on clues he has deliberately left us. Like I said, we’ll have an official profile to work with soon, but in the meantime, please be advised that my team and I are working literally around the clock on this.’
O’Brien continued looking at her for a moment, then finally relaxed his gaze before turning to look at the two detectives. ‘So, if the lab doesn’t have anything useful to contribute, where are you two these days?’
Kennedy gave a resigned shrug. ‘We’re following a couple of leads, especially in relation to the victims’ families, but other than that—’
‘So we’re really no nearer solving this than we were when those Ryan kids showed up dead?’ he concluded.
‘I’m
still not sure that’s a fair summary, Chief—’ Chris began.
‘Oh you’re not, aren’t you?’ O’Brien glared at him. ‘So tell me, Detective Delaney,’ he spat his name out with almost a sneer, ‘Who is this guy? And where is he going to strike next? Can you answer me that?’
The room fell silent. O’Brien slurped noisily on his coffee, stared from one to the other. ‘Let me tell you lot something, with a high-profile case like this, results are everything. I don’t care how fecking clever you all think you’re being, or what your lab results and fucking profiles tell you – until the moment you have that fecker banged up with a pair of handcuffs on him, you’re all just pissing in the dark. And right now I’m the one who’s getting wet!’
There was a soft knock at the door. He stood up and glared around the room at them all. ‘You’d better come up with something positive soon because I don’t like the way this investigation is being run – and it’s not about to get any better in my opinion.’
He walked to the door and stepped outside. The others looked at each other, all deducing that this wasn’t just a standard briefing – something else was going on.
‘Not about to get any better? What does he mean by that?’ Chris asked.
‘I have a feeling that guff we’ve just heard was only for the cameras,’ Kennedy said.
They could hear O’Brien in a whispered conversation outside the door. He still sounded worked-up but was trying to keep his voice down.
Finally, the door opened again and the Inspector walked back in, followed by two other men. His deferential manner toward them made it quite clear that these were his superiors.
He waited for them to sit down and fussed around fetching them coffee. Reilly recognized one of them – Chief Superintendent Armstrong who’d been involved in her recruitment from the States. He was a big man, huge hands, a strong jaw. In his sober dark suit you could see his muscular build. He had short cropped gray hair, and could have been anywhere between fifty and sixty years old.
The other man was older. He was small, dapper, in an immaculate gray suit with a matching tie and pocket handkerchief, an expensive haircut, an air of calm superiority on his face as he surveyed the room.
Armstrong nodded to the two detectives as O’Brien finally sat down. ‘These are Detectives Kennedy and Delaney, and the current acting head of GFU, Reilly Steel,’ he introduced them one by one to the other man. ‘This is Commissioner Patrick Moloney.’
Moloney nodded to each of them in turn, letting his gaze settle on Reilly a little too long. ‘Ms Steel – I’ve heard some good things about you.’
Reilly wasn’t sure how to reply. She finally managed an embarrassed, ‘Thank you, sir.’
Moloney took a delicate sip of his coffee, and looked at everyone in turn. He spoke quietly, calmly, each word carefully chosen. ‘This unfortunate affair took a rather … unexpected turn recently, didn’t it?’ No one responded. ‘A dangerous intruder assaults one of our own people, in our laboratory.’ He sipped again at his coffee. ‘Which means that this matter has rather slipped the coop, so to speak.’ He sighed, as though this was all rather bothersome. ‘When something of that nature happens it ceases to be simply a local matter.’
Kennedy was right, Reilly realized, they were bringing in the big guns now, and judging by the look on O’Brien’s face, not with his blessing.
‘We’re dealing with this fine,’ O’Brien growled. ‘In fact, one of our senior investigators is returning early from annual leave to row in on this.’
At this Reilly’s head snapped up. Jack Gorman would indeed be back in the mix sooner than she’d thought. Damn.
Moloney smiled with all the charm of a Nile crocodile about to consume its prey. ‘I’m sure you are, Inspector. However,’ he glanced around, making sure he had everyone’s full attention, ‘as already explained, this investigation has become top national priority.’
‘It’s already top priority,’ Kennedy said shortly and O’Brien glared at him too.
‘We have a murderer running around Dublin despatching our citizens at a frightening rate,’ Moloney went on. ‘This is naturally of huge concern to the public, the Minister and the Irish Government as a whole.’ He looked toward Reilly. ‘And without wanting to devalue the expertise of our own, we felt we could do with more specialized on-the-ground help in a matter of this magnitude.’
He now had everyone’s attention. Reilly glanced around, wondering where this was leading. O’Brien definitely wasn’t happy about it – he looked like he’d just bitten into a lemon.
‘I believe you’ve recently begun working with Mr Daniel Forrest from the FBI?’ Moloney continued, turning to Reilly. She nodded, an unsettling knot suddenly appearing in the depths of her stomach. ‘Well, it appears that his superiors in Quantico feel that in order to assist us in apprehending this murderer in the fastest possible time, it might be more beneficial to have him on the ground here.’
‘Here – in Dublin?’ she echoed.
‘Yes. Needless to say the Minister and I are all for anything that might assist in our bringing this … situation to a timely and satisfactory conclusion.’
In other words, Reilly thought, the public are baying for blood and the pressure is on.
She swallowed hard. There was no way Daniel would allow himself to be uprooted from Quantico on the whim of a government official, no matter how pressing the circumstances might be. Far more likely he’d instigated this himself, most likely because of the break-in and perhaps also because of her mini breakdown on the phone the last time they’d spoken. Reilly cursed herself for letting her guard down and allowing her emotions rise to the fore.
Yes, Daniel was behind this, she was sure of it. But what she couldn’t be sure of was whether he was coming to assist her or protect her.
27
The meeting over, Reilly headed straight to the GFU building. She went directly to the lab to see what her team had discovered from their survey of the evidence from the break-in.
‘Hey there. How are you feeling?’ Lucy asked. Reilly looked around at their faces, touched by their obvious concern. She allowed a small smile to crease the corners of her mouth but was anxious to get back to business. ‘I’m fine, guys, thanks for asking. So tell me, what do we have from yesterday?’
Gary spoke first. ‘We processed as much of this floor as we could. Lucy took your office, Rory covered the lab, and I took the stairwell.’
‘Good job.’ She was proud of them. Even without her supervision they had covered all bases.
Lucy held some papers out to her. ‘The main thing in your office was the photo album. We figured you would know the significance of the photo.’
Reilly could still see the attached note in her mind. ‘Happy Families.’
‘Not exactly, but I think it’s safe to assume that whatever message he’s trying to get across it’s personal.’
Lucy looked troubled. ‘I also analyzed the notepaper, but it’s just a generic yellow post-it pad, could have been bought in a million different places or even taken from your own desk drawer, so no lead there.’
Reilly nodded, expecting as much. ‘What else do we have?’
‘I processed the lab.’ Rory said. ‘Whoever was in there was looking at the case files – they were spread out on a table at the back of the room, as you probably saw.’
She recalled that all too clearly. ‘Yeah, they distracted me while he slipped out behind me.’
He pulled a large eight by ten photo out of a file. ‘When we looked at what he’d done with the files, how he’d put them almost in order, we started wondering if there might have been a pattern.’
‘A pattern to the killings, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
Reilly studied the photo. One lab report from each crime scene had been neatly laid out in a row, in chronological order, from the Ryans to Redmond to Watson, with the Sarah and Vera Miles killings following on. But there was also a gap, a space left between the Miles killings and the Watson
photo. Reilly looked up at Rory and Gary. ‘What do you think?’
Gary spoke, careful and considered as always. ‘The first killing – the Ryans – was blatant, eye-catching, guaranteed to get people’s attention.’ He paused, looked around at the others who were watching him intently. ‘He could have killed them in just about any way he wanted, but he chose the gun – loud, attention grabbing. It guaranteed that that first crime scene was found almost immediately.’
‘Good point,’ Reilly agreed. ‘What else?’
‘Well, Jim Redmond was pretty much the same – we know that our killer tracks his victims very closely, so he would have known his wife’s movements, would have known that she would soon discover the body.’
‘So again, no time delays,’ Lucy mused.
‘Right. And once his calling card – the whole Freud thing - is discovered,’ he pointed to another file, ‘we come to the Miles and the Watson killings. Both were designed and executed in such a way that they would take that bit longer to find. Watson out in the open in a deserted area and the Mileses a quiet family who kept to themselves.’
Rory spoke up again. ‘So when we saw a gap in the layout of the photographs that he left us, we wondered if it meant something.’
‘That we’ve missed one,’ Reilly concluded, her heart racing.
‘Right.’ Rory cleared his throat again. ‘We know when the Miles women were killed,’ he checked his notes ‘on the 28th, so we thought maybe the police should check missing person reports for anyone who went missing in the weeks leading up to that date.’
Reilly stared at the photos of the crime scenes. ‘Good thinking,’ she said, making a mental note to share this line of thinking with Chris and Kennedy.
‘You said you swept the stairwell?’ She turned to Gary again, whose serious expression never seemed to change, whether he was discussing a sub-standard sandwich from the canteen or a gruesome murder. It was a trait she appreciated – he was going to make a great investigator.
