Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (23 page)

The profiler looked back and forth between the three of them. ‘Any thoughts? He sees himself as the punisher, remember?’

Reilly nodded slowly. ‘Confessions.’

Reuben clapped his hands together in delight. ‘Reilly, you really do have a brain to go with those heavenly legs!’

Their discussion was interrupted by the door flying open. Inspector O’Brien stood in the doorway, a furious look on his face, waving a newspaper at them.  ‘Have you lot seen this?’ he demanded.

‘What is it, Chief?’

O’Brien opened the paper, and held it up for them. The banner headline proclaimed: ‘Serial Killer Stalks Dublin – Where Will The Punisher Strike Next?’

‘The Punisher? Speak of the bloody devil,’ growled Kennedy, looking at Reuben, who’d just described the killer as exactly that.

O’Brien slumped in the chair opposite Reilly’s desk and rubbed his forehead.  He was a small man, with a short salt-and-pepper-colored hair, always immaculately dressed. Today he was wearing a dark gray suit with a purple tie – he looked more like a politician than a policeman.  He tossed the paper on Reilly’s desk and turned to look at them all. ‘How in God’s name did this get out? Tell me that.’

Reilly ran her gaze down the page – the usual lurid account, describing all four murders, with the obligatory pictures of the victims.

‘Did you read the last line?’ O’Brien thundered.

She turned to page two, scanned to the bottom of the column. 

‘Go on, read it out loud to the other eejits in the classroom,’ he instructed.

She cleared her throat, and began to read.  ‘“But as horrific as these crimes are, as demented as the Punisher must clearly be, the scariest fact is this: the police have absolutely no clues yet as to who this madman is, or when and where he will strike next.”’

O’Brien stared at the detectives. ‘Well, is he right?’ he growled.

Chris sat up. ‘We are moving forward—’

‘Ah, cut the PC crap, Delaney.  Do we know who this bugger is or don’t we?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Do we know what he wants? Do we know when he’ll strike next?’ The questions came thick and fast. ‘What am I supposed to say to the press?  They want a statement. People want some reassurance that there’s not some maniac out there who’s going to steal their babies from their cots while they sleep.’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘What am I supposed to tell them?  My secretary tells me there’s a wolf pack waiting outside my door at the moment – all the nationals are on the story now – and they’re baying for blood. Mine!’

He stood up, and paced the small office. Three strides up, three strides back.  ‘Can you lot give me anything, any hope,
anything
to appease the angry mob?’

‘We are making progress, Chief, but we can only work with the evidence we have,’ Kennedy said. ‘Whoever this guy is, he’s clever. He’s giving us only what he wants us to have.’

‘What about you, Knight?’ O’Brien whirled round to face Reuben. ‘You’re supposed to know all about these bloody maniacs.’

‘Actually I was just about to outline my theory—’

‘Well, then – outline. Get on with it.’

Reuben proceeded to bring O’Brien up to speed on what they’d discussed so far, about the Dante blueprint, the drawings and the videotaping.

Reilly noticed that Chris all the while seemed to be thinking hard.  ‘He’s going to want to make the videos public, isn’t he?’ he said suddenly. ‘I hope to God he’s not planning to put them on YouTube or something. That’s all we need.’

Reuben looked at him in surprise. ‘O Serious One, you really are beginning to see the way this works, aren’t you?’ He gave Chris his most ingratiating smile.

‘Imagine that?’ Chris spat. ‘Only ten years on the force, and already I know what the hell I’m doing.’

‘This really is splendid, isn’t it?’ Reuben beamed. ‘All of us getting along so well and learning so much ...’

Ignoring this, Reilly thought about what Chris had said about the killer making the videos public in order to showcase his work. She too hoped he didn’t plan on sending them to the media or uploading them online. Although some press would be sensitive enough to the victims and their families not to use them, others would no doubt jump at publishing something of such a gratuitous nature. And online ... well, there was no limit to the havoc that would cause.  The public would go crazy.

‘What else?’ O’Brien cut in, looking impatiently at Chris and Kennedy. ‘Anything to report from last night?’

Kennedy looked at Chris and shrugged. He pulled out his notebook and flipped it open.

‘Oh, goody!’ Reuben cried. ‘I do love a cliché – a detective and his trusty little notebook.’

Kennedy ignored him. ‘We asked around.  Seems the property belongs to an old guy who died about seven years ago ...’ Screwing up his eyes, he peered at his notes. ‘A Joseph Patterson. Locals say it’s been abandoned ever since.  Kids play in the yard from time to time, but other than that it’s just sat there abandoned.’

‘That’s how the body was discovered,’ Chris added. ‘The killer started a big bonfire in the yard, kids discovered it on their way home yesterday evening, saw the door to the barn was open, and came across Fitzpatrick in his bath.’

‘Again, ensuring the body was found quickly,’ Reuben observed. ‘He does like to be noticed, doesn’t he?’

Chris glanced pointedly at Knight’s flashy suit. ‘He’s not the only one.’

‘It makes sense,’ Reilly said. ‘He’s deliberately choosing out-of-the-way locations to do his work, but then drawing attention to these locations once he’s finished.’  She turned back to the detectives. ‘I guess nobody had seen anything suspicious recently?’

Kennedy shook his head. ‘He’s a clever bastard – chooses his spots very well.’  He sniffed, and sipped at his coffee. ‘I mean, look at the place last night – it’s completely hidden from the road, there are no close neighbours, but it’s on a road that’s busy enough that you wouldn’t notice the same car passing a couple of times.’

‘How does he find out about these places?’ O’Brien asked. ‘Did you check the estate agent to see if anyone had made enquiries?’

Chris nodded. ‘Called them first thing this morning. She said no one had enquired about the place in over three years.’

‘He wouldn’t make a mistake like that,’ Reuben said quickly.

‘So what
would
he do then?’ Chris demanded. ‘You’re the expert, the big-shot profiler, the one who is supposed to tell us about this guy.  So far all I've heard is us giving you information, and you mincing around saying how brilliant you are. So how about displaying some of the genius you seem to think you have.’

Reilly stared at Chris, shocked at the outburst. He sounded as though he was completely at the end of his tether, yet she didn’t quite believe that it was the investigation alone that was getting to him. They’d had frustrating cases before and usually Chris was the calm, unruffled one, keeping the rest of team motivated with his relentless optimism. This was a side to him she had never seen before, and she really wanted to get to the bottom of what was troubling him.

But if Chris’s sudden attack had taken Reuben aback, he showed absolutely no sign of it. He sat back in his chair, unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket and carefully stroked his pen. ‘A good question, my good man. What does all this tell us?’

He gazed up towards the fluorescent light, and puckered his mouth. The room was silent for a while and just when Reilly thought O’Brien might spontaneously combust, Reuben spoke again.

‘Our killer is a careful, meticulous, possibly obsessive individual. He’s the type who would spend his weekends trainspotting, collecting matchboxes, trying to hit the highest score on his favorite videogame, something tiresome like that. He has been planning this for some time, doing the background research on the individuals involved in this miscarriage of justice, planning how each of them should be punished for their transgression according to the writings of Dante in the
Inferno
 choosing his exact locations, scouting them out, getting his supplies.’  He looked around the room at the other four.

‘That’s one of the things that makes him so dangerous, so effective. Because he’s not in a rush, he’s had time to do things gradually. For example, you might consider checking around with roofing suppliers, find out if someone has bought a large quantity of pitch lately—’

‘We’ve already got someone checking that,’ Chris interjected.

Reuben nodded. ‘Yet I’d wager there’s no point. He would have bought the pitch a long time ago, probably even had a job he could use some of it on. That way he could experiment with it in his own time, make sure he had the ability to heat it properly, know how to work with it, to pour it, et cetera.’ He let the thought settle for a moment. ‘Then, when the time came, when he had his victim, he would know exactlywhat to do, how long it would take to reach the right temperature.’

O’Brien nodded.  ‘So he’s a meticulous bastard. He’s been planning this for a while. What else?’

‘The art angle is interesting,’ Knight admitted. ‘From what we know of this person, he wouldn’t be drawing these scenes unless he’s good – he certainly wouldn’t settle for something amateurish. That means he’s either a professional artist or a very gifted hobbyist.’

‘So why is he drawing them?’ Reilly wondered. ‘If he’s already videoing them, he’s got a record. Why the drawings?’

‘A very shrewd question from the Fairy Princess.’ He turned to her. ‘My guess is it’s how he relates to people, how he sees the world. If he draws them, he’s captured the soul, the essence, the spirit of the moment.  He owns it.’

‘Like the Egyptians and their carvings?’

‘Precisely. It’s his way of seeing the world. I would imagine that the videos are without doubt for public consumption, but the drawings – well, the drawings are for himself.’

O’Brien still looked irritated. ‘All of this sounds fan-fecking-tastic, Knight, but are we any nearer to catching this cute hoor?’ he spat. ‘We don’t know who he is, where his home, barn or ... bloody spaceship is, or where and when he’ll strike next.’

Reuben gave him a searching look. ‘You are asking for certainty where there is only mist and fog, a real animal when all we have is a chimera ...’ Then he sighed. ‘All right, here’s what I think.’ He waggled a finger at them all. ‘Notice I said
think
, yes?’

Chris rolled his eyes. ‘Get on with it, man.’

Reuben stood up, carefully rebuttoned his jacket, and gazed at his reflection in Reilly’s window. He patted a stray hair back in place, then spun back suddenly to face them all. ‘He will strike again soon.  And I think it won’t be long until he reaches his last victim, the true perpetrator.’

‘True perpetrator?’ O’Brien repeated.

Reuben explained carefully. ‘There’s been a great injustice, a crime committed, yet the ultimate transgressor wasn’t effectively punished. The journalist wrote about it, the policeman covered it up, lost evidence, took a bribe, whatever. The doctor is connected in some way, how I’m not yet sure. The politician presumably pulled some strings.  But someone, somewhere, committed this original crime. The true perpetrator.’

Reilly nodded in understanding.

‘He wants us to know what it’s all about,’ Reuben continued, ‘so I would imagine that the video – or videos – will appear soon. They will be cryptic, but they will give us some degree of understanding all this.’  He fidgeted with his hands. ‘He lives alone.  He is a professional, meticulous person - calm, collected, studious even.  In fact, he is probably the very last person you would suspect of such brutal crimes.’

O’Brien had his eyes fixed on Reuben. ‘Will we catch him?’

‘The million-dollar question.’  The profiler sighed. ‘Sadly, I suspect not until he’s ready.’

L
ucy edged her car out of the parking space, deep in the bowels of the GFU building. The quiet thrum of the engine vibrated through the seat – the car seemed as eager as she was to escape the lab for a few hours.

She emerged from the gloom into a bright winter’s day. She was planning to earn her stripes on this case, spending several days working overtime to try to isolate the soil samples, and had finally come up with a match from a small village near Kildare town. But before saying anything to Reilly, she was going to grasp the nettle and investigate the area herself. She could imagine it was what her boss would have done when she was learning the ropes at the FBI Academy. Lucy never tired of hearing Reilly’s stories about her time at Quantico, which always sounded so brilliantly exciting, almost glamorous.

So much better than studying for a Forensic Science degree at boring old UCD.

The N8 was one of the better roads in the area, and Lucy felt herself unwinding as she drove, Today FM chirping happily from her radio, the gear changes crisp and sharp as she pushed her little Mini along at speed.

Some thirty minutes later, she reached the village of Clane and pulled into the car park of the pub. It was a large white painted building with a brown tiled roof. A bare cherry tree stood by the pub’s wooden fence, its branches still tinged with dew.

Lucy climbed out of the car, stretched and took a deep breath of the cold, clean air. She was dressed casually, jeans tucked into brown leather boots under a heavy winter jacket, and her curly hair pulled back. She zipped her jacket up and hurried into the pub.

It was a quiet family establishment with a blazing fire burning in the hearth.  Lucy unzipped her jacket, and settled onto a stool at the bar. A bored-looking teenage girl chewing furiously at a piece of tired gum sloped over.

‘What are you having?’

Lucy looked around.  If she wanted information this was not who she needed to talk to. ‘Is your boss around?’ she asked politely.

The girl maintained her air of effortless boredom.  ‘You mean Mr Cooper?’

‘Is he the owner?’

The barmaid nodded, smacked her gum.  ‘Him and his missus.’

Lucy remained polite.  ‘Could I talk to him, please?’

The girl shook her head.. ‘Wednesday is Mr Cooper’s day off.’ 

‘I see.  So who’s in charge today then?’