Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (35 page)

The lab tech’s face colored with surprise, and he smiled.

‘Hmm ...’ Reuben raised an eyebrow as he surveyed the exchange. ‘Clearly, I’m in entirely the wrong field.’

R
icky Webb slowly opened his eyes. Where the hell was he?  He tried to move, and found that he was bound hand and foot, strapped to a chair with thick bands of duct tape.

He looked around – he was in an old shed or barn or some sort. There was straw on the dirty concrete floor and a single bare light bulb hanging overhead casting deep shadows to the far corners of the room.

Ricky turned his head – he could hear some movement behind him.

‘Hey!  Anybody there?’

Footsteps approached from behind his back, a shadow passed across and a tall figure stood before him. Ricky looked up. The man was slim, with glasses and dyed jet-black hair, his skin scarily white, as if he were wearing make-up or something. ‘Why the fuck have you got me tied up here?’  Ricky raged. ‘Let me go, arsehole. I’ll fucking get you for this!’

Luke considered him carefully. ‘That’s hardly an incentive to let you go, is it?’

Ricky seemed to think about this for a moment.  ‘All right – let me go, and I’ll just walk away, won’t say nothing, won’t tell anyone.’ He looked up, pleading.  ‘Deal?’

‘No deal.’ Luke pulled up a chair and sat down facing Ricky. ‘I brought you here for a reason.  Can you guess what that might be?’

Ricky shrugged. ‘You fancied me? You could have just asked me for a date.’  He couldn’t keep his cockiness from his voice.

‘You really are a despicable little worm, aren’t you? A pampered posh git trying to sound like a hard man.’

The obvious menace in the cold tones of his voice chilled Ricky. He said nothing, and waited for him to continue.

‘You spent eighteen months inside for raping a teenage girl. You think spending a paltry few months in prison constitutes justice?’

Ricky looked back at him, belligerent. ‘What the hell is this? Do you think you’re some kind of caped vigilante, is that it?  Ha, you need to put your underwear on over your tights to do that.’ He laughed nastily. ‘Anyway, what’s it to you if I got my leg over with some tramp?’

Luke’s dark gaze bored into Ricky while he struggled to contain his fury. ‘That ...
girl
,’ he said, emphasizing the correction, ‘was my sister.’

Ricky couldn’t maintain eye contact as the full impact of his situation suddenly struck him. ‘Look, I’m sorry, right?’ he blustered. ‘I didn’t mean to do anything, you know, we were just messing around and things got a bit out of hand.’

Luke stood up so suddenly that his chair flew across the floor. ‘An accident?  An accident?’  He suddenly flicked out an arm, smashed the back of his hand across Ricky’s right cheek. ‘The police said you violated her at least three times!’  His hand slammed against the other side of Ricky’s face. ‘You beat her, left her on the side of the road – and you say that was a fucking accident?’ He smashed his fist into Ricky’s face again and pulled it back – his knuckles were cut and bleeding.

Ricky slumped against the chair and felt around his mouth with his tongue – two teeth were gone. He could feel them rolling round in his cheeks.

‘I didn’t mean to.  Like I said, things just got out of hand. She threatened me ... clawed at me  I just lost it, man, you know how it is.’

He spat out a gobbet of blood and broken teeth, and looked up at Luke, who stood over him, breathing hard.

‘No I don’t.’  Suddenly Luke turned and marched behind Ricky, out of his sight. Ricky strained at his bindings; desperate to keep an eye on what was going on. Bad as it was getting a beating, at least he could see him.

‘Where are you?’ he pleaded. ‘What are you doing?’

There was no reply.

He squirmed, strained in his chair. ‘We can work something out, right?  I said I was sorry, didn’t I?’

He could hear Luke moving around. 

‘I’m different now – I’ve been inside, done my time – I’m rehabilitated – that’s what the parole board said.’  He turned his head from side to side, desperate to see what the other man was doing.

‘Rehabilitated?  Different?’ Luke’s voice was venomous. ‘You forget that last night I caught you about to commit the same act. You’d been out only a few hours.’

‘What?  No way!’ Ricky turned his head as far as it would go and could just see some movement in his peripheral vision. ‘That girl wanted it, was gagging for it!’

‘Liar.’

Something hard caught Ricky across the back of the head and sent him sprawling across the floor, still strapped to the chair. He landed hard, his world spinning.  He felt a wave of nausea, closed his eyes, and passed into black.

‘Wake up!’

Ricky spluttered, and blinked. A wave of cold water soaked him. He opened his eyes, to see the weird-looking guy standing over him, a plastic bucket in his hand.

‘This is no time to sleep. You’ve got work to do,’ Luke bent over and, with strong hands, hauled Ricky and the chair back upright.

Ricky shook the water from his eyes, and blinked hard against the glare.  There was a spotlight trained on him, a video camera on a tripod set up facing him.  He looked up, confused. ‘What’s this?’

Luke wiped his face with a rough cloth. ‘Your last chance.’

‘Chance?’ He grasped at the faint tinge of hope. ‘What do I have to do?’

Luke stepped over to the camera. A small red light blinked as he turned it on.  ‘This is your last chance for a confession.’

Ricky could see his face, half hidden in the shadows behind the camera.  ‘What ... what am I supposed to say? Just tell me – I’ll do it.’

Luke smiled. ‘Of course you will.  You are going to confess to your crimes – all of them.’

Ricky screwed up his eyes against the glare of the light. ‘All of them?’

‘My sister wasn’t the only one, nor the first, was she?’

Ricky’s body shook. He wouldn’t meet Luke’s gaze. ‘I don’t know what—’

‘Be a man and tell the truth for once in your sorry life. Your daddy isn’t here to bail you out now. Tell me about them – all of them.’

Ricky was thinking over his options. ‘And if I do ... if I do exactly what you say ... will you let me go free?’

Luke gazed back at him, his dark eyes unblinking.  ‘Maybe ...’

I
t was safe to say that Inspector O’Brien was even less pleased to be disturbed at home than the courts HR manager had been. His sour face when he saw Chris and Kennedy on his doorstep was worth a thousand words.

‘This better be important,’ he growled as he ushered them into the kitchen.  ‘We’re entertaining – my wife will murder me.’

He flicked on the kitchen light, and headed straight for a corner cupboard and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. The detectives waited impatiently as O’Brien poured himself a generous measure into a cut-glass tumbler. He took a sip.

‘So what’s so important that you have to come and disturb me at home at ten o’clock at night?’

‘We’re pretty sure we know who the punisher is,’ Chris announced, gritting his teeth as, out of nowhere, another wave of pain struck.

‘Pretty sure?’ O’Brien raised an eyebrow. ‘If you’re here at this time I hope to God you have a solid reason for your suspicions.’

Kennedy jumped in. ‘The murders are all linked by one incident, sir, a rape a few years ago of a girl called Amanda Harrington.’

O’Brien gave them a sharp glance; the name obviously meant something to him and Chris wondered if Reilly had been right about Crowe’s comment in the video about this particular case going higher up the food chain. He couldn’t process something like that just now, not when his faith in the system he himself was a part of had already been shaken to the core.

Their boss contemplated his drink and Chris was thinking that he wouldn’t mind one of those himself. The tremors were particularly bad at the moment, possibly because it was such a long bloody day.

‘Nasty affair – Roger Webb’s son was involved, as I recall?’

Involved? Well, that was one way of putting it. Seemed like their boss was another one of the deceased developer’s cronies.

‘At first we believed that the girl’s biological father was the one responsible for the murders,’ Kennedy told him quickly, when Chris remained silent. ‘Her parents moved to Australia the year after the trial, but her real father, Simon Darcy, lives in Dublin – he’s a court artist, works down at the Central Criminal Court.’

O’Brien looked thoughtful. ‘An artist? The guy fits the profile Knight gave, then, and he’s certainly got motive if this is indeed about the Harrington case.’

‘It’s not the father – he’s disabled. But we’re pretty sure it’s his son, Luke Darcy, Amanda’s brother.’ Chris explained about the sketchpad of drawings Simon had reluctantly shown them.

When they’d got the call from Reilly about the farmhouse location, they’d left Simon in the custody of a couple of local officers, under instructions that he be brought in for further questioning. From there they’d gone straight to O’Brien.

The older man looked incredulous ‘Well, what are you doing here then? Bring the son in, question him.’

The detectives exchanged a look. ‘He’s currently off the radar.’

‘Then find him.’ O’Brien glanced at his watch.

‘We think Ricky Webb is his next victim,’ Chris said.

‘Webb. He’s inside, isn’t he?’

‘He was released yesterday. Now seems he’s disappeared – no one knows where he is.’

O’Brien lifted his glass, took another sip of whiskey. ‘Well, he’s been inside. He’s probably lying drunk in a ditch somewhere, or shacked up with some woman.’

‘Actually, sir, we believe Luke Darcy has seized Webb, and is currently holding him at a farm in Kildare,’ Kennedy said quickly. ‘It’s why we’re here. We need you to authorize the response unit. And a search warrant.’

‘A tactical weapons team? You’re that sure?’

Chris met Kennedy’s eye. They both trusted Reilly’s judgement, knew that she wouldn’t have given the location unless she was absolutely sure. ‘Yes, sir.’

A woman in her early sixties with a nervous, thin face poked her head out of the dining room. ‘Are you coming, Donal? I’m nearly ready to serve dessert.’

O’Brien nodded to his wife. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

He looked at the two detectives. ‘You’d bloody better be sure. These guys cost a feckin’ fortune, so for your sakes, you’d better hope this doesn’t turn out to be a fool’s errand.’

Having located the Harrington farm, Reilly then called Lucy to her office and asked her to describe in greater detail the farmsteads she’d visited on her recent renegade trip to Kildare.

‘A woman in the pub pretty much gave me the heads-up about where to go,’ she told Reilly. ‘The places I checked out all fit the profile: isolated farmhouses with stables or a barn onsite, totally unoccupied ... apart from the one with the dogs, of course.’

‘Dogs?’ Reilly’s ears pricked up at this. Why would dogs be present on an unoccupied farm? Either they would have left the property at the same time as their owners, or they were being kept there for a reason. As guard dogs perhaps?

‘Actually,’ Reuben put in, ‘this is what I had come to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Once again it all comes back to
Inferno
. In the Seventh Circle, there are a selection of hellish torments meted out to sodomites and rapists – a rain of fire, rivers of boiling blood ... And while our man is inventive, I’m not entirely sure these are torments anyone could reconstruct. But another such punishment,’ he added with a pause, his tone heavy with meaning, ‘is being is torn apart by dogs.’

Reilly met his gaze, understanding immediately. ‘So if Luke has got Ricky Webb,’ she finished, ‘he’s going to throw him to the dogs.’

Kennedy turned on the blue strobes and siren and maneuvered impatiently through the traffic at speed. He glanced over at Chris.

‘What’s up with you? You’ve barely said a word since we left O’Brien’s. Having second thoughts about all this?’

Chris gripped the door handle tightly, as his body was once again racked by convulsing pain. He tried to keep his voice even. ‘Of course not. Reilly will have done her homework. This is the endgame, I’m certain of it.’

They cleared the suburbs and the road opened up before them. The engine  growled as Kennedy pushed the hammer down. 

‘Althought, to be honest with you, I’m still not sure why we’re rushing ...’ Chris said to his partner quietly.

Kennedy shook his head.  ‘I know what you’re thinking but don’t even go there.’ He changed down, tore past two slow-moving lorries. ‘Our job is to catch criminals, and prevent crimes. We have the opportunity to do that today.’ He glanced over at Chris, frowning. ‘What are you saying, mate? That you want me to slow down, that you’d rather we get there after Darcy has done a number on Webb?’

Chris gazed out the window at the dark fields dashing by. ‘The guy’s a convicted rapist, not exactly a great loss ...’

Kennedy didn’t reply. He slowed to thirty as they entered a village near Kildare.  The bright lights of a pub loomed up ahead. ‘OK, maybe we’ll stop here then,’ he suggested archly. ‘We could have a quick drink, talk about the weather for while ...’

Chris gazed at the pub.  Through the window he could see people talking, drinking, relaxing. Safe. Secure. And who kept them safe?

People like him and Kennedy, that’s who. Or at least, they tried to.

Kennedy drove slowly through the village, past the bright lights of the pub Lucy had visited before. ‘We’ll be there inside five minutes.’  He glanced across at Chris. ‘You ready for this – or not?’

Chris nodded automatically, thinking he might be ready if he had any idea what ‘this’ was likely to be.

L
uke kneeled down behind Ricky, and with a quick flick of his knife sliced through the bands of duct tape that secured his wrists.

Ricky started to move his arms and tried to relax them, but before he could get any feeling back in them, Luke seized first one, then the other, and clamped a pair of handcuffs on him.

Ricky twisted in the seat and looked back at him. ‘You’re going to release me, right?  I did what you said.’  He glanced back towards the video camera.  ‘You got it all, everything ...’