Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) (5 page)

Chris nodded. ‘I believe he was a big supporter of bringing in a ban on hunting with dogs, similar to the one in the UK?’

Sandra gave a dry laugh. ‘Yes, you can just imagine how well that went down around here.’

‘Ever any trouble over it?’

She nodded. ‘A few months ago, when it was all very heated. It was what I would call silly, anonymous stuff – a dead fox left on the front step, slashed tires on the Range Rover. I insisted that it was all reported to the police, of course – you should have it on record somewhere – but nothing ever came of it.’

Mrs Coffey walked to the middle of the room, and stood looking down at the detectives, sitting side by side on the low couch, Kennedy with his teacup still on his knee. 

‘Searching for my husband’s enemies based on his writing would be a lifetime’s work, Detectives. There’s hardly a sector or group in Irish society that he hasn’t attacked or upset at some point.’

She glanced towards to the family portraits on the piano.

‘He was very good at what he did. Almost too good.’

‘Meaning?’

Sandra gave a brief smile. ‘Uncovering dirt, being controversial, winding people up.’  She sighed. ‘Tony could wind anyone up if he had a mind to. Give him five minutes and he’d find your weakness, and exploit it mercilessly.’

‘He must have pissed off a lot of people in his time then,’ Kennedy commented, with a frustrated glance towards Chris.

Sandra looked reflective. ‘The thing about Tony – something that when I first met him was very attractive – was that he would always find a way to get what he wanted, whatever it took. He was no respecter of anything – position, power, privacy – they were just trivial obstacles sent to challenge him. And he loved a challenge.’

Chris looked at her. ‘Mrs Coffey, are you suggesting your husband operated on the margins of the law?’

She shrugged.  ‘I’m not sure Tony would describe it that way. As he far as he was concerned, he just did whatever it took.’

Wonderful, Chris thought darkly. He tapped his pen against his notebook.  ‘Didn’t he have any principles, any causes that he believed in?’  Even as he said it, he regretted the question, realizing it sounded too harsh, too judgemental.

Mrs Coffey gave a bitter laugh. ‘Principles – Tony?  Except for a vague belief in the freedom of the press, he was completely without beliefs, morals or scruples. If you wanted some dirt on someone, wanted a hatchet job, an assassination, he was your man. Believe me, he wrote for the highest bidder.’

She stared out the window once again. ‘Detectives, the reality is – was – that my husband was an arm twister, a digger of dirt, a discoverer of secrets.  And it’s no surprise that many people hated him for it.’

R
eilly woke suddenly, instantly awake even though it was the middle of the night.  Her eyes flicked quickly to the alarm clock.  The red digits glared back at her: 3.27. Three and a half hours until the alarm blared into life, starting another day. So what had woken her? A noise of some kind?  She listened carefully.  Was there something happening next door ... or outside?

Lying completely still, she strained her ears to hear the faintest sound, but she could make out nothing but the steady beat of her own pulse. She lifted her head off the pillow – still nothing. The street was quiet, peaceful – the reason she had moved to Ranelagh in the first place. That and the fact that it was the nicest area in the city she’d been able to afford the rent.. Though only a couple of miles from the center, it had a villagey feel to it that really appealed to her, with a multitude of restaurants, cafés and cute little shops that weren’t yet suffering the effects of the ongoing economic recession.

Now, she focused her attention on the rooms around her – not a sound from the living room, no creaking floorboards, not even a radiator ticking quietly as it cooled.

She settled her head back on her pillow, sighed deeply, and tried to relax, tried to let herself unwind and go back to sleep, but the harder she tried, the more sleep eluded her. Something was lurking there, hiding in a quiet corner of her mind, waiting to ambush her as soon as she started to drift off.

She turned over again, seeking that perfect position that would help her to relax. What was playing on her mind?  Was it the Coffey case?  She would have the ME’s report in the morning, and the lab were analyzing the samples they had collected. Sure, it was a weird situation, but at this early stage, and with so little evidence uncovered, it wasn't at the point where it preyed on her mind.

That would happen soon enough, Reilly knew, but not until later, not until she had enough pieces of the jigsaw to see if there was a pattern. Then her brain would go into overdrive, trying to fit the pieces into coherent order, and striving for that elusive part, the keystone, the one that would make sense of everything. Then she would work days, nights – and barely sleep while she drove herself crazy trying to make sense of it. 

Reilly rolled over, and pulled the covers tightly around her. She had been in Ireland for over a year now, but she still hadn’t got used to the biting cold. While she’d thought that winter back home in San Francisco could be chilly, really she’d had no idea. Two blankets and a duvet covered her, but still her toes felt like blocks of ice. She curled her legs up to bring them into the warmer part of the bed and slowly began to relax.

The climate was something she hadn’t really considered when, the previous year, she’d got an invitation from the Irish Police Commissioner offering her the job of bringing the new Garda Forensic Unit up to date.

With her Quantico qualifications and her law enforcement experience, Reilly knew there was a lot she could bring to the job, but another reason she’d accepted the position was to keep tabs on her father, who in the hope of starting afresh after family life had been shattered, had moved from San Francisco back to Ireland, the land of his birth. At the time of Reilly’s arrival in Dublin, Mike Steel was living in a scummy city center flat, drinking himself into oblivion.

Recently, though, he’d cleaned himself up, was staying off the bottle, and had even found himself a lady friend in one of his neighbours. Reilly was glad; after all the shit that had gone down in their family, he deserved to be happy.

But it also meant that there were fewer opportunities to spend time with him now, and Reilly missed checking in on him, missed taking care of him. Mike had moved on and it was almost as if he didn’t need her anymore. She shook her head, annoyed with herself. Her dad was a grown man – of course he didn’t need her. Still, his new relationship was a sure sign that his relocation from the US had been a success, whereas Reilly still wasn’t certain if the same could be said for her own move ...

Finally her breathing began to even out, and she felt a ripple of calm wash over her. Her eyes gradually felt heavier as sleep began to creep in.

She was almost gone, right at that delicious point where you know you are about to sleep and you can luxuriate in it when –
bam
– it hit her again.

Like an icy grip the dream grabbed her mind, started to play itself out, started to move towards its inexorable conclusion. It had visited her many times before, always when she was at her most vulnerable, when she had something else on her mind. There it was, coming out of the mist of her subconscious, a reminder of past defeats, a reminder that if you don’t figure things out in time, you have failed.

Reilly was running – running as fast as she could – but getting nowhere.

Ghostly images floated around her, trees like sticks appearing in the mist ... tiny snippets of conversation with Chris and Kennedy ... Reilly’s feet moved as though she were struggling through thick treacle, each step taking an agonizing minute, each minute bringing death one step closer.

She tried to run faster, strained, cursed the air, ripped at it with her hands as though it were a physical thing that she could tear aside by sheer willpower, but at the same time she already knew that she was doomed to fail.

Just as she had failed with her sister.

––––––––

H
ours later, an exhausted Reilly was at the lab to begin analysis of the samples they’d taken from the Coffey scene.  There would be no weekend breaks while this investigation was going on.

The first sample was from one of the footprint indentations around the opening of the tank, and it was of interest because she’d noticed a slight glistening in the soil at the bottom of one of the soleprints around the heel area.

Something the killer may have walked in on the base of his shoe? She couldn’t be sure but it was worth a look.

Reilly approached the mass spectrometer, placed the swab of soil into a sample cup, and fed it into the input slot at the base of the machine. After a brief irradiation and some molecular weight calculations, the machine spat out an answer.

Water, caramelized sugar, vinegar, sodium chloride and capsicum.

Reilly frowned. A soft drink perhaps? Strike that; no soft drink would use vinegar as one of its ingredients. So it had to be savory, maybe some kind of cooking sauce?

She racked her brains for a cooking sauce that might consist of such ingredients, and immediately came up with several: chili, taco, sweet and sour, Tabasco ... She’d get Julius to track it down, crosscheck all the major brands available commercially to see if he could pinpoint it to something specific. The older lab tech was like a dog with a bone when it came to things like that.

Still, the type of sauce was perhaps less important than where it had come from. Had the killer walked it in from his own kitchen? Perhaps he’d made himself a bite to eat before taking poor Tony Coffey off to stew in his own filth.

Or perhaps it had been on the bottom of Coffey’s shoes, and had slipped off onto the mud he was being dragged to the opening? She made a mental note to get Chris and Kennedy to ask Mrs Coffey what her husband’s eating habits and preferences had been, although the ME’s analysis of Coffey’s stomach contents during autopsy should determine if he’d eaten anything savory beforehand.

Water, sugar, vinegar, salt and capsicum ...

As with all unidentified trace, Reilly found that this simple piece of evidence threw up more questions than answers.

‘Hey.’ Later that morning, Chris stood in the doorway of Reilly’s office. It was a fair reflection of herself: small, meticulously organized, with minimal personal touches.

She was reading a file and was so engrossed she hadn't even heard him approach.

‘Hey there. Thanks for coming by. I’ve got the ME’s report, and I’m going over it for the second time to see if there’s anything I missed on the first reading.’

He came in, and slumped down into a chair in front of her desk, his dark hair flopping over one side of his forehead. ‘You look a bit gray today,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep?’

She pushed the file aside, and looked at him properly. ‘Gee, thanks, you sure know how to make a girl feel good,’ she joked. She leaned back in her chair. ‘I slept some. How about you?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Not great, to be honest.’

‘Oh?’ she gave him a questioning look. But before she could say anything more, Kennedy barged in, holding three paper coffee cups.

‘Ah, quit your whingeing, lightweights,’ he said, ‘Has the bogyman been haunting ye with nasty nighttime visions?’  He handed out the coffees, hitched up his trousers and flopped down into a vacant chair beside Chris. It creaked a little under the strain.

Reilly grabbed the cup, lifted the lid and blew at the steam. ‘Let me guess, you slept like a baby?’

He nodded. ‘Just like every night.’

‘The joys of a happy marriage,’ Chris said with a wry smile, winking at Reilly.

‘Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.  But I
am
happily married, something at least one of you might consider trying before you’re too old and cynical.’  He looked back and forth between their amused faces. ‘Laugh all you want. You might think it’s sad, but every day when I get home from work, Josie’s there waiting for me with a kind word and some good grub. Can’t argue with that – or a sound night’s sleep.’  He stirred his coffee with a slim plastic stirrer, and flipped it into the nearby rubbish bin.

‘So anyway, Reilly, much as we love you, we didn’t drive all the way over here to chat about my home life. Do we have anything?’

‘Well, here’s Karen Thompson’s report, for starters.’ Reilly duly slid the document across her desk towards the two detectives.

Kennedy waved dismissively at the paperwork, and sipped his coffee. ‘Save us the time – just give us the edited highlights. And no fancy medical talk either – you know I’m a meat-and-spuds man.’

She suppressed a smile. Kennedy liked to wind her up about her use of technical jargon, but she’d come to know that underneath all the bluster, the guy was a lot smarter than he let on. After all, she had him to thank for pinpointing her location and coming to her rescue on a previous case when things went bad. Nope, there were no flies on Pet Kennedy.

‘All right, seeing as you asked ... Autopsy for Dummies, page one.’ She flipped open the report. ‘First of all, the doc confirms Coffey had been in the tank for at least forty-eight hours.’

‘That would make it Wednesday when he was put in there?’ Kennedy clarified.

‘Yeah.’

‘When Mrs Coffey would have been at her weekly bridge club meeting,’ Chris put in, looking at his own notes. ‘Sounds like the killer had some idea of their schedule.’

‘Right. And like you said yesterday, he was indeed alive when he was put in the tank.’ 

‘Ugh, the thoughts of that ...’ Kennedy grimaced.

Chris looked pensive. ‘So what was the actual cause of death? Drowning, ... sewage poisoning?’

‘Those fumes would have asphyxiated him pretty quickly,’ Reilly agreed, ‘but yes, actual cause of death was drowning.’

‘Oh Christ ...’ Kennedy said wincing. ‘You’re saying the guy drowned in his own shit? The press are going to have a field day with that one.’ As it was, media interest was already heightened in the case, given that the victim was a fellow journalist. Reilly cocked her head to one side. ‘Actually, I would never say anything that inelegant, Detective Kennedy, and neither would Dr Thompson. As the report says, Mr Coffey drowned in human excrement – you’re the one saying he drowned in his own shit.’