Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3)

HIDDEN

Casey Hill

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster, 2013.

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Casey Hill 2013

The right of Casey Hill to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. You must not circulate this book in any format.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

How can this tainted world contain us, how can it contain our dreams? At night, in the freedom of my mind, the shackles of this mortal realm fall away as I soar above the fields and the farms, over forests and hills. I have always dreamed of flying – dreams like this are where the spirit comes alive, where we create our own rules, our own reality.

Why should we let other people tell us how to live, or what is right and what is wrong? Flex your wings and soar with me, my little ones. Do you see our land below us? Is it not beautiful? The lake and the fields, the river and the trees, the horses running free beneath the sun.

This is our world, our home, our sanctuary, and within it we are safe. Is that a dream? No, it is our reality. And so I know that when I awake, when the rooster calls me to another day, that my eyes will open onto our own paradise.

Colin O’Dea was trying to figure out the fastest and easiest way to murder his wife. Dark hedgerows rushed past the windows as he sped along the narrow country road.

‘Will you please slow the hell down?’ Fiona grunted. ‘Your work buddies may be impressed by your new car, but I’m not.’

He responded by speeding up, unable to resist the urge to do the opposite of what she asked.

Just a few minutes until they were home. Then she could go off and have one of her herbal baths, or whatever it was she called them, and he could watch the Chelsea game he had recorded earlier. What sort of people had dinner parties on shaggin’ Thursday nights? At least he’d escaped reasonably early.

‘Colin!’

His wife’s sharp scream pulled him out of his reverie just in time for him to spot something lying in the road – a white bundle. Rubbish from a truck, or a dead sheep maybe? Without thinking, he swerved around it, feeling the BMW’s anti-lock brakes push back against his foot with a faint shudder.

He tried to fight the slide – dammit, that’s what traction control was supposed to do – but it wasn’t enough. The car was going too fast, the road was damp from the rain shower earlier, and Colin wasn't as good a driver as he liked to think.

They spun 360 degrees, fields and fences, trees and ditches racing past in a blur as the headlights threw everything into sharp relief for a split second, then back into blackness. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the car was still once more. The only movement was the smoke  and steam pouring past the headlights’ beams.

Colin was rigid, his knuckles white where he had gripped the steering wheel, his heart pounding in his chest, while beside him Fiona sat in shocked silence. The engine continued to purr quietly.

Finally Colin unpeeled his hands from the steering wheel and glanced around. They were sideways across the road, the front corner of his precious new car dangling over a ditch.

‘Fuck!’

He slammed his hands on the wheel, threw the door open and stepped into the chilly evening air.

Colin studied the front of the car. The headlights shone on the grassy bank at the side of the road and the reflected light was enough to show the damage. The front spoiler was crunched up beneath the car, the plastic split. Damn … It was almost as if he himself had been violated – his new car was supposed to be perfect, a tonic for his midlife crisis.

The sound of Fiona opening the passenger door made him look up. ‘What was that?’ she asked, looking back down the road, her voice trembling. ‘What did we…?’

He stood up and peered in the same direction.  ‘Dead sheep I think.’

  ‘It didn’t look like—’

Colin sighed in exasperation. ‘What else would it be? Stupid animals are always wandering out into the road around here. Farmers ought to take better care of them.’ He removed his glasses and wiped the drizzle off them. ‘Jimmy hit one last month in his Land Rover. Made a right bloody mess of the front end, I can tell you.’  He put his glasses back on. ‘Where are you going?’

Fiona was already stumbling up the road on her high heels. ‘It didn’t look like a sheep to me,’ she continued doggedly.  ‘Even if it was, we need to get it out of the road before somebody else hits it.’

‘Forget about the bloody sheep,’ he growled. ‘How are we supposed to get the car out of this ditch?’

He crouched down again and examined the spoiler. It was already pretty messed up so, really, backing the car up could hardly do it any more damage ...

‘Oh, God, shit!’

Colin stood up again and stared down the road to where Fiona stood, her green dress almost ghostly against the dark hedgerows.  ‘What now?’ he called out irritably.

His wife said nothing, she just stood with her hands clamped to her mouth.

Colin squinted at her face as he approached, suddenly disconcerted by how pale she looked against the beams of the car’s headlights.

‘What is …’  The words froze before he could finish his sentence, and his eyes locked on to what lay at her feet. 

‘Fuck …’

For a moment neither of them moved, then Colin turned and vomited on to the road, the viscous liquid splattering his expensive shoes and the leg of his designer suit.

The body of a young woman lay on the road. Even in the darkness they could see that she was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pale nightdress and the only burst of color came from her thick, red, curly hair.  There were cuts and scrapes all over her body, a deep gash in her head, and a bone sticking out of her ankle at an unnatural angle. For a horrible moment, Colin worried that he had caused that, but then he remembered he’d swerved in time to avoid hitting her.

Or had he?

‘Is she…’

‘Dead …?’  Fiona whispered, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘Without a doubt.’ 

The girl’s skin was pale, and she had an almost ethereal look as she lay on the dark road, her red hair framing her face, her body and white clothing seeming to glow against the darkness around them.

‘On this road, at this time of night, she could have been here hours without anyone seeing her...’

Fiona snapped open her handbag. ‘I’ll call 999.’

Colin glanced around. ‘Should we move her or …?’

‘Better not.’ She glanced at him, her voice full of meaning. ‘Just in case.’

‘Oh Christ.’ Colin’s chest tightened. Surely nobody would think they’d run her over? He knew he hadn’t hit her, and despite the damage to the front of the car that should be easy to prove, shouldn’t it?

Bending down, he hovered over the girl’s body. As he glanced again at the extent of her injuries, he frowned, noticing something.

Her long hair was splayed across to one side, revealing the base of her neck. On the skin Colin could make out a strange pattern disappearing beneath the nightgown.

His eyes narrowed as he tried to process what he was looking at.

‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered. ‘What the hell is that?’

Chapter 2

The small kitchen was dark with just the ghostly orange glow of the street lights to illuminate the gloom.

Reilly Steel’s flashlight played across the room. At first a cursory glance around, then a more orderly scan. First impressions, then the methodical search.

The flashlight's beam revealed the details of what had happened here and the lives that had been played out: an overturned chair; a dark pool of blood on the torn linoleum floor; an overflowing ashtray on the table beside a baby’s bottle; the sink overflowing with dirty dishes.

Reilly hated domestic violence cases – the hidden years of tension, the secret beatings, the lies, the cover-ups. There were no winners, only losers, just another generation of damaged children growing up to believe that this was what relationships were like and how people treated each other.

This one was worse than most – the wife was currently in hospital, her stomach held together by a hundred staples after her husband had stabbed her with a broken bottle. 

The Garda Forensic Unit wasn’t usually called in on these cases, as they were generally cut and dried, but this one was different. Not only had the woman nearly died – the bottle had nicked her superior mesenteric artery – but the husband denied doing it and the wife was now insisting she’d simply fallen on broken glass.

The saddest part, Reilly mused, was that the poor woman feared further wrath from her demonic husband far more than she trusted the system to bring her justice and protection.

Her jaw clenched as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Attacking a defenseless woman with a broken bottle,  stabbing her in the gut, then running off and leaving her lying in a pool of blood and claiming that he wasn’t even
there?
What kind of man would do that? The kind that she was determined to see convicted.

She brushed aside a lock of her blond hair, tucking it in place behind her ear. Not for the first time, she wondered if she should get a short, functional haircut, something that would look sharp, professional and most importantly would never get in her way. Still, she liked the sensation of quite literally letting her hair down on her admittedly few days off.

She scanned the kitchen once again. The alleged attacker, Brian McGavin, had been thorough – he’d fled the scene, established an alibi with friends, taken the weapon with him. If Reilly couldn’t find anything to place him at the scene at the time of the attack, there was a good chance that he would get away with it.

She was not prepared to let that happen.

She had seen McGavin when the detectives brought him in for questioning. He had a cocky, brutal face –  a life-long bully who challenged any man with his eyes –  and a rap sheet as long as his Neanderthal arms.

She was of course supposed to be impartial, simply gathering the evidence that presented itself, but there were times when it was impossible not to get involved, not to have a personal investment in nailing someone.

The kitchen table told its own story. An ashtray full of cigarette butts, yesterday’s copy of
The Sun
open at the horse racing pages, and an empty can of Heineken. There were traces of McGavin everywhere, but could Reilly place him here at the house when the attack took place?

Sudden noises spooked her – kids outside shouting at each other, an empty can being kicked, the roar of a car – but just as quickly the street fell quiet once more and Reilly’s focus was back on the job.

She enjoyed working late in the evenings, liked the way the darkness naturally forced her to focus on nothing other than the small pool of light thrown up by the flashlight. With nothing to distract her, she was forced to focus on the minutiae and look for the little details that might otherwise be missed.

She aimed the flashlight on the floor and crouched down to look closer at the bloody pool. Reaching out with a gloved hand – the deeper parts were still slightly sticky – she realized that there was something else there. A faint glint of light caught the beam as it skipped across the floor.

She reached out with her tweezers and slowly lifted up a shard of blood-covered glass. A fragment of the weapon?  Something to go on at least.

She looked closer at the immediate surroundings. The floor hadn't been mopped in years, the once-white lino now stained a motley gray. And there, under the
edge of the sink unit, was another thin sliver. Once again she picked it up and slipped it into an evidence bag. Taken alone, the pieces of glass meant nothing, but it was possible that they might have picked up the slightest glimpse of a fingerprint or a tiny piece of skin, anything that might link them to McGavin.

Reilly stood up, closed her eyes and took in a few deep breaths through her nose as she tried to imagine exactly what had happened here. Her sharp sense of smell filtered out individual odors from a cacophony of stench. She slowly edged forward toward the blood-stained couch, the metallic smell breaking through the more pungent whiff of baby vomit.