TRACE - CSI Reilly Steel #5 (Forensic novel Police Procedural Series) (18 page)

Chapter 33

My little bird was not at group tonight. It is more than frustrating. There is so little time, and everything is ready.

Instead I had to spend an hour running next to an over-excited middle aged woman who kept up a running commentary about her children. Talk slower, run faster I wanted to tell her.

But I have to keep good relationship with these people if I am to see Constance again. What if she never comes back? Young women are like that. They flit from one thing to another, taking what they need from each thing that takes their fancy. Is it too soon simply to ask her out? To offer to cook for her? This is a harder one than the rest. There were expectations there. This is something far more delicate. Constance has not sought me out. She is not looking for a relationship, or sex. She thinks of me as a helpful acquaintance.

I need to get closer to her, somehow.

Kennedy and Chris were getting nowhere fast. Peroni was steadfastly refusing to tell them how his DNA may have been present in the Cooper and McMurty scenes. Added to that, he had engaged a fancy lawyer who knew his way around the interrogation room.

‘Isn’t it true that you have already falsely accused one person for these murders?’ asked the lawyer. He was a small, skinny man, with a chin like a dagger. ‘Harry McMurty’s name was dragged through the mud because he was framed as a killer. It caused the victim’s families much unnecessary pain. If McMurty was framed, is isn’t it possible that my client was also framed? Isn’t it possible that you are making yet another terrible mistake?’

Chris was becoming frustrated. ‘The samples from Rose Cooper’s flat were taken months ago,’ he said. ‘Why would someone try to frame your client then?’

‘Someone with a long game,’ said the lawyer. ‘You may not know much about fine dining, Detective Delaney, but my client is a successful man. There are many who would only love to see him ruined.’

Kennedy tried again. ‘Mr Peroni, any way you help us now will be remembered later on. You are only making this worse for yourself. Now, tell us, can you explain how your DNA may have ended up at those crime scenes?’

Peroni shook his head again and his lawyer held his hands out in exasperation. ‘Gentlemen, this is getting ridiculous. My client is clearly as clueless as you are. You must let him go.’

‘It’s our right to hold him for twenty-four hours,’ said Kennedy.

After Kennedy and Chris had a break, they were ready to go in and keep working on Peroni, when suddenly Reilly appeared at the station.

‘What are you doing here?’ Chris asked, worried by the slightly maniacal look in her eyes. ‘What’s going on? Are you OK - ’

Kennedy entered the room and instantly got a read on the tension. ‘Everything all right, folks?’

‘Yes,’ said Reilly, giving Chris a warning look.

She smiled at the two of them and held up something in her hand ‘I’ve just been to Peroni’s house. Look what we found.’

Chris held the little white bag in front of Nico Peroni’s face. The suspect’s eyes widened, and then closed when he saw it. Reilly watched intently from behind the mirror.

‘How did this bag of antimine come into your possession?’ asked Chris. Of course, they had no confirmation that the substance was anti mine just yet. They needed to get it back to lab first. But Reilly was pretty sure.

Nico Peroni just shook his head. Faced with the truth, he was finished talking.

‘We’re holding you under suspicion of the murders of Rose Cooper, Jennifer Armstrong, Harry McMurty and Naomi Worthington,’ said Chris.

As she heard Chris say it, it was the best that Reilly had felt since her return.

Finally, they had him.

Having delivered the substance to the lab and overseen the preliminary analysis, she was about to leave early in the hope of a well-deserved night’s rest when both Rory and Gary approached her at cross angles.

‘OK,’ she sighed defeatedly. ‘You go first Rory.’

‘I’ve managed to find an online profile for a person that both Naomi Worthington and Jennifer Armstrong were communicating with,’ said Rory. ‘It goes back to a fake email address, but the same address has been used to create a Facebook page for a guy called “Danny Prime”. Probably a fake name too. The profile is full of pictures that have been ripped straight from Google images. It’s amateur.’ He sniffed derisively. ‘Anyway, this guy is really active on running pages and things like that.’

Reilly was confused. ‘But we’ve got our guy,’ she said. ‘Nico Peroni didn’t have any dating profiles set up. We’ve combed his laptop.’ She wasn’t sure how to feel about this development. It was a bit late in the piece, but she would have to look into it. The fact that the guy was a runner piqued her interest though given the fitness angle running through the evidence all along. Was it possible that Peroni hadn’t worked alone?

‘And Gary,’ she turned to the other tech once Rory had left.

‘OK, first of all, don’t be mad …’ he began.

‘Now that you said that, I already am a little bit.’

‘I was doing a little more work on the Grace Gorman case.’

‘OK…’

‘And I just did a search on the house where we found the necklace. I dug up some more information on the ownership history. It’s up for sale at the moment and I got in touch with the seller Janey Smith — sister of that OAP Martin O’Toole, pretending to be an interested party.’

‘I’m not sure if that’ll help, we already know that the brother died years ago and it doesn’t look he had anything to do with the more… recent occupant.’

‘Maybe but the woman, Smith has agreed to meet, and I thought she might be able to shed some light on a few things about the house and what it was like when her brother was still living there, maybe the story behind the wigs or something?’

‘I don’t know Gary, that’s probably one for the task force.’ She sighed. This was the problem with imbuing the team with the same kind of work ethic as your own. Of course Gary wanted to chase this up himself, when it was painfully obvious to everyone that no-one trusted the task force guys. ’When are you meeting the sister?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon. Any chance you’d come along? That would be brilliant.’

Reilly didn’t feel brilliant when she got home. Yes, it had been a successful day. It was always good to get a killer off the streets. Peroni hadn’t confessed as yet, but his complete unwillingness to defend himself or even speak was as good as. They had enough evidence to see him convicted which was the main thing. Pure antimine was hard to come by.

She cooked herself a nutritious meal: spinach, asparagus and quinoa salad with a steak. That seemed like it should have all the vitamins she needed.

She felt so restless. It was as if she should be doing something, every moment, to prepare for what lay ahead. But what? All she could do was wait for the next eight months or so to pass. Isn’t that what all women did? At some stage she would have to start making more concrete arrangements, but it was early days now.

In fact, it was so early that she still couldn’t be certain of anything. People got false positives all the time, didn't they? She had to book an appointment with a doctor just to be sure. She would do that soon.

After dinner, she took a long bath. She hadn’t spoken much to Chris today, though he was obviously curious. She couldn’t bear to talk about anything just yet. But to be honest, it was nice to know that he was interested at least. It made her feel as though she hadn’t completely wrecked their friendship after all.

She pulled herself out of the bath and looked at her dripping body in the mirror. Had it changed? Was it making its own secret preparations for motherhood? She couldn’t see that it had changed. Maybe she looked a little bit … fuller overall, but that could be explained by the lack of exercise she had been doing since she got back from Florida. No, it was impossible to tell. For something like that, she needed the diagnosis of a professional to make sure.

The information that Rory had given her before she left work was still niggling at the back of her mind. It was probably just a coincidence, but it was worth looking into.

She sighed and opened her laptop and typed in the hack link that Rory had given her. Even when something was over, it wasn’t really over.

The page was private, but because of the password that Rory had given her, she was able to see it. Pretty innocuous stuff. Just posts about running, really. It was set up so that no one could add him as a friend, but he interacted regularly with the running club in the Phoenix Park, in particular conversing with one young girl who wanted advice.

Unfortunately, there was no way to find out who he really was. Lots of men set up fake profiles for dating, so that wasn’t suspect in itself. Probably he was just married. It was weird that he had a bogus Facebook account, but then some people tried really hard to maintain their privacy. After all that heavy thinking — about everything, Reilly thought she deserved to get some rest.

Sleep didn’t come easy, though. The events of the past few weeks went running through her head like the wind that was blowing outside. For Reilly, it still didn't feel as though anything was put to rest.

Chapter 34

Why do you look so different from your profile pictures?

Oh, those aren’t of me. I only use this thing so that I can keep up to date, I don’t like to have my life plastered all over the place.

Fair enough, lots of my friends have pages like that. Maybe I over-share.

No, it’s good. Your pictures are really nice. They remind me of family.

That’s really sweet.

You keep icing that hamstring, OK? I want to see you back at the track next week. I don’t want to have to run with someone else again. Such a pain.

She’s beginning to trust me, I can feel it. She didn’t come last time because she had an injury. But she actually messaged me to tell me that. She reached out to me. The time is coming closer.

In other good news, Nico Peroni has been arrested. It’s mixed news, actually. The heat is off me, for now, but it’s not great news for the business. I would prefer for all of this to be taking place far away from me but I have to take my wins where I find them.

I need all my energy for this. My creation for Constance must be the most spectacular yet.

So it seems as though everything is coming together. My only wish is that I could see Ruth when they tell her of her daughter’s fate. I want to see the horror and grief rush up on her. I want to see all of her worst nightmares come true.

If there’s anyone I’m leaving this legacy for, it’s her. Soon she can see the result her selfishness has wrought, so that she can know my pain.

Just in case you forgot about me, Ruth.

Constance sighed and stirred the soup she was making for her mother. She didn’t have a hamstring injury. The truth was, her mother had fallen into one of the black depressions that sometimes seized her and Constance had made the journey over to Oxford to look after her. She had just wanted to reach out and talk to someone normal, so she had messaged Danny from the running group. There was something kind of calming about him. Constance wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship, but she didn’t think he was either.

When her mother got into a place like this, she was hard to deal with. ‘You just had to wait it out,’ is what the doctors said. She spent the night before telling Constance: “I’ve done such awful things, Connie, such terrible things.”

It was a common theme of her depression. She would never tell Constance exactly what it was that she had done. Constance didn’t think it could be that bad. She was a lecturer, for goodness sakes. It wasn’t exactly a life of sin. She had been a good mother, for the most part. Constance knew that her mother had seen a psychologist before she was born, to talk through various issues, but that was her business. She knew that Ruth had mixed feelings about becoming a mother. She wanted it, but feared that she might not be very good at it. Constance had to reassure her a lot on that score.

‘Connie? Are you in here?’ Her mother appeared at the kitchen door, weak and pale.

‘Sure, Mum. I made soup. You have to eat something tonight, ok?’

Ruth nodded. This meekness usually indicated that she was getting back to normal and Constance was relieved. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could handle, to be honest.

‘Are you feeling better?’

Ruth nodded again. ‘I feel that there are things you should know,’ she said. ‘About me. Things I’ve done.’

‘Mum, like I said before, I don’t want to know. You don’t need to tell me anything. This is your business. What happened in the past has nothing to do with me.’

‘But it does,’ said Ruth. ‘I feel that you know me as a better person than I really am.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ said Constance. ‘You’re flawed. I’m flawed. Everyone is flawed. We just have to do our best to overcome those things and to live with them and move on. You need to stop beating yourself up for something that happened in the past.’

‘You really, really don’t want to know?’ asked Ruth.

Constance shook her head. ‘I don’t.’

‘OK. Then let me just say this: never do something out of a sense of duty, because you will not be good at it. You will disappoint yourself, and everyone around you. Promise me that.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Constance. ‘No promises. Making a promise is just another way to let someone down.’

Reilly and Gary pulled up to the industrial block of flats where Janey Smith lived.

‘I’m still not sure this is a productive use of our time,’ said Reilly.

‘Well, look at it this way. The chef case is closed, we’ve got a little more time on our hands for the moment. So we might as well use it.’

There was rubbish clogging the stairwells, but Reilly refused to take the lifts. ‘Those things look like death traps,’ she said.

‘You know that people get stabbed in stairwells like this one?’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ said Reilly.