Taboo (26 page)

‘They’re a good group, Reilly, you should know that better than anyone.’

She gave a grudging nod.

‘Now you need to trust them and, more to the point, trust
us
to get the rest of the job done.’

‘I know,’ she conceded, hoarsely. But it was so hard to have to just stand back and do nothing. ‘As I said, I’ll talk to O’Brien – but on one condition,’ she added, firmly. He looked at her. ‘Just give me a little more time to go through the files, see what I can find—’

‘Reilly—’

‘Chris, please, just give me this much, not as a cop, but as a friend. All I’m asking is a couple more hours at the most. I know I’m off this; we don’t have any other choice. But I’m only off it once Jess is officially a suspect and right now we’re only working on conjecture. Just give me the rest of the afternoon, tops.’

‘Reilly, you know I can’t—’

‘You and I both know that occasionally things need to stay off the radar,’ she said, staring purposely at his left arm and leaving him under no illusions that she was referring to his illness. It was a cheap shot and they both knew it but Reilly was desperate.

For a long moment he stared at her, then he sighed and she knew she had him. ‘For what it’s worth, I think this a really bad idea.’

‘It isn’t and you know it. Let me look over the evidence one last time, see if I can give us anything that’ll help you find her. What you guys uncover yourselves after today has nothing to do with me.’

There was a long silence as she watched him mentally weigh things up.

‘Please, Chris, you owe me this much.’

‘We could both get fired over this.’

‘Not if we keep things quiet. Daniel won’t talk until you do and nobody other than the three of us
know what’s going on – right?’

‘Well, I was just about to call Kennedy—’

‘A couple of hours, Chris, that’s all I’m asking, then I’m off it, I swear.’

He nodded almost imperceptibly and she breathed an internal sigh of relief.

‘You have until the team briefing at eight- tomorrow morning; we can all talk to O’Brien then.’ He reached for the door. ‘In the meantime, this conversation never happened.’

‘Of course.
But you’ll keep me in the loop, won’t you? I can still help – unofficially of course and—’

‘Reilly, as far as this thing goes, I think I’ve given you more than enough,’ Chris said, his tone steely. ‘Right now, I need you to let me do my job, so I can get out there and stop anyone else from getting hurt.’

‘You’re right, I should have told you,’ Daniel admitted.

It was much later that evening and he and Reilly were at her apartment sifting through what they had so far on the killings, searching for anything that might help them locate Jess  and, by extension, Mike.

‘But I didn’t want to upset you, or indeed prejudice your handling of the case – not until I knew more. As far as I was concerned I needed to treat this as just another profile and leave my personal suspicions out of it.’

‘Which was why you so readily offered to help on the ground.’

‘Yes.’

While she could perhaps understand Daniel’s professional reluctance to say anything, personally she still felt hurt and somewhat betrayed by his actions. At the very least, he should have told her that Jess was out of CCWF.

As her tutor, he had been aware of her personal history, and having gradually drawn Reilly out and earned her trust, they’d discussed the situation throughout her time at Quantico. For her part, she’d been desperate to try and understand how her little sister could have committed such a killing, and the profiler in return had been fascinated by his protégé’s history and how it had shaped and perhaps even driven her professional life.

Not only that but, given her mother’s mental health issues, Reilly always worried if she might too might be genetically predisposed to some kind of psychological fragility in the way that Jess was. It was something that had haunted her every day since that horrific incident at Cassie’s house, despite Dr Kyle and Daniel’s assurances that this wasn’t a given.

What if some day, like Jess, some deep-seated malaise was triggered in her?

Reilly had always clung to the notion that her sister was not at heart an evil person, that her personality had instead been shaped by her experience, and the trauma of losing her mother at such a young age. But as Daniel had repeatedly told her, sociopathic or psychopathic personalities are innate and almost always rise to the fore, irrespective of family circumstances or outside influences. Still, it was a disturbing and unsettling thought.

She stood up and stretched her limbs, unwilling to dwell on that aspect just now. ‘I don’t know what Jess is trying to achieve with all this.’

He looked at her, his expression dubious. ‘Come on, Reilly, stop deluding yourself; you really have no idea what this is all about? The power play, the personal challenge, the family connection …’

‘I guess the obvious is answer is that she blames me. She blames me, on some crazy level, for what happened with Mom, and what she did. And she wants me to be punished.’

Your fault…

She slumped back down on the sofa. Despite the disconcerting thought that Jess was somewhere out there, watching her, stalking her even, it seemed unlikely that she would actually attack or kill her – if she had wanted to do that, she could have easily done it before now. Instead, the murders, the throwing down of a challenge to Reilly’s professional abilities … Jess was clearly trying to punish her in a very different way.

‘You yourself were the one who admitted Jess always had a simple sense of right and wrong. An eye for an eye …’

Reilly nodded. ‘And now she has Dad and she wants me to find them.’

He was silent for a moment before asking the next question. ‘And when you do?’

‘I really have no idea.’

‘The taboo fixation …’ Daniel ventured. ‘Professionally speaking, my belief is that this aspect of the killings is especially significant, given her history,’ he added.

‘I know. Even as a kid, she was always pushing limits, daring others to break the rules. It was like she got a kick out of it. Of course, there was no way I could have anticipated …’ Reilly’s eyes shone.

‘Of course you couldn’t. Who could? But tell me more about her relationship with your parents, as much as you can remember.’

Reilly sat forward. ‘As a young child, she always observed people, saw things and picked up on things that others didn’t see.’ She looked away into the distance, thinking back to their childhood. ‘She adored my dad though, that’s why I find it hard to believe she would hurt him now. They had a special relationship, different to the one he had with me after Mom left I guess, because she was the baby, the one we both needed to look after. It was why I was so sure it was only because of him that she hurt my mother – and her boyfriend – in the first place. She was trying to protect him.’

That had always been the thread of hope Reilly had clung to when trying to make sense of it all. Jess had only committed that horrible act out of love and loyalty to her father, who she knew had been devastated and betrayed by his wife’s desertion. But, deep down, she and Mike both knew this wasn’t the case; there was much more to it.

‘So why has she taken him now?’ Daniel asked. ‘Why bring him into this?’

She looked at him, noticing the change in his tone. He was trying to lead her somewhere. ‘You think she’s using him as part of this game, as a pawn of some kind?’

‘Think about everything she’s done so far. The killings were all about forcing people to do what is most abhorrent to them. Think about it, Reilly. What would be most abhorrent to
Mike, or to you even?’

She couldn’t reply, couldn’t even comprehend an answer to that question. It was utterly beyond her realm of thinking – as was everything Jess had done.

She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know, but either way it’s a disconcerting thought.’

‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘But she
thrives
on your discomfort. That’s a big part of what she’s doing.’

‘Challenging me? Being noticed?’

‘Yes. Chances are she knows that you’ve made the connection by now and that you’re trying to figure out what’s coming next. She loves that.’

The events of the past few days raced through Reilly’s mind like a DVD on fast-forward, images piling one on top of the other. ‘My apartment, the lab, my dad’s place – she’s been watching me for weeks, hasn’t she?’

‘I would think so, yes.’

Despite Daniel’s belief that Mike wasn’t in immediate danger, everything pointed toward another violent death – but whose? Jess had already shown that she could get to Reilly whenever she wanted to – at home, at work, seemingly anywhere. So if she had simply wanted to kill her she’d had ample opportunity.

No, there was more to it than that. The theatrical nature of the killings, the way she’d left the victims, all suggested that in her own sick way Jess saw herself as an artist, painting a grim tableau that told her own very particular story, in her own unique way. But what would it be? Even with this new information, coupled with the mass of evidence they’d accumulated, they were still no nearer to knowing what Jess might do next. She was still fully, totally, in control.

Reilly stood up and headed for the coffee maker. ‘I need a break.’ She suddenly felt exhausted. After all that had happened over the past few hours – days even – finding the right way to channel these powerful emotions and relive things that had happened so long ago was almost impossible.

But for her father’s sake, and the sake of anyone else Jess might have her sights on as a target, Reilly tried to tell herself that this was just another case, and she needed to treat it as such.

‘What are you thinking?’ Daniel asked, accepting the mug of coffee that Reilly had just made.

She sat across from him, and looked away into the distance. ‘If this really is Jess and she’s doing all this to challenge me, to punish me, why bring so many innocent victims into this? All those people, some of them just kids …’

‘Because that’s what you do, Reilly, that’s your strength. Your job as an investigator is to find as many pieces of a puzzle as you can, and help the authorities make the rest of them fit. For someone like Jess, it’s purely that – a game, and the morality of it doesn’t come into it. As to why she chose those particular people, well, I have a theory about that.’

‘You do?’

He nodded. ‘Detective Delaney told me earlier about the witness they’d spoken to, that homeless man who recognized the young college girl and the camper.’

‘Yes, Kennedy did mention they were looking at a possible charity angle – something that might help tie the victims together.’

‘Well, if you think about it, upon entering the country someone like Jess would have had to live under the radar, at least for a while, until she found somewhere to base herself. It’s very common for criminals entering new territory to align themselves with the homeless population. They have access to food, shelter and, for the most part, afford complete invisibility.’

Reilly nodded; it made sense. She’d been wondering where Jess had been basing herself, particularly when planning all of this.

‘Now if it’s established that those victims routinely went out of their way to help such people, then there’s a very good chance Jess may have come into contact with them, even briefly,’ Daniel continued. ‘Think about it, an attractive blond in her twenties begging on the streets?
Certainly the type to attract more attention or pity than the usual junkie and alcoholic types.’

‘So you’re thinking Jess picked these people because they tried to
help
her?’ The suggestion was more cruel and even more horrendous than believing they were chosen at random.

‘Well, for a lot of people, helping others, particularly those in dire straits, is a form of taboo in itself. The majority of people don’t like to cross that particular social divide, mostly because they’re afraid to. Deep down they don’t want to be confronted with the reality that such a break from society can happen to any one of us. People like the young college student or perhaps that well-to-do businessman – who not only acknowledge down-and-outs but go one step further by engaging and actually trying to help them – are actually breaking a social taboo, albeit a very positive one.’

‘And Jess may have picked up on that. After all she has spent the last decade with people trying to help her, rehabilitate her.’

‘Yes, and given her history, I would think this aspect of their personalities would have intrigued her. If nothing else, it would certainly throw a degree of light as to why such a disparate group of people, who have no known connection to one another, ended up dead at the hands of a murderer. Chances are Jess may have learned a great deal about them and their lives through one or perhaps repeated conversations. We both know that she’s very skilled at eliciting information in order to get what she wants.’

Reilly thought about it. To think that these people had gone out of their way to talk to her, maybe tried to help her, and she repaid them by using them in her sick, murderous game.

‘I know what you’re thinking and there’s little point. There is no morality involved; for people like Jess, there never is.’

Reilly nodded. The fact remained that all these people were dead; their only sin possibly being that they’d been too kind-hearted for their own good.

She set her empty coffee cup on the table. ‘Do you think she’s still living in that environment? Could she have taken my dad to a homeless shelter?’

Daniel shook his head defiantly. ‘No. The shelters would have been a two or three week thing at the most, simply a stopgap before she found somewhere more permanent, somewhere private for her to hole up, preferably unnoticed.’

But where might that be?
Reilly asked, silently, looking again at the evidence files. There had to be something amongst the trace that might lead them to where she was holding Mike now.

Daniel followed her gaze. ‘I’m not sure the answer is in there just now. Knowing Jess, she’ll throw a few additional crumbs your way somehow – it’s what she’s been doing all along.’

But Reilly’s biggest frustration was that she was now no longer in a position to find those crumbs, whatever they might be. ‘She’s planned this carefully. And no doubt, she’ll keep doing so until you catch her,’ he concluded. ‘Which is why we’d better get back to this and try help your friend Delaney and his crew do just that.’

Reilly looked at her watch. It was now past 2 a.m., and the team briefing with O’Brien was scheduled for eight-. Time was running out.

‘I’ll keep going on this stuff all night if I have to, but really, you should be getting back to your hotel. Where are you staying again?’

‘The
Merrion, but actually, I have no problem making this an all-nighter – or at least catching a couple of hours on your couch before we head in for the meeting.’

‘There’s no need Daniel, honestly.’

‘Yes, there is. So far, I’m sorry to say I’ve been more of a hindrance than a help, but now that everything’s out in the open …’

‘OK, if you insist.’ Reilly got up and moved to the cupboard where she kept a spare set of bed linen. ‘Might as well get you organized then.’

In truth, with all that was going on, she was almost relieved she wouldn’t have to stay here alone tonight. If Jess was watching and planning something, who knew what? But upon opening the cupboard door, the rest of her thoughts trailed away.

‘Now, don’t go to any fuss on my behalf. Believe me, I’ve spent many nights with my head on nothing more than a cold wooden desk and—’ Daniel paused, noticing her stillness. ‘What is it?’

Reilly’s face had gone deathly white. ‘Oh my God.’