Taboo (5 page)

In the meantime, because of the victim’s profile, the media frenzy had already begun in earnest. While it was almost expected that inner-city scumbags would go around shooting each other, violent deaths in so-called ‘polite society’ was simply not acceptable to the general public, and the demands for answers were coming as fast as the hysterical headlines. Which meant that O’Brien was leaning even heavier on the detectives for a breakthrough that wasn’t easily apparent.

So far, not one person had a bad thing to say about Clare Ryan, or could give a single reason why anyone might want her dead.
Which made the bizarre circumstances of her death all the more sinister.

‘Reilly? Do you have a minute?’ Reilly looked up from her desk to find Lucy in front of her, a worried expression on her face.

‘Sure. What’s up?’

The lab tech chewed uncomfortably at her lip. ‘Something really weird.’

‘So tell me.’ She continued writing, giving Lucy only half her attention – she was busy and not in the mood to play guessing games today. Lucy needed to learn to think for herself and trust her own intuition more often. While she reminded Reilly a little of
herself when she was starting out in forensics, there was this slight insecurity about her that she hoped would be erased over time.

‘This I think you really need to look at.’

Something in her tone of voice caught Reilly’s attention this time, and she put the pen down. ‘What is it?’

‘Can you just come and take a quick look?’

Following Lucy into the lab, they approached the light microscope. ‘Just take a look and tell me what you see.’

Reilly bent over, looked through the eyepiece and adjusted the magnification to 400X. ‘Weird …’ she remarked, studying the specimen on the slide. She looked away for a moment, trying to make sense of it.

‘I’m glad you think so too,’ Lucy said, quietly. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should say anything …’

‘No, you were right. This is important. Important but weird,’ Reilly added, almost to herself.

‘So what do you think it is?’

‘Looks like some kind of animal hair,’ Reilly said. ‘Human hair is much finer, and the scales along the shaft are a giveaway.’ She moved away from the microscope. ‘Can’t say which animal it is though, at least not until we have a comparative sample.’

‘Which we do – in a way,’ Lucy said, looking tentative.

Reilly breathed out deeply. ‘Not exactly the kind of comparison we want, though, is it? Can I take a look at that paint sample again?’

‘Sure.’ Lucy duly prepared a second slide, this time using another piece of material evidence listed on the inventory.

Reilly quickly examined it under low magnification. ‘Both paint samples will need to be
analyzed further – and separately – using microspec,’ she said, referring to the process of microspectrophotomotery which involved electronically studying the wavelengths of energy absorbed and released by a single paint sample. ‘That will tell us if they are indeed the same sample. But if I were a betting girl – which I’m not – they look pretty alike to me.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Lucy said. ‘And seeing as this and the hair were both found at the Ryan scene …’

‘It means that one way or the other,’ Reilly finished grimly, her head spinning, ‘we’ve got a major problem.’

The hair and paint specimens she and Lucy had just examined were not the samples taken from the Ryan scene a few days earlier – they’d been collected the previous day from the home of a man who’d apparently committed suicide.

Now, back in her office, and reluctant to draw any hasty conclusions, Reilly decided to contact the unit dealing with the suicide.

She grabbed her coat and headed out the door. The station was just a few blocks away – she could use the fresh air to clear her head, and knew from bitter experience that it was always better to deal with the cops in person whenever possible.

Harcourt Street was always busy, but Reilly seemed to have chosen the rush hour. She was directed to the relevant room by a harried-looking female cop, then left to fend for herself. The room was a mass of scruffy desks, outdated computers, and busy officers. An older officer at a nearby desk noticed her lost expression.

‘Who you looking for, love?’

‘Jones,’ she said, hesitantly.

He pointed her toward the back of the room. ‘Over by the wall – see the lad in the blue sweater?’ She spotted a thirty-something man with dark hair and thick eyebrows tapping away busily at a computer.

‘Got it, thanks.’ She weaved through the desks, finally reaching Jones’ workstation. ‘You Jones?’

He looked up slowly. ‘Who wants to know?’

Reilly offered him her hand. ‘Reilly Steel, GFU.’ He looked surprised and she launched into her story without preamble. ‘We’re analyzing evidence collected from a suspected suicide your unit is handling. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about that if I may.’

Guess you must have enjoyed that garlic dinner you ate last night
, she added, silently, reeling back a little at the overpowering stench emanating from him. At times like this, her trusty sense of smell was a real disadvantage.

Like many of his colleagues, Jones was naturally wary of any interference from GFU and she readied herself for the inevitable defensiveness. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. As I said, I just wanted to clarify a couple of things for the file. You investigated a death in Donnybrook – a Jim Redmond?’

He nodded, the wary look never leaving his eyes.

‘Is this a confirmed suicide?’

Jones sighed and motioned her to a chair, and Reilly could tell that he was thinking GFU chasing a suicide was the last thing he needed. ‘We’re waiting for the ME to verify that there was no foul play, but the guy was found hanging from the beams in the dining room of his mansion. Sure, anyone could see it was a suicide.’

This kind of thinking was one of Reilly’s pet hates and the reason she rarely took any aspect of an open investigation at face value.

‘Was he married?’ Jones nodded and looked pointedly at his watch, but Reilly was like a terrier with a cornered rat, pursuing her prey until she got what she wanted. ‘So what’s the wife’s story?’

He waved a dismissive arm. ‘Same as ever – the missus is saying otherwise, that there’s no way he’d do something like that and that it has to be some kind of accident,’ he muttered. ‘But then again, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’

Reilly raised an eyebrow.
‘Any valid reason for her to think that?’

‘Nah, just the usual – he was on great form lately, they had a lovely life and were happy as Larry. You know – all pretty standard stuff.’

‘OK, so the wife reckons they were happy, but he …’ she opened her folder, looked at the inventory of evidence, ‘… he hanged himself with a cotton bed sheet?’

‘The old reliable.
Although, again, the wife is convinced he couldn’t tie a knot to save his life. I don’t know – I feel sorry for her and all that but … well, I think sometimes people just need to face facts. Especially when there’s a suicide note.’

At this, Reilly’s ears pricked up. ‘There was?’

From her point of view, this was good news; it meant there was more likely nothing untoward. But of course, if there was no foul play, the occurrence of the same trace evidence in separate scenes would be even harder to explain. She took a deep breath, reminding herself not to leap to conclusions, to wait and see where the evidence led. Another old training mantra echoed in her brain:
Intuition is a valuable tool – but only when based on evidence.              

‘
Yep. Laid out right on the dining room table, so you couldn’t miss it,’ Jones continued. ‘It was a strange one though, not the straightforward “Sorry I can’t take it anymore” type of thing you usually see.’

‘A strange one,’ Reilly echoed. ‘What did it say?’

He paused, thinking. ‘I can’t remember it exactly off the top of my head. Hold on there for a minute.’ He began to rummage through the stack of files on his desk. ‘I’ve got the report here somewhere.’

Reilly watched as Jones rummaged through the files on his desk, wondering how people could ever expect to operate efficiently in such a mess. She wasn’t even terribly interested in the note’s contents, more concerned about the fact that one did, in fact, exist.

‘OK, here it is.’ He held up the paper, and cleared his throat before reading, like a schoolboy reciting for his teacher. ‘“We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.” That’s all it said. Weird, isn’t it?’

‘It’s actually rather sad,’ Reilly mused. ‘It sounds like a quote of some sort.’

Jones shrugged. ‘No idea. The wife says she doesn’t know what it is, or what he’s trying to say. Obviously, he was saying goodbye.’

‘Maybe.’
A sudden thought crossed her mind. ‘Hey, you couldn’t make me a copy of that, could you?’

‘Of the note?
Why?’ Again, Jones sounded defensive. ‘Why are you so interested in all this anyway?’

Thinking quickly, Reilly sighed dramatically, as if she too felt that this could all be a complete waste of time. ‘Well, the GFU is undergoing a radical transformation at the moment, and they want us double-checking every last thing.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You know how it is.’

She didn’t want to tell Jones about the trace evidence, not until she’d at least examined things further. Luckily her conspiratorial manner seemed to placate him.

‘I get you. All right then, let’s do it now while I have it in my hand.’

He stood up and walked over to the copier. Reilly followed.

‘By the way, do you know if the
Redmonds had any pets?’ she queried.

‘Couldn’t be sure, but I doubt it,’ he said. He slipped the note into the machine and pressed the start button. ‘They’ve no kids; apparently he
traveled all over the world in his line of work – he was a property developer. Those guys aren’t in the country often enough to keep pets. I’ll find out though.’ He handed her the copy of the note. ‘There you go, love,’ he added patronizingly and this time it wasn’t just the garlic that got right up Reilly’s nose. ‘Knock yourself out.’

Back at the lab, Reilly leaned back in her chair, and studied the words again.

We are never
so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

It was sad, strangely haunting. Suffering, lost love …

Yet, according to his wife, Jim Redmond was happily married, so who
was
this lost love? And for a supposedly hard-nosed businessman, Redmond certainly seemed to have the soul of a poet.

She read the note again – both the words, as well as the sentiment behind them; they sounded almost Shakespearean in their simplicity. Could it be a quote from Shakespeare? Not that it mattered all that much in the scheme of things, but curiosity had got the better of her.

Reilly brought up Google on her computer and typed the entire sentence into the search box. Seconds later, a list of results appeared onscreen.
Aha!
she thought, satisfied. So it was a quote – although not one from Shakespeare; nope, this particular quote had been attributed to Sigmund Freud.

Curiouser
and curiouser …

Like most trainees, she’d come across the work of the famous psychoanalyst as part of her studies at the Academy and had a brief knowledge of his works relevant to behaviourism. But this particular phrase wasn’t familiar to her.

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

Then again, she thought, perhaps the expression ‘love object’ should have been a giveaway – wasn’t Freud renowned for his insistence that man objectifies everything?
Interesting though, that a property developer would have such an interest in Freud, and that he should use the man’s sentiments to sign off his life.

Oh well, she thought, putting the photocopy aside and picking up the phone to inform Jones of her findings, perhaps Redmond had studied psychology during his college days or something.

Suddenly, Reilly sat up rigidly in her seat, an icy shiver traveled along her spine. Damn, how could she have missed it, she thought, frantically scrambling around on her desk for a case file.

She was wrong in her thinking that she hadn’t come across Freud in a while; she had – very recently.
And if she thought about it, way too coincidentally. Reilly scanned rapidly through the crime-scene photos until she found the one she was looking for.

And there it was.

The cop was waiting for her outside Clare Ryan’s apartment.

He stood up straight as she approached, as though a tough drill sergeant had just come on deck. ‘Bit unusual this, if you don’t mind me saying – especially at this time of night.’

Reilly smiled at him. ‘Sorry to call you out so late – there’s just something I needed to check.’

Carefully selecting the right key, he unlocked the door to the apartment. ‘Don’t mind at all, to be honest – much more interesting than sitting around waiting to be called out for the next drunken fight.’

Reilly stepped into the apartment, the uniform right behind her. The place was dark, long lines of shadows and light came in from the tall windows and altered the perspective in a disconcerting way. She hesitated slightly, wondering why being here now should feel
so different from before, especially as the victims were gone and the initial horror had since dissipated. Of course, the death scene always seemed less threatening by daylight, but Reilly suspected that the disquiet she felt at the moment was rooted in something other than the dark. Now she was aware she’d missed something important the first time round, her senses had automatically gone up a notch and it almost felt as though a third party (the killer … the victims even?) was there with her urging her forward.

Or taunting her.

The cop flicked the lights on and right away the atmosphere changed. Trying to regain her composure, Reilly headed straight for the bedroom, her companion a respectful couple of paces behind her. She reached inside and, finding the light switch, flicked it on.

In the harsh light the scene looked almost as gruesome as it had when she first saw it. The bodies had gone but the blood splatter on the wall, now dark and dry, looked even more horrific. And the smell – that distinctive scent of blood, brains and death – still hung in the air, a brutal assault on Reilly’s sensitive nose.

She stood still for a moment, taking it all in, trying to picture the scene – not as she had before with just Clare and the man, but this time with someone else – perhaps a third party there in the room, and the uneasy knot in her stomach returned.

Concentrate,
she told herself.

Putting aside her fears, Reilly took a deep breath and closed her eyes, trying to let her senses take over, trying to imagine it afresh – this time with someone else in the room.

First the killer shoots Clare in the chest, while the boy does what – just lies there, quiescent? She struggled to figure out how he had restrained them. Then, as Clare lay dying, gasping out her last few breaths with a hole in her chest, he turns the gun on the boy and splatters his brains across the wall.

Reilly gradually shook those thoughts from her mind and approached the bedside table – the reason she had come back.

Kneeling down, she carefully scanned the books lined up neatly on the table. She bent closer to examine the pile and still couldn’t believe she’d missed it first time round. But now that she was aware, it was screaming at her.

Out of all the books on the bedside table, it was the only one that wasn’t covered in blood splatter, which meant that it must have been put there
after
Clare and her boyfriend were killed.

Reilly’s heart pounded faster in her chest.

‘Find what you were looking for?’ the uniform asked. She started quickly; she’d forgotten he was there.

‘Sure did,’ she replied, trying to hide the tremor in her voice as she stared at the title along the spine.

There, by the side of the victim’s bed, and clean as a whistle, was a copy of
The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund S. Freud.

A gruff voice answered the phone. ‘Kennedy here.’

Reilly cursed inwardly. She had been hoping to speak to Chris Delaney. She could only imagine what his cynical partner’s reaction would be.

‘It’s Reilly Steel from the crime lab,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve found something relevant to the Ryan case.’

‘Go on,’ he replied, cagily. As Reilly expected, he made little attempt to hide his suspicion of anything to do with the GFU.

‘Well, first of all, we’ve found material evidence common to yours and another more recent crime scene,’ she began.

‘OK …’

‘We just processed another case – an apparent suicide victim, Jim Redmond. Seemed fairly straightforward until we found a sample of paint and animal hair at the Redmond scene that matched samples we found at your Ryan scene.’

Kennedy was immediately sceptical. ‘What’s a suicide got to do with us? Maybe the common stuff has come from one of you lot – you walked it in or something.’

Reilly was ready for that. ‘I’m pretty certain that isn’t the case,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent the past few months drilling the problems with cross-contamination into my guys and I’d have to say their entry preparation is absolutely meticulous now. You’ve seen what we wear – nothing can get through those dust suits, and we change them after each crime scene.’

Kennedy remained resistant and Reilly figured the last thing he wanted was complications to his already baffling case. ‘Then one of our guys could have walked it in,’
he protested. ‘There was a bunch of uniforms at the Ryan place – it was like a bloody circus if you ask me.’

‘Considered that too,’ she countered. ‘I’ve already checked with the attending unit and nobody at the Ryan scene was common to this most recent one – the locations are at different parts of the city.’ She cleared her throat. If the paint sample had caused him to bridle, she knew that the Freud connection was sure to push him over the edge. ‘But there’s something else that links them …’

It was a moment before he responded. ‘Go on.’

‘Jim Redmond left a suicide note. I’ve just discovered it contains a Freud quote.’ When Kennedy didn’t answer, she went on. ‘Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology?’

‘Yeah, I went to college too,’ he growled. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, here’s the other coincidence – there was a copy of Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams
on Clare Ryan’s bedside locker when she died.’

‘So? Nothing unusual about that – she was a psychology student.’

‘It had no blood splatter on it – so it had to have been added after Clare and the boy died.’

He grunted, unwilling to concede.

Reilly spoke quickly. She could tell she was losing him. ‘Don’t you think the fibers and the Freud connection are just too much of a coincidence? If there’s any chance these two cases could be connected, however remote, it means that someone else must be involved and—’

‘Look,’ Kennedy sighed, wearily. ‘I know that conspiracy theories are all the rage where you come from, but here things are usually more straightforward—’

Reilly was about to reply when on the other end she heard a shuffling noise, and a curse.

‘Reilly?
Chris Delaney here,’ the other detective said, coming onto the line. ‘I’m sorry about that. My partner’s having a bit of a bad day. What have you got for us?’

She let out a deep, pent-up breath. ‘I was just explaining that we have some interesting new evidence on the Clare Ryan murder.’

‘What have you found?’

With a feeling of relief, Reilly went on to explain her most recent findings to the one person on the force, it seemed, who was prepared to listen.