Taboo (7 page)

‘What the fuck?’ Kennedy was aghast. ‘What kind of sick …?’

‘I don’t know – maybe even
they
didn’t know. That’s what we’re here to find out.’

It was the following morning, and the detectives were once again heading to the Ryan household, hoping to get some answers.

Reilly’s recent findings were shocking, particularly in light of the pathologist’s earlier report confirming the sexual activity. It had never crossed Chris’s mind that Clare Ryan’s killer could have been a close relative – why would it? Close relatives didn’t usually end up naked in bed together. But if the dead pair were in fact, brother and sister – and more importantly
knew
it – well, this case had taken a very odd turn.

‘Well, it might be weird, but it brings the case to a fairly simple conclusion, doesn’t it?’ Kennedy said as they climbed out of the car in front of house.

‘What?’ Chris had tried to avoid speculating too much about what the implications of the results were but Kennedy was forcing him into it. ‘You think that they couldn’t live with the shame of incest so they took part in some kind of twisted suicide pact?’

‘Maybe.’
Kennedy drew hard on his cigarette, his face wreathed in smoke. ‘Or maybe he decided to end it and the girl was just a victim. Either way,’ he concluded, stubbing his cigarette out beneath his heel and pitching the butt into the carefully manicured flower beds, ‘we need to find out what the hell is up with this family.’

They headed up the path to the front door and rang the bell. The chimes rang clear through the huge house.

Clare Ryan’s mother opened the door, her eyes wide and hopeful. ‘Detectives?’

She urged them into the house and straight through to the living room.

Her husband was sitting ramrod straight on the sofa, his face full of half-hidden hopes and fears. ‘Is it Clare?’ Bernard Ryan asked as they walked in. ‘You have news? Have you found out who … who killed her?’

The detectives sank into the expensive leather couch and exchanged a brief glance. ‘The investigation is still ongoing,’ Kennedy said noncommittally, taking out his notebook.

‘We just need to ask you both a few more questions,’ Chris added.

‘Of course, if it helps we’d be happy to—’

‘But we’ve already told you everything we know,’ Bernard interjected, irritably. ‘If you don’t have any news for us, then why are you here? It’s been a dreadful time – and we haven’t even buried our daughter yet.’

‘Why is that,
Mr Ryan?’ Delaney asked, glad that the man had raised this particular subject. He’d thought of little else since Reilly’s phone call. It was now a week since the murders and the Ryans still hadn’t buried Clare. They’d said that they were waiting to inform a family member who was difficult to locate. Difficult to locate because he was, in fact, lying on a cold slab in the morgue? ‘Who are you waiting for?’

Bernard paused, looked at his wife. ‘Our eldest, Justin, Clare’s older brother,’ he snapped. ‘He’s abroad somewhere traveling, and as usual we haven’t a clue where he is, let alone a means of contacting him.’

Ryan’s disapproval of his son was plain to see, but it wasn’t the kind of disapproval Delaney was looking for. Apparently the Ryans knew nothing of their children’s unusual closeness – or if they did, they were in denial, or doing a damn good job of hiding it.

Kennedy glanced at Chris for a moment before asking his next question. ‘Was Clare close to her brother,
Mr Ryan?’

The man shrugged. ‘Of course they were close – they were brother and sister.’ He looked to Gillian for reassurance.

She nodded slowly. ‘We’ve tried everything to locate him, detectives.’ She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. ‘He’ll be devastated when he finds out.’

‘So, Clare and Justin are your only children?’

‘Yes,’ Bernard replied. ‘Justin is five years older than Clare.’

‘And when was the last time you spoke to your son?’

Mrs Ryan glanced worriedly at her husband.

‘It was a couple of months ago,’ Bernard answered, ‘before he left for Thailand or Vietnam or whatever godforsaken country took his fancy this time.’ He shook his head. ‘We had words about it at the time, and we haven’t heard from him since.’

Chris caught Kennedy’s eye. ‘Is there a chance he might have come back, maybe returned home since then without letting either of you know?’ he ventured. ‘Could he be in the country and you not know it?’

There was a sniff of disapproval from Bernard. ‘Anything is possible.’ He looked from one detective to the other. ‘What I mean is that it wouldn’t be unheard of. Justin tends to do what suits him first and foremost.’

Kennedy leaned forward, probing gently. ‘It sounds as though you disapprove of your son’s travels, Mr Ryan.’

‘The boy is twenty-six years old, Detective, and has never worked a day in his life. He’s irresponsible and to be perfectly honest, is—’ he caught himself, sorrow etched all over his face, ‘
was
a very bad influence on Clare.’

You can certainly say that again,
Chris thought.

‘Even so, we can’t go ahead and bury his sister without him,’ the man continued. ‘It just wouldn’t be right. He adored Clare and, despite the fact that he was rarely at home, she adored him.’

The detectives exchanged a surreptitious glance.

‘Would Justin have ever stayed at Clare’s place when he came home from his travels?’ Chris asked. ‘Maybe without you knowing he was home? After all, her apartment is much closer to the city and the airport than here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ Torn between anger at his son and grief over his daughter’s death, Bernard Ryan’s emotions were clearly shot to pieces. ‘I suppose he could have – who knows what he might do? He may have preferred that to coming all the way out here. As you can probably tell, my son and I don’t always see eye to eye.’

Did that make Bernard Ryan a possible suspect then? Chris wondered. Did he find out that Justin had been corrupting Clare in the most deplorable way and, repulsed and ashamed by his children, decide that he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands?

Reilly had been trying from the start to convince them that something wasn’t right about this shooting. She was convinced that a third party was involved in both this, and the Jim Redmond suicide. But he and Kennedy weren’t yet in a position to share her view that the unexplained paint and animal fibers common to Clare Ryan’s apartment and Jim Redmond’s front room meant that these cases were somehow connected.

Still, he decided to try a bit of speculative fishing. ‘
Mr Ryan, do you know a man called Jim Redmond?’ he asked, ignoring Kennedy’s surprised glance.

After a beat, Bernard replied. ‘You mean Johnny Redmond who plays bridge with us now and then?’

‘The person I’m referring to is a businessman from Donnybrook.’

‘No. Johnny lives just up the road from us here …’ Ryan looked blank, genuinely blank, and Chris knew instinctively that if there was a connection between Clare Ryan and Redmond’s death, it was unlikely it had anything to do with Clare’s father.
Their
Redmond clearly meant nothing to him.

‘Who is he?’ Bernard demanded, glancing in surprise at his wife. ‘And what has he got to do with my daughter’s murder?’

‘Nothing as far as we can tell,’ Kennedy interjected, smoothly. ‘We’re just making further enquiries, that’s all. But what we
would
like to do now is help you locate your son Justin. Have you reported him missing?’

‘Missing?’ Bernard Ryan was dismissive. ‘He’s not missing – he just hasn’t bothered to contact us in a while, which, believe me, is nothing new.’

‘Do you have any recent photographs of him? Something that might help us locate him for you?’ Chris asked.

Gillian Ryan headed for the sideboard at the other end of the living room, where a small selection of family photographs was displayed. Chris remembered briefly running his eye over these pictures the first time they’d visited, but he hadn’t really studied them. He certainly hadn’t figured on them helping him identify Clare Ryan’s dead companion.

‘Here,’ Gillian handed them a photo. ‘This is probably the most recent one we have of Justin. It was taken at Clare’s twenty-first birthday party last year.’ Clare looked happy and carefree, sitting on the sofa alongside a young guy playing the guitar. ‘That’s our son there,’ Gillian clarified.

Not that her clarification was necessary. Because almost as soon as he’d laid eyes on the photo, Chris realized that the guy in this picture was the same man they’d found in bed with Clare. He knew this because on his right upper arm, Justin Ryan was sporting the very same oriental-style tattoo as the body they’d found.

But as he continued studying the photograph, something else jumped out at him – something that hit him with all the force of a ten-ton truck. And while the first realization might have brought things to a tidy conclusion, the second sent the entire investigation into absolute disarray.

‘You were right,’ Chris said to Reilly, handing her the photograph they had picked up at the Ryans’ house. When he and Kennedy had finished up with the parents, he’d phoned Reilly to ask if she could meet them in the incident room back at the station. If she could confirm what they’d now discovered, they needed to present a whole new set of facts about this case to O’Brien – who would probably go ape.

While the investigation had never exactly been straightforward, there was no question that it had now taken on a much more sinister turn. A murder with incestuous overtones was sufficiently gratuitous to send the media into an even greater frenzy, and if there was one thing their boss despised, it was high-profile cases.

Kennedy had mostly been silent on the drive back to Dublin, as if refusing to admit that they had been going about the investigation all wrong.

‘Look, it doesn’t prove anything,’ he’d protested when they’d left the Ryan household and Chris had filled him in on his discovery.

‘It proves that we’ve been chasing our tails while the GFU was trying to point us in another direction – the
right
direction,’ he replied, nodding at the photograph Kennedy held in his hands. ‘Reilly was right about them being siblings and now this means she’s probably also right that everything isn’t as it seems.’

‘Come on – we still don’t know that for sure.’

‘Look at that photograph, Pete. You know as well as I do what it means. Even if he did shoot his sister, the kid couldn’t have pulled the trigger on himself – not voluntarily anyway.’

‘So what other explanation is there?’

‘The one that Reilly’s been trying to open our minds to from the beginning,’ he reiterated, his mouth tightening into a grim line as he drove. ‘There’s somebody else involved.’

‘But how?’
Kennedy couldn’t seem to get his head around it. ‘There was no break-in, no motive, no nothing other than a few scraps of paint and a bit of dog hair that could have come from anywhere.’

‘
Animal
hair,’ Chris corrected. ‘We already know the Ryans don’t have pets. Clare didn’t have a pet – and neither, for that matter, did Jim Redmond.’

‘You’re not telling me that you seriously think this is connected to that guy Redmond’s suicide, are you?’ Kennedy protested, turning to look at him. ‘What the hell has Steel done to you?’

Chris accelerated through an amber light, keen to get back to the station and talk to Reilly. Never again would he make the mistake of discounting her insights so readily, not when she’d been certain there was something off about this case from day one. ‘Opened my eyes, that’s what.’

Now, as the three sat together in the incident room, the Ryan file open and the crime-scene photos scattered across Chris’s desk, Chris handed Reilly the photograph of Justin Ryan. ‘Take a look at that.’

She studied the picture. ‘This is the brother? No surprises there, he fits the identity profile, and the tattoo is pretty conclusive—’

‘Take a closer look,’ he interjected, impatiently, ‘a closer look at what he’s doing, or more importantly,
how
he’s doing it.’

Her interest piqued, Reilly scrutinized the photograph for a few moments more before it finally hit her. ‘Whoa,’ she said, looking from one detective to the other, her eyes widening in realization. ‘The guitar – he’s right-handed, isn’t he?’

‘That’s what we thought. Which means—’

‘
Which means that he couldn’t have voluntarily fired the gun.’ Reilly tried to keep the exultant tone out of her voice, but her glee was obvious. ‘The trajectory went from left to right. I knew it, I
knew
there was somebody else in that room.’

‘Yeah well, I hope you don’t mind if we save the champagne till later,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘We’ve got a case to run.’

‘You’re welcome, Detective,’ she retorted with no small measure of triumph. ‘Glad to be of help.’

‘Yeah, well,’ he shifted in his seat, ‘we would have worked it out … just maybe not as soon.’

‘Wow, is that actually a
thank you
I’m hearing?’

‘It’s the closest you’re going to get to it in this place, sweetheart,’ he shot back, a hint of a smile on his face.

‘Seriously, Reilly,’ Chris said, turning to her, ‘thanks for the heads-up. If it wasn’t for you, we might never have discovered this.’

She shrugged. ‘Hey, that’s what I’m here for.’

‘OK, OK, enough of the you’re-great-I’m-great stuff,’ Kennedy growled, sipping on a stale cup of coffee, ‘let’s get back to business.’ He spluttered as the cold coffee hit his tongue. ‘Jesus, how old is this?’

‘It’s the one you made this morning – before we visited the
Ryans,’ Chris replied, sardonically. ‘You might want to freshen it up a bit.’

‘No shit.’ He stood up, hitched his trousers up over his belly. ‘Anyone else want one?’

‘If you’re buying.’

Kennedy waddled over to the coffee machine and busied himself making three cups of coffee. ‘How’d you take it, Steel?’ he threw back over his shoulder.

‘Black, no sugar, thanks.’

‘Bloody health freak,’ he muttered to himself. Reilly met Chris’s amused glance. Clearly Kennedy’s bark was worse than his bite and he was likely a big softie behind it all.

The detective returned with three mugs clutched in his big hands and set them down on the desk. ‘Firstly, I think we need to get all of this straight before we ruin the boss’s year and start giving the tabloids orgasms.’ He eased himself back into his chair and sipped his coffee. ‘Ah, that’s better. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve been involved in ballistics,’ he said to Reilly, ‘so is there any way of telling whether or not somebody else fired both shots?’

‘You mean shot Clare as well as setting up the brother to look like he shot himself?’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll take another look but if you ask me, I think it’s likely. I’ve always thought the gunpowder residue found on the brother was suspect, and there’s no reason as yet to believe that he would have shot his own sister.’

‘I wonder if this other person might have known that they were brother and sister, that it might have been his – or her – motive?’ Chris ruminated. While they’d established that Clare had no jealous exes or current boyfriends that might have taken offence to their relationship, what about Justin? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that. Surely most women would be utterly repulsed by the discovery that the man in her life was sleeping with his own sister. Hell, who wouldn’t be?

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Reilly said, studying him. ‘And I think we now have to assume Clare and Justin’s … close relationship must have been the motivating factor for these murders. Whoever did this discovered them in bed together, or
set
out to discover them in bed together and then …’

‘Which means we can’t rule out the parents,’ Kennedy mused. ‘Although if I found out my kids were up to those
sort of shenanigans, I think I’d want to put a bullet in my own head, not theirs.’ He shuddered at the very thought.

‘So what about the Redmond suicide?’

‘I still don’t see how it’s related to this one,’ Chris replied. ‘I know about the fibers and the hairs, but still—’

‘Well, I’m still willing to bet it’s not cross-contamination,’ Reilly protested. ‘And the Freud connection means something – I’m sure of it.’

Chris started to argue, but hesitated, seeing the conviction in her eyes. ‘OK, so say for the moment we go with your belief that these are connected. Where does that lead us?’

She sighed. ‘Nowhere, yet.’ She toyed with her coffee cup. Chris noted her chewed-down nails and was almost relieved to see a chink in her armor. ‘But what it does mean is that we need to formally include the Redmond “suicide” in our case file, and start looking more closely for anything else that might tie the two cases together.’

‘Fan-fucking-
tastic,’ Kennedy grumbled. ‘Just what we need – an extra case. O’Brien’s going to love this.’

She drained her coffee and stood up. ‘I’m going to attend Redmond’s autopsy this evening,’ she said. ‘See if Karen can give me anything else to go on.’

‘It’s scheduled for later today?’ Chris knew the ME’s caseload was almost always full and suicide victims often ended up at the bottom of the pile.

‘Tonight at eight.’

‘We’ll come with you,’ he said, and out of the corner of his eye spotted Kennedy’s surprised look. ‘Look, I know it still doesn’t feel like one of ours, but if Reilly really believes there might be something—’

‘Fine,’ his partner growled. ‘I said I’ll go with the flow on this one  but you can count me out for tonight,’ He shivered.. ‘You know I only go to the dungeon if I really have to,” he added, referring to the recently built city morgue building.  ‘It might be all shiny and new but  it still gives me the creeps.’

‘OK, then
I’ll
come with you,’ Chris said. ‘If there’s a chance this might have something to do with the Ryan murder, then it wouldn’t kill us to check it out. If it doesn’t – great, but if it does, it might just save us a lot of time later.’

‘Well, as I said, count me out.’

‘Fair enough.’ Chris shrugged. ‘How about I go to the dungeon – and you can visit the lion’s den?’

Kennedy began gathering paperwork and putting photos back into the file. ‘Brilliant. By the time I’ve finished breaking the bad news to O’Brien
,
we’ll be lucky if the two of us don’t end up in the bloody dungeon.’ He paused and looked again at the photo of Justin, smiling, playing his guitar. ‘Families, eh? They can get you into a shitload of trouble.’