Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3) Page 10

  It was stupid really. She’d long ago stopped caring and celebrating these things, but this was the first time she’d never received so much as a single card or phone call.

  Even Mike was too caught up in his new romance to remember, she mused, feeling truly sorry for herself. Maybe she should stop resisting joining Facebook; at least then her ‘friends’ would automatically be reminded that today was her thirty-third birthday. She’d sort of hoped that Chris might remember at least, given that he’d wheedled the date out of her before, back when they’d shared such things. But obviously those days were gone.

  Reilly slowed for a road crossing, briefly passed under the bright lights of a junction, then disappeared into the shadows of the pavement, shaded by a line of tall trees.

  Self-pity was not an emotion she liked to indulge and so she forced her mind to focus back on the events of the day, particularly the new possibility of a cult being involved. Everything they’d discovered – the tattoos, the girls’ mysterious lack of belonging and otherworldlyness – could indeed suggest that both had once been part of a cult. Given the latest discovery of corresponding trace elements, it seemed the girls had almost certainly spent time in a similar area too.

  But seeing as there was almost a decade between the discovery of the bodies, if they had been members of the same cult, it would have to have been in existence for some time.

  When Reilly had worked on the case involving the New Eden Cult back in the US, there had been some similarities. Two extended North Carolina families called Bullard, who owned a two-hundred-acre farm and woodland, decided under the leadership of Ruddy Bullard Snr that the world was gone to hell and it was time to sever all links with it. The group had moderate religious beliefs but were extreme survivalists. They had spent years gathering supplies and becoming self-sufficient. They had pretty much built a fortress and a small army by the time one of the younger Bullard boys came to the attention of the Greensboro PD for his part in an assault.

  When they eventually tracked him down to New Eden, they were rebuked by Ruddy Snr, and when they came back with a warrant and reinforcements, the leader had called a code red. The families hunkered down in their fortress and a high-profile three-week stand-off ensued.

  The FBI were called in within days, and Reilly’s old mentor and friend Daniel Forrest had profiled Ruddy and three other senior family members. Reilly was one of the many officers stationed there for the duration of the stand-off, as well as the subsequent clean-up and investigation.

  The clean-up was the part that still resonated with her; the faces of the kids in the barn, teenagers who looked so much younger and more innocent than their peers at the local mall or high school had ever done. They had discovered a small township inside the compound. The group had collected everything from generator fuel to tinned food; enough supplies to out live a nuclear winter, complete with bunkers where some of the clan – mostly the younger kids – were discovered gassed to death as part of a mass suicide. Sixty-three men, women and children dead, and four officers too.

  But the reason the follow-up investigation had lasted so long was the kids. It seemed Ruddy had wanted to widen the gene pool so that when the outside world destroyed itself, they could flourish and repopulate, aided by the dozen or so non-family members who had been abducted and brought to the compound from as far away as Seattle. Tracking the children’s identities had taken months; some of them had been missing for several years, and Reilly had helped match DNA from missing children’s reports to New Eden victims.

  Yet something about the cult theory for their current investigation didn’t sit well with Reilly.

  All too often, cults were about male dominance, sexual and otherwise. Yet, there was no evidence of sexual abuse – or indeed any kind of physical abuse – on either of the girls. They were both well nourished, healthy and indeed the lack of dental work suggested that they had had very wholesome diets.

  Reilly glanced at her GPS watch. She was running an eight-minute-mile pace and barely out of breath.

  And what of the algae? How did this fit in? Was the supposed cult’s homestead situated somewhere near those lakes and mountain streams Chris mentioned were so prevalent in the area? And if such a group did exist and none of the locals seemed to know about it, how had it remained undetected for all this time?

  Without context the very notion was simply another mystery.

  She felt there was something more, something out there, a piece of evidence, a clue, something that would help the whole thing fall into place like the last tumbler that opens a lock. But what was it?

  Despite the cold, the sweat was building up on Reilly’s forehead. She wiped at it with her sleeve and picked up speed as she neared Ranelagh. Pushing herself harder, her feet danced over the wet pavement, the extra exertion pushing out every thought and instinct except the urge to suck in more oxygen. She rounded the last turn and sprinted all the way to her front gate before slowing down and dropping her pace to a gentle jog.

  One more lap around the block to cool down, then she’d finally allow herself to relax and have some dinner. Pushing herself, driving herself, that was all she knew. She applied it to her work life and her personal life. If you work hard enough, push yourself – some might say punish yourself – enough, then eventually you will get what you want.

  Did it work? She slowed to a walk as she approached her door, and slipped her key from a pocket in her sweats. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it was the only way she knew to assuage the guilt of failures past.

  She slid the key into the lock and opened the door. Welcome home to an empty house, another night alone with just her thoughts and a glass of wine for company. Happy birthday.

  Pushing hard may be a good tactic for work, she thought regretfully, but it sure wasn’t doing anything for her social life.

  She threw her running clothes in the laundry basket and stood in the shower. Time to try and forget about work for a few hours before it drove her crazy. Let the subconscious mind work on it while she watched ten-year-old repeats of Friends and tried to make a single glass of wine last all evening.

  She was settling down to do just that when the shrill sound of the phone made her jump. But the number on the caller display made her grin.

  ‘Happy birthday to you … happy birthday to you ....’ a familiar voice with an unmistakeable Virginia burr sang.

  ‘Well, thank you, Daniel, but I’m glad to say it’s nearly over,’ she replied with a smile in her voice.

  ‘Oh contraire, my dear. It’s early in the day here.’

  ‘And where exactly is “here” these days? I can’t keep up with you since you retired.’ The former FBI profiler now worked in a private consultation role and frequently traveled around the country.

  ‘Clearwater, and forget retiring, I’ve never been busier. But enough about sunshine and easy living. How’s the Emerald Isle treating you?’

  ‘Great,’ Reilly lied. They chatted a while about their respective work lives, Reilly feeling more than a little jealous of Daniel’s beach house on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It seemed his consulting practise was going from strength to strength. ‘Todd is with the Tampa force down here too.’ Reilly had meet Daniel’s oldest son several times before – a nice guy who was shaping up to be a real chip off the old block.

  ‘That’s great, be sure to tell him I said hi.’

  ‘I will, and remember if you ever get tired of fighting crime in the North Atlantic, there’s always an opening down here for you. Come for a holiday sometime, I’m sure you could use some vitamin D by now.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’

  As they said their goodbyes, and given the week she was having, Reilly already knew that the possibility would be very much on her mind.

  Chapter 15

  I feel the weight upon me, the weight of expectation, of fear. I have failed once before, and now the specter of failure looms over me again. I have sworn to protect them, to shield them from a toxic world, but th
e fear has crept into our own world – the fear of uncertainty.

  Our safety is everything, it is what defines us, what makes us who we are. We are complete, one family, one being, but now I see that our world is fragile. Like an egg, our shell is all too precious, and once it is broken it can never be repaired, things can never be the same.

  Beyond the walls are cruelty and deceit, lies and pain, ageing and death. As long as we are strong we can resist these things, but if we let our guard down, all manner of pestilence will enter.

  But now I fear the walls may be breached, the shell cracked. Our family is cracking, fear and anxiety haunt our dreams, unanswered questions hover on our lips. How will we stay strong, stay together?

  I have been here before, suffered through this once already – and this is a suffering too much for one man to bear. And so my failures haunt me.

  I can see their eyes at night, shining in the darkness, accusing me of my greatest failure, failure to protect those that I love. What more damning accusation can there be? How can I sleep not knowing where my darlings are, that they are gone because of me, that in their hour of need I was not there?

  But now I must again head out into the wicked world to find another, guide them to our home, welcome them to the bosom of our family.

  Stephen and Julia Dignam entered the police station the following morning. Both were in their early fifties but looked older, the sleepless nights and worry taking their toll. Julia linked her husband’s arm through her own and in her other hand she held a ringbinder close to her chest.

  Written on the spine in faded ink was one word: Megan.

  The Dignam’s daughter had vanished without a trace twenty years before and every new story of a missing child or unidentified body brought back a new flood of familiar emotions – fear, hope, the possibility of closure after so many years. But they were realists, and had long stopped hoping for the dream conclusion to their nightmare.

  They longed now just to know what had happened to Megan, to have a final resting place to visit, a place to lay flowers – somewhere their beautiful daughter could rest in peace. Their lives had ended the day Megan disappeared and finding her was their only desire while they were still breathing.

  Like so many others who’d made contact since the public appeal about the tattooed girls, the Dignams were compelled to come here, to have somebody listen to their story and to maybe find some truth – even if that truth meant hearing the worst news any parent could ever hear.

  They gave the garda on duty all the details they could, showed them photos and old documents from her missing person case.

  And then the Dignams went home to continue doing the very thing they had spent the last two decades doing – wait.

  All week the Incident Room was inundated with more false leads following the press release detailing the tattoo. At times it had resembled a trading floor on Wall Street, especially in the first twelve hours.

  Ignoring the crank calls, they seemed to be divided into three categories: those who thought they might have seen angel-wing tattoos somewhere recently; those who seemed to remember once seeing a girl with a similar tattoo at some point in the past; and, most heartbreakingly, those who had a missing family member and were holding out hope that the remaining unidentified girl might belong to them.

  Such cases were the hardest to deal with. Almost all of them were on record and already reviewed, but they still owed it to the families to at least give them a response.

  They say hope springs eternal, but it also blinded some to reality. The people calling in about their missing relatives were not only from all over the country, but also went back decades, and included not just redheads, but blonds, brunettes and those whose hair ‘looked sort of red in the right light.’ Each got a call back, thanking them for their time and effort, but none produced anything useful.

  Between them the investigative team divided up the leads and tried to follow up on them. O’Brien gave them some extra resources, but it was still a long, slow process.

  As the calls continued to come in, the press stayed on the ‘Angels’ – and that meant that O’Brien stayed on their backs. For the first few days he’d called every morning for an update, but as the information they were getting from the public proved increasingly worthless his calls became less frequent but progressively more frantic.

  ‘Isn’t there anything?’ he complained at the end of the week.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but once again there’s been nothing especially useful,’ replied Reilly. She could hear him sucking on his teeth as he thought.

  ‘And the evidence from the girls … anything there?’

  ‘Pieces of a jigsaw, sir. Until we have further information they are just tantalizing bits and pieces.’

  O’Brien gave a deep sigh. ‘Very well. I hope to hear from you.’

  Reilly replaced the phone on its receiver. I hope to have a reason to call you, she thought.

  Most of those who thought they had seen either girl could be ruled out quickly. Either their memories were so vague as to be worthless, or they had supposedly seen the hit-and-run girl her since her death, or the location was so far away as to be unlikely.

  ‘Given what we know,’ Kennedy said, as he and Chris sifted through another batch of notes passed on by the information hotline, ‘I think we can rule out this report that our girl was seen last week on a beach in Ibiza.’

  Reports of the angel-wings tattoo were again mostly too vague to be of any use. Most viewings seemed to be from some indistinguishable point in the past – on a beach somewhere, or a gym changing room. Nothing solid that would be of any actual use.

  There was, however, one genuine lead from a social worker who called in to report that he had once dealt with a young boy who’d been tattooed in a similar manner. Reilly returned the call without delay.

  ‘Simon Keogh?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Reilly Steel, GFU. You called our hotline in relation to our recent media request for assistance?’

  ‘I did indeed.’

  ‘You mentioned that you thought you’d seen a similar tattoo?’

  ‘Yes. It was a strange case. A young lad about twelve, red haired like your girls. I remember reading something about a winged tattoo on the file at the time but didn’t see it myself.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  He sighed. ‘That’s the problem. We never actually knew his real name, but we called him Connor.’

  ‘Is there anything else you remember about the boy?’

  ‘Yes. He was about nine years old, a bit wild, almost feral I’d say, and would only speak Irish. Listen, I’m sorry, I don’t have the full details to hand. I’ll go through my records at work tomorrow and call you back,’ he promised.

  ‘Thanks.’ But Reilly guessed that this may well turn out to be yet another dead end.

  Lucy picked up the coffee cup and took a sip before realizing it was stone cold.

  ‘Damn,’ she said out loud to the empty office at her third failed attempt to drink a cup. She kept getting sucked into the missing person reports in front of her and forgetting all about her coffee. The growing sense of urgency and frustration at the lack of progress was really starting to hit her hard.

  Like some of the desperate families who’d made contact after the case had gone public, Lucy knew exactly what it felt like to have lost and to be helpless to do anything about it. Except now she could do something. She could try and help these people. But she was bone tired. Every day this week she’d come to work an hour early and left three hours late, yet they were still scratching at crumbs.

  ‘Who are you, honey?’ Lucy whispered, as she caught sight once more of the photo of the tattooed dead girl. These days she was seeing it even when she closed her eyes. Especially when she closed her eyes.

  Lucy picked up another missing person file and opened it. The picture of the little girl’s face – so achingly young – immediately jumped out and she felt a lump in her throat.


  Starting to read, she went through the details of the report. Statements from the family and neighbors, notes from the investigating officers, all so similar to the dozens of other cases she’d already reviewed.

  But then she saw something in the medical notes and leaned forward.

  Fracture to the radius bone, aged five.

  It could be nothing; hundred of kids picked up similar fractures all the time. Still, she picked up the phone on her desk and dialled the relevant extension.

  ‘Nikki, I need to order up a couple of x-rays.’ Lucy rattled off the file number. ‘Yes, it’s very urgent.’

  ‘I think I might have something …’ Lucy sounded breathless as she stood in Reilly’s doorway.

  Reilly immediately noticed how drawn the younger girl looked – her face was gaunt, eyes dark and sunk deep. She had obviously been burning the candle at both ends. Reilly knew only too well the obsession that took hold when working a case, and how trivial normal, everyday things like food and sleep could become, but she worried she was infecting her staff with her own crazy work ethic.

  She was often haunted by thoughts of previous situations she’d been unable to control, the people she’d been unable to save.

  The faces crept into her memory in a sequence of images: her mother, Jess, the children of New Eden, and Emily, the ‘girl in the well’ – a missing child that had been found much too late.

  Reilly could still see her face, pale and dirt-covered, her little doll clutched to her chest – just the way they had found her. If only she’d run faster, if only she’d thought to look in the well sooner.

  But she had been too slow, and the waters had risen inexorably, minute by minute, until…

  Worse still, she didn’t just recall what they found down that dark well, she also imagined what it had been like for Emily, trapped, lying still, paralyzed by horror as the water level rose higher and higher.