Chapter 1
How can this tainted world contain us, how can it contain our dreams? At night in the freedom of my mind, the shackles of this mortal realm fall away as I soar above the fields and the farms, over forests and hills. I have always dreamed of flying – dreams like this are where the spirit comes alive, where we create our own rules, our own reality.
Why should we let other people tell us how to live, or what is right and what is wrong? Flex your wings and soar with me, my little ones. Do you see our land below us? Is it not beautiful? The lake and the fields, the river and the trees, the horses running free beneath the sun.
This is our world, our home, our sanctuary, and within it we are safe. Is that a dream? No, it is our reality. And so I know that when I awake, when the rooster calls me to another day, that my eyes will open onto our own paradise.
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Colin O’Dea was trying to figure out the easiest way to murder his wife. Dark hedgerows rushed past the windows as he sped along the narrow country road.
‘Will you please slow the hell down?’ Fiona grunted. ‘Your work buddies may be impressed by your new car, but I’m not.’
He responded by speeding up, unable to resist the urge to do the opposite of what she asked.
Just a few minutes until they were home. Then she could go off and have one of her herbal baths, or whatever it was she called them, and he could watch the Chelsea game he had recorded earlier. What sort of people had dinner parties on shaggin’ Thursday nights? At least he’d escaped reasonably early.
‘Colin!’
His wife’s sharp scream pulled him out of his reverie just in time for him to spot something lying in the road – a white bundle. Rubbish from a truck, or a dead sheep maybe? Without thinking he swerved around it, feeling the BMW’s anti-lock brakes push back against his foot with a faint shudder.
He tried to fight the slide – dammit, that’s what traction control was supposed to do – but it wasn’t enough. The car was going too fast, the road was damp from the rain shower earlier, and Colin wasn't as good a driver as he liked to think.
They spun 360 degrees, fields and fences, trees and ditches racing past in a blur as the headlights threw everything into sharp relief for a split second, then back into blackness. Then as suddenly as it had started, the car was still once more. The only movement was the smoke and steam pouring past the headlights’ beams.
Colin was rigid, his knuckles white where he had gripped the steering wheel, his heart pounding in his chest, while beside him Fiona sat in shocked silence. The engine continued to purr quietly.
Finally Colin unpeeled his hands from the steering wheel and glanced around. They were sideways across the road, the front corner of his precious new car dangling over a ditch.
‘Fuck!’
He slammed his hands on the wheel, threw the door open and stepped into the chilly evening air.
Colin studied the front of the car. The headlights shone on the grassy bank at the side of the road and the reflected light was enough to show the damage. The front spoiler was crunched up beneath the car, the plastic split. Damn ... It was almost as if he himself had been violated – his new car was supposed to be perfect, a tonic for his midlife crisis.
The sound of Fiona opening the passenger door made him look up. ‘What was that?’ she asked, looking back down the road, her voice trembling. ‘What did we...?’
He stood up and peered in the same direction. ‘Dead sheep I think.’
‘It didn’t look like—’
Colin sighed in exasperation. ‘What else would it be? Stupid animals are always wandering out into the road around here. Farmers ought to take better care of them.’ He removed his glasses and wiped the drizzle off them. ‘Jimmy hit one last month in his Land Rover. Made a right bloody mess of the front end, I can tell you.’ He put his glasses back on. ‘Where are you going?’
Fiona was already stumbling up the road on her high heels. ‘It didn’t look like a sheep to me,’ she continued doggedly. ‘Even if it was, we need to get it out of the road before somebody else hits it.’
‘Forget about the bloody sheep,’ he growled. ‘How are we supposed to get the car out of this ditch?’
He crouched down again and examined the spoiler. It was already pretty messed up so, really, backing the car up could hardly do it any more damage ...
‘Oh, God, shit!’
Colin stood up again and stared down the road to where Fiona stood, her green dress almost ghostly against the dark hedgerows. ‘What now?’ he called out irritably.
His wife said nothing, she just stood with her hands clamped to her mouth.
Colin squinted at her face as he approached, suddenly disconcerted by how pale she looked against the beams of the car’s headlights.
‘What is ...’ The words froze before he could finish his sentence, and his eyes locked on to what lay at her feet.
‘Fuck ...’
For a moment neither of them moved, then Colin turned and vomited on to the road, the viscous liquid splattering his expensive shoes and the leg of his designer suit.
The body of a young woman lay on the road. Even in the darkness they could see that she was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pale nightdress and the only burst of color came from her thick, red, curly hair. There were cuts and scrapes all over her body, a deep gash in her head, and a bone sticking out of her ankle at an unnatural angle. For a horrible moment, Colin worried that he had caused that, but then he remembered he’d swerved in time to avoid hitting her.
Or had he?
‘Is she...’
‘Dead ...?’ Fiona whispered, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘Without a doubt.’
The girl’s skin was pale, and she had an almost ethereal look as she lay on the dark road, her red hair framing her face, her body and white clothing seeming to glow against the darkness around them.
‘On this road, at this time of night, she could have been here hours without anyone seeing her...’
Fiona snapped open her handbag. ‘I’ll call 999.’
Colin glanced around. ‘Should we move her or ...?’
‘Better not.’ She glanced at him, her voice full of meaning. ‘Just in case.’
‘Oh Christ.’ Colin’s chest tightened. Surely nobody would think they’d run her over? He knew he hadn’t hit her, and despite the damage to the front of the car that should be easy to prove, shouldn’t it?
Bending down, he hovered over the girl’s body. As he glanced again at the extent of her injuries, he frowned, noticing something.
Her long hair was splayed across to one side, revealing the base of her neck. On the skin Colin could make out a strange pattern disappearing beneath the nightgown.
His eyes narrowed as he tried to process what he was looking at.
‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered. ‘What the hell is that?’
Chapter 2
The small kitchen was dark with just the ghostly orange glow of the street lights to illuminate the gloom.
Reilly Steel’s flashlight played across the room. At first a cursory glance around, then a more orderly scan. First impressions, then the methodical search.
The flashlight's beam revealed the details of what had happened here and the lives that had been played out: an overturned chair; a dark pool of blood on the torn linoleum floor; an overflowing ashtray on the table beside a baby’s bottle; the sink overflowing with dirty dishes.
Reilly hated domestic violence cases – the hidden years of tension, the secret beatings, the lies, the cover-ups. There were no winners, only losers, just another generation of damaged children growing up to believe that this was what relationships were like and how people treated each other.
This one was worse than most – the wife was currently in hospital, her stomach held together by a hundred staples after her husband had stabbed her with a broken bottle.
The Garda Forensic Unit wasn’t usually called in on these cases, as they were generally cut and dried, but this one was different. Not only had the woman nearly died – the bottle had nicked her superior mesenteric artery – but the husband denied doing it and the wife was now insisting she’d simply fallen on broken glass.
The saddest part, Reilly mused, was that the poor woman feared further wrath from her demonic husband far more than she trusted the system to bring her justice and protection.
Her jaw clenched as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Attacking a defenseless woman with a broken bottle, stabbing her in the gut, then running off and leaving her lying in a pool of blood and claiming that he wasn’t even there? What kind of man would do that? The kind that she was determined to see convicted.
She brushed aside a lock of her blond hair, tucking it in place behind her ear. Not for the first time, she wondered if she should get a short, functional haircut, something that would look sharp, professional and most importantly would never get in her way. Still, she liked the sensation of quite literally letting her hair down on her admittedly few days off.
She scanned the kitchen once again. The alleged attacker, Brian McGavin, had been thorough – he’d fled the scene, established an alibi with friends, taken the weapon with him. If Reilly couldn’t find anything to place him at the scene at the time of the attack, there was a good chance that he would get away with it.
She was not prepared to let that happen.
She had seen McGavin when the detectives brought him in for questioning. He had a cocky, brutal face – a life-long bully who challenged any man with his eyes – and a rap sheet as long as his Neanderthal arms.
She was of course supposed to be impartial, simply gathering the evidence that presented itself, but there were times when it was impossible not to get involved, not to have a personal investment in nailing someone.
The kitchen table told its own story. An ashtray full of cigarette butts, yesterday’s copy of The Sun open at the horse racing pages, and an empty can of Heineken. There were traces of McGavin everywhere, but could Reilly place him here at the house when the attack took place?
Sudden noises spooked her – kids outside shouting at each other, an empty can being kicked, the roar of a car – but just as quickly the street fell quiet once more and Reilly’s focus was back on the job.
She enjoyed working late in the evenings, liked the way the darkness naturally forced her to focus on nothing other than the small pool of light thrown up by the flashlight. With nothing to distract her, she was forced to focus on the minutiae and look for the little details that might otherwise be missed.
She aimed the flashlight on the floor and crouched down to look closer at the bloody pool. Reaching out with a gloved hand – the deeper parts were still slightly sticky – she realized that there was something else there. A faint glint of light caught the beam as it skipped across the floor.
She reached out with her tweezers and slowly lifted up a shard of blood-covered glass. A fragment of the weapon? Something to go on at least.
She looked closer at the immediate surroundings. The floor hadn't been mopped in years, the once-white lino now stained a motley gray. And there, under the edge of the sink unit, was another thin sliver. Once again she picked it up and slipped it into an evidence bag. Taken alone, the pieces of glass meant nothing, but it was possible that they might have picked up the slightest glimpse of a fingerprint or a tiny piece of skin, anything that might link them to McGavin.
Reilly stood up, closed her eyes and took in a few deep breaths through her nose as she tried to imagine exactly what had happened here. Her sharp sense of smell filtered out individual odors from a cacophony of stench. She slowly edged forward toward the blood-stained couch, the metallic smell breaking through the more pungent whiff of baby vomit.
Why had the row gone from verbal to physical? Perhaps the wife had stood up to him, goaded him from behind the perceived shield of his child suckling on a bottle.
The reason didn’t matter; what did matter was hard conclusive evidence that would put this animal behind bars where he belonged.
She looked at the floor, the bottle of baby formula on its side, and a dried pool of milk around it where it had fallen. A white muslin cloth close by was covered in blood and yellow milky reflux. Reilly closed her eyes again, this time as an involuntary gesture, and she hoped the baby had done the same rather than witness the full horror of what had happened here.
She held up her camera and pressed the shutter button, the harsh flashlight briefly illuminating the room.
OK, so McGavin had flipped, she thought, continuing her inner monologue. He’d grabbed the bottle, smashed it across the table like he was in a barroom fight, and stabbed his wife in the stomach while the baby was still in her arms.
It was a parting shot; he wouldn’t have hung around, and he’d left the injured woman slumped on the floor, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood with her hands while her baby, their baby, screamed in fear. Reilly could almost hear echoes of the infant’s desperate cries, and she tried to block it out and focus on the here and now. She glanced across at the kitchen door. It led out to a tiny back garden, a low fence separating it from an area of wasteland. The perfect escape route if you didn’t want to be seen. Or if you were carrying a blood-covered broken bottle ...
She reached the back door. It was still open, revealing a patch of scrubby lawn, a rotary clothes line draped in tiny clothes, and an overturned rubbish bin, with its contents strewn across the dirt by local foxes.
She paused in the doorway, flashlight scanning up and down, following the doorframe ... and then she saw it. It was small, easy to miss, but to Reilly’s trained eye it was unmistakable – a bloody partial.
As McGavin had barged out the door and fled the house, leaving his wife lying bleeding on the floor, his hand had glanced against the doorframe.
Reilly swung her camera around and took shot after shot of the incriminating print. She had him.
A small smile of satisfaction stole across her face as she pressed a thin film of tape on to the print, before gently easing a sample of the blood onto a cotton bud.
The shrill ring of her mobile phone startled her. Slipping the sample into its container, she slid her phone from her pocket and glanced at it.
Chris Delaney.
‘Chris. What’s up?’ She knew the detective wouldn’t be calling her at this time if it wasn’t urgent.
‘Hope I’m not disturbing you. I tried the lab first.’ He knew her habits – they had worked together for long enough. Still, there was a faint coolness in his tone. They might have been good friends once, but there was a definite distance between them now.
Despite herself Reilly felt wounded by it. Since her arrival at the GFU almost a year and a half ago, she and Chris had been to hell and back together in the course of the job, and until lately she would have considered him her closest friend.
But that was before he’d started hiding things from her.
It made it even more apparent that the longer Reilly lived in Dublin the fewer friends she seemed to have, such was the imbalance between her always hectic work schedule and non-existent social life. A sharp contrast to back home in California, where the work–life scales were generally tipped in the opposite direction with after work drinks and parties on the beach a common occurence.
‘Not a problem,’ she said, her tone neutral and professional. ‘I’m just at the McGavin house in Ballyfermot – the wife-beater?’
‘Not the best area to run a scene at this time of night,’ he commented, sounding like an overprotective father.
‘It’s fine. There’s a uniform stationed here in case one of his firefly cronies shows up to do a job on the place.’
‘So did you find anything to incriminate him?’
She mentally crossed her fingers. ‘I think so. We’ll have to have a chat with the wife when she’s able, let her know there’s a good chance we can put him away if she’ll testify.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Chris said ruefully, making Reilly suspect that her efforts might well be in vain.
Well, that would be his department. As far as forensics was concerned, her job was done.
‘So, I’m guessing this isn’t a social call,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Suspected fatal hit and run,’ Chris said flatly. ‘Rural area near Roundwood in County Wicklow. Just took the call from HQ. Not a lot of detail but by all accounts the locals seem a bit spooked.’
‘Spooked?’ Reilly repeated, frowning.
‘Like I said, few details so far. But seems there’s definitely something about this victim that needs a closer look.’
Chapter 3
Detective Pete Kennedy climbed slowly out of the silver Ford Mondeo and looked around. ‘A lonely place to be wandering around at night,’ he said to no one in particular.
A younger cop hurried over to meet him. ‘Davis,’ he informed Kennedy. ‘We were first on the scene.’
Kennedy nodded and pulled a packet of John Player Blue cigarettes from his pocket. He opened it and popped one between his lips. ‘Hit and run, we were told.’ The cigarette dangled as he talked. The driver’s side door opened and Delaney jumped out, slipping his arms into a crumpled waterproof jacket with ‘Garda’ written on the back of it.
‘Certainly looks that way,’ Davis replied. ‘Body’s just over here. You should take a look at ... well, it’s just weird,’ he mumbled, leading them towards the scene of the accident, as the detectives exchanged glances.
They approached the body that was lying on the road. Chris bent down to look more closely at the dead girl, while Kennedy finished his cigarette, steeling himself for yet another look at death in the face.
‘Where do you think she might have come from?’ he asked Davis.
The other man shrugged. ‘Not much around here, apart from a couple of farms. Roundwood village isn’t too far away.’
‘Are there ever any parties, raves, whatever you call them, out this direction?’
Davis couldn’t keep the smile from his face. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that out here.’
Kennedy nodded and puffed on his cigarette. ‘Well, this is your home turf. Got any ideas?’
Davis wanted to say something insightful – it wasn’t every day that a city detective asked him for an opinion – but in truth he was as puzzled as anyone else. ‘To be honest, I don’t. The couple who found her say it was like she just appeared out of nowhere.’
Kennedy grunted. ‘Of course they did.’ Carefully quenching his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, he placed the half-smoked butt back into the pack. ‘If there’s one thing we can be sure of,’ he said, standing straight and pulling up his trousers, ‘it’s that she didn’t fall out of the sky.’ He bent down to where his partner crouched beside the body. ‘Well, any ideas?’
Chris replied without looking up. ‘She may not have fallen from the sky but she sure did have wings,’ he said, gently pulling back the clothing on the dead girl’s shoulders to reveal a large, intricate tattoo. ‘I’m guessing this is what you meant by weird,’ he said to Davis, who nodded.
‘Christ, that’s a lot of ink.’ Kennedy’s gaze followed the beam of light from the other cop’s torch, revealing artwork which completely covered the girl’s upper back. The blueish tinged lines were fine, sweeping the wings upwards from near the base of her spine to fan outwards as they reached her waist, eventually covering almost the whole of her upper back. ‘An out-and-out fallen angel.’
‘She certainly got hit by somebody,’ Chris commented, pointing out the contusions, tarmac burns and dirt etched into her skin. ‘The question is, was she alive or dead when she was hit?’
‘We’ll have to wait for the ME before we know that.’ Kennedy groaned as he got up from his haunches. ‘So did she walk here or was she dumped?’
Chris directed his flashlight down to the girl’s ankles, careful to touch nothing. As the light played across her bare feet it revealed a layer of mud and gravel smeared across the soles, blades of grass sticking in places. ‘She’s certainly walked some way,’ he observed.
Kennedy was still gazing around. ‘Is there a hospital around here, a residential home, anything like that?’ he asked Davis.
The officer nodded. ‘There’s a sheltered housing place over near Newtownmountkennedy. I think it’s a sort of respite facility for special needs people, Down’s Syndrome and the like.’
They all gazed at the dead girl’s face. There was no sign of the typical physical characteristics of Down’s – the flatter face, the upward slanting eyes. In fact she had elfin features, a small mouth, a dainty nose, chiseled cheekbones. Combined with her flowing red hair you would have thought her quite beautiful had you seen her in any other circumstance. What would lead such a young woman to be wandering a lonely country road in the middle of the night in nothing but a thin cotton dress? Her delicate features bore a look of deep sadness; it was hard to imagine that events leading up to her death had been anything other than tragic.
‘That would still be quite a walk,’ observed Kennedy. ‘Even cross country it’s got to be what ... five miles or more?’
‘And barefoot.’ Chris gently touched the edge of her nightdress and rubbed it between finger and thumb. ‘It’s pretty damp – she must have been out in the rain for quite some time.’
He looked out across the dark fields. Before she was hit, the dead girl could have come from anywhere, a hundred yards or five miles away. Out in the darkness lay hundreds of solitary houses, dozens of farms, several villages ... and that was assuming she had walked here. If she had been dumped then their search area expanded almost infinitely.
‘The ground is more damp than wet though, and it’s a mountain mist in the air rather than rain.’
Chris looked at Davis. ‘Better check out the local houses. Some parent might wake in the morning not realising their kid has gone sleep-walking in the night.’
But something told him this was no accident.
Kennedy pulled out his unfinished cigarette again and tapped it thoughtfully against the packet. ‘So what now?’
‘Better talk to the couple who found her, then wait for Thompson to give us a COD. Forensics are on their way too so let’s see if Reilly and the crew come up with anything.’
Kennedy gave a deep sigh. ‘Is that what it’s come down to now? We just sit on our hands and wait for the science guys to throw us crumbs?’
Chris shrugged. His partner was old-school, and increasingly apprehensive about the more scientific bent to police investigation these days. He could understand his frustration, but there was no denying that developments in forensics and crime scene investigation helped considerably.
‘For the moment it would also be worth our while calling at houses within a couple of miles of here, to see if they saw or heard anything unusual while it’s still fresh in the memory. Like I said, maybe there’s a simple explanation.’
Kennedy gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You’re not serious about the sleep walking thing.’
‘There’s only one way to find out: some good old-fashioned detective work. Aren’t you the one constantly complaining about the lack of it?’
‘Let the locals handle that; at least they will know the neighbors. We roll up to some farmhouse at this hour in an unmarked car and we’ll be running the gauntlet of guard dogs and farmers with shotguns. People don’t live out here in the sticks because they want to be disturbed in the middle of the night, you know.’
Chris wrinkled his nose. ‘Fair point. But for the moment, the tattoo seems like the only decent lead we’ve got in terms of ID. Let the GFU in to take a photo, upload it to the lab, and within a few minutes one of the techs will be comparing it with every known piece of ink from Ballymun to Bangkok.’
Kennedy might decry the GFU’s ‘toys’, but an interactive device Reilly had been beta-testing for one of her old Quantico workmates had proved its worth on recent cases. The device, called iSPI, enabled fast and accurate re-enactment of crime scene details with 3D imagery, and provided a mine of information that sped up the investigative process. iSPI would almost certainly be able to indicate in which direction the girl was traveling at the time she was hit, and exactly where on the road the fatal impact had occurred. If she had indeed been killed this way.
It was merely one of many nifty gadgets the GFU had at their disposal. Now almost three years in existence, and with a propensity for indepth analysis and, more importantly, fast results, the purpose-built forensic unit headed by Reilly Steel had improved the force’s abilities no end.
It wasn’t appreciated by everyone, however.
Kennedy pulled his cigarette out of his mouth and stuffed it back into his pocket. So much for trying to quit. ‘We’re becoming bloody errand boys you know, gofers for the scientists, that’s what we are,’ he grunted. ‘They’ll be training monkeys to do our jobs soon, the way things are going ...’
Chris watched him out the corner of his eye as they walked towards the couple who’d discovered the body. In the four years or so that they had worked together he knew Kennedy’s moods well and was pretty sure that something other than ‘the scientists’ was bothering him.
The detectives briefly interviewed the couple who’d discovered the body before sending them to the local police station with Davis’s partner to obtain more detailed statements.
‘So are you going to tell me what’s got you so fired up today?’ he asked Kennedy eventually as they made their way back towards the body.
The detective said nothing, just took out the same cigarette and tapped it against the packet again. Chris was experienced enough as an interviewer and friend to allow him the space and time to organize his thoughts and answer when he was ready.
Kennedy relit the cigarette this time, took a puff and let out a deep sigh. ‘Ah it’s nothing...’
Again Chris let the silence do its job, looking sideways at his partner as he fiddled with the filter of his cigarette.
‘It’s Josie.’
Josie was Kennedy’s wife, the bedrock upon which he rested, his safe haven after a day amongst the detritus of society. A few years older than her husband, she had taken early retirement, and seemed happy to potter around the house and be there with a warm dinner and a pair of slippers when Kennedy came home from work more often than not drained and exhausted.
‘What’s up?’
‘She’s been having some stomach problems, they ran some tests...there’s something not right...’ He looked sideways at Chris, worry etched across his features. ‘You always fear the worst, though, don’t you?’
Chris nodded. ‘Human nature. And the more the person means to you...’
Kennedy stared out across the dark field once more for a few moments, before turning abruptly back to Chris. ‘You hear that?’
Chris listened. He could hear the faint sound of another vehicle approaching. ‘Car? So what?’
‘That’s not just a car, that’s a gearshift cranking one-eighty.’ He reached over and started straightening Chris’s leather jacket. ‘Miss Baywatch is on the way. Here, let me smarten you up a bit.’
‘Give it a rest.’ Chris immediately recognized the sharp switch in mood as a cue to drop the subject. It was characteristic of Kennedy to not let his guard drop for very long. Still, Chris made a mental note to keep an eye on his partner. Such concerns were potentially a dangerous distraction from the job, something he himself knew only too well.
‘I keep telling you,’ Kennedy was saying, ‘one of these days you might catch her in a weak moment, when she’s desperate and lowers her standards...’
Unlikely Chris thought, especially now. Right from the beginning, he and Reilly had had some kind of connection, and while at one point there might have been something brewing between them, he’d done something which disappointed her, and he knew it.
Back to his usual blustery self, Kennedy guffawed as the headlights swept around the curves and Reilly Steel approached the scene. ‘Here comes trouble.’
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End of excerpt
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