Blood Sisters by Graham Masterton

that most of her face was visible. She was pale, with wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and wisps of white hair showing from underneath her coif. As Sergeant Finlay had said, her eyes were wide open, the palest duck-egg blue, but spotted with tiny red petechial haemorrhages.
    ‘Think there’s any connection to Sister Bridget?’ asked Katie.
    ‘She’s a nun, and she’s elderly, and from the looks of her eyes she died of strangulation, but who knows? Maybe there’s no connection at all. What’s the date? Maybe it’s just open season on nuns.’
    They waited around for another twenty minutes until the Technical Bureau van arrived, as well as the chief technical officer, Bill Phinner, in his bronze estate car. Three technicians suited up on the bridge and were then helped to climb down to the river bank by the gardaí.
    ‘Well, well,’ said Bill Phinner. ‘I thought I’d seen everything. But a crash-landed nun? Jesus.’
    ‘The wind’s blowing from the south-south-west,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘That means she must have floated up the Glashaboy from Lota. Or it could have been even further. She could have come all the way across the river from the south side, Blackrock even.’
    ‘Kieran! I want at least three samples of gas before that fat feller totally deflates!’ Bill Phinner shouted out. One of his technicians gave him the thumbs up and clambered around to the other side of the bulging balloon, carrying a Gresham gas-sampling kit in a small black case. Sergeant Finlay looked up sharply, as if he had thought for a moment that Bill Phinner was referring to him.
    An ambulance arrived, but it took another hour before the technicians had finished photographing and measuring the nun’s body in situ . It was beginning to grow dark now, and a chilly evening wind was ruffling the surface of the river, so Katie raised the hood of her duffel coat and pulled on her thick brown woollen gloves.
    Two of the gardaí went to the Cafe Chino in the Glanmire bus park and came back with burgers and chips and buttered scones, and Tayto chocolate bars with bits of cheese and onion crisps in them, as well as polystyrene cups of coffee and tea and cans of soft drinks. Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and Detective O’Donovan both hounded their burgers as if they hadn’t eaten for a week, and O’Donovan ate a Tayto bar, too, but all Katie could manage was a raisin scone and half a can of Coke Zero. She was beginning to feel very cold and tired.
    At last, one of the technicians climbed back up to the bridge and said, ‘She’s all ready to be moved now, sir. Do you want me to call the paramedics?’
    ‘Let’s go down first and take a look at the poor soul,’ said Bill Phinner, draining the last of his tea and perching his empty cup on the wall.
    He went down first, turning around now and again to give Katie a hand, with Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán and Detective O’Donovan following behind them. They gathered around the nun’s body, which was still lying face-down as she had landed. The last balloon was almost completely deflated now and hung drooping in the trees, like an elephant’s skin.
    Two of the technicians knelt down beside the nun and very carefully turned her over on to her back. They had already closed her eyelids, so that at least she wasn’t staring at the sky. Twenty or thirty horse chestnut leaves were stuck to her habit, yellow and brown and shiny red. One of the technicians shone a bright LED forensic flashlight on to them, and it was only than that they saw that the red leaves weren’t naturally red but bloodstained. The intense white light showed that her habit was soaked in blood, too.
    ‘Would you look at this?’ said Bill Phinner. He tugged on a pair of white latex gloves and crouched down beside the body. He took hold of her habit between finger and thumb and lifted it up, heavy and wet. They realized now that it had been cut apart all the way down the front, from the coif to the hem. As