TORN by CASEY HILL Page B

anxious look; he was aware of the increasing media coverage of the crime because of Coffey’s profession, and it was clearly weighing on him.
    Reilly smiled and tried to look reassuring. The last thing she wanted was uptight lab techs who had trouble focusing on the job. She needed the team sharp, paying attention to every detail. 
    ‘The usual,’ she told them. ‘Anything goes – lint, fluff, skin flecks.  Basically anything that’s out of place, we want it.’
    Rory nodded.  ‘So we’re focusing around the collar and cuffs to start with?’
    ‘Yes.’
    For a few moments the three of them worked in silence, each going over the clothes meticulously using a hand-held magnifying glass.
    This was one part of the job that Reilly loved. There was something soothing about focusing the mind on the most minute details, poring over a tiny area, searching in the nooks and crannies like a hunter creeping stealthily over a wooded hillside in search of prey.
    At times like these she was able to clear her mind, let her worries and problems go, allow the creative side of her brain to roam free while her conscious mind was completely absorbed in a task. All she could hear on either side was Lucy and Rory’s steady breathing as they too concentrated on the job at hand.
    Coffey’s jacket was a wool and synthetic blend. Under Rory’s magnifying glass – which increased the image fortyfold – it looked like a rolling hillside, a nightmare tangle of crossed threads running at ninety degrees to each other. There were literally thousands of little ridges and valleys, places where a microscopic piece of material could hide.
    Every so often one of them would find a tiny particle of trace on the clothes. They would remove the particle with their tweezers, bag it, label it, then resume. They all knew from experience that there was no point getting excited at such times.  Unless they found something large or very obviously out of place, there was virtually no way of knowing what it was until it was analyzed. For every vital piece of evidence that they recovered in this way, they analyzed a hundred bits of household dirt and toast crumbs.
    Reilly relaxed and enjoyed the hunt, hoping that somewhere out there she would find her elusive prey. And while she worked, she let her mind wander, speculating on what a sad lonely death Coffey’s must have been. Whoever had it in for him had conjured up one hell of a punishment.
    Not that freezing to death in a bathtub of ice would have been a bed of roses either, she mused, thinking about John Crowe’s equally strange manner of death. The former policeman’s funeral had taken place early that day, and she knew that some of the older members of the GFU who’d worked alongside Crowe in the past,including Jack Gorman, had been in attendance.
    The thinking was that Crowe’s death was all to do with punishment – revenge from one of his former collars, or payback from someone who’d borne him a grudge.
    Reilly shivered. Criminals were getting more and more inventive these days, coming up with ways of sending out strong, defiant messages to their opponents.
    What kind of message they were trying to send out by immersing a guy in ice was anyone’s guess. She shrugged, thinking that they’d probably picked the idea up from one of those TV cop shows; you got a lot of that these days – criminals styling themselves on hotshot mafia types.
    ‘Take a look at this.’ Rory’s voice broke into her thoughts. She turned and saw that he was delicately tweezing open a folded piece of paper. ‘From the inside pocket of his jacket,’ he told her. ‘Looks like a note.’
    ‘Seems to be in pretty good shape too,’ Reilly commented, pleased that whatever it was, it had escaped the sludge. The outside of the jacket would have got the worst of it, and while the paper still looked wet, Rory was slowly but expertly teasing the folds apart.
    ‘Generic lined notepape r nothing distinctive,’ he continued,