Free TORN by CASEY HILL Page B

scene.’
    ‘Great. And you obviously think it’s of interest.’
    Reilly felt relieved; she wasn’t pessimistic by nature, but given what little trace evidence they’d collected, it was a pleasant surprise to think that her team might have been able to isolate something potentially helpful from the sewage-soaked sludge.
    ‘Come take a look and see what you think,’ Lucy said, and Reilly followed her down the hallway to the lab.
    The GFU laboratory was a brightly lit open space. Two long benches of equipment ran the length of the room, and in the corner at the far end was a pair of small desks with computers and printers for the lab techs to share.
    Lucy led Reilly over to where she had an electron microscope set up.  She was talking quickly, almost tripping over her words to get them out. ‘We’ve gone through everything we brought back. Firstly, you were right: that hair sample was Mr Coffey’s.  It matched one of the pubic hairs we took from his corpse for comparison.’
    Reilly nodded, expecting as much.
    ‘Most of the soil samples we collected were consistent with the type found in Coffey’s garden,’ Lucy continued. ‘But there was something different about one batch in particular.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Not only is it a much more alkaline soil, but it also had traces of something rather interesting.’  She slid the microscope towards Reilly. ‘Take a look.’
    Reilly swept her hair back off her forehead and leaned into the microscope, adjusted the setting so that the specimen was in focus. ‘So what am I looking at?’ she asked.
    ‘Traces of chloride, sodium, potassium, creatinine …’
    ‘… and urea?’ Reilly straightened up. 
    Lucy nodded.
    ‘So it’s urine. Not much of a find, considering,’ Reilly said, decidedly unimpressed. ‘This sample was taken from the region surrounding a septic tank, Lucy; what did you expect to find?’
    She quickly assuaged her misgivings. ‘Of course. I was inclined to dismiss it at first too, but then I looked more closely at the composition. It’s not human.’
    ‘Oh. You caught me there,’ Reilly said quickly. ‘Well, if you know what it isn’t, I take it you also know what it is?’
    Lucy smiled. ‘Would I drag you in here if I didn’t?’  She slid a printout towards Reilly. ‘This is what gave me the strongest clue. It’s the chemical composition of another substance we took from the very same sample.’
    Reilly ran her gaze over the elements. Barley, wheat, bran, soybean, canola meal, molasses, vegetable oil, limestone, salt, dicalcium phosphate.  She racked her brains, trying to figure how such a seemingly random group of ingredients could relate to the urine sample.
    ‘OK,  I give up, what’s this then?’ she asked.
    ‘The ingredients commonly found in horse feed. Horse pellets, to be precise. What we got was most likely fine dust residue from the pellets. So I’m thinking that the urine has to be from a horse.’
    ‘I see.’ Something clicked in Reilly’s brain, and her mind raced to work out why this should be significant. Then she recalled something Chris had said about Coffey’s wife being part of the horsy set.
    Which meant it may not be so significant after all.
    When she mentioned this to Lucy, the younger woman frowned. ‘Yes, but that garden is pristine, not somewhere you’d ordinarily let horses loose to feed and pee. And the Coffeys don’t keep horses themselves, do they?’
    ‘No. That’s true.’
    ‘So while there’s a chance that Mrs Coffey or one of her horsy friends walked it in, there’s just as much of a chance that whoever put Mr Coffey in the tank might have done so,’ Lucy persisted.
    ‘OK, let’s go with that for the moment, until we discover otherwise. What about the samples from Mrs Coffey’s boots that you took for elimination? Any traces of it on those?’
    Lucy shook her head. ‘Not a sausage,’ she said, and Reilly smiled. It had taken her a while to get to grips with some of the team’s