Free Inferno (CSI Reilly Steel #2) by Casey Hill

shirts and a leather jacket. This morning was different, though: he was part of a guard of honour for Johnny Crowe’s final send-off, hence the formal threads.
    With the uniform smartly enshrouding his tall frame, he went into the galley kitchen, which abutted his living room area. The linoleum floor hadn’t seen a mop in some time, and the counter tops were crowded with boxes, cartons and other remnants of too many takeaways.
    He shook his head. He’d better be careful or he’d turn into one of those clichéd detectives that appeared in TV shows  the alcoholic workaholic, who spent his evenings alone surrounded by takeaway boxes and whiskey bottles. He laughed. Not likely. For one thing, he rarely drank other than socially, and for another he was actually quite a decent cook when he could find the time.
    Chris sighed. As for the workaholic part, well, in the murder business that was non-negotiable.

Chapter 9
    T he GFU building was almost deserted when at seven thirty Reilly arrived. She liked to get in early, and have some time to think in peace and quiet before the interdepartmental phone calls and questions started.
    She settled in behind her desk with her coffee – black, no sugar. Today she’d decided to see if the iSPI software could reveal anything about the Coffey scene that the investigative team had missed.
    Grabbing a cable with a mini-USB connector on the end, she plugged it into the recessed slot on the side of the iPhone, and the other into her PC.
    The computer immediately sprang into life and displayed a password confirmation screen. Reilly keyed in ‘Cassandra’, her late mother’s first name, and the terminal hummed, a status bar indicating its progress as it downloaded the data from the iSPI app.
    When that was complete, it displayed a second progress bar, under the words ‘aggregating image data’, and she waited patiently to see what would happen next.
    Eventually the rendering engine displayed a ‘complete’ icon, and prompted her to enter a file name. Reilly saved it using the Coffey case file number and date, and then as directed, keyed in the command to begin a further render.
    As the progress indicator began another maddeningly slow advance across the screen, Reilly went to the comfortable chair that sat next to a small table supporting two data gloves and a head-mounted display: the second piece of Jet Miller’s toy, and the stuff that really sent Gary into spasms of excitement. She’d let him try it out later, but first she wanted to see for herself how the software performed.
    Relaxing back into the chair, she laced the display onto her brow like some sort of intricate hat. Two small viewing panels folded down over her eyes and reflected, through a series of prisms and mirrors, the visual output of two small high-resolution color LCD displays. Sliding the data gloves on to her arms, she made an ‘OK’ gesture with her right hand  as Jet’s instructions directed  and the terminal flared to life.
    The goggles displayed a boot menu, and using subtle movements of her right hand, she reached across the screen through the network, and grasped the freshly rendered scene from the storage attached to the rendering engine. Turning her palm face up, she clenched a tight fist and then splayed her hand out open. As if by some miracle, the machine responded by unfurling a finely stitched virtual reality mosaic of the Coffey septic tank.
    Whoah... Reilly  felt goosebumps.
    Poking around at the edges of the illusion, she was amazed to find that for a first attempt she had actually followed the instructional protocol fairly well, and all the vital data needed to reconstruct the scene seemed to have been properly captured.
    In fact, it was so close to the real thing it was scary. OK, so there was no way a machine could replicate the sounds ... smells ... feel of a crime scene for real, but in this situation that was a good thing. This time there was no stink, no toxic stew.
    Nice work,