Free TRACE - CSI Reilly Steel #5 (Forensic novel Police Procedural Series) by Casey Hill

of people. Their blood rushing to their skin. It was a good smell, a small of people being human. Not being monsters.
    None of this was easy. There was nothing easy about what she for a living did all day long. Her young GFU team might think they knew that now, but it was nothing compared to what you saw once you had been working forensics for years. Sometimes Reilly saw kids like Lucy, Gary and Rory and wanted to tell them to get out of this line of work. Go be a schoolteacher, she wanted to say, or work in a bookshop. Go do something useful that won’t leave you hurt and lonely.
    But that wasn’t her place, she knew. They all had their reasons for being there, just like she did. Her job was to make them the best she could, to attempt to guide them through the many obstacles that this job threw in your way.
    There would be times when they wanted to give up, when the darkness of the world seemed too much for them. She had been through it, and her mentor, Daniel Forrest had dragged her through. It had all made her stronger. If she was worried about losing her edge, she only had to look back at some of the hellish cases she had endured. She could do it again, she knew.
    So the run was a good way to start the day, before it got clouded with the mess that she dealt in. Today was a full day: interviews with Jennifer’s friends and family, and two of the men that she had dated that had come forward.
    They just had to find the killer before something else happened. Every morning Reilly woke up knowing it was one day closer to when he would feel brave enough to kill again. They needed to get ahead of him. She ran faster and faster, as though the killer was ahead of her and she was trying to catch him physically.
    When she reached the gates of the park she realized that she had almost run herself to exhaustion. She stretched up towards the sky, fighting the impulse to curl into a ball. As she fought to control her breath, she thought once more about the day ahead. They would make progress, today, she told herself.
    They just had to.
     
     
    ‘Reilly! You’re here, finally,’ Gary rushed her like an eager puppy as soon as she got in the door.
    ‘It’s 7:55am, Gary,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t say I overslept or anything.’
    ‘I know, I know. It’s just, last night I was thinking about the case and I couldn’t sleep. So I came in at around 5am…I know, I know, it’s crazy,’ he said in response to her stern look. ‘But I was thinking about the bed in our victim’s house. And I’d been going over cold cases for days and finding no similarities. But I just needed to have another look. It was playing on my mind. And Reilly,’ he said, ‘I think I found something.’
     
    Reilly, Chris and Kennedy waited patiently as Gary set up the viewing equipment. Crime scenes had only started being transformed into 3D a few years ago, so there was still something of the magical about it for Reilly and the two cops.
    But it was now just the everyday for Gary. He would never know what it was like to spend painstaking hours recreating an older crime scene from photos alone.
    Reilly could see that he was excited. She knew how it felt, early on, when you made a connection or discovery. It was a rush, a high. It was easy to believe you were simply solving a riddle sometimes, looking for clues. You had to forget that you were dealing with the minutiae of people’s lives, or you would go mad.
    ‘OK,’ said Gary. ‘Besides the Armstrong case and the previous one that knocked out Reilly, there have been no other antimine poisonings that we could find. So I started to look at poisonings with other substances, instead. Over the past few years, there has been a significant rise in people being injected with large amounts of heroin; trying to make murder look like a suicide. But I had this perp figured for something a little more sophisticated. Whoever this guy is, he’s not out trawling backstreets to score dope.’
    Reilly saw Kennedy