Read Hidden ( CSI Reilly Steel #3) for Free Online Page B

stopped and got out to see what he’d hit and it fell out and into the ditch.’
    ‘And these?’ Reilly pointed to the pieces of black plastic.
    ‘These look like they might have come off the front end of a vehicle – again, they weren’t covered in mud which suggests they’d not been in the ditch for very long.’
    Reilly looked closely at the plastic scraps. ‘If we find the vehicle these could well be critical.’ She turned to Gary. ‘Anything from your end?’
    He shook his head.  ‘Mostly junk, and the majority of it irrelevant.’
    ‘Hey, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a princess.’
    ‘No kidding. There was a whole army of frogs on that road. But I did pick up these close to where iSPI reckons the impact would have happened.’ Neatly arranged on the bench was a handful of safety glass, tiny crystal nuggets.
    ‘Fortunately for us, different motor companies use different types of glass. These, believe it or not, come from the front headlights of a commercial vehicle manufactured by Ford sometime between 1991 and 1997.’
    ‘Wow, that specific?’
    Gary shrugged. ‘According to the database anyway.’
    ‘Good work. I’ll get this information to the detectives right away,’ Reilly said. 
    ‘Any luck with the green goo, boss?’
    ‘Actually yes.’ She held up a printout of the chemical analysis of the mysterious greenery. ‘It’s algae,’ she told him, still kicking herself for not figuring it out. ‘At some point before our victim was hit by the van, she must have been in a pond or a lake.’
     
     
    ‘Bizarre,’ Kennedy said when later that morning, Reilly arrived at Harcourt Street station to update him on the findings. ‘Why would a girl in a nightdress be swimming in a lake in the middle of the night?’
    ‘Why would she be wandering around anywhere in the middle of the night in bare feet and a thin nightdress?’ she countered.
    ‘Good point. Did I already mention that you look terrible?’ he teased, studying her.
    ‘Yes,’ she replied archly, ‘but the difference between you and me is that I only look this bad when I’ve had no sleep.’
    ‘Touché.’ Kennedy pulled a chair across from his cubbyhole for her.
    She sat back, and crossed her legs. ‘Where’s Chris?’
    ‘Meeting with the boss. Can I get you a coffee?’
    ‘I’d kill for one, thanks. So what’s he talking to O’Brien about?’
    ‘Statement to the press. We’re going to need help getting an ID on the girl.’
    ‘You’ve already canvassed the local area?’
    He nodded.  ‘Local boys have been on it since the early hours. Nothing to report so far, but here’s hoping they turn up something that leads to an identification. At least then we can concentrate on catching the scumbag who left her dead in the road.’
                  ‘I presume they’re going to —’
     
                  ‘Widen the area?’ he finished for her. ‘Yeah. But you and I both know that just makes things harder.’ There was a mathematical relationship involved in widening a search area, and all too often the numbers quickly became unmanageable with so many personnel and subsequently much more information in the mix.
    Chris arrived while they were talking, and Reilly immediately sat up on alert. She hated the way they both now always seemed so uncomfortable around one another. 
    The current rift stemmed from a major difference of agreement. Chris was covering up something from his superiors – something important, which he’d reluctantly confided to Reilly in order to enlist her help. At the time, she’d assumed they had an understanding: she’d help him get to the bottom of the issue, and he’d deal with the implications. As far as Reilly was concerned, she’d held up her end of the deal, but he had not, and in refusing to come clean was potentially putting himself and others on the force at risk. She couldn’t condone that, no matter how much she liked him. She’d always believed