Read Online Taboo by Casey Hill - Free Book Online Page B

her.
     
    Later that day, Reilly was glad to be back in the lab. It provided a sanctuary, a place where everything was orderly and made sense.
    But not right now.
    She looked again at the printout in her hand. It was a mistake, she was sure of it. It had to be a mistake. Otherwise …
    She felt like rubbing her eyes, like a character in one of those cartoons she used to watch when she was a kid. Maybe if she rubbed hard enough, when she looked at the results again, everything would look normal.
    But no, the same results were there, written down in black and white, and seeing as she’d run these samples herself …
    Momentarily worry-stricken, Reilly picked up and reviewed the evidence chain of custody card. Nope, she hadn’t made a mistake, there they were: Sample A and Sample B – one from the deceased female recently identified as Clare Ryan, the other from the also deceased and still unidentified male.
    Although nobody was truly infallible, when it came to evidence she was pretty damn thorough, and she knew in her heart and soul that she hadn’t screwed up this sample; she hadn’t screwed up a sample in her entire life. There was always way too much at stake.
    And again, as her Quantico tutors had taught her, no matter how weird some things looked, no matter how unlikely they seemed, results were results, and the evidence never lied.
    Particularly when you ran a test twice.
    As Reilly looked again at the two samples, she couldn’t help but recall how another one of her tutors, Daniel Forrest, had drilled the principles of Ockham’s razor into them.
    ‘People,’ he would say, addressing a group of trainee investigators. ‘Intuition is a valuable tool – but only when it is based on the evidence.’
    She recalled the first time he’d introduced the concept to them. Most of the students had never even heard of it, but there was one guy – his name escaped her – who always had an answer for everything.
    ‘Anyone heard of Ockham’s razor?’ Daniel had queried.
    ‘Yes, sir. It means that the simplest theory is always right,’ Clever Clogs had replied.
    ‘Wrong.’
    Clever Clogs looked devastated. ‘I thought—’
    ‘A lot of people mistakenly think that’s what it means,’ the profiler explained, the overhead lights twinkling off his glasses. ‘But what it actually says is far more subtle than that – and much more helpful to investigators.’ He motioned to the evidence they were reviewing – evidence that could lead to two different conclusions. ‘What Ockham’s razor says is that when faced with two theories, when the available data cannot distinguish between them, we should study in depth the simplest of the theories.’
    He watched as light bulbs went on in his students’ brains.
    ‘So while it doesn’t guarantee that the simplest theory will be correct, it does establish priorities.’
    Establishing priorities – that was the perspective Reilly needed right now. Given the results she’d got, there were two possible explanations. One was that all her testing was wrong, her methods flawed, her chain of custody compromised.
    And the other …
    Well, quite frankly, the other was no less difficult to comprehend.
    Reilly had known there was something wrong with the blood samples when the tox screen had come back. While both samples had been clear of the usual irregular chemicals, upon comparison something that could only be described as unexpected had appeared. So, just to be sure, she’d run the test again herself again – this time using separate samples from both corpses. Sure enough, the same results appeared.
    Unwilling to jump to conclusions too quickly, Reilly had eventually decided to settle the matter by running a genome scan. And it was those results that she now held in her hand, results that even to Reilly, who had seen a lot of weird things on the job, were pretty damn shocking.
    ‘Ockham’s razor,’ she muttered to herself as she cast her eye once again over her findings. She