Spirit Animals

by E. E. Richardson

  BY THE TIME the fire brigade had arrived, there wasn’t much of the crime scene left to be preserved. Though the stone walls were still standing, the roof had collapsed at the altar end, and the straw had carried the flames to the animal cages, adding the stench of burning flesh and fur to the haze of smoke. A thorough dousing from the fire hoses helped to ensure that any evidence that hadn’t burned would still be ruined.

  They were still awaiting permission to re-enter the building when Pierce’s phone rang. Seeing her sergeant’s name on the screen, she wandered away from the scene to answer it. “Deepan. What’s up?”

  “Might need you for a consult on this case, guv,” he said. “Are you free to come out to the scene?”

  “As a bird, unfortunately—my evidence just went up in flames.” She grimaced at the still-smouldering barn. “Is this the ritual murder?” she asked. “I thought you were out there with Dawson.”

  DI Dawson, her ostensible new second-in-command, was becoming a bit of a thorn in her side; he’d been brought in to run the RCU while she was out on medical leave with a shoulder injury, and she suspected both he and her superiors had expected her to politely shuffle off into early retirement instead of coming back to take the reins. Somebody up there was apparently still hoping that she’d take the hint, since they’d yet to divest her of Dawson despite the fact her team was too small to need a second senior officer. He tended to behave as if he was still in charge, and certainly wasn’t inclined to call her in for a second opinion on one of his cases

  “I am, but I think this one might be linked to one of our cold cases,” Deepan said. “Before my time, though, so you’d know better than me.”

  “Which case?” Pierce said, trying to mentally pull up the details of the call that had come in early that morning. Not much to go on, as she recalled: a killing down in Nottinghamshire that was suspected of being ritual murder. That was one crime that definitely justified the RCU showing up on-site instead of just remote consultancy, but in her experience it was over-reported—most of the time the supposed occult elements were just attempts to disguise a more mundane killing, or nervy investigators jumping the gun over oddities at the scene. She’d been happy to let Dawson take this one to keep him out of her hair.

  Deepan hesitated before answering. “I really think you should come and see the crime scene for yourself, guv,” he said. “If I’m right, this is a big one, so I’d rather you see it clean than have me put ideas in your head.”

  Ominous. “All right then, I’ll come down,” Pierce said, transferring her phone to a shoulder clamp as she reached for her notebook. “Just tell me where I’m going.”

  THE BODY HAD been found in a graveyard, which might have rung a bell, but honestly, it rang all too many: there were few locations would-be occult killers liked better, aside from convenient sets of standing stones. A broad perimeter had been taped off around the site, and Pierce was stopped at the gate by a young PC who looked a bit overwhelmed. Rural beats could be busier than most supposed with only a few coppers to cover miles of ground, but ritual murder was still a little out of the ordinary.

  “DCI Pierce, Ritual Crime,” she said, showing her warrant card and RCU badge. Her sergeant, Deepan Mistry, was already jogging over to meet her as she ducked under the tape.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” he said with a relieved smile, pushing back his hair. He was a chubby-cheeked lad who still looked younger than his thirty years to her, though he was starting to pick up some lines from the strains of the job. Or maybe that was parenting two small girls. “Crime scene’s down this way, if you want to take a quick gander. The locals are getting a little bit twitchy about leaving the scene as-is for this long, but I wanted you to see things in situ.”

  She donned a set of disposable crime scene coveralls, and Deepan led her on through the rows of graves to a wooded area a little further back from the road, probably intended to allow mourners a quiet space for private reflection. Though it wasn’t quite private enough for performing human sacrifice. “I take it we don’t think the victim was killed here?”

  Deepan shook his head. “No, guv. But the corpse was laid out with a bit of ceremony—that’s part of what pinged me as familiar. See what you think.”

  He gestured her on through the trees to where a denser cluster of police and forensics personnel surrounded the body. She recognised the bulky, shaven-headed shape of DI Graham Dawson among them, but left him to his task of lecturing the forensics team so that she could scope the scene out before he butted in with his opinion.

  The victim was a young man, laid out among the trees in classic coffin pose with his arms folded over his chest. Early twenties, maybe, with a relatively muscular build—not the first choice of a killer looking for easy prey. Nothing else too distinctive about his appearance at first glance: white, square-jawed with shortish brown hair, unshaven past the point of stubble but short of a true beard. Hard to tell if that was a sign of being held in captivity or a fashion choice.

  His eyes had been closed, though dozens of razor-fine cuts over his face and neck and exposed arms gave lie to the impression of peaceful repose. Those cuts had been made while he was still alive to bleed. Yet aside from the inevitable discolouration and the effects of lying outdoors for some hours, the corpse was remarkably clean, clearly bathed to remove excess blood and the worst indignities of death. His clothes were pristine enough that they either had to have been removed before any trouble started and replaced after his death, or they’d been supplied by the killer.

  Which made the choice of outfit interesting. Not the ceremonial robes you might expect of ritual symbolism, nor the formal or fetishistic choices of a killer intent on displaying their victim at his best, but strangely casual: tracksuit bottoms, a sleeveless black T-shirt with a small logo on the breast, colourful trainers. She crouched to peer at the soles: no visible sign of wear, and the other clothes looked new too.

  Deepan was right. This was ringing some bells. Healthy young victim, fit and in the prime of his life, dressed up in sports gear... and of course that criss-cross web of cuts, evidence of ritual blood-letting. Pierce moved to crouch by his head, looking for the sign that would confirm it.

  There, just under the edge of his crew neck on the left side: two deep round puncture wounds spaced about an inch and a half apart, like a snakebite.

  Pierce sat back on her heels with an explosive huff of breath. Shit almighty, what had she done to deserve this?

  Deepan appeared discreetly by her shoulder. “Thinking what I’m thinking, guv?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Depressingly, I probably am.” She accepted his hand up, rising from the ground with an unhappy groan. “Right, grab Dawson, but let’s keep this chinwag away from any other ears for now.” Mention the Valentine Vampire in front of anyone old enough to remember the previous killings and they’d be seeing it in the papers the next day.

  She retreated to a quiet corner of the graveyard, and Deepan followed a moment later with DI Dawson in tow, or rather striding out ahead of him.

  “Right,” he said brusquely as he reached her, jerking a thumb back at Deepan. “Your boy said he recognised this, but he wouldn’t say anything without a second opinion. What’s the news?”

  Pierce pressed her lips together. She wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of letting a glory-hound like Dawson know this one was a potential career-maker, but she could hardly keep him out of the loop either. “He’s right,” she said. “MO has all the hallmarks of the Valentine Vampire murders.”

  Dawson narrowed his eyes, obviously trying to place the name—not one that Pierce had ever been thrilled with, but it was what that had stuck in the public’s imagination, and there was no shifting these things once the press got hold of them. “Serial killings in the ’nineties?” he said.

  Pierce had already been doing the mental calculations, and she didn’t much like the answers she’d come up with. “The first set of three murders was in February ’87,” she said. She didn’
t always remember the details of older cases, but she had good reason to remember the dates in this one. “There were three more seven years later, and another three seven years after that. We were ready in 2008, but there were no killings reported.” In situations like that you could only hope your serial was either already dead or banged up for life for an unrelated crime.

  Deepan had already done the maths. “And now we’ve reached the next interval.”

  They had—and as the only member of the department who’d been around for the original killings, Pierce should have been on the alert for a resurgence, but after the skipped interval and what with the chaos of everything else that had been going on lately, it hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  “So the killer’s resurfaced,” Dawson said.

  “Possibly,” Pierce allowed. “Possibly not. We could easily be dealing with a copycat. There was a book published just before the last set of killings was supposed to have been due—Christopher Tomb. Remember him?”

  Deepan let out a startled chuckle. “Oh, wow. Yes, I do. He was on all the talk shows, with the dyed black hair and the earrings and that red velvet jacket.”

  “That’s the one,” Pierce said with a grimace of a smile. “Anyway, he wrote that godawful sensationalist book—On the Blood Trail of the Valentine Vampire, I think it was called—and publicised the details of the murders far and wide. He always claimed he had an anonymous source who used to be a member of the killer’s cult, but most likely he knew someone who’d been at the scenes.”

  “Or he could be our killer,” Dawson said.

  “Too young,” Pierce said, shaking her head. “He’d have been fourteen when the first murders took place.”

  “Old enough,” he said flatly.

  “To kill? Yes. To subdue and slowly ritually murder three healthy young men and transport the corpses? Not without help. Besides, we checked him out thoroughly at the time. In school for the first round of murders, at university down in Sussex during the second wave... He’s not our man.”

  “But he could be the copycat,” Deepan suggested.

  “It’s a possibility, but let’s not get married to it,” Pierce said. “After that bloody book was published, anybody in the country could put together a mock-up that passed muster.” But despite the long years since the last one, this scene had the ring of authenticity to her. “All the same, we’ve got to operate on the assumption that this could be the original killer, returning after a break in the pattern.” It might indicate jail time, or a period spent overseas or hospitalised for some reason or other—all potential leads, if they could only pin down some suspects to start testing them against.

  On the other hand, it could indicate another three murders had somehow passed under their radar seven years ago. She would hope not, with the details of the case so well-established in the public consciousness, but with the RCU’s overstretched resources, it was depressingly possible.

  But that wasn’t the main concern right now. Pierce pushed aside thoughts of possible past mistakes to focus on the current scene. “The victim,” she said. “Any possibility of ID?”

  “Already done,” Deepan said. “Membership card for a gym in Newark-on-Trent in his pocket, complete with ID photo. Nottinghamshire Police sent somebody over, and it checks out. Matt Harrison, twenty-three years old, living with flatmates in Newark—according to them, he didn’t come home the night before last, but they weren’t worried because he texted one of them to say he’d met a girl. The family have already been notified.”

  “Pretty cocky murderer,” Dawson said. The killer had to have been the one to dress the victim; she doubted the card had been left there by accident.

  But cockiness fit the profile of the Valentine Vampire. “And fond of symbolism,” Pierce said. “The gym card goes with the clothes—emphasizes that the victim was young and strong and healthy. All of the past victims have been athletes, joggers, on competitive sports teams... we believe that the killer’s intent with the blood-letting ritual is to absorb the victim’s vitality to increase their own strength.” Whether the ritual actually worked, or if it was all in aid of a bit of occult hokum... well, who could say with these things?

  “One thing we do know for sure,” she said. “Whether this is the original killer or not, our murderer is deliberately echoing the Valentine Vampire’s past patterns. If that holds true, we can expect two more deaths before February is out.” She fixed both of her subordinates with a serious stare. “Let’s see that it doesn’t happen.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  PIERCE LEFT DAWSON in charge of liaising with the local police, hoping he wouldn’t antagonise them too much, and drove back to the police station that served as the RCU’s base of operations. Too small to merit their own dedicated building, they worked out of a set of offices and labs on the second floor.

  She climbed the stairs and pushed through into the open-plan office that housed her team of detectives—along with a mountain of paperwork, stacked up around the computers that were supposed to have taken its place. Entering the information from the old case files into a fully computerised database was the kind of work in progress that never actually progressed; with one small Yorkshire-based team handling the caseload for the whole of the north, any supposedly free moment they snatched at the computers had to be used to answer consult requests.

  Fortunately, Pierce had two constables and a sergeant to filter through those, so that only the more interesting ones got to her desk. The final member of her team was manning the computers as she arrived: Constable Eddie Taylor, a lanky ginger-haired lad in his late twenties with a broad Brummie accent and a nervous disposition that he hadn’t yet shaken off despite several months in the job.

  “Ed!” she barked as she came in, snapping her fingers. “Whatever you’re doing, if no one’s in immediate danger of death, you’re reassigned. I need you to pull everything we’ve got in the files on the Valentine Vampire murders. You’ll have to go a way back—they started in ’87 and ran through to just after the turn of the millennium.”

  “I know the case, guv,” Eddie said with a sombre nod. “I remember the last murders—our mom wouldn’t let us walk home from school while the vampire was out there.”

  That made her grimace, and not just for the depressing reminder that most of her co-workers had still been spotty teenagers back when she’d been a forty-something sergeant battling to get her boss to listen to her.

  “Don’t let yourself get sucked in by all the media drama, constable,” she said. “I’ve been working this job thirty years, and I’ve yet to see evidence that there’s any sort of supernatural creature out there that wasn’t either a human using magic or a spirit temporarily summoned by a ritual. We’re looking for a human killer, not some kind of vampire.” And maybe if her superiors had listened to her about that fourteen years ago, they might have caught the bastard back then instead of wasting their time on dubious vampire lore.

  “We thought the murders had ended in 2001, but either the killer’s just resurfaced, or we’ve got a well-informed copycat on our hands,” she said. “Get familiar with those files. We need to know every relevant detail.” She sighed. “Better get a copy of Christopher Tomb’s book as well,” she conceded. “If it’s a copycat, they may well be working from that.”

  “Yes, guv.”

  Pierce shrugged her jacket off and was treated to a waft of smoke and worse, reminding her of the morning’s escapades. “Gemma been back in?” she asked.

  “Er, briefly, guv,” he said. “She had some evidence for the labs, but she’s gone back out on a follow-up to the grave disturbances in Bridlington.”

  “Right. I’ll be next door,” Pierce said. “Get on and find those files.”

  ‘Next door’ was the Magical Analysis department, home of the RCU’s array of specialists and researchers. They were an eclectic bunch, inevitably snowed under with far more cases than they could reasonably process: it was hard to get the budget for a field of analysis that was still most
ly experimental and tough to demonstrate in court. Magical rituals were always difficult to predict, repeat or record, and even when they did successfully produce results, it was an uphill struggle convincing the legal system to accept them.

  Pierce poked her head into the first office on the left: Sympathetic Magic, the domain of Jenny Hayes. At a petite five-foot-one, she was barely visible behind the wall of evidence boxes and file folders on her desk.

  “Jenny! Did my bright-eyed and eager young constable bring anything back from the barn scene this morning?” Pierce asked.

  “Claire!” Jenny popped up from where she’d been rooting through one of the boxes stacked beside her, pushing her wavy hair back from her glasses as she straightened. “Heard you were doing your best to blow yourself up.”

  “Well, I do try,” she said. “Was anything rescued from the rubble?”

  “Not much,” Jenny said with a grimace and a shrug, and waved her vaguely on down the hall. “Wasn’t really anything substantial enough for me to make much sense of—I think it’s all gone down to Simon in Ritual Mat.”

  “Oh, is he in?” she said. “Truly, we are blessed.”

  Simon Castle was their expert in identifying ritual materials, the closest thing the Magical Analysis Department boasted to a legitimate forensics job. He was also a busy little bee, frequently spending the few hours the department could afford him prowling the region’s occult markets and magic shops to pick up comparison samples. Ideally he should probably have an assistant doing that kind of scut work for him so he had more time to devote to the analysis, but while they were wishing, why not get them all assistants, and a departmental pony?

  Besides, the finicky little sod would probably refuse to accept anyone else could do the job to his exacting standards anyway. Pierce supposed it took a particular kind of mindset to devote your life’s work to studying the mysteries of the occult and then make your speciality comparing the composition of one shop’s bag of allegedly magical mixed herbs with another. But at least he got results that made sense to a judge and jury, which was more than could probably be said for the rest of them. She gave Jenny a nod of acknowledgement and headed on to Ritual Materials.