Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  “Any joy?” Pierce asked towards the end of the afternoon, walking round to rest her hands on the back of his chair. Deepan sat back and rubbed his face with a groaning yawn.

  “None of the cameras we’ve got show anything unusual at the time of the theft,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m going back through the days before now, see if there’s any sign of anyone casing the place.”

  “Need a fresh set of eyes?” she offered. Watching security footage for any length of time was hypnotically dull, but you had to stay alert for little details, especially when there was a chance some form of magic might be involved.

  Deepan waved the offer away with a tired smile. “No, I’ve got all my recurring guest stars memorised by now,” he said. “Curly-haired woman with pushchair. Bloke walking overweight pug. So far the pug is my most likely suspect.”

  “Yeah, they’re shifty little buggers—always heavy breathing.” She clapped her hands on the back of his chair. “Don’t stay up all night on this, all right? It’s a pretty long shot.”

  He just leaned his head back to smile wryly up at her. “You should take your own advice, Guv,” he said. “I doubt we’re going to see any breakthroughs tonight. You might as well get out of here on time for once.”

  He had a point: more hours staring at her computer screen weren’t likely to produce much but a headache. On the other hand, sitting around at home making a half-hearted effort at being domestic didn’t seem very appealing either. Pierce pulled out her phone and flicked through the address book until she found Sally Keane’s name. She’d been putting this visit off for far too long.

  SALLY OPENED THE door herself when Pierce knocked at the small terraced house, a warm smile already in place. “Hiya, Guv!” she said brightly, stepping back to let her in.

  She looked a world better than the last time Pierce had seen her, not long out of hospital; though she hadn’t put back all the weight that she’d lost, it now looked like healthy slimming instead of alarming gauntness. The tracheostomy tube was now gone, and in the chill December weather, it wasn’t immediately obvious that her high-collared shirt was hiding the horrific scars from the shapeshifter’s claws.

  “You’re looking good,” Pierce told her, the words sincere but still ringing awkward. With Sally no longer in quite such a bad way, this visit fell in an uncertain etiquette limbo between social call and checking up on a subordinate. Assuming Sally was still her subordinate. If there had been any discussion of her returning to work, Pierce hadn’t been notified.

  “So are you,” Sally said, as she stepped in and closed the door behind her.

  “And you lie well, too,” Pierce noted. She followed Sally through into the front room, exchanging a brief nod of greeting with her husband Mike where he sat on the sofa watching TV. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, and a few googly eyed reindeer and snowmen standing amid the row of cards on the mantelpiece. It had been years since Pierce had bothered with decorations herself; they always lingered for months if she did.

  “So are you back at work now?” Sally asked, bustling into the kitchen to get them all drinks, while Pierce perched on one of the armchairs next to the dining table. The room was on the cosy side of cramped, shelves of books and DVDs in the corner, framed photographs clustered on the window ledges and TV table. It had a lived-in feel that Pierce’s own home had never really acquired despite the fact she’d probably been there longer.

  “Went back on Tuesday,” she said, and shook her head slightly. “It’s all new faces—did you know that even Palmer’s gone?”

  She wondered if Sally, out of everyone, might be willing to believe her theory that their old superintendent had been replaced before he left. Sally was the one who’d seen the full extent of the skinbinder’s handiwork in the raid, moments before the shapeshifter in panther form had slashed her throat; she was the one who’d seen that he had human skins prepared among his collection of shapeshifting pelts.

  But with Mike here in the room with them and the lightness in Sally’s tone as she raised her voice over the boiling kettle, it was difficult to imagine broaching the topic. “Yes, Deepan told me,” she said from the kitchen. “He and Anita came round with the kids a couple of weeks back—they’re lovely girls. So well behaved.” There was the clink of mugs being set down on the counter. “Mike and I have been talking about starting a family, actually.”

  “Oh, right?” She politely returned Mike’s nod and smile, feeling at once both very old and very much out of her depth in this sort of conversation. Pierce couldn’t say she’d ever had any desire to have kids—she wasn’t overly fond of other people’s, and had spent too many years in the police to believe everyone really did find it ‘different when they’re your own’—but she’d always vaguely imagined she’d get round to doing the marriage thing at some point.

  Apparently a bit too vaguely, since past other halves had been and gone without it ever coming up, and in fact, it had been a while since any had come and gone at all. The last one had been Paul of the regrettable taste in cardigans, and that had probably been longer ago than it seemed if she stopped to work it out.

  For Christ’s sake. This was why she didn’t do social visits: too much maudlin contemplation and self-pity, when it wasn’t other people’s pity. She shook the thoughts off and accepted the mug of tea from Sally with a grateful smile. “Cheers.”

  “We’ve got biscuits as well if you like,” Sally offered. “Or you’re welcome to stay for tea—Mike was just going to make a curry.”

  Rude to invite herself round for a meal at such short notice, but she did want this chance to talk to Sally, and since depressing self-reflection seemed to be the other option for her evening: “Curry would be great, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Mike soon headed into the kitchen to start the meal, probably as eager for an excuse to duck out of being the third wheel as she was to talk to Sally alone. But Pierce was still conscious of his presence in the next room, inhibiting how much she could safely spill about RCU work, let alone the murkier waters of conspiracy around it.

  All the same, the conversation inevitably turned towards the devastating events of last October.

  “So terrible about Tim,” Sally said, gazing distantly over the top of her mug of tea as she held it in both hands. “Poor kid. I wish I’d been able to make it to the funeral.”

  Pierce made a soft noise of understanding. She’d been there herself, though she probably shouldn’t have been; too soon after the operation to be struggling into formal clothes and sitting through the service at the crematorium half dazed from pain and the pills that were supposed to kill it.

  It had been a secular service, thankfully—she could take or leave other people’s religion, most of the time, but she wasn’t sure she’d have sat well through platitudes about God’s plan as they gathered to cremate the remains of a lad in his twenties who’d been skinned for no better reason than he made a convenient figure to impersonate.

  She wasn’t sure if Sally had even been told the full circumstances of Tim’s death; if not, Pierce didn’t have the stomach to enlighten her right now.

  “Just a baby,” she said instead, and shook her head. “They’re all babies. You should see the two new constables they’ve given me—so fresh and shiny they still squeak when they move. And they’ve landed me with a DI who’s convinced he knows better than the people with RCU experience. I’m just lucky I’ve still got Deepan.”

  Sally sighed and lowered her now empty mug. “Guv,” she said after a long pause. “I’m not going to be coming back.”

  Pierce tilted her eyebrows her way. “No?”

  She’d suspected as much from the beginning, but it was still a blow. If she’d had both Deepan and Sally to call on, she wouldn’t have felt quite so outnumbered by inexperienced unknowns.

  “I’ve been talking it over with Mike,” Sally said, with an apologetic twist of a smile. “I love RCU work, it’s fascinating—but it’s just too much of a risk. I was lucky to s
urvive this time, and it could easily have been me in Tim’s position. And if we do end up having kids...”

  Pierce nodded with a sigh of her own, knowing anything she could say to reassure her would be lying.

  “I’ve been thinking of transferring to something safer,” Sally said. “Maybe part time. What I’d love to do, actually, is get into the forensics side of things—Magical Analysis. But that probably means going back to do another degree, and even if I can get some sort of credit for my time with the RCU, doing it part time...”

  “That’s going to take a while,” she said, nodding. And there was no guarantee, even if Sally got the necessary qualifications, that she would end up getting a job in the RCU’s research department. The demand was always there for more trained staff, but the budget wasn’t, and unlike the detective branch, Magical Analysis didn’t have the same alarmingly high turnover.

  Pierce pressed her lips together, not quite ready to concede defeat even though she knew it was on the cards. “So your mind’s made up?” she said.

  “’Fraid so, Guv,” Sally said with a wry smile.

  Pierce sat back with a sigh, peering into her mug at the last mouthful of tea that was probably too cold to finish now. “Fair enough,” she said. “So you’re all finished up with the department? Did they send someone round to take a statement about the raid on the farm? Deepan said there was some kind of official investigation, but I haven’t heard anything about what came of it.”

  Sally nodded, her frown taking on a few deeper wrinkles. “Yeah... it was while I was still in hospital, actually. You were probably in hospital after your op yourself, come to think of it. God, aren’t we a pair?” She grinned, but it soon faded back into a frown. “Internal investigation, was it? Seemed more like Special Branch, from what I could tell. Made it very clear that”—she gave a reflexive glance towards the kitchen where her husband was cooking the meal, but went on without obvious pause—“the nature of the skinbinder’s activities was to stay under wraps.”

  Pierce grimaced. She couldn’t help but wonder, from the slightly tense set of Sally’s face, exactly what kind of threats had accompanied the injunction. Threats enough to be responsible for her reconsidering returning to the RCU at all?

  Maybe—but if so, that only made her stated reasons for quitting all the more true. Working for the RCU was dangerous. Getting involved in any off-books quest to find out the truth about who was responsible for Palmer’s disappearance and all the shenanigans surrounding their last case could only make it more so.

  Pierce had already put Sally in the path of a shapeshifter’s claws. The least she could do was avoid dragging her in to face even worse trouble.

  THEY CALLED AN end to the grim shop talk, and spent the meal chatting about more pleasant things. Pierce left shortly after they’d eaten, not wanting to outstay her welcome. It had grown dark outside, and she stopped under a streetlight to delve in her handbag for her car keys.

  Whereupon she promptly discovered a set of folded print-outs that she’d shoved in there hours earlier. “Bollocks!” The photos that she’d taken of the ritual circle in Vyner’s basement. She’d gone to the effort of transferring them from her phone to the computer and printing them off so she’d have hard copies she could pass on to Doctor Moss at the university. Then she’d clean forgotten about it in the stultifying haze of fruitless research in which she’d spent most of the afternoon.

  Odds were Doctor Moss had already left the office by now. She could run the pictures over in the morning... But that would mean getting into work late again, and with Dawson’s penchant for wandering off without permission she’d rather be there first thing just in case anything new had come up overnight. She might as well take them over now, even if she could only shove them under the door of the locked office with a note.

  Mind made up, she drove back over to the university campus. The place was still occupied by wandering packs of students, but while the academic buildings were still lit they seemed largely deserted, and by the time she’d crossed the campus to the out-of-the-way corner that housed the School of Occult Studies, she’d lost most of the company.

  The glass doors onto the building’s outer porch swung open to let her in, but inside was a more solid fire door, this one requiring a card key. There was no sign of anyone around to let her in this time. Pierce reached for the door handle to test it, more out of habit than any actual hope that she’d get in. If there were no security staff on duty, she might have just wasted a trip.

  Yet the handle turned and the door started to move. She glanced at the lock and saw the light was green, despite the fact there was no card in the slot. Her gaze fell on a small device like a USB flash drive plugged into a port at the base of the lock. She was pretty sure that hadn’t been there this morning.

  She was pretty sure it shouldn’t be there at all. Someone unauthorised was in the building... and she had a dark feeling she knew which office they were here to visit.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PIERCE RAN THROUGH her options as she stepped into the building. She had no police radio, and backup was too far away to get here at a useful speed. Campus security were closer, but if there was anything here that she couldn’t handle herself, she doubted they could help.

  So far all she had was evidence of a potential break-in. If the intruder was still in the building—and the fact they’d left that device behind in the lock pointed to yes—seconds might count. She should assess the situation first before she called for backup.

  And thus also handily avoid looking a complete tit if this was just some idiot student showing off their hacking skills without thinking of the consequences.

  It could be that. It could just be a bog standard break-in, thieves after whatever could be lifted from an out-of-the-way corner of the campus. But her instincts were ticking like a car indicator, and she took the stairs at speed, unwilling to be trapped inside the slow, noisy lift. She’d be a sitting duck if anyone was waiting outside of the doors.

  The lights were on, but the building felt empty; that subtle quality to the silence that rang differently from a space that only seemed quiet because your brain was tuning out the background noise. Pierce was hyper-aware of the sound of her feet on the stairs, the faint jangle of car keys in her pocket before she closed her fist around them to stifle the sound. She reached the fire door at the top and peered out through the narrow pane of safety glass. The hallway looked clear at first glance.

  She eased the door open and then closed it again behind her, guiding it to rather than risking a betraying slam. The corridor beyond was carpeted: easier to move with stealth, but that applied to others just as much as her. She glanced into each doorway as she passed, alert for shadows.

  A row of lecture theatres, all apparently unoccupied. Beyond them were staff offices, these with solid wooden doors that had no windows to peek through. Her stomach tensed as she approached Doctor Moss’s door. She didn’t try knocking this time, but grasped the handle to test it with slow care.

  It turned. Abandoning stealth, Pierce threw the door open and took in the room in a rapid glance.

  The office that she’d been in just this morning, but now thrown into wild disarray. Books and papers tossed about, too thoroughly for casual vandalism. The wheeled chair shoved back into a far corner—and Doctor Moss slumped in it, a bloody cut visible on her forehead.

  Crouched before her was a black-clad figure in a hoodie, caught in the act of marking out a ritual circle on the floor, candles scattered on the carpet. At the sound of Pierce’s intrusion, he spun around, and she saw that his mouth and nose were covered by a scarf so she could see no more than a strip around his eyes.

  “Police!” she barked, but the man didn’t falter, hurling the object in his gloved right hand towards her face. She flinched and threw her arm up to defend her eyes before she registered that it was just a pen. He snatched something else up from the floor—a lighter, she realised as he flicked it on—and swept it across the wicks of the c
andles lying at his feet.

  They went up as if they were soaked in petrol.

  Probably were, she realised, or some equivalent, her nose picking up on the chemical scent too late to be useful. A hastily faked magic circle, candles soaked with accelerant... the ingredients for arson disguised as a ritual gone wrong.

  That plan might be out of the window with Pierce’s arrival, but it seemed that the would-be assassin was willing to leave collateral damage. He grabbed the table lamp from the edge of the desk and smashed out at her with the weighed base. She blocked the blow with her elbow and grabbed his arm to try and wrestle it away, cursing as the move pulled on her weak shoulder.

  The assassin let go of the lamp and cracked her in the jaw with the elbow of his other arm, sending her staggering backwards. He slammed her back against the bookshelves on the opposite wall and forced his way out past her through the door. Pierce made a lunge for him, but her fingers only snagged the back of his hood, yanking it down before he twisted out of her grip.

  The momentary glimpse it bought her told her next to nothing: white male with short brown hair, his face still mostly hidden by the wrapped scarf as she glimpsed it in profile. He ran on out into the corridor.

  Pierce pushed away from the bookshelves and gave chase, but it only took half a dozen paces to know she wouldn’t catch up. Turning back to the office door, she could already see the smoke beginning to form a haze in the air. The fire alarms had caught on as well, electronic wails breaking out.

  And Moss was still inside. Shit. Pierce almost ran back in before her eyes fell on a fire extinguisher in the corridor. She darted across to grab that instead. Foam, thank fuck, not just water; she yanked it off the wall and charged back to Moss’s office.