Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  Pierce checked her watch. Still time to catch up to him, maybe, if it was somewhere close. “Did he say where he went?”

  “Yeah, I made a note.” Freeman rolled her chair across to snag a Post-it from where it was stuck to the side of the cabinet.

  “Good.” At least someone round here was doing their job. Pierce stood up from her chair, any hopes of a brief break forgotten. “All right, let’s go.”

  The informant had asked to meet Dawson round the back of an industrial estate: somewhere with enough traffic that cars wouldn’t draw attention, but with secluded corners where they could talk unobserved. A logical enough call, but it still made Pierce twitchy; maybe it was just the fact her last meeting in a similar location had ended in attempted murder, but she didn’t have a good feeling about this.

  She tried to call Dawson on his mobile as Freeman drove, but it was switched off. She doubted if he’d have his radio on him: a burst of police chatter could easily spook a source wary of being seen talking to them.

  Which meant that he was incommunicado: perhaps a necessary evil, but still exactly why he shouldn’t have gone without backup. There was no guarantee that their mystery informant was truly planning on helping the police; at best, it might just be a time-waster or a wannabe journalist fishing for hints, but at worst he could easily end up with a knife between the ribs. Pierce didn’t know if Dawson was just a macho idiot who thought he could handle anything, or ambitious enough to be trying to crack the case without sharing the credit. Either way, the lone wolf tactics were pissing her off.

  “Which way now, Guv?” Freeman asked as they approached a roundabout.

  “Left, down here.”

  They passed parked cars and industrial units that hummed with the sound of working machinery, but there was no foot traffic on the roads out here. They took several twists and turns through the estate before Freeman slowed. “That’s Dawson’s car,” she said, indicating a discreet silver Mondeo parked in front of the metal fence to their left. There was no one inside. Beyond the fence were the tree-covered grounds of a disused factory that might have made a potential meeting point, but the gates were padlocked shut.

  Pierce glanced off to the right, where the road continued a short way before turning off to the left and vanishing behind the buildings. The informant could have insisted they walk a distance away from the car, but Dawson would have to have been foolishly cocky to agree. Possible, but... She looked again at the row of industrial units in front of them. The leftmost didn’t quite butt up against the high brick wall that surrounded the factory grounds: instead, there was a narrow strip of grass and bushes running in between them.

  She reached for the seat belt release. “I’m going to check around the back,” she murmured to Freeman. “Turn the car around. Cut the engine, but be ready to leave fast if we have to run.” Excessive precautions were only paranoid if it turned out that you didn’t need them.

  Pierce left the car and headed around the side of the building, the wet grass muffling her footsteps as she left the tarmac. She stuck close to the side wall of the industrial unit, edging down to the end to peer around. There was Dawson, speaking with a man in a grey hoodie a short distance away under the trees. The informant kept shifting from foot to foot and looking around nervously, so Pierce withdrew around the corner to listen rather than watch. She could barely hear the hushed whisper of the man in the hoodie, but Dawson wasn’t trying quite so hard to keep his voice down.

  “Where is this site?” she heard him press.

  “I can’t tell you,” the informant said. “If they realise—”

  “Well, you’ve got to give me something to bloody go on, man! How many people involved in this operation?”

  “A lot. I mean, this is... large-scale shit.” The man gave a nervous laugh that sounded more sick than amused. “Huge. They call themselves Red Key, but that’s just the group I’m working for. I don’t know who they really are. They’ve got people high up—they’ve got people in the police, man. I’m risking my life even talking to you. I don’t know that you haven’t talked to them.”

  His voice sounded closer, as if he was on the verge of considering making an exit. No way for Pierce to withdraw without being spotted, so she stayed where she was, ready to detain him if necessary. Not that there was much ‘if’ about it. The scale of operation he was talking about sounded a lot like the people she’d tangled with back in October’s shapeshifter case, a fake company called Solomon Solutions who’d vanished into the mist after the raid where she’d arrested the skinbinder. If this was them resurfacing again, she needed to know about it.

  “Then make it worth our while,” Dawson said forcefully. “You say they’re going to come after you—d’you think they care if you’re betraying them a lot or just a little? You’re in deep shit already. You want to crawl out? Tell us everything.”

  “Oh, no. No,” the man said. “There are things I know that anybody could have told you, but the high clearance stuff... No way. They’d trace it straight back to me—there’s only like five guys that it could be and they’re already suspicious.” As he backed away from Dawson, Pierce could see the back of his hood around the corner; a pace or two more and he’d see her. She edged further back along the side of the building.

  The roof above her head creaked, and she froze, thinking that she’d bumped against a drainpipe. Then the faint noise came again, and she realised it was something moving up there on top of the roof.

  Something too heavy to be a bird or a squirrel. The roof creaked, and Pierce stepped back, trying to see, but the narrow strip between the building and the brick wall didn’t give her enough room to get the viewing angle.

  A sudden burst of frantic beeping from a car horn broke the hush of the scene. Pierce spun to look, thinking it was a car alarm, but then she saw Freeman waving frantically, gesturing at the roof. As Pierce turned back, the informant spotted her and let out a shocked yell. “You fucker!” he shouted at Dawson as he scrambled away from both of them. “Who the fuck did you bring?”

  “I didn’t—” Dawson’s words were cut off as Pierce moving out from around the building. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, face red with indignation.

  “Forget that; move!” she ordered them both, twisting to try and look up at the roof. “There’s someone—”

  A dark shape sprang down lightly from the edge of the roof, too sinuously graceful to be human, too big for any native animal.

  A shapeshifter.

  Pierce barely had a chance to register the sleek feline shape before the beast had bounded up again, leaping towards the informant. She cursed and grabbed for the equipment on her belt; silver would break the enchantment on a shapeshifting pelt, but getting cuffs on a live, moving panther was a joke. She had malodorant spray, a stink bomb in a can that should give a shifter’s sensitive nose pause.

  A pause that ought to involve Firearms being there to take the thing down with silver bullets. Without that backup, they were pretty fucked. All they could do was run.

  Before she’d even pulled the spray can out of the belt pouch, the shifter had trapped the informant. He had nowhere to flee, hemmed in by the brick walls and the trees, and she could only watch, too far away, too slow to act, as the panther sank its teeth into his thigh. Blood droplets flew in a spray as it shook him like a rag.

  “Fuck!” Dawson had his own can of the malodorant out, but he might as well have spritzed the thing with water. The stinking cloud didn’t even have time to start to spread before the shapeshifter twisted and sprang away, dragging the screaming man along by his leg like a careless child bumping a doll along the ground. Pierce cast around for some kind of ranged weapon, but there was nothing, not even a rock.

  The panther shifter reached the foot of a tree by the wall and briefly let go of its human prey, but only for long enough to take another, better grip before it scrambled with him up the trunk. The tree bent under the combined weight with an ominous crack, but before the bran
ches could break, the panther heaved its victim up over the top of the wall and let him fall down with a crunch of bones and an agonized cry. The tree whiplashed away from the wall and then back again, and the panther leapt after him, cresting the wall in an inelegant scramble.

  “Shit!” Dawson ran forward, Pierce following on his heels, but they could already hear the big cat crashing away through the trees on the other side.

  “What’s past here?” she shouted, but he didn’t answer, instead making a grab for the branches of the tree to try and haul himself up after. The branch splintered and cracked as he put his weight on it, and he hastily let go before it snapped. He whirled to look up at the wall, but it was clear at a glance it was too high to climb.

  Pierce was already running back towards the road. “Come on!” she shouted to him. “Freeman’s in the car!” She barrelled back to the vehicle, which sat waiting as she’d ordered, the nearest back door already cracked open. She hauled it the rest of the way and leaned her body in, not bothering to climb in properly.

  “What happened?” Freeman asked, looking back at her with wide eyes. “There was something up on the roof—some kind of a big animal—”

  “Call backup!” Pierce told her. “Ask for Firearms Support—tell them to bring Tasers, silver bullets if they’ve got them. We’ve got a shapeshifter in panther form on the loose, and it’s abducted our source!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PIERCE GOT ONE of the nearby businesses to provide them with bolt cutters so they could break the padlock onto the factory grounds. They found the informant’s body dumped a short distance away, on a patch of brick-strewn waste ground between the trees. His chest had been ripped open: a faster death than waiting to bleed out from the leg wound, but not a kind one.

  When Firearms Support arrived they searched the region thoroughly, but to no one’s great surprise the shapeshifter was long gone by then. More than likely he’d stripped out of the pelt, stashed it in a car, and driven off with nobody the wiser.

  Another operation gone completely to shit. This morning’s minor victory in retrieving the artefacts already seemed both small and far away.

  “You should have taken backup to the meet,” she told Dawson. “If we’d had more people on scene from the start, we could have watched for attempts on his life.”

  “Would we have been prepared for shapeshifters?” he countered. “The RCU shouldn’t be reliant on outside Firearms units. We need to have our own silver bullets.”

  “Take it up with the government.” Personally, she’d rather not have to deal with the responsibility of carrying a gun; she’d had to briefly handle one in the clusterfuck of their last shapeshifter case, and she’d been at least as worried about hurting somebody as she had the shapeshifters trying to kill her. She certainly didn’t want an impulsive maverick like Dawson in a position to literally call the shots.

  A dedicated Firearms Officer of the RCU’s own, though... But that was a pipe dream, and way down a wishlist that started with a desperate need for more manpower of any variety. She could have had her whole team on safeguarding the informant, and it still wouldn’t have given them a hope of watching every angle well enough to stop the shapeshifter’s attack.

  Which didn’t excuse Dawson’s idiocy. “Shapeshifter or not, you shouldn’t have been out here alone without even a radio check-in,” she said. “If we hadn’t come out here after you, that could be your guts decorating the woods alongside our informant. The shifter would have had all the time in the world to conceal the crime, and we wouldn’t have even been sure till tomorrow that you were missing.” She should not have to be talking to a forty-something DI like the parent of a recalcitrant teenager.

  “If you’d been here when I arrived, the bloke would have done a runner, and we wouldn’t have got anything out of him at all,” he said.

  “It didn’t sound like you were getting very much,” she said.

  “Got enough to prove he was involved,” Dawson said, with a dispassionate glance down at the corpse. “He told me he was working for a group called Red Key. He confirmed he helped them plant the skulls—and he said that was only the start.”

  “The start of what?” she asked.

  “A much bigger ritual. They’re trying to summon some kind of major demon. The skull sites are like bait—little spirits trapped in cages, drawing the big one closer. Those things that attacked our people are just worms on hooks, there to lure the big fish to the surface.”

  If those were the worms... “How big a fish are we talking, exactly?” she said, feeling the hairs rising on the back of her neck. Read a dozen texts on demonology and you could find an equal number of quibbling definitions of demons versus spirits versus djinn and ghosts and fuck-knew-what-else, but if there was one thing they agreed on, it was that anything grouped under the banner of ‘major demon’ was apocalyptic levels of bad news.

  Maybe literally.

  “Our man didn’t know the details, or he didn’t want to risk his neck by sharing them,” Dawson said. “But it was bad enough to make him risk coming to us even though he thought they’d kill him for it.”

  Pierce grimaced as she looked down at the savaged body between them. “Wasn’t wrong, was he? Poor bastard.”

  They didn’t even have a name to put to the dead face: the man had no ID on him, and while they could take prints and dental X-rays, she already had a hunch it wouldn’t get them far. An outfit this professional, using shapeshifters to silence awkward witnesses? She had a bad feeling she’d tangled with these people before, and they didn’t leave any loose ends behind. She stretched her injured shoulder out, feeling the ache.

  Last time, she’d won a minor victory but lost the war: only the skinbinder Sebastian taken into custody, and by Deepan’s account, he hadn’t stayed there long. This time, with the prospect of a demon summoning, they might be playing for even higher stakes.

  And if Cliff was right about Monday being the deadline, they only had three days to stop it happening.

  MOST OF THE rest of the day was spent on the futile hunt for the shapeshifter and dealing with the fallout from the incident. Pierce received another bollocking from Snow over the shambolic proceedings, which made it impossible to discuss any concerns about Dawson’s reckless behaviour without seeming as if she was shifting the blame.

  At least she had their partial success in the artefact thefts to pull out of her hat, but as predicted, it didn’t do much to sway him with the perpetrators still on the loose. They needed an arrest, something concrete he could put down on his crime statistics, and then maybe he’d finally back off.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. The involvement of the panther shapeshifter had only brought her paranoia back. If the group she’d tangled with were still operating in the area, then maybe it wasn’t so crazy to think that they hadn’t just packed up and left the RCU after their operative took Palmer’s place. Snow might just be the innocent successor filling dead man’s shoes, but he could also be their inside man. And what about DI Dawson? Just a bull-headed cowboy operator who was used to getting his way, or was he actively working against her?

  There were no answers, only the headache of continued uncertainty. It went nicely with the matching headaches of her unsolved cases and the bloody druids still hanging around. She treated herself to red wine and ice-cream that night, and studiously ignored the footage running on the news of herself evading questions and the anchors quoting Dawson’s false assurances over haunting photos of Terry Davenport and Alan Winters looking all of bloody twelve years old.

  Even with the wine, she didn’t sleep too well.

  Pierce returned to work the next day to more media presence, ongoing druid occupation, and, more promisingly, a message from Doctor Moss to say she was out of the hospital. Pierce arranged to meet the lecturer at her house, and snagged Dawson to take with her, both to keep him out of trouble and because he was the only one who’d actually heard what their informant had said about the ritual.

  Moss was the s
ame woman that she’d met with just days ago, but now somehow she looked her age. Even in home surroundings she was just as well turned out, blouse and skirt and suit jacket and hosiery et al, but in place of her previous energetic presence she seemed almost dwarfed by the armchair that she sat in. She looked pale, blue veins visible through the skin, and she still had a wound dressing taped to her forehead.

  But though her movements seemed faintly shaky as she stirred sugar into her tea—served from a dedicated sugar bowl, into delicate china cups with matching saucers—the lecturer’s voice was as strong as ever.

  “First I should thank you, Chief Inspector, for your help the other night,” she said. “I’m told that thanks to your actions the fire damage was minor, and mostly confined to the—frankly, dreadful—carpet. I shudder to think what would have been lost if the books in there had been allowed to burn.”

  Her own life, for a start, which would have weighed on Pierce more than academic knowledge, no matter how irreplaceable. “I can only apologise for having put your life in danger in the first place,” she said. “If we’d had any idea that there would be an element of risk involved, we would never have brought you in on the case.”

  “Nonsense,” Moss said briskly, breaking a wafer biscuit in half to consume it in delicate bites. “People don’t try to murder you over things that aren’t important.” Pierce’s police experience argued it was often otherwise, but she let the overall point stand. “If it matters that much, you need an expert, and I flatter myself enough to be fairly assured I’m as much of one as you can hope to find.”

  “So can you tell us what the ritual’s all about?” Dawson said, sitting forward. He looked distinctly out of place perched on one of Moss’s Queen Anne chairs, like a bulldog pressed into taking part in a child’s tea party.

  Moss smiled smoothly, unfazed by the bluntness. “I can’t give you particulars,” she said. “I can tell you that the site you documented will be the first of three.”