Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  Simon’s personal fiefdom was not much bigger than Jenny’s tiny office, but despite having just as heavy a workload he still managed the mind-boggling trick of keeping things well-organised. The room was flanked by two matching rows of tall metal cabinets, and on top of them stacked sets of tiny plastic storage drawers, the kind that elsewhere might be used to hold nuts and bolts. Here they were employed to store Simon’s many material samples, all individually labelled in neat, sharp capitals. At the back of the room was the equally tidy, well-organised lab area.

  Simon himself, an extremely tall and very thin man in his forties who’d had the same short-back-and-sides haircut for the near-decade that she’d known him, was currently perched spider-like on his lab stool, in the midst of dripping some kind of liquid solution onto a test stick. Pierce waited in the doorway for him to finish, knowing from experience that there was no point attempting to chivvy him along.

  Eventually he received whatever result he’d been looking for, made a detailed note of it on the form in front of him, then set everything down and swivelled around to face her. “Chief inspector,” he said, clasping his hands together and raising his chin expectantly.

  “Simon. Any word on the evidence recovered from the barn scene this morning?” she asked.

  He pressed his thin lips together disapprovingly. “As I already told your constable, the samples were hardly in any fit condition to do anything with.”

  “Couldn’t be avoided,” Pierce said. “The whole place went up around our ears—we were lucky to come out with anything.”

  “It’s debatable whether you did,” Simon said. He rose and stalked over to one of the cabinets, opening the door to retrieve an evidence list that he’d apparently already filed. He raked it with a dubious eye. “Unknown yellow powder, contaminated with ash and molten plastic. Heavily melted stubs of wax candles. Burned leather pouch containing herbal residue. Small metal container of possible bone chips... that’s about the only promising item on here.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can work your magic even with that much,” she said.

  He gave her a stern look. “It’s hardly magic, chief inspector, just expertise and careful work. And no amount of expertise can make the results any better than the samples.”

  It could be a real effort making conversation with Simon at times. “Then please do what you can,” she said. “What about the altar? Did that survive the fire?”

  He looked vaguely irritated to be consulted on something he no doubt considered outside his department. “I understand it was heavily damaged by a falling roof beam,” he told her. “The centre slab was shattered and the alignment of the other stones destroyed, making reconstruction difficult. I believe Cliff has the photos.” He closed the folder and placed it back in the cabinet. “If there was anything else?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Not yet,” she said. “But make this case a priority. The people behind these animal killings are still out there, and if they’re leaving that kind of booby-trap on their equipment, then they’re a dangerous bunch. I need anything you can get me on what they were up to and where we can track them down.”

  He gave no particular gesture of acknowledgement as she left, and Pierce suspected he was going to go right on handling his cases according to whatever priority he saw fit, as per usual. Still, at least he was always efficient.

  She headed on down to end of the corridor and the Enchanted Artefacts lab, the largest and best equipped in the department. It was the base of operations of Clifford Healey, their expert on identifying and rating the threat level of occult objects that they’d seized from crime scenes. As this was mostly achieved by a process of hazardous trial and error that often amounted to poking them to see how they reacted, Pierce generally entered the room with a degree of caution.

  There were no obvious sounds of chaos, and a quick glance through the wire-reinforced window didn’t suggest an imminent crisis, so she pushed in through the heavy fire door. “Cliff! Got a minute?”

  Stooped over one of the lab benches facing the door, he smiled at her and held up a finger, vaguely indicating the headphones in his ears. She loitered in the doorway while he finished drawing out a charcoal magic circle on a large piece of art board, then straightened up and excavated his music player from a pocket under his lab coat, tugging the headphones out of his ears.

  “Claire! What brings you to my humble abode?” he said with a bright smile. He was a big man, somewhere around his fifties with broad doughy features and hair that had retreated to two greying islands at either side of his head.

  “You get those altar photos from our crime scene this morning?” she asked.

  Cliff gave an apologetic grimace. “Yes, but I’m afraid there’s not much to be made of them,” he said. “I have your constable’s notes on what she remembers of the arrangement, but the main altar stone was shattered by the roof collapse, and the other rune stones knocked out of alignment. Without more of an idea of the nature of the ritual being conducted, I doubt there’s any way to reconstruct it.”

  She pulled a face, though she hadn’t expected much better. “Well, thanks, anyway.” She started to reverse out through the door, but Cliff beckoned her back.

  “That said, I do have some possible results for you on...”—he lifted his eyebrows meaningfully—“that personal project we discussed.”

  Cliff trying to be circumspect was a bit like something out of a pantomime, but nonetheless, Pierce felt herself tense as she stepped back inside and closed the door. “You managed to put a date on that shapeshifting pelt?” she asked.

  At the end of December they’d made a bust on a group calling themselves Red Key, who’d been attempting to raise a major demon. Alarmingly organised and well-supplied, they’d had at least one bona fide warlock in their employ, and a number of shapeshifters acting as the muscle. The shifters—always difficult to contain—had mostly been killed in the chaos or escaped, but Pierce had successfully arrested one in panther form.

  He wasn’t talking... but the shapeshifting pelt they’d seized from him just might. The maker’s rune inside had been Sebastian’s. And if Cliff could prove the pelt had been created after Sebastian supposedly died in a car accident last October...

  “I’m afraid there’s a limit to how precise I can be,” he cautioned, moving over to the racks of metal shelving at the far side of the room and retrieving a manila envelope from between some boxes. “Frankly, dating pelts has traditionally been a matter of centuries, not months or weeks, and the little work that’s been done on newer skins has naturally been angled towards establishing whether artefacts were made pre- or post-legislative reforms in the last few decades.”

  “You don’t need to sell me on how hard you’ve been miracle-working, Cliff,” she said. “I’ll believe your expert opinion.”

  He opened up the padded envelope, and carefully tipped out a smaller sealed plastic bag containing a single strand of black hair—or, she assumed, panther fur. He held it up to the light of one of the standing lamps set up near his workspace. “I’m afraid the results of the earlier testing have faded somewhat, but if you will observe the subtle banding by the root of the hair...?”

  She squinted at a hint of red or gold tint that might be a trick of the light on the plastic. “Your eyesight’s better than mine,” she said.

  “Not my eyesight, my contact lenses,” he corrected with a smile. “I do have enhanced photographs, in any case.” He fished a much-magnified photo of the panther hair out of the envelope, the colours artificially brightened to show bands of colour shading from a bright gold near the root through a spectrum of reds into black.

  “Now, as I say, this is an imprecise and untested methodology, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hang the success of a court case upon it,” Cliff cautioned, “but I acquired some samples from legal pelts and subjected them to the same test.” He tipped out two more photographs and laid them out side by side with the first. “Now, this one here was a pelt made about eight
een months ago—note how the test for enchantment shows much less distinct results?”

  The bands of colour on the hair in this second photo were dramatically duller, a deep rusty red at the root and a narrow, near-invisible smudge of brown.

  Cliff tapped the third and final photo. “And this one was taken from a pelt that was enchanted just this past November.”

  In this one, the bands of colour looked much more similar to the first, but when Pierce rearranged the pictures to compare the two side by side, she could see that the bands on the original picture were still a fraction brighter and more visible. She raised her head to look at Cliff. “So this means that our pelt was enchanted more recently?”

  “It’s hardly a smoking gun,” Cliff cautioned, raising a finger. “There could be any number of factors influencing the results—variations in the ritual, a more talented skinbinder with a higher quality of skinning blade... perhaps even the type of animal that provided the pelt. Your sample is from a black panther, whereas both of my comparison hairs were from large dogs. I’m afraid there simply isn’t enough research on this kind of comparative testing to control for all possible factors.”

  “Disclaimers duly noted,” she said, but she could feel the buzz of vindication nonetheless. Maybe it wasn’t outright proof that Sebastian had still been alive and making pelts after his October arrest and supposed death, but it was certainly cause for suspicion—especially when the official story stunk to high heaven. “It’s a start, at least.”

  “A good lawyer would rip it to pieces as evidence, and rightfully so,” Cliff warned.

  Pierce grimaced. “We’re a long way from getting this in front of a lawyer,” she said. Not when it came to the kind of case where government groups had permission to walk in and seize her evidence, prisoners died in too-convenient accidents, and the skinbinder she was chasing had the capability to turn murder victims into skin-suits for impostors to wear.

  “Keep this safe,” she told Cliff, handing the photographs back. “The people who busted Sebastian out of his cell aren’t the kind to respect due process.”

  But now she had a loose thread to begin tugging on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THOUGHTS OF CONSPIRACIES would have to keep, with a major murder investigation in the pipeline. Pierce headed back into the office to see what Eddie had dug up on the Valentine Vampire. “All right, constable,” she said, grabbing the nearest chair that wasn’t buried in files, “refresh my memory.”

  He looked a little flustered as he rifled back through his notebook, but that was his default response to being put on the spot; he seemed to have his facts together as he cleared his throat and began.

  “Erm, the first wave of murders took place between February fifth and twenty-first, 1987. Three victims: all white males, aged between twenty-one and twenty-six. Two were members of sports clubs and one was a marathon runner. The bodies were left posed in or near graveyards across South and West Yorkshire. All victims showed numerous ritualised cuts across the face and upper body, and identical puncture wounds at the base of the neck, which combined with the discovery of the second victim on February fourteenth led the media to come up with the name the Valentine Vampire.”

  Her disdain for the name must have showed, because he cleared his throat and hastened on. “Er, there were no leads in the initial investigation, but the murders were assumed to have stopped until the body of Neil Sherrington was found in a graveyard near Horncastle on February third, 1994. It wasn’t immediately linked to the Valentine Vampire murders of the ’eighties until a second body was found in Grimsby a week later. Again there were three victims, all following the same profile. The third body was left at the same location as the first, shortly after the police were pulled out of the area.”

  “Cocky sods,” Pierce said. And neither of those sites were all that far from today’s body near Newark-on-Trent. Maybe the killer was playing the same trick again, circling back to old haunts once the heat was off.

  “Yes, guv,” Eddie said with a dutiful nod, and checked his notes again. “Erm, the third set of murders began with the discovery of the body of Andrew Cole near Rotherham on February sixth, 2001. Nine days later the killers dumped the body of a second victim in Hemsworth, but this time there was an alleged witness, a man called Alan Waite who claimed to have been out looking for his lost wallet after he’d dropped it on the way home from the pub. He was briefly treated as a suspect, but found to have been out of the country at the time of the 1994 murders. Questioned by...” He leaned over to consult one of the opened files. “DI Raymond Carlisle and Sergeant... er, you, guv,” he said with a blink.

  Pierce gave a terse nod, vaguely remembering the interview, though the man himself was a faded ghost in her memory. She wanted to say middle-aged, overweight, balding... but how much of that was recollection, and how much just her mind sketching in details borrowed from a thousand others like him she’d interviewed in her career?

  “He gave us a description of the vehicle used to dump the bodies,” she said. “But he also gave us a load of complete guff about the people driving it.” What had started out as a halfway-plausible description of a woman or maybe a long-haired man driving and a bald man in the passenger seat had quickly swollen with ‘remembered’ details until the woman was beautiful and pale as death and the passenger could have starred in Nosferatu. By the time the media got hold of him, Waite was prepared to swear he’d witnessed the Nosferatu lookalike restored to strength by drinking blood from the corpse.

  After that it had been impossible to quash the assumption the killer was a real vampire—especially with DI Carlisle all too eager for an excuse for why the police hadn’t managed to make any arrests yet.

  Eddie clearly had enough sense to skip over the details of Waite’s dubious witness statement. “The police received a tipoff about the van?” he said.

  Pierce nodded. “Anonymous female caller claimed to have seen it coming and going from a boarded-up house in York, and that the people living there had tried to recruit her into their cult. Based on her information, Carlisle believed that the cult leader would be confined to the house in daylight hours, and organised a dawn raid.”

  “But they weren’t there?” he said.

  “Nope,” Pierce said grimly. She hadn’t been either—and she couldn’t help but think that maybe, if Carlisle hadn’t considered her surplus to requirements, she might have realised it was all about to go horribly wrong... “Firearms went in and found the place empty except for a coffin in the basement. When they opened the lid, it blew up in their faces. One officer was killed and two injured. The whole thing was probably a setup from the start—we found the third body in a graveyard fifty miles away a couple of hours later. It must have been dumped there the night before the raid.”

  About as comprehensive a cock-up as you could ask for.

  “One of the officer’s statements mentions a possible suspect at the scene of the raid,” Eddie said, consulting his files.

  “Oh?” Pierce frowned a little, racking her memory, but if she’d ever been informed of that detail she’d forgotten it since.

  He peered at the page again as if he might have been mistaken. “Yes, um, Firearms Officer Leonard Grey—”

  “Leo Grey?” That caused her head to snap up. “He was part of the raid?”

  “Er, yes, guv.” He turned the folder to show her the statement sheet. “Is that significant?”

  Pierce glanced at the signature, and then the written statement above it. A terse summation of events, much as she might expect from the man. “Not directly,” she said. “But I know him. He’s got good instincts.” He’d had good instincts, she supposed; he was retired now, another victim of the clusterfuck of a case that had been their pursuit of Sebastian. “Go on,” she told Eddie with a nod.

  He swallowed. “Um... there’s not much here, guv,” he admitted. “According to Grey’s statement, he was stationed outside the building in case of attempted escapes, and spotted a young woman watc
hing from the park across the street who he considered to be acting suspiciously.” He flipped through a couple more pages inside the folder. “I don’t see any evidence that it was followed up.”

  Meaning that it might have turned out to be nothing—or just gone ignored in the chaos of the disastrous raid. No way to ask DI Carlisle about it now: he’d died of a heart attack five or six years back. Depressing, how many of her former colleagues who’d managed to actually make it out of the job alive were now dropping like flies as time caught up.

  But Leo was still around, even if he was retired. Pierce checked her watch and stood. “Right,” she said. “I’m going to see if I can talk to Leo Grey. Maybe he remembers some details about that raid that didn’t make the reports.”

  And even if he didn’t, she still owed him a visit that she’d been putting off for far too long.

  LEO WAS MORE than willing to meet with her immediately—in fact, his eagerness at the prospect of being involved in police work made her feel guilty that her pretext for seeing him was such a long shot. Enforced retirement had to chafe for a man only in his forties who’d kept himself in good shape before he’d been injured. Pierce hadn’t seen him since the hospital, but with the state that he’d been in back then, she doubted he could be back up to full strength barely four months later.

  The address that he directed her to was a modest terraced house in a village on the edge of the Dales. After much circling of the narrow streets in search of somewhere to legally park, she made her way back on foot and pressed the bell.

  The door was opened by a small woman in blue jeans and a knitted cardigan: Leo’s wife, whose name unfortunately currently escaped her. Ruth? Rose? Something like that. Pierce had only met her briefly at the hospital, though she’d made a good impression, a calm, pragmatic woman who seemed well-suited to her equally phlegmatic husband.