Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  “DCI Pierce,” she said, with a warm smile. “Leo said you were on your way. You’re looking well.”

  That was questionable after the day she’d had, but she supposed that when Rose—she was nearly positive it was Rose—had seen her last she’d been newly released from her shoulder surgery and still half-stoned on painkillers.

  “Sorry to butt in on you at such short notice,” she said. Often a bit of a social wobble adjusting to the half-forgotten fact that other people had families and lives outside of police work. “I shouldn’t take up too much of his time.”

  “Oh, do,” maybe-Rose said cheerfully, stepping back to let her in and gesturing her down the narrow hallway. “He’ll be delighted to have something to do. He’s never been much of a one for being cooped up around the house. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’s putting up shelves and talking about re-tiling the bathroom, and never mind that he’s still supposed to be resting that leg.”

  On their last case together Leo had taken a brutal battering from a shapeshifter in a chimaera pelt, an unholy hybrid patchwork of animal skins. He’d come away with an ugly laundry list of injuries: broken ribs, a shattered kneecap, claw wounds through the muscle of his thigh, and probably worst of all to a man accustomed to being steady-fingered on the trigger, a nasty crushing injury to his right arm and hand that had left him with nerve damage.

  Pierce was guiltily aware that she hadn’t been keeping up with his recovery as well as she should. He was a taciturn man at the best of times, and a few brief phone calls hadn’t told her much about his medical condition: the fact that his status had gone from medical leave to early retirement said more than anything he’d shared directly.

  Maybe-Rose led her through to the front room, a warmly cosy sort of space with dark wooden furniture, alcoves full of books and CDs, and a brown leather suite. Leo himself was sitting in one of the armchairs, and she couldn’t help but think that he looked older and more worn than she remembered. He’d always had an ageless sort of quality, craggy features and sandy blond hair that hid the signs of grey, but where he’d always been lean he now just looked stretched thin, the angles of his face etched more sharply, like a portrait repainted by a less forgiving artist.

  It was disconcerting to see him in casual clothes instead of his ever-present uniform and tac vest; his chinos and grey jumper were somehow even more of an upset than the hospital gown Pierce had last seen him in. She couldn’t help but notice a cane tucked beside the chair.

  The gravelly voice, though, was still the same as ever. “Claire,” he said with a curt nod, about as effusive a greeting as she ever got from him.

  His wife leaned over to give him a brief kiss on the cheek. “Right, I’m off to Lucy’s,” she said. “I’ll have my mobile with me, so call me if you need anything, otherwise I’ll be home about nine.” She headed out, and Pierce and Leo sat in slightly awkward silence for a moment as they listened to the sounds of her departure, neither of them much inclined to small talk.

  “So,” Leo said, sitting forward once she’d gone. “You need my help on a case?” He looked newly alert, like a bloodhound perking up at the hint of a fresh scent, and she felt bad that she had so little to offer him.

  “Looks like the Valentine Vampire might be back to his old tricks,” she said. “You were at the raid in York in 2001, right?”

  Leo nodded; no doubt he had little trouble calling the case to mind after it had gone so badly. “Yeah, but there’s not much to tell,” he said. “Suspects had already cleaned out before we got there, and left the place wired to blow. Killed Bill Winston from my unit—I wasn’t even in the building at the time.”

  Pierce nodded in return. “In your report you mentioned spotting a woman you thought was watching the house. I know it was fourteen years ago, but if you can remember anything...”

  It was a long time, but if Leo was like her, he’d probably spent many a sleepless night in the years that followed dwelling on the details of the botched raid, trying to find the different call he could have made.

  He closed his eyes to think, and without that penetrating gaze to distract her, Pierce could see new lines on his face. She darted a glance at his right hand where it rested on the arm of the chair, but the signs of the surgeries had healed and what damage remained wasn’t visible on the surface.

  Leo rubbed his temples with his left hand. “There was a woman,” he said. “Girl, really—I’d have guessed she was a teenager if she hadn’t been so poised. That was what drew my attention: you pay close attention to body language when you’re going in armed. Hers was... wrong. Too calm. Not scared or excited, just watching us to see how it went. I was about to call in for somebody to detain her when it all went to hell. By the time I got another chance to look round she was gone.”

  “Got a physical description?” Pierce asked without much hope. It had been too long. Somebody should have taken all these details down immediately after the fact, even if nothing had come of it.

  He pursed his lips. “Young,” he repeated. “Mid-twenties at most. Very pale, and I think dark hair, but it could have been dyed. Main thing I remember is she was wearing a silver necklace with something like bat wings on it.” He touched his chest vaguely. “Thought that might have been significant.”

  “Maybe,” Pierce agreed. It was something—or at least, it would have been something fourteen years ago. After all this time, with the leads long grown cold, it was a woefully thin description to hang any kind of witness hunt on, and they both knew it.

  She sighed, out of any questions that he could usefully help with, but feeling it was too soon to leave. She fished for any other avenue of conversation that wasn’t just a blunt enquiry about his injuries.

  Leo rescued her, sitting forward in his chair as it became clear her line of questioning had petered out. “So, I hear the skinbinder we went through all this shit to arrest died in a car crash during a prison transfer,” he said. “That stink as much to you as it does to me?”

  “Like a dead fish down the back of the radiator,” she said with a nod. “You’re right—I’d bet any money somebody extracted him. Either his own people, or those government wankers who kept trying to take over the case.” The Counter Terror Action Team, a group she’d never heard of before or since. “They were obviously pretty eager to get control of the one skinbinder with the know-how to make pelts from human skin.” Pierce hesitated, wondering if she could trust him with her wilder conspiracy theories. “And that’s not all that stinks. My old superintendent—Howard Palmer. You heard that he retired?”

  Leo cocked his head. “You think they forced him out?”

  “Worse than that.” She pressed her lips together, assembling an argument that still felt almost too paranoid even to her. “He came to see me in the hospital after I’d had my op—or at least, somebody claiming to be Palmer did. Looked and sounded like him, but the way he was acting was all wrong. Nervous, police uniform in a mess... I’d have been willing to call it stress if he hadn’t been missing his silver watch.”

  With the details of their last shared case probably still even fresher in Leo’s mind than in hers, it took him barely a moment to twig to the implications. “You think he was replaced by a shapeshifter.”

  Pierce let out a huff and shook her head slightly, aware how mad it sounded. “Maybe I’m nuts,” she admitted. “But he’s completely disappeared. Supposedly moved to France, and didn’t leave contact details behind him.” And there was no way to know if the new superintendent who’d taken his place was an innocent patsy or part of the conspiracy.

  She was relieved when Leo nodded thoughtfully rather than dismissing it out of hand. “It’s possible,” he said. “The people involved in this clearly have a long reach.” He straightened in his seat. “Any leads?”

  “Maybe,” she hedged. “I had a run-in with a group calling themselves Red Key back in December: organised, well-funded, and they had a whole bunch of shapeshifters working for them. Only managed to arrest one of th
em, but he was wearing a pelt with Sebastian’s maker’s mark. I had our Enchanted Artefacts man analyse the pelt’s age—the results wouldn’t stand up in court, but he swears it was made after Sebastian supposedly died.”

  Leo drew in a long breath and nodded slowly. “So that’s the start of the trail,” he said. “If Sebastian’s alive, we need to find him.” His gaze sharpened as he focused on her. “You said you apprehended the shapeshifter. Still alive?” he asked.

  She nodded. He was last time she’d checked—and she checked pretty frequently. “Had a suicide rune on the roof of his mouth, but we knew to look for it this time.” Unlike the decidedly unpleasant outcome the last time they’d arrested one of Sebastian’s crew. “Didn’t manage to get a word out of him in questioning, though.”

  “Well, he’ll have had time to stew by now,” Leo said. “You confront him about the age of the pelt?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. Cliff only came back to me with the results today.”

  “Then we’ve got time to press before anyone finds out you’ve got something,” Leo said, standing up. “We should head over there right now.”

  Pierce could have pointed out there was little reason to bring Leo along for that, but she didn’t have the heart.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PIERCE HAD CAUSE to doubt the wisdom of bringing Leo along with her as she watched the painstakingly slow, stiff way he bent to lace his shoes, and again as she accompanied him to her car; he hadn’t brought the cane, and his limp seemed to worsen even over the short walk to where she’d parked. She wondered if the reason he’d opted to leave his wife a note was less to avoid questions about where they were going, and more to avoid ones about whether he was up to it.

  But it would have felt like unnecessary cruelty to question his accompanying her now, and besides, maybe she was just feeling guilty, seeing only how far he’d fallen and not how much he’d already recovered. He’d always been a steady, sensible sort of man, and who was she to question his opinion of what he could handle?

  All the same, as she drove, she was conscious of him shifting restlessly in the passenger seat beside her, constantly stretching his bad leg as if to ease a cramp. She’d seen him hold almost perfectly still for hours before when the job demanded it.

  But he didn’t have that job any more, and how could she argue with him seeing this through alongside her when it was thanks to her dragging him into this mess that he’d lost it?

  “You know this place they’re keeping him?” Leo asked her, after fifteen minutes of driving.

  Pierce nodded. “Secure facility off of the M62.” In theory a shapeshifter should be no more dangerous than any normal human being once they’d been stripped of their pelt. In practice, magic wasn’t so easily and neatly contained, and there were stories of shifters who’d spent too long in their pelts retaining some animal traits even without it. When it came to keeping them contained after arrest, it was best not to take chances.

  The Yorkshire Enhanced Offender Institution had high metal fences tipped with razor wire, and a guard on the gates who took the time to actually study Pierce’s warrant card when she showed it. She’d called ahead and made arrangements, pleading time-sensitive questions as an excuse for the short notice, but there was still some bureaucratic wrangling to be done and forms to be filled in before they were finally cleared to see the prisoner.

  “I doubt you’re going to get much out of this one,” the prison officer escorting them cautioned. “Gone feral. I’ve seen it before—scratching at the walls and howling, biting, losing the ability to use tools... Oh, the psych people try to work with them, of course, but there’s only so much you can do. Put one of those skin suits on and it starts messing with your brain. People weren’t meant to be other shapes.”

  “Mm,” Pierce said neutrally, and forbore from pointing out that it was her own field of expertise. In truth, she supposed, it was scarcely anyone’s area of expertise. Most of the literature on long-term aftereffects from shapeshifting came in the form of highly dubious historical accounts of men that had become ‘near beast in mind and manner,’ and some pre-war experiments where the poor sods had been studied under such inhumane conditions it was hard to know whether to blame the magic or the testing.

  “Has Tate spoken since he was brought here?” she asked. The shifter hadn’t said word one to her or anyone else who’d tried to question him when he was first arrested. Even the identification was no more than provisional: dental records taken when they’d dealt with the suicide rune concealed inside his mouth had come up with the name of Martin Tate, but they’d been completely unable to find any other up-to-date details on the man, and Tate himself hadn’t responded any better to that name than to anything else they called him.

  Maybe six weeks in custody would have given him time to start reconsidering his options—though judging by the prison officer’s sceptical grimace, she was thinking not.

  “Non-verbal since he came in,” he said. “Doesn’t appear to respond to commands, though you never know how much these guys are faking. But he’s in line with some of the worse cases of animal behaviour we’ve seen.” He sucked in a dubious breath and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to get out of this, but the prisoner will have to stay secured. No phones or internet-capable devices inside the interview room; nothing sharp or that can otherwise be used as a weapon. You’ll be monitored on CCTV from outside the room—if you move beyond the demarcation line on the floor or the prisoner gets violent, the interview will be terminated immediately.”

  It was a familiar spiel to her, but Leo listened with a level of serious attention that seemed to placate the prison officer’s obvious dubiousness. “I’ll be monitoring from outside, as will the main security office,” he said as they reached the suite of secure interview rooms. “You’ll be recorded the whole time you’re in the room. Interview room two, on your left.”

  They entered the interview room, a sparse affair with the table and chairs securely bolted to the floor and nothing else on hand for the prisoner to grab. Not that he could have anyway: his arms were fixed to the metal frame of his chair with silver cuffs, leaving him unable to lift them more than a few inches or properly stand up. The chair was set well back from the interviewers’ table, inside a magic circle etched into the concrete floor. Pierce glanced up, and saw a mirror of the design marked on the ceiling. Heavy duty magical containment; it shouldn’t be necessary for a shifter stripped of his pelt, though it might well be for other prisoners who couldn’t be so easily separated from their magical enhancements.

  There were two chairs on the other side of the interview table; Leo took one, but Pierce stayed standing, leaning back against the rear wall to observe Tate in the flesh for a short while.

  His hair had grown back a little from the close crop he’d had when he was arrested, and he’d developed a scruffy beard, suggesting he wasn’t shaving himself and no one else was prepared to do it for him; there was something in his near-smirk that suggested he wouldn’t be above snapping his teeth at anyone who got that close. He was a well-muscled man perhaps in his mid-thirties, and even cuffed there was an air of coiled menace to his posture that put her in mind of a cat ready to pounce. His loose-fitting prison T-shirt didn’t quite cover the intricate tattoo that spread from the back of his neck down across his shoulders: an hourglass made up of interlocking strands that resembled a stylised letter S.

  The skinbinder Sebastian’s mark, a perfect match to the rune inside the pelt that would allow him to use its magic.

  Pierce watched him jitter in the chair, restless in spite of the restraints. When she’d first interviewed him, shortly after his arrest, he’d been much more collected; perhaps the prison officer was right, and he was starting to go feral after too long deprived of the chance to shift into his animal form.

  But she wouldn’t bet it wasn’t a performance. His head was always shifting, tilting in a not qu
ite natural manner, as if trying to make use of eyes and ears that weren’t the same shape as the ones he actually had—but when his eyes passed over her, there was too much intelligence there for a man completely gone over to animal instinct. He recognised her, that much she was certain. There was something here that she could work with.

  A strained silence filled the room as they sized each other up. When she’d seen enough, Pierce moved forward unhurriedly to take the seat beside Leo, folding her arms on the tabletop—a posture that meant leaning forward slightly, showing no fear of the potential threat across the table.

  “So, Mr Tate,” she said. “How’s incarceration treating you?” No response, but he was watching her. “I imagine you must be getting a little bit restless by now. Muscles giving you trouble? I hear it’s hard, getting used to being stuck in one shape when you’ve spent your time shifting at will.”

  She didn’t make more than a cursory pretence of waiting for a response. Always better to proceed calmly and casually as if everything was going to plan and the interview was a mere formality; let the interviewee know they had knowledge that was worth something to you and they’d do their best to skew the bargain further in their favour.

  Assuming they were prepared to bargain at all. Tate hadn’t proved an easy nut to crack so far; she could only hope that by now he’d undergone some softening as it sank in that he was likely to be in here for a very long time, and his former allies didn’t seem too fussed about hastening his release. Six weeks on the inside stretched an awful lot longer than it did in the outside world.

  And even if Tate was a true fanatic for the cause, being deprived of his enchanted pelt would surely be taking its toll. Certain types of magic could be pretty addictive—and addicts, as a rule, didn’t stay loyal for long to anyone who couldn’t get them their fix.