Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  She turned to Jenny. “Animal senses from a charm—seem legitimate?”

  Jenny frowned a little, pushing her glasses up. “Well, it’s possible, though most of the enchantments I’ve heard of rely on using some part of the animal carcass as a focus, like with shapeshifting skins. I suppose you could conceivably use a blood ritual to transfer the focus via the blood...” She shook her head. “This is really more Cliff’s area than mine.” Then she brightened and snapped her fingers. “Oh, but you know who you should ask? Phil Havers at RCU Oxford. He was always talking about writing a book on human-to-animal transformations.”

  “Shit, Phil—yeah, should have thought of him.” Pierce gave herself a mental kick. Phil Havers was a former colleague of hers who’d transferred down south about eight years back; so far as she knew, his much-discussed book was no closer to materialising now than it had been when he left, but his magpie approach to gathering shiny-looking reference materials might be of some use.

  She moved as if to leave, then with a pretence of casual afterthought: “Oh, and while I’ve got you both here, what do you say about grabbing a bite to eat after work? The rest of my team’s buggered off in all directions, and I had some ideas about using divination rituals to find enchanted objects that I wanted to kick around when we’re not on the superintendent’s time.”

  Or more precisely, some ideas about Jenny using her knowledge of divination to help them find their missing panther pelt that she didn’t want to share in a room that secrets had already leaked from.

  Cliff looked blank for a few moments before he seemed to catch on. “Ah, yes, I think I know what this is about,” he said nodding. “Yes, of course.”

  Jenny blinked. “Well, I obviously missed my Illuminati meeting,” she said. “But colour me intrigued. Sure, I’ll be there, provided work doesn’t blow up in the meantime.”

  “Ah, thank you, I hadn’t had anybody jinx my day yet,” Pierce said.

  SHE PUT IN a quick call to Phil down in Oxford before it could slip her mind. “Phil! Not caught you hip-deep in intestines again, have I?” she asked.

  “I should be so bloody lucky,” Phil grumbled. Pierce could swear his Yorkshire accent grew broader the longer that he spent down south. “Hip-deep in paperwork, more like. While your lot are off chasing vampire serial killers we’re playing hot potatoes with London on the world’s most doomed antiquities case. I swear every other bugger implicated in this one has an uncle in the House of Lords and plays golf with the Chief Superintendent.”

  “You’re the one who left us for the glamour of the gleaming spires,” Pierce said unsympathetically. “I’d say you’re welcome to transfer back any time you like, but we’re all bloody brass and no constables up here as it is. I’m still sharing an office with the DI they tried to replace me with—I think somebody up there’s hoping I’ll blink first.” They couldn’t shuffle her off towards retirement if she refused to take a hint; so far they hadn’t pushed it, probably reasoning that at her age they could afford to wait her out.

  She sighed and scrubbed a weary hand over her well-greyed hair, feeling the arthritic ache in her bad shoulder that never entirely went away. Exhausted as she was these days, they might not be far wrong.

  But: work to do. She sat forward in her chair. “Got a case involving animal spirit charms, allegedly endowing heightened sensory abilities,” she said. “Any chance you’ve got anything in your reference library that might be of use? Seller claims they’re antiques, but we’re thinking animal sacrifice ring: found one of their abandoned workshops, but the altar was destroyed before we got a good look at it. Cliff reckons the charms are a one-shot activation deal—I can email you a pic of what the things look like, though it’s not the greatest quality.”

  “Hmm. A little sideways from my field, but send away,” he said. “I did have a few contacts in your neck of the woods, though I haven’t spoken to them in years. I can shake a few trees for you, see if anyone’s still up them.”

  “Cheers, Phil,” she said. “Anything you can get us would be good.” Because right now this case felt as close to a dead end as the bloody Valentine Vampire.

  Speaking of which... She checked her watch. “Anyway, I’ll send you what we’ve got—sorry I can’t sit and chat, but I’ve got to go and see a prat in a cape about a book.”

  THE COFFEE SHOP where Christopher Tomb had agreed to meet her was the kind of pretentiously expensive joint where everything had unnecessarily fancy names and the menu listings featured more buzzwords than useful information. It was the sort of place that coppers usually only frequented in desperation, generally preferring their caffeine boosts to be served up fast, cheap, and readily portable.

  Tomb, however, was apparently a regular; he made a point of greeting the barista by name and engaging her in chitchat about her family that Pierce wasn’t convinced the tired-looking woman particularly welcomed. They ordered their drinks and took a table in the corner.

  “So, Chief Inspector Pierce,” Tomb said, with a broad, white-toothed smile as he held a chair out for her. “I believe it was Inspector Pierce when we met before, wasn’t it? I always thought that you’d go far.”

  He wasn’t quite as heavily made up as he had been on the TV last night, but she definitely got the impression he’d spent more time artfully styling his appearance this morning than she did in the average month. At least he’d ditched the cape, thank God, though he was wearing a billowy white ruffled shirt that wasn’t much less dramatic.

  “And I believe it was Christopher Brown,” she said pointedly as she pulled her chair in.

  He gave a small, self-deprecating grin. “Ah, well—it’s important to present oneself in a way that gives people what they want to see, isn’t it?” he said. “We all do it in big and small ways, from dressing up for job interviews to choosing what to share on our internet profiles. You can have the best ideas in the world, but without a little artful marketing to draw your audience, how can you possibly hope for them to be shared?”

  “I’m more concerned about perpetrating the image that a serial killer wants to present,” Pierce said, pressing her lips together. She wasn’t going to use the phrase ‘Valentine Vampire’; not with this man and his thirst for the dramatic. “It’s irresponsible to spread hysteria about vampires when there’s nothing to suggest that these murders are anything other than the work of a human serial killer.”

  She glanced around a little warily, wishing she’d insisted on meeting at his house, but their corner table was at least relatively tucked away, and no one was paying obvious attention.

  “Nothing?” Tomb said, raising his eyebrows archly. “Surely, Claire—may I call you Claire?” he asked, rolling on without waiting for confirmation, “—the fact the police still have yet to uncover a single lead in all this time ought to point to supernatural involvement.”

  “Yeah, and we still haven’t found who took the last jam doughnut either, so maybe we’ve got pixies,” Pierce said. “We don’t publish all our leads.” Especially when they didn’t have them. “In fact, there are a lot of things we don’t publish when we’re pursuing an active investigation, and I’m a little concerned just how many of them seem to have found their way into your book.”

  “I’m flattered that you’ve read it,” he said, steepling his hands.

  Pierce might have pointed out that it was her job, but that was when their coffee arrived.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Tomb said, with a warm smile for the woman.

  “Cheers,” Pierce said, as she accepted hers, and took an immediate gulp. This conversation was already giving her a headache, if it wasn’t the cloying scent of Tomb’s aftershave.

  She waited until the barista was back behind the counter before resuming their low-voiced conversation. “Your book contains a number of details of the past crime scenes that were never released to the general public,” she said. “Mind sharing exactly how you came by that kind of information?”

  “As I explained in the book, I had a
number of meetings with Jonathan, a former member of the Valentine Vampire’s cult,” he said, sitting back and sipping his coffee without visible concern. “He was too afraid of the vampire’s ability to read his mind to tell me anything of the mortal guise it wore, but he spoke of being one of several disciples promised that they would be allowed to share the gift of vampirism if they proved themselves by following faithfully. He told me that he left the group when their initiations grew too intense, but was able to describe the nature of the blood-letting ritual as he’d seen it set out in a grimoire.”

  That was halfway plausible, Pierce supposed—not the vampire guff, but that a cult leader might spin the story that way to hook a few true believers who would assist with the abductions and murders. On the other hand, that line about vampire mind-control was a mighty convenient excuse for Tomb not being able to bring any actual details of the cult leader to the table. “So what was this grimoire?” she asked.

  “The cult has the only copy in existence,” Tomb said. “Jonathan said they translated the title as Bleeding the Heart of the Earth, and told him that it had been written by a twelfth-century vampire who was once a monk.”

  Pierce would eat her hat if there wasn’t some artistic licence being taken by somebody along that chain, though in fairness the twelfth-century monk could be real.

  “There were details of crime scenes that you couldn’t have got just from a description of the ritual,” she said.

  “My source told me what he could, and I filled in the rest from interviews,” he said, sitting back with a slight shrug. “I take my research very seriously, I assure you.”

  She pressed her lips together, unconvinced. “Either you did a lot of filling in from some dubious sources, or your so-called former cultist knew far more than he was admitting about the murder scenes,” she said. “He’s quite likely an accessory to murder at the very least.” And frankly, even if it wasn’t actually illegal, failing to come forward when you had inside information about a group that had killed and planned to kill again was hardly morally unimpeachable.

  Of course, if you could arrest people for self-centredness and moral failings there’d be no one out of prison—but right now Tomb’s attitude was getting up her nose. “If you believed his information to be genuine, then why not try to convince this man Jonathan to share his knowledge with the police, or come forward with what you’d learned yourself?”

  “I offered my expertise to the police during the last phase of the vampire’s killing cycle, but I’m afraid they didn’t seem very receptive to my suggestions,” he said. And if he’d phrased it in those terms, she knew exactly why whichever officer had been on duty at the time hadn’t been the least bit interested in humouring him. “Of course, I’m more than happy to do so again, if the RCU is perhaps more open now to employing non-police experts.”

  “Expertise we’ve got,” she said flatly. Or at least, they weren’t likely to get any more of it by bringing in wannabe vampire gurus. “What I want is your sources. I need to speak to this man Jonathan. It’s been fourteen years since the last set of killings—surely if the cult has left him alone for this long he can risk coming forward now.” Assuming that he even existed.

  “I may be able to persuade him to speak off the record,” Tomb told her. “But he’ll need reassurances first.”

  “If he can offer us credible information against the vampire cult, then there are options we can discuss,” Pierce said. But she wasn’t about to commit to anything sight unseen. Not when this alleged source could be nothing but a fame-hungry timewaster spinning a tall tale—or up to his neck in ritual murder.

  On her return to the office, she checked in with Dawson to see how the investigation was going down in Nottinghamshire.

  “Forensics are pretty sure it’s the same blade as before, and the same tool used for the post-mortem puncture wounds,” he told her over the phone.

  She closed her eyes in a brief grimace. “So this is the real deal, not just a copycat.” A murder cult that had killed at least nine people already—and got away with it every time.

  “Looks like,” Dawson agreed.

  “Forensics turn up anything else?” she asked.

  “Nothing useful. Clothes the victim was found in were brand new—parents didn’t recognise them, neither did the flatmates. Been trying to track down where they were bought, but it’s looking like it was an internet purchase, and not necessarily recent. No prints, no DNA.”

  So much for hoping that modern advances in forensic techniques would crack the case. Pierce sighed. “Anything on this woman Harrison was supposed to have been meeting the night he disappeared?” she asked, changing tacks.

  “Nothing,” Dawson said. “Can’t even be sure that she really exists—text to the flatmates was sent at eleven thirty-six, which is two hours after the last sighting of Harrison on CCTV. Could easily have been the killers who sent it.”

  “So we’ve basically got a whole lot of nothing concrete.” The problem with the Valentine Vampire case all along. Those who killed in groups were usually let down by a weak link somewhere along the chain, but this cult appeared immune to slip-ups. It was clear their leader kept a very tight hand on the reins—possibly even via some form of magical monitoring or control.

  They were fast, they were clever, and they seemed to get away with abduction and murder without leaving a single trace.

  But Pierce was damned if she was going to start believing in vampires.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HER CLANDESTINE MEETING with Jenny and Cliff took place at an Indian buffet place close to the RCU’s storage facility—and also, Pierce hoped, far enough outside the usual cafés and pubs where her team were semi-regulars to avoid prying ears. Cliff had the foresight to bring the satchel containing his ritual kit, which caused Jenny to raise her eyebrows, but she followed their lead in keeping the chatter light until they were all settled back at their table and the waiter had brought them their drinks.

  “All right, then,” Jenny finally said, dragging her seat forward. “I’m guessing this is about something a bit heavier than joint-authoring an article. What’s going on?”

  “I’m afraid,” Cliff said, broad face atypically pinched and troubled, “we’ve had a bit of a serious issue with wandering evidence.”

  Pierce gave her a summary of events, conscious that even if nobody seemed to be actively listening, their conversation was still far from wholly private. She went from the heavy-handed interference of the Counter Terror Action Team in the shapeshifter case, something most of the station had been aware of, to the more classified details of that case involving human-to-human shapeshifting skins, and her suspicions about the murder and substitution of Superintendent Palmer.

  “Christ,” Jenny said, staring into her glass of orange juice as she swirled it, as if wishing she’d opted for something stronger instead. “If they can impersonate senior members of the police at will...”

  “I don’t know if they can do it in the long term,” Pierce said. A reassurance to cling to, though it might be a false one. “The one case I saw of a human skin in use”—she paused to swallow and breathe out, trying not to think of the murder of a young constable on her team—“degraded pretty quickly.” Peeled away to reveal a stranger’s face before her eyes, in a vision that would be bound up in her nightmares for years to come, alongside the rest of the horrors her work had thrown at her. “But that was...”—another deep breath—“probably made in haste. They removed their version of Palmer from the station quickly, but that may have just been fear that the impersonation wouldn’t hold up.”

  “It’s a complex question,” Cliff mused, rubbing his chin as he gazed off into the distance. “A well-made shape-shifting skin should last almost indefinitely—there are museum examples that have survived for centuries, though of course no one’s actually worn them to see if they work. But there’s been a lot of debate in the literature about the difficulty of producing working ape skins—it’s possible the source anim
al’s intelligence may be a factor in the success of the initial skinbinding ritual, or that perhaps there’s a form of rejection at work, where the more similar the transformation is to the wearer’s natural form, the more likely the body will revert of its own accord.”

  Jenny was leaning forward, and Pierce could see they were in danger of slipping into an academic debate. She cleared her throat. “Regardless of how they did it, these people clearly have the capability to walk into police-controlled facilities and seize any evidence that would incriminate them.”

  “And you want me to find out where it wandered off to?” Jenny surmised.

  “The test results are almost certainly gone,” Pierce said. “But a panther pelt’s a difficult thing to sneak out of the storage facility without a trace—and a valuable artefact to destroy without good reason.” Skinbinders who could make truly high-quality pelts were rare, and for that matter, panthers weren’t exactly crawling out of the woodwork either. “It’s possible it’s still in there somewhere while they wait for an opportunity to move it out. With the amount of crap that’s stored in there, we’d have to strip the place bare to find it... unless you know a quicker way.”

  Jenny took her glasses off to clean them as she thought. “Well... I did do some research into the enchantments on shapeshifting pelts after you brought me that case in October,” she said. “I might be able to whip up a divination that’ll show you if the pelt’s somewhere nearby. If they’ve already moved it halfway across the country, though...” She shrugged apologetically.