Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3)

by E. E. Richardson

  Sometimes she suspected her main beef with the media was simply the way they forced her to channel the sort of weasel words that she couldn’t stand from other people. It sounded every bit as disingenuous to her as it must to the public, but anything with actual character and content inevitably just got ripped to pieces.

  She tried to step away, but another reporter got her before she’d reached the sanctuary of the police tape. “DCI Pierce! Do you have any comment on the account published by Christopher Tomb of his encounter with the Valentine Vampire last night?”

  Many, but none that she was about to unload on the press.

  “We are aware of the content of Mr Tomb’s account,” she said crisply. In her case, only because she’d just heard it on the news, but hopefully someone from West Yorkshire Police had already been round to rap his knuckles. Unfortunately, you couldn’t unspill milk, and trying to contain or refute his words now would only make a worse mess. Best to just sidestep it. “As I say, it’s not possible for us to make any comment on the details of ongoing investigations.”

  She looked towards the camera, deciding she might as well try to wrest some control of the situation. “All I would like to add is that if anyone has any information about last night’s events or the murder of Matt Harrison near Newark-on-Trent last Tuesday, we are appealing to them to come forward to the police with whatever they know. Your information could save lives.”

  After Tomb’s publicity stunts and the media hoohah they’d be lucky to sort the legitimate leads from the crackpots, but at least it would give the news channels something to run other than her deflecting questions. And who knew, maybe there actually was someone out there who’d been planning to sit on life-saving information about a murder inquiry until a few words from a tired, middle-aged copper convinced them otherwise. Stranger things had probably happened somewhere.

  Pierce left the reporters behind and headed over to find Dawson among the coverall set. From this close up he was easier to pick out, a bear of a man with his hood pulled back to reveal his shaved head. Pierce donned an unflattering coverall of her own so she could duck beneath the crime scene tape and join him. “Anything new?” she asked, pressing her lips together as she surveyed the frosty grass.

  Dawson grimaced. “Not much. Looks like the assailant came up behind the bench from under the trees. We’ve got a size-seven boot print that may be the killer’s—too small to be the victim’s.”

  Pierce nodded. “The guy that attacked us wasn’t tall—five-eight at most, maybe? Probably a bit shorter than that, but hard to say.” The killer had moved fast, and knocked her to the ground before she’d had much of a chance to see what was happening. “Small, lightweight build, but very strong. And fast.”

  “Yeah, well, he must have come up behind the victim fast and silently—far as forensics can tell from the blood splatter, the victim turned his head but hadn’t started to stand up. No obvious sign of a struggle.”

  Pierce pictured the scene in her head: the cultist Jonathan, arriving, nervous, sitting down on the bench to wait for her and Tomb. Some faint sound from behind him, or maybe a flicker of motion—but only subtle, a small enough thing for him to have believed that he was just jumping at shadows. He’d turned his head to look towards the trees, and...

  She rubbed at the base of her neck. “Murder weapon?” she asked. The killer had come after her with his bare hands—if they were lucky, he might have ditched the weapon somewhere before she and Tomb had even arrived on the scene.

  “Pathologist reckons it was a long-bladed knife.” Dawson mimed throat-cutting. “Hasn’t been found, but we’ve got the uniforms out checking bins and drains in the area.”

  Another reason to be glad her WPC days were far behind her. “Same blade that was used for the Valentine Vampire killings?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Size and angle of the incision was all wrong, apparently. Might have been a kitchen knife. Professional job, though—all over in one cut.”

  “No ritual in this,” Pierce said with a grimace. Just good old-fashioned silencing the witnesses. “Any progress on identifying the victim?”

  “None yet. No ID, and the bloke you were meeting with claims to have only known him by an assumed name. They’re running fingerprints and dental records, but no hits so far. West Yorkshire are going through missing persons.”

  But it was early yet for the victim’s absence to have been noted and reported—assuming there was even anyone to do the reporting. If he’d been a recluse in hiding from the cult, there might not be anybody to miss him.

  Pierce scowled in frustration. It looked like they might still not have a smoking gun. The lack of a struggle meant less chance of evidence transfer to the victim’s body, and if the killer had left prints on the bench or fibres on the trees, they’d be lost among any number of innocent passers-by.

  Still, they’d go ahead and collect everything they could, and maybe at some point down the line it would match to something useful. She just hoped that point would come before there were more victims to process. If the cult kept to the previous pattern, they were looking at another body within the week.

  And there was just enough unpredictability in that pattern that they couldn’t be sure how much time they had left.

  “Keep looking,” she said to Dawson, as if he needed to be told. “I’m going to take a walk around the scene, see if there’s anything that I missed in the dark last night.”

  It was unlikely she’d spot anything that forensics hadn’t already bagged and tagged, but at least it gave her the illusion of doing something useful. As she picked her way across the crime scene, mentally retracing all the steps of last night’s scuffle, she could already feel the pressure of the headache building up behind her eyes from lack of sleep.

  Multiple deaths, and still nothing they could track back to the killer. Pierce could almost see how her old DI had been tempted by the vampire explanation: the idea of a killer who could turn to mist or moonlight was a whole lot easier to take than one who just kept ahead by smarts and luck.

  But she didn’t believe in vampires. There was a human killer at the head of this cult, she was certain—and human beings had lives, they left traces, they were in the system somewhere. She just had to figure out where.

  But she wasn’t going to find those answers stalking around a park that younger, sharper eyes had already been combing for hours. With a sigh, Pierce had to admit that she was achieving nothing here she couldn’t have covered with a phone call, and hanging around any longer was really just delaying the inevitable bawling out she was due from Superintendent Snow.

  Not keen to risk another brush with the media, she headed away across the park instead of retracing her steps, the same direction the killer had fled in when backup arrived last night. She ducked under the crime scene tape on the other side and divested herself of the claustrophobic overalls, absently handing them off to a hapless PC standing nearby as something caught her eye.

  A woman lurking by the bus shelter a little way away, watching all the police activity. Nothing criminal in that, despite the early hour: crime scenes always brought out the gawkers, especially ones big enough to have made the morning news. But something in the woman’s profile, a momentary flicker of familiarity as she turned away to head off across the road—it was her, Pierce was suddenly sure. The woman with the bat necklace who’d run from her in York.

  A necklace that matched the one worn by the murdered cultist. Even if she couldn’t tell them who Jonathan really was, she had to know where he’d got that silver bat pendant and what it meant—and Pierce was betting that she knew much more than that.

  Ignoring whatever response she got from the PC, she started off along the footpath after the woman. She didn’t want to break into a run with the news crews still skulking in the background, but she strode as fast as she thought that she could get away with, breaking into a full-blown trot by the time she reached the road. The woman had already crossed over, on the verge of dis
appearing down a back alley between two empty shops.

  “Hey!” Pierce called after her, voice at a pitch that she hoped wouldn’t quite carry back to the media in the early morning quiet. The woman obviously heard her, pausing in her stride but not quite turning to look round. “Wait! I spoke to you before. You were at the house in York, weren’t you? You were there fourteen years ago.” The woman made no acknowledgement, but Pierce thought that she stiffened minutely. “Did you know the man who died last night?” she asked. “Maybe you know who it was that killed him. If you talk to us, we can protect you.”

  It probably seemed like a hollow reassurance after what had just happened to their last would-be informant. The woman was still standing, unmoving; she hadn’t run—but she hadn’t turned either. Pierce stepped out into the road, careful to use slow, unthreatening movements. “Look, even if you’re worried that you may be implicated, our top priority is saving lives,” she said. “We can—”

  A BMW came rocketing around the corner, too fast, honking with no apparent effort to slow as the driver saw Pierce in the road. She scrambled back behind the white line with a curse, resisting the urge to offer a hand gesture that wouldn’t look good for the police.

  By the time he was gone, the woman with the necklace had vanished, hammering away down the alley.

  “Shit!” Pierce dashed across the road after her, but she was no match for the younger woman. By the time she rounded the bollards at the mouth of the alley, the woman had already disappeared from the far end. Pierce followed her down to the storage yard at the rear, but it was empty: she had to have gone into one of the buildings, or over the fence at the back. It was high, but the line of recycling bins in front of it would provide a stepping stone for the sufficiently determined.

  Pierce didn’t risk her dignity by trying to reproduce the feat. She was already puffing, and as their chase in York had proved, if the woman wanted to stay ahead of her, she could.

  But her appearance at a second scene couldn’t be a coincidence. She knew something about this whole mess. The question was, had she been lurking to pluck up the courage to come forward to the police... or to report their activities back to the cult?

  With a sigh, Pierce turned to head back to the crime scene. Either the woman would come back of her own volition, or she wouldn’t. All Pierce could do was give her description to Dawson, and head into work to face the music for a string of failures.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PREDICTABLY, SUPERINTENDENT SNOW was not pleased. About anything, so far as Pierce could tell, up to and including her continued employment.

  “Everything about the way you conducted this late-night meeting was reckless and irregular!” he said, as she stared fixedly at the wall of newspaper clippings just behind his head. He hadn’t offered her a seat, and despite her exhaustion she wasn’t about to ask.

  Besides, he had a point—albeit one that was only apparent in hindsight. Following leads off the clock with no backup would be deemed reckless if it went wrong, but if she’d set up a full-scale police operation for a tip that hadn’t panned out, she’d be standing here on the same carpet hearing about how it had been wasteful and unnecessary.

  Although in that case, no one would be dead.

  “Agreeing to meet this man late at night without any police support or attempt at securing the scene—that’s not just cutting corners with procedure, it’s ignoring it entirely. Why wasn’t he brought into the station?” Snow demanded.

  “Those were the source’s own conditions, sir,” Pierce said, since, ‘thought it was most likely bollocks, sir,’ wasn’t going to fly as a response, and probably wouldn’t have even back when she’d reported to Howard Palmer. “He was reluctant to speak to police, and I judged it better to accept his terms than risk not getting vital information.”

  “Well, you judged wrong!” he said. “Do you appreciate why we have approved procedures for these matters, Pierce?”

  There was an opening best not stepped in if ever she’d heard one.

  “It’s not, as you seem to think, to ‘cramp your style,’” he said, pronouncing the words as if he’d read them in a magazine article about the youth slang of today, “or because anybody particularly delights in coming up with ways to make the job more difficult. It is so, in the event that anything does go wrong, we can know that everything was handled as well as it could have been. When police officers—or entire departments, for that matter—under my authority decide to ‘wing it’ and make up their own rules, it leaves me fielding questions about actions I neither approved nor received any notification about!”

  “It was a judgement call, sir,” she repeated, too tired to find her way around a more conciliatory approach. All she could do was stick to her guns. “The RCU has limited resources to bring to bear, and without further information I didn’t see any justification to call in support from other parts of the force.”

  “Yes.” Snow shuffled his stack of paperwork unhappily and tapped it on the desk to straighten the edges. “And speaking of the RCU’s limited resources, why were constables...”—he hesitated for a beat, but she gave him points for successfully pulling the names to mind—“Freeman and Taylor apparently tied up with a stakeout for another case entirely while this was going on? I told you to make the Valentine Vampire your top priority.”

  “Time-limited opportunity, sir,” Pierce said, meeting his gaze now she was back on firmer ground with a case they hadn’t managed to fuck up yet. “The gang behind these animal sacrifices have proved that they’re willing to kill indiscriminately to protect their operations, and this is our best chance to catch them on the hop. I wanted trained RCU eyes in place to spot any suspicious behaviour.”

  Snow pressed his lips together in a grimace: sceptical, she suspected, but as long as she gave him justification that he could sell on, he would probably let it go—and ‘gang’ was always a useful PR buzzword to be able to throw around.

  “Yes, well,” he said. “You’re fortunate that they had something to report to show for it, or else your judgement in these matters would be called into even greater question.” He briefly pinched his nose, frowning, before folding his hands together and recovering his poise. “From now on, I expect frequent reports on your team’s movements, yours included—preferably before you get involved in any more poorly-planned escapades. The eyes of the world are watching closely on this one, and I don’t need to tell you how bad the fallout will be if the Valentine Vampire isn’t caught this time around.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pierce said.

  SHE HADN’T EVEN had a chance to check in with her constables before being hauled into the superintendent’s den, so it was happy news to her that the stakeout on Trick Box had actually turned up something. When she returned to the office, they presented her with a series of photographs of an unmarked white van that had apparently made a late-night visit to the shop’s delivery entrance.

  “Wilkes returned to the shop shortly before one in the morning,” Gemma told her. “The white van arrived and parked by the delivery entrance at approximately half past. One man, not the driver, got out and was let into the shop by Wilkes.” She showed a couple of photos, though they’d be of limited use in identifying the man until they had a suspect in the frame: burly build, swaddled against the cold in a heavy coat and black woolly hat that by luck or design made a clear glimpse of his features difficult.

  “Suspect stayed inside for under ten minutes before returning with a package that he carried back to the van, which then left.” There were photos of that too, but it was difficult to make much of the vague bundle the man was carrying in the dark pictures. Gemma was grinning, however. “Couldn’t see what it was, but I had Eddie go in early this morning and ask some silly questions about joining a magic group in the area,” she said. “Told him which display case to look in and he said there’s no sign of the animal spirit charms any more.”

  “Too hot for Wilkes to handle,” Pierce presumed. No doubt the shop owner had falsified
paperwork to show that they’d all been sold to a collector just yesterday, bad luck, chief inspector, sorry you’ve wasted your time... She turned her attention back to the van pictures, glad to see a visible number plate. “Have you checked into the vehicle yet?”

  That was Eddie’s cue to look up from his computer, blinking earnestly. “Um, trying to find out more about the owner now, guv,” he said. “It’s registered to a Vanessa Hills of West Bradford, aged seventy-two, but we’re looking at the son-in-law, Michael Miller—he gave her address as his place of residence when he was questioned in connection with an artefact smuggling case about nine years ago. No charges brought, as he only had the one illegal piece in his possession and the investigators couldn’t prove intent to sell or that he was aware of its real nature.”

  An all-too common story; if Pierce had been involved in that past case, it had since vanished into the mental blur of any number of similar investigations over the years, and the name rang no bells. “Anything else on Miller?” she asked.

  “Still digging at the minute, guv,” he said. “But he runs an internet business buying and selling ritual supplies—I’ve got an address for their warehouse.”

  That sounded promising, though they might struggle to get a search warrant on the tenuous connection. Still, an unannounced visit right on the tail of some dodgy business could sometimes fluster people into revealing things they didn’t intend. “All right, then,” Pierce said. “You try to get hold of Vanessa Hills, see if she can tell us anything about her son-in-law’s current whereabouts, and we’ll go and have a gander at the warehouse and see what’s to be seen. Tell Dawson to let me know if anything new comes in on the vampire case.”