Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (10 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HE AMBULANCE TOOK
Deepan off, but Pierce didn’t get the chance to accompany it; there was still a storage shed full of artefacts to be dealt with, and it took most of the rest of the day to bag, tag and shift the contents. After the incident with the mirror, everything they didn’t immediately recognise had to be subjected to various improvised tests before they dared move it, and Pierce didn’t want to risk involving extra pairs of hands who didn’t know what they were doing.

A call from Deepan’s wife at the hospital a few hours later at least confirmed that he was doing well, no lingering after-effects expected. The good news didn’t quite lift Pierce’s mood. Seeing Leo last night had been a grim reminder of how easily the odds could catch up to any of them, no matter how careful and well-prepared. Deepan might—touch wood—come out of this one okay, but it was still the sort of thing that got a man with two young daughters to start re-evaluating his career path.

She was selfishly aware that if a transfer request ever did come across her desk, she’d pull out every bribe and guilt trip she could think of to get him to stay. After the number of casualties and departures her unit had seen in the last year, he was the only detective she had left whose loyalties she could be fully sure of.

Dawson was still off pursuing his own leads in Nottinghamshire, but he’d sent Eddie back to the office to cross-reference the latest findings with the old paper files. “Any joy?” Pierce asked wearily on her return, slumping into her chair with a mug of coffee.

“Er, nothing concrete yet, guv,” he said apologetically. “But I’ve got all the details of the past scenes entered into the computer now, along with the photos and statements Constable Freeman took in York this morning, so at least it’s all properly indexed and available to compare now.”

“All right, I’ll take a look,” Pierce said, wheeling herself closer to the computer. “She still out there in York?” she asked, typing one-handed as she sipped the coffee.

“Er, no, she went to follow up on the barn scene from yesterday,” he said. “She wanted to see if there was any way to get the animal corpses identified—I think she was talking to some vets about microchip scanners or something.”

“Fair enough.” Pierce took a skim through the statements Gemma had taken from the neighbours, but while the canvassing had been industriously thorough, it seemed that few people living on the terrace had actually been there fourteen years ago, and most of the stories they had to tell about the cult amounted to urban legends and recycled tabloid stories.

Dawson and Eddie’s findings from the latest crime scene were of little more help. According to Nottinghamshire’s autopsy their victim had likely died of heart failure from blood loss, a diagnosis that brought on an extra wince after today’s events. Time of death was a vague enough guesstimate that it merged with the equally uncertain time of abduction; despite appeals, no one had yet been found who had seen Matt Harrison since he’d left work on the night of his disappearance, and nor had anyone come forward who’d seen him with the girl that he’d claimed to have met.

At least that was one snippet of suggested MO. Pierce checked back on the details of the previous victims. One of the men killed in 1987 had told coworkers about a new girlfriend that the police had never managed to track down; a final LiveJournal entry from one of the 2001 victims had also mentioned meeting a girl in a bar. All right then: assume a woman—multiple women, more than likely, if they were picking up men in their early twenties over a twenty-eight year period—reeling the victims in for the cult to abduct. Was that where their friend from York with the silver bat necklace fit in?

Or was Pierce just constructing patterns out of thin air? The fact that several of a given sample of young men had been talking up their recent success with women wasn’t exactly compelling evidence.

She pushed her chair back from the computer with a sigh, realising it was already past time she should have been gone. “All right, unless you’ve found something, you may as well go home,” she told Eddie, flapping a hand at him. “Maybe if we’re lucky the casework pixies will come in the middle of the night and solve this for us.”

“Er, yes, guv,” Eddie said with an awkward smile as he stood up, not seeming quite sure how to respond to that. Poor lad was still painfully over-earnest; she hoped he grew out of that before he strained something.

He headed off home, leaving Pierce to fail to take her own advice as she gave the files one more fruitless going-over. She was conscious of the time pressure weighing down on her: going from the previous killings, they had roughly a week before the second body appeared, but the schedule wasn’t fixed enough to put too much faith in it. They could easily see another death tomorrow.

Unfortunately, new evidence wasn’t going to spontaneously appear just because she stared really hard at the screen. Feeling like she was conceding defeat by doing so, she logged off the computer and rose to leave.

Cliff arrived to hover in the doorway as she was shrugging her coat back on. “Are you off?” she asked him. Of all the analysts, he was the one most likely to work hours as ridiculous as hers, but she’d probably worn him out with his unaccustomed trip out to the field.

He ran a hand rather awkwardly over the remaining tufts of his hair. “Ah,” he said. “Well, actually, there’s a bit of a problem.”

“With the artefacts that we picked up from Leeds this afternoon?” she asked, heart clenching. If that mirror turned out to have after-effects the hospital couldn’t detect...

But Cliff shook his head, looking around nervously before stepping into the office. “No, I’m afraid this concerns our extracurricular research,” he said in a low voice. “I’m sorry to say that while we were out, the evidence regarding the age of your panther pelt appears to have gone walkabouts. It’s not just mislaid—both the physical evidence from the tests and my personal files are gone.”

A chill settled over her. If the evidence had been taken from Cliff’s lab, it could only have been by someone who worked at the police station—or had the connections and clout to waltz in and out of one unchallenged.

Or someone wearing the right skin.

“Did you have backup copies stored anywhere else?” she asked Cliff.

He shook his head unhappily. “I’m afraid I was trying to be discreet, and assumed it wasn’t necessary to be so paranoid,” he said. “A stance I am admittedly rethinking right now. But I can reproduce the results easily enough with another hair from the original pelt.”

Somehow Pierce doubted it would be that easy. She pressed her lips together. “Where is the pelt right now?” she asked.

“Long-term storage,” Cliff told her. “At least that ought to be considerably harder for anyone to access without the right authorisation.”

Pierce made a neutral noise, far from convinced. “Should be,” she said. “How about we go and take a look anyway?”

T
HE
R
ITUAL
C
RIME
Unit’s long-term storage facility was a high-security warehouse a few miles from the station, housing artefacts from cold cases as well as seized items that were illegal to possess but either too difficult or too valuable to destroy. With the study of magic a field that was still riddled with gaps and uncertainty, it took an awful lot of paperwork to authorise the destruction of anything that could potentially increase their knowledge.

That meant that, aside from when items were on loan to academic institutions or other police departments for research purposes, the evidence warehouse played host to just about every deadly, illegal or just plain mysterious artefact that the RCU had seized in decades of policing the north of England. Pierce hoped security through obscurity really was the best defence, because there was a limit to how well a full-scale raid on the place could be repelled by a few card locks and a man called Ken with a beer gut and a walkie-talkie.

“Working late again, Doctor Healey?” the security guard asked cheerfully as they signed in to the visitors’ book. “I hope they pay you overtime.”

“Just a flying visit this time, Ken,” Cliff said as he printed his name in the book in neat block capitals. “Chief Inspector Pierce wants to review the evidence from a previous case.”

Ken nodded to her affably as she took the pen from Cliff. Pierce casually perused the previous sign-ins, but the last was Cliff himself three days ago, and the only other names on the page were other personnel from Magical Analysis, and Gemma Freeman from when Pierce had sent her to fetch some ritual blades back in January.

Not that she’d truly expected to spot anything as obvious as an unfamiliar name on the list. She tried to check if the handwriting in any of the signatures looked inconsistent with the others, but there was only so long she could pretend to take before Ken started to get suspicious.

How hard would it be to bribe or replace one of the security staff here, really? Or even to buy out the security company and take over their contract, if you happened to be a shady government agency with those kinds of resources at your disposal? Even the best security system in the world inevitably had its weak links, because sooner or later they all involved people.

Ken certainly waved the two of them through without any attempt to verify their story, and they were free to enter the main warehouse without an escort. It was a dim, chilly space with a bare concrete floor and many high, skeletal rows of metal shelves, loaded with endless stacks of cardboard boxes. In theory there was a system to their arrangement, but the practicalities of storing enchanted objects in proximity meant the system had more quirks and exceptions than it did rules.

Pierce had been here often enough to dig up evidence from one cold case or other, but it was Cliff’s native territory, and she deferred to his lead. “I hope
you
know where this thing is supposed to be,” she said.

“Pelts are on the storage racks at the back,” he said with a nod. “I have the item number, but we don’t have a great many of them in storage anyway. Since they’re legal with the right licences, those that aren’t part of ongoing cases tend to end up being auctioned off.”

He led the way down one of the long aisles and through to the back of the warehouse, where stacked boxes gave way to items that were larger and more awkward to store. They passed a row of cursed bikes and motorbikes—a surprisingly popular crime—and many sacrificial altars of varying degrees of authenticity before they came to the collection of shapeshifting pelts. They were hung up inside zipped covers like garment bags, though the bulky furs gave the unfortunate impression of a row of body bags.

Cliff retrieved a scrap of paper from amid the loose change and crumpled notes in his trouser pocket. “Item number KZ-201412-5672F,” he read after a brief squint.

They checked the row over, twice. Cliff was right—there were no more than two dozen pelts hung up on the rack, and some she could tell were wholly the wrong shape for a big cat even before she found the evidence label.

The item number that Cliff had given her wasn’t anywhere among them.

“Perhaps I copied it down wrong,” he said, rechecking his paper with a frown.

Pierce doubted it very much, but all the same, she went through the motions, opening up every bag to check. Inside hung the sagging, hollow-eyed forms of skinned animals: wolves, dogs, stags, bears, a
cow
of all bloody things... There were two big cat pelts in the collection, a tiger and a cheetah—neither remotely possible to mistake for the missing black panther.

It wasn’t here. Their evidence was gone.

And with it, any hope of proving that the skinbinder who’d made it was still alive and out there somewhere making more.

CHAPTER NINE

I
T WAS IN
a distinctly depressed mood that Pierce parted ways with Cliff and headed for home. She’d missed visiting hours to see Deepan at the hospital; probably best not to inflict her current mood on him anyway. Tough to convince someone else that the risks of the job were worthwhile when she was having the sort of day where she wondered why she even bothered.

How could she hope to unravel the conspiracy surrounding Sebastian’s death when the very people she was after had their sticky fingers all over the system itself? She didn’t want some kind of vigilante revenge—she wanted to see the people responsible brought to justice. But who could she turn to when police channels were compromised? Politicians? That was a laugh. She could go to the press, but she needed some sort of proof first—and she’d have to gamble on finding a journalist who prized the truth over dramatic headlines.