Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) (3 page)

The young constable chased after her like a bewildered puppy. “Are we just leaving, then?” he said, looking back over his shoulder.

“I’m going back to the station,” she said. “He might have taken over our crime scene, but we’ve still got a prisoner to interview.”

S
HE GOT
T
IM
to drive her back to the station. The journey passed mostly in silence, barring the lingering tinnitus from the gunshots. The headache only shortened her temper as she stewed in her own irritation.

There’d been no hint of a terrorist connection to the case before this. They still hadn’t uncovered the skinbinder’s identity—so what the hell did Maitland and his team know that they didn’t? If Counter Terrorism had been watching the farm for reasons of their own, they should have been coordinating with the local police so both sides knew before the raid went down. The way things had shaken out, it felt uncomfortably like her team had been used to do someone else’s dirty work, then kicked out.

“Do you need me here, Guv?” Tim asked as he stopped the car outside the station.

Pierce flapped a hand at him. “No. Go home.” Somebody was going to need to be fresh tomorrow morning, and it clearly wasn’t going to be her. She snagged another no doubt ill-advised cup of coffee before heading down to the cells.

Arthur Jakes, the Custody Sergeant, was there to let her in through the barred gate. A stout, broad-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair leaning towards the salt side, he’d been part of the scenery here for as long as she’d been at the station.

“Did Deepan bring our shifter in?” she asked him as the gate clanged shut behind her.

Jakes nodded. “Yep. We had a fun time with that one. Took a bite out of Constable Carter while they were stripping him out of his skin.”

“Did you get a name?” She wasn’t optimistic.

“Ha, yes. One Mr ‘Grrr.’”

She gave that a wry smile that she doubted it deserved. “Did you put him in the special cell?”

With the RCU’s limited budget, they only had one cell built to handle supernatural strength. A shifter removed from his pelt should be no more danger than a normal human, but Pierce wasn’t prepared to bet the farm on it. Those who wore their animal forms too long or too often didn’t always turn all the way back. Ritual magic was never as safe and controlled as its practitioners might like to believe.

“We did, but he’s in interview right now,” he said. Pierce turned to stare at him.

“Deepan took him in for questioning without me?” She would have thought he’d have realised she’d want to be in on this one.

Jakes shook his head. “No, these weren’t your lot. Counter Terror Action Men, or some such bollocks. Had the proper authorisation so I let them in.” He peered over his glasses at her scowl. “Problem?”

Pierce grimaced, but shook her head. “Mine, not yours,” she said. If Maitland’s people had authorisation from Superintendent Palmer, there was nothing she or Jakes could do about it. “They were throwing their weight around at the crime scene, too. Waited for us to make the bust, then kicked us all out as soon as the fur had stopped flying.”

“I did hear it flew.” Jakes pursed his lips in sympathy. “How’s Sally?”

“Still no word,” she said, and gave a tired sigh. If she’d known they were going to be turfed off the crime scene without the chance to collect evidence, she would have sent someone along in the ambulance.

She stared at the wall of the interview room, wishing she had a good excuse to storm in and take over. Tempting though it might be, squabbling in front of the suspect could only harm their chances of getting anything out of him.

She turned to Sergeant Jakes. “Do we have audio on the interview room CCTV?”

He snorted. “And waste his lordship’s precious pennies when the interviews are all taped anyway? You jest, my lady. It’s video only.” He turned one of the charge desk monitors around so she could see it.

Not that it showed anything she couldn’t have pictured for herself. The interviewers were both nondescript men in grey suits; the shifter that sat across from them lounged casually in his chair, still something subtly feline about his posture. Not a huge man, but solidly muscular, with a broad jaw and shaved head. The camera angle showed part of an intricate tattoo on his neck, no doubt a match for the corresponding maker’s rune inside the panther pelt. She doubted that she’d get a chance to check, with Maitland intent on seizing all her evidence. She scowled.

It was impossible to tell what the interviewers were asking, but the responses came through loud and clear on camera. Studied indifference, the occasional curve of a cynical smirk; no protestations of innocence here, just the relaxed arrogance of a man who either expected to walk free or didn’t care that he wouldn’t.

She needed to be in there, asking her own questions and watching for the tell-tale twitches that an audio recording wouldn’t show. Assuming she would even be allowed to listen to it; the national security umbrella could be used to cover all sorts of things.

“I don’t suppose you can lip-read?” she asked the desk sergeant.

“And find out what the prisoners are saying about me?” He raised a hand to his heart. “I prefer to imagine they all think I’m lovely.”

“Everyone thinks you’re lovely, Arthur,” she said absently. A flicker of something on the monitor caught her eye. Just a brief flash of darkness in between the shifter’s lips seen as he sneered, maybe no more than a shadow on the footage.

Maybe not. She held up a hand to stop Jakes as he began to speak.

“Did those idiots let Deepan check the suspect over before they took charge?” she asked, her eyes still focused on the screen.

A faint motion in her peripheral vision as the sergeant shook his head. “Insisted on doing it all by themselves. Something up?” He rounded the desk to watch the monitor with her.

“I’m not sure.”
Come on, you bastard
... Pierce tried to will the shifter into opening his mouth.

And there it was. A split second glimpse inside his mouth as he made another soundless jeer, and this time she saw it for sure: the shapeshifter’s tongue was turning black.

“Shit!” She turned and sprinted for the interview room.

Jakes ran with her without questioning why, the keys jangling at his belt. As she threw the door open the two interviewers jumped up from their seats, and the nearest tried to crowd them back outside. “Chief Inspector! You shouldn’t be in here. This interview concerns potentially sensitive information—”

“You idiots,” she shouted. “He’s got a suicide rune in his mouth! We need to get him to—”

But it was far too late. Sprawling back in his chair, glassy-eyed, the shifter still managed to offer her a mocking grin. His gums were black, the teeth loose in their sockets, and decay wafted out on his panting breaths like halitosis.

“Get medical!” she shouted at Jakes, though there was nothing they could do. The man was rotting from the inside out.

Dark spots began to blossom on his skin, spreading quickly into open sores. His eyeballs blackened and burst like crushed grapes, thick tarry goo oozing down sunken cheeks. By now what skin remained was bruise-black, thin as paper, like fragile fabric stretched over a frame. One of Maitland’s men grabbed his arm, trying to pull him up, but the rotting flesh just tore with a wet squelch.

Within seconds, the decaying form was barely even human anymore; just a hollowed, shrivelled, blackened
thing
collapsing in on itself.

Outside in the hallway the alarms wailed, summoning help that was already too late. The shapeshifter was dead—and any secrets that he might have revealed had died with him.

CHAPTER THREE

B
Y THE TIME
the medical team arrived, there was little to be done with the prisoner except scrape his oozing remains off the furniture. The stench of decay and death lingered on her clothes and in her throat even after several sprays of deodorant and yet another mug of coffee. She’d given up on getting to bed tonight.

If Pierce was resigned to being stuck at work until the early hours, Superintendent Palmer was bloody furious about it.

“This has been a complete cock-up from start to finish!” he said, hands clasped behind his back as he paced his office. He was a finicky little man, shorter than her and probably a few years younger, though you wouldn’t know it from the receding hairline. Under normal circumstances he would have been happy to sleep through their after-dark raid and hear about the results in the morning, but Maitland’s interference and the news of a death in police custody had dragged him out of bed and back to work.

And Pierce was the one who got called onto the carpet to account for it. If Maitland’s two men were getting a bollocking for their part in this fiasco, it was taking place in private, with no opportunity for her to stick her oar in.

Which was a pity, because she had plenty to say. “Sir, the team from Counter Terrorism came waltzing in throwing their weight about and overrode all our procedures,” she said. “My people would have checked the prisoner for ritual markings if they’d only been allowed to do their jobs. We’re lucky it was just a suicide rune and not something worse. He
could
have taken half the station down.”

“Lucky,” he echoed, with a bitter twist to the word. He whirled about to face her. “Yes, Claire, I feel exceptionally
lucky
that the resource-intensive, high-profile raid
you
persuaded me to authorise has resulted in two injured officers, one suspect escaped, and another one dead in our custody!”

Now was not the time to argue. “Sir.” She acknowledged the words with a carefully neutral expression, staring past him at the crime statistics posted up on the wall. The RCU lagging behind, as usual.

Palmer spent several more moments pacing himself out before he stopped and heaved a defeated sigh. He fixed her with a cool gaze. “A suicide rune,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” She nodded. “It would have been tattooed on the inside of his mouth. He only needed to hold his tongue against it for a set length of time to trigger the rune.” She’d seen it before, though it had been over a decade ago; some ridiculous apocalypse cult or other with a vow to take their secrets to the grave.

He ran a hand back through his thinning hair. “Then it couldn’t have been prevented?”

“It might have, if they’d allowed a team with the proper expertise to take charge,” she said. “Sir, I don’t know who these people are, or what their interest is in this skinbinder, but there’s no way they’re half as qualified as the RCU to handle supernatural crime. This should be
our
case.”

Palmer pressed his lips together and gave another sigh, pulling the chair out from under his desk to sit down. “That’s as may be, but it’s not your decision to make—or mine,” he said, shaking his head as he leaned back. “This is coming from above my head, Claire. The Counter Terror Action Team have full autonomy to do as they see fit, and we are to give them our cooperation.”

“No questions asked, of course.” Pierce scowled.

He gave her a stern look. “You understand perfectly well how important information security can be. Loose lips sink ships, and all that.”

“On the other hand, maybe if we’d loosened some, we might have found the suicide runes hidden behind them.”

He threw up his hands. “I can see that you’re not going to drop this, but there’s only so far even
you
can get running on stubbornness.” He checked the time on his fancy silver watch and gave a grimace. “Go home, get some sleep, and consider this case off your desk and best forgotten. It’s the Counter Terror Action Team’s problem now.”

P
IERCE HAD LEARNED
to sleep like the dead no matter how grim a day she’d come home from, but that alone didn’t make three hours substitute for a night’s rest. She dragged herself reluctantly out of bed, skipping the minimal time she had to make breakfast in favour of a phone call to Sally’s husband.

He sounded more exhausted than she was, but he told her that Sally was stable after the doctors had given her a tracheostomy. She tried to call Leo, but he didn’t pick up; she left a message on his phone asking after Sergeant Henderson.