Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (4 page)

“Ed!” she barked as she came in, snapping her fingers. “Whatever you’re doing, if no one’s in immediate danger of death, you’re reassigned. I need you to pull everything we’ve got in the files on the Valentine Vampire murders. You’ll have to go a way back—they started in ’87 and ran through to just after the turn of the millennium.”

“I know the case, guv,” Eddie said with a sombre nod. “I remember the last murders—our mom wouldn’t let us walk home from school while the vampire was out there.”

That made her grimace, and not just for the depressing reminder that most of her co-workers had still been spotty teenagers back when she’d been a forty-something sergeant battling to get her boss to listen to her.

“Don’t let yourself get sucked in by all the media drama, constable,” she said. “I’ve been working this job thirty years, and I’ve yet to see evidence that there’s any sort of supernatural creature out there that wasn’t either a human using magic or a spirit temporarily summoned by a ritual. We’re looking for a human killer, not some kind of vampire.” And maybe if her superiors had listened to her about that fourteen years ago, they might have caught the bastard back then instead of wasting their time on dubious vampire lore.

“We thought the murders had ended in 2001, but either the killer’s just resurfaced, or we’ve got a well-informed copycat on our hands,” she said. “Get familiar with those files. We need to know every relevant detail.” She sighed. “Better get a copy of Christopher Tomb’s book as well,” she conceded. “If it’s a copycat, they may well be working from that.”

“Yes, guv.”

Pierce shrugged her jacket off and was treated to a waft of smoke and worse, reminding her of the morning’s escapades. “Gemma been back in?” she asked.

“Er, briefly, guv,” he said. “She had some evidence for the labs, but she’s gone back out on a follow-up to the grave disturbances in Bridlington.”

“Right. I’ll be next door,” Pierce said. “Get on and find those files.”

‘Next door’ was the Magical Analysis department, home of the RCU’s array of specialists and researchers. They were an eclectic bunch, inevitably snowed under with far more cases than they could reasonably process: it was hard to get the budget for a field of analysis that was still mostly experimental and tough to demonstrate in court. Magical rituals were always difficult to predict, repeat or record, and even when they did successfully produce results, it was an uphill struggle convincing the legal system to accept them.

Pierce poked her head into the first office on the left: Sympathetic Magic, the domain of Jenny Hayes. At a petite five-foot-one, she was barely visible behind the wall of evidence boxes and file folders on her desk.

“Jenny! Did my bright-eyed and eager young constable bring anything back from the barn scene this morning?” Pierce asked.

“Claire!” Jenny popped up from where she’d been rooting through one of the boxes stacked beside her, pushing her wavy hair back from her glasses as she straightened. “Heard you were doing your best to blow yourself up.”

“Well, I do try,” she said. “Was anything rescued from the rubble?”

“Not much,” Jenny said with a grimace and a shrug, and waved her vaguely on down the hall. “Wasn’t really anything substantial enough for me to make much sense of—I think it’s all gone down to Simon in Ritual Mat.”

“Oh, is he in?” she said. “Truly, we are blessed.”

Simon Castle was their expert in identifying ritual materials, the closest thing the Magical Analysis Department boasted to a legitimate forensics job. He was also a busy little bee, frequently spending the few hours the department could afford him prowling the region’s occult markets and magic shops to pick up comparison samples. Ideally he should probably have an assistant doing that kind of scut work for him so he had more time to devote to the analysis, but while they were wishing, why not get them
all
assistants, and a departmental pony?

Besides, the finicky little sod would probably refuse to accept anyone else could do the job to his exacting standards anyway. Pierce supposed it took a particular kind of mindset to devote your life’s work to studying the mysteries of the occult and then make your speciality comparing the composition of one shop’s bag of allegedly magical mixed herbs with another. But at least he got results that made sense to a judge and jury, which was more than could probably be said for the rest of them. She gave Jenny a nod of acknowledgement and headed on to Ritual Materials.

Simon’s personal fiefdom was not much bigger than Jenny’s tiny office, but despite having just as heavy a workload he still managed the mind-boggling trick of keeping things well-organised. The room was flanked by two matching rows of tall metal cabinets, and on top of them stacked sets of tiny plastic storage drawers, the kind that elsewhere might be used to hold nuts and bolts. Here they were employed to store Simon’s many material samples, all individually labelled in neat, sharp capitals. At the back of the room was the equally tidy, well-organised lab area.

Simon himself, an extremely tall and very thin man in his forties who’d had the same short-back-and-sides haircut for the near-decade that she’d known him, was currently perched spider-like on his lab stool, in the midst of dripping some kind of liquid solution onto a test stick. Pierce waited in the doorway for him to finish, knowing from experience that there was no point attempting to chivvy him along.

Eventually he received whatever result he’d been looking for, made a detailed note of it on the form in front of him, then set everything down and swivelled around to face her. “Chief inspector,” he said, clasping his hands together and raising his chin expectantly.

“Simon. Any word on the evidence recovered from the barn scene this morning?” she asked.

He pressed his thin lips together disapprovingly. “As I already told your constable, the samples were hardly in any fit condition to do anything with.”

“Couldn’t be avoided,” Pierce said. “The whole place went up around our ears—we were lucky to come out with
anything
.”

“It’s debatable whether you did,” Simon said. He rose and stalked over to one of the cabinets, opening the door to retrieve an evidence list that he’d apparently already filed. He raked it with a dubious eye. “Unknown yellow powder, contaminated with ash and molten plastic. Heavily melted stubs of wax candles. Burned leather pouch containing herbal residue. Small metal container of possible bone chips... that’s about the only promising item on here.”

“Well, I’m sure you can work your magic even with that much,” she said.

He gave her a stern look. “It’s hardly magic, chief inspector, just expertise and careful work. And no amount of expertise can make the results any better than the samples.”

It could be a real effort making conversation with Simon at times. “Then please do what you can,” she said. “What about the altar? Did that survive the fire?”

He looked vaguely irritated to be consulted on something he no doubt considered outside his department. “I understand it was heavily damaged by a falling roof beam,” he told her. “The centre slab was shattered and the alignment of the other stones destroyed, making reconstruction difficult. I believe Cliff has the photos.” He closed the folder and placed it back in the cabinet. “If there was anything else?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.

“Not yet,” she said. “But make this case a priority. The people behind these animal killings are still out there, and if they’re leaving that kind of booby-trap on their equipment, then they’re a dangerous bunch. I need anything you can get me on what they were up to and where we can track them down.”

He gave no particular gesture of acknowledgement as she left, and Pierce suspected he was going to go right on handling his cases according to whatever priority he saw fit, as per usual. Still, at least he was always efficient.

She headed on down to end of the corridor and the Enchanted Artefacts lab, the largest and best equipped in the department. It was the base of operations of Clifford Healey, their expert on identifying and rating the threat level of occult objects that they’d seized from crime scenes. As this was mostly achieved by a process of hazardous trial and error that often amounted to poking them to see how they reacted, Pierce generally entered the room with a degree of caution.

There were no obvious sounds of chaos, and a quick glance through the wire-reinforced window didn’t suggest an imminent crisis, so she pushed in through the heavy fire door. “Cliff! Got a minute?”

Stooped over one of the lab benches facing the door, he smiled at her and held up a finger, vaguely indicating the headphones in his ears. She loitered in the doorway while he finished drawing out a charcoal magic circle on a large piece of art board, then straightened up and excavated his music player from a pocket under his lab coat, tugging the headphones out of his ears.

“Claire! What brings you to my humble abode?” he said with a bright smile. He was a big man, somewhere around his fifties with broad doughy features and hair that had retreated to two greying islands at either side of his head.

“You get those altar photos from our crime scene this morning?” she asked.

Cliff gave an apologetic grimace. “Yes, but I’m afraid there’s not much to be made of them,” he said. “I have your constable’s notes on what she remembers of the arrangement, but the main altar stone was shattered by the roof collapse, and the other rune stones knocked out of alignment. Without more of an idea of the nature of the ritual being conducted, I doubt there’s any way to reconstruct it.”

She pulled a face, though she hadn’t expected much better. “Well, thanks, anyway.” She started to reverse out through the door, but Cliff beckoned her back.

“That said, I do have some possible results for you on...”—he lifted his eyebrows meaningfully—“that personal project we discussed.”

Cliff trying to be circumspect was a bit like something out of a pantomime, but nonetheless, Pierce felt herself tense as she stepped back inside and closed the door. “You managed to put a date on that shapeshifting pelt?” she asked.

At the end of December they’d made a bust on a group calling themselves Red Key, who’d been attempting to raise a major demon. Alarmingly organised and well-supplied, they’d had at least one bona fide warlock in their employ, and a number of shapeshifters acting as the muscle. The shifters—always difficult to contain—had mostly been killed in the chaos or escaped, but Pierce had successfully arrested one in panther form.

He wasn’t talking... but the shapeshifting pelt they’d seized from him just might. The maker’s rune inside had been Sebastian’s. And if Cliff could prove the pelt had been created
after
Sebastian supposedly died in a car accident last October...

“I’m afraid there’s a limit to how precise I can be,” he cautioned, moving over to the racks of metal shelving at the far side of the room and retrieving a manila envelope from between some boxes. “Frankly, dating pelts has traditionally been a matter of centuries, not months or weeks, and the little work that’s been done on newer skins has naturally been angled towards establishing whether artefacts were made pre- or post-legislative reforms in the last few decades.”

“You don’t need to sell me on how hard you’ve been miracle-working, Cliff,” she said. “I’ll believe your expert opinion.”

He opened up the padded envelope, and carefully tipped out a smaller sealed plastic bag containing a single strand of black hair—or, she assumed, panther fur. He held it up to the light of one of the standing lamps set up near his workspace. “I’m afraid the results of the earlier testing have faded somewhat, but if you will observe the subtle banding by the root of the hair...?”

She squinted at a hint of red or gold tint that might be a trick of the light on the plastic. “Your eyesight’s better than mine,” she said.

“Not my eyesight, my contact lenses,” he corrected with a smile. “I do have enhanced photographs, in any case.” He fished a much-magnified photo of the panther hair out of the envelope, the colours artificially brightened to show bands of colour shading from a bright gold near the root through a spectrum of reds into black.

“Now, as I say, this is an imprecise and untested methodology, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hang the success of a court case upon it,” Cliff cautioned, “but I acquired some samples from legal pelts and subjected them to the same test.” He tipped out two more photographs and laid them out side by side with the first. “Now, this one here was a pelt made about eighteen months ago—note how the test for enchantment shows much less distinct results?”

The bands of colour on the hair in this second photo were dramatically duller, a deep rusty red at the root and a narrow, near-invisible smudge of brown.

Cliff tapped the third and final photo. “And this one was taken from a pelt that was enchanted just this past November.”

In this one, the bands of colour looked much more similar to the first, but when Pierce rearranged the pictures to compare the two side by side, she could see that the bands on the original picture were still a fraction brighter and more visible. She raised her head to look at Cliff. “So this means that our pelt was enchanted more recently?”

“It’s hardly a smoking gun,” Cliff cautioned, raising a finger. “There could be any number of factors influencing the results—variations in the ritual, a more talented skinbinder with a higher quality of skinning blade... perhaps even the type of animal that provided the pelt. Your sample is from a black panther, whereas both of my comparison hairs were from large dogs. I’m afraid there simply isn’t enough research on this kind of comparative testing to control for all possible factors.”