Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

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Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) Page 18

by E. E. Richardson


  “We need this guy searched and stripped out of the magical camouflage gear,” she said. “It’s possible he’s got some of our artefacts on him, and he might have a few more of his own as well.” Pierce stood up, keeping a hold on the silver cuffs to encourage her prisoner to stand with her, and gave him a tight smile that he returned as a scowl. “Then stick him down in the cells with his mate from out the front,” she said. “Station invasion’s over.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THEIR NEW PRISONER seemed fairly disinclined to talk, switching between sullen silence and explosions of cursing as the uniforms took him downstairs to be processed. But once she returned to his partner in the interview room with news that he’d been apprehended, ‘John Brown’ folded like a paper swan. Yes, they’d stolen the artefacts, yes, he could give them names and details on his unfortunate partner, yes, he’d confess just about anything if it got him off the charge of attempting to murder a police officer. Pierce left the interview with the feeling of a job well done. At bloody last.

  She checked in on young Nancy, and was relieved to find she’d already regained consciousness, responding well to the first-aider’s tests.

  “I didn’t really see what happened,” she told Pierce. “The door opened and there was no one there, and there was just this smell—like, you know when somebody’s been smoking some kind of weird funky herbal cigarettes, and then they breathe it out right in your face? Like that. And then just: zonk.” She mimed falling over with a sweep of her forearm. “I really do feel fine, by the way,” she insisted to the bulky officer still hovering nearby with the first aid kit.

  “Yeah, well, see a proper doctor anyway,” Pierce told her. “No offence, Baz,” she added to the first-aider.

  “None taken. They didn’t train me for all this mystic shit,” he said.

  “Me neither, but somehow I get paid to deal with it anyway.” She nodded at them both and headed out the door. Plenty more work still to do before the artefact theft case could be laid to bed, but the hard part was over, and now they were just left to clear up the details.

  Like the gaggle of druids she’d had herded in for questioning, who it seemed were probably innocent of any wrongdoing after all. Pierce grimaced. She had a feeling the superintendent wouldn’t be too happy to hear that they’d hauled a whole group of protestors in off the street to help them with their inquiries. She just hoped the uniforms she’d had to delegate that task to had kept a light, polite touch and treated them as witnesses rather than suspects.

  Pierce collared the uniform sergeant in charge of the questioning, Higson. “Our knifeman’s confessed,” she said. “Looks like this lot are all in the clear, so we just need witness statements from them. Where’s their boss?”

  “Beardy fella with the big stick?” Higson nodded his head towards the door on the corner. “In there, having a chat and a cup of tea with Constables Lewis and Markham, all very civilised, like. Didn’t think the man in the fancy office would be too happy with us if we ruffled too many feathers dealing with this lot.”

  A shrewd assessment. “You’ll go far, mate,” Pierce told him.

  “Rather not, if it’s all the same to you, Guv,” he said with a smile. “Seems like the higher you go up the ladder the more paperwork falls on your head. I get enough of that where I am as it is.”

  “If only we all had your sense.” She girded herself to go and make nice to the Archdruid, hoping he didn’t decide to kick up a fuss about his people’s treatment; it would be all too easy to spin that kind of story to a media already thirsty for blood.

  “DCI Pierce.” He greeted her with a pleasant smile as she entered. The outfit somehow looked even more incongruous seated in one of their cheap plastic chairs, but the voice still gave him a presence that stopped him from seeming completely ridiculous.

  “All done here?” Pierce asked the two PCs, who seemed only too happy to get up and scuttle out to leave her to it. She took over one of the vacated chairs and drew it closer to the table. “Firstly, I’d like to apologise for keeping you and your people here so long,” she said. “We appreciate your cooperation, Mr—” Mr what? The PCs hadn’t left her any convenient notes to skim from. “I’m sorry, sir, I never did catch your name,” she was forced to admit.

  “Archdruid Alastair Greywolf,” he said, in measured tones.

  Pierce very respectfully didn’t snigger, but she couldn’t help but raise a sceptical eyebrow nonetheless. “Is that what it says on your driving licence?” she had to ask.

  “It does,” he said, but then smiled. “Not my birth certificate,” he conceded.

  Praise the Lord, a glimpse of a sense of humour. Maybe there was a chance he could be reasoned with yet. “Well, thank you for your assistance earlier, Mr Greywolf,” she said, letting the matter of names go. “That could have been a very nasty incident, and we appreciate your help in containing the attacker.”

  He inclined his head regally. “Surely what any good citizen would try to do,” he said.

  “Well, generally we prefer good citizens to stay back out of harm’s way. Which is why, I’m afraid, I really do have to ask you if you can move your people away from the station building. As today’s incident has demonstrated, we do regrettably deal with some dangerous people from time to time, and having crowds around the station is only risking the safety of my people and yours.” She didn’t overtly state that the crowd had allowed her attacker to get close, but he was a bright boy, he must have realised it. Maybe his sense of good citizenship would extend to getting the hell out of their car park.

  “Then I in turn must make my apologies,” Greywolf said solemnly. “These are not my preferred methods, I assure you, Chief Inspector—but my people’s concerns really must be heard.”

  “And they will be,” she said, refusing to concede control of the situation. “However, you have to appreciate that the RCU deals with many dozens if not hundreds of cases across the whole of the north, and we have to prioritise those incidents that pose the most urgent danger to people’s lives and welfare.” She would have been delighted to have enough officers to let one of them waste time chasing up trivial land use disputes with no proof of a crime, but this was the real world.

  “This is urgent,” the Archdruid said forcefully, locking eyes with her. His were a rare shade of brilliant blue that were difficult to meet directly, and Pierce didn’t doubt that he was used to getting his way by sheer weight of personality. “The stone circle my people venerate is a site of great ritual potential. I believe that the farmer who used to grant us access was pressured into selling against his will, and now he fails to answer any of our communications. The site has been completely sealed off, and we believe the new owners are making preparations for a ritual.”

  Pierce resisted the urge to sigh and rub her temples. All right. He sounded relatively sane, and while she doubted there was much substance to the allegations, perhaps some evidence that they were taking steps to investigate would be enough to get him and his druids off their backs.

  “All right,” she said. “If you really can show visible indications that there may be illegal magic going on at the stone circle, I will try to detail an officer to go and check that out just as soon as we have somebody available. Now, in return, can I please ask that you be willing to move your encampment away from the police station to avoid any further incidents like today’s?”

  “Of course,” he said, inclining his head with an affable smile.

  She just wished she was optimistic enough to believe it would be that easy.

  AGREEMENT OR NOT, there was no way the druids’ issue was going to make its way onto her priority list any time soon. They might have all but resolved the artefact thefts, but right now they still needed all hands on deck to deal with the matter of the skulls. As soon as Deepan and Freeman returned to the station she gathered her team together for a briefing.

  “All right,” she said, surveying her forces, limited though they were. “From this point on, the skull case
is officially the RCU’s top priority. Here’s what we know so far.” She indicated the photos from the ritual scenes in Bingley and Silsden, pinned to a board behind her; high-tech was all very well, but in her experience you usually spent more time trying to get the computer and projector to agree to talk to each other than you actually saved by using the fancy equipment.

  “These two sites are apparently spirit traps or cages,” she continued. “They were keeping disembodied spirits—or minor demons, possibly, it’s a matter of terminology—of some form penned up inside.” She swept her gaze across the team. “Now, as we’ve learned, those things are bloody dangerous in themselves. It could be that this is intentional, and the traps are primed to unleash the things on anyone who interferes. Or it could just be an ugly side effect. That doesn’t really matter for our purposes.” It might when it came to figuring out the appropriate criminal charges, but Pierce would worry about that when they had some suspects in hand.

  She pointed at their map of the region, made up of several sheets of printed A4 pinned together. The Bingley and Silsden sites were marked, with intersecting circles drawn around them so that the whole thing looked like a lopsided Venn diagram.

  “Now, we’ve consulted with an expert in ritual demonology, and she believes that there will be a third site, echoing the triangular arrangement of the skulls at the two we’ve already discovered. That gives us two potential locations for the third.” She squinted at the map. “Somewhere around... Oakworth? And somewhere just south of Ilkley, on the moor.” At this scale, any triangle they marked out was going to be inexact.

  “That’s not very much to go on, Guv,” Taylor said dubiously. They all remembered just how well a vague, directionless search had gone in Silsden, and now they had two sites to cover simultaneously.

  “No, it’s not,” Pierce said. “And there’s worse. Our intelligence suggests that whatever this ritual is supposed to accomplish is due to go down on the twenty-second of December—that is, for those of us who haven’t spent enough time looking at the calendar lately, the day after tomorrow. That means we only have a very limited time to act on this information and locate the site before it all goes pear-shaped.”

  Freeman looked like she was on the verge of raising a hand to be called on with her question before she remembered that she wasn’t in school any more. “Do we know what the ritual is intended to accomplish, Guv?” she asked.

  “According to DI Dawson’s informant”—still an unidentified corpse, poor bugger, despite their best efforts with prints and dental records—“the spirits imprisoned by the skull traps are effectively bait for something even bigger and nastier,” she said. “We believe that the group behind this ritual are trying to summon a far more dangerous entity—what’s generally referred to in the literature as a major demon. The lesser spirits in the traps are to draw its attention, luring it closer to the barrier between this world and the Other Side—whichever theory you subscribe to about what kind of ‘other side’ we’re dealing with.”

  Pierce wasn’t sure if that one was a question for the ritual theorists or the philosophers. Certainly, none of the sources that claimed to have had a glimpse of said beyond sounded remotely convincing, and if the ones who’d died horribly trying had actually managed, nobody would ever know.

  As far as she was concerned, it didn’t really matter what demons were or where they came from; it wasn’t her job to make sense of it all, just to police those bits of it that caused trouble in her territory.

  “Have we spoiled their plans by destroying two of the skull traps?” Freeman asked, sitting forward.

  “It would be nice to think so.” Which was why Pierce didn’t trust that thought. “But we have to proceed from the assumption that whatever they’re trying to lure is already close enough for them to perform the final summoning—whatever form that takes. Our expert’s going to come back to us with more research on that, but it’s safe to assume it will involve large scale sacrifice. And probably large scale slaughter if it succeeds.”

  She had a bad feeling she might be underselling it even with that. Major demons in the literature were the kind of thing that wiped whole towns off the map, if not entire countries.

  “Do we have any clue who might be behind the rituals?” Deepan asked, face uncommonly sombre. Pierce hesitated, thinking of the shapeshifter and her suspicions. But then her gaze slid past him to DI Dawson where he stood in the doorway, one hand rubbing the bridge of his bruised nose. He might have come through for her earlier, but she still wasn’t entirely certain how far they could trust him.

  “Not at present,” she said crisply. It was true enough. “Our informant claimed that they’re calling themselves Red Key, but I doubt that pursuing that will get us any paper trail. What we do know is that they’re highly organised, and they must have a fair number of people in their employ. The skulls were set in place with great precision and presumably some degree of ritual, without drawing the attention of the public. That suggests a group of people working together with a high degree of professionalism. They’ve sent killers after two of our consulting specialists, and they have at least one shapeshifter on their team, panther form.”

  She saw Deepan press his lips together. He hadn’t been with her in the barn when Sally had got her throat slashed by the last panther shifter they’d tangled with, but he’d seen the aftermath.

  “These people are dangerous,” Pierce said, meeting the eyes of her two newest young rookies in particular. “Extremely so. We have to assume that they can accomplish what they’ve set out to do. We have to be aware of the possibility they may be keeping tabs on our investigation.” She drew in a deep breath. “And, somehow, we have to get ahead of them.”

  She turned back to gesture at the map behind her. “We can’t afford to gamble on picking the right site and risk wasting our time,” she said. “It’ll stretch us thinner, but we have to try to tackle both at once.” She indicated the northernmost of the two sites, near Ilkley. “Dawson, you’re in charge of the search on the moor. See if you can borrow additional warm bodies from across the county line in North Yorkshire.”

  After Silsden, the regular police should at least be taking the situation seriously, even if they were less than happy about cooperating. She just had to hope that Dawson could keep enough of a lid on his obnoxiousness to avoid riling them any further, because she really couldn’t spare the resources to keep an eye on him.

  She turned back to face the others. “Sergeant Mistry and Constable Taylor will be handling the second search in the Oakworth region.” With his lesser rank, Deepan might face more obstruction from the locals, but hopefully a greater degree of RCU presence would balance that out; Pierce didn’t want to commit herself to either location before they knew which was the real one. “Freeman and I will be following up other leads from here.” Assuming they could find any.

  She surveyed her team, locking eyes with each of them in turn. “From now until D-Day,” she said, “consider this case the only one that matters.”

  The clock was ticking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AFTER DEALING WITH their two new prisoners and reporting in to Snow, there were only so many hours of afternoon left to get anything done. They were coming up for the shortest day of the year, and the two area searches barely had a chance to get started before the winter dark dropped like a blackout curtain. After what had happened in Silsden, Pierce reluctantly vetoed any idea of continuing into the night, and ordered the two groups to resume at dawn. She could only pray that the lost hours wouldn’t come back to bite them.

  She wasn’t certain that finding the third skull site would get them any closer to dealing with the main demon-summoning in any case. What they really needed was more information back from Doctor Moss—but that was a process she had no power to accelerate. Pierce had the itchy feeling of sitting at a traffic light when she was in a hurry, knowing that things needed to be done but unable to take any action until things outside her control had lined up. Sh
e spent far too long pacing the office when there was no reason for her to still be there, too restless to settle to the actual work that was available for her to do.

  When she finally left, the druids’ vans and tents were still set up in the car park, but the druids themselves and their placards and banners were nowhere in sight. Pierce pressed her lips together. The Archdruid had appeared to accept her request for them to clear off, but he hadn’t given any promise of how soon they would do it. She’d already struggled to get Snow off her back after the incident with John Brown in the car park.

  Apparently a glutton for castigation, she kept flicking the news on all night, looking for fresh evidence that details were leaking, even hoping that somehow the media had learned something she didn’t know yet. But right now the vultures were still picking the corpse of their juicy story from Silsden. Police officers dead, the potential for an inquiry... this was all going to crash down on Pierce’s head eventually, but if some kind of major demon ate Yorkshire next week, they’d all have bigger problems.

  She was too wired to sleep easily—taking the job home with her in her head, the big thing they warned you against, though when the job involved a looming threat to who knew how many lives, it was advice that was impossible to heed. She couldn’t risk taking any pills that might leave her groggy and hungover in the morning, so she only dropped off in the early hours, spending her dreams running through endless corridors in search of a vital meeting she was supposed to be leading.

  She snapped awake to the sound of the alarm after what felt like no time, and spent several minutes contemplating the possibility of just staying in bed before she remembered why she couldn’t. Right. Back to the grindstone.

  To her displeasure, the camper vans had still yet to disappear from their car park when she arrived back at work. She went over and knocked on the window of one until a ruffled head in a druid’s hooded robe poked out.

 

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