Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (18 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

P
IERCE HADN’T BEEN
convinced that she would get a wink of sleep, but she barely had the chance to lay down flat before exhaustion smothered her into unconsciousness. Unfortunately, it
was
only a wink that she managed to get. Her first bleary thought as the alarm trilled through her dreams was that it must be the phone or the fire alarm, because there was no way she’d slept long enough for it to be morning already.

She huddled mutinously under the covers for several minutes before she remembered that she’d left Dawson in charge of a crime scene and two constables on a stakeout, and Deepan was probably still going to be off work. She shoved herself out of bed to stagger through the morning routine on autopilot, and hoped that nobody was going to expect her to be human, never mind alert and with it, before well into the afternoon.

But it didn’t look like the fates were going to be that kind. She switched on the TV news to keep herself awake, the Valentine Vampire story quickly coming up in the rotation. Last night’s escapades were already the new headline.

“Author and vampire researcher Christopher Tomb has related over social media the harrowing ordeal that he faced last night at the hands of the Valentine Vampire killer,” the anchor said. “Tomb was assisting the police Ritual Crime Unit with their enquiries when they were set upon by an attacker that he described as inhumanly strong and fast, with dead white skin, claws, and a hypnotic gaze. Police are refusing to comment on the nature of Tomb’s involvement with the investigation, but it’s believed to be connected to a suspicious death that occurred in a park on the outskirts of Leeds last night. Rachel Marston is at the scene. Rachel?”

Pierce grimaced at the sight of the reporter positioned in front of a row of police vehicles. Crime scene tape had been strung around the trees, and figures in forensic overalls were still working in the background, searching for evidence that might have gone overlooked in the darkness. At least in a case as high-profile as this one they could count on the regional forces pulling out all the stops to assist, regardless of how much Dawson might have been antagonising them.

There was no obvious sign of him amid all the anonymous figures in coveralls, thankfully: he had even less patience than her for the careful hedging of words required to handle the media, and a bad tendency to make bold promises they couldn’t guarantee they’d keep. But today, either he or the local DI was running a tight ship, and the on-site reporter mostly seemed to be milking the established facts and hanging around in hopes of seeing something interesting.

Pierce supposed her own plans for the morning were really much the same: she wanted to take a fresh look at the crime scene herself now it was daylight, and frankly it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world to delay heading into the station for a bit. The superintendent was bound to be on the warpath, and she wouldn’t be surprised if there were reporters there too.

Dammit, who’d let Tomb run straight off to blab his story all over the internet? Pierce would have cautioned him herself, but she hadn’t wanted to there to be any suggestion of her influencing his statement—which unfortunately left him free to spout whatever bollocks he pleased about the supposed vampire. She’d barely been able to see a bloody thing when she was grappling with the killer, so she didn’t see how Tomb could possibly have made out any more detail. The trouble was, he might not even be telling intentional porkies: panic and preconception could sway eyewitnesses into ‘seeing’ all sorts of things that weren’t really there.

Pierce rubbed her arm as she stopped at a set of traffic lights. She’d have an ugly bruise where she’d been bitten, but there certainly hadn’t been any skin-piercing fangs on offer. No, despite the enhanced strength she was sure it was a human being they were looking for—and human beings, no matter how clever or dangerous, made mistakes.

As she parked outside the same pub where she’d stopped last night, Pierce patted the inside pocket that held the fibre she’d taken from Maitland’s chair. That little piece of evidence was staying on her person until she got the chance to deal with it.

But first, the present investigation.

She’d hoped that strolling up on foot wearing a business suit would help her sidle past the press unnoticed, but with the number of RCU cases that had made headlines—mostly bad ones—in the last year, she’d become a more recognisable face than she’d prefer. As soon as the first reporter spotted her, the others came scuttling over, scenting a possible new angle to wring more headlines from.

“DCI Pierce!” said the lucky lad in the lead, as a camera was thrust in her face. “Is the RCU treating this murder as connected to the Valentine Vampire killings?”

Sadly, ‘Why don’t you all sod off and let us find out?’ was never considered an acceptable answer. Pierce composed her best neutral face, trying to look neither too harassed nor inappropriately cheerful. “I’m sorry, but I can’t make any comment on the progress of an ongoing investigation,” she said, raising a hand but careful not to look like she was trying to block the cameras. “Obviously, we
will
consider all the angles—at this stage, we haven’t ruled anything out.”

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.