Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (19 page)

A necklace that matched the one worn by the murdered cultist. Even if she couldn’t tell them who Jonathan really was, she had to know where he’d got that silver bat pendant and what it meant—and Pierce was betting that she knew much more than that.

Ignoring whatever response she got from the PC, she started off along the footpath after the woman. She didn’t want to break into a run with the news crews still skulking in the background, but she strode as fast as she thought that she could get away with, breaking into a full-blown trot by the time she reached the road. The woman had already crossed over, on the verge of disappearing down a back alley between two empty shops.

“Hey!” Pierce called after her, voice at a pitch that she hoped wouldn’t quite carry back to the media in the early morning quiet. The woman obviously heard her, pausing in her stride but not quite turning to look round. “Wait! I spoke to you before. You were at the house in York, weren’t you? You were there fourteen years ago.” The woman made no acknowledgement, but Pierce thought that she stiffened minutely. “Did you know the man who died last night?” she asked. “Maybe you know who it was that killed him. If you talk to us, we can protect you.”

It probably seemed like a hollow reassurance after what had just happened to their last would-be informant. The woman was still standing, unmoving; she hadn’t run—but she hadn’t turned either. Pierce stepped out into the road, careful to use slow, unthreatening movements. “Look, even if you’re worried that you may be implicated, our top priority is saving lives,” she said. “We can—”

A BMW came rocketing around the corner, too fast, honking with no apparent effort to slow as the driver saw Pierce in the road. She scrambled back behind the white line with a curse, resisting the urge to offer a hand gesture that wouldn’t look good for the police.

By the time he was gone, the woman with the necklace had vanished, hammering away down the alley.

“Shit!” Pierce dashed across the road after her, but she was no match for the younger woman. By the time she rounded the bollards at the mouth of the alley, the woman had already disappeared from the far end. Pierce followed her down to the storage yard at the rear, but it was empty: she had to have gone into one of the buildings, or over the fence at the back. It was high, but the line of recycling bins in front of it would provide a stepping stone for the sufficiently determined.

Pierce didn’t risk her dignity by trying to reproduce the feat. She was already puffing, and as their chase in York had proved, if the woman wanted to stay ahead of her, she could.

But her appearance at a second scene couldn’t be a coincidence. She knew
something
about this whole mess. The question was, had she been lurking to pluck up the courage to come forward to the police... or to report their activities back to the cult?

With a sigh, Pierce turned to head back to the crime scene. Either the woman would come back of her own volition, or she wouldn’t. All Pierce could do was give her description to Dawson, and head into work to face the music for a string of failures.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

P
REDICTABLY,
S
UPERINTENDENT
S
NOW
was not pleased. About anything, so far as Pierce could tell, up to and including her continued employment.

“Everything about the way you conducted this late-night meeting was reckless and irregular!” he said, as she stared fixedly at the wall of newspaper clippings just behind his head. He hadn’t offered her a seat, and despite her exhaustion she wasn’t about to ask.

Besides, he had a point—albeit one that was only apparent in hindsight. Following leads off the clock with no backup would be deemed reckless if it went wrong, but if she’d set up a full-scale police operation for a tip that hadn’t panned out, she’d be standing here on the same carpet hearing about how it had been wasteful and unnecessary.

Although in that case, no one would be dead.

“Agreeing to meet this man late at night without any police support or attempt at securing the scene—that’s not just cutting corners with procedure, it’s ignoring it entirely. Why wasn’t he brought into the station?” Snow demanded.

“Those were the source’s own conditions, sir,” Pierce said, since, ‘thought it was most likely bollocks, sir,’ wasn’t going to fly as a response, and probably wouldn’t have even back when she’d reported to Howard Palmer. “He was reluctant to speak to police, and I judged it better to accept his terms than risk not getting vital information.”

“Well, you judged wrong!” he said. “Do you appreciate
why
we have approved procedures for these matters, Pierce?”

There was an opening best not stepped in if ever she’d heard one.

“It’s not, as you seem to think, to ‘cramp your style,’” he said, pronouncing the words as if he’d read them in a magazine article about the youth slang of today, “or because anybody particularly delights in coming up with ways to make the job more difficult. It is so, in the event that anything
does
go wrong, we can know that everything was handled as well as it could have been. When police officers—or entire departments, for that matter—under my authority decide to ‘wing it’ and make up their own rules, it leaves
me
fielding questions about actions I neither approved nor received any notification about!”

“It was a judgement call, sir,” she repeated, too tired to find her way around a more conciliatory approach. All she could do was stick to her guns. “The RCU has limited resources to bring to bear, and without further information I didn’t see any justification to call in support from other parts of the force.”

“Yes.” Snow shuffled his stack of paperwork unhappily and tapped it on the desk to straighten the edges. “And speaking of the RCU’s limited resources, why were constables...”—he hesitated for a beat, but she gave him points for successfully pulling the names to mind—“Freeman and Taylor apparently tied up with a stakeout for another case entirely while this was going on? I told you to make the Valentine Vampire your top priority.”

“Time-limited opportunity, sir,” Pierce said, meeting his gaze now she was back on firmer ground with a case they hadn’t managed to fuck up yet. “The gang behind these animal sacrifices have proved that they’re willing to kill indiscriminately to protect their operations, and this is our best chance to catch them on the hop. I wanted trained RCU eyes in place to spot any suspicious behaviour.”

Snow pressed his lips together in a grimace: sceptical, she suspected, but as long as she gave him justification that he could sell on, he would probably let it go—and ‘gang’ was always a useful PR buzzword to be able to throw around.

“Yes, well,” he said. “You’re fortunate that they had something to report to show for it, or else your judgement in these matters would be called into even greater question.” He briefly pinched his nose, frowning, before folding his hands together and recovering his poise. “From now on, I expect frequent reports on your team’s movements, yours included—preferably
before
you get involved in any more poorly-planned escapades. The eyes of the world are watching closely on this one, and I don’t need to tell you how bad the fallout will be if the Valentine Vampire isn’t caught this time around.”

“Yes, sir,” Pierce said.

S
HE HADN’T EVEN
had a chance to check in with her constables before being hauled into the superintendent’s den, so it was happy news to her that the stakeout on Trick Box had actually turned up something. When she returned to the office, they presented her with a series of photographs of an unmarked white van that had apparently made a late-night visit to the shop’s delivery entrance.

“Wilkes returned to the shop shortly before one in the morning,” Gemma told her. “The white van arrived and parked by the delivery entrance at approximately half past. One man, not the driver, got out and was let into the shop by Wilkes.” She showed a couple of photos, though they’d be of limited use in identifying the man until they had a suspect in the frame: burly build, swaddled against the cold in a heavy coat and black woolly hat that by luck or design made a clear glimpse of his features difficult.

“Suspect stayed inside for under ten minutes before returning with a package that he carried back to the van, which then left.” There were photos of that too, but it was difficult to make much of the vague bundle the man was carrying in the dark pictures. Gemma was grinning, however. “Couldn’t see what it was, but I had Eddie go in early this morning and ask some silly questions about joining a magic group in the area,” she said. “Told him which display case to look in and he said there’s no sign of the animal spirit charms any more.”

“Too hot for Wilkes to handle,” Pierce presumed. No doubt the shop owner had falsified paperwork to show that they’d all been sold to a collector just yesterday, bad luck, chief inspector, sorry you’ve wasted your time... She turned her attention back to the van pictures, glad to see a visible number plate. “Have you checked into the vehicle yet?”

That was Eddie’s cue to look up from his computer, blinking earnestly. “Um, trying to find out more about the owner now, guv,” he said. “It’s registered to a Vanessa Hills of West Bradford, aged seventy-two, but we’re looking at the son-in-law, Michael Miller—he gave her address as his place of residence when he was questioned in connection with an artefact smuggling case about nine years ago. No charges brought, as he only had the one illegal piece in his possession and the investigators couldn’t prove intent to sell or that he was aware of its real nature.”

An all-too common story; if Pierce had been involved in that past case, it had since vanished into the mental blur of any number of similar investigations over the years, and the name rang no bells. “Anything else on Miller?” she asked.

“Still digging at the minute, guv,” he said. “But he runs an internet business buying and selling ritual supplies—I’ve got an address for their warehouse.”

That sounded promising, though they might struggle to get a search warrant on the tenuous connection. Still, an unannounced visit right on the tail of some dodgy business could sometimes fluster people into revealing things they didn’t intend. “All right, then,” Pierce said. “You try to get hold of Vanessa Hills, see if she can tell us anything about her son-in-law’s current whereabouts, and we’ll go and have a gander at the warehouse and see what’s to be seen. Tell Dawson to let me know if anything new comes in on the vampire case.”

Snow could go on about prioritisation all he liked, but if there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was sitting idle, rereading the same files over and over and waiting for new information to come in. Forensics might come back with something useful from the murder scene, but until then, they might as well get on with some actual police work.

M
ILLER’S WAREHOUSE WAS
tucked away in an unoccupied corner of a shabby industrial estate. On this grey February morning the whole site was quiet, only a handful of the units in use and the few parked vehicles standing amid seas of empty spaces. They left their own car in front of a carpet shop and approached on foot; sometimes it was useful that two women in business suits didn’t register with most people as being police.

And as she and Gemma rounded the corner, Pierce could see their luck was in: whatever Wilkes had told her suppliers last night had clearly convinced them that a hasty clearout of the premises was required. The shutter was up, and a trio of men were loading boxes and equipment into a lorry labelled
Miller Supplies
—and the white van they were looking for was parked right beside it.

A casual passer-by probably wouldn’t have spared much curiosity for the tarp-covered crates, but to Pierce’s eyes they looked an awful lot like they could have been cages. She heard no obvious sounds of animal distress as the trolley wheels rattled over the rough tarmac, but she doubted the men who’d mass-euthanised the animals back at the barn would fret too much about the health risks of keeping them sedated for transport.

Pierce snapped a few surreptitious shots of the men and vehicles, hoping it would pass for checking something on her phone. That was the van, all right—but they didn’t have it directly linked to a crime, only to a rather suspicious late-night visit to Helen Wilkes. Hopefully she could get her suspects to incriminate themselves with a little luck and bluster.