Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (23 page)

“We’ll split the team when we go in,” she said. “Dawson goes with the upstairs team, I take downstairs and the basement. Check the rooms from the doorways but
do not
proceed further without RCU okay. We tell you to stop or to retreat, don’t argue, just do it. Suspects may be in possession of magical enhancements that give them superhuman strength and speed, likely have access to bladed weapons, and are practised killers.”

Not much of a pep talk. Pierce glanced round at the mob of sturdy, sombre-faced officers who crowded the van and tried to think of an appropriately pithy sentiment. “This is a big one, so let’s not fuck it up,” she said. That was going to have to do.

She gave the nod to Clarke, he barked a few quick commands to his officers, and then the back of the van was thrown open and they poured out into the street, Pierce and Dawson bringing up the rear. As they hustled towards their target at number 7, Pierce had only the briefest instant to take the house in: concreted front yard, bars on the downstairs windows, basement window at ground level covered up by boards. Her pulse rushed in her ears. Was this the place, or just an empty house, a poorly maintained student property?

No time for second guessing: Clarke’s people were already at the door. There was no glass pane to give them easy entry, but the wood looked old and battered, half the paint scratched away. One quick check to make sure they weren’t about to look like idiots smashing through an unlocked door, and then it was time to pull out what they called ‘the big red key’—the Enforcer battering ram.

There were doors out there that could stand up to a few slams with a lump of hardened steel, but this wasn’t one of them: the second blow was practically a formality to shove the door open after splintering through it with the first. The Firearms officers poured in to the narrow hallway inside, and Dawson shoved in after them at the first shout of, “Clear!”

“Okay, up the stairs!” Pierce heard him bellow, and hoped it meant he’d scanned the hall, not just blindly charged in; she had to trust him and the rest of the entry team to do their jobs, because she couldn’t be everywhere at once.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs, and she heard their shouts echoed on her radio as they slammed into each room upstairs and cleared them one by one. Then she was through the doorway herself, trying to glance in every direction at once. No lights on inside the house, the entry team flashing torches rather than hitting light switches that might have useful prints or even be wired to do worse than turn the lights on.

Pierce shone her own torch quickly about the floor and walls, seeking the threats they wouldn’t know to look for: chalk marks, salt lines, any object that might be cursed or hide a trigger rune. She flicked the beam over the doorways, urgency warring with diligence. On her left, the kitchen: tiny, grimy, bare of all but the most basic fittings. On the right, a front room still unfurnished aside from a saggy sofa and a TV standing on a box. Temporary, minimal accommodation.

And there, the dark staircase leading down to the basement. Pierce ran the torch from side to side over the top few stairs: no visible lines or runes, but the light only reached down to the first bend in the staircase—the natural place to lay a trap. The stairs were too narrow for two people to descend side by side: it had to be single file.

“Ma’am, we need to clear down there,” said the Firearms man beside her—Turner? Tanner?

There was no way that they’d let her take the lead. “All right, down to the lower level!” she said. “Be alert for markings on the floor or walls—stop moving if you see them.” She stuck close behind Tanner as he led the descent, sweeping the torch over the poorly tacked-down carpet ahead of his feet.

The crowd of officers pressing in close behind made her feel claustrophobic, all too aware how messy a rapid retreat would be. The air below ground felt as cold as the grave, and she couldn’t tell if the shiver that rippled over her was just the chill and the adrenaline or the subtle tingle of magic in the atmosphere.

Tanner made the bottom of the stairs without any disaster. “Two rooms down here!” he called. There was hardly space to justify the subdivision of the basement. The stairs came down into a small antechamber piled with junk: a clothes horse, an ancient hoover, the empty cardboard box from some large flatpack purchase. All fruit for forensics, but not their concern now; Pierce swung her torch onto the door to the next room, inward opening and left slightly ajar.

No sign of runes: she offered Tanner a terse nod. He shouldered through it, weapon raised, and swung from side to side to scan the space beyond. A moment longer than it should have taken to assess the room, and then, instead of the all-clear: “We’ve got a coffin.” She felt the tension rise in the group behind her.

“Don’t approach,” Pierce cautioned, though he’d made no move to do so. This had all too many echoes of the previous disaster. “I need to see.”

“Could be somebody hiding inside,” he cautioned, clearly reluctant to let Pierce get too close as she squeezed in beside him in the doorway. The room beyond was small and mostly bare, a carpet rolled up and standing in the corner beneath the boarded window. There was an eye-watering smell of bleach in the unaired room.

And there, in pride of place in the centre of the floor as if set up to wait for them, stood a wooden coffin.

“I need to check it over before we open it,” Pierce said. Would the cult try the same trick twice?

They were just cocky enough that she thought they might.

Tanner didn’t look happy to be letting her approach before he’d checked inside it for armed suspects, but he swallowed his objections and kept pace with Pierce. She didn’t let the coffin distract her from checking the bare concrete floor, the walls and ceiling, but the bareness of the room was a fairly safe assurance it was clear. Tanner kept his weapon trained on the lid of the closed coffin as she circled round it, matching her steps as if ready to bodily shove her aside the moment the lid moved.

It didn’t move. As Pierce held still, it seemed to her that there was no sound inside the room except for her own breathing and Tanner’s subtle shifting. The lid of the coffin looked practically airtight as she shone her torch over it. Surely no one alive could be inside?

That still left plenty of unpleasant options on the table.

Tanner tensed as she crouched down beside the coffin, but resisted any urge to yank her back. Pierce played the torch around the edge of the lid, looking for carved symbols or markings on the wood. The coffin was the real thing, as far as she could judge, plain in design but solidly constructed.

No trigger runes on the outside. If there were any inside... well, there was only one way to find out.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t take precautions. She unfastened a pocket of her police vest and pulled out a non-standard piece of kit—a canister of salt that she’d picked up from Cliff’s lab on her way out. Throwing salt on a trigger rune was a clumsy way of neutralising it if it worked at all—a lot like tossing a glass of water onto a fire—but it might reduce the spread of the enchantment. And frankly it felt better to have some sort of plan beyond crossing her fingers, no matter how unlikely it was to work.

She glanced up at Tanner, debating whether he’d listen if she insisted he move back into the outer room. Probably not—they both had their jobs to do. But at least she could minimise the potential damage. Pierce spoke into her radio. “All non-essential personnel, evacuate the building. We have a potentially booby-trapped coffin in the basement. May bring the place down.” But they had to open it here: there was no guarantee that moving it wouldn’t set off a trap too.

Tanner stayed beside her, weapon still trained on the coffin lid, but there was a shuffling exodus back up the stairs by the rest of the entry team. She listened out for all the check-ins on the radio, hearing Dawson’s voice among them. The smell of bleach fumes seemed to be getting stronger, and she resisted the urge to scrub her eyes and cough.

Everybody clear now except for her and Tanner. Pierce flicked a glance at him. “Any last words?”

“I’ll be pissed off if this kills me,” he said.

“Fair enough.” She breathed in slowly and touched her radio again. “All right. Opening coffin.” She closed her eyes a moment, silently counting down from three before she eased the coffin lid up by just a few a millimetres.

No explosion—yet. Still tense, she shone the torch along the line of the narrow crack created. No visible markings along the wooden rim or the underside of the lid. Looked like it was clear of trigger runes.

But it wasn’t empty: even from the small crack that she’d opened, the unmistakable stench of death and decay wafted out, overpowering the smell of the bleach. She swallowed, gripping the open canister of salt just in case she was wrong about the runes, and then in one sharp movement threw the coffin lid open.

As it clattered onto the bare concrete on the other side, she jerked, halfway through throwing the salt before she registered she didn’t need to; Tanner made an abortive sound as he started to shout a warning to the pale-faced figure inside—and then realised he was beyond hearing it. The naked, pallid young man clearly wasn’t going anywhere.

“Shit,” Pierce said, with feeling. They’d found the cult’s base all right—but they’d also found the second victim.

They were too late.

CHAPTER TWENTY

M
UCH LATER, WHEN
preliminary reports had been made, the house given over to forensics and the as-yet unidentified body sent off for examination, Pierce caught up with Dawson where he was taking a smoke behind one of the police vans.

“We’ve got them on the ropes,” he said with far more confidence than she felt, cupping his lighter to shield the flame from the wind. “This is a break in the pattern. They weren’t ready for us to find this body.”

“
We
weren’t ready for us to find this body,” Pierce said. “It’s only been four days since Harrison’s body was dumped. The earlier killings were more widely spaced than this.” There should have been more
time
.

“They’re panicking,” Dawson said. “Accelerating the schedule because they’re scared that we’re onto them. And panicking murderers make mistakes.”

She grimaced. “Wouldn’t hurt if they made a few bigger ones. They might not have had the chance to stage the body in their usual style, but they still managed to clear out before we got here. According to Jenny the tracking spell isn’t working anymore, so they obviously had some way of detecting what we were doing.”

“And it rattled them,” he said. “Must’ve cleared out pretty bloody sharpish. They’re running scared now.”

Baseless bravado, in her view, but she wouldn’t have minded a shot of it; it was hard to stay optimistic when the cult evaded their efforts at every turn.

But at least, now that she’d done all that she could here, she had her chance to pursue a quarry who
had
left some evidence behind. Pierce patted her pocket, reassuring herself that the hair she’d taken from Maitland’s chair last night was still there. As she returned to her car she took a casual look around, but she didn’t spot any obvious signs of surveillance; hopefully his people were smart enough not to lurk around the fringes of a major police operation where they’d attract all the wrong kinds of attention.

And that meant now was her best time to act.

The only trouble was, she couldn’t do it alone. She needed someone to perform a tracking ritual for her—and with the usual police channels out, her options were thin on the ground. She didn’t want to drag Cliff and Jenny any further into this mess than she had already; they hadn’t signed up for this.

But there was someone else she’d already involved: someone who had as much motive as she did to want to see the conspiracy surrounding Sebastian’s death exposed, and might just have some contacts of his own they could call on.

She started the car and headed for Leo’s.

P
IERCE HADN’T RISKED
calling ahead, almost certain that Maitland would have some way to listen in on phone communications, but she managed to catch Leo at home nonetheless; she got the impression he didn’t get out much these days. He was a perfectionist, the sort of man to have hands-on, manual hobbies, and she doubted he’d get much pleasure out of struggling through things he’d once found easy.