“They’ve been non-responsive since we brought them in,” Sergeant Horton told her over the phone. “Not just playing difficult; practically catatonic—we just had the doc in to look at them, and she doesn’t think they’re faking.”
Brilliant. “Some kind of drug?” Pierce asked with a grimace.
“We’ve had our eyes on them the whole time,” Horton insisted. “If they took anything, it was before the arrest. Reckon this is one for your department.”
He might just be passing the buck for the suspects going downhill in his custody, but he was more than likely also right: either the cultists had done this to themselves with some kind of magical trigger, or the control that Violet had over the group extended to more than just tracking their whereabouts. Balls. Pierce should have insisted they be checked over for tattoos and stripped of any suspicious jewellery the second that they’d been restrained, but she’d been preoccupied with Dawson’s injuries and the search for Violet.
She sighed into the phone. “Right. I’ll send some people over to check over the prisoners and their effects, see if we can figure out what happened.” It was doubtful in the extreme that there’d be any way to reverse it, let alone that they’d find it in time for it to be useful. “Let me know if their condition changes.” She hung up and made her weary way back up the stairs to the RCU office, where the remains of her team were assembled.
Deepan looked up from his computer as she pushed through the doors. “Just got off the phone with the hospital, guv,” he told her. “Looks like Dawson’s going to be okay—they want to keep him in for a bit, but it sounds like his injuries were relatively minor.”
“Good.” That was one weight off. “Unfortunately, it seems our two cultists we just arrested have gone magically mute. I want you and Eddie to get over to York and find out why. I’m going to head in to the hospital, see if Dawson’s got anything to report he didn’t tell us at the scene.” It was doubtful, but at least it gave her a work-related pretext to blunt the awkwardness of visiting a man she couldn’t pretend she considered a friend.
She arrived at the hospital within visiting hours, and Dawson was in a regular ward, so she had no hassle getting in. That said, she almost managed to miss the man himself, not expecting him to have another visitor already. It was only the familiar voice that snagged her attention, halfway down the row on the opposite side.
Pierce narrowed her eyes at the sight of her DI in low-voiced conversation with a tall, blond man in a business suit. Who was that? Not a doctor, she was fairly sure, but he didn’t look enough like Dawson to peg him as a relative, either: much slimmer build, with finer features and fairer colouring. Could be a friend or neighbour, she supposed, but if so he’d arrived awfully quickly—and Dawson had never struck her as the type to broadcast a brief hospital stay. He was more the sort to stubbornly tough things out alone till he keeled over.
But then, what did she really know about the man and his life outside work? For all she knew he’d had to call a friend and ask him to feed the cat.
Or maybe he reported to somebody other than her, and had all along. Maitland’s people definitely had some way of keeping tabs on what was going on within the RCU, and she’d had her suspicions about Dawson from the start—though it was hard to be sure if that was anything he’d done, or just her dislike of the man.
Before she could make up her mind whether to risk trying to eavesdrop, Dawson’s visitor rose from his seat to go. It seemed to Pierce that he gave a distinctly wary look around the ward before leaning forward to murmur some inaudible parting comment to Dawson; the two exchanged brief nods, and then he left.
Pierce wasn’t sure if Dawson had spotted her yet, but judged it best to march straight over to him just in case.
“Not interrupting, am I?” she said, tilting her head after the departing visitor. Dawson didn’t answer, just raised his eyebrows. Pierce helped herself to the recently vacated chair. “Friend of yours?” she pressed.
He gave a noncommittal grunt that could have been deliberate evasiveness or just his usual brusque manners. “They tracked her down yet?” he asked, not bothering with any attempt at pleasantries.
Pierce gave up and turned to the case, shaking her head. “Looks like she got away clean,” she said. She doubted he’d appreciate any sugarcoating of the situation.
Dawson grunted, grimacing slightly as he adjusted his position in the bed. “Should’ve gone after her,” he said.
“Yeah, well, if I’d gone out that window, there’d be two of us in here, and she’d still have got away,” she said. She nodded at his hospital gown. “What are they telling you?”
“Didn’t manage to skewer anything major,” he said. “I should be back in the office tomorrow.”
Having had the joy of her own personal stab wound before now, Pierce doubted that was the official prognosis. “Don’t push yourself,” she said. “We can manage without you for a couple of days without the department coming to its knees.” Or more pragmatically, they were so terminally understaffed at the best of times that being one down could only do so much to make it worse.
“We’ve got a major case on. I can handle it,” he said, forehead furrowing.
Pierce stayed noncommittal, far from convinced, but in no position to reject the help.
All the same, she couldn’t help but wonder exactly why he was quite so determined: just a dose of the usual macho crap and his desire to get the credit for the Valentine Vampire case—or because he wanted to be back in position to report on her activities to Maitland?
P
IERCE MADE HER
excuses soon after, fairly sure that further attempts at friendly chit-chat wouldn’t have been much fun for either side. The rest of the day’s investigations were a similar waste, serving only to underline that Violet had well and truly vanished, her cultists weren’t likely to be talking to anyone anytime soon, and no, forensics hadn’t come up with anything since the last few times she’d hassled them. She went to bed at the end of the day battered, frustrated and nursing a brutal reprise of her earlier headache.
The next morning she got a phone call from Phil Havers before she’d even left to go to work. “I spent the night going through the old files,” he said. “I think you’re right—your killer
did
hop the border into Oxford’s jurisdiction back in February ’08. I’ve got two likely bodies found near Kettering and Peterborough. Haven’t managed to dig up a third, but it could have missed RCU attention entirely, or fallen between the cracks.” RCU cases on the borderlands between jurisdictions had a bit of an unfortunate tendency to get bounced back and forth while they argued over who could least spare personnel to make the trip.
Pierce consulted her rusty knowledge of those parts of UK geography that weren’t usually her problem. “That’s... over Cambridgeshire way?” she hazarded.
“Thereabouts.”
And Matt Harrison’s body had been found down near Newark-on-Trent, which was really quite far south in relation to the other killings, mostly clustered around the bases in Leeds and York... She needed a map.
“All right, thanks, Phil,” she said distractedly, clamping her phone in place with her shoulder as she bent down to rifle through the detritus of old newspapers and takeaway menus that cluttered her living room bookshelves. “You may have just been a big help. Send me whatever you’ve got on those two murders, okay?”
“Will do,” he said. “I’ll keep looking out for a third. And good luck—I know this one’s been hanging over you a long time.”
“Yeah, like a bloody vulture,” Pierce said. She seized upon the spiral-bound spine of the map book and tugged it out, sending a cascade of papers to the ground. “All right. Talk to you soon.”
She carried the map book over to the dining table, and with the aid of much cross-referencing of map pages and consultation with her notes, eventually managed to plot out the locations of all the known body dumps. Most were clustered in a loose ring around the Leeds-Bradford area; the ’nineties killings had taken place in Lincolnshire, but both they and the recent dump near Newark could have been taken as a wider extension of that ring.
Add in the two murders further south in Oxford’s jurisdiction, and all of a sudden it started to look like a different picture. Like there might, in fact, be another focal point, somewhere around the Lincolnshire-Leicestershire border. She drew a loose triangle connecting the three most southerly sites, and found it centred on... well, a whole lot of nothing much, really; the only thing of note at this map scale was a stretch of the A1.
Pierce frowned, wondering why that rang a faint bell in her head. Someone had mentioned driving on the A1 recently, she was sure, but her brain refused to dredge the context up. Maybe just her team discussing the drive down to Newark-on-Trent? No, she was pretty sure it had been something she’d read. A detail from one of the old case files? She racked her brains, but couldn’t place the reference.
She was in her car, halfway to work and grimly contemplating whether she really wanted to hear what was on the radio news, when the memory finally clicked. Christopher Tomb’s book—he’d described being taken to a barn off the A1 where the cult had supposedly conducted initiation rituals. At the time, it hadn’t particularly stood out among numerous other dramatically rendered incidents and encounters, all vividly described but suspiciously short on specifics—names, locations and dates—that would allow for any sort of verification.
Of course, on that first read-through she’d also been operating on the assumption that what legitimate information Tomb did have to offer had probably been cribbed from an inside source in the emergency services. Knowing he really had made contact with a former member of the Valentine Vampire cult put a different spin on things. The details might be heavily embellished, but perhaps the barn really did exist—and perhaps it had been in use recently enough that there would still be useful evidence to be found there.
It was a long shot, but at this stage, any lead was worth checking out.
When she arrived at the office, she skimmed through the case files Phil had forwarded. Easy to see how the connection could have been missed—no one down in Oxford had been on the alert for more Valentine Vampire killings, and these two were a step away from the usual MO. One body had been dumped in the woods and set upon by scavengers before it was found; the other effectively dismembered, the presence of ritual cuts noted, but the overall pattern overlooked.
Violet and her cult of killers had been careful that time out, apparently spooked that the police had come close to tracking them down the last time they’d been active. But when their precautions had worked, they’d probably decided the close call had been a fluke and gone back to the cocky showboating, returning to their old hunting grounds, displaying the body of their first kill in a way that was sure to grab everyone’s attention.
Sometimes you caught the clever ones because they wanted you to
know
that they were clever. Violet had showed her hand too many times, and now the net was closing in.
Recent events would probably cause her to go to ground again, but right now she had a limited window for a third killing to complete the ritual. If she was relying on the magic to maintain her supernatural strength and youth, she wouldn’t want to abandon the ritual part-finished—it was quite possible she
couldn’t
. Magic was a hell of a drug, and withdrawal could be lethal. After a good three decades or more of living on magical energy, there was no telling if she’d even survive without it.
So she needed to kill again, soon—and hopefully, with her resources severely curtailed, she’d be backed into returning to one of her old boltholes, where they stood a chance of tracking her down.
“I’m going to see Christopher Tomb again, and find out if he can give me more on the locations where he met with this man Jonathan,” she told Deepan. Without calling in advance this time: if this really was a lead, she didn’t want him blabbing it all over the internet and potentially tipping off the killer. “You follow up on the Oxford murders—see if you can find any evidence of another killing around the same time that might be our third victim, or anything that might indicate where the cult were based when they were operating down there. Violet’s already lost two bases and some if not all of her most loyal followers—she can’t have an unlimited number of places left to go.”
She moved to leave, then ducked back into the office with an afterthought. “And if Dawson comes in, tell him I said to go home.”
“Right, guv,” he said, with obvious scepticism. She didn’t think Dawson would listen either, but at least if she was going to be out of the office, then worrying about his potential loyalties didn’t have to be her problem for a while.
P
IERCE DROVE OVER
to the address that they had for Christopher Tomb, a semi-detached house not too far from the park where Jonathan had met his end. She knew it was the right place from the car parked out in front, though the cheerful redheaded woman in cycling gear who answered the door gave her pause.
“Chris!” the woman called back into the house. “Someone for you.” She gave Tomb a quick peck on the cheek when he appeared at the door, looking remarkably normal in grey jeans and a navy blue jumper. “Right, I’m off on my ride. See you later.” The woman gave Pierce a polite smile as she slipped out past her and went round to the garage to fetch her bike.