All in all, a productive week’s work, she supposed, but not one she could feel all that proud of. Too many fuckups, deaths and injuries that might somehow have been avoided if she’d only handled things better. If she’d insisted that Tomb give her the address and stay behind, if she’d gone in with a police team from the start... if they’d managed to arrest Violet at the café, or after Jonathan’s murder; if she’d insisted Jonathan come to the police station to meet with them, or brought a bigger escort...
Hell, why stop there? Might as well go back to 2008, when she’d failed to do the due diligence and find the Valentine Vampire’s new hunting grounds down in Oxford, or 2001, when she might have done more to challenge her old DI’s hasty conclusions. With the murder investigation stretching back almost as far as her own history with the force, she was spoilt for choice when it came to self-recriminations.
But at least one of their more notorious cold cases had finally been laid to rest.
“So you’re certain that this woman... ‘Violet’... was the one behind all of these murders, going back to the 1980s?” Snow asked when she dropped by his office to make her report in person.
“All the evidence points that way,” she said. Complete certainty was a luxury they seldom got in their line of work. “She appears to be the same woman who was spotted at the original bust fourteen years ago, and given her other magical enhancements, the lack of visible aging was probably part of the effect of the blood ritual.” Unfortunately, once that little detail got out to the press they’d be probably looking at a wave of attempted copycat rituals by other would-be seekers after eternal youth. The vast majority wouldn’t have access to legitimate occult texts, but they could still do all kinds of harm in the process.
Snow grimaced and straightened the papers on his desk. “So we have no way of telling exactly how old this woman really was?” he said.
Pierce shook her head. “They’ll autopsy, but there’s no saying what the results will show.” Violet might prove to have the internal organs of a woman decades older, or they might reflect her outward-seeming youth; it was always difficult to guess with magic. “Not sure we’re going to be able to get any better identification, either,” she admitted. Not with the uncertainty over dates and the fact that Violet must have been keeping under the radar since back when it was easier to do so.
Snow sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And Christopher Tomb?” he asked.
It felt like an accusation even with his neutral inflection. Pierce tried not to flinch. “Still in critical condition. His wife’s been notified.” And she was guiltily relieved not to have to take that particular job; it was bad enough to have a mental image of the woman thanks to their brief encounter earlier that day.
“He should never have been there in the first place,” Snow said.
“I know, sir,” she said tiredly. No point making excuses, and it would have left a bad taste to shove any of the blame onto Tomb. He might have been being deliberately obstructive in an effort to get invited along, but she still should have known better than to let him accompany her into a potentially dangerous situation. And nobody deserved to suffer what he’d gone through in that barn.
Perhaps she looked and sounded ragged enough for her boss to take pity, or else he just saw no mileage in repeating a lecture he’d given once already this week. “Well, what’s done is done,” he said rather grudgingly, pressing his lips together. “At least the killer’s off the streets, and the press are off our backs—though frankly, I would have preferred it if RCU Oxford hadn’t put out a press conference about the joint operation without consulting with us first.”
“You’ll have to take that up with DI Dawson, sir,” she said, not particularly repentant at dropping him in it. “I was indisposed at the time.”
“Yes.” Snow eyed her battered, dishevelled appearance. “I suggest that you go home, Pierce—and take at least a couple of days off. Your team claim enough overtime as it is without half of you being at work when you should be on medical leave.”
“Yes, sir.” Pierce didn’t think she had the energy to argue, which probably proved his point.
She headed back up to the RCU offices, where Gemma was the only one around. “Anything come in that I should know about?” she asked as she collected her bag and coat.
“Nothing major, guv,” she said, shaking her head; Pierce suspected she’d have said the same regardless.
She stood for a moment, blank with tiredness, certain she must be forgetting things, important or trivial. “Everything squared away on the spirit charms case?” she asked.
“So far,” Gemma said with a nod. “Oh, Cliff did want a word before you go, though,” she added. “Something to do with the charms we seized, he said.”
“Right-o. See you later.”
She headed down the corridor to poke her head in on Cliff. “Issues with the evidence on the charms case?”
“Possibly.” Cliff was alone in his lab today, but he looked around nervously as she entered the room, and waited for her to come all the way inside and shut the door before he continued. “I wondered if you might humour me by taking a look at the animal spirit charms we seized.”
Pierce blinked blearily as Cliff spread the collection of wooden charms before her. “What am I looking for?”
“I wouldn’t want to prejudice you,” he said, pursing his lips. There was a grimness to his tone that stopped her pleading exhaustion, and she studied the things more closely. To her inexpert eye the wooden medallions they’d seized at Miller’s arrest looked pretty much the same as the one Cliff had already examined; in fact, she was fairly sure it was included in the mix—she recognised the running hare design.
Or maybe that wasn’t the only reason it stood out from its fellows. Now that her eye had been drawn to it, she couldn’t help but feel there was something subtly different about the way that the runes were formed, like the mismatched handwriting of a forged signature. “This one’s different,” she said, pointing it out to Cliff. “I’d say it was made by someone else.”
“Yes,” he said. “And though I’m afraid I can offer you no concrete proof of this, I
don’t
think it’s the same charm you originally gave me.”
Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “You think it’s been replaced with a fake since you’ve had it in the lab?”
He grimaced. “As I say, I can’t offer any definitive proof, but it feels different to me—slightly lighter, perhaps, a little rougher around the edges. I doubt I’d have noticed if you hadn’t brought me all these others to compare... and if I didn’t have good reason to be paranoid.”
If Cliff was right, then whoever had made the substitution had to have had repeated access to the lab to examine and photograph the medallion and then replace it with a convincing fake. Meaning Maitland’s people’s theft of the shapeshifting pelt hadn’t been a one-time thing—he had someone positioned here at the RCU full time, monitoring their activities and keeping an eye out for any artefacts her team encountered. Who knew how many other items they’d seized had gone missing from storage without their knowing?
And that wasn’t the worst part. Someone among her small group of coworkers had to be aiding these people. Snow? Dawson? One of her two constables? They were all new to the unit—any one of them could be a plant.
And they weren’t the only possibilities. What about Deepan, the sergeant she’d trusted with her life for years? The research team, some of whom she’d known for even longer? She didn’t want to believe that any of them could be persuaded to turn mole, or that they could have been replaced by impostors without her spotting it.
But what if she was wrong?
“Keep this to yourself,” she told Cliff. “From now on, we can’t trust anybody.”
He nodded soberly. “So what do we do now?” he asked.
Pierce let out her breath in a heavy sigh. “I wish I bloody knew,” she said.
Everything seemed hopeless lately.
H
ER MOOD WAS
grim as she drove home, mind alternating between the implications of Cliff’s news and even darker thoughts of the scene back in the warehouse. Despite feeling utterly worn down by the day’s events, she couldn’t settle, keeping herself occupied in hopes her mind would stay that way too.
Item one, do something about her broken phone. It wasn’t the first to come a cropper in the line of duty, especially in recent years—she couldn’t help but miss the bloody great brick of a phone she’d had back in the old days, a pain to lug about but not nearly so fragile. At least she still had all the numbers written down on paper; no doubt the two children she called constables would be hopelessly at sea if ever they lost track of their precious gadgets.
Pierce let out a slow sigh at the thought. She hadn’t worked with either of them long, but they both seemed like good kids. She didn’t
want
to believe that one of them might be a spy in her department, but she knew she had to stay wary of the possibility. The only people she could trust now were those outside of the police completely.
Even if that was more by misfortune than by choice. She paused as she came to the Gs in her address book. Leo Grey. Should she update him on the latest wrinkle in their investigation? It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do... and, yet somehow she thought it might make her feel better to have a conversation with someone where she could put all her cards on the table.
She picked up the landline and dialled Leo’s number.
“Hello?” His wife answered the phone on the second ring, catching Pierce slightly unprepared.
“Er, hi, this is Claire Pierce from the RCU. Is Leo there?”
“No, he’s not,” she said. She sounded faintly worried, which put Pierce on alert. “Is he working on something for you? I’ve been trying to get hold of him all day, but his phone’s switched off.” She tutted a little at her own concern. “Oh, I know I shouldn’t fuss, and I’m sure it’s important... It’s just that he was out half the night last night as well, and I don’t want him to push himself too hard doing ten times the work you even asked him for, you know? He’s really not recovered enough to drive himself like this.”
It was probably more a general outpouring of worries to a sympathetic ear than anything aimed at Pierce specifically, but it still hit her like an accusation. “I did ask him to look into a few things for me,” she admitted, “but there’s no reason for him to be burning the midnight oil over it.” Especially when their investigation seemed to have hit a dead end with the Hardison Group site—a site that she was prepared to bet Leo was sitting outside right now, keeping up a lonely, dangerous surveillance.
“Look, I might have an idea where he’s taken himself off to,” she said. “I need to speak to him anyway, so I’ll have a word, tell him to take a break. It’s really not that urgent.” Not when there was no obvious way to proceed from here.
“Could you?” The gratitude in his wife’s voice only made her feel worse. “It’s just that it’s difficult coming from me, you know? I don’t want to feel like I’m nagging, but you know how stubborn he is.”
“I do,” she said.
What his wife didn’t know was that it could already have got him into much bigger trouble than just setting back his recovery from his injuries.
I
T TOOK
P
IERCE
several wrong turns to find her way back to the Hardison site; she was grateful her own car was still being examined for evidence back at the barn so she was driving one no one would find familiar. It still felt reckless to be returning this soon, and she drove past several more turns before parking to return on foot. She saw no other cars along the way; if Leo was here, he’d either brought in a third party to drop him off or hiked further than he probably should with his injured leg. Both options struck her as unnecessarily reckless.
Of course, maybe she was wrong, and he hadn’t come here at all.
Or maybe he’d already been caught. Pierce cursed to herself. She’d brought him in on this mess so that she wouldn’t have to keep going out on a limb all by herself, with no one knowing where she’d gone or why. It hadn’t been part of the plan for Leo to start doing the same thing.
She picked her way cautiously across the fields towards the Hardison building. In the dimming light, she could just about make out the glint of the high metal fence. There was no way Leo would have been able to get past that level of security. But if he’d set up surveillance on the place, then where would he be? She headed towards a small copse of trees beside the access road to the site, the only obvious source of cover around.
Too obvious? As she approached, she thought she saw a moving shadow shift beneath trees, and she hesitated. If it wasn’t Leo, but one of Maitland’s people...
Then she was already caught. She stepped backwards, reaching for her warrant card, as a dark shape emerged from under the trees.
On four legs rather than two. Shit, shit, shit. Pierce turned to run, but the big dog leapt after her, eerily silent as it bounded past her and herded her back towards the trees. In the face of gaping mastiff jaws that could crush her bones, she raised her hands and backed down, mind ticking away furiously. Malodorant spray—had she grabbed another canister after discharging hers in the scuffle at the park? Shit, she didn’t think she had. She had the silver cuffs, which would neutralise the pelt, but she’d never get them on the shifter while it was in dog form.