Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (5 page)

“Disclaimers duly noted,” she said, but she could feel the buzz of vindication nonetheless. Maybe it wasn’t outright
proof
that Sebastian had still been alive and making pelts after his October arrest and supposed death, but it was certainly cause for suspicion—especially when the official story stunk to high heaven. “It’s a start, at least.”

“A good lawyer would rip it to pieces as evidence, and rightfully so,” Cliff warned.

Pierce grimaced. “We’re a long way from getting this in front of a lawyer,” she said. Not when it came to the kind of case where government groups had permission to walk in and seize her evidence, prisoners died in too-convenient accidents, and the skinbinder she was chasing had the capability to turn murder victims into skin-suits for impostors to wear.

“Keep this safe,” she told Cliff, handing the photographs back. “The people who busted Sebastian out of his cell aren’t the kind to respect due process.”

But now she had a loose thread to begin tugging on.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HOUGHTS OF CONSPIRACIES
would have to keep, with a major murder investigation in the pipeline. Pierce headed back into the office to see what Eddie had dug up on the Valentine Vampire. “All right, constable,” she said, grabbing the nearest chair that wasn’t buried in files, “refresh my memory.”

He looked a little flustered as he rifled back through his notebook, but that was his default response to being put on the spot; he seemed to have his facts together as he cleared his throat and began.

“Erm, the first wave of murders took place between February fifth and twenty-first, 1987. Three victims: all white males, aged between twenty-one and twenty-six. Two were members of sports clubs and one was a marathon runner. The bodies were left posed in or near graveyards across South and West Yorkshire. All victims showed numerous ritualised cuts across the face and upper body, and identical puncture wounds at the base of the neck, which combined with the discovery of the second victim on February fourteenth led the media to come up with the name the Valentine Vampire.”

Her disdain for the name must have showed, because he cleared his throat and hastened on. “Er, there were no leads in the initial investigation, but the murders were assumed to have stopped until the body of Neil Sherrington was found in a graveyard near Horncastle on February third, 1994. It wasn’t immediately linked to the Valentine Vampire murders of the ’eighties until a second body was found in Grimsby a week later. Again there were three victims, all following the same profile. The third body was left at the same location as the first, shortly after the police were pulled out of the area.”

“Cocky sods,” Pierce said. And neither of those sites were all that far from today’s body near Newark-on-Trent. Maybe the killer was playing the same trick again, circling back to old haunts once the heat was off.

“Yes, guv,” Eddie said with a dutiful nod, and checked his notes again. “Erm, the third set of murders began with the discovery of the body of Andrew Cole near Rotherham on February sixth, 2001. Nine days later the killers dumped the body of a second victim in Hemsworth, but this time there was an alleged witness, a man called Alan Waite who claimed to have been out looking for his lost wallet after he’d dropped it on the way home from the pub. He was briefly treated as a suspect, but found to have been out of the country at the time of the 1994 murders. Questioned by...” He leaned over to consult one of the opened files. “DI Raymond Carlisle and Sergeant... er, you, guv,” he said with a blink.

Pierce gave a terse nod, vaguely remembering the interview, though the man himself was a faded ghost in her memory. She wanted to say middle-aged, overweight, balding... but how much of that was recollection, and how much just her mind sketching in details borrowed from a thousand others like him she’d interviewed in her career?

“He gave us a description of the vehicle used to dump the bodies,” she said. “But he also gave us a load of complete guff about the people driving it.” What had started out as a halfway-plausible description of a woman or maybe a long-haired man driving and a bald man in the passenger seat had quickly swollen with ‘remembered’ details until the woman was beautiful and pale as death and the passenger could have starred in
Nosferatu
. By the time the media got hold of him, Waite was prepared to swear he’d witnessed the Nosferatu lookalike restored to strength by drinking blood from the corpse.

After that it had been impossible to quash the assumption the killer was a real vampire—especially with DI Carlisle all too eager for an excuse for why the police hadn’t managed to make any arrests yet.

Eddie clearly had enough sense to skip over the details of Waite’s dubious witness statement. “The police received a tipoff about the van?” he said.

Pierce nodded. “Anonymous female caller claimed to have seen it coming and going from a boarded-up house in York, and that the people living there had tried to recruit her into their cult. Based on her information, Carlisle believed that the cult leader would be confined to the house in daylight hours, and organised a dawn raid.”

“But they weren’t there?” he said.

“Nope,” Pierce said grimly. She hadn’t been either—and she couldn’t help but think that maybe, if Carlisle hadn’t considered her surplus to requirements, she might have realised it was all about to go horribly wrong... “Firearms went in and found the place empty except for a coffin in the basement. When they opened the lid, it blew up in their faces. One officer was killed and two injured. The whole thing was probably a setup from the start—we found the third body in a graveyard fifty miles away a couple of hours later. It must have been dumped there the night before the raid.”

About as comprehensive a cock-up as you could ask for.

“One of the officer’s statements mentions a possible suspect at the scene of the raid,” Eddie said, consulting his files.

“Oh?” Pierce frowned a little, racking her memory, but if she’d ever been informed of that detail she’d forgotten it since.

He peered at the page again as if he might have been mistaken. “Yes, um, Firearms Officer Leonard Grey—”

“Leo Grey?” That caused her head to snap up. “He was part of the raid?”

“Er, yes, guv.” He turned the folder to show her the statement sheet. “Is that significant?”

Pierce glanced at the signature, and then the written statement above it. A terse summation of events, much as she might expect from the man. “Not directly,” she said. “But I know him. He’s got good instincts.” He’d
had
good instincts, she supposed; he was retired now, another victim of the clusterfuck of a case that had been their pursuit of Sebastian. “Go on,” she told Eddie with a nod.

He swallowed. “Um... there’s not much here, guv,” he admitted. “According to Grey’s statement, he was stationed outside the building in case of attempted escapes, and spotted a young woman watching from the park across the street who he considered to be acting suspiciously.” He flipped through a couple more pages inside the folder. “I don’t see any evidence that it was followed up.”

Meaning that it might have turned out to be nothing—or just gone ignored in the chaos of the disastrous raid. No way to ask DI Carlisle about it now: he’d died of a heart attack five or six years back. Depressing, how many of her former colleagues who’d managed to actually make it out of the job alive were now dropping like flies as time caught up.

But Leo was still around, even if he was retired. Pierce checked her watch and stood. “Right,” she said. “I’m going to see if I can talk to Leo Grey. Maybe he remembers some details about that raid that didn’t make the reports.”

And even if he didn’t, she still owed him a visit that she’d been putting off for far too long.

L
EO WAS MORE
than willing to meet with her immediately—in fact, his eagerness at the prospect of being involved in police work made her feel guilty that her pretext for seeing him was such a long shot. Enforced retirement had to chafe for a man only in his forties who’d kept himself in good shape before he’d been injured. Pierce hadn’t seen him since the hospital, but with the state that he’d been in back then, she doubted he could be back up to full strength barely four months later.

The address that he directed her to was a modest terraced house in a village on the edge of the Dales. After much circling of the narrow streets in search of somewhere to legally park, she made her way back on foot and pressed the bell.

The door was opened by a small woman in blue jeans and a knitted cardigan: Leo’s wife, whose name unfortunately currently escaped her. Ruth? Rose? Something like that. Pierce had only met her briefly at the hospital, though she’d made a good impression, a calm, pragmatic woman who seemed well-suited to her equally phlegmatic husband.

“DCI Pierce,” she said, with a warm smile. “Leo said you were on your way. You’re looking well.”

That was questionable after the day she’d had, but she supposed that when Rose—she was nearly positive it was Rose—had seen her last she’d been newly released from her shoulder surgery and still half-stoned on painkillers.

“Sorry to butt in on you at such short notice,” she said. Often a bit of a social wobble adjusting to the half-forgotten fact that other people had families and lives outside of police work. “I shouldn’t take up too much of his time.”

“Oh, do,” maybe-Rose said cheerfully, stepping back to let her in and gesturing her down the narrow hallway. “He’ll be delighted to have something to do. He’s never been much of a one for being cooped up around the house. Leave him alone for five minutes and he’s putting up shelves and talking about re-tiling the bathroom, and never mind that he’s still supposed to be resting that leg.”

On their last case together Leo had taken a brutal battering from a shapeshifter in a chimaera pelt, an unholy hybrid patchwork of animal skins. He’d come away with an ugly laundry list of injuries: broken ribs, a shattered kneecap, claw wounds through the muscle of his thigh, and probably worst of all to a man accustomed to being steady-fingered on the trigger, a nasty crushing injury to his right arm and hand that had left him with nerve damage.

Pierce was guiltily aware that she hadn’t been keeping up with his recovery as well as she should. He was a taciturn man at the best of times, and a few brief phone calls hadn’t told her much about his medical condition: the fact that his status had gone from medical leave to early retirement said more than anything he’d shared directly.

Maybe-Rose led her through to the front room, a warmly cosy sort of space with dark wooden furniture, alcoves full of books and CDs, and a brown leather suite. Leo himself was sitting in one of the armchairs, and she couldn’t help but think that he looked older and more worn than she remembered. He’d always had an ageless sort of quality, craggy features and sandy blond hair that hid the signs of grey, but where he’d always been lean he now just looked stretched thin, the angles of his face etched more sharply, like a portrait repainted by a less forgiving artist.

It was disconcerting to see him in casual clothes instead of his ever-present uniform and tac vest; his chinos and grey jumper were somehow even more of an upset than the hospital gown Pierce had last seen him in. She couldn’t help but notice a cane tucked beside the chair.

The gravelly voice, though, was still the same as ever. “Claire,” he said with a curt nod, about as effusive a greeting as she ever got from him.

His wife leaned over to give him a brief kiss on the cheek. “Right, I’m off to Lucy’s,” she said. “I’ll have my mobile with me, so call me if you need anything, otherwise I’ll be home about nine.” She headed out, and Pierce and Leo sat in slightly awkward silence for a moment as they listened to the sounds of her departure, neither of them much inclined to small talk.

“So,” Leo said, sitting forward once she’d gone. “You need my help on a case?” He looked newly alert, like a bloodhound perking up at the hint of a fresh scent, and she felt bad that she had so little to offer him.

“Looks like the Valentine Vampire might be back to his old tricks,” she said. “You were at the raid in York in 2001, right?”

Leo nodded; no doubt he had little trouble calling the case to mind after it had gone so badly. “Yeah, but there’s not much to tell,” he said. “Suspects had already cleaned out before we got there, and left the place wired to blow. Killed Bill Winston from my unit—I wasn’t even in the building at the time.”