Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (11 page)

So far all she had was evidence of a potential break-in. If the intruder was still in the building—and the fact they’d left that device behind in the lock pointed to yes—seconds might count. She should assess the situation first before she called for backup.

And thus also handily avoid looking a complete tit if this was just some idiot student showing off their hacking skills without thinking of the consequences.

It could be that. It could just be a bog standard break-in, thieves after whatever could be lifted from an out-of-the-way corner of the campus. But her instincts were ticking like a car indicator, and she took the stairs at speed, unwilling to be trapped inside the slow, noisy lift. She’d be a sitting duck if anyone was waiting outside of the doors.

The lights were on, but the building felt empty; that subtle quality to the silence that rang differently from a space that only seemed quiet because your brain was tuning out the background noise. Pierce was hyper-aware of the sound of her feet on the stairs, the faint jangle of car keys in her pocket before she closed her fist around them to stifle the sound. She reached the fire door at the top and peered out through the narrow pane of safety glass. The hallway looked clear at first glance.

She eased the door open and then closed it again behind her, guiding it to rather than risking a betraying slam. The corridor beyond was carpeted: easier to move with stealth, but that applied to others just as much as her. She glanced into each doorway as she passed, alert for shadows.

A row of lecture theatres, all apparently unoccupied. Beyond them were staff offices, these with solid wooden doors that had no windows to peek through. Her stomach tensed as she approached Doctor Moss’s door. She didn’t try knocking this time, but grasped the handle to test it with slow care.

It turned. Abandoning stealth, Pierce threw the door open and took in the room in a rapid glance.

The office that she’d been in just this morning, but now thrown into wild disarray. Books and papers tossed about, too thoroughly for casual vandalism. The wheeled chair shoved back into a far corner—and Doctor Moss slumped in it, a bloody cut visible on her forehead.

Crouched before her was a black-clad figure in a hoodie, caught in the act of marking out a ritual circle on the floor, candles scattered on the carpet. At the sound of Pierce’s intrusion, he spun around, and she saw that his mouth and nose were covered by a scarf so she could see no more than a strip around his eyes.

“Police!” she barked, but the man didn’t falter, hurling the object in his gloved right hand towards her face. She flinched and threw her arm up to defend her eyes before she registered that it was just a pen. He snatched something else up from the floor—a lighter, she realised as he flicked it on—and swept it across the wicks of the candles lying at his feet.

They went up as if they were soaked in petrol.

Probably were, she realised, or some equivalent, her nose picking up on the chemical scent too late to be useful. A hastily faked magic circle, candles soaked with accelerant... the ingredients for arson disguised as a ritual gone wrong.

That plan might be out of the window with Pierce’s arrival, but it seemed that the would-be assassin was willing to leave collateral damage. He grabbed the table lamp from the edge of the desk and smashed out at her with the weighed base. She blocked the blow with her elbow and grabbed his arm to try and wrestle it away, cursing as the move pulled on her weak shoulder.

The assassin let go of the lamp and cracked her in the jaw with the elbow of his other arm, sending her staggering backwards. He slammed her back against the bookshelves on the opposite wall and forced his way out past her through the door. Pierce made a lunge for him, but her fingers only snagged the back of his hood, yanking it down before he twisted out of her grip.

The momentary glimpse it bought her told her next to nothing: white male with short brown hair, his face still mostly hidden by the wrapped scarf as she glimpsed it in profile. He ran on out into the corridor.

Pierce pushed away from the bookshelves and gave chase, but it only took half a dozen paces to know she wouldn’t catch up. Turning back to the office door, she could already see the smoke beginning to form a haze in the air. The fire alarms had caught on as well, electronic wails breaking out.

And Moss was still inside.
Shit
. Pierce almost ran back in before her eyes fell on a fire extinguisher in the corridor. She darted across to grab that instead. Foam, thank fuck, not just water; she yanked it off the wall and charged back to Moss’s office.

The fire was already spreading at an alarming rate, spilling across the half-drawn lines of the fake ritual circle. Through the smoke of stinking carpet fumes, she could see Doctor Moss weakly stirring in her chair, obviously dazed even without the choking smoke.

Pierce tore the plastic tag from the extinguisher and aimed the hose, wincing as the shift to supporting the thing by its handles put all the weight on her bad arm. She struggled to hold it steady as it spewed foam over the twisted mess of half-melted candles and burning carpet.

“Can you move?” she shouted to Doctor Moss. There might have been some coughed words in response, but the fact she couldn’t make them out didn’t bode well for the answer.

The fire was shrinking, but Pierce wasn’t sure there was enough foam in the extinguisher’s tank to fully smother it. Regulation said at this point it was the fire brigade’s job, and not to put herself in danger trying to assist.

Maybe so, but regulation expected fire and police to be responding to the same 999 call, not her on-scene with them minutes away. Making split second decisions in the field wasn’t always about what was smartest or safest—it was about the choice you knew you’d have to live with.

Still spraying the hose back and forth over the fire, Pierce skirted closer than she should around the edge of it, feeling the heat bake her skin and coughing in the smoke. She tried to call out to Doctor Moss again, but the words became a wheeze.

Moss was struggling to get up, but she needed help, and Pierce couldn’t assist her and keep aiming the hose. The extinguisher felt like it must be near empty, so she let the hose drop and hauled the lecturer from her chair, unable to take the time to be gentle. The older woman seemed dazed, but she was still awake, and managed to grab hold of Pierce in turn.

Pierce swung back to face the remains of the smothered fire, and saw that it wasn’t out yet. “Shit!” She raised the extinguisher for one last burst of foam, blasting the flames back towards the desk side of the room as best she could. Then she let it fall to the floor and charged across the office, pulling Moss with her. Her feet almost skidded on the foam-slick carpet, but she made it across and shoved Moss out into the corridor.

“We need to get to the stairs!” she barked, turning to slam the office door behind them. Maybe that last blast of foam had killed the fire, maybe it hadn’t; either way they’d be fools to stick around here and find out. Doctor Moss needed medical attention, and Pierce was feeling faintly light-headed herself as she led the lecturer at a staggering dash towards the stairway. Fumes or just the adrenaline rush?

“My books...” Doctor Moss said feebly, turning partway back towards the office. Not just lack of priorities, Pierce knew—some of those occult works were doubtless irreplaceable.

Still less valuable than human lives.

“The fire brigade’s coming,” she offered as a sop. Prophetic: as they pushed through the door into the stairway, she heard the sound of sirens in the distance. They descended the staircase, Doctor Moss leaning on her with a dizzy groan. She looked pale, the wound on her forehead starkly drawn.

As they pushed out through the fire exit, fresh alarms joining the cacophony, Pierce drew in a great gulping breath of air. The cold evening hit like a slap, ice water thrown on skin that still felt scorched. It took a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness dotted with artificial lights.

A small crowd of students had gathered to gawk at the smoking window, teenage appetite for spectacle overriding common sense. “Police! Back up, back up,” she yelled at them. “Get away from the burning building!” She didn’t think it would go up, hoped that she’d smothered the blaze well enough that it wouldn’t even burn out the office, but only idiots would take that sort of thing for granted.

She helped Doctor Moss to sit down on the grass and looked around for anyone who looked like campus security or a paramedic. As she started to straighten up, Moss tugged on her trouser leg—not in immediate medical distress, she realised after a heart-dropping moment, but trying to communicate something. Pierce crouched down to speak to her. “Don’t try to talk,” she said.

But Moss sucked in a gasping breath, persisting stubbornly though her voice was a croak. “The ritual. I was researching...”

“I know.” Doubtless the photos and any notes Moss had made had been the first things to be disposed of, but that wasn’t a major concern right now.

Moss shook her head, insistent. “The ritual,” she repeated. “More skulls. More sites. Part of a greater d-design...” She broke down coughing, and Pierce patted her back uncertainly, not confident that thumping would help rather than harm.

“Okay,” she said. “All right. Don’t try to talk now.” The details could wait until a time when Moss didn’t look like she was on the verge of keeling over. As Pierce straightened up, she could see blue flashing lights. “All right. Help’s coming.”

The immediate crisis seemed to be over, but a grim feeling still gripped her stomach like a clenching fist. First Vyner killed, now this. Whatever they’d stumbled over in that field, it was big. Big enough for whoever was behind it to keep tabs on the police investigation, and deal professionally with anyone who knew too much.

And if Moss was right that the site that they’d found was only one part of a greater ritual at work, then this could well be something far nastier than they’d guessed.

A
FTER A QUICK
check-over by the paramedics, Doctor Moss was taken to the nearest hospital, while Pierce stayed behind at the site to coordinate with the local emergency services. The fire brigade went up, and came back down, rather anticlimactically: it seemed she’d more or less done the job of containing the fire, and hopefully at least some of the rare texts in Doctor Moss’s office would be recoverable.

If Pierce hadn’t decided to drop by with the photos from Vyner’s house this evening, they wouldn’t have been so lucky. It seemed that Doctor Moss had been the only one still working after hours, and she doubted very much that anyone would have noticed anything amiss until the building was ablaze.

The device that had been used to override the lock had vanished with the man who’d used it; she should have thought to take it as evidence before she’d entered the building. The local police would dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s when it came to processing the office for trace evidence and checking campus CCTV, but she already suspected they’d find nothing. The hooded assassin had been too professional to leave any obvious trail.

Once she’d given her statement of events to anyone who needed to know, there was little else useful that Pierce could do here. Exhausted, aching and chilled, she trudged back to her car and called in to the RCU to report the incident.

The northern RCU team was too small to be worth further subdividing with round-the-clock shifts; in the absence of urgent time-sensitive cases, they worked a theoretical—if often extended—eight hours and then left it to dispatch to determine whether anything was urgent enough to recall them to duty. Aside from the semi-regular bollockings about the amount of overtime her officers inevitably drew, it worked about as well as any other system for covering half the country’s ritual crime cases with only a handful of staff.

So with Deepan unlikely to have stayed more than an hour or so, she was expecting the office to be empty when she called in, and it threw her off-balance to be put through to Dawson. “What are you doing working this late?” She didn’t recall authorising anything that should have taken him this long.

“Just dropped back in to write up a report,” he said. “Got word back from the Vyner post-mortem. Definitely murder dressed up as a suicide.”

As a confirmation of earlier assumptions, it didn’t really need him to rush back into work to deal with, but she could charitably assume that despite the continued brusque tone, Vyner’s death was eating away at Dawson more than he cared to show.

Or he could be making another attempt to do an end run around her authority and pursue the case however he pleased.

Or
he could be flat out lying to her, to cover some less legitimate reason to be at the office on his own. Suspicions prickled, but she was too damn tired to sort conspiracy theories from reasonable doubt. She let it pass.

“I’ve got an attempted homicide here that may be the same attacker,” she said instead. “Doctor Anne C. Moss, lecturer in occult studies—I gave her some photos of the ritual skull arrangement to research. Came back this evening, and caught the perpetrator in the act of setting the scene to have her killed in a seemingly accidental fire. White male, brown hair, average height, probably under forty...” She shook her head, aware it was so generic it could hardly be termed a description. “Had his face covered by a hood and scarf, so I didn’t see much of him. I doubt the CCTV got a good picture, either.”