Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (19 page)

“Hmm?” Freeman glanced back at her.

“Nothing useful or informative,” Pierce said, shaking her head. She ran a hand back over her hair; it hardly seemed worth putting her hood back up when she was this drenched already. “You should get yourself cleaned up and head home,” she advised. “Paperwork can wait until we’ve got full details from the scene.” She drew a fortifying breath as they reached the door. “Meanwhile, I’ll go and see what’s got his nibs’s knickers in a knot.”

Whoops, so much for thoughts of setting a good example for the newbies. Freeman just flashed her a momentary grin, though. Smart girl. Right attitude. She’d go far.

Assuming she didn’t end up dying an ugly early death, like so many other young officers who’d had the misfortune to get mixed up in RCU work. Didn’t seem fair sometimes that Pierce was the one who kept on trucking while the youngsters fell like dominos around her, but that was the way it went sometimes: you had to be lucky for long enough to learn the art of survival. Not everyone could be that lucky.

Pierce sighed, and went to face the music.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
HE BOLLOCKING ABOUT
the operation from Superintendent Snow went about as well as she could have expected, which was to say not very.

“This operation was entirely mishandled from the start,” he said, peering at her sternly through his narrow glasses. He didn’t pace the way Palmer had when he was agitated, but stayed planted behind his desk where he could give her a supercilious look like a disapproving headmaster. “Rushed, shoddily put together—the local forces had no idea what they were getting into!”

“Neither did we, sir,” Pierce said wearily.

“All the more reason there should have been planning, consultation—why wasn’t this operation cleared with me?”

“Sir, it was just an exploratory search operation, initially,” she said. “We were following up on some disturbed graves. There was no way to be certain that the ritual scene was even in the area, or to think that it might pose a danger to police personnel. The first scene in Bingley was excavated with no harm to the forensics team.”

“Yes, until your unit came along and purposely called forth a supernatural effect that resulted in multiple injuries!” he snapped.

Which had been Dawson’s bloody stupid idea, but as DCI in charge she couldn’t pass blame down the command chain, no matter how richly it was deserved.

“That was... a miscalculation,” she agreed. She wasn’t going to say it had been hers. “But nothing like that was attempted at the Silsden site. We’re still working to ascertain how PCSO Davenport came to be possessed.” Or at least they had been before he’d had her unceremoniously yanked away from the scene.

“And you used PCSOs for this!” Snow threw up his hands. “The media’s already been up in arms about them taking on too many police duties in place of regular constables. When it emerges that they were deployed in an operation that ended in multiple deaths...”

That wouldn’t have been Pierce’s first concern when it came to the tragic deaths of two young men, whatever their roles. She pressed her lips together. The only self-defence that she had here was not to budge an inch. “I contacted the officer in charge of the local police,” she said. “They supplied me with the personnel that they felt would be adequate for the search.”

Bollocks, of course: at best they’d provided as many as their overstretched force could spare, at worst as few as they could get away with, but what was the point of stating as much on the record? The locals couldn’t be blamed for not wasting more personnel on a needle in the haystack search, and it was their people who’d suffered for it. Just a miserable fuck-up of a situation that couldn’t be laid at anybody’s door—but of course, the people who dissected such things after the fact never wanted to hear that as an answer.

“Well, don’t think that’s going to stop them blaming us for this!” Snow said. “There’s already been a history of complaints from other departments about the RCU using their personnel for tasks they haven’t trained for. This is only going to add fuel to that fire.”

Nobody
was trained for the kind of unpredictable situations that Ritual Crime cases dealt with, but if he thought it was a bad idea to keep relying on outside personnel, she wasn’t going to disagree. If Davenport had been one of hers, could he have avoided whatever mistake had led to him becoming possessed?

“Sir, I know it’s not an ideal situation to rely so heavily on outside forces,” she said. “But without more dedicated RCU personnel—”

He pressed his lips into a thin tight line. “This is hardly the time to campaign for a greater departmental budget,” he said. It seemed like the
exact
time to her, in all frankness, but for some inexplicable reason the political entities that played with their livelihoods seemed to view extra funding as an incentive for success rather than a remedy for shortfalls. The Catch-22 of target-setting: earn your cash injection by first proving that you could do without it.

“Sir... this was not a situation that could have been foreseen,” she said tiredly. “It’s a terrible tragedy. People have died. But everybody involved was doing the best they could with the information and resources that they had available.”

Snow sat forward in his chair to hold her gaze. “Then
do better
,” he said. “This is not the first police operation that’s ended with casualties on your watch, and I can’t allow your unit to just keep staggering from one disaster to the next without the slightest thing to show for it. I expect to see some results on your cases very soon, or we will have to think very seriously about a change of leadership.”

Pierce didn’t trust herself to make any remark in response, so instead she just turned on her heel to go.

“And one more thing,” he added, before she could leave. “I understand that there’s a group in the car park who are refusing to leave until they get the RCU’s attention. Why haven’t they been dealt with?”

“They’re just your average neighbourhood cranks,” she said. “Protesting things that don’t have anything to do with the police. They’ll probably have given up by morning.”

The way things were going right now, it was tempting to do the same.

P
IERCE SLEPT POORLY
that night; in spite of all words to the contrary, she couldn’t help but keep turning over thoughts of all the things she might have done to ensure matters turned out differently. Joined up with the dog team herself, for a start; chosen to reduce the number of search teams rather than let anyone go out without an RCU officer to accompany them. Maybe if she’d been there she could have made a difference.

Or maybe she’d have been caught unawares like Collins and poor Winters, just another name on the casualty list. The worst part was the fact that there was no way to know, only endless second thoughts to chase around.

She woke in the morning feeling every one of her years, not to mention all the war wounds from the last few days. Too much running, and definitely too many scuffles with people who were younger and stronger. DCI wasn’t supposed to be this much of a front-line job, but in the RCU it came with all the management responsibilities and not nearly enough junior officers to delegate the scut work to.

If she’d had more people, then maybe yesterday...

But there she was, going back down that same futile path again. Ugly as yesterday had been, she had to put it out of her mind and focus on the next job.

The half-arsed make-up patch job to cover the bruises blossoming on her neck and her jaw—never one of her greatest skills, but necessary if she was going to be interacting with the public—made her later than she’d planned to be. And that wasn’t the only problem. When she arrived at the station, she saw that the druids hadn’t given up as hoped, but had set themselves up a proper encampment, placards and banners everywhere.

They weren’t the worst of it. Pierce grimaced as she spotted a news van parked on the corner, a woman with a vaguely familiar hairdo doing a piece to camera in front of the station’s main doors. She could see several other cameras taking shots of the protestors, and no doubt some of the milling crowd were journalists.

The sad thing was that them being here to cover the protest was probably the
best
case scenario.

She parked her own car across the road from the station car park, in defiance of the stern edicts of several circulated memos. With luck, and her lack of a uniform, she might be able to slip around the side unnoticed. Most people still defaulted to expecting to see men when they were looking for high-ranking police.

Unfortunately, luck wasn’t with her, while a journalist who’d covered RCU business before apparently was. “DCI Pierce!” a brash voice called out as she attempted to nonchalantly slip past, and then the pack descended.

“DCI Pierce! DCI Pierce!” A microphone was thrust into her face. “Can you comment on the RCU’s involvement in the deaths of two police officers in Silsden last night?”

“DCI Pierce! Is it true that last night’s deaths are connected to the skulls that were excavated in Bingley?”

“Does the RCU accept any responsibility for the suicide of the necromancer Martin Vyner?”

She hated this shit when it came in press conference form, and the ambush version was even worse. “I can’t comment on the details of any ongoing investigations,” she said, holding up a hand as she strode past. And they shouldn’t
have
those details to be quizzing her about. How had the press connected the dots so fast? A leak from any one of the crime scenes was perfectly plausible, but multiple spills at once started to seem like enemy action. Was someone deliberately feeding information to the press? That was all they bloody needed.

The journalists chased her across the car park, the cameras swinging to follow. “Will there be an internal investigation?” someone demanded.

“Does the RCU routinely employ necromancers?”

“DCI Pierce! DCI Pierce!”

Apparently the words ‘can’t comment’ didn’t translate well, since they didn’t stop baying questions until the doors were closed behind her. Then, giving up on her, they rapidly turned their attentions back to the group of druid protestors, who were doing their best to get their signs into every photo, aided and abetted by the cameramen. Pierce sensed news stories tenuously stitching the unrelated protest into a tale of widespread unhappiness with the RCU in her near future.

And a headache. She rubbed her temples. The headache was here already.

“How long have the hyenas been out there?” she asked Jill, on desk duty again.

“Since first thing,” she said with a grimace. “The Superintendent’s livid.”

“
Quelle surprise.
Oh, well, don’t tell him that I’m here, would you?” Snow would probably want to speak with her soon enough regardless, but with any luck there would be a lead or a new case that got her out of the office before he had a chance. She didn’t fancy starting the day with a louder, faster remix of last night’s bollocking.

Jill tapped the side of her nose confidentially. “I was regrettably distracted when you came in,” she said.

“Very regrettable,” Pierce said. “You should be careful with that. Anybody could sneak up the stairs while you weren’t paying attention.” She proceeded to do just that.

The rest of her team had beaten her to the office, all looking tired but present and correct. She stuck her head in for long enough to confirm that nothing more of significance had happened at the woods after she’d left, then moved along to Magical Analysis.

“New skulls. Anything?” she asked Jenny, leaning in through the doorway of her office.

Jenny shook her head. “Preliminaries suggest they’re the same as the others, and after the last one exploded...”

“Kid gloves?” she presumed.

“And a blast shield.” She shrugged. “You might have better luck going through regular forensics, I’m afraid—looks like mixing any magic with the existing enchantments is too chancy, so there’s really not much more that we can do.”

Pierce pressed her lips together unhappily. “I’m not sure we have that kind of time,” she said. “According to Cliff, the clock is ticking: D-Day in three days.”

Jenny gave her an apologetic grimace. “I’m studying the bone fragments from yesterday,” she offered. “
Carefully
. So far nothing’s gone boom, but it hasn’t got us anywhere either.” She shook her head. “If you need results fast, I don’t think they’re going to be coming from us.”