Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (21 page)

She left Deepan and Taylor to await the arrival of forensics and headed back to the station on her own. She could report this to the superintendent as a win, but she doubted it would be enough of one for him. Snow struck her as a man who didn’t much like being left with inconvenient loose ends.

Like, for instance, those bloody druids. Their tents were still taking up one end of the station car park, and she could swear the group had even gained in number, probably bolstered by the excitement of getting some media attention for their cause. At least the journalists had given up and gone by now, though it was too much to hope the lack of police statement would stop them from running with what they already had.

And what they had was far more than they should. She’d like to know who’d spilled the beans, but the last thing they needed was to worsen their relations with the local police still further by throwing accusations around. Maybe someone was trying to drop the RCU in it for getting their officers hurt and killed—unprofessional as hell, but she couldn’t exactly blame them for being angry. She and her team had fucked up at both of the skull scenes, and the fact she couldn’t really see how it could have been avoided at Silsden didn’t make for that much consolation.

Done was done. Couldn’t plug a leak that had already done its leaking—best to just let it go, and hope like hell it didn’t prove to be ongoing. This case was enough of a disaster already without having every detail splashed across the newspapers.

Deciding reporting their partial success to Snow could wait until he called her in to speak to him, she headed back up to the RCU office. Freeman looked up from her computer as she came in. “Find anything at the chapel site, Guv?” she asked.

“We recovered the artefacts, but the thieves got away,” Pierce said.

“Oh, well, that’s... sort of good?” Freeman offered uncertainly.

“‘Sort of good’ about sums it up,” she said, dropping into her seat with a sigh. She logged back in and squinted warily at the horror that was her inbox. Only a few things flagged ‘urgent,’ at least, none of which looked like they really were. “Any trouble with the media?” she asked. They might have disappeared from the doorstep, but that probably only meant they’d moved on to trying their luck with the phones.

“We had a bunch of calls this morning, but Inspector Dawson talked to them in the end,” Freeman said.

Oh, God, that didn’t bode well. Pierce could feel the headache settling over her temples. “Dawson talked to them? What did he say?”

Freeman’s forehead wrinkled with concern, as if she thought it should have been her job to corral her idiot superior. “Er... just reassurances, mostly,” she said. “The RCU is on the case, we expect to have results very soon.”

Yes, definitely a tension headache. “Oh, well, that’s just bloody wonderful,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “You tell the media ‘soon,’ they take it as licence to ring you up every fifteen minutes and demand to know why you haven’t solved the case yet.” She glanced around. “Where’s Dawson now?”

Freeman still had that slightly cringing look, as if she thought any unwanted news she had to report might reflect back on her. “He went to meet an informant. Someone called saying they wanted to speak to us about the skull case, but it had to be in person.”

“And he went, without speaking to me?” She might have to downgrade her opinion of the man to something stronger than ‘bull-headed idiot.’

Freeman grimaced apologetically. “I asked if I should inform you, but he said it wasn’t necessary.”

Then perhaps she should have disregarded that... but Pierce bit back any urge to say as much. Giving that kind of order could lead nowhere good, no matter how much she might personally dislike Dawson’s presence in her chain of command. Let Freeman learn to judge for herself when she should or shouldn’t listen to a superior being a prat.

“Let me guess, he didn’t take any backup with him either.” She didn’t wait for the predictable answer to that. “How long ago did he leave?”

“The meet was set up for one o’clock, but he left early so he could keep a lookout for the bloke arriving.”

Pierce checked her watch. Still time to catch up to him, maybe, if it was somewhere close. “Did he say where he went?”

“Yeah, I made a note.” Freeman rolled her chair across to snag a Post-it from where it was stuck to the side of the cabinet.

“Good.” At least someone round here was doing their job. Pierce stood up from her chair, any hopes of a brief break forgotten. “All right, let’s go.”

The informant had asked to meet Dawson round the back of an industrial estate: somewhere with enough traffic that cars wouldn’t draw attention, but with secluded corners where they could talk unobserved. A logical enough call, but it still made Pierce twitchy; maybe it was just the fact her last meeting in a similar location had ended in attempted murder, but she didn’t have a good feeling about this.

She tried to call Dawson on his mobile as Freeman drove, but it was switched off. She doubted if he’d have his radio on him: a burst of police chatter could easily spook a source wary of being seen talking to them.

Which meant that he was incommunicado: perhaps a necessary evil, but still exactly why he shouldn’t have gone without backup. There was no guarantee that their mystery informant was truly planning on helping the police; at best, it might just be a time-waster or a wannabe journalist fishing for hints, but at worst he could easily end up with a knife between the ribs. Pierce didn’t know if Dawson was just a macho idiot who thought he could handle anything, or ambitious enough to be trying to crack the case without sharing the credit. Either way, the lone wolf tactics were pissing her off.

“Which way now, Guv?” Freeman asked as they approached a roundabout.

“Left, down here.”

They passed parked cars and industrial units that hummed with the sound of working machinery, but there was no foot traffic on the roads out here. They took several twists and turns through the estate before Freeman slowed. “That’s Dawson’s car,” she said, indicating a discreet silver Mondeo parked in front of the metal fence to their left. There was no one inside. Beyond the fence were the tree-covered grounds of a disused factory that might have made a potential meeting point, but the gates were padlocked shut.

Pierce glanced off to the right, where the road continued a short way before turning off to the left and vanishing behind the buildings. The informant could have insisted they walk a distance away from the car, but Dawson would have to have been foolishly cocky to agree. Possible, but... She looked again at the row of industrial units in front of them. The leftmost didn’t quite butt up against the high brick wall that surrounded the factory grounds: instead, there was a narrow strip of grass and bushes running in between them.

She reached for the seat belt release. “I’m going to check around the back,” she murmured to Freeman. “Turn the car around. Cut the engine, but be ready to leave fast if we have to run.” Excessive precautions were only paranoid if it turned out that you didn’t need them.

Pierce left the car and headed around the side of the building, the wet grass muffling her footsteps as she left the tarmac. She stuck close to the side wall of the industrial unit, edging down to the end to peer around. There was Dawson, speaking with a man in a grey hoodie a short distance away under the trees. The informant kept shifting from foot to foot and looking around nervously, so Pierce withdrew around the corner to listen rather than watch. She could barely hear the hushed whisper of the man in the hoodie, but Dawson wasn’t trying quite so hard to keep his voice down.

“Where is this site?” she heard him press.

“I can’t tell you,” the informant said. “If they realise—”

“Well, you’ve got to give me something to bloody go on, man! How many people involved in this operation?”

“A lot. I mean, this is... large-scale shit.” The man gave a nervous laugh that sounded more sick than amused. “Huge. They call themselves Red Key, but that’s just the group I’m working for. I don’t know who they really are. They’ve got people high up—they’ve got people in the
police
, man. I’m risking my life even talking to you. I don’t know that you haven’t talked to them.”

His voice sounded closer, as if he was on the verge of considering making an exit. No way for Pierce to withdraw without being spotted, so she stayed where she was, ready to detain him if necessary. Not that there was much ‘if’ about it. The scale of operation he was talking about sounded a lot like the people she’d tangled with back in October’s shapeshifter case, a fake company called Solomon Solutions who’d vanished into the mist after the raid where she’d arrested the skinbinder. If this was them resurfacing again, she needed to know about it.

“Then make it worth our while,” Dawson said forcefully. “You say they’re going to come after you—d’you think they care if you’re betraying them a lot or just a little? You’re in deep shit already. You want to crawl out? Tell us everything.”

“Oh, no. No,” the man said. “There are things I know that anybody could have told you, but the high clearance stuff... No way. They’d trace it straight back to me—there’s only like five guys that it could be and they’re already suspicious.” As he backed away from Dawson, Pierce could see the back of his hood around the corner; a pace or two more and he’d see her. She edged further back along the side of the building.

The roof above her head creaked, and she froze, thinking that she’d bumped against a drainpipe. Then the faint noise came again, and she realised it was something moving up there on top of the roof.

Something too heavy to be a bird or a squirrel. The roof creaked, and Pierce stepped back, trying to see, but the narrow strip between the building and the brick wall didn’t give her enough room to get the viewing angle.

A sudden burst of frantic beeping from a car horn broke the hush of the scene. Pierce spun to look, thinking it was a car alarm, but then she saw Freeman waving frantically, gesturing at the roof. As Pierce turned back, the informant spotted her and let out a shocked yell. “You fucker!” he shouted at Dawson as he scrambled away from both of them. “Who the fuck did you bring?”

“I didn’t—” Dawson’s words were cut off as Pierce moving out from around the building. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, face red with indignation.

“Forget that; move!” she ordered them both, twisting to try and look up at the roof. “There’s someone—”

A dark shape sprang down lightly from the edge of the roof, too sinuously graceful to be human, too big for any native animal.

A shapeshifter.

Pierce barely had a chance to register the sleek feline shape before the beast had bounded up again, leaping towards the informant. She cursed and grabbed for the equipment on her belt; silver would break the enchantment on a shapeshifting pelt, but getting cuffs on a live, moving panther was a joke. She had malodorant spray, a stink bomb in a can that should give a shifter’s sensitive nose pause.

A pause that ought to involve Firearms being there to take the thing down with silver bullets. Without that backup, they were pretty fucked. All they could do was run.

Before she’d even pulled the spray can out of the belt pouch, the shifter had trapped the informant. He had nowhere to flee, hemmed in by the brick walls and the trees, and she could only watch, too far away, too slow to act, as the panther sank its teeth into his thigh. Blood droplets flew in a spray as it shook him like a rag.

“Fuck!” Dawson had his own can of the malodorant out, but he might as well have spritzed the thing with water. The stinking cloud didn’t even have time to start to spread before the shapeshifter twisted and sprang away, dragging the screaming man along by his leg like a careless child bumping a doll along the ground. Pierce cast around for some kind of ranged weapon, but there was nothing, not even a rock.

The panther shifter reached the foot of a tree by the wall and briefly let go of its human prey, but only for long enough to take another, better grip before it scrambled with him up the trunk. The tree bent under the combined weight with an ominous crack, but before the branches could break, the panther heaved its victim up over the top of the wall and let him fall down with a crunch of bones and an agonized cry. The tree whiplashed away from the wall and then back again, and the panther leapt after him, cresting the wall in an inelegant scramble.

“Shit!” Dawson ran forward, Pierce following on his heels, but they could already hear the big cat crashing away through the trees on the other side.

“What’s past here?” she shouted, but he didn’t answer, instead making a grab for the branches of the tree to try and haul himself up after. The branch splintered and cracked as he put his weight on it, and he hastily let go before it snapped. He whirled to look up at the wall, but it was clear at a glance it was too high to climb.

Pierce was already running back towards the road. “Come on!” she shouted to him. “Freeman’s in the car!” She barrelled back to the vehicle, which sat waiting as she’d ordered, the nearest back door already cracked open. She hauled it the rest of the way and leaned her body in, not bothering to climb in properly.

“What happened?” Freeman asked, looking back at her with wide eyes. “There was something up on the roof—some kind of a big animal—”

“Call backup!” Pierce told her. “Ask for Firearms Support—tell them to bring Tasers, silver bullets if they’ve got them. We’ve got a shapeshifter in panther form on the loose, and it’s abducted our source!”