Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (4 page)

“Um, excuse me, madam, but this is a crime scene,” he said, revealing an unmistakably Brummie accent.

Was it uncharitable to bet that a male officer in plainclothes wouldn’t have been stopped and questioned? Though he bloody well ought to have been, so no point biting heads off. She’d kept the warrant card handy for this eventuality. “DCI Pierce. RCU,” she said.

The young copper paled a bit. “Oh! Sorry, um, we thought you were going to be off until after Christmas,” he said.

For a moment Pierce wondered if she’d become so notorious across the local forces they were keeping tabs on her medical leave, but then she caught on. “You’re one of the new RCU officers?” she said.

He nodded hastily, obviously worried he’d made a bad first impression. “Constable Ed Taylor.”

Oh, well, earnest and overzealous beat sloppy and cocky. She waved him on ahead of her with a nod. “I’m just here to check in,” she said. “Is DI Dawson around?”

“Er, yes, ma’am, he’s overseeing the search for more remains.”

Overseeing. Blimey. Maybe Taylor wasn’t the only one who was being a tad overzealous. Unless they’d turned up greater evidence of an imminent threat than a skull with a few ritual markings, the RCU’s role in the case should be purely advisory. Local police forces tended to get more than a bit shirty when you stomped in and started ordering their officers about, and the RCU was far too dependent on outside manpower to try playing ten ton gorilla.

She followed Taylor up the hill towards the trees, where a group of police and forensics bods stood clustered around a marked-off excavation. Which one was Dawson? Her money was on the ruddy faced bloke with the receding crewcut who looked like he had an equal amount of fat and muscle stuffed under the tight-collared suit. The man next to him had a face like he’d just found a wasp in his chewing gum, so she pegged him as having been the officer in charge prior to RCU involvement.

Taylor’s pointing finger confirmed it. “That’s Inspector Dawson, ma’am.”

Which meant now came the joy of playing politics. Stop and introduce herself to Dawson first, with the attendant likelihood of ruffling the feathers of the local police even further as she ignored them, or snub Dawson and run the risk of him being the type to hold a petty grudge for the rest of their working career?

Fortunately, she was spared having to pick option A or B by a shout.

“Sir!” one of the PCs called from further off in the trees. “We’ve got another skull!”

CHAPTER THREE

I
N THE GENERAL
scramble to relocate to the second find, Pierce managed to get the chance pull her new DI aside.

“Dawson?” She offered him a handshake. “DCI Claire Pierce.”

Seemed he wasn’t the kind of idiot to try making a point by crushing her bones, but he definitely had a hearty grip. The strong scent of cigarettes clung to his coat. “DCI Pierce,” he said with a curt nod. “I was told you had another week or two of leave.”

“So was I, but I’m not one to sit around,” she said. “What’s the situation here?”

“Man walking his dog took a shortcut through the field. Dog ran off and started digging, uncovered a human skull.” He indicated the original excavation, where forensics had carefully cleared out the earth from around the skull. “Local bobbies had a look and then called us in. I told them not to move it till we’d had it analysed.”

Pierce moved in for a closer look at the skull down in the pit. Not hard to see why it had been flagged as the RCU’s business: the skull was daubed with complex geometric patterns in what looked like blood, and a rolled parchment scroll tied up with black ribbon was tucked between its jaws. Around it, the excavation had uncovered a ring of nine small flat stones, each one etched with a different symbol.

Not one of the common sets of runes, but that didn’t mean much. The world—and these days the web—was awash with alleged occult texts, far too many for the police Arcane Documents Network to try to compile. Only a tiny fraction might be legitimate, but the real bugger was telling that fraction from the rest. The general public mucking about with magic were the infinite monkeys with typewriters who only needed to strike it lucky once; the RCU had a handful of overworked monkeys and a limited budget for typewriter ribbons.

Pierce straightened up and looked around. No obvious landmarks to suggest this field had any particular magical significance: not even a distinctive hill or suitably ancient tree. The choice of field might indicate some sort of curse targeting the owner, or it could just be a conveniently out-of-the-way location for the ritual burial.

Dawson had moved on without waiting for her, but DC Taylor was still hovering, probably in a state of existential confusion over who was technically in charge. Pierce motioned for him to walk with her as she followed the others over to the trees. “What do we know about the owner of the field?” she asked.

He hurried to consult the pages of his notebook. “Er... Jane Hockney. Local, seventy-two... keeps cows. Used to use the fields to... graze them, or something?” He gave a confused shrug. “City boy, me. But apparently she’s been selling off most of her animals since her husband died two years ago, and this field hasn’t been in use for quite a while.”

Not the most likely avenue of investigation. Still, best to be thorough. “What happened to the husband?” she asked as they moved into the shade of the trees.

“Throat cancer,” he said, with a sympathetic twist of the mouth. He ducked under a tree branch and held it back for her. “Nothing suspicious. And he was cremated, so, probably not his skull.”

“Not unless he had two heads, anyway,” she said, as they caught up to the others, clustered around a newly marked off area where one of the forensics team was crouched. As the woman brushed dirt away from the crown of a second skull, Pierce could see a similar set of blood-daubed patterns emerging from the soil.

“Looks like more of the same,” Dawson said, stepping back. He raised his voice to address the whole assembled group. “There may be others! They’re probably arranged in a pattern. Measure out the distance between the two skulls, and start searching in an equivalent radius around them. If you find a patch of disturbed earth, let forensics dig it out—it may be dangerous to move the skulls.” He clapped his hands. “Go!”

Pierce hid a grimace at the supercilious tone. The local officer in charge didn’t bother, scowling openly at the order even as he reluctantly endorsed it. “All right, do what the man says, lads, come on,” he said. “The sooner we get this scene mapped out, the sooner we can leave the RCU to do their thing.”
And go back to proper police work
was silently implied.

Dawson definitely wasn’t winning friends and influencing people here, and that would be a real pain in the buttocks if they needed more assistance from the locals later on. Maybe he was used to having enough clout to run things his way, but the RCU didn’t have the resources to operate like that. They’d have been here till February if they had to process a scene this size with no outside help.

But stepping in herself wasn’t likely to smooth any feathers, only ruffle Dawson’s, so she let him go off and direct the operation as he would. The attitude problem might not be wholly on his side this time, she supposed; if it turned out to be a pattern of behaviour, she could address it later.

Instead, she turned her attention to her other, newer and more malleable young recruit as he joined her in watching the painstaking excavation of the second skull. “All right, Taylor, what’s your opinion on this?” she asked. He blanched, but Pierce only had a limited amount of pity to waste on nervous newbies. RCU was a specialisation where you had to think on your feet.

At least he rallied fairly quickly, even if he retained the deer-in-the-headlights look. “Er, well, the... presence of multiple prepared skulls suggests... it’s not just a ritual burial. It’s more likely that the skulls themselves are an... ingredient, if that’s the word? It’s skulls because the ritual requires skulls, not just because the perpetrator had bodies to dispose of.”

She gave a noncommittal
hmm
and a single nod, encouraging him to go on.

His eyes darted down to the half-buried skull for inspiration. “Erm... the elaborate setup and use of sigils suggests this is something copied from an occult text rather than the caster’s own invention, which means it’s worth researching from that angle.”

‘Worth it’ more in a hypothetical sense than in terms of the needle-in-haystack odds of finding the right text, but she’d allow the optimism.

Taylor was sweating now as he struggled to come up with anything else. “Um... the tied scroll in the skull’s mouth most likely has a written enchantment. Untying it might break the ritual, or it might set it off. Skulls... suggest some kind of death-related symbolism, so...”

And now they’d reached the point where he was just desperately parroting any old bollocks from the textbooks, so she raised a hand to stop him. “Lots of symbols in magic, true, but don’t assume it’s that straightforward,” she said. “Blood and death equate to power, and just because a ritual uses them for juice doesn’t mean it’s intended to kill.” Though it was probably a safe bet that it wasn’t meant to bring great joy and happy bunnies.

Still, decent effort on Taylor’s part. Pierce gave him a nod. “Not a bad analysis, just don’t take it too far,” she cautioned. “The most important thing to know in this job is that most of the time we actually know bugger all. Always better to admit you haven’t got a clue than assume you know what you’re dealing with when you don’t.”

She straightened up, beginning to get a crick in the neck from watching the excavation. “All right,” she said. “Let’s see what’s going on with this search.”

F
ULL EXPLORATION OF
the site, or at least as wide a region as it was feasible to search, uncovered a total of three skulls, arranged in a triangle. The locations were interesting, one tucked away under the trees, the third one close to the base of the dry stone wall. Awkward places to dig, not the nice convenient patch of open ground that you’d pick if you were free to site your ritual anywhere you chose. It suggested that the arrangement had some significance, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was tied to the field itself or the people who owned it or lived nearby.

Magic. Always more questions than answers.

Pierce watched enough of the excavation of the final skull to confirm it matched the others, and then went to join Dawson. He’d moved away from the rest of the group to make a phone call, but as she approached, he lowered the phone from his mouth and pocketed it. She tried not to give in to the momentary flash of paranoia. No reason to think he’d been talking about her, and even less to assume it was more than bitching about the boss being back if he had.

“So what’s your plan from here?” she asked, careful to take less of an assessing tone than she had with Taylor. She didn’t need to be at war with her DI, especially since he’d had weeks to establish his claim on the loyalties of the two new constables she’d barely met.

“I’m treating this as a potentially serious ritual curse,” he said. “We need to learn more about these skulls before we try to move them. I’ve called in a necromancer—”

“A necromancer? Who?” In Pierce’s experience, those who claimed they had an affinity for raising the dead were either fakes, or worse, the kind of dangerous dabblers who knew just enough to get a result but not what to do next.

Dawson’s eyes narrowed fractionally at the challenge. “Man called Martin Vyner. He’s a local.”

“Never heard of him.” She frowned.

“No? Well, you’ve been out of the game for a while,” he said. The dismissive tone set her on edge.

“Maybe—but I’ve been in it for long enough to know that trying to raise the dead rarely makes a situation better,” she said sharply. “We’ve got the site contained and there’s no immediate danger. No need to escalate things by bringing more magic into the mix.”

“Not so sure about the lack of immediate danger,” he said. “This is no amateur effort. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“And there are ways to find out without leaping straight to the nuclear option.”

“Not quickly.” He held her gaze with a challenging stare.

Pierce would have had plenty more to say, but the DI in charge of the local team, Bowers, was heading towards them. She made a conscious effort to relax and step back, aware that even if he wasn’t close enough to overhear, he could more than likely recognise the body language of two officers having a barney.