Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) Read online

  “This is an RCU case,” she said, standing firm. “We can’t allow anyone to start handling the evidence until it’s been cleared as safe by our experts.”

  By her side she sensed Tim shifting, uncomfortable at being caught in a power struggle, but she wasn’t about to concede ground by breaking eye contact with Maitland.

  If he was ruffled by the challenge, he didn’t show it. “We have our own specialists in ritual magic,” he said.

  “Specialists? From where?” She raised a sceptical eyebrow. True experts were thin on the ground, and ones with police training even more so. She could count the members of the RCU’s northern branch without resorting to toes, and its southern counterpart wasn’t much bigger. Either Maitland was overestimating the knowledge of his specialists, or someone was playing silly buggers with the allocation of police resources. The RCU was struggling to put together a useful crime database as it was without some shadowy subdepartment out there duplicating their efforts.

  “All fully PRMC certified,” Maitland said. The same qualification the Unit required—and stuck with a wet-behind-the-ears rookie as she was right now, Pierce couldn’t even claim to have greater field experience on her side. She stepped back out of his way with a scowl.

  “Two good officers were injured making this bust,” she reminded him. “This suspect has been top of the RCU’s most wanted list for months.”

  “I assure you, we’re not going to let him go free.” Maitland’s flash of teeth was more predatory than reassuring. “He’s been top of our most wanted list for even longer.”

  “But you can’t tell me why.”

  His smile broadened into an even less likeable expression. “I’m sure you understand the realities of these things.” He straightened up, already dismissing her from his attention. “Now, if you could please have your people clear the scene as fast as possible. The longer we delay here, the greater our suspect’s lead on us becomes.”

  Our suspect. Her lips curved in bitter acknowledgement. They weren’t going to win any concessions here. “Of course,” she said, and held his gaze for a few seconds longer before turning to stalk away across the long grass. “Come on, Tim. Let’s go.”

  The young constable chased after her like a bewildered puppy. “Are we just leaving, then?” he said, looking back over his shoulder.

  “I’m going back to the station,” she said. “He might have taken over our crime scene, but we’ve still got a prisoner to interview.”

  SHE GOT TIM to drive her back to the station. The journey passed mostly in silence, barring the lingering tinnitus from the gunshots. The headache only shortened her temper as she stewed in her own irritation.

  There’d been no hint of a terrorist connection to the case before this. They still hadn’t uncovered the skinbinder’s identity—so what the hell did Maitland and his team know that they didn’t? If Counter Terrorism had been watching the farm for reasons of their own, they should have been coordinating with the local police so both sides knew before the raid went down. The way things had shaken out, it felt uncomfortably like her team had been used to do someone else’s dirty work, then kicked out.

  “Do you need me here, Guv?” Tim asked as he stopped the car outside the station.

  Pierce flapped a hand at him. “No. Go home.” Somebody was going to need to be fresh tomorrow morning, and it clearly wasn’t going to be her. She snagged another no doubt ill-advised cup of coffee before heading down to the cells.

  Arthur Jakes, the Custody Sergeant, was there to let her in through the barred gate. A stout, broad-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair leaning towards the salt side, he’d been part of the scenery here for as long as she’d been at the station.

  “Did Deepan bring our shifter in?” she asked him as the gate clanged shut behind her.

  Jakes nodded. “Yep. We had a fun time with that one. Took a bite out of Constable Carter while they were stripping him out of his skin.”

  “Did you get a name?” She wasn’t optimistic.

  “Ha, yes. One Mr ‘Grrr.’”

  She gave that a wry smile that she doubted it deserved. “Did you put him in the special cell?”

  With the RCU’s limited budget, they only had one cell built to handle supernatural strength. A shifter removed from his pelt should be no more danger than a normal human, but Pierce wasn’t prepared to bet the farm on it. Those who wore their animal forms too long or too often didn’t always turn all the way back. Ritual magic was never as safe and controlled as its practitioners might like to believe.

  “We did, but he’s in interview right now,” he said. Pierce turned to stare at him.

  “Deepan took him in for questioning without me?” She would have thought he’d have realised she’d want to be in on this one.

  Jakes shook his head. “No, these weren’t your lot. Counter Terror Action Men, or some such bollocks. Had the proper authorisation so I let them in.” He peered over his glasses at her scowl. “Problem?”

  Pierce grimaced, but shook her head. “Mine, not yours,” she said. If Maitland’s people had authorisation from Superintendent Palmer, there was nothing she or Jakes could do about it. “They were throwing their weight around at the crime scene, too. Waited for us to make the bust, then kicked us all out as soon as the fur had stopped flying.”

  “I did hear it flew.” Jakes pursed his lips in sympathy. “How’s Sally?”

  “Still no word,” she said, and gave a tired sigh. If she’d known they were going to be turfed off the crime scene without the chance to collect evidence, she would have sent someone along in the ambulance.

  She stared at the wall of the interview room, wishing she had a good excuse to storm in and take over. Tempting though it might be, squabbling in front of the suspect could only harm their chances of getting anything out of him.

  She turned to Sergeant Jakes. “Do we have audio on the interview room CCTV?”

  He snorted. “And waste his lordship’s precious pennies when the interviews are all taped anyway? You jest, my lady. It’s video only.” He turned one of the charge desk monitors around so she could see it.

  Not that it showed anything she couldn’t have pictured for herself. The interviewers were both nondescript men in grey suits; the shifter that sat across from them lounged casually in his chair, still something subtly feline about his posture. Not a huge man, but solidly muscular, with a broad jaw and shaved head. The camera angle showed part of an intricate tattoo on his neck, no doubt a match for the corresponding maker’s rune inside the panther pelt. She doubted that she’d get a chance to check, with Maitland intent on seizing all her evidence. She scowled.

  It was impossible to tell what the interviewers were asking, but the responses came through loud and clear on camera. Studied indifference, the occasional curve of a cynical smirk; no protestations of innocence here, just the relaxed arrogance of a man who either expected to walk free or didn’t care that he wouldn’t.

  She needed to be in there, asking her own questions and watching for the tell-tale twitches that an audio recording wouldn’t show. Assuming she would even be allowed to listen to it; the national security umbrella could be used to cover all sorts of things.

  “I don’t suppose you can lip-read?” she asked the desk sergeant.

  “And find out what the prisoners are saying about me?” He raised a hand to his heart. “I prefer to imagine they all think I’m lovely.”

  “Everyone thinks you’re lovely, Arthur,” she said absently. A flicker of something on the monitor caught her eye. Just a brief flash of darkness in between the shifter’s lips seen as he sneered, maybe no more than a shadow on the footage.

  Maybe not. She held up a hand to stop Jakes as he began to speak.

  “Did those idiots let Deepan check the suspect over before they took charge?” she asked, her eyes still focused on the screen.

  A faint motion in her peripheral vision as the sergeant shook his head. “Insisted on doing it all by themselves. Something up?” He
rounded the desk to watch the monitor with her.

  “I’m not sure.” Come on, you bastard... Pierce tried to will the shifter into opening his mouth.

  And there it was. A split second glimpse inside his mouth as he made another soundless jeer, and this time she saw it for sure: the shapeshifter’s tongue was turning black.

  “Shit!” She turned and sprinted for the interview room.

  Jakes ran with her without questioning why, the keys jangling at his belt. As she threw the door open the two interviewers jumped up from their seats, and the nearest tried to crowd them back outside. “Chief Inspector! You shouldn’t be in here. This interview concerns potentially sensitive information—”

  “You idiots,” she shouted. “He’s got a suicide rune in his mouth! We need to get him to—”

  But it was far too late. Sprawling back in his chair, glassy-eyed, the shifter still managed to offer her a mocking grin. His gums were black, the teeth loose in their sockets, and decay wafted out on his panting breaths like halitosis.

  “Get medical!” she shouted at Jakes, though there was nothing they could do. The man was rotting from the inside out.

  Dark spots began to blossom on his skin, spreading quickly into open sores. His eyeballs blackened and burst like crushed grapes, thick tarry goo oozing down sunken cheeks. By now what skin remained was bruise-black, thin as paper, like fragile fabric stretched over a frame. One of Maitland’s men grabbed his arm, trying to pull him up, but the rotting flesh just tore with a wet squelch.

  Within seconds, the decaying form was barely even human anymore; just a hollowed, shrivelled, blackened thing collapsing in on itself.

  Outside in the hallway the alarms wailed, summoning help that was already too late. The shapeshifter was dead—and any secrets that he might have revealed had died with him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE TIME the medical team arrived, there was little to be done with the prisoner except scrape his oozing remains off the furniture. The stench of decay and death lingered on her clothes and in her throat even after several sprays of deodorant and yet another mug of coffee. She’d given up on getting to bed tonight.

  If Pierce was resigned to being stuck at work until the early hours, Superintendent Palmer was bloody furious about it.

  “This has been a complete cock-up from start to finish!” he said, hands clasped behind his back as he paced his office. He was a finicky little man, shorter than her and probably a few years younger, though you wouldn’t know it from the receding hairline. Under normal circumstances he would have been happy to sleep through their after-dark raid and hear about the results in the morning, but Maitland’s interference and the news of a death in police custody had dragged him out of bed and back to work.

  And Pierce was the one who got called onto the carpet to account for it. If Maitland’s two men were getting a bollocking for their part in this fiasco, it was taking place in private, with no opportunity for her to stick her oar in.

  Which was a pity, because she had plenty to say. “Sir, the team from Counter Terrorism came waltzing in throwing their weight about and overrode all our procedures,” she said. “My people would have checked the prisoner for ritual markings if they’d only been allowed to do their jobs. We’re lucky it was just a suicide rune and not something worse. He could have taken half the station down.”

  “Lucky,” he echoed, with a bitter twist to the word. He whirled about to face her. “Yes, Claire, I feel exceptionally lucky that the resource-intensive, high-profile raid you persuaded me to authorise has resulted in two injured officers, one suspect escaped, and another one dead in our custody!”

  Now was not the time to argue. “Sir.” She acknowledged the words with a carefully neutral expression, staring past him at the crime statistics posted up on the wall. The RCU lagging behind, as usual.

  Palmer spent several more moments pacing himself out before he stopped and heaved a defeated sigh. He fixed her with a cool gaze. “A suicide rune,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded. “It would have been tattooed on the inside of his mouth. He only needed to hold his tongue against it for a set length of time to trigger the rune.” She’d seen it before, though it had been over a decade ago; some ridiculous apocalypse cult or other with a vow to take their secrets to the grave.

  He ran a hand back through his thinning hair. “Then it couldn’t have been prevented?”

  “It might have, if they’d allowed a team with the proper expertise to take charge,” she said. “Sir, I don’t know who these people are, or what their interest is in this skinbinder, but there’s no way they’re half as qualified as the RCU to handle supernatural crime. This should be our case.”

  Palmer pressed his lips together and gave another sigh, pulling the chair out from under his desk to sit down. “That’s as may be, but it’s not your decision to make—or mine,” he said, shaking his head as he leaned back. “This is coming from above my head, Claire. The Counter Terror Action Team have full autonomy to do as they see fit, and we are to give them our cooperation.”

  “No questions asked, of course.” Pierce scowled.

  He gave her a stern look. “You understand perfectly well how important information security can be. Loose lips sink ships, and all that.”

  “On the other hand, maybe if we’d loosened some, we might have found the suicide runes hidden behind them.”

  He threw up his hands. “I can see that you’re not going to drop this, but there’s only so far even you can get running on stubbornness.” He checked the time on his fancy silver watch and gave a grimace. “Go home, get some sleep, and consider this case off your desk and best forgotten. It’s the Counter Terror Action Team’s problem now.”

  PIERCE HAD LEARNED to sleep like the dead no matter how grim a day she’d come home from, but that alone didn’t make three hours substitute for a night’s rest. She dragged herself reluctantly out of bed, skipping the minimal time she had to make breakfast in favour of a phone call to Sally’s husband.

  He sounded more exhausted than she was, but he told her that Sally was stable after the doctors had given her a tracheostomy. She tried to call Leo, but he didn’t pick up; she left a message on his phone asking after Sergeant Henderson.

  The grim reminder of the raid’s ugly results undid any work the rest might have done towards cooling her temper. The queue at the bakery where she grabbed breakfast made her late, and she arrived at the RCU with a cooling cup of coffee, a bacon sandwich, and a headache.

  The detective branch of the Ritual Crime Unit worked out of an open plan office on the second floor. As she pushed through the double doors, heads popped up from behind the computers like startled prairie dogs. No Sally today, of course, but Tim had made it in on time, though he looked dreadful. So much for the resilience of youth. He followed Deepan’s cheerful, “Morning, Guv!” with a vague mumble of his own, sinking back down low behind his monitor.

  With the caseload they had, there ought to be more than the four of them, but the budget was tight and not many people stuck it out in the RCU for long. It was an equally bad career choice for both the ambitious and the lazy, dangerous work that rarely came to the sort of tidy conclusion that looked good on a CV.

  Deepan crossed the room to greet her as she set her makeshift breakfast down on her desk. “Heard our suspect self-destructed after I left,” he said, with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, Guv. I should have insisted they let me check him over.”

  She shook her head. “Not your fault. They had Palmer’s authorisation to take over—and from what he said, this is coming from over his head. We’re officially off the case, kids.”

  A gloomy silence settled. Sally was usually the one to provide a note of cheer on days when the job was going badly, and without her the office seemed even grimmer.

  “Did you get my handcuffs back?” she asked Deepan, to break the silence. The silver cuffs were special issue, and an arse-ache to replace.

  “Oh, yeah, Guv.” He
moved to his desk and opened a drawer. “Got them right here.” He held the cuffs out to her by one of the loops. “Good job I remembered. Those blokes were trying to confiscate anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  “Thieving bastards,” Pierce muttered, crumpling her sandwich wrapper to toss at the bin. “Six months we’ve been after this skinbinder.” Had Counter Terrorism known where he was operating all along? Or had they been riding along on the RCU’s coattails, letting them do all the work before sweeping in to take over?

  She spun the handcuffs around her finger as she pondered, the harsh artificial light reflecting off the battered silver.

  And also off something else. Pierce raised the cuffs to take a closer look.

  A single strand of thick black hair was caught in the hinge. Definitely not hers. She glanced across at Deepan. “Have you been rubbing these cuffs on your head, my son?” she asked him.

  “Er... not recently, Guv,” he said, giving her a sideways look.

  She spun the handcuffs around to show him the strand of hair—or rather, fur. “Then we might still have some evidence from our panther friend after all.”

  THERE WAS NO point taking the panther hair down to forensics. It would take them weeks to get around to testing it, with their backlog—assuming they would even agree to process it at all, when it hadn’t come through proper channels. Besides, she already had a good idea what kind of hair it was and where it had come from.

  No, what she needed now was a different kind of analysis. She bagged the strand of hair and took it down to Sympathetic Magic.

  Magical analysis was a hodgepodge field, still in its infancy—and utterly useless for securing a conviction. Ritual magic was tough to safely replicate, difficult to record, and harder still to explain to a jury. Sympathetic magic drew the shortest straw of all, since no lawyer on Earth could fail to clear a client charged with harming a victim from miles away with a few fingernails and some hair.