Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (15 page)

“We’ve told them all this,” he said, nodding along. “But they’re adamant that it’s a conspiracy, and that someone’s up to something nefarious on the site.”

“And do they have evidence of this?” Pierce asked, narrowing her eyes as more robed figures stepped down from the van, these ones carrying a looped banner between them. They were never going to get into the bloody car park at this rate.

Deepan gave her a sidelong look. “Well, the Archdruid got bad vibes, apparently.”

“Oh, did he now?” She pursed her lips, then waved a hand at Deepan. “Honk your horn. We’ll be here all day otherwise.”

He gave a discreet beep of the horn. A few of the druids in their path looked briefly mutinous, obviously considering whether to block their entrance, but they hadn’t had the time to get organised yet, and they scattered out of the way as the car began inching forward.

“Don’t run anyone over. We can’t afford a lawsuit,” Pierce said.

They avoided any druid-splattering incidents, but getting into the building was a gauntlet of its own. A small squad of robed druids bore down on them as they got out of the car, led by a long-haired, thickly bearded man who would have been at home in an aging prog rock band. She was guessing he was the big boss, from the subtle clues of his long red cloak, wooden medallion, and the tall staff he was leaning on.

Lord, even when these people did have some form of magical ability to their name, she had a bugger of a time taking them seriously.

“Sergeant Mistry,” the Archdruid called out as he approached them. He had a magnificent theatrical baritone, commanding attention. “I wonder if we might have further words about the progress on the invasion of our sacred site.”

“You’ve spoken to these folks before?” Pierce asked Deepan.

“Many times,” he said, with a barely noticeable sigh.

She clapped him on the shoulder. “Then I think you’re best placed to liaise with them again,” she said. “See what they’ve got to say, and then just make sure they’re out of our car park before the superintendent leaves.” Even on their short acquaintance, Snow didn’t strike her as the type to have much tolerance for a group of attention-attracting protestors hanging around his car park. Not that many police higher-ups would.

“Thanks, Guv,” Deepan said with a weary smile, as she slunk away and left him to the wolves. The druids, unfamiliar with her face after all her weeks off, ignored her to focus on the officer they knew, and she made it to the front door unmolested. When she glanced back, Deepan was in the midst of a huddle of white robes, trying to politely state his position while they all talked at him at once.

She offered a brief wave that he probably didn’t see, and headed back into the building. Rank did have its privileges, and right now the main one was getting back to her desk so she could sit down and have a sandwich while she went through her emails.

Even these modest lunch plans, however, were interrupted by an excited hail from Constable Freeman as she walked in. “Guv, I think I might have found something on those grave robberies you asked me to look for,” she said.

“Oh?” Pierce went over with sandwich in hand to join her at her computer.

Freeman had, by some act of computer wizardry a bit beyond Pierce’s ken, put together a map of the area around Bingley complete with little markers in various colours. She swept the mouse pointer over the display to indicate the lone black marker in the midst of brighter colours. “This is the site where the skulls were found,” she said. “I’ve been going through reports of graveyard disturbances and grave desecrations—not much of note recently, so I expanded it to the last six months. There are a lot from around Hallowe’en—”

“Always are,” Pierce said. “More often idiots arsing about than anyone who knows what they’re doing.” Lord save them from the yearly flood of wannabes who thought that doing vaguely mystical things on a significant date was a better way to develop magical talents than years of study.

Freeman nodded in acknowledgement. “I tried to filter out some of the noise: all of these incidents marked in blue are Hallowe’en or Hallowe’en adjacent, and if you hide those it’s a bit less busy, but there’s still quite a lot of data to dig through—I didn’t know grave-robbery was such a popular crime!”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of the RCU,” Pierce said, taking a bite out of her sandwich. “It’s glamour all the way down. You and Taylor are going to get pretty used to squelching around graveyards in all kinds of weather.”

She remembered that duty all too well from her own days as a DC and DS. They were always getting called to bloody graveyards—it only took a group of idiot teenagers playing dares or a vandalised gravestone to start a panic about Satanic cults raising the dead. Never mind that she’d never heard of any successful incident of zombie-raising in her long career, and was deeply sceptical of the few historical accounts.

“Is there any way to sort the false alarms and grave desecrations from actual instances of remains being removed from the scene?” she asked.

“Yeah, I was looking into that,” Freeman said, nodding. “And then in one of the crime scene photos I noticed this gravestone—the date.” She brought the photo up on the screen, and Pierce looked on in vague incomprehension at a picture of the headstone beside an opened grave. A relatively modern stone, in memory of one ‘Henry James Heath, died 22
^nd
Dec 2003, beloved father and grandfather.’

Then the date rang a bell. The twenty-second of December, D-day for Cliff’s prophecy of some kind of upcoming supernatural crisis; not related to the skull case, but she’d thoughtlessly scribbled it on the page of notes she’d given to young Freeman. She grimaced. Her own damn fault for being hasty and unclear. “That’s not—”

“And it’s not the only one,” Freeman pushed on, switching the screen back to her map. “So far I’ve managed to find
four
cases of graves being dug up in the last few months where the date of death was the twenty-second of December—different years, but all relatively recent graves where you’d expect to find a fairly intact skeleton. Two of them were in cemeteries near the ritual site in Bingley, while the
other
two”—she scrolled her map—“were up near Silsden.” She turned and grinned triumphantly at Pierce.

Pierce studied the indicated set of markers on the map. One grave featuring that date would be a small coincidence; four, two of them in exactly their area of focus, started to sound an awful lot less like one. Maybe Cliff’s big supernatural event and their large-scale ritual weren’t so disconnected after all.

And that meant they now had a second area of focus. She clapped Freeman on the shoulder. “Good work,” she said. “Keep chasing other cemeteries in the area, see if you can find any more disturbed graves with that date. I’ll get on the horn to Silsden and see what we can do about getting a search organised. Our outside expert tells me that there’s a big chance the Bingley site isn’t the only one, and you may have just got us a jumpstart on finding a second.”

Freeman beamed at her, and Pierce smiled back, feeling a surge of rising optimism. At last, after days of dead ends, they had somewhere concrete to start. There had to be something in Silsden—maybe another ritual crime scene, or maybe the home base of the perpetrators, but either way, if they could track it down, they’d be one step closer to the root of this mess.

T
HE SERIES OF
phone calls that followed gave her optimism more of a battering. While the local police would have no doubt been fast on the ball if she’d asked them to search for a missing child or a fresh body, they were than less impressed by the prospect of pulling officers from their current duties to hunt for a few stolen skulls. Without a clear picture of what exactly the ritual was intended to do, all she could fall back on were empty warnings that it was probably both big and dangerous.

“What kind of search force are they lending us?” Freeman asked when Pierce hung up.

“Apparently, we can have two PCs, three community support officers, and someone with a dog,” Pierce said.

“To cover the whole area?” she said incredulously.

Pierce twisted her mouth wryly. “We get what we get,” she said. Hard enough getting the local teams to play nice with the RCU at the best of times, and Dawson’s rough handling of the Bingley scene hadn’t done them any favours on that front. With the number of senior officers in the region already slashed thanks to recent budget cuts, Bowers being out of action from his injuries meant stretching thin coverage even further, and she didn’t doubt the news of the RCU’s involvement had done the rounds.

“We’ll make do,” she said. “I’ll go and rescue Deepan from the hippie druid invasion in the car park—you get in touch with Dawson, tell him we’ll be out for the afternoon and he’s holding the fort.” She wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of leaving the department in his hands, but he’d been running it for weeks already, and frankly she’d rather have him behind her back than be butting heads with him at another crime scene. “And see if he can send Taylor back to us,” she added as an afterthought. “We’re going to need all the help that we can get.”

W
ITH SUCH A
limited search force on offer, Pierce’s role was less one of oversight, more one of mucking in beside the rest. They needed every pair of eyes that could be spared, but all the same she was reluctant to involve the local public in the search. For a start, the news of potential ritual magic in the area would be bound to leak out to the press—and more importantly, she didn’t trust folks with no police training to obey her strict instructions not to touch anything.

She wasn’t sure she trusted the community support officers that far, either. They might have the basic training needed to do their duties, but it wasn’t the same as having experienced police under her command—and even those could be mighty shirty about taking the word of outside specialists that they needed to go beyond standard procedure. She supposed the one advantage of the inadequate search force was that she outranked everyone here by a mile.

“All right,” Pierce said, assessing her assembled forces. They were gathered outside the gates of the cemetery where the two grave robberies had occurred. It would no doubt be a pleasantly shady spot in the summer, but in the depths of winter the overhanging trees were bare and gaunt, the pavement at the base of the wall thick with a mush of rotted leaves.

“We’ll partner up,” she decided. “RCU officers should be teamed with a local. Taylor, Freeman, you go with Constables Winters and Jackson.” Possibly risking some chain of command friction, putting her two least experienced officers with uniform constables equal in rank, but she’d rather they have proper backup than leave them wrangling PCSOs when they were this new in the job. She’d just have to trust they’d have the confidence not to let the locals ignore or override them when it counted.

She nodded at the trio of community support officers. “You’ll be with me and Sergeant Mistry,” she told the nearest two. “And you with Constable Collins.” Their dog handler, a tall, ruddy-faced woman who seemed to be the most enthusiastic of the lot about being seconded to the RCU for the day. “And Magnus,” Pierce added, eyeing the German Shepherd lying watching their feet with soulful canine patience. “Make sure the dog doesn’t get too close if we do find disturbed earth.”

“He’s well trained,” Collins assured her, giving the dog a supportive stroke that caused his tail to thump. Maybe so, but Pierce would still have preferred it if all the search teams could have at least one RCU officer along for guidance. Not practical, though: with the shortest day approaching, they’d be lucky if the light lasted till four o’clock, and they had to spread their search coverage as wide as it would go.

She checked her watch. Not as much time as she would have liked to give a proper briefing on the dangers of touching the wrong thing, so she’d have to make the lecture short and sweet.

“All right,” she said. “We’re looking for a site with multiple shallowly buried human skulls, most likely three in a triangular arrangement some metres apart. They may have been buried recently, or as much as several months ago. Concentrate on unused fields, waste ground, abandoned or seldom used properties—places where the ritual-workers would have reason to think their work would go undisturbed.
Do not
be the one to disturb it,” she added emphatically. “If you find anything that looks suspicious, call it in on the radio and await instructions.”

She couldn’t tell if it was going in; anyone who’d spent any time working for the police force soon learned to perfect the art of looking politely attentive while superiors talked bollocks. The only one she could be sure was definitely paying attention was the dog.

But time was a-wasting, and labouring a point never won more supporters. Pierce clapped her hands. “All right, we’re short on time and we don’t have a clear radius for how far from the cemetery our location might be, so move out, split up, and keep checking in on the radio to let the others know what ground you’re covering.” She flagged the first community support officer whose name she could remember. “Archer, you’re with me.” He trotted along after her with an affable smile, a sturdy young blond lad who once upon a time would have been considered too short to be a policeman.

They started along a steep lane that was hemmed in by the graveyard wall and a high hedge on the other side; there was no pavement, and the white line that divided it to take two lanes of traffic looked a tad too optimistic in her view. Still, it didn’t look like the matter got tested much: right now, everything was pretty quiet.