Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (23 page)

“We caught the skinbinder,” she said neutrally. “I’m told he was killed in an accident during prisoner transfer.” She wasn’t sure she believed that—but she also wasn’t sure she wanted Dawson to know of her suspicions.

“Convenient accident,” he noted, nonetheless.

“Maybe,” she said, committing to nothing. “Nobody told me a damn thing about it until I was back on duty, so your info is as good as mine.”

“What about pelts?” he asked. “Were they all impounded?” He glanced over at her once again. “I tried to get the details of your last case. Might as well have been trying to get into the Queen’s knickers.”

“Not my choice to classify it,” she said. “The Counter Terror Action Team seized all our evidence.” They’d had their sticky paws all over her case the second they knew that human-form shapeshifting skins were involved. Before
Pierce
had known, and her people had suffered for it. “Whether they got all the shapeshifter’s creations...” She shook her head. “Hard to say.”

And she doubted that the so-called Counter Terror Action Team would be responding to any queries any time soon. She wouldn’t be surprised if they’d already melted back into the melange of vaguely defined, highly classified counter-terror operations and reformed as something else, renamed and unaccountable.

She wouldn’t trust a damn thing that they tried to sell her anyway. They’d proven more than once that they were willing to be ruthless in pursuit of what they wanted, and what they’d wanted was the secret of the skinbinder’s ability to make functional human skins. It was entirely possible that they still had him alive and in their custody... and that if there was something in it for them, the panther shapeshifter from yesterday could have been on their payroll.

“Panther skins are hard to source,” Dawson noted. “The shifter that attacked your team had his pelt destroyed, yes?”

“Shot with a silver bullet. Should have been.” So far as she knew, it was impossible to restore the enchantment on a shapeshifting pelt once it had been breached by something silver.

Of course, as far as she’d known a couple of months ago, it was impossible to create a working shapeshifting pelt from human skin.

“We should look into animal smuggling, any big cat sightings in the area,” Dawson said.

“Mm.” He was right, but she couldn’t be optimistic about their odds of finding anything.

They reached the police station. The journalists had gone off to pursue some other angle, thank God—probably ghoulishly haunting the crime scene at Silsden, or trying to prod the bereaved relatives into taking a pop at the police—but the car park was still awash with milling druids. Dawson forged a way through them with a few pointed horn honks and just enough of a nudge over minimum speed to imply that he might not actually stop if they didn’t move. They took the hint.

As soon as he and Pierce got out of the car, however, the druid protestors closed in around them. They’d learned her name from the journalists yesterday, and weren’t shy about throwing it around.

“DCI Pierce! Why isn’t the RCU doing anything about the wholesale desecration of sacred sites?”

“The Earth is crying blood!”

“How much is the government paying you to look the other way?”

“Why have you been ignoring our calls? DCI Pierce!”

Several of the group had taken up the rather unimaginative chant of, “We demand action now!” It all blended together into the vague blur of mob noise. Pierce focused her gaze on the doors of the station and marched through, avoiding making eye contact with anyone. Stopping to reason and offer platitudes was always a mistake, because it never got you anywhere and only caused the group to close in further as they spotted the first hint of an opening.

She shouldered her way through the demonstrators, peripherally noting that their numbers seemed to have swelled still further—probably glory hunters who’d spotted a glimpse of the protest on TV and rushed down to try and get in front of the cameras themselves. She passed one bloke who was wearing a baseball cap with his robes, not very druid-like...

“Look out!” Dawson’s roar of warning came only a fraction of a second before his shoulder slammed her aside—and just before the druid with the pulled-down baseball cap slashed out at her with the knife he’d had concealed in his sleeve.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
HANKS TO
D
AWSON’S
shove, the knife blade missed Pierce’s turning cheek by inches, but the force sent her staggering into bodies in the crowd who hadn’t yet had the time to react.

Or else they were part of the attack. The grabbing hands might have been meant to restrain or to help, but either way they hindered her efforts to find her feet. As the knifeman came at her again, there was no way to retreat: she kicked out at him, a glancing blow off the shin that barely made him stumble. But it delayed him for long enough for Dawson to grab his arm, wrestling to get the weapon off of him. Pierce shoved away from the people holding her as they started to scatter and yell, recognising the scuffle in their midst if not yet its deadly nature.

Her attacker twisted away from the DI’s grip, driving his free elbow into Dawson’s stomach. As Dawson doubled over, the man threw his head back, cracking him in the middle of the face. Dawson staggered sideways, and the man tore free from his hold, whirling around with the knife held up.

Pierce launched herself after him, grabbing at his back to try and pull him away from Dawson. She caught a fistful of his druid robe, but found that it was just a makeshift costume, the fabric so thin and frayed that it tore apart in her grip as she pulled. The attacker wrenched away from her, staggering as the fabric gave way. He fell against a woman in the surrounding crowd, who screamed and shoved him off, only to go sprawling sideways herself as she tried to pull away with him still standing on her robes.

All around the struggle was a press of panicked bodies, people trying to get away through a ring of others pushing forward to see what was happening. Pierce straightened up to try and see the knifeman through the scrum, and got clonked on the back of the head by a protest sign. She doubled forward, cursing, her eyes watering with pain.

Something struck her arm; she spun around to face the threat, but there was no one, just a random flailing limb from the crowd. She spotted Dawson through the throng of people, still clutching his bleeding nose. “Dawson! Get—”

He opened his mouth to shout something back at her, but it was his widened eyes that warned her before he had the chance. Pierce whirled around, stepping away even as she did, and raising her arms in self-defence before she saw the flash of the knife coming towards her.

She blocked her attacker’s forearm with a strike of her own, grabbing his wrist and trying to force him away. But she didn’t have the angle to stand firm, and he pressed forward, bringing the knife down towards her neck. She tried to retreat, but a barrier of moving bodies blocked her way, shoving back against her and forcing her forward.

Desperate, she stamped down on her attacker’s foot. He flinched and jerked back, buying her a split second of time. She struck out at his chest with the heel of her free hand, but her weakened shoulder muscles let her down; there wasn’t enough force behind the blow to drive him back. Despite her grip on his wrist he was winning the battle, the knife blade getting closer and closer to her face.

And then something whooshed past her head to crack against the side of his, a sweeping blow from something she thought was a police baton. Her attacker went reeling, the knife falling from his fingers to bounce off across the car park. As he staggered sideways, the baton’s wielder thrust it between him and Pierce like a restraining bar, yanking it tight across the knifeman’s chest to hold him immobilised.

Pierce registered after the first blink that what she’d assumed was a baton was actually a carved wooden staff, and then that the man wielding it was the tall, bearded figure of the red-caped Archdruid. She caught her breath and straightened up. “Thanks,” she said. The druid leader gave her a dignified nod, still holding her attacker prisoner with an ease that suggested a surprising amount of muscle hidden under the robe.

“Get cuffs on him,” she ordered Dawson as he came storming through the crowd to join them, jerking her head at the prisoner. Pierce stepped back to stand guard over the fallen knife and tried to calm her panting breaths before she raised her voice. “Everybody back away!” she ordered the jostling crowd. “This is officially a crime scene, and we don’t want your feet trampling evidence. Your witness statements will be required, so no one is to leave the car park without police permission.”

Impossible to stop the group collaborating with each other, but this was about as open and shut as any crime could get; the real interest was in whether they could give any information on the knifeman’s identity or movements before the attack.

Pierce tried to see through the crowd to the station doors, wondering if anybody inside had noticed the attempted murder in their own car park, but her words had done little to calm the general panic. Dawson, bloody-nosed from the headbutt, arrested the knifeman with a certain degree of vindictive satisfaction, and once he was cuffed the Archdruid relinquished the man to their control. He then thumped the base of his staff on the concrete and raised his sonorous voice to ring above the hubbub.

“Brothers, sisters! Calm yourselves, please. The danger is past.”

Pierce was slightly gratified that his call didn’t
immediately
halt the chaos where hers had failed, but it did still seem to calm things down after a moment, the shoving and screaming gradually petering out into the faintly embarrassed shuffling of a mob coming back to its senses.

“Back away from the crime scene, please,” she ordered them again, and this time they obliged her by shuffling back. Through the widening gaps she spotted a group of uniformed officers coming to join the fray at last, and she raised her voice to address them over the crowd. “Had a little bit of an incident!” she said. “This man needs to go into the cells, and we’re going to need statements taken from everyone else here.”

“My people had no part in this attack,” the Archdruid told her.

“Well, we’re still going to need their statements, all the same.” The knifeman had been dressed as one of their number, however makeshift the disguise: someone must have noticed when and where he’d joined them, and others in the group could have been involved in some capacity.

The big question was what could have motivated the attack. The druids’ beef with the RCU was hardly big enough to resort to attempted murder—there was always a chance of fanatics on the fringes, of course, but more than likely her would-be killer was a cuckoo in their nest. But planted by who? This seemed overly crude for the group who’d deployed the panther shifter and gone after Vyner and Doctor Moss—unless it was deliberate refuge in ineptitude, a professional assassination set up to look like a senseless, amateurish stabbing just as Vyner’s death had been meant to appear a suicide and Moss’s a tragic accident.

On the other hand, with the wide swathe of cases the RCU handled, the motive could have been just about anything. They were always a magnet for the kind of nutters who thought the Prime Minister was putting a hex on their cat through the television.

“Anything you’d like to say for yourself, my lad?” she asked the man in cuffs, still being restrained by Dawson though he’d yet to make much of a real effort to bolt away. Average-looking bloke: white, somewhere in his twenties, with a square jaw and beaky nose and what looked like short, curly brown hair under the baseball cap. Nothing about him struck her as immediately familiar, though he could have had a brush with her department in the weeks she was off work.

He said nothing in response to her words, glaring sullenly. Well, there’d be time enough to try and prise a story out of him, and the crowded car park was hardly the place to start an interrogation in any case.

“Take him down to the cells,” she told the first young PC to reach them. “And get someone out here to photograph the knife before it’s taken into evidence.” She nodded down at the blade lying by her feet. “We’ve got CCTV of this, I assume?” They definitely weren’t going to be lacking for proof of such a brazen attack, but still best to be thorough. “Better get someone to photograph Dawson’s face, too,” she added as an afterthought. She turned to the DI, and saw that he was still rubbing his nose, though the nosebleed seemed to have stopped. “Is that broken?” she asked him.