Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) (4 page)

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.”

T
HERE 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.

Hence, the station’s Sympathetic Magic department was pretty small. About five foot one, in fact, and commonly known by the name of Jenny.

“Jen!” Pierce leaned in through the door of the small office, made still more cramped by stacks of books and file folders. “Got an analysis job for you.” She held up the evidence bag.

“Fantastic.” Jennifer Hayes peered out at her through a gap between cardboard boxes, a view that showed little more than a glimpse of her silver-framed glasses and wavy black hair. She gestured vaguely towards the left side of the room. “Put it with the other fifty-seven. I’m sure that I’ll get caught up sometime in the next few decades.”

“This one’s a priority,” Pierce said, stepping into the room and closing the door behind her. She squeezed her way past a box of ring binders to reach the desk.

“Aren’t they all?” she said with a wry purse of her lips, but she shoved a stack of books aside to free up some desk space. “All right. What miracles are you expecting me to work for you this time?”

Pierce set the evidence bag down in front of her. “I need everything you can tell me about this.”

She peered at the bag, for a moment more intrigued by the lack of labelling than the dark hair within. “Ooh, unmarked evidence.” She looked up with a slight smirk. “What am I doing, hunting down your ex?”

“I don’t know when you think I had the time for one of those,” she said. If police work ate into your private life, then working for the RCU swallowed it whole and crunched up the bones. They were writing the book as they went along; so much about magic was still undocumented and poorly understood.

“You’re telling me field investigation isn’t the glamorous rock star lifestyle that I’ve been dreaming of so long?” Jenny grinned, then bit her lip. “Sorry, I suppose that was poor taste,” she said, clearly thinking of the events of the night before. “Any word on how Sally’s doing?”

“She’s stable.” A term that ought to be reassuring, but only served as a dark reminder of how close it had come. “Still waiting to hear from Leo Grey about the Firearms Officer who was hurt.”

“Nasty business all round,” she said soberly. She studied the hair in its evidence packet. “This is from that?”

“Hair from the shapeshifter’s pelt,” Pierce told her. “All that we’ve got left. Some goons claiming to be the ‘Counter Terror Action Team’ took over our case, seized all the evidence, and managed to give the suspect that we had in custody a chance to off himself while they were at it. Officially, it’s no longer our business.”

“Officially,” Jenny echoed, and gave her a knowing look. She took a deep breath and pushed her chair back to stand. “Well,” she said, regarding the unmarked bag. “Obviously, the chain of evidence has been compromised here, so there’s no point passing this on to the officers handling the case.”

“None at all,” she agreed.

“
So
, since it doesn’t need to be retained, I could always use it to test a new divination process I’ve been trying to refine.” She slid a sidelong look towards Pierce. “Of course, I’d need somebody from the department to follow up on the results and verify the findings are correct...”

“Well, if it’s for the cause of advancing our knowledge of magical forensics...” She spread her hands.

“Absolutely.” Jenny led the way down to the ritual lab in the basement.

Unlike the cluttered workstations filling most of the offices, the small square table in the centre of this room stood bare. Etched into the concrete floor around it was a ritual circle, bounded by concentric rings of symbols. On the ceiling above was painted an exact duplicate. Containment circles, there to trap anything that might be raised here; Pierce was careful to stay well outside the bounds.

An industrial refrigerator hummed away to itself in the furthest corner of the room. Beside it stood a row of fireproof cabinets. Jenny fished a key out of her pocket to unlock the leftmost, rooting briefly through shelves of labelled boxes and plastic bags. “Ah, here we go,” she said as she retrieved a cloth-wrapped bundle.

She tugged the cloth aside to reveal a crudely made bowl on a metal stand. Oval-shaped and fitted with a metal rim, the polished but uneven surface was the colour of ivory... or bone.

“Is that a skull?” Pierce said, raising her eyebrows.

“Yep.” Jenny gave an impish grin as she held it up beside her own head to illustrate the angle at which the skull had been sliced. “Brains not included, I’m afraid, but he does have mystical powers of divination to make up for it. And don’t worry—whoever he was, he’s a couple of hundred years outside your jurisdiction.” She turned the bowl over so Pierce could see the symbols painted inside. “This is a Magnus bowl.”

“How does it work?”

Jenny grinned wider as she set the bowl down on the table. “Ah,” she said, raising a finger as she moved to the refrigerator. “That’s where the goat blood comes in.”

“Always reassuring words,” Pierce noted as Jenny came back to the table with a beaker of thick red fluid. She set it down next to the bowl, then retrieved a wax candle and a ritual knife from a drawer.

“Right, now, I wasn’t kidding about this being an experiment,” she said. “We’ve tried this with hairs from live humans, but where fur from an enchanted shapeshifting pelt fits in, God only knows.
Assuming
that it’s viable at all, our best bet is probably divining something that’s a common truth for both panther and man. Location of their home, for instance.”

“That’d do me.”

“Okay. So, I’m going to carve what is
hopefully
the right symbol for home into this candle...”—she made a few precise incisions with the knife—“and then add the magic focus...” She made a deeper slit in the base of the candle and carefully inserted the hair. Then she stood it up in the middle of the skull bowl, and poured blood in around it. “All right,” she said, and took a slow, deep breath. “The next step is to light the candle.” Her eyes flicked to Pierce. “This might be a good time to mention that if this spell interacts badly with the one on the pelt, it could well blow our heads off.”

“Good to know,” she said wryly, but made no move to leave.

Jenny fetched a box of matches from the drawer, then shuffled back to arm’s-length distance from the table. “Well, here goes.” She lit a match and stretched forward to touch it to the candle.

The wick went up as if it had been soaked in lighter fuel. Jenny yelped and scrambled backwards as the candle flame leapt high, burning a dark, vivid red that filled the space with shadows. The wax melted like butter, shrinking rapidly, while the atmosphere inside the closed room grew heavy and greasy. As the sinking flame drew level with the blood filling the bowl, it flashed into a hissing cloud of steam. Pierce flinched back, shielding her eyes from the scalding red mist that boiled outwards.

When she lowered her arm a fraction later, the steam had faded and the candle burned out, leaving behind a nauseating smell like burning flesh. The thick tension that filled the air gradually leaked away.

Beside the table, Jenny rose from her defensive crouch, and let her breath out in a sheepish huff. “Well,” she said, half to herself, “let’s see what that did.”

Moving closer, Pierce saw that the inside of the skull bowl was caked with sticky black clots of dried blood. Random splashes, to her eyes, but Jenny seemed quite satisfied as she hauled over a big book from on top of a cabinet. She paged through the long lists of symbols inside, occasionally pausing to jot one on a notepad.

“Right,” she said, after a good deal of rifling back and forth. “Amazingly, I might actually have something for you.” She indicated a blood splatter at the centre of the bowl, a crescent moon shape with a cluster of dots. “That’s definitely a number—twenty-two, I think. It could be thirty-two.” She moved her pen to point at to another misshapen blotch. “And this one I know for sure: that’s the symbol for ‘path’ or ‘way.’”

“So it’s Twenty-Two Something Way?” That sounded promising.

Jenny raised a hand in a half shrug. “Could be ‘Way.’ Could be ‘Road,’ could be ‘Street.’ It’s not an exact translation.” She tapped two other clusters of blood spots with her pen. “Which is what makes this part tricky to decipher. So far as I can tell, these are the symbols for ‘antlers’ and ‘wood.’ Wood as in planks of, not a forest.”

Pierce mulled that over. “Antler-timber.” Not the most common street name, she had to admit. What else could antlers stand for? Deer. Stags. Reindeer. Horns. Hornwood? Horntree? She had it. “Hornbeam!” she said aloud. “Twenty-Two Hornbeam Way?”

“You should do cryptic crosswords,” Jenny said.

“Ha. I prefer my clues to end with arrests and convictions.” She was already heading for the door. “Thanks, Jen,” she said.

“I did nothing, I saw nothing, I was never here,” Jenny called after her.