Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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