Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

more of an idea of the nature of the ritual being conducted, I doubt there’s any way to reconstruct it.”
    She pulled a face, though she hadn’t expected much better. “Well, thanks, anyway.” She started to reverse out through the door, but Cliff beckoned her back.
    “That said, I do have some possible results for you on...”—he lifted his eyebrows meaningfully—“that personal project we discussed.”
    Cliff trying to be circumspect was a bit like something out of a pantomime, but nonetheless, Pierce felt herself tense as she stepped back inside and closed the door. “You managed to put a date on that shapeshifting pelt?” she asked.
    At the end of December they’d made a bust on a group calling themselves Red Key, who’d been attempting to raise a major demon. Alarmingly organised and well-supplied, they’d had at least one bona fide warlock in their employ, and a number of shapeshifters acting as the muscle. The shifters—always difficult to contain—had mostly been killed in the chaos or escaped, but Pierce had successfully arrested one in panther form.
    He wasn’t talking... but the shapeshifting pelt they’d seized from him just might. The maker’s rune inside had been Sebastian’s. And if Cliff could prove the pelt had been created after Sebastian supposedly died in a car accident last October...
    “I’m afraid there’s a limit to how precise I can be,” he cautioned, moving over to the racks of metal shelving at the far side of the room and retrieving a manila envelope from between some boxes. “Frankly, dating pelts has traditionally been a matter of centuries, not months or weeks, and the little work that’s been done on newer skins has naturally been angled towards establishing whether artefacts were made pre- or post-legislative reforms in the last few decades.”
    “You don’t need to sell me on how hard you’ve been miracle-working, Cliff,” she said. “I’ll believe your expert opinion.”
    He opened up the padded envelope, and carefully tipped out a smaller sealed plastic bag containing a single strand of black hair—or, she assumed, panther fur. He held it up to the light of one of the standing lamps set up near his workspace. “I’m afraid the results of the earlier testing have faded somewhat, but if you will observe the subtle banding by the root of the hair...?”
    She squinted at a hint of red or gold tint that might be a trick of the light on the plastic. “Your eyesight’s better than mine,” she said.
    “Not my eyesight, my contact lenses,” he corrected with a smile. “I do have enhanced photographs, in any case.” He fished a much-magnified photo of the panther hair out of the envelope, the colours artificially brightened to show bands of colour shading from a bright gold near the root through a spectrum of reds into black.
    “Now, as I say, this is an imprecise and untested methodology, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hang the success of a court case upon it,” Cliff cautioned, “but I acquired some samples from legal pelts and subjected them to the same test.” He tipped out two more photographs and laid them out side by side with the first. “Now, this one here was a pelt made about eighteen months ago—note how the test for enchantment shows much less distinct results?”
    The bands of colour on the hair in this second photo were dramatically duller, a deep rusty red at the root and a narrow, near-invisible smudge of brown.
    Cliff tapped the third and final photo. “And this one was taken from a pelt that was enchanted just this past November.”
    In this one, the bands of colour looked much more similar to the first, but when Pierce rearranged the pictures to compare the two side by side, she could see that the bands on the original picture were still a fraction brighter and more visible. She raised her head to look at Cliff. “So this means that our pelt was enchanted more recently?”
    “It’s hardly a smoking gun,” Cliff cautioned,