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

raising a finger. “There could be any number of factors influencing the results—variations in the ritual, a more talented skinbinder with a higher quality of skinning blade... perhaps even the type of animal that provided the pelt. Your sample is from a black panther, whereas both of my comparison hairs were from large dogs. I’m afraid there simply isn’t enough research on this kind of comparative testing to control for all possible factors.”
    “Disclaimers duly noted,” she said, but she could feel the buzz of vindication nonetheless. Maybe it wasn’t outright proof that Sebastian had still been alive and making pelts after his October arrest and supposed death, but it was certainly cause for suspicion—especially when the official story stunk to high heaven. “It’s a start, at least.”
    “A good lawyer would rip it to pieces as evidence, and rightfully so,” Cliff warned.
    Pierce grimaced. “We’re a long way from getting this in front of a lawyer,” she said. Not when it came to the kind of case where government groups had permission to walk in and seize her evidence, prisoners died in too-convenient accidents, and the skinbinder she was chasing had the capability to turn murder victims into skin-suits for impostors to wear.
    “Keep this safe,” she told Cliff, handing the photographs back. “The people who busted Sebastian out of his cell aren’t the kind to respect due process.”
    But now she had a loose thread to begin tugging on.

 

     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    T HOUGHTS OF CONSPIRACIES would have to keep, with a major murder investigation in the pipeline. Pierce headed back into the office to see what Eddie had dug up on the Valentine Vampire. “All right, constable,” she said, grabbing the nearest chair that wasn’t buried in files, “refresh my memory.”
    He looked a little flustered as he rifled back through his notebook, but that was his default response to being put on the spot; he seemed to have his facts together as he cleared his throat and began.
    “Erm, the first wave of murders took place between February fifth and twenty-first, 1987. Three victims: all white males, aged between twenty-one and twenty-six. Two were members of sports clubs and one was a marathon runner. The bodies were left posed in or near graveyards across South and West Yorkshire. All victims showed numerous ritualised cuts across the face and upper body, and identical puncture wounds at the base of the neck, which combined with the discovery of the second victim on February fourteenth led the media to come up with the name the Valentine Vampire.”
    Her disdain for the name must have showed, because he cleared his throat and hastened on. “Er, there were no leads in the initial investigation, but the murders were assumed to have stopped until the body of Neil Sherrington was found in a graveyard near Horncastle on February third, 1994. It wasn’t immediately linked to the Valentine Vampire murders of the ’eighties until a second body was found in Grimsby a week later. Again there were three victims, all following the same profile. The third body was left at the same location as the first, shortly after the police were pulled out of the area.”
    “Cocky sods,” Pierce said. And neither of those sites were all that far from today’s body near Newark-on-Trent. Maybe the killer was playing the same trick again, circling back to old haunts once the heat was off.
    “Yes, guv,” Eddie said with a dutiful nod, and checked his notes again. “Erm, the third set of murders began with the discovery of the body of Andrew Cole near Rotherham on February sixth, 2001. Nine days later the killers dumped the body of a second victim in Hemsworth, but this time there was an alleged witness, a man called Alan Waite who claimed to have been out looking for his lost wallet after he’d dropped it on the way home from the pub. He was briefly treated as a suspect, but found to have been out of the country at the time