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

of the 1994 murders. Questioned by...” He leaned over to consult one of the opened files. “DI Raymond Carlisle and Sergeant... er, you, guv,” he said with a blink.
    Pierce gave a terse nod, vaguely remembering the interview, though the man himself was a faded ghost in her memory. She wanted to say middle-aged, overweight, balding... but how much of that was recollection, and how much just her mind sketching in details borrowed from a thousand others like him she’d interviewed in her career?
    “He gave us a description of the vehicle used to dump the bodies,” she said. “But he also gave us a load of complete guff about the people driving it.” What had started out as a halfway-plausible description of a woman or maybe a long-haired man driving and a bald man in the passenger seat had quickly swollen with ‘remembered’ details until the woman was beautiful and pale as death and the passenger could have starred in Nosferatu . By the time the media got hold of him, Waite was prepared to swear he’d witnessed the Nosferatu lookalike restored to strength by drinking blood from the corpse.
    After that it had been impossible to quash the assumption the killer was a real vampire—especially with DI Carlisle all too eager for an excuse for why the police hadn’t managed to make any arrests yet.
    Eddie clearly had enough sense to skip over the details of Waite’s dubious witness statement. “The police received a tipoff about the van?” he said.
    Pierce nodded. “Anonymous female caller claimed to have seen it coming and going from a boarded-up house in York, and that the people living there had tried to recruit her into their cult. Based on her information, Carlisle believed that the cult leader would be confined to the house in daylight hours, and organised a dawn raid.”
    “But they weren’t there?” he said.
    “Nope,” Pierce said grimly. She hadn’t been either—and she couldn’t help but think that maybe, if Carlisle hadn’t considered her surplus to requirements, she might have realised it was all about to go horribly wrong... “Firearms went in and found the place empty except for a coffin in the basement. When they opened the lid, it blew up in their faces. One officer was killed and two injured. The whole thing was probably a setup from the start—we found the third body in a graveyard fifty miles away a couple of hours later. It must have been dumped there the night before the raid.”
    About as comprehensive a cock-up as you could ask for.
    “One of the officer’s statements mentions a possible suspect at the scene of the raid,” Eddie said, consulting his files.
    “Oh?” Pierce frowned a little, racking her memory, but if she’d ever been informed of that detail she’d forgotten it since.
    He peered at the page again as if he might have been mistaken. “Yes, um, Firearms Officer Leonard Grey—”
    “Leo Grey?” That caused her head to snap up. “He was part of the raid?”
    “Er, yes, guv.” He turned the folder to show her the statement sheet. “Is that significant?”
    Pierce glanced at the signature, and then the written statement above it. A terse summation of events, much as she might expect from the man. “Not directly,” she said. “But I know him. He’s got good instincts.” He’d had good instincts, she supposed; he was retired now, another victim of the clusterfuck of a case that had been their pursuit of Sebastian. “Go on,” she told Eddie with a nod.
    He swallowed. “Um... there’s not much here, guv,” he admitted. “According to Grey’s statement, he was stationed outside the building in case of attempted escapes, and spotted a young woman watching from the park across the street who he considered to be acting suspiciously.” He flipped through a couple more pages inside the folder. “I don’t see any evidence that it was followed up.”
    Meaning that it might have turned out to be nothing—or just gone ignored in the chaos of the disastrous