Free Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) by E. E. Richardson Page A

that he’d been removed, when he wasn’t really dead at all?
    Pierce pressed her lips together as she cleared the remains of her meal with a clatter. These trails were weeks, months old. She’d been out of action too long to have much hope of catching up to anyone behind all this. There was nowhere to start.
    But Pierce had spent thirty years of her life working for the RCU. Nowhere to start was practically routine.

 

     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    P IERCE LEFT D EEPAN to liaise with the local police and see about getting them CCTV footage from the surrounding streets, and drove back to the station. No sign of her DI in evidence. “Dawson call in?” she asked Freeman.
    The young DC shook her head, and Pierce tried not to grimace. It could be that Dawson was just caught up in the drudgery of routine police work and didn’t have anything to report, but she didn’t fully trust him out of her sight. If he had found some kind of lead, what were the odds he’d actually notify her instead of going off half-cocked to chase it down? She was all in favour of her team showing initiative—Lord knew the RCU was too small and too busy to keep officers tied to her apron strings—but it would help to be sure she could trust their judgement before turning them loose.
    Time to get to know her new pair of constables. She drew their attention with a clap. “All right, these artefact thefts,” she said. “What do we know?” Always easier to get up to speed from a verbal briefing than reading dry reports, and it would give her some chance to take their measure as investigators.
    Freeman was the first to speak up, sitting up smartly while Taylor was still sporting the stunned rabbit look that seemed to be his default response to snap tests of his abilities. “There have been four incidents that we’re treating as connected,” she said. “Five now, if we’re including last night’s theft from the Hemsfield Gallery.”
    “It seems to be the same MO, but let’s stick with the earlier cases for now,” Pierce said.
    Freeman nodded earnestly. “Erm... all of the break-ins occurred at night. Two museums, an antique shop and a private collection, at locations scattered across Yorkshire. The thefts look like they’re professional—alarms and internal CCTV disabled, no witnesses or useful trace evidence left at any of the scenes. Targeted, too—in each case, the thieves could easily have got away with far more than they took.”
    “So what exactly have they taken so far?” Pierce asked. She’d skimmed this file yesterday, but the details of the items taken had been secondary in her attention to clues about the thieves and their operation.
    By this time Taylor had riffled through his notebook and found the appropriate spot. “In the first museum heist they took a ceremonial dagger.”
    “They opened up a glass case full of them, but only took the one,” Freeman added. “Quite plain, leather scabbard, nothing fancy in the design. There were others in the same case that would have been worth thousands.”
    “But this one would be easier to fence,” Taylor countered.
    “Possibly,” Pierce allowed, though she doubted that had been the motivation. “What else?”
    He consulted his notes again. “The second museum theft was a wooden cup. Goblet, is that what you call it? Wine-glass-shaped thing.” He sketched it vaguely in the air, looking faintly worried, as if he might be marked down for failing to get the right word. “Chalice?” he hazarded.
    “Cup’ll do.” Pierce waved the detail away. Facts mattered, not the terminology.
    “Carved, but not very valuable,” he went on with greater confidence. “They also took a wooden box from an antique shop in Leeds.” He held his hands out to illustrate an object about the dimensions of a tissue box. “With little subdivided sections inside. The owner thought it might have been an old magician’s herb and powder store, but there was nothing in it, just an empty