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

box.”
    “And what was taken from the private collection?”
    “A bag of rune stones,” Freeman put in. “Only twelve stones, though, not a complete set. The owner used to buy them up cheap at auctions—antique sets of stones with some runes missing.” Not much use to anyone for casting runes, then; Pierce was dubious towards most alleged forms of divination in the first place, but you certainly couldn’t get an effective reading with only half the runes available.
    “Maybe the thieves have the other part of the set?” Taylor suggested.
    “It’s possible,” Pierce allowed. “Or they’re looking for it.”
    “Why this set, though?” Freeman bit her lip thoughtfully. “Why not grab one of the others instead? Why not steal a complete one, even? We know they’re capable of pulling off the thefts.”
    “Obviously they’re after these specific items for a reason,” Pierce said. “So what links them together?”
    A moment of contemplation, then Taylor shook his head. “Nothing, Guv,” he said. “It could be components for a ritual—the dagger, the goblet cup thing—but I don’t see how a box and a few useless rune stones fit into that.”
    “It’s not just about the magic,” Freeman said, sitting forward. “We’ve got to think of it as a crime. What’s the motivation if it’s not about money?”
    “Jealousy, revenge, obsession,” Taylor reeled off, and shook his head. “Maybe we’re looking for a rational connection when there isn’t one? They could be stealing things because the ghost of Elvis told them to. Or using some kind of ritual to divine what they ought to steal next.”
    “Ownership,” Freeman suggested, with a self-deprecating shrug. “They think these objects are theirs by right. Maybe the thieves used to own these items, or have some reason to think they ought to.”
    “But we don’t know the provenance of most of the items,” Taylor objected. “We don’t have any evidence they were ever linked together.”
    “ We don’t,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “Maybe the thieves do.”
    Pierce sat forward. “Maybe we’re thinking too recent,” she said. “The item stolen last night was a seventeenth-century carved mask. This is not necessarily about who owned these things ten years ago, or even fifty—maybe the thieves are trying to unite a collection from much longer ago.” She stood up from her chair. “Find me everything you can about the history of these artefacts before they ended up in collections.”
     
     
    I T WAS A frustrating afternoon of effort without much result. The only thing their research into the history of the artefacts managed to dig up was that the dagger and carved box were both estimated to be of a similar age to the mask, supporting the idea that all five pieces probably had a common origin. But exactly what that might be proved impossible to track; the history of the dagger dead-ended with the man who’d sold it to the museum in the 1930s, and none of the others had even that much of a paper trail, picked up in house clearances and auction lots with no details attached. They weren’t visibly valuable enough for anyone to have bothered keeping records.
    Dawson’s search for more detail on Vyner’s actions had come up similarly blank. He’d been checked out at the hospital but found to have nothing more obvious than a headache and some bruises, gone straight home afterwards, and no doubt his body would still have been lying there undiscovered if the constable sent to get a statement from him hadn’t been concerned he’d done a runner.
    Deepan had secured them some CCTV footage from the cameras in the region of the Hemsfield Gallery, but none of them were positioned to show the building or the street in front of it directly, which left the needle-in-haystack task of watching the whole lot in hopes of spotting anything of interest.
    “Any joy?” Pierce asked towards the end of the afternoon, walking round to rest her hands on the back