Under the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit) Read Online Free Page A

bakery where she grabbed breakfast made her late, and she arrived at the RCU with a cooling cup of coffee, a bacon sandwich, and a headache.
    The detective branch of the Ritual Crime Unit worked out of an open plan office on the second floor. As she pushed through the double doors, heads popped up from behind the computers like startled prairie dogs. No Sally today, of course, but Tim had made it in on time, though he looked dreadful. So much for the resilience of youth. He followed Deepan’s cheerful, “Morning, Guv!” with a vague mumble of his own, sinking back down low behind his monitor.
    With the caseload they had, there ought to be more than the four of them, but the budget was tight and not many people stuck it out in the RCU for long. It was an equally bad career choice for both the ambitious and the lazy, dangerous work that rarely came to the sort of tidy conclusion that looked good on a CV.
    Deepan crossed the room to greet her as she set her makeshift breakfast down on her desk. “Heard our suspect self-destructed after I left,” he said, with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, Guv. I should have insisted they let me check him over.”
    She shook her head. “Not your fault. They had Palmer’s authorisation to take over—and from what he said, this is coming from over his head. We’re officially off the case, kids.”
    A gloomy silence settled. Sally was usually the one to provide a note of cheer on days when the job was going badly, and without her the office seemed even grimmer.
    “Did you get my handcuffs back?” she asked Deepan, to break the silence. The silver cuffs were special issue, and an arse-ache to replace.
    “Oh, yeah, Guv.” He moved to his desk and opened a drawer. “Got them right here.” He held the cuffs out to her by one of the loops. “Good job I remembered. Those blokes were trying to confiscate anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
    “Thieving bastards,” Pierce muttered, crumpling her sandwich wrapper to toss at the bin. “ Six months we’ve been after this skinbinder.” Had Counter Terrorism known where he was operating all along? Or had they been riding along on the RCU’s coattails, letting them do all the work before sweeping in to take over?
    She spun the handcuffs around her finger as she pondered, the harsh artificial light reflecting off the battered silver.
    And also off something else. Pierce raised the cuffs to take a closer look.
    A single strand of thick black hair was caught in the hinge. Definitely not hers. She glanced across at Deepan. “Have you been rubbing these cuffs on your head, my son?” she asked him.
    “Er... not recently, Guv,” he said, giving her a sideways look.
    She spun the handcuffs around to show him the strand of hair—or rather, fur. “Then we might still have some evidence from our panther friend after all.”
     
     
    T HERE WAS NO point taking the panther hair down to forensics. It would take them weeks to get around to testing it, with their backlog—assuming they would even agree to process it at all, when it hadn’t come through proper channels. Besides, she already had a good idea what kind of hair it was and where it had come from.
    No, what she needed now was a different kind of analysis. She bagged the strand of hair and took it down to Sympathetic Magic.
    Magical analysis was a hodgepodge field, still in its infancy—and utterly useless for securing a conviction. Ritual magic was tough to safely replicate, difficult to record, and harder still to explain to a jury. Sympathetic magic drew the shortest straw of all, since no lawyer on Earth could fail to clear a client charged with harming a victim from miles away with a few fingernails and some hair.
    Hence, the station’s Sympathetic Magic department was pretty small. About five foot one, in fact, and commonly known by the name of Jenny.
    “Jen!” Pierce leaned in through the door of the small office, made still more cramped by stacks of books and file folders.