“Salt can’t do that to an open wound, can it?”
“In large enough quantities salt can be corrosive on an open wound. But we’re talking a lot of salt, and I didn’t find that much.”
That didn’t answer any of Hardin’s questions. She needed a cigarette. After thanking the ME, she went outside.
She kept meaning to quit smoking. She really ought to quit. But she valued these quiet moments. Standing outside, pacing a few feet back and forth with a cigarette in her hand and nothing to do but think, let her solve problems.
In her reading and research—which had been pretty scant up to this point, granted—salt showed up over and over again in superstitions, in magical practices. In defensive magic. And there it was. Maybe someone thought the victim was magically dangerous. Someone thought the victim was going to come back from the dead and used the salt to prevent that.
That information didn’t solve the murder, but it might provide a motive.
Patton was waiting at her desk back at the station, just so he could present the folder to her in person. “The house belongs to Tom and Betty Arcuna. They were renting it out to a Dora Manuel. There’s your victim.”
Hardin opened the folder. The photo on the first page looked like it had been blown up from a passport. The woman was brown skinned, with black hair and tasteful makeup on a round face. Middle-aged, she guessed, but healthy. Frowning and unhappy, for whatever reason. She might very well be the victim, but without a face or even fingerprints they’d probably have to resort to DNA testing. Unless they found the missing half. Still no luck with that.
Ms. Manuel had immigrated from the Philippines three years ago. Tom and Betty Arcuna, her cousins, had sponsored her, but they hadn’t seemed to have much contact with her. They rented her the house, Manuel paid on time, and they didn’t even get together for holidays. The Arcunas lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and this house was one of several they owned in Denver and rented out, mostly to Filipinos. Patton had talked to them on the phone; they had expressed shock at Manuel’s demise, but had no other information to offer. “She kept to herself. We never got any complaints, and we know all the neighbors.”
Hardin fired up the Internet browser on her computer and searched under “Philippines” and “magic.” And got a lot of hits that had nothing to do with what she was looking for. Magic shows, as in watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat, and Magic tournaments, as in the geek card game. She added “spell” and did a little better, spending a few minutes flipping through various pages discussing black magic and hexes and the like, in both dry academic rhetoric and the sensationalist tones of superstitious evangelists. She learned that many so-called spells were actually curses involving gastrointestinal distress and skin blemishes. But she could also buy a love spell online for a hundred pesos. She didn’t find anything about any magic that would slice a body clean through the middle.
Official public acknowledgement—that meant government recognition—of the existence of magic and the supernatural was recent enough that no one had developed policies about how to deal with cases involving such matters. The medical examiner didn’t have a way to determine if the salt she found on the body had had a magical effect. There wasn’t an official process detailing how to investigate a magical crime. The Denver PD Paranatural Unit was one of the first in the country, and Hardin—the only officer currently assigned to the unit, because she was the only one with any experience—suspected she was going to end up writing the book on some of this stuff. She still spent a lot of her time trying to convince people that any of it was real.
When she was saddled with the unit, she’d gotten a piece of advice: The real stuff stayed hidden, and had stayed hidden for a long time. Most of the information that was easy to find was a smoke screen. To find the truth, you had to keep digging. She went old school and searched the online catalog for the Denver Public Library, but didn’t find a whole lot on Filipino folklore.
“What is it this time? Alligators in the sewer?”
Hardin rolled her eyes without turning her chair to look at the comedian leaning on the end of her cubicle. It was Bailey, the senior homicide detective, and he’d given her shit ever since she’d first walked into the bureau and said the word “werewolf” with a straight face. It didn’t matter that she’d turned out to be right, and that she’d dug up a dozen previous deaths in Denver that had been attributed to dog and coyote maulings and gotten them reclassified as unsolved homicides, with werewolves as the suspected perpetrators—which ruined the bureau’s solve rate. She’d done battle with vampires, and Bailey didn’t have to believe it for it to be true. Hardin could at least hope that even if she couldn’t solve the bizarre crimes she faced, she’d at least get brownie points for taking the jobs no one else wanted.
“How are you, Detective?” she said in monotone.
“I hear you got a live one. So to speak. Patton says he was actually happy to hand this one over to you.”
“It’s different, all right.” She turned away from the computer to face the gray-haired, softly overweight man. Three hundred and forty-nine days to retirement, he was, and kept telling them.
He craned around a little further to look at her computer screen. “A tough-nut case and what are you doing, shopping for shoes?”
She’d cultivated a smile just for situations like this. It had gotten her through the Academy, it had gotten her through every marksmanship test with a smart-ass instructor, it had gotten her through eight years as a cop. But one of these days, she was going to snap and take someone’s head off.
“It’s the twenty-first century, Bailey,” she said. “Half the crooks these days knock over a liquor store and then brag about it on Myspace an hour later. You gotta keep on top of it.”
He looked at her blankly. She wasn’t about to explain Myspace to him. Not that he’d even dare admit to her that he didn’t know or understand something. He was the big dick on campus, and she was just the girl detective.
At least she had a pretty good chance of outliving the bastards.
Donning a smile, he said, “Hey, maybe it’s a vampire!” He walked away, chuckling.
If that was the worst ribbing she got today, she’d count herself lucky.
Canvassing the neighborhood could be both her most and least favorite part of an investigation. She usually learned way more than she wanted to and came away not thinking very highly of people. She’d have to stand there not saying anything while listening to people tell her over and over again that no, they never suspected anything, the suspect was always very quiet, and no, they never saw anything, they didn’t know anything. All the while, t
hey wouldn’t meet her gaze. They didn’t want to get involved. She bet if she’d interviewed the Arcunas in person, they wouldn’t have looked her in the eyes.
But this was often the very best way to track down leads, and a good witness could crack a whole case.
Patton had already talked to the neighbor who called in the smell, a Hispanic woman who lived in the house behind Manuel’s. She hadn’t had any more useful information, so Hardin wanted to try the more immediate neighbors.
She went out early in the evening, after work and around dinnertime, when people were more likely to be home. The neighborhood was older, a grid of narrow streets, eighty-year-old houses in various states of repair jammed in together. Towering ash and maple trees pushed up the slabs of the sidewalks with their roots. Narrow drives led to carports, or simply to the sides of the houses. Most cars parked along the curbs. A mix of lower-class residents lived here: kids living five or six to a house to save rent while they worked minimum-wage jobs; ethnic families, recent immigrants getting their starts; bluecollar families struggling at the poverty line.
Dora Manuel’s house still had yellow tape around the property. When she couldn’t find parking on the street, Hardin broke the tape away and pulled into the narrow driveway, stopping in front of the fence to the back lot. She put the tape back up behind her car.