“No,” she said. “I have a set of free-standing legs attached to a pelvis, detached cleanly above the fifth lumbar vertebra. The wound is covered with a layer of table salt that appears to have caused the flesh to scorch. Try explaining that one to my captain.”
“No thanks,” he said. “That’s your job. I’m just the criminal reprobate.”
“So you’ve never seen anything like this.” “Hell, no.”
“Have you ever heard of anything like this?” She’d set the photos flat on the table. He was still studying them.
“No. You have any leads at all?”
“No. We’ve ID’d the body. She was Filipina, a recent immigrant. We’re still trying to find the other half of the body. There has to be another half somewhere, right?”
He sat back, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“You’re sure you don’t know anything? You’re not just yanking my chain out of spite?”
“I get nothing out of yanking your chain. Not here.”
Scowling, she put the photos back in her case. “Well, this was worth a try. Sorry for wasting your time.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
He was yanking her chain, she was sure of it. “If you think of anything, if you get any bright ideas, call me.” As the guard arrived to escort him back to his cell, she said, “And get some sleep. You look awful.”
Hardin was at her desk, looking over the latest reports from the crime lab. Nothing. They hadn’t had rain, the ground was hard, so no footprints. No blood. No fibers. No prints on the shed. Someone wearing gloves had cut off the lock in order to stuff half the body inside—then hadn’t bothered to lock the shed again. The murderer had simply closed the door and vanished.
The phone rang, and she answered, frustrated and surly. “Detective Hardin.”
“Will you accept the charges from Cormac Bennett at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility?”
It took her a moment to realize what that meant. She was shocked. “Yes, I will. Hello? Bennett?”
“Manananggal,” he said. “Don’t ask me how to spell it.”
She wrote down the word, sounding it out as best she could. The Internet would help her find the correct spelling. “Okay, but what is it?”
“Filipino version of the vampire.”
That made no sense. But really, did that matter? It made as much sense as anything else. It was a trail to follow. “Hot damn,” she said, suddenly almost happy. “The victim was from the Philippines. It fits. So the suspect was Filipino, too? Do Filipino vampires eat entire torsos, or what?”
“No,” he said. “That body is the vampire, the manananggal. You’re looking for a vampire hunter.”
Her brain stopped at that one. “Excuse me?”
“These creatures, these vampires—they detach the top halves of their bodies to hunt. They’re killed when someone sprinkles salt on the bottom half. They can’t return to reattach to their legs, and they die at sunrise. If they’re anything like European vampires, the top half disintegrates. You’re never going to find the rest of the body.”
Well. She still wouldn’t admit that any of this made sense, but the pieces fit. The bottom half, the salt burns. Never mind—she was still looking for a murderer here, right?
“Detective?” Cormac said.
“Yeah, I’m here,” she said. “This fits all the pieces we have. Looks like I have some reading to do to figure out what really happened.”
He managed to sound grim. “Detective, you might check to see if there’ve been a higher than usual number of miscarriages in the neighborhood.”
“Why?”
“I used the term ‘vampire’ kind of loosely. This thing eats fetuses. Sucks them through the mother’s navel while she sleeps.”
She almost hung up on him because it was too much. What was it Kitty sometimes said? Just when you thought you were getting a handle on the supernatural, just when you thought you’d seen it all, something even more unbelievable came along.