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 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 got her through the Academy, it got 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 they 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; blue collar 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.
Across the street, a guy was on his front porch taking pictures of the house, the police tape, her. Fine, she’d start with him.
She crossed the street and walked to his porch with an easy, non-threatening stride. His eyes went wide and a little panicked anyway.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t hurting anything, I’ll stop,” he said, hiding the camera behind his back.
Hardin gave him a wry, annoyed smile and held up her badge. “My name’s Detective Hardin, Denver PD, and I just want to ask you a few questions. That okay?”
He only relaxed a little. He was maybe in his early twenties. The house was obviously a rental, needing a good scrubbing and a coat of paint. Through the front windows she could see band posters on the living room walls. “Yeah . . . okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Pete. Uh . . . Pete Teller.”
“Did you know Dora Manuel?”
“That Mexican lady across the street? The one who got killed?”
“Filipino, but yes.”
“No, didn’t know the lady at all. Saw her sometimes.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Maybe a few days ago. Yeah, like four days ago, going inside the house at dinnertime.”
Patton’s background file said that Manuel didn’t own a car. She rode the bus to her job at a dry cleaners. Pete would have seen her walking home.
“Did you see anyone else? Maybe anyone who looked like they didn’t belong?”
“No, no one. Not ever. Lady kept to herself, you know?”
Yeah, she did. She asked a few more standard witness questions, and he gave the standard answers. She gave him her card and asked him to call if he remembered anything, or if he heard anything. Asked him to tell his roommates to do the same.
The family two doors south of Manuel was also Filipino. Hardin was guessing the tired woman who opened the door was the mother of a good-sized family. Kids were screaming in a back room. The woman was shorter than Hardin by a foot, brown-skinned, and her black hair was tied in a ponytail. She wore a blue T-shirt and faded jeans.
Hardin flashed her badge. “I’m Detective Hardin, Denver PD. Could I ask you a few questions?”
“Is this about Dora Manuel?”
This encouraged Hardin. At least someone around here had actually known the woman. “Yes. I’m assuming you heard what happened?”