Thehalf a body looked slightly ridiculous laid out on a table at themorgue. The legs had been stripped, and a sheet laid over them. Butthat meant the whole body was under the sheet, leaving only the waistand wound visible. Half the stainless steel table remained empty andgleaming. The whole thing seemed way too clean. The morgue had a chillto it, and Hardin repressed a shiver.
“Idon’t know what made the cut,” Alice Dominguez, the ME on the case,said. “Even with the burning and corrosion on the wound, I should findsome evidence of slicing, cutting movements, or even metal shards. Butthere’s nothing. The wound is symmetrical and even. I’d have said itwas done by a guillotine, but there aren’t any metal traces. Maybe itwas a laser?” She shrugged, to signal that she was reaching.
“Alaser—would that have cauterized the wound like that?” Hardin said.
“Maybe.Except that it wasn’t cauterized. Those aren’t heat burns.”
Now Hardinwas really confused. “This isn’t helping me at all.” “Sorry. It getsworse. You want to sit down?”
“No.What is it?”
“Itlooks like acid burns,” Dominguez said. “But the analysis says salt.Plain old table salt.”
“Saltcan’t do that to an open wound, can it?”
“Inlarge enough quantities salt can be corrosive on an open wound. Butwe’re talking a lot of salt, and I didn’t find that much.”
Thatdidn’t answer any of Hardin’s questions. She needed a cigarette.After thanking the ME, she went outside.
Shekept meaning to quit smoking. She really ought to quit. But she valuedthese quiet moments. Standing outside, pacing a few feet back and forthwith a cigarette in her hand and nothing to do but think, let her solveproblems.
Inher reading and research—which had been pretty scant up to this point,granted—salt showed up over and over again in superstitions, inmagical practices. In defensive magic. And there it was. Maybe someone thought the victim was magically dangerous. Someonethought the victim was going to come backfrom the dead and used the salt to prevent that.
Thatinformation didn’t solve the murder, but it might provide a motive.
Pattonwas waiting at her desk back at the station, just so he could presentthe folder to her in person. “The house belongs to Tom and BettyArcuna. They were renting it out to a Dora Manuel. There’s your victim.”
Hardinopened the folder. The photo on the first page looked like it had beenblown up from a passport. The woman was brown skinned,with black hair and tasteful makeup on a round face. Middle-aged, sheguessed, but healthy. Frowning and unhappy, for whatever reason. Shemight very well be the victim, but without a face or even fingerprintsthey’d probably have to resort to DNA testing. Unless they found themissing half. Still no luck with that.
Ms.Manuel had immigrated from the Philippines three years ago. Tom andBetty Arcuna, her cousins, had sponsored her, but they hadn’t seemed tohave much contact with her. They rented her the house, Manuel paid ontime, and they didn’t even get together for holidays. The Arcunas livedin Phoenix, Arizona, and this house was one of several they owned inDenver and rented out, mostly to Filipinos. Patton had talked to themon the phone; they had expressed shock at Manuel’s demise, but had noother information to offer. “She kept to herself. We never got anycomplaints, and we know all the neighbors.”
Hardinfired up the Internet browser on her computer and searched under“Philippines” and “magic.” And got a lot of hits that had nothing to dowith what she was looking for. Magic shows, as in watch me pull arabbit out of my hat, and Magic tournaments, as in the geek card game.She added “spell” and did a little better, spending a few minutesflipping through various pages discussing black magic and hexes and thelike, in both dry academic rhetoric and the sensationalist tones ofsuperstitious evangelists. She learned that many so-called spells wereactually curses involving gastrointestinal distress and skinblemishes. But she could also buy a love spell online for a hundredpesos. She didn’t find anything about any magic that would slice a bodyclean through the middle.
Officialpublic acknowledgement—that meant government recognition—of theexistence of magic and the supernatural was recent enough that no onehad developed policies about how to deal with cases involving suchmatters. The medical examiner didn’t have a way to determine if thesalt she found on the body had had a magical effect. There wasn’t anofficial process detailing how to investigate a magical crime. TheDenver PD Paranatural Unit was one of the first inthe country, and Hardin—the only officer currently assigned to theunit, because she was the only one with any experience—suspected shewas going to end up writing the book on some of this stuff. She stillspent a lot of her time trying to convince people that any of it wasreal.
Whenshe was saddled with the unit, she’d gotten a piece of advice: The realstuff stayed hidden, and had stayed hidden for a long time. Most of theinformation that was easy to find was a smoke screen. To find thetruth, you had to keep digging. She went old school and searched theonline catalog for the Denver Public Library, but didn’t find a wholelot on Filipino folklore.
“Whatis it this time? Alligators in the sewer?”
Hardinrolled her eyes without turning her chair to look at the comedianleaning on the end of her cubicle. It was Bailey, the senior homicidedetective, and he’d given her shit ever since she’d first walked intothe bureau and said the word “werewolf” with a straight face. It didn’tmatter that she’d turned out to be right, and that she’d dug up a dozenprevious deaths in Denver that had been attributed to dog and coyotemaulings and gotten them reclassified as unsolved homicides, withwerewolves as the suspected perpetrators—which ruined the bureau’ssolve rate. She’d done battle with vampires, and Bailey didn’t have tobelieve it for
