She had introduced herself to the coroner shortly after she had arrived. She had stopped at the coroner's office early in the morning before she went out on her preliminary ride around the victim's neighborhoods. The coroner had his assistant photocopy the reports of the previous reports for her to read but could not spare her the time for any questions.
"It's all in the report, Agent Carpenter," he had said in a tone that let her know that this was not a man to threaten or coax once he had made up his mind.
She went through them again in the truck, comparing the men, trying to find anything they had in common physically but nothing jumped out at her. She looked out at Laurence Lopez's house where she had just left his widow. It was just as average and nondescript as the other victims' houses.
If they had been visiting the brothel, the four other men had covered their tracks well. Their spouses and neighbors either did not know or were in denial.
She had stopped first at Federico Lopez's house and had been greeted by his eldest daughter, an eighteen year-old girl with tons of personality and an attitude to match it.
"What do you want to know?" she had asked the moment Jo had flashed her badge.
Jo had been too embarrassed to ask directly about her father maybe seeing some hookers. She had asked instead about girlfriends.
"Girlfriends? Not that I know. Not really, not since Natalia was born mom our mother left," the girl scooped up the toddler and rocked her on her hip, "He worked a lot. He had a lot of us to feed."
She gestured at the twins doing their homework on the folding dinner table and the little girl she was holding, "There are two more but they're at a friend's house."
"How do you care for them?" Jo asked bewildered.
"Quit school. Now I work three jobs and my grandparents and relatives are pitching in. We're a close-knit bunch. I assure you Agent Carpenter, if my dad was seeing anyone, we would all know. We didn't keep secrets. It's impossible to keep secrets in here."
"I see," she said. She pulled out the matchbook from her pocket and after considering it for a moment showed it to her, "Have you ever seen one of these? Maybe your father forgot one of these in a pocket."
"Uh huh," the girl shook her head, "Dad didn't smoke and I've never seen that logo."
"Right. Well, thank you for your time. I'll let you know if we find anything more," Jo said feeling disappointed.
She had gone immediately to James Holden's house which was just three blocks from the house. She was disappointed to find that the house had been sold shortly after the discovery of Holden's body by his wife. She was now in California according to her neighbors. They could not give her much information about Holden or were unwilling to speak ill of the dead. Jo pushed as much as she dared but all she got was the old "nice person, devoted husband, kept himself to himself" crap people write in obits.
She considered breaking in but the house looked a little too inhabited to risk it, even during work hours, besides, any of the previous owners things would probably have been thrown away by now. Still it was noteworthy that at least two of the victims lived within a few blocks of each other.
She stopped at a diner for lunch and pulled out her laptop and cellphone. She browsed all the usual lore websites for clues. There was nothing on the region itself, local lore made no mention of any violent deaths involving clay, no suicides in the areas where the bodies had been found... There had been a poltergeist once but it had apparently been taken care of in the sixties by a hunter names Marks.
The MO, choking the victims with clay and posing them in lewd and humiliating ways, sounded just like your typical vengeful spirit. At least one man had been unfaithful but then again, his wife was still alive. Maybe the hooker mistress was dead, she thought. But then, prostitutes were poor candidates for ghosting. It was usually the John who grew too attached, not the hooker. Now if Lopez had killed one of the hookers... But this was all conjecture, she was getting ahead of herself.
If it was tied to the brothel like she hoped it would make sense only if all the other victims had frequented it too and had been with the same hooker and were all somehow involved in her death. As far as she knew though, none of the men were involved in any kind of suspicious deaths.
Her second favourite theory was witches but she really hoped it was not because witches were remarkably tricky to deal with. There were usually several working in a group and they could be anyone. Still, checking for hex bags and spell ingredients was on her to-do list.
She considered phoning Bobby or Ash, they had far better resources than her and they enjoyed research more than she did anyway. But calling them meant her mom would know all about what she was up to. Neither of the men would risk getting on her mother's bad side. She might even drive herself all the way here to 'help' and that was the last thing Jo needed right now. She still had two more families to interrogate to try to establish a connection the easy way. If they could not give her the information, she would have to go to plan B and Plan B kind of sucked.
By the end of the day though, all she could establish was that the men were all hard-working, family men. They did not go to the same places, except for Holden and F. Lopez who went to the same church. The last two lived in the same neighborhood but apparently did not know each other beyond that. As far as anyone knew they had never talked to each other, did not even shop in the same places, if they shopped themselves at all, and worked in different parts of town. They were all straight, one was White, one Black, two were Hispanic and one Asian. Nice to see that evil is still color-blind, she thought to herself as she stared at the pictures and clippings she had stuck to the wall of the motel room she was staying in now.
She played with the matchbook as she tried to establish a connection between the different victims. She wondered what her father would have done. He was a good hunter, her dad, but even she had to admit his strengths lay in the clear cut, track-and-gank type of cases. He was not a fan of the jobs where you had to investigate, put clues together and spend more time thinking than doing. He was a man of action. His daughter was a lot like him, it had to be said. She smiled sadly.
She thought of phoning for help again, it would be a comfort, if nothing else to have someone to talk the case over with. This was something she had known about but had not entirely believed. It was lonely on the road and she was not used to being on her own. She wondered what it would be like to work with a partner. It must be nice to have someone reliable watching your back, someone to bunce ideas off of, someone strong and cocky, short brown hair, hazel eyes...
"Bah!" she swatted at the air as if shooing a particularly annoying fly. She did not need a partner, most hunters ran solo, it made you tough, wily. Some thought it made you safer, no one to mess up and get you killed, no one to use you as bait.
She turned on the TV for background noise and company. She had not realise how much she would miss the constant bustle of The Roadhouse until she had found herself all alone on the road.
"... Another body in connection with the suspicious deaths of five men earlier on this year," Jo turned so quickly she nearly gave herself whiplash. She snatched up the remote and turned the volume up, "Police will not confirm whether this sixth body is a copycat crime or can be attributed to the same killer. According to reliable sources, this latest victim has been dead for less than forty-eight hours and is a woman. Police are in the process of attempting to identify the victim but have not released any names at this time."Jo groaned. It was a woman this time which meant that finding a connection between the victims was now just a little bit harder.
What she wanted was a nice obvious link, like them all being male and cheating on their spouse, for example. She wanted this case to be textbook so she could have something to brag about, something to show the others that she was good at this so they'd get off her back.
She wondered again why she had not simply picked the case in Ohio with the hitchhiking ghost or the poltergeist in Maine. Nice, obvious, salt and burn some bones and get out of dodge before anyone found the desecrated graves. Oh yes, that was too boring for Jo Harvelle... She was too confident for her own good sometimes.
The coroner would already have gone home at this time. Part of Jo just wanted to break into the morgue and have a look at the body herself right now. She weighed the pros and cons and decided against it. She knew she could do it but it was not worth the risk when she could do it first thing in the morning anyway by posing as Agent Carpenter. A lot of hunters ended up in jail because they got too impatient and got caught breaking into places or digging up graves at the wrong time. A lot of them were wanted just about everywhere and lived in holes, moving every few hours...
She knew she would probably end up there too herself some day but she might as well put it off as long as she could.
If she was perfectly honest with herself, the thought of those freezers in the morgue made her uncomfortable too. She could not help remembering another narrow, cold place where she could barely move, no one there but her, a terrified young woman, old bones and a dead madman...
She shuddered and rubbed the goosebumps off her arms. She was too restless to go to sleep anyway. She put on her jacket and braided her hair. She had not brought hiking boots but her sneakers should do well enough. She looked at the time, it was only 10 pm, still pretty early. She could probably make it out there and back before 1 am. She just wanted a quick look and the police might even still be there. She grabbed her fake badge, gun and the silver-bladed knife she always kept with her. She already had a flask of holy water in her pocket and a pouch of salt at her belt. She considered taking a shotgun with salt rounds but it was too hard to conceal. She could leave it in the truck and if no one was there then she would take it but she justwanted to some quick recon.
Hunters loved the nighttime. They hated the things that came out at night but hunting after sunset was in some ways easiers. For one, there were fewer civilians to worry about getting in the way of a stray bullet or stray monster. It was harder to be seen and recognised, and hunted yourself - provided you were not after something with better senses than you that is. It was still crazy dangerous but what was life without a little risk?
It was also more exhilarating, if truth be told. If you lost your flashlight, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye. But then, if you weren't an adrenaline junkie anyway, you were in the wrong business to start with. Besides, there were just as many dangerous things that would rip you apart during the daytime as there were at night. They were just subtler so why worry?
Another definite advantage to doing recon at night was that no one saw if you happened to pick up some evidence and slipped it into your pocket.
It certainly felt more natural to be hunting monsters at night, maybe in the darkness you just could not see how completely insane the whole thing was. You did not have to examine it as if it were right there, in your face, in the light. Jo liked it, the darkness, the deep silence that seemed to sharpen her instincts and her senses. She felt like a wild thing on the prowl.
Finding the site in the dark was not easy. She had very approximate GPS coordinates so she found herself trying not to trip or get her feet tangled up in the scrubby dirt.
She finally found the large area over which the six murders had taken place. There were a couple of police all-terrains with the headlights on though there was very little activity on the site itself.
The site was cordoned off with police tape. After the third murder in the area they had simply encircled the whole thing covering the six places where they had found human remains but the individual crime scenes were also marked so that she had to duck under several lines of tape to get to each spot. Each one was guarded by one or two cops but they did not give her any trouble after she showed them her badge. They need not have bothered really. No one in their right mind would come out all the way out here.