Joy pushed Xander aside, after he shut the phone down.
"She's a Slayer?" she asked in a whisper, only as a confirmation.
"Was. Yeah," he said, his voice a mixture of sorrow and anger.
"What was she doing here?"
"I'll explain later. Let's hear what the doctor has to say first, okay?"
"Sure," Joy said, and turned back to the pathologist. The chubby woman looked to Xander.
"Are you positive on the ID of the victim?" she asked.
"Sure, her name is Andrea Miller, age . . . 23, I guess. I can arrange for more information if you need."
"That would ease things up a little. Let me continue, then."
"Sure," Joy said.
"Well, cause of death was massive blood loss, caused by severing the jugular vein. Attacker was left-handed, about six feet. Weapon was very sharp, the cut was precise, and the blade was curved. She didn't have any skin under her fingertips, and no other signs of struggle."
"What did you find on her blood work?" Xander asked immediately.
"How did you . . ." the pathologist started.
"She was a trained special ops. No one would get her like that without a struggle," he answered.
"You're right. We found traces of a powerful muscle relaxant in her tissues, and by the quantity of it, if she hadn't died from the blood loss, she would probably have from a heart failure."
The agent and Xander nodded.
"Time of death?" Joy asked.
"It's hard to be precise, but I'd say between thirty-two, thirty-five days."
"Anything else?"
"Well, aside from the cause of death, no. The girl was in perfect health, no broken bones, no nothing. You sure she was a special ops?" the doctor asked.
"She was very good," Xander said, with sadness on his voice.
"Well, okay. Let me give you my report, and if you could send me the info for her proper ID I would be pretty thankful," she said.
"Sure."
"So . . ." Joy started, after they had entered Xander's SUV.
"Well, I could go for a cup of coffee. You mind?" he said, turning the car on.
"Yeah, that would be nice," she said, eyeing him. The look on his face told her a story of too many scenes like that in his past.
"The time of death is wrong," was the first thing he said after a few minutes of silent driving.
"How do you know?" she asked.
"You know that after death our bodies keep functioning for a little bit. In Slayers, with their healing, they take a lot of time to stop working. I would say we have like forty days since she died, perhaps more. And we lost contact with her forty-three days ago."
"O-kay," she said, thinking about it. It made sense. "And how did you know about the drug?"
"Slayers can pretty much gobble up everything you throw at them, and aside from massive trauma, magic or some drugs, you can't expect to cut one's neck without any form of struggle."
"So, we are back to square one?" she asked. The autopsy gave them almost nothing to work with.
Before Xander could reply, they were parking in front of a cozy-looking café.
"No," he said, jumping out of the car and joining her on the other side. They entered, and Xander chose a corner booth, where they couldn't be heard. The waitress appeared, and the one-eyed man traded some amicable talk with her, ordering some coffee and a piece of pie. Joy decided to join him, ordering the same.
"I guess that she stumbled on something she wasn't supposed to," Xander said, while they waited.
"What? Some conspiracy theory?" Joy said, with some disgust.
"No, I guess not," he replied, seriously. The agent actually flinched with his response.
"Sorry," she said.
"No problem."
"What was she doing, then?"
The pies and coffee chose that exact moment to appear, in the hands of the waitress. They thanked her and after she had gone away, Xander replied.
"Investigating disappearing demons."
Joy almost spitted her coffee on the table top, stopping just in time.
"You mean invisible?" she asked.
"No, I mean as in missing. You see, things changed a lot after Willow's empowering spell. We ended up with so many of them that the underworld shifted their approach to them. Now, instead of only demon hunters, we act as some sort of unofficial underworld police force. We have strike teams, doing what Slayers did from their first incarnation, we have an investigative unit, doing what police detectives around the entire world do, and we have what you could call a 'diplomatic corps'. Ah, and we have the free-lancers, like you."
Joy chuckled with the 'diplomatic' bit.
"Diplomatic corps?" she asked, between giggles.
"Yeah, you should see how peaceful some discussions can get when you sit a Slayer team in a table, armed to the teeth," he said, grinning.
"So, I can gather that . . . Andrea was a 'detective', right?"
"Yes, she was investigating a series of disappearances on the demon community around Arizona. In her last contact with the Council, she said that she had some information pointing to Washington."
"Shouldn't you guys be cheering with demons disappearing?"
"Not exactly," he said, finishing his pie. "There are a few possibilities for such a case: one is a rogue or yet unidentified Slayer at work, other is a demon hunter or just people with a grudge. In that case, we check things out and if it is one of those cases, we help them out and point them in the right direction, or deal with it more . . . harshly. Option number two is inter- demon-species war, and that is not good, you can gather the reasons. Option number three is someone is using them for something else, like spells, or summons, or something like that. Option number four is them gathering for an assault on humanity. Option number five I don't want to talk about right now."
"What is it?"
Xander grimaced. "Something along the lines of a 'conspiracy theory'."
"So, how we are going to approach this now?"
"First I have a call to make from my car. Then we'll see."
"Okay," she said, finishing her coffee and pie. Xander called the waitress, paid the bill, and they walked out, going to his SUV.
Xander grabbed his PDA and put his thumb in the reader. The small device connected to the car's communication gear and made a vidcall to the Watcher's HQ, an image of an attendant appearing on the car's windshield.
"Watcher's . . . oh, hello, Xander," the woman said, refraining from calling him Mr. Harris.
"Hello, Marla. Patch me to Andrew, please," he said, with a grin.
"Sure, sir. Wait a moment," she said, and her image was substituted by one of a bald man.
"Hey, Director Fury," Andrew said, while typing in his keyboard.
"What you got for me, Professor X?" he asked, using the nicknames they issued to one another a long time ago.
"Your PDA should be receiving the file . . . now. It is ordered by difficulty of casting, by the way."
"Thank you. Anything that you can say to me already?"
"Yeah, I filtered it with Willow, and from what we gathered, it isn't apocalyptic-related. This is just some idiots trying to gather a few goodies."
"Too complicated a job to be just that. But thanks, Chuck."
"No problem. If you need anything, howl. Xavier out," and the vidcall was cut.
Joy looked at him, bewildered. "Director Fury? Professor X? Chuck?"
"Old joke. You don't wanna know."
Xander skimmed rapidly through the list, his eye focusing on a particular spell almost at the end of it. He cursed, marked it, scribbled a few things on the screen and sent a message back to Andrew.
"What?" Joy asked, to a somber-looking Xander.
"Nothing. Just something he sent me wrong," he said.
"Okay," she said. He was clearly lying, but about what? "What now?"
"I guess its back to the House, we need to talk with your boss. Then let's check her apartment, see if we can find anything there. If we don't, you up for some traveling?"
"Arizona?"
"Arizona."