Chapter 36: Haunted places
On the easternmost part of Vaal street, Joe was standing by the sidewalk talking to a mutant woman that looked like a rabbit crossed with a human. She had the ears and face of a rabbit with short fur covering her whole body and rabbit feet too big for shoes, but she was bipedal and wore a simple floral A-line dress that hangs down to her knees. Clothing that you would expect a woman to wear.
Joe: “And you're sure you haven’t heard about someone named Mark?”
Mutant rabbit woman: “No, like I said, I just moved here. Anyways, I gotta go. Hope you find whoever you're looking for,” the mutant woman said before walking away from Joe.
Once the woman was out of earshot of Joe, he started to mumble to himself.
Joe: “That's just great,” he said to no one in particular.
This was the thirtieth person he had asked about Mark, and everyone he asked didn’t know anything about him. The neighborhood he was asking around was old, but there had been a series of renovations over the years. New cheap apartment complexes were put in and many people living around here were new residents that moved in a year or two ago.
Rob had murdered Mark around the time he disappeared, which was eight years ago. That would mean Mark was living somewhere on Vaal street eight years ago as well. But, with many of the people living around here being new residents, it made it hard to find someone that lived around here when Mark was around.
Joe needed to find an older looking person, someone that probably has lived on this street for a while, to have any chance of finding someone who knew Mark. That would have been Joe's main line of pursuit, but there was another problem compounding the difficulty of his search. Most people that lived around here were mutants.
Mutants can have a bunch of inhuman traits that make it hard to tell a person age. Because of how krimson mutates people, it’s impossible to accurately guess a mutant's age by just appearance. The mutations just vary way too much from person to person. A mutant that might look young might actually be quite old and vice versa.