[Marnie Baranuik 02.5] Cold Company (7 page)

Which man I'd less like to meet in a dark alley, I couldn't say, nor was I sure that day wouldn't come, considering what my housemate was; for a moment, despite our acquaintance, I felt intimidated. I took a bracing sip of espresso and pictured Batten prancing out in the snow wearing nothing but a sport sock, trilling Tiptoe Through the Tulips in Tiny Tim falsetto. Better. In fact, I had to work not to smirk. Judging by the further narrowing of Batten's glare, my twitching lips nudged him off balance. Much better.

Chapel leaned forward, elbows on knees, palms out. The familiarity of the gesture struck a warning bell: Chapel and his body language tricks, trying to put me at ease. If memory served, he'd use only our first names, consistently. I was about to be handled with all the determination of a Hollywood dermatologist on a starlet's rash.

“Marnie, Mark and I have already ruled out werewolf,” Chapel said.

“No bite marks?” I blurted like a dummy, kneejerk. Ugh. Point: Chapel.

“Plenty,” Batten replied. “Space between's too small. No broken bones. No tearing. Tidy.”

I hadn't expected Batten's grim tone and economy of speech to slug my chest the way it did; he never elaborated, and he rarely softened his tone. I focused on Chapel, keeping my face dispassionate.

“Then you're right, it's not a lycanthrope. Could be a young revenant, un-Bonded and solo, not running with clutch mentality, though not completely feral or you'd find tearing.” I struggled with the stirring of temper and loins, bickering Siamese twins, linked in flesh and blood at hip level. “Agent Chapel, you do understand the word “retired” and all it implies?”

Batten made a throaty noise. I refused to look at him. Childish, me?

“Mark and I understand you're on a break, Marnie.” Chapel nodded like an FBI bobble head. Behold! The world's most agreeable man. His voice warmed a degree. “You need some time.”

Only a few decades or so. “Gold-Drake & Cross represents twenty-five other federally-licensed psychics you can consult,” I reminded him. “All of them outrank me in Talent, goodwill and general friendliness.”

“Now, you know the first part's not possible,” Chapel said.

I didn't miss the implication, and smiled for the first time. Point: Chapel. An attempt to disagree with the last two would have been blatantly ridiculous and would have ended this conversation, and he knew it.

“There are more powerful psychics,” Batten hedged. “But how many have a doctorate in preternatural biology and more than a passing understanding of the Dark Arts?”

As far as I knew, I was the only one, but admitting that wasn't going to make them go away. I played with my cup and shrugged at Chapel, expression neutral. “You'd have to ask my old boss at GD&C.”

“And how many have a media nickname?” Batten drew a rolled-up newspaper from behind his back, where it must have been crammed in his pocket. For a second I thought he was going to swat 
me on the nose like a misbehaving puppy; he waved it in my face, then dropped it on the desk. “Must be famous for a reason?”

I felt my face go carefully blank; as far as I knew I didn't have a nickname. Certainly, I didn't want one. I could only imagine. “If you hit a wall, there's some hardcore unlicensed Talent in Denver.”

“Freaks and lunatics,” Batten translated.

I sucked wind through my teeth; it was getting harder to ignore him. Was that sweat on my upper lip? It had to be a kajillion degrees in my office. Chapel must have noted my discomfort; he smiled to disarm, an excellent smile for a lawman: quick, genuine, safe. It was hard not to smile back at him, and while a part of me unintentionally loosened, I kept my guard up. Having worked with him in close quarters once before, it hadn't taken me long to note all his tricks; this one wasn't going to work as well as he thought, not this time.

“Marnie, we're not here to lure you back into something you're not comfortable with. We're not here to haul you back into the field. Mark and I were just hoping, since we were in the area, you'd do a quick consult for us, look at some pictures, give us your first impress—”

“Doesn't work that way.”

He corrected himself immediately. “I didn't mean psychic impressions. I know you need an object to touch.”

“Or a victim to feel up,” Batten said, like I was guilty of something questionable.

Yes, I'm dual-Talented. GD&C used to promote me from their third-floor retrocognition department in forensic psychometry, otherwise known as token-object reading; this is my main Talent, a touch psychic. In-house lingo pegged me as a Groper, but we Gropers didn't like our slang to leave the office, for obvious reasons. Neither did the Feelers, the empaths who felt both the real-time emotions of the living and strong emotional residues left behind. The fact that I wielded both empathy and psychometry had given GD&C the opportunity to boast of a rare dual-Talented employee in their ranks, touched by the Blue Sense not once but twice, earning me the title Groper-Feeler; anyone who called me that to my face landed just below Batten's permanent spot on my shit list.

“Marnie, I only meant,” Chapel was saying, “using your experience with preternatural biology, just have a look at some pictures and tell us what you think we're dealing with.”

(Only. Just. Just have a look…) “Just a bit of gore to start off my day,” I drawled. “In case the hail storm and oppressive cloud cover weren't depressing enough?”

Neither man called me on it. I should have known they weren't here on a social call from the moment I eyeballed them through the peephole. The way they stood there on my porch, looking nowhere in particular with that habit cops develop, their gazes devouring every detail, missing nothing. Right then and there, I should have listened to my impulse to scrunch down and pretend I wasn't home, though honestly at the time that urge had been based on my desperate need for a makeover, or at least a sweep of lip-gloss.

Another murder. Another grisly set of photos in full unfortunate color. At least they didn't want me on a crime scene, still I was amazed at their nerve. Specifically, Batten's nerve. What part of “I quit” did they not get? What part of “go hop up your own ass” did he not get?

“Tell me, Agent Chapel, was the secluded cabin not a big enough hint?” I asked. “No offense, but you FBI guys should be way better at grasping clues.”

Again, I was on the receiving end of not one but two stony silences. I'd have classified them as chilly, but my housemate is moody and I had survived true chilly silences. These didn't even remotely compare. I pressed my back into my chair and turned my attention at last to Batten's face.

Even blank-faced, as he was now, those freshwater blue eyes were alive, bright, calculating. Shrewd. My stomach twisted into a quivering ball. I'd never been able to read his emotions with either of my psychic Talents. Not because he was in any way adept at hiding them; Batten was as mundane as a man could get. I wanted to read him too badly, that was the problem. The harder I tried, the more it was like trying to pick a wet watermelon seed off a Formica table: think you've got it, then it squirts away. To get an easy free-flow of psi, I had to relax to the point where I almost didn't care. I was never that relaxed in Batten's presence. I doubted I ever could be.

I hadn't seen him since Buffalo. Brains had come to check on me in the hospital, but Brawn hadn't. I'd hoped that by some bizarre happenstance Batten had lost his magnetism, or that some clever, savage creature had taken him down a notch, wrested his ego, humbled him. I saw it wasn't true. He was as cocky as ever and a few degrees hotter. Considering I looked like I'd just been released from a typhoid clinic, I thought it highly unfair.

I watched Batten's jaw ripple as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. I gave him credit for not looking away; he met my glare and must have read the fury stirring there, but he took it like a man.

“Agent Batten can ask me to look at the file,” I said coolly. “He can say pretty please, and follow up with tulips and a pack of Double-Stuf Oreos.”

Batten's answer was the quirk of one dusky eyebrow. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and noisily without speaking. Nor did he look away. Maybe this was his way of apologizing. Maybe it was all I was going to get. It sucked, frankly. I'd have loved to see him hang his head in shame for what he'd done. Even when I fantasized that moment, though, it felt wrong; Kill-Notch wasn't the apologetic type.

My warring body parts continued to bicker. I wanted to taste him again. I also wanted to whap him in the face with a ball-peen hammer. Probably I couldn't do both. Shouldn't do either, really. Memories of his abs pressing hard against my soft naked belly intruded, sending heat prickling down my thighs.

Kill-Notch wasn't going to say please any more than I was going to win the Miss Congeniality award at the annual GD&C ball, and the tulips were a long shot. I could get a please out of Chapel, maybe cookies too, but it wouldn't be the same.

“I'm not on vacation,” I told Chapel. “I know that's how GD&C spun it.” I eyeballed Batten's newspaper, sluggishly unrolling on the desk. (How many have a nickname?) “For what it's worth, I didn't leave because of the Prost case or how it ended. I knew working a serial of a preternatural sort would land me in the spotlight. Bad press wasn't a shocker, neither was the injury.”

Batten grumbled, “Who'd have thought a vamp would be packing?”

“I'm not taking time off to nurse old gunshot wounds. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress or whatever you guys are calling it now. I'd just like to be done.” That sounded too much like asking permission, so I rallied the troops and tried again: “Quitting is not a whim. I'm done.”

“The team trying to find Kristin Davis’ head will be disappointed to hear that,” Batten said.

I rocked forward. “Kristin Davis the actress?”

“No, Kristin Davis the twelve-year-old girl from Denver.” He mimed opening the file like a dickhead.

Point: Batten. I had the almost irresistible urge to crack my jar of newt eyes over his head. My scruples jabbed me. “Gimme the damn file.”

TWO

The manila folder Chapel drew out of his laptop case was slim. The edges of photo paper that peeked out of this folder looked like black mold on the lid of Tupperware long forgotten behind the pickles in the back of the fridge. A complicated file number was written in blue ink, in Chapel's recognizable blocky handwriting: PCU18744. I reached out one leather-gloved hand and tapped the folder. Leather gloves (I have them in all colors imaginable) are a Groper's best friend, a necessity for any touch-psychic of merit. One never knows where horrible images are lurking, ready to jump out and assault a sensitive brain.

Out of habit, I took a No. 2 pencil from my frog-shaped ceramic jar to make notes in the margins of an abandoned Sudoku puzzle, but also to make Batten wait. When someone says “jump”, Marnie Baranuik is more liable to kick them in the yambag than ask “how high”? I doodled a googly-eyed caricature of him with Xs for eyes and a protruding tongue. I added a ukulele and some tulips. Knowing I couldn't draw the sport sock without cracking up drained an ounce of throbbing heat out of my temples.

Standing vigil as a doorstop in one corner of the office was a weighted stuffed teddy-frog, and another stuffed frog with a shocked expression rested in a chair in the corner. My espresso cup was decorated with Monet's water lilies, across which some internet artist had added fanciful cartoon frogs. Two of the three of us in the room knew I had a tiny poison dart frog tattooed between my shoulder blades. Some people collect teapots. I'm froggy-obsessed.

Summoning my nerve, I flipped to the first photo. It was dated and time-stamped early this morning and it was worse than I 
thought it would be; they always are. Instantly I regretted my big greasy breakfast.

A headless body in the early stages of blossoming into a woman lay naked and fragile, too pale against the dirty grey asphalt. Conscious of today's pelting hail, I imagined laying nude and prone in that hard grit and ice-strewn alleyway between an overflowing dumpster and a brown brick wall filthily stained with who knows what. Kristin Davis’ remains were surrounded by countless standard-issue boots in mid-shuffle. There are always too many witnesses to a bad end. You'd think the cold weather would hinder some of the curious; it doesn't, especially if the case has even the faintest whiff of the preternatural. I found my shoulders aching and realized I'd pulled them up to keep my neck warm, even though the woodstove was blasting and the cabin was toasty.

The next picture in the series was a close-up of small matching pairs of puncture wounds on the pale, tender inside of the right thigh. I clenched my fist and the leather creaked. I wished I wasn't wearing the crimson gloves. They felt gory.

“We thought vampire,” Batten said.

“The nineties called, Kill-Notch, they want their politically incorrect terminology back. No one uses the V-word anymore,” I murmured, not wanting to bring the next picture closer for inspection and doing it anyway. “That being said, I see why you'd suspect a revenant. No livor mortis, not enough blood left in her body to pool. But here's the problem with your theory: I'm not seeing necrosis, no early signs of crypt plague. When yersinia sanguinaria strikes, the early signs pop within minutes: black marks across the side of the neck,” when the body has a neck, my cruel brain piped up, “and under the armpits, anywhere the lymph nodes are.” I brushed my fingertips over the picture to show them. “Has toxicology screened the tissue around the wounds for V-telomerase and ms-lipotropin?”

“They will. If this is the primary crime scene, he drained her before he took her head off, as there's very little blood at the scene,” Chapel said, his pen moving without benefit of his full attention. Neat trick. “Why did he want the head?”

“Trophy?” Batten suggested.

I shook my head no, hoping he was wrong. “Anything's possible. What I know about aberrant revenant psychology could fill a change purse.”

“Find that hard to believe,” Batten replied. His attitude made me want to put him in a head lock, so I eye-rolled my focus back to Chapel.