Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (17 page)

He didn't look at all mollified by that. “No, I was correct when I presumed that your half of our Bond is damaged. We must remedy this.”

“After you tell me what happened?” I pressed.

He gave me an impatient flutter of sandy lashes. “The sheriff and his somber chief deputy accepted my invitation to tea. I sent your agents away on chauffeur duty.”

“That was bonehead-stupid.”

“I was bored stiff by the agents’ company. Despite what your badge bunny hormones may mislead you to believe, officers of the law are dreadfully dull. Why, even your much-ballyhooed hunter induced yawns. I am afraid his reputation may, in fact, be based on rumor and innuendo,” he said innocently.

I chewed back an angry accusation: he'd been hoping someone would challenge him. Batten hadn't lived up to Harry's expectations, I guess. Neither had the local cops.

“We were having a pleasant chat when the mail truck arrived. Deputy Dunnachie asked if I cared to pause our question-and-answer period so I might fetch the mail. I explained that I rarely went out during the afternoon. Deputy Dunnachie wondered aloud, with a marked degree of audacity, if I was indeed capable of venturing out of doors during the afternoon. Naturally, I was inclined to demonstrate.”

“Naturally,” I deadpanned.

“We went out together, and while I waited under the shelter of the weeping cedar by the end of the drive, Deputy Dunnachie went to the fence to fetch the mail.”

“And then of course…” I felt my forehead pinch. “There were corpse beetles in my mailbox?”

Harry smiled, but it was unpleasant; I braced for it even as he hesitated. “I expect the beetles were attracted to the severed human head secreted within.”

I stared until my eyes felt dry. Then I remembered to blink. Harry seemed perfectly content to wait while the gears in my skull ground to a halt and caught once again. “A head.”

“A head, Dearheart.”

“Like, a skull? A dry, dug-up, formerly gross but now completely clean and polished…no? How about a plaster cast? A medical school learning tool skull? That kind of head?” Harry was shaking his head slowly back and forth. “So an actual…with flesh and hair and…brains and… I should sit down.”

“You are sitting down, my love.”

“Oh, good. I'll have less distance to fall when I pass out. Whose head is it?” Don't say Kristin Davis. Don't say Kristin Davis.

“That which at one time belonged to a young lady. It may possibly be the one your FBI gents are missing.”

“Why my mailbox?” I cried. Unless Davis’ murderer was Sherlock, and she wanted to congratulate my narrowly escaping death by delivering hacked up body parts. I stood. “I guess they need my help.”

His lips crooked into a half-smile and he made a soothing noise with them, part way between a shush and a cluck. “In your current mental condition that is neither sensible nor prudent.”

“Mental condition!” I huffed, but it was sort of silly to argue since I'd just thrown a major snit-fit in front of twenty or so strangers. “Did you see it?”

“But of course. I rushed forward to help the deputy and…” He displayed his hand, upon which a big red welt was swelling between thumb and forefinger. “I was forced to kill the poor, faultless creatures.”

“You rushed into the sun?” I grabbed for his hand and he dropped it out of my reach. “They bit you. You're lucky they didn't get to an orifice, or you'd be short a few million brain cells.”

“It is of no consequence, as I explained to the medics. You know I am neither vulnerable to crypt plague nor to the venom in their bite.” He shrugged with a lopsided, self-deprecating smile. “I feel far worse for the beetles. We disturbed them from their feast.”

Feast. Blerg. “What about the head?”

“The head has been left in situ, right where the deputy discovered it.”

“Crammed atop my Christmas cards?”

“Who sends a witch Christmas cards?” Harry cocked his head in consideration. “Perhaps the head was an early holiday gift?”

“Drooling semi-digested grey matter on my gas bill and attracting brain-eating zombie beetles, some gift.” I wondered how much the average flamethrower cost, and if I could find one on EBay. “You know what follows necrophila noveboracensis, Harry, if they don't clear them all out before the adults lay their larvae.” The larvae of the necrophile beetle had only one known natural predator: spitting carrion spiders. “Scytodes rugulosum are the rabbits of the spider world. We'll have eight million of the little fuckers before you know it.”

“I do so enjoy when you teach me lessons I learned centuries before your birth. It is indescribably endearing.”

“Can the sarcasm. Once they get in, it's hell trying to clear them out. I'll have to re-caulk around all the windows to make sure they don't sneak inside and make a big ole web in your casket.”

“Leave it all to the professionals, dearest philomel.” He put his hands on me, to ease me back to sitting. I fought it for a moment. His hands insisted.

“Philo-what?”

“You tried the forensic work and decided it was a one-time thing. Furthermore, no one is asking for your assist—”

“Baranuik, I need you,” Batten called from the kitchen.

Harry's lips tightened into a line. “Shruff and cinders, how I detest that man. Have I mentioned?”

“I'll let you eat him later.”

His eyes flashed. “Promise?”

“Nah. But I will let you tell him about the spiders.” I grinned. “He's phobic.”

“If you are prepared to dally with him, be off then. Your reckless, self-punishing determination to be close to that rodgering ne'er do well is most unfortunate. Let it be said, lest you've forgotten.” He pointed at the bedroom door, the back of which was decorated with a poster of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's profile against a backdrop of the Starship Enterprise. “That man makes you miserable more often than not.”

“That's a terrible thing to say about Patrick Stewart,” I chided, laying a hand on Harry's cheek. I stroked him there, where his smooth cheek dotted with the barest of stubble around his dimple. It was a literary myth that a revenant's hair no longer grew. As long as they were well-fed, it was all systems a-go in many ways. Harry shaved every single evening. He swore he only used his straight-edge, but had a not-so-secret habit of swiping my Gillette Venus razors and apricot-scented shave gel. My eyes were drawn almost helplessly, just for a minute, to the forbidden curve of his lips.

“Baranuik!” Batten barked again. I saw temptation flash across my companion's face like the warning flare of heat lightning.

“Don't do it, Dreppenstedt,” I cautioned. “Whatever you're about to say, just don't.”

“Would it kill him, then, to think the two of us were having a congenial personal reunion?”

“If ‘congenial personal reunion’ means screwing, we don't. And even if we did, he might wonder why that occurred at the same time as the discovery of a severed head.” I felt my eyebrows pucker together. “Hacked-up body parts should be a definite turn-off for any couple, Harry.”

“I am already the penultimate evil in his books,” Harry said without expression. “Malevolence embodied, sin personified. It is perfectly likely that I am a suspect in this crime, and can do no worse in his eyes. I expect that Agent Batten will never think a fraction more highly of me, no matter how I attempt to redeem myself, therefore I do not intend to waste any concern as to what impression I make with that particular gent.”

It was a sad but realistic assessment; Batten would be hard pressed to see Harry as anything but a fiend.

“So you're just going to be yourself and if Batten doesn't like it he can go choke on a cockroach?”

“Or something ever so slightly more delicately phrased.” Harry assented with the barest of nods. Then attentively: “Is Agent Batten truly afraid of spiders?”

I winked at my Cold Company and whisked open the bedroom door.

FOURTEEN

The kitchen had emptied out. Something in the way Batten stood in the epicenter of the room, hip cocked, legs firmly planted, said he didn't like calling on me, or needing me, or needing anyone else for that matter. Tension quivered along the solid line of his shoulders, and his forearms, crossed over his chest, bulged like they were chiseled from rock. He was dying to act, needed to act, but had no one yet to stake. His kit was propped open on my table, exposing his weapons brazenly like a male stripper flashes cock for dollars. Rowan wood, hand carved, laced the inside of the lid. Four green bottles of Brut cologne stamped with a black cross atop red wax seals were strapped deep inside and I understood in a rush: Batten didn't wear watered-down cologne… he wore holy water that he just happened to keep in old Brut bottles. When he glared at me, it was clear he didn't want to ask for my help. Which was great, because I didn't particularly wanna give him any.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

Batten's dark blue eyes were veiled. “Chapel's managing the scene. Hood went with the bus and his man.”

“Detective Munchie?”

“Deputy Dunnachie.”

“Right.” I shoved my hands in my jeans pockets. “He does look a lot like Richard Belzer… dunked in mint jelly. He gonna be okay?”

“Hood said he's been green since early this morning, fighting flu. Add the shock of a vampire and beetles hollowing out a kid's skull and I'm not sure any of us wouldn't be green.”

Hollowing out. Eeeeuuuuww. Zombie beetles: all about efficiency. “Did you spray the rest of the bugs? Spray won't kill them, but it'll daze them enough so we can flick them aside and burn them.”

He gave a single nod. “Already taken care of.”

I took the long gaze down the hall. The front door had been left open, the door mat crumpled to one side kicked under the draft guard. I could hear their radios crackling back and forth, competing in volume across the yard through the storm—codes bantered, orders given, requests made—very coordinated. Everything well in hand, not a single one of them seeming shocked at the sight peeking out of the mailbox. They sure as hell didn't look like they needed my help.

Batten's face was carefully blank. “Got in touch with the mail carrier. The head wasn't there when he dropped off the mail.”

“Just the kind of thing an unbalanced head-toting mailman would say.”

“Means in the minutes between the truck leaving and Dunnachie going to the mailbox, the head was placed there.”

“Wonder how long someone hunkered in the forest with a severed head, waiting for the mail truck to come and go,” I mused. Then I thought: if the beetles were close, they probably found the head before Sherlock could get it in the mailbox, and may have swarmed her. “Check the ERs for anyone else admitted with beetle bites in or around her orifices, or the early symptoms of crypt plague caused by yersinia sanguinaria: massive headache, plummeting body temp, black blooms under her skin, especially in and around the lymph nodes, as well as incoherence. Then again, if it's Danika, her coherence isn't great to begin with.”

I saw Harry out of the corner of my eye, lingering in the bedroom doorway.

“K9's ten minutes out,” Batten said.

“K9's are useless,” I sighed, feeling the frustration tightening my shoulders until they matched his. “The dog's going to hone in on Harry's scent, and once it does it won't be interested in anything else. You know they haven't been able to train K9 dogs to ignore the undead yet.”

“Then I guess we could use your Talents here,” he said.

“Well, as fascinating as body parts in a mailbox might sound to you, Harry's right: I retired for a reason. I am a spaz, and when I stick my neck out, I get clobbered.” I turned away from him to the kitchen sink to draw water into the old-fashioned whistle kettle for
tea; then I put the tea pot in the sink with some hot water inside to warm the china. “The Marnie Baranuik Blue Sense vending machine is officially unplugged.”

“Quitting is Harry's idea, then?”

“No, but I'm grateful for the reminder. This is your case, not mine.”

“So you said. But then you went bumbling off to chase down clues on your own.” Batten continued, his voice raising through the octaves. “Without calling me for backup.”

“We've been over this. I was trying to do the right thing, but it was a mistake, I admit that. Working this case at all would be a mistake. It would be a disaster. Like last time. Like Buffalo.” Except in Buffalo we fucked like two sex addicts after an unsuccessful support group meeting.

“If you're talking about Prost,” he growled, “we were only on that case a couple weeks. We barely gave it a shot.”

“I gave it a shot, all right. Two .38s, shoulder and spine, and it was about as much fun as a club up the ass.”

His perceptive eyes narrowed to slits. “Thought you said quitting had nothing to do with the shooting.”

He had me there. I wasn't about to confess I retired so I didn't have to see him again. I stuttered around in my brain for a clever retort and gave up, chucking tea bags into the pot—two, four, seven, not even counting anymore.

“Talk to me, Baranuik, stop running.” Batten jabbed a finger at me. “You're not this cowardly, deep down. I know you.”

“You don't know shit,” I snapped, pointing back. “You're all job. When it comes to me, you're fuckin’ clueless.”

“You talk awful big for such a tiny woman.” Batten scowled at me, advancing, his square-shouldered form looming over me.

“Go ahead, remind me of my size. See what good that macho bullshit does you.”

“You need to do more than this, to get rid of me.”

Harry came to lean against the counter, enjoying the show; loud and clear I got the impression that part of him agreed with Batten, which only served to irritate me further.

“I'm not trained for FBI shit. I'm just an ex-pro psychic. I should set up a quaint little magic shop, flip tarot cards and self-publish erotic poetry like old Ruby Valli.”

That drew Harry stiffly upright. “Poetry?”

“Hey, I know Ruby Valli.” Batten took a step toward me, drawing himself up to his full six feet. “I've worked with Ruby Valli. She's ninety-three-years-old, half lame and still plays paintball with people half her age. Unlike you, she's earned her retirement, but she'd be all-in if I asked for her. The fact that she's arthritic, half-deaf, and mostly blind wouldn't stop her for a second.”