Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (20 page)

SEVENTEEN

Bending in half to tie a double knot in the shoelaces on my Keds hurt my stapled gut like a motherfucker, but Batten was watching, so I had to keep a stiff upper lip. While I exchanged my light gloves for heavy tan fur-lined lambskin ones, I heard the impatient shuffle of standard issue boots behind me. I realized too late that there was still a mushed-up newt eyeball in the right front pocket of my jeans, making a conspicuous wet smear, but there was nothing I could do about it in front of Agent Batten. Twisting into my puffy pink parka, I was an acrobat twisting on the trapeze, and zipping it up right to the hood made me feel like a gladiator strapping on armor. I'd put the innerpants holster in my jeans and the Beretta Cougar mini was now tucked near my butt-crack. Look out, Sherlock, Marnie Baranuik has gone badass. I turned to face Batten, all business.

His eyebrows were puckered hard with dismay, as if he were witnessing a ridiculous act that both aroused him and hurt his head. I jerked the ties on my hood, which nearly swallowed my head in a perfect padded pink circle.

Batten folded his arms across his chest. “You look like a marshmallow Peep.”

“If she's out there, I don't want her to see me,” I explained from within.

“You're the only five-foot female who would be at this cabin fondling dismembered body parts.”

“Don't say the word dismembered, it's major blech. And I'm five-foot-three.”

“In three-inch heels, maybe. You're not fooling anyone with the hood.” When I opened my mouth to object he waved me quiet. “What the hell is that?”

He reached around me like he was playing grab-ass, and jerked the gun out from behind my back. I nodded at it. “Right. That. I thought I should pack heat.”

His lips twitched with a barely-contained smirk. “Is it loaded?”

“Only if the bullet fairy did it when I wasn't looking.”

“Put it away.”

“But what if she's out there?”

“She's not out there,” he said tiredly. “Even if she is, there are nearly twenty law enforcement and emergency personnel out there trained to use firearms. Loaded firearms.”

“Do you honestly think a nutcase would leave a severed head in a mailbox and not hang around to watch the fall-out?”

“They're long gone. It's possible the mailbox and the murder wasn't Sherlock at all,” he reminded me. “No proof yet that she murdered Davis.”

“I'm sorry. You're right.” I swallowed hard and shook my head, passing the Beretta butt-first to Harry, who verified that it was unloaded before returning it to my bedroom. “I'm letting my anger affect my work.”

I stopped on the porch, looking down the length of the drive at the mailbox. It had always seemed charming before, listing slightly off center, dented in the back as though the mailman woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and punched into it. Now it seemed like a time bomb, ticking off the seconds before it went off. I felt Harry's cool presence return, an icy ward that had the opposite effect on my shoulders than the cold air did. I felt the muscles melt, and knew Harry was pushing his feelings of comfort and confidence through the Bond at me, either to buck me up for the job ahead, or for his own agenda. I couldn't tell which.

“Better to think of it as an it and not a she,” Batten advised at my shoulder. It wasn't the first time he'd given me that advice, I thought, rather miserably. It might not be the last, and the trepidation of seeing a wasted life again hung its hooks in my heart, dragging me down.

“If Ms. Sherlock is out there, you had best not stand so close to my DaySitter, Agent Batten,” Harry said from the safety of the shaded hallway, and touched the door further closed, so that it blocked more of the late afternoon sun.

“Let her see,” Batten growled. “I don't give a shit what she wants. Or what you want, vampire.”

It dawned on me that Batten was playing pretty fast and loose with what was still my life. I wasn't about to play worm on a hook. I'd seen Danika Sherlock's snarling hate enough for one lifetime.

“I give a shit,” I hissed at him. “Let's not jerk her around more than we need to. Stand away from me, Agent Batten. And when I go to the mailbox, you stay here.”

He crammed his hands in his pockets and shuffled aside with an impatient sigh. I took one step forward and my heel hit ice. It slid out from me too fast, but Harry had me under the armpits before I knew what had happened.

Apparently Batten hadn't seen him move; he grunted with surprise. I straightened while Harry melted back into the hallway, and adjusted my coat with a proud jerk. My companion gave the Fed a sweeping frown of disgust, as if he'd expected Batten's reflexes to be better.

Rather than sort out their brewing tiff, I focused on the mailbox. Avoiding all the eyes that followed my determined approach, wishing I'd spruced myself up a bit so at least I'd have the armor of desirability on my side to offset the shitstorm of doubt. Bravely to the police do-not-cross tape I marched. Aspare yellow vein in the otherwise colorless yard, fluttering in the cold wind around the ramshackle fence by the mailbox. Psychically pummeled by their qualms, buffeted by their distaste, I pulled up my chin, alert so as not to trip over my feet, not wanting to glance around and see derisive sneers or rolling eyes or silent laughter. There were few things I find more degrading than the blatant disbelief of men I admire: cops, firemen, medics, they're all heroes to me, doing brave work. I know they don't feel the same about me, and sometimes it made me wonder why I bothered. Even if I was successful with this effort, I couldn't prove what I saw. No one had to believe me.

Oh well, screw it. I'd do this, and we'd solve the case, and everyone would go away, right? Riiight. I could keep telling myself that. But I was sorely convinced that Batten was determined to be a part of my life, even as he railed against the science of psi, even as he disapproved of my living situation and my Talents. Even if he
thought my having a gun was amusing at best and tragedy-in-waiting at worst.

I unclenched my teeth long enough to mutter under my breath, “Jerk”, putting them all out of my mind. Nothing mattered now but the head in my mailbox, its original owner, and the person who put it there; this was my task. Finding out what it felt like to be decapitated ranked real low on my list of Things to Do, but maybe nailing Sherlock's ass would balance it out? I ducked under the tape line with my shoulders scrinched up around my neck in anticipation.

Maybe it was the cold that took my breath away. By the time I rounded the box I could barely draw air. My other artsy sister, Claire, had painted for Carrie morning glory flowers creeping up the sides of the box, heather-blue cupped blossoms open to greet the sun. The lid was down. The cheerful bright red flag was up. Delivery! it proclaimed cheerily. The thought of trying to cleanse the death out of this box seemed about as possible as reaching up and caressing the moon's big round bottom. I'd need bleach and lavender, a full roll of paper towels, rubber gloves, a HAZMAT suit, and in the end a new mailbox, because there was just no way I'd ever be able to make it feel clean. Maybe I should consider a tidy slot in my storm door…so Danika can slip severed body parts directly into the hallway? Okay, maybe not.

For the second time today I took off my gloves and bared the fragile pale skin of my naked hand. It hurt, so unused to the fresh winter air was my flesh. I didn't let it show on my face. I glanced over the box to the porch. Batten stood with his arms crossed, his legs in a wide authoritative stance, the one that made his tight butt look fucking marvelous if memory served. He was surveying the men to make sure no one interfered. His jaw was doing its clench-unclench routine. I tried to mimic his confident body language, setting my shoulders back. Harry was barely visible over his shoulder, safely tucked in the dim hallway, one pale slender hand holding the door ajar. I could tell by the half turn of Batten's face that the hunter had the revenant guardedly locked in his peripheral vision.

The heavy weight of the Sun God's protective ward vibrated down my arm, strengthening my resolve. I made an experimental poke of the metal lid.

Images flashed immediately: the mailman's bare hand. Calluses, big knuckles, early rheumatoid pain. Attempting a psychic link to him as a warm up exercise, I caught a whiff of the pot he'd smoked with his wife that morning during breakfast of eggs and cheap side bacon. How he disliked cheap bacon streaked with too much fat and wished she'd buy the better, meatier stuff. Even when he gave her extra money for groceries she'd still buy the cheap stuff, but it was a minor thing. He was a mellow man who picked his battles prudently. He was a man who loved his wife, despite or even because of her thriftiness, and all her other faults. His name was Jacob. No one called him Jake, just Jacob.

I tried once more, rubbing the metal and closing my eyes. I saw him again, a slightly portly man in his early forties, those thick calluses from playing bass guitar, his habit of masturbating during his long drive out to Shaw's Fist. He'd pull off on one of the quieter roads and have what he considered a little “stress-busting tug”. Sometimes he didn't—couldn't really—wash his hands afterward. I felt myself blushing but didn't break the link. Inside the box, there were a lot worse things than a microscopic hint of residual semen from an otherwise happily-married man.

Thinking about that made the head a bit less ghastly when I finally opened the lid. Because out there, not everyone was off-their-tits crazy. Sometimes they were only mildly loopy. Maybe life with people in it wasn't all that bad. Maybe knowing something more about them made tolerating them easier, not harder. It was something I'd never considered, but the fact remained I was staring at this poor girl's head, and knowing the mailman masturbated in his truck so he wouldn't make his wife feel like she wasn't doing enough to please him made looking at the dead girl somehow less horrid. I couldn't have explained it. But there it was, and I was calm enough to notice details without barfing on my Keds in front of the cops. Always a plus.

The hair was brunette with soft natural hints of auburn. Her mouth was closed, which was good. I'd been to a crime scene where one of Jeremiah Prost's victims had died with a scream frozen on his jaw, his toddler mouth open in a silent wail. It had made the scene a hundred times worse, had kept drawing my eyes back in horror-
struck, sympathetic wonder to the frail bloodless corpse forever crying out for his mother.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them to erase Jeremiah's history written across my memory banks then focused on Davis.

There were dark sunglasses propped on her… “it”, I corrected. I would be damned if I was going to touch them. I didn't want to see if her eyes were brown, blue or green, open, closed or missing. There were cotton plugs in her nostrils, shredded by beetle pincers and dangling, smudged with fluids.

There was a ripple of conversation between those watching me. Radios had been turned down slightly, enough so they could hear them and I could barely. I appreciated that. But their voices were distracting me from going deeper, and I jerked my chin at Batten in a summons.

He stalked across the snow-covered lawn like he was expecting a fight, brow lowered and shoulders forward.

“Chill out, Cro-Mag,” I said when he got close enough. “They've fallen back. That's great. But they're still making too much noise. If you can quiet them, I'll try again.”

A nod. He turned around to go talk to the clustered groups. I was drawn to the flicker of impatience from the coroner's attendants, who were sharing a lighter and having their third cigarette. The doctor had long gone and was waiting for them at the morgue in Denver with the rest of the body. The attendants couldn't leave without the head. It was their “property” technically, from now until the funeral home reclaimed it for the family after the autopsy. They were being good sports as a favor to the FBI but the attendants didn't appreciate having to wait. They figured they'd already waited in the cold too long. I tried to focus past their foot-shuffling irritation. Again the image of the mailman's sticky fingers teased the outer reaches of my awareness. I told myself, just because it was often on his hands doesn't mean it transferred to the metal. Besides, he kept Kleenex in his truck. In the glove box next to the well-read Busty Babes magazine.

I pinched my lips together to deny myself the outrageously inappropriate grin that tickled and threatened the corners of my mouth. No no no, I was not going to start giggling like a harebrained
nutcase in front of the collective departments of sheriff, fire and rescue guys. Marnie Baranuik didn't giggle. Ever. Especially not when faced with gore. I succeeded in making it look like Serious Business instead of lunatic laughter by pulling down a dour grimace. Point: me.

Batten was getting heightened resistance, now. The coroner's attendants had had enough, and I couldn't blame them. I glanced at the porch and raised my eyebrows at Harry. He cocked his head in consideration, looking, as he often did, for my permission to step in. This time, I shrugged a why not in silent approval.

Harry never failed to make every motion appear salacious, and crooking one long finger seductively at the forest was no exception. His long fingers coiled and curled through the air as though he was weaving electric invitations through the atmosphere, lifting from his side toward the danger of the open yard, the setting sun, creeping in the direction of peril. I'd seen him do this before, still it had the power to take my breath away. I didn't think that anything could resist the lure of that invitation, not once they beheld the potent force of energy behind his luminous eyes. Even the inanimate craved his governance. Now, it hurried to obey.

As though she were a hesitant lover given over to wicked seduction, the woods offered up her darkest secrets to him in a rush. Filmy shade peeled out from under the trees, misting as it raced across the snow-covered lawn like an inky wave, picking up pricks of frost in its swift, slinking purl around him, shrouding the porch. He raised both hands only slightly, palms up, commanding the sanctuary of the shadows in an ever-growing spiral drawn up the length of him until it cloaked his head.