Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (33 page)

All traces of teasing or guile had vanished from his face, and I sensed he was sincere and frightened, but determined. Mr. Cynical
had seen the worst thing he’d come up against, and he wanted to pick a
fight with it, but his self doubt now showed in new lines on his
forehead.
“I need your help, Marnie. Just you. This is no place for him.” He motioned with a frown at the hall. “He can’t help us with this. I
mean no disrespect. He’s a formidable officer of the law and an intelligent ally… but this is a matter for preternaturalists.” He thumped one last nail in the coffin. “You don’t want him to get hurt. He’s not prepared for this. That will put him in danger. You could get him killed.”

I hated him for saying that. I didn’t want to picture the dreadnaught bulk of Constable Patrick Schenk broken and battered,
frozen solid in a foot of water, covered in a silken sheet of MUCE, staring at the night
sky with accusing eyes, his mouth jacked open in a final, soundless scream. The vision was so vivid that it drew a shudder. “I won’t let that happen,” I said, more to myself and my mental Schenk than to
Scarrow.

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Marnie.”

“No, you call me Miss Baranuik,” I said, remembering what
Harry
said. “There are some major problems, here. First, we don’t know
where the skull went.”

Scarrow agreed. “Barnaby took it somewhere.”

“Second, the poltergeist is really fu--ntastically angry.”

“Funtastically?” Amusement glinted in his eyes.

“Bite me, creep. Third, we could get seriously injured.”

“Killed, even. Yes. And if my theory about what happened to Britney is correct, it will be both terrifying and excruciatingly painful.”

“Well, fuck.”

“We could do that first,” he said, smiling slyly, “if you think that’ll help.”

“You’re doing it again,” I accused.

“I’ll behave when you do.” He pointed to the low-grade disaster I'd turned his office into. “Now, will you clean up your mess?”

Schenk marched back into the living room, sparing a glance at the disemboweled bookshelf and pillows on the floor, and hooked one big hand in the hood of my parka.

“Miss Baranuik,” Schenk said calmly, “may I see you outside for a moment?”

I shrugged at Scarrow and threw him the keys to his desk as I was marched backward, hood first, from the room. “Guess I’ll do it later?”

“I’m leaving it for you,” Scarrow warned.

“I’ll be back soon,” I promised. “And not in some French Maid getup, so don't even think about it.”

When Schenk released my hood, I spun and chased him out to the Sonata. His long legs made this a problem, as his one stride was about four of mine. I hurried to catch up.

“No time for lunch,” Schenk said, not looking back. “Y’okay? No gigglefit?”

“Nope,” I said, but there was an undeniable residual effect from being in Father Scarrow’s presence; a lightness to my step, even after an argument, that I still did not understand. “Where we going?”

“Body in the pond.”

“No, that was yesterday. Are you getting your days scrambled? Sometimes that happens to me, too.” I jumped into the car as soon as
he unlocked it. I strapped in and thought about telling him about
Scarrow’s concerns and plans, but his eyes were wide; there was a lot going on behind them, and I didn’t want to add to it.

“Same spot,” he said gruffly, pulling out onto the Haulage,
taking the corners with less care than he had earlier. “Different body.”

“I thought they had that area cordoned and secured,” I said,
remembering the uniformed officer cruising under the floodlight last night. “It was being patrolled.”

Schenk said tightly, “It was.”

“Bodies don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

“Apparently it floated to the surface in front of the patrolman’s eyes. Body moved ashore into its position while the officer was calling it in, watching it.”

I had the sinking realization that I already knew the answer, but asked anyway. “Whose body?”

“Barnaby Nowland.”

DEAR DIARY: FUCK
fuck fuck fuck fuck! Also, fuck. Love, Marnie.
PS: I found a really bitchin' teapot.

There was no doubt about it; the body of Barnaby Nowland, clad
only in jeans and a t-shirt, lay in exactly the same spot as Britney Wyatt’s had, in the same position, head tucked between two rocks,
covered by a silky, white sheet of MUCE. This enraged Schenk. He hid it remarkably well, but he couldn’t hide it from his buddy, the
empathic psychic. The Blue Sense was hot and chaotic against the left side of my body. Beside me, Schenk vibrated with silent fury, a towering mountain of training and restraint, needing to put his
massive
mitts on some mundane cause and strangle it into submission. Though he felt the unfairness of blaming me, I could sense he was tempted; before the weirdo psychic showed up all his missing
persons showed up as cut-and-dry, human-on-human nonsense, or disappeared of their own, very human, volition. Now he had to put up with both an exorcist and a witchy psychic, as well as a whole lot of evidence that only fit together if you accepted paranormal explanations.

Batten was as mundane as his standard-issue boots; Hood was as stolid as the winch on his Humvee; both had come to grips with the preternatural intersections of the world they thought they'd known with something that might approximate grace and
adaptability. Schenk hadn't gotten there yet, and watching him fight it filled me with an
uneasy mixture of terror and sympathy. If there was anything I
could do to smooth the way for him, I would have. There weren't exactly training wheels for this kind of world-view adjustment.

The uniformed officer who had been on the scene when the body
appeared was sitting at the back of an ambulance in the vehicle’s heat, trying to push his explanations past chattering teeth for the
third or
fourth time to yet another superior; this time it was Detective Sergeant Malashock herself. She was dressed for the field in heavy
boots and an
overcoat with the collar turned up in lieu of a muffler. Though she was nodding I could tell she was having a hard time picturing the events that the shaken young constable in front of her was
describing.

Dr. Taylor was again on the scene, and after handing a folded
piece of paper to Schenk, he left our side to direct his assistants. Schenk scanned the paper, holding it in both hands so the wind
didn’t flap it about, and then handed it off to me. Taylor’s toxicology screen from Britney Wyatt’s autopsy showed negative results for ms-lipotropin,
V-telomerase, and batrachotoxins. Britney wasn’t killed by a
revenant
or a mermaid. Her macula showed no radiation damage, so the
culprit wasn't a Will-o’-the-Wisp, either.

The crime scene unit had their hands full with the slippery terrain and the bad weather, despite the protective advantage of the
crayon-blue tarp tent. Radio babble got snatched away by the wind, which whipped in seemingly random and directionless gusts and spirals. I
secured my hat strings under my chin and yanked at my gloves, wishing I had Ellie’s big fuzzy mittens instead. The leather did little
to keep my
hands warm in the relentless storm, so I stuck my hands in my
pockets,
where I found a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Peanut butter.
Strawberry jelly. The crusts had been cut off. Was
put food in Marnie’s pockets
part
of Combat Butler’s job description, or had he suspected I’d not have time to grab a meal today? I looked at the scene before me and figured he was right; if I got so much as a cup of coffee anytime
soon, it’d be a miracle.

I couldn’t think of anything constructive or helpful to say, so I sighed. “Well, Boogernuggets.”

“Settle down, Cinderblock,” Schenk said. “It's a bit early to start dropping B-bombs.”

“I fell in there last night,” I said, looking up and down the
shoreline, trying to orient myself. “Like,
right there
. Didn’t I?”

“You were a little further east,” he agreed through his teeth, “but yeah.”

“There was definitely no corpse here last night, right?” I
swallowed hard, trying to block the frustration flowing from him. Unwrapping the sandwich with my gloves on was tricky; when I managed it, I offered him half. “Just the killer skeleton.”

He took the sandwich but didn’t eat it. “Your branch? I tossed it
over there.” He gestured with the bread at an embarrassingly small branch. More of a twig, really. What little pride I'd been
accumulating trickled away and died quietly of shame.

“Felt like a killer skeleton, sorry,” I said a little defensively,
chagrined by the memory of my wounded-cow howling. “What was Barnaby Nowland doing near the canal? You’d think if your ghost hunting crew stole a dead guy’s skull from a pond, and one of your gang got killed and washed up at that pond, and then
you
stole the maybe-haunted skull from a priest, you’d stay the hell away from the Pond of Doom.” I masticated PB&J then dug Wonder bread out of my
molars with my tongue. “Hate to speak ill of the dead, but maybe he wasn’t too bright. I mean, even Shaggy wasn't that dumb, and he
was a stoner who thought his dog could talk.”

“I guess we’ll find out when we track Nowland’s last known movements, and where he went in. Find his car, the last people to
see
him, check the canal videos from late last night.” We watched the
forensics guys running around through the blizzard, trying to do their thing while being assaulted by the storm. It seemed no matter which way I turned, the snow was whipping right up my nose.

I said, “Being in a graveyard always makes me think of my own death. You?”

“Mortality? The afterlife?” He gave the half a sandwich back to me. I ate it. “Deep, doleful thoughts there, Cinderblock.”

“I’m more concerned about what they’ll say at my eulogy.”

“I’m sure your companion already has one prepared.”

“He
does
treat me like I’m a minute away from disaster at all times.” I finished the sandwich and dusted the crumbs off the front of my parka. “Speaking of disasters, Father Scarrow wants me to go with him to the tunnel.”

“The haunted one,” Schenk clarified. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

“That might be the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“Not even close. I used to bang a coworker. And this one time, I met a half-possessed, homicidal ex-DaySitter alone in a cheap motel, and she tried to gut me. I had to fake my own death to survive. The stabbing, I mean. I didn't fake dead during sex. I’m not that kinky.”

The wind snatched at his scarf, sparing both of us any more of my
True Confessions
babble. He popped his collar and rearranged the
scarf up around his ears. “I'm still not sure Father Scarrow isn't
involved
with these deaths,” Schenk said. “You are absolutely not going
anywhere alone with him, sorry.”

“He won’t go if you’re there. He thinks you’re a problem. Sorry.”

“I'm a cop. It's my
job
to be a problem for people doing illegal things. Besides, I’ve already been there.”

I tilted my head back and stared at him from under the sliding hem of my floppy hat. “To the Blue Ghost tunnel? When?”

“Took a crew out to check it for evidence after Simon Hiscott mentioned it during his initial questioning.”

“And?”

“Nothing out there but a bunch of frozen frogs.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Frogs don’t freeze.”

“And bats.”

I felt my brows knit harder. “Bats don’t freeze, either. They
either
migrate to a more suitable cave or tunnel, or hibernate.” Now I
absolutely
had
to see this tunnel. I had an idea. “What if I bring Harry?”

“I thought revenants couldn’t be near ghosts because of the
Kinship of the Departed. The ghosts could drive revenants insane.”

I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “You’ve been doing your research.”

“Had time to kill on a stakeout where my partner didn't take an
impromptu swim, so I read your diary. I’m very thorough.” He cut
his eyes down at me. “You said mean things about me.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “It’s true that Kinship of the Departed
will cause a deep and instant emotional connection between Harry and any ghosts that may be lingering in that place, but that will be a good way of seeing if there actually are any dangerous
manifestations there, and Harry can keep his distance if he starts sensing their presence.” The ghost at North House made Harry uncomfortable, but didn’t drive him batty. More like annoyed that he was a ghost-wuss.

“Will Harry be willing to participate?” he asked, adding, “Unofficially, of course.”

“Are you kidding me?”
I don’t know
. “Sure, he’ll do it.”
Maybe. If I beg
. I texted Harry about my tunnel date right away. “He won’t get this until he rises at dusk, but we should have his answer then. What
next?”

“Barnaby Nowland’s apartment. I want that missing skull.” He
rubbed a gloved hand across his face, wiping snow off his goatee. “If you molest your way around the apartment, will you get vibes or whatever?”

“Probably lots of whatever, but maybe some vibes, too. And it's not molesting, jeez. You make it sound filthy.”

“I’m really getting sick of this ghost shit, Cinderblock.”

That was true, but there was something else, something he wasn’t eager to admit. I politely pulled back on the Blue Sense,
knowing he wouldn’t appreciate my prying into his emotions. Instead, I waited, looking way up at him, to see if he was going to continue to share. When he didn’t, I nodded.