Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (9 page)

“Nuh uh, I didn't bet you, I bet Jeeves. What’s with you guys, anyway? When did Canada become a no-swearing zone?”

He started the car without bothering to answer; the heater and radio both blasted on full. While he turned the volume down, I took the opportunity to slip my sock-feet out of my boots and tuck them near the vent to defrost my frigid toes.

“Feet off my dash,” he said.

“No way, man.”

Schenk’s eyes slunk sideways at me, and I complied
immediately with a shuffle. He watched me do it, nodded once, and said, “Nice socks. Were those frogs on the ankles?”

“Yep.”

“Cute.” He put his notes away, leaned one long arm into the back seat to set his folder back there neatly. “I knew when I spoke to
you that you were going to show up.”

“Then it’s unanimous,” I said. “Everyone knew before I did.”

“You strike me as nosy and stubborn.”

“Completely untrue,” I said. “For the most part I am
disinterested and flaky.” He didn't appear to be buying it, despite the mounting evidence that I was flakier than a stale croissant. I wondered if he knew where North House might be, and whether I could sponge a ride. “I’m not stooging around here for kicks. I’m here to help if I
can. And that’s not a promise, it’s a hope.” I looked past the
dashboard at the Welland Canal. The water was so dark blue that it was nearly
black, even with the morning sun on it. Usually, it was business
water,
a mode of transportation and nothing more. Today, it was hungry
water, foreboding and sentient, though I couldn’t have said why.
“No one should have to disappear here.”

Schenk made an incomprehensible noise. His pencil hand started
moving, and the pencil went
taptaptap
on the steering wheel. I
wondered if he even knew he was doing it.

“I take it she hasn’t been found,” I said.

Schenk stared over the dashboard, too, and said nothing.

“I take it you don’t think she
will
be found?” I asked.

“You ever seen a corpse after it’s been in the water a while?”

I thought about altogether too many autopsy photos I’d seen; the surprise package in my mailbox that had turned out to be the head of twelve year old Kristin Davis; the drooling ghouls I’d battled; the rotting zombies I’d dodged, exploded, and melted; the possessed,
exsanguinated body of a woman who'd tried to kill me; the scarred, slipper-humping vermin that used to be my brother; and the comprehensively flensed revenant in my house right this second. “I’m a
forensic psychic and a preternatural biologist, officer. I’ve seen a lot of things I wish I’d never seen. Frankly, a waterlogged body doesn't even make my top ten list.”

That didn’t seem to impress him. It wasn’t what he was waiting to hear. I added, “I’ll be okay. By all rights, I shouldn’t still be sane, but here I am.”

“I don’t have the time or patience to hold your hand,” he
warned, and the Blue Sense reported he was fibbing; Schenk had a natural protective streak a mile wide.

“And I don’t have the time or patience to let you,” I volleyed.

“Why should I humor you, Miss Baranuik?”

I let the Blue Sense rise until the psi in the car made the skin under my gloved palms twitchy. It reported his feelings of
dedication, his unwillingness to let anyone distract him unless that distraction was going to pay off for his victim.

I said, “There are five pictures of Britney Wyatt in the car with us.”

He retrieved his folio again, flipped open the notes, took a paper clip off the inner pocket, and fanned two photographs for me. One was a picture of three young people, two male, one female. The girl in the middle had a brilliant smile and a heart-shaped face, long dark hair with a thick shock of turquoise painted across the brow, and a silver nose ring. The other picture was a college graduation picture, between her parents. Same dark hair, lacking mermaid colors.

“Two,” he said.

I flipped the sun shield down above his head and a picture was tucked there, stuck with a piece of medical tape. Britney Wyatt, solo, posed with one fist under her chin, a professional picture with fair lighting, taken by a chain department store photographer.

“Three,” he conceded. “Lucky guess.”

“There’s an official print-out with her picture in your briefcase. Four.”

He nodded, unimpressed. “Paperwork. You’ve worked with cops before.”

I smiled and took off a glove. I reached for his jacket. He let me. The inside pocket above his heart yielded to my questing fingers the
rough corner of photo paper. I flicked it around to look at it; a
snapshot of Britney, not looking at the camera, holding something that looked like a digital voice recorder. The photo was dark and grainy, but she
was stunning, a flash of ghostly beauty lit only by the moon, pale
and delicate, the set of her brow serious. Another shock of color at her brow, but the night and the poor picture quality washed it out, and I
couldn’t quite tell if it was blue or purple. I showed Schenk the
picture and said, “Five.”

His slate eyes considered me for a long moment before he took the picture back and tucked it away in his jacket. We listened to the car idle, warm air blowing softly from the vents.

“This might get cold and ugly.”

“Like the last guy I dated,” I said, cramming my froggy hat back on. “Awesome.”

“You let me know when you start regretting this.” He stretched an arm behind me to put his folio in the back seat.

“Eleven o'clock last night,” I said, putting my glove back on.
“But that won't do Britney Wyatt much good. I'm here, and I'm
tenacious, and I’m tough like a cinder block.”

“Of course you are.” Schenk nodded like he believed me, but his lips did a little
yeah-right
pucker. “All right, you’re on a one-day trial. Buckle up, Miss Cinderblock.”

ON THE OTHER
side of the canal, a few locks up, was a dirt lot speckled with cars and trucks and factory workers smoking on their breaks. Schenk pulled into what could have been a giant pot hole in the far corner of the lot. Under a slick layer of black ice dusted with snow, broken asphalt heaved and buckled. I held onto the car getting
out, scuffing my Doc Martens to get a good idea what I was walking
on.

Schenk unfolded impossibly long legs and got out of the Sonata, giving me the first real sense of his size: I pegged him at about six-eight, and nearly three hundred hard-hitting pounds. At five-zilch, I should have been intimidated; I wasn’t. In fact, standing in the wind break at his right side, I felt sheltered.

When we walked into the Oh Yeah! Café, Schenk had to duck. What was going to be so exciting about diner eats?
Maybe they put
something fun in the eggs
. After removing my frog hat, I ran my
gloved hand over my hair to smooth the fly-aways. That was the theory. In practice, not so much.

The interior of the café was older than I was; the tables and
chairs
were pine, the floor, ceiling, and walls were covered with wide,
knotty
paneling. When we seated ourselves, both chairs creaked loudly
enough to announce their retirement.

Schenk set his leather folio on the table and his pencil
reappeared as if he'd conjured it from thin air. He lifted his face to the air and I thought he looked hungry; if he had a well-honed cop face like Hood or Batten, he wasn’t bothering to use it. The smell in the café was a perfect blend of bacon, coffee, toast, and something sweet that might have been cherry Danish. The thickly-laminated menu was small and simple, and the food was cheap. Schenk didn’t have to look at
the choices, and the waitress knew to bring him coffee immediately. A regular. I turned my cup up for some, and before I could try it, he
grunted.

“You’re gonna want something in that.”

I placed my order for scrambled eggs and French toast, smiled the waitress away, and checked out his cup. “You took yours black.”

“I’ve been drinking it for a decade,” he said. “No taste buds left.”

I took an experimental sip and my sight blurred with tears.
Schenk slid two cream cups and the sugar canister across the table. I thought
his lips twitched, but it might have been my eyes doing the
twitching.

I went on the offensive while I doctored my drink, interrupting myself with occasional sips to see if it had attained palatability. “The coffee’s bad, the waitress looks like someone exhumed Bea Arthur, the décor is late-60’s fishing cabin, and this place is nowhere near the cop shop. Why do you come here? Are the eggs
that
good?” Four creamers and enough sugar to make a small plate of cookies later, I could finally stop grimacing when the coffee met my lips.

Schenk braced himself, sipped his coffee, and gave me a long stare. “You tell me. You’re the Big City Psychic.”

“I told you, I’m not that kind of…” I broke off, seeing another test written across his face. He was still wary about believing in my
Talents,
but I sensed he
wanted
to believe. “Fine. You wanna play, Constable Cynic? Let’s play.” I slipped off a glove and tentatively poked the table.

The pine under my finger tingled as the Blue Sense stirred to life at my request. Empathically, I felt a wash of interest from the big cop
across the table, a nice sort of open-minded inquisitiveness mixed
with a healthy dose of skepticism and reservation. Not the sort of
openly rejecting doubt I usually got from the law; this one was
willing to give
me a chance. The pictures had given me a foot in the door. If I
wanted
that door to remain open, I had a shot, maybe only one, to peel away that layer of resistance. Grateful for the opportunity, I laid my hand
flat, opening myself completely to whatever vision might slap my brain.

Like a spotlight hitting a stage, the Blue Sense spiraled opened in the front of my skull, parting the darkness to give me hints about the
people who had left any residual impressions at this spot. Unlike
psychometric visions from crime scenes, which are always chaotic
and
violating, several gentle images flickered onto that stage, the coy
tease of a fan dancer. I was vaguely aware that the waitress had returned with our food; I smelled the cinnamon and maple syrup, but focused on the vision, blocking the input of her curiosity.

The man who sat here last was also a cop. In uniform. Young. He worked traffic and enjoyed it. His thought processes tended to black-and-white when it came to the law, and traffic suited him well. For him (
Ben something, but his friends still call him Bubba because he used to be chubby,
the Blue Sense reported), there was no mystery involved; he already knew you broke the law, he saw it happen. His job was to make you pay for it, and he thrived on two things: keeping his streets safe and setting things capital-R Right.

The vision flicked to black like the cable had gone out. I focused deeper, reaching for impressions buried under others, digging for
clarity, sifting through half-ideas and broken pieces to find a solid handle. For a moment, the intrusion of empathic sensation
overwhelmed the
token-object reading; Schenk vibrated on the edge of excitement.
This
was no skeptic; this was a closet believer, secretly thrilled by the
possibility of proof right in front of him. If I opened my eyes, I’d see it in his face, but I pushed that urge away and focused on the table.

The other person to have left a recent impression on the wood
beneath my hand was a woman: Detective Sergeant Nicole
Malashock,
Constable Schenk’s superior. I’d met her once before, in April,
another
missing person case; one where I
had
been invited to consult.
Malashock
was a no-nonsense woman whose position had hardened her
irrevocably in ways that made her undeniably coarse. When she’d sat here last,
she’d been lonely, borderline depressed with her lot in life, feeling
like no matter what she did, it wasn’t good enough. Malashock hated the coffee here, too, just like Ben. (
Bubba Osterhout,
the Blue Sense piped up
. And Malashock has called him that by accident. He was neither amused to hear it nor able to hide his irritation, and Malashock had felt a jolt of guilt
.) Malashock didn’t like the décor in the Oh Yeah! either, but she kept coming back because she craved connection with other cops, though she rarely found it here, even though…

When I looked up with a sad smile, Schenk was dipping the
corner
of his rye toast in egg yolk and waiting to hear my report. The
waitress was still hovering. My clairempathy was jittering around the room, collecting impressions of feelings from every table, and the waitress felt
uncertain, nosy, skeptical
. She asked if we needed anything else.

Schenk and I said in chorus, “Hot sauce.”

Then he asked me, “Well?”

“Does Bubba Osterhout have a bit of OCD, do you think?”

Schenk’s toast paused halfway into his mouth, but his face did
not betray surprise.
Aha!
There’s the cop face I was waiting to see: jaw relaxed, eyes unimpressed, expression guarded. Taking
information in and revealing little, his hand gave him away as he placed the egg-soaked bread in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, wiped his fingertips on his napkin, and then casually asked, “Who?”

Point: Marnie. Yay, me!

“Constable Benjamin Osterhout. His rigid thinking patterns suggest that he does. Not a serious case, I don't think, but he’s very
black-and-white. Might be why he loves his spot in traffic, eh? I mean, you’re either speeding or you’re not, the numbers don’t lie.”