Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 6

  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.”

  “I don’t think he likes being called Bubba,” Schenk said.

  “He doesn’t mind so much if it’s coming from a friend. He really didn’t like it when Malashock said it, though. Not one bit.” I frowned. “So the owner of the Oh Yeah! is an ex-cop, eh? Retired. Didn’t get a name. That’s why you police types hang out here.”

  Schenk put his fork down with a clunk and pressed the meat of his back into the chair. It cracked a warning, and he readjusted his legs on either side to compensate. “Got all that from molesting the tabletop?”

  “Groping,” I corrected with a snort-laugh. “I’m a Groper, not a molester.” I filed that away for later, though, so I could tell Batten. “And yes. I saw them both, and her reason for coming, although she’d rather hit a Starbucks, frankly.”

  “Saw?”

  “More of an impression, really,” I explained, pulling my glove back on. “I didn’t get a lot of physical details about either, except that she felt like a brunette. To be fair, I knew that already. I’ve met her before.”

  “What does a brunette feel like?”

  “I should have a cheeky answer to that, but I don’t. I also sensed she was wearing a really snazzy red leather jacket.” And that she has no friends.

  Schenk digested this. He dipped some more toast in egg yolk. Then he wiped his hands on a napkin without eating more, drained his coffee, and waved the waitress over for a refill. She was happy to oblige. One of the women from the next table used the waitress’s motion as an excuse to glance at Schenk; she took him in from head to toe with an appreciative but subtle ogle, decided he was doable, and went back to her pancakes. Schenk didn’t seem to have any idea he’d just passed a visual inspection. The woman saw me staring, and I gave her a he’s-not-remotely-mine eyebrow-and-lip signal, an unspoken go-ahead. She smiled down into her coffee, embarrassed. The Blue Sense reported she’d never have the nerve to approach him, but if he struck up a conversation, she’d have to work hard not to swoon right out of her seat. I wondered how many opportunities this man was missing out on because he had no idea he was being checked out.

  Schenk dropped his voice. “Are you finished making friends across the aisle, or should I wait?”

  I hid my mouth behind my napkin. “I’m trying to get you laid, dude. You’re welcome.”

  He thumped his file hard with one thick finger, but his eyes said he knew exactly what was going on at the next table. Well, well, I thought. Can’t slip anything past this one.

  “According to the statement we got from her boyfriend, Simon Hiscott, he and Ms. Wyatt walked through the gap in the chain link toward the sand piles,” Schenk said, opening the file to scan his notes and pictures, “at approximately nine o’clock. At which point, Ms. Wyatt turned away from Mr. Hiscott, stared into the canal, and then jumped into the water.”

  Thinking of the ice, snow, and slush piled at that end of the canal, I asked, “Jumped, not slipped?”

  “Jumped.”

  “Just like that? Mid-winter swan dive?”

  “According to him, she went underwater head-first, arms at her side. And didn’t come back up. We’re in the process of getting video from the Seaway.”

  “When you do, can I see it?”

  “Possibly,” he said noncommittally.

  “Marks on him?” I asked.

  “None.” He sipped black coffee, putting his pencil between middle and forefinger like a cigarette. I wondered if he was an ex-smoker.

  “Is Simon Hiscott alive?”

  “As opposed to?”

  “Dead?” I shrugged, thinking revenant. “Undead, maybe?”

  “Living, breathing human.”

  “I’m going to ask you something,” I said, pointing at him with a crispy strip of bacon, “and I want you to keep an open mind.”

  “Hooboy.” The pencil began to taptaptap softly on his files, and when his brows knit, his lips did that doubtful pucker again, like brows and lips were attached by the same drawstring. “Can’t wait to hear this.”

  “If there was some form of mind control involved, do you like him for it?”

  “He had an engagement ring in his pocket with their names engraved on it. He was waiting for the right moment and says he’d just about worked up the nerve.”

  “That’s sad, if it’s genuine,” I murmured, and comforted myself by wolfing the rest of my bacon.

  “If,” he repeated, not a question. The pencil paused in its tapping.

  “Well, yeah. It’s also a good cover story. If you were gonna murder your girlfriend, buying an engagement ring a few days before is a good way to demonstrate you planned on keeping her around, yes? Having it engraved furthers that display.”

  “That’s fairly cynical.”

  “You disagree?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  My phone buzzed against my butt cheek to indicate a text and I dug it out to peek at it. Carrie, the only member of my family, other than Wes, who still spoke to me. Come see me tonight at mom’s. You can tell me about this date with a lawyer. And then, a second later: What’s with you and soulless bloodsuckers?

  I sighed and put the phone face down on the table. How did she know about that? How did my family always know every move I made? Wes was a bat, but I didn't take Harry for a rat. For people who wanted to have nothing to do with me they sure couldn’t stay away. She wanted me to see her at my mother’s house? Was she out of her mind? “I need an espresso.”

  Schenk indicated my empty mug. “Want me to flag down some more bad coffee?”

  I considered this, feeling drained by my travels, using half my brainpower to figure out how to dodge my family for the next few days, and the other half to remember where the nearest Tim Horton’s was, and shook my head. “Divers searched the canal for her body?”

  “And out into the lake by Municipal Beach. A shoe surfaced near the coast guard station, a few scraps of what might have been the blue coat she was wearing caught up against the wall on the east side of the canal.”

  “What kind of shoe?”

  I expected a Batten-like “what the fuck does that matter?” but Schenk flipped a page over and said, “Brown leather half-boot.”

  I drummed my thumb on the side of the table. “Real leather or some cheap alternative?”

  This time, he looked like he wanted to ask, but answered, “Real leather.”

  I filed that away in case it became important.

  An older man in a vivid yellow golf shirt with a drum belly trapped behind a black apron brought the next pot of coffee, and offered Schenk a sunny smile. It was thirty degrees below zero outside, but this guy was wearing short sleeves. His forehead was sweaty. I was still bundled in my parka and dreaming of a hot bath.

  “Longshanks,” Yellow Shirt greeted. “Haven’t seen you in a few weeks. Welcome back.”

  Schenk gave him a fond return smile, watched him tend to the other patrons like a bumblebee settling from one flower to the next, contentedly busy.

  Knee-jerk, I opened my mouth to mock the apt nickname, but heard Harry in my head advising against it. Keeping my teeth together was the hardest thing I’d done all day, but I reminded myself I was there on a trial basis. Se
lf-restraint, me? Point: Marnie.

  Schenk let me sift through his files and photos, pictures of the crowd taken during the search and rescue attempt. I could see a bunch of nosy citizens behind the yellow tape up the road, a gaggle of cops near the ambulances and shiny white police cars, reporters with cameras and video cameras and microphones. There was one guy standing apart from the others, one boot propped on a pile of hard-packed frozen slush, one pale hand on the chain link fence between the Welland Canal and the stretch of road heading north.

  “Who’s this dude in black?” My gloved pointer hovered over his picture.

  “Why finger him instead of anyone else in that crowd?”

  “He looks like a creep. Or a rock star. Or a creepy rock star.”

  Schenk’s pencil resumed its drumming, this time on his denim-clad thigh. “Ren Scarrow.”

  “He must weigh about as much as my left thigh.”

  “So, two pounds?”

  “Funny. Look at him. He’s built like a praying mantis. Or maybe that’s an illusion caused by the skinny jeans.” I squinted. “Who is he?”

  “Exorcist, or so he says.”

  “Amateur or professional?”

  A blink. “Is that a serious question?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” I peeked across the imposing bulk of his left forearm where it blocked part of his notes, and he moved the arm to give me access. “Renfield Aquinas Thackeray Scarrow. I’m going to want to see his Red Flag.”

  “His what?”

  “Exorcists licensed to speak with demons on behalf of the Church carry a kit, including their Red Flag. Exorcists licensed by the government also carry a kit and a different Red Flag.” I tapped my right biceps with a gloved forefinger. “They sometimes wear it here on their sleeve. It’s more of a patch, really, but Red Patch doesn’t sound very bad-ass.”

  “Exorcists and psychics,” Schenk said; it sounded like he was trying to soothe himself so I didn’t interrupt. I really wanted to add, “... and stiffs, oh my,” but I was winning in the self-control department, today. Point, Marnie.