Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) Read Free

photo paper that peeked out of this folder looked like black mold on the lid of Tupperware long forgotten behind the pickles in the back of the fridge. A complicated file number was written in blue ink, in Chapel's recognizable blocky handwriting: PCU18744. I reached out one leather-gloved hand and tapped the folder. Leather gloves (I have them in all colors imaginable) are a Groper's best friend, a necessity for any touch-psychic of merit. One never knows where horrible images are lurking, ready to jump out and assault a sensitive brain.
    Out of habit, I took a No. 2 pencil from my frog-shaped ceramic jar to make notes in the margins of an abandoned Sudoku puzzle, but also to make Batten wait. When someone says “jump”, Marnie Baranuik is more liable to kick them in the yambag than ask “how high”? I doodled a googly-eyed caricature of him with Xs for eyes and a protruding tongue. I added a ukulele and some tulips. Knowing I couldn't draw the sport sock without cracking up drained an ounce of throbbing heat out of my temples.
    Standing vigil as a doorstop in one corner of the office was a weighted stuffed teddy-frog, and another stuffed frog with a shocked expression rested in a chair in the corner. My espresso cup was decorated with Monet's water lilies, across which some internet artist had added fanciful cartoon frogs. Two of the three of us in the room knew I had a tiny poison dart frog tattooed between my shoulder blades. Some people collect teapots. I'm froggy-obsessed.
    Summoning my nerve, I flipped to the first photo. It was dated and time-stamped early this morning and it was worse than Ithought it would be; they always are. Instantly I regretted my big greasy breakfast.
    A headless body in the early stages of blossoming into a woman lay naked and fragile, too pale against the dirty grey asphalt. Conscious of today's pelting hail, I imagined laying nude and prone in that hard grit and ice-strewn alleyway between an overflowing dumpster and a brown brick wall filthily stained with who knows what. Kristin Davis’ remains were surrounded by countless standard-issue boots in mid-shuffle. There are always too many witnesses to a bad end. You'd think the cold weather would hinder some of the curious; it doesn't, especially if the case has even the faintest whiff of the preternatural. I found my shoulders aching and realized I'd pulled them up to keep my neck warm, even though the woodstove was blasting and the cabin was toasty.
    The next picture in the series was a close-up of small matching pairs of puncture wounds on the pale, tender inside of the right thigh. I clenched my fist and the leather creaked. I wished I wasn't wearing the crimson gloves. They felt gory.
    “We thought vampire,” Batten said.
    “The nineties called, Kill-Notch, they want their politically incorrect terminology back. No one uses the V-word anymore,” I murmured, not wanting to bring the next picture closer for inspection and doing it anyway. “That being said, I see why you'd suspect a revenant. No livor mortis, not enough blood left in her body to pool. But here's the problem with your theory: I'm not seeing necrosis, no early signs of crypt plague. When yersinia sanguinaria strikes, the early signs pop within minutes: black marks across the side of the neck,” when the body has a neck, my cruel brain piped up, “and under the armpits, anywhere the lymph nodes are.” I brushed my fingertips over the picture to show them. “Has toxicology screened the tissue around the wounds for V-telomerase and ms-lipotropin?”
    “They will. If this is the primary crime scene, he drained her before he took her head off, as there's very little blood at the scene,” Chapel said, his pen moving without benefit of his full attention. Neat trick. “Why did he want the head?”
    “Trophy?” Batten suggested.
    I shook my head no, hoping he was wrong. “Anything's possible. What I know about aberrant revenant psychology could fill a change