The Talisman Killer, page 2
“We’ve got a situation.”
“So I assumed,” I said dryly as I switched on the bedside lamp and climbed out of bed, the mattress springs squeaking a little. I searched the floor for my jeans from yesterday until I remembered I’d thrown them in the laundry basket to wash. Mud on the knee. Crap. I wasn’t sure I had another clean pair. I probably should go clothes shopping at some point. Or maybe do some laundry. “What sort of situation?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” Wolffe admitted. “Riley was a little unclear.”
I snorted. “That’s Riley for you.” I was well aware of his crush on me and the fact that he turned into a blithering idiot every time he got within five miles of me. It’s weird, since he was normally such a cool, collected guy. “Do we at least know where we’re supposed to be?” I staggered toward the laundry basket— thinking for the millionth time I should buy a rug, the floor was freezing—and pulled out my jeans. A quick sniff revealed the loamy scent of earth, but other than that, they weren’t bad. I pulled them on. The damp patch had dried so I brushed as much dirt off as possible.
“The clear-cut across from Fern Hill.”
“Meet you there.”
“Oh, and Vee, he said it had to do something with trees.”
“Trees. You sure?” Something inside me suddenly went cold. An uneasy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. Could it be...? Surely it was just a regular old dream. Not one of my weird prescient ones. “Be there in fifteen.” My voice sounded a little strangled even to my ears.
“You’re only ten minutes away.”
“Coffee.”
“I’ve got some for you. Just get there,” she said and hung up.
I managed to wrangle myself a clean t-shirt and knock most of the mud off my boots. No sense getting another pair dirty. I threw a brown jacket with buckle fasteners over the shirt. My hair was a hot mess and too short for a pony tail, so I grabbed a newsboy cap in the same brown as my jacket and slapped it on my head. Good enough.
I cast a quick look around to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. On the table gleamed two brass-colored tuning forks. Might need those. I stuffed them in my pocket and headed out.
My pink and white VW bus was parked in the lot behind my apartment building. It had belonged to my mother during her hippy days. She hadn’t wanted to let it go, so she bequeathed it to me the day I got my driver’s license. Eleven years later, it still ran. Mostly.
I drove toward the crime scene. My mind was still whirling from the earlier nightmare. Had it been just a dream? Once upon a time, I would have said yes, but since the Rift, all bets were off. Lately, my dreams had become unusually vivid, extremely disturbing, and had a bad tendency to come true.
As I neared the scene, I could see the police lights strobing the trees with red and blue. I pulled to the side of the road behind Wolffe’s SUV, tires crunching in the gravel. I turned off the engine and took a deep breath before climbing out of the car.
To my right, Fern Hill stretched against the overcast sky, blocking the early morning sun. What there was of it. To the left, on the side of the highway nearest the Columbia River, rose a lower hill, stripped bare of trees. Only the stumps of the pines remained. It was an ugly scar against otherwise glorious scenery. The only positive thing about it, in my opinion, was that Oregon law would force the loggers to replant several seedlings within two years, thus ensuring reforestation. The sad thing was the ugliness would remain for decades.
A cluster of police, firemen, and emergency medical technicians were gathered at one end of the clear cut. I could make out Wolffe standing just apart from them, her long, black peacoat fluttering in the slight breeze. She clutched a coffee cup in one hand. I suppressed a groan as I saw who was standing next to her: Riley. Aka Officer Smooth. Goody. What a morning this was shaping up to be.
My boots crunched against rocks and fallen branches as I made my way across the clearing, mentally bracing myself for what lay ahead. Back when Wolffe and I had been normal private investigators with a side business in paranormal hunting, dead bodies and gross crime scenes had been almost unheard of. I mean, there had been that one guy that had a heart attack while in bed with a hooker. His wife had hired us to follow him. Unfortunately, we got the whole thing on audio. That had been a bit of a shock. I think I downed six whiskeys that night. And I don’t even like whiskey. Unless it’s in cake.
As I drew closer to the scene, my stomach churned. I had an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. Good thing I hadn’t eaten any breakfast, or I would have lost it. The scene was eerily reminiscent of last night’s dream. I swear, the trees were exactly the same.
Then the sea of police parted and I saw it: At the edge of the clear-cut, a man tied up between two trees. But not with rope. He was bound with branches wrapped tight around ankles and wrists like vines.
“Just like my dream,” I said softly to myself as Wolffe handed me the cup of coffee. I took it automatically, barely noticing the heat in my hand.
“What?” Wolffe’s voice barely penetrated the fog around my mind.
“Just like my dream,” I repeated faintly as I stepped closer. Riley said something, but it didn’t register. Every fiber of my being was focused on that man, suspended between the trees. Blood had dripped from his mouth and dried in rivulets on his chin. Branches sprouted from his chest, but not because a branch had pierced his back. These branches had exploded from the inside out.
Just like my dream.
Chapter 4 – Wolffe
Riley and I stood aghast. The scene was so horrible I almost dropped Vee’s precious coffee. Far beyond what I had expected. Vee and I were sensitives. That meant we had the capacity to confront the paranormal head on, and that our intuition was more than just intuition—if it hadn’t been more than that, we wouldn’t be valuable. Our unique skillset is not something that can be trained or obtained. You either have it or you don’t. We both have it, and we were drawn to one another because of it.
It turns out, one generally has to have two X chromosomes to be a Rift Sensitive, to the degree that we are. This is a girls-only club. Scientists speculate that it has to do with our propensity to use both brain hemispheres more than men, who tend to stick to the left lobe. Some say it’s our larger hippocampus and our more complex limbic systems, which explains the keen instincts. All I know is that we’re just better equipped to deal with this shit than guys are. I personally think it’s because women are thoroughly bad-ass, and the Rift knows it.
Our awesome gifts aside, there is never anything that can prepare anyone, even a sensitive, for something like this. Rift-related deaths are brutal, savage, and haunting. This one was worse than most. My stomach tingled with butterflies at the idea of a Rift crime that wasn’t a random otherwordly rodent, demon possession, or uppity ghost. But I also could not help but balk at what I was looking at.
Bane wasn’t here yet. I stood, waiting for the state Medical Examiner—ME—to cordon off the site. It was on the edge of the clear cut where there were tall trees marked for cutting. The ground looked like the aftermath of a flood, the soil churned up, roots overturned like osteal, gnarled hands clawing up from the soil. Piles of branches were heaped up into stacks. Navigating it had been a nightmare. Making my way to the cluster of police personnel I had been jabbed by sharp branches and almost twisted my ankle twice.
The MEs were just inside the line of trees. What was remarkable was the area they were cordoning off was a perfect circle. In the center was a man, his arms spread like a messiah, and lashed to two trees across the diameter of the circle. The binding was made of branches.
One foot was rooted into the earth. Roots had punched through denim jeans and wormed down into the soil. His chest was bristling with small branches. As I stood there, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and frissons washed over my skin. I peered up, into the boughs. The wind was passing through the evergreens. Even with the din of the police radios and MEs, there was a bizarre muted quiet about the place. An expectant silence. Watchful, I thought. That’s what it felt like. As if someone was scrutinizing me. But it was not just the feeling of one set of eyes. It was as if the whole forest was watching. I turned, listening to it. Riley glanced at me in puzzlement, wondering why I was looking up, not at the victim.
“What is it?” he asked. I didn’t answer, I couldn’t explain it to him in any cogent way anyway. I stepped back, still gazing up. Out of the edge of my sight I saw a uniform become startled. He muttered “shit,” and backed away from a tree.
“You okay, Sorensen?” another asked.
“Dude, that tree just moved. And not like ‘in the wind’ moved. It moved like the bark was skin,” he said. “I’m out of here…” he stumbled through the detritus that loggers left behind, and disappeared behind a pile of tree limbs. The officers were all on edge. Not unusual at Rift related scenes. Who wouldn’t be?
I turned my attention back to the scene. Just as I did, a figure appeared, making her way through the obstacles. Vee looked grumpy and pretty scrubby in that rolled-out-of-bed kind of way. Riley didn’t seem to care. His face lit up at the sight of her, and he started fidgeting in that adorable way that he did when he was within sight of Vee.
“This is just peachy, isn’t it?” Vee asked, her brow arched sardonically.
I handed her the coffee and she gave me a grateful glance before taking in the scene. A wash of weirdness coursed over me again. It felt like the circle of trees was closing in. The air felt thicker. I gazed upwards again, watching the branches swing in the wind; trying to find something that would explain my prickling sense of wrongness. I moved away, threading through the trees around the circle; my fingers brushing the gritty surface of the trunks as I walked, my eyes searching skywards.
I could almost hear whispers in the breeze that hissed through the boughs and needles. Like a hundred unseen mouths forming shapes into the passing wind. Abruptly, the strange voices stopped and everything fell into a weighty silence. I froze. I had my hand on one tree, my feet at its knobby roots. I looked down on impulse, and something bright against the dark pitch and humus right in front of my feet in the nook between two roots caught my eye. I knelt and craned to look at it, pushing my glasses up my nose. I did not pick it up. We learned the hard way, early on, not to touch evidence.
It was a smooth white stone. Pure white, with a marbled depth and the opacity of a riverstone. Etched into the stone was a symbol. It looked oddly like the roots of a tree, sort of, as if viewed from beneath. A strange little tangled sunburst, but rudimentary and primitive. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. Then I put it as close to the stone as possible and snapped an Instagram-worthy macro of the thing just before I heard Riley and Vee come up behind me asking: “What d’you find, Wolffe?”
I stared at the picture as I sat in my car, the door agape. The police threaded around the area looking for more clues while the body was being carried out of the clear cut. They were forced to prune the branches off of the body to fit him into the body bag. One officer laughed uncomfortably as he walked past, “Who knew police work would involve topiary?”
Vee stood next to my car drinking her coffee, the brim of her hat shading her eyes. Riley fidgeted , trying not to stare at her. “Lenn Olsen,” Riley blurted, “from Olsen logging. That’s who the victim is. He’s the owner of the logging company that contracts through Braedenhauser.” He glanced quickly at Vee, then back to his police book. “His employees found him this morning. They were going to start taking down those trees over there.”
I eyed the equipment that waited—large machinery, giant hooks on huge chains and shackles, that kind of stuff. It hung quietly on this grey morning, condensation and dew dripping from the painted metal and tempered glass windows. Somewhere, a raven was making a grating, raspy call. My eyes went up on instinct in search of it.
“What do you guys make of this?” Riley asked.
“We can’t know yet. Need to find out more first. More about this too.” I turned my phone to display the image to him.
Riley nodded. “Okay, I’ll s-see ya ladies. We’ll touch base after we get the report back from the ME.” He smiled awkwardly at Vee, who just ignored him.
“I don’t think the ME is going to have anything useful for us. The death is unusual, but the body isn’t going to tell us anything. It’s the rock that will lead us further,” Vee murmured.
“And the trees,” I added, trying to ignore the whispering that had resumed. They stood like a line of soldiers on the edge of the clear cut, almost straining. One looked like it had broken ranks, standing a good ways from the rest, well into the clear cut. I didn’t remember seeing it there before. I stared at it for a moment, until words startled me from my reverie.
“I’ll catch you later, then,” Riley said. “Call me if anything comes up.” He turned away, giving Vee one last glance before leaving. She was staring at the stump of some doomed sapling, kicking it.
“We need to get back to the office, Vee. I forgot to cancel the receptionist interview when I left this morning. The first one’s due in about half an hour.” Vee nodded, watching Riley amble away to join the parlay of police officers clustered around one of the vehicles.
“What do you make of that stone? That’s a first, huh?” Vee mumbled, draining her coffee and tossing the paper cup into a nearby branch-pile which I knew they’d burn within the next few days.
“I don’t know. It’s talking to me, but I don’t understand the language. Let’s get back and get that interview knocked out. Then we can speculate about the stone.” Vee’s eyebrow arched and she gave me a peculiar look.
“It is what it is, Vee. I hear voices. I have always heard voices. They just got louder when the Rift opened. Big whoop. Everett thought I was nuts, but hey, turns out, I’m not. Why don’t we have a word about your little comment up there?”
“What comment,” Vee snapped defensively, turning toward her car.
“You said something about dreams. When we were looking at the site, you said ‘like my dream,’ or something.”
She crossed her arms, sinking her weight onto one hip. “We can talk about this later.”
I frowned darkly, “What are you not telling me?”
Vee’s eyes were hidden behind the brim of that damn cap, so I couldn’t see her reaction before she turned and left
“Hey!” I called out with a mischievous smirk, as she walked away. “Go home and change first. You look like a frickin’ hobo.”
Chapter 5 – Bane
I stuck my tongue out at Wolffe in a mature way. “You try waking up at the crack of dawn and see how you like it.”
“I’ve been up since six,” Wolffe said dryly. “I have a kid, remember.”
Huh. Well, there went my martyrdom complex.
“Hey, Verity.” Riley’s voice came from a couple feet behind me. I turned to glare at him. In his favor, he didn’t quale. Much.
“No one calls me Verity.” Well, except my mother, but she doesn’t count. She’s too busy taking on high profile ecological cases these days to notice much of anything. After I was born, she dropped the hippy routine and went for professional eco warrior. Only she fights in a courtroom and her armor is expensive pantsuits. I’m proud of what she does, but we don’t talk much these days. She finds my “gifts” embarrassing.
“S-Sorry. Bane.”
“Yeah, what do you want? I thought you left.” I cursed myself at how blunt I sounded. Riley was annoyingly puppy-dog like, but he was a sweet guy and there weren’t many of those in my world.
“I wanted to ask you something.” He drew himself up, shoulders back, looking suddenly every inch the police detective.
“Yeah, so ask.” Gods of the Rift, I needed more coffee.
He licked his lips and I suddenly realized the lower lip was nice and full. Perfect for nibbling. Jesus, Bane, get it together. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot.
“I was wondering if you would go to dinner with me sometime. Like, maybe tonight.” He watched me eagerly.
I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “Did you just seriously ask me out over a dead body?”
“Uh—.”
Behind me Wolffe was laughing like a hyena. She was trying desperately to hold it in, but she was literally snorting with laughter. I shot her a glare over my shoulder and turned my attention back to Riley who looked crestfallen. Which made me feel guilty. Which made me annoyed. Which made me feel guiltier.
“I’ll think about it.” The words came out of my mouth, but they weren’t mine. They couldn’t be. Still, Riley perked up so much I couldn’t dash his hopes. Christ, this is a clusterfuck.
Without waiting for his response, I stomped to my car, Wolffe’s laughter ringing in my ears. To make up for my annoyance, I rolled down the windows and blasted Alien Ant Farm’s version of “Smooth Criminal” as loud as I could. Then I revved the engine and spun my tires on the blacktop like a testosterone laden teenager until smoke billowed behind me. I knew it would annoy the cops, and especially Riley who was about as by-the-book as it got, but they wouldn’t do anything. And it made me feel better.
I’d contemplated telling Wolffe about my dreams many times. If anyone would understand, she would. But the fear that I was going crazy and this was the first sign was greater than the desire to tell anyone, even Wolffe.
After stopping at home for a quick change of clothes and a comb through my hair, I swung by Bean Nation on the way back to the office. It was one of those drive-thru coffee stands. Astoria had more than its fair share of them, which made my life easier.
Clutching the world’s largest caramel toasted marshmallow fat-free latte, I pushed my way into the office and stopped in my tracks. In front of me was the most gorgeous man I’d seen outside an Avengers movie. He was at least six foot two with muscles in all the right places—shown off nicely by strategically worn jeans and a forest green Henley that was just a little too snug. He had beautifully tanned skin and flaxen hair that flowed to his shoulders. I swear he glowed with golden light. They should have used him for Thor instead of that Hemsworth person.
