“Agent Marks, I need you to report in as early as possible and wrap up as much of your investigation as you can. I got a tip that FPMP National is going to step in. Today? Next week? I’m not sure. But their M.O. has always been to cover things up and make them disappear. Two of our agents were killed, in our house. We need to find out what happened before the entire investigation goes away.
“And what the heck is up with Vic? He’s not returning any of my calls.”
I groaned. “Where’s your charger?”
“Kitchen counter. But it’s a different model from yours.”
I had extra batteries somewhere, didn’t I? I thought back to the last time I’d seen them. Back at HQ.
“I’m heading in,” I told Jacob.
He nodded and hopped into the still-dripping shower.
I was halfway to the office, marveling at the fact that traffic was nonexistent, when I realized it was Saturday. Was Laura Kim at the office, or was she set up to work from home? I tried to buzz her on my phone, realized it was still dead (likely because I still hadn’t charged it) and ended up going to my own office to try my luck with the landline.
To my surprise, Darla was there.
No Saturday casual for her. She wore a sleek black pantsuit with a dark blue blouse, and a sparkly pin casting tiny rainbows over her lapel. Her hair was swept up in a twist and her makeup was pristine. The only element of her wardrobe that wasn’t full-on professional business was her footwear: black trainers. And she’d only conceded to wear them because she was walking on her treadmill. “I wasn’t sure you came in on the weekends,” she said.
“The murders can’t wait till Monday.”
“I tried calling you, but it went right to voicemail. Some chick was looking for you. A chick with combat boots and no sense of humor whatsoever.”
“Battery’s drained.” I held up the phone as if that would prove something. “I think I’ve got a charger here somewhere.” I set the phone on my desk—the one I hardly ever used—and began rifling through the drawer for the accessories Patrick had given me. I only found a car charger, which wouldn’t do me any good unless Darla’s treadmill had a port for a cigarette lighter, but I stuck it in my pocket anyway.
“Anyhow,” Darla said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe your Andy guy couldn’t tell you who shot him, but I’m guessing he could at least say where it happened. There’s bound to be some kind of evidence we could use if we could at least find the scene. Right?”
Damn, she really was smart. I wanted to tell her so. And to express concern about the toll it took on her body to reach past the veil for the sake of playing messenger. And to let her know that I totally valued the skills she brought to the table. But I’d caught a glimpse of something on the floor that completely hijacked my brain.
It was a shoe.
I deal with my fair share of floor shoes—I live with Jacob, after all. It wasn’t the shoe itself that sent me into flashback mode. It was the angle, and the way I was seeing it through the spiky leaves of one of the many dozens of plants that crowded the office. The leaves were roughly the same shape as the overgrown, grassy weeds by the railroad tracks. And the shoe lay on its side just so….
Daylight. Wind nipping at my bare neck. Me swiping at my runny nose and chafing my peach fuzz mustache. Four new cigarettes falling to the ground with a gentle patter with me frozen in shock. Not from the shoe I was seeing, but the flicker of motion above it.
In comic books, artists drew motion lines to indicate when something was traveling through space. I’d never expected to see anything like that in real life, any more than I thought random punctuation symbols could tumble out of someone’s mouth when they swore.
I figured it for nothing. The flutter of a plastic bag. A shifting shadow. But as I stood there staring at the spot trying to figure out what the hell I’d just seen, it happened again.
The shoe. Arcing toward the spot where it landed. Like a shadow, if a shadow were in color, and kind of transparent. I couldn’t blame the nicotine—I hadn’t inhaled—so I was sure that whatever trick of the light was messing with me, no way would it happen a third time.
And then, it did.
I crept forward and tried to touch the thing I’d seen, but of course it was empty air. When it happened again, it startled me so badly I twisted an ankle, went down hard, and landed on my ass in the rocky strip beside the railroad track. It hurt—seriously hurt—but the pain was obliterated by the sight of a man tumbling through the air, soundless and transparent. One of his shoes flew off and pinwheeled toward the spot I’d just been attempting to touch. The rest of him somersaulted off into the tall grass without disturbing a single blade. Rocky gravel sprayed as I scrabbled backward on my elbows and heels, but there was nothing for me to flee. Nothing physical, at any rate.
I sprawled there with rocks digging into my palms and ass, and I gawked while my heart pounded so hard my pulse whooshed in my ears. And when I finally convinced myself it was all a trick of my eyes, it happened again.
Shaking so hard it was a wonder I could even walk, I crept toward the spot where the semi-transparent man who’d been catapulted from the railroad tracks had landed.
I found the other shoe.
If it had been warmer out, if I’d been downwind—or if the body had been fresher—the smell of decomp would have prepped me for what I was about to see. But the particulars were just right. I didn’t know I was looking at my first corpse until I put together that the jagged, pale stick protruding from the other shoe was somebody’s leg bone.
My friends found me screaming and pointing. They handled it pretty well. They might’ve been two years younger, but my reaction must’ve alerted them to what they were about to see, whereas I’d been totally blindsided. One of them went into a spiel about nobody touching anything because it might be a murder scene—he never missed an episode of Law & Order—and the group of us hightailed it out of there to go tell our folks.
I’d found Harold at home, scrubbing a gang tag off the fence. He took one look at me, and before I even got a word out, he knew something was seriously wrong. He grabbed me by both shoulders, looked deep into my eyes, and said, “What is it, Victor? Did it happen again?”
My conscious mind was thinking, “Did what happen again?” But that wasn’t my answer. Instead, what I told him was, “Yes.”
I looked up from Darla’s shoe, dazed. She was still talking, but I wasn’t hearing. I was too busy wishing I’d said something, done something different. Anything that didn’t lead me to the session with Dr. Kleinman that ended with me going home to a completely new family and a life I never wanted.
“What’s with that look?” Darla asked.
I shook my head. “One of my earliest ghosts—it was a repeater. Probably would have chalked it up to a trick of the light, if it weren’t for the decomposed body a few feet away.”
“Interesting. I wonder how many other FPMP agents just so happened to stumble across a dead person when they were young?” One good thing about talking ghost with another medium. They didn’t bother coddling you. “So we’ll add that to our checklist, but what about Andy Parsons?”
“Sorry…what were we talking about?”
She straddled her treadmill belt, turned off the machine and stepped down. “We could try again. Sometimes I can manage a second channeling, but it’s not easy. The dead hate it. Once they know how it feels, they get better at slipping my connection. He’ll try to dodge me, and I might not be able to snag him. I’ve most definitely never managed a third try, so this is our last shot. Anything you need to ask him, figure it out before I go looking.”
I was leery of bringing Jacob in on the channeling session. Maybe he got off on watching me do my thing, but Darla’s talent was a much weirder ball of wax. Seeing her in action might taint his second-favorite pastime, but since I was well aware of how it felt when he made important decisions without me, I invited him to join us. He was relieved to get a break from frantically combing through Andy�
��s emails. Together, the three of us decided that the murder location and exact time of death were the most valuable pieces of information. With those, we could survey the area, uncover new witnesses, and if we were lucky, catch our killer on camera.
While I would have preferred bright lights and an empty office to work in, I wasn’t the talent, for once. Darla shut the blinds, turned off the overhead lights, and set the jumbotron to play a colorful, abstract screen saver. She sat back in her plush leather chair, selected a crystal from her massive assortment, and gazed into it. Jacob was watching her as intently as she was watching the crystal. Me? I was watching him.
“Okay, Andy,” Darla said. Her gaze went soft and vacant as she searched for the headspace she needed. “I know it sucks, but I’ve got to ask. Andy Parsons. C’mon, guy, you want justice, don’t you? Andy, Andy. I’ll make it quick, I promise. Andy, Andy, Andy. Where…were…you…?”
Darla’s voice slowed to a crawl, and as it did, her irises and pupils filmed over. She stilled. Went quiet. And then stiffened all over as she sucked in a great gasp.
The temperature in the room plummeted. Jacob clutched my arm hard enough to leave a mark.
Darla blinked, then turned toward me with those unseeing white eyes, and smiled. It looked a heck of a lot like her trademark Dead Darla evil grin…except I knew damn well that Darla wasn’t home.
“Detective Bayne,” she purred. “What a pleasant surprise.” Gooseflesh raced down my arms. It might have sounded like my old frienemy Darla, but it couldn’t have been anyone other than Jennifer Chance.
Chapter 35
Jacob was on his feet with his gun out before I even registered what he was doing.
“Stand down,” I barked. “You’re not shooting Darla.”
Besides the fact that the target was incorporeal, the stopping power was unnecessary. While Darla was channeling, it seemed, she couldn’t really move around. Just her head. Chance turned Darla’s milky eyes toward Jacob, and her wicked smile got even broader. “I wouldn’t put physical violence past Detective Marks…he’s no stranger to manhandling a woman.”
Like Jacob needed yet another reminder of how it felt to wrestle her over to the other side. Darla’s breath came out in visible puffs of vapor, but the whole room had gone so cold, and so did Jacob’s and mine. Just like the morgue. Fuck. “You’re not wanted here,” I told Chance. “Get the hell out.”
“Or what? You’ll pull the trigger? I didn’t think so. Now, take me to my tuner.”
“The one Dreyfuss had hidden? It’s gone, thanks to you. Grabbed up by FPMP National.”
“Perfect! Then show me the headlines. I need to see.”
“What headlines?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Detective.” The words were harsh on puffs of frozen vapor. “My tuner is the biggest thing in Psych since the Ganzfeld experiments. Now show me the headlines.”
“There are none. The goons you called in confiscated your damn equipment. It’s gone, totally dismantled, or buried deep in some federal bunker. Happy?”
“Well…at least Dr. K never got the chance to take credit for—”
“Vic?”
I swung around to the flatscreen and found Patrick’s face filling the massive monitor. He squinted as if he was trying to figure out the controls. I wasn’t sure exactly how much the executive staff could see of me when they videoed in to my office, but I presumed the camera was somewhere above the monitor, like an oversized webcam.
Instinctively, I stood and blocked his view of Darla. Nothing personal. I was just unaccustomed to letting my talent hang loose, and felt the same protective instinct for my old cohort. “Now’s not really a good time.”
“Oh…sorry…it’s just you haven’t answered my texts and my calls are going to voicemail.”
“Phone’s dead.”
“So you haven’t seen my email either?”
“Seriously, I’m right in the middle of something, I’ll catch you soon as I’m done.”
“Okay, great—but don’t forget. I dug up some special info you asked about.”
“Yep, just as soon as I finish up here.”
Patrick gave a stilted wave, and the jumbotron went blue.
“What’s Patrick Barley doing at the FPMP?” Jennifer Chance said.
I whirled around to face her and was startled anew by Darla’s white eyes. And now her lips were turning blue and her teeth were beginning to chatter.
It took me a second to figure out how she knew him, but then I realized the two of them had worked together at The Clinic for quite a while. “It’s no big secret,” I said. “Admin is admin.”
“Well, sure. If you’re just talking about some secretary from your local temp agency. Seems a little slapdash, even for Dreyfuss, giving such high access clearance to a psychopath.”
“Who, Patrick?”
Most folks, when they call someone a psychopath, mean that person is violent and out of control. Chance was a medical doctor, though. And if she was using the word in the clinical sense, the diagnostic sense, the evidence would be a lot more subtle. True psychopaths aren’t typically axe murderers, but they do have a big bunch of nothing where their feelings are supposed to be. Yet they’re really good at mimicking human emotion.
I can’t imagine it was easy having these supposed authority figures telling you who you were.
Was Patrick a psychopath?
Or had his earliest clinicians just assumed so, if they were undiagnosed empaths who couldn’t get an emotional read on him because he was a Stiff? Maybe. Or maybe he wasn’t a Stiff at all, and Bly had just attributed his emotional blankness to a psychic cause.
I wasn’t sure if Chance could actually see me though Darla’s physical eyes, but she sure seemed to be enjoying my confusion. She smiled wider. Darla’s lower lip cracked, and a bead of blood welled up.
“Look what this is doing to Darla,” Jacob said. “Get rid of Chance. Get her out of here.”
“You can try.” Chance closed her eyes and rolled her neck, and it gave off a sound like bubble wrap. “But I’ve been in this body before. It’s a very good fit, and I’ve got urgent business. I certainly don’t trust you to have followed up on my tuner—you were always too self-involved to see the big picture.”
I cast around for something to use—salt, Florida water, even one of Richie’s blessed candles—but Darla had well and truly taken over the office, and there was nothing at hand but her crystals. I grabbed a craggy hunk of quartz and tried to suck white light into it, but I might as well have been attempting to get a cat to speak Mandarin. The rock wasn’t attuned to me. And in my hands, it was nothing more than a paperweight.
I lunged for the supply cabinet beside Carl’s desk—I’d catch hell for that come Monday—and yanked open the doors one after the other. File folders, scotch tape…and holy water. I yanked out the bottle, threw the cap on the floor, and flung the water at Darla. Belatedly, I hoped it didn’t scald her like battery acid. But all it did was wet her blouse.
Darla ignored it. Her eyes closed and her brows drew down in concentration.
Her fingers twitched. Chance’s physical control was spreading.
“Do something,” Jacob begged. But this was so far out of my league, I had no idea what else to try.
I reached into my pocket, which held nothing more than a dead cell phone, and came up with a handful of invisible fairy dust. With panic heightening my emotions, the mojo was strong. To my inner eye, it glowed. “You’re dead,” I shouted at Jennifer Chance as I flung the psychic dust. “Stay that way.”
Darla’s eyes shot open. Milky clouds roiled around inside the iris for a moment. They cleared—but only briefly. And then solidified into that hideous, blank white. “Nice try, Detective. But I’m vibrating on an entirely different frequency. Neither your psychic talent nor the hunk of metal in your holster can stop me.”
Darla’s eyelashes were white with rime now, and her teeth chattered continuously. The skin on her lips furled as it started t
o peel off, and the snot that ran from her nose solidified and frosted over. Her fingers flexed, stronger, more sure. Not by her own volition.
Jacob might have been haunted by memories of Chance’s half-frozen corpse thrashing under the plastic, but he wasn’t about to leave Darla to the same fate. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and each shake was punctuated by a word. “Get—out—now!”
Darla’s body slackened, briefly. Went limp.
And then her milky eyes found Jacob’s, and she laughed.
He dropped her into the chair and backed away to regroup. Which left the next move up to me.
Vibration—that was key. Chance wasn’t inside Darla with an etheric ghost body, not like she had been with all the other mediums on the physical plane. Chance’s spirit was beyond the veil, and the connection was broadcasting on some other station, a wavelength that Darla had been tapping into for years, but one that was entirely foreign to both Jacob and me.
“I wish this was the medium I’d tested my tuners on, not you. I would have given her the star treatment she deserved. Oh, the grand things we could have accomplished together!”
“You won’t accomplish squat by killing Darla now,” I said. “Let her go.”
She flexed Darla’s fingers once more, then very deliberately, made a fist. She smiled wider. Blood oozed from Darla’s shredded lips and froze on her chin. “Or what, Detective?”
“Or I’ll…take the final GhosTV, and I’ll….”
Darla’s frosted eyebrows screwed up quizzically.
“I’ll give it to Dr. K. All your research, all your hard work, I’ll make sure he takes sole credit for it. Every last bit.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“The hell I am. Dreyfuss left a tuner with me. I’m more than happy to ditch that creepy hunk of junk, and if I screw over your dead ass in the process, all the better.”
Her bloodied mouth worked as she struggled to convince herself I was making it all up.
Agent Bayne: PsyCop 9 Page 23
