PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Psych tests.” I realized he might take the old meaning from that. Pre-eighties, psych only meant psychiatric. Nowadays, it could be either or, depending on the context. “Psychic,” I clarified.

  The “duh” look turned to a “yeah, right” expression. “I dunno. I just bring ‘er in. Doctor Gillmore would be the one to ask about that.”

  I found Zigler waiting by the information desk. He had his green badge in his hand and he didn’t look happy. The woman behind the desk was busy talking on a headset phone, and wasn’t even looking in his general direction. “If you think there’s something paranormal involved,” he said, “then we should go through Warwick and get a warrant.”

  I’d had scads of warrants granted over the length of my career. I’d never been turned down. And maybe I could’ve pressed my talent more times than that—heck, I was sure I could’ve—but I was always too busy being evasive about what I actually saw to make a big stink about it and drag it in front of a judge.

  “I sensed a presence,” I admitted. “With that homeless woman. An…evil presence.” I wished I could’ve thought of a word that with less moral connotations. Maybe Zig would frame it in copspeak for me.

  Zigler glanced at the receptionist. She was still fielding calls on her headset. His voice dropped to a whisper. “You mean…possessed?”

  “Uh, no. I don’t think so.” Unless that was how possessions happened. I’d had a ghost or two in my skin before, and I sure as hell hoped that wasn’t how it all started, with a creepy black blob looking for a new body to tool around in.

  Zigler was positive that whatever it was we needed to see, it was inside that ER. We headed back to the station to hash out a plan with Warwick to get us in there, and I signed some statements for the judge that said I “sensed” something on the premises. We’d changed the word evil to supernatural. It didn’t look all that much better on paper.

  Warwick tried to convince LaSalle General that we were guaranteed to get our warrant, and it would save us all a lot of time and taxpayer dollars if they just gave us an all-access badge. He reminded them that we were as qualified as any other emergency personnel, and that we wouldn’t wander around and stick our hands under the defibrillator paddles.

  Still, no luck.

  I had an appointment with Stefan that afternoon, so I left Zig to fill out paperwork and went back home to find something less polyester to wear.

  Except that I passed the street that would take me back to the cannery, and I kept on going. LaSalle Hospital loomed up ahead, a dark, uninviting pile of bricks.

  It was nearly an hour, and a half dozen cups of coffee, before I crossed paths with Doctor Gillmore in the cafeteria. She looked mildly startled when I sat down beside her, and then when she recognized who I was, annoyed.

  “I’m guessing you’ve heard of doctor-patient privilege,” she said.

  I took a sip of coffee, and then wished I hadn’t. I was really tired of coffee. “Listen, I’m sorry if my partner was acting like a prick. He isn’t, really.” She should see a cop who had it in his mind to be a bully; compared to that, Zig was Captain Kangaroo. “We’re just kinda stuck on this one thing…. Well, anyway, he thought he spotted something that might make a difference in our investigation.”

  “And what would that be? Your investigation.”

  Great. Since we’d established that Zig would do the talking, I didn’t bother thinking about political ways to say what we were doing. “A death rate is…high.”

  “This is a hospital. People come here when they’re sick and injured.”

  “There are other aspects involved.”

  “And you can’t talk about them, because they’re part of an ongoing investigation.”

  “That’s right.”

  Doctor Gillmore gave me a meaningful look.

  “Okay, I get it.” I took another sip of coffee and had to swallow twice to get it down. I pushed the cup away. “But I was just wondering something about patient intake, something general.”

  She sized me up. “And what would that be?”

  “People who come in seeing visions, hearing voices. Do they get a psychic ability test before they’re given any psychiatric meds?”

  Gillmore smiled—the first smile I’d seen from her—and shook her head wearily. “You’re serious?”

  “Um…yeah.”

  “Have you seen the psychic ability test?”

  I looked around as if it might’ve appeared on the dessert kiosk. “Not lately.”

  She glanced at her watch. “I’ve been on for over fourteen hours. My plan was to eat, go home, and sleep.”

  “I, uh… I have shifts like that, too.”

  She assessed my face. I wondered if she had a touch of talent, or if she just knew how to read people. “I imagine you do, Detective.” She wrapped her sandwich in a napkin and stuck it in her pocket. That seemed like something I would do, except I’d probably manage to fall on it while chasing a fleeing ghost down an icy alleyway. “Let me show you LaSalle’s psychic abilities test, and you tell me how effective a diagnostic tool you think it is.”

  A couple of young doctors on their way to dinner—or maybe it was breakfast, for them—saw Gillmore and me walking side by side, and gave us a long stare. No hostility, but plenty of curiosity. “You been a doctor long?”

  “Eighteen years next month. Is this relevant to your case—the one you’re not going to tell me anything about?”

  “No. I was just curious.” I glanced at her pocket. Her sandwich was still okay. “Scrubs. Seems like they used to be…blue.”

  “Blue. Navy. Turquoise. You name it. Blue, blue and more blue. Good riddance, I say. I hate blue.”

  I think if I were unattached, and straight, I would’ve asked her out to dinner. Her sandwich would keep.

  We came to a locked door. She swiped it with a keycard and led me into an administrative section. The walls were the same bright white, the floors the same speckled linoleum. But there were framed prints on the wall of slightly faded flowers. Someone had at least tried to make it less soulless. The hallway smelled strongly of hazelnut coffee and microwave popcorn. “At least they didn’t burn it this time,” Gillmore muttered.

  We turned off the hall into a small office. “We’re short on space, so I share with the night supervisor. Don’t touch anything. He hates it when people move things.”

  She gestured to a chair and I sat. It was uncomfortable. “Let’s see, now. Where’d I put that….” She stared up at the shelves above her desk. They were so packed with books and three-ring binders that they were starting to sag in the middle. “Oh. Right. Here it is. Ready to see how psychic you are, Detective?”

  Was it dickish of me not to clue her in? “I just want to see the test itself. That’s all.”

  She pulled a cardboard box from a shelf, and a sprinkling of dust bunnies drifted out behind it. She hefted a stack of books from her desk and set it on the floor with utmost care. Her officemate’s, I took it.

  “All right, what do we have here? A pair of dice. But where’s the Candyland? Where’s the Chutes and Ladders? Guess there is none. Just this.”

  She pulled a tri-fold board out of the box and stood it up between us.

  “Don’t peek.”

  “I, um….You really don’t have to administer…. I just wanted to see it.”

  She rattled the dice. “Call it, Detective.”

  “Four. Listen, I’m not a precog. They test for that on the force.”

  “The more you talk, the longer this will take. Call it.”

  She did four more throws, and then moved on to the cards. There were circles, squares, triangles, and crosses. That’s it. She showed me one of the cards before we started. It had the words ciculo and cercle printed on the back.

  “What about the colors?” I asked her.

  “They’re all the same. Black and white.”

  I named five random shapes for her as she flipped over the cards. “But if there are no colors, there’s a one in four
chance that I’d get that right,” I told her.

  “Detective, do you know how they analyze the results of psychic ability tests where both color and shape are used?”

  I suspected one of the U of C residents tried to explain it to me, once. But I probably had my pants down and wasn’t paying much attention.

  “Of course, if this were computerized, it would be easier to score….”

  “But TKs and computers don’t mix, so you’d get a false read. Some other psychics do funky things to electricity, too.”

  “And do you know how likely it is we’d get a telekinetic wheeled through that door, complaining that he was hearing things, seeing things?”

  “I’m not all that good with…statistics.”

  She slapped the deck of cards down and stared at me hard. “Have you ever met a telekinetic, Detective?”

  A mental image of Movie Mike twitching in his wheelchair sprang to mind. Sweat rolled from the crook of my knee down my calf, where the top of my sock soaked it up. “Why do you ask?”

  “TKs are rare. Exceedingly rare. I’d guess there are no more than a dozen in the entire country. That’s one in twenty-five million. And yet, the AMA voted that the psychic screening must not be electronic, because of the possibility that a telekinetic will cause a false negative.”

  I spotted a box of tissues on the desk and took one, despite Doctor Gillmore’s warning not to touch anything. She was too busy scribbling on a scorecard to notice.

  “What about the mediumship test?” I said.

  “That’s the only part of the exam they’ve taken any pains to make legitimate.” She took a smaller box from inside the kit and handed it to me. It was silver. Just like Show and Tell. “If you got any hits on the clairsentient portion, I’d need to get someone else to administer this section, someone who’d never seen the key.”

  “But I pretty much bombed.”

  “Not entirely. You got a four right. But everything else was incorrect, so the single hit won’t classify you as a clairsentient.”

  I opened the silver box and pulled out a bone fragment. “This is human, isn’t it? They wouldn’t test mediums with animal bones.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. But you’re thinking like a cop. Not a medium.”

  I didn’t know about that. I hadn’t been doped up on Neurozamine and stuck in a room with a corpse to prepare me for the Police Academy, that was for sure.

  “Tell me who that bone belonged to, Detective. Age, gender, cause of death.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You could guess.”

  I snapped the box shut and handed it back to her. “That’s a lousy test. The only way you’d know if someone was a medium or not is to have a more powerful medium confirming their findings.”

  And I’d never met a medium who saw more than I did. So how did they rate me? They must have just…guessed; that was all I could figure.

  “This is human bone,” she assured me.

  “Maybe so. But it doesn’t mean its previous owner is floating around in your office waiting to read his memoirs to the next talented medium who opens that box.”

  Doctor Gillmore glanced down at her papers. “A real medium would be able to tell me something.”

  I dug my I.D. out. My CPD badge is on the front, but I poked behind it and pulled out a little paper card. It had been printed off on a laser printer—not even a plastic card, because they make so few of them every year—insanely forgeable, if you even knew what they looked like. Most people never had occasion to see one. I’m thinking maybe Doctor Gillmore, as an ER shift supervisor, might have.

  I placed the card on the desk facing her.

  She picked it up, brows knit, and read. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  I wish.

  “Doc, I’m a PsyCop. And your patient, the homeless lady? She’s not crazy.”

  “She’s…what? Possessed?”

  Why was that the first idea that popped into everyone’s head? “No, not possessed. But something ugly’s following her.”

  Doctor Gillmore folded up the tagboard screen and put the cards away. She kept the instructions and my test scores out of the box. “You scored average on this test,” she said. “Did you do that on purpose?”

  I shook my head. “The bone’s just a bone. And all that other stuff? I’m not precog or clairvoyant. But there’s no way you’d know that by this test. You didn’t take enough readings to score me. This test took five minutes.” I thought back to the earnest U of C residents and their flash cards. “You need to do an hour’s worth, at least. And with better cards. Some clairvoyants only hit on the colors.”

  Doctor Gillmore tapped on the directions. “I followed these to the letter. And you see how effective it was? It scored a fifth-level certified psychic as NP. You think I don’t know how a real test is done? We haven’t got the time or the manpower to administer and score them manually.” She looked around the crowded little office. “We haven’t even got suitable conditions or equipment.”

  She turned the testing directions around in her hands and frowned at them. “How does the federal government test for mediums?”

  “There are some hot spots where other mediums generally agree they sense something, and we’d be taken there, see what we came up with. Usually there’s documentation of a death in that location, so the tester might be able to compare the medium’s impressions with a photo, or a report. It’s…more of an essay question than a multiple choice.”

  Gillmore nodded. “That’s too bad. Because if there were any way to make this test work, even if it was flawed, you can bet I wouldn’t let it gather dust on my shelf.”

  -TWENTY-

  I was half an hour late for my appointment. Stefan’s secretary was waiting for me, and motioned me right in.

  “Are you running a tab, or anything? I should pay you today.”

  Stefan looked up from his desk. He was head to toe in black today, and I suspect he may have penciled his eyebrows to make them more imposing. “Should I have Carissa open up a claim with your health insurance? Or are you still convinced you’re being watched?”

  “I am. And besides, my permanent record is already a mile long. I’ll pay in cash.”

  Stefan checked his day planner, tapped some numbers into a calculator with the eraser end of a shiny black pencil, and named me a four-digit figure. Dang. Good thing I had a pocket full of hundreds. I’d been thinking I could surprise Jacob with a vacation, or maybe a new upstairs bathroom to smooth things over a little between us, give us something to be happy about. Make things good again.

  If I wanted to pursue the regressions, my plans for a bathroom remodel would need to be downgraded to a new air freshener.

  Stefan sat back in his huge leather chair. It creaked beneath his weight. He stared down his nose at me, and said, “How are things?”

  “Things are…” I shrugged. I’d never really told him very much about my current situation, other than the fact that I was having panic attacks, and that I conveniently forgot a hell of a lot of stuff. “Things are kind of… stressful.”

  “And the Valium—you’re not taking it every day, are you?”

  “No…I know it’s addictive.” I couldn’t remember the last time I took a Valium. I was too worried about the FPMP catching me off guard. I needed to be sure I had an edge. That I wasn’t high on Auracel. Or drunk.

  “Anything unusual going on at work?”

  “I don’t know, work’s okay. I’m at this hospital. It’s thick with ghosts. But nothing I can’t handle.” Work was fine. Really. Except for Officer “Andy.” But I doubted there was anything Stefan could say to make me feel better about the FPMP following me around, spying on me, siccing a remote viewer on my pathetic life. “I’m remembering more. I think maybe it’s good that we’re doing these regressions. I think maybe I’m ready to remember.”

  “Is there anything in particular you want me to focus on in today’s session?”

  Probably, but no doubt I couldn’t ar
ticulate it. “This is going to sound crazy, but the stuff I’m remembering, everything except for being locked in a room with a dead body, well… how can I say it? It’s not too bad. You and me, we had some fun.”

  Stefan watched me intently. There was a deep vertical crease between his brows. “At times. I suppose.”

  “The kitchen raids. The whippits.” The sex, of course. I didn’t say that. It felt too awkward. “A lot of that wasn’t any worse than any other kid of our age would have gone through in the dorm.”

  “At first. Before Krimski.”

  Another huge jolt of memory rocked me. My throat closed up, and I started to sweat all over.

  “Inhale, slowly, and then let it out. You’re safe here.” Stefan’s voice was close now. He seated himself in the chair across from the hypnosis couch. I hadn’t even seen him cross the room. “Inhale—two, three, four. Good. Relax.”

  It started as a memory. Krimski’s face. In his forties, slim, a full head of hair, gray at the temples. Maybe handsome, once, but now etched with deep lines at the sides of his mouth, across the forehead. Eyes deep set, never missed anything.

  Stefan spoke again. “Show and Tell day again? I hope they brought donuts.”

  We sat in the smoking lounge, even though I didn’t smoke, with our legs dangling out the window. I had on zip-up combat boots so scuffed that the toe was separating from the sole. Stefan wore black creepers with leopardskin tops and silver buckles. We both kicked our heels against the brick building.

  The wings of Heliotrope Station formed an “L” shape, and we could see the cafeteria from our perch. One floor down, at a ninety-degree angle, a bunch of kids who were about our age, but much less jaded, set their gear up on the lunchroom tables. A branch of the University of Chicago Medical School sent a select group of med students over every month. Every month, they set up their little plastic barriers and engaged us all in a very tedious guessing game. Some of them were very earnest. Some of them were quite obviously scared.

  And sometimes, some of them were kind of hot, and would let me and Stefan double-team them. I never trusted myself to pick those out, of course. I let my empathic boyfriend do it.