PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  His wide eyes went wider still, and his head snapped up to meet my gaze.

  “Vic, come on.” Zigler pulled my arm harder.

  Roger Burke cocked his index finger and thumb into a gun shape, and mimed the shot that had killed him.

  He’d done that before—shackled, so that his other hand had dragged along behind the first. Back in the visiting room, when he’d told me about the assassin.

  I nodded. I couldn’t think of a more fitting way for him to go.

  I started to turn away, but then Roger waved at me to get my attention. I looked, grudgingly, because I’ve always hated that habit of his, feeding information out slowly so that he can have the last word.

  He put his fingers to the outer corners of his eyes and pulled back.

  If we were playing charades in a schoolyard, I’d interpret that as “Chinese.” But that couldn’t be right.

  “Get in the car,” Zig barked, and I flinched. He’d never used his bossy cop voice on me before, and it was pretty darned effective. I climbed in.

  He’d double-parked next to the sedan, and traffic behind him started to clog the street. Zig drove to the end of the block, then pulled into a bus lane and parked. “What did you see?”

  Burke. Gun. Chinese. “I’m not sure.”

  “You had to be seeing something. Otherwise you would’ve had the sense to get your ass out of the direct line of fire.”

  “Oh.” He was getting pretty good at reading me. And he’d just sworn, which meant he was pissed. “Uh…yeah.”

  Gun. Chinese. The only Asian I even knew was…Laura.

  I’d always heard that secretaries run the show, but this was a little much. Laura, the assassin?

  Or was that really so crazy after all? It would’ve put her in the perfect spot to keep tabs on Dreyfuss. Shit. I’d drunk half a pot of coffee brewed by an assassin. My fingers and toes felt numb, and I was shivering. I aimed the heater vent toward my face and pressed my whole body back into the seat. “His spirit stuck around, but I was too far away to hear anything.”

  Zigler grunted. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure whatever he said would’ve been a lie.”

  -THIRTY FOUR-

  I gave a statement in the FBI van. There wasn’t much to say. I’d been looking at Roger Burke, and the shot had come from behind me. Somewhere out in the street, or maybe across it. Maybe from wherever Laura had ducked off to while the Feds had their eyes on Metropolitan Correctional’s front door.

  I didn’t mention Laura, even when they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual or relevant that I wanted to add. Maybe I could’ve said something in passing…but how could I, without invoking the name of the FPMP?

  The last thing Laura had told me was to be careful. And I took that advice to heart.

  They took my card and told me they’d be in touch if they needed anything else, but even though it was a different agent who took my statement than the one who’d been on the receiving end of the fake recant, I didn’t think they’d base their investigation on anything I had to say, not unless it was corroborated by someone reliable.

  Zigler might’ve seen more from his vantage point on the street, or maybe not, given that he was busy keeping an eye on me. The Feds split us up before I could ask. Given my track record, I guess I didn’t blame them.

  Despite my heavy overcoat, I was chilled through and through, and my teeth started knocking together while I waited for Zigler to give his statement. The cruiser was locked, and he had the keys. And it wasn’t as if the lobby of Metropolitan Correctional was anywhere I could kill an hour while I waited for Zig.

  I stared up at the gray sky between the El tracks, and I guesstimated the distance to Russeau and Kline. Seven city blocks? If that. It would be easier to block Stefan’s number from my cell phone and drop off his radar for another fifteen years, but I knew if I weaseled my way out like that, the unfinished business between us would eat away at me. I needed to look him in the eye, and tell him that I knew.

  Cold turned to numbness as I made my way to the big beige skyscraper. By the time I got to the elevator, I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. I think it was only partially the cold. Mostly, it was nerves.

  Carissa looked up when I walked into the waiting room of Russeau and Kline. “Detective…Bayne is it? I don’t think you’re in the schedule today.”

  I walked by her, figuring the chances of her being able to physically prevent me from walking into his office were pretty slim. After all, how many secretaries moonlighted as assassins? Probably not as many as you’d think.

  Stefan stood as I burst into the room. Or I tried to burst, anyway. The door had a pneumatic closer at the top, and the best I could do was cause it to bump into the circular rubber doorstop on the wall.

  He was at his hypnosis chair, and a woman in a sweater suit with an artsy necklace on sat across from him on the couch, head lolling. She sniffed and stopped talking as if she sensed my presence despite her hypnosis, but then resumed whatever she was saying. Evidently, her subconscious had decided that I really wasn’t a threat. I couldn’t quite make out the words. It was as if she was speaking in tongues, or maybe twin-language.

  Stefan marched up to me like he was ready to bite my head off, but then he stopped maybe a yard away. I can only guess at what he might’ve thought: that I was coming in for my panic attacks, maybe—or that I had the sudden urge to uncover yet another buried memory.

  I had no doubt that if that was the presumption he’d been working under, his sixth sense had cleared it all up for him and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that I was pissed.

  “Not now,” he whispered, and jerked his head to indicate his patient.

  I glanced at her. She mumbled something, smiled, then mumbled some more.

  “Don’t worry.” I tried to whisper back, but I was so mad that I spat the “D” out. “This won’t take long.”

  He put his hands on his hips. I struggled to keep myself from poking him in the chest. “I don’t know what’s worse,” I hissed. “You passing yourself off as some kind of therapist and then running to Dreyfuss with everything I say, or back then, all those years ago, when you and me, we actually had something.”

  He held up his hands as if they’d ward me off. “Before you fly off the handle….”

  “You told Krimski about the wig!”

  His eyes went wide. I guess I’d gotten more out of the regressions than he’d bargained for.

  “You won’t show mama the carpet,” the patient on the couch blurted out in a sudden burst of clarity. Then she resumed her bizarre mumbling.

  “It was stupid of you not to,” Stefan whispered. “What on earth were you hoping to accomplish by lying about it? It was a wig. That’s all. A fucking wig.”

  “I told them I couldn’t read anything from it. They kept sending it back anyway.”

  “But you didn’t explain that whole thing about objects and clairsentients. You never told them anything about anything, and it was always so obvious that you knew. You held back because you were stubborn, end of story.”

  I though of the Joneses and their cheeseball Vegas act, and the fourth-level medium who’d bought it in Florida, and all the remote viewers who’d been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle without the benefit of a Caribbean cruise. And I wondered if was possible that Stefan had never actually figured out it was entirely possible to be too psychic.

  “If that’s why you think I was holding back, then they must’ve been grading you on a bell curve to give you a Level Five.”

  Stefan scowled. I’d never impugned his ability. I’d never dared. After all, he could very well make me shit myself.

  “It’s not as if I can read you now,” he said. “You’re nothing but angry. But back then? I guess I would’ve said you were scared.”

  “And still, you gave away secrets—my secrets—behind my back.”

  From the couch, the hypnotized woman muttered, “No, Mama. It was like that when I got home.”

  “What the fuck is he
r problem?” I snapped.

  Stefan rolled his eyes. “Bulimic. Weird relationship with her mother.” He turned his back to her and steered me toward the wall, as if was just the two of us, alone, in the room. “Vic, if I didn’t tell Krimski about the wig, the next time they took you into the green room, the twelve-hour wig-fest would’ve seemed fun in comparison. I didn’t tell them anything new. I confirmed what you’d already told them: that there was nothing to see.”

  My anger ratcheted down, but I couldn’t determine if it was because he was using that smooth baritone voice on me, speaking in that well-modulated, calm and controlled way that would lower the blood pressure of anyone within twenty paces of him, or if he was using his talent on me, stroking me internally and telling me that everything was perfectly fine, nothing to get worked up about…or if maybe I simply believed him.

  I tried to rally my self-righteous anger. “You make it sound like you were doing it for my sake—but here’s what I don’t get. You had to know how pissed I’d be if I found out. You could’ve let me in on it from the start. We could’ve fed them what we wanted them to hear together.”

  “And have a precog tattle on me?” He shrugged, disgusted. “It wasn’t as if there were any decent options for me to choose from. I did what I thought was best.”

  The woman on the couch picked up the tissue box, tore the cardboard side off it, and stuffed it into her mouth.

  “Aren’t you going to stop her?”

  Stefan glanced disdainfully in her direction, and said, “Dietary fiber.”

  I told myself to stay focused. Stay mad. “That was then. What about now?”

  “What about now?”

  “I know about the faxes.”

  His expression shifted subtly. Hardened. “Fine. So you know. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to figure it out, considering what you supposedly do for a living. What do you think I tell them? About your Valium and your panic attacks and your terrifying boyfriend who’s harder to read than the coat rack in the corner? No. I tell them where you had lunch. I make note of what you’re wearing. I mention what you’ve done at work…which they can just as easily pick up by monitoring your workplace. And, by the way, they do. But I give them that very same information, and they think they’ve got a secret window into your psyche. And maybe they stop digging so hard.”

  I stared him in the eye, and I tried to figure out whether or not I believed him. He could’ve been telling me the truth. My guess was that he’d given me some truthful reasons, but probably not all of them. Only the ones that would paint him as less of a Judas.

  The hypnotized woman started gagging.

  “Good lord,” Stefan said. He took a few steps toward the hypnosis couch. “You’re in a safe place, Eloise, where no one can hurt you, and most of all, no one is judging you.”

  Right.

  His voice was like velvet. But once the eye contact had been broken, I realized that, yeah, I was still mad. So not only did Stefan have the balls to try to make me think he’d been spying on me for my own good, but then he was reaching into my head with a spoonful of sugar and trying to tweak my emotions to make me swallow down all of his flattering half-truths.

  Stefan was a certified fifth-level empath. And if he was anywhere as proficient at his talent as I was at mine, then arguing with him was like trying to bail out the Titanic.

  I heard the splatter of vomit as I slipped out Stefan’s office door. I hoped at least part of it had hit him.

  -THIRTY FIVE-

  Zigler needed to make his noontime call to Nancy, but I wasn’t ready to stop what I was doing just yet. If I turned my head and tilted it, I could still see a pale sliver of white where the suicide nurse’s cap disappeared into the wall. Except she wasn’t really a suicide nurse. She’d jumped to escape the fire that started in the coal cellar in 1949. I’m guessing she didn’t make it, judging by the repeater she left behind.

  “Go ahead,” I told Zig. “I’m gonna give this one a few more passes.”

  I’d discovered I was perfectly able to do my own exorcisms—even without Jacob beside me, glowing with the white light he’d pilfered. I’d been watching Zig pretty hard ever since we discovered Jacob’s talent, and my guess was that Bob Zigler was NP through and through.

  I didn’t mention it to Zig, of course. He felt bad enough for bailing on the fire ghost, and I wanted to make sure he stuck around for the long haul because, psychic or not, he was a good guy to have at my back as long as zombies and crazy fire ghosts weren’t involved. Not only had he been willing to step in front of a shooter to haul me into the cruiser—he’d also cooked up the idea to rig a box of exorcism tools to look like an evidence kit, so I could act like I was dusting for prints while I spread powdered herbs. He couldn’t figure out a way to pass candles off as forensic gear, but a luminol bottle filed with Florida Water worked just as well.

  The zombies and crazy fire ghosts? They were the exception rather than the norm. But a day didn’t go by where I didn’t spot a repeater somewhere.

  I sucked some white light, spritzed the not-suicide nurse with my flowery luminol, and gave her ghost a mental shove toward the spirit realm. It was the twentieth time I’d done it, and the mental effort combined with the smell of the Florida Water was making me giddy.

  But when I looked hard at the spot where she’d been disappearing into the wall—over and over for roughly sixty years—and saw that she was finally gone, I felt like I’d really accomplished something good.

  I turned to leave, and found Doctor Gillmore standing in the doorway. “How’s the shoulder?” she said.

  I rotated it. It hurt. But now I was in the hit-by-a-car-and-lived-to-tell-about-it club. If sideview mirrors counted. And judging by the way my shoulder felt, I’d say they did. “Stiff. Sore.”

  “Hold it out. I’ll check your range of motion, see if it’s any better than it was last week.”

  I was glad she didn’t have me strip down first. Jacob had added a fresh new series of toothmarks to my belly. I chewed on my lower lip and tried not to look too smug about it.

  Gillmore pressed my arm back.

  “Ow.”

  “You’re taking aspirin?”

  Sure. Wait, no. “I uh…I meant to.”

  “I can’t write you a prescription for anything stronger, not with your other meds. But I could call your clinic and give them a recommendation.” If the phone number of The Clinic was even listed. Maybe it had to be, in case a psych turned up unconscious in Gillmore’s ER.

  I decided not to think about that, since I could feel my sweat glands gearing up for another good soak. “No, that’s okay. Aspirin’s fine. Things just slip my mind sometimes when I’ve got a lot going on.”

  She pressed my arm up, then back, then rotated it. “Mm hm. Better. But don’t knock the aspirin. Anti-inflammatories are your friends.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave a bottle in my car.” Gillmore sank her thumb into my shoulder and I did my best not to wince. “So, what about that homeless lady? What was her name?”

  “I never told you.”

  Damn. I’d thought I was so smooth. “But you’ll give her my card if you see her, right? And tell her I’ll buy her dinner.”

  She nodded like maybe she was just humoring me, but I suspected she would at least try.

  Gillmore turned toward the door, and then paused. She put her hands in the pockets of her white lab coat. She spoke slowly, in a voice that was a lot softer than her usual ultra-authoritative tone. “I did track down a couple of Miss Connoley’s nieces,” she said. “In case you need to tell them how she died.”

  “Oh.” I scratched my head. “I dunno. I think she’s at rest now. I mean, I know she is. If I go to her family and start dragging skeletons out of the closet, it’ll turn into a whole…thing.”

  “And they’ll wonder why she was confined in the coal cellar, and not safe in her bed.”

  In the mental ward, which I’m guessing wasn’t all fun and games, either. Not back then. “Ma
ybe you’re the one who needs to know,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Who would do something like that?”

  “Never underestimate the twistedness of a guy with screwed-up urges. My boyfriend works sex crimes….” That had just come rolling right out. Gillmore glanced at me, but didn’t seem terribly blown away by the revelation that I was queer. “He sees stuff like this, and worse, day in and day out. I don’t think he asks why anymore. He just puts an end to it.”

  Doctor Gillmore sat on the edge of the bed, laced her fingers together on her lap, and sighed hard. “But what about the hospital administration—where were they in all of this? Didn’t anyone notice she was gone? Didn’t anyone look for her?”

  Maybe, maybe not. Crazy people are kind of invisible that way. “It was too long ago. We’ll never know.” And even if we could figure out who was responsible, I was sure he was long dead. I think Gillmore wanted an explanation. She wanted justice. Sometimes things don’t work out that way.

  • • •

  It was nearly a week before Jacob and I had a day off that coincided. We parked his Crown Vic in the lot of a small industrial park that hadn’t seen much use in the past several years. A few enterprising weeds had sprung up in the cracks where the snow had recently melted, though the bigger drifts that fell in the shade of the building were still lying across the asphalt in pollution-specked white ridges.

  Jacob looked the squat brick building up and down. “That’s not it,” I said. I pointed between a couple of corrugated metal machine sheds. “Over there. I, uh… I think.” I looked up at the sky, as if I could find a landmark there. “Kinda hard to say.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Jacob marched on ahead, and I followed, placing my feet in his footprints where he’d punched through the crust of old snow.

  We walked to the back of the property, which ended in a chain link fence. I looked at the top, and tried to imagine the razor wire looping through. That was fifteen years ago. There wasn’t anything left to protect now, so the old fencing had probably gone the way of the Camp Hell building itself.