The door opened just a few inches, exposing a security chain so lousy that even I could break it. A brown eye set in brown folds of skin peered out at me. "Si?"
I flashed my badge. "I'm Detective Bayne, this is Detective Zigler. Habla usted ingles?"
"Un momento," she said, shutting the door. I heard her scuttle deeper into the apartment, calling, "Carlos? Carlos!"
I hadn't thought about the possibility that Miranda's family spoke Spanish, despite the fact that she lived in a neighborhood more Hispanic than not. I wasn't used to talking with living witnesses anymore; Maurice had always done that. I wondered if I did find Miranda's spirit floating around, would I need a translator?
"You speak Spanish?" Zig asked, sounding pleasantly surprised.
"Not much."
Zigler shifted gears immediately into neutral, staring over my shoulder at the door. It opened again, all the way this time, and a wiry kid of about eighteen glared out from the apartment. Shaved head, tattoos, and flashing dark eyes you could get lost in. If you were a girl, anyway, since my gaydar told me this kid was the last one I'd find trolling Boys' Town.
"You cops?" he asked.
"Detective Bayne," I repeated, showing him the badge I hadn't bothered to pocket. "Detective Zigler."
"You here about my mother? You find her?"
"Not yet," I said. I probably wasn't supposed to be so blunt, but hell. We didn't have all day. "I was hoping we could come in...."
"I already told them everything I know." Carlos crossed his arms like Jacob did when he wasn't planning on going anywhere. He wasn't bulky like Jacob, but he could still fill a doorway.
I really didn't want him to challenge me. Not in front of fucking Zigler. "If we could just go over things one more time..." and really, I knew the facts already. Who'd last seen Miranda, what she'd been wearing. The fact was, I just wanted to get into that apartment without announcing that I was ghost hunting.
"Don't you people ever read? You make all these notes, and then what? You throw them out when you leave?"
It wasn't any good to argue, especially when I had to admit that, aside from throwing our notes away, it pretty much was the way we operated. "It'll only take a few minutes...."
"Carlos," said Mrs. Lopez, dragging him out of the doorway. She motioned for us to come in while she lit into him in Spanish. I might not have been able to understand her word for word, but her body language and her tone were crystal clear: Carlos, stop being a jerk.
Zig and I crowded into the small kitchen. I swerved to avoid knocking over a table full of lit candles with my hip, or maybe setting myself on fire, though I suspected the polyester in my suit coat would melt rather than bursting into flames. But you never know with these mystery fabrics.
Zig got ready to take some notes while I stared at the makeshift shrine. Saints, crosses, a bunch of religious paraphernalia. And why not pray? Miranda was missing. But the candles triggered some other memory in me that wasn't entirely religious. I'd been to a few weddings, but aside from that, I wasn't a big church-goer. So why did the Saint Martin candle look so familiar?
Mrs. Lopez poured coffee while Zigler loomed over a sullen Carlos and told him to think back and recall everything he could about the day Miranda disappeared. That was good; Carlos would be distracted by a Q& A session with Zig, and it'd buy me some time.
Mrs. Lopez handed me a mug full of coffee pale with milk and I nodded gratefully. There was no spirit in the kitchen, but maybe Miranda had come back to her bedroom. I juggled the cup to my left hand while I attempted some made-up sign language: a person walking, and then me pointing to the doorway that let to the rest of the apartment.
"Si," she said, grabbing me by the forearm and towing me deeper into the house. She talked to me in Spanish as we went, and though a word here and there sounded familiar, I didn't attach any meaning to it. I suddenly felt like I was looking at yet another condo with Jacob, noticing the crappy light fixtures and the double hung windows sealed shut with at least twenty coats of landlord-white paint.
I felt vaguely guilty for phasing out of cop mode, though I suspected it didn't matter whether I was focused or not. If Miranda was lingering around, I'd see or hear her. I couldn't possibly miss her.
The sound of Carlos' angry voice drifted toward us from the kitchen, "Of course she wasn't going to the doctor's. We don't have health insurance like you do—and we don't got the money to run to the hospital for every little thing."
Mrs. Lopez met my eyes. Her expression seemed to be saying, "Look what I have to put up with." I nodded a little and looked inside one of the bedrooms. There were clothes everywhere, and CDs outside their cases just waiting to be stepped on. Bunk beds. Cool for kids Clayton's age, not so cool for kids as old as Carlos.
There weren't any ghosts. Top or bottom.
We moved through a living room crowded with brown and orange furniture from the seventies and way too many knick-knacks to a couple more bedrooms. Mrs. Lopez's room was the size of a closet, but the bedspread was so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. Miranda's room had one dresser too many crammed in there, but it was neat enough.
I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my pocket and slipped them on before I entered the bedroom. If I were a precog, maybe I'd get an idea from handling Miranda's hairbrush. But I wasn't precognitive. The tests had been pretty clear on that.
Didn't the city have another PsyCop at its disposal to figure out what'd happened to these people? Why send me—a medium—when they didn't even have bodies?
Miranda's dresser held a picture of her and two boys—one of them Carlos about five years younger, before he'd had to act like a tough guy. They were all smiling. A rosary hung from the corner of the mirror, and something else that looked like a religious press pass, only a flaming, bleeding heart with a crown of thorns was in the spot where the laminated pass would usually hang. A silver charm of a woman's head on a white ribbon completed the grouping of weird, iconic religious paraphernalia.
She also had curling irons in three sizes. I didn't know they made such a wide variety.
"Senior Bayne," said Mrs. Lopez, touching me gently on the arm. I turned, and she pressed a Polaroid picture into my hand, which dragged at my latex glove. Miranda—a different picture than the one on her file. Her hair was shorter, permed and bleached orange, and she had on gigantic hoop earrings and a huge smile that lit up the room. She was dressed in purple. It suited her.
Mrs. Lopez pressed my hand over my heart with the photo in my palm. She said something in Spanish. "I'll try my best," I told her, feeling completely useless.
Lisa could tell me if Miranda was still alive. She'd have to make an exception for something so important. Maybe. Fuck, I didn't know.
"Abuela," said Carlos, storming into the living room where Mrs. Lopez and I stood awkwardly outside his mother's empty bedroom. He glared at me and said something else in Spanish.
"Do you want to ask Mrs. Lopez anything?" Zig asked me.
"Carlos will translate."
I glanced over my shoulder, wishing someone would appear from the great beyond and tell me where Miranda really was. But, unlike the condo I'd looked at the night before, the Lopez's household wasn't haunted.
Mrs. Lopez and Carlos went back and forth in Spanish a few times, and then Carlos glared at me with his piercing, dark eyes. "You a priest?" he demanded.
"What?"
"My grandmother says you're a priest."
I felt my cheeks color, imagining Jacob ramming me over the kitchen counter. "No, I'm not a priest."
Mrs. Lopez seemed to understand that much English. She reached deep into one of the shelves among the statuettes and clutter and pulled out something so small that her thumb and forefinger hid it. She took my hand, the one holding Miranda's picture, and dropped a tiny silver charm, a little girl no more than a half inch long, on top of the photo. "Hallazgo Miranda, por favor."
I stuffed everything into my pocket, including my right glove. There was no ghost to tel
l me what to do, and Carlos'
glare threatened to burn a smoking hole into the center of my forehead. "Those are all the questions we have," I mumbled, turning sideways to slip past Carlos in the narrow room, to get back through the kitchen and out the door.
The cadence of Spanish words flying back and forth sounded behind me as I tried to make my escape. Carlos slipped by Zigler and crowded me against the sink as I deposited my coffee cup. "You a witch doctor?" he asked me.
I could see the whites of his eyes, and he looked more than a little freaked out.
"No," I lied, wondering how his grandmother had pegged me for a psychic, even if she lacked the right vocabulary, by simply looking at me. "I'm just a cop."
Chapter Six
As I drove back to the Fifth after a series of fruitless interviews, my phone rang and vibrated in my pocket. Jacob.
"Hi," I said, knowing Zigler was listening from the passenger seat—how could he not? I wondered how gay I sounded.
"What's up?" Ugh. Overcompensating.
"How late are you working?"
We were, in fact, just finishing up. It was past seven and the sun had set an hour ago. "Dunno." Okay, where'd that come from? "Why?"
"There's a house in Rogers Park I want to look at, and a couple more condos. Want me to check them out myself?"
The person behind me honked as I sat a half second too long at a green light. I resisted giving them the finger. "I, um.... Do you care?"
"I could eliminate all the places that won't work out for completely mundane reasons. Then you can check whatever's left."
It sounded logical. And yet, I couldn't help but wonder if house-hunting was something I was supposed to do with Jacob, now that I'd committed to living together for real.
Maybe his ultra-logical tone of voice was masking some kind of unspoken disappointment in me.
Fuck.
I felt like I'd rather chat with a dead suicide bomber than look at another house just then. I'd been checking houses for ghosts all day. "Yeah," I said. "Sounds like a plan."
Zig tapped at the buttons of his cell phone while I hung up with Jacob. None of the apartments we'd been in had ghosts in them. None. People died all the time, so what was the deal? Dead people usually move along, most of them, anyway. Ghosts obviously had to move on at some point or another, or else I'd be swimming through an ocean of the dead every day. Murders, suicides, and accidents just took longer, as well as ghosts who were just plain stubborn.
"Are you holding supper for me?" Zig said into the phone.
"No, that's okay. Half an hour. Uh huh. No, really, you can all go ahead." He sighed. "No, nothing. I don't know. I guess there weren't any spirits to see. Uh huh. Okay. Yup. Love you. Bye-bye."
"If they were there, I would have seen them," I said, wondering why it'd come out so defensive.
I took my eyes off the road to glare at Zig. He nodded at me, eyes round behind the mounds of his fleshy eyelids and encroaching cheeks.
"Seriously," I said. "There's one sitting at that bus stop right there. And another one on the roof of the hardware shop."
"The roof?"
I tried to crane my neck to see if the roof ghost was obviously a jumper, but it was difficult to tell at thirty five miles per hour, and her semi-transparent.
"Maybe they're not dead," I suggested.
"Who? Lopez and the others?"
"Sure. Maybe it's some kind of cult thing. Gathering up people for...?" It sounded retarded even as I said it. I flicked on my turn signal and pulled into the parking lot of the Fifth.
I dropped off Zigler and then pulled out into traffic.
Chicago rush hour started before I even rolled out of bed and never ended before eight at night—though it was a little lighter on the weekends, at least before bar traffic started. I backtracked past the woman on the hardware store's roof and the ghost at the bus stop, and pulled up in front of the home of the last family we'd questioned, double parking. There weren't any spirits in my visual range. That wasn't so unusual. Maybe.
I wended my way past one of the other houses we'd searched and watched for a while. Maybe, now that it was full dark, a confused murder victim would make itself known. I didn't really think so, of course. Otherwise, I'd come clean with the family and get them to let me inside again. Or at least I'd pretend I had a few more questions for them so I could nose around.
I drove some more, and I thought. Three people missing.
Probably dead. Otherwise, there'd be ransom—especially the alderman's nephew. Unless ... what? Their spirits were trapped, too? Or maybe tied to the spot they were murdered, which I hadn't found yet. Or maybe there was a succubus scarfing down their souls like big strings of oily, black pasta.
I looked up and found myself at the Lopez's apartment, double-parked. Yellow light shone through the lace curtains that covered the living room window and hid the shelves of knick-knacks and clutter inside. All that crap taking up space, when the family sorely needed elbow room. Maybe it was a Hispanic thing, the need to have all that stuff around. Lisa would know.
Lisa would know if Lopez was alive or dead, too. She could even tell me where to look.
I had to call Lisa. She hadn't sounded very happy with me the night before, but she had to understand. I wasn't asking for myself. I thumbed in her speed dial and waited for her message, the one I always found myself mouthing the words to because she never answered her phone anymore now that she was being brainwashed at PsyTrain. Except that Lisa's phone didn't ring, and instead I got an earful of three dissonant tones.
"We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again."
I figured I'd just fat-fingered Lisa's number and went to dial it again, when I realized I'd used the speed dial to get her. I pressed the buttons again with exaggerated care.
"We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed."
Son of a bitch. Lisa had cancelled her cell phone.
I slammed my car into gear, pulled away from the curb, and drove. It was one thing for Lisa to tell me not to call her, but something entirely different for her to actually ditch her phone. You'd think I was some kind of psycho stalker or something. Who was the one who'd supported her while she was trying to figure out if she could be both a psychic and a cop? Me. Who was the one who took her under his wing when all her friends and family were across the country? Me.
I drove, and I swore, until finally I pulled my car over in front of a fire hydrant and slapped my police permit onto my dashboard. I glanced at the sidewalk. A couple inches of slush had hardened into a patchy obstacle course of ice, with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts and fast food wrappers sticking out here and there. The neon sign that said "Tarot Card Palm Reader" cast a pastel glow onto the hazardous walkway. I'd never met the palm reader; I was headed for Sticks and Stones, the shop upstairs, to see Crash.
The official business hours of Sticks and Stones are noon to six, Monday through Saturday. But Crash lived in a couple of rooms behind the store, and if he was home and had nothing better to do, he usually just left it open well into the night.
I followed the pattern of painted thumbprints up the stairs and wondered why I thought Crash wouldn't have anything better to do on a Saturday night than sit around in his store.
He was probably out getting laid or something. The doorknob didn't move, and I felt like an idiot for not calling ahead, when suddenly the knob unstuck itself and turned, and the door jangled open with a giant fanfare of a dozen strung-together bells.
"Oh. It's you." Crash sprawled on a threadbare recliner beside the counter, squinting at a catalog. His ancient Levis had been washed so many times that they molded to every intimate contour of his body, except his knees, which poked out through frayed holes. His T-shirt was screened with the logo of a band I'd never heard of before, and Jesus Christ, I felt every sad year of my pushing-forty life when I looked at his spiked, bleached hair, his piercings and tattoos, and his long, lean muscles.
/> I stared at him, wondering what, exactly, I'd expected him to do for me. He ignored me and read.
"Do you sell anything that can answer a yes or no question?" I asked him.
"For entertainment purposes," he asked me, not bothering to look up, "or for real?"
I squelched the impulse to scream, "What do you think, you jackass?" Maybe he was asking a serious question—though I had my doubts. "You're the one with the metaphysical shop. If I wanted a Magic Eight Ball, I'd go to SaverPlus."
He looked up at me and grinned. "Did you notice the new guy who works at the return counter in the SaverPlus basement? He's kind of a creep—which I think I like about him—and he's got this monster bulge in his pants."
I could totally see him getting into someone who was a creep. "Um. No."
"They're still open. Why don't you go buy a Magic Eight Ball so I can return it?"
"No."
"Then what the fuck good are you?"
I turned my back to him and started flipping through rows of incense boxes on a shelf beside the door. "Don't you have something, I dunno, like one of those pendulum things?"
"They only work if you're a precog. Which you aren't."
I sighed. I knew that. I was just freaking out because of Lisa.
"So first it's this purported GhosTV you want me to locate for you," Crash said, the recliner creaking and protesting as he levered himself out of it, "which makes no sense, since it can't actually get rid of ghosts, only screw around with their signals so you can't see 'em." He looked like he was grinning, though I only saw him from the corner of my eye because I refused to give him the satisfaction of looking at him. Still, it was a pretty safe bet.
"That sounds way worse to me—knowing they're there but not being able to see 'em, just 'cos you flipped a switch. So tell me, Vic. What is it you really want?" He'd abandoned his catalog and swung the full weight of his focus on me, pouring himself against the shelf where I couldn't possibly not see him, running his tongue-barbell along his bottom teeth. It might've been full-on flirt mode for anyone else, but it was day-to-day attitude for him. No wonder Jacob cut him loose. I don't think I'd sleep well at night knowing my boyfriend was willing to drop trou for any Tom, Dick, or Harry, either.
PsyCop 3: Body and Soul Page 5
