We were both pretty groggy as we headed over to the scene, but I figured I should get some business out of the way. "There's gonna be other cops there. Techs, photographers, uniforms. You've gotta run interference for me, keep some distance between me and them the way you did with Lopez's brother. And if they start acting funny ... they're not usually too keen on the PsyCop unit barging in on their scene."
"Understood."
I thought about the silence that usually settled over a crime scene the second I showed up, all the regular, subdued banter that happened between co-workers draining away, replaced with only the bare minimum of information. Did that happen when Jacob and Carolyn showed up to announce to the world that, yes, their suspect was definitely lying?
I doubted it. I think Carolyn's co-workers may have silently hoped that she'd never ask them a point-blank question, even at a cocktail party, but they were probably pretty damn happy to see her when she walked in the door. Her presence on the job meant they'd be going home to their families that much sooner.
"It's, ah ... it's more that I'm a medium—instead of a precog or empath—than just the whole ... y'know. PsyCop thing."
Zigler glanced at me, then put his eyes back on the road.
"I heard."
He seemed prepared. No sense in me beating it into the ground. He'd get to witness it first-hand in a few minutes, anyway. We parked and picked our way down the icy alley in our protective plastic shoe covers and gloves. I couldn't imagine a worse crime scene than a snow covered alleyway after dark. I'm sure one existed somewhere. I just couldn't imagine it.
"How fast should we walk?" Zigler asked.
"Pretty much regular." I tested the snow with my plastic-wrapped foot. "Uh, slow enough to stay upright."
The perimeter seemed wide, barricades manned by uniformed officers—big, burly ones, many of them with mustaches like Zigler's—enough of them to do some serious crowd control. I saw a guy with a camera having a heated discussion with an officer in a cruiser, and I figured all the security was there to keep the press out of our way.
"Jesus," Zigler muttered. I guess he thought the cops were laying it on a little thick, too.
Spotlights shone on the alley from one end to the other, focused mainly on the Dumpster, while Non-Psychics walked a grid with baggies and tweezers and crime scene techs snapped photos like crazy.
"Cripes, that guy," I said, avoiding the eyes of an NP detective whom I'd overheard referring to PsyCops as
"overpaid circus side shows" at a party once. As soon as he saw it was me, he also found something very interesting to focus on in the opposite direction.
A couple of techs muttered, "Spook squad," just loud enough for me to hear, probably on purpose. Techs took particular issue with my "nonscientific" approach.
Some NPs called Zig's name and motioned him over, but he just waved, nodded, and stuck to me like glue.
"Anything?" he asked me.
The wind was howling through the alley and the groups of people who couldn't be bothered to actively snub me were all talking. Cameras clicked and plastic rustled. There was too much activity for me to spot anything for sure without really staring at people and getting a bunch of nasty looks in return.
I probably had enough clout to get the whole alley cleared so I could scan it, but the thought of all the attitude I'd get in return made my coffee turn to acid in my stomach. I focused on the Dumpster. Everyone in, on, or around it looked like they had a pulse.
I entertained some sentimental longing for the GhosTV, though by now in my mind's eye it had morphed down to the size of a Dick Tracy wristwatch communicator that worked flawlessly on two AA batteries.
I could stand next to that Dumpster and crank up the juice on my GhosTV, and anything paranormal would shine like a big, dead beacon. I watched the personnel milling around, tagging, photographing, and collecting. Maybe there wasn't anything, or anyone, to be seen. Maybe there was just a wallet in the Dumpster, and that was all.
"Pretty."
I glanced to the side, moving only my eyes. No one was there, except for Zigler, who was a few steps away, scribbling in his note pad. The voice hadn't been his. I'd peg it for a kid, probably a girl. It sounded like she was talking through a paper towel roll. Given that there were no kids around playing "megaphone," I figured it was safe to say I'd found myself a dead one.
"What's pretty?" I said. I really wished I knew ventriloquism. I'd be able to talk to dead people a little longer without anyone else noticing and acting like an ass.
"In your pocket. Pretty necklaces."
I patted my coat pockets. Nothing. But inside, tucked into my blazer, the silver pendulums were a solid weight against my hip. "They're uh..." I didn't know if I could explain what a pendulum was supposed to do to a child. Was she Clayton's age when she died? Older? Younger? And what if she'd died before psychics were certified? She wouldn't even know any of the psychic talents were real—despite the irony that I was the only one around in the teeming throng of investigators who could hear her. "What's your name?"
"Tiffany. Lemme see the necklace."
Zigler noted me talking to myself and casually wandered between me and the thick of the crowd. He'd also put himself in earshot.
"I can't," I said, wondering what a dead kid wanted with a pendulum. "All these other people will see."
"So?"
I filed the word "so" into a repertoire of snappy comebacks that I hoped would one day ease my social anxiety. "So that's it," I said. "Do you live here?"
"I dunno."
I sighed. "Are you here a lot?"
"I guess."
"Do you know why we're all here?"
"They're here to get the man's money back for him. He was rich."
I got Andy Lynch's file from Zigler, then dug inside my coat and pulled a pendulum out. I turned my back to the biggest group of techs, hoping they'd be too disdainful to gather around me and stare. Zigler kept glancing over his shoulder, doing his best to look casual, but I could tell he was dying to get a better look at what I was doing. "Think about the man," I said, flipping the file open to Lynch's photo. "Is this him?"
"It's so pretty. I wish I could touch it."
"You can have this necklace, but I can't give it to you until I figure out what happened to this guy."
"Really? How about gold? Could you get me a gold necklace?"
"Sure," I said, wishing Tiffany could let go of the whole necklace thing and I.D. the photo one way or the other. The dead are persistent like that. "Gold, silver, the works. But first you've gotta tell me if this was the rich guy or not."
"Not silver. I used to like silver. But not anymore."
"Okay, sure. Gold."
"You promise? It can't be silver."
"Yeah, I promise. Cross my heart."
Tiffany was quiet for a minute, while Zigler threw no less than three glances over his shoulder. "Yeah. That's him. But his hair was shorter."
Bingo.
"All right, good. Can you tell me how his wallet got in the Dumpster?"
"Mom says I should never tell on people. She says they always find out, and they'll do bad things to you later if you tell. This one time? She told on her boyfriend for hitting her, and he hit her so hard that she couldn't hear in one of her ears no more."
Oh, great. The only witness to Andy Lynch's disappearance was an underage jewelry fiend with blinders on. Though I could hardly argue with the motive of not wanting to be found out.
"Here's the thing," I said. "I just want to find this guy. That's all." It occurred to me that Tiffany might or might not know she was dead, so I'd have to tread lightly. "Is he, uh ... around?"
"No. He left in the white van."
"Was he hurt when he left?"
"Yeah. He was bleeding. But a man and a lady came to help him."
"Was it ... an ambulance?"
"Nuh-uh. Just a van. The back doors were crunched in and they didn't close right, and the other man had to tie them shut with a rope after h
e put the hurt man inside."
Tiffany didn't seem capable of telling me a license plate number or even the model or age of the van when I questioned her about it, but that was all right. I'd rather search for a white van with screwed up doors than the same damn silver sedan that everyone seemed to own these days.
"Okay. Good. So ... why was this guy bleeding?"
"When the guy stabbed him..." Tiffany went abruptly quiet.
"Who stabbed him?" I whispered. "The guy with the van?"
Tiffany wasn't saying. I tried to determine whether she was still with me or not, but with all the activity and the hot and cold patches from the steaming spotlights and the bone-chilling wind, it was too hard to tell without a visual on her.
I reoriented myself to the physical world—the alleyway, the slush under my feet, the sting of the wind on my cheek.
Zigler was talking in low tones to a couple of the techs, and none of them looked happy. Whatever. I didn't become a PsyCop to win any popularity contests. If Zigler expected to make a bunch of new friends at this job, then he was in for a rough ride.
"Zig," I said, touching him on the sleeve. The techs shot me a look of pure venom, and Zigler's cheeks flushed. "We need to go talk to Warwick."
I half-slid, half-squeaked back to the car in my plastic shoe covers, relieved to finally be able to slip out of them once I got there and had something to lean against. I assume I was allowed to lean on the Impala, anyway. Zigler didn't tell me that I couldn't.
He beeped the locks open and we climbed in. "You know those two?" he asked, once the shut doors sealed us into a little bubble of privacy.
"Who, the techs? Uh, not by name. I guess I recognize 'em." Maybe I could piece together a specific time where I'd met one of them. A scene, a social function. And maybe I could remember the exact point at which we mutually decided that it was better off if we didn't even pretend to be civil, that it simply cost too much energy. But I was too busy trying to sum up the things that Tiffany had told me, scribbling down everything I could remember by the passenger light on the rear-view mirror while my hand cramped from the cold.
Warwick was pretty tickled to get the lead on the white van with the doors tied shut. Not that he actually smiled or anything. He was one of those pale blonds that got ruddy when they were angry, and his coloration seemed pretty even as he repositioned a bunch of pushpins on the map and barked out orders to some other teams on the speakerphone while we waited. The location of Lynch's wallet marking his last known location tightened up the red pins on the map considerably. "I've got NPs out looking for the van. I want Bayne to walk this neighborhood, see if any more ghosts saw anything."
I knuckled my eyes. By the time Warwick was done, it was closing in on six in the morning and rush hour was almost upon us. Maybe a living person had seen something, too. Not that they'd feel compelled to tell me much about it.
Zigler parked at the northwest corner of our route and we got to work. I was grateful for my winter coat and all its shiny new buttons. It was well below freezing, and windy, with tiny snow pellets stinging my face.
"You know that the Supreme Court voted six to three in favor of accepting testimony from the deceased if the medium is certified level four or higher," Zigler said.
Goody. Someone else would probably try and kidnap me for fear that I'd testify on behalf of their dead witnesses. "I have a no-courtroom clause in my contract."
"It might not seem like it, especially with whatever it is you've got to look at day in and day out, but what you've got is a gift."
"I guess," I said, tuning him out. The conversation seemed like it was starting to go moral, and I figured I could avoid an argument if I just kept on agreeing with him. I stopped to listen to voices, but it was only yelling, a corporeal argument drifting out of a duplex doorway about a set of lost keys and the inevitability of someone being late for work.
"No visuals?" asked Zigler.
We were combing a residential side street jammed with parked cars. There was a convenience store at one end and a bus stop on the other, where it intersected Wilson, a main drag. "No ... not that I usually get 'em on streets like this." I thought of the condo I'd almost fallen in love with, the one with the broken record player of a ghost in the bedroom.
"They're usually indoors on the side streets."
We trudged along for a few more minutes, looking and listening. Zigler must've noticed that I was focusing on something, and thankfully he shut up, maybe for fear of messing with my dubious "gift." We went single-file around a hunk of sidewalk pushed up by a tree root, and I stared at the back of Zigler's thick-necked head as he lurched around it.
Somewhere between Saturday and Monday, my dread had disappeared. Zigler wasn't such a bad guy. Not pleasant, by any stretch of the imagination, but smart enough to keep us from getting killed. I could work with him.
"Uh, Zig ... you're pretty well-read on the latest psych research, aren't you?"
He watched me as I picked my way around the scrambled sidewalk and caught up with him. "I try to keep up."
"A ghost said something to me about silver. Couldn't touch it. You know anything about that?"
"Well, there's the planetary associations, the vibrational properties, the high magic associations." His eyebrows scrunched together. "Are you testing me?"
"Huh?" I stared at him stupidly. "Oh, cripes, no. I'm serious. I was hoping you could tell me. I never read any of that shit."
"That's what you trained in, isn't it? At Heliotrope Station?"
"Yeah, uh..." Sweat prickled at the back of my neck even though it was cold enough out to freeze on contact. I scratched at it, ruffling my hair at the nape. "Not exactly.
That was back before they knew much about ... anything."
Zigler's face relaxed. "Right." He chuckled, a little forced.
"Silver, well, it can be potent stuff, depending on the purity.
The folktale about the silver bullet killing the werewolf originated in some sort of fact."
Werewolves, shmerewolves. I found myself swallowing convulsively at the mere thought of Camp Hell. Maybe I needed therapy. Scratch that. Obviously, I needed therapy.
But I was still holding a grudge against the German psychiatrist with the thick accent and even thicker nostril hair who'd initiated my transfer from the psych ward to Camp Hell. Maybe looking him up and toilet papering his house would be therapeutic enough.
"The use of silver as protection against evil spirits is found in more than a few old religions. Driving silver nails into a threshold, for instance, is supposed to keep evil at bay."
Hm. I wondered which massive, mostly-wrong textbook he'd gleaned that from. Maybe the silver wasn't keeping evil at bay so much as repulsing the spirits. Right effect, wrong cause. A mental image of the stack of textbooks in the corner of my room at Camp Hell popped into my head. Sometimes I'd leave them in the doorway to trip up the Neanderthal orderlies with their hypodermics full of noxious psyactives, but after the first couple of spills, they got wise to it and just stepped around them.
We came to the end of the block, and even though it wasn't yet daylight, the convenience store was doing brisk business in Chicago Tribunes, high octane coffee, and pink frosted donuts. "I'm gonna grab a coffee," Zigler said. He wasn't puffy from sleep anymore, but he didn't look like he enjoyed being called to work at 2 a.m. any more than I did.
"That okay?"
Sweat prickled at my armpits and I fought the urge to shiver. Fucking Camp Hell. "Yeah, sure. I'll wait outside."
Zig's brow furrowed. A normal guy would've welcomed the opportunity to defrost the tips of his ears. I hoped I wouldn't have to explain that I was waiting to see if I was going to hurl. "You want one?" he asked "A water would be great." I dug in my pocket for a dollar to give him, but he made a "forget about it" motion and went inside.
I shuffled over to the side of the store in case I actually did puke. The gap between the building and the eight-foot security fence smelled like urine, despite the co
ld and the snow. I couldn't imagine how badly it stank in the summertime.
A Valium or a Seconal would've been nice. Or maybe the chakra stones that were supposed to help me get into
"alignment," if only I had enough focus, enough belief, to make them work. They just seemed like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to me, and though I found one or two of them in the courtyard a couple of weeks after I'd chucked them out the window, I never did recover the full set. The ones I'd rescued just sat on a windowsill, gathering dust.
"Rock?"
I jumped and my head snapped around. A ratty guy in a navy peacoat and a knit hat had snuck up the alley while I was busy beating myself up about Camp Hell. At first I wondered if he'd read my mind. But then I realized that most lowlifes aren't thinking about semiprecious gemstones when they say the word "rock."
"Don't need it," I said, wishing he'd go away and doing my best not to ask if he could get me some reds. Because he probably couldn't. Coke, heroin, weed, maybe even ecstasy.
But if I wanted to score Seconal that easily, I'd need to time travel back to the seventies when people actually took it for fun.
"You a cop?" said a voice to the other side of me. I looked, and no one was there. Great. A drug dealer and a ghost. Just what I needed.
"Got a bone, got a boulder."
Persistent fucker. I wasn't up on the most current crackspeak, but I was guessing he was trying to unload his bigger quantities, given that all my buttons were sewn on and I'd washed my hair sometime in the last twenty-four hours.
"Get outta here," I said. "I don't need it."
"C'mon, man, I see you jonesin' for a hit. How 'bout a dime."
"What kinda cop just stands there and lets this shit happen?" asked the disembodied voice. Sounded like a white male, twenties or thirties. There was a whiny quality to it, a voice I'd match up with a weasely sort of guy who stepped in front of cars and then sued the drivers. "Are you on the take? Or are you just a lazy piece of shit?"
"Nine dollar," said the guy in the knit hat. I guess he was running a blue light special on his dimes.
PsyCop 3: Body and Soul Page 9
