PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1

by Jordan Castillo Price

  I’d had free rein as a teenager too, but I think that was due to neglect, not trust. It makes you self-sufficient, though, to not have to answer to anyone hovering around you. And it makes it less likely that you’d run off and not tell anyone just for the sake of proving a point.

  Allison said, “I’d show you a picture, but it’s stuck in my damn phone.”

  “They can usually transfer that stuff.”

  “I know. It just sucks. Wait a minute…” she rifled through her pocket and pulled out a set of keys with a cascade of decorative keychains attached. “I do have one. Here.”

  She held up the tangle of metal and plastic, and there among the tchotchkes was an acrylic heart that contained a picture of two young, smiling girls in puffy ski jackets. One was Allison. The other one looked a heck of a lot like her. And both of them looked happier than I’d ever imagined Allison being. I touched the fob and a shiver traveled down my arm. That couldn’t mean anything good.

  Maybe I could drive up next weekend. Have a little visit. Stop by for coffee. Check out Sarah’s favorite haunts.

  Right. That wouldn’t seem weird at all.

  “Hanging out here, we weren’t big jocks or anything. It’s just a good place to come and think. Well, it used to be.” She sighed. Cigarette smoke and the vapor of her breath streamed away. “Now all I can think about when I’m in these woods is how much I miss her.”

  My heartbeat sped, like my body had figured out something my brain was too cautious to grasp. “Because you spent a lot of time together here.”

  “I dunno. We spent a lot of time together in a lot of different places.” Allison gave an uncomfortable shrug. “There’s just something about these woods.”

  5

  If we were back at the cannery and I wanted alone-time to check something out, I could invent half a dozen reasons I urgently needed to dash over to the store. Jacob might think of a few things to add to my phony shopping list, but unless my absence screwed up other plans, he wouldn’t think much of me leaving. But here? In the dark, in the dead of winter, with no car and nowhere to go but some cross country trails or the dining hall? No way was he going to buy that I wasn’t up to something, and no way would he let me comb through the woods alone.

  “Maybe we could go for a walk,” I suggested.

  Jacob, crammed into the bottom bunk, looked up from the training handouts he’d been re-reading with an expression that said, Yeah, right.

  Fine, I’d give him a reason. He knew me well enough that I couldn’t point to excess post-dinner cookie consumption as an excuse to undertake voluntary physical activity. So, what might be more plausible? “The log walls in here, they’re kind of claustrophobic. So brown. So much…wood.”

  My reason must’ve resonated. He got up and pulled on his overcoat.

  The grounds were eerily quiet in a way that didn’t happen in Chicago, even in the dead of night, but when we ducked into the trees, my hearing shifted. The sound of snow and gravel felt overblown, and the trees made various shooshing, rustling or squeaking sounds depending on whether they were winter-bare or covered in needles and snow. Even the sound of my own breathing, my own heartbeat, grew distracting. No wonder people in horror flicks went on stir-crazy murder sprees.

  Hopefully that was just in the movies.

  It was also just in the movies that you could navigate by a full moon once your eyes adjusted. We flicked on our flashlights. Jacob aimed his at the ground and I shone mine up ahead, and even still I wasn’t sure of what I was seeing. After dinner, I went back and forth a dozen times and ultimately decided to take that last dose of Auracel. Now I was doubting the wisdom of that choice, but the drug was deep enough in my system that sticking my finger down my throat wouldn’t accomplish anything.

  “About the Neurozamine,” Jacob said. I sighed. My breath made a dramatic plume in my flashlight beam. “For all we know, Jack’s getting a placebo, and he’s here to monitor us and report back to Laura.”

  “He’s an empath. What’s he gonna tell her, that you’re way too into card collecting and I think the whole thing’s pathetic?” Laura’s no dummy, she could’ve figured all that out on her own.

  “The training’s not over,” he said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow morning.”

  I was pretty confident I did. More muffins, more flat coffee, more wandering through the woods looking for WITNESSES, and a bunch of certificates stating we’d fulfilled twenty hours of continuing ed. “Look, I’m not saying you’re in the wrong for ditching your meds. We all pick our battles. For this one, though…I decided I’m just gonna keep my head down and go with the flow.”

  A prickle danced across the hairs at the nape of my neck, and I veered off the main trail onto a side path.

  Jacob followed. We squeaked along the packed snow for a long while without a word, frittering away all the time we could have been speaking openly without fear of being tapped and recorded, both of us too lost in our own thoughts to fill the silence. We passed the stump where I’d found Allison earlier, and I thought about the impact a missing girl can have on her entire family. I multiplied that by the number of people who disappeared every year, considered how many of those were probably foul play, and wished again that Auracel’s side effects were tasty enough to make me forget. “I met this witness. Her sister disappeared a couple years ago and I don’t like the way it sounds. I need to look into it.”

  The snow-squeaks went thin as Jacob paused and fell behind a few steps. I stopped too, turned and shone my light at his crotch so it didn’t catch him in the face and blind him. “What?” I demanded.

  “Vic, that’s just a story.”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth, I’m not saying you are. But everyone here has a canned story. It’s part of the whole routine. All the witnesses are actors who do summer theatre. They have certain lines they feed you, and if you manage to steer the interview the right way, they give you a card. This whole thing is one big improv.”

  I thought about Allison. Her fried hair. Her tacky keychain. The furtive way she hunched over her cigarette. If she was really a character actor playing a downtrodden, minimum wage twenty-something, she deserved a freaking Oscar.

  But what if it was all just a line? And there I was, playing the sucker. Gullible enough to trust Laura Kim to dictate when I should or shouldn’t take meds. Gullible enough to think Sarah was a real person, and not just the scripted figment of some trainer’s imagination. Gullible enough to think I was doing something that even mattered.

  I aimed my beam between the trees and went deeper. Jacob wouldn’t see my cheeks flushing, not out in the dark by the light of a couple of flashlights, but he knew me well enough that he could probably read my chagrin in the set of my shoulders. If anyone knew better than to trust someone without a damn good reason, it should be me.

  It would be easier to say screw it all, head back into the cabin, and stare at the rafters until I fell asleep. But I thought of Allison’s sadness—not just a haunted look about her eyes, but a weariness that pervaded her whole self—and I just couldn’t let the issue drop. “Look, maybe it really is nothing. But we’re what, an hour away from home? This agency doesn’t have access to the type of resources we do, not for a missing person with no evidence of foul play. And think about it, we’re feds now, our jurisdiction’s gotta reach way outside city limits.”

  “Vic, wait.”

  Jacob hung back while I stepped into a moonlit clearing with long, ground-eating strides. “We’ll check it out first, make sure her sister exists.” I was sure she did. Positive. “And then come up here and look around. We don’t find anything, no one’s any the wiser.”

  “Stop.”

  “I get that you’re the rock star investigator and I’m just some guy who sees dead people, but give me at least some credit—”

  “Get back here,” he said urgently. “That’s not trail, it’s ice.”

  It wasn’t the words that r
egistered, not initially. It was the tone. He wasn’t mansplaining, he was scared. In the way thunder follows lighting half a heartbeat later, it took me a second to understand what the fear was all about. Not the sort of ice I chip off the driveway, but a frozen body of water. And then Jacob’s fear leapt over to me. Normally, I’d only need to worry about falling on my ass, but with the freakish warm snap we were having, things could turn ugly.

  My breath caught and I held it, terrified that the wrong step would send me plunging to an icy grave. My middle school hockey coach’s single piece of advice sprang to mind, Don’t be stupid. I’d always thought it meant I’d better not put a move on any of my team members, but in retrospect, I realized he was discouraging us from skating on the frozen pond out by the railroad tracks. More convenient than the rink, but so not worth the risk. And now, there I was, adult-sized and twice as heavy, wondering if I should turn and carefully follow my own footsteps back, or forget about the precision and slam myself into reverse.

  And then the ice groaned.

  “Holy fuck.”

  “Slow and easy,” Jacob said, in a tone he’d use for talking a jumper off a ledge. “Just back up.” Slow and easy. Right. I shuffled back one step, then another, scanning the ice for telltale fissures with my flashlight beam. “That’s right, follow my voice. Not much farther. You got this, Vic. You got it.”

  I’m not sure whether he was giving me encouragement or trying to cover any more panic-inducing sounds, but with my vision limited to whatever I captured in my flashlight beam, my ears were working overtime trying to make sense of my surroundings. Since I’m a city mouse, every outdoorsy creak and rustle immediately conjured images of rotten ice in the throes of disintegration.

  “Keep going,” Jacob said. I wasn’t sure when I’d frozen, but suddenly it was imperative to see, to hear, to thoroughly understand what was going on. I swept my light across the surface, back and forth, back and forth, searching for a telltale puddle or spreading crack. “Vic, come on.”

  There. Movement. I fixed my flashlight beam, and I strained. Clenching all over never seemed to help, but I did anyway, trying to make sense of things through sheer force of will.

  “Vic,” he repeated, even more urgently. “Come on.”

  A flicker on the surface of the ice pack resolved into a shape that made sense. A…hiking boot?

  “Vic!”

  “Just a sec.”

  I scanned up and down, and if I really, really strained, I could see the boot was connected to a leg, to a whole body, a woman in jeans, a puffy ski vest and a fleece hat. But it wasn’t a hiker out on the lake with me, not anymore, and it wasn’t a sentient ghost, either. It was a repeater. I could tell by the way she flickered out, then reappeared a few steps back, only to start walking toward the spot where she’d vanished.

  I opened up my crown chakra and pulled white light down from the heavens. The impulse to charge my batteries came to me automatically, but the focus wasn’t all there. It felt tenuous and strange, like dropping a call in an area with shitty cell coverage. I could kick myself for taking that dinner dose of Auracel.

  I took a deep breath and did my best to calm down. The ice groaned again.

  “Vic,” Jacob implored.

  I considered keeping the repeater to myself, for all of two seconds. I didn’t think Jacob knew my talent was so strong that a normal dose of Auracel couldn’t squelch it, but it probably wouldn’t come as any big shock. “Repeater. Two o’clock.”

  Jacob digested that information, then said, “It’ll keep.”

  Maybe. Or maybe this elusive moment was my only chance of seeing what I needed to see. Repeaters are ten times thicker at night, so in the morning she might be gone. And even if we came back next week with a jug of Florida water and a solid plan, the ice might be too weak for me to get a look at her from any useful angle.

  Most people have checks and balances, but not me. I was the only one who could determine if I was just seeing what I wanted to see—namely, a definitive answer as to what had become of Sarah—or if the remnant belonged to some other long lost hiker.

  “Since when do you have a sense of urgency about repeaters?” Jacob said. “They’re not suffering.”

  “No…but their families are.” I eased forward a few more steps as I silently begged the surface to hold me, but I was beginning to doubt the wisdom in consuming that extra cookie. The ice didn’t groan again, but it definitely creaked. And while it was a more subtle sound, it was also a hell of a lot closer. Meanwhile, the repeater took a few flickering steps forward, then disappeared. “I can’t see her face.”

  “Vic, please.”

  “I need to see.” I waited, breathing as shallowly as possible, for the spectral film loop to start again. And just when I thought that maybe the ghost show was over for the evening, I caught it again. The woman took a few steps, flickered, and disappeared. Right before she blinked out, though, what was that movement? A shrug, or…? She was so transparent, the light so poor—or my inner vision was so clouded by Auracel—I couldn’t tell. “Damn it all, I can’t make it out.”

  “What can I do to get you off the ice?” Jacob pleaded.

  I wiggled my fingers back at him in a gimme-gesture. “Either pipe down and let me concentrate or pass me some mojo.”

  “I’m not coming out there too.”

  “You shouldn’t have to. I don’t need to touch anything to gather up the white light, and neither do you. Funnel it in my direction—use your will.”

  I suspected will was probably a trigger word for an overachiever like Jacob, a point of character he prided himself on. I had no idea if he could psychically email me the juice, but if he busied himself with the effort, at least he’d be occupied enough to stop distracting me. I took a deep breath and centered myself, ignoring all the ominous creaking and crackling that filled the night air, and I focused on the flickery white haze of the repeater.

  She was still a pale jumble of frozen moments. One foot forward, then the other, then…was that a smile? She was smiling. Maybe. For a split-second, maybe. And then she disappeared. “Are you sending it?”

  “I’m trying.”

  And I wasn’t receiving. Damn it.

  “Do the details really matter?” he asked. “For all we know, this death might be old news around here and she’s already been ID’d.”

  Maybe. I tried to will the repeater to brighten and solidify anyhow. I’d done it before…but that was without Auracel, in range of a GhosTV. And even then, it had cost me. Out here on thin ice with my psychic ability pharmaceutically stunted? I should be grateful I saw anything at all.

  “Kill your flashlight,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll see better by moonlight.”

  “Vic,” he said desperately. But when I flicked off my beam, he did the same.

  While I know I’m not seeing ghosts with my physical eyes, my brain must be hardwired so my sense of vision is still involved. Ghosts don’t glow in the dark, and I can’t see them with my eyes closed. But whether it really was an effect of the moonlight, or the absence of the flashlights just made the background trees less confusing, the next time the repeater cycled through, she looked more like a person and less like a degraded loop of film.

  I eased toward her another few shuffling steps to see her face at a better angle, and the ice sighed beneath my feet. Jacob didn’t say anything, but I imagined I could feel him begging me to turn around as a tug in the pit of my gut. I did my best to tune it out—really, to tune out my whole physicality and focus on that part of me that was made of light—and to see her.

  The woods were dark and still, and utterly quiet. And then the woman appeared, walking, looking down at her phone. She scrolled to something that made her laugh. Innocuous. Normal. But then, for just a glimpse, laughter blurred into something more like surprise as the ice gave way, and she was gone.

  I waited one more cycle, focusing this time on the face. I wasn’t positive, but I strongly suspected I was looking at whatever was left of Sarah.
My heart felt heavy enough to sink me as I flicked on my flashlight beam and backtracked off the groaning ice. The moment I was on solid ground, Jacob grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise it and dragged me back a few more yards as if to stop me from changing my mind and charging back out there.

  Once we were out of danger, he grabbed me and kissed me so hard I suspected he did it in lieu of punching me in the face—or maybe I was feeling the crackle of psychic energy that leapt over to me when we touched skin to skin. Though I do think he wanted to slug me. “It’s okay,” I said, when he let me come up for air. “We’re fine. I’m fine.”

  He grabbed me by the head, mashed his forehead into mine so hard it hurt, and said, “Don’t do that ever again.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “But one of these days, you won’t be. Not if you keep following your inner eye, and to hell with what’s going on around you.” He gave me a shake. “You might not care much about your physical shell, but I do.”

  I covered his hands with mine and eased them off before he popped my head like a fleshy balloon. “Okay, okay.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.” I eased myself against him and brushed my lips across his, and marginally, his shoulders relaxed. I pictured the white light flowing back into him, not as an electric rush, but a soothing mist. Who knows if it happened or not, but I like to think it was possible. “I know.”

  6

  No one’s ever accused me of being an optimist, and I’m the last person who’d try to profit from anyone’s death, but once I called in the repeater to Laura Kim, she went into FPMP Regional Director mode and had a search and recovery team trudging through the camp by morning. The ridiculous trading card exercises were preempted. I tried not to look too self-satisfied about it.