PsyCop 1: Among the Living

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Are you medicated?” Warwick said. Because it’s so professional to accuse someone of being high right as you introduce them to their new partner. It’s some kind of newfangled team-building exercise, all the rage in L.A.

  “I was at my partner’s retirement party,” I snapped, deciding I would have to admit to one Auracel, but not three. They couldn’t prove I’d taken three without a really expensive and time-consuming drug test. “What do you think, I wanted that idiot who hung herself in his garage to follow me around the whole afternoon? That’s my idea of a great party, lemme tell you.”

  Warwick twirled the pen harder while his jaw worked. “Detective Bayne is authorized, when he’s off duty, for the use of Auracel…” he started to explain.

  “An anti-psyactive,” said Gutierrez. “I know what it is. Now tell me what’s so unusual about this case that you’d call Bayne in instead of assigning it to the team on call.”

  Warwick blinked, and then pulled out a manila folder, opened it, scanned the contents and began gathering his thoughts. I stuck my hand in my pocket in order to stop myself from giving Gutierrez a high-five, since she seemed so clipped and professional that she’d probably leave me waving in the wind. But damn, I liked her.

  * * *

  I was happy to let Gutierrez drive since I was legally impaired, although a breathalyzer wouldn’t have been able to pick up on it. She was just in from Albuquerque and didn’t have a car yet, so we took mine. She had to move the seat up three whole clicks.

  “That was…um…cool,” I said as I got into the car, wondering if I could possibly sound any more retarded. “The way you got Warwick off my case.”

  She glanced at me. “Your pupils are totally dilated. You should put on some sunglasses before you damage your retinas.”

  Maybe she was genuinely concerned, or maybe she wasn’t so lax on the whole drug thing after all. She had that deadpan delivery that was kind of hard to read. I rummaged around my glove compartment and found an old pair of shades crusted with mysterious dust. How did things get dusty while they were shut inside a glovebox? I also saw half a tab of Auracel cradled inside the hinge. I took a pen and flicked it out to stop it from being crushed when I closed the door, and then moved my registration over to cover it up. Gutierrez’ eyes were on the tiny GPS navigation screen. Also dusty, I noted.

  “It’d be faster if you turned up Clark,” I said.

  Gutierrez ignored my directions, preferring instead to trust the Magellan. She’d turned the audio down, but still glanced at the map occasionally.

  “Were you a PsyCop at your last job?” I asked.

  A little smile played on her lips, and she was actually kinda cute in that moment, like a kid sister. “They don’t even have ’em in New Mexico.” She pronounced Mexico with an “X” in the middle, like I would. I wondered if the “Me-HEE-co” pronunciation was reserved for the country.

  We passed Clark again, a diagonal street that defied the grid of the rest of the city, and I sighed. “Then how’d you land this job? Not that I’m complaining, but I heard the competition was pretty…fierce.” I wondered if she thought I was crass enough to say “stiff.”

  Gutierrez shrugged and turned on Lawrence. Her jacket didn’t quite fit her in the shoulders. She was petite and a little stocky, would probably need something tailored. I wondered how I knew that, given that I owned only two sportcoats and my sloppy dress shirts were about twenty years out of style. I figured it was the Auracel thinking for me. And then I realized I was still in jeans, a big no-no given the department’s dress code. That’s what they got for calling me away from a party on the opposite side of the city from my apartment.

  “My track record’s good,” she said. “Beyond good. And besides,” she gave me a sly look. “I count as two minorities: a woman and a Hispanic. Your boss’s got his quotas to fill, just like everybody.”

  I stared through my dusty plastic lenses at a string of Indian grocers and sari shops and noted that I could kind of see over one lens but not the other. Therefore, the shades were probably crooked as well as dusty. Charming. “Our boss.” I tried to straighten out the glasses and failed.

  The Magellan beeped as Gutierrez missed a turn onto Artesian and then readjusted itself to plot her a new course to the scene. I figured she must’ve been sightseeing and just passed it by.

  “The Auracel,” she said, taking the next right, “it works for you?”

  “It makes the dead people shut up,” I told her. And, by golly, the high was just an added bonus. I didn’t tell her that. Oh, and it only muffled the ambient dead people. If I really, really wanted to, I could try real hard, pick one out and make him spill his guts. But I didn’t mention that, either. A guy’s gotta have some boundaries.

  She nodded and pulled up behind a pair of squad cars. I glanced down Artesian and saw a pair of orange-striped sawhorses blocking the area and a surly resident getting nasty with the uniformed officers for not letting him park in front of his apartment building. Good thing Gutierrez missed that turn or we would’ve still been struggling to get around that moron to flash our badges and get onto the scene.

  Even though it wasn’t my regular shift, I knew the men on duty, and thankfully they weren’t weird around Psychs. I introduced Gutierrez and let the officer in charge walk us through the scene.

  “The victim was found by his downstairs neighbor. Says she pounded on the ceiling with her broom handle so long that she put a hole through the plaster trying to get him to turn his music down. Came up to tell him to his face and found him…well, you can see for yourself.”

  “The door was unlocked,” Gutierrez said, more than asked, and the officer nodded. She stopped at the door to slip on a pair of latex gloves and plastic booties. I looked at my jeans as I slipped the booties on over my holey Converse All-Stars and wondered if I’d gotten any jiz on them in Maurice’s bathroom. I didn’t bother with gloves since I didn’t plan on touching anything.

  Gutierrez paused in the victim’s vestibule and then stepped aside to let me enter. She stared straight ahead of her into a living room where a couple of techs were setting down numbered cards around a sofa-bed and snapping photos. I came in behind her and nearly had to scoop my jaw up off the floor.

  The victim was splayed buck naked on his red velvet bedspread like a piece of fucking performance art. Shards of mirror surrounded him, at first making it appear that a disco ball had taken vengeance on an unsuspecting naked guy. But on closer inspection, it was obvious that every piece had been painstakingly placed around the body so that, from the proper angle, the whole thing became a glittering, psychedelic swirl.

  It might’ve even been fun to look at, given my current state of medication, if it weren’t for the hot dead guy in the middle of it all. Not a mark on him, but obviously quite dead.

  Gutierrez was already getting briefed. The victim was one Anthony Blakewood, twenty-seven, Caucasian, single, worked downtown in the Loop at a brokerage firm, no known enemies.

  “Sexual penetration?” Gutierrez asked the Medical Examiner’s tech, a thin girl with a blond ponytail who was still snapping photos.

  “We haven’t flipped the body yet, but it’s a good possibility. The Coroner will have the final word on that.”

  I fixed my gaze on a completely irrelevant nail hole on the wall and pretended they weren’t talking about anything gay. I always figure I’m going to get some kind of telltale look on my face and tip somebody off about my own “lifestyle.” As far as I knew, the only one besides Hotshot Marks who might’ve guessed about me was Maurice, and Maurice just didn’t talk about those kinds of things, period. That was that.

  I then noticed that Blakewood had a little collection of miniature furniture with Scotty dogs painted on it, arranged on a semicircular shelf in the corner. Yeah. He was queer.

  I wondered what I had in my apartment that would incriminate me to a casual observer. Not much, surprisingly. I tended not to hold onto stuff, because stuff usually held vibes, and vibes are a
pain in the ass.

  I almost ran my fingers through my hair again, but stopped myself just in time to keep from contaminating the crime scene by shedding. I jammed my hands into my pockets instead. The tech said that judging by the open container of lube nearby she’d just spotted, the victim had likely been penetrated, though the Coroner would have to verify that. A psycho murderer who lubed. How considerate.

  Chapter 3

  I stared up at my featureless white ceiling as I waited for the Seconal I’d taken to kick in. I’d loaned my car to Gutierrez with the stipulation that she wake me no earlier than noon. The victim hadn’t spoken to me while I was at the apartment, and I’d taken three Auracels I needed to sleep off.

  And while three was a pretty high dose for me, it wasn’t like I’d never imbibed that many before. (Actually, my record is seven, but at that point you can’t walk anymore and you tend to start vomiting.) Even after three Auracels, I should’ve been able to talk to Blakewood. Yeah, that’s right. Even with my sixth sense trapped under all those meds, if I tried really hard, I should’ve been able to hear him. And I hadn’t—not even a peep. So I was beginning to get concerned.

  Anthony Blakewood, collector of Scotty dog miniatures, reamed out and discarded among several thousand other glittery bits. I wondered if he kind of dug it, being snuffed out in his prime and displayed so lovingly…or at least exactingly. I might have asked him as much, if I’d been able to find his ghost.

  I dreamt of shards of silvered glass, seven years’ bad luck and who’s the fairest one of all. I woke with a post-Auracel sandpaper tongue and a piercing pain behind my right eye. I considered downing a handful of aspirin, but knew I’d only be asking for heartburn after lunch if I did.

  I was at work on my second pot of coffee when Gutierrez called on the intercom. I buzzed her up from the lobby.

  “Coffee?” I asked her as she stared over my shoulder and into my three-room apartment.

  She hesitated for just a second, and then came in and took one of the two barstools by the kitchen counter. “Sure.”

  I looked around, not seeing the place anew, exactly, but reminding myself how stark it looks to a anyone who’s never been there. “I’m kind of a minimalist.”

  Gutierrez’ shoulders relaxed a little at my admission. “Is everything in here white?”

  I handed her a white coffee mug and then pointed out the cream. She shook her head and sipped it black.

  “White matches white,” I said, and fiddled with my own cup, which had chilled and grown a skin on its surface. “I guess it seems easiest.”

  “I talked to the Coroner,” she told me as I dumped my congealed coffee down the drain. “Our perp’s even sicker than we thought.”

  You have absolutely no idea what I was thinking, I said to myself. But I didn’t know her well enough to tease her like that. And besides, I didn’t need anyone trying to read between the lines about anything I had to say on this particular case. With the gay and all. “Yeah?”

  “The Coroner found pieces of mirror stuck under the victim’s eyelids. But they’d been placed there so carefully they hadn’t even scratched him.”

  I tried to imagine why I hadn’t noticed that my victim had something angular beneath his closed eyelids, but since I was pretty much looking everywhere but at him, I wasn’t very surprised. “I was so busy trying to talk to him…” I said, thinking that it wasn’t altogether untruthful. I had tried.

  “On Auracel?” Gutierrez asked. She drained her cup and came over to put it in the sink. “Why even bother?”

  “I dunno.” I pulled a black sportcoat off the peg on the back of my kitchen door. “I had to do something.”

  “We’ll go try again now. You, uh…. You have better reception at the scene or at the morgue?”

  Reception. I liked the way she was trying to be so casual about it. “His spirit’s probably at the apartment,” I said. “Accidents, suicides and murders tend to be sticky.”

  “Okay, we’ll start there.” She offered me the keys, but I waved them toward her. She’d get to know the city that much quicker if she was the one who drove. And there was that lancing pain behind my eye to consider.

  Traditionally, the younger partner was the one to do the driving anyway. Maurice let me slide on that responsibility when I told him that on bad days I tended to get visuals of accident victims, and that on certain intersections they got pretty numerous. They didn’t look quite as solid as real pedestrians, but when you’re doing forty-five on a residential street you don’t necessarily have tons of time to study them. Maurice had said it explained a lot of the swerving I did. I’d let him think that. It seemed less incriminating than admitting that the Auracel didn’t help my driving any, either.

  At the scene I donned the plastic booties, and this time, the gloves, too. It irked me that the night before I’d been in the same room as a homicide victim and he hadn’t said a word. But I was fairly clean now, having taken my last Auracel about twenty hours prior. I was ready to hear Blakewood’s side of the story.

  A couple of guys from the lab were combing through the apartment with their powders and brushes and ultraviolet wands. One of them muttered “Spook Squad” in a voice so low I almost didn’t catch it, and the other one straightened his tie and looked nervous.

  “Just tell me where we won’t be in your way,” I said. I was actually only paying them partial attention, because I was sure that any minute I’d be bowled over by Blakewood’s spirit.

  “Can you work from the kitchen?” the tech who’d called us Spook Squad asked. “We’re done processing the kitchen.”

  I figured he wanted to get rid of us so they could gossip, and I almost suggested that Gutierrez and I go have a sandwich and come back later, when it occurred to me that a dead queer might very well be hanging out near the fridge. I jerked my head toward the kitchen doorway and Gutierrez followed me. Undoubtedly she’d been given a job description the size of the phone book, but I thought I could summarize for her in a few sentences.

  “So here’s how it works,” I told her. “You record all the factual stuff, plus whatever impressions I give you. Then you record your impressions about my impressions.” I peeked into the kitchen, but didn’t see Blakewood in there. I was glad. I really didn’t want a visual on those mirror eyes. “You score points for being as skeptical as humanly possible.”

  “So I’m supposed to shoot you down,” she said.

  I stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Chinese takeout, Diet 7-Up and fat-free yogurt. “If my impressions are right, the facts’ll back them up and you won’t be able to debunk me.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she muttered. “We’re partners. We’ve gotta watch each other’s backs, not tear each other down.”

  “Hey.” I gave her a smile over my shoulder. “Don’t take it so personally. I never do.” I liked hearing her swear. It left me free to do the same.

  I walked into the kitchen and waited for that telltale sensation, like a drop in temperature that only I could feel, before the voices started. Except the kitchen was toasty, and the only sound in it was the motor on the refrigerator.

  “Blakewood,” I whispered, but the kitchen felt as flat and spiritless as…mine. “What’s his first name?” I asked Gutierrez.

  She flipped open her pad. “Anthony.”

  “Anthony,” I said, figuring that maybe he’d died so horribly that he couldn’t leave the side of his sofa bed. “Tony,” I called softly. “You here?”

  I planted my hands on my hips and looked around. Nothing.

  Gutierrez stared at me with her pen poised over the tablet. She was a lefty. “Forget it,” I said, easing past her into the small foyer. “There’s nothing here.”

  I stood there while Gutierrez scratched what sounded like lots and lots of notes onto her pad. I didn’t see the victim, didn’t hear him. I wondered if it was possible that he died of natural causes and was just set up pretty by some kind of necrophiliac. Sure, that would be weird. But I’ve se
en plenty of weird in my time.

  “What now?” Gutierrez asked.

  I crept closer to the archway that opened into the main room where we’d found him. “Anthony,” I said, quiet, just barely moving my lips, but the tech who thought I was creepy blanched and started tugging at the collar of his shirt.

  I listened hard, but didn’t hear anything but the sound of Gutierrez’ pen. “You’re not picking anything up,” she murmured, “are you?”

  I shook my head just a tiny bit and we backed up into the vestibule. “We can come back when those guys are through,” she offered. “Maybe they’re blocking it.”

  I looked at a set of keys hanging beside the door. There was an embossed Scotty on the key fob. “Believe me, it’d take a lot more than a couple of guys with powderpuffs to block a fresh murder victim.”

  Gutierrez scratched out some more notes. “Okay, then. What if he didn’t die here?”

  I considered her theory. No one had mentioned any evidence of the body being relocated, but given what I wasn’t hearing, it made sense. Her brow furrowed, as if she’d found a hole in her own logic, but I thought we should explore the idea more conclusively before we shot it down.

  “What if,” I said thoughtfully.

  Chapter 4

  My cell phone rang, displaying the number for the Coroner’s office. “The crime scene was definitely the victim’s apartment.”

  Unfortunately, Gutierrez and I had come to the same conclusion, given that a neighbor had sworn he saw Tony walking back home that night with some new boyfriend he didn’t recognize and, predictably, couldn’t describe—except to say he was very handsome.

  I sat in the passenger seat of my car and picked the brim of a styrofoam coffee cup into a dozen small, ragged pieces. I hesitated before letting them fall to the floor, and then I realized that it was my own damn car and I could do what I wanted. Styrofoam fluttered to the carpet around my shoes.

  “That ever happen to you?” Gutierrez asked. “A dead guy that won’t talk?”