PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Richie is honest to a fault.” He also didn’t have the mental capacity to cook up an elaborate scheme. Or even a very simple scheme.

  “True. But I’m not talking about Richie. What do you think of the cold spots?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t put on an extra sweater when you come in.” I hadn’t meant to be quite so honest. But at least I didn’t tell him I could see them.

  I think it worked to my advantage, saying something before I had considered it carefully, or really, at all. Dreyfuss broke into a smile. But before he could try to milk any more information from me, his intercom beeped. “Sir? Richie is on the line.”

  “Thank you, Laura.” The sound quality changed, with a slight hiss indicating connection to a cell phone that was at two bars or less. “How’re you doing, Richie?”

  “Hello, Agent Dreyfuss. Do you need me to come upstairs?”

  “Victor Bayne is here, and he just wanted to say hello.”

  Dreyfuss prompted me with his eyes. “Hello, Richie,” I said.

  “Hi, Vic! You should have come earlier. They had lasagna for lunch. You like lasagna, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Listen, the cold spots in Agent Dreyfuss’ office—you’ve been working on them?”

  “Yeah, what a pain. I try to clean them out every Monday, but then they’re back again the next time I check. You think you can do anything about it? You will try, won’t you? I get so tired of doing the same thing over and over, you know?”

  Richie’s bald-faced honesty was painful to hear. Anyone else would be worried that I was out for their job, but not him. He just wanted the problem solved. He might not be able to see or hear what I did, but when you thought about it, he was probably the best damned medium that Dreyfuss could hope to have.

  “I won’t keep you,” I said. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  “We should get together sometime. But not Saturday. I’m in a bowling league. Unless you bowl. Do you bowl?”

  I tried to imagine Richie slinging a 20-pound ball down a lane and had to stop myself from smiling. It felt too vulnerable to let Dreyfuss see me smile.

  “Uh, no. Some other time, then.”

  “So, these cold spots,” Dreyfuss said, once he turned off the intercom. “You read any more into them?”

  I debated how much to tell him. We both knew damn well that I saw more than I was willing to say. But there had to be some way of making it seem like I was telling him almost as much as I knew. I figured I would feed him a little more information and see how he took it.

  “This one over here.” I reached out as if I would touch the repeater who’d gotten spun around by the bullets, but I stopped just short of it. “I feel…impact.” I touched my thigh where the bullet hit the repeater. Theatrical. Not like me. Did Dreyfuss know that? Not unless he had video cameras on me, or the remote viewer was incredibly descriptive. And if the remote viewer really was that good, I imagine they would have him spying on Castro, or Donald Trump, or Bill Gates…or anyone but me. I touched my hip, absently, the way Crash touched his stomach when he was reading other people’s feelings.

  “I see.” He saw, all right. He saw that I could tell someone was gunned down here once upon a time. I wished I had toned down the theatrics. “Can you take care of it?”

  “You mean exorcise it? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “I could have Richie assist you.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Bible verses? You’ve got to believe in that stuff for it to work for you. I’m what you might call a skeptic.”

  “The FPMP doesn’t endorse any particular religious affiliation. You need different gear? I’ll get it. I’ll even order it from your friend. Tell him to mark it up if he wants—I won’t quibble on the price. What do you need? Voudoun? High magic? Say the word, and it’s here.”

  I wanted to tell him that unless Richie eventually wore the repeaters down by visiting them every single Monday, he was stuck with them, and their bullet holes, and their blood spray. And, in fact, that I hoped they seriously creeped him out.

  But then I surprised myself. “Get me the latest information on exorcism, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Done, and done. Laura will have it couriered to your place tonight. I’d assume that’s where you’ll be, anyway.”

  I didn’t dignify the remark about my hotel stay with a response. “Unless there’s anything else, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Report back here in the morning. LaSalle can wait. I’ll send a car for you.”

  “I can drive.”

  “What about your cab fare?”

  “I haven’t done anything for you today.”

  “Your blue-collar ethic is refreshing. Psychics don’t get paid for results, Detective. They get paid for their time. Because until somebody invents a Geiger counter that tells them whether the Psychs have produced any measurable effects, who’s to say if any work has been done or not?”

  I thought of Doctor Chance and her GhosTV, and had to force myself to keep from rubbing goosebumps off my arms. “If I could just use the john before I go.”

  Crisis pointed through yet another repeater, a gunshot victim just like the others, and indicated a door. “Use my private powder room. It’s got a solid gold toilet and a roll of hundred dollar bills to wipe your ass with.”

  I must have been giving him a Richie-look.

  “Just kidding—but there is a bidet. Pretty swanky.”

  I really didn’t want to spend any amount of time in the same room where he shot water up his bunghole. But I needed to talk to Chance. “Just make sure you turn off the video cameras before I piss.”

  “Do you seriously think I would plant mechanical eyes in my own crapper? I gotta draw the line somewhere.”

  Given how many people had been gunned down in his office, I wasn’t planning on entrusting myself to his line-drawing skills any more than I had to.

  I locked the bathroom door and looked around. Dreyfuss was right. It was pretty swanky, and there were no paranormal film loops of people getting shot to death, either. I focused on white light and my third eye, and tried to suck in as much power as I could. Then I thought about Doctor Chance, and hoped that my need to talk to her would override the fact that I really didn’t want to.

  Hopefully, Chance would sense me reaching out to her, and respond. That’s how it was with those Victorian table-rappers, right? They held séances and summoned spirits. They were mostly hoaxes, so I guess that didn’t count. Still, you had to wonder if maybe the occasional spiritualist was legit.

  I turned the water on and watched it run. “Doctor Chance,” I whispered, low. Because Dreyfuss had told me he wouldn’t be filming me in the bathroom, but I didn’t recall him saying it wasn’t bugged. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Maybe Dreyfuss’ office was out of range. Did I need to get back into that boardroom? I supposed it was possible. I’d need to lie, maybe say that I saw something that I wanted to check out. What? A trail of bloody footprints? I was weighing the likelihood that Dreyfuss would fall for the footprint ruse when Chance’s reflection appeared in the mirror beside me.

  I couldn’t help it. I jumped.

  “I would think you’d be more difficult to startle,” she said.

  “Shh, he’s right out there.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, which gave me a gruesome new angle to see into the bullet hole in her forehead. “Then you’d better keep your voice down. But it’s not as if he can hear me.”

  True. “How did you know I was here? Did you feel me trying to contact you?”

  She looked puzzled. “I don’t know. I just came here on impulse. What else have I got to do with my time but check up on the people who work here?”

  “So you do know what they’re up to.”

  “Keep your voice down.” She crossed her arms and looked peevish. “I might.”

  “I need to know where those faxes are coming from. Have there been any more?”

  “Yeste
rday, actually. Assuming that my sense of time passing is in any way accurate. Which it probably isn’t.”

  My voice shook with the effort of keeping it quiet. “Who was it from?” I said carefully.

  “Don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at it before Dreyfuss shredded it. It was the same handwriting though—I could see that much.”

  She had to be yanking my chain. She was a ghost, for Christ’s sake. If she wanted to see the fax, she could have appeared beside it before it hit the shredder. “Okay…is there anything I can do to help you remember more clearly?”

  “Are you trying to bribe me?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “What could you possibly do for me? I’m dead.”

  Maybe Chance thought that death was a huge barrier, but I’d dealt with enough dead people to know they could be motivated. “What about your amplifier? Tell me where you hid the prototypes and I’ll take up where you left off. I’ll make sure everyone knows it was you who started it all.”

  She stared at me, thinking. That was good. She didn’t shoot the idea down, not right off.

  “It worked, you know,” I told her. “In the hotel room—I made it work.”

  “Damn it.” She whirled around and disappeared through the wall.

  I waited for a long time for her to come back. The water ran. I wondered how long it’d been. Agent Dreyfuss was right there on the other side of the door. Damn it was right.

  I peed—furtively, because I didn’t know who was watching—just in case there was some kind of sensor in the toilet that would monitor whether I’d used it or not. And then I could’ve kicked myself. Because if the toilet was monitored, I bet it could analyze my urine for drugs. Sonofa….

  “Roger Burke knows where the amplifiers are.”

  I buttoned my fly, fast.

  “Roger’s not keen on telling me much.” I washed my hands. Actual towels hung beside the sink. I looked around for a paper towel dispenser, or even one of those blow-dry things. There was none.

  “You’ve spoken to him? How is he?”

  “His usual charming self.” I patted my hands against the towel without moving it from its bar. Then I finished by wiping them on my pant legs. “Trying to get me to do a 180 on my testimony to reduce his sentence. Guess you can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “You can do that?”

  Hadn’t it occurred to her? Maybe not. She didn’t work in law enforcement like Roger and me. “I don’t think anyone would buy it. How can I just walk in there and say I had it all wrong when I testified?”

  “But I gave you Amytal Sodium. Several doses. Can’t you tell them you were confused? It’s not unheard of for it to do strange things to your memory.”

  And my memory was turning out to be a hell of a lot patchier than I thought. “I don’t know.”

  “I know you’re angry at me because we weren’t straightforward with you about the amplifier,” she said. Nice understatement. “But don’t leave Roger in prison, not if something you do or say can get him out. I’ll stick to that fax machine, I swear I will, and I’ll make sure I find out who’s sending them. How about that?”

  I’d now been washing my hands for, what? Ten minutes? I’m sure that didn’t seem suspicious at all. I debated whether or not I should make some vomiting noises to explain my absence. “And the amplifiers,” I said. “Tell me where they are. I know there are two more left. I want to get to one before Roger does.”

  “I won’t—not until you change your testimony.”

  The thought of lying under oath, shuffling my story around to get a guilty bastard off, sat hard and cold in the pit of my stomach. But every time I turned around, the deck was stacked higher in its favor.

  “Someone you’re in regular contact with is reporting to Dreyfuss,” she said. “Can you really afford not to know who it is?”

  And there it was. The tipping point. Fuck.

  “Then keep your eye on the fax machine,” I told her. “I can’t guarantee whether they’ll believe me or not, but I’ll recant.”

  -TWENTY SIX-

  My land line wasn’t bugged—the gym monkeys had told me so. And if the line wasn’t secure at the other end of my phone call, well, that was the FBI’s problem. All the digging and delving I’d been doing with Stefan over the past couple of weeks had really paid off. I gave an Oscar-worthy account of going under, flashing back to the Bed and Breakfast, and realizing that Roger had no idea that he was kidnapping me. I framed Chance as the mastermind. She’d been the one to shoot me full of Amytal, after all. And evidently they already thought she was crazy, since she’d been on her way to psychiatric evaluation when she was scooped up and killed.

  Although the agent’s stray comment about the good doctor being “at large” made the queasiness I’d been fighting crank up several more notches. The FBI didn’t know Chance was dead, and I did. What the fuck was the world coming to?

  I pulled something out of the fridge and ate it for dinner without tasting it, then forgot what it was as soon as my plate was in the dishwasher. A cascade of lies filtered through my brain as I went through the motions of cutting, chewing, swallowing. And with every lie, I reminded myself that I was going to have to tell Jacob what I’d done, that I’d spun a story that might get a murderer off, all in the interest of figuring out who was whispering behind my back to the FPMP.

  Jacob burst through the door and grabbed me up from the couch by my upper arms. He mashed me into his chest. His wool overcoat smelled like winter. “I don’t want to get too excited,” he said, “but Carolyn thinks I might be able to block her.”

  I tried to shake off the disappointment I’d been wallowing in and be happy—because he was on the verge of something big, and maybe he was the happiest guy in the world. And because I’d finally given him something for a change. That made me feel a little bit better. “You’re sure.”

  “No completely. But there’s definitely…something. I wish I had more Psychs to practice with and work out the details.”

  “Who else could you test it out on? Lisa? Crash?”

  “I was thinking of that precog PsyCop on the west side. I put a call in to his precinct.”

  “I know you’re excited and all—and I am too—but do you really want to show a stranger what you can do?”

  Jacob slung his coat over the back of the couch and sat down beside me. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I just wanted to know….”

  “Yeah. I get it. But once the cat’s out of the bag, there’s no turning back.” I should know. Telling someone about a single fucking car crash put me on a roller coaster that took me through two institutions and the Police Academy. I took Jacob’s hand and held between both of mine in my lap. “Maybe you could practice with Lisa, see how it works over the phone.”

  “You think it would?”

  “I dunno. What if you’re the reason the remote viewer has trouble keeping tabs on us?”

  “There has to be some way we can test it….”

  We both flinched at the sound of our doorbell. It was an industrial buzz that could wake the dead, and we hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing it with something that wasn’t designed to be heard over the noise of heavy machinery.

  My holster was lying on the coffee table. I pocketed my gun before the two of us went to the front door.

  A guy in a baseball cap with “Fleet Delivery” embroidered above the bill stood on our doorstep with a huge bankers’ box in his hands. “Victor Bayne?” He had an Eastern European accent, and he managed to give my last name two syllables. And then I remembered that Dreyfuss promised he’d send me something that passed for Psych research these days.

  “…yeah.”

  “Where you want I put this?”

  If he was an FPMP spy, he had a really good disguise. Particularly the five-day B.O. he was working on. I backed away from the door and into Jacob, who gave in once I pressed on him, and backed away, too.

  I signed the clipboard, Jacob tipped the guy a five, an
d then we both stared down at the box on our vestibule floor. “I went and saw Dreyfuss today.”

  Jacob gave the box a meaningful look, then hustled me into the bathroom and turned on the radio. “Go on.”

  “I talked to Doctor Chance, like you wanted me to.”

  “Can she figure out where the faxes are coming from?”

  “Maybe. She said she’d try.”

  “You think she really will?”

  I massaged the back of my neck. My phone call to the FBI had left me feeling battered and sore. “She’s not doing it for me.” I sighed, hoping that some new air in my lungs would make me feel a little bit cleaner. It didn’t. “I had to recant my testimony to try to get Burke off.”

  “When?”

  “Today. I did it already. It’s done.”

  I snuck a look at him to see if I’d managed to kill all the joy that he’d been basking in over his newfound talent. His eyebrows were drawn down, and the crease between them was deep. He was thinking hard.

  “You think what you told the Feds was plausible?”

  “Maybe. Chance coached me. Said that Amytal could have affected my memories. Plus, I figured that my sessions with Stefan were dredging up so much buried shit, who’s to say that one of those things wasn’t my night in the hotel room with the GhosTV?”

  “And Roger Burke has no way of knowing that Chance talked you into it. Right?”

  Weird. I’d been so caught up in Chance that I hadn’t thought much about him. “I don’t see how he could.”

  “Good. Let him know, and make it sound like it was all him. He promised to give you the FPMP. See what he’s got. Now what about this box?”

  “It’s psych research,” I said. “I was trying to figure out what the FPMP had that I would want…and it was the best I could come up with.”

  I followed Jacob back into the vestibule where the box sat on the floor, looking mundane. He picked it up and hauled it into the main room. He set it on the dining room table and gave it his best interrogation-look. He ran his hand over the top of the box, then broke the seal and carefully lifted the cover.