He pressed his forehead against the back of my head and breathed into my hair. “And the temperature drop?”
“Dunno. It’s a ghost thing. Always has been.”
“Can spirits hear your thoughts? Did I need to speak to Connoley aloud, or could I have communicated mind to mind?”
Since when did I have all the answers? Or any at all, for that matter. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to Vulcan Mind Meld with ‘em, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Carolyn hears thoughts, right? Maybe there’s a medium out there who’s got a touch of telepathy.” And maybe a different medium actually could get a reading off a dead person’s possessions, if the medium’s talent came through a clairvoyant-looking route. Who knows?
Jacob took me by the shoulder and maneuvered me around to face him. Our lips brushed. Mine were cold, his warm. He touched my cheek. His hand was trembling.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He smiled against my mouth. “Yeah. More than okay.” He cupped the back of my head and put an end to our conversation with a long, deep kiss.
**
“Detective Bayne?” I wondered if Betty was using her normal tone of voice, or if she was especially chipper. Hard to tell. “Sergeant Warwick wants to see you before you go to LaSalle General this morning.”
I tallied up my mental scorecard and decided that the chances of me getting called on the carpet for something I’d screwed up were exponentially higher than anything else: a pat on the back, a harmless question, or a couple free tickets to a Bulls game. And yet, Betty wasn’t doing that thing with her eyes—the thing that said, “be careful—he’s in a mood.”
“Like, uh, now?”
She glanced back at his office as if to see if he was listening in, and then nodded.
I wouldn’t even get to talk to Zigler, tell him that we’d sent the fire ghost on to wherever it was that tormented, crazy spirits went when they were done haunting the spot they’d died in.
I brushed some bagel crumbs off the front of my sportcoat, waited for Betty to buzz Warwick and give me a nod, and went in.
Ted Warwick was scowling at his computer. He didn’t use a mouse, just the touchpad. I watched his blunt cop-finger stroking the plastic square as he scrolled something on his screen. I couldn’t really gauge how irritated he was. His face had a few permanent lines on it that tended to be misleading.
“Sit down, Bayne.”
And again, that could be either good or bad. I straightened my tie, and I sat.
Warwick closed his laptop, and sighed. “I need advance notice if you plan to venture out with Detective Marks in any official capacity.”
I can’t imagine how blank I must’ve looked. Scratch that, I can. Pretty blank.
Warwick looked at me hard. He didn’t seem angry, exactly. Just really, really focused. He stared at me for a second, then swiveled in his chair and pulled a sheet of paper off his inkjet printer. He slid it in front of me.
It was a candid photo, slightly dark. A three-quarter view of Jacob striding by in a black suit and overcoat filled most of the frame. My God. He was so hot.
And there, just behind him, was me. I don’t photograph well. I was opening my mouth to talk. But it was definitely me.
“Cameraphone,” Warwick said. “One of the nurses snapped a shot of Marks so she could show her girlfriends.”
“This was taken last night,” I said. “How did you end up with it?”
“I’m getting phone calls and e-mails about you left and right. This one came from D.C., though. So I figured it was time to lay down some ground rules.”
I wanted to balk. I’ve never been good with rules. But I couldn’t get over the fact that Warwick wasn’t angry with me. Warwick was always angry. He’d been angry with me since day one. So naturally I was curious about what had changed.
Warwick slid me a card. “Cell phone, home phone. Call me half an hour before you and Marks go ghost hunting.”
I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote, very small, on the back of the card, Is FPMP watching? I rotated the card so it faced Warwick. “And this is your e-mail,” I said, “right?” He squinted at it, then met my eye, and very deliberately, nodded.
I jabbed my finger at the card, because damn it, I was so fucking sick of being monitored. “This one bounces sometimes. Don’t you have another one?”
He looked at me hard.
“Cos I had this Psych research article I wanted to send you. So we could talk about it.” I was so not smooth.
But I guess I was good enough.
“Okay,” Warwick said. He wrote out Evidence Rm. in small block letters. “Try this one.”
I’d been in the evidence room a time or two, but to be honest, I’d usually let my Stiff deal with the evidence, same as the paperwork. The long, stuffy, rambling room was floor-to-ceiling with boxes and bags, and oddball oversized pieces of furniture, cars, and even architecture. I stared down at a hunk of banister and tried to imagine the tech sawing it off the staircase.
There was also a distinct hum in the air. The west wall was covered in electrical breakers and archaic conduits that looked like a blatant code violation, even to my untrained eye.
“Too much interference,” said Warwick, his gruff voice quiet and close. I hadn’t even heard him approach. “They can’t hear us through the static.”
I turned and looked Ted Warwick over. He looked like a cop to me, big and muscular, with a few extra pounds and additional folds of skin that’ll sneak up on you in your sixties, but still, someone you wouldn’t pick a fight with in a bar. He had a cop face. Cop eyes. And so I’d always assumed that was exactly what he was: a cop.
Then again, so was Roger Burke, technically.
“Will I be in the doghouse if I ask who you work for?” I said.
Warwick turned toward a shelf, picked up an evidence bag, held it at arm’s length to read the faded label, then set it back on the shelf. “No,” he said. He shook his head. “It’s probably better for you to hear it from me, and not cobble together some half-assed theory.”
He turned toward me, stuffed his hands awkwardly in his pockets, and said, “I work here. Period. But if I wanted a PsyCop, I had to play ball. With…them.”
“Okay. I’ll buy that.” I wondered if he’d known back then that adding a medium to his roster would buy him a building full of bugs and a bunch of double agents on his force. But I’m not sure it mattered. Whatever Warwick thought he was getting into, it’s what he ended up with that counted. “But this paperwork you’re funneling to them, the way their goons show up when I’m at a crime scene…you could’ve given me a heads-up.”
“It wouldn’t have changed a thing.” Warwick picked up the same evidence bag he’d already looked at, turned it over a couple of times, and put it back again. “Here’s what I can tell you. You do your job, keep a low profile, and do the odd side-job for them, and they’re not gonna bother you. That’s what you want. Ain’t it?”
I wanted to argue, but when he put it that way, maybe it was.
“You and Marks meeting up,” he made a broad gesture, as if it could encompass Jacob in his absence, “all of a sudden, you stood the chance of popping up on everyone’s radar. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Marks a celebrity…but people recognize him. They remember his face. People hear the word PsyCop, the first guy they think of is Marks.”
That was true.
“They start connecting him and you….” He stuffed his hand back into his pocket and shrugged.
I thought about the way we approached the media at the Fifth. Warwick himself always spoke to the press, and he never named names. It was always “investigators” who would be following up, or collecting evidence, or combing the scene. Jacob’s sergeant, on the other hand, recognized him as the public relations dream that he was, and stuck him front and center every time they so much as nabbed a peeping Tom. Which meant that while the Twelfth got the enthusiastic community policing program, and the new parking lot, and even the good so
ftball team T-shirts, the Fifth got nothing.
“Is it worth it?” I asked.
Warwick looked up at the ceiling. My eyes followed his. Ductwork. He rocked on his heels, and weighed his reply so long that I thought he might not even answer me. But when he did start to talk, it all came out in a long rush.
“I wanted a medium. My sister’s kid, her oldest son…he was a medium. We always knew, see? ‘Cos he could talk to my mother, who passed when he was just a baby. We all thought he was making it up. He seen her picture, maybe. Heard us talking about her.
“But then he recited the birthdates of all her brothers and sisters, nine of ‘em…. None of us knew any of them dates. My brother-in-law, he went down to City Hall, looked ‘em up. It took him the better part of a day, but he did. And each and every one of ‘em was right.”
Warwick gazed at the ductwork. I tried hard to breathe normally, but I was fighting off a lump in my throat. Because how could I help but compare this other guy’s experience to mine? What if I had someone to confide in, an actual family member, someone who wasn’t itching to ship me off so that they could wash their hands of me? Everything would’ve played out differently. Everything.
“Uncle Lou?” Warwick said. His voice startled me. “His first name was really Leslie. The kid even knew that. I asked my cousins. They said he never went by it, not since he started the first grade.
“Once we figured out the kid was for real—and believe me, I was a beat cop on the south side, and I looked for every other explanation I could think of—we had him keep quiet about it. And little Alex, he was a good kid. He never told nobody.”
I couldn’t look Warwick in the eye, not while he told this story. Because I could tell it wasn’t gonna end well. If it did, Alex would be the one with the gun and the shield. Not me. I stared hard at the humming conduits.
“Until they came up with those Psych screenings. Alex was twenty. And we brought him in to be tested.”
Cripes. He was a year younger than me.
Warwick was quiet for a long while. I looked at him, finally, and found him staring at the evidence bags with a red flush over his cheeks and neck. “Did he train?” I asked.
Warwick nodded.
“Heliotrope Station?”
He nodded again.
Jesus.
Maybe Camp Hell was the part of my life I’d managed to repress, and maybe I was sweating buckets lately, and popping Valiums while I tried to sort it all out. But I realized something. At least when Camp Hell recruited me from the Cook County Mental Health Center, I was already fairly jaded.
Imagine if I’d thought the world was a fairly decent place? They would’ve flayed me alive.
“He didn’t last long,” Warwick said. “Slit his wrists after three months. That’s what they told me, anyway.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, and gave a heavy, world-weary sigh. “I viewed the body but…who’s to say what really happened?”
“He tested too high,” I blurted out.
I’d meant to comfort him. Warwick was a cop; he’d want the truth. Wouldn’t he? But when his eyes snapped to mine, and I felt the full intensity of his gaze, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “Alex died before you even signed up,” he said. “You got no way of knowing that.”
I didn’t add anything else. We both knew that I did.
Warwick shook his head and turned on his heel. “I wanted a medium, I got one. End of story.”
I had to take long steps to keep up with him, and even so, I barely caught what he was saying because he was so busy walking away from me. “Sarge,” I said. “Hold on.”
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob and looked. I could tell his patience was running on fumes—and that maybe I’d get a better answer later, once he’d shed a tear or two for Alex in the privacy of a restroom stall. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe we’d never speak of any of this again. After all, that was the way he handled anything problematic, by pretending it wasn’t happening. Right?
“Why me?”
He stared.
“I’m sure you saw everyone’s files. Faun Windsong was almost as strong. Maybe even a level four. Me? My talent’s stronger, but I know my file was full of black marks, and it had ‘queer’ written all over it.”
Warwick considered. “The gay thing? Technically, it’s a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen if anyone hassles you over it. And you always had enough sense to downplay your…lifestyle. So I didn’t worry about it. The rest of the file?” He thought about it. “I been on the force longer than you been alive. What your record said to me was that you knew how to take care of yourself.” He shrugged. “So far, I been right about that.”
He opened the door. A rush of air drifted in from the hallway, cool and clean in contrast with the sour stuffiness of the evidence room. “Faun Windsong,” he said, so low I almost didn’t hear it. “Now there’s the most annoying interview I ever did.”
-THIRTY THREE-
I sat down hard at my desk and stared across it at Zigler. He was typing something up on his ancient desktop, and it was a good enough excuse for him to not have to look me in the eye. So he ditched a scene with a crazy ghost in it. In my eyes, that made him more of a pragmatist than a coward. But Zig seemed to be having a little trouble swallowing the way things had gone down in the basement at LaSalle.
“You talked to Warwick a long time,” he said.
I nodded, then realized he was still not looking at me, and followed it up with an affirmative grunt.
Zig typed. The keys made sticky plastic sounds. Elsewhere on the second floor, a half dozen conversations rose and fell and a couple of phones rang.
“Anything I need to know about?” he said.
“Huh?”
“Come on, Vic. Stop playing around. What did Warwick say?”
“Oh.” He’d said so many things that I hadn’t even processed them all. But nothing that pertained to Zigler. “Nothing. Not about what happened yesterday, anyway.”
Zigler’s typing stopped.
“I, uh…I didn’t mention anything to him,” I said. “So, y’know. It’s all good.”
Finally he looked me in the eye. “It isn’t ‘all good.’ We’ve still got a thing in the basement at LaSalle. What’ll happen with that?”
“Oh.” I scratched the back of my neck. “I kinda went back and…dealt with it.”
“You went back.” Zig thought about that. “Alone?”
“Jacob…helped.”
Zig sat back so hard his chair wheezed. “You and Marks took care of it.”
He seemed so baffled by that idea, I almost felt sorry for him. “Jacob’s into stuff like…that.”
He shook his head. “Jesus.”
“I guess we could check out the repeaters now. But my guess is that they’re all tied to that ghost in the coal cellar. She was restrained down there, a fire started—heck, maybe she started it herself—and a bunch of people died, including her. A few of those people left repeaters behind. She left a full-blown spirit.”
Zig was nodding at my explanation, but he still looked stunned. “So you worked with Marks.”
“Unofficially. I mean, I think it’s not exactly smiled upon by either Warwick or Owens.” Or the FPMP, or whoever else was keeping tabs on me. “How do you even fill out a time card for that?” I joked.
My attempt at lightening up the mood fell flat. “He’s a better NP, I imagine.”
“Working with Jacob is like being chased by a bulldozer. If he were my Stiff, I’d be used up and burnt out by now.” I didn’t mention that Jacob technically wasn’t NP, either. I figured it was safest to keep it our little secret, even though it meant that I couldn’t complain about him stealing my white light.
Zigler looked doubtful—as if I could make something like that up just to spare his feelings. “Trust me,” I said. “On the job, Jacob’s a shark. Carolyn Brinkman can handle that. Me?” I pushed a paper clip along the edge of my desk blotter. “I’ve got enough to worry about withou
t keeping one eye on my partner, too.”
Zig nodded slowly. “So. If we head back to LaSalle, are we still going to see your breath in the coal cellar?”
“Nope. It’s clean. Other than all the boxes and ductwork I knocked over, anyway.”
My phone rang and vibrated, and Zigler went back to his typing when I flipped it open to take Jacob’s call. “Hello?”
“Last night was amazing.”
“Uh huh. I was just telling Zig about that.”
“You know what would’ve made it even better?”
I could imagine. “Well, it was kinda late.” I was running on three hours’ sleep as it was.
“I want to do it again.”
I reminded myself that I should be happy for him. He actually wanted to be a Psych. “Yeah, uh, sure. I imagine something will crop up.” Given that I was surrounded by death, I was fairly confident we’d find more ghosts to play with. Hopefully, they’d be nice, safe repeaters.
“Don’t work too late,” he said. His tone of voice suggested that he’d make it worth my while.
We disconnected, and I looked at my messages. “This message you left me after all the fun we had at LaSalle yesterday,” I said to Zigler. “Do I need to listen to it?”
His cheeks flushed. “I’d prefer if you didn’t.”
“You got it.” I hit erase.
There was yesterday’s unplayed message from Jacob, telling me I was right. He didn’t go into any details, but the tone of his voice made me smile, even though I knew now that it would lead to white light theft, and who knows what else, down the road. I saved it. That left one more message—the one from Unavailable.
Even though I expected Dreyfuss’ voice, he still managed to surprise me. “Here I am,” he said, “in a swanky building overlooking the river, and there you are, in a musty old basement. Does that make any sense to you, Detective? Because you’re the one with the skills. Shouldn’t you be able to cash in on them?
“Look, I don’t expect you to be crazy about me. But let’s be practical. We can help each other out, so why shouldn’t we?
“I’m really keen on getting those cold spots taken care of, dig it? So here’s a little something that might light a fire under you.
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 27