PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  The kitchen guy nodded. “You want another one for later?”

  “No thanks.” Would anyone believe I was on a diet? Doubtful. “I’m watching my gluten.”

  He wrapped one in a napkin and handed it to me, beaming. “It’s made with brown rice and spelt. Today’s your lucky day.” Right.

  Chapter 18

  I washed down my mouthful of minimally-processed twigs with all of my water, and as I drained half of Jacob’s glass too, my phone rang.

  I pulled it from my pocket and checked the caller. Crash. The Psych staff was regarding me with varying levels of annoyance for being gauche enough to let my phone ring at mealtime, except for the dream coach, who thought it was funny, and Chekotah, who looked too wrung-out to care. I let Crash leave me a message and set the phone to vibrate.

  The teachers began pulling napkins off laps, draining herbal teas, and pushing away from the table. Quarter after one, almost time for afternoon classes to begin. My phone vibrated against the outside of my thigh. I ignored it, and stood to intercept the dream coach before she got away. “Listen, uh….”

  “Debbie.”

  “Debbie. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “We’ll have to talk on my way to class.”

  I glanced at Jacob, who gave me a small nod as if to say we’d cover more ground if we split up, so I tagged along to Debbie’s classroom.

  She walked fast for a girl, especially a girl in retro tango heels, and when we got to the elevator, I saw she was breathing fast. She jabbed the “close door” button for all she was worth, and then we were alone.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  “I just wanted to talk to you without the Stepford Hippies listening in. Lisa talked about you a lot. I want to help you, any way I can. She was one of my favorite students: smart, focused, and totally genuine.

  It is not like her to just up and leave without saying anything.”

  “What makes you think the administration shouldn’t be in the loop?”

  “The Katrina-and-Bert thing was gag-worthy enough before he stepped into the Director position…but now?” She curled her lip. “Now she’s acting like she’s the Assistant Director, just ’cos she’s doing him.” I hadn’t even realized that Faun and Chekotah were an official “thing,” though in retrospect, the signs were pretty obvious. Not only had I glossed over it because it didn’t have anything to do with finding Lisa, but more likely, I hadn’t wanted to envision Faun Windsong “doing” anybody.

  “Lisa was studying, uh…what do you call your technique?”

  “Sleep Paths.” She rolled her eyes. “I wanted to call it ‘Dream Analysis,’ but I guess it didn’t test well in the over-45-with-too-much-money crowd.”

  “So what happens when you dream? Do you uh…go somewhere?” She narrowed her eyes. “You are a Psych, aren’t you? Lisa was pretty slim on the specifics, but she let it slip once that you were really good at what you do.”

  “I guess I’m not up on all the vocabulary.” Either because I didn’t want to pay attention, or because I couldn’t. The thought of not being able to learn anything even if I should choose to apply myself made the spelt I’d consumed do a nauseous flip in my stomach.

  The elevator stopped on the second floor, and Debbie jammed the “close door” button in with her thumb and held it. “Dreaming happens in your brain. It’s a bunch of neurons firing—electricity.”

  “What’s the difference between dreaming and astral projection?”

  “I’ve never gone astral myself, but the current theory is a part of you does actually travel when you’re projecting. Probably some kind of wave or particle we don’t have the equipment to measure. Think about radios—they emit electromagnetic waves, and a hundred miles away, someone turns a dial and gets to hear that asshat Don Imus on the way to work. Projecting’s kind of like that, but your body is like a radio station, the world is your airwaves, and the rest of the astral plane is your car stereo.”

  I dry-swallowed, and not just because jagged bits of spelt were stuck in my throat. Debbie’s explanation made total sense, not just to my head, but to my gut. “You’re a great teacher.” She tried to quell a smile. “That’s what Lisa said, too.”

  “What do you know about—”

  An alarm cut me off before I could ask her what the hell she might think my page full of no no no was all about.

  “Damn it.” She released the close door button and the elevator doors creaked open. A couple of forty-something women in muted earth-tone clothing stared into the elevator car.

  They eyed me—the tall guy in the suit—with no little amount of skepticism. “Are you okay, Professor March?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she said, in a tone a lot sassier than the one she used with me. We filed out of the elevator and the newbie Psychs trooped in. Debbie gave them an ironic salute as the elevator doors slid shut to cut off their concerned looks. We walked down a hall filled with students on their way to classes.

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?” I asked her. “Maybe that Mexican restaurant across the street. I’ll buy you a margarita.”

  “Can I take a rain check? I need to get to class.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want to sit in?”

  “No, I uh…I would.” I actually wanted to. Weird. I’d been in class all morning, but I’d be interested to hear what was on Debbie’s lesson plan. Unfortunately, I didn’t think deciphering that dream where my teeth crumbled would help my investigation any. “Can’t you skip out?

  Give ’em a reading assignment and have someone write their names on the blackboard if they talk while you’re gone?”

  “Are you kidding me? One of them would go running to Katrina bitching about how I’d deprived them of the full value of their tuition.” She checked her watch. “They’ve determined my time is worth something like ten dollars a minute—and I’m almost late as it is.” She strode into the thick of the crowd. I spotted one or two goth-wannabes and a smattering of Earth mothers, but most of the crowd was a typical mix of people like you’d see waiting in line at the DMV.

  It was possible that Debbie’s being in a hurry could work to my advantage. A lot of times when you interview a subject, they give you all kinds of ridiculous details, thinking they’ll add up to something like they do in a Sherlock Holmes book. Usually it turns out the first thing someone thinks is closer to the truth. Unless you count the zombie employment agency. I doubt that was first on anyone’s list.

  “Listen…real quick…what do you think is going on?” She paused in the hallway, as students streamed around her and filtered into classrooms. Weighing her answer. Which meant she knew something—she just wasn’t sure how she wanted to say it.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re gonna leave me hanging? Just like that?” She began to turn, but paused again in the doorway to her classroom.

  It was a lot like Faun Windsong’s classroom, in that there were no desks, no world maps, no bulletin boards with construction paper turkeys made from handprints on it. Just a bunch of weird chairs, a watercooler and a whiteboard. And a dozen annoyed students all glancing at their watches then looking back at Debbie.

  I put my hands on my hips so my jacket slid open enough that my sidearm showed, and the students immediately found something else to stare at. “You can’t just dangle something like that in front of me and then take it back. C’mon—what if it’s important? Anything you can tell me is more to go on than what I’ve got now.”

  “All right. But not here.”

  She turned toward her classroom and I caught her sleeve. “I’m serious about that margarita.” I sounded a little desperate. “I need to know more about automatic writing, too.”

  “Okay. Class runs ’til five. Let me look up a few things and I’ll come find you.”

  She closed the door, and just like that, I was alone. I leaned against the wall and stared at the empty hallway that had been full of fresh-faced, optimistic Psychs just a minute bef
ore, and wondered how my life would have been different if I’d learned about my abilities in a place like this—maybe even from a teacher like Debbie—rather than Camp Hell.

  What use was it, though? PsyTrain didn’t exist then, Debbie was in high school—and the idea that psychic abilities were real was so new that even the “experts” didn’t know what was what. And if I were really being honest with myself by adding a twenty-three-year-old me to the equation, even with a better facility, better teachers and better subject matter, it didn’t add up to me graduating in the top tenth of my class.

  Still, I could have done without the sleep deprivation and drug testing.

  My phone buzzed against my thigh. I checked the readout. Crash.

  Again. How persistent of him. I might as well answer. “Hello?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Uh…nothing.”

  “Are you at work?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Uh huh. Did you check your email today?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “Okay. I didn’t think so. D’you know if Mr. Perfect did?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Really? Doesn’t he get all his ducks in a row before he suits up for his crimefighting gig?”

  “We’re not in Chicago.”

  “Oh-kaaaay. You win the vague-contest. I give up. What’s the skinny?” Honestly, did he have to use that particular expression? I lowered my voice and turned toward the wall, even though there was no one else in the hall anymore but me. “We’re at PsyTrain, looking for Lisa.”

  “What do you mean, looking for her? She’s not there?”

  “No. And whatever’s going on, it’s a whole big…thing.” He gave a long, drawn-out sigh. “If there’s anything I can do….”

  “Automatic writing. You know anything about that?”

  “It’s a tool. Like tarot cards and candles and incantations.” Like the invocation of Thor and the big iron spike? That explanation didn’t ring true at all. Not that I’d ever dare to challenge Crash’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things psychic, but how could I possibly be using a tool I didn’t know existed? “A tool for what?”

  “It’s old-school divination. Victorian Psychs used it to find pen pals among the spirits and demons and whatever other unseen forces they were looking to chat with.”

  “Demons? Come on. Isn’t there anything else it’s good for? Something more modern?”

  “Like I told you: old-school. Kind of like Ouija boards.” The hair at the back of my neck prickled. Even I knew about Ouija boards. They sold them in same aisle as the Etch-a-Sketch when I was a kid. Not that we were ever privileged enough to have anything fancier than a beat-up garage sale copy of Sorry with half the pieces missing.

  “It’s all about focusing your energy—”

  The thing with Crash is that he can’t stand the idea that someone other than him might be right, which made it hard to bounce ideas off him. Plus, the tone he was taking with me had started to sound annoyingly like Faun Windsong. “I gotta go…we’re kind of in the middle of things.”

  “Wait a sec—before you hang up. Tell Jacob his email is bouncing.” The remains of the carob-spelt cookie tickled at my uvula, and I swallowed down the urge to hurl. “Which email—work or home?”

  “His Q-mail.”

  My mind scrambled to put together a perfectly logical and benign explanation as to why Jacob’s personal email account would be full.

  Maybe his mother’s camera got switched back to its default settings.

  Maybe Q-mail reduced size of its inbox in an effort to cut costs. Or maybe his spam filter was on the fritz.

  Except I didn’t buy it. Lisa’s Q-mail filled up, and now she was gone.

  Cause, effect, or some weird step in between—it didn’t matter. “I gotta go,” I repeated, and I snapped my phone shut and took off at a run to go find Jacob.

  I skidded to a stop in front of the elevator, but the car must have been headed down. The cables creaked, and the pointer on top went from the number 1 to the letter B—very, very slowly. I waited for a couple of seconds while the pointer sat there on “B”, and then I decided the stairs would be quicker. I thundered down the back stairwell, through the main floor, across the public areas, down the side hall that led to the dorm area, and up some more stairs to the second floor rooms above the empty ones Lisa and her suite-mate had shared.

  By the time the door to our room was in sight—ten minutes, tops—

  I’d already convinced myself that an Internet demon was traveling through Psychs’ emails, squatting in their inboxes, and devouring them when they checked their messages. I’d love to say I’ve never seen anything that messed up, but once you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, almost none of your theories land in the “too weird” category anymore.

  Once upon a time, I would have assumed Jacob was immune to weird shit that preyed on Psychs. Lucky Jacob. He was a Psych now, too.

  I staggered to a stop in front of our door, and hammered hard on it like I was practicing to take the point position on a drug raid. “Jacob?”

  “Vic? It’s open.”

  Relief flooded me so fast I swayed on my feet—and only then did I realize how well and truly scared I’d been to think that the minute I’d taken my eyes off Jacob, something had happened to him. Something bad.

  I pushed the door in and it opened a couple of feet and bumped the crate. Jacob and Dreyfuss stood in the narrow aisle between the beds, both of them facing the GhosTV. Both of them stared at me expectantly—and damn it, did it really have to be Dreyfuss there with us? Couldn’t it have been anyone else? I wanted to send him back to his own room so I could talk to Jacob in private, but he wasn’t just employed by the FPMP…he was the goddamn director of the entire Midwest division. If anyone could help us connect the dots, it was him. But if he was even interested in helping us, or if he was just using us to further his own obscure motives—that’s the part I didn’t know.

  My gaze dropped to a sheet of paper in his hands. Hasty handwrit-ing. Directions for working the GhosTV? It looked that way to me.

  He’d done it. He’d pried those directions out of an inmate in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the time it took me to have lunch.

  Just like that.

  It pained me to let Dreyfuss in on my secrets, honestly it did, but between the full inbox, the no no no, and the way my best friend was fucking missing, it didn’t seem like I could afford not to trust him.

  “Jacob,” I said, “your email is full. Just like Lisa’s.”

  Chapter 19

  Jacob and Dreyfuss both pulled out their cell phones at the same time. It took Jacob a few seconds to navigate to the web. Dreyfuss had his secretary on the phone before I could even blink. “Hey, Laura.

  See if you can find any kind of pattern about email filling up.” He listened for a moment, then locked eyes with me and said, “Any particular type?”

  “Q-mail.”

  “Those accounts are huge. They never get full.” He turned away from me and went back to chatting with his disturbing secretary. “Q-mail.

  Uh huh. I know, right? See what you can find. Bye.” Dreyfuss disconnected, but Jacob was still thumbing the buttons on his phone. The vertical line between his brows was as sharp as I’d ever seen it. “I can’t get in.”

  “Let’s see your error message,” Dreyfuss suggested. Jacob handed his phone over.

  Dreyfuss frowned at the little screen. “That’s a new one. I’ll send a screenshot to Laura to see if she can make anything of it.” His fingers flew over the little buttons in a weird thumb-forefinger-thumb combo, and he worked Jacob’s phone as confidently as if he himself owned the very same model. “I’ll get your storage space upped so we can get in there and unlock it, too.”

  He could do that? Q-mail wasn’t government. It was some little open-source thingie up in Seattle—or so everyone thought. Jacob and I met eyes, but neither of us said it out loud.

  There was a thoughtful
pause in Dreyfuss’ thumbing, and then he said, “I’ll score you kids some laptops, while I’m at it. Make it a little easier to keep an eye on the web. What’s your flavor, Windows or Mac?”

  I was fairly sure that even in my mohawk stage, I’d never been arrogant enough to own a Mac. “Windows?”

  “Right. You can always spot a lifelong municipal employee.” He thumbed in a few dozen more characters. “Cool beans. Hopefully the GhosTV’s electromagnetic field won’t do a number on the motherboard.”

  For real? Maybe he was just being a wiseass, but I turned so the pocket that held my cell phone was facing away from the console, anyway.

  Dreyfuss’ phone rang, a subtle beep of a ringtone that I would have taken for a piece of electronics resetting itself in a nearby room if I didn’t see him answer it. “Uh huh? Yeah.” He juggled phones, handed Jacob’s phone back to him, climbed over the corner of our bed, and headed toward his room via the bathroom without even a typical Dreyfuss parting smartass remark.

  I grabbed a Valium out of my suitcase and dry-swallowed it. “I want us to stick together from now on,” I said.

  “Why? You don’t want me talking to Dreyfuss behind your back? Damn it, Vic, if you don’t trust me by now—”

  “That’s not it—not at all.” I planted my hands on my hips and looked around the room without even making sense of the jumble of colors and textures of crap stacked upon crap. “If Dreyfuss can dig up GhosTVs and hack into your full email account and whatever else he’s gonna pull out of his sleeve next…fine. Maybe I’m selling my soul by getting into bed with him, but so what? What the fuck does it matter?”

  He made an exasperated face. “Vic….”

  “The only thing I care about? I want to make sure you don’t disappear next. That’s all that matters to me. If I owe him, so be it. He’s got access to resources it would be impossible for me to scare up, and he’s my best shot.”