PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Someone who signed up for a bunch of different free accounts just so he could mess you up.”

  Jacob shook his head. His eyebrows were all bunched together and he was staring at nothing, thinking. “Or maybe Five Faith managed to dig up my private information while they were house-hunting in Skokie.”

  “We could call Keith and Manny, have ’em set up surveillance at the cannery.”

  Maybe I’d thought he would jump at the chance to bring his brawny gym-buddies into the mix, but he didn’t even seem to notice I was attempting to play by rules I thought he’d understand. He planted his hands on his hips, paced up and back, and finally wedged himself onto the bed on the other side of the laptop. “I’ve got to call Carolyn, make sure she’s okay. You should probably let Zig and Maurice know what’s going on, too.”

  Jacob and I don’t have tons of friends; it comes with the territory of working a million hours a week. Among those friends we do have, the only Psychs are Lisa, Carolyn and Crash. Given our jobs, you’d think that number would be higher, but it seemed to jibe with the statistics for Psych distribution in the general population. I would have liked to think that, as Stiffs, Zig and Maurice weren’t in any danger. But for all anyone knew, Jacob was also a Stiff. And I didn’t suppose religious kooks thought any more rationally than mad scientists when it came to targeting people for their fucked-up agendas.

  I waffled over calling Warwick, but I figured the FPMP wouldn’t learn anything by spying on him that they didn’t already know from Dreyfuss. Once I’d told him what was going on, the Sarge said one word to me. “Understood.” That sent a chill through me worse than Zig’s nervous questions, or Maurice’s heavy sigh. Even if I’d been in the room with Warwick, I probably wouldn’t have been able to read him. He’d been walking the FPMP tightrope a heck of a lot longer than I had. Or at least he’d realized he was on one, while I’d been stagger-ing through life blissfully unaware.

  As brief and pointed as we kept all the conversations, I still felt like I was running on fumes when we finally finished up our phone calls.

  I looked at Jacob, who’d been holding his cell phone in his lap, and staring at it ever since he’d hung up with Crash. He looked wrecked.

  There’s helpless, and there’s helpless. Experimental Psych facilities and thuggish orderlies are one thing. Seeing the man you love looking like that…I almost preferred the wrist restraints.

  “Hey,” I said. I reached out to stroke his face—but hesitated when I saw the scabby knuckles and realized I was just about to touch him with my ectoplasm hand. Then again, nothing paranormal had befallen anything else I’d touched since the incident. Besides, that was probably Jacob’s new favorite hand. I touched his temple—he had a few more grays shining through the black there than the last time I’d taken a good look—and did my best to put the image of his veiny, swollen-foreheaded GhosTV appearance from my mind.

  “What about my family?” he whispered. “Jesus.” I swallowed down a sick twist in my gut and forced myself to look on the bright side. “If anyone can figure this out, it’s us. We’ve brought down scarier sons of bitches. Now that we’ve got the GhosTV, I can project through the building and nose around.” And see light leaking out around people’s eyes…but that was a whole new can of shit.

  “Dreyfuss and all his money and connections are in our corner. And you’re the smartest guy I know; there’s no doubt in my mind you’ll put everything together and figure out what the hell’s really going on.”

  He slung his arm around me and rested his cheek against mine. His goatee tickled my chin. I could feel him breathing, slow and deliberate, getting himself calm and centered. I set my creepy hand on his thigh and felt his shoulders relax. Yep. His new favorite hand.

  When he spoke again, he was the same old Jacob. Strong. Confident.

  Completely in control, and willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. It was probably just a veneer. But at least he didn’t look so damn vulnerable. “Plus there’s the automatic writing,” he said.

  “Maybe we can use that to our advantage.”

  My ick-factor kicked in—because the thought of someone else moving my arm was too close to possession for my taste—but even I couldn’t deny automatic writing might turn out to be a valuable tool. Besides, maybe it wasn’t as scary as I was making it out to be. Maybe it was less like someone using my arm as a sausage casing for their ghost arm. Maybe it was more like radio signals, or Morse code, where an electrical impulse tells a stylus when to move. I suspected whatever it was, Professor March could probably explain it to me in a way I would actually understand. “Debbie was supposed to come help us at…” I checked the clock.

  Almost six thirty.

  Shit.

  “At when?”

  “She was supposed to be here over an hour ago.” She had said she was coming over after her class ended at five, right? I might be scat-terbrained, but I usually had a good sense of time. Although she’d said she needed to look it up. Maybe the research was taking longer than she’d anticipated. There had to be a way to talk to her without running all over the building. Was there a phone in each room, like a motel? I scanned the mountain of stuff. If the phone did exist, it was buried. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway, given that Lyle had pulled the plug on the phone system.

  Lyle. We had his cell number. And it wasn’t buried under a suitcase, either.

  I picked up his card and handed it to Jacob. “Here, call your boyfriend. See if he can help us find her.”

  “My boyfriend?” He handed it back.

  “C’mon. He wore perfume for you and everything.”

  “Grey Flannel. And who says it was me that he was trying to impress?” I tried to give Jacob a “just call the guy” look, but he’d turned back to his new ultra-portable laptop already. “Besides,” he said without bothering to look up. “He gave the number to you. Not me.” While it cut the tension to spar with him on something as dumb as who was getting cruised and who wasn’t, I couldn’t afford to get into the whole debate. I needed to see if Debbie was just fashionably late or if she’d actually stood me up, so I gave Jacob a parting sigh, checked the business card, and dialed the cell number of a Mr. Lyle J. Peters, Office Manager, PsyTrain LLC.

  He answered, and I said, “Mr. Peters, this is Detective Bayne. Is there a way I can get in touch with Professor March?”

  “Well, sure, I can buzz her room…wait a minute, no I can’t. Um….”

  “I need to speak with her.”

  “I’m not allowed to give out personal numbers, sorry, but I’ll call her myself and have her call you right back.”

  We hung up. He still sounded edgy, to me. But that was the way people who didn’t normally chat with cops tended to sound. Pacing seemed like a good idea, but there was nowhere to pace. I tossed my phone from hand to hand as if that might make it ring faster, but then I remembered the slimy feel of ectoplasm in my right hand and wondered if it was even safe to hold the phone with that hand anymore, or if I was emitting some kind of electromagnetic jelly that would fuck up the circuitry.

  There was still enough gauze in the first aid kit to go around my fist a few times—but instead of protecting my carpet burn from dirt and germs, this time I was shielding the outside world from my weird right hand. My phone rang again, and I recognized the number as the one I’d just dialed. “Any luck?”

  “She’s not picking up her phone. I knocked on her door and nobody answered, so she’s not in her room.”

  She’d seemed really keen on talking to me before, in the elevator, so the no-show didn’t make any sense at all. “Is there anyplace she might go to do some research?”

  “I’ll check the library.” He huffed and puffed as he went from room to room, but who am I to judge? “No. She must have gone out. I’m sorry. If I see her, I’ll be sure to tell her—”

  “Lyle, do me a favor.” He shut up fast, in the way people do when you bark their name at them like I just did. “Stand outside Debbie’
s room and call her again, and see if you hear her phone ringing. Can you do that?”

  I hung up with him and found Jacob watching me. “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “Nothing. Yet. I just want to see—” my phone rang. Lyle again. “Yeah?”

  “You’re right. Her phone is in there. Maybe she went to the cafeteria for a snack.”

  Maybe. Except the sick, cold feeling settling in the pit of my gut was telling me otherwise. I hung up with Lyle and told Jacob, “Let’s go check with the security guards in the lobby. Maybe I’m wrong…but I think something happened to Debbie.”

  Chapter 22

  Fact: Deborah March was not in the building.

  Fact: the security guards in the front lobby hadn’t seen her leave.

  Fact: the security camera on the back door hadn’t, either.

  I made my way around the building’s entryway for the umpteenth time, sucking white light through my forehead like a giant SUV guz-zles gas, looking with all my might for something that could tell me where Debbie was.

  As I pictured a white balloon surrounding myself, I realized I’d been chugging white light since Jacob and I left our room. The sudden stop-page of the flow actually left me lightheaded, and I had to plant my feet for a second, close my eyes, and re-orient myself to keep from tipping over.

  While I know that psychic stuff is really real—unlike portions of the general public who still aren’t convinced—I still don’t give a concept like “white light” as much credence as I give “a rock hard spelt cookie,” for instance. So in a place like PsyTrain where everything was set up to facilitate psychic experience, a guy like me, in all my profound sensitivity, could get his skinny white ass into some serious trouble. Sure, whatever Feng Shui might have once existed in my room was history the minute they crammed in a second bed. We still had a dozen instructor Psychs and over a hundred bright, eager newbies continually conscious of raising the energy. As much as I scoffed at the idea that positioning your furniture at weird angles made any difference in those elusive “energies,” I’d need to keep reminding myself that those energies did actually exist. And that I was drinking them up like a binge-drinker at a kegger.

  Plus I had a big hunk of scary electronics in my room that was making said energy do all kinds of unheard-of things. Like causing me to sweat fairy dust and ectoplasm.

  Like ejecting me from my body.

  I patted down my chest as if I was looking for something in my jacket, but really, I needed to ensure that my subtle bodies were still anchored in my physical one, where they belonged. As far as I could tell, nothing was sticking out where it shouldn’t have been. Then I focused on the room.

  Nothing. The lobby was clean, of ghosts, of psychic residue…of everything but the dust that had gathered where the receptionist used to sit—back before they needed to worry that a nutjob with his head screwed on too tight would lob a grenade through the front window in the name of Leviticus.

  Jacob was talking to Chekotah…actually, he was practically propping the guy up. Chekotah was so stressed out he looked about ready to collapse. While I was noticing the way Jacob steered Chekotah toward a chair, like he really was worried he might need to call a paramedic, Lyle hovered near the doorway, took a couple of steps, then blanched when he saw me notice him. Maybe he’d know something. The security guards sure didn’t.

  He had fair skin that blushed easily, and blushed blotchily. He was looking pretty blotchy at that very moment. His eyes darted all over like he couldn’t figure out where to look when I approached, and he gave me a tight, weird smile. I know it’s bad when I’m the one wishing I had Carolyn at my side to figure out what’s what. “How long have you been with PsyTrain?” I asked him.

  “A year? No, wait, it’s almost two years now.”

  “And you live here—in the building?” I said. He nodded. “You ever been tested yourself?”

  He stared at me for the duration of an awkward pause, then said,

  “For what?”

  For gonorrhea. Jesus H. Christ, what did he think? “Psychic ability.”

  “Oh.” Nervous laugh. “Yeah, of course, I…well, my first test showed an empathic tendency.” He sighed. “But after that I tested random-normal. The first one was a fluke. Sometimes you can do that. Score high. Score low.”

  I knew all about that. Two whole years of my life I’d been put through more tests than the dials of the GhosTV. “All right, maybe you don’t have an extrasensory edge. But living here’s gotta count for something. What do you think is going on?” Lyle’s eyes flicked to one side. He was thinking about what he was going to say. People filter before they verbalize, which is why you need to knock them off-balance so they don’t have a chance to clean up their story. I caught his eye and held it—and then propped an elbow on the wall and leaned in closer to him, slouching a little so I didn’t look like I was towering over him quite so much. The potential for me coming off as ridiculous rather than cool was astronomical, but somehow the move worked. Lyle didn’t back away when I got close. Careful, so as not to be totally over the top, I dropped my voice subtly and said, “You can tell me.” His eyes widened a little. Pupils, too.

  He was into me. Jacob had been right.

  I’d never hear the end of it.

  “It’s really nothing concrete.” Lyle sounded like he was just about ready to spill. What would Zigler do? Scratch that, Zigler never would have been angling at a witness like I currently was, and the mere thought of Zig even trying nearly destroyed my illusion of coolness.

  I gave a small shrug, like I could care less about how concrete it was, and I kept on staring him in the eye.

  His cheeks got blotchier. “Five Faith.”

  Another long pause. I leaned in closer, and when it became obvious he’d hit another roadblock, I said, “Uh huh.”

  He wet his lips. His eyes darted. And, damn, just as I figured my working-the-witness mojo had been all in my head and he wasn’t going to give me a damn thing, he said, “If they were trying to target someone, what better way?”

  “Target who?”

  “Lyle,” Chekotah called, and the spell was broken.

  Lyle flinched, looked at me apologetically, and took off at a fast trot toward his boss. “Wait,” I said, but evidently my powers of seduction only went so far.

  “Take the detectives to Debbie’s room,” Chekotah said. “Just them, okay? Let them have a look around, see if they see anything useful.” Lyle nodded, and Chekotah repeated, “Just them.” I glanced at Jacob to see if he had the same feeling I did—that something was churning around under the surface—but there was only so much our non-verbal eyelocks could communicate. Lyle led us to the classroom wing of the building, then up to the third floor to the area where the bigwigs lived. He pulled out a master key. Jacob snapped on a latex glove, took the key from Lyle and opened Debbie’s door.

  Clothes were strewn on the bed, the floor, the dresser. Jacob said to Lyle, “Stay in the hall. The room’s been tossed. We’ll need to call it in.”

  “It’s always that way.” Lyle held up his hands as if to tell us, just sayin’.

  Jacob took a closer look, then said, “If that’s the case….” He pulled out another pair of gloves, handed them to me, and said, “Be careful. Lisa’s room was already contaminated when we got here. But if there’s any evidence the locals can pull from this room….”

  “Right.” Contaminated? Hell, the dipshits at PsyTrain had been in Lisa’s room moving furniture, burning incense, and who knows what else. Not only was evidence contaminated, it was probably destroyed.

  I might not have graduated at the top of my class, but I knew better than to shuffle evidence around. I pulled on the gloves. My scabby, spooky right hand felt taut and prickly as the latex dragged over the scabs. It also felt vaguely weird, though maybe that was just me worrying that I’d fill the glove up with ectoplasm and end up carrying it around like a baggie full of goldfish I’d won at a midway game. Still, it seemed to me that if m
y hand had the potential to spooge on the evidence, it was probably best for everyone that I kept it sheathed in latex.

  “We’ll treat it as a crime scene,” Jacob said. “What do you want to do? Sketches or photos?”

  Like I was any good at either of those things. I’d never needed to be.

  That’s what techs were for. I took a covert peek at my phone to see if it might telepathically relay the instructions for the camera to my brain, but it didn’t. With my best impression of confidence, I said,

  “Sketch.”

  I think Jacob bought it. He was already sweeping around the room with his cell phone clicking away while I still lingered at the threshold, struggling to pick the starting point. It was harder than you’d think. No body, no obvious sign of a struggle, and—judging from a quick glance—no ghost.

  Not so great for me, I supposed, but good for Debbie.

  Unless the Internet demon had sucked her in. But I’d see something obvious, like a computer with a curl of brimstone wafting up from the keyboard, if that were the case. Right? I told myself Internet demons were only a figment of my overexposed imagination. They didn’t exist. And if they did, they wouldn’t stuff inboxes full of bibles unless those bibles were penned by Anton LeVay.

  Back to the sketch, which wasn’t drawing itself. Begin at the beginning, I decided…the front door. I pulled out my pad and pen and considered the room. As far as messes go, it was mostly clothes, like maybe she’d tried on a couple of outfit combos that day. She’d hung plenty of retro crap on the walls to mark her territory; B-movie posters, a neon light in the shape of a lipstick tube, and a full-sized vintage jukebox all warred for my attention. Despite the kitsch-and-clothing explosion, it was a pretty spacious layout. Probably doctors’ quarters originally, rather than patient rooms. I craned my neck to peer around Jacob. Private bathroom, too. Not too shabby.