A pair of scrunched-up fishnets lay on the floor, and a red bra was draped across the leopardskin bedspread. Given how most women feel about strangers who aren’t potential bedmates looking at their lingerie, I was guessing she hadn’t been expecting company.
I might not have a tape measure on me, but supposed I wasn’t too bad at judging distance. I paced the length of the bedroom, drew a rectangle on my pad, and marked the dimensions. Ten feet, same as ours. It was wider, though, a whole window-width wider.
I placed the windows, doors and furniture, then did a slow circuit with my shields down and my feelers up, in case anything happened to be sending out any helpful psychic signals. Jacob emerged from the bathroom, sweeping his gaze back and forth to cover anything mundane that I was likely to miss, and the sleeves of our jackets brushed as we passed each other in the center of the room. I paused for a heartbeat, but decided not to remark on the fact that I was surprised it felt so natural to work with him, even here, totally out of my element. I suspected he knew.
The bathroom was more cluttered, since Debbie had a thing for makeup that bordered on fetish. The outfit she’d been wearing earlier lay in a pile in the middle of the bathroom floor, as if she’d come back to change after class. Did she feel the need to slip into something a little more comfortable while she looked up automatic writing for me?
I scanned the sink area. There, on the wall—blood? I crouched to take a better look at it, and my days of helping my ex, Stefan, go from a sassy bleached blond to a magenta siren came flooding back like they were yesterday. The spatter shape on Debbie’s bathroom wall looked like it’d been made by something thicker than blood, and its position relative to the sink led me to think it was hair dye. It was old and long-dried. Plus, it wasn’t glowing.
“Someone’s coming,” Jacob called from the bedroom.
I guesstimated the width of the room and added the measurement to my sketch, put an X on the wall and marked it red spatter 10 in. off floor. Then I filled in the rest of the details. Tub. Toilet. Window. Door.
“A few someones. And your friend Katrina.”
Wait, what? I looked at the opposite wall from where I stood in the doorway to Debbie’s bedroom. Door? There was no door on the opposite wall, not like our shared bathroom, where we were stuck flossing our teeth with Dreyfuss just a keyhole away.
I looked down at my sketch. I’d definitely drawn a door there. Huh.
“Give us a few minutes,” I heard Jacob say, his voice projecting out toward the hall. I glanced over my shoulder and saw he was blocking with his body. All right, I thought. I’d worked under a hell of a lot more pressure with a lot smaller of a barrier between myself and the people who didn’t want me around. I could figure this thing out.
I squinted at the wall where I’d drawn the door. Nothing. White light, faucet wide open, energy pouring in through my forehead. Breathe in. Breathe out. Indigo chakra spinning—wow, that was a new one. I didn’t think I’d ever known which way those things were supposed to turn, but there it was, whirling so fast behind my forehead I felt dizzy again.
I looked at the wall where I’d drawn the door. Nothing.
The sound of people pushing into the room was marginally distracting, but Faun Windsong’s voice—my own personal form of water torture—insisting that her precog and her clairvoyant needed to have a look…that voice was the thing that finally broke my concentration.
When I clicked the pen cap so I could stick it back in my pocket, I felt something cold creep over the inside of my wrist.
Holy hell. That glove full of ectoplasm I’d imagined earlier? Yep. I had it.
Chapter 23
Voices amped up as Faun Windsong forced her way in with a couple of Psych students, and while Debbie’s room was spacious enough, jamming a bunch of people into it, especially relatively untrained people, was the surest way to botch evidence I could think of. And I don’t mean contaminating it so it was inadmissible in court, either.
I mean obliterating it so we couldn’t use it to find Debbie, and ultimately, Lisa.
It was tempting to wad the spent ectoplasm-rubber into my pocket and rinse off my hand in the sink, but on the freakish off-chance that the fine folks at PsyTrain wouldn’t totally destroy any evidence that might be in the room, I just couldn’t. Hell, I couldn’t even bring myself to steal some toilet paper to wrap around my wrist; I’d had “don’t touch anything, leave it for the techs” branded into my brain for too many years.
While I figured if I was loudmouthed enough I could distract Faun Windsong from noticing I was keeping my right hand in my pocket, I didn’t want anyone to think I might draw on them. Sure, I didn’t keep a gun in my pocket like some junkie out to rob the Stop ’n’ Go, but I knew better than to assume a civilian would follow that logic.
Instead, I held my elbow at an angle and kept my hand at my side, pretending it was glued to my ribcage. Hopefully no one would notice I was standing funny. And hopefully my exuberant astral jam wouldn’t spill.
Surprise, surprise: Faun was shooting her mouth off at Jacob when I slipped out of the bathroom. “…and you think we can’t see anything just because we don’t have state licenses?”
“What I think,” he replied just as loudly, and while he remained outwardly polite, I could tell he wanted to strangle her. She was lucky he’s practically made of patience. “…is that there could be physical evidence here along with the psychic evidence. They could both be critical.”
The way NPs tend to get jumpy when Psychs come in to do a sweep?
I saw the same thing unfolding here, only in reverse. I said, “Listen, Faun.” Katrina, whatever. “This makes three women, up and gone.
Not just students—teachers now, too. What if you’re next?” She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again and gave me a good, hard stare, and when she spoke again, she’d taken it down a few decibels. “You think this has to do with gender?” Actually, it hadn’t yet occurred to me. When it had just been Lisa and Karen missing, I’d assumed it was something to do with them being roommates. But now Debbie was gone, too—from the opposite side of the building. Jacob’s stuffed inbox didn’t fit the theory—but Faun didn’t need to know about that. I gave her the patented non-answer,
“We’re looking at all the angles.”
Her shoulders fell and she took a half-step back. “If you think this is some kind of thing where women are being targeted…I can’t take that risk. I’ll need to postpone the semester and send everyone home.” Bad idea. We needed to interview people. And mostly, we needed to see if anyone was acting hinky—because no matter how hard it was to land a spot at PsyTrain, if there was a group of religious weirdos targeting Psychs, I wouldn’t put it past one of them to weasel their way in somehow. “For now, the best thing you can do is sit tight,” and stay out of our way… “and let us do our jobs.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Dreyfuss. My favorite person. Right on schedule. He slipped around Lyle, who didn’t move to stop him, since as far as PsyTrain was concerned, he was with us.
He managed to intimidate all the Psychs out of his way—him, with his stupid ponytail and his track suit—took a deep breath, rubbed his hands together, and said to us, confident as you please, “Okay, kids. Brief me.”
I let Jacob handle it. Like I said, he’s made out of patience.
Since just looking at Dreyfuss made me want to punch something, I ducked into the bathroom to see if the not-door was there. It was not.
There. Maybe I’d just imagined it, since I was busy comparing and contrasting Debbie’s room to ours. I couldn’t just discount it, though.
What if my hand had drawn that door of its own accord, kind of like the notebook pages full of no no no? Or what if I was tweaking so hard on white light—hard enough to start seeping ectoplasm—that I was catching glimpses of ghost doors?
Could buildings have subtle bodies? If they did, it would explain why spirits didn’t sink through floors and keep on falling through everything soli
d until they reached the molten core of the earth.
Weariness washed over me at the thought of how much I didn’t know, and I almost sagged against the wall—but I thought better of it, seeing as how it was the wall with the not-door on it. I glanced at the bathtub and considered perching on the edge of it, just for a second, while I knuckled grit out my eyes and wished that Calgon really could take me away…and then, on impulse, I pushed the shower curtain open with my pen.
Debbie had at least ten kinds of shampoo and shower gel—why was I not surprised—and one of those nylon puff things dangling from the showerhead. And on top of that…jewelry. Someone had thrown a necklace over the sprayer.
It wasn’t the fact that a necklace was hanging in the shower that was unusual. Who hasn’t stumbled into the shower with a watch on and tossed it onto the nearest convenient surface? Debbie’s rooms were brimming with makeup and accessories, so it wasn’t the presence of the necklace that was puzzling. It was the necklace itself.
The style…totally not her.
I took a quick peek in the direction of the medicine cabinet, where some earrings and necklaces littered the ledge above the sink. Debbie had a specific “look” going on. She wore funky chains and polka-dot-ted, studded things in black and chrome and bubblegum-pink plastic. The necklace in the shower was beaded, but not the big, round, retro-fifties fake pearls I’d expect to see on Debbie. This necklace was turquoise, onyx and sard seed beads. I almost touched it—almost—as if my hand might be able to tell whether the semi-precious stones were real. But of course they were. I could practically feel them sing-ing to my sixth chakra.
Hippy dippy stuff. Not Debbie’s bag at all.
I held my gloved hand about an inch away from the dangling necklace, sucked some white light through my third eye, and tried to see if any impressions came to me. They didn’t, not like the glowing blood spatter on my carpet. What did I expect? I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t a precog.
“Vic? We gotta get going.” Jacob was in the bathroom doorway. I glanced at him. “Did you find something?”
I cut my eyes back to the necklace. “I dunno. Take a picture of this.” He raised his phone and snapped, though he didn’t seem nearly as curious about it as I was. Between him and me, Jacob might be better at picking out a tie, but I’d been the one with the mohawk and the bad attitude, albeit many years before. I knew when something didn’t belong in an alternative chick’s wardrobe.
We waded our way out of there through the sea of wannabe-Psychs.
They were getting a stern lecture from Faun Windsong to not touch anything, even as one of them was groping through Debbie’s desk drawer and another one put his fingerprints all over the windowsill.
“Let’s get back to our room,” I told Jacob. “I think the day is catching up to me.” We passed by the soda machines on our way there, and I managed to slip out of my latex gloves and pitch them into the trash, with the apple cores and granola bar wrappers, without anyone being any the wiser to my most recent ectoplasmic spurt.
Chapter 24
“I’m just gonna rest my eyes for a second,” I told Jacob.
A tap sounded on our door as I was taking off my shoes. I ignored it, so Jacob did another cardio-healthy bout of climbing the furniture to answer it. Dreyfuss. “Good thing you processed that scene before the Odd Squad got there,” he said. “You know how it is when the sixth sense is the only sense someone’s using. Common sense goes right out the window. And you weren’t the only ones who totally scored.” He reached behind his back, and for a split second I thought he was reaching for a small-of-the-back concealed holster—but the thing he pulled out, with a very self-satisfied smile, wasn’t even remotely gun-shaped. It was a netbook.
Not just any netbook: a silver netbook covered in stick-on sequins like a twelve-year-old girl’s cell phone. Three guesses as to whose computer it was. And two of those guesses, I didn’t need. “What about you two?” he said. “Find anything juicy?” A door that wasn’t there. Which I didn’t want to volunteer…because it meant nothing? It might mean nothing. Or it might have something to do with my player-piano hand. My brain insisted Dreyfuss was working with us, and while I didn’t need to be his buddy, I did need to share evidence. But I wasn’t sure what the door was evidence of—something to do with PsyTrain, or something to do with me. And I wanted to keep the me-evidence to myself.
But Debbie March was missing now, too. So I couldn’t. I tore the sketch out of my pad and gave it to him. He glanced at it and said,
“Red splatter?”
“Hair dye.”
Thanks to the Miss Clairol, he didn’t notice the extra door.
“I photographed the scene.” Jacob said. “I’ll send you the pictures.” Dreyfuss turned to go and clocked his hip on the GhosTV. “And what about this?”
“I saw the one repeater,” I told him. “That’s it.” Liar, liar, I know. But I told myself that Jacob’s veiny forehead and Dreyfuss’ weird eyeball trick had nothing to do with the case, so it didn’t matter if I told him or not. Same with the astral projection.
“Maybe no news is good news,” Dreyfuss said. “I’d prefer to keep telling myself no one’s gonna turn up dead.” He patted the top of the console, and went back to his room.
Jacob stared at the door for a few seconds after Dreyfuss closed it, then said, “He almost sounded like a human being for a minute there.”
“Tell that to the wire tap.”
“I wish I could run him past Carolyn. She’d know how to separate truth from the bullshit.” Thankfully, that was the extent of what Jacob had to say about Dreyfuss. He started to get undressed and ended up knocking the crate lid on the floor with his elbow. “I’m gonna try to organize some of this stuff,” he told me. “Maybe move one of the dressers into the hall.”
I grunted, and he knew me well enough to take it as, “Knock yourself out.” I was so drained, both from working a case I had a personal stake in, and from the time change that supposedly shouldn’t have affected me at all, that “resting my eyes” went the route it usually does when I’m at home in that recliner of Jacob’s I’ve taken over. The light, the strange bed, the sound of Jacob moving furniture…none of that could prevent me from conking out so hard and fast it felt like one of those rides where the bottom falls out.
Later—maybe much later, given the time warp that happens when sleep hits hard—Jacob pressed into bed behind me. We’ve always fit together well. My last boyfriend was always bitching about my elbows and knees, especially when he was crabby because his pot dealers had run dry, but Jacob probably couldn’t even feel my pesky bones through his solid wall of muscle. I sighed back into him. Falling into bed after a long day is great. Settling in with Jacob wrapped around me, though…that’s amazing.
He snuggled up harder, and the snuggling wasn’t the only thing that was hard. It felt like someone had nestled a salami between the cheeks of my ass for safekeeping. I smiled to myself and enjoyed the warm, stiff length of his heavy cock against me. That was about all we would enjoy, given the fact that if I had even one iota of spare energy, I intended to use it in finding Lisa, and not getting my rocks off. Plus, there was no lube.
Jacob’s mouth pressed into the back of my neck, and an electric thrill shot down my spine. “What do you think you’re you doing?” I said.
He mostly mumbled, but I made out, “I love the way you feel.” The sensation of the words against my skin played along some poorly mapped erogenous zone, and that combined with his sneaky flat-tery—in an arena where I so sorely needed it—made my body start to respond to his subtle grinding. My nuts hitched, and that telltale tingle started at the base of my cock.
Still, it felt like I should be getting some rest, not some jollies. “Here?” I said. “Seriously?”
“Please…don’t say no.”
He sounded awfully forlorn. I figured the investigation must’ve been wearing on him. Hell, if it meant that much to him, I’d give him a quick beej so we cou
ld both get some rest. He’d probably sleep better without that huge boner weighing him down, anyway. I started to roll over, but Jacob had fit himself against my back curve for curve so close I couldn’t muster the leverage to move. “Okay,” I said, and pushed back to get him to give me some room. He didn’t. “I’m trying to go down on you, but I can’t do it if I’m facing the other way.”
“Don’t just get me off…that’s not what I want.” He flicked his hips and slid that stiff piece of meat up and down my ass crack again. It felt like skin on skin.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “C’mon. I want to.” He trailed his fingertips down my arm, and my skin danced like we were rubbing socks on a carpet to create static. “Don’t you want me?” Talk about a conversation I was tempted to deflect with a well-placed sarcastic comment. I couldn’t do it, though. Not the way he sounded.
Raw. Really raw. “Sex just isn’t on the top of my list right now. When this is all over, once we get home—”
“When you were talking to that guy….”
I knew exactly which guy he meant. The little doughy guy with the Grey Flannel cologne. “Right, I’m sure I looked like a big idiot playing sexy-cop for Halloween. Are you giving me shit about that? ’Cos he was just about to tell me something important.”
“I dream about you looking at me like that.”
I shoved against him to try and turn around to get a look at him now, but it was like shoving against the side of a building. “I don’t look at anybody like that in real life, mister, because I look like a huge fake doing it.”
“Really? You weren’t into him?”
“What? No, I wasn’t into him.” If I were single, and itching for some company? I supposed I wouldn’t turn him down. But he wasn’t anyone I’d do a double-take at and think, wow, that guy’s tasty. Not like Jacob.
“I thought…when you were inside me…I didn’t think I could satisfy you.”
PsyCop 6: GhosTV Page 19