Miranda Lopez's body gave a long, drawn-out shiver, and then it was still. I got a quick glimpse of her spirit as it floated out of her body. It looked surprised. It was there, and then it was gone, dissolving in a mist of sparkly ether.
I did the same for the other two victims, using the silver pendulums that Crash had given me to separate the spirit from the body. Neither of them stuck around to chat with me, either. They were there, and then they weren't. And when I stuffed the pendulums and the milagro back into my pocket, the bodies remained only bodies, dead and quiet, and the rustling of the leaves was silenced.
The sound of sirens threaded through the high basement windows as our backup arrived, and my phone vibrated in my pocket, chirping. Jacob's ring. I flipped the phone open and held it to my ear. "You'll never guess who I'm looking at," I said quietly, gazing down at Miranda's pale face.
"I'll bet it's not the Tooth Fairy."
"What's up?"
"Carolyn and I have been called in to question a couple of suspects in the disappearance of Andy Lynch. Anything I should know?"
Whoa. The department was pulling out the big guns on this case if they were using me to locate the bodies and Carolyn to do the questioning. "Yeah. I think Esmeralda's the brains of the operation, but you'll get more information out of Irving. He's a wuss. Although, Esmeralda's a crackhead, so maybe you can work that to your advantage."
"I see." I could hear Jacob smiling in the tone of his voice.
"Any chance I'll be home by breakfast?"
I resisted the urge to pick a silver coin off Andy Lynch's eye. Bad enough that I'd have to try to convince everyone that all I did was touch the other three with some silver to stop their thrashing. "Six bodies," I told Jacob. "I'm guessing the coroner will need to determine whether or not they were dead when we found them."
There was a moment of silence on the line while Jacob considered what I was telling him ... and what I wasn't, too.
"You want to give me your professional opinion on that? I mean, if anyone can tell whether someone's dead or not, it should be you."
I stared down at Lynch's slack face and imagined his spirit features superimposed over it. There was a body, and there was a spirit, and they'd been somehow linked so that they could both move around. And yet there'd been no pulse and no consciousness. My gut told me that I couldn't really call that living.
"They were ... um ... they were dead. More or less." I sighed. "Anyway, they are now."
"Right. I can see I've got my work cut out for me tonight." I said goodbye to Jacob and took one last look at Miranda.
Poor girl. She looked worse than either Lynch or Adamson, what with the one eye open, one eye closed. I hoped her mother didn't have to see her like this. And I wondered who'd have to tell her mother what had happened. Me and Zigler, most likely—translated through Carlos. Wonderful. I really, really missed Lisa, and not for her "si-no" ability, either. I bet Miranda's mom would take the news a whole lot better coming from Lisa.
I went upstairs and found Officer Franco walking a crime scene unit through an office stuffed with paperwork. "What's all this stuff?" I asked her.
"Get this," she said, leaning toward me. I could count the number of times a uniformed officer intentionally moved closer to me on one hand. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. "They had fake social security cards and state I.D.s made up for all those people in the basement."
The techs were scooping all the files into boxes, labeling them with thick, black marker, while I considered the dubious merit of providing a corpse with a new identity. "Insurance fraud?" I ventured. "Credit card scam?"
"Not very likely, with fake Social Security numbers. They run a credit check on them before they issue cards."
I nudged open a narrow closet and found stacks and stacks of videotapes. When cops find a large amount of videotape, they think sex ring. I know I do ... but then again, Jacob and I did just make the happy discovery of the shop with the gay porn section not two miles from my apartment.
These tapes looked different, though. Housecleaning hints and tips. Cooking. Gardening. Most of them bearing labels and barcodes from the public library.
"I don't get it," I said, "but it looks like they racked up a hell of a library fine."
Chapter Thirteen
I'd eaten some of the gourmet leftovers that had miraculously appeared—labeled, no less—in the fridge, slept all by my lonesome, and was currently attempting to fit another 3 into a Sudoku square when Jacob came home. His neat, sharply-creased edges were slightly softened and a hint of a five-o-clock shadow darkened his jaw, and that was the only testament to the fact that he'd been up all night interrogating my good buddies from the basement.
"Tell me they weren't cooking up a zombie employment agency," I said.
He eased his necktie off, considering. "Irving flipped out every time I used the word zombie. According to Carolyn, that wasn't what he thought he was doing. He was a big environmental activist forty years ago, the type of guy who'd scrub seagulls with dishwashing liquid after an oil spill. He really thought he was creating a viable alternative to a conventional burial."
"Get outta here—he thought people would let themselves be zombified voluntarily?"
Jacob hung up his suit, stripped off his shirt, then settled beside me on the futon couch in blue striped boxers and an immaculate, white, sleeveless undershirt. White couch, white undershirt, pale blue underwear. He coordinated very well with my apartment, when he was mostly naked. He made it look kind of classy.
"Irving had a certain type of ... client ... in mind," said Jacob. "Someone who thought burial was a waste of natural resources, and someone who'd be thrilled to keep on contributing to society, despite the fact that they were dead.
Esmeralda, on the other hand, had a little more business acumen."
"And how were they gonna send them to work with leaves all over them?"
"The jimson weed?" Jacob asked. He shrugged. "Creative use of down jackets, I guess. And don't forget the veves on their foreheads."
More voodoo talk. There'd been shelves and bins full of other stuff, too—herbs and powders, candles and incense. I thought of Irving or Esmeralda methodically draining all the paranormal suppliers in the city—heck, of them shopping in Crash's store, close enough to make a zombie out of him if he happened to die from too much exotic sex while they were shopping—and I shuddered. "Esmeralda is scary."
"You're not kidding. She's a rogue precog."
"Precog? Like Lisa?" I nestled against Jacob and let the sudoku magazine slip onto the floor. He put his arm around me, tangling his fingers absently in my hair.
"In a way, yeah. Like Lisa. Her precognitive abilities had a limitation—kind of like the 'si-no,' only darker." His fingertips traced patterns on my scalp, and I felt my eyelids drooping.
"Esmeralda knew when someone was going to die. That was the extent of her talent."
So she and Irving could be in the right place at the right time to find volunteers for their experiment in alternatives to burial. Sick.
"She'd probably been trying to figure out ways to exploit her talent for years," he said. "Though I'll bet she would've preferred being able to pick the winning lottery numbers."
I sighed and snuggled my head into Jacob's lap. He traced my ear, the long muscle running down my neck. I shivered a little and pressed against him harder. "I miss Lisa."
"Give her some time," said Jacob. "She's figuring out her talent."
I wrapped my arms around Jacob's thigh. "Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better." Given that I'd lived with mine since the summer I turned twelve and I still hadn't figured it out, I wasn't looking forward to waiting for Lisa to gain enlightenment.
Jacob continued stroking my head, tracing patterns as if he was writing a secret message on my scalp, and I let myself be lulled into a relaxed state that was drowsy and alert at once.
"We don't have to move in," Jacob said, "if you don't want to."
"What?" I sat u
p and banged my knee against the coffee table.
His expression seemed mild, but then again, it might have been practiced-mild, and not this-isn't-such-a-big-deal-mild.
"The whole ghost thing—I hadn't realized that finding somewhere clean would be such a bitch. I should've known."
"Gimme a break," I said. "There's plenty of places around here that aren't haunted. I've seen 'em myself." Places like Miranda Lopez's apartment. Places with clanging radiators and sagging ceilings—places that Jacob wouldn't set foot in voluntarily.
A crease formed between Jacob's eyebrows and he looked at me hard. Maybe it was a residual expression from interrogating crazy zombie-makers all night, or maybe he really was scrutinizing me that much.
"We'll look tonight," I said. I think I sounded optimistic. I hope I did, anyhow, because inside I couldn't stop thinking, please, please, let there be somewhere we can both stand living, or else he's gonna get fed up and nix the idea of the two of us living together. And that would really, really suck.
I have no idea who I was praying to, given that I was agnostic. But it didn't stop me.
While Jacob got his beauty sleep, I spent my afternoon in the SaverPlus jewelry department looking for a necklace.
Okay, maybe not the entire afternoon. I made a quick stop in the tool section, and then, since I was already in the basement, I veered down toward the return desk to see if I could get a look at whoever it was that Crash was fantasizing about. I didn't think the two octogenarians who were staffing the desk in crisp, silver wigs and pearls fit the bill.
Jacob had a condo, two houses, and a duplex slated for viewing by the time I got home. He'd pre-screened all of them for things like roaches and railroad crossings, so there was nothing left for me to look for but ghosts.
Even I felt somewhat hopeful.
We'd left a little early so that I could swing by the alleyway where Andy Lynch's wallet had been found in the Dumpster.
The crime lab equipment was long gone; we may not have found the guy who'd stabbed Lynch in the gut for whatever cash he'd been carrying, but we got Irving and Esmeralda, and my guess was the alderman was happy enough that he had someone to throw the book at.
I would've been happy to question Lynch about his stabbing, but he hadn't stuck around. Not very good closure for the family and friends he'd left behind; but I, on the other hand, thought it was probably for the best that he'd hit the ground running in the afterlife instead of lingering, waiting to tattle to someone like me.
Jacob put the car in park and looked me over. "Do you want me to stay here?"
"And dig the hole all by myself? Ground's frozen."
Jacob reached into the back seat for the trowel and tub of quick-set concrete I'd brought home from SaverPlus. His face was very still, but his eyes looked kind of intense. If I didn't know him, I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in his head. But having spent so much time with him ... crammed together in that lousy little apartment ... having met his family ... having watched him sleep, early in the morning, his eyes moving back and forth beneath closed lashes, dreaming his verifiably non-precognitive dreams?
I could tell he was totally getting off on this.
Late November days are short, and the sun had already set by the time we came to visit Tiffany. The dim alleyway was lit by widely spaced yellow streetlights and everything looked washed out and surreal, like a poorly developed photograph. Except Jacob. He looked like he'd just stepped out of some noir film set. All he needed was a fedora. He called Stan and told him we'd meet him in half and hour, then he set down the tub of concrete, planted his hands on his hips, and looked around the alley with much more glee than I thought the situation warranted. "Is she here now?"
"I dunno. I never did get a visual on her." I dug in my coat pocket and pulled out the necklace I'd settled on. Gold. Very shiny. A butterfly with wings set in sparkly pink gemstones swayed as I held it out in front of me, trying to get Tiffany's attention. Which is stupid, when you consider that she'd seen Crash's pendulums straight through my pockets. "Hey, kid," I said. "C'mon out. It's safe."
Jacob found a patch of snow where an electrical line was anchored into the ground. He kicked the hard packed snow away, exposing a patch of dirt beside the asphalt. "How about here?" he asked me.
I looked around, wondering how Tiffany could possibly resist a sparkly butterfly. "Uh, yeah. That's fine."
Jacob crouched down and started digging a hole while I paced up and down the alley, absentmindedly walking a grid.
Tiffany might not show up, I reminded myself. She might be like Jackie, my most irritating dead neighbor—some days there, some days not, with no rhyme or reason that I could discern. Or she might be like the dead baby in the basement of my apartment building, visible only in the wee hours of the morning.
Or maybe she'd moved on. I looked down at the butterfly in my palm. Somehow, I doubted that. Ghosts that stuck around had their reasons. Otherwise, they'd be like the six victims in the zombie factory, dissolving like smoke on the wind as soon as the tie was severed with their bodies.
"Who's that man?" said someone in an outrageously loud stage whisper.
I looked around. No one here but us PsyCops. "That's my ... friend." I'd almost said boyfriend, which was reassuring, that truth mode had somehow begun trumping my natural impulse to hedge. It was just that I couldn't tell how old Tiffany was. Had she had friends with two mommies or two daddies—or had hers been a world where the adults had loveless hookups for a few bucks or a nugget of crack? "He's helping me make a spot for your necklace, so no one else can take it."
"Really?" she sounded dubious.
"Didn't I promise?"
Jacob bent over the hole he'd made, neatening up the sides, but I could tell he was watching me talk to Tiffany out of the corner of his eye. Guess I was showing Jacob a really good time.
"Let me see it again," she said, her whisper grown frantic with excitement.
Though she could probably see it through my clenched fist, I let it dangle. The streetlights caught the pink gemstones.
They twinkled.
"It's really for me?"
"Really. We're going to put it right in there, for safe keeping. And you can visit it any time you want." I was assuming a gallon of post anchoring concrete wouldn't hinder her enjoyment of the butterfly, since she was so good at seeing through things.
The butterfly charm rotated, though the wind was still, and a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature raced up my arm. "It's my favorite thing," Tiffany said. "Ever."
I walked up to Jacob, my arm trembling from the ghost-chill, and looked down at the hole. "Is it deep enough?"
He nodded, his eyes roaming up and down my body. I don't know if he was looking for evidence of the supernatural, or just taking in a good eyeful of me. I crouched across from him and dropped the necklace into the hole while he broke open the seal on the plastic tub. The plastic gave with a pop and a sigh. It was then punctuated by a squeal and the smack of metal on metal at the end of the alleyway, the ugly clap of a fender bender.
Figured. Just when we were having fun delivering presents to ghosts.
"We should probably go call that in," I said. The collision didn't sound loud enough to have caused injuries, but we'd need to check it out anyway since we were the good guys, Jacob and me.
Jacob handed me the trowel. "I'll go," he said. He slipped his hand around the back of my neck and pulled me toward him for a kiss.
Just a quick one, a warm brush of lips, the tickle of his goatee, but still—what a rush, out there in public where anyone could see us, heck, the ghost kid probably did see us.
I licked my lips as he stood up, dark bedroom eyes lingering on me for just a moment before he turned and sprinted to the end of the alleyway to check out the crash.
"Why did he do that?" said Tiffany.
I shrugged and stuck the trowel into the concrete. It was so stiff with cold that I could barely shove the blade in, like ice cream so frozen it be
nds the spoon when you try to shave a little off for yourself. "Because he likes me."
"But you're both boys."
"Sometimes boys like each other that way."
"Oh."
I scraped out a few puny scoops of the mixture, then decided that if I sat there scooping at it all night, it was going to air-set before I got halfway through. I upended the bucket, slid out the contents, and tried to jam the cylindrical mass of concrete into the hole with the flat of the trowel, instead.
"Just step on it," said somebody. I looked over my shoulder and found a Caucasian woman, maybe seventy, seventy-five, watching my progress. I would have taken her for a live one, if she'd been dressed for the weather, or if I could see her breath. She had on a shapeless, brown, smock-type dress, bright purple socks, and Birkenstock sandals. Her white hair was cropped short and stuck up at the crown of her skull. She looked like a hippy punk grandmother. Or maybe an ageing lesbian.
"It's too cold out to scoop," she told me, arms crossed, gesturing toward the cylinder of concrete with her chin. "Just step on it."
"I'll ruin my shoe."
"Oh, for God's sake," she said. She had a voice like Ethel Merman. "Cover your foot with a plastic bag."
Luckily in the city there's never a shortage of plastic bags when you need one, especially if you don't care whether it's coming apart at the seams or not. I pulled a fairly intact bag from between the links of a chain link fence, wrapped it around my shoe, and stomped.
It took a few good stomps, but I mashed the cylinder of concrete all the way in.
"Now some dirt," instructed the ghost. "Don't worry, it'll still set. And then some snow."
I realized Jacob would have a field day if he knew we had spirit supervisors on our team. He'd been out on the street for quite a while. "Say, you didn't just die in a car crash, did you?"
"Me? Oh, hell no. I fell through a rotten stair and broke three vertebrae."
"Gee. Sorry."
She shrugged and peered between a couple of buildings. "I should've known better. I'd been stepping over it all week, but had my arms full of power tools, the phone was ringing, and I miscounted." She pointed, and I came over to look. It was the back of a building. Brick. Square. Flat roof. Pretty plain, pretty industrial.
PsyCop 3: Body and Soul Page 12