I was reading through for maybe the twelfth time when Jacob got home. He led with, “What’s this I heard about you coming back to the FPMP tomorrow? All you owed Dreyfuss was an exorcism, right? He didn’t talk you into anything else. Did he?” He sat down beside me. “Vic?”
While I did register that he was speaking to me, I was currently occupied with the fact that my reality had just tilted on its axis. Not because of anything supernatural, either.
Once Jacob realized how livid I was, he did try to talk me down, but he was subtle about it. He’d actually ratcheted down my pissed-offedness significantly by the time Lisa came home. I realized, vaguely, that her hair looked nice, loose around her shoulders. But mostly I was as devastated as the victim’s family. Because I hand the system a murder scene swimming with evidence and a perp so obviously guilty his own mother would convict him—and he’s acquitted?
“The last case I worked on,” I said to Lisa, “guy’s truck covered in blood evidence. Does he get convicted?”
“I don’t know. That’s the future, it hasn’t happened yet.”
“But is there a chance he’ll get off? The sí-no must be able to see that.”
“Maybe there’s a chance, but there’s usually some kind of chance for anything you can think of. You’ll go crazy wondering about every possible way it can turn out.”
“A good chance?”
No answer. I didn’t need to do any wondering to piss myself off all over again, that was for sure. “Why bother?” I snapped. “Why bother bringing in these lowlifes at all if the only consequence is a few months in lockup while they wait for their acquittals?”
“You can’t think about it that way,” Jacob said. “You did your part. You’re not responsible for what happened after that.”
Holy shit. “I never said I was—although you’ve got to admit, the fact that I gathered the evidence with my ability did seem to be the deciding factor.”
They tried to convince me it was a fluke, that the system needed people who cared, people like me. That the use of PsyCops’ testimonies was so new and so radical it had a long way to go, but it would never gain legitimacy unless judges and juries got used to admitting psychic evidence. Maybe it was true, and someone had to be the poor schlub whose work was systematically destroyed just to allow the idiots in the courtroom to begin reaching outside their comfort zone. But did that someone really need to be me?
* * *
Going back to working on my jigsaw puzzle didn’t feel worthwhile, not in comparison to the puzzle of my life that needed sorting through. I couldn’t see flipping on the TV, either. Prime time features bad guys who get what they deserve in the long run, and my cynicism cup would surely runneth over if I had to bear witness to fictional karma in action. So what was left to do? Jacob put food in front of me and I ate it, but I didn’t taste a thing. And then I swallowed the remaining half of my Seconal and headed upstairs, ignoring all the well-meaning inquiries as to whether I was okay. I could have told them tomorrow was another day, or it would all come out in the wash, or he who laughs last, laughs best—but I’ve never been much for platitudes, and I figured my inner circle wasn’t either.
I was staring at the pressed metal ceiling, counting the number of diamonds across (twenty-four and a half, same as always) when Jacob joined me. He lay on his side, facing me, with his elbow planted and his head propped on his fist. “I’d be pissed off too,” he said.
“Forensics found a fragment of the dish stuck to a bloody fucking hair under the baseboard,” I said. “How can anyone with a brain manage an acquittal out of that—just because I told them where to look?”
Jacob didn’t bother answering. We both knew it was bullshit.
“So how do they treat the evidence you find for the Feds?” I asked. Then I realized I had no idea what he actually did with himself once he left the cannery. For all I knew he was a glorified bodyguard, or, God forbid, a pencil-pusher. “Assuming you’re an investigator.”
“I am.”
I counted to twenty-four and a half, then flipped onto my side to face him. I’d figured him to be bubbling over with eagerness to sell me on his spiffy new job, so the reticence seemed telling…though I don’t know what, exactly, it told me.
He searched my eyes, and said, “I can’t really say how they’ll treat my evidence. I haven’t found anything.”
“In two months?” He would have put away at least a few scumbag rapists by now if he was still on the force. “Couldn’t you ask Lisa a few questions to move things along?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“She can’t see anything. It’s like the signal is blocked.”
Although Jacob wasn’t the only True Stiff in the world, that seemed pretty damn inconvenient. “At some point you give up, tuck away the file and start something new, right? How much longer does Dreyfuss expect you to dig?”
Jacob shrugged. He seemed awfully unconcerned to me, given that he cares enough about everything for everybody. Some small part of me must have been wondering why he wasn’t more frustrated about his lack of results, because I almost missed it when a sinew in his jaw shifted.
And then I realized his nonchalance was all a front.
I tested the waters with, “Maybe all that matters to you is keeping an eye on the FPMP.”
He clenched his jaw again.
Maybe not.
“I could talk to Lisa for you,” I suggested. “She might sí-no with me a little longer—”
“I thought you didn’t want anything to do with the FPMP,” he said, and he was right. I didn’t. “So don’t worry about it. It’s my problem.”
Of course, by saying that, he basically ensured that I’d worry about it. Plus, picking at the edges of Jacob’s investigation was infinitely more appealing than contemplating the futility of my own job. “Maybe the sí-no could point you at someone who’d be able to help you.”
“We’ve hashed through it already. It’s not working. Not for this.”
“Then maybe they need to let it go and let you move on to something fresh. Some things take time to unravel.”
Jacob rolled over and showed me the back of his head.
I kept talking. “They’ll shift the investigation to the back burner eventually, right?”
“Not anytime soon.”
“It just seems like such a waste.”
Since I wasn’t letting it go, Jacob sighed and rolled to face me again. “The agency’s whole mission is to keep Psychs from getting picked off. And here an ex-FPMP Stiff was gunned down on a crowded street in broad daylight.”
How had that managed to evade the news? And the water cooler talk? “Recently?”
“Last February.”
Whatever I’d had for dinner churned in my stomach as my body put together what Jacob was saying before my brain did. “Here, in Chicago?” I asked stupidly.
“Right in front of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.”
Maybe my brain had been searching its databases for the appropriate film clip. It played that delightful bit of memory now: the gray drizzle, the traffic, the SUV sideview that nailed me in the shoulder. The gunfire, the panic, the churn of the crowd. The red hole in Roger Burke’s forehead.
It also played the pantomime his spirit did before it got sucked into hell—the one where he’d implicated Dreyfuss’ secretary in the shooting.
Jacob had been watching me for a good long while before he said, “The statement you gave the investigators was pretty straightforward. You didn’t mention seeing anything other than the physical.”
And because I hadn’t been willing to go into Roger’s ghost-charades, I hadn’t mentioned seeing Laura at the scene, either. I groaned into a sitting position and scrubbed at my face with my hands. One Seconal was totally not cutting it. “You’re working on a case for two months where I was an eye witness, and you tell me now?”
“I was hoping you weren’t directly involved.”
“Well, I didn’t shoot h
im.”
Jacob kept his tone deliberately bland. “We recovered the bullet. It was a 9mm round, but not from a Glock. A Glock’s firing pin leaves a square impression, which eliminates your service weapon.”
Jeez. Good thing I only had one gun to my name.
“Is there a reason I should have run it by you?” he asked. Smoothly. Calmly.
As if I didn’t see right through him like a decade-old repeater. “What does Lisa say?”
“That you know more than you put in the deposition.” Fantastic. They had actually discussed this already—although Jacob could have presumed as much with no help at all from the sí-no. Then he added, “But not that you know who pulled the trigger.”
Hold on a minute.
Didn’t I?
Chapter 6
“Laura Kim?” Jacob almost laughed, but then his expression hung, not quite smiling, as a dozen emotions played across his face, all of them some subtle flavor of confusion and disbelief. “You’re joking. Right?”
“You know me better than that.”
“But…” Jacob’s mouth worked. I’d never seen him so gobsmacked. “Laura Kim?”
“Was she there on some other official business?”
“I had no idea she was there at all. Are you sure it was her?”
Yes, I am able to tell one Asian person from another. I answered with a look.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I was just at the firing range with her—she picks bull’s eye targets instead of human-shaped outlines. That’s how uncomfortable she is with shooting at a human being.”
Too bad he hadn’t known…maybe he could have grabbed one of her casings. I read the thought on his expression, and just as quickly I saw him counter it. Snagging a casing wouldn’t do any good, since he didn’t have any casings from the scene in evidence, only a slug. He’d need a slug for comparison, and the bullets that pierced the bull’s eye targets last night would be sunk deep in ballistic rubber mulch. Good luck finding it among five tons of additional used lead.
“She’s the nicest person you’d ever meet, Vic. A real sweetheart. I can’t believe she’d…you saw it?”
“Not directly. Burke’s ghost told me it was her.”
“You talked to the…? My God, that’s huge. What did it say?”
“Nothing—he was a good twenty yards away.” There was no sugar-coating it, I supposed. “But he gestured to me. He made Chinese-eyes. And a gun-shooting motion. And then he disappeared.”
“She’s Korean,” Jacob murmured. “Not Chinese.”
He wanted more, I could tell. A plausible reason, for instance. A more likely suspect. Something that could potentially make sense. We both searched for inspiration in the tin ceiling, and finally I said, “He could have been lying. He’d love to make a fool out of me.”
“Isn’t it your theory that naming the killer is usually the whole reason a murder victim sticks around? If that’s the case, why would he go against the flow just for the sake of pointing you in the wrong direction—especially if he wasn’t going to be around to revel in the fallout?”
I’d never been able to pin down Roger Burke while he was alive, so I wasn’t exactly shocked that I couldn’t make heads or tails of him now that he was dead. Since the most definitive answer we could possibly get was right downstairs, I figured I might as well go see what the sí-no thought of our predicament.
The overhead lights were off, but a reading lamp was glowing inside the tent, throwing Lisa’s silhouette against the blue nylon. Her hair was still softly loose. I caught a snatch of conversation, and then a pause—talking on her phone, judging by the tilt of her head and the angle of her arm. Low laughter. More talk. Spanish, I realized as I cleared the bottom step. Which was good. Because it would be creepy to stand outside her tent and eavesdrop.
Most of my Spanish vocabulary consists of phrases like I didn’t know that car was stolen, or I was home watching TV during the shooting, or That’s not blood, it’s molé sauce. Given her tone, I was pretty confident Lisa wasn’t in the midst of that type of discussion. I stood for just a moment and let the lilt and cadence sink in, and enjoyed the fact that she sounded happy. Really happy.
I imagined a Hispanic guy on the other end of that phone call. Maybe thirty-ish. Earnest looking. Good hair. Someone her family would approve of—hell, someone I would approve of. Maybe a cop. Or maybe something less brutal, like a teacher, or a social worker, or a fireman. My question could wait, I decided. It had gone unanswered since February, after all. I was just about to turn and head back upstairs when Jacob came thundering down after me, so loud he couldn’t have made more noise if he’d been trying.
Lisa’s silhouette stood and unzipped the tent flap, and then the nylon peeled down and she wasn’t a silhouette anymore. Her fight-or-flight response is just as well tuned as mine is, and Jacob’s “herd of buffalo” impression on the stairs had triggered her alarm. “Hold on,” she said into her phone. Then, to me, “What?”
Jacob wobbled to a stop behind me, taking in the tent flap, the phone, Lisa. He’s as skittish as I am about her leaving, and while they’re obviously close, there’s more awkwardness between the two of them than there is between Lisa and me. Once you get to know me, I’m pretty predictable. Not Jacob. For years Jacob has lived by the adage, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all…and if you’ve gotta lie, do it by omission. But thanks to the sí-no, he can’t even think a dissenting thought without Lisa knowing about it by asking herself a few quick questions. He walks on eggshells around her now. Not that it really helps. “It can wait,” he said. “We didn’t mean to…it can wait.”
Lisa looked us both over, then said, “I gotta go,” into the phone. A small pause, then, “No, llegarás a mañana.” I knew mañana meant tomorrow, but had no context for the rest of the phrase. Probably something mundane, like “see ya.” I considered looking it up later in my Spanish-English dictionary, but knew my chances of remembering it more than thirty seconds without writing it down were slim. She disconnected, then said in a voice more exasperated than curious, “It’s no big deal. What?”
Jacob said, “When Roger Burke was shot in front of the prison, Vic says he saw Laura Kim—”
Lisa looked startled. “He did.”
“I already said that.” Why was this such a difficult concept for Jacob to grasp? I recognized Laura, and I’d seen her there. “Laura Kim was in a bus shelter across the street. She talked to me, told me I shouldn’t be there. I got away from her, and then I heard the shot. I wouldn’t have pegged her right away—I figured she was just a secretary, you know? And with all the skyscrapers, you couldn’t tell where the noise had come from, it was like an echo chamber. But once he was dead, Roger indicated she was the shooter.” I don’t use the word “indicate” in common conversation, but I was fresh from reading all those carefully worded reports. Indicating, noting. Careful words for when reality sounds completely whacked.
Lisa’s eyes tracked back and forth like she was watching a tennis game play on the front of my shirt. After the first second or two, I realized that she hadn’t said yes.
And she hadn’t said no, either.
I held my breath. Jacob held his. The distant sound of a motorcycle engine peaked and ebbed. The radiators hissed. The refrigerator motor kicked in and settled into a low hum. “Vic saw her,” Lisa repeated, puzzled. “But it won’t tell me if she shot him.”
“See?” I said. “She was there.”
Lisa looked troubled. “Actually…I don’t know about that. Only that you saw her.”
“Okay,” Jacob said, “that’s fine, that’s good—it’s something to work with.” He grabbed a pen off the coffee table and started pawing around for something to write on. “All we need to do is narrow down a better question.”
He was looking so hard for a piece of paper that he didn’t see the look on Lisa’s face, or the fact that she was shaking her head. But I did. “I’m not helping you investigate Laura Kim,” sh
e said.
Jacob paused his search for paper. “Why not?”
“Don’t you know? She’s Constantine’s ex-wife.” Holy shit…Laura was way out of that weirdo’s league. “It wouldn’t make any sense for Laura to do it. Maybe they’re not married, but they’re still close—they trust each other with everything. If she was the shooter, either she went behind Con’s back and…” she shook her head. “No. Or Con knew and…no, he didn’t know.”
Jacob said, “That’s good, it means he didn’t put me on the case just to keep me busy.”
“No…and that’s it, I’m done. That’s all I’m going to look at. We’ve been through it back and forth, up and down.”
Jacob said, “But not with Laura—”
“It’s like one of those Magic Eye pictures where you’re supposed to see something else in the pattern. If I don’t see it, and I try to force myself, it’s not going to come. Especially not if I’m upset about it. The sí-no won’t show me the main thing you want to know, and the harder I try to see it, the more you grill me about it, the muddier it gets.”
Jacob looked startled. “Why are you upset? I’m not grilling you.”
“What does it matter to you if she used to be Mrs. Dreyfuss?” I asked. “Since when do you care what either of them think?”
“You two weren’t the only ones who came out to Santa Barbara to help me when I was in a bind. Con was there too.”
“Oh sure,” I scoffed, “out of the kindness of his heart.”
Lisa gave me a warning look. “I’ll ruin my own credibility if I go around accusing people that close to him, especially if the sí-no isn’t clear and I could be completely wrong.”
She zipped up her tent while Jacob stared at her like a drunk who’d missed last call by ten seconds. I took him by the elbow and steered him toward the stairs. Lisa might be unwilling to play the psychic game tonight, at least not with us. Still, I had no doubt she was sí-noing herself to sleep, whether she would admit it to Jacob or not. As someone who’s accustomed to having a handle on things, she must’ve been irked by her talent’s non-responsiveness. I was sure she’d keep picking at it. And when she came up with something definitive, we’d be the first ones to know.
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