Spook Squad
Page 16
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To say Laura Kim looked at me funny when I invited her to lunch was an understatement. With the GhosTV turned off, I couldn’t tell on sight if any of the suits wandering past were capable of reading my mind, so I sheathed myself in a white light wetsuit just in case. That meant one part of my attention was on shielding myself, so the portion of my brain responsible for talking was underpowered, and none too slick.
“I figure it’s gotta get boring, staring at these four walls all day.” It didn’t seem like a pickup line. I hoped. I dropped eye contact and noticed a folded Tribune with an ad for a hot dog joint called Jim’s Original on top. “We could try that place,” I suggested, and then I felt like an idiot. I’d just asked The Fixer, who wore diamond earrings and tailored suits, to go out for a hot dog?
Her face lit up, and she grabbed her purse.
Aside from my time behind Camp Hell’s razor wire, I’m a lifelong Chicago North Sider. As such, I get all turned around south of Roosevelt. I think it’s because the main diagonal artery cuts through the grid in the wrong direction down there. Plus, with my head throbbing and my brain occupied by white light allocation and random-thought generation, chances were I’d end up in Lake Michigan if I attempted to get anywhere myself. Luckily, Laura Kim was absolutely delighted to be my driver. Turns out Jim’s Original was located in her old stomping ground on Maxwell Street, the neighborhood where her detached car door was nearly lost to an overeager bargain hunter.
Maybe my lunch companion was miked, maybe not, and I was going with the supposition that anything that was said between us would get right back to Dreyfuss. Still, she hadn’t sprouted a third eye in the lambent glow of the GhosTV. At least my thoughts would be my own—and believe me, the wheels were turning. While Jacob was placing her at Burke’s shooting, maybe I could figure out whose orders she’d been carrying out, if anybody’s. Given the fact that the FPMP was one big speed-dating pool, for all I knew, the motives in play had been entirely personal. I’d been pondering how, exactly, to bring up Burke when Laura slowed down and began trolling for a place to park…or double-park as the case may be. Jim’s was a bright yellow building fronted by sliding windows where people ponied up to order, then wandered off eating their sloppy hot dogs and Polishes as they walked, or drove. There was nowhere to sit and nowhere to park, but the stream of diners seemed unconcerned that they weren’t offered these basic amenities with lunch. Maybe they were grateful enough that for a measly $3.50 they’d get fries with their sandwich.
“Are you sure the nitrates won’t make your headache worse?” Laura said.
“It’s fine.” I wasn’t even fibbing. “I feel a lot better now.”
“I kept a headache journal for over a year. Lots of people can’t handle any kind of processed meat. Lucky for me, hot dogs weren’t my trigger.” And I knew my ebbing head-splitter was due to psychic strain, dubious drugs and a GhosTV, though I didn’t volunteer it.
Laura eased her Lexus beside a thuggish SUV with a naked lady silhouette decal on the window. “I’ll order, so we can put it on the company card,” she said, “but you should probably stay with the car so we don’t get ticketed. The Polish with grilled onions is amazing.”
“Sounds good. I’ll take two.”
I pressed my still-cold fingers against the heating vent and watched her approach Jim’s. There were three lines going, all of them doing brisk business. But the line closest to the car, I realized, had a dead panhandler wandering through it. And by through, I mean literally through. His semitransparent body wove in and out of the people waiting in line as if he was getting his jollies from touching their insides. Laura strode past him, planting herself in the line farthest from him, and I recalled how eager she was for me to exorcise Dreyfuss’ repeaters. Maybe for good reason.
The GhosTV hadn’t revealed any gruesome psychic features on her, but mediums are hard to spot. Our subtle bodies ride loose in our skins, and for me to really shake free to the point where the multiple limb syndrome is visible to my inner eye, I either need to be psyactive- or TV-enhanced. In a lower-calibre medium, I imagine the multi-body effect would be phenomenally subtle.
A few minutes later, the smell of awesomeness filled the car. “I saw some parking spots down the block, if you don’t mind us eating in here.” She laughed nervously. “I mean, it’s so much better when it’s still hot.”
“Your fancy Lexus isn’t a no-food zone?”
“A car’s not important, it’s just a thing. A material possession. Besides, I can always have it detailed.”
She pulled into an empty space while I spread a plastic bag over my lap and divvied up the Polishes. The personal motivation theory for offing Burke, the lovers’ quarrel or steamy vendetta, was seeming less and less plausible. It was possible they’d crossed paths at the FPMP. But from what little I knew of her, and from what little I’d seen of the real Roger Burke, I couldn’t imagine them together for longer than the duration of a single incompatible conversation. She was a philosopher—Burke was a sociopath. All my questions about their relationship evaporated, and what I said instead was, “Are you psychic?”
She looked at me, shocked, then started to laugh. Still a nervous laugh, but more robust, like she actually thought I was being funny on purpose.
“You’ve been tested,” I said, “right?”
“Extensively. Me and everyone else at the office. But, no. My Psych scores are totally average.”
Psychic evaluation is straightforward for most talents. Can you call a sequence of cards because you see it in your head? You’re clairvoyant. Are your readings coming from the person administering the test rather than the test itself? More likely, you’re a telepath or empath. Can you peg what will happen in the future? Precog. You probably can’t move things with your mind, given that I’ve only ever met one guy who could do that…but if you could, you’d be telekinetic. Mediums, though, are slippery to test.
To measure someone’s sensitivity, why not run them through a gauntlet of awful repeaters and see how many they swerved to avoid? I’d seen Laura veer around four ghosts in the past two hours. Totally average people don’t do that. In general, people might avoid a haunted locale. But once they were up close and personal, they’d stand there blissfully unaware while non-corporeal panhandlers manhandled their guts. And even if a bunch of ghost energy was available for testing purposes, the only person who could grade the exam would be someone who could actually see what was going on—another medium. A really strong one.
“Who administered the mediumship part of your test,” I said. “Richie?”
“Well, yeah, who else? And I’d been meaning to tell you, as soon as I got the chance, I think it’s really sweet how you are with him.”
I needed to turn that statement around in my head a few times. People don’t generally call me sweet. Plus, I had no idea how I was with him. “What do you mean?”
“The bodyguards would rather be assigned to anyone but him. They have some kind of betting pool running as to who’s going to get stuck on Richie duty. They all throw a few bucks in and…well, I’m not sure how they win, they would never do it in front of me.”
“Why not?”
“I’d rip ’em a new one. Then I’d guilt them into donating to the Manatee Rehabilitation Fund. There’s no need for them to be so cruel.” Funny, I’d expected Laura Kim to spook me with her ice-cold assassin grace and to floor me with the extent of her callousness. I was floored, all right, but for entirely different reasons. Jacob was right, this coldblooded killer was more of a bleeding heart. “Yes, this is a high-stress job, and it’s hard to listen to Richie being so obnoxious. But all the agents have been briefed on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and they know his personality issues are classic.”
Uh oh. “I don’t know anything about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” I admitted, hoping I could right my worldview, which was suddenly alarmingly askew.
“Oh. I thought you…uh, I mean, since you were friends at Heliotrope Station.”
She glanced at me sharply over my use of the word inmates, though she didn’t choose to open that particular can of psychic worms, and steered the conversation back to Richie. “If the mother’s alcohol consumption isn’t known or documented, the syndrome can be diagnosed based on facial features, they’re that distinctive. You wouldn’t know it so much to look at him now, he looks like a regular guy, but there’s a baby picture in his file. In that photo he looks like a textbook example. The bow of his upper lip is so flat it’s practically missing. Plus, his eyes are really small. He has no peripheral vision—which is good, in a way. It’s the reason Agent Dreyfuss uses to explain to him why he wasn’t issued a sidearm.”
Two Polishes with fries sat like a greasy rock in my gut as I pictured Stefan and me swinging around to face each other and laugh our mocking, “Heh-heh.”
Laura brought me back from my Camp Hell ruminations with the question, “Why are you asking about my tests, anyway? I’m not a medium. I can’t be.”
“Yeah…back when the testers pegged me there wasn’t a word for it other than schizophrenic.”
“But you don’t get it. I can’t even deal with cartoon ghosts and rubber masks—I’m that scared of dying. If I ever saw a spirit, I’d totally lose it. Death is just so…so….”
“Messy?”
She laughed once, nervously, at my attempt to lighten the mood. “So final.”
Now the way her level of anxiety spiked around me made a lot more sense.
“I guess I don’t see it that way,” I said. “What gets me is the unfairness of people dying because of someone else’s jealousy or maliciousness or greed. But once we’re dead…I guess it’s some comfort to know it’s not just a black pit of nothingness in store for us. That when we’re done here, we start on another leg of the journey.”
She dabbed the corner of her eye with a greasy napkin while I pretended to be very interested in brushing poppy seeds off my overcoat. “Wow, is it really that late?” she said brusquely. “We should probably head back. I don’t like to be away from my post when Washington’s been calling.”
“Is that code for…the President?”
“No, no. The executive branch doesn’t want anything to do with Psych. It’s Con’s boss, the National Assistant Director. Our attorneys have been advising a clairvoyant in Iowa—poor thing lost her investment banking job to jealousy and internal politics—and Washington wants us to pull out. Con’s been stalling it. One of his precogs told him he could get this woman a good severance package if he dawdled long enough.”
It was bad enough I needed to shift my view on Richie’s mental capabilities. I was not willing to re-evaluate my thoughts on Dreyfuss now, too. Especially since I knew the precog in his pocket was probably the same one who camped in my living room.
The trip back up Halsted was outrageously short, though it was long enough for Laura to convince me to “adopt” a manatee. Well, why the hell not? It only cost twenty-five bucks, plus it got me out of participating in a 5k walkathon. Once we were parked, I dug out the cash while she crammed the evidence of our lunch into a plastic bag: the waxed paper, the mustard packets, the greasy napkins and hot pepper stems. As I handed over the manatee money, a pair of very non-agent-looking people got out of a Lexus parked near the lab door and let themselves in with a magnetic key card. “Have you been through the lab?” she asked.
“Label-makers Gone Wild.”
“A few years ago I had an assignment down there. I was helping them crunch a huge pile of data, a room full of forms, all of it on paper, nothing digitized or searchable. It was nice and quiet, no ringing phone, no interruptions. But even so….” She gave a shiver. “I was glad when it was over. It’s creepy down there.”
I’d been spooked too, though my own issues were caused by my history with Camp Hell. Although if Laura Kim said a particular location creeped her out, I was inclined to wonder why.
I was also inclined to wonder why I’d ever taken her to be a murderer. Sure, she’d been in front of the federal prison that day, but so had hundreds of other people. In our recent conversations, she’d mentioned working offsite on occasion, and also that her job involved a fair amount of analysis. If Con Dreyfuss wanted a set of physical eyes and ears downtown the day that Roger was released, it made plenty of sense to send someone as savvy and observant as Laura. So what if Roger Burke implicated her—what did that actually prove? Burke had drugged a good two dozen coffees and handed them to me with a smile. How far-fetched would it be for him to point me in the wrong direction, either to cover his own ass, or to glean a final moment of sick satisfaction by pitting me against someone I might actually like?
As we walked toward the elevator, I realized I’d learned plenty about Laura during our lunch, but nothing I could use. Proving that she wasn’t the shooter could at least be a step in discovering who the killer actually was, and maybe now that she and I had broken bread together, she’d be willing to hint at her real reason for being downtown that afternoon. Doing my best to sound as casual as if we were still talking about manatees, I said, “D’you remember the day Roger Burke was released?”
“Do I ever.” Laura paused in front of the elevators, but didn’t hit the button. She leaned toward me and said, “I had such a bad migraine, I would’ve checked myself into the emergency room if I thought it would do me any good. I left work early and took so many meds I was out of it for days.”
Although shooting someone in the head might easily be stressful enough to trigger a reaction in the body, this didn’t strike me as the type of response the shooter would give me. I tried to sound sympathetic. “And it was probably a mess to get home, all the chaos, all the traffic.”
“No, not really. I just caught a cab.”
“It was a mob scene down there. My partner needed to lay on the flashers and siren to get out of the jam.”
“Oh sure, down by the Correctional Center. But I’m talking about the Near North Side before lunchtime. As far as I can remember, traffic was pretty light. If I’d been caught in that mess down in the Loop, I dunno what I would’ve done.”
We rode up to the fifth floor while I tried to determine if she was really saying what I thought she was saying. “Then you weren’t downtown,” I clarified.
“Nope, I missed all the commotion.” The elevator doors opened. She went back to her desk and tossed our fast food remnants in her trash. “I’m glad you suggested lunch, Detective. My stomach won’t thank me later, but for now I’m one happy camper. As to your donation, I’ll make it anonymously to protect your privacy, and send your adoption certificate home with Agent Marks.”
I stood, nodding stupidly, and wondered how to say, But we talked to each other that day, as surely as we’re talking right now.
Given some of the mind-bending stuff I’ve seen—fingernail demons and shapeshifting succubi—and given the fact that the sí-no wouldn’t peg her as the shooter, how could I be one hundred percent sure that the woman I’d spoken to in the bus shelter that fateful day was really Laura Kim?
Chapter 18
So I’d gotten our main suspect alone, but now I was more confused than ever. Nothing was adding up. Laura, the potential assassin, got choked up when she thought too hard about the plight of plankton and krill. Meanwhile, Con Dreyfuss, my personal nemesis, was filibustering Washington over a single lost job.
Although…the fact that Dreyfuss and Washington didn’t see eye to eye could be significant. What if Washington was calling some shots that Dreyfuss didn’t authorize? Maybe it was Washington that told Laura to take out Roger Burke. And Jennifer Chance, too.
Sure. Right after Laura talked everybody into adopting a manatee.
I’d been girding myself for another head-splitting visit with Dreyfuss and his repeaters, so I was relieved when Laura gathered Richie, Carl and me in the lounge and s
aid, “A meeting came up. Agent Dreyfuss can’t join you this afternoon, so he’d like you to sweep the perimeter for the rest of the day.” She then said to me specifically, “That’s outside, under viaducts and along the highway. The wind off the river is brutal. If you need gloves or a hat—”
“It’s fine.” I am so not a hat person. “I’m used to working outdoors.”
We all donned our overcoats, then stood there looking at each other. I waited for the FPMP agents to get going. Carl looked to Richie to lead the way when Richie said, “Well, go ahead.”
“Which kit should we bring?” Carl asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak.
“Pick one,” Richie snapped. If Carl cared about the attitude, he didn’t show it. I’m guessing he’d been thoroughly briefed about the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I’m also guessing he received adequate compensation in return for his patience. He chose a spiffy briefcase, then looked again to Richie. Richie gestured toward the elevators and said, “Get going, then—why do I always have to do everything?”
Carl turned and led the way without so much as a raised eyebrow.
I hadn’t realized that being interrupted mid-rosary would leave Richie in such a snit. I’d need to bone up on his condition myself, although reading about it would no doubt leave me wracked with guilt over the way I used to treat him. In an effort to be nice without coming off as condescending, I asked, “Big plans for Sunday?”
He looked me over coolly, and said, “Nothing special.”
Cripes, I knew the game wasn’t quite as thrilling if the Bears weren’t playing, but I’d figured it might cheer him up to talk about the Falcons and the Patriots. Guess not.
It was cold outside, not a crisp winter subzero freeze that made everything fresh and new, but a damp late autumn cold driven home by a persistent wind. Still, the dank stretches under the viaducts probably smelled better now than they would in the summer, just judging by the occasional whiff of pee I detected despite the chill breeze.