Lisa cocked her head and furrowed her brow. “No.” She sí-noed in silence for a moment, then said, “I don’t really know what that means.”
I’d had a sneaking suspicion something was up. “I’ll give him a quick call and see what’s what.” I pulled out my cell phone and asked Dreyfuss, “Do you have his number?” My little screen didn’t light up when I flipped the phone open. Figuring it was turned off, I hit the on-button.
Nothing. Dead.
Dreyfuss poked his smartphone’s on-button a few times, then stuck the unresponsive thing back in his pocket with a sigh. “Can the day get any worse? Don’t answer that, querida, it’s rhetorical. Let’s just hope Laura can fix it.”
* * *
“As if my morning wasn’t stellar enough,” Dreyfuss said, “now I killed my phone.” He tossed the dead smartphone onto Laura’s desk. It hit with a clatter.
I placed mine carefully beside it. “Mine too.” Lisa didn’t need to join in. She’d left her phone in her car—presumably because the sí-no told her to.
Laura glanced at the phones. “I hate to ask what you were doing,” she said, “but I suppose I need to know.”
“High tension wires might or might not have been involved,” Dreyfuss allowed.
“Then cross your fingers.” The Fixer pulled a fresh battery out of her desk, swapped it into Dreyfuss’ phone, and lo and behold, the little touchscreen lit up.
He took the phone from her. “It was just a drained battery? How is that possible?”
“I have no idea—but the same thing happened to me the last time I got an MRI. Apparently my purse was too close to the machine.” She slipped open the back of my phone and peered at the battery. While my phone is nowhere near as old as my car, it’s still a cheap model. I’m as hard on cell phones as I am on blazers, and since I end up in the phone store a couple times a year having my data transferred out of a crushed hunk of plastic, I don’t invest in anything fancy. “I don’t have a battery for this,” she said, “but I do have a charger.”
Dreyfuss, meanwhile, was scrolling through his messages. “How many times did you call me, Laura? I’ve gotta try and figure out our next step here, pronto, and I hate to think what else could’ve gone to shit while I was out of range.”
“It’s Agent Duff. He’s being really weird…and really persistent. He’s insisting that I leave work and go to his house, but he won’t tell me why.”
“He probably wants you to show him how to program his new remote,” I said, hoping it was something as simple as that. But Lisa shook her head, no.
Behind us, the elevator whooshed open, and out tromped Carl, Richie’s unflappable assistant, looking a lot more animated than I’d ever seen him. He took in the agitated cluster of folks around Laura’s desk and zeroed in on Con. “Agent Dreyfuss, I really hate to interrupt you—”
“It is a phenomenally bad time.”
“—but Agent Duff is losing it.”
“I do not have the resources to wipe Duff’s ass for him at this particular moment. Not now. Not today.”
With the aplomb of someone who knew when to pick his battles, Carl dug in his heels and said, “He tried to talk me into getting Laura over to his place. By force.”
That revelation did give us all pause, despite the GhosTV-raid fallout. “Did he mention why?” Dreyfuss asked calmly.
“No. But he offered me ten thousand dollars to do it.”
Dreyfuss considered that information, then turned to Lisa. “I have a feeling it’s all connected,” she said.
Feeling. Right. Like the way I “sense” things in mixed company when the ghosts are telling me exactly where their bodies are buried.
“What about those repo men who paid us a visit today?” Dreyfuss asked Lisa. “You think he might have invited them to Chicago?”
“I…don’t know.”
Maybe Lisa wasn’t willing to confirm or deny anything, but Dreyfuss decided he’d found his leak. “After all I’ve done for him, this is how that cretin repays me? Son of a bitch.”
If there’s one thing I’ve come to expect from Constantine Dreyfuss, it was his ability to bounce back from anything with a smile, a wink, and smartmouthed quip. I’d never seen him seriously angry outside the astral—and now he was spouting off things he’d normally keep to himself. Watching him teetering on the brink prompted me to fling my psychic faucets open wide and bring my protective white light thundering on down.
Now that Carl had his boss’ attention, he added, “I think Agent Duff came in over the weekend, too. Someone went through my desk—and no one else has the keys but him and me.”
“I’ll check his keycard,” Laura said. I expected Lisa to use the sí-no to save some time, but Lisa kept her mouth shut. Either she didn’t want to broadcast the extent of her clairvoyance, or the sí-no was being flaky again. “He was here Saturday,” Laura verified, “from 10:12 to 10:41. Do you want me to pull the surveillance? It’ll take a few minutes.”
“Do it,” Dreyfuss said.
Surveillance had become a major pain in my ass. But when I wasn’t the subject of the mechanical eye’s gaze, I had to admit it was pretty convenient to have a record of exactly what had gone down. Once Laura pulled up the files, we watched as Richie entered the office he shared with Carl, and proceeded to systematically go through one desk, then the other.
“What’s he looking for?” Laura wondered aloud.
And whatever it was, why wouldn’t he know whose desk it was in—his, or his assistant’s? Then again, it was Richie we were dealing with. Unless there was a football stat attached, he didn’t sweat the details.
Onscreen, Richie flattened a booklet on one of the desks, then peeled a sticky note from a cube and jotted something on it.
“Is that the internal phone directory?” Dreyfuss asked.
“Looks like it,” Lisa said. Which I took to mean that it definitely was.
“From my desk,” Carl said. “That’s my desk.”
I made a mental note to never touch anything of Carl’s without asking him first.
Richie pulled a tissue from a dispenser on the desk, knocking the box askew, and blew his nose. “That was the first thing I noticed was moved. Then he went and put the notepad back in the lower drawer—oh mercy, his germy hands were all over my desk. Every single drawer and knob.”
“Pull his phone records,” Dreyfuss told Laura. “Cell and landline.”
“Already on it. But even if he was the one who called in Washington—what is it he wants with me?”
Dreyfuss turned to me. His hair was corkscrewing free from his scrunchie, the creases on either side of his mouth were deep, and his flecky hazel eyes looked like they’d been on the seeing end of too damn much. “You know him better than anyone here. I want you to go check this out. You never agreed to do any fieldwork for me, and I can’t order you—but I’m asking you.”
Did he honestly think I was enough of a prick to say no? “Yeah, I’ll…okay. Yeah.”
“Not without backup. Laura, get Bly, Santiago and Marks up here. That should be enough firepower to find out what his deal is.”
Laura hit a button. “Agent Marks’ phone is going straight to voicemail.” She turned from the phone to the keyboard and typed a flurry of commands that pulled up a map on a quadrant of her monitor. A few keystrokes, and a moving red dot appeared in the schematics. “He’s in the building.”
Her casual tracking of Jacob gave me a chill. I no longer needed to wonder whether or not I was being tracked, but how. Would my dot still show up, should the FPMP care to search for me, or had the electromagnetic field disrupted whatever was transmitting my signal?
“Actually,” Laura said, “it looks like he’s already on his way.”
Jacob stepped into the fifth floor lobby and leveled a look of calm assessment at everyone in the room. My adrenal system was already on threat level orange from watching my partner show up on a tracking system. As if that wasn’t enough, there was something else, something in
his demeanor that twanged my warning signals. His shoulders were squared, his stride was purposeful and his eyes were intense. Yeah, his bearing’s normally assertive, but there was a brusque stiffness to it now that felt intimidating. I trusted him with all our semi-serious power plays in the bedroom, and his current body language had me a bit spooked, so I could hardly imagine how formidable he must look to everyone else.
Jacob cut through the crowd, heading straight for Laura. As he reached her desk, he pulled a plastic evidence bag from his overcoat—a bag that contained a gun. Wordlessly, he set the weapon down in the middle of Laura’s desk, and he looked at her.
She stared back at him, uncomprehending. We all did.
The moment stretched, silent, awkward, unbearably long, until finally Dreyfuss said, “Okay, I give up. What’s this about?”
“A team just pulled this Sig from a marina downstream from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Once ballistics runs their tests, they’ll confirm it fired the bullet that killed Roger Burke.”
If that was Jacob’s murder weapon, you’d think he would seem happier to have it in his possession. A hell of a lot happier. He was anything but happy, though. And he was staring into Laura’s eyes with excruciating intensity as he explained about the weapon. She stared right back, too, but not in a defiant sort of way. More like she couldn’t imagine why Jacob was telling her about the Sig Sauer in the plastic bag.
Jacob dropped his voice low and said to Laura, “It’s registered to you.”
Laura laughed, a single awkward sound that was almost a sob, because it was painfully obvious Jacob was not kidding around, and said, “That’s not my gun.” Jacob said nothing—no one said anything—and Laura insisted, “My main weapon is right here,” she checked her desk drawer to be sure, “and no one can get to my backup but me.”
“I wasn’t randomly dragging the river, Laura. I located it with GPS tracking. Your GPS tracking.”
“There’s got to be some mistake,” Laura went on with a frantic edge to her normally-unflappable voice. “I store my backup in a safe deposit box, and I haven’t opened it since Christmas.”
While Laura turned to her keyboard to call up more records, Jacob said, “Surveillance footage shows you visiting a safe deposit box approximately forty-five minutes before the shooting.”
Laura’s hands started trembling so hard her typing went sloppy. A sprinkle of random dots lit up the map, and she smacked the keyboard in frustration. “How could I have gone to the bank? I was flat on my back with the worst migraine of my life!”
“Okay, kids,” Dreyfuss said, “everybody simmer down. Let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions.” He reached across the desk and picked up the evidence bag by a single corner. The gun dangled heavily from his two-fingered grasp. “Laura, route the phones to the switchboard and meet me in my office with Dr. Santiago.”
Laura’s eyes widened and she went the color of chalk. “You’re going to interrogate me with a telepath?”
“We need to figure out how your gun got involved. That’s all.”
Although the words were delivered in a calm and reasonable way, I didn’t really buy them. I’m not sure any of us did.
Chapter 28
Bly’s car charger didn’t look like it would fit, but I jabbed the plug at the hole a few times just to be sure. No good. I pocketed my drained phone.
In front of me, the Agent himself adjusted his rearview. I caught a glimpse of his pale gray contacts and looked away. Frankly, I wished he’d stayed behind at the FPMP for Laura’s dissection. Not for Laura’s sake…it was bad enough she was getting brain-raped by Dr. Santiago. For my own sake. Selfish, I know. I would have preferred to work alone with Jacob. So what if Bly knew the way? That’s what GPS is for. I just didn’t like being in a car with someone who could read my emotions, since emotions were impossible to camouflage with times tables and mindless songs.
I vowed to try and keep a lid on my feelings anyway, though it was distracting, to say the least. I’d always thought being a Stiff was a lot more handy than we all realized—and this was a prime example. At least one of us could withhold his inner life from Bly. Hopefully mine was messy enough that he could chalk it up to my perpetual state of nauseated anxiety.
Jacob sat in the passenger seat beside our unwanted empathic partner, sketching out a Richard Duff timeline in his notepad. “How did Agent Duff seem to you at the prison?” Jacob asked.
Bly shrugged. “It’s a prison. He was stressed out—just like everyone else.”
So much for empathic insight.
“Look,” Jacob said, “my ex-partner is a telepath. If I were going into this situation with her, she’d be getting some kind of useful read off him. You could try doing the same.”
I’m sure Bly didn’t appreciate Jacob challenging him—and I was glad I wasn’t the one who’d had to do it. Bly grit his teeth and drove in silence until we pulled onto a side street and he nosed into a parking spot. As he cut the engine, he said, “If you ask him what he wanted with Laura, he’ll come up with some kind of lie. You need to make suggestions. Maybe they were planning something together. Maybe he was going to blackmail her. Heck, maybe he thought he could hold her for ransom. Ask anything you can think of, and I’ll touch my chin if I get a hit.”
It was nothing at all like the way Carolyn worked, but if anyone could handle the shift in operating procedure, it was Jacob.
I wasn’t sure what I expected Richie’s house to look like, but when we took in the two-story brownstone, all I could think was that it looked perfectly normal. The property was well-maintained, from what I could tell beneath the old snow, anyway. His mailbox sported a Bears logo. His brown Lexus was parked in the driveway.
All his shades were drawn.
I mentioned the shades, and both Jacob and Bly unconsciously shifted their holsters. We got out of the car and approached the front stoop. Maybe Dreyfuss had never issued Richie a service weapon, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean he didn’t own a gun. It might behoove us to try and sidestep Richie as soon as we could, since he didn’t have much peripheral vision at his disposal thanks to the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
At least I wasn’t front and center. Bly had been to Richie’s place before—playing pinochle, no less—so he volunteered to take point. I was happy to let him.
Bly rang the bell. We waited. Richie yelled from somewhere inside, “Bring it around the back!” And then, quiet.
Bly rang again. Pounding footsteps. Galumph-walk? Maybe a very angry galumph-walk.
“I said, bring it around the—” the door pulled open, only as far as the security chain. “Agent Bly? I thought you were someone else—the FedEx delivery guy, he’s useless.” The door closed and the chain rattled while he called through the wood, “Is Laura with you?”
“She couldn’t make it. They need her at the office.”
“I ask for one simple thing…” the door whipped open and Jacob and I both sidled away, since for all we knew, he’d been readying a semiautomatic. But it looked like it really was only the door chain that had been engaging him and he was empty-handed. He turned to look at Jacob in a sort of swooping motion that was all head and shoulders, and then at me. His face lit up and he said, “Detective Bayne!”
He didn’t offer to shake this time. For which I was relieved.
“Can we come in?” Bly said.
Richie pivoted to set his sights on Bly, then me, then Jacob, then me again, taking his sweet time in formulating his answer. Finally, he said, “Sure…but it’s kind of messy. I’m right in the middle of a repair.”
The brownstone had a tiny foyer, just big enough to hang up a coat, which led into a combo living/dining room. The carpet was beige, the walls were papered in boring neutrals, and furniture…well, hard to say about the furniture. Every square inch of surface was covered with bits of electronics.
“My television is defective,” Richie explained.
“It was probably under warranty,” Bly said.
“
Anyway…can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”
Jacob and Bly both declined, but I said, “Coffee’s fine.” I figured the longer we stayed, the more congenial we managed to act, the more likely it was that Jacob could slip some questions in about Laura Kim and we’d figure out exactly what had sent Richie off the deep end, and why he was overcome by the urgent need to see her.
First things first—I needed to make sure Richie didn’t hock a loogie in my cup.
I followed him into the kitchen. It was done in chrome and granite—expensive, and again, monochromatic and dull. The kitchen table was dominated by a laptop and a printer, both new, judging by the matching boxes stacked by the garbage can beside the back door. The overflowing garbage can…which had a trio of cereal boxes poking out from the top, processed sugary stuff that would make even a five-year-old cringe.
He must’ve known I was on loogie-patrol. He was extra solicitous when he ushered me over to the shiny new coffee pot, even attempting to slip an arm around me…which I avoided. Because, ick. It was Richie. And he was acting phenomenally creepy.
Calling in sick, taking apart his new TV, acting like a freak…. Everything must tie together, but how? My best guess would be that Richie was bipolar—maybe the FPMP already knew that, or maybe the condition had gone undetected due to the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome—and he was roaring through a manic phase right now. That’s what all the “projects” and the shopping spree suggested to me, anyway. I’ve known plenty of bipolars and I’ve seen them cycle, though. Richie’s body language was awfully calm for someone in manic phase.
Aside from the normal stuff, like canisters and paper towels, the countertop was cluttered with a bunch of tools I couldn’t name—meters and wires and electrical looking things. The cabinet-mounted work light was on, shining down on the gear. Richie shuffled through it like he was playing three-card Monty. He turned back to me with a prescription bottle in his hand. “Want a Xanax?”
Wait, what? “No. Thanks.”
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