PsyCop 4: Secrets

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Not.

  “Put a bandage over it and say you have a rash.”

  “That’s really appealing,” I said. So much for Jacob’s so-called control.

  -TWO-

  Carolyn Brinkman wouldn’t have been my first choice as a moving helper, but since I wasn’t exactly chummy with my partner on the force, Jacob’s partner would have to do, all hundred and ten pounds of her. Carolyn was waiting on our front stoop, ready for business in immaculate white tennis shoes, size four jeans and a baggy U of I sweatshirt. She’d brought along her best friend, Crash, who also happened to be Jacob’s ex. Yay.

  “It’s awfully late,” she said. Not the world’s warmest greeting, but Carolyn had no choice but to say what she thought. She was a telepath who could smell a lie a mile away, which made her a kick-ass investigator. But the flip side of her talent was that she couldn’t lie, herself. Not even for the sake of being nice.

  Crash took a long drag off his cigarette and gave me a smug little smile. He always looked smug. His hair was dyed Kool-Aid green. Maybe that’s what he was looking smug about today, despite the fact that it clashed with his olive drab army duster. Or maybe he knew my ass stung with every step I took—either because he was an empath who got “feelings” about what everyone else was experiencing, or because he’d taken it up the ass from Jacob himself. Crash’s smirk widened and I looked away. One day I’d probably slap him.

  And then I’d regret it, because he was probably into stuff like that.

  Crash flicked his mostly-smoked cigarette into the gutter. “C’mon, kids. Let’s get this show on the road while we’ve still got daylight.”

  The next couple of hours were a blur of heavy lifting and smashing my fingers on anything they could possibly be smashed on: between boxes and crates, furniture and walls, the front door and the doorjamb.

  We emptied the rental truck first, and lined my white pressboard furniture up against the far wall. The high ceilings dwarfed it; the bookshelves looked like something out of Bar-bie’s Dream House. I regretted using up the entire stack of sticky notes. At least Carolyn and Crash didn’t give me any flak. Carolyn was probably happy she was actually able to lift something. And Crash might not have even noticed, since his furniture was no better.

  The apartment at the back of his store was outfitted with mismatched odds and ends he’d found in the alley.

  The folks at Jacob’s storage unit sent his furniture over in a crate that was probably about the size of my apartment. My old apartment. I lived here now, I told myself.

  “Victor,” said Carolyn. “Give me a hand.”

  It took both of us to lift Jacob’s bedside table. “Holy shit. Are the drawers lined with lead?”

  “And this is going upstairs, right?”

  I would’ve been just as happy to leave it on the narrow strip of lawn. “I guess.” Jacob and Crash steered the massive leather sofa through the front door while Carolyn planned out the order in which we’d take the smaller stuff. I’d expected to feel jealous the day that Jacob could look at Crash without scowling. But instead I was just relieved that it wasn’t me holding up the other end of that gigantic couch.

  Carolyn and I were just setting down the coffee table and Jacob and Crash were halfway up the stairs with the king-sized box spring when two phones chimed in pager-mode simultaneously. “I’ve got it,” said Carolyn. She speed dialed the Twelfth Precinct, where she and Jacob work sex crimes. They wouldn’t have been called in so late unless it was urgent, possibly a suspect or a victim who’d just turned up and needed to be questioned before they could start reconstructing events in their own heads. You’d think that either something is factual or it isn’t. Carolyn tells me people’s individual truths often have little to do with facts.

  Jacob came downstairs, planted his hands on his hips, and looked at Carolyn. “There was an incident at Rosewood Court,” she said.

  The Twelfth district rubs up against mine, the Fifth, on one side, but I wondered if I was hearing her right. “The old folks’ home?” I said.

  “I’ll get cleaned up and meet you there,” said Jacob. “Vic, find me the blue suit bag in the closet.”

  Carolyn and Jacob deployed, him to the bathroom and her out the front door, leaving Crash and me frowning at the boxes. “That is so fucking sick,” said Crash.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean something happened to a resident,” I told him. I squeezed my way between an empty bookshelf and a waist-high box. Jacob could shower in two minutes if he had to, and I figured he’d need socks, underwear and shoes. “It could’ve been an employee. Or a visitor.”

  Crash worked his tongue stud against the backs of his teeth like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “No, it wasn’t,” he said flatly. His hand was pressed against his stomach, Crash-shorthand for “I felt it.” I fought the urge to press my hand against my stomach, too.

  “We can finish this ourselves,” Crash told me as Jacob tied his shoes. “Unless you’re too much of a wuss to lift the entertainment center.”

  I did my best not to let him yank my chain. Without answering him, I headed outside to get the next box. Jacob, now freshly-showered and suited up, paused at the edge of the container to grab the back of my head and pull me into a quick kiss. “Text me if you need anything.” Which I took to mean that he was turning off the ringer on his phone. The more a crime disturbed Jacob, the less he said about it.

  Jacob nodded at Crash. “Thanks,” he said. Then he climbed into his midnight blue Crown Victoria and peeled away from the curb. His tires squealed as he took the turn at the end of the block.

  “Well, let’s get to work,” said Crash. “This stuff won’t move itself.” That’s it? No flirting? I probably should have felt relieved. But I didn’t, and of course I then felt guilty for wanting him to flirt with me. I climbed deeper into the storage container after him, glad that we didn’t have much more furniture to move. “What do you think?” he said. “Do you want to start with the entertainment unit, or are you going to put your back out?”

  “I can carry that. Half of that.” I planted myself at the far end of the gigantic slab of solid wood and hoped that it was true. Crash let me go first. That was probably for the best. It would have been really embarrassing if I dropped the thing on him.

  We brought the entertainment unit in, me leading, and then some boxes and some shelves, and a big leather recliner. Once we’d gotten the container emptied I was about ready to collapse. But I knew Jacob would be gone all night, or most of it at least, and so I hoped that Crash could do one more thing for me—with his clothes on—before he left. “Hey, you know about computers, right?”

  Crash looked up from the fridge with a two-liter bottle of Coke in one hand and half a sandwich in the other. “I guess.”

  “The phone guy said that our DSL line was hooked up. Can you help me set up the computer?”

  Crash chewed slowly. His eyes raked my body up and down, and I wondered what kind of payment he would suggest. Then he took another slug of Coke and shrugged. “Okay.” I let out a breath, carefully, so that he couldn’t see I had been holding it.

  “But you have to drive me home. I’m not taking that bus at midnight.”

  “Sure. I’ll drive you home.”

  Crash inhaled the rest of the sandwich and ducked back into the fridge for more. “Fine. Figure out where you want it to go.”

  I looked down at the really big box marked “computer”. It was Jacob’s. I felt a little weird about going through Jacob’s things, which is funny, when you think about it. My whole apartment had been fair game for months.

  “It’s just my laptop,” I said, wondering which box it’d ended up in. “I want to get online.”

  “Yeah. That’s the first thing I’d hook up.” Crash’s voice was right next to me. I wondered if he was being serious, or if he was just looking for a way to shoehorn the phrase “hook up” into casual conversation. He bit into an apple way too hard. Juice rolled down the side of his hand and he licked it off
. He wasn’t looking at me or making a big show out of it.

  I felt dirty for noticing.

  I found the laptop in a bag of textbooks from Camp Hell. I hoped it hadn’t been contaminated. I put it on Jacob’s coffee table and opened it up. “Where’s the modem?” Crash asked me, looking around the huge room.

  “Uh….”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Okay. Where’s your phone?”

  I looked around. We had a land line, right? I could call it and find out where it was if I knew the number.

  Crash threw his bulky wool duster over my little plastic table, the one reserved for my keys. It nearly collapsed under the duster’s weight. He sashayed into the kitchen. “Never mind. Here it is.”

  I watched the laptop power on. Crash returned to the furniture maze. “Okay. So where’s your wireless router?”

  Damn. I knew I’d gotten off too easily. “I don’t…know?” Crash crossed his arms. “Do you even have one?”

  “Maybe not?”

  “Okay, how about a CAT-5 cable?”

  I stared at him.

  “Like a phone cord, only fatter.”

  So it went, with him asking me for a bunch of bizarre things whose proper names I’d never heard before, and me looking like a total idiot. It took nearly an hour to hook up the cable, locate the carbonless form with our account information and password, and get everything up and running.

  And then the damn laptop had to download about eight hundred virus definitions. It does that every time I go online, which is why I hardly ever use it.

  “Fuckin’ A. That thing’s slower than a dead dog. Can’t you afford a new one?”

  “I’m not all that into computers.”

  “Yeah. I noticed.”

  I stared hard at the laptop screen. The updates were almost done.

  “So.” Crash drew out the word and added a naughty lilt to it. “Why couldn’t you wait for Mister Perfect to help you hook it up? Gonna download some porn to keep yourself occupied?”

  “No.”

  Well, I had been expecting him to flirt. Maybe he’d picked up on that vibe. He eased up next to me at the kitchen counter. I could’ve moved over so that we weren’t touching, but I was too stubborn. I figured he’d just keep scooting up next to me, anyway. “Jacob doesn’t get jealous of porn, does he?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Probably not with you,” he purred. “You’re such a good, faithful boyfriend, you don’t give him any reason to doubt your loyalty.”

  “Yeah. I’m a saint.” Porn would never get me into trouble—I found it a lot more engaging with Jacob kneeling between my legs than I did sitting by myself in an empty loft. Porn wasn’t on my agenda, but an old boyfriend was. The whole time we’d been lugging furniture, my thoughts kept drifting back to my partner-in-crime at Camp Hell. There must have been some hormonal reason; I’d thought of Stefan while Jacob was fucking me, and there he was, front and center in my mind.

  There were a few really old boxes where I might have stashed my pathetic collection of photos—the one foster family I could actually stomach on a picnic that was besieged by yellow-jackets, a few tattered school portraits with “sample” stamped across my chin, Stefan and me with our fingernails painted black with a magic marker he’d stolen from the nurses’ station. But I didn’t really want to dig for that old picture. I figured it would only remind me that I had another damn birthday creeping up on me. What I really wondered was what Stefan was doing now.

  I brought up the web browser and typed in “find person.” A list of three million potential sites popped up. I sighed. “I want to look up an old friend of mine from Heliotrope Station, see how he’s doing.”

  Crash planted his elbows on the countertop and drew in even closer, but it seemed like I’d gotten him more interested in looking at the computer than in torturing me. “Camp Hell’s classified,” he said. “You won’t find anything about it online.” That didn’t seem possible. I keyed it in.

  A few million pages came up, but even on the first page, the hits weren’t right. Gag albums with camp songs on them. A web comic that hadn’t been updated in three years. A story about a tent full of fire ants.

  “Pop your buddy’s name in there,” said Crash. “I’ll bet you don’t get anything.” I wanted to prove Crash wrong more than I wanted to keep my ex-boyfriend a secret.

  Besides, Stefan and I had been friends, too. Technically. I typed in Stefan Russell with two index fingers and hit the enter key.

  A dozen hits for a B-movie director named Russell Stefan Bartlett. A bunch of other lists of names where Russell and Stefan appeared separately.

  “Try it in quotes,” said Crash. “That’ll eliminate a lot of junk results.”

  Right. I tried it. Nothing.

  “Heliotrope Station made headlines,” I said. “I remember. It was on the news when the whole psych phenomenon exploded. Twenty years ago, you couldn’t turn on the TV without psych-this, psych-that. How can something so big just disappear?”

  “You work for Uncle Sam. You tell me.”

  “I’m a detective, not a Fed. I work for the city.” I stared at the laptop and racked my brain. The difficulty in locating anything on Heliotrope Station was just a matter of time and distance. The Internet as we know it didn’t exist back then. If I’d been looking for something current, it would probably pop right up. Heliotrope Station was just old news.

  There was no big conspiracy. And just to prove it to myself, I looked up an even older blast from the past, the place I’d done all my formative drug training—the Cook County Mental Health Center.

  Its website popped right up.

  That didn’t prove a thing. It was still in business. Of course it had a website. I felt Crash watching over my shoulder. If I’d thought the CCMHC would pop up so quickly, I wouldn’t have searched it with him staring at me, wondering what I wanted with it. He didn’t say anything. I ignored him.

  Maybe the facility was still there, but I was sure that the people I’d known there wouldn’t be floating around the web in plain sight. I typed in the name of my first roommate, a guy we all knew and loved as “Suicide Charlie.” Some article about his kid making the All-State high school basketball team popped him onto the first page. He was still alive.

  He lived in Lincolnwood.

  I tried someone else—the chick from the bulimia ward who used to blow everyone whether they wanted her to or not. She’d gone on to have an illustrious criminal record for shop-lifting that culminated in her being arrested for threatening the owner of a shoe store at gunpoint. The fact that the gun wasn’t loaded hadn’t made her sentence any lighter.

  Two for two. Fine. Maybe there was a reason Stefan wasn’t on the Internet. Maybe he’d…

  died. I closed my eyes and pulled myself together by staring at the insides of my eyelids for a minute, and told myself he wasn’t dead. Which was stupid. If I’d never even looked him up, how would I know?

  I tried my strategy from CCMHC and started looking up other Camp Hell in-patient residents, all the ones I could remember. Rhonda the animal psychic. Leroy, who spoke in tongues. Big Larry, the hysterical precog. None of them yielded a hit. Not one.

  “Some evil shit went down at Camp Hell,” said Crash, his voice soft and low, and Jesus Christ, did he have to stand so close to me, talking practically against the side of my face?

  “I’ll bet you’ve got a story or two to tell, Victor Bayne.”

  “No.” I closed the laptop without shutting it down. It let out a long, annoying beep. “I don’t remember much. I was on heavy meds. The whole time.”

  Crash opened the laptop again and the beeping stopped. “You want me to change the preferences so that it goes into standby mode when you close it?”

  “I don’t care.” I stomped into the main room and shoved boxes against the walls until sweat prickled at my armpits, and my sore muscles threatened to cramp me into a brittle ball. Camp Hell existed. It did. Because if it hadn’t, then why was I wor
ried I might throw up? When I could breathe normally again, I looked up and found Crash leaning in the kitchen doorway, draining the last of the Coke.

  “I know I give you a hard time,” he said, “but seriously. If you wanna talk, it won’t get any farther than me.”

  “Okay,” I said, with no intention telling him anything, ever. “Great.” I picked up his duster and threw it at him, then made a fist around my keys. “Let’s go. It’s late.” Crash smirked as he pulled on his coat. I ignored him. I listened to the police band a lot louder than I had to so that we didn’t have to talk on the way back to his place. Crash’s neighborhood was an entirely different world than mine, but Damen Avenue connected them in one straight shot. It was useless to even attempt to park anywhere near his building, so I flicked on my hazards and double-parked in front. “Thanks a lot,” I said, hoping he’d just leave.

  His door didn’t open. I looked at him. He was still smirking.

  I stared back.

  Crash held eye contact for a good five seconds before he reached over and turned down the scanner. “Ever do a web search on yourself?” he asked me.

  My stomach churned. If Crash had been grinning about that all the way back to his place, it couldn’t be good. “No,” I said. “Why would I?”

  “Idle curiosity. People search their own names all the time.” I looked away from Crash and focused on my steering wheel. “Why do you ask? Have you?”

  “Maybe.”

  He’d draped himself over the cup holder like he was waiting for a kiss goodnight. I pressed myself against the driver’s side door and stared really hard at the blink-blink-blink of the hazards.

  “According to the World Wide Web,” said Crash, “you don’t exist.” His fingertip ghosted down the side of my neck and set Jacob’s toothmarks on fire. I shuddered, and clamped my arms tight to my sides in hopes that I’d just look like I was cold. “But you and I both know differently.”