“And that’s why you go around looking for ghosts—scary ones, bloody ones—so you can interrogate them and find their killers.”
I rolled my eyes. “Take off those stupid sunglasses, will you?” Lisa slid the glasses off and set them on the counter. Her eyes looked squinty, the skin around them swollen, as if she’d been crying for days.
“I don’t know why I do it,” I said. “They give me a paycheck. What else am I good for, anyway?”
I poured Lisa some coffee. She took the cup from me and hugged it to her chest. “Vic, I don’t want the si-no.”
“So stop.”
“How can I? What if it saves lives?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Everybody dies eventually. Look at it this way: what if you never realized how powerful the si-no is? What if you were just a regular cop with a gun and a badge? Would you feel like you needed to solve every case on the board? In every precinct, every city? No. You’d do your job, and then you’d go home.” We drank coffee and listened to sirens in the background, cruisers by the sound of them, and we sat side by side and listened to the rise and fall of their wails. It hadn’t taken much effort to make Lisa forget about the Auracel. I had to wonder if she’d been after the meds at all, or if she’d just wanted an excuse to talk to me.
I hoped she didn’t think I had any answers.
Lisa set her mug on the counter. “Is it okay if I use your computer? I should probably email my coordinator at PsyTrain and let her know I’m all right.”
“Can’t they track that type of thing and come and get you?”
“Vic, I’m not a prisoner there. I just want to let them know I’m not dead in a ditch.”
“Oh.” I waved at the laptop. “Go ahead.” Did she know for sure that a couple of psy-goons weren’t going to show up on our doorstep and haul her away? I wanted to tell her to check her si-no, just in case. But I couldn’t very well do that if I’d just suggested that the answer to all her problems was to stop using her talent.
“Lisa?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you know that there’s nothing about me on the Internet at all? Camp Hell, either?”
“There isn’t supposed to be, is there? I had to sign like a hundred papers that said I’d protect your privacy or else I’d lose my job, my credentials, everything.” She said this with minimal interest, as if it were old news.
I hovered in the doorway, debating exactly how I could get a little more information on these “papers” without sounding as completely freaked out as I felt. Lisa was leaning on me; she depended on me to show her how to navigate the world as a high-level Psych. If I was going to fall apart, I’d have to do it quietly and keep it to myself. At least until she sorted herself out. Then I’d totally grill her.
I went up to the bedroom and grabbed the sheet set in the mangled package and a pillow off the bed. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock, but I figured I could offer Lisa a Valium, or maybe half a red, if she just wanted to get some sleep. I tucked the fitted sheet around the couch cushions the best I could and spread out the blankets.
“Vic?” called Lisa from the kitchen. “Who’s Ash Man, and why does he care what you’re wearing?”
-EIGHT-
Lisa had a knack for things that I considered to be “guy” stuff. She liked to drive. She liked to play on the computer. And judging by the fact that she got Jacob’s humongous TV completely set up, right down to programming the remote, I was guessing she liked electronics. I wondered if I could possibly bribe her into letting me take the credit for the setup, but I decided that chances were slim that Jacob would believe I’d accomplished anything mechanical. Maybe I could say it was like those women you hear about who, in a burst of adrenaline, lift a car to keep it from crushing their beloved child.
Nah. He still wouldn’t buy it.
It was ten-ish when Jacob got home, and Lisa’s explanation of some feature on the gigantic remote control with eight thousand buttons was going in one ear and out the other. Jacob stopped in the doorway with his overcoat half off and his gym bag dangling from one hand, and he stared at Lisa as if he’d (finally) seen a ghost.
“Hi, Jacob,” she said.
He dropped his bag and came over, spread his arms wide, and gathered her into a big bear hug.
I hadn’t hugged Lisa, and she’d been my partner. I guess I’m just not a hugger. I’d been sitting down when we first greeted each other, so maybe that was why it hadn’t occurred to me. I guess I could have patted her on the knee. Or done something vaguely affection-ate.
“Are you okay?” Jacob asked her.
Lisa nodded. “Things were getting…it’s hard to explain.” They’d fallen back to arm’s length, but still held on to each other as if it were natural to touch other people who you weren’t trying to pick up during a two-for-one drink special. “Being a precog was starting to get to me.”
Jacob hugged Lisa to him one last time, then let go. “Your timing is incredible,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the si-no told you to come here to give me something to go on in this case.”
“Uh, Jacob?” I said. “Did you just hear her?”
If anyone wanted watertight evidence on this case to appear in front of Jacob wrapped up in a neat little bow, it was me. But Lisa was so wigged out about the si-no that she’d actually flown the coop and come back to Chicago.
“She can’t do it…tonight,” I said. “She’s on Neurozamine.” I wondered if I’d ever fed him a lie of such giant proportions before. Not that it wasn’t a believable lie—Lisa had been trying to score off me, after all. But that it was about something so important to him. And then I wondered if I had any “tells” that would alert him to my lying. I hunted for the volume button on the remote and fiddled with the TV in case I had a look, or a twitch, or a weird little gesture that might give me away.
Jacob gave Lisa a lingering, wistful look. “It’s that bad?” She nodded.
“I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her head and then went to take off his coat and put his bag away.
Lisa gave me a look when his back was turned, and I shrugged. I’ve never been good at charades, and it was the closest gesture I had for, “What the hell do you expect me to say?
You’re the one who told me you can’t handle the si-no.” Water ran in the downstairs bathroom. I heard Jacob brushing his teeth. He always showers first, brushes his teeth second, so I figured he’d showered at the gym. It was unusual for him to weight train two nights in a row, but maybe he’d been using their track since mounds of snow and ice didn’t make for good jogging terrain. “This isn’t your case,” I said, low enough that Jacob wouldn’t hear me over the running water. “It’s Jacob’s case. Pretend you’re back at the station, the two of you. If you happened to fall across some evidence, you’d point it out to him, sure. But you wouldn’t go in your off-hours and nose around his crime scene. You wouldn’t hack into his computer and double-check his work.”
“But he asked me.”
“Yeah, well. He hates seeing other people suffer, just like you do. But he doesn’t know, really know, the toll it takes on you to be a Psych.”
“He knows….”
“Intellectually, yeah.” I pressed my hand under my sternum like Crash did when he was getting a read. “But not here.”
Jacob came out of the bathroom in an old T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants. He carried his suit on a hanger.
“We made popcorn,” I said. “Want some?”
Jacob shook his head. “Then I’ll have to floss again. You two go ahead and catch up. I need to get some sleep.”
We watched Jacob round the top of the stairs and disappear into the bedroom. “I should just do the si-no,” Lisa whispered.
I found the volume on the giant remote and turned the news up to cover the sound of our voices. “I just bought you some time to think about it. Don’t go caving in at the first sign of pressure.”
“What good does it do me to hold back? Maybe I
have to do the si-no whether I want to or not,” she said. “It’s who I am.”
“No way. You’ve got a talent that you can turn off by not thinking about it. Not me—I’ve got to see things whether I want to or not. So do it for me if you won’t do it for yourself.
Stop asking the si-no. I’m not giving you any Auracel ‘cos it’ll make you high as a kite, and not in a good way, but maybe we really should get you some Neurozamine. Carolyn’s got a stash.”
Lisa played with the end of her braid. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I think you better go to Jacob,” said Lisa.
If I was lucky, Jacob would be asleep. Then he couldn’t ask me where I got the Neurozamine that I didn’t have.
I patted Lisa’s shoulder and said goodnight. Good thing she wasn’t a telepath, or she’d know I debated the whole hug thing and ran through a long catalog of gestures I could use so that I could seem friendly without being weird.
I went upstairs and opened the bedroom door an inch. I saw Jacob sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. “So,” I ventured. “Any new evidence?” Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose. “She says he did it again.” Oh. He didn’t mean Lisa. He was talking about his victim. Jacob’s voice had been quiet, but carefully enunciated. There was no way I’d heard him wrong.
“How could that happen? Wasn’t there a guard posted?”
“Two. And a camera.”
“And?”
“The guards saw nothing, and the video’s too dark and distorted to make anything out.” Damn it. My mind spun out a few more crazy theories, from a telekinetic who could walk through walls to a hypnotist who was pulling a big, sick con on the nursing home staff.
Even the incubus I’d shot in Jacob’s condo couldn’t get into a sealed room; he’d tricked people into inviting him through the door, and I’d seen him flee through a window with my own two eyes. Still, there were more beasties in the world than incubuses. Or incubi.
Whichever. My Camp Hell textbooks were chock full of monsters. And several of them were probably even real.
There was a fast and easy way to figure out what was going on: wait for Jacob to fall asleep and then do the si-no. But if Lisa made an exception for this case, then where did she draw the line? And what about that spiel I gave her about not being responsible for solving every crime in the world? Maybe I’d meant it, or maybe it was just something clever to say, something to make it seem like Lisa’s talent wasn’t going to crush her.
“You’ll figure it out,” I said. Jacob didn’t look at me. I turned out the lights so I didn’t have to see what kind of toll the case was taking on him. I was keeping secrets from him, but I reminded myself it was only so that Lisa could figure out how to navigate her talent. It didn’t help. Even after the room went dark, in my mind’s eye I could still see the look on Jacob’s face as he stared at the wall and tried to force himself to come up with an answer.
Q
Jacob was already gone and Lisa was dead to the world when I left for work. I stuck a bandage over the ghost of the bite mark on my neck and covered it with a scarf. If magical thinking were my bag, I would have said that my desire to hide that hickey caused Zigler and me to end up ghost hunting outside in the freezing cold when we could have been indoors making phone calls and doing paperwork, all so that I wouldn’t have to take off my scarf. But I’ve always thought that my preferences usually had little or no influence in the way things turned out.
“Where is the spirit, exactly?” Zigler asked me. His eyes were narrow and his forehead seemed to have a few extra folds in it. It was the look he tended to give me when I was feeding him a line of bullshit.
“Somewhere over here,” I said, pointing toward the mouth of the alley. “I haven’t got a visual.”
Zig moved a few steps toward the street.
“…so then my Aunt Myrtle says to me, she says, Peg, you have such a pretty face. Why do you have to go and ruin it with all that rouge?”
“That’s what they call you?” I asked the ghost. “Peg?”
“Oh yes. My family calls me Peg.”
I nodded slightly, and Bob Zigler’s felt tip pen made a squeaky noise as it moved over his notepad. I wondered if I were able to see Peg, would she look like the fragile, wrinkled corpse that a guy had found behind the Dumpster while he was walking his dog, or if she’d appear to me as a fifteen year old wearing too much blush. I couldn’t see Peg, though. I could only hear her voice. That was fine by me.
“What’s that short for?” I asked Zig, because Peg was a rambler.
“Margaret.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How do they get ‘Peg’ from ‘Margaret’?”
Zig shrugged.
“…but if it was up to Aunt Myrtle, I wouldn’t have even been able to date a boy until I was nineteen….”
“And what year was this?”
“Peg” stopped—for the first time in the past twenty minutes. I rocked on the balls of my feet and waited for a magic number—something, anything, we could identify her with.
“Ronnie Carson down the block. He was a fine looking boy. And smart, too. He could have gone to college.”
I jammed my fingertip against the inner corner of my eye and stifled a sigh.
“Is she communicating with you,” said Zigler, “or is it bad…” he waved his hand around, a vague gesture, “reception?”
“I hear her just fine. I just can’t get her to say anything that we can actually use.”
“My blue dress, now that was something. I got that at J.C. Penney’s. That was back when people usually made their own clothes, so it was really something special to have a store-bought dress….”
“When did people used to make their own clothes,” I asked Zig. “The Stone Age?”
“You’re talking about clothes?”
“How about J.C. Penney’s? How long has that been around?”
“We know her approximate age. Her body’s at the Coroner’s office, remember? Get a birth date. Get a wedding date. Or how about a last name?” I faced the direction the voice was coming from. “Ma’am,” I said, “could you repeat your name for me?”
There was silence for a long moment. I wondered if maybe my directness had scared her off. And then: “It was a blue dress. With black topstitching.”
“Nothing?” asked Zig.
I decided not to mention the topstitching.
“You need to learn how to control the interview,” he told me, “instead of letting the interview control you.”
“It’s different with ghosts. You can’t cuff ‘em and bribe ‘em with coffee and smokes.”
“Stop attacking the problem head on. If she can’t give you her name, maybe she can give you her kids’ names. Or her address. Just use your head, work around the roadblock.” I addressed the ghost again. “Okay, so there was that blue dress from Penney’s. But what I was wondering about was something a little more recent. Take, for instance, late February. Of this year.” This century, I refrained from adding. “You were outside with no coat on, no I.D. Any idea why?”
“Oh, I had my coat on. It’s cold outside.”
“She says she had her coat on,” I told Zigler. Either Peg was senile and had imagined putting it on, or some crack whore had come along, discovered Peg’s frozen body, and decided that she could put the coat to a much better use by trading it for a couple of caps.
“Anything else?” said Zig. “Like maybe an address?”
“Don’t rush her. She’s working her way up to the present.”
“We don’t have all day. My pen’s starting to freeze.” Maybe so. Or maybe Zig didn’t like watching me talk to ghosts any longer than he abso-lutely had to.
“Aunt Myrtle taught me how to crochet. We’d sit for hours while my Charlie was at the office, watching Days of Our Lives and crocheting together. I’d make afghan squares until my hands ached. She always told me I pulled the yarn too tight. Too tight’s no better than too loose.
It makes the blanket stiff and heavy. But too loose and your fingers and toes poke through.”
“Husband’s name is Charlie,” I said to Zig, then I raised my voice and addressed Peg. “How many years were you married to Charlie?”
“Oh, let’s see now. We were married on June 17, 1951. It rained that day, all of a sudden, like buckets and buckets of water were just pouring down from the sky.”
“Wedding,” I said, and repeated the date to Zigler.
“Good, good, keep going,” he murmured.
“That was here?” I asked her. “In Chicago?” A search of Cook County marriage licenses would probably be enough for a preliminary I.D. on poor old Peg. Then we could track down her family.
“That’s right, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Oh, the rose window. We thought it would be all lit up. But it was storming so hard that everything just looked gray.”
“It’s snowing now,” I said, in an attempt to get her to shift gears into the present again.
“Was it snowing the last time you went outside? Did you see anyone else? Maybe someone who asked you for money?”
“It was snowing,” she said dreamily. “And I saw a cat that looked so much like Bibs. I followed her here. I knew it wasn’t really Bibs, but sometimes I would get confused.” Her voice trailed away.
“She was following a cat,” I told Zigler.
“Jesus. What a way to lose grandma.”
“Here kitty-kitty,” Peg crooned.
Did the elderly have to be so damn cute, so bizarre and endearing? The sound of Peg’s voice got me to thinking of Jacob’s case, and I felt like a huge ass for expecting him to come home and act like nothing was wrong. Lisa could point him in the right direction with just a handful of si-no s. Was I a bad friend to wish she could set aside her psychic epiphanies for ten minutes and give Jacob a hand?
Zigler capped his pen. “If there wasn’t any foul play, we can go back to the station and run the wedding date.”
PsyCop 4: Secrets Page 7