“I’m all for having high moral standards, but when push comes to shove—”
Bly gave a bitter laugh. “That’s what you think this is all about? My ethics? Wise up, PsyCop. I’ll say or do whatever it takes to keep myself alive.”
I suppose it said something about me that I found that statement comforting. Probably because I could relate.
“Who doesn’t want to be popular?” he said. “We’re social creatures—a big, fat colony of rats. We humans depend on each other for food, shelter and procreation. Not only that, but we’re always searching for affirmation, to test our boundaries where they blur, to keep track of what’s us and what’s not-us.”
The contrarian in me wanted to argue that I didn’t need other people to verify my own self-awareness. Then again, I would chase Jacob halfway around the cannery so he could smell the creamer and tell me if it had turned.
“Like everything worth having in this world,” Bly said, “hardcore empathy comes with a price. There’s an echo chamber effect—one day you wake up and realize you’re surrounded by a bunch of puppets with no real reactions of their own. It warps into something like masochism. You’re sick of everyone agreeing with you—what’s the challenge in that?—and start to seek out people who push your boundaries. And the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of a drug deal pretending to be a crooked cop, and you’re wondering if maybe you really are one, since you’re more at home with the lowlifes and scum. And you get so good at what you do, at being everyone’s best friend, you get promoted and promoted and promoted. Not just by the Chicago PD, but the dealers.
“Until finally, you’re poised to hook up with the top dog. Maybe you’ve heard of him: The Scorpion.”
“That was you?” Damn. I remembered the buzz around the water-cooler when the Twentieth Precinct brought The Scorpion down. They’d attributed their success to good, old-fashioned policing. No one mentioned the PsyCop. Because they wanted the conviction to actually stick? Or because they were protecting Detective John Wembly? Or maybe because it stuck in their craw that he’d used a technique he’d been born with and not determination and grit.
Maybe all of the above.
Even if Bly didn’t get the credit…. “I could see needing to disappear after such a big bust. Big shot like him can mess you up even from inside a prison cell.”
“No reason to. As far as any of them knew, I was still the dirty cop on their payroll. That meant I was worth a lot more alive than dead.”
“Then I don’t get it.” Because if he could be rolling in drug money and pizza, why settle for dietetic meals and another hour on the elliptical?
“It wasn’t the crew I was scared of. It was The Scorpion’s sister. Claudia.” He turned awkwardly in his seat so he was facing the driver side window—according to the tradecraft, shame can do crazy things to your body language—but I could still see his face reflected in the glass as he spoke. The nighttime shadows pulled funny tricks. His reflection looked about twenty years older. The face of a guy who’d seen way too much.
“Everyone liked me. That’s just how it had always been. I didn’t even have to put forth any effort—I could fall in with any crowd, from a scraggly group of bums beneath an overpass to a VIP delegation from Brunei. I’d worked my way up the drug ladder just the same, connection after connection, friend after friend. Until I came to the top. And I realized that where The Scorpion’s emotions should’ve been, there was nothing. A total void.”
“A sociopath?”
“Nope. Even sociopaths register something, even if it’s more like meaningless static. He was like Jacob—an honest-to-god Stiff.”
I’d always known Jacob would make a damn fine archvillain. I quelled a shiver, though I doubt it hid my surprise from Bly.
“I’d spent months working my way up to him, and once I got there, I realized I was fucked. He didn’t trust me…smart guy. And I saw he’d set me up to take a fall. So I did what I had to do to win him over.” I watched his brow furrow in the window reflection, but he wasn’t leaking at me. Maybe older emotion is easier to tamp down than new hurt. “I went for his sister. Or, more accurately, I made her go for me.”
I flashed back to the tender sincerity of his kiss out of the stoop when we performed for the neighbors. Then I imagined it with an empathic push of infatuation behind it. “Well, shit.”
“Who knows if he ever really trusted me, but Claudia was a persistent woman, and eventually she wore him down. It took damn near three years from the day I got in her head to the day I had enough evidence to put her brother away.”
We sat and listened to the sparse late-night traffic squeaking through refrozen slush. I never knew what to say to people at the best of times. And now I had zero clue exactly how deep Bly wanted to go. But I was curious about one thing. “Did you fall for her?”
He gave his head a disgusted shake. “My moral gray area might be broader than the side of a battleship, but even I can’t force myself to fall for the echo chamber.”
At least it proved he wasn’t a narcissist. Nowadays, psychic powers come with a handy guide. Not necessarily an accurate one, mind you, but something. Back when we were kids, though, psychic powers were just crackpot theories like alien abduction and the Bermuda Triangle.
Maybe he didn’t get swept up in his own games…but maybe that wasn’t a good thing. I’m sure it would’ve been easier if he could lose himself in the moment. Playing half of a fake couple was hard enough in public. He’d had to carry on once the bedroom door was closed.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“I don’t—” I started to deny it. But I couldn’t.
He sighed. “It gets worse. Once The Scorpion was behind bars, I moved out.” He’d been living with this Claudia girl? Well, shit. “I tried to let her down easy, said I had to move out to make my precinct think I’d gone straight, and that it wasn’t safe for the two of us to keep carrying on. It was plausible. It should’ve worked. My Sarge and me, we’d worked out all the details with undercover experts, Feds, to transition me out good and safe with the least amount of drama.
“Well, I might’ve been done with Claudia…but she wasn’t done with me. Everywhere I went, there she was. I couldn’t so much as stop for gas without her throwing herself across my windshield.”
“Couldn’t you just un-flip that switch?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But she’d spent three years convincing herself I was the love of her life, and quelling that spark was emotional whack-a-mole. I gave it my best shot…but it was no use. And eventually it came to a head.
“I still remember the big blow-out like it just happened—and it still makes me want to puke. She’d tailed me to The Clinic, I was picking up some sleeping pills—fucking Patrick Barley at the window—anyways, she was throwing a scene in the parking lot, screaming, crying, carrying on. And I knew that she was so hooked on the relationship—not even on me specifically anymore, but the idea of the two of us together—that I had to do something more than just cool her jets. So I told her the ugliest thing I could think of. The truth. That I only wanted her so I could get to her brother, and with him out of the picture, I was through. And when it looked like even that wasn’t enough to send her packing, I gave her a good, hard empathic shove toward hate.
“I guess I didn’t know my own strength.
“If my goal had been to get Claudia to stop loving me? Mission fucking accomplished. But she wasn’t through stalking me. Not by a long shot. She was all over me like shit on a shingle, and now she was pissed. And this was not your typical girl—she was a drug lord’s flesh and blood. She didn’t just leave a nasty note on my windshield or even slash my tires—she had one of her brother’s buddies put a bomb in my wheel well. Good thing I was at work and a K9 unit found it before it found me.”
“You couldn’t back off the hate-throttle?”
“I tried. With a snubnose .38 Special to my temple, I tried. But however empathy works, whatever neural pathways it li
ghts up, Claudia’s were so fried by then, it was no use.
“I wouldn’t be the first undercover cop who made his exit team work overtime…but I was one of the few documented Psychs. And while the NPs were cooking up a strategy to put Claudia behind bars, Con Dreyfuss approached me and offered me an opportunity to disappear instead.
“All my choices were shitty ones, so erasing myself seemed like the best tack to take. No family to speak of. I’d been playing a dirty cop so long, my real friends didn’t know what to make of me anymore, and obviously, I didn’t have a girl. Plus, the thought of Claudia getting locked up for coming after me ate away at me. She was no saint, not by any stretch of the imagination. But she wouldn’t have boarded the train to Crazytown if it wasn’t for me messing around in her head.”
He turned back toward the windshield. Not quite facing me, but no longer wallowing in shame. “Anyways. In pre-natal yoga? She was there.”
The woman in the pricy clothes. I swallowed hard. “So she saw you, but she didn’t make you.”
“No, thank God. Looked right at me, too. But seeing her knocked up—everything that must’ve gone with it—you’d think I’d be relieved she somehow got her life back. I wasn’t, though. My knee-jerk reaction was jealousy. Just for a second, but that was enough. Guess it goes to show, I’ve got an asshole where my heart should be.”
The old John Wembly might’ve quipped, “Better than having a heart where your asshole should be.” But given all he’d been through, maybe that guy—the happy-go-lucky “guy with the hair”—was well and truly dead.
31
It was sunup by the time we hashed out our plan. I’d go next door with my dead rat and act all dismayed, then trash-talk Amelia and see if I could get Hale to commiserate, maybe even brag about getting rid of her. Then go talk the ghost into crossing over.
My fake husband and I sat in a good, old-fashioned 24-hour diner where the grease was thick and the coffee was thin. Bly had an egg white omelet and I had a heart attack on a plate, plus a half stack of buttermilk pancakes on the side…which he’d started picking at the moment I realized I was too stuffed to keep going, and had eventually polished off, one surreptitious half-bite at a time.
“I’ll read Hale for you,” Bly said, “and signal when he gets agitated. But if he really did kill Amelia, why would he admit anything to you? What could he possibly have to gain?”
Good question. “I didn’t see it in the tradecraft, but I’ve dealt with enough criminals to know that they’ll jump on any chance to justify their actions. Otherwise, they’d be stuck wallowing in their own guilt.”
Bly sniffed out a dry laugh and stared out the window. His eyes were bloodshot from staying up all night with contacts in. I supposed he knew a thing or two about regret, although I couldn’t say if unburdening himself made him feel any better.
But me? Other than a stiff neck, I felt okay. Hopefully I was on a roll and could get Hale to confide in me, too. We headed back to the townhouse to grab the rat I would use to make him talk. Meanwhile, since I’d be heading into a property with an active ghost presence, I closed my eyes and visualized my chakras spinning, then opened the valve in my third eye and pulled down a fat stream of white light. Something about the yoga sessions had greased the wheels and allowed me to get out of my own way. Instead of worrying about which direction the colored balls of light should be spinning, I relaxed and felt them spin.
Or maybe it was more exhaustion than relaxation. Because I snorted awake when Bly snapped, “Sonofabitch—there he goes.”
Disorientation. The white light turned into winter sun bouncing off snowbanks, and the vaguely familiar street was the one I currently called home. A cab pulled off, going the opposite direction. Bly was driving like a cop now with an aggressive three-point turn.
“It’s not even eight o’clock,” I said lamely.
Bly clenched his jaw and pulled into the morning rush with just one car between us and Hale’s taxi. Bly hugged that poor guy’s bumper so hard I’m surprised we didn’t end up in his trunk, but the car chase didn’t last long. Hale cabbed it to destinations that most people would walk, and the taxi pulled up in front of Halsted Fitness Club to let him out. Bly swung into a nearby bus stop and said, “What now?”
Maybe I should’ve felt apprehensive about dealing with Hale in public, but instead I was relieved to not have to go back to that townhouse. I’ve met enough ghosts in my time that they don’t automatically scare me. But when they do, I’m just as creeped out as anyone else.
Unfortunately, there were other potential demons inside the gym. “I’ll handle this,” I told Bly. “You stay in the car.”
“But I need to read him for you.”
“It’s not worth the risk of you running into your ex.” I wasn’t so sure Bly’s emotional reading would affect my performance anyway. “You lie low. I’ll deal with Hale.”
Unfortunately, gyms don’t just let you waltz on in, and I didn’t have a badge to tell the stern lady at the desk to pipe down and let me past. At least the douchebag was in the system from the past couple of times he’d tried to yoga. But by the time I paid an exorbitant amount of money for a day pass, yoga was in session.
I was looking for a spot to waylay Hale on his way out when I heard his dulcet tones. “No, I am not ‘cool’ with you listening to your podcast sans headphones. If I wanted to be subjected to inane blather, I’d voluntarily converse with the likes of you.”
And there he was. Sylvester Hale, in all his queeny octogenarian glory, ensconced on a recumbent bike in a blue velour tracksuit. The recumbents were nowhere near as in-demand as the spin bikes, and there was a wide swath of empty machines all around him—including the nearby treadmill vacated by the cute purple-haired kid who’d just wanted to listen to his podcast. I picked out the bike that would most effectively cut off Hale’s escape, and I planted myself in it. Snowy shoes, winter coat and all.
“Well. If it isn’t the beefcake magnet. I’m surprised you’re even able to sit on that bike after whatever it was the two of you were doing last night.” Holy hell—I felt sorry for the guy whose love life sounds like me falling off a yoga ball. Hale regarded me with cool assessment. “Makeup sex after being caught with your pants down in the bookstore?”
“My pants are none of your business.”
“Is that so? Surely you’re aware they leave nothing to the imagination. The disconnect is truly stunning, you parading around in those ridiculous dungarees, trying to pass yourself off as a paragon of integrity to all the men you encounter.”
My cheeks heated up—and not just because I was struggling to pedal the bike. I knew that I was playing a character. And I knew I had no reason to feel insulted. But I did anyhow. “What men?”
“As if every Tom, Dick and Harry at Twice Told Tales isn’t wrapped around your pretentious little finger.”
“Oh, please—you’re one to talk about integrity. I get that you’re older than dirt, but I had no idea you’d actually banged Charles Dickens.”
He narrowed his eyes and gave me a nasty little smile. “It took you long enough to figure it out.”
“What about that ugly statue?”
“A paperweight. The look on your face as you handled it was priceless.”
“Seriously?”
“Come now, you can’t blame me for embellishing my exploits. At least my subterfuge wasn’t at the expense of a generous husband.”
“Leave him out of it. This is about me. And you. And…Amelia Griggs.”
Hale’s pedaling slowed to a crawl and he gave me a bewildered look. “What on earth does Amelia have to do with anything?”
Good—I’d managed to disarm him. According to the tradecraft, if I wanted to squeeze the truth out of him, it was now or never. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use the internet. I’ve seen the stuff you post, and I know how obsessed you are with things that go bump in the night. But if someone was haunting you, it wouldn’t be your ex—it would be Amelia.”
“Amelia, haunt me? Whatever for?”
I crossed my arms, gave him a cool look, and said, “I think you know.”
It was the perfect opening for him to unburden his troubled soul. To clear his conscience and extricate himself from his suffering. To come clean.
So, of course, what he said was, “I have no idea.” Not in a refuse-to-tell-me way, either, but a sincere show of confusion.
Which definitely didn’t jibe with the way a killer would react.
Fine, maybe he hadn’t murdered her…but a haunted rat colony wasn’t pointing at him for nothing. He must be culpable somehow. “The nagging, the complaints. You wanted Amelia out of there, and you made her life hell to try and make that happen—you even threatened her rats with strychnine.”
“Ridiculous. The only strychnine in my home was a bottle of detergent done up as a prop for Mystery Potluck—in which the plot was nowhere near as convoluted as the one you’re spinning out right now.”
Since when was making fake poison such a popular hobby? “I don’t buy it. Why else would you be sleeping on the couch to avoid the upstairs—the place where she died on the other side of the wall, just a few sheets of plasterboard between the two of you?”
“Because my knee hurts,” Hale said, with a meaningful glance toward his cane.
“He’s lying.”
I swung around and found that while I’d been trying to rope Hale into a confession, someone had climbed into the bike on my other side…someone dead.
The complainer.
He fit his feet into the pedals, but when he gave a push, they went right through. As ghosts went, he was hardly terrifying. Pathetic. Annoying. Nothing to be careless around, for sure, like an open flame or a loaded gun. But in movie terms, less Poltergeist and more Beetlejuice.
I couldn’t exactly talk to him without coming off like a total whack job, though, so I gave him the raised eyebrow instead.
“Totally lying,” the complainer insisted. “I overheard him on the phone, talking to his proctologist when he thought the locker room was empty. He wet the bed. And now he won’t sleep in it.”
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