PsyCop 4: Secrets (9 page)

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.”

“Hold on, lemme try one more time.” It’d taken me twenty minutes to get her first name out of her, but maybe she’d have more to say about her husband. “Peg, what’s Charlie’s last name?”

“Here kitty-kitty-kitty.” Her voice was thin and insubstantial, weaving in and out of the wind.

“I think she’s fading,” I said.

Zig stuffed his pad and pen into his pocket. “That’s all right. Let ‘er go. With that wedding date and the first names, we’ve probably got enough for an I.D.” Zigler headed toward the street, snow squeaking under the treads of his heavy, black-soled shoes. I stood and looked hard at the alleyway, the graffiti-covered dumpster where the dog walker had found Peg blue and stiff in a housedress, a pair of boots and a few swipes of bright orange lipstick. I imagined white light flooding the area, and pushed hard at it, straining to feel its substance. “Go to the light, Peg,” I told her. I concentrated until I felt dizzy, and then I stopped and listened.

All I heard was the wind gusting, and in the distance, traffic.

Zigler had the heat blasting inside his Impala, and the police scanner murmured low under the rush of hot, dry air. I knocked as much snow as I could from my shoes before I climbed in, and managed to close the passenger side door on my overcoat. I considered leaving it where it was so that Zig didn’t see me opening the door to pull it in, but I figured the hem would get pretty nasty dragging along the street all the way back to the station.

I opened the door and situated myself better. Zig didn’t notice. He was finishing his notes.

“About that thing I asked you the other day,” I said.

Zig’s pen stopped squeaking. He sighed and tucked the notepad away.

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you thought all the secretiveness about me and my identity was for my own privacy,” I said as he put the Impala in gear,

“but there had to have been someone who spelled it all out for you. Who was it? Warwick?” Ted Warwick, our commanding officer at the Fifth, was the one who’d hired Zig.

Zigler shifted in his heated leather seat and checked his rearview and sideview one time too many. “No, not Warwick. He did the interview, him and your doctor, and of course the Chief. But the intake was mainly Betty.”

Betty? As in, Betty of the chipper hello, and Betty of the incredibly awkward housewarming? “Betty,” I repeated. Her name sounded strange, like when you try to freak yourself out by saying the word “the” until it sounds funny and its actual meaning starts to slip away from you.

“She keeps all the personnel files,” said Zig.