PsyCop 6: GhosTV (23 page)

He had fair skin that blushed easily, and blushed blotchily. He was looking pretty blotchy at that very moment. His eyes darted all over like he couldn’t figure out where to look when I approached, and he gave me a tight, weird smile. I know it’s bad when I’m the one wishing I had Carolyn at my side to figure out what’s what. “How long have you been with PsyTrain?” I asked him.

“A year? No, wait, it’s almost two years now.”

“And you live here—in the building?” I said. He nodded. “You ever been tested yourself?”

He stared at me for the duration of an awkward pause, then said,

“For what?”

For gonorrhea. Jesus H. Christ, what did he think? “Psychic ability.”

“Oh.” Nervous laugh. “Yeah, of course, I…well, my first test showed an empathic tendency.” He sighed. “But after that I tested random-normal. The first one was a fluke. Sometimes you can do that. Score high. Score low.”

I knew all about that. Two whole years of my life I’d been put through more tests than the dials of the GhosTV. “All right, maybe you don’t have an extrasensory edge. But living here’s gotta count for something. What do
you
think is going on?” Lyle’s eyes flicked to one side. He was thinking about what he was going to say. People filter before they verbalize, which is why you need to knock them off-balance so they don’t have a chance to clean up their story. I caught his eye and held it—and then propped an elbow on the wall and leaned in closer to him, slouching a little so I didn’t look like I was towering over him quite so much. The potential for me coming off as ridiculous rather than cool was astronomical, but somehow the move worked. Lyle didn’t back away when I got close. Careful, so as not to be totally over the top, I dropped my voice subtly and said, “You can tell me.” His eyes widened a little. Pupils, too.

He
was
into me. Jacob had been right.

I’d never hear the end of it.

“It’s really nothing concrete.” Lyle sounded like he was just about ready to spill. What would Zigler do? Scratch that, Zigler never would have been angling at a witness like I currently was, and the mere thought of Zig even trying nearly destroyed my illusion of coolness.

I gave a small shrug, like I could care less about how concrete it was, and I kept on staring him in the eye.

His cheeks got blotchier. “Five Faith.”

Another long pause. I leaned in closer, and when it became obvious he’d hit another roadblock, I said, “Uh huh.”

He wet his lips. His eyes darted. And, damn, just as I figured my working-the-witness mojo had been all in my head and he wasn’t going to give me a damn thing, he said, “If they were trying to target someone, what better way?”

“Target who?”

“Lyle,” Chekotah called, and the spell was broken.

Lyle flinched, looked at me apologetically, and took off at a fast trot toward his boss. “Wait,” I said, but evidently my powers of seduction only went so far.

“Take the detectives to Debbie’s room,” Chekotah said. “Just them, okay? Let them have a look around, see if they see anything useful.” Lyle nodded, and Chekotah repeated, “Just them.” I glanced at Jacob to see if he had the same feeling I did—that something was churning around under the surface—but there was only so much our non-verbal eyelocks could communicate. Lyle led us to the classroom wing of the building, then up to the third floor to the area where the bigwigs lived. He pulled out a master key. Jacob snapped on a latex glove, took the key from Lyle and opened Debbie’s door.

Clothes were strewn on the bed, the floor, the dresser. Jacob said to Lyle, “Stay in the hall. The room’s been tossed. We’ll need to call it in.”

“It’s always that way.” Lyle held up his hands as if to tell us,
just
sayin’.

Jacob took a closer look, then said, “If that’s the case….” He pulled out another pair of gloves, handed them to me, and said, “Be careful. Lisa’s room was already contaminated when we got here. But if there’s any evidence the locals can pull from this room….”

“Right.” Contaminated? Hell, the dipshits at PsyTrain had been in Lisa’s room moving furniture, burning incense, and who knows what else. Not only was evidence contaminated, it was probably destroyed.

I might not have graduated at the top of my class, but I knew better than to shuffle evidence around. I pulled on the gloves. My scabby, spooky right hand felt taut and prickly as the latex dragged over the scabs. It also felt vaguely weird, though maybe that was just me worrying that I’d fill the glove up with ectoplasm and end up carrying it around like a baggie full of goldfish I’d won at a midway game. Still, it seemed to me that if my hand had the potential to spooge on the evidence, it was probably best for everyone that I kept it sheathed in latex.

“We’ll treat it as a crime scene,” Jacob said. “What do you want to do? Sketches or photos?”

Like I was any good at either of those things. I’d never needed to be.

That’s what techs were for. I took a covert peek at my phone to see if it might telepathically relay the instructions for the camera to my brain, but it didn’t. With my best impression of confidence, I said,

“Sketch.”

I think Jacob bought it. He was already sweeping around the room with his cell phone clicking away while I still lingered at the threshold, struggling to pick the starting point. It was harder than you’d think. No body, no obvious sign of a struggle, and—judging from a quick glance—no ghost.

Not so great for me, I supposed, but good for Debbie.

Unless the Internet demon had sucked her in. But I’d see something obvious, like a computer with a curl of brimstone wafting up from the keyboard, if that were the case. Right? I told myself Internet demons were only a figment of my overexposed imagination. They didn’t exist. And if they did, they wouldn’t stuff inboxes full of bibles unless those bibles were penned by Anton LeVay.

Back to the sketch, which wasn’t drawing itself. Begin at the beginning, I decided…the front door. I pulled out my pad and pen and considered the room. As far as messes go, it was mostly clothes, like maybe she’d tried on a couple of outfit combos that day. She’d hung plenty of retro crap on the walls to mark her territory; B-movie posters, a neon light in the shape of a lipstick tube, and a full-sized vintage jukebox all warred for my attention. Despite the kitsch-and-clothing explosion, it was a pretty spacious layout. Probably doctors’ quarters originally, rather than patient rooms. I craned my neck to peer around Jacob. Private bathroom, too. Not too shabby.

A pair of scrunched-up fishnets lay on the floor, and a red bra was draped across the leopardskin bedspread. Given how most women feel about strangers who aren’t potential bedmates looking at their lingerie, I was guessing she hadn’t been expecting company.

I might not have a tape measure on me, but supposed I wasn’t too bad at judging distance. I paced the length of the bedroom, drew a rectangle on my pad, and marked the dimensions. Ten feet, same as ours. It was wider, though, a whole window-width wider.

I placed the windows, doors and furniture, then did a slow circuit with my shields down and my feelers up, in case anything happened to be sending out any helpful psychic signals. Jacob emerged from the bathroom, sweeping his gaze back and forth to cover anything mundane that I was likely to miss, and the sleeves of our jackets brushed as we passed each other in the center of the room. I paused for a heartbeat, but decided not to remark on the fact that I was surprised it felt so natural to work with him, even here, totally out of my element. I suspected he knew.

The bathroom was more cluttered, since Debbie had a thing for makeup that bordered on fetish. The outfit she’d been wearing earlier lay in a pile in the middle of the bathroom floor, as if she’d come back to change after class. Did she feel the need to slip into something a little more comfortable while she looked up automatic writing for me?

I scanned the sink area. There, on the wall—blood? I crouched to take a better look at it, and my days of helping my ex, Stefan, go from a sassy bleached blond to a magenta siren came flooding back like they were yesterday. The spatter shape on Debbie’s bathroom wall looked like it’d been made by something thicker than blood, and its position relative to the sink led me to think it was hair dye. It was old and long-dried. Plus, it wasn’t glowing.

“Someone’s coming,” Jacob called from the bedroom.

I guesstimated the width of the room and added the measurement to my sketch, put an X on the wall and marked it
red spatter 10 in. off
floor
. Then I filled in the rest of the details. Tub. Toilet. Window. Door.

“A few someones. And your friend Katrina.”

Wait, what? I looked at the opposite wall from where I stood in the doorway to Debbie’s bedroom. Door? There was no door on the opposite wall, not like our shared bathroom, where we were stuck flossing our teeth with Dreyfuss just a keyhole away.

I looked down at my sketch. I’d definitely drawn a door there. Huh.

“Give us a few minutes,” I heard Jacob say, his voice projecting out toward the hall. I glanced over my shoulder and saw he was blocking with his body. All right, I thought. I’d worked under a hell of a lot more pressure with a lot smaller of a barrier between myself and the people who didn’t want me around. I could figure this thing out.

I squinted at the wall where I’d drawn the door. Nothing. White light, faucet wide open, energy pouring in through my forehead. Breathe in. Breathe out. Indigo chakra spinning—wow, that was a new one. I didn’t think I’d ever known which way those things were supposed to turn, but there it was, whirling so fast behind my forehead I felt dizzy again.

I looked at the wall where I’d drawn the door. Nothing.

The sound of people pushing into the room was marginally distracting, but Faun Windsong’s voice—my own personal form of water torture—insisting that her precog and her clairvoyant needed to have a look…that voice was the thing that finally broke my concentration.

When I clicked the pen cap so I could stick it back in my pocket, I felt something cold creep over the inside of my wrist.

Holy hell. That glove full of ectoplasm I’d imagined earlier? Yep. I had it.

Voices amped up as Faun Windsong forced her way in with a couple of Psych students, and while Debbie’s room was spacious enough, jamming a bunch of people into it, especially relatively untrained people, was the surest way to botch evidence I could think of. And I don’t mean contaminating it so it was inadmissible in court, either.

I mean obliterating it so we couldn’t use it to find Debbie, and ultimately, Lisa.

It was tempting to wad the spent ectoplasm-rubber into my pocket and rinse off my hand in the sink, but on the freakish off-chance that the fine folks at PsyTrain wouldn’t totally destroy any evidence that might be in the room, I just couldn’t. Hell, I couldn’t even bring myself to steal some toilet paper to wrap around my wrist; I’d had “don’t touch anything, leave it for the techs” branded into my brain for too many years.

While I figured if I was loudmouthed enough I could distract Faun Windsong from noticing I was keeping my right hand in my pocket, I didn’t want anyone to think I might draw on them. Sure, I didn’t keep a gun in my
pocket
like some junkie out to rob the Stop ’n’ Go, but I knew better than to assume a civilian would follow that logic.

Instead, I held my elbow at an angle and kept my hand at my side, pretending it was glued to my ribcage. Hopefully no one would notice I was standing funny. And hopefully my exuberant astral jam wouldn’t spill.

Surprise, surprise: Faun was shooting her mouth off at Jacob when I slipped out of the bathroom. “…and you think we can’t see anything just because we don’t have state licenses?”

“What I think,” he replied just as loudly, and while he remained outwardly polite, I could tell he wanted to strangle her. She was lucky he’s practically made of patience. “…is that there could be physical evidence here along with the psychic evidence. They could both be critical.”

The way NPs tend to get jumpy when Psychs come in to do a sweep?

I saw the same thing unfolding here, only in reverse. I said, “Listen, Faun.” Katrina, whatever. “This makes three women, up and gone.

Not just students—teachers now, too. What if you’re next?” She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again and gave me a good, hard stare, and when she spoke again, she’d taken it down a few decibels. “You think this has to do with gender?” Actually, it hadn’t yet occurred to me. When it had just been Lisa and Karen missing, I’d assumed it was something to do with them being roommates. But now Debbie was gone, too—from the opposite side of the building. Jacob’s stuffed inbox didn’t fit the theory—but Faun didn’t need to know about that. I gave her the patented non-answer,

“We’re looking at all the angles.”

Her shoulders fell and she took a half-step back. “If you think this is some kind of thing where women are being targeted…I can’t take that risk. I’ll need to postpone the semester and send everyone home.” Bad idea. We needed to interview people. And mostly, we needed to see if anyone was acting hinky—because no matter how hard it was to land a spot at PsyTrain, if there was a group of religious weirdos targeting Psychs, I wouldn’t put it past one of them to weasel their way in somehow. “For now, the best thing you can do is sit tight,” and stay out of our way… “and let us do our jobs.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Dreyfuss. My favorite person. Right on schedule. He slipped around Lyle, who didn’t move to stop him, since as far as PsyTrain was concerned, he was with us.

He managed to intimidate all the Psychs out of his way—him, with his stupid ponytail and his track suit—took a deep breath, rubbed his hands together, and said to us, confident as you please, “Okay, kids. Brief me.”

I let Jacob handle it. Like I said, he’s
made
out of patience.

Since just looking at Dreyfuss made me want to punch something, I ducked into the bathroom to see if the not-door was there. It was not.

There. Maybe I’d just imagined it, since I was busy comparing and contrasting Debbie’s room to ours. I couldn’t just discount it, though.