Spook Squad (13 page)

A giant bouquet took up the whole surface. While I couldn’t name any of the flowers, I was guessing it was pricy. Not a cheap carnation in the bunch. As I tried to come up with something amusing to say about it, something to break the pause in conversation that was growing awkward, I realized there were more flowers on the floor. And more in the back seat.

“You’re dating a florist?”

She gave me a look.

“Why are you leaving the flowers in your car? They’re all frozen. Bring them in the house so you can, I dunno, stare at ’em or something.”

She clicked the lock open and said, “Grab that one, it’s still fresh.”

I hauled it off the seat while she slung her purse over her shoulder and collected a doggie bag from the back seat. I caught a whiff of spice as the bag shifted. The food smelled better than the flowers, which smelled like a funeral home. I wondered how smart I’d been in telling her to bring them inside, after all.

*
 
*
 
*

A couple of vases had managed to make their way into the cannery after Jacob’s retirement party. I’d been shifting them farther and farther out of sight every couple weeks with hopes of sneaking them into the trash by Christmas. I pulled the biggest vase out of the cupboard, cracked a big chunk out of it on the kitchen faucet, then pitched it into the trash with a surprising amount of regret. I filled the second-largest vase halfway with water and set it on the countertop uneventfully. Lisa tried to jam in the bouquet all at once, but it was too big. I grabbed a random handful of stems and pulled about a quarter of the flowers and fronds out of the batch, and said, “Try that.” A card fell out. Without being too obvious, I had a look at it while she hoisted the rest of the bouquet into the vase. It landed face up, which was good. I could be smooth about reading it. However, it was in Spanish, which was bad. It read
Para la rosa más hermosa
in quirky, back-slanted cursive.
 

Once she stuffed all the flowers in the overflowing vase, she said, “I don’t think they’ll fit inside the tent with me.”

As floral arrangements went, it was very large. I wondered if she’d bothered telling her mystery man that she wasn’t really a hearts-and-flowers type of girl. That she was an ex-cop who’d gone over to the New Age side when she couldn’t hide her abilities anymore, that she was more interested in goofball comedies than sweeping romances, and that she preferred french fries to caviar. But other than her unfortunate liaison with a slimy Casanova of a shaman at PsyTrain, she’d been single the whole time I’d known her. She probably exclaimed over the flowers like they were the best damn thing in the world, so as not to rock the boat. I’d been single plenty of years myself—in her situation, it’s what I would have done. “We can put them on the coffee table,” I suggested.

“Then we won’t be able to see the TV.”

True. I shifted a cutting board out of the way and hauled the vase over to a part of the kitchen counter that could be seen from the main room—though if there wasn’t a roof in the way, you’d be able to see the damn thing from orbit. “There. Whaddaya think?”

After a pause, she said, “Victor….” in a tone that conveyed she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. Something about leaving.

“I’m really sorry.” I focused at the flowers and not on her, so as not to spook the conversation. “Locking you out was just a dumb…it was totally a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

“I know. It’s fine. I’m not mad.”

“Okay, good. Because we love having you here—it was just a dumb mistake and you totally shouldn’t read anything into it.”

“I’m not.”

“Good.”

I risked a sidelong glance at her, sensing that whatever we were trying to talk about was nowhere near resolved. Now she was staring fixedly at the vase. I decided to shift tactics. “So does flower guy have a name?”

She did look at me then, up and down, taking my measure. Then she said, “It’s after midnight, and you get up early for work. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Why did a simple first name require a lengthy discussion? “I’m not gonna jinx it.”

“We’ll have dinner tomorrow, okay? You and me. We’ll talk. And you can ask me anything you want to ask.” She gave me a quick hug, retreated to her tent and zipped up the flap behind her.
 

If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if some of our gay had rubbed off on her and she hadn’t quite figured out how to introduce her new girlfriend. Because uncharted gender territory was the only reason I could dredge up for her not letting me in on her secret valentine. That didn’t make any sense, though. Of anyone, I would be the first person she would confide in (other than the lucky lady) if she started pitching for my team…right?

The card I’d spotted didn’t offer much by way of clues. I went back and looked at it again. It was in Spanish, but I already knew her paramour was Hispanic. It was in cursive, which you don’t usually get nowadays from the under-thirty crowd. I’m pushing forty and I print everything in block lettering myself. Maybe she was seeing an older guy (or gal). But I couldn’t really infer it from the card. For all I knew, it had been written by the florist.

She wanted to tell me about her new thing in her own time and her own way. Fine. But maybe she’d be willing to tide me over with a quick sí-no to help me determine whether Dr. Chance was still lurking around the FPMP, or whether I’d be shit outta luck in getting “set up” with a good supply of drugs. But then her silhouette assumed the phone position and murmured something in Spanish, and I realized my question should probably wait until morning. Especially given that I’d become vividly aware that my pants felt like three kinds of wrong—freezing and wet on the hem, stiff at the pocket and slimy in the seat. Since I was already downstairs, I treated myself to a quick blast in the shower before I headed back up in a towel to wrest some blankets and bedspace back from Jacob and fall into a deep, thankfully dreamless sleep.

The sex must’ve done me good. I slept straight through to the alarm—something I rarely do. When I dragged my bleary ass downstairs, Lisa was gone.

“Where the hell would she be at six-thirty in the morning?” I complained. I was talking loudly to make sure my bitching could be heard over the hum of my electric razor. Then I saw I’d somehow missed a strip of hair on my jaw, even after three fucking passes.

Jacob knotted his tie. “Yoga.”

“This early? If I didn’t have a day job, I’d go for the later yoga. The one that takes place after sunrise. After rush hour, for that matter.”

“I gather she likes the teacher.”

Chapter 12

Likes, as in
likes
? Hm. I could see Lisa going for a yoga instructor. But would a yogi have the financial wherewithal to shower her with all those massive floral testaments of their devotion? And would she really need to be so secretive about seeing this person? Given all the esoteric stuff I’ve been exposed to, I’d hardly scoff at a little yoga. I tried to imagine the yoga instructor. He’d be limber, naturally. If he was a hippie-type, he might have a beard. Not a manicured beard like Jacob, either, but one of those natural beards that go all the way down the neck. Heck, his face might even be mostly concealed by a nest of hair. If he had a saving grace, it would be the eyes. They’d be sparkly eyes, a lighter color. Blue, or maybe green.

Or gray. Pale gray, the type of eyes you really don’t see on anybody…unless they’re wearing special contact lenses. “What’s with Bly’s colored contacts?”

Thankfully, Jacob didn’t suggest anything dumb, like maybe the guy had always wanted gray eyes. “Don’t know.”

“Maybe I could get Dreyfuss to put us all together, and you could have another look at—”

“Vic, wait. I can’t look at Bly. Now that you’ve pointed me at Laura Kim, I feel like I’m right on the verge of something. Yesterday I spent the day in archives. According to the paperwork, Laura claimed she was sick the morning Burke was shot. She left the FPMP before noon. I’m tracking down video surveillance from her apartment building now. It’s slow going, but I found some footage that might tell me if she went straight home or not.”

It seemed like a shame to waste a bunch of time trying to determine something the sí-no could tell us in five seconds. Yeah, it was being flaky about whether Laura was the shooter, but maybe we could get it to verify her location and save Jacob a lot of tedious work. I figured I’d send Lisa a vague text that she could answer at her leisure once she’d rolled up her yoga mat and put on her shoes. I was halfway to my phone when our ridiculously loud doorbell nearly blew out my eardrums. I checked the clock. Still early—twenty to seven.

I doubted that anyone who’d show up on my doorstep at twenty to seven was someone I’d be eager to see.

My sidearm was upstairs, so I palmed a kitchen knife before I answered. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses and Avon Ladies don’t just pop over at twenty to seven—and installing a peephole was one of those household chores that Jacob hadn’t yet gotten around to (and I didn’t dare attempt for fear of destroying the door.) I crept up, knife in hand, and considered kneeling down and peering out through the mail slot. That would just give me a view of someone’s knees, though. Then I saw the security chain, the one that had been the cause of my screwed up FPMP dream last night, and I slipped it on before I answered.

I opened the door, then did a double-take. The early morning visitor framed by the two-inch gap was Sergeant Warwick. I slammed the door and yanked the chain off, then re-opened it. Though not all the way.

“Uh…hi.” Was I supposed to invite him in?
 

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

While I’m pretty sure any government surveillance around the cannery is confined to the building’s perimeter—and therefore, his visit would already be duly noted—I decided whatever he wanted to say to me would probably be less awkward without the presence of the male stripper jigsaw puzzle and the tent in the living room.

Warwick’s gaze flickered over my shoulder, and I felt Jacob’s presence at my back as a subtle creak in the floor, or maybe a shift in the air pressure. Warwick greeted him curtly with, “Detective.”

“Sergeant.” Jacob didn’t bother mentioning it was “Agent” now. But he did slip the kitchen knife out of my hand and tuck it behind the bag of sidewalk salt without Warwick being any the wiser. “Would you like some coffee?”

Warwick scowled. He wasn’t accustomed to politeness—he was more in the habit of being direct. Which, I realized, I didn’t actually mind. “We were just going for a walk,” I said. Jacob had the grace to act as if it was a perfectly normal thing for me to do, despite it being painfully early and unpleasantly cold.

I stepped into some shoes, threw on a coat and joined Warwick on the front stoop. Ted Warwick is a solid tank of a guy, with a neck as big around as his head. I’ve seen photos of him in his military days. His short thinning hair had been darkish blond once, but had gone tarnished platinum with age. At the best of times, he was ruddy. Now, in the cold, he was practically fluorescent.

He walked. Fast. I struggled to keep up without taking a header and landing on the frozen garbage in the gutter. Once we’d gone three unrelenting blocks, he said, “Your absence…is it voluntary?”

My first impulse was to defend my choice to report to the FPMP offices rather than the Fifth Precinct, at least until I realized what he was actually asking. The Sarge—worried, about me? I hardly knew what to make of it. “Yeah, it’s…yeah.”

He paused and gave me a sharp look, a look that had been honed over the decades to cut straight through bullshit. “You’re sure you’re not in over your head.”

I shrugged. I probably was—but at least my eyes were open.

“If you needed to take a last-minute trip…I know a guy who can sell you a used car and hold the title, keep it hard to track….”

“I don’t need a—it’s fine, it’s nothing weird.” Relatively speaking. “It’s no worse than anything else I do.”

We turned a corner and stopped talking while we passed a frazzled-looking woman strapping a wailing toddler into a car seat. Once we were clear, Warwick said, “A few years ago, a PsyCop from the Twentieth was moonlighting where you’re working now: Detective John Wembly, an empath.” He let out a sigh, and the wind carried its white tendrils away. “He disappeared.”

“From his job?”

“From everywhere.”

The image of the repeater who’d swallowed a bullet in the conference room flashed through my mind’s eye. Could an empathic cop be neutralized by locking him in a room with his sidearm and a bunch of suicidal head-cases? Talk about an elaborate way to take someone out. Not that I thought it was implausible, mind you. I’ve seen too much weird shit to discount the possibility. Just that it seemed like a hell of a lot of effort.

“I think it’s in their best interest to keep me around,” I said. “Who else can monitor their ghosts?”

“And if one of the higher-ups had to choose between keeping you around and making sure no one else had the benefit of your expertise? Don’t get cocky. Everyone’s expendable, Bayne, even you.”

If I was expendable, I’d be dead by now.
I didn’t say it. Hell, I was shocked I’d even thought it. Shocked and angry. I was tempted to tell him to fuck off for calling me expendable, but what came out was, “At least the things I do there matter.”

His reply was a level glare.

I did my best to glare back without tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. “How many of my collars get acquitted?”
 

His eyes widened—he hadn’t seen that one coming. But then he took stock and said, “Too many.”

We both looked away and focused on our brisk, pointless walking. After another block we’d already passed twice, he said, “Defense attorneys are starting to realize they can play the Psych angle and hang a jury, at least if they’re lucky enough to land a judge who doesn’t ride the fuck out of ’em in the courtroom.”

“Oh my God.”

“Look at it this way…a public defender ain’t gonna use that tactic. The criminal’s gotta hire high-priced defense to get off like that. These scumbags mortgage their houses, their families’ houses, sell everything they own and then some to pay for some slick lawyer to work it. They’ll be paying the rest of their lives.”