Spook Squad (16 page)

I swallowed the massive amount of saliva that had suddenly gushed out of my glands, and decided identifying a few repeaters might see me all the way through the weekend if I bartered for each individual ghost. Since I was already pushing my luck, I said, “I’ll I.D. your first victim for three Seconals.”

He plucked out three more pills and lined them up beside the first one. I quelled the urge to smack myself in the forehead. Obviously I should have asked for more, but I couldn’t exactly backpedal now. I sucked at negotiation.
 

According to the paperwork, Throat Bullet worked for the Chicago Tribune. His missing persons report had been filed eight years ago. The photo was an obvious match, and the identity and dates would be easy enough for me to verify, so I presumed it was real. I pulled the page and handed it to Dreyfuss. He glanced at the paper and bit off the corner of his fingernail. “I would’ve thought this guy was off sunning himself in the Caribbean. He took a lot of dirty money to keep stories quiet.”

The guy by the bathroom was even easier to I.D. thanks to his dramatic hairline. Russian mob. Supposedly. That put me up to seven pills. It also left the most disturbing repeater unidentified.

Triple-Shot took his three bullets and went down. I considered my sheaf of photos. It was possible the repeater wasn’t even in the stack. Still, I scrutinized each one. I could eliminate two thirds of them easily, but there were five possibilities I wasn’t so sure of. Grim white guys in suits tend to look a lot alike. I wanted to put a name to this face, and not only for the Seconal. The PsyCop program had been running in Chicago for just over a dozen years—I should know, since I was one of its charter members. When had Detective Wembly turned up missing—last year, or last FPMP directorship? I wasn’t sure. Sarge had been vague. Maybe I should have set Jacob on researching Wembly and not Laura Kim. At least we knew what Laura Kim looked like and where she was.

I straightened up, not realizing I’d been hunched, while my back cracked like a chorus of castanets. I stole a look around the room as I stretched. Dreyfuss was watching me, all that snappy wiseass energy of his now quiet, calm and focused. The only thing moving was his hand as he picked at a ragged cuticle while his eyes remained on me. Sometimes my people-instincts are spot on, and sometimes they’re shit. I wasn’t sure which of those variables I was currently experiencing…just that I thought maybe,
maybe
, I finally knew him well enough to get a read off him. “Tell me something,” I said.

“If I can.”

“The guy in the boardroom who shot himself in the head….”

Supposedly the only thing I knew about the boardroom was the presence of a now-eradicated cold spot. His eyes widened. I’d never supplied such a precise level of visual detail to anyone outside my most trusted inner circle.

“…was it the missing PsyCop, Wembly?”

His face froze. Only for a nanosecond. And then he said, “Definitely not.”

Maybe that was true, or maybe every word out of his mouth was a lie. I might not know if the suicide repeater was Wembly, but one thing was for sure: I’d seen that pause. I knew Dreyfuss had plenty to hide.

Was he lying? Having Carolyn Brinkman in my life has taught me there are plenty of ways to lie. Not every falsehood is a bold-faced whopper. There are lies of omission. There are subtle misdirections. If Con Dreyfuss says he’s never lied to me, I’m inclined to think that might be the case.

Technically.

So if the missing PsyCop wasn’t the boardroom suicide, then…I cut my eyes to Triple-Shot.

“That’s not Detective Wembly either,” Dreyfuss said.

“I wasn’t looking at anything.”

“And I’m the Queen of England.” He turned to his keyboard and dismissed the photo lineup on his monitors. “If the third ghost isn’t in my stack of likely candidates, then maybe he’s someone I don’t know about yet. We can do a composite—I’ve got the software—and pull some more suspects.”

“It’s not that. He might even be one of these guys on the shortlist.”

“Maybe a trained sketch artist could help you figure out—”
 

“I know how to I.D. features, that’s not the issue. It’s that people tend to look a lot alike when they’re screaming.”

That shut him up. He tore off the hunk of cuticle he’d been picking. The nail bed on his ring finger started bleeding. Profusely. He gave a disgusted grunt and blotted it on the hem of his hooded sweatshirt.

“Plus he’s all flickery now from the Hail Marys.”

Dreyfuss leaned forward in his chair. “So you can actually see the effects of Agent Duff’s rituals take hold?”

I shrugged.

“And, in theory, you could exorcise this guy for good…once you were satisfied you knew who he was, and that I didn’t kill him.”

I was tired of hedging. Plus, it seemed pointless. “Yes.”

“Well, then.” Dreyfuss sucked a bead of blood off his finger. “What about the reverse? Could you bring the spirit back and get a better look?”

My knee-jerk reaction was to insist I couldn’t. But as I opened my mouth to deny it, I began to wonder. Maybe Dreyfuss was on to something, and maybe I actually should be looking at my ability that way. Making the ghosts sharper wasn’t something I ever set out to do—or, more accurately, it wasn’t something I was aware of attempting. But every time I scoured a crime scene for psychic evidence, every time I chased a flicker I saw in the corner of my eye, wasn’t I hoping to find some clear and obvious piece of evidence that would help us make our pointless arrest?

“Maybe,” I said finally.

He was watching me, hard. He knew he’d piqued my interest. “Never tried, have you?”

I shook my head.

“I’ve always thought it was a crying shame you were stuck ticketing jaywalkers with those bozos on the force. You know I’d love to put you on the fast track for personal growth and development.”
 

Excitement surged through me as he reached into his pocket, and I figured I hadn’t blown my chance at those last three Seconals after all. But it wasn’t his magic pillbox he pulled out this time. It was a keyring. He opened his lowest desk drawer, took out a slim black folder and placed it on his desk, careful not to bleed on it. “All the Psych trainers in the world can tell you to clear your mind and breathe and chant and ring the Tibetan prayer bowls…but it’s all a bunch of theory. None of them can really guide you from a place of experience.”

He’d lost my attention with the folder. People don’t keep their pills in a folder. Unless there was a prescription in there…but he’d already told me a Seconal prescription was out of the question.

“After all,” he said, “who’s gonna tell Michelangelo how to paint a ceiling?” He was happy to supply his own answer. “Not the guys down at the Home Depot. That’s for sure.”

Unless it was a prescription for some kind of psyactive that might allow me to talk to Triple-Shot. After the mickey I’d let him slip me in Santa Barbara, I didn’t want anything to do with Dreyfuss’ experimental drugs. Unless they were benzos.

“But there is one person who can provide Victor Bayne with the benefit of her experience.” He opened the folder, but the sheet of paper inside wasn’t a prescription at all. It was a piece of notebook paper, slightly yellowed. My heart sank at the sight of it—because while he’d been trying to arouse my curiosity as to what it might be, I really had sold myself on the idea of a new prescription. He was watching my face fall—and I didn’t care. All that setup, for a stupid note?

And then he said, “Marie Saint Savon.”

*
 
*
 
*

“It’s in French.” I tried to sound cocky, but my voice was shaking. ’Cos once I registered what he was showing me, scoring pills was the last thing on my mind.

“I took a few semesters in high school,” Dreyfuss said, “but I was too busy watching Conchita Suarez in the front row twirling her long black hair to remember much more than the basics. They wouldn’t let the Cuban kids take Spanish just to raise their GPAs. Lucky for me.”

“So you don’t know what this list says?”

“I didn’t say that. There’s such a thing as a translator, y’know.”

I read a line. I was so excited I kept going back on myself, reading and re-reading, trying to make sense.

Resentir un frisson.
Okay. For all I knew, the
Frisson
was an overpriced luxury sedan. I looked to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He read the line out loud, and while I wouldn’t know a good accent from a bad one, he sounded pretty damn French to me. “It means to feel a sudden drop in temperature,” he explained, “along with a big case of the willies. A cold spot.”

He read the next couple of lines. “
Le voir mourir
—seeing a death…not a spirit, but the death itself. You call ’em repeaters.
Parler a l’ame
—chatting with spirits.”

Holy hell. Marie Saint Savon had left behind a laundry list of medium abilities. In order of difficulty, no less. I read the final line out loud. “
Craquer les morts
. What the hell is that supposed to be? Dead crackers?”

“Now
that
would be an interesting snack to serve at a football game.” Dreyfuss gazed down at the yellowed page. “
Craquer
is more about forcing them to do what you want. You know, like when you’re questioning a suspect and they finally crack. Breaking them.”

Breaking the dead? Maybe that wasn’t so farfetched. Look what I’d done to Jacob’s biggest vase.

“You know what I don’t see on this list?” Dreyfuss asked.

“Do I even want to know?”

“Astral projecting. Fully awake. Standing up.”

“I don’t actually have that ability,” I said quickly. “It was the drugs. I was pumped full of crazy-strong psyactives and I was running on pure adrenaline—”

“Relax.” His shrewd eyes were right on me, unflinching, and he spoke in a voice so calm and low it was hardly more than a whisper. “Your secret’s safe with me. After all, you’re holding onto my nearest and dearest confidence yourself. So it behooves me to keep certain matters between us.”

“As a rule, I don’t project,” I insisted. “It’s never happened to me anywhere but PsyTrain.”

“Never mind the specifics. What I’m trying to say, if you’d put a lid on your panic attack, is that you’ve uncovered some new abilities above and beyond Marie Saint Savon’s chart, and that with certain augmentations, you can achieve them. If you can do the difficult stuff, the unheard-of stuff…then the skills on this page should all be do-able. Put your mind to it, maybe you can compel spirits.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“So you say—but I doubt you’ve ever tried. You want to know who that third repeater is?” He knew damn well I did. “Force his spirit to tell you.”

*
 
*
 
*

I considered asking Dreyfuss to leave so I could concentrate, but I knew that scenario would give him an advantage. If he was in another room, he could do whatever he wanted unbeknownst to me, while my every move would be visible to his psychic eye. So I let him stick around. I pretended it didn’t bother me, either.

My white light level was pretty high, though most of the juju was currently pumped into my protective shell. Keeping up with the armor was second nature. Once I’d visualized it in place, I hardly gave a thought to maintaining it. Using the white light to affect other beings was more problematic for me, because I had to let the energy flow through me and then into something else. Jacob was better at letting go than I was. He could steal the light and blanket the room with it…but since he can’t actually see what’s going on, having him assist would be like blindfolding him, handing him my sidearm, describing a target and expecting him to hit it by squeezing out a spray of bullets. I’m guessing it worked with the Fire Ghost because he could hardly miss her. Plus she was so eager to get out of there, she met us halfway.

I approached the repeater, a fortyish Caucasian guy in a dark suit. A bullet to the thigh jerked him back, then another to his opposite hip flung him the other way. The final bullet in his shoulder spun him around. Shoulder wounds aren’t normally fatal, so it must have been an arterial hit. Probably so, judging by the spray of blood. Maybe, since his death was imminent, that third bullet knocked his spirit loose before his physical body actually expired. Thinking along those routes made me anxious about predestination and free will, though, so I told myself the actual moment of death wasn’t in question. It was the identity of the repeater…and whether I could figure that out.

He was flickery from Einstein’s ritual. Was it possible to un-exorcise him? Maybe white light didn’t run on a one-way street. If not, I could theoretically throw an exorcism into reverse. If Richie was able to affect the repeater with those ridiculous botched prayers, it seemed to me I should be able strengthen the ghost signal. Not with prayer—I’m not completely sold on the idea of a guy with a big white beard in the sky—but with energy.

I watched the critical moment unfold. Thigh. Hip. Shoulder. Blood spray. My intent was usually to break up the energy and send it off to its proper place. Not a physical location, but a plane that overlaps it. I’m not sure the name mattered—astral, ethereal, the metaphysical scholars try to label these planes of reality, but they never seem to agree with one another, so it was vague in my mind.
Go wherever it is that you belong. Not here.
That’s the gist of my usual command.

What would that look like in opposite-land? I did my best to ignore Dreyfuss, ignore the repeater, and focus on the question. The opposite of “go away”?

Come back.

I felt a shift in my understanding, a realization that calling something back should, in theory, work. I wouldn’t need to make a big show of it, either. While I do use my physical voice to talk to sentient ghosts, I’d long ago stopped speaking with repeaters. They never reacted as if they were hearing me, and I could salt them perfectly well without saying anything aloud.

To be honest, I could salt them perfectly well without salt, too. But I hated the way my hand felt after I reached into my pocket and pulled out my psychic fairy dust. My own salt was currently in my overcoat, which was in the lounge. I was in no mood to try to explain to Richie what I was doing by going out there to retrieve it, so I supposed my salt packets would have to stay where they were. Given the choice of letting the FPMP supply me with salt or using my own non-physical stock, I opted to tap my own mojo and suffer the clammy-hand later. I’m sure I didn’t actually need to reach into my pocket either, but I’d never bothered to break the habit. It was good camouflage to keep the people around me thinking that I needed to employ some sort of physical prop in order to perform.