Spook Squad (31 page)

Lisa glanced from me to Dreyfuss and back again. Her brow was furrowed. It should have looked hilarious with her hair floating all around her, but it didn’t, not one bit. I wished I was privy to whatever she was asking herself—but I supposed I’d need to be a telepath to hear it. Lucky me. I just saw dead people.

Would she really hold back something that would clear my name all for the sake of proving a point, or was she protecting me? Whether I did something or not, I didn’t want Lisa to take the fall for my mistakes. I repeated, “Tell him.”
 

She stared at me hard, her dark eyes boring into me for a long moment, then she turned to Dreyfuss and said, “No. It wasn’t him.”

Dreyfuss shouted, “Someone told upper management about the GhosTVs. And exactly where they were kept.”

“Oh, come on,” I yelled, “plenty of people know that.”

Dreyfuss smiled grimly. “Actually, no. Only a handful of people knew about the set in my office.”

And I was one of them. Fantastic. In my defense, I had absolutely no idea it was that big a deal. He’d given a set to me, after all…though he’d also given me a warning that I’d better not go blabbing about it. So what if I knew he locked the TV’s credenza. He locked his goddamn refrigerator, too.

Lisa tried to haul Dreyfuss toward the door. “They got what they came for,” she said. “They’re gone now—they’re not listening. We don’t need to do this.”

Dreyfuss and I were too busy having our own standoff to worry about something as mundane as the electrical field scrambling our guts. We both stayed put and tried to stare each other down. “Other people knew besides me,” I insisted. Richie and Carl must have seen it at some point—I knew absolutely nothing about Carl, but it’s always best to watch out for the quiet ones. Maybe Bly, too. And then there was Dr. Santiago, who could’ve had some kind of rivalry going on with Dr. K I didn’t know about, a rivalry where she’d benefit by sabotaging his work…although even as I thought up that scenario, I knew I was grasping at straws. All those people must have seen it at some point. All those people, plus Dreyfuss, and me…and Laura.
 

My gut wanted to trust Laura Kim, but my gut’s proven itself to be spectacularly wrong on numerous occasions. The thought of suggesting Laura was the culprit made me sick. Especially when I couldn’t temper the accusation with an apologetic tone of voice. No, I’d need to scream it out in all its ugly glory, and I realized I wasn’t willing to. Not without definitive proof. Still, I felt the need to deflect the blame from myself, because even though Lisa had just conveyed the sí-no’s blessing on me, Dreyfuss looked like he wasn’t buying my innocence. Lisa dropped his arm, stepped away from him, and paused at the door. She looked to me, pleading with her eyes for me to leave the humming, crackling room with her. But I had a point to make. “I’m not the only one who knows about it,” I insisted. “The thing didn’t install itself in your credenza.”

“No, Dr. K put it in. So he sabotaged his own project?”

“All I’m saying is that what happened this morning could’ve been in the works long before I set foot in this place.”

“No,” Lisa chimed in. So much for that argument. She looked a bit stunned, like she hadn’t been expecting the sí-no to spill out at that very moment. But now that it had, her internal stream of questioning was running through her mind. “It happened while you were here, Vic. This week. You know the person who’s responsible. A woman. It’s a woman.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face.

“Not Laura Kim,” Lisa called out. I could see it in her eyes—she was as relieved as I was that the sí-no was finally taking a firm stance on Laura.

“Then it’s Santiago,” I said. “I never trusted her.”

“Not Santiago,” Lisa snapped, pressing her shoulder impatiently into the door.

“There is no other woman there,” I said. “Unless you’re talking about someone I saw in passing, in the lunchroom or the hall.”

“No, you know her. You spoke to her. Where…? In the dining room? No. In Con’s office.”
 

I ran back the tape in my mind and tried to figure out what she meant. Thoughts of the exorcism and the botched rosary brought back memories of repeaters and jellyfish. I supposed it was possible the jellyfish were female, and I did chat with them, even if it was just to tell them to hit the road. Maybe they were something more than habit-demons. Maybe they were some kind of spying device. But if they were capable of carrying information back to Dreyfuss’ superiors, who the heck would receive it in Washington? Even if they had a Psych hopped up on psyactives interpreting the message, all the jellyfish could do was undulate. They weren’t sentient enough to carry on a conversation. Not like….

I closed my eyes and swayed on my feet. Not like Dr. Chance. It fit, it all fit. A female I knew. In Dreyfuss’ office. Pissed off at Dr. K and positive he was poised to snatch a Nobel for her GhosTV. “Is it Chance?” I asked weakly. Her name was swallowed up in our noise shield. I needed to come clean, even though it meant admitting that I’d been holding back the majority of what I knew. If the dead doctor had managed to figure out a way to exact her revenge, I’d need all the help I could get. I braced myself and shouted, “It’s Dr. Chance.”

Dreyfuss went ashen. Lisa closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, clutched Dreyfuss’ hand and said, “I’m not saying one more word until both of you come outside.”

Chapter 27

Grand Avenue was dead in the gap between morning rush hour and lunch. Although the wind was bitter and sleet pelted our faces, it was an enormous relief to escape the electrical hum of the dank, low-ceilinged utility hut and to slide back into the real world, although that reality felt a bit flimsy now that I’d integrated so many new and scary concepts in such a short span of time.

My ears were still ringing from the hum, and I worked my jaw hoping to make my eardrums flex and shake off the residual drone. We could speak freely now since the sí-no assured us no one was listening in, and while it was a relief to stop shouting over the noise, it was no relief at all to hear that Dr. Chance was indeed the one who’d told Washington about the GhosTVs.

“One thing I asked of you,” Dreyfuss muttered at me. “One damn thing. To take care of Chance.”

“There wasn’t any time. I was feeling her out, then she got in a snit and took off. I haven’t seen her since—and I did try.”

“I’ve seen you try, Bayne. You try to do the things you deign to do, like pinning those lousy repeaters on me. You try ’til you puke. But how hard did you really try to find Chance? Don’t answer. I’m sure by now you’ve rationalized that you’re the good guy, and you’re convinced you really did give it your all.”

Lisa took Dreyfuss by the elbow and murmured, “You didn’t eat anything today.” He shook his head in disgust. “Baby, you need to eat or you’ll make yourself sick. You need your head in the game right now.”

The smoothie cart Richie’d discovered was less than a block away, and Lisa had her eye on it. The old guy manning the cart was swaddled in winter clothes with his breath streaming away from him in a cloud. Not exactly the best enticement to try a slushy cold drink. Even so, it was quick, portable and available, so the three of us trooped up to the cart. As we watched Dreyfuss’ strawberry mango swirl churning through the blender, I tried to come up with a way to explain myself, to assert that I’d done what I thought was right at the time. Except I couldn’t, because now it was obvious I should have been less concerned with identifying the repeaters and more worried about tracking down Chance. Lisa ordered a chocolate banana smoothie for herself, then asked if I was getting one. Although I knew it was completely illogical, and although we’d be able to see the guy making them, I declined. I couldn’t get past the notion of Richie hocking loogies into the drinks. He’d been out of sorts lately too, crabby and quick to take offense, and now he was home sulking.

Wasn’t he?

“Is Richie hungover for real this morning?” I asked Lisa.

“No.”

“So he’s pissed off that I interrupted his rosary.”

“No.”

“Does he want to get back at me for Camp Hell?”

“No…why do you ask?”

“Because I was a raging asshole to him—yeah, I know, you’re shocked.”

“No. He doesn’t see it that way. No.”

What an unexpected relief. I still felt guilty as sin, but I deserved to carry that burden. What mattered was that I hadn’t messed him up any worse than the hand of Fate already had. “So he’s okay.”

Lisa cocked her head and furrowed her brow. “No.” She sí-noed in silence for a moment, then said, “I don’t really know what that means.”

I’d had a sneaking suspicion something was up. “I’ll give him a quick call and see what’s what.” I pulled out my cell phone and asked Dreyfuss, “Do you have his number?” My little screen didn’t light up when I flipped the phone open. Figuring it was turned off, I hit the on-button.

Nothing. Dead.

Dreyfuss poked his smartphone’s on-button a few times, then stuck the unresponsive thing back in his pocket with a sigh. “Can the day get any worse? Don’t answer that,
querida
, it’s rhetorical. Let’s just hope Laura can fix it.”

*
 
*
 
*

“As if my morning wasn’t stellar enough,” Dreyfuss said, “now I killed my phone.” He tossed the dead smartphone onto Laura’s desk. It hit with a clatter.

I placed mine carefully beside it. “Mine too.” Lisa didn’t need to join in. She’d left her phone in her car—presumably because the sí-no told her to.

Laura glanced at the phones. “I hate to ask what you were doing,” she said, “but I suppose I need to know.”

“High tension wires might or might not have been involved,” Dreyfuss allowed.

“Then cross your fingers.” The Fixer pulled a fresh battery out of her desk, swapped it into Dreyfuss’ phone, and lo and behold, the little touchscreen lit up.

He took the phone from her. “It was just a drained battery? How is that possible?”

“I have no idea—but the same thing happened to me the last time I got an MRI. Apparently my purse was too close to the machine.” She slipped open the back of my phone and peered at the battery. While my phone is nowhere near as old as my car, it’s still a cheap model. I’m as hard on cell phones as I am on blazers, and since I end up in the phone store a couple times a year having my data transferred out of a crushed hunk of plastic, I don’t invest in anything fancy. “I don’t have a battery for this,” she said, “but I do have a charger.”

Dreyfuss, meanwhile, was scrolling through his messages. “How many times did you call me, Laura? I’ve gotta try and figure out our next step here, pronto, and I hate to think what else could’ve gone to shit while I was out of range.”

“It’s Agent Duff. He’s being really weird…and really persistent. He’s insisting that I leave work and go to his house, but he won’t tell me why.”

“He probably wants you to show him how to program his new remote,” I said, hoping it was something as simple as that. But Lisa shook her head, no.

Behind us, the elevator whooshed open, and out tromped Carl, Richie’s unflappable assistant, looking a lot more animated than I’d ever seen him. He took in the agitated cluster of folks around Laura’s desk and zeroed in on Con. “Agent Dreyfuss, I really hate to interrupt you—”

“It is a phenomenally bad time.”

“—but Agent Duff is losing it.”

“I do not have the resources to wipe Duff’s ass for him at this particular moment. Not now. Not today.”

With the aplomb of someone who knew when to pick his battles, Carl dug in his heels and said, “He tried to talk me into getting Laura over to his place. By force.”

That revelation did give us all pause, despite the GhosTV-raid fallout. “Did he mention why?” Dreyfuss asked calmly.

“No. But he offered me ten thousand dollars to do it.”

Dreyfuss considered that information, then turned to Lisa. “I have a feeling it’s all connected,” she said.

Feeling. Right. Like the way I “sense” things in mixed company when the ghosts are telling me exactly where their bodies are buried.

“What about those repo men who paid us a visit today?” Dreyfuss asked Lisa. “You think he might have invited them to Chicago?”

“I…don’t know.”

Maybe Lisa wasn’t willing to confirm or deny anything, but Dreyfuss decided he’d found his leak. “After all I’ve done for him, this is how that cretin repays me? Son of a bitch.”

If there’s one thing I’ve come to expect from Constantine Dreyfuss, it was his ability to bounce back from anything with a smile, a wink, and smartmouthed quip. I’d never seen him seriously angry outside the astral—and now he was spouting off things he’d normally keep to himself. Watching him teetering on the brink prompted me to fling my psychic faucets open wide and bring my protective white light thundering on down.

Now that Carl had his boss’ attention, he added, “I think Agent Duff came in over the weekend, too. Someone went through my desk—and no one else has the keys but him and me.”

“I’ll check his keycard,” Laura said. I expected Lisa to use the sí-no to save some time, but Lisa kept her mouth shut. Either she didn’t want to broadcast the extent of her clairvoyance, or the sí-no was being flaky again. “He was here Saturday,” Laura verified, “from 10:12 to 10:41. Do you want me to pull the surveillance? It’ll take a few minutes.”

“Do it,” Dreyfuss said.

Surveillance had become a major pain in my ass. But when I wasn’t the subject of the mechanical eye’s gaze, I had to admit it was pretty convenient to have a record of exactly what had gone down. Once Laura pulled up the files, we watched as Richie entered the office he shared with Carl, and proceeded to systematically go through one desk, then the other.

“What’s he looking for?” Laura wondered aloud.

And whatever it was, why wouldn’t he know whose desk it was in—his, or his assistant’s? Then again, it was Richie we were dealing with. Unless there was a football stat attached, he didn’t sweat the details.

Onscreen, Richie flattened a booklet on one of the desks, then peeled a sticky note from a cube and jotted something on it.