PsyCop: GhosTV Part 29

could summon ectoplasm there in the astral." I explained the whole thing to him-the astral axe, the blood ghost, the slime on the back of Chekotah's blouse, and even the stretched head. I felt a little crazy talking about that last part. But you never know which piece is going to make the whole puzzle come together.

Jacob didn't say anything when I finished. He just sat there cradling my hand, which was long-dry but still a little bit cold, and he stared at me.

"What?" I said finally.

"Do you realize how big this is?"

"I dunno. What, specifically?"

"The ability to travel anywhere, to see a location without being physically present, to hear a private conversation?" He made it sound awfully empowering. What it had felt like to me was that I was flailing around, making up the rules as I went along.

Like usual. In Jacob's a.s.sessment, I was some kind of superspy. And that was exciting for maybe two seconds, until a few more realiza-tions sank in. The CIA had been trying to crack remote viewing since 1972, and I had no desire for the government to be any more interested in me than it already was. Even the remote viewer the FPMP supposedly had was only spoken of in whispers. "We gotta be careful who we tell," I said.

Jacob squeezed my fingers. It hurt the tight scabs, but even so, the feel of his hand surrounding mine was a comfort. He sat that way for a moment, and then when he spoke, it was quiet, and very measured.

"You know how, when we figured out that I actually had something other than a big psychic void inside me, right away we told Carolyn and Crash so we could get their take on it?"

"Yeah."

254.

"Let's just keep this to ourselves."

Being on the same page with Jacob, especially right after we'd been snarling at each other over him pulling me out of the projection, should have been a relief. Instead, the fact that he'd agreed with me sent an icy finger of dread sneaking down my spine. Not only would federal recruitment efforts step up if I made this new facet of my talent known. If the wrong people found out I could sneak around at will and return to my body with a full understanding of what I'd just heard and seen, I might as well paint a big ol' target on my forehead and kiss my a.s.s goodbye.

255.

Chapter 29.

Thanks to my enviable new method of gathering evidence, Jacob and I could agree that we had more direction in figuring out what was going on with all the disappearing girls. Agreeing on which direction that might be was another story.

"Faun Windsong actually said they deserved it," I repeated for the umpteenth time. "If that's not a big red flag, I don't know what is."

"True, but you can't ignore the b.l.o.o.d.y ghost. She was gruesome, right? And she was trying to touch Bert."

I wasn't sure exactly what she'd been trying to do to him-slime him, possess him or lobotomize him-but whatever it was, it didn't look too savory.

"I think we need to find out who she is." He pulled out his notebook and poised his pen over it. "Give me a description."

"Other than the gaping black wound in her chest that was throwing off sparks?" I sighed. "Caucasian. Twenty-five to thirty. Five foot five, average weight, dark hair, pale skin." I thought back to her features in search of anything that might help me pick her out, though unfortunately she hadn't had any astral tattoos or name tags. "Maybe a little long in the chin."

"And if you saw her here, she died here. Right?"

"Either that, or she blames Chekotah for her death and she's following him around. Not that I see him as a murderer-he doesn't 256.

strike me as the type-but maybe someone who convinced her to do a hippy-dippy herbal cure that stopped her heart and landed her in the hospital with her sternum cracked open." Figuring out who'd died on the property in the last ten, twenty years shouldn't be hard if the local PD was willing to pull some records. Figuring out who Chekotah knew that had died a sudden or violent death, one in which he was somehow culpable, without letting him know we were sniffing around him? Nearly f.u.c.king impossible. "Look, never mind the ghost.

I need to get back there and see what Faun was saying."

"Never mind the ghost? Listen to yourself. You're carrying such a grudge against Katrina that you're writing off the most important witness."

"There's no grudge."

"Are you sure? Because she seemed to come through Camp h.e.l.l pretty much unscathed-in fact, she doesn't even call it that. It's Heliotrope Station when she's referring to it."

I yanked my hand out of his lap and balled my fist a few times to bring the feeling back into my frigid fingers. "You keep on talking to me like this, I'll be too ramped up to fly back over there anytime today."

He kept gnawing at that same old bone as if I'd consented to be part of the conversation. "She might not be as strong as you, but she's still a decent medium, isn't she? It's more than just cold spots for her, right?"

"So?"

"So...it would stand to reason that she would have been just as in-demand as you. Or at least nearly as much."

"If you try to tell me I brought whatever happened at Camp h.e.l.l on myself...you'd better get used to sleeping in the decoy bed."

257.

He grabbed me and pulled me against his chest before I had a chance to flinch away. "You're putting words in my mouth. What I am saying is that you might be p.i.s.sed off at her for not deflecting some of the attention off you. That's all."

Seeing as how Jacob typically makes so much sense, even though my brain was trying to spin into a heated panic, I had to admit that being p.i.s.sed off about something like that did sound an awful lot like me.

Why hadn't she taken some of the heat? Maybe she had...and she'd just processed it differently than me. Taken those sleep-deprived exercises in futility and re-framed them as exciting, multi-day cram sessions in search of a brave new world of Psych.

Or maybe the powers-that-be had played catch and release, and allowed her to swim back to her non-traumatic Heliotrope Station experience since she was just a minnow, while they had a great, big catch they could be feasting on instead.

Maybe it was only the big fish who'd been trawled in the nightmare net. Movie Mike. Stefan. Me.

"I'm not saying we don't look at Katrina." Jacob's voice was gentle and low, and he spoke into my hair. "I'm just saying that a b.l.o.o.d.y spirit in a building that's supposedly clean-that's important, too."

"Even if the locals were on board, which I'm thinking they're not, it'll take us forever. Back home, we've got people we know who can dig through records for us, people willing to cut us a little slack. Here, I don't even know how to figure out who we're supposed to call."

"Then let Dreyfuss do it." Although I gave pulling away a pretty good try, Jacob had me in a bear hug, and he just crushed me to his chest harder. "He's got the contacts. He's got the resources. Let him dig up the records, and in the meanwhile, you see if you can get back to Chekotah's room."

I suppose it could've been worse. At least Jacob was on board for the astral eavesdropping portion of the program. He could have told me 258.

to physically go and question Chekotah and Faun, after all. He was too accustomed to getting a psychic edge on his statements, I guess, to go back to needing to dissect a witness' actual statement to pick out the truth.

It was a good enough plan, one we could both live with. And while I was tempted to tell myself that giving Dreyfuss some paperwork to pull would keep him out of our hair, I did have to admit-we really hadn't seen much of him. Only those couple of times he was in our room giving us electronics.

I went through the bathroom and gave the door to Dreyfuss' room an ungentle bang. Shuffling, footsteps. He opened the door. "Any news?" Although my goal had been to get him working on the photo lineup and get back to what I'd been doing, my curiosity spiked. What, exactly, did he do all day? He didn't interview anyone. And, other than his walk through Debbie's bedroom, he hadn't been combing for physical evidence. I glanced over his shoulder. He had a laptop on his desk, but it was off. That didn't mean anything, though. Maybe he had it set up to power down the second he shut the cover. "Another ghost," I said as I tried to get a better idea of what he'd been up to.

"In the hall outside Chekotah's room."

"Sloppy cleanup work. They should ask for their money back."

"She wasn't talking. I thought you could dig up some info and help me figure out who she was."

I wasn't entirely truthful about my location and astral state, but when it came down to the blood ghost herself, I gave him the same description I'd given Jacob-minus the touching Chekotah and the ectoplasm parts. He didn't write anything down. "And how does she fit in?"

"I won't know until I figure out who she is."

"A theory. A guess. Is she victim number one? A witness? A fluke 259.

you're trying to rule out? A little something would help me know which rocks to start turning over first."

"Maybe she lived here? Maybe she was someone Chekotah knew, since she was near his room?" I shrugged, and did another visual sweep of Dreyfuss' desk, what I could see of it beyond his head and his half-closed door, via the s.p.a.ce he was mostly blocking. No clue what he'd been up to all this time. I had myself convinced he'd been busy spying-it takes time to monitor all those bugs and little cameras, after all-when he turned his head and I noticed a ridge on his cheek. The GhosTV had me seeing things again, veins and bulges that didn't exist. Or so I thought. Until it didn't shift or move or do anything supernatural at all, and I realized it was a pillow mark.

That a.s.shole'd been sleeping.

"I do think you're on to something," he said. "But your vagueness needs work."

"What're you trying to say?"

"You were just standing there in the hall outside Chekotah's room when this ghost appeared, didn't say anything to you, and didn't do anything in particular?"

"That's not what I-"

"Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Why were you hovering around Chekotah's doorway? What did you say to the ghost that she didn't answer? Why did she disappear, when it was all said and done?

If she even did. Maybe she's still standing there in the hallway, waiting for you to bring a photo lineup and see if you can put a name to the face."

"I wasn't being vague-I was trying to get to the point. I went to Chekotah's room to ask him a question, I saw the blood ghost in the hall, I asked her if she was okay and she didn't answer me, and when I touched her wrist to get her attention she disappeared."

260.

"There you go. Was that so difficult?" He winked at me. Winked.

"We'll make a proficient liar out of you yet." When I went back to our room, I closed the door very carefully behind me, because if I slammed it as hard as I wanted to, it'd fall off its hinges and Dreyfuss would be able to peek in at us any time he wanted. "Don't let him get to you," Jacob told me. "I can tell you're ticked off. Ignore him. Just think about relaxing and getting astral again."

Which had taken me an hour the first time I'd done it. Chances were, Faun Windsong would be long gone by the time I got my astral a.s.s back up there. But the problem did seem to center around the Native American couple of the year. And since there was a chance, albeit slim, that I might learn something important they weren't willing to say to my face, and because I wouldn't put it past her to annoy Chekotah all morning while he was busy moping, I settled myself back down on the bed and tried to get astral.

Tried being the operative word.

I closed my eyes and imagined I was looking down at myself, and Jacob read through the relax-this-and-that script, and the GhosTV was tuned the same as it had been before. And nothing. No drifting, no floating, no astral at all...because my stomach kept moaning and groaning like I hadn't fed it in days. "I don't think spelt agrees with me."

"Are you sick?"

"No...just hungry." Hungry enough to eat the packing crate.

"It's not even eleven, although we are two hours off. It says here that any kind of physical distraction-stuffy nose, cold room, noises, hunger-will make it really hard to project. That's probably why they do the sensory deprivation tanks in Katrina's cla.s.s."

"I'm not shutting myself up in any-"

261.

"I was just thinking we should order you a burrito. That's all."

"I'd blow you for a burrito."

"You'd blow me anyway." True. But the burrito would make it especially satisfying. Jacob dialed information, connected to the Mexican restaurant across the street, listened for a long moment, and then hung up. "They don't open 'til four."

"Four? But they're a restaurant. Why aren't they open for lunch?

Everyone opens at eleven for lunch. Eleven thirty, tops."

"We don't have time to waste on this. Give me Lyle's card."

"Aw c.r.a.p, not more cardboard and lawn clippings. Can't you just look in the phone book?"

"Don't worry, I'm not sending him to the kitchen. I'll just ask him the name of a nearby restaurant that delivers."

Not a bad idea. It was probably faster than calling around and trying to give directions to where we were when we didn't exactly know, ourselves. Plus, he'd lived here nearly two years. He should have a shortlist of decent restaurants. It seemed like a good plan, until Jacob explained to Lyle what we wanted, stopped to listen, and the vertical line made a reappearance between his eyebrows. What, was it a national restaurant holiday, now? First no direct flights from Chicago, and now this. Fine. There had to be an open grocery store. Or even a gas station. The green chile microwave burritos at the gas station minimart went down okay with an antacid chaser.

I was about to signal to Jacob to just forget the whole thing when he started giving Lyle the order. Two chicken burritos, rice and beans, extra guac. He thanked Lyle and hung up.

"He's playing concierge now?" I said. "When we first got here, he didn't even want to deal with answering the phone."

"It might just be an excuse for him to try and get in your good 262.

graces...but I'd rather play it safe. He's going to go pick it up himself.

He said people stopped having food delivered to PsyTrain once Five Faith showed up on their radar."

"They're worried an anti-Psych delivery guy's gonna spit in their food?"

"Or worse. Radiator fluid. Rat poison."

My stomach should have clenched up at the mere thought of it...but it didn't. I was way too famished for a little anti-freeze to kill my appet.i.te.

Jacob pulled his laptop onto his lap and scrolled down the astral projection site to pick up a few more pointers while we waited for our food, only he wasn't really reading it. Just looking. "We're sitting ducks," he said finally, disgusted.

"You and me, or...?"

"Psychs. In general. I would have expected this to happen fifteen years ago. Not now."

I made a noise that didn't mean much of anything, since it sounded more like he was venting than trying to elicit a response from me.

"And you know what the worst part is?" he said. "It's not the criminals trying to take us out. It's regular people." I couldn't say I was particularly shocked. Maybe I'd never thought so-ciety would thank us for all the monsters we helped put away. At the very least, it would be nice to be allowed to live in peace...but deep down inside, maybe I never expected even that much. Not in the long run. "Someone who's going to feel threatened by another poor schmuck's ESP probably felt the same way fifteen years ago. It's likely a charismatic instigator met up with the right hotheads at the right time, and convinced them to start a movement, and now they've got somewhere to channel the hate."

263.

My a.s.sessment didn't make Jacob feel better. Poor guy. He just wasn't accustomed to being hated.