PsyCop: GhosTV Part 34

I was only too happy to oblige. If I was astral and p.r.o.ne to venture into TMI-territory, the last person I wanted to talk about was me. "So, what's next? You point your snipers at the bible-thumpers and shut them up for good?"

"You're confusing me with James Bond. I don't carry out hits. I just crunch the numbers that pick out the targets."

"Oh." Not just a river in Egypt. "That's completely different."

"It is, actually, because I follow parameters. I check with all my top-level Psychs, and if their collective data confirms that some thug's living results in my Psychs dying...." He shrugged. "I gather the info and I pa.s.s it along to the military."

"You have people eliminated based on psychic evidence."

"You didn't have much of a problem with Detective Marks' evidence treating the Criss Cross Killer to a lethal injection."

"There's no comparison. He had due process. A jury convicted that guy, and a judge sentenced him."

"I guess Hardcore Vic has officially retired." Dreyfuss stood up from 306.

the physical chair, and an astral skateboard appeared in his hand.

He let it drop to the floor with an astral clatter easily as loud as any physical skateboard would produce, then popped the nose up with his heel and caught it. "And he's been replaced by Detective 'Law and Order' Bayne-who'd rather put his life in the hands of twelve potentially bribeable, ignorant, prejudiced pinheads than trust a team of certified Psychs like him."

Hardcore Vic had left the building some years ago-though I wouldn't exactly cla.s.sify the guy who'd filled his Chuck Taylors as a propo-nent of the straight and narrow. Did I trust a Psych any more than I trusted an NP juror? Maybe, maybe not. But executing someone based solely on psychic evidence made me question whether or not I believed in free will, and that, in turn, made me want to swallow a couple Valiums, curl up in bed, and pretend the whole thing was just a c.r.a.ppy TV show I was better off forgetting.

Dreyfuss dropped the board, then popped it up again. "It's something you saw in my office that's got you spooked, isn't it?"

"Duh." What I'd meant to say was no. G.o.d d.a.m.n it.

"There's a good chance that anyone noncorporeal you see is just some poor schmoe I inherited from the old guard-"

"Jennifer Chance. Did you inherit her?" Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

"I knew it!" He flickered, and then he was right in front of me, young and thrashy and way too f.u.c.king smart. "I knew you could see Dr.

Crazy-cakes."

"You had her killed."

"What I did-and believe me, I ran all kinds of scenarios-was determine that any jury that could possibly be a.s.sembled would take one look at her, with her blonde hair, easy smile and an M.D. after her name, then take one look at your surly self, with your history of drug use and mental illness, and let her go scot-free. And if she 307.

didn't come back and find you, which was the predominant possibility, thanks to the trial you'd pop up on some other wacko's radar and end up full of holes."

What I'd always a.s.sumed was that Roger Burke and Jennifer Chance had been erased because they were hypothetical threats, loose can-nons with potentially FPMP-damaging ammo. Not because they were threats to me, specifically. And normally I would have a.s.sumed that Dreyfuss was just making it all up-because he was good at cooking up enough specific-sounding detail to make the things he said seem totally plausible-except that we were astral. And even for the most dishonest of us, every conversation in the astral was so painfully truthful it sounded like the inside of Carolyn's head.

"If you're so smart," I said, "then tell me what you really think happened here."

He dropped his skateboard again. I steeled myself for the clatter, but this time, it hit the floor with a gentle whumpf like he'd dropped a couch cushion instead, and it broke apart into hundreds of tiny, sparkling astral motes that flickered, then winked out. "Bert Chekotah."

"But he got slimed, too."

"I'm not saying he did it. I'm saying his insatiable pit of neediness was what set the vortex spinning."

"You know this for a fact?"

He flickered, and reappeared right beside the couch where Faun Windsong was zonked out. "I know it in my heart. All those women...

and he didn't deserve any of 'em. Not even close. Chekotah had a dichotomy working for him that sucked in strong women like a gravi-tational pull. Here he was, a physical leader, a spiritual leader, strong and proud-and, of course, dreamier than Lou Diamond Phillips. And yet, at the same time, he was a wounded little boy who just wanted a great, big hug." His voice was dripping with disgust. "That's got more pull than an electromagnet for a powerful Psych chick. Especially 308.

a woman like her." He gazed down at Faun sadly. "She wanted to gather him up in her arms, snuggle his darkness away and make it aaaall better."

Ew. Maybe once I was physical again I'd forget the mental picture I concocted of Faun cradling Chekotah's head to her bosom. But I doubted I'd be so lucky. "So what're you saying-Chekotah stirred up too much psychic energy by hopping from Psych to Psych?"

"Not at all. I'm saying h.e.l.l hath no fury like a woman scorned." I looked at him, looked at the incapacitated afghan-mummy on the couch, and looked back at him again. "So you're saying Faun Windsong did it."

He knelt beside the couch and tried to take Faun's wounded hand in his, only his fingers pa.s.sed right through her. "You said yourself she seemed genuinely distraught when Chief Feelumup disappeared. I say we look at the other women."

"It wasn't Lisa," I said. Intellectually, I knew that the amount of stress she'd been under was probably enough to make anyone snap.

Although she'd probably built up a pretty big emotional callus to make it through the police academy, plus whatever other horrors she'd seen over the years walking the beat, it wasn't as if police officers never cracked. But I knew Lisa. And I just couldn't see her going all Fatal Attraction over a man.

"How about Professor March?" he suggested.

I shook my head. I could see Debbie having the potential to be a Grade-A b.i.t.c.h if you crossed her. But she'd told me herself that she liked Lisa. Plus, Debbie had a life outside PsyTrain. She had interests- and although those interests were primarily clothes and makeup, I had a feeling they connected her with a social circle that had nothing to do with "spelt" unless they thought it was Rockabilly slang for something dirty. Plus, she really didn't seem smitten enough with Chekotah to go all psycho over his other women.

309.

Psycho, like Karen Frugali. "But it can't be Karen," I said out loud.

And while Dreyfuss hadn't been privy to my entire line of reasoning, he followed along well enough. "You sure 'bout that?" The buzzing in my head, the one that made me worry I'd float up to the ceiling, intensified to the point that I felt like I needed to shout for Dreyfuss to hear me. "She's dead. Maybe Chekotah had another affair going on with someone even more desperate who we don't know about yet."

"Yet another woman?" Dreyfuss batted his ear with the heel of his palm like he was trying to force some pesky water out of his ear ca.n.a.l. "Unlikely. His d.i.c.k hardly had enough time to dry off between his current mistresses. You should take a better look at Karen. After all, we never found a body."

"I don't need to see her physical body," I said. "I saw her astral." Mother f.u.c.ker. That was my secret.

Dreyfuss stopped trying to tamp water out of his ear and gave me a big-eyed caughtyoured-handed look. "Astral?" Wait a minute, I'd meant her ghost. Hadn't I? My head buzzed so hard it sounded like he was talking through a really s.h.i.tty cell phone connection. "Never mind."

"But don't you get it?" He seemed so pleased with himself for catching me in a lie-the one where I said I'd just been hanging out in the hall, minding my own business when I saw Karen's ghost-that he was actually hopping up and down. He said something else, but it was lost to the astral static.

"What?"

He cupped his ear and shook his head like he couldn't hear me, either.

The buzzing swelled, and I started feeling shaky. As I fought down 310.

the astral equivalent of vertigo, it occurred to me that Dreyfuss was gesticulating like crazy, trying to tell me something. He grabbed one of his dreads and pointed to it, and then he pointed at my sneakers, and he nodded at me, wide-eyed and grinning, as if to say, Isn't.i.t obvious?

With the sensation of the cord tethered to my third eye suddenly burning against my astral forehead, I couldn't make heads or tails of whatever he was so worked up about. And while most of me was hoping beyond hope he'd forget all the secrets I'd let slip during the conversation, a tiny sliver of me realized that if he forgot his astral outing, whatever big idea he was trying to tell me would die with his current projection.

He must have figured as much too, 'cos he seemed keen on getting me to understand. Since he could tell I was clueless, he made a fist and cradled it over the left side of his chest, making it go pa-pump, pa-pump like a human heart. Then he pretended to rip it out. He looked at me harder and spread his hands. See?

See, yes. Understand, no. Was he trying to be Karen? I squinted at him and he went sparkly around the edges, kind of like his astral skateboard had when it hit the floor for the final time. He pantomimed ripping out his heart one more time, then he held up two fingers behind his head and did the woo-woo-woo thing in front of his mouth with the flat of his fingers, like a little kid playing cowboys and Indians in the years before political correctness existed.

Chekotah ripped out Karen's heart? No doubt she saw it that way...

and just as my astral vision went hazy, and I suspected that I probably looked like I was turning into sparkles too, I realized that astral bodies don't have much to do with how you actually look in your physical life. Sparkles turned into streaks as I rushed across the building and through the ball pit of the floor to hurtle toward my own body. I careened into my physical sh.e.l.l with a sickening, buzzing lurch that filled my mouth with bile, and even so, I clung to one 311.

single, crystalline thought. The way astral travelers see themselves is the way they look to other astral folks. So if Karen Frugali felt like she'd been eviscerated, maybe she wasn't the ghost of a murdered woman. Maybe she was the astral form of a jilted lover.

Which would mean Karen wasn't dead, after all.

"Karen Frugali," I blurted out. I sat up and my head hurt, bad. Thanks to Auracel, I'm no stranger to headaches, but this was a scarier headache, like maybe something was really wrong. Jacob was crouched in front of the GhosTV, and he looked at me over his shoulder. I told him, "You gotta crank down the astral channel, now."

"You feel it?"

"Yeah, I feel it."

He consulted his notes and twirled the dials. My headache stayed right where it was, so maybe what I was feeling were the consequences of being forced out of my body with a bag of Mexican takeout in my system. I slung my legs over the side of the bed. Holy h.e.l.l, everything on me hurt. Everything. "Get Dreyfuss." It even hurt to talk. "He knows."

"He knows what?"

I pointed toward the door that joined our room to the bathroom we shared with him, as if to say, Justgogethimalready,beforeheforgets.Andcan'tyouseeIfeellikec.r.a.p?

Jacob ducked into the bathroom. I heard the knock, not quite pounding, but still urgent. Low voices, and then he came back into our room with Con Dreyfuss trailing him.

Dreyfuss' hair was flat on one side and huge on the other, as if the 312.

pillow had displaced it. His eyes were squinty and red. "Did you find something?"

"Karen Frugali," I said.

Both Jacob and Dreyfuss eyed me expectantly and waited for the money shot. I searched Dreyfuss' bloodshot eyes. Didn't he remember? He'd been so phenomenally lucid back there in the Quiet Room.

How could he not remember?

Once they both started to look as if they were getting exasperated with me, and once I realized no corroboration would be forthcoming from my new astral buddy, I said, "What if she'd thrown herself into her relationship with Chekotah as hard as she did with everything else? And what if she realized she wasn't the only side action he was getting-that Chekotah had the gall to put the moves on her roommate, too? Her heart getting ripped out-what if that was a metaphor?

And what if what I saw wasn't her ghost, but her astral form?" I took a careful breath. Breathing hurt, too. "What if she's not dead?"

"I'd totally buy it," Dreyfuss said, "except for one thing. If she's astral, where's her body?"

313.

Chapter 35.

It wasn't so much that we thought we'd find Karen Frugali's physical body in her room. It was just the only logical place to start looking.

Since my headache didn't let up no matter which way Jacob spun the GhosTV dials, I had him set it to the channel that made his cheeks streak red like the skin of a cuttlefish and also caused Con Dreyfuss'

eyes to multiply and leak light. With the psychic channel playing, hopefully a really good piece of evidence would take pity on me and sparkle, or glow, or jump up and down and point to itself.

While I'd stopped converting California time to "my time," it seemed pretty clear to me that anyone who had the authority to open the door to Karen Frugali's room was asleep. Either that, or jerking off to a picture of me on their cell phone. The clock was ticking down on our missing Psychs, though, and we weren't particularly concerned about anyone else's beauty rest. Jacob pulled out his cell and said, "I'll have Lyle send a security guard."

Dreyfuss said, "Don't bother." He pulled out a keyring and stuck a key in the lock, and right as I wondered when he'd managed to get a copy made for himself, he wiggled it, gave it a sharp smack with his pocket flashlight, and pushed the door open. b.u.mp key, the type of thing a locksmith would use...or a burglar. Very illegal, in Illinois, anyway. Very useful, though.

Karen Frugali's room was the same way I'd remembered it. Bed at an awkward angle, red screen protecting the rest of the room from her stack of books. I swept it with my GhosTV-sensitized gaze, 314.

but nothing lit up. Jacob and Dreyfuss flitted in ghost-quiet, each of them combing over Karen's possessions with a flashlight and a scowl.

"Anything?" Dreyfuss asked me, and yeah, I realized I'd never actually told him I was seeing Psych, but we seemed to be so close finding something I didn't really care.

"Nothing."

"Go through her books," Dreyfuss told Jacob. "See if she kept a journal-although, if she was paranoid, she probably didn't."

"She wasn't paranoid." Yeah, that was me, defending the main suspect.

"She wasn't schizophrenic," Dreyfuss said, "but let's face it, the girl had problems." He turned back to Jacob and said, "When you don't find a journal, see if she underlined or highlighted anything in the books. If not, see if anything's bookmarked or dogeared, or if they fall open to a particular page."

I made my way around the diagonal bed and looked down at the picture of the baby. Karen's baby, I presumed. The picture frame was a cutesy ceramic thing painted with wooden alphabet blocks, jacks, and a teddy bear. The kid itself was not attractive-and I wasn't just thinking that as someone who didn't particularly go for children, either. His head was kind of peanut-shaped and his creepy milk teeth had big gaps between them. Still, he'd never grow up to get braces, or a more flattering haircut. And for that, I felt bad.

I pulled on a latex glove and picked up the photo, looked at the back, and looked at the front again. Nothing buzzed, nothing glowed. I put it back down, and I wondered what the h.e.l.l I'd expected to see with the GhosTV tuned to its current channel. Outward manifestations of psychic ability? Check. Old repeaters? There probably weren't any to see. Faun's necklace, would that still be glowing? Probably. I glanced down at my ectoplasm hand, the hand covered in carpetburn, then slipped off my glove and picked off one of my scabs. Then I realized 315.

it would probably not be a good idea to leave a scab at a scene that might eventually be combed by a forensics team, and I flicked it into my pocket. Hopefully I wouldn't follow it up after I'd forgotten about it with a cookie I wanted to save for later...but given the ingredients of PsyTrain cookies, I doubted I would.

A bead of blood welled from the hole in my knuckle, and I wiped it on the cuff of my black jacket, then squinted. Yep. Glowing.

Though all that experiment seemed to prove was that n.o.body had bled recently in Karen Frugali's room.

"Anything?" Dreyfuss asked me.

I shook my head no.

"It's totally possible there's nothing here for you to see. Don't forget, Chief Feelumup ran in here and started burning sage and messing with the energies the second he realized something hinky was going on."

That was the same exact thing he'd called Chekotah back in the Quiet Room. Was that a hint? A challenge? Or what? I stared at him, baffled...

and he shrugged and gave me a thumbs-up, then turned and went to search the bathroom. What the h.e.l.l was that supposed to mean? Did he remember our whole astral conversation, or not? Everything about him was so ambiguous, I'd never know without coming right out and asking him...which would leave me totally exposed, if it turned out he had no memory of his astral trip.

d.a.m.n it.

I went past Jacob, who was dutifully picking through each and every one of those textbooks to see if Karen decided to scrawl her evil master plan in the margin, and I followed Dreyfuss into the bath. "So." How could I ask him if he remembered tripping without coming right out and saying it? "You been sleeping okay?"

316.