PsyCop 3: Body and Soul (11 page)

"Nothing."

"It's pretty ballsy of the two of you to zero in on Adamson and Lopez when Andy Lynch was the last one seen."

At first I thought Jacob was criticizing our approach, but judging by the curve at the corner of his mouth, he was proud of us for not caving in and focusing all our efforts on the guy with connections.

"I think if we find one, we find 'em all. Besides, the NP detectives are all over Lynch's route." I plowed through everything on my plate, figuring the onion-looking thing that tasted weirdly sweet for the fennel, and waited for Jacob to tell me about the real estate he'd seen.

Only he didn't. He kept me company while I ate, got me a refill on my soda, and told me he was going to go and read.

No condos. No duplexes. No brownstones. No bungalows.

Huh.

I took a shower, then walked through the apartment and turned on the two lights that were still off—a crooked torcheire behind the futon sofa and a reading lamp next to the laptop that I never open.

I found Jacob propped up in bed with all the pillows, reading a manual that looked like a cousin to that monster text that Zigler'd been reading at work. "What," I asked, "did someone reissue all that inconclusive bullshit they pass for psych research nowadays? The publisher must've wanted a new yacht."

Jacob smirked over the edge of the book. "It's the new PsyCop procedures that NYPD's going to put into place the first of the year. Chicago probably won't be too far behind."

I made a snoring sound.

Jacob shrugged. "You're not the only PsyCop in the room anymore, mister."

Sure. Only the most neurotic one. I stripped down to my boxers and crawled over Jacob with the intention of just resting my eyes for a couple of minutes. I faced the wall with my back toward Jacob and my head pillowed on my bent arm, and that was it for me.

I woke up confused. The bedroom lights were off, but there was enough light to see by from the living room spillover. Jacob was curled against my back and I was using his arm as a pillow. We were warm, almost too warm, but not quite yet, and his chest hair tickled my back when I shifted.

Then a noise from the kitchen: my cell phone ringing and clattering around on the countertop from its vibrating.

Had I overslept? I looked at the clock—two in the morning.

At least, I assumed it was morning. I needed a digital alarm clock with a gigantic am/pm that was impossible to miss.

Jacob peeled himself off my back and re-established his domain over all the pillows. "You want me to get that?" he said.

"No. It's Warwick." I rolled over Jacob clumsily. He was smirking. I take it he recognized the ring and hadn't actually been offering for the sake of being helpful. I'd need to watch out for that sense of humor of his.

The call had gone to voice mail by the time I stumbled to the kitchen. It was silent for a moment, then started ringing and dancing around again. I got it in one ring, that time.

"Bayne."

"The NPs turned up Andy Lynch's wallet in a Dumpster three blocks from the park. Money and credit cards gone, everything else intact."

Andy Lynch had been robbed? And then what? A whole bunch of crime scene techs were probably very, very happy that it was below freezing out as they combed through Dumpsters for body parts. Those things smelled bad enough even when they were frozen solid. "You need me to take a look?"

"Come down to the station, grab Zig, and get over to that Dumpster. It's the best lead we've had so far."

I took a quick shower, blow-dried my hair for two minutes on full power, and stepped into my shoes. Jacob met me by the door with my winter coat, a plain black wool number that I'd bought on impulse one day when I was freezing my ass off outside a Big & Tall shop. It had always fit me exceptionally well. It looked a lot better than I remembered it, what with all the lint brushed off and the buttons sewn on. "No rest for the wicked," Jacob said. He pressed himself against me and took my chin in his fingers, steering my mouth against his for a long, slow goodbye kiss. His lips lingered over mine, mostly chaste, except for a hint of tongue that grazed my lower lip, leaving me wanting more. He pressed a travel mug of coffee into my hands and unlocked the deadbolt. No mention of real estate. None whatsoever.

My previous boyfriends would've been baffled by the late-night summons to the station, had we ever been in the habit of sleeping in the same bed. Jacob was a PsyCop too; he understood the stress of the job. Maybe he really didn't mind scoping out all the properties by himself. Probably.

I made it to the station first, about two forty-five. Zigler showed up a few minutes later—looking puffy, but otherwise unremarkable—as Warwick walked me through a map of the alleyways where the wallet had been discovered. Zigler and I went back to our desks, though I obviously didn't need anything from mine, and I watched him while he flipped through his files, making sure he had everything.

Zigler wasn't such a bad guy, was he? He'd dragged me out to the hot dog stand without telling me why, but given how broken up he was about the whole thing, maybe I could cut him some slack. And he never mentioned me being queer.

I was fine with that. I told him my big, scary secret, he voiced absolutely zero opinion, and we moved on.

"I need you to drive," I said. "The ghosts are thicker in the middle of the night."

Zigler's eyes widened briefly, then he nodded. I guess he didn't know if he could talk to me about the things I saw any more than he could about my living arrangement with the hottest Stiff in Chicago.

"If you could do more of the talking with the witnesses," I said to his back as we headed downstairs. "That would be good. You could introduce us and all. I think you're better.

With people. You know?"

He paused at the front doors and turned to look at me. He was slowly getting less puffy, but I'd hardly call him bright eyed and bushy tailed. "All right."

Zigler was probably a better cop, too. I didn't think I'd need to lay that on the table. That was the sort of thing that would prove itself over time.

We were both pretty groggy as we headed over to the scene, but I figured I should get some business out of the way. "There's gonna be other cops there. Techs, photographers, uniforms. You've gotta run interference for me, keep some distance between me and them the way you did with Lopez's brother. And if they start acting funny ... they're not usually too keen on the PsyCop unit barging in on their scene."

"Understood."

I thought about the silence that usually settled over a crime scene the second I showed up, all the regular, subdued banter that happened between co-workers draining away, replaced with only the bare minimum of information. Did that happen when Jacob and Carolyn showed up to announce to the world that, yes, their suspect was definitely lying?

I doubted it. I think Carolyn's co-workers may have silently hoped that she'd never ask them a point-blank question, even at a cocktail party, but they were probably pretty damn happy to see her when she walked in the door. Her presence on the job meant they'd be going home to their families that much sooner.

"It's, ah ... it's more that I'm a medium—instead of a precog or empath—than just the whole ... y'know. PsyCop thing."

Zigler glanced at me, then put his eyes back on the road.

"I heard."

He seemed prepared. No sense in me beating it into the ground. He'd get to witness it first-hand in a few minutes, anyway. We parked and picked our way down the icy alley in our protective plastic shoe covers and gloves. I couldn't imagine a worse crime scene than a snow covered alleyway after dark. I'm sure one existed somewhere. I just couldn't imagine it.

"How fast should we walk?" Zigler asked.

"Pretty much regular." I tested the snow with my plastic-wrapped foot. "Uh, slow enough to stay upright."

The perimeter seemed wide, barricades manned by uniformed officers—big, burly ones, many of them with mustaches like Zigler's—enough of them to do some serious crowd control. I saw a guy with a camera having a heated discussion with an officer in a cruiser, and I figured all the security was there to keep the press out of our way.

"Jesus," Zigler muttered. I guess he thought the cops were laying it on a little thick, too.

Spotlights shone on the alley from one end to the other, focused mainly on the Dumpster, while Non-Psychics walked a grid with baggies and tweezers and crime scene techs snapped photos like crazy.

"Cripes, that guy," I said, avoiding the eyes of an NP detective whom I'd overheard referring to PsyCops as

"overpaid circus side shows" at a party once. As soon as he saw it was me, he also found something very interesting to focus on in the opposite direction.

A couple of techs muttered, "Spook squad," just loud enough for me to hear, probably on purpose. Techs took particular issue with my "nonscientific" approach.

Some NPs called Zig's name and motioned him over, but he just waved, nodded, and stuck to me like glue.

"Anything?" he asked me.

The wind was howling through the alley and the groups of people who couldn't be bothered to actively snub me were all talking. Cameras clicked and plastic rustled. There was too much activity for me to spot anything for sure without really staring at people and getting a bunch of nasty looks in return.

I probably had enough clout to get the whole alley cleared so I could scan it, but the thought of all the attitude I'd get in return made my coffee turn to acid in my stomach. I focused on the Dumpster. Everyone in, on, or around it looked like they had a pulse.

I entertained some sentimental longing for the GhosTV, though by now in my mind's eye it had morphed down to the size of a Dick Tracy wristwatch communicator that worked flawlessly on two AA batteries.

I could stand next to that Dumpster and crank up the juice on my GhosTV, and anything paranormal would shine like a big, dead beacon. I watched the personnel milling around, tagging, photographing, and collecting. Maybe there wasn't anything, or anyone, to be seen. Maybe there was just a wallet in the Dumpster, and that was all.

"Pretty."

I glanced to the side, moving only my eyes. No one was there, except for Zigler, who was a few steps away, scribbling in his note pad. The voice hadn't been his. I'd peg it for a kid, probably a girl. It sounded like she was talking through a paper towel roll. Given that there were no kids around playing "megaphone," I figured it was safe to say I'd found myself a dead one.

"What's pretty?" I said. I really wished I knew ventriloquism. I'd be able to talk to dead people a little longer without anyone else noticing and acting like an ass.

"In your pocket. Pretty necklaces."

I patted my coat pockets. Nothing. But inside, tucked into my blazer, the silver pendulums were a solid weight against my hip. "They're uh..." I didn't know if I could explain what a pendulum was supposed to do to a child. Was she Clayton's age when she died? Older? Younger? And what if she'd died before psychics were certified? She wouldn't even know any of the psychic talents were real—despite the irony that I was the only one around in the teeming throng of investigators who could hear her. "What's your name?"

"Tiffany. Lemme see the necklace."

Zigler noted me talking to myself and casually wandered between me and the thick of the crowd. He'd also put himself in earshot.

"I can't," I said, wondering what a dead kid wanted with a pendulum. "All these other people will see."

"So?"

I filed the word "so" into a repertoire of snappy comebacks that I hoped would one day ease my social anxiety. "So that's it," I said. "Do you live here?"

"I dunno."

I sighed. "Are you here a lot?"

"I guess."

"Do you know why we're all here?"

"They're here to get the man's money back for him. He was rich."

I got Andy Lynch's file from Zigler, then dug inside my coat and pulled a pendulum out. I turned my back to the biggest group of techs, hoping they'd be too disdainful to gather around me and stare. Zigler kept glancing over his shoulder, doing his best to look casual, but I could tell he was dying to get a better look at what I was doing. "Think about the man," I said, flipping the file open to Lynch's photo. "Is this him?"

"It's so pretty. I wish I could touch it."

"You can have this necklace, but I can't give it to you until I figure out what happened to this guy."

"Really? How about gold? Could you get me a gold necklace?"

"Sure," I said, wishing Tiffany could let go of the whole necklace thing and I.D. the photo one way or the other. The dead are persistent like that. "Gold, silver, the works. But first you've gotta tell me if this was the rich guy or not."

"Not silver. I used to like silver. But not anymore."

"Okay, sure. Gold."

"You promise? It can't be silver."

"Yeah, I promise. Cross my heart."

Tiffany was quiet for a minute, while Zigler threw no less than three glances over his shoulder. "Yeah. That's him. But his hair was shorter."

Bingo.

"All right, good. Can you tell me how his wallet got in the Dumpster?"

"Mom says I should never tell on people. She says they always find out, and they'll do bad things to you later if you tell. This one time? She told on her boyfriend for hitting her, and he hit her so hard that she couldn't hear in one of her ears no more."

Oh, great. The only witness to Andy Lynch's disappearance was an underage jewelry fiend with blinders on. Though I could hardly argue with the motive of not wanting to be found out.

"Here's the thing," I said. "I just want to find this guy. That's all." It occurred to me that Tiffany might or might not know she was dead, so I'd have to tread lightly. "Is he, uh ... around?"

"No. He left in the white van."

"Was he hurt when he left?"

"Yeah. He was bleeding. But a man and a lady came to help him."

"Was it ... an ambulance?"

"Nuh-uh. Just a van. The back doors were crunched in and they didn't close right, and the other man had to tie them shut with a rope after he put the hurt man inside."