PsyCop 4: Secrets (12 page)

The cafeteria coffee was too sour and cooked-down, even for me, and was probably decaffeinated, besides. I took a slug, winced, and decided to leave the rest of it for the garbage can. Lisa sipped the miniature cup of room-temperature tap water she’d been given. I wished I’d opted for the fruit punch, but it was too late now. The cafeteria ladies had gone home.

“I’m nervous,” said Lisa.

No shit. I mean, crap. I figured I should attempt to make her feel better. “Three words, yes or no. How hard can it be?”

“They’re gonna have more than three questions.”

“Yeah, but I can tell that Jacob’s going to play by your rules. He might ‘accidentally’ wake you up a minute after midnight—and when he does, a question might happen to spring to mind—but he’ll follow the letter of the law. You can tell just by looking at him that he sees it as a challenge.”

“Do you think we can head upstairs and get it over with?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Actually, I didn’t really know, but the longer I sat there, the closer I was to trying another sip of that decaf. I stood up and wondered if I was supposed to walk around and pull Lisa’s chair out for her, but she was on her feet and bussing her own tray before I even had my own chair pushed in.

We passed a TV room on the way to the elevator with a handful of residents talking to each other so loudly that I doubted any of them actually heard the show, even though the volume was cranked so high that the sound had distorted. Some reality show was playing, with a bunch of twenty-somethings running around on a beach. I couldn’t say which show, as I’d never jumped on the reality TV bandwagon. I stuck my head into the doorway to see if anyone looked guilty. Nobody did. Nobody looked dead, either. Strange. I would’ve thought there’d be more ghosts in a place where people came to die.

I punched the elevator button and watched Lisa mutter to herself as we waited for the car.

“Did you always do the
si-no
twenty-four hours a day?” She looked sheepish. “Kind of. But I guess I wasn’t aware of it. Now that I’m working with PsyTrain on subjects like psychology and philosophy, talking to counselors about the na-ture of subjectivity, I’m always thinking about it.” We got on the elevator and turned toward the front. The door stayed open. The elevators were on long timers so they didn’t shut on someone’s wheelchair. “In other words, everything was fine ‘til you started monkeying with it.”

“Something like that. What’s with these doors?” Lisa flashed her palm over the door slot a few times to try and trip a sensor.

“Stop it. You’ll make them stay open longer. You move your lips now when you do it—

you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

Lisa scowled at me. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you. If I can see it, that means Jacob can, too. Maybe you should chew some gum.”

“It’ll pull out my fillings. Isn’t there a door closer on this thing? That button that looks like two triangles and a stick?”

I stared at the panel. It was pretty simple. B-1-2-3. “I guess not.” The doors shifted and began to ease shut. “Finally,” said Lisa. Maybe she wanted to answer her
si-nos
and get going, so she could eat something that didn’t turn into mush if you pressed your fork against it too hard. We both watched the doors slide shut expectantly.

There was maybe a foot of space left between them when the homeless guy darted up.

He was quick, for his age. Stuck his head in the elevator so fast that I flinched back. The elevator doors must have caught him on the shoulders because he didn’t come in any farther. Just his head. I waited for the doors to pop back open and then sit that way for another minute and a half while the guy got in.

Except the doors didn’t stop. They closed.

I shielded my face with my hands. I wasn’t sure which way the blood spray from a crushed head would go, but I didn’t want it to hit me in the eye.

“Vic?”

At first I thought the head was sliding down the door seam, but then I realized the elevator was rising. I looked at the head. It looked back at me. So solid! Its skin was the color of my cooked-down decaf. The pupils of the eyes were bluish with the beginning haze of cata-racts, and the whites around them were yellowed. The hair was clumpy with dreadlocks, gray like steel wool, and the skin of its cheeks and eyelids was speckled with skin tags.

The head got to the bottom of the door seam and then sank right through the floor. I stared down at the spot where it had disappeared.

“What was that?” said Lisa. “You saw a ghost? Yes.”

“Don’t do the
si-no
on me,” I told her. “Save it for Jacob.”

The elevator doors whooshed open on the third floor and the nurse at the desk quickly looked away when I made eye contact with her. Someone must have told her I was a medium, maybe the patrolmen. “Male or female?” said Lisa. She didn’t seem to notice or care what sort of impression we made, which was probably good, given what she was wearing.

She also seemed convinced that the Elevator Ghost was significant.

“Male,” I said. “African-American. Medium complexion, gray hair. Between sixty and sev-enty. Five ten, average build. Dark clothes, kind of dirty. He looked like a homeless guy.” We passed the desk and went down the hall. The two officers stood outside 304, looking a lot less relaxed then they had the first time we’d seen them. There wasn’t a coffee cup in sight.

“Did he say anything?”

“No. He only looked at me. I guess…he wasn’t a repeater. Because there was definite awareness and eye contact.”

“You should try to find him, talk to him. Maybe he saw something that the video cameras didn’t pick up.” The officers stood back without a word as we opened the door.

“Oh, okay, I’ll just look him up in the dead directory.” Inside the room, Carolyn and Jacob were seated in front of the laptop at an angle where both of them could see it. They looked up as we came through the door. Jacob tried to look as if he wasn’t completely fascinated by the tail end of our conversation, and failed miserably. It was a very slightly raised eyebrow, but by now I could read his cop-faces pretty well.

I dropped the subject. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to hide it from Jacob. It’s just that the predatory side of him was starting to trip my self-preservation mechanism.

Jacob looked at me for a moment, and then switched his attention to Lisa. “Do you need anything? Coffee? Water?” I couldn’t tell if he was still being a gentleman or if he was trying to butter up Lisa for an extra
si-no
. I’d told her Jacob would play by the rules, but he probably wasn’t above trying to bend them.

“I’m fine. Ask.”

Carolyn stood up and crossed her arms at the waist, cupping her opposite elbows. “Was Irene raped Monday night?” she asked.

Lisa almost blurted something out, but then she stopped herself. Her eyebrows knit. Then she looked confused.

Carolyn and Jacob both leaned forward.

“I don’t know.”

“Then that question doesn’t count,” said Jacob.

“Hold on,” I said. “It sure as hell does. The answer might not be definite, but it’s still an answer. It means that it’s both, or neither, or totally subjective. Am I right?” Lisa nodded mutely.

“You probably got more from that answer than you would have for either a yes or a no,” I insisted. I did my best to act indignant.

“All right,” said Carolyn, “fine. But we’ll need more time to figure out our other two questions. We’d only banked on a yes or a no.”

“Come on,” I told Lisa. I grabbed her by the elbow. “We’ll take a walk.” On our way back out, I noticed the officers had positioned themselves slightly farther away from the door to 304.

“We could have stayed there,” said Lisa.

“The two of them were gonna start bouncing questions back and forth. You mean to tell me that you wouldn’t be sitting there answering them in your head? And don’t think that Jacob isn’t reading every last look on your face.”

We passed the desk and the elevators and walked up another wing. The hallway was lined with people in wheelchairs. Several of the residents had been parked outside their rooms to allow them to socialize a little before bedtime.

Or not, depending on the resident. I caught one of the eyes of the wheelchair guy I’d seen in the elevator and looked away, fast. His head was tilted back, and if he was even able to perceive what he was looking at, he couldn’t have been doing anything more interesting than counting the ceiling tiles.

I picked up speed to get by him fast. Not that I thought he’d turn Special Olympics and start wheeling himself after me. He just gave me some serious creeps.

The sound of multiple televisions playing mingled through the half-open doors, and two old ladies parked outside their rooms, one black and one indeterminately-complexioned and very wrinkled, watched Lisa and me like a couple of vultures as we walked by. The black lady reached out for Lisa. “What’s going on with Irene?” she whispered.

Lisa stopped walking. “Nothing yet. We’re working on it.”

“Are you with the police?”

Lisa nodded.

The other woman said a long string of something in Spanish, and Lisa smiled at her and answered back. Something about women cops, from the few words that jumped out at me. Lisa switched back to English. “Anybody ever see ghosts around here? Any stories about part of the building that’s haunted?”

“You think a ghost did it?” chuckled the black woman. Her laugh turned into a rattling cough. She pulled a wad of tissue out of the sleeve of her pink velour robe and covered her mouth with it.

Lisa went on when she was done coughing. “We need to look at every possible angle.”

“¡Ai!”
said the Hispanic lady, long and low as if it were a secret.

“Being thorough? Are you sure that’s the only reason you ask?” said the black one. “Because Irene says she can see spirits.”

I’d been eager to brush off the old women and keep on walking—I’m always uncomfortable around people in wheelchairs because I’m worried they’ll catch me staring at their feet, and thanks to the guy with the prominent wrist bones, I was now visualizing myself in their places—but at the mention of Irene’s spirits, I froze in my tracks.

“Do you think she really sees them,” I asked, “or is she…you know.”

“Crazy?” offered the Hispanic lady.

“Senile?” said the black lady. “I don’t know. I don’t talk to Irene.”

“No,” said Lisa. “Neither.”

I looked at her with exaggerated patience. “Three a day?” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “But it saves so much….”

My phone rang—Jacob’s ring tone. “We’re ready,” was all he said. I think he knew it sounded melodramatic, and yeah, sexy too. I think he was too shameless to care.

“Sorry, ladies,” I said to the old women in the wheelchairs. “Duty calls.” Sheesh. Spending so much time with Jacob was definitely rubbing off on me if I was willing to say things as shamelessly cheesy as he did.

“Irene’s a medium,” said Lisa as we power-walked back to 304.

“You’re still doing it?” I said. Lisa’s talent fascinated me, don’t get me wrong. But I was starting to see why the
si-no
had Lisa feeling spooked. Maybe it was more like my talent than I’d realized, something without an on/off switch. If Lisa didn’t stick to her guns and limit her answers, every cop who had access to her was going to treat her like some kind of omniscient, precognitive tickertape machine. We passed the nurses’ station and rounded the corner. Jacob stood outside the door of room 304 with the patrolmen on either side of him. He had a sultry half-smile on his face. The officers looked terrified, but not of him.

I managed to keep myself from saying “boo” as we followed Jacob into the room.

“All right,” said Carolyn, once Jacob had shut the door behind us. “Here goes. Is the attacker human?”

“Yes.”

Carolyn and Jacob looked at each other. They’d probably worked out three final questions for the day, depending on whether Lisa’s second answer turned out to be yes, no, or maybe. I wondered if I should tell them that Irene had access to another whole set of social contacts, or if I should let them finish up so we could all go home.

Carolyn opened her mouth to ask another question, but Jacob cut her off. “Is it an energy vampire?”

“No.”

Jacob’s face fell. He looked down at his notepad as if it had managed to betray him.

Carolyn turned on him.“That was not the question we agreed to.” I decided Lisa and I needed to be somewhere else, and fast. “Okay.” I grabbed Lisa by the upper arm. “It’s late. We’re leaving.” I hustled her out into the hall before Carolyn cried foul and demanded some consolation
si-nos.

“Should we go talk to those ladies down the hall?” Lisa said as I propelled her toward the elevators. “Should we talk to Irene?”

“Whose case is this?” I asked her.

I jabbed the elevator’s down-button.

Lisa sighed. “I only want to help.”

“We will. But I’ve been up since seven and it’s time to call it a night. They have a camera on Irene, and now they’ve got two patrolmen watching her. We’ll do better on a full night of sleep.”

The elevator opened up and a nurse with tightly permed hair squeezed past us, silent on her rubbery white shoes. We got in and turned toward the front. Lisa pushed the 1-button.

“What does that mean? You’re coming back tomorrow?” The doors stood open as I considered. “First I’ll talk to Jacob. It’s not my case, it’s his.

And if he says yes, he wants our help, I’ll check with Zigler and see if we have anything urgent going on at the Fifth.”

The doors finally closed and I felt the elevator start to move.

“Jacob will say yes,” said Lisa.

“Stop doing the—”

“I didn’t. I swear. I’m judging by the way he kissed you when you showed up.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She was smiling. “He can’t keep his eyes off you.

Whenever you’re in the room….”

“Yeah, I know. It’s weird.”

The doors opened on the first floor and we headed out into the vestibule full of plastic plants and the saltiest two steps in Chicago. I realized that I’d already forgotten about the homeless guy’s head and looked back over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t stepped on it, but the only sentient thing I saw was the nurse at the information desk whispering on her cell phone.