PsyCop 4: Secrets (3 page)

“Fuckin’ A. That thing’s slower than a dead dog. Can’t you afford a new one?”

“I’m not all that into computers.”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

I stared hard at the laptop screen. The updates were almost done.

“So.” Crash drew out the word and added a naughty lilt to it. “Why couldn’t you wait for Mister Perfect to help you hook it up? Gonna download some porn to keep yourself occupied?”

“No.”

Well, I had been expecting him to flirt. Maybe he’d picked up on that vibe. He eased up next to me at the kitchen counter. I could’ve moved over so that we weren’t touching, but I was too stubborn. I figured he’d just keep scooting up next to me, anyway. “Jacob doesn’t get jealous of porn, does he?”

“None of your business.”

“Probably not with you,” he purred. “You’re such a good, faithful boyfriend, you don’t give him any reason to doubt your loyalty.”

“Yeah. I’m a saint.” Porn would never get me into trouble—I found it a lot more engaging with Jacob kneeling between my legs than I did sitting by myself in an empty loft. Porn wasn’t on my agenda, but an old boyfriend was. The whole time we’d been lugging furniture, my thoughts kept drifting back to my partner-in-crime at Camp Hell. There must have been some hormonal reason; I’d thought of Stefan while Jacob was fucking me, and there he was, front and center in my mind.

There were a few really old boxes where I might have stashed my pathetic collection of photos—the one foster family I could actually stomach on a picnic that was besieged by yellow-jackets, a few tattered school portraits with “sample” stamped across my chin, Stefan and me with our fingernails painted black with a magic marker he’d stolen from the nurses’ station. But I didn’t really want to dig for that old picture. I figured it would only remind me that I had another damn birthday creeping up on me. What I really wondered was what Stefan was doing now.

I brought up the web browser and typed in “find person.” A list of three million potential sites popped up. I sighed. “I want to look up an old friend of mine from Heliotrope Station, see how he’s doing.”

Crash planted his elbows on the countertop and drew in even closer, but it seemed like I’d gotten him more interested in looking at the computer than in torturing me. “Camp Hell’s classified,” he said. “You won’t find anything about it online.” That didn’t seem possible. I keyed it in.

A few million pages came up, but even on the first page, the hits weren’t right. Gag albums with camp songs on them. A web comic that hadn’t been updated in three years. A story about a tent full of fire ants.

“Pop your buddy’s name in there,” said Crash. “I’ll bet you don’t get anything.” I wanted to prove Crash wrong more than I wanted to keep my ex-boyfriend a secret.

Besides, Stefan and I had been friends, too. Technically. I typed in
Stefan Russell
with two index fingers and hit the enter key.

A dozen hits for a B-movie director named Russell Stefan Bartlett. A bunch of other lists of names where Russell and Stefan appeared separately.

“Try it in quotes,” said Crash. “That’ll eliminate a lot of junk results.”

Right. I tried it. Nothing.

“Heliotrope Station made headlines,” I said. “I remember. It was on the news when the whole psych phenomenon exploded. Twenty years ago, you couldn’t turn on the TV without psych-this, psych-that. How can something so big just disappear?”

“You work for Uncle Sam. You tell me.”

“I’m a detective, not a Fed. I work for the city.” I stared at the laptop and racked my brain. The difficulty in locating anything on Heliotrope Station was just a matter of time and distance. The Internet as we know it didn’t exist back then. If I’d been looking for something current, it would probably pop right up. Heliotrope Station was just old news.

There was no big conspiracy. And just to prove it to myself, I looked up an even older blast from the past, the place I’d done all my formative drug training—the Cook County Mental Health Center.

Its website popped right up.

That didn’t prove a thing. It was still in business. Of course it had a website. I felt Crash watching over my shoulder. If I’d thought the CCMHC would pop up so quickly, I wouldn’t have searched it with him staring at me, wondering what I wanted with it. He didn’t say anything. I ignored him.

Maybe the facility was still there, but I was sure that the people I’d known there wouldn’t be floating around the web in plain sight. I typed in the name of my first roommate, a guy we all knew and loved as “Suicide Charlie.” Some article about his kid making the All-State high school basketball team popped him onto the first page. He was still alive.

He lived in Lincolnwood.

I tried someone else—the chick from the bulimia ward who used to blow everyone whether they wanted her to or not. She’d gone on to have an illustrious criminal record for shop-lifting that culminated in her being arrested for threatening the owner of a shoe store at gunpoint. The fact that the gun wasn’t loaded hadn’t made her sentence any lighter.

Two for two. Fine. Maybe there was a reason Stefan wasn’t on the Internet. Maybe he’d…

died. I closed my eyes and pulled myself together by staring at the insides of my eyelids for a minute, and told myself he wasn’t dead. Which was stupid. If I’d never even looked him up, how would I know?

I tried my strategy from CCMHC and started looking up other Camp Hell in-patient residents, all the ones I could remember. Rhonda the animal psychic. Leroy, who spoke in tongues. Big Larry, the hysterical precog. None of them yielded a hit. Not one.

“Some evil shit went down at Camp Hell,” said Crash, his voice soft and low, and Jesus Christ, did he have to stand so close to me, talking practically against the side of my face?

“I’ll bet you’ve got a story or two to tell, Victor Bayne.”

“No.” I closed the laptop without shutting it down. It let out a long, annoying beep. “I don’t remember much. I was on heavy meds. The whole time.”

Crash opened the laptop again and the beeping stopped. “You want me to change the preferences so that it goes into standby mode when you close it?”

“I don’t care.” I stomped into the main room and shoved boxes against the walls until sweat prickled at my armpits, and my sore muscles threatened to cramp me into a brittle ball. Camp Hell existed. It did. Because if it hadn’t, then why was I worried I might throw up? When I could breathe normally again, I looked up and found Crash leaning in the kitchen doorway, draining the last of the Coke.

“I know I give you a hard time,” he said, “but seriously. If you wanna talk, it won’t get any farther than me.”

“Okay,” I said, with no intention telling him anything, ever. “Great.” I picked up his duster and threw it at him, then made a fist around my keys. “Let’s go. It’s late.” Crash smirked as he pulled on his coat. I ignored him. I listened to the police band a lot louder than I had to so that we didn’t have to talk on the way back to his place. Crash’s neighborhood was an entirely different world than mine, but Damen Avenue connected them in one straight shot. It was useless to even attempt to park anywhere near his building, so I flicked on my hazards and double-parked in front. “Thanks a lot,” I said, hoping he’d just leave.

His door didn’t open. I looked at him. He was still smirking.

I stared back.

Crash held eye contact for a good five seconds before he reached over and turned down the scanner. “Ever do a web search on yourself?” he asked me.

My stomach churned. If Crash had been grinning about that all the way back to his place, it couldn’t be good. “No,” I said. “Why would I?”

“Idle curiosity. People search their own names all the time.” I looked away from Crash and focused on my steering wheel. “Why do you ask? Have you?”

“Maybe.”

He’d draped himself over the cup holder like he was waiting for a kiss goodnight. I pressed myself against the driver’s side door and stared really hard at the blink-blink-blink of the hazards.

“According to the World Wide Web,” said Crash, “you don’t exist.” His fingertip ghosted down the side of my neck and set Jacob’s toothmarks on fire. I shuddered, and clamped my arms tight to my sides in hopes that I’d just look like I was cold. “But you and I both know differently.”

I clenched my teeth as he opened the car door and stepped into oncoming cars, which honked and streamed around him. He leaned into the car with the door wide open, and the interior filled with frozen air. “Don’t search me on the Web,” I said.

“Sure thing, tiger. I snagged a picture of that pulsing love bite on my cell phone.” He made a jerk-off motion with a loose fist. “What more do I need?”

“You look lousy with green hair,” I said, but the car door was already shut. It was a lie, anyway.

I pulled away from the line of parked cars and took three right turns and a left to get myself headed north again. I drove fast, faster than normal. Ghosts were easy enough to spot in late February’s freezing rain. They were the ones that wandered by in shorts and sandals. They were the ones that strolled around without a care in the world while everyone else hunched deep into the collars of their coats and held soggy newspapers over their heads. They were the ones that didn’t splatter when I drove through them.

I took a wrong turn at Montrose and went three blocks before I realized I was headed back toward my old apartment. I pulled into the bike lane, drummed my fingertips on the steering wheel, and tried to calculate the least congested way back to the cannery.

I didn’t feel like going back there, but what other choice did I have? If I turned around and went to Crash’s place, I’d end up cheating on Jacob. Sure, my sex life with Jacob was incredible and he looked like a supermodel, but if I had to admit it, I’d always been more partial to rock-star types. Even Stefan, who’d carried around thirty extra pounds that drove him totally nuts, had looked like he’d just rolled in from touring with some underground British goth band.

It wasn’t just a matter of style, either. Crash told me things, like the fact that I couldn’t be found on the Web. Neither could Stefan. Or Camp Hell. Jacob had to have known about that. I’d bet my right eye he’d tried to search Camp Hell himself. He’d probably searched me too, shrewd guy like him. I’d never known Jacob to skimp on his homework.

I dug in the pocket of my peacoat and found a linty Seconal. I swallowed it dry and pressed my head back against the headrest. I told myself not to be stupid. I was just crabby from moving. I had cold feet. That’s all.

And besides, maybe Crash wasn’t being totally straight with me, either.

I stared into my rear view and waited for an opening, then pulled out and headed toward the cannery. I parked in front, pulled out my phone, and memory-dialed Crash’s number.

“Changed your mind?” he said. “I was just getting dressed to go out for a drink. You’re welcome to come upstairs and undo all these buckles.” I didn’t know what he was wearing that had lots of buckles, and I didn’t care. I’d just remembered something from a conversation we’d had when he asked me to carry around those silver charms for him. “You said that you found out online that I was fifth-level,” I told him. He’d said it months ago, but I remembered it anyway. His exact words had been “juicy Internet rumor.” He’d practically licked the consonants and vowels on their way out of his mouth.

“Oh. So you do pay attention when I talk.” I heard the snap of a lighter, and the sound of him sucking in a lungful of smoke and exhaling. “I thought you were too busy picturing me bending over the nearest horizontal surface to hear my conversation.”

“So which time were you lying—when you said I’m nowhere on the Internet, or when you bragged about finding out my test scores?”

“I’m probably lots of things, but I’m no liar. Ask Carolyn.”

“Either I’m online, or I’m not.”

“The actual words—in a password-protected Usenet group, I might add—were ‘a certain Chicago medium tested out at fifth level.’”

“A certain Chicago medium.”

“That’s right.”

“What makes you even think that means me?”

“Do you know any other certified mediums in Chicago? Let alone Class Five?”

“I’m going,” I said, and hung up before he could plant any more ideas into my head about unbuckling his buckles and bending him over. I had enough uncomfortable thoughts to keep me occupied for a good, long time.

I searched the Web for signs of myself until the Seconal made the letters on the screen start to blur together. I’d found plenty of stuff about Jacob and Carolyn. The Chicago Tribune database was full of articles that mentioned them in conjunction with the crimes they’d solved—assaults and rapes.

Crash? Totally searchable, if you knew his whole name—which I did, thanks to Miss Mattie, the guardian angel who watched over him. Curtis Ash. Plenty of hits on him. His store, Sticks and Stones, had a website that made it look a lot bigger than it really was in person.

He had a presence in the Wicker Park Chamber of Commerce. His telephone number even popped up.

Nothing about Maurice Taylor except an old article in the Chicago Defender about a convoluted embezzling scam he’d exposed before he became a PsyCop.

And me, with all those murders that would have ended up in the cold case file without me and my wonderful “gift”?

Nothing.

By the time Jacob got home around three in the morning, I was so dead to the world that the front door didn’t even wake me. I sleep deeply on reds, even one pill, and Jacob had to shake me to bring me around. Unfamiliar couch, unfamiliar room, and all my clothes were still on, even my sneakers. “Come to bed,” he said.

We made our way upstairs to the narrow lofted area that held a small bedroom, an even smaller bedroom, and a bathroom that must have been modeled after something in an RV. Jacob’s bedroom furniture fit in the largest of the small bedrooms—barely. Maybe the bed wouldn’t have looked quite so displaced if I’d bothered to put some sheets on it, but it hadn’t occurred to me to make the bed.

The mattress sat there in the middle of the room, naked and shiny, and a hell of a lot less inviting than the couch. Jacob opened a couple of boxes while I stood there in my Seconal daze and rubbed my eyes. He threw a handful of pillows and blankets toward the middle of the bed and started to strip out of his suit.