PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (27 page)

“I won’t—not until you change your testimony.”

The thought of lying under oath, shuffling my story around to get a guilty bastard off, sat hard and cold in the pit of my stomach. But every time I turned around, the deck was stacked higher in its favor.

“Someone you’re in regular contact with is reporting to Dreyfuss,” she said. “Can you really afford not to know who it is?”

And there it was. The tipping point. Fuck.

“Then keep your eye on the fax machine,” I told her. “I can’t guarantee whether they’ll believe me or not, but I’ll recant.”

-TWENTY SIX-

My land line wasn’t bugged—the gym monkeys had told me so. And if the line wasn’t secure at the other end of my phone call, well, that was the FBI’s problem. All the digging and delving I’d been doing with Stefan over the past couple of weeks had really paid off. I gave an Oscar-worthy account of going under, flashing back to the Bed and Breakfast, and realizing that Roger had no idea that he was kidnapping me. I framed Chance as the mastermind. She’d been the one to shoot me full of Amytal, after all. And evidently they already thought she was crazy, since she’d been on her way to psychiatric evaluation when she was scooped up and killed.

Although the agent’s stray comment about the good doctor being “at large” made the queasiness I’d been fighting crank up several more notches. The FBI didn’t know Chance was dead, and I did. What the fuck was the world coming to?

I pulled something out of the fridge and ate it for dinner without tasting it, then forgot what it was as soon as my plate was in the dishwasher. A cascade of lies filtered through my brain as I went through the motions of cutting, chewing, swallowing. And with every lie, I reminded myself that I was going to have to tell Jacob what I’d done, that I’d spun a story that might get a murderer off, all in the interest of figuring out who was whispering behind my back to the FPMP.

Jacob burst through the door and grabbed me up from the couch by my upper arms. He mashed me into his chest. His wool overcoat smelled like winter. “I don’t want to get too excited,” he said, “but Carolyn thinks I might be able to block her.”

I tried to shake off the disappointment I’d been wallowing in and be happy—because he was on the verge of something big, and maybe he was the happiest guy in the world. And because I’d finally given
him
something for a change. That made me feel a little bit better. “You’re sure.”

“No completely. But there’s definitely…something. I wish I had more Psychs to practice with and work out the details.”

“Who else could you test it out on? Lisa? Crash?”

“I was thinking of that precog PsyCop on the west side. I put a call in to his precinct.”

“I know you’re excited and all—and I am too—but do you really want to show a stranger what you can do?”

Jacob slung his coat over the back of the couch and sat down beside me. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I just wanted to know….”

“Yeah. I get it. But once the cat’s out of the bag, there’s no turning back.” I should know. Telling someone about a single fucking car crash put me on a roller coaster that took me through two institutions and the Police Academy. I took Jacob’s hand and held between both of mine in my lap. “Maybe you could practice with Lisa, see how it works over the phone.”

“You think it would?”

“I dunno. What if you’re the reason the remote viewer has trouble keeping tabs on us?”

“There has to be some way we can test it….”

We both flinched at the sound of our doorbell. It was an industrial buzz that could wake the dead, and we hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing it with something that wasn’t designed to be heard over the noise of heavy machinery.

My holster was lying on the coffee table. I pocketed my gun before the two of us went to the front door.

A guy in a baseball cap with “Fleet Delivery” embroidered above the bill stood on our doorstep with a huge bankers’ box in his hands. “Victor Bayne?” He had an Eastern European accent, and he managed to give my last name two syllables. And then I remembered that Dreyfuss promised he’d send me something that passed for Psych research these days.

“…yeah.”

“Where you want I put this?”

If he was an FPMP spy, he had a really good disguise. Particularly the five-day B.O. he was working on. I backed away from the door and into Jacob, who gave in once I pressed on him, and backed away, too.

I signed the clipboard, Jacob tipped the guy a five, and then we both stared down at the box on our vestibule floor. “I went and saw Dreyfuss today.”

Jacob gave the box a meaningful look, then hustled me into the bathroom and turned on the radio. “Go on.”

“I talked to Doctor Chance, like you wanted me to.”

“Can she figure out where the faxes are coming from?”

“Maybe. She said she’d try.”

“You think she really will?”

I massaged the back of my neck. My phone call to the FBI had left me feeling battered and sore. “She’s not doing it for me.” I sighed, hoping that some new air in my lungs would make me feel a little bit cleaner. It didn’t. “I had to recant my testimony to try to get Burke off.”

“When?”

“Today. I did it already. It’s done.”

I snuck a look at him to see if I’d managed to kill all the joy that he’d been basking in over his newfound talent. His eyebrows were drawn down, and the crease between them was deep. He was thinking hard.

“You think what you told the Feds was plausible?”

“Maybe. Chance coached me. Said that Amytal could have affected my memories. Plus, I figured that my sessions with Stefan were dredging up so much buried shit, who’s to say that one of those things wasn’t my night in the hotel room with the GhosTV?”

“And Roger Burke has no way of knowing that Chance talked you into it. Right?”

Weird. I’d been so caught up in Chance that I hadn’t thought much about him. “I don’t see how he could.”

“Good. Let him know, and make it sound like it was all him. He promised to give you the FPMP. See what he’s got. Now what about this box?”

“It’s psych research,” I said. “I was trying to figure out what the FPMP had that I would want…and it was the best I could come up with.”

I followed Jacob back into the vestibule where the box sat on the floor, looking mundane. He picked it up and hauled it into the main room. He set it on the dining room table and gave it his best interrogation-look. He ran his hand over the top of the box, then broke the seal and carefully lifted the cover.

For just a second, I imagined a flash, and a detonation. But no, a bomb wouldn’t make any sense. Dreyfuss needed me to clean up his repeaters. And besides, a bomb would be too hard to cover up. It’d be a bitch to keep a big explosion on a residential, inner-city street out of the news. Anthrax, or maybe ricin? That seemed a little more like the FPMP’s style.

Jacob lifted some bound reports out of the box. Still, nothing exploded. “Keith and Manny say that books are the perfect hiding place for transmitters.”

It never fucking ended. “Do you want them to come over and scan the box?”

“I want to be able to speak freely with you.”

“Fine. Whatever. Just…don’t invite them to hang around for beers or anything. I don’t feel very sociable at the moment.”

“In and out.” Jacob picked up the top report and thumbed through it. “And assuming that they’re clean…I can’t wait to read these.”

I peeked into the open box while Jacob called his friends on the land line. Reports. Dozens of them. Books, too. With catchy titles like
Statistical analysis of precognitive subjects, levels 3 - 4.
I glazed over before I’d read beyond the title.

Jacob, on the other hand, was raring to go. He even put on a pot of coffee. It was going to be a long night—but at least he and I were on the same page.

Manny, or Keith, who’s to say which was which, dropped by with the big metal detector and gave the scary box an all-clear. Then Jacob and I settled in to do some serious reading.

The most relevant book I found in the stack was less than a hundred pages long, hardbound with a plain cover stamped
Paranormal Eradication: A Modern Approach to Exorcism.
No thumping bedframes or pea soup vomit in this one. Six case studies of modern exorcism, each one more bone-dry than the last. I skimmed.

“Says here they use a different scale of ability in Japan,” Jacob said without looking up from the report he’d been working his way through. “No levels. More like X-Y axis personality profiles.”

I had no idea what that meant. “Uh huh.”

“Kind of makes you wonder how accurate the Western seven-level, six-talent classification system really is.”

A draft snuck through a window in need of tuckpointing and hit me on the back of the neck, and I realized I’d just broken into a sweat. I shrugged off my flannel shirt and let it fall beside me on the floor, but even so, my armpits and the crooks of my knees felt clammy and wet.

I stared down at the page, which looked like nothing more than a gray blur of ink and paper now, and told myself to get it together. It was just Jacob, and just a passing observation. Nothing to be scared of.

Sweat beaded my upper lip. I went to the bathroom and splashed my face, blotted it dry. I gave myself a hard look in the mirror, and reminded myself that Jacob had only remarked on something I’d been thinking myself for a hell of a long time. That’s all.

I coaxed myself out of the bathroom and found Jacob still engrossed in the report. “D’you maybe want to take a look at this exorcism book for me? I think I need a cheat sheet.”

And just like that, Jacob switched gears, started plowing through the insanely dull exorcism book so that I didn’t have to. I felt a little bad. But mostly relieved.

I’m not sure how far into the reading-bee I dozed off. Once I thought about it, I recalled moving over to the recliner when the dining room chair and I realized that neither one of us had enough padding to extend our acquaintance beyond an hour or so. And then I started rubbing my eyes, and decided it would be a good idea to rest them. Just for a minute or two.

I woke up to Jacob running the backs of his fingers down my cheek. Everything was dark except a light shining out of the loft from our bedroom. But even in the mostly-dark, I could see him smiling at me. “You coming to bed, or do you want me to leave you here?”

It was a great recliner, but I’m more of a side-sleeper. And besides, my back feels naked without Jacob curled against it.

• • •

Jacob tried to give me a crash course in exorcism while I ate my corn flakes, but even with him explaining it to me from the point of view of various religious disciplines, I still found my mind drifting to my day’s to-do list, and my eyes drifting to the vee of his unbuttoned dress shirt, where a few of his chest hairs beckoned from the top of his crewneck undershirt.

I did gather this much: different religions and different disciplines each approached exorcism in their own special way—and supposedly all of these methods worked, to some extent, depending on the strength of the practitioner, and the stubbornness of the paranormal infestation.

Which all seems like common sense, when you think about it. But my common sense wasn’t telling me which method would work for me. It only told me that I’d feel like a phony if I cracked open a bible like Richie, or swore by the sword of Saint Barbara like Miss Mattie. So that meant I had to figure it out for myself.

I called the Fifth and took a personal day while Jacob got ready for work with one hand and one eye on a psy-manual. “When do you have to give these back?” he asked me.

“I dunno.” I was sure the FPMP kept multiple copies. “Maybe never.”

Jacob swung by me where I brooded beside the coffee pot and gave me a mouthwash-flavored kiss. “You’re sure you don’t want me to go downtown with you?”

“They won’t let both of us in to see Burke,” I said, which I knew that he knew. “You weren’t involved in his case. And it’s not like we’re his family.”

“Don’t go there, mister.” Jacob kissed me again, then ran his fingertips down my forearm. “There’s creepy, and then there’s creepy.”

I watched the vestibule door as Jacob left, heard his Crown Vic’s engine turn over, and then settle into a low purr as the car pulled away. I felt very, very alone without Jacob there, but free to flex my talent, too.

I could think of a few things that amped up my talent. The GhosTV was the most high-tech, but I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on one of those until I coaxed their location out of Doctor Chance. Alcohol was an option, but everyone insisted it wasn’t really a psyactive after all—and besides, it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to show up at the prison smelling like a brewery. And there was High John the Conqueror, which came in bath salt or soap form. And which I still had a rash from, thank you very much.

If only I had a practice ghost to exorcise. I could hunt down Tiffany, the dead girl in the alleyway, but it seemed rude to exorcise someone I knew. I’d rather start on a repeater, but all the repeaters I could think of were in such public places that I’d probably get carted off to the loony bin for trying to erase them.

I glanced at the clock. I needed to get moving. Preparing for an exorcism wasn’t like studying for a test. I’d have to wait and try it on the real deal once I was faced with an actual ghost. I drove downtown, parked in an outrageously-priced lot, and locked my gun in my glovebox so I didn’t have to deal with checking it in at the desk. And then I headed in to the Metropolitan Correctional building to give Roger Burke the “good” news.

The wheels of injustice would take a few days to grind into motion, but for now there was a scarred plastic tabletop between me and my buddy in orange. As much as he needed me to recant, I think that on some level, it disgusted the ex-cop in him that I’d done it. Sure, he’d been punching two time clocks: the Buffalo PD’s and the FPMP’s, but in his heart of hearts, I doubted he saw himself as a dirty cop. Not if he actually got both jobs done.

Burke sat with his shackled hands folded in his lap and his head high, glaring at me as I wrote on the notepad I hardly ever used. “Here’s the structure,” he said, taking no pains to talk slowly enough for me to get everything down. “Headquarters in D.C., but most of the work done in the regional branches. New York, Chicago, Seattle, Vegas and L.A.—those are the cities with their own branches.”