PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (36 page)

“You should go home,” she told me. “It’s not safe.” She gave the silky gray scarf around her neck an extra wrap and strode past me, out of the bus shelter, and past the FBI agents who were all hopped up on red alert. I’m sure they saw her. But an unremarkable Asian woman? Not worth their notice.

Laura slid between a couple of parked cars, and then I lost sight of her.

One of the uniforms got into a standoff with the video camera guy. The cop was body-blocking, a lot like Jacob does when he’s trying to get his way, and the guy had the poor judgment to give him a shove. Three officers converged and spun the guy’s face to the wall, the video camera bounced off the concrete, leaving a few shards of plastic behind, and a set of cuffs snapped on the cameraman’s wrists faster than you can say “dislocated shoulder.”

The cops dragged the cameraman toward a squad car. Speaking of which…. Was Zig still around? I assumed so. I’d had him park. I bet his cruiser would offer a better vantage point than the stupid Plexi bus shelter. But I suspected my “I’m just a guy on the phone” act had worn thin, and I didn’t want to risk drawing attention to myself by marching past the Feds yet again.

I checked the street. It looked like typical South Loop traffic, slowish, stop-and-go. I could squeeze between the parked cars and the moving vehicles without too much fear of losing a limb. Bike messengers did it every day.

Once I actually tried it, I had no idea how they managed. My heart was already in my throat from the whole who’s-who that seemed to be going on in front of Metropolitan Correctional. Add moving cars brushing against my right side to the mix. The sideview of a gigantic van clipped me in the shoulder. Damn it. I passed the van and squeezed through the other side. Zig was about ten cars back. I could do it.

There was a scuffle behind me, and I glanced back over my shoulder just in time to see Roger Burke emerge, flanked by a couple of lawyer-looking white guys in suits and a half-dozen security guards. They turned toward the sedan I was currently standing directly in front of. So much for camouflaging myself.

I wouldn’t say Roger was smiling, not exactly. His eyes were wide and his lips were pulled back from his straight, white teeth, but he looked more dazed than anything. Manic.

I was trying to fix that fucked-up expression in my mind’s eye—probably so I could sort it out later—when the red hole appeared in the center of his forehead.

The report of the gun probably happened at roughly the same time, or even slightly before. But my brain registered the sight of the bullet hole before I heard it. Or maybe my sixth sense was ever so slightly precognitive, and I could see gunshot wounds before they happened, but not far enough in advance that I could actually do anything about them.

Not that I would’ve thrown myself in front of Roger Burke and taken a bullet for him, anyway.

Car doors flew open, and men in suits streamed all around me. Seems I wasn’t the only one who’d decided that a parked car was the only logical place to hide.

“Vic.” My arm was on fire. I didn’t realize that stupid van had hit it so hard until someone grabbed it. Zigler. “Get in the car.”

“Wait.”

I looked at the swarm around the spot where Roger Burke had gone down. And there he was, standing in the middle of it with that bullet hole in his forehead, security guards ducking through his spirit to get to his rapidly cooling corpse.

His wide eyes went wider still, and his head snapped up to meet my gaze.

“Vic, come on.” Zigler pulled my arm harder.

Roger Burke cocked his index finger and thumb into a gun shape, and mimed the shot that had killed him.

He’d done that before—shackled, so that his other hand had dragged along behind the first. Back in the visiting room, when he’d told me about the assassin.

I nodded. I couldn’t think of a more fitting way for him to go.

I started to turn away, but then Roger waved at me to get my attention. I looked, grudgingly, because I’ve always hated that habit of his, feeding information out slowly so that he can have the last word.

He put his fingers to the outer corners of his eyes and pulled back.

If we were playing charades in a schoolyard, I’d interpret that as “Chinese.” But that couldn’t be right.

“Get in the car,” Zig barked, and I flinched. He’d never used his bossy cop voice on me before, and it was pretty darned effective. I climbed in.

He’d double-parked next to the sedan, and traffic behind him started to clog the street. Zig drove to the end of the block, then pulled into a bus lane and parked. “What did you see?”

Burke. Gun. Chinese. “I’m not sure.”

“You had to be seeing something. Otherwise you would’ve had the sense to get your ass out of the direct line of fire.”

“Oh.” He was getting pretty good at reading me. And he’d just sworn, which meant he was pissed. “Uh…yeah.”

Gun. Chinese. The only Asian I even knew was…Laura.

I’d always heard that secretaries run the show, but this was a little much. Laura, the assassin?

Or was that really so crazy after all? It would’ve put her in the perfect spot to keep tabs on Dreyfuss. Shit. I’d drunk half a pot of coffee brewed by an assassin. My fingers and toes felt numb, and I was shivering. I aimed the heater vent toward my face and pressed my whole body back into the seat. “His spirit stuck around, but I was too far away to hear anything.”

Zigler grunted. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure whatever he said would’ve been a lie.”

-THIRTY FOUR-

I gave a statement in the FBI van. There wasn’t much to say. I’d been looking at Roger Burke, and the shot had come from behind me. Somewhere out in the street, or maybe across it. Maybe from wherever Laura had ducked off to while the Feds had their eyes on Metropolitan Correctional’s front door.

I didn’t mention Laura, even when they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual or relevant that I wanted to add. Maybe I could’ve said something in passing…but how could I, without invoking the name of the FPMP?

The last thing Laura had told me was to be careful. And I took that advice to heart.

They took my card and told me they’d be in touch if they needed anything else, but even though it was a different agent who took my statement than the one who’d been on the receiving end of the fake recant, I didn’t think they’d base their investigation on anything I had to say, not unless it was corroborated by someone reliable.

Zigler might’ve seen more from his vantage point on the street, or maybe not, given that he was busy keeping an eye on me. The Feds split us up before I could ask. Given my track record, I guess I didn’t blame them.

Despite my heavy overcoat, I was chilled through and through, and my teeth started knocking together while I waited for Zigler to give his statement. The cruiser was locked, and he had the keys. And it wasn’t as if the lobby of Metropolitan Correctional was anywhere I could kill an hour while I waited for Zig.

I stared up at the gray sky between the El tracks, and I guesstimated the distance to Russeau and Kline. Seven city blocks? If that. It would be easier to block Stefan’s number from my cell phone and drop off his radar for another fifteen years, but I knew if I weaseled my way out like that, the unfinished business between us would eat away at me. I needed to look him in the eye, and tell him that I knew.

Cold turned to numbness as I made my way to the big beige skyscraper. By the time I got to the elevator, I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. I think it was only partially the cold. Mostly, it was nerves.

Carissa looked up when I walked into the waiting room of Russeau and Kline. “Detective…Bayne is it? I don’t think you’re in the schedule today.”

I walked by her, figuring the chances of her being able to physically prevent me from walking into his office were pretty slim. After all, how many secretaries moonlighted as assassins? Probably not as many as you’d think.

Stefan stood as I burst into the room. Or I tried to burst, anyway. The door had a pneumatic closer at the top, and the best I could do was cause it to bump into the circular rubber doorstop on the wall.

He was at his hypnosis chair, and a woman in a sweater suit with an artsy necklace on sat across from him on the couch, head lolling. She sniffed and stopped talking as if she sensed my presence despite her hypnosis, but then resumed whatever she was saying. Evidently, her subconscious had decided that I really wasn’t a threat. I couldn’t quite make out the words. It was as if she was speaking in tongues, or maybe twin-language.

Stefan marched up to me like he was ready to bite my head off, but then he stopped maybe a yard away. I can only guess at what he might’ve thought: that I was coming in for my panic attacks, maybe—or that I had the sudden urge to uncover yet another buried memory.

I had no doubt that if that was the presumption he’d been working under, his sixth sense had cleared it all up for him and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that I was pissed.

“Not now,” he whispered, and jerked his head to indicate his patient.

I glanced at her. She mumbled something, smiled, then mumbled some more.

“Don’t worry.” I tried to whisper back, but I was so mad that I spat the “D” out. “This won’t take long.”

He put his hands on his hips. I struggled to keep myself from poking him in the chest. “I don’t know what’s worse,” I hissed. “You passing yourself off as some kind of therapist and then running to Dreyfuss with everything I say, or back then, all those years ago, when you and me, we actually had something.”

He held up his hands as if they’d ward me off. “Before you fly off the handle….”

“You told Krimski about the wig!”

His eyes went wide. I guess I’d gotten more out of the regressions than he’d bargained for.

“You won’t show mama the carpet,” the patient on the couch blurted out in a sudden burst of clarity. Then she resumed her bizarre mumbling.

“It was stupid of you not to,” Stefan whispered. “What on earth were you hoping to accomplish by lying about it? It was a wig. That’s all. A fucking wig.”

“I told them I couldn’t read anything from it. They kept sending it back anyway.”

“But you didn’t explain that whole thing about objects and clairsentients. You never told them anything about anything, and it was always so obvious that you knew. You held back because you were stubborn, end of story.”

I though of the Joneses and their cheeseball Vegas act, and the fourth-level medium who’d bought it in Florida, and all the remote viewers who’d been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle without the benefit of a Caribbean cruise. And I wondered if was possible that Stefan had never actually figured out it was entirely possible to be
too
psychic.

“If that’s why you think I was holding back, then they must’ve been grading you on a bell curve to give you a Level Five.”

Stefan scowled. I’d never impugned his ability. I’d never dared. After all, he could very well make me shit myself.

“It’s not as if I can read you now,” he said. “You’re nothing but angry. But back then? I guess I would’ve said you were scared.”

“And still, you gave away secrets—my secrets—behind my back.”

From the couch, the hypnotized woman muttered, “No, Mama. It was like that when I got home.”

“What the fuck is her problem?” I snapped.

Stefan rolled his eyes. “Bulimic. Weird relationship with her mother.” He turned his back to her and steered me toward the wall, as if was just the two of us, alone, in the room. “Vic, if I didn’t tell Krimski about the wig, the next time they took you into the green room, the twelve-hour wig-fest would’ve seemed fun in comparison. I didn’t tell them anything new. I confirmed what you’d already told them: that there was nothing to see.”

My anger ratcheted down, but I couldn’t determine if it was because he was using that smooth baritone voice on me, speaking in that well-modulated, calm and controlled way that would lower the blood pressure of anyone within twenty paces of him, or if he was using his talent on me, stroking me internally and telling me that everything was perfectly fine, nothing to get worked up about…or if maybe I simply believed him.

I tried to rally my self-righteous anger. “You make it sound like you were doing it for my sake—but here’s what I don’t get. You had to know how pissed I’d be if I found out. You could’ve let me in on it from the start. We could’ve fed them what we wanted them to hear together.”

“And have a precog tattle on me?” He shrugged, disgusted. “It wasn’t as if there were any decent options for me to choose from. I did what I thought was best.”

The woman on the couch picked up the tissue box, tore the cardboard side off it, and stuffed it into her mouth.

“Aren’t you going to stop her?”

Stefan glanced disdainfully in her direction, and said, “Dietary fiber.”

I told myself to stay focused. Stay mad. “That was then. What about now?”

“What about now?”

“I know about the faxes.”

His expression shifted subtly. Hardened. “Fine. So you know. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to figure it out, considering what you supposedly do for a living. What do you think I tell them? About your Valium and your panic attacks and your terrifying boyfriend who’s harder to read than the coat rack in the corner? No. I tell them where you had lunch. I make note of what you’re wearing. I mention what you’ve done at work…which they can just as easily pick up by monitoring your workplace. And, by the way, they do. But I give them that very same information, and they think they’ve got a secret window into your psyche. And maybe they stop digging so hard.”

I stared him in the eye, and I tried to figure out whether or not I believed him. He could’ve been telling me the truth. My guess was that he’d given me some truthful reasons, but probably not all of them. Only the ones that would paint him as less of a Judas.

The hypnotized woman started gagging.

“Good lord,” Stefan said. He took a few steps toward the hypnosis couch. “You’re in a safe place, Eloise, where no one can hurt you, and most of all, no one is judging you.”

Right.

His voice was like velvet. But once the eye contact had been broken, I realized that, yeah, I was still mad. So not only did Stefan have the balls to try to make me think he’d been spying on me for my own good, but then he was reaching into my head with a spoonful of sugar and trying to tweak my emotions to make me swallow down all of his flattering half-truths.