PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (37 page)

Stefan was a certified fifth-level empath. And if he was anywhere as proficient at his talent as I was at mine, then arguing with him was like trying to bail out the Titanic.

I heard the splatter of vomit as I slipped out Stefan’s office door. I hoped at least part of it had hit him.

-THIRTY FIVE-

Zigler needed to make his noontime call to Nancy, but I wasn’t ready to stop what I was doing just yet. If I turned my head and tilted it, I could still see a pale sliver of white where the suicide nurse’s cap disappeared into the wall. Except she wasn’t really a suicide nurse. She’d jumped to escape the fire that started in the coal cellar in 1949. I’m guessing she didn’t make it, judging by the repeater she left behind.

“Go ahead,” I told Zig. “I’m gonna give this one a few more passes.”

I’d discovered I was perfectly able to do my own exorcisms—even without Jacob beside me, glowing with the white light he’d pilfered. I’d been watching Zig pretty hard ever since we discovered Jacob’s talent, and my guess was that Bob Zigler was NP through and through.

I didn’t mention it to Zig, of course. He felt bad enough for bailing on the fire ghost, and I wanted to make sure he stuck around for the long haul because, psychic or not, he was a good guy to have at my back as long as zombies and crazy fire ghosts weren’t involved. Not only had he been willing to step in front of a shooter to haul me into the cruiser—he’d also cooked up the idea to rig a box of exorcism tools to look like an evidence kit, so I could act like I was dusting for prints while I spread powdered herbs. He couldn’t figure out a way to pass candles off as forensic gear, but a luminol bottle filed with Florida Water worked just as well.

The zombies and crazy fire ghosts? They were the exception rather than the norm. But a day didn’t go by where I didn’t spot a repeater somewhere.

I sucked some white light, spritzed the not-suicide nurse with my flowery luminol, and gave her ghost a mental shove toward the spirit realm. It was the twentieth time I’d done it, and the mental effort combined with the smell of the Florida Water was making me giddy.

But when I looked hard at the spot where she’d been disappearing into the wall—over and over for roughly sixty years—and saw that she was finally gone, I felt like I’d really accomplished something good.

I turned to leave, and found Doctor Gillmore standing in the doorway. “How’s the shoulder?” she said.

I rotated it. It hurt. But now I was in the hit-by-a-car-and-lived-to-tell-about-it club. If sideview mirrors counted. And judging by the way my shoulder felt, I’d say they did. “Stiff. Sore.”

“Hold it out. I’ll check your range of motion, see if it’s any better than it was last week.”

I was glad she didn’t have me strip down first. Jacob had added a fresh new series of toothmarks to my belly. I chewed on my lower lip and tried not to look too smug about it.

Gillmore pressed my arm back.

“Ow.”

“You’re taking aspirin?”

Sure. Wait, no. “I uh…I meant to.”

“I can’t write you a prescription for anything stronger, not with your other meds. But I could call your clinic and give them a recommendation.” If the phone number of The Clinic was even listed. Maybe it had to be, in case a psych turned up unconscious in Gillmore’s ER.

I decided not to think about that, since I could feel my sweat glands gearing up for another good soak. “No, that’s okay. Aspirin’s fine. Things just slip my mind sometimes when I’ve got a lot going on.”

She pressed my arm up, then back, then rotated it. “Mm hm. Better. But don’t knock the aspirin. Anti-inflammatories are your friends.”

“Okay. I’ll leave a bottle in my car.” Gillmore sank her thumb into my shoulder and I did my best not to wince. “So, what about that homeless lady? What was her name?”

“I never told you.”

Damn. I’d thought I was so smooth. “But you’ll give her my card if you see her, right? And tell her I’ll buy her dinner.”

She nodded like maybe she was just humoring me, but I suspected she would at least try.

Gillmore turned toward the door, and then paused. She put her hands in the pockets of her white lab coat. She spoke slowly, in a voice that was a lot softer than her usual ultra-authoritative tone. “I did track down a couple of Miss Connoley’s nieces,” she said. “In case you need to tell them how she died.”

“Oh.” I scratched my head. “I dunno. I think she’s at rest now. I mean, I know she is. If I go to her family and start dragging skeletons out of the closet, it’ll turn into a whole…thing.”

“And they’ll wonder why she was confined in the coal cellar, and not safe in her bed.”

In the mental ward, which I’m guessing wasn’t all fun and games, either. Not back then. “Maybe you’re the one who needs to know,” I said.

She shook her head. “Who would do something like that?”

“Never underestimate the twistedness of a guy with screwed-up urges. My boyfriend works sex crimes….” That had just come rolling right out. Gillmore glanced at me, but didn’t seem terribly blown away by the revelation that I was queer. “He sees stuff like this, and worse, day in and day out. I don’t think he asks why anymore. He just puts an end to it.”

Doctor Gillmore sat on the edge of the bed, laced her fingers together on her lap, and sighed hard. “But what about the hospital administration—where were they in all of this? Didn’t anyone notice she was gone? Didn’t anyone look for her?”

Maybe, maybe not. Crazy people are kind of invisible that way. “It was too long ago. We’ll never know.” And even if we could figure out who was responsible, I was sure he was long dead. I think Gillmore wanted an explanation. She wanted justice. Sometimes things don’t work out that way.

• • •

It was nearly a week before Jacob and I had a day off that coincided. We parked his Crown Vic in the lot of a small industrial park that hadn’t seen much use in the past several years. A few enterprising weeds had sprung up in the cracks where the snow had recently melted, though the bigger drifts that fell in the shade of the building were still lying across the asphalt in pollution-specked white ridges.

Jacob looked the squat brick building up and down. “That’s not it,” I said. I pointed between a couple of corrugated metal machine sheds. “Over there. I, uh… I think.” I looked up at the sky, as if I could find a landmark there. “Kinda hard to say.”

“Let’s take a look.”

Jacob marched on ahead, and I followed, placing my feet in his footprints where he’d punched through the crust of old snow.

We walked to the back of the property, which ended in a chain link fence. I looked at the top, and tried to imagine the razor wire looping through. That was fifteen years ago. There wasn’t anything left to protect now, so the old fencing had probably gone the way of the Camp Hell building itself.

“Need a leg up?” he said.

I stared at the eight-foot fence. “Can’t you just lean on it and knock part of it down?”

Jacob raised an eyebrow.

“The last time I went over a fence, I sprained my elbow. And since then, my other arm got hit by a car.”

He gave me a sharky smile. “Come on. I’ll give you a good push. You’ll only have to worry about your landing.”

I had no doubt Jacob could throw me over the fence like a big, gangly football if he wanted to. And also, since I’d brought him this far, there was no turning back now. Jacob’s a pretty patient guy. But there were some areas where his self-control had clear limits.

Camp Hell was one of those areas.

I pitched the exorcism kit I was carrying over the top of the fence. “Fine. Give me a boost.”

My arms said ow, and ow, but I managed to make my way over without damaging any other part of my body. And even though my elbow was still smarting, the sight of Jacob scaling the fence in his form-fitting black jeans and leather jacket was enough to dull the pain.

I picked up my exorcism kit, and Jacob pressed his hand against the small of my back. “What do you think? Was this it?”

I stared at the empty lot. It had no street address of its own. Instead, it was tucked away in the middle of a bunch of other properties, mostly industrial, or maybe storage. Patches of ground were covered in snow. Others had last year’s brown husks of weeds poking through. I tried to picture the building itself, and then just a few details. The reflective black glass doors. The view of the parking lot from the smoking lounge. But everything was different now.

I shook my head. “I dunno. It’s changed too much.”

Jacob slipped his arm around my waist. “It’s okay.”

“For me it is. But I’ve got to make sure Warwick’s nephew is gone. You know?”

He nodded. “All right.”

We walked carefully. The ground changed, from old asphalt to old concrete, and then, to dirt—fill dirt thick with pebbles and stones. There had been a building there once. But whoever tore it down had done a thorough job of it.

“Spirit activity?” Jacob asked.

“Nope. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m that obvious, huh?”

I decided there was no good way to answer that. Instead, I reached over and stroked the back of Jacob’s neck where his hairline ended, just over the collar of his leather jacket. He shivered, and gave me a dark-eyed look that told me he’d be happy to throw me down and add a few more marks to my collection.

I felt myself smile back at him. Even though I was possibly standing smack on top of the corpse of Camp Hell.

His gaze went to my mouth, and he brushed his lips over mine. I pressed my forehead against his, and funneled white light into the two of us. I couldn’t say if he was glowing or not, given that we were standing outside under a pale gray overcast sky. But I suspected that he was.

We stood there together, quiet, glowing. And then Jacob’s gaze shifted to something over my shoulder. “How about that red roof?” he said. “You remember that?”

I turned to looked at the squat, industrial skyline at my back. Gray, gray, brown, tan, gray…. Red. A burst of color in a sea of neutrals. It did indeed tug at my memory since, after all, I really am a visual kind of guy. I held on to Jacob’s sleeve, gave his forearm a squeeze, and stared.

The red roof. I’d been able to see it from the classroom where I’d spent so many hours in focus groups with Faun Windsong, and Dead Darla, and Richie. I stepped onto the packed fill dirt and walked toward the red roof, pulling Jacob along behind me. I stopped right under my old classroom.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is the spot.”

“You okay?”

Surprisingly, the sureness that Camp Hell used to be there didn’t send me into a panicky cold sweat. “I’m okay.”

I walked forward, Jacob right behind me, and did my best to pick out the perimeter of the building. There were areas I’d only been to a few times, mostly the storage spaces, or the administrative wing. But there were others where there wasn’t much else to do but stare out the window and wonder what kind of life could possibly be out there for a freak like me.

I saw a tree, a papery white birch among a straggling of neglected maples, or maybe oaks, which look the same to me once the leaves have dropped. And I realized that I remembered that tree with its pale, smooth trunk, the odd one out among all the other trees that were dark and gnarled. I’d seen the birch from a window in the stairwell behind the pop machines.

“The basement was over here,” I said. I pointed at a patch of ground, and tried to envision myself walking down a flight of stairs, turning, and going down another. A steel door. A hallway. Here: a drinking fountain. A fire extinguisher. A pair of doors. Men’s room. Ladies’ room.

I’d retraced the steps. All at ground-level, of course, but my vision was shifted inward. I stood in the spot where the repeater slipped and fell, and cracked her head open on the sink. I looked for her, but didn’t see her. Maybe she was still there, but buried under twenty feet of backfill, slipping and falling for all eternity. I hoped not.

“I don’t really see anything,” I said. “But I think I want to clear the area. Just in case.”

Jacob pulled the dashboard compass out of his pocket and consulted it. He squatted beside me, and cleared away a stubborn mound of snow that had clung to a bit of rubble. He jerked his hand back and a bead of blood welled on his fingertip, bright red, like the red roof. “Broken glass,” he said.

I squatted beside him and pushed the snow away more carefully. The stump of a prayer candle had cemented itself into the fill dirt, but the glass holder had cracked from the cold. The base was held together with white wax, but the sides had fallen away, all but the sharp point that had drawn blood on Jacob. “Maybe this is why the area’s clean,” he said. He sucked the blood off his fingertip, then wiped his finger on his black jeans. “Due north. Another medium got here first.”

We looked more carefully, and found the remnant of a candle on the east point. The others were long gone. Whoever’d cleaned house had done it a long time ago.

“You think it was Richie?” Jacob asked. “You said he used prayer candles in his exorcisms, right? And he would’ve known about this spot.”

“I dunno. I don’t think it matters. If I call him and ask, I’ll need to make up some excuse why I can’t go bowling with him, and….”

Though I had no great love of bowling, the real reason I wouldn’t call Richie was that he was employed by the FPMP, albeit in a more transparent capacity than Stefan. Since I preferred to keep my pineal gland bullet-free, I’d decided to step back and let the FPMP go about its business with no further help from me.

Dreyfuss had stopped calling me after I’d watched Roger Burke buy it. I wondered if Laura had told him she’d seen me at the scene of Burke’s shooting, or if he’d gathered it from his sources at the Fifth Precinct. Or the FBI. Or if I’d been spotted by his stupid remote viewer.

I touched Jacob’s knee and fed him some more white light. If we weren’t willing to slip off to an uninhabited desert island, then we’d need to keep ourselves glowing white, go back to doing our jobs, and make as few waves as possible. I felt a deep pang of loss at the realization that someone else was going to end up with the two remaining GhosTVs…heck, maybe they’d even get junked without anyone even knowing what they really were, since the gigantic tubes were so heavy and archaic in the age of flat-screen, high-definition everything. But I couldn’t risk visiting Chance again. There were too many ghosts full of bullet holes in Dreyfuss’ office. I wasn’t about to add myself to their number.