PsyCop 1: Among the Living (3 page)

And while three was a pretty high dose for me, it wasn’t like I’d never imbibed that many before. (Actually, my record is seven, but at that point you can’t walk anymore and you tend to start vomiting.) Even after three Auracels, I should’ve been able to talk to Blakewood. Yeah, that’s right. Even with my sixth sense trapped under all those meds, if I tried really hard, I should’ve been able to hear him. And I hadn’t—not even a peep. So I was beginning to get concerned.

Anthony Blakewood, collector of Scotty dog miniatures, reamed out and discarded among several thousand other glittery bits. I wondered if he kind of dug it, being snuffed out in his prime and displayed so lovingly…or at least exactingly. I might have asked him as much, if I’d been able to find his ghost.

I dreamt of shards of silvered glass, seven years’ bad luck and who’s the fairest one of all. I woke with a post-Auracel sandpaper tongue and a piercing pain behind my right eye. I considered downing a handful of aspirin, but knew I’d only be asking for heartburn after lunch if I did.

I was at work on my second pot of coffee when Gutierrez called on the intercom. I buzzed her up from the lobby.

“Coffee?” I asked her as she stared over my shoulder and into my three-room apartment.
 

She hesitated for just a second, and then came in and took one of the two barstools by the kitchen counter. “Sure.”

I looked around, not seeing the place anew, exactly, but reminding myself how stark it looks to a anyone who’s never been there. “I’m kind of a minimalist.”

Gutierrez’ shoulders relaxed a little at my admission. “Is everything in here white?”

I handed her a white coffee mug and then pointed out the cream. She shook her head and sipped it black.

“White matches white,” I said, and fiddled with my own cup, which had chilled and grown a skin on its surface. “I guess it seems easiest.”

“I talked to the Coroner,” she told me as I dumped my congealed coffee down the drain. “Our perp’s even sicker than we thought.”

You have absolutely no idea what I was thinking, I said to myself. But I didn’t know her well enough to tease her like that. And besides, I didn’t need anyone trying to read between the lines about anything I had to say on this particular case. With the gay and all. “Yeah?”

“The Coroner found pieces of mirror stuck under the victim’s eyelids. But they’d been placed there so carefully they hadn’t even scratched him.”

I tried to imagine why I hadn’t noticed that my victim had something angular beneath his closed eyelids, but since I was pretty much looking everywhere
but
at him, I wasn’t very surprised. “I was so busy trying to talk to him…” I said, thinking that it wasn’t altogether untruthful. I had tried.

“On Auracel?” Gutierrez asked. She drained her cup and came over to put it in the sink. “Why even bother?”

“I dunno.” I pulled a black sportcoat off the peg on the back of my kitchen door. “I had to do something.”

“We’ll go try again now. You, uh…. You have better reception at the scene or at the morgue?”

Reception. I liked the way she was trying to be so casual about it. “His spirit’s probably at the apartment,” I said. “Accidents, suicides and murders tend to be sticky.”

“Okay, we’ll start there.” She offered me the keys, but I waved them toward her. She’d get to know the city that much quicker if she was the one who drove. And there was that lancing pain behind my eye to consider.

Traditionally, the younger partner was the one to do the driving anyway. Maurice let me slide on that responsibility when I told him that on bad days I tended to get visuals of accident victims, and that on certain intersections they got pretty numerous. They didn’t look quite as solid as real pedestrians, but when you’re doing forty-five on a residential street you don’t necessarily have tons of time to study them. Maurice had said it explained a lot of the swerving I did. I’d let him think that. It seemed less incriminating than admitting that the Auracel didn’t help my driving any, either.

At the scene I donned the plastic booties, and this time, the gloves, too. It irked me that the night before I’d been in the same room as a homicide victim and he hadn’t said a word. But I was fairly clean now, having taken my last Auracel about twenty hours prior. I was ready to hear Blakewood’s side of the story.

A couple of guys from the lab were combing through the apartment with their powders and brushes and ultraviolet wands. One of them muttered “Spook Squad” in a voice so low I almost didn’t catch it, and the other one straightened his tie and looked nervous.

“Just tell me where we won’t be in your way,” I said. I was actually only paying them partial attention, because I was sure that any minute I’d be bowled over by Blakewood’s spirit.

“Can you work from the kitchen?” the tech who’d called us Spook Squad asked. “We’re done processing the kitchen.”

I figured he wanted to get rid of us so they could gossip, and I almost suggested that Gutierrez and I go have a sandwich and come back later, when it occurred to me that a dead queer might very well be hanging out near the fridge. I jerked my head toward the kitchen doorway and Gutierrez followed me. Undoubtedly she’d been given a job description the size of the phone book, but I thought I could summarize for her in a few sentences.
 

“So here’s how it works,” I told her. “You record all the factual stuff, plus whatever impressions I give you. Then you record your impressions about my impressions.” I peeked into the kitchen, but didn’t see Blakewood in there. I was glad. I really didn’t want a visual on those mirror eyes. “You score points for being as skeptical as humanly possible.”

“So I’m supposed to shoot you down,” she said.

I stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Chinese takeout, Diet 7-Up and fat-free yogurt. “If my impressions are right, the facts’ll back them up and you won’t be able to debunk me.”

“That’s bullshit,” she muttered. “We’re partners. We’ve gotta watch each other’s backs, not tear each other down.”

“Hey.” I gave her a smile over my shoulder. “Don’t take it so personally. I never do.” I liked hearing her swear. It left me free to do the same.

I walked into the kitchen and waited for that telltale sensation, like a drop in temperature that only I could feel, before the voices started. Except the kitchen was toasty, and the only sound in it was the motor on the refrigerator.

“Blakewood,” I whispered, but the kitchen felt as flat and spiritless as…mine. “What’s his first name?” I asked Gutierrez.

She flipped open her pad. “Anthony.”

“Anthony,” I said, figuring that maybe he’d died so horribly that he couldn’t leave the side of his sofa bed. “Tony,” I called softly. “You here?”

I planted my hands on my hips and looked around. Nothing.

Gutierrez stared at me with her pen poised over the tablet. She was a lefty. “Forget it,” I said, easing past her into the small foyer. “There’s nothing here.”

I stood there while Gutierrez scratched what sounded like lots and lots of notes onto her pad. I didn’t see the victim, didn’t hear him. I wondered if it was possible that he died of natural causes and was just set up pretty by some kind of necrophiliac. Sure, that would be weird. But I’ve seen plenty of weird in my time.

“What now?” Gutierrez asked.

I crept closer to the archway that opened into the main room where we’d found him. “Anthony,” I said, quiet, just barely moving my lips, but the tech who thought I was creepy blanched and started tugging at the collar of his shirt.

I listened hard, but didn’t hear anything but the sound of Gutierrez’ pen. “You’re not picking anything up,” she murmured, “are you?”

I shook my head just a tiny bit and we backed up into the vestibule. “We can come back when those guys are through,” she offered. “Maybe they’re blocking it.”

I looked at a set of keys hanging beside the door. There was an embossed Scotty on the key fob. “Believe me, it’d take a lot more than a couple of guys with powderpuffs to block a fresh murder victim.”

Gutierrez scratched out some more notes. “Okay, then. What if he didn’t die here?”

I considered her theory. No one had mentioned any evidence of the body being relocated, but given what I wasn’t hearing, it made sense. Her brow furrowed, as if she’d found a hole in her own logic, but I thought we should explore the idea more conclusively before we shot it down.
 

“What if,” I said thoughtfully.

Chapter 4

My cell phone rang, displaying the number for the Coroner’s office. “The crime scene was definitely the victim’s apartment.”

Unfortunately, Gutierrez and I had come to the same conclusion, given that a neighbor had sworn he saw Tony walking back home that night with some new boyfriend he didn’t recognize and, predictably, couldn’t describe—except to say he was very handsome.

I sat in the passenger seat of my car and picked the brim of a styrofoam coffee cup into a dozen small, ragged pieces. I hesitated before letting them fall to the floor, and then I realized that it was my own damn car and I could do what I wanted. Styrofoam fluttered to the carpet around my shoes.

“That ever happen to you?” Gutierrez asked. “A dead guy that won’t talk?”

“Never.” I said it quietly, through clenched teeth, to keep myself from yelling at her. What did she know? It was her first time on the Spook Squad…er, PsyCop Unit.

She flipped open her notepad, rested it against the steering wheel and scanned it. “There’s gotta be a reason, then. Something unique to this case. We just need to figure out what it is.”

My cell phone rang. I pulled it from my coat pocket and flipped it open. “Bayne.”

“Gutierrez with you?” Warwick asked.

I refrained from asking him where the fuck else he thought my partner would be in the midst of an investigation. “Yeah.”

“Get back to the station. Both of you.” He hung up on me before I could try to figure out if he knew that the victim was giving me the silent treatment. What if one of the techs had overheard me talking to Gutierrez and had called him to tell him that I was a waste of taxpayer dollars? No, that was stupid. They had no idea how easy talking to dead victims usually was for me. They didn’t know the silence was freaking me out.

If Gutierrez had any smarmy platitudes to offer on the way back to the squad house, she kept them to herself. The GPS unit beeped every now and then and styrofoam squeaked under my heels, but at least my performance anxiety wasn’t exacerbated by a bunch of meaningless comforting phrases.

We went straight to Warwick’s office. He motioned for me to shut the door behind us. “Interesting report came through from Albuquerque today,” he said.

Albuquerque? Gutierrez was from Albuquerque. I thought that was a pretty odd coincidence until I realized the whole face-to-face could very well be about her, and not me.

“Test results,” he said, spreading the pages of a gray, degraded fax in front of us. “Did you know that your scores were identical on every psy-test you took, Lisa? Different tests, different days, and on each and every one you hit the exact score of random probability. To the percent?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but isn’t that a good thing for a Stiff?”

“Stiffs vary,” Warwick said, and I noted that a red flush had broken out across his formidable neck. “Usually between six and thirteen percent. This,” he said, gesturing at the fax, “this is not random.”

Gutierrez had ability? That probably explained what I’d seen in her right away that set me at ease. Normally I’d be happy to hear it, if she were my dry cleaner or my bridge partner. But certifiable psychics weren’t allowed on the force without spending half a year training at Camp Hell. Otherwise known as Heliotrope Station, to those who’ve never done time there.

“You’re off the case,” Warwick said. “In fact, you’re off active duty until I can figure out what to do with you.”

Gutierrez’ face was a bland mask as she handed over her badge and gun. She hadn’t said anything to defend herself. And she hadn’t denied her ability, either. She turned and walked out without a word.

“Where are you with this case?” Warwick said to me. His voice seemed normal, but his color was way too high.

“We, um.” I missed Gutierrez already. “The victim.” I shrugged. “It’s a tough one.”

“I’ll assign a pair of uniformed cops to back you up. Broaden your contact area and see what you can find.”

Great. I’d have a pair of superstitious flatfoots following me around as I went from the cemetery to the victim’s childhood home to anywhere else he liked to hang out while he’d been alive. I wondered if he had a favorite bar and, if so, the chances of eluding my babysitters and getting lucky. Ideally with Detective Marks, who’d just so happen to be there. Not that he hung out in gay bars or anything. At least, that’s what I assumed, though I didn’t hang out in gay bars either, so I didn’t actually know for sure.

Warwick turned back to his notes and picked up the phone. I was dismissed.He’d call me when he had someone lined up. I could go to my desk and start trying to make sense in writing of what was going on, but writing had never been my strong point. Even Maurice, with his two-fingered, misspelled typing, was Shakespeare next to me.

I went out to my car with the intention of grabbing a very late lunch when I saw there was someone sitting in my drivers’ seat. Since Gutierrez still had my keys, I realized that was a good thing.

“Wow,” I said as I got in. “That was….” The fact that she’d been crying stopped me dead in my tracks. I can’t stand it when girls cry.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “I earned this job.”

I tried to recall a time in my life where I would’ve gotten as worked up as she was over a job, and failed. But that’s just me. And then I had to remind myself that she’d needed to beat out a thousand other applicants to get it, and I could empathize at least a little.

“For what it’s worth, I like working with you.”
 

She gave me a sidelong glance. Her eyes, nose and lips were all red and puffy.

“What if I want to be a Stiff?” she said. “I make a better Stiff than a psychic. I’m a good cop. Really good.”