PsyCop 3: Body and Soul (12 page)

Tiffany didn't seem capable of telling me a license plate number or even the model or age of the van when I questioned her about it, but that was all right. I'd rather search for a white van with screwed up doors than the same damn silver sedan that everyone seemed to own these days.

"Okay. Good. So ... why was this guy bleeding?"

"When the guy stabbed him..." Tiffany went abruptly quiet.

"Who stabbed him?" I whispered. "The guy with the van?"

Tiffany wasn't saying. I tried to determine whether she was still with me or not, but with all the activity and the hot and cold patches from the steaming spotlights and the bone-chilling wind, it was too hard to tell without a visual on her.

I reoriented myself to the physical world—the alleyway, the slush under my feet, the sting of the wind on my cheek.

Zigler was talking in low tones to a couple of the techs, and none of them looked happy. Whatever. I didn't become a PsyCop to win any popularity contests. If Zigler expected to make a bunch of new friends at this job, then he was in for a rough ride.

"Zig," I said, touching him on the sleeve. The techs shot me a look of pure venom, and Zigler's cheeks flushed. "We need to go talk to Warwick."

I half-slid, half-squeaked back to the car in my plastic shoe covers, relieved to finally be able to slip out of them once I got there and had something to lean against. I assume I was allowed to lean on the Impala, anyway. Zigler didn't tell me that I couldn't.

He beeped the locks open and we climbed in. "You know those two?" he asked, once the shut doors sealed us into a little bubble of privacy.

"Who, the techs? Uh, not by name. I guess I recognize 'em." Maybe I could piece together a specific time where I'd met one of them. A scene, a social function. And maybe I could remember the exact point at which we mutually decided that it was better off if we didn't even pretend to be civil, that it simply cost too much energy. But I was too busy trying to sum up the things that Tiffany had told me, scribbling down everything I could remember by the passenger light on the rear-view mirror while my hand cramped from the cold.

Warwick was pretty tickled to get the lead on the white van with the doors tied shut. Not that he actually smiled or anything. He was one of those pale blonds that got ruddy when they were angry, and his coloration seemed pretty even as he repositioned a bunch of pushpins on the map and barked out orders to some other teams on the speakerphone while we waited. The location of Lynch's wallet marking his last known location tightened up the red pins on the map considerably. "I've got NPs out looking for the van. I want Bayne to walk this neighborhood, see if any more ghosts saw anything."

I knuckled my eyes. By the time Warwick was done, it was closing in on six in the morning and rush hour was almost upon us. Maybe a living person had seen something, too. Not that they'd feel compelled to tell me much about it.

Zigler parked at the northwest corner of our route and we got to work. I was grateful for my winter coat and all its shiny new buttons. It was well below freezing, and windy, with tiny snow pellets stinging my face.

"You know that the Supreme Court voted six to three in favor of accepting testimony from the deceased if the medium is certified level four or higher," Zigler said.

Goody. Someone else would probably try and kidnap me for fear that I'd testify on behalf of their dead witnesses. "I have a no-courtroom clause in my contract."

"It might not seem like it, especially with whatever it is you've got to look at day in and day out, but what you've got is a gift."

"I guess," I said, tuning him out. The conversation seemed like it was starting to go moral, and I figured I could avoid an argument if I just kept on agreeing with him. I stopped to listen to voices, but it was only yelling, a corporeal argument drifting out of a duplex doorway about a set of lost keys and the inevitability of someone being late for work.

"No visuals?" asked Zigler.

We were combing a residential side street jammed with parked cars. There was a convenience store at one end and a bus stop on the other, where it intersected Wilson, a main drag. "No ... not that I usually get 'em on streets like this." I thought of the condo I'd almost fallen in love with, the one with the broken record player of a ghost in the bedroom.

"They're usually indoors on the side streets."

We trudged along for a few more minutes, looking and listening. Zigler must've noticed that I was focusing on something, and thankfully he shut up, maybe for fear of messing with my dubious "gift." We went single-file around a hunk of sidewalk pushed up by a tree root, and I stared at the back of Zigler's thick-necked head as he lurched around it.

Somewhere between Saturday and Monday, my dread had disappeared. Zigler wasn't such a bad guy. Not pleasant, by any stretch of the imagination, but smart enough to keep us from getting killed. I could work with him.

"Uh, Zig ... you're pretty well-read on the latest psych research, aren't you?"

He watched me as I picked my way around the scrambled sidewalk and caught up with him. "I try to keep up."

"A ghost said something to me about silver. Couldn't touch it. You know anything about that?"

"Well, there's the planetary associations, the vibrational properties, the high magic associations." His eyebrows scrunched together. "Are you testing me?"

"Huh?" I stared at him stupidly. "Oh, cripes, no. I'm serious. I was hoping you could tell me. I never read any of that shit."

"That's what you trained in, isn't it? At Heliotrope Station?"

"Yeah, uh..." Sweat prickled at the back of my neck even though it was cold enough out to freeze on contact. I scratched at it, ruffling my hair at the nape. "Not exactly.

That was back before they knew much about ... anything."

Zigler's face relaxed. "Right." He chuckled, a little forced.

"Silver, well, it can be potent stuff, depending on the purity.

The folktale about the silver bullet killing the werewolf originated in some sort of fact."

Werewolves, shmerewolves. I found myself swallowing convulsively at the mere thought of Camp Hell. Maybe I needed therapy. Scratch that. Obviously, I needed therapy.

But I was still holding a grudge against the German psychiatrist with the thick accent and even thicker nostril hair who'd initiated my transfer from the psych ward to Camp Hell. Maybe looking him up and toilet papering his house would be therapeutic enough.

"The use of silver as protection against evil spirits is found in more than a few old religions. Driving silver nails into a threshold, for instance, is supposed to keep evil at bay."

Hm. I wondered which massive, mostly-wrong textbook he'd gleaned that from. Maybe the silver wasn't keeping evil at bay so much as repulsing the spirits. Right effect, wrong cause. A mental image of the stack of textbooks in the corner of my room at Camp Hell popped into my head. Sometimes I'd leave them in the doorway to trip up the Neanderthal orderlies with their hypodermics full of noxious psyactives, but after the first couple of spills, they got wise to it and just stepped around them.

We came to the end of the block, and even though it wasn't yet daylight, the convenience store was doing brisk business in Chicago Tribunes, high octane coffee, and pink frosted donuts. "I'm gonna grab a coffee," Zigler said. He wasn't puffy from sleep anymore, but he didn't look like he enjoyed being called to work at 2 a.m. any more than I did.

"That okay?"

Sweat prickled at my armpits and I fought the urge to shiver. Fucking Camp Hell. "Yeah, sure. I'll wait outside."

Zig's brow furrowed. A normal guy would've welcomed the opportunity to defrost the tips of his ears. I hoped I wouldn't have to explain that I was waiting to see if I was going to hurl. "You want one?" he asked "A water would be great." I dug in my pocket for a dollar to give him, but he made a "forget about it" motion and went inside.

I shuffled over to the side of the store in case I actually did puke. The gap between the building and the eight-foot security fence smelled like urine, despite the cold and the snow. I couldn't imagine how badly it stank in the summertime.

A Valium or a Seconal would've been nice. Or maybe the chakra stones that were supposed to help me get into

"alignment," if only I had enough focus, enough belief, to make them work. They just seemed like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to me, and though I found one or two of them in the courtyard a couple of weeks after I'd chucked them out the window, I never did recover the full set. The ones I'd rescued just sat on a windowsill, gathering dust.

"Rock?"

I jumped and my head snapped around. A ratty guy in a navy peacoat and a knit hat had snuck up the alley while I was busy beating myself up about Camp Hell. At first I wondered if he'd read my mind. But then I realized that most lowlifes aren't thinking about semiprecious gemstones when they say the word "rock."

"Don't need it," I said, wishing he'd go away and doing my best not to ask if he could get me some reds. Because he probably couldn't. Coke, heroin, weed, maybe even ecstasy.

But if I wanted to score Seconal that easily, I'd need to time travel back to the seventies when people actually took it for fun.

"You a cop?" said a voice to the other side of me. I looked, and no one was there. Great. A drug dealer and a ghost. Just what I needed.

"Got a bone, got a boulder."

Persistent fucker. I wasn't up on the most current crackspeak, but I was guessing he was trying to unload his bigger quantities, given that all my buttons were sewn on and I'd washed my hair sometime in the last twenty-four hours.

"Get outta here," I said. "I don't need it."

"C'mon, man, I see you jonesin' for a hit. How 'bout a dime."

"What kinda cop just stands there and lets this shit happen?" asked the disembodied voice. Sounded like a white male, twenties or thirties. There was a whiny quality to it, a voice I'd match up with a weasely sort of guy who stepped in front of cars and then sued the drivers. "Are you on the take? Or are you just a lazy piece of shit?"

"Nine dollar," said the guy in the knit hat. I guess he was running a blue light special on his dimes.

Zigler walked out to the center of the parking lot, his gallon-sized coffee leaving a vapor trail behind him. He frowned and scanned the sidewalk.

I gave him a quick whistle between my teeth. He turned, and the dealer muttered, "Oh, shit." I might not have looked a whole lot like a cop, but Zig couldn't have been anything other than a police officer or a football coach. The dealer's steps, loud, crunching through ice, receded quickly as he sprinted back the way he'd come.

"What're you doing?" Zigler asked. He came over and handed me an ice cold water, which I took with numb fingers.

"You let him get away," whined the voice. "Why didn't you do something?"

I cracked the seal on the water and drank deeply. I felt chilled through and through, but my shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. "There's a chatty one over here," I told Zigler.

He looked impressed. Or spooked. I didn't know him well enough to differentiate one from the other. "Did ... it ... see the van?"

"I dunno." I turned my head in the general direction of the whiny voice. "Have you seen a white van with damaged rear doors held together by rope?"

The voice snorted. "Why're you going after the buyers? It's the dealers you need to hit. I swear, the corruption in this city ... you got some kind of quota you need to fill?"

"Are you saying you have seen the van?"

"What if I did? You going to do anything about it?"

"I take it you've got an axe to grind."

"Well, I ... No, of course not. It's the principle of the thing.

It makes no sense for you to punish the buyers, man. They're not the source of the problem."

Principle, my ass. He'd bought a bad batch of dope from this dealer and dropped dead, and now he wanted to get even. Still, there'd be no harm in tipping the station off to Mister Blue Light Special. "Okay. If the van checks out, I'll send someone from narcotics over for this jerk. Scout's honor."

There was a long silence. Zig's coffee steamed, and the automatic doors around the corner creaked open and whisked shut. Engines started as more cars pulled away with fresh coffee warming the cup holders.

I thought maybe the ghost had left, unwilling to barter. Or maybe he wasn't as lucid as I'd thought, unable to hold a conversation outside his usual parameters. But then he caved in. "The dude with the van comes Mondays and Thursdays after dark," the voice told me. "He's an older guy with glasses. I don't think he's scoring for himself. He looks clean."

I took another long pull at my water. My eagerness for cracking the case pushed memories of Camp Hell to the back of my mind. I still felt clammy, but at least the spinny-throw-up sensation was gone. "You ready to sink your teeth into a white van?" I asked Zigler.

Zigler and I sat across from the convenience store in the Impala. Our hands were busy with deli sandwiches made from every possible form of meat that could be processed from a pig, washed down with coffee. Not the best culinary match, but we had to keep ourselves wired so we could stay awake as long as we needed to. A couple of cruisers waited nearby, one hidden in an alley, another shielded by the world's largest pickup truck. The murmur of the uniformed officers periodically checking in over the radio provided some background noise. Sundown was close. We ate, and we watched.

"Getting the paperwork together for this case is a dream," Zigler said.

I raised my eyebrows at him while I slurped my coffee.

Still a little too hot, but impossible not to drink it.

"Your word's good enough for any judge. You're like a walking search warrant."

I shrugged. It was kind of embarrassing. "More like a drug-sniffing K-9 unit—white van," I blurted out, sinking down in my seat and doing my best to look forgettable.

The van pulled into the parking lot, leaving its back doors facing us. There was a crust of gray salt thick enough to write "wash me" in it, but nothing that suggested there was a problem with the latch. No rope. The driver, a black man in navy blue coveralls, went into the store. We watched him buy a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket, get back into his van, and drive away.