PsyCop 3: Body and Soul (15 page)

"Ron," I said, hoping to grab his attention. "What were these people trying to do?"

"Dunno," he said dreamily.

"What happened on your way to work last Tuesday?"

"Dad—how'd you get here? You look so young."

I started losing my visual on Adamson as he began to fade. He was transparent now, and he glowed a little. "Ron," I said. "How did you get here?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, it was really the pits. There was a bee on the turnstile at the El station. Do you believe it? A bee, in November. Stung me right in the palm of my hand..."

Adamson grew fainter, and fainter still, until he was gone, leaving me to join his father. Zigler was barking orders at Warjovsky to clear the room, a little harsher than he had to be, doing his best to keep a handle on a situation that could go south, fast. I went over to Adamson's body, and yeah, the right hand was gigantic. He'd probably died of allergic shock.

Esmeralda watched me examining Adamson's body as Warjovsky herded her up the stairs. "You just happened to be there to grab him as he was stung by a bee?" I asked her.

She smiled to herself and shrugged. "Some people are just lucky," she said.

Once Zigler and Warjovsky got the two of them upstairs, I was finally alone with six bodies—three of them dead and three of them twitching. Lynch, the alderman's nephew, was the third one that'd been ... released, for lack of a better word. I hiked up the edge of his shirt and found a puncture wound in his abdomen that was consistent with the story that the kid in the alley had told me. His spirit hadn't stuck around to give me a play by play.

I looked over the three bodies whose spirits were still somehow attached and struggling to get free. There was the hefty Caucasian who Zigler'd been trying to assess, a young black guy whose skin was the color of ash, and Miranda Lopez. Her dead face was bloated, with one eye open, one shut. Maybe she'd had a stroke. Maybe an aneurysm. The coroner could sort that out. My only concern was that she was still moving even though she was dead.

My bile rose, seeing her like that, body rocking rhythmically against her restraints. I knew her mom, her kid.

I had that snapshot of her in a tight, purple sweater. Cripes.

It just wasn't right.

I glanced at the three still bodies with the coins on their eyes. Silver. I didn't think it would hurt anything if I removed them and used them on the bodies whose spirits were still stuck; after all, the first three spirits had moved along, right?

But what if I moved the coins and it didn't work? What if Esmeralda had been humming some kind of spell under her breath? I didn't remember squat about Voodoo from Camp Hell and I wasn't sure if I even believed in spells, but I didn't want to risk contaminating a crime scene for something that might not even help.

"Miranda," I said, putting my fingertips on the back of her hand. I don't think she heard me. Her bloated body kept convulsing against the bands that held her down, arms and legs rustling the dried leaves.

I squinted at her and tried to see whatever it was that Zigler and Warjovsky had seen—a moving body. So what?

Oh, a body that was dead. Yeah. I guess that would've spooked me too, once upon a time.

It was the sight of the overlaid spirit that bothered me more. Miranda Lopez's physical body was just a puppet. It didn't register pain, or fear. But the clenching fingers of the spirit hands, the flashes of horror I saw when the ghost eyes slipped out of alignment with the physical eyes ... that was rough.

The number one crime scene rule is that you're never, ever supposed to touch anything. The number one exception to that rule is that if you've got an injured person, you should try to save them. Lopez was already dead; the milky sheen of her open eye made that pretty damn obvious. But it didn't mean she wasn't suffering.

I fumbled in my pocket, feeling the poke of the tiny metal feet of the milagro through my latex glove. I took it between thumb and forefinger, careful not to drop it. "Miranda," I said, bending over her. It didn't seem right to put it on her eye, so I set it on her forehead and covered it with my palm so it wouldn't fall off. "This is from your mother."

Miranda Lopez's body gave a long, drawn-out shiver, and then it was still. I got a quick glimpse of her spirit as it floated out of her body. It looked surprised. It was there, and then it was gone, dissolving in a mist of sparkly ether.

I did the same for the other two victims, using the silver pendulums that Crash had given me to separate the spirit from the body. Neither of them stuck around to chat with me, either. They were there, and then they weren't. And when I stuffed the pendulums and the milagro back into my pocket, the bodies remained only bodies, dead and quiet, and the rustling of the leaves was silenced.

The sound of sirens threaded through the high basement windows as our backup arrived, and my phone vibrated in my pocket, chirping. Jacob's ring. I flipped the phone open and held it to my ear. "You'll never guess who I'm looking at," I said quietly, gazing down at Miranda's pale face.

"I'll bet it's not the Tooth Fairy."

"What's up?"

"Carolyn and I have been called in to question a couple of suspects in the disappearance of Andy Lynch. Anything I should know?"

Whoa. The department was pulling out the big guns on this case if they were using me to locate the bodies and Carolyn to do the questioning. "Yeah. I think Esmeralda's the brains of the operation, but you'll get more information out of Irving. He's a wuss. Although, Esmeralda's a crackhead, so maybe you can work that to your advantage."

"I see." I could hear Jacob smiling in the tone of his voice.

"Any chance I'll be home by breakfast?"

I resisted the urge to pick a silver coin off Andy Lynch's eye. Bad enough that I'd have to try to convince everyone that all I did was touch the other three with some silver to stop their thrashing. "Six bodies," I told Jacob. "I'm guessing the coroner will need to determine whether or not they were dead when we found them."

There was a moment of silence on the line while Jacob considered what I was telling him ... and what I wasn't, too.

"You want to give me your professional opinion on that? I mean, if anyone can tell whether someone's dead or not, it should be you."

I stared down at Lynch's slack face and imagined his spirit features superimposed over it. There was a body, and there was a spirit, and they'd been somehow linked so that they could both move around. And yet there'd been no pulse and no consciousness. My gut told me that I couldn't really call that living.

"They were ... um ... they were dead. More or less." I sighed. "Anyway, they are now."

"Right. I can see I've got my work cut out for me tonight." I said goodbye to Jacob and took one last look at Miranda.

Poor girl. She looked worse than either Lynch or Adamson, what with the one eye open, one eye closed. I hoped her mother didn't have to see her like this. And I wondered who'd have to tell her mother what had happened. Me and Zigler, most likely—translated through Carlos. Wonderful. I really, really missed Lisa, and not for her "si-no" ability, either. I bet Miranda's mom would take the news a whole lot better coming from Lisa.

I went upstairs and found Officer Franco walking a crime scene unit through an office stuffed with paperwork. "What's all this stuff?" I asked her.

"Get this," she said, leaning toward me. I could count the number of times a uniformed officer intentionally moved closer to me on one hand. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. "They had fake social security cards and state I.D.s made up for all those people in the basement."

The techs were scooping all the files into boxes, labeling them with thick, black marker, while I considered the dubious merit of providing a corpse with a new identity. "Insurance fraud?" I ventured. "Credit card scam?"

"Not very likely, with fake Social Security numbers. They run a credit check on them before they issue cards."

I nudged open a narrow closet and found stacks and stacks of videotapes. When cops find a large amount of videotape, they think sex ring. I know I do ... but then again, Jacob and I did just make the happy discovery of the shop with the gay porn section not two miles from my apartment.

These tapes looked different, though. Housecleaning hints and tips. Cooking. Gardening. Most of them bearing labels and barcodes from the public library.

"I don't get it," I said, "but it looks like they racked up a hell of a library fine."

I'd eaten some of the gourmet leftovers that had miraculously appeared—labeled, no less—in the fridge, slept all by my lonesome, and was currently attempting to fit another 3 into a Sudoku square when Jacob came home. His neat, sharply-creased edges were slightly softened and a hint of a five-o-clock shadow darkened his jaw, and that was the only testament to the fact that he'd been up all night interrogating my good buddies from the basement.

"Tell me they weren't cooking up a zombie employment agency," I said.

He eased his necktie off, considering. "Irving flipped out every time I used the word zombie. According to Carolyn, that wasn't what he thought he was doing. He was a big environmental activist forty years ago, the type of guy who'd scrub seagulls with dishwashing liquid after an oil spill. He really thought he was creating a viable alternative to a conventional burial."

"Get outta here—he thought people would let themselves be zombified voluntarily?"

Jacob hung up his suit, stripped off his shirt, then settled beside me on the futon couch in blue striped boxers and an immaculate, white, sleeveless undershirt. White couch, white undershirt, pale blue underwear. He coordinated very well with my apartment, when he was mostly naked. He made it look kind of classy.

"Irving had a certain type of ... client ... in mind," said Jacob. "Someone who thought burial was a waste of natural resources, and someone who'd be thrilled to keep on contributing to society, despite the fact that they were dead.

Esmeralda, on the other hand, had a little more business acumen."

"And how were they gonna send them to work with leaves all over them?"

"The jimson weed?" Jacob asked. He shrugged. "Creative use of down jackets, I guess. And don't forget the
veves
on their foreheads."

More voodoo talk. There'd been shelves and bins full of other stuff, too—herbs and powders, candles and incense. I thought of Irving or Esmeralda methodically draining all the paranormal suppliers in the city—heck, of them shopping in Crash's store, close enough to make a zombie out of him if he happened to die from too much exotic sex while they were shopping—and I shuddered. "Esmeralda is scary."

"You're not kidding. She's a rogue precog."

"Precog? Like Lisa?" I nestled against Jacob and let the sudoku magazine slip onto the floor. He put his arm around me, tangling his fingers absently in my hair.

"In a way, yeah. Like Lisa. Her precognitive abilities had a limitation—kind of like the 'si-no,' only darker." His fingertips traced patterns on my scalp, and I felt my eyelids drooping.

"Esmeralda knew when someone was going to die. That was the extent of her talent."

So she and Irving could be in the right place at the right time to find volunteers for their experiment in alternatives to burial. Sick.

"She'd probably been trying to figure out ways to exploit her talent for years," he said. "Though I'll bet she would've preferred being able to pick the winning lottery numbers."

I sighed and snuggled my head into Jacob's lap. He traced my ear, the long muscle running down my neck. I shivered a little and pressed against him harder. "I miss Lisa."

"Give her some time," said Jacob. "She's figuring out her talent."

I wrapped my arms around Jacob's thigh. "Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better." Given that I'd lived with mine since the summer I turned twelve and I still hadn't figured it out, I wasn't looking forward to waiting for Lisa to gain enlightenment.

Jacob continued stroking my head, tracing patterns as if he was writing a secret message on my scalp, and I let myself be lulled into a relaxed state that was drowsy and alert at once.

"We don't have to move in," Jacob said, "if you don't want to."

"What?" I sat up and banged my knee against the coffee table.

His expression seemed mild, but then again, it might have been practiced-mild, and not this-isn't-such-a-big-deal-mild.

"The whole ghost thing—I hadn't realized that finding somewhere clean would be such a bitch. I should've known."

"Gimme a break," I said. "There's plenty of places around here that aren't haunted. I've seen 'em myself." Places like Miranda Lopez's apartment. Places with clanging radiators and sagging ceilings—places that Jacob wouldn't set foot in voluntarily.

A crease formed between Jacob's eyebrows and he looked at me hard. Maybe it was a residual expression from interrogating crazy zombie-makers all night, or maybe he really was scrutinizing me that much.

"We'll look tonight," I said. I think I sounded optimistic. I hope I did, anyhow, because inside I couldn't stop thinking, please,
please
, let there be somewhere we can both stand living, or else he's gonna get fed up and nix the idea of the two of us living together. And that would really, really suck.

I have no idea who I was praying to, given that I was agnostic. But it didn't stop me.

While Jacob got his beauty sleep, I spent my afternoon in the SaverPlus jewelry department looking for a necklace.

Okay, maybe not the entire afternoon. I made a quick stop in the tool section, and then, since I was already in the basement, I veered down toward the return desk to see if I could get a look at whoever it was that Crash was fantasizing about. I didn't think the two octogenarians who were staffing the desk in crisp, silver wigs and pearls fit the bill.

Jacob had a condo, two houses, and a duplex slated for viewing by the time I got home. He'd pre-screened all of them for things like roaches and railroad crossings, so there was nothing left for me to look for but ghosts.

Even I felt somewhat hopeful.