PsyCop 6: GhosTV (19 page)

I put my hands on my hips so my jacket slid open enough that my sidearm showed, and the students immediately found something else to stare at. “You can’t just dangle something like that in front of me and then take it back. C’mon—what if it’s important? Anything you can tell me is more to go on than what I’ve got now.”

“All right. But not here.”

She turned toward her classroom and I caught her sleeve. “I’m serious about that margarita.” I sounded a little desperate. “I need to know more about automatic writing, too.”

“Okay. Class runs ’til five. Let me look up a few things and I’ll come find you.”

She closed the door, and just like that, I was alone. I leaned against the wall and stared at the empty hallway that had been full of fresh-faced, optimistic Psychs just a minute before, and wondered how my life would have been different if I’d learned about my abilities in a place like this—maybe even from a teacher like Debbie—rather than Camp Hell.

What use was it, though? PsyTrain didn’t exist then, Debbie was in high school—and the idea that psychic abilities were real was so new that even the “experts” didn’t know what was what. And if I were really being honest with myself by adding a twenty-three-year-old me to the equation, even with a better facility, better teachers and better subject matter, it didn’t add up to me graduating in the top tenth of my class.

Still, I could have done without the sleep deprivation and drug testing.

My phone buzzed against my thigh. I checked the readout. Crash.

Again. How persistent of him. I might as well answer. “Hello?”

“What are you doing?”

“Uh…nothing.”

“Are you at work?”

“Not exactly.”

“Uh huh. Did you check your email today?”

“Uh…no.”

“Okay. I didn’t think so. D’you know if Mr. Perfect did?”

“I doubt it.”

“Really? Doesn’t he get all his ducks in a row before he suits up for his crimefighting gig?”

“We’re not in Chicago.”

“Oh-kaaaay. You win the vague-contest. I give up. What’s the skinny?” Honestly, did he have to use that particular expression? I lowered my voice and turned toward the wall, even though there was no one else in the hall anymore but me. “We’re at PsyTrain, looking for Lisa.”

“What do you mean, looking for her? She’s not there?”

“No. And whatever’s going on, it’s a whole big…thing.” He gave a long, drawn-out sigh. “If there’s anything I can do….”

“Automatic writing. You know anything about that?”

“It’s a tool. Like tarot cards and candles and incantations.” Like the invocation of Thor and the big iron spike? That explanation didn’t ring true at all. Not that I’d ever dare to challenge Crash’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things psychic, but how could I possibly be using a tool I didn’t know existed? “A tool for what?”

“It’s old-school divination. Victorian Psychs used it to find pen pals among the spirits and demons and whatever other unseen forces they were looking to chat with.”

“Demons? Come on. Isn’t there anything else it’s good for? Something more modern?”

“Like I told you: old-school. Kind of like Ouija boards.” The hair at the back of my neck prickled. Even I knew about Ouija boards. They sold them in same aisle as the Etch-a-Sketch when I was a kid. Not that we were ever privileged enough to have anything fancier than a beat-up garage sale copy of Sorry with half the pieces missing.

“It’s all about focusing your energy—”

The thing with Crash is that he can’t stand the idea that someone other than him might be right, which made it hard to bounce ideas off him. Plus, the tone he was taking with me had started to sound annoyingly like Faun Windsong. “I gotta go…we’re kind of in the middle of things.”

“Wait a sec—before you hang up. Tell Jacob his email is bouncing.” The remains of the carob-spelt cookie tickled at my uvula, and I swallowed down the urge to hurl. “Which email—work or home?”

“His Q-mail.”

My mind scrambled to put together a perfectly logical and benign explanation as to why Jacob’s personal email account would be full.

Maybe his mother’s camera got switched back to its default settings.

Maybe Q-mail reduced size of its inbox in an effort to cut costs. Or maybe his spam filter was on the fritz.

Except I didn’t buy it. Lisa’s Q-mail filled up, and now she was gone.

Cause, effect, or some weird step in between—it didn’t matter. “I gotta go,” I repeated, and I snapped my phone shut and took off at a run to go find Jacob.

I skidded to a stop in front of the elevator, but the car must have been headed down. The cables creaked, and the pointer on top went from the number 1 to the letter B—very, very slowly. I waited for a couple of seconds while the pointer sat there on “B”, and then I decided the stairs would be quicker. I thundered down the back stairwell, through the main floor, across the public areas, down the side hall that led to the dorm area, and up some more stairs to the second floor rooms above the empty ones Lisa and her suite-mate had shared.

By the time the door to our room was in sight—ten minutes, tops—

I’d already convinced myself that an Internet demon was traveling through Psychs’ emails, squatting in their inboxes, and devouring them when they checked their messages. I’d love to say I’ve never seen anything that messed up, but once you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, almost none of your theories land in the “too weird” category anymore.

Once upon a time, I would have assumed Jacob was immune to weird shit that preyed on Psychs. Lucky Jacob. He was a Psych now, too.

I staggered to a stop in front of our door, and hammered hard on it like I was practicing to take the point position on a drug raid. “Jacob?”

“Vic? It’s open.”

Relief flooded me so fast I swayed on my feet—and only then did I realize how well and truly scared I’d been to think that the minute I’d taken my eyes off Jacob, something had happened to him. Something bad.

I pushed the door in and it opened a couple of feet and bumped the crate. Jacob and Dreyfuss stood in the narrow aisle between the beds, both of them facing the GhosTV. Both of them stared at me expectantly—and damn it, did it really have to be Dreyfuss there with us? Couldn’t it have been anyone else? I wanted to send him back to his own room so I could talk to Jacob in private, but he wasn’t just employed by the FPMP…he was the goddamn director of the entire Midwest division. If anyone could help us connect the dots, it was him. But if he was even interested in helping us, or if he was just using us to further his own obscure motives—that’s the part I didn’t know.

My gaze dropped to a sheet of paper in his hands. Hasty handwrit-ing. Directions for working the GhosTV? It looked that way to me.

He’d done it. He’d pried those directions out of an inmate in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the time it took me to have lunch.

Just like that.

It pained me to let Dreyfuss in on my secrets, honestly it did, but between the full inbox, the
no no no,
and the way my best friend was fucking
missing
, it didn’t seem like I could afford not to trust him.

“Jacob,” I said, “your email is full. Just like Lisa’s.”

Jacob and Dreyfuss both pulled out their cell phones at the same time. It took Jacob a few seconds to navigate to the web. Dreyfuss had his secretary on the phone before I could even blink. “Hey, Laura.

See if you can find any kind of pattern about email filling up.” He listened for a moment, then locked eyes with me and said, “Any particular type?”

“Q-mail.”

“Those accounts are huge. They never get full.” He turned away from me and went back to chatting with his disturbing secretary. “Q-mail.

Uh huh. I know, right? See what you can find. Bye.” Dreyfuss disconnected, but Jacob was still thumbing the buttons on his phone. The vertical line between his brows was as sharp as I’d ever seen it. “I can’t get in.”

“Let’s see your error message,” Dreyfuss suggested. Jacob handed his phone over.

Dreyfuss frowned at the little screen. “That’s a new one. I’ll send a screenshot to Laura to see if she can make anything of it.” His fingers flew over the little buttons in a weird thumb-forefinger-thumb combo, and he worked Jacob’s phone as confidently as if he himself owned the very same model. “I’ll get your storage space upped so we can get in there and unlock it, too.”

He could do that? Q-mail wasn’t government. It was some little open-source thingie up in Seattle—or so everyone thought. Jacob and I met eyes, but neither of us said it out loud.

There was a thoughtful pause in Dreyfuss’ thumbing, and then he said, “I’ll score you kids some laptops, while I’m at it. Make it a little easier to keep an eye on the web. What’s your flavor, Windows or Mac?”

I was fairly sure that even in my mohawk stage, I’d never been arrogant enough to own a Mac. “Windows?”

“Right. You can always spot a lifelong municipal employee.” He thumbed in a few dozen more characters. “Cool beans. Hopefully the GhosTV’s electromagnetic field won’t do a number on the motherboard.”

For real? Maybe he was just being a wiseass, but I turned so the pocket that held my cell phone was facing away from the console, anyway.

Dreyfuss’ phone rang, a subtle beep of a ringtone that I would have taken for a piece of electronics resetting itself in a nearby room if I didn’t see him answer it. “Uh huh? Yeah.” He juggled phones, handed Jacob’s phone back to him, climbed over the corner of our bed, and headed toward his room via the bathroom without even a typical Dreyfuss parting smartass remark.

I grabbed a Valium out of my suitcase and dry-swallowed it. “I want us to stick together from now on,” I said.

“Why? You don’t want me talking to Dreyfuss behind your back? Damn it, Vic, if you don’t trust me by now—”

“That’s not it—not at all.” I planted my hands on my hips and looked around the room without even making sense of the jumble of colors and textures of crap stacked upon crap. “If Dreyfuss can dig up GhosTVs and hack into your full email account and whatever else he’s gonna pull out of his sleeve next…fine. Maybe I’m selling my soul by getting into bed with him, but so what? What the fuck does it matter?”

He made an exasperated face. “Vic….”

“The only thing I care about? I want to make sure you don’t disappear next. That’s all that matters to me. If I owe him, so be it. He’s got access to resources it would be impossible for me to scare up, and he’s my best shot.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“You can’t just go around thinking that—not without knowing whatever it is we’re up against. Promise me we stick together, and you won’t hear one more word out of me about Dreyfuss. For as long as we’re here, he’s part of the team…and I’ll deal with the fallout later.” Jacob narrowed his eyes as if he thought I’d add a few more condi-tions on to my little lecture, but that was all I’d had to say. He nodded, and said, “All right. I can live with that.” Something clicked into place, as if I’d been trying to do one of those peg-and-hole psychiatric ward puzzles, and just realized that if I gave something a quarter-turn, it fit right in. Being able to stop struggling…that was a relief.

“The redhead?” he asked.

“Debbie.”

“Did she have anything to say?”

A whole lot of nothing—I’d have to drill her later. With Jacob present.

It wouldn’t be as effective as talking to her alone, but at least he could be pretty damn charming when he wanted to be. “She’s looking into the automatic writing.”

He handed me the paper Dreyfuss had been looking at, a fax. “Dreyfuss sent in a telepath to pick the instruction manual out of the mind of your buddy at the MCC.”

I looked at the fax. Handwritten words: amplitude, frequency, phase—numbered, so we knew which was which. A bunch of meaningful-looking arrows, like some kind of fancy football play. Cripes. I hoped Jacob would be able to make sense of it, because I sure couldn’t. I handed it back to him. “You seriously think Dreyfuss telepathed the guy? Just now? How do we know he didn’t have this piece of paper in reserve already so he could look like a big hero when we asked for it?

Why have a lab team trying to figure out what makes the GhosTV tick if it was so easy to scrape the answers out of Scott’s mind?”

“I guess it’s possible.” Jacob considered the diagram. “I don’t get the impression that it
was
easy. I think it cost him.” Good. I didn’t say it…then again, I probably didn’t need to.

“But I thought you were done harping on Dreyfuss,” he said.

Old habits die hard. “What does this mean, amplitude—ability—maximum 3?”

Jacob turned on the set and spun the innermost knob to three. “Let’s find out.”

Great. I could look forward to a full afternoon of
Can you see anything
now?
and then a dinner of organic, free-range compost. I sighed, sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard. “Okay,” I said, hoping to move things along. “If amplitude has something to do with ability, what are frequency and phase? On the other GhosTV, one of the knobs made an old ghost fainter and a new ghost clearer.” If only we had a handy old ghost and new ghost standing conveniently side by side, it would be a snap to figure out which was which.

“And what does it have to do with astral projection?” Jacob said. He looked at me expectantly, but luckily spared me from the
Can you
see anything?

I shook my head.

“You can see astral things.”

“Yeah, if I’ve been drinking.” And a stiff shot sounded really good just then. “But only because the booze lowers my shields. Last night when I projected, though, your shields didn’t stop me.” Jacob stopped fiddling with the set and pivoted in his crouch to look at me. I was picking at a bit of toilet paper fluff stuck in the dried blood on my knuckle, so it took me a second to realize he wasn’t going to pick up his side of the conversation again.

“What?” I said.

“What does that mean—my shields didn’t stop you?” I actually had no idea what it meant, just that my mouth seemed to be drawing conclusions on its own. Plus, I hadn’t mentioned I’d seen his red energy all wound around me like the toilet paper around my mashed-up hand. And now that I’d stupidly let it slip…fat chance I’d be able to stuff that genie back in the bottle. “You know. Your shields.”