Spook Squad (25 page)

Then again, how many scumbags who bludgeon their girlfriend to death with a dog dish get to skip the penitentiary simply because some of their evidence was gathered by a PsyCop?

Maybe life wasn’t always fair…but for the inmates of the MCC, their living conditions were some kind of payback. I reminded myself of that as I steeled myself to step through that reinforced door. “I’ll go first,” I said, thinking I should get it over with before I changed my mind. I wouldn’t have minded Jacob being in there with me, but if I suggested pairing off, chances were I’d end up with Bly. He didn’t look like he’d been flayed anymore, so the GhosTV must be out of range. But he was still a big, square guy, and the potential of him following me into that cell had “Camp Hell flashback” written all over it. “It’s pretty tight,” I said very, very calmly. “You guys stay out in the hall while—”

“We can fit,” Richie said, and shoved me into the cell.

I spun around on him, flinching, and snapped, “What the hell is your problem?”

“Hee-hee. What’s wrong…scared?”

Calm down
, I told myself.
He’s mentally handicapped.
Or differently abled. Or whatever. “You don’t just go shoving people into a prison cell.” With some effort, I lowered my voice. “Especially after what we’ve been through at Camp Hell.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, the picture of innocence.

I sucked white light and quelled the urge to whap him upside the head. Despite his crazy-making presence, I should be able to perform. I must have managed to absorb some coping skills during my time on the force, after all, some way to compartmentalize the anxiety until it was safe enough to unwind. Jacob was poised in the doorway, ready to drag Agent Oblivious out of the cell if I gave the word, but I indicated with a small shake of my head that it was okay. I was okay. Being in Roger Burke’s cell was a rare opportunity. I wasn’t going to squander it by letting Richie throw me off my game. Closing my eyes, I took a deep, centering breath.
 

It smelled like feet. I wasted no time in exhaling.

“Haven’t you ever been in a jail cell before?” Richie said. “You’re supposed to be a cop.”

I let the cop part of the statement slide, since he was obviously trying to get back at me for interrupting yesterday’s exorcism, and instead said, “Jail, lockup…that’s different from prison. Prison is long-term. Decades. Life.” I snapped on a latex glove and ran my finger along the edge of the bed. It was round, blunted down to prevent anyone from getting hurt. Still, no doubt a sufficiently motivated cellmate could use it to cave in a skull. I guess there wasn’t any good way to make a prison cell inmate-safe without removing every last thing in it and making every room single-occupancy. And then some inmate rights group would complain about the solitary confinement and sensory deprivation constituting cruel and unusual punishment.

“Kind of makes you think about the ‘guest suites’ back at the FPMP,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re miles apart in terms of accommodations. But maybe that only means it would take longer to lose it in a nicer cell.”

Richie clutched my forearm and said, “What difference does it make if someone’s sitting in a cell or a mansion? We’re only as free as we can be in our own heads.”

An unpleasant sensation twinged up my arm, like hitting on a shred of tin foil with my molars, and I pulled away roughly enough to let him know I didn’t appreciate all the manhandling. “Quit touching me, okay? I need to concentrate.”

Chapter 21

Aside from the striking aroma of old socks, Roger Burke’s cell was clean. Maybe that was for the best. If there’d been a repeater in residence, it wouldn’t have supplied me with any useful information. And if there’d been a sentient ghost lingering around, I would have exposed the extent of my ability to Richie and Bly by talking to it. Seeing Jacob’s eyes, the longing look he cast on the door of the cell, wrenched my heart. If we couldn’t get to the bottom of Burke’s final mind-game, he’d be stuck squandering all his FPMP time trying to solve a puzzle with key pieces that were long since lost.

Agent Bly said, “We should see if the staff would let us join them for lunch.” When he piped up with that suggestion, I realized he hadn’t said much. Maybe it was Jacob’s investigation, but Bly had been an FPMP agent longer than him. Richie actually had seniority…but obviously, his opinion didn’t carry much weight unless it had to do with cold spots or football.
 

Some phone calls were made and lunch was confirmed. While the MCC guards didn’t have any say as to where we were allowed to go, there was nothing written in stone about them needing to go over and above to accommodate us, and certainly nothing forcing them to have a deep heart-to-heart chat with us over our lousy sandwiches and vending machine chips. Sure, they’d all done their jobs. Burke had made it out through the facility’s front doors alive. But my experience with the people in these types of professions is that they give the facts and leave it at that, for fear of bringing down some kind of recrimination on their own heads. So it floored me when the guard and the nurse we broke bread with were downright friendly.

Don’t get me wrong—I know exactly how charming Jacob can be when he sets his mind to it. But before the sandwiches were even unwrapped, these guys opened up to him like long lost brothers. The guard said, “I dread getting an ex-cop on my cellblock. Fucking dread it.” He was a middle-aged Latino guy with “don’t fuck with me” written all over him. “But Burke could handle himself, and there was something about him…the other inmates took to him a lot better than I thought they would. He spent as much time as he could in the library, trying to figure out how to get off. He probably told a few of the other ones he’d help them get off, too.”

I’d wager he didn’t mean “get off” in the porno sense, given that Burke would rather cut off his own dick than let another guy handle it.

I took a bite of my sandwich, an institutional approximation of a BLT that tasted like the plastic wrap. The bread was spongy, the lettuce was soggy, the tomato was crunchy, and the bacon—if that’s even what it was—had the consistency of beef jerky. The meatlike-substance was so bad that even Richie the carnivore peeled open his spongy bread and picked it off. Then he tried a bite of the veggie mush-and-mayo sandwich and opted to not eat it at all. Jacob was probably crying inside while he ate, but he didn’t show it. The prison staff seemed accustomed to the cuisine. “However Burke finally worked it for himself,” the guard said, “however he got his sentence overturned, looks like it didn’t pan out too good for him after all.”

The nurse was a younger guy, tough, black, and just as big and imposing as the guard. “Even if he stayed,” the nurse said, “there’s no guarantee he would’ve been safe. Couple months later, flu ripped through the inmates. Took out a half dozen guys in his cellblock. Makes you wonder about the hand of God. Maybe when your time is up, nothing you can do to get out of it.”

I was well aware of the mortality rate of the latest flu outbreak. We’d had our share of cases in the Fifth Precinct’s residents…though the cause of death was plain enough that they didn’t need me to confirm it. I said, “It must’ve been brutal to contain it here.”

“You got that right,” the nurse agreed. “Keep everything as clean as you can, don’t matter. Whatever’s catching, it spreads.”

“The inmates who passed…any of them friendly with Burke?” I asked.

The guard ran through his mental roster of recently deceased inmates. “Could’ve been. Like I said, he got along a lot better than you’d expect.”

“And did the flu patients die here, or were they transported elsewhere?”

“Flu or no flu,” the nurse said, “these are dangerous felons. They treat them here, in the infirmary.”

I looked up and met Jacob’s eyes, and he rewarded me with the grim shadow of a smile.

*
 
*
 
*

Certain types of places just seem like they’d be haunted: cemeteries, abandoned houses, disturbed Indian burial grounds…places people avoid, and places people die. Since plenty of convicts probably have an axe or two to grind, enough unfinished business to cause them to stick around, I figured the Correctional Center’s infirmary would be swarming with spirit activity.

So, of course, it was clean.

Jacob and Bly took one of the doctors aside, a greasy looking guy who seemed eager to be distracted from his job. There were a few patients in hospital beds. I wasn’t sure if they were as out-of-it as they looked, or if they were faking because they had no desire to help the Law. Richie moved slowly up and down the center of the room, scrutinizing each patient in turn. I had no idea why he was insisting on making eye contact. I personally didn’t want to interact with any surly, diseased convicts. But I suppose I should’ve been happy that at least Richie wasn’t subjecting us all to his exuberant galumph-walk.

A second doctor sat at a desk toward the back of the room, arms crossed, scowling down at a pile of reports as he read. His demeanor struck me as more serious than the other doctor’s, since he was less eager to drop what he was doing, I suppose. Maybe he would have heard something about Roger Burke’s final plans. And maybe he’d be willing to tell me about them. Not here—I imagine there’d be a possibility of recriminations for him here. But I could get his number and have Jacob call him later.

“Doctor, I’m Detective Bayne. We’re investigating the homicide of former inmate Roger Burke.”

To say I startled the guy was an understatement. He nearly fell out of his chair.

I scanned for a name tag, but he wasn’t wearing one. Caucasian male, average height and slightly overweight. Age, approximately fifty. Gray hair, a sparse beard, and thick glasses. And he was staring at me like I’d just crept up behind him while he was reading and yelled “Boo!”

Hoping to let the whole startle-thing slide, I acted like I didn’t notice the spooked look he was giving me, and said, “Were you acquainted with Burke?”

“What
are
you?” he said.

I got a better look at him and saw his elbow was intersecting the plastic arm of the office chair. The nearest inmate was peering at me through slitted eyelids, probably wondering why I was introducing myself to thin air. I had a potential witness—a really solid ghost—but I also had a bunch of people around me I couldn’t simply shoo out of the room. One guy was in traction. Another one was on dialysis. I couldn’t exactly give the ghost my business card and have him meet me after work. Could I?

I dug out my paper PsyCop license and placed it on the desk. The doctor didn’t try to pick it up, but he bent over it and read. “I’ve heard of Psychs, but you can see me? Actually see me? And hear me too?” I looked him in the eye and nodded. “I always thought this psychic business was a bunch of malarkey. I see I was entirely wrong. You’d think I would be used to it by now, too.” He gave a grumpy huff, crossed his arms and shook his head.

There was a desktop computer and laser printer on the desk. I pulled a pen out of my pocket and a sheet of plain paper from the printer, and began to write.

“Patient records are privileged information,” the greasy doctor called from across the room, not seeming particularly alarmed that I was monkeying around on his desk.

“Just making a few notes,” I called back.

“That guy’s an idiot,” the ghost doctor said. “He’s given up, you know? Lost his practice and now he’s here, and he can’t give two shits about the job.”

You worked here?
I wrote.

“Eight years. Eight long, ugly years.”

Did you know Roger Burke?

He stared at the question for a moment, stroking his beard in thought. “The ex-cop. Ex-fed. So that’s why the big guns are here.”

I’d hardly call myself a “big gun” but luckily I was able to keep my side of the conversation to a minimum.

“I didn’t know him,” the ghost said. “But I’d heard of him.”

Any idea who’d want him dead?

He leaned back in his chair, though his chair didn’t move, and folded his hands behind his head in a show of excessive casualness. “They say he kidnapped a cop. Does the cop have an alibi?”

My first impulse was to roll my eyes and assure him I could be fairly certain I knew where that cop was…and then I realized that I was damn lucky I didn’t have the FBI breathing down my neck. Lucky…or enjoying the protection of the FPMP. Eager to find something, anything of use, I wrote,
Did any of Burke’s pals die in the flu outbreak?

“Could be. There were a dozen casualties. Me included.”

Can I talk to them?

“Can you?” he echoed. “I don’t know. They’re gone. I moved them along, the ones that were troubled, confused. Hard to explain why I bother, it’s just something I feel the need to do. So they’re not here.”

Talking to spirits who’d moved along would be like trying to call the ghosts back to the repeaters. It seemed possible, but only in theory. I felt like I had access to a telephone, but dialing random numbers was getting me nowhere fast.
Where are they?

“Wherever it is we go when we finish our earthly business. Heaven? Reincarnation? The Elysian Fields? Wherever we go, that’s where they are. Whether you can call them back from beyond the veil, I have no idea. I’m a man of science, not superstition. It never occurred to me that the afterlife was anything more than a morality tale to keep people from slaughtering each other.” He glanced at the guy in traction. The patient was covered in prison ink, including three tattooed teardrops at the corner of his eye—one for every life he’d taken. The dead doctor sighed. “Not a very effective morality tale, either.”

While part of me found it encouraging that some dead folks stuck around to keep the spirit population in check, I was disappointed that they seldom told me anything helpful. Maybe Miss Mattie would know how to contact the dead-and-gone. I’d avoided asking her since she’d probably say something cryptic about believing in myself and suggesting I pray, but I supposed I shouldn’t presume that’s what her answer would be.

Since this dead guy’s vocabulary seemed a lot closer to mine (or maybe it’s just we were both clearly pessimists) and since he was willing to discuss the matter with me, I tried to puzzle through another question that would help me figure out how to broaden my reach. I was about to write,
Can you hear my thoughts?
when a hand clapped down on the back of the office chair, and now I was the one to nearly jump out of my skin.