Spook Squad (37 page)

We were still a couple minutes away from FPMP headquarters by the time I remembered the note from Zigler burning a hole in my pocket. If I learned something ugly about Detective Wembly at this stage of the mission, it might throw me off my game. Investigators with redacted names are unlikely to turn up sipping mai tais on a Maui beach…and if I found out Dreyfuss (or Bly, or both of them) had been the ones responsible for disappearing the missing PsyCop, it might undermine this cautious truce.
 

I fiddled with the envelope for a while, then folded it in half and slid it toward my pocket…and then I considered the fact that it wasn’t very full. I flexed it a few times. One sheet of paper inside, tops. Zig would hardly be able to show definitive proof of what had become of poor Wembly in a single sheet. It was probably nothing more than a quick note, a phone number, a lead. Or maybe a reassurance that Wembly’d simply left the force and moved to Poughkeepsie. I folded the envelope. Unfolded it. Sighed. And slid my thumb under the seal. Because whether or not there was something upsetting inside, the not-knowing would create a gap in my focus where my white light could leak out. Now was not the time for me to be leaky.

There was indeed a single sheet inside. It wasn’t a note, though. It was a photo printed on plain paper off a computer—a small picture, like you’d snap with a cell phone, but despite its small size, I felt a jolt of recognition. I knew the room, and I knew the people in it. Maurice and I had been in that room countless times, doing our boring duty as PsyCops to sit through tedious PowerPoint presentations on statistics and bone dry protocol lectures. Front and center, three PsyCops posed awkwardly with their thumbs in the air as if to say, “Yeah, this really is as lame as it looks.” Carolyn Brinkman on the left. Valdez, the South Side precog, in the middle. And on the right, The Guy With the Hair—that’s what Maurice and I always called him. He was a tall, paunchy ex-narc with this thick, full head of dark hair like you wouldn’t believe, and it was always sticking up like he’d slept on it wrong. Apparently The Guy With the Hair was John Wembly, according to the words
Brinkman, Valdez, Wembly
jotted below the picture. It stood to reason I knew him, or at least knew
of
him, but in light of his disappearance, connecting a face with the name just made me sad.

Until I got a better look at the photo and realized that Detective Wembly, minus the paunch, the pallor, the brown eyes, and the big, crazy head of hair…was sitting directly in front of me. His eyes flickered up and met mine in the rearview, and I looked away fast. No doubt he felt my emotions peaking yet again. It must be exhausting for an empath to be around me—although this time, I’d hauled out a set of feelings that didn’t really see much use: surprise, wonderment, relief. Maybe even cautious optimism. Whoever had transformed John Wembly into Jack Bly had done such a good job of it, neither Jacob nor I realized we’d met the guy dozens of times before. Heck, he’d come right out and asked me how I liked being a PsyCop. Without the picture, though, I might have never made the connection.

 
Something you believe to be true is revealed as false.
It had sounded so ominous at the time (and the illustration of the lightning-struck tower contributed to the overall sense of dread) but I was stoked to learn Detective Wembly was alive and kicking. His reward for helping the FPMP in some clandestine investigation hadn’t been a pair of concrete shoes after all, but rather a shiny new badge, an SUV that cost as much as a small bungalow, and one hell of a makeover. Not only that, but I’d been badgering Con Dreyfuss about Wembly’s whereabouts all week. Hell, I’d gone so far as to imply Dreyfuss was responsible for having him knocked off. It must have been pretty tempting to point me at Agent Bly and say, “There’s your missing PsyCop, dickwad.” But Dreyfuss had resisted the urge to set the record straight, even though it left him looking like a murderer.

My optimism even shed a bit of its cautiousness as I realized I was privileged to have some solid Psychs in my corner. Yeah, Jennifer Chance still creeped me out. But I could take her. Especially with all the backup I had at my disposal.

*
 
*
 
*

I had Jacob unplug my phone and hand it back to me, hoping to keep myself from blurting out “I know who you are!” by scanning through my messages before we rolled into the FPMP underground lot. A quick glance showed nearly forty missed calls—busy morning—but mostly they were hang-ups, with only a few messages.
 

First, Bob Zigler. “I dropped something off for you. Hope it’s what you’re looking for.”

It sure as hell was. Although for a guy who’d just uncovered something the FPMP had tried really hard to bury, he sounded pretty down in the dumps.

Second message, Crash. His voice was shaking. “So, your phone keeps going to voicemail. Anyway. There was a fire. The store is gone.” A long pause. A clamor of raised voices in the background. Breathing. Although I knew he hadn’t been hurt, my heart still hammered when I heard him tell me the news himself. “I’m okay. I’m…yeah, I’m okay. I wasn’t home.” A sigh, and another long pause, where I thought he’d probably hang up and start attending to the endless snarl of red tape he’d need to unravel to start getting his stuff in order. But then he added, “You know, it’s funny. I thought I’d just made a great big change in my life, since I decided,
What the hell? Might as well go for it.
With Red, I mean. Absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder, but the thought of him pining away for me while he was off in San Francisco made me feel a lot better. Petty, huh?” He gave a wry laugh.

While Crash’s empathy wasn’t as sensitive or accurate as Bly’s, I’d bet he had a good sense of how much regret this poor Red guy actually felt. You might be able to lie to an empath with what you say or don’t say, but lately I’d gained firsthand experience on how challenging it is to shift the way you feel.

“Just goes to show, my idea of change is jack squat compared to what the universe had in store.” He sighed again. “I’ll bet it went up like a fucking bonfire. The incense, the resin, the books, the herbs, the charcoal. Shit. I hope Lydia’s okay.”

Lydia. Existentially speaking, she was fine. But my heart sank to hear the concern in his voice. I scrolled through more missed calls to see if he had any more news for me, but the rest of Crash’s calls were all hangups. I would have phoned him back there and then, except for the identity of the caller who’d left the third message: Stefan. Briefly, I considered deleting the message from my Judas ex unheard and going on with my life, but I couldn’t bring myself to thumb past without hearing what he had to say.

“So, are everyone’s calls going straight to voicemail, or just mine?” His voice…. I’ve never met anyone with a voice like Stefan’s—deep and rich, like you could sink right in to it, drown…and die with a smile on your face. He should’ve been working in Hollywood, or at least radio. And even though if I ran into him on the street I’d be happy to jab him with a sharp stick, the sound of his voice still left me breathing funny and swallowing dry. “Listen, I get that there’s a lot of bad blood between us, and I know you don’t understand why I did what I did, but set all that aside for now. Since you’re some big-shot detective, I need you to help me find someone from Camp Hell.”

The fact that he’d called me “some big-shot detective” in a dismissive way shouldn’t have tripped my trigger. Of course, it did. Our triggers ran deep.

“I suppose you’ll want to know why, so you might as well hear it from me. I joined a twelve-step program. It’s just as hokey you’d think, too. All that B.S. about a higher power, and helplessness, and surrender. ‘I’m Steven, and I’m an addict.’ ‘Hi, Steven.’” It jarred me to hear him call himself by the new name the FPMP had assigned to him, even though it was only marginally different than the name I’d imprinted on. “The success rate is nowhere near what they claim, either, but I had to try something. This past summer I got stopped by a traffic cop for making a lane-change without a signal—who the heck gets stopped for that?—and I realized there was a roach in my ash tray. What if that cop had searched my car? I could have lost my practice over something as ridiculous as a lane change.”

Says the guy who smokes weed in his office, covers it up with air freshener, and thinks no one notices. I decided that maybe someone jonesing that hard for a hit really might benefit from Narcotics Anonymous. Then I wondered if there were supernatural jellyfish on goopy tethers hooked into his lungs. I rolled down my window and sucked in a few cleansing breaths before I hurled a stomachful of sour coffee onto Bly’s plush leather seating.

“I’m on step nine, making my amends. I’m generating a lot of resistance to doing this, y’know? So it makes me think there must be some growth waiting for me on the far side of the process.”

Could I forgive him for what he’d done to me—going behind my back, telling all my secrets, pumping me for information that he turned right over to the highest bidder? Could I even handle hearing the apology? I had no idea.

“Maybe no one’s ever going to convince me that the little dweeb didn’t deserve at least some of what he got, but I feel like I need to apologize to Movie Mike…if I can manage to find him.”

Fucking hell, that asshole Mike? What about me?

“But you know who was doing unexpectedly well?” Stefan asked. “Richie Duff—good old Einstein. We were brutal to him, weren’t we? Especially that imitation of his pathetic laugh you were always doing…I get goosebumps just thinking of it. He was a lot more gracious about my apology than I would have been, although maybe he’s blocked a lot of it out. Haven’t we all? He seemed pretty eager to chat about Camp Hell, but he couldn’t remember anybody’s name.”

I could take that at face value, since Richie actually was doing unexpectedly well, or I could presume Stefan had recently been duped into providing Jennifer Chance with a long roster of Psychs. Given that he didn’t make a snide remark about being invited to see the Bears play on Thanksgiving, it was more than likely Stefan Russell been making his amends to a ghost.

Chapter 32

Stefan gave me Movie Mike’s actual name and ran through which channels he’d already searched, then said, “Maybe you’ve got better resources at your disposal than I do,” and hung up without telling me he was sorry. I would have called him back and demanded my apology if it weren’t for the fact that I was busy reeling over the idea of him chatting it up with Jennifer Chance. That, plus the fact that we’d arrived at FPMP headquarters, where I needed to leave my personal life on hold.

Dreyfuss was waiting for us beneath a cheesy sign that read,
Wow her with two dozen red roses!
His arms were crossed, clenched tight to his body, and he was pacing in a precise three-stride formation that spanned the entire potted plant section. I noted he wasn’t biting his nails.

“The sí-no says Dr. Chance has been coming and going from the FPMP,” he told us, “but this building’s off limits.”

“Where’s Lisa?”

“Somewhere safe.” And apparently he wasn’t going to be any more specific than that. Given the whole train yard scenario, I had no doubt there were several pre-planned hidey holes at his disposal. “I’ve got Richie and Laura hunkering down in the back room here ’til this all blows over, with Dr. Santiago ‘treating’ Richie to make sure he doesn’t start acting too smart.”

“But I thought you said the shop was a safe—”

“I’m not taking any chances. Richie’s a mess, and the thought of someone else inside Laura…” Dreyfuss shuddered. “Your hunch about mediums being an easy target for possession was right on the mark. Theoretically, anyone but a Stiff is at risk, but mediums’ subtle bodies are a hell of a lot easier to shove out of the way.”

Right. And I’d need to shove out my own spirits if I wanted to escort Dr. Chance to the veil. I said, “We should try to make sure we don’t expose too many Psychs to her. NPs too. With the mediumship test being as lame as it is, Laura’s probably not the only one who scored a false negative.”

“I’ll start sending people home.” Dreyfuss tapped his phone a few times, then said, “Shit. This is no piece of cake without Laura at the helm. Plus, what if the ghost rides home inside one of my agents? What then?”

“Distance shouldn’t matter.” Theoretically, anyway. I did my best to sound knowledgeable. “We’ll flush her out. If Jacob and I amp up on psyactives—”

“Me too,” Bly cut in. “I saw that thing, it was just for a second and it looked kinda…kinda jellied. But I saw it—and I want another crack at it. I know what it feels like, inside its head. If it slips into anyone, I’ll know.”

Before, it would have rankled to have Bly elbowing in on my territory. But now that I knew he was an ex-PsyCop, I was ecstatic to have his talent on board. I said, “Can you soften her up somehow to make her an easier target?”

“If you nudge people the wrong way, it can backfire. Some people need to be calmed down; it makes them complacent. Other people are easier to amp up. They start feeling overwhelmed. They get sloppy. That ghost thing was intense. It’ll be more of a danger to itself if I crank that intensity up a few notches…but do you really want to make it more unpredictable than it already is?”

We all went quiet and considered whether or not it behooved us to face a new and intensified Jennifer Chance.

Jacob had been taking in the whole discussion with his own brand of intensity, analyzing, thinking. He had it all sorted out by the time he spoke. “It depends on how you plan to handle her. If you’re going to coerce her into the proximity of this veil thing, then knocking her off-balance first might be helpful. But if you’re going to haul her over there with a sheer force of will—with your talent—then we’re better off discouraging her from struggling.”

“Either one of those things could work,” I said. “I won’t know until I try. And I might even need to switch tactics midstream if it’s not going the way I want it.”

“Psyactives are no problem,” Dreyfuss said, “but how will you find her? Using the psychic tuner as bait?”