Chapter 16

Bert Chekotah looked just as calm, cool and collected as he had the last time we’d chatted. He looked just as carelessly handsome, too. His black hair was boyishly wind-tousled, his skin was tan, and the few days of wispy beard growth he hadn’t bothered to shave formed a rakish natural goatee. 

“The necklace of protection,” I said curtly. “I need to make one.”

“That’s smart. There are spirits all around us—in every living being, yes, but other things too. Rocks and water and all of the natural world. Most of them don’t care about us one way or another. But some of them mean us harm.”

Rocks. Sure. “So how do I go about it? Take apart an old rug and…is it braided? Macrame?”

“There is no pattern for making a personal amulet—you’re not knitting a sweater.”

“Then how did you make the one you gave to Fau…uh…Katrina?”

“It was a process.” Damn it, his answer sucked already. “First, I removed myself from the distractions of day-to-day life to commune with Spirit. I fasted, I drummed, and I prayed. How long? I’m not sure. Days. Maybe a week. When I walk with my ancestors, I see time is a modern construct with no true meaning.”

Funny, I was acutely aware of the passage of time—I wanted to hang up on him five minutes ago. Carl rejoined us and sat beside Darla. I swallowed my natural loathing of Chekotah and settled in to hear what he had to say.

“I searched for materials among the things I owned, items of power I’d collected over decades. I prayed over each piece, and listened for the spirits to tell me how to bind them all together. I sacrificed my most precious possessions, irreplaceable things of great value, filled with history and culture, to rework their power into a circle of protection.”

Fantastic. It took me multiple attempts to re-lace my shoes without getting everything all twisted around. But maybe Crash could source some raveling prayer rugs for me—and maybe Carl would research how to knot them back into something helpful. 

Was I learning to delegate…or was I out of my comfort zone and itching to get back to the murder?

“What’s most important,” Chekotah said, “is that the whole time you’re making the amulet, you hold your focus. Your energy as a shaman. That’s what binds the power.”

I sighed.

He said, “Sometimes the best path is rocky.”

“So what I need to do is drop everything, say a bunch of prayers, find some random crap laying around and throw it together. Is that what you’re saying? Wing it? ’Cos that’s what it sounds like. And frankly, I have no idea how you manage to brush up against ghosts as much as you do without ending up as some dead guy’s wetsuit.”

Chekotah had zero reaction to my annoyance. Why should he? That guy was slicker than an ashy tube of KY. I was just a minor intrusion on his charmed life. “Some people claim the body is a just a vessel,” he said, “but it’s more than that. It’s the physical part of you, and your spirit knows it. A ghost might try to claim your body, but it’s like putting on someone else’s shoes. You can force your feet in, but they don’t feel right.”

Like Jennifer Chance’s ghost fingers poking through Richie’s stubby fingertips. I shuddered.

“Matter of fact,” he said, “I do remember the first time I spiritwalked. It wasn’t scary. Confusing, maybe. But not scary. It was my cousin Max’s funeral. He shot himself in the leg cleaning a gun, and bled out before the ambulance showed up. Probably drunk, but who knows? He was a year older than me, seventeen. A quiet kid, the type you don’t really notice but who’s always there in the background. During the wake, I was out back behind my uncle’s garage with our friends, passing around a joint—a sloppy way to lower your defenses—and I was just stoned enough that I didn’t think much of it when Max joined the circle and waited for a toke. But when I tried to pass it to him, he couldn’t take it.

“Everyone else figured the weed just hit me harder than normal. Of course, they talked some shit about it, but pretty soon the subject changed and no one paid it any more attention. But I could still see Max. Standing there, quiet, trying to be part of the group. Just like when he was alive.

“I wanted to believe it was all in my head. Grief playing tricks on me. But later that night, once my mom was passed out by the TV, I went back by Uncle’s place and snuck into the yard. I didn’t think I’d find anything, but there he was, sitting in an old lawn chair. My cousin Max. Looking at me. Sad.

“I said to him, you know you’re dead, right? Not sure why I chose those words—maybe the ancestors were guiding me. He hung his head and looked embarrassed. He didn’t want to believe me, but we’d known each other our whole lives, and he knew I was way smarter than him. We argued about him being dead for a while, but eventually I made him see the truth.

“And then he said, Bert, I’m scared.

“I said, what’s there to be scared of? Looks like the worst already happened.

“Come with me, he begged. Like he always did, when he was too shy to do something by himself. And when it happened, I did it without thinking. I reached for his hand, like I did when we were kids, and everything shifted.

“The world of spirit—you know it? Looks just like our world, but only the shell. You know you’re there ’cos it feels like a dream. I was young and cocky, didn’t know enough to be afraid.

“Even when my cousin pulled back and sank into my body.

“Do you know how lucky I was? Max was lonely and scared and confused, but he wasn’t malicious. If he was, things could’ve been so much worse. Don’t be a dumbass, I told him, and I yanked him back out. I don’t think he even knew what he’d just done. I walked him over to the veil—which was out by the rotten tree stump where we used to throw knives, but not really there. The closer I got, the more everything felt like a dream. Because the world of spirit isn’t like the physical world. Going deeper has nothing to do with location or distance. 

“He said he was scared. And I said, whatever’s in there, it’s gotta be better than hanging around your yard forever.

“Come with me? he said.

“And I told him I was right behind him.” 

No big shock to hear lying had always come easy to Chekotah, but it wasn’t worth getting in a dig. Not when he was telling me something I could eventually use to figure out my own shit.

After a long silence, he said, “After that, I started hanging out on the reservation. My mom always avoided it—my dad was there with his other family—but I was sixteen, and what could she do to stop me? I told the shaman everything, and he said he would mentor me. A couple years later, the Ganzfeld reports came out, and the rest…? Well, back then, in that first crop of certified Psychs, the sky was the limit. You know how it was.”

Hardly. But I wasn’t about to volunteer anything that personal to the likes of him.

It took a few jabs to hang up, but I managed to do it without video-calling anyone else. It didn’t occur to me that I might not be the only one who didn’t appreciate Chekotah’s ability to end up in the right place at the right time until Darla piped up. “Maybe the sky was the limit for him. My reality was a big glass ceiling.”

I tried to imagine a job where my particular skillset was in high demand, but other than homicide investigator, I came up blank. “You seem to be doing okay.”

“Maybe now. But I waited tables for nearly eight years before I finally caught a break and got a call from the FPMP.”

I suspected her gender didn’t have much to do with it. Back then, any police department with the budget would’ve been thrilled to have a fourth-level medium on the team. The more likely problem would’ve been getting through the physical screening at her old weight—hell, even I’d struggled with the chin-ups—but I was smart enough not to go there. Before I could open my mouth and say something I’d surely regret, a text from Jacob popped up.

Need you in the lab ASAP.

I texted back, On my way.

“That’s my other investigation,” I told everyone. “Gotta go.”

“Sure,” Darla said, “no problem. Carl and I are doing just fine without you.”

Did it count as a passive-aggressive reply when it was dripping with so much sarcasm it practically left a residue behind? Since I knew there wasn’t nearly enough time to get to the bottom of that particular dig, I pretended to take it at face value, and headed off to the section of the FPMP I don’t normally deal with: the underground. Not just a simple basement, but three whole levels of basement. 

All the way down to the parking lot, the stairwell, the bulletproof glass doors that made a sucking sound every time they glided open on their hermetically sealed tracks, I drank down white light like an alcoholic during happy hour. There was no broad curve of a grand wooden desk at the lab; anyone who showed up there would know where they were going, and they wouldn’t have time to look at fancy decorating or sip coffee. Just a small desk with an armed security guard who looked like his sense of humor had been surgically removed. 

Jacob was waiting at the guard station for me, looking handsome, and official, and full of existential dread. (Okay, so he had a furrow between his brows and the set of his shoulders looked stiff. But I’d learned to speak his body language pretty darn well.) He lit up when he saw me with a quiet sort of relief, and told the guard, “This is Agent Bayne.”

Bored, the guard motioned toward the card reader. I scanned my ID. “Top clearance,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Once we were out of earshot, I asked Jacob, “Whatever we’re doing down here—don’t you have enough clout to make it happen somewhere aboveground?”

“Without alerting a bunch of people to what we’re looking at? No.”

I felt a twinge of recognition. “Are we heading where I think we’re heading?”

“Parsons’ autopsy is done. I figured we should hear the findings together.”

“And just when I hoped I could end my day without a trip to the morgue.” Although I supposed I should be relieved he hadn’t summoned me to the polygraph suite.

We headed into the lab and passed their obsessively labeled supply cabinets, some small windowless offices, and a room that looked to my untrained eye like a bunch of people raking mulch. The latest and greatest in Psych research? It would take a lot more than that to surprise me.