Chapter 22

I spent the rest of the afternoon combing through keycard timetables with Jacob. But when someone walks up behind you, it’s common courtesy to hold open the door for them. I’d wager that half the people in the stairwell weren’t on that list.

You know Jacob is exhausted when he leaves dinner to me. Had I known ahead of time, I would’ve called for delivery on our way home, but by the time I figured out what was what, it was way too late. I nuked us some frozen chicken breasts, but not only were they bland, they were tougher than shoe leather all around the edges, and we ended up throwing most of the meat away. At least running the garbage disposal gave us a chance to really talk.

“These past few years,” I said, “I always figured the Fifth Precinct was holding me back. All the shit I put up with from the meatheads on the force, all the bureaucracy from above, everything seemed like a series of ridiculous barriers stopping me from making a difference. At the FPMP, some small part of me was starting to think that maybe I could do some actual good.”

“You can.”

“Really? That’s not how it looks from my end. Because not only do I have zero clue how to score a medium’s ability, but now my colleagues are being picked off right under my nose.”

“Yours and everyone else’s. You’re not the only one assigned to this case.”

“But…I’m different. I’ve got an edge no one else has. And I should be able to figure out what’s going on.” I turned off the empty garbage disposal before it burned itself out, and it rattled to a stop. “Never mind. Let’s go to bed.”

I always claim I don’t have a very sound or restful sleep, but wake me up at two a.m. and I discover that’s patently untrue. I was so far gone that when Jacob’s phone started blaring, I lurched out of sleep with a startled, sickening confusion and a half-remembered slip of a dream that disintegrated when I tried to put words to it. Even in my sorry state, I was quicker than Jacob. I grabbed the phone from his nightstand, glanced at Laura Kim’s number on the screen, picked up and said, “Bayne.”

“I need you and Jacob at Agent Lipton’s house right now. There’s been a break-in. And for heaven’s sake, turn on your ringer.”

We staggered into our clothes half-asleep and made it to the fake schoolteacher’s Lincoln Park brownstone in fifteen minutes flat. Veronica Lipton was about Jacob’s age. She had a well-kept house with a ubiquitous Lexus in the garage. I thought of her as a professional, a federal agent in a suit, with no-nonsense brown hair and sensible shoes. At home, though, she looked more like a regular person. She was in a robe, though it kept sliding off the silky nightgown beneath, and she was constantly pulling it back into place and attempting to re-anchor it by cinching the belt tighter. And when her nightgown slipped, the faded edge of an old tattoo showed just above her breast. A dragonfly wing, or maybe a fairy.

Her house looked like a regular house. Behind the nearest closed door, a cat yowled to get out. Possibly more than one. She had a truly impressive collection of takeout menus stuck on her refrigerator door with magnets shaped like various swear words. The “fuck” magnet was holding up a snapshot of her snuggling a squirming longhaired cat. Her kitchen table was clear of everything but a salt shaker, a few pieces of junk mail, and a Beretta 9mm.

Police presence was sparse. One beat cop was being talked to by a guy in a suit—probably being informed that the feds had this, thanks very much. “Can I make us some coffee?” Veronica asked.

Jacob shook his head. “Better play it safe and treat the whole thing as a crime scene, just in case.” 

“The guy forced open the back door and didn’t get any farther than the edge of the cabinets. So the coffee pot should be fine to use. It’s all the way across the room.”

“You’d destroy evidence for a cup of coffee?”

She crossed her arms. “Well, when you put it that way…but sometimes a cup of joe is the only thing standing between me and a bottle of Jack.”

“Look,” I said, “just give us your statement and you can go grab yourself the biggest coffee the minimart carries. You need two hands just to pick that thing up.”

“Fine. I was asleep and the cats woke me up. They were bouncing off the walls. Figured it was just one of those random cat freakouts. They do that once in a while, the tails get big, eyes go black, and boom, they’re off. It’s usually funny.” She eyed the back door warily. “Anyway, I heard noise downstairs and came down to find some guy prying the door open. I fired three rounds. He ran.”

“Any blood?” I asked.

She shook her head. “A team is scouring the deck, but given that one round is obviously buried in the wall over by the light switch, I wouldn’t be so shocked if the other two missed him too.”

Shitty of me to gloat, but my seventy percent wasn’t looking so bad after all. Then again, I’d been shooting on a well lit range at a stationary paper target.

“Anyway,” she said, “from what I could see, he was under six feet tall. Average frame. But it was dark, and he was wearing a hoodie with the opening tied so tight the only part of his face showing was his eyes and nose. Hard to even guess his age based on that, or his hair, or much of anything. He moved pretty well—so was he young and fit, or just in good shape? I can’t even tell you what race he was. All I can say for sure is that going by his silhouette, the way he moved and his low center of gravity, he was male.”

What a shame. All I could say was that she and Agent Garcia had better take to sleeping with the lights on.

* * *

It would take the FPMP forensics crew some time to comb through Veronica’s property and give us a definitive answer, but their initial findings weren’t particularly encouraging. No obvious blood. No usable footprints. And I’d be shocked if there were any fingerprints waiting to be lifted, though that didn’t stop them from trying.

The sun had grudgingly risen by the time they found enough of nothing to tell us about it. I scowled open my phone and tried calling Laura, but ended up getting Patrick instead. Dreyfuss used to divert his calls too, and I hadn’t minded then. But Laura was different. I liked Laura. And her not being available for me would take some getting used to.

“Any luck?” Patrick asked me.

“If by luck, you mean nobody seeing squat….”

“Tough break. Look, I’m here for you guys. Anything you need, let me know. I might be the newbie, but Laura left extensive notes on where to get stuff and who to call. And I’ve just about mastered the internal phone system.”

“That makes one of us who understands phones.”

“Listen, speaking of phones, have you checked out that productivity app I showed you? Because I’d hate for you to get so bogged down prioritizing the urgent quadrant that you fail at the main thing Director Kim wants from you.”

Maybe Laura was the one who needed to look at her priorities. I’d have to talk some sense into her. After all, the more of her live agents who got killed, the more potential ghosts she’d end up with. “Is she there? I just wanted to touch base.”

“Sorry, she’s booked solid. But let me get you on the calendar now, and if anything opens up, I can move you forward.” He typed for a few seconds, then said, “She’s got a spot next Tuesday at three.”

“I guess,” I said listlessly. That was nearly a week away. By then, either we’d figure out who was killing FPMP agents, or everyone would be dead.

I hung up with Patrick and took one last look around the scene. No ghosts. And even if there were, talking to them might not give me anything I could use. So I put on my homicide investigator hat and took a closer look. 

Still nothing.

I glanced up and saw Jacob at the perimeter of the snowy lawn, getting a debriefing from the techs. His posture was straight, his gaze was focused and intelligent, and he commanded the same respect he always did. But by the look on his face—something that would unlock my new smartphone—I could tell he wasn’t too keen on what the techs had to say.

Since I’d started my official stint at the FPMP, I’d been leery of working with Jacob. Worried he’d ride me too hard, or that I’d turn out to be a liability. But catching sight of him now, embroiled in a case with lethal ramifications and nothing to go on, I realized what I was really scared of. Me, caring too much. Because when I worked homicide, I didn’t hold back. When a ghost came crying to me, I’d give a hundred percent. Now, though, with Jacob involved? Seeing how pained he was over failing a victim he felt it was his duty to protect? I felt compelled to give even more, whether or not there was anything left in my reserve.

Jacob caught my eye and nodded for me to join him out in the alley, where old Christmas decorations poked out from frozen gray snowbanks. Ice crunched beneath our feet. “I’m hiding Lipton and Garcia until this blows over.”

“Safe houses? Good idea. Patrick can probably help you with that.”

Jacob shook his head. “The fewer people who know any details, the better. There could be a telepath involved. I’ll make all the arrangements myself.”

While Jacob went off to hide two undercover agents—from a killer, or from each other—I grudgingly headed back to the office I’d been avoiding. My office.

After so many years of being on plain view in a precinct that either hated or feared me, you’d think I would relish having an office of my own. But I didn’t. Not because I was sharing it with my new assistant and my old frienemy from Camp Hell.

Because I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

I stood there in the center of the plant-filled room, stared at my useless computer, and scrabbled for a next move. Any move. And while I flailed uselessly, Darla showed up with a couple of big guys and even bigger boxes in tow. “You’re early,” she said.

I grunted.

She strode over to her standing desk, planted her hands on her hips, and assessed the room. She pointed to an open area and said, “Put it right here, it’ll get the most midday sun.”

The big guys wheeled over their big boxes.

“I hate to ask,” I said.

“Treadmill desk. I haven’t even been in Chicago a week and I’ve already gained three pounds. And who knows how long I’m stuck here. I’ve still got hundreds of NPs to analyze. On a test that might prove exactly nothing.”

Carl came in at nine on the dot, and without preamble, said to me, “I heard you were at Agent Lipton’s last night. What happened?”

“Attempted break-in. Shots fired.”

“Is she okay?”

Was he asking because he was worried about her? Or just trying to see what I knew? “Nobody’s hurt,” I told him.

“I can’t get hold of her.”

“She went dark, for her own protection.”

“Where is she?”

“I’m not privy to the details,” I said, and when he saw I wasn’t going to give him anything, he turned around and stomped right back out.

I should probably tell Jacob. What, exactly? That Carl seemed upset about Agent Lipton’s break-in? That didn’t mean a thing…other than the realization that I’d never fully appreciated how harrowing it must’ve been for him to find out Laura Kim fired the shot that ended Roger Burke. 

Even when Jacob slapped the waterlogged gun on the table, I’d had a hard time believing it was her. And I had just as hard a time imagining Carl putting someone through a mulcher. I wandered over to the window and stared out at the highway. Morning rush was in full force. Traffic crawled. But they were making a hell of a lot more progress than I was.

Maybe I could kill two birds with one round. As if I was innocently brainstorming aloud, I said to Darla, “According to Carl’s badge, he’s NP. Maybe we could test out some alternative medium-finding methods on him.”

Darla left off watching the burly guys wrestling with the treadmill, joined me at the window and mirrored my stance, feet planted, arms crossed. “Like what?”

“Have him handle some of the typical props. Incense, Florida Water. See how he reacts.”

“What would that tell us? You and I handle that stuff plenty, and it never made either of us burst into flames.”

But what if we’d been possessed at the time? That might make a difference, though I wasn’t about to volunteer my body to see if the theory held water.

“If testing mediums was as easy as sprinkling them with salt,” Darla said, “don’t you think they would’ve figured it out at Camp Hell?” As critical as she’d been acting, this time she wasn’t challenging my suggestion. More like thinking out loud. “I remember my test. I was twenty. Community college dropout. Still living at home. I’d answered some ad I’d seen on TV. A plain black car picked me up and took me to an active crime scene. The cops, they were having conniptions about letting some random person into their crime scene, but someone talked to them, and they let us in. And there was this group of creepy old fogies in overcoats standing to the side. Just watching me…while the victim cried about her boyfriend unloading an entire clip into her for saying she didn’t want to see him anymore.” She suppressed a shudder. “I got an invitation to Heliotrope Station for training, all expenses paid, by the end of the day. Via messenger. My family was so poor, we’d never actually seen a messenger before. Dumb detail to remember, right?”

“Guess it’s hard to forget your first time.”

“We spent how long together at Camp Hell, and you never really told me about your first time. What’s your story?”

“Sometimes it feels like my life began in the psych ward.” I admitted. “Before that, everything’s kind of a blur.”

“Seriously?” She swung around to face me. “How could you possibly forget your first encounter with the dead?”

“It’s not so much specifically that one incident that’s hazy…more like the majority of my childhood.”

Her reaction was so cold, I could practically feel the temperature in the room drop. “After all the personal stuff I’ve just laid on the line, you don’t want to tell me? Fine. Be that way.”

“It’s not a matter of what I want. I don’t remember. It must’ve been the drugs. Too much Thorazine, too few shits to give.”

Disgusted, she let the matter drop, though it was obvious she didn’t believe me.

To be fair, neither did I.