Chapter 5

Con’s office was exactly how he’d left it when he blew out of town with my best friend and wiped them both off the radar. Throat Bullet—the missing Tribune reporter—went down in a spray of blood. The Russian mobster slumped and puddled by the bathroom door. And the unidentified Triple-Shot reeled from his three silent bullets. Evidently the stasis I’d once put him in had been temporary, because his post-death film loop was now playing at normal speed—bang-bang-bang. 

Looking beyond the three familiar ghostly fixtures, I spotted a few more details that were even more chilling. The lockable credenza was open and a spill of wires hung out. A chair was tipped over and a painting had been knocked askew. And that brownish splatter on the wall? I didn’t need to call in forensics to identify it as the old director’s blood.

If FPMP National was willing to rough up Con Dreyfuss, then I’d sure as hell better not get complacent.

Laura Kim had charged Darla and me to come up with an accurate way to assess potential mediumship using the three repeaters, and while it wasn’t my favorite plan, I couldn’t think of anything better. Darla strode through the dead reporter and planted herself in front of Con’s old desk, which looked like someone had thrown a temper tantrum on it. “Is this a crime scene?”

I considered how best to answer. “Not…recently.”

She turned a wire mesh pencil holder right side up and stuck the spilled writing implements back inside. “It’s obvious no one’s been in here for a while. It’s stale and covered in dust. Then, what? It’s haunted?”

“You tell me.”

Her reaction wasn’t quite the snotty eye-roll I was accustomed to, but I could still see the chubby goth chick in the rigid 40ish government employee. “And now you’re testing me.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of you being here?”

Darla shook her head in disgust. “Whatever, Vic. You might intimidate other people, but not me.” 

I’d hardly intimidate anyone unless I had my weapon drawn, and even then it was pretty questionable, but I decided not to admit it. Besides, I didn’t currently have a gun. Darla fixed herself in the center of the room, shook out her arms, took a deep, slow breath, and closed her eyes.

I watched. Waited. Held my breath. And the repeaters around her kept right on dying. And just when I thought she’d cast out some vague observation to fish for details, like, I sense an energy, it’s male, her hand floated up toward the Russian mobster and she said, “Can’t tell exactly what happened to this guy, but English wasn’t his first language.”

Wow. I wasn’t the only one who’d picked up some new tricks since Camp Hell.

She opened her eyes, looked at me, and narrowed them again. “So now that I’ve passed your little exam, maybe you’ll deign to tell me why the FPMP dragged me back to this pretentious dump of a city.”

“Look, I can do without the attitude. It’s not like I had anything to do with it. Heck, I didn’t even know you’d be here until just now.”

Darla turned toward the window and looked out onto the rail yard. “I have a life, you know.”

“Then that makes both of us.”

“Maybe I expected too much from Chicago.” With her back to me, it must’ve been easier to speak. “I thought it would be cool—what a major letdown. I wasted two years at Heliotrope Station, and the big job that was supposedly waiting for me afterward never materialized. One day they just shut the doors and turned us all out with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and I ended up waiting tables to pay the bills. No fancy job. No nothing. But at least I was in Chicago, right? Ha. Once I could finally start going out and meeting people, turned out the goth crowd was nothing but a bunch of whiny art school punks.”

I wouldn’t know. After Camp Hell, I’d skipped over the bar scene and gone straight into the police academy. 

Darla turned to face me. “All I want is to finish this project and go back home. So, let’s not draw this out any more than we need to.”

“Fine. Help me figure out a way to score mediums, and everyone will be happy.”

Happiness was probably a farfetched goal. Relieved to be rid of each other was more like it. Darla shut down all my suggestions by repeating them back to me in a way that made everything that came out of my mouth sound idiotic, and by the time she’d shot down every last idea, I was more than ready to escape to the lunchroom. Thankfully, she strode off before I could worry about whether she’d try to sit with me. Jacob wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but there was one familiar face in the crowd. I plunked my tray down beside Patrick Barley’s, and sat. 

“How’s your project going?” he asked.

I grunted, swallowed down some surprisingly good risotto, then said, “Any luck with your phone?”

“If by luck, you mean nearly locking the Director out of her own office…then yeah, this job and I are a natural fit.”

 I looked out over the room. Every time I’d spent the day at FPMP headquarters, it was always with the understanding that it was temporary. A limited time engagement. Do my job, collect my drugs, pass go, and head back to the Fifth Precinct. But not anymore. This was my new reality. And it felt weird. 

“I’ve only ever worked one other place,” I admitted.

“Then it’s bound to be a challenge. But at least you psychics have an empirical level and talent to fall back on. You’re not…replaceable.” As we talked, Officer “Andy” passed by our table, and paused to give us both a look. It was brief. And maybe at the Fifth Precinct it wouldn’t have amounted to anything, given the looks I deflected all day long. But here, in the FPMP, where I was just one among many psychics, already I’d become accustomed to people not giving me a second glance.

Once he left the room, Patrick said, “What’s his problem?”

“No idea.” But it felt good for someone other than me to pick up on the attitude.

Overall, lunch was surprisingly companionable. Patrick was deep into an anecdote about how he almost drove to the Clinic that morning and had to perform an elaborate backtrack when I felt eyes on me yet again, and glanced up to see Jacob crossing the room. He caught my eye, gave me a nod, then settled in the corner with the two women from his department.

“My partner works here too,” I said.

Patrick looked over at Jacob’s table. “Oh right, I’ve seen that guy before, he’s picked you up from Mid North Medical.”

“Between work and home, there was the potential we’d see a little too much of each other, if you know what I mean. But it looks like that won’t be an issue.” Apparently, there was enough to do at the FPMP that we wouldn’t be stepping on each other’s toes. And while I hadn’t actively been fretting over it, knowing we wouldn’t be working together directly was actually a relief.

Too bad I couldn’t say as much for the rest of my day. Darla and I spent the afternoon arguing about how to use Con’s office to our best advantage. Since neither of us had any actual ideas, it wasn’t as if there was anything to disagree about. But we managed.

The sight of the three gruesome repeaters made it hard for me to focus on arguing, so we headed back to the office I shared with Carl. It was a simple white room—ideal, really—with stark overhead lighting and a single window with a typically shitty FPMP view of the highway. And now…a flatscreen big enough to entertain a sports bar. It was the same model as the one in HR, but it looked twice as big in my office as it had in the meeting room.

Carl had his back to it, mousing around on his computer. “Did Richie send us a present?” I asked him.

He looked up at me blandly. Guess my humor was wasted on him. But Darla picked up a remote and punched a button, and the massive screen lit up. 

While I marveled over the fact that she’d managed to requisition the thing and have it installed in the span of a single lunch hour, she walked up and started poking at the fancy touchscreen. She sketched the general shape of the office in black, criss-crossed the floor with red lines, and said, “If you mark off a grid and then have people guess where the murders took place, even if you don’t use the word ‘murder’, just the act of having a visible grid would predispose them to know that not only is there something to find, but that target exists within one of the coordinates.”

“What’s the alternative? Put them in the room, tell them nothing, and see what happens? That won’t tell us anything.” I wasn’t deliberately trying to shoot her down, but that tactic was too close to my Dead Lady’s Wig incident for comfort.

Darla, of course, thought I was criticizing her. And she’d never taken kindly to criticism. “It would tell us plenty, if you were willing to look beyond your own preconceived ideas of what it means to be a medium.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind.” She crossed her arms and turned away. “Just tell your buddy the Director that I’m completely useless so she’ll cut me from the team, and I can go back home where I belong.”

* * *

By the end of the day, I was just as eager to go home. Since Jacob had to stay late yet again, I treated myself to a dinner of scrambled eggs and microwaved tater tots, then planted myself in front of his massive desktop. The plan was to try and come up with some idea of how to test a medium, so I didn’t come off as a complete dipshit at my new job. It wasn’t so much that I thought the internet could tell me how to do it, but I hoped it might at least shake loose some ideas. By the time Jacob finally rolled in, though, I was elbow deep in videos of people saying words until they didn’t sound like words anymore, and no closer to formulating a plan for the FPMP.

Jacob paused in the doorway, massaged the back of his neck, and said, “I keep meaning to install that app that cuts down the blue light.”

I glanced at the clock. It was well past eleven, and my goal was to go “no screens” by nine. Whoops. “You’ve been putting in awfully long days.”

He shook his head. “Hopefully it’s nothing.”

Vague. But since I was better off not being privy to his IA business—and since we both needed to get our asses to bed if we had any chance of functioning the next day—I didn’t ask.

If there was some kind of award for falling asleep, Jacob would take the first place trophy. No big surprise—he’s always an overachiever. But as his breathing deepened and became more of a snore, I lay awake, fingers interlaced across my sternum, staring at the ceiling and wondering how to solve the testing problem. It wasn’t as if I knew anything about statistics, and there was no accuracy in the tests I’d taken at Camp Hell. And yet, a little part of my brain insisted that if I hadn’t lied like a rug for two solid years, maybe those scores would’ve been somewhat accurate after all.

Or would they?

You could import subjects to test the other types of psychic talents, but since ghosts were more difficult to procure, our little team of mediums got to take more field trips than anyone else at Heliotrope Station. I even had a standing joke about it with Stefan. He’d say, “Bring me back some onion rings.” Or nail polish, or fuzzy handcuffs, or weed, and I’d act like I totally would by asking what color, what size, how many dime bags, or some other dumb detail. Then he’d say, “Surprise me,” and, of course, neither of us would mention it again. Because it wasn’t as if my keepers ever let me off-leash to go shopping—and even if they did, I had zero money to spend—but it was better than making him jealous that I got to leave the compound while he was stuck staring at the same four walls.

It was a balmy spring day, and Miss Maxwell walked us through the scene of a major accident on a rural road just outside city limits. No repeaters had been left behind, no sentient ghosts either. But given the shrine that was collecting alongside the ancient blacktop, with flowers and balloons, photos and stuffed animals, there was nothing else the intersection could possibly be. I was trailing along behind, dragging my feet while Faun Windsong prattled on about auras and energies, when I noticed a crumb of broken safety glass lodged in the sole of my Chucks. 

“They were going too fast,” I said aloud. 

I didn’t think anyone was paying attention to me, but Miss Maxwell spun around and said, “What was that, Vic?”

I shrugged and looked away. “They were going way too fast.”

Richie gave his stupid heh-heh, while Dead Darla tuned us all out. This was after she realized Stephan and I were an item, so her tuning me out was nothing new—but in this case, she was busy focusing on the shrine. She had her hands on one of the photos, eyes closed, trying desperately to get a read on the victim. Unfortunately, in that case, there was no victim to find. Judging by the look on Miss Maxwell’s face, though, my perfectly logical observation would land on my permanent record. After all the trouble I went through to try and keep my abilities on the down-low, too.

Beside me, Jacob gave a sharp snore, flung an arm across my neck, and sighed in his sleep. I echoed that sigh, because false positives would indeed have to be ruled out.

I gazed up at the tin ceiling. Seeing ghosts was one thing, but discovering potential mediums had me entirely out of my depth.