Zigler stared at me from the desk opposite mine. I'd thought of it as Maurice's desk, back when it'd been cluttered with CDs in mismatched cases, half-empty coffee cups, and weird trinkets his kids made him in art class. But now the desk was so clean and sterile that it was just a desk. I tried to think of it as Zig's desk, but I didn't want to go there. I figured there was no sense in straining myself over it, especially with missing persons on the line.
"What's your plan?" Zig asked. He said it in a monotone.
Either he was mad at me for ruining his dreams of glory as a glamorous and celebrated PsyCop by being queer, or he couldn't accept me as a senior partner because I was younger, quieter, skinnier, and ... let's face it: queer.
I thumbed through the files. Miranda Lopez, first to disappear. Lived with her elderly mother and her two teenaged kids. The mother might have seen something that would tip us off. Or a neighbor could've noticed something unusual. Or one of the kids might have an idea where she'd gone.
"Let's walk through the homes. If any of them are dead, they might turn up there."
Zig nodded.
"If you could just act like you've got some more questions for them, I can see if there are any spirits around."
Zig stood up and buttoned his suit coat. "Let's go."
I headed for my car, since I wanted something familiar around me while I dealt with the neckless plug of a new partner who was glaring at me like I'd eaten his goldfish in a game show stunt. Zigler filled the passenger seat completely.
I had the arm rest down between us, and we were both careful not to brush elbows on it.
Miranda lived in the Second Precinct, not usually my turf, but the alderman had called the commissioner in a panic, and the commissioner grouped all the recent missing persons together and called in the PsyCops in hopes of getting the alderman's nephew back. Money. Power. I should've been offended that you had to be "somebody" to get shuffled to the top of the deck, but I couldn't help but wonder ... what if those people were still alive somewhere? I could overlook a little political favoritism if it saved lives, right? Or maybe I just didn't have a backbone.
Or maybe I'd been going stir-crazy and just wanted to get back to work. Even if my new partner was a bulldog with a Ditka mustache.
I took Lincoln to Ashland, then headed south toward the Second. The ghostly newspaper vendor who always stands in the bus shelter on the corner of Ashland selling invisible papers was more or less solid, but the rape-homicide who usually jumped around waving her fists was nowhere to be seen. Maybe her killer had finally gotten caught doing someone else, and she decided she'd had enough of her afterlife aerobics.
As I made my way deeper into the Second, the buildings crowded closer together, the traffic slowed, and multiple thudding bass lines warred for dominance from cars and garden apartments. We weren't far from Crash's shop, which reminded me that I wanted to ask him if he'd made any progress on finding me a GhosTV. Supposedly he had a lot of savvy internet friends who'd sit up and beg for the chance to hook up with a real medium. And I'd be tickled to give them a reading in exchange for a device that could clean out spirits like a stiff wind blowing away cobwebs.
But I wasn't planning on stopping at Sticks and Stones with Zig in tow. I'd never hear the end of it. From either of them.
The Lopez family lived on the third floor of a leaning walk-up with stairs that creaked something fierce as we went up—
louder with Zig's weight on them than mine. I knocked—not the cop knock that says, "Let me in right now, you piece of shit," but the polite human being knock that most cops reserve for victims' families. That's my typical knock anyway, since I've always hated calling attention to myself. I wondered briefly if my knock wasn't manly enough for Zig, but then I thought, fuck it. I was already pretending to be macho by doing the driving. I didn't need to batter down the door.
The door opened just a few inches, exposing a security chain so lousy that even I could break it. A brown eye set in brown folds of skin peered out at me. "Si?"
I flashed my badge. "I'm Detective Bayne, this is Detective Zigler. Habla usted ingles?"
"Un momento," she said, shutting the door. I heard her scuttle deeper into the apartment, calling, "Carlos? Carlos!"
I hadn't thought about the possibility that Miranda's family spoke Spanish, despite the fact that she lived in a neighborhood more Hispanic than not. I wasn't used to talking with living witnesses anymore; Maurice had always done that. I wondered if I did find Miranda's spirit floating around, would I need a translator?
"You speak Spanish?" Zig asked, sounding pleasantly surprised.
"Not much."
Zigler shifted gears immediately into neutral, staring over my shoulder at the door. It opened again, all the way this time, and a wiry kid of about eighteen glared out from the apartment. Shaved head, tattoos, and flashing dark eyes you could get lost in. If you were a girl, anyway, since my gaydar told me this kid was the last one I'd find trolling Boys' Town.
"You cops?" he asked.
"Detective Bayne," I repeated, showing him the badge I hadn't bothered to pocket. "Detective Zigler."
"You here about my mother? You find her?"
"Not yet," I said. I probably wasn't supposed to be so blunt, but hell. We didn't have all day. "I was hoping we could come in...."
"I already told them everything I know." Carlos crossed his arms like Jacob did when he wasn't planning on going anywhere. He wasn't bulky like Jacob, but he could still fill a doorway.
I really didn't want him to challenge me. Not in front of fucking Zigler. "If we could just go over things one more time..." and really, I knew the facts already. Who'd last seen Miranda, what she'd been wearing. The fact was, I just wanted to get into that apartment without announcing that I was ghost hunting.
"Don't you people ever read? You make all these notes, and then what? You throw them out when you leave?"
It wasn't any good to argue, especially when I had to admit that, aside from throwing our notes away, it pretty much was the way we operated. "It'll only take a few minutes...."
"Carlos," said Mrs. Lopez, dragging him out of the doorway. She motioned for us to come in while she lit into him in Spanish. I might not have been able to understand her word for word, but her body language and her tone were crystal clear:
Carlos, stop being a jerk
.
Zig and I crowded into the small kitchen. I swerved to avoid knocking over a table full of lit candles with my hip, or maybe setting myself on fire, though I suspected the polyester in my suit coat would melt rather than bursting into flames. But you never know with these mystery fabrics.
Zig got ready to take some notes while I stared at the makeshift shrine. Saints, crosses, a bunch of religious paraphernalia. And why not pray? Miranda was missing. But the candles triggered some other memory in me that wasn't entirely religious. I'd been to a few weddings, but aside from that, I wasn't a big church-goer. So why did the Saint Martin candle look so familiar?
Mrs. Lopez poured coffee while Zigler loomed over a sullen Carlos and told him to think back and recall everything he could about the day Miranda disappeared. That was good; Carlos would be distracted by a Q& A session with Zig, and it'd buy me some time.
Mrs. Lopez handed me a mug full of coffee pale with milk and I nodded gratefully. There was no spirit in the kitchen, but maybe Miranda had come back to her bedroom. I juggled the cup to my left hand while I attempted some made-up sign language: a person walking, and then me pointing to the doorway that let to the rest of the apartment.
"Si," she said, grabbing me by the forearm and towing me deeper into the house. She talked to me in Spanish as we went, and though a word here and there sounded familiar, I didn't attach any meaning to it. I suddenly felt like I was looking at yet another condo with Jacob, noticing the crappy light fixtures and the double hung windows sealed shut with at least twenty coats of landlord-white paint.
I felt vaguely guilty for phasing out of cop mode, though I suspected it didn't matter whether I was focused or not. If Miranda was lingering around, I'd see or hear her. I couldn't possibly miss her.
The sound of Carlos' angry voice drifted toward us from the kitchen, "Of course she wasn't going to the doctor's. We don't have health insurance like you do—and we don't got the money to run to the hospital for every little thing."
Mrs. Lopez met my eyes. Her expression seemed to be saying, "Look what I have to put up with." I nodded a little and looked inside one of the bedrooms. There were clothes everywhere, and CDs outside their cases just waiting to be stepped on. Bunk beds. Cool for kids Clayton's age, not so cool for kids as old as Carlos.
There weren't any ghosts. Top or bottom.
We moved through a living room crowded with brown and orange furniture from the seventies and way too many knick-knacks to a couple more bedrooms. Mrs. Lopez's room was the size of a closet, but the bedspread was so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. Miranda's room had one dresser too many crammed in there, but it was neat enough.
I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my pocket and slipped them on before I entered the bedroom. If I were a precog, maybe I'd get an idea from handling Miranda's hairbrush. But I wasn't precognitive. The tests had been pretty clear on that.
Didn't the city have another PsyCop at its disposal to figure out what'd happened to these people? Why send me—a medium—when they didn't even have bodies?
Miranda's dresser held a picture of her and two boys—one of them Carlos about five years younger, before he'd had to act like a tough guy. They were all smiling. A rosary hung from the corner of the mirror, and something else that looked like a religious press pass, only a flaming, bleeding heart with a crown of thorns was in the spot where the laminated pass would usually hang. A silver charm of a woman's head on a white ribbon completed the grouping of weird, iconic religious paraphernalia.
She also had curling irons in three sizes. I didn't know they made such a wide variety.
"Senior Bayne," said Mrs. Lopez, touching me gently on the arm. I turned, and she pressed a Polaroid picture into my hand, which dragged at my latex glove. Miranda—a different picture than the one on her file. Her hair was shorter, permed and bleached orange, and she had on gigantic hoop earrings and a huge smile that lit up the room. She was dressed in purple. It suited her.
Mrs. Lopez pressed my hand over my heart with the photo in my palm. She said something in Spanish. "I'll try my best," I told her, feeling completely useless.
Lisa could tell me if Miranda was still alive. She'd have to make an exception for something so important. Maybe. Fuck, I didn't know.
"Abuela," said Carlos, storming into the living room where Mrs. Lopez and I stood awkwardly outside his mother's empty bedroom. He glared at me and said something else in Spanish.
"Do you want to ask Mrs. Lopez anything?" Zig asked me.
"Carlos will translate."
I glanced over my shoulder, wishing someone would appear from the great beyond and tell me where Miranda really was. But, unlike the condo I'd looked at the night before, the Lopez's household wasn't haunted.
Mrs. Lopez and Carlos went back and forth in Spanish a few times, and then Carlos glared at me with his piercing, dark eyes. "You a priest?" he demanded.
"What?"
"My grandmother says you're a priest."
I felt my cheeks color, imagining Jacob ramming me over the kitchen counter. "No, I'm not a priest."
Mrs. Lopez seemed to understand that much English. She reached deep into one of the shelves among the statuettes and clutter and pulled out something so small that her thumb and forefinger hid it. She took my hand, the one holding Miranda's picture, and dropped a tiny silver charm, a little girl no more than a half inch long, on top of the photo. "Hallazgo Miranda, por favor."
I stuffed everything into my pocket, including my right glove. There was no ghost to tell me what to do, and Carlos'
glare threatened to burn a smoking hole into the center of my forehead. "Those are all the questions we have," I mumbled, turning sideways to slip past Carlos in the narrow room, to get back through the kitchen and out the door.
The cadence of Spanish words flying back and forth sounded behind me as I tried to make my escape. Carlos slipped by Zigler and crowded me against the sink as I deposited my coffee cup. "You a witch doctor?" he asked me.
I could see the whites of his eyes, and he looked more than a little freaked out.
"No," I lied, wondering how his grandmother had pegged me for a psychic, even if she lacked the right vocabulary, by simply looking at me. "I'm just a cop."
As I drove back to the Fifth after a series of fruitless interviews, my phone rang and vibrated in my pocket. Jacob.
"Hi," I said, knowing Zigler was listening from the passenger seat—how could he not? I wondered how gay I sounded.
"What's up?" Ugh. Overcompensating.
"How late are you working?"
We were, in fact, just finishing up. It was past seven and the sun had set an hour ago. "Dunno." Okay, where'd that come from? "Why?"
"There's a house in Rogers Park I want to look at, and a couple more condos. Want me to check them out myself?"
The person behind me honked as I sat a half second too long at a green light. I resisted giving them the finger. "I, um.... Do you care?"
"I could eliminate all the places that won't work out for completely mundane reasons. Then you can check whatever's left."
It sounded logical. And yet, I couldn't help but wonder if house-hunting was something I was supposed to do
with
Jacob, now that I'd committed to living together for real.
Maybe his ultra-logical tone of voice was masking some kind of unspoken disappointment in me.
Fuck.
I felt like I'd rather chat with a dead suicide bomber than look at another house just then. I'd been checking houses for ghosts all day. "Yeah," I said. "Sounds like a plan."