Chapter Six
ALL THE WAY back to my office, Evelyn waxed eloquent about the wonders of technology.
And all the way there, I wondered how I could possibly shake her.
Maybe Carl would do the dirty work for me.
He was even sterner than I was, and he had a military background.
He could neutralize Evelyn. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. But if it did, he’d be the guy.
Pretty sure that if I locked eyes with him and then flicked my gaze to the intruder, Carl would know exactly what I was trying to convey.
Now, whether he’d deign to act on that intel remained to be seen.
Still. I had to try. As Evelyn talked about how much more the app could do if only the interface were more advanced, I pushed open the office door, expecting to beseech my partner with my eyes…
only to have them land squarely on Jacob.
Not quite the partner I’d anticipated.
And to add to the confusion, Carl wasn’t there. But Laura Kim was.
“Well, I see you’ve already met Dr. Hall,” she said pleasantly. “Not every day National sends one of their top researchers to the Midwest.”
Okay, so Laura was there to warn me. Made sense. She’d watched helplessly back when National’s foot soldiers stormed through Con Dreyfuss’ office like a pack of barbarian raiders.
But why was Jacob here?
He met my eyes as if I might read something in his gaze.
Being on the receiving end of a loaded look was a lot harder than I’d anticipated.
Laura said, “Agent Hines had some personal business to attend to, but since Agent Marks is a veteran PsyCop NP, I thought pairing him with you would be the most seamless way to keep the Boswell case progressing.”
The words all made sense. Yes, Jacob had been a Stiff.
And yes, he was perfectly capable of packing my exorcism kit and keeping an eye on me while I was busy hunting for ghosts.
But yesterday, Laura hadn’t been all that gung-ho to track down Boswell.
And I’d been the one to talk her out of salting the half-seen repeater in case we might need it.
I wasn’t born yesterday. Obviously, there was no “personal business” involved, and Carl was likely enjoying some long-overdue time on a Caribbean beach. What did Jacob bring to the table that had Laura pull him from his duties for an assignment as a glorified babysitter?
Unless it wasn’t his expertise at play, but his performance gaps…and he was up for a big, fat demotion. As if his ego wasn’t wounded enough.
Maybe those “satisfactory” ratings on his evaluation had been something to worry about after all.
“Logistics has located Boswell,” Laura informed me. “Security cameras confirm his location.”
All eyes turned to me. It was my case, after all, but I was utterly clueless as to what they expected me to say. And then Jacob gave me the subtlest of nods.
“Okay.” That sounded natural. “Jacob and I will go check it out.”
Evelyn perked up. “Oh, can I ride along? This would be the perfect time to see what sort of thing you deal with in the field.”
“Sure,” I said, hoping the pause that preceded the word wasn’t too noticeable. “Let’s head out.”
The hit our guys got on Boswell’s license plate when his van pulled into a nearby Jewel-Osco happened not ten minutes ago. It was close, but we’d have to hustle.
Jacob is what you might call an assertive driver. He had us there in no time flat. And the fact that I was busy clutching the arm rests and stomping on the imaginary passenger brake provided a nice smokescreen for whatever other anxiety might have been radiating off me.
We found Boswell’s van in an empty lot near a small warehouse. The vehicle’s windows were covered with black garbage bags and a plastic gallon jug sat beside the front passenger tire…clearly filled with water that had taken a trip through someone’s kidneys and come out the other side yellow.
A bunch of puzzle pieces slid into place.
Boswell’s unwillingness to take my call.
The fake mailing address. And the clincher—the fact that he was saving his own urine instead of just letting it splash down wherever it happened to land.
Boswell was exactly the sort of guy I would’ve rubbed elbows with back in my institutionalized days.
Not at Camp Hell, but at Cook County Mental Health.
“Say, Jacob, that apartment review Boswell posted…have you got it handy?”
He sent something to my phone, and I pulled it up and read.
I don’t know who these other people are who say this building is good but they must all ride bikes because there’s nowhere to park and their bikes are everywhere and they are not letting me park which is crazy because I have a parking spot and this guy told me that I could park here but then that guy was like no you can’t and he was yelling at me about it so anyways this is a shitty place.
Plus there’s that dead lady always in the bedroom in this day and age you should have to disclose something like that.
What good were the Ganzfeld reports if landlords can get away with renting an apartment that’s clearly haunted and not have to mention it.
At the very least there should be a discount on the rent I’m thinking at least a hundred bucks a month.
I’d deliberately avoided reading it so I could form my own opinion of the scene. Now, I could see why Laura would want me to check it out—the lady in the bedroom was especially creepy nestled in there among all the mundane ravings.
Plus, the bedroom had been exactly where my flickering shadow was headed. Which either meant there really was a ghost after all…or Boswell had glimpsed a similar reflection bouncing through the dining room window.
Boswell would probably be better off with a visit from a social worker.
But he was getting me. We got out of the car and walked toward the van.
Jacob slowed as we approached, his gaze sweeping over the cracked windshield and mismatched hubcaps.
Evelyn fell in behind us, silent but tense.
She hadn’t even laid eyes on Boswell yet, but I could tell she was already tuning into whatever vibe he was putting out.
Fine by me—if she was picking up on his mental static, maybe she wasn’t picking up on mine.
I stepped up to the driver side door and rapped gently on the window, so as not to send the guy flying out of his skin. “Noah Boswell? It’s Victor Bayne—the one leaving all the phone messages. I just need a few minutes of your time.”
I paused. No response…though the van’s suspension creaked as someone inside repositioned themselves.
“It’s in regard to this review you left on .”
Something clinked. But no one emerged.
Building rapport is challenging enough with a normal person.
But if this guy wasn’t playing with a full deck, hard to say how, exactly, I should go about it.
When Big Brother decided to make contact, some psychics received an amicable visit from a friendly FPMP empath, while others—like me—were treated with kid gloves and observed from afar, like gorillas in the wild.
Now I was beginning to think I should’ve brought along a few bananas.
If I led with the ghost, would that draw him in, or drive him even further underground? It could go either way. I glanced down at the review again, and decided to come at it from a different angle.
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Boswell. Maybe you can recoup some of your security deposit, maybe not. But I won’t know until you answer a few simple questions.”
The window I was shouting at powered down an inch, and a shifty pair of eyes peered out.
“Who did you say you were with?”
While it might run the risk of sending the guy screaming in the opposite direction, I opted for the truth.
Not only was it easier than coming up with a plausible lie on the spot (since I knew diddly squat about real estate contract litigation).
But Boswell might already be aware of the FPMP—which really was the only federal organization that would dig deeper into a haunting.
I held up my I.D. and gave the eyeballs a chance to read it.
When he did…the window powered down. Not all the way. But enough for me to get a good look at him.
“I thought the FPMP was just a myth,” Boswell admitted.
“Well…up till a couple of years ago, so did I.”
Noah Boswell was a big, stocky doofus of a Caucasian guy in his mid-forties. For someone living out of a van, he didn’t look half bad. His hair was combed, his shave was recent, and his clothes were reasonably clean.
If I didn’t know better, I’d take him for a normal person….
If his van weren’t stacked floor to ceiling with 2-liter cola bottles. And all of ’em full of…pee? Yeah. The contents weren’t brown, but yellow. And there had to be at least a hundred bottles. Maybe more.
That must be hell on the van’s mileage.
I tried my best not to stare at the bottles so as not to destroy the tentative rapport.
“So, how much of a refund are we talking?” Boswell asked me. “Because the fire in the bathtub was most definitely not my fault.”
Uh-huh. “Hard to say. The most critical piece of evidence in your favor is obviously gonna be the psychic aspect.”
“Well, right. Sure. I get it. The bathtub, though—that’s where they really dinged me. That, and my moving out partway through the second month. But I wouldn’t have had to cook dinner in the bathtub if the oven wasn’t full of asbestos.”
I’m no expert on large appliances, but the stove had looked like a normal oven to me. And all those bottles in the van were not exactly helping the guy’s credibility.
“I’ll see what I can do about the tub charge,” I lied. “But what can you tell me about—”
“And the windowsills?” he interrupted. “What about those?”
Dare I ask? “What about them?”
“I was reassured that the windows formed an airtight barrier—the amount of outgassing that comes off the city buses is ridiculous. They claim they’re electric powered, but they don’t fool me—they’re obviously radioactive.
Ten, twenty years from now there’s gonna be a huge cancer outbreak, and it’ll follow all the bus routes to a T.
So the windows were decent enough—but where the windowsills met the wall, you could feel the breeze coming through, plain as day.
It’s not my fault the rubber roof sealant only came in black. ”
Maybe the place had struck me as a dump…but after five minutes talking with Boswell, I was ready to nominate the landlord for canonization.
“I’ll see what I can do. Now, back to the nonphysical disturbance. What can you tell me about that?”
Boswell’s car door swung open, and Jacob stepped back a pace—not startled, just reflexively creating distance.
Evelyn shifted her weight beside him. She didn’t say a word, but her lips were pressed together tight, and she was blinking too often.
I managed a hasty sidestep just as the soda bottles came rolling out, all of them some obscure cut-rate cola brand called Blast. Empty, thankfully, judging by the way they bounced and the hollow plastic thunks they made as they hit the asphalt.
Though that didn’t make them any less weird. There were just so many.
Boswell slammed the door, grabbed the runaway bottles, and pitched them back through his open window.
I tried not to stare, really, I did. But there was nowhere else to look.
“You can only find this pop in certain stores.” Boswell snagged an empty bottle doing its best to roll away. “I need to be strategic about where I turn in the empties for deposit. Otherwise the soda algorithm goes wonky, and next thing you know, no more Blast.”
I didn’t sound too sarcastic when I said, “You learn something new every day.”
Jacob didn’t react beyond a single raised brow. Evelyn glanced away quickly, like she couldn’t quite stop herself from feeling everything Boswell felt, and needed a second to recalibrate.
Boswell straightened. He was big—as tall as me, as broad as Jacob, and all of it pure flab. “And obviously, I can’t just dump my urine out anywhere. All those vans driving around supposedly taking photos for street maps have trackers installed that big pharma doesn’t want you to know about.”
Pee trackers? I didn’t ask.
“Running water is best. I’m planning a trip down to the North Avenue bridge just as soon as I drop off a few empties.”
I’d always thought it never hurt to foster a healthy sense of paranoia. After all, my paycheck is signed by a secret government agency lurking in the shadows.
But talking to Boswell in person—now that I’d witnessed firsthand his elaborate cola processing system—I’d have to conclude that the weird flicker I’d seen was just wishful thinking, a diversion to spice up my mundane routine. And his apartment was just a normal apartment.
“Thanks for your time,” I told him, hoping he wouldn’t now deluge my voicemail with a dozen daily rants or Bigfoot sightings. “If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch.”
“But I haven’t even told you about the dead woman in the bedroom,” he said. “Though I guess there’s not a lot to tell. Just the sense of her being there.”
“I’ll make note of that on my report,” I said.
I was turning around to head back to the car when he added, “And this weird shadow she cast running into the closet.”