Free PsyCop 6: GhosTV by Jordan Castillo Price

in his rectum.”
    “Haven’t you heard? I’m a faggot. I get off on that kind of thing.”
    “I can dig it—when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” I stared at a spot on the wall.
    “You know your plane’s boarding right now,” he said, “right?” I’ve never ground my molars, but I was tempted to start. I planted my elbows on my knees and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. Ahh. “What is it you want, anyway?”
    “Just making sure you’ve got a good overview of the situation. That right now, you’re stuck here in the bowels of Terminal 2—while who-knows-what is happening to your friend out in California.” I stopped pressing on my eyes and glanced sideways at Dreyfuss.
    When the sparklies dissipated, there he was, looking at me. Dead serious now. I said, “What do you know about Lisa?”
    “Not much. The western edge of my territory is the Nebraska border, remember? But Lisa was a Chicago girl…if only for a couple of weeks.”
    “Look up your FPMP buddies in the company’s California directory.
    I’m sure they’ll be happy to score some points by filling you in.”
    “They’ve got their hands full with the universities out there trying to ban telepaths from qualifying for scholarships. What do they care about a single precog who isn’t even a California resident?” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Especially if none of her paperwork happens to mention the fact that she’s practically omniscient?” On one hand, I suspected he was just trying to scare me by acknowledging how powerful Lisa’s little si-no actually was. On the other, it was working. “So why’re you here?”
    He set the empty water bottle on the seat between us, then propped his elbows on his knees, mirroring me, and laced his fingers together.
    His nails looked just as chewed as they had in February. “When someone goes missing, the chance of finding them grows exponentially more improbable each and every day that passes. Lisa’s three days gone. Her roommate’s been AWOL for a week.”
    The thing with missing adults is that unless there’s some obvious clue, like a bloody candlestick in the conservatory, law enforcement needs to go with the theory that they’ve up and left on their own accord. Cold feet before the wedding, a secret rendezvous with an online fling, the sudden urge to see the Grand Canyon. People do all kinds of crazy shit. Some adults are considered lower risk for ditching their lives than others. People with children. People with steady jobs.
    People in loving relationships.
    I had no idea what the roommate’s deal was, but Lisa was single and childless, and her job status was vague.
    Even worse, she’d been struggling hard with the meaning of life. That might sound existential, but for a Psych, it ranks in importance with all the other big pieces of the identity puzzle: job, friends, home, kids, and whatever else keeps people from jumping off bridges.
    Here’s where most people whose loved ones are gone say, “But I know them. They wouldn’t have left without telling anyone. It’s just not like them.”
    We cops hear it all the time. And after the first few missing people are found on the wrong end of a drinking binge, you can’t help but feel skeptical about how well anyone really knows anyone else.
    The thing was, I did know Lisa. And I knew that she was probably the most grounded person I’d ever met, and she was a cop. A good one. She had enough backbone to tell people to leave her alone if she needed space to think, something I’d experienced personally, so there was no reason for her to slip off in the middle of the night.
    Unless she got sucked into something trying to bail her roommate out of trouble.
    And what about her email account?
    It might not be a bloody candlestick, but it was reason enough for me to be worried.
    “I was hoping you might work with me on this,” Dreyfuss said, “but you’ve always had a chip on your shoulder when it comes to the