If you know anything about psychics, real ones, they don’t generally consign to any of the clichéd bag of tricks like those found at carnivals or in the rooms behind glowing neon signs. In fact, real psychic ability happens so naturally that most people take you for a liar simply because it looks and sounds so damn casual. That is until you throw out some jaw-dropping tea about their innermost secrets, then…well then they either back away slowly like you’re some kind of voodoo witch, or they go hard in and want to know everything you can tell them about their life.
I steer clear of those kinds of interactions these days. The only people who know the extent of what I can do are my bαbά and detective Rask. The former is a given, the latter…he just kinda happened.
After I’d gotten out of the hospital, you know after the whole brush with death via Jeremiah, the ketamine killer, I needed something to do. I was bothered by the fact that people like Jeremiah were just out there in the world, preying on people far less equipped to deal with them than me. So I gave detective hottie a call–not for a hook-up (I’d seen too much in our brief introduction to know better), but to see if he needed any help, I guess. I don’t know, it was a weird time, probably a little survivor guilt mixed with a strange new edge the ketamine had given me. Whatever drove me to it, I was wired to do some good in the world.
At first Rask was hesitant. He said he didn’t have anything someone like me could help with, which was straight nonsense because, hello, you’re a detective, right? I let it go, or rather I let him think I’d let it go, but I didn’t have to be psychic to know the curious Detective would be calling within a couple days. When he did, he made sure to tell me he didn’t want to be associated with the circus, and since it would all be sub rosa, anything I gave him would have to be something he could have legitimately found on his own. Yeah, duh–the last thing I wanted was my name or face associated with the psychic friends hotline.
He said he wanted to start small, test out how I could be useful and how he could make the information beneficial without raising flags, so he brought me a shirt.
“A shirt? What do you want me to do with this?”
“No. That’s not the way this is gonna work. I’m not giving you information. I wanna see you do what you do, and I will confirm or deny if you’re right.”
“Okay, but this better not be one of your weirdo sex-kink kinda shirts. I don’t want to stumble on any of the hidden Rask files here.”
“Just stop it with that. Do your thing. Tell me what you get”
We were standing in the alcove of my apartment. I was wearing my usual protective gear–gloves, long sleeves, jeans, boots. Nothing exposed but my face. I took the shirt and walked to my living room. Tossing it on the coffee table, I slipped off my left glove, then paused. “You’re not gonna throw me into the middle of the lake here, are you? I mean, this isn’t some heinous stuff that’s gonna haunt my nightmares, is it?”
He didn’t respond, just eyeballed me with those cop eyes and tilted his head to the shirt.
“Shit.” I breathed, then picked up the shirt. There was chaos for a moment, a flurry of hands and faces, dogs and trees, all the places the shirt had been, rewinding like a movie reel as I watched it go. Then, with an abrupt shift, the reel stopped. I was looking in a mirror wearing the shirt, except it wasn’t me. It was a girl, brown hair, somewhere in her mid to late teens. She looked good in the shirt–we both thought so. The image shifted again and faded into blurs and blotches.
I turned to Rask and shrugged, “Okay, so a girl about 15 to 18 wore this shirt last. She had brown hair, tanned skin, maybe Latino. Pretty. She had a mirror in her room and a lot of light colors, or maybe just a lot of light coming from the windows. There was a chair…mmm, like one of those giant beanbag chairs in the corner, and pictures hanging from a string of those little twinkle lights across another wall.
“Yeah, yeah, okay. Now this one.” The piece of cloth he held in his hand was no more than a strip. It had been darkened with dirt or death…a touch would tell me which. I hesitated and just looked at him.
“You said you wanted to help.”
I grabbed the cloth and was suddenly on the ground being smothered in the dirt. I clawed at the leaves and muck that surrounded me. A weight lay across my back, panic squeezed at my heart, my terrified brain suddenly kicked in separating present from past, and I dropped the cloth. I opened my eyes to find Rask kneeling over me. I lay on the floor of my living room apparently having fallen as I thrashed about in the memory.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I-I didn’t know if I should touch you or not. Does it always happen like that?”
I sat up, confused and a little pissed off. “How the fuck should I know? I don’t generally make it a habit of going around touching things from fucking murder scenes.”
Rask sat down on the floor across from me, and stared for a beat. “You good?”
I didn’t answer.
“What’d you see?”
“I didn’t see shit. I had my face down in the fucking dirt. Something was pinning me down. It was dark and I…She was terrified.”
Rask stood up with the cloth in his hand. “I don’t know how productive this is gonna be if all it does is put you through hell without giving you any information.” He was being mister matter-of-fact, not really insulting me just stating plainly that my whole psychic thing wasn’t all he had expected.
Now, I was mad. “Give me the goddammed cloth.” I said, getting to my feet. “But hold onto my shoulder or something. I need some kind of grounding to the present, I think.”
He looked at me like I was a cross between comedy and contagion, “Are you sure? Won’t that muddy the waters or something?”
“Just don’t touch my skin.” I winked, still pissed, but also a little psyched.
He went to put his hand on my shoulder, then paused, “You don’t have permission to run around in my brain. Got it?” He raised a brow and I couldn’t help but smile.
“Like I’d want to. Come on, let’s do this.” I took a couple steadying breaths and put my hand out for the cloth.
My Yiαyiά had taught me long ago that depending on circumstances, visions could be mild third-person observer types, stronger first-person shooter types (my explanation not hers), or severe all-in 100% exposure types. Though I never encountered the third type while she was alive, she’d prepared me. The trick was to put up a wall blocking yourself from the intensity of the vision, but in order to do that you needed to remain anchored in the here and now.
Rask was my anchor. I focused on the weight of his hand as the vision yanked me down into the darkness. “Okay, I’m here.” I was looking down on the scene now. I recognized the girl though I was looking at her back. There was a large man straddling her, shoving her face down into the dirt. The man’s energy was so violent, and the girl’s so full of fear, I had to struggle against being pulled into their vortex. “There’s a man, he’s a big guy, sitting on top of her. Her face is down in the dirt, but it’s the same girl from the shirt–Emily, or Emmy, her name is Emmy. She knew this man. A friend…Tony. She didn’t mean to…he said it was her fault…He’s shoving dirt in her mouth…he’s mad, he’s gonna–”
Rask yanked the cloth out of my hand and I snapped back to my living room. The room spun when I tried to open my eyes and my head throbbed so bad I thought it would explode. I leaned over and barfed all over my favorite rug.
Rask took a step back and waited for me to pull my shit together. I put my hands on my knees, hunched over like I’d just finished the 100 yard dash, and tried to shake off the nightmare that had been that poor girl’s last moments of life. “Her name was Emmy Cordova.” I said, spitting out a little leftover yuck. “The man was Tony Hurtado. He raped her, smothered her, then bashed her head in with a rock. Griffith Park hills. That’s her skirt,” I said pointing to the object, “He ripped it off of her when he raped her. Said she was teasing him by wearing it…mother fucker.”
Rask turned and walked to the armchair in my living room. He sat down on the edge of it and blew out a long sigh.
I tried to stand but I still felt sick so I took a seat on the floor next to my vomit. “What?” I said, with absolutely no desire to try to decipher his breathing sounds.
“I’m just trying to figure out if this is gonna be worth putting you through.” Neither of us spoke for a minute. “It’s a closed case. Emmalina Cordova was a fifteen year old girl, who was kidnapped, and yes, raped and killed by a family friend, 25 year old Athonio Hurtado. The case came to HSS because the MRD thought it could be a problem with all the immigration issues in LA right now. Hurtado was here on an expired student visa from Caracas, Venezuela. The shirt was what the dogs used to locate her, and the other was her skirt, like you said.”
“Great. So I passed the test?”
Rask didn’t speak, just stared silently as I’d come to find was his baseline MO.
“Is it worth it to put me through this?” I repeated and laughed. “Who the fuck cares what it does to me?” The anger felt good because it pushed the sickness of the vision further away.
He shook his head and stood up. “Well, I guess we’ll see how you do with an active case.”
I didn’t hear from Rask again for three weeks. I was kinda losing my mind and was thinking about calling him when my phone finally rang.
“You ready.” Was all he said.
“Hi Rask, been a minute. How are you?”
“I was finishing up some open shut cases. Sorry I didn’t have something heinous–was that your word?–to call you about sooner. Do you want me to put the word out to the animals that they need to pick up on the killing because my psychic is bored?”
His comment both stung and flattered…my psychic, pshhh–so detective Rask could be cheeky, good to know. “Ha-ha-ha, that’s pretty twisted, Rask.”
“I’m twisted? You’re the one waiting by the phone.” I could hear the smile in his voice, he was definitely in a mood.
“Get over yourself, buddy, I just want to do what I can.”
“Yeah, well if I’m being honest, I didn’t want to call you. You’re a calculator.”
“Cryptic. Continue.”
“You know, I’m a little worried you’re gonna make my job too easy and I’ll forget how to do actual police work.”
“Ahhhh. Hmm, that’s valid. Well, I can’t promise I’ll make it easy at all, you still have to catch the animals no matter what I tell you.”
There was a knock at my door and I damn near jumped out of my skin. “Shit, hang on, someone’s at my door.” I walked to the door, opened it, and found Rask’s smiling face on the other side.
“What kind of psychic are you?” He said, face screwed up into utter disgust.
“Well, you clearly have no education in the world of the paranormal, detective.”
“True.” He said walking passed me into my apartment. “Gross, you kept that rug.”
“I cleaned it! It’s my favorite rug!”
“Wow, and you let your hands have a little freedom when no one’s around, interesting.” He said, referring to my ungloved hands.
“Well, yeah, everything here is mine and safe to touch.”
“That must suck.” He turned and pinned me with his eyes. “How does that work in your life? Do you ever get to be intimate with people?”
I swallowed. He’d hit a spot not too many people got close enough to hit. I cleared my throat, “Don’t probe me, Rask. What’d you got?”
“Yeah, not too fun when people expose all those hidden little places… I can relate. Anyway, I got this.” He held up a large clear bag with a label plastered to the front. “It’s supposed to be sealed at the scene, run through the lab, then resealed and placed back in an evidence locker. Every hand-off is written on this label, so my bringing it here is a severe breach in that protocol and could cause a mistrial if and when this case goes to court.”
“Got it. We are taking some pretty big risks here.”
“Enormous. But it’s a bad one and we got nothing, so…”
“So an excellent first case.” Considering my last experience and how very real this suddenly felt, what with the evidence bag and all, I felt a little anxious. “Maybe I should grab a sheet or something. I don’t want to have to throw this rug out, it really is my favorite.” I went to grab a sheet out of my linen closet and spread it out on the floor.
“Look, I’ve seen what you can do, so if you want a heads-up on this one, I can walk you through it a little so you know what to expect.”
“No. I think it’s better if we don’t mess with my perception at all.” I didn’t know if it would matter, but I didn’t want to be the reason anything got screwed up, and I was pretty sure detectives walked into nightmare situations all the time without a heads-up, so if they could do it… “But it’s bad you said?”
He nodded his head and his eyes bored into mine.
I replied with my own nod of acceptance, so he turned to place the evidence bag on my coffee table and pulled out a high-heeled shoe. It was a zebra print stiletto, marred by dried blood that ran along the heel.
I looked up at Rask and he raised his eyebrows as if to say, you ready? I breathed a couple steadying breaths, closed my eyes, and held out my hand. I felt the weight of Rask’s hand on my shoulder before he placed the shoe in my palm, sending me tumbling into blackness.
The vision was disorienting at first, black, with chaotic flashes and thrashing. The woman of the siletto was being strangled, almost repeatedly, as if it were on a loop. “Hang on, I’m having a hard time getting the memory to share more of itself. How old is this murder?”
“That’s from one of the first victims. It’s over a year ago.”
“Hmmm, it seems the memory is fading or something. I can only catch a fragment of it. Just a woman being strangled, over and over…hang on, let me try…” I moved the object around in my hands, letting my fingers touch every part of the fabric. I grasped the heel where the blood was and felt a jolt. “This is his blood. She was trying to fight him off, but she only had the shoe. The heel stabbed him several times.”
“We figured that, but there’s no DNA in the system matching it so it doesn’t really help us right now. We’d need to catch him to compare.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at him. The frustration in his eyes matched my own. Dammit! “The signal’s weak. I guess there’s an expiration day on these things…I’m sorry.”
“Too good to be true, I guess. Back to police work.” He took the shoe out of my hand and dropped it back in the bag.
I felt like an asshole, worse than that, I felt like a fraud. What the hell was wrong with my sight? Did object-memory really have an expiration date? And why had this never come up before? Why hadn’t Yiαyiά taught me anything valuable like how to catch a murderer instead how to help rich people catch their cheating partners? Had she known about the fickleness of old memories? Did she have a technique she hadn’t shown me? Or did she teach me and I just blew it off? I was confused and preoccupied, mentally berating myself, until Rask’s voice grabbed my attention.
“Hello, Earth to Rini, you there?”
“Sorry. I’ve never done this kind of thing before. Whenever I’ve used my sight it’s always been to tell people something about themselves, you know, like a current issue. I guess I’ve never really done the whole deep dive into the past thing. Maybe it’s like a muscle, I need to work at it, to like strengthen my ability to pick up older signals…? Do you have anything more recent?”
“Not with me. Look, don’t sweat it. We gave it a go.”
“Rask, Don’t patronize me. You know I can fucking do this. Let me talk to my ba-, my dad. Let me do some research. I’m gonna figure this out.”
He nodded and gave me one of those condescending pitying smiles, like I was some damaged toy he wouldn’t get to play with anymore, then he turned and walked to the door.
“I’ll call you. Don’t take that shoe back yet.”
“Sure. See ya.”
ERRRG, I wanted to punch him in the face, but mostly I wanted to unlock my stupid brain. Think Rini! I didn’t have time for practice or honing my skill, I needed an edge, a push…
I needed some ketamine.
The thought popped into my brain as though it were a stalker hanging out in the shadows waiting for its moment to pounce.
Unfortunately, I had to kill my last ket dealer so finding someone legit without a script and a bunch of questions on short notice wasn’t going to be easy. Then again, I was a pretty clever cookie and had managed to make a lot of resourceful friends thanks to my concierge service.
I made some calls and had a new hook-up within a half hour. I tagged Rask and told him to meet me back at my place around 5pm with that damned shoe. All I had to do was pick up the Ketamine. Jeremiah’s face floated into my mind. Needless to say, I would not be going back to anyone’s apartment nor would I bypass the quick background check with a little skin-to-skin handshake.
To my enormous relief, my new hook-up was an adorable blonde named Cassidy. She was a young button-nosed assistant to a psychiatrist in Brentwood. She said she could get me as much ket as I needed…as long as it was for legitimate purposes. I reassured her emphatically and couldn’t help thinking how this little detour in my life wouldn’t be happening had I met her instead of Jeremiah.
I exchanged money for product, told her I’d probably be in touch again, and with a bit of a lift in my step, if I’m being honest, headed home.
My new friend Cassidy had given me the lowdown on how much ketamine would do what to a 120 pound person. Though she was under the impression I was picking the product up for a client with PTSD, her recommendations would work for what I hoped to accomplish with the shoe.
Ten minutes before Rask was supposed to arrive, I mixed equal parts saline with the ket, as instructed, drew it into the syringe, and self-administered the dose into a vein. The rush was instant and amazing. I felt my body crumple into my couch and lay there as my mind floated away.
I had no clue when the knocking started, but at some point the sound beckoned me and I rose to answer its call. Though my perceptions seemed pretty intact, the floor gave the impression of clouds so I hopped gently across them to the door.
“Hey detective Rask. Come on in.” I sang, then hearing myself, cleared my throat in an attempt to not sound high.
“What’s with you?”
Shit. “Nothing. I’m great.”
“Are you high?”
“What?! No way. It’s just a little psychic tea. Trust me. It lets the chi flow.” I silently praised my quick wit as I floated back to the living room. “Okay, let’s do this.” I smiled up at him, “Shoe, please.”
He eyeballed menacingly.
“Whaaat? I’m good. Come on, let’s try this.” We stood on the sheet that still lay over my rug. I closed my eyes and put my empty naked palm out to him. “Don’t forget to ground me first.” I peeked one eye open at him.
“That tea better not contain any DMT.” He said peripherally as he fumbled around with the plastic bag.
“Or else what? You’re not gonna use my psychic abilities to catch bad guys. Pshhh.” I laughed, he didn’t, and peeked an eye open again. I could see I was beginning to piss him off so I straightened up a bit. “I’m sorry. That was unprofessional of me. I apologize. But I’m trying something here Rask, and I need you to support this. I don’t have time to learn how to read older signals naturally. The tea is just to relax me so I can pull out as much as I can from the shoe.”
He squinted at me, but lifted his head as if to say go on, so I closed my eyes and put out my hand again.
Like before, I felt Rask’s heavy hand on my shoulder, and a beat later the shoe pressed into my palm. Again, I was sucked down into the darkness of the memory. This time, however, the scene was different. I was looking at a frozen frame of a woman being strangled. I turned around in the photo-like memory and saw that I was standing in an underground parking lot of a rundown old building. At my feet was a ratty old mattress shoved into an alcove. The woman lay on it, remnants of her clothes clung to her body though most had been torn away. A man straddled her, much the same as poor Emmy.
Everything was so dark it was hard to make out the details. Frustrated, the vision-me said, A little light would be nice, and just like that the scene lightened. I could see the man’s face vividly now, the woman’s too. I remembered from my time with Jeremiah that all I needed to do was think about what I wanted and the memory would comply, so I thought rewind, and the scene reeled backwards like magic. I watched as the man raped the woman in reverse, pulled his punches away, zipped her clothes back onto her body, stood up, then she popped back up, he wrestled her backwards out of the parking lot, her body flopped onto his shoulder, he walked backwards up some stairs and down a corridor, then through a door that flung in reverse, backed out of the building and moved to a car. Stop, I commanded the vision.
The scene froze again. I was looking at the back of the car. “Buick. Older, beat-up a little. I think it says LaCrosse. Dark blue, maybe black. He’s a large black man, not really tall, just big. He has a mustache, bald head, and a light scar on the side of his face, almost looks like it belongs there…”
“Can you get a name?” Rask’s voice poured into the vision like warm water.
“No. She doesn’t know his name. He’s a trick, not a usual.” The vision began to flow easily, giving me what it knew I wanted. “She’s on the street, leaning into the car. She’s a black woman, pretty for a prostitute. The man in the car talks with a lisp. She says it reminds her of the way Mike Tyson talks. She calls him Tyson to sweet-talk him. Whatchu looking for Tyson? She says. He’s smiling at her. He has a nice smile. Whada do for a rock? He asks. Ohhh you wanna party, Tyson? I do whatever you like, you smoke me out, baby.”
The vision blurred, then sharpened again in an alley. “They’re somewhere else now. Tyson’s mad, he’s punching her in the face. Pounding on her face. She’s unconscious.” Again the vision shifted, bounced around and acted like it was going to fade. I relaxed my body and told it to show me the woman, show me her story. The vision behaved, and brought me back to the alley behind the building where we started.
“She’s in the car. Her face hurts, she can’t pick up her head. She doesn’t know where Tyson went. Her head hurts so bad. She touches her face, it’s all bloody and swollen–she’s so scared. She has to move. The trunk slams. She grabs the only thing she can find–her shoe. When he opens the door, she slams it into his face, his neck, his shoulder. Over and over she swings it like a wild animal. He yanks it out of her hand and throws it to the floor. She tries to scramble away, but he grabs her leg and punches her again. She can’t fight anymore…it hurts. He wipes at her face with a dirty towel. It smells like gasoline. Then he puts tape over her mouth. She’s crying. He pulls her out of the car and throws her over his shoulder, then grabs the shoe.”
I told the vision to stop again. The man was carrying the woman into the building, but as he went, she raised her head to show me the back of his car. “His plate–6TRJ244.”
Rask’s hand left my shoulder and I was plunged into first-person mode. I could feel the terror fighting to break through her fluctuating consciousness. I could feel the sobs sealed behind the tape, feel his body trudge down the stairs and I knew what awaited us.
Rask cursed and yanked the shoe from my hand. I fell to the floor and allowed the sobs–her sobs–to wrack my body. I don’t know how long I cried for, but when I’d finished up, I felt Rask’s arms pull away. “I honestly don’t know if I should let you do this.” He said, uncharacteristically gentle.
The ketamine was all but gone, flushed out by the intensity of the vision and while I’d love to have lain there crying for the rest of the night, I was compelled to let the poor detective off the hook.
“It’s cool, Rask. I’m good. It’s residual memory–hers not mine.” Yes, I lied, but he needed it.
He nodded his head, reading me better than I could read him. “I’m gonna return this evidence and run this number.” He stood.
“You’ll tell me how it ends, right?”
“You’ll be the only person I tell…outside of the department I mean.”
I walked him to the door, and closed and bolted it behind him. Then I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.
Two weeks later Rask finally called me. I’d been working with old objects, trying to pick-up little threads of memory and get them to talk, but it was slow and discouraging. The ketamine taunted me from the shadows in my mind, and I understood even better what Rask had meant by the calculator comment. I didn’t want to be weak, didn’t want to throw my hands up and succumb to the easy power the drug gave me, but damn it was going to be hard…
“We got him.”
“Tell me everything!”
“At first, the plate didn’t give me shit. It was an impounded car. The owner’d gotten it back within a week, and she was a total wash. We tore her life apart–investigatively speaking–and got absolute dick. But that got me thinking about what a perfect set-up it would be to have access to cars that would take investigators on all sorts of different wild goose chases, right? So I went to the impound lot and who do I meet? One Chester Bolden, 5’10, 240 pounds strong, scar running down his left cheek. But get this, the scar was joined by some more recent scars about the size of a stiletto heel. Oh, and he had a lisp. Of course I couldn’t book him off the cuff, couldn’t even question him if I didn’t wanna run him off. But you know, with a little detective work–I nailed the sonofabitch!”
“Very good, Detective Rask. I’m genuinely happy to hear that. How many women are you tying to him? He was a serial, right? Willie wasn’t the only one.” We’d become intimate, the victims and I, since I’d been a witness to their deaths. Both Emmy and Willie stayed with me. They were silent, but they were there.
“That we know of, 10, but there are thirty reported missing ladies of the street, and I’m sure plenty more unreported. It’s not a population that people spend too much time worrying about, unfortunately. But we took care of ten, Rini.”
“It’s a small victory.”
“That’s all we get. It’s the job. Can you handle it?”
“Honestly, it seems like the only thing worth doing…even if it kills me.”
“You and me both, partner. Rest up. We’ll talk soon.
K. Banks 