PsyCop 3: Body and Soul by Jordan Castillo Price Read Free Book Online Page A

file folders might still be alive. So I had to get my ass in gear and find them.
    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