Crime Spells

“Okay, okay. What about our case?”

“I still haven’t had a chance to talk to the girl. I was going to interview her now.”

“Wait for me. Give me twenty minutes.”

“This is Washington.”

“Forty.”

“That’ll do.” I closed the phone and ducked back into the ER.

Things had more or less gotten back to normal except Gerber was nowhere in sight and Dickert was in leather restraints, snoring from whatever he’d been given. Someone had also taken soap and water to him. Didn’t really improve his looks. A walrus in a flimsy hospital gown that had hiked up in unfortunate places. Obligatory biker tattoos: a ring of barbed wire around his left bicep that, with gravity and a couple years, would end up a bracelet; an American flag on the right. He had a thing about skulls: skull on fire, Jolly Roger centered in an ace of spades peeping from an ass cheek (too much information!), Grateful Dead skull haloed with red roses.

I hoped Wylde pressed charges. There was just something about Dickert I didn’t like, and it wasn’t about the t-shirt or that he was a drunk and a bully. His tattoos were unoriginal, but you couldn’t throw a guy in jail for his taste in tattoos.

Just… something. That voice, for starters.

And the one in my head…

Oh, don’t go there. I’d just about convinced myself the whole thing was stress.

The medical student sat on a stool next to a surgical resident who was stitching Dickert’s scalp back together. “Your sister around?” I asked the student.

If she was surprised that I’d put it together, she didn’t show it. “Zoe,” she said, and stuck out her hand. We shook; her grip was firm. “Sarah’s with the Chouns.” Zoe tilted her head toward the bay where the Asian family was hidden behind a drawn curtain. “She might be a while. They’re family friends.”

“She okay?”

“Sure. I don’t think she’s going to press charges, though.”

“That’s a shame. And here I was hoping.”

“The guy had an idiosyncratic reaction to alcohol. It happens. Once their BAL goes down, they’re pretty reasonable people. Well… maybe not him.”

“Your sister always take risks?”

“Yes,” the surgical resident said, without turning around. “Rushing in where angels fear to tread. Can’t tell Sarah anything and never could, if you listen to the attendings. On the other hand, can’t tell Zoe anything either. I pity the chief resident of whatever specialty she ends up in.”

“A fan club,” I said to Zoe.

“Part of the family charm. We go all sorts of places.” She mock-punched the resident. “Harry’s just worried that I’ll end up his intern for his first big case.”

“Are you kidding?” Harry tied off, snipped. “When that day comes, and if you’re very, very good, I’ll let you staple the skin.”

“So generous.”

I debated a half second about waiting for Wylde-to ask her… what? Hey, whoa, nifty parlor trick. Do all the witches in your coven do that? But then I spotted Rollins trundling in, and I really did have work.

“Hey,” Rollins said. He was open faced and big in a solid, apple pie, Midwest kind of way. Last person in the world you’d peg as a computer geek. “Computer guy thinks he might have something. I’d have given it a shot, but I was doing paper.”

“My, my, everyone is working hard and on a Saturday morning. What’s the story on Dickert?”

Rollins fished out some flavor of PDA and started tapping. “Mostly small stuff. Couple DUIs. A breaking and entering kicked down to illegal trespass, along with two assault charges. All three were in co

Odd he lived out there, given his reaction to the Chouns. Route 50 near I-495 was wall-to-wall Korean, Vietnamese, Thai. “What about military? He said he’s a vet. Well, implied.”

“Drafted in ’65, did two tours. Army. Third Brigade, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division.”

Hmmm. “Two tours? He volunteered?”

“Du

“Nothing.” I let it go. Dickert was trouble, but a brigade was a big place, and I had plenty to deal with.

Lily Hopkins looked very young and very scared. A trace of baby fat under her chin. Maybe thirteen. But there also were purple smudges in the hollows of her cheeks and beneath her eyes, and she had that kind of haunted, hunted look you saw in runaways.

“I don’t know what happened. I just… it was like I was dreaming. Only I couldn’t move at first. I almost couldn’t breathe. Like someone sitting on my chest. Then it was kind of like… You know how you get in a crowded room and people are shoving you and shoving you? That’s what it was like. I got shoved aside.” A quick flick of her eyes to my face and then away. “There was somebody else.”

“Somebody. Not something?”

Shake of the head. “A girl. She talked about her mother and an aunt.”

“You heard a voice?”

Really hesitant now. “N-nooo. Know how you hear your own voice in your head sometimes? When you’re reading? Like that. Her voice but not really talking to me. I don’t think she was American.”

Rollins and I looked at each other. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, she didn’t sound American. Like she thought about this guy. I think he was… you know, she… was doing what Mackie made me do. Only either his name was like a joke in her head or she really didn’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“In my head, she said he was Call-Me-Bob. You know, the old joke. Guy shakes your hand and you say, ‘Lily’ and he says, ‘Call me Bob.’ Like that. And she mentioned a place named Poy… Polypett or something, and said a bunch of words… yama and mutra… stuff I didn’t get.”

I snagged on mutra. Like Wylde… “Tell me the rest.”

She did. It gave me a little chill, the way she described a presence residing in her mind, watching, waiting. Of being yanked around like a doll and commanded to do a horrible thing.

I couldn’t help but think of Wylde.

I expected to see Gerber waiting when Rollins and I pushed through the curtain. But he wasn’t.

“Detective Saunders?” Dr. Wylde offered her hand. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you properly.”

I liked her grip: firm but not overly so. I introduced Rollins, then asked, “How’s the lip?” Actually I could see how the lip was: swollen.

She touched the knot with slender fingers. “I think the plastic surgeons were disappointed. My dignity’s hurt more than anything else. We usually don’t have situations like that get so out of hand here. Anyway.” She held up a chart. “Ms. Hopkins has been transferred to the psychiatry service for evaluation. Dr. Gerber will consult, if needed. He said that he hadn’t had a chance to go over the EEG results with you. So.”

We followed her to the nurses’ station. A quick glance at Dickert’s bay-empty now, I saw. Ten to one, his ample butt was parked on his Harley. Ten to one, he didn’t use a helmet.

Good. The world needs more organ donors.

Wylde flipped pages. “Okay, here are the EEG findings.”

A lot of scratchy scribbles. “What am I looking at?”

“We do a routine run to get a baseline, and then we introduce various types of stimulation to evoke a response. For example, here, you see normal brain activity and then, with photic stimulation-light-there’s activity in the occipital lobe, where visual information is processed.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, everything’s going fine, with no abnormalities until… right… here.” She stretched past to point with a pen, and I saw the vivid scroll of a tattoo at her right wrist, a weird line of script.