The next morning, after coffee, I emailed Ross Holtz. He called me back after five minutes.
“I don’t know.” He sounded full of energy, the kind that comes from staying up all night and taking a pill to achieve a second wind. “Not a lot of time. I’m downtown today, you’re in luck. I guess a few minutes? Meet me outside, on Dearborn, at 11, okay? I’m busy.” He hung up.
Rachel strode into the office, humming the wedding march. “Carrie texted. Last night, when we were—you know. I’m having lunch with her.”
“Tell her hi.” Carrie, Rachel’s best friend, was her maid of honor. She doesn’t like me, but Rachel insists she’s getting better. “Oh, do you still know any of the people in that invisible club?”
“I think I’ve still got Danny’s number.” Danny was part of a group who possessed various tools that could render them invisible—mostly for harmless pranks, like sneaking into movie theaters. He’d helped me on a case many years ago when someone invisible had committed a murder with a baseball bat. “He might have moved, though.”
“I’ll try him.” I sent a few more emails, then switched over to work on another case involving fraud and embezzlement.
I left the office at 10:30, and by 11 I was standing outside an office building down on Dearborn Street. Busses and cars streamed by, but the sidewalks weren’t too crowded in the middle of the morning. A homeless man helped a woman who dropped her shopping bag. Two women jogged by in colorful sweats. The usual pace of life in the big city.
The revolving door behind me swished with office workers and delivery people spinning their way in and out. At 11:46 it pushed out a young man in jeans and a blazer, a loose necktie dangling over his white shirt. A shorter man followed him, wearing a brown jacket and sneakers.
“Jurgen?” The first man looked me up and down, then fished a cigarette out of his blazer. “Ross Holtz. Sorry, I only have a few minutes. What do you want?”
Usually we find a nearby Starbucks or a bar. Holtz wanted to do this on the street? Probably to keep the chat short—a control move. Not the first time people have played it on me. I looked at the other man. “Who’s this?”
Holtz frowned as he lit up. “Finn works with me. What’s going on?”
“Sean DiTocco. You were friends?”
He nodded defensively. “Yeah. We hung out. Sorry about what happened. What did they tell you about me?”
“Just that you’re working on some kind of a secret project.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Going to change the world. You bet. Look, I don’t know anything about what happened to Sean, all right? It’s too bad. Some people just—I don’t know, right?”
“Which people? Sean?”
“I just mean he had a lot of luck in his life, you know? Good job, hot girlfriend. Sometimes it all goes away too quick.”
“Would anyone make it want to go away for him?” I moved to let a guy lugging boxes pass me.
“Who knows? Look, if that’s it, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a meeting at noon, so—” He dropped his cigarette on the ground and rubbed it out with his shoe.
I held out a card. “If you think of anything, call me.”
A breeze caught the card, and it fluttered to the sidewalk next to the smoldering cigarette but. Holtz scowled and bent down for it—
—and it rose up into his fingers.
It wasn’t a breeze. It didn’t blow in any direction. It just elevated itself upward until Holtz closed his hand on it.
“Okay?” Holtz straightened and shoved the card into his pocket. “Come on, Finn.”
Finn was looking at me, his mouth tight. As if warning me to say nothing. Then he followed Holtz through the door and into the building.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched them head through the lobby toward the elevators. I looked down at the sidewalk. Not the wind, not any kind of a bounce, not a helpful bug. The card had lifted itself in the air, rising straight into Holtz’ hand.
I looked around, then sent a quick text to Rachel. Then I headed for home.
Rachel came back from her lunch with Carrie at 2:30. “What’s new, lover?” She leaned down to kiss me.
“You’re in a good mood.” I suspected they’d had a few beers.
“Carrie says hi.” She punched my arm, which also meant she was in a good mood. “I got your text, and she said she’d send a list of people who know about moving stuff around with your mind. Psychokinesis, that’s what she calls it. And she says if you ever hurt me, she’ll track you down and rip your intestines out.”
“Nice to see she’s come around. Oh, we got an email from Sharp saying yes.” Anita Sharp was a cop I’d worked with on vampire cases and other supernatural affairs involving the CPD. Like Carrie, she tolerated me more than she actually liked me, but she was close with Rachel.
“Yay. So what’s up with the case?” She sat down at her desk.
“This guy I met, Ross Holtz? I saw him do some psycho-tele-whatever it is when I met him outside his office.”
“Huh. What are you thinking?”
“Not sure yet. I’ve been researching him ever since I got back.” Suddenly I felt hungry. I’d forgotten to eat lunch.
But I’d found out a lot about Ross Holtz. Thirty-two, M.S. in biochemistry from the University of Chicago, single, stints at Pfizer and Baxter before his current position in neurobiological research at his current employer, Tior. Where Sean had worked.
Holtz’ specialty was antidepressant drugs. He’d helped develop several, never as a lead researcher, but at Tior he apparently had his own team and his own projects. After some digging I found Finn—full name Martin Finlay, not a scientist but an IT specialist.
Holtz owned a house in Skokie, where Tior had its labs. Finn rented an apartment in the Uptown neighborhood. He’d gone to the University of Illinois, then worked at half a dozen companies in and around Chicago, never staying in place more than one or two years. But I didn’t find any suggestion that he wasn’t good at his job. Maybe he just got restless.
After a quick sandwich I got Carrie’s list of experts on psychokinesis. Carrie isn’t psychic like Rachel, but she knows a lot of people in Chicago’s supernatural community. I recognized one or two names, but I decided to start with Dr. Lindsay Hoffman, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because Carrie had noted that she’d been studying psychic phenomena throughout her career.
Rachel was in a Zoom conference with a client of hers—she’s kept up her graphic design business while transitioning into fulltime therapist work—so I moved into the living room to call, and got Dr. Hoffman between classes.
“In my experience, PK is pretty rare,” she told me. “I’ve seen some studies and performed some of my own tests, but nothing stands up to rigorous analysis. Anecdotally? Yes, I’ve seen it, but never under properly controlled situations. I mean, you can’t always drag the equipment you need into someone’s house, and there’s also the fact that I can’t emphasize this stuff in my work. Or my colleagues will think I’m just kooky.” She laughed
“So you can’t say what might cause a person to develop psychokinetic powers?”
She sighed. “Some people theorize that paranormal abilities originate from the pineal gland, the, uh, ‘third eye’ in the brain. Stimulating it, in theory, can access insights and abilities beyond what we would consider natural. But there’s absolutely no scientific evidence of that. Still, you can find papers arguing for that. Just not in any reputable journals.” She grunted. “What I’ve seen has mostly been unverifiable. People moving pencils, books, small objects. But one time . . .” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes?” I prompted.
“I wrote this up in my notes but I’ve never told anyone. Professionally, I mean, just family and friends. I was in China, in a small village, about 10 years ago. And there was a woman, 80 years old, she could—I saw her lift a boulder the size of a car. A small car, but still. Not a pencil. A boulder. I asked her about it, through an interpreter, and they told me she drank a special kind of tea, passed down in her family for generations. But they wouldn’t tell me what was in it. Or let me drink it.”
“Would you? Drink it?”
Hesitation. “I don’t know. But right then, at that moment, I really wanted to understand how it happened. How it was possible. I don’t know.”
A boulder. Or a body? “So there might be some way to create it in a person. With the right, uh, formula.”
“If you ask me in front of my colleagues or my class, I’ll say no. I’m a scientist, I need facts. Proof. Confirmation. But between friends—and you’re a friend of Cassiopeia, aren’t you? I’d have to say yes.”
I didn’t know Carrie’s full name was Cassiopeia. “She’s a friend of my fiancée. But it’s safe with me. Thank you.”
We hung up. I called some other people on Carrie’s list, but didn’t learn anything more. Everyone told me they’d witnessed psychokinesis themselves. Some offered to send me videos.
At 4:00 I went back into the office. Rachel was done with her Zoom. “I’m going downtown to tail someone,” I told her.
“What about dinner? It’s your turn.” She tapped at her keyboard.
“Isn’t there lasagna left over? We were in kind of a hurry last night.”
“Oh yeah.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t count on getting lucky again.”
“Never.” I winked.
Down on Dearborn Street again I waited across the street from Holtz’s building. Finn emerged at 5:35, listening to music from his phone. He walked fast, but I managed to keep pace with him as he went down below the street to the subway.
The platform was crowded and noisy with people on their way home, Men and women in business suits, young people in jeans, a hairy man in bike shorts, two teenagers in school uniforms—a whole panorama of urban humanity. They stared at their phones, mostly; some read books or the newspaper, others listened to music or podcasts. A few just stared ahead like robots waiting to be reactivated.
The subway pulled in, and I got on behind a woman in a long picket coat. The train went north, under the river, as I watched Finn nod his head in rhythm with whatever song he was listening to.
Finn got off at the Wilson stop, where the subway was now the el, high over the street. I followed him down to the sidewalk, keeping a few people between us as he sauntered east. I expected him to go straight home. Instead he stopped in front of a bar named Bad Canyon, checked the time on his phone, and went inside.
I waited a moment, then followed him in.
Finn sat at the bar, a bottle of Coors and a shot of whiskey in front of him. I plopped onto the stool next to him. “Hi there.”
He glanced over, then blinked. “Wait, you’re—”
“Tom Jurgen. We met this morning.” I dropped a card on the bar and ordered a Heineken from the bartender. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
He was suspicious. Understandably. “About what?”
“Ross Holtz. You’re friends.”
His jaw tightened defensively. “I work for him.”
“Doing what?”
“Research.” He glared at the mirror behind the bar. “What’s this all about?”
“What kind of research?”
“Confidential.” He jerked up his whiskey and downed it in one gulp. “I work with the data. Making sure everything’s correct, analyzing patterns, looking for trends. What are you looking for?”
“Does the research involve psychokinesis?” I watched his eyes. “Moving things with your mind?”
“I know what psychokinesis means.” Finn shoved his shot glass forward for another as the bartender brought my beer. “What about it?”
The word didn’t surprise him. “I saw Ross pick up my card when I dropped it this morning. He didn’t touch it. It just floated up into his hand.”
Finn stared at me. The bartender brought him another shot of whiskey, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw it into my face. Instead he polished it off, licked his lips, and set the shot glass on the bar next to my beer.
He bit his lip, concentrating. I watched a bead of sweat run down his forehead. He was breathing slowly, as if meditating, his eyes locked on the glass.
It slowly lifted an inch above the bar.
Finn smiled. The glass fell, rolling over, and Finn gulped some beer. “Does that answer your question?”
“I have more.”
“Well, I’m done.” He reached for his wallet, dropped some cash on the bar, and stood, leaving his beer half full.
“Don’t forget my card.” I held it toward him.
Finn grabbed it, glaring at me.
Suddenly I felt a push. Deep inside my chest. I toppled backward, my stool tipping over, and hit the hardwood floor. Hard. Pain shot up through my arm and into my shoulder. Cursing, I rolled away from the chair and got to my knees.
Finn stood over me, grinning, but one of his eyes was suddenly blood red, and he was rubbing the side of his head as if he’d been struck with a sudden migraine.
A man from a nearby stool helped me stand up. Finn veered around us, unsteady on his feet, but he made it through the door without a glance back.
“You all right?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah, fine. Thanks.” I bent my arm and rotated my shoulder, but nothing felt broken. “Must have just leaned back too far.”
The bartender poured me a fresh beer, on the house. I had no chance of following Finn now, so I pulled my stool upright and gripped the edge of the bar as I drank.
I called Rachel. “I’ll be home in an hour. We can have the lasagna, or I can pick something up.”
“It’s already 6:30.” She sighed, exasperated with me. “What happened?”
I looked around. The bar was hall full, but no one was sitting close enough to hear me over the sound of the TV and the jukebox. “The guy used it on me. Pushed me off a bar stool. There’s definitely something like psychokinesis involved.”
“Are you okay?” Impatience shifted to concern. Mild concern, but still.
“My shoulder hurts a little. I’m fine. The guy’s gone.”
“So . . . what now? Did he kill your client’s son? Are you out there taking on murderers with psychokinetic powers two weeks before our wedding? It’s not too late for me to back out, but we can’t get our deposit back.”
“Don’t do that,” I said quickly. “And don’t jump to conclusions. Holtz has the same power. I saw it today, although he didn’t hit me with it.”
“Maybe he’s cooking up some magic potion?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing. You really are psychic.”
“Ha-ha. Okay, I can zap the last of the lasagna. You might have to pick up something for yourself. I’m hungry.”
“Home soon. Love you.”
She laughed. “Whatever.” We hung up.
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