Poltergeist

CHAPTER 8

The phone rang at five a.m. and kept on ringing until I groped around in the autumnal predawn darkness and answered it. "What?" My civility doesn't function well before nine. "Harper?" I knew the voice but couldn't connect it to a name in my half-asleep state. I grunted. "Who's this?" "It's Cameron. Cameron Shadley.”

That woke me. Cameron had been my first vampire client, and I thought we'd solved his problems, but he sounded scared. "Cam? What's wrong?”

"I am in big trouble and I need some help. Carlos thought you'd be the best person to call." Carlos was helping Cameron learn the ropes of vampirism after a rather bad start and he was one of the few vampires I respected for something more than their ability to kill. He was a scary bastard even as vampires went and not particularly friendly to "daylighters," though he seemed to find me interesting. I wasn't sure what sort of interest he had, however.

I turned on the bedside lamp and snatched a shirt off the floor and yanked it on. Even with a phone line between us, I felt vulnerable and nervous talking to a vampire while undressed.

"What's wrong?" I asked when I had my shirt on. I clamped the phone between my shoulder and cheek as I struggled into the nearest pair of pants.

"I don't have a lot of time to explain. The sun's coming up soon.”

"Then talk fast.”

"Someone died and I need you to go to the morgue and make sure he's truly dead.”

"What kind of someone? Your kind of someone or my kind?”

"It was an old man. Just an ordinary old guy. He wasn't supposed to die, but I made a mistake and—”

"You killed him?" My voice had gone cold with disgust. I'd liked Cameron, even when I realized the nature and necessities of a vampire's existence. I'd hoped he wasn't going to be like the rest, somehow, though that wasn't possible.

"No!" Cam protested. His voice swooped with emotions—at least he still had that bit of humanity. "He just died. He had a heart condition. I didn't know. Carlos was trying to teach me. . something. I miscalculated and the guy was too weak and he died. I didn't know what to do and while I was trying to figure it out, someone found the body and the cops took it to the morgue. I can't get to him before the sun comes up. I need you to go and find out if the guys going to rise or not.”

"What?”

"Rise. You know—come back as a vampire. Or something. . else. Carlos is furious with me about this.”

"Why are you asking me to do this? I know Carlos must have someone he can send.”

"I made the mistake. I have to fix it. I can't let my mistake cause Carlos problems with Edward. If Carlos sends someone to fix it, the word will get out and things could get pretty nasty.”

"I thought Carlos and Edward were getting along these days." Edward was top dog in the local vampire pack. He and Carlos had reconciled some of the bitterness that had simmered for over a century between them when I had stepped in to help Cameron with his problems.

"Its more like detente, really," Cameron said. 'Man, Harper, I'm running out of time here. Please say yes. I'll pay you whatever you want and I'll owe you a favor—we both will. All you have to do is go to the morgue this morning, look at the guy and see if he's dead. Then call me first thing tomorrow night and let me know. Please.”

I sighed. "How am I supposed to tell?”

"You know what a vampire looks like in the Grey. He might look dead to the ME, but he won't to you. If he's dead—true death, that is—he'll just be cold, like any other dead body.”

"Any chance he's still alive?”

Cameron went quiet a moment. "Trust me, Harper. He's dead. The only question is if he's going to sit up and scare the hell out of someone or not.”

Oh, goody. I sighed again and got a description of the man. I hoped that he was dead and staying that way. I had no idea how to put a vampire down for good and I doubted the pathologists would be enthusiastic about experimenting. I said good-bye to Cameron and figured I might as well go to the morgue before the day got too much further advanced. I wanted to arrive at the end of the night shift, when the small staff was least likely to be on the ball.

I looked down and realized the clothes I was wearing were filthy and I didn't have time to wash anything. I couldn't find a clean pair of jeans in the place.

Muttering, I rushed through a shower, then dragged from my closet a pair of wool slacks I'd bought in a fit of incomplete wardrobe overhaul and put them on with a cashmere sweater foisted upon me by my mother one Christmas. It was a nice outfit, but I always cringed at the dry-cleaning bill. I prayed the corpse was clean and not inclined to get up and lead me on a merry chase into filth-laden alleys. It would be just my luck to get covered in gore or garbage the one day I wore something that couldn't take the strain. Well, at least I looked good.

Chaos yawned at me and stretched luxuriously when I checked the cage latch on my way out. She didn't even protest the lack of playtime, still sated with her condo-wrecking exertions of the night before.

Traffic was light when I got onto the West Seattle bridge, and the sun hadn't yet risen high enough to pierce the cloud cover and stab into my eyes as I headed east.

Harborview Medical Center perched on the edge of First Hill—Pill Hill to the locals—and loomed over the freeway like a stone vulture waiting for something to die. It seemed appropriate that the county morgue was located in the basement of this Topsy-like maze of extensions, wings, annexes, and walkways that had "just growed" from the original core over seven decades. I parked on the administrative side of the hospital to avoid the busy trauma center and made my way down.

I walked through dim images of the buildings that had once flanked the hospital and crossed through the memories of sickness and health, birth and death. Ghostly accident victims lined the halls, lying on misty gurneys. The odors of illness and the sounds of newborn babies pushed on my attention and I moved aside without thinking for the shades of long-ago nurses bustling past me. The boring elevator was a small relief, though even it had a few lingering shadows that defied the lights. The doors opened on a throng of ghosts.

The morgue had been in the basement for a long time, collecting Grey, dead things. I'd been down there before—missing persons, insurance, and pretrial investigations sometimes led to the deceased— but I'd never before been able to see what everyone always imagines: the spirits that never leave the place. There were plenty of them, though as I stared, I realized there were fewer than I would have thought. Most were oblivious to me, but some had gathered around the elevator door, making the apparent crowd. Two or three looked at me as if they expected something.

"I don't have time for you right now," I muttered. "Go away.”

A few of them backed away or faded as I stepped out of the lift. Something whispered, "We don't know the way." I wondered if that was literal truth or something more spiritual in nature.

I thought I might regret it, but I murmured, "You can follow me out when I leave. But after that, you're on your own." The rest of the ghosts that could, moved aside and let me through, though I still had to step through a couple to get to the desk. Each phantom I touched had a different icy feel as they slid through me. I shivered and was glad of the cashmere sweater.

The sleepy clerk at the desk wasn't someone I knew, but she was a type I was familiar with—college student working an undemanding job late at night so she could make money and do homework at the same time. Since Harborview was the county hospital and administered by the University of Washington's medical center, the chances were good the clerk was a UW med student doing work study. She didn't even close her textbook when she looked up at me, a little puzzled by my natty appearance in such a place.

"Can I help you?”

"I hope so." I showed her my license. "I'm checking for a missing person and I wondered if you had any unidentified males who matched his description." I rattled off the information Cameron had given me, and tried to ignore the cold presence of the dead around me. It occurred to me that Mark Lupoldi's body was somewhere nearby, but I didn't want to see it again and didn't mention it.

It took some scuffling with papers and phones first, but I was escorted back to the cooler by a young man who called himself Fish and looked like a badger in blue scrubs. A small cortege followed me down the narrow hall. Most visitors saw the deceased on a monitor in a viewing room, but there wasn't time or personnel to set that up before the shift changed and everyone just wanted to get this over with, which I had counted on. I saw the body in person, my retinue of ghosts spreading around to look at him, maybe wondering why he was so important.

He didn't look like much lying on his metal tray. Just an old man, white-haired, dressed in ragged clothes, and dead. Just plain dead. I peered at him from several angles, but couldn't see anything, not even a mark of whatever Cameron had done to him. I sank as far into the Grey as I dared, but he had no gleam of living power to him at all and certainly nothing like the dark red coronas I'd seen around most of the vampires I'd met. I closed my eyes and thanked every god who might have an interest that he was only a cold husk of empty flesh with nothing Grey to him, not even a ghost.

I shook my head. "Not my guy.”

"You sure?" Fish asked. "You were looking pretty hard. . ”

"He's similar. The beard threw me a bit. But it's not him. I'm sorry for the trouble.”

He shrugged. "No biggie. At least someone's looking for someone. Makes me hope someone'll come looking for him, too.”

I glanced at Fish as he pushed the corpse back into the chilled drawer. "You care about these guys?”

He nodded. "Yeah. No one should have to stay in a drawer forever. Couple of these bodies have been unidentified for more than ten years. That's just wrong.”

I nodded, disturbed by the thoughts he'd started in my head, and took my leave. I was followed by a macabre parade, like the Pied Piper of the dead.

The ghosts trailed me all the way out the parking lot door, where they dispersed with a sigh. I looked back over my shoulder, but couldn't see a single one. They'd just wanted out of the morgue, I guessed, out of the hospital where some of them must have died. They had escaped at last. My good deed for the day, like the Girl Scout I'd never been. I wondered about the bodies that had lain so long unidentified and hoped the old man wouldn't be joining them.