Poltergeist

CHAPTER 16

Tuckman was still snake-oiling the rest of the séance sitters at the top of the stairs. Terry had disappeared. I walked back and spotted him in the observation room. The Nebraska-sized chip on his shoulder left me wondering what he had to be defensive about, since it now seemed unlikely that Tuck-man had a saboteur.

I whispered to Tuckman's back, "Keep the remaining sitters here while I review the video with Terry. I want to get a better look at what happened. Cara thinks one of the others threw that thing at her and if so, we need to find out who, right away.”

He made a twitch of one shoulder and I hoped that was agreement, not dismissal.

I ducked into the observation room.

Terry was poking buttons on the video recording equipment. He didn't look up.

"Now what do you want?" he demanded.

I closed the door and pulled a chair around to sit in. Terry was a little in front of me and to the side, so I could see most of his profile as well as the tense set of his shoulders and back. "I want to know what your problem is.”

"You.”

"Don't think so," I said. "You don't even know me and I haven't done anything or said more than a dozen words to you since this ridiculous investigation began.”

"Ridiculous is right." He kept his head forward, but he pulled his hands away from the controls, balling them into fists and resting his wrists on the console.

"Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. This investigation bugs you?”

"Damn straight it does.”

"Why? It makes you angry. Do you think it's critical of you? Or are you afraid of it? You have something to hide?" I didn't think so; he didn't have any Grey connection to the poltergeist that I could see or to anything else. But he did have a big, angry red aura, shot through with white sparks.

He spun his chair to glare at me, thumping his fists onto his thighs. "No! If Tuck thinks I'm padding his results, he should come out and say so! I'm not a cheat! I earned everything I ever got—I worked my ass off for it! I got no reason to undermine this project. If this goes down in flames, I go, too. And there's Tuck saying the results are too good. Too good! He says he's going to bring in an independent investigator to check the group. And here comes you—you snooping, sneaky nobody, poking into our stuff, into our records and methods like you know any damn thing. Which you don't. You had to bring someone with you just to understand the machines.”

"I admit to being lost on certain subjects. I rely on experts to tell me what I don't know, like I'm relying on you to help me with that video.”

He stared at me, his fury slackening into surprise, the furious light around him dimming.

"Terry, it's true that you're in a good position to sweeten or skew the results. But so is Denise Francisco or almost any of the people sitting in that room every Sunday and Wednesday—even Tuckman himself. I have to know what can be done before I can tell if it has been done.”

"Are you saying you don't think it's me?”

"Yes and no. I'm saying I'm not sure that Tuckman's right about the problem. What happened today was so spectacular it should make or break Tuckman's belief in a saboteur. So what I want is to find out if what I saw through that benighted glass is the same thing the camera saw. I'm trusting that you haven't been up here doctoring that recording.”

He scoffed. "It would take a lot more than fifteen minutes and the equipment we have in here to do that.”

"Then show me the recording.”

Terry chewed on the idea for a while, then scooted his chair to the side and let me sit next to him while he cued the video. "I've got three angles, but this one's the best.”

"Three? The recordings you gave me before were only one angle.”

He shrugged and didn't look at me. "You didn't really need the other stuff, anyway, just general records—that's what Tuck said.”

I sighed. I didn't think Terry's spite was going to make any difference and I supposed I should be glad I hadn't waded through three times as much video to end up in the same place.

We watched the short session from every angle twice. By the end, we were both shaking our heads in amazement.

"That thing just popped in from nowhere and hung there in the air," Terry marveled, pointing at the close-up. "That. . that's just. .

"That's an apport," I supplied.

"It's cool. The certifiable, real, live thing. The Philip group thought they could get one, but Tuck said he didn't think it was possible.”

"Tuck seems to be wrong." I stood up and looked at him. "Thanks, Terry.”

He gave me an embarrassed nod.

In the séance room, most of the remaining project members had re-gathered with Tuckman. Wayne Hopke, Ana, and Ian were lined up on the couch. Ian had his arm over Ana's shoulders, but she was looking away from him—at the floor or at Tuckman, who was sitting at the table with Ken and Patricia. Ken was frowning, his jaw tight, and listening intently to Tuckman while Patricia clutched his nearest hand and continued to sniffle. Wayne seemed oddly outside it all, just sitting beside Ana, nodding. Looking through the glass, I couldn't tell what might be happening in the Grey. There was no indication at all now—not even the wisps and lights I'd seen the last time.

Terry turned up the volume from the audio monitors.

"… sure it's not true. Cara was overwrought—momentary hysteria at having been hit. It's natural to feel stunned or shocked.”

"We'd better tell him they can go home," I said. "None of them threw that brooch.”

Terry stood up, stretching his back and legs with a series of small pops. "I'll do it.”

In a few moments, he walked into the séance room and whispered to Tuckman, who nodded and put his hands together in his sincere salesman pose and smiled. "They've finished looking at the tape and everything's fine. No one threw anything at anyone. I'll speak to Cara and for now we can assume that the project is going ahead. Thank you for being so patient. I know this has been a very difficult day.”

The sitters began stirring, sluggishly. Tuckman removed himself a little faster. A few seconds later, he strode into the booth.

"What's going on now?" he demanded.

"Nothing you shouldn't be spectacularly happy about," I replied. I nodded at the image on the monitor screen. "Looks like a legitimate apport.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked at the screen. He shook his head. "How are they doing that?”

I shrugged, though I still felt a little dizzy from my brush with Celia. "Power of the mind? Terry's been running it through everything he can think of and there's no sign of wires or strings or that it's just been tossed there. You can run it back and forth from every angle and it just appears there. It's the real thing.”

Tuckman stared at the image, his face blank.

"Tuckman?”

He scowled and flipped a dismissive hand at me. "Just finish it up." Then he turned and stalked out.

I put a hand through my hair, rubbing the impending headache developing in the top of my head. I was tired and feeling somewhat queasy and irritable. I hoped the hollow ache in my skull wasn't going to be a migraine, though Tuckman's attitude seemed good enough reason to feel irritated and worn-out all on its own.

"Do you want this one?" Terry asked.

"No. I think I can remember this. Besides, I'm almost done and that recording doesn't prove anything Tuckman wants to acknowledge.”

"You got that right.”

"Terry, why are you on this project? This seems like a waste of your time.”

"Abnormal psych doesn't get more juicy than the prisoner/guard experiment.”

”Excuse me?”

"There's this classic experiment in behavioral and abnormal psychology in which you give a group of people permission to do whatever they want to another group of people—even though you tell them they are supposed to take care of the other group. You let them know that their actions have no repercussions in the outside world. Pretty soon they're doing some horrible things to each other. This is an interesting variation, because this group has no prisoners, only guards, and they've been told that what they do has power in the world, but only if the group as a whole does it. I'm writing my thesis on permission, self-justification, and psychosis based on some of this.”

"I see." I didn't, but I didn't want a deeper explanation at that point. It was ugly enough without going off on research tangents. "I'll get the monitoring information from you on Monday.”

"All right. If you want any more of these recordings you let me know." He looked aside. "I'm—uh. . I'm sorry I've been. .”

I waved him off. "Don't worry about it. I'm used to it.”

I let myself out, lingering long enough to miss the séance group as they left.

I couldn't just write off the idea that Terry had tweaked the information, but the apport pretty well put a bullet in the idea of faked effects; there's very little in the realm of paranormal research more convincing than a documented apport under proper scientific conditions—because there'd never been one. Even a professional skeptic of the class of a Houdini or a Randi would have to pause over this. I needed to clear off the last interview with Wayne Hopke and catch up to «Frankie» before I'd feel I'd completed the job, but I was convinced that Tuckman's phenomena—however impossible they seemed—were the real thing. Why they were so strong I couldn't be sure. He hadn't asked me to find that out, but I wanted to know, even if he didn't.

I wondered about the phenomena as I headed home, feeling the throbbing in my head ebb and flow with every pulse. It seemed as if the apported brooch had picked out Cara before flying into her face. It would have taken a considerable amount of power to apport the brooch in the first place, then hold it in place long enough to change its direction. Most apports just drop straight down out of the air—and according to Randi and Houdini they're faked by sleight-of-hand artists tossing things over their own shoulder behind their backs. This one had appeared, hung in one place, then twitched aside with enough force to hit a woman more than a foot away and cut her deep enough to need stitches. It seemed not only a show of power, but also a little vicious.

Cara's remark about Celia becoming cruel ran through my head. Maybe the group had somehow made their very own duppy—not just a simple poltergeist, neutral and playful like Philip, but a malicious ghost. Terry had said they'd been given permission. They'd been told they had power and perhaps somehow every piece of pettiness and bad temper had become manifest in their ghost. I was half convinced by my own argument, since most people will do more out of anger or spite than they will out of compassion or good feeling—there are always more people willing to complain than to praise, after all—but I didn't let myself buy it just yet. I needed to finish up before I could draw a conclusion. I didn't want to be like Tuckman and predetermine the solution before I'd got all the evidence.

I had to pause my maundering while I negotiated the last of the drive home. I continued my train of thought after I'd closed and locked the condo door behind myself.

I didn't like the fact that I was running parallel to a murder investigation. I imagined Solis wasn't too thrilled about my presence nearby, either. Odd bits of conversation kept pulling me closer to Mark's murder without solving anything. It annoyed me to have those few broken threads of information I could do nothing about. I wished I could just pass them all to Solis and call this thing closed. I wondered if I ought to tell him about the brooch. It was Cara's, and by her admission she'd left it at Mark's the day he'd been killed. That pretty well made her the woman who'd been in his bed, even without her confession to me, and that would interest Solis. He'd get the basic information when he interviewed the séance group—someone would mention such a startling event—but I wondered if I should mention it sooner. It might lead him to an arrest all the faster and then I wouldn't have to keep on thinking about this case.

Except that I'd seen the brooch apport and that meant Celia had taken it into the Grey. Had she taken it from Mark's apartment or from somewhere else? The uncomfortable thought stirred in my mind that a ghost so mean-tempered it would cut someone and strong enough to make a table run around a room and menace people might be able to do much worse. I had to know what the ghost's involvement with Mark's death was.

I didn't think I could get the answers from Celia and I didn't like the alternative route. I hated to ask vampires for favors, even when I was owed a few. I had no desire to mix with that bunch if I could avoid it, but I might be forced to ask Carlos for help if I was to discover how Celia was involved in Mark's death.

I didn't feel up to negotiating with anything tougher than a tub of yogurt that evening. My headache was not improving and all I wanted was to lie down for a while. I fed the ferret and watched her destroy my bookshelf while I lay on the couch gulping down aspirin with pints of water until we were both ready to sleep.