Possession

FIVE

I didn’t see Quinton that night, but I did talk to him on the phone while the ferret played the clown and tried to hide one of my boots under the living room bookshelves. I had been poking, searching, and sneaking around databases trying to get information on Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar, so while I was pleased to hear from he-who-dislikes-the-phone, my mind was not quite on his track at first.

“Hey,” he said. “Just a heads-up: Your friends with long teeth might have attracted unwanted attention.”

I puzzled over it for a moment before I connected what he was saying to what he meant. Quinton was busy making trouble for his father’s project because he didn’t want to be sucked back into the covert machine; he was also dead against the project on moral grounds, since it had something to do with “investigating” paranormal creatures and using them in horrible experiments for purposes that I wasn’t quite clear on. Among other things, Quinton didn’t want his father to discover that I was a sort of paranormal creature myself, because the gods only knew what James Purlis would do if he thought he had a “freak” so close to hand, much less one who had access to monsters and the deep secrets of the Grey. He was still thankfully ignorant of it, though he must have been close to figuring out that there was an interface between the normal and the paranormal. So if Quinton was warning me about trouble for folks with fangs, Purlis must have been close to or actively targeting vampires.

The local blood-sucking society wouldn’t like that and since they were still making the transition to new management—the fall of the old regime was three years ago, but vampires don’t like change—and if Quinton’s father was messing with them, that would put certain people on the spot, which could upset the current calm among the life-challenged and lead to a hell of a lot of mess that would spill out into the normal world in the guise of gang violence and murder. I hadn’t heard anything about this from them, so it might not be an issue yet, but with my almost-father-in-law involved it would come my way eventually.

“Great,” I muttered. “Any idea what the problem is?”

“Not in a position to discuss it. If they don’t know, they will soon.” He sounded harried and nervous.

“OK. I’ll look into it. And you do remember there’s a meal-thing in a couple of days, right?”

“Meal . . . ? Oh. Right. I’ll make it.”

He disconnected without further conversation. I sighed—I hadn’t mentioned Stymak’s digital recordings to him. I wouldn’t be able to run the same sort of high-end analysis on them that Quinton could have. I’d have to muddle through it on my own, since it sounded like Papa Purlis’s plans were dangerous and advanced far enough to require a lot of Quinton’s monkey-wrenching to derail. I hoped he’d be safe and that he would actually show up for our dinner with Phoebe and her family—it had been planned for a while and I wouldn’t be forgiven easily for missing it. Quinton, though, usually got off the hook of Phoebe’s ire through sheer charm. Still, I’d rather be chasing my comparatively mild case of possession than dealing with James Purlis and whatever gang of human spooks he had with him.

I couldn’t talk directly to the local vampires during the day and in this situation I thought it best not to leave a detailed message with their daylight assistants, but I left call-back requests and hoped for the best. No one called back.

Frustrated, I put that task aside and tried to listen to Stymak’s recordings, but they were static-filled and confusing. I don’t know how it happens, but electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is always lousy—full of background noise, electronic feedback, pops, hisses, dropouts, and overlapping voices that have to be filtered, isolated, and pulled apart for analysis. I didn’t have those skills or the right tools on my computer even if I knew how to use them. Stymak had filtered quite a bit, but Julianne’s voice was still broken and difficult to pick out and the only thing I was able to hear consistently was a sudden clear voice that said, “Beach to bluff,” which put me in mind of Julianne’s paintings but didn’t clear up any of my questions. The whispering of ghosts overlapped Julianne’s strange mutterings and the sharp screech of electronic feedback in the presence of the uncanny marred the playback, making me wince. After an hour of gritting my teeth and trying, I had to give up and put it aside for Quinton when he had time.

I went to bed that night without having heard more from Quinton or gotten any response from the vampires. I’d keep trying on both scores, but the most pressing thing was finding the other PVS patients. In the morning I went back to tracking Sterling and Delamar through cyberspace.

It’s easier to get information about politicians’ questionable funding and personal activities than it is to get information about medical patients—which is as it should be. The back door to this stuff, however, is insurance. As a private investigator, I’ve done my share of personal injury fraud investigations and while medical records may be protected by HIPAA, billing records—especially disputed or defaulted bills—aren’t quite as hard to get. I didn’t need to know what the bills were for or what treatment the patients were getting, only that they were being billed and where the bills were being sent. I’m not saying it was easy, but it’s an even bet that anyone who’s been sick long enough will have a bill they can’t pay or that the insurance company has refused, and those bits of business are the crack in the wall through which sneaky bastards like me can creep. It took another day of digging, but I finally found mailing addresses for Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar, which was a good start. And I wasn’t distracted by Quinton’s presence while I was doing it—more’s the pity—because he didn’t come around. I assumed he was busy making his father’s life difficult and I was fine with that.

Delamar’s address was a private mailbox company in Capitol Hill. It would take a little more digging to find the actual address, but I kept that working in the background. Sterling’s address was a single-family house in Leschi.

Leschi households ran pretty much the whole range of the middle-income bracket, with a few folks struggling to keep up balanced by those having no problems even in a bad economy. The usual mix of condos and houses, a smattering of older apartment buildings, and a long stretch of Lake Washington shoreline kept the area diverse and a little hard to peg culturally. Unlike some parts of Seattle, there wasn’t one strongly defined ethnic group or neighborhood feel here, so I arrived in the area without much idea about Kevin Sterling.

The house was on one of the curving streets on the north end of the hill that overlooked the shoreline and Leschi Park. Not as swank as the south end of the hill near the marina, but certainly not a slum. The Sterling house was one of the few that had no lake view to speak of, being set back on the slope by a twist in the road. There wasn’t much parking to be had on the street, so I ended up a few blocks away and walked back. My eye was still giving me some trouble and I appreciated the leaf-dappled shade on the streets, since the sun had decided to pop in for a short visit to un-sunny Seattle that afternoon, just to prove that it was, technically, summer. I could hear distant children in the park and down the shore, though I couldn’t see them, and the Grey’s energy grid shone through the landscape in pulsing lines of azure and jade, frosted here and there with the memory of old trolley lines that had cut imperiously over the hill until 1940.

I came up the driveway and looked at the house. One end was unsided and looked as if a renovation project had been given up in midwork and temporarily weatherproofed until it could be completed at a future date that had come and gone some time ago. The Tyvek and plastic were beginning to fray from friction under wind and soaking by rain for longer than they’d been meant to be so exposed. I wondered when the work had stopped—before or after whatever had put Sterling into his current state of lingering ill health.

On my way to the door, the persistent Grey vision on my left became more pronounced until I was seeing the world as two partially overlapped layers—one of the normal sphere and the other of chilly silver fog and ghostlight. The house seemed to melt away on the left, becoming a gleaming wire frame of light and emptiness through which the mist of uncanny things played around knots of colored energy. I knocked on the door that was half there, half memory. Something flickered at the edge of my vision and I started to turn to look for it, but it fell back before I could pick it out from the general psychic noise of the street and a neighborhood full of kids on summer break. Once again I thought I heard the distant rattle and roar of the Guardian Beast, but I saw no sign of it nearby.

My attention was jolted back around as the door opened with the scrape of loose weatherstripping over quarried flagstone. A blond girl, about fifteen years old, stood in the doorway. She was too thin for her gangly height, barefoot, her hair hanging loose almost to her waist, dressed in ragged cutoff jeans and two layers of T-shirts so thin and clinging that I could count her ribs through them. A pall of surly red and dull olive green energy hung on her. I remembered being that thin at her age and cast a glance down, to see the same kind of knobby, bruised, and calloused feet I still had.

She held on to the door and the frame, making a barrier, and shot one hip, tucking her chin down and staring at me as she did. “Yeah?”

“Are you a dancer?” I asked.

Her head came up and interest sparked in her eyes. “Yeah.”

I nodded. “Thought so. Ballet?”

She returned my nod. “And Irish step.”

I pointed at the scar on her right foot that gleamed too white in one world and jagged red in the other. “FHL release?”

“Yeah. About a year ago.”

“Still hurts, doesn’t it.”

“Like a bitch. I’m trying to keep it limber by going barefoot, but sometimes it still hurts.”

“Your PT doesn’t make you wrap the arch?”

She gave a bitter shrug. “Can’t afford to go anymore. Dad’s been sick and it’s eaten all the insurance and most of the cash.”

“Your dad’s Kevin Sterling?”

“Yeah.” She frowned. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Harper Blaine. I’m a private investigator.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh fuck. I can’t believe you people. Dad’s sick. I mean totally ill. He’s not sneaking around doing shit behind your backs. He’s not faking a coma, y’know!”

She started to shove the door closed but I wedged my right leg and shoulder in between the frame and the door. I’m still pretty skinny even though I haven’t danced in ten years or more and I didn’t want my too-prominent collarbones or less-than-perfect knees to take the worst of the impact, so I used the hard toe of my boot as a stopper. The door banged into the leather and rubber and bounced back a little, smacking the girl’s palm.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” I said, easing through the doorway and putting up one of my hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not with the insurance company or the hospital or any of those people. I don’t believe your dad is faking anything and I’m not here to get him in trouble. My client’s sister is the same way. We’re just trying to figure out what’s happening.”

“You mean, like, why she’s a veggie, like my dad?”

“No—we know why that happened. What we don’t know is why she’s doing weird things.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at me. “What kind of weird things?”

“She paints and she babbles and sometimes she throws things, but she’s not awake when she does it; she’s still in a coma. Does your dad do that kind of thing?”

She closed her eyes as if a burden had been removed. “Oh, man. We thought it was just him.”

Another woman called out from farther back in the house. “Olivia!”

The girl rolled her eyes. “I’m coming, Mom!” She looked at me again, biting her lip and frowning. “I’m not supposed to let you in.”

“I understand. But I want to help my client and if I can help her, that may help your dad. The more I know, the better the chances.”

Olivia sucked a breath in through her teeth, looking conflicted, her energy corona flashing and fluttering red and orange and pink by turns. She made up her mind. “Mom’s going to kill me, but come on. I’ll show you Dad.”

She led me through the foyer and into a half-finished hallway that went down the side of the house toward the back. “It’s kind of messy here. Dad was working on the new garage and stuff when he had his accident and no one’s ever finished it. Probably never will.”

“That sounds rough.”

“It kind of sucks.”

“Sounds it. What’s your dad do?”

“He’s a tunneling engineer—he was working on the waterfront project to replace the viaduct and part of the shaft collapsed and he got buried in the mud.”

“Why was he working on your house if he’s a tunnel guy?”

“He’s Mr. Fix-It. He’s always, like, ‘I can do that better.’ And usually, y’know, yeah. But this time . . .” She shook her head. “Fucking tunnel got him.”

“What are the weird things your dad’s been doing since his accident?”

Her voice got quieter as we walked and the colors around her became increasingly anxious shades of orange. “A while ago, he started writing stuff and then he started saying stuff. It really freaks my mom out. Well, it freaks me out, too, but I figure even though it’s kind of creepy, at least he’s trying. Y’know, somewhere in there he’s still . . . there, y’know?”

“So it makes sense. He’s writing to you and your mom?”

“No. That’s the creepy part. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not talking to us.” She stopped just before an open door and turned around to put a finger to her lips. She turned back and walked through the door, leaving me in the unfinished hall. I could hear the mutter and ping of life-support machines and monitors in the room beyond and see the dark green misery that rolled out of the room like smog.

My intrusive Grey vision left me with a strangely overlaid view of the room beyond the wall. Olivia’s fluttering colors of anxiety and anger buzzed through the cloud-filled space toward a storm front that boiled with ghosts and was pierced by a tight coil of green despair and fear.

“Hey, Mom,” Olivia said.

“What took you so long? Where have you been?” The words came forth strung on spiky orange filaments.

“I just went to the door, like you told me to.” Olivia sounded defensive and I could see her energy colors shifting toward red. It appeared that Olivia’s resentment burned on a short fuse and I wondered if this uncomfortable relationship was a symptom of stress from Sterling’s lingering state or if it had been this way before he was injured.

“You should have come right back. What took you so long and who were you talking to?”

I thought I could hear the eye roll that came with Olivia’s reply. “Mom,” she whined, making the word three syllables long. “Don’t get all over me. This lady was at the door and she said she might be able to help Dad, so I let her in.”

I figured that was my cue to step into the room.

Once through the door, I could see the room wasn’t much different from Julianne Goss’s—the space that had been a large bedroom was now a sickroom filled with machines—except that instead of paintings, drifts and piles of scrawled paper occupied every vertical space that wasn’t filled with equipment or plumbing. Stacks of yellow notepads and boxes of cheap pens lay on one of the rolling tray tables pushed near the large hospital bed. An emaciated form made barely a lump in the blankets on the bed, and had become the focus around which all else flowed, including the churning darkness-and-silver boil of ghosts.

A live middle-aged woman sat alone beside the bed on a desk chair that made her look waifish—not because the chair was so large but because she was so thin. I guessed from her pallor and the way her skin seemed loose over her bones that she’d been much plumper not long ago and her weight loss had been swift and unhealthy. Everything about her had gone dull. As there was no one else in the room, I assumed she was Olivia’s mother.

She looked at me as if she couldn’t imagine where I’d come from. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Harper Blaine, Mrs. Sterling. I work for a woman whose sister is in the same state as your husband.”

She frowned at me. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve had information that Mr. Sterling has episodes of strange behavior—writing, talking—as if he were awake, but he remains in a vegetative state—”

Mrs. Sterling jumped to her feet and surged toward me. “Who told you that? It’s not true! My Kevin isn’t faking being sick!” She slapped me with all the strength she could muster. Her bony hand felt like a giant bird’s claw striking my cheek, her fingernails leaving tracks on my skin.

I flinched away from her. She shoved me backward, screaming, “Get out! Get out!”

I’m not easy to move, but her anger added force to her efforts and I took an involuntary step backward. Olivia hopped out of our way and for a moment I could see the man in the bed clearly. Most of the ghosts had drawn aside as if disappointed in their efforts, while two foggy forms lingered, pressing inward until the darker of the two had flowed over the man and covered him like a shroud.

The man shivered and his left hand started scrabbling at the covers. “No soup today,” he said.

I stared. Olivia and Mrs. Sterling turned around, frozen for a moment. Then they rushed to the bed. Olivia tried to put a pen in the moving hand, but Mrs. Sterling knocked it aside and clutched her husband’s hand. “It’s just a spasm,” she said, as if she were reassuring herself. “It’s nothing. Just muscles twitching. It means nothing.”

“No, Mom!” Olivia cried, pulling at her. “He’s trying to write. Let go!”

She turned a furious expression on her daughter. “Shut up! Shut up. It’s not true. And you get that woman out of here, Olivia Pearl Sterling. You get her out! Now!” Then she cast a look at me, saying, “Leave us alone! Go the hell away!”

I was already backing into the hallway. I’d seen what I needed, and Mrs. Sterling wasn’t going to be any help, even though the situation seemed the same as at the Goss house: A seeking cloud of ghosts circled the room, each waiting for its chance to occupy the body of the patient, trying to say something that we couldn’t understand. It wasn’t all I wanted to know, but it was enough for now.

Olivia brushed past her mother in a flurry of frustration and anger, striding to me and pointing down the hall. I half expected her to leave me to find my own way out, but she came along.

At the front door, she stopped me with a hand on my arm. She was breathing heavily, as if we’d run to the door. “My mother . . . I’m sorry—she doesn’t understand. She’s afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of losing Dad’s L&I case. If they decide he’s not really . . . vegetative”—she clearly hated the word—“they’ll take back the benefits and we’ll lose the house and stuff.”

I was familiar with the state Labor and Industries Board and their often hard-nosed and by-the-book attitude toward long-term injury cases. I’d investigated plenty of suspected frauds for them when I was a lot hungrier. They weren’t as bad as some insurance companies, but they weren’t easygoing, either, and a case like this had to seem hinky to them.

I patted at the stinging fingernail-scrapes on my face. No blood now, though they itched and irritated my skin.

“I’m sorry—about your face,” Olivia said.

“It’s nothing. Aren’t you worried about the L&I case, too?”

Olivia bit her lip. “I am, but I want to help my dad. You saw—”

“I did. He writes a lot, doesn’t he?”

She nodded. “Mom used to let him, but now she tries to stop him. She can’t. He keeps on doing it. If he can’t use a pen, he’ll just use his fingers like he’s drawing in the sand. I don’t understand most of what he writes, but it’s not nonsense. You said you could help him—can you?”

“Not right away. I need to know more.”

“Is this like the other lady? Like your client?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“What is it? Don’t tell me it’s just muscle spasms. I know what a muscle spasm is and that’s not it.”

I peered at her. “Do you believe in God?”

She gave me that look of incredulity and disgust that teenage girls are so good at. “What? Are you some kind of religious nut?”

“No, I just wanted to know how to express this. I take it you don’t go to church much.”

“No. So what?” she added, crossing her arms over her too-thin chest.

I returned my best professional briefing expression. “My client believes her sister is possessed. She’s a religious woman and that’s the word she understands for what seems to be happening. But when I say ‘possessed’ I don’t mean that a demon has taken over the body, but that some other entity is momentarily in control. That’s what I think is happening to her and to your dad. Some other spirit is pushing through, trying to say something but not making itself clear to us.”

“But what about my dad? Isn’t this my dad trying to talk to us?”

“I think he’s unable to shove the others aside—they’re stronger than he is and there are a lot of them. They’re very upset and if I can find out why, or who they are, I may be able to solve their problem so they’ll go away and let your dad come back on his own.”

She pursed her lips and scowled, thinking. “How do you know this shit? How do you know what’s happening to my dad?”

I sighed. “I can see them—the ghosts.”

“You’re some kind of psychic, like that chick on TV?”

I almost laughed. “No. I’m not like that at all.”

“You can’t make my dad come back? Like, call him to his body or something?”

“No. That’s not how it works. At least not for me. The human spirit is stubborn. We’re a troublesome bunch. We don’t like to shut up and go away, even when we’re dead. We reshape the whole world to suit us, even the world we can’t see. And something has made these lingering spirits so frantic to speak up that they are bullying people like your dad—the ones who are kind of in between here and there.”

“You said there’s more people like my dad. How many?”

“Just two that I know of, but that’s a lot, if you think about it.”

She gazed at me, her lower lip pugnacious and downturned, thinking hard. Finally she said, “Are you going to help us or not?”

“I’m going to help all of you. But I need help from you, too.”

“What kind?”

“I would like to see some of the papers your dad has written and, if you can remember any of it, a transcript of what he’s been saying. I need to know where he was injured and how long he’s been like this.”

“I’ll get the papers. Mom won’t care if I take them. I don’t know if I can remember the things he’s said but I’ll try. And he was working on a site down near King Street and Alaskan Way when he was hurt. What else?”

Something had been bugging me and I had to ask, “How long has your mom been sick?”

“She’s not sick. She just can’t gain weight.”

“And that doesn’t seem strange to you? Wasn’t she . . . fatter when your dad was hurt?” I chose the word because I knew how dancers felt about the subject of weight and body form. To someone who starves herself, overexercises, and may even do drugs to keep her weight down, any normal degree of plumpness represents the hated “fat.” There’s nothing so cruel as telling another dancer she’s overweight and I couldn’t imagine Olivia had never been angry enough at her mother to shout that mean little word.

Olivia started, tears sparking a moment before she looked horrified at the direction of her thoughts. “Mom was never . . . fat. But she has lost some weight. I’d swear she eats like a pig, but she never gains an ounce—always been jealous of that. We’re all thin in this family.”

“That’s not thin, what your mom is. She’s skinny like someone starving herself.”

“But I told you: She eats all the time!” She threw her hands up in exasperation.

“All the time?”

“Like, five meals a day. I think it’s ’cause she’s stressed over Dad.” Olivia scowled for a moment. Then her face softened as she gave it some thought. “Oh, man . . . that’s so weird. I hadn’t thought about it. . . . Maybe she’s got, like, a parasite or something.”

“Maybe. You need to look after her—and yourself. Do you have brothers or sisters?”

She nodded. “Yeah, two brothers. They’re older than me. They help; they’re just not home right now.”

“Good. Get one of them to help your mom while you come out to bring those papers to me.” I handed her my card. “I promise to do everything I can for your dad.”

“A real promise, or an adult-to-kid promise?”

I wondered what the story was behind that question, but I answered, “I only make the real kind.”

Olivia put out her hand. “Deal. I’ll call when I want to come over. I might have to sneak out. Mom’s freaky about me leaving the house ever since . . . you know.”

“I understand,” I said, shaking her hand. “Don’t do anything risky. If you need my help, or if you can’t come, just let me know. We’ll find another way.”

She smiled at “we.” “Yeah, we will.” She cast a glance over her shoulder, then gave me a conspiratorial grin and a thumbs-up. “Merde!” she whispered, before she turned and closed the door.

I chuckled. It had been a very long time since anyone had offered me one of the dancer’s versions of “good luck.” I suspected I’d need it.

As I walked toward my truck, I got the feeling someone was watching me. I turned back and eyed the Sterling house, but I saw no sign that anyone observed me from there. Still . . . I felt like prey—something I don’t care to be. I considered dropping into the Grey and looking for the observer in the bright mist, but there was no guarantee that would put me at an advantage. If my stalker was paranormal, I might be giving them an opening I’d regret. I kept walking, stretching my senses as far as I could while remaining in the normal world and without making it too obvious that I was aware of my tail. I doubted they thought I was clueless, but I didn’t see a point in putting them on alert.

I was pretty sure they’d have to break for their own vehicle once I got into the truck—or make it obvious there was a second team on me—though I found the idea of a major surveillance team following me around Seattle ridiculous. Who’d be interested in a small-time PI who sees ghosts? I wasn’t working on anything sensitive or significant that I knew of. In spite of Mrs. Sterling’s worries about L&I, there wasn’t any real intrigue about the case in hand. If someone was observing the Sterling house on a fraud investigation, they would just make note of my presence and drop in for a chat if they were really interested. But as I moved away, the sense of being observed persisted. I stopped and dug around in my pockets for my keys, taking a moment to scan the area and peep back over my arm as I gave up on my pockets and began rooting in my bag instead.

Something moved in opposition to the delicate breeze rippling the leaves overhead and left a thin trail of red-gold in the corner of my damaged vision. Yeah, someone was following me. I sighed, annoyed. I don’t have a great tolerance for being tailed, watched, bugged, investigated, or eavesdropped upon. It makes me cranky. The only quandary was whether I wanted to shake them off on general principle more than I wanted to know why they found me so fascinating.

Screw it, I thought. Let them be bored a while; I had more important things to do than wound their feelings by blowing them off now. I’d lose them later and then see where they popped back up—as they would do if they were seriously interested. If it was a casual tail, what did it matter if they dragged along? I was only heading back to my office to see if anything had turned up about Jordan Delamar and to manage some paperwork for other cases. Hardly an exciting afternoon.