Possession (7 page)

“It was . . . very loud. There are a lot of ghosts in here and they’re clustered around Julianne, waiting for an opportunity to . . . use her, I guess. But they were very interested in you once you started calling to them. And then they were babbling and it sounded like a bunch of pieces trying to make one whole or . . . well, more like a jumbled signal that needed to be adjusted. So I tried to ‘tune’ the ghosts a bit, I guess you’d say, trying to get the bits of the noise to line up into an intelligible sound. It was just a guess, though.”

“Seems to have been the right one. But, man, that was really unpleasant.”

“Ghosts generally are.”

He frowned at me. “I don’t find them to be. They’re just . . . needy. Scared. Lonely. Like the living.”

“That’s a nice commentary on your fellow man.”

“I mean the things that make them seek help are the same things that make living people do it. And like us, they sometimes do the wrong thing or don’t know how to express themselves. People don’t get wiser when they get deader.”

“That’s the truth.”

“So, now what do you plan to do?”

“I need to find those other patients and see if they truly are manifesting anything like Julianne’s behavior. With three cases, I might find something they have in common that could tell me what’s happening.”

“I’d like to come along.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t keen on having an impromptu partner, but I had to admit Stymak had been able to make contact with the ghosts in a way I couldn’t. I wasn’t certain I’d have been able to get any information out of them on my own. “I’m not sure it’s a great idea . . .” I started.

“It’s a better idea than keeping our information to ourselves. We both want to find out what’s going on with Julie and I’m not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t been here to push that ghost off me. I’m scared, to be honest. But you’re not scared.”

I made a face. “Oh, I’m scared. I just know it doesn’t help, so I’m going ahead anyhow.”

Stymak brightened up. “Good! Then I’m sticking with you.”

Whether I liked it or not, it appeared I had a sidekick. Or something like that. “It may take a while to track these guys down,” I said. “I can start on that. Could you get started deciphering yesterday’s recording?”

“Oh, crap! I forgot to send it to you. I knew I’d forgotten something.” He looked abashed. “I’ll get it done today. I still haven’t figured out what language it is—if it is a language.”

“Don’t worry about it. Once you get it to me, I’ll have a friend of mine work on it too. It’ll go faster that way.”

Stymak nodded. “All right. I’ll stay with Julianne for a while and then head back to my place to work on the file. She usually gets pretty quiet in the middle of the day.”

“Maybe she’s exhausted by then.”

“Could be. . . .”

I turned back to Lily Goss and Eva Wrothen, who had settled down near the bed. Julianne was apparently asleep—or whatever one called the state she was in. Wrothen kept shooting me furtive glances. I wondered what she thought I was going to do. Maybe she’d noticed my tendency to become a bit see-through when I dropped toward the Grey. Most people ignore it, but those who do notice are often a little freaked out at the sight. I hadn’t been too hard on her . . . had I?

I frowned and turned my attention back to Stymak.

“All right, if we’re going to work on this together, you stay here and observe Julianne or work with the ghosts—you know better what’s yielding information in this situation than I do. And be very careful—I don’t want you to have another problem with a ghost trying to harm you. I’ll get started finding those other patients. Send me the audio files as soon as you can and I’ll send you the information I dig up. When we’re both up to speed, we can get together and decide how to proceed.”

Stymak nodded. I started to leave, pausing for a moment by the bed. The dark shape that had descended over Julianne wavered and heaved like a sail in a gusty wind and as I listened, it sighed and groaned, “Leave, leave, leave . . .” No one else seemed to have heard. I wanted to touch the dark form and see if I could communicate with it, but I was afraid the motion might seem sinister to Goss and Wrothen.

“Ms. Goss,” I began, then turned my gaze to include the nurse. “Ms. Wrothen, would you mind if I touched Julianne?”

Wrothen scowled. “In what way?”

“Just my hand on her hand.”

Wrothen looked at Goss, who bit her lip but nodded assent.

I drew as close to the bed as machines and rails would allow and reached out to take Julianne’s left hand. The first thing I felt was wet paint and I realized she’d been using that hand to paint with. Then I felt a cold jolt that traveled up my arm and zinged across the back of my eyes, warping my vision into a static-filled haze of darkness shattered by jagged curtains of shifting colors. The shock stole my breath and I gasped, taking in air gone ice-sharp. There was no summer here. The darkness hovering over Julianne lashed at me with thin whips of silver mist that left a howling despair and anger behind as they passed through my flesh. “This is mine! Go away!” They weren’t so much words as they were the strongest mental impression of a shout.

I held out for a moment against the pressure, pain, and cold, trying to see the shape of whatever held sway over the body of Julianne Goss, but all I could make out with either eye was a dull, unbroken blackness that cloaked her form like a drenched blanket. No more enlightened than I had been before, I broke the connection and pulled my hand away from hers, easing back from the edge of the Grey.

The two women beside me stared at me with expectant expressions—Lily’s more hopeful than Wrothen’s.

“What did you see?” Lily asked, hesitating as if she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.

“Just darkness.”

“Is that . . . bad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does something have possession of my sister?”

“In a way, but what it is and why it’s acting like this is still a mystery to me. It doesn’t seem to be harming her . . . any more than she’s already been harmed, but it’s not helping her heal, either. It’s a lot of angry and confused something—it might even be Julianne herself.”

Goss grabbed the hand I’d laid on her sister’s, her head enveloped in hopeful shades of blue with white sparks. “Can you help her? Can you figure out what it is?”

“I will, one way or another, with Mr. Stymak’s help. You and Ms. Wrothen need to keep her safe and well until we do.”

Wrothen made a soft snorting sound in the back of her throat, but didn’t say anything while giving me the evil eye, her aura spiking out in an annoyed shade of pumpkin orange. At least she seemed to be back to her normal grumpy self—which was better than conflicted and confused—and I had the impression she didn’t like me much. Not that that’s new: A lot of people and things don’t like me.

FIVE

_I
didn’t see Quin
ton 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.