Poltergeist

Dornier started scooping up his pads and pens and followed Tuckman out of the booth, not quite closing the door. I heard them talking in the hall as I lingered, watching the other room for signs of any further Grey activity. Through the glass, I couldn't see any if it was there, and the people wandering through the space gave no indication that anything new disturbed them—they seemed excited the way some people do after an accident, but not as if they were still experiencing anything surreal.

Tuckman reappeared on the other side of the glass in a few minutes, rounding up the participants and urging them downstairs. I went out into the hallway once it was clear of study participants. There was an odd scent to the air from the séance room: a whiff of something sharp and burned, a hint of iodine—the lighter perfume of its earlier, unca

Dornier met me in the hallway with a fistful of yellow paper.

"I had to transcribe these," he said, thrusting out the notes to me.

"Thanks, Terry." Now I was glad he'd introduced himself before, since Tuckman had just waved at him as if graduate assistants were as interchangeable as Shakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. "Can I call you if I have any questions about these readings?”

He shrugged. "I guess. You're working for Tuck.”

"Terry," I started, uncomfortable, but needing to ask, "do you believe that's all. . real? That they couldn't actually be raising something paranormal in there?”

He snorted. "If you think it's really some ghost or spook or something, you had better be prepared to back yourself up—all the way to the wall Tuck'll shove you into if you come up with crap like that. Hard proof. Whatever you think it is. . you better have stone-hard proof it can't be anything else.”

I frowned at him but said nothing before I excused myself and headed out with the papers in hand and a list of questions already tabulating in my head. Dornier had quite the sandpaper personality and I suspected he wasn't the only one. The tone of the byplay in the séance had been more tense than I'd expected for a group that supposedly worked together to create a ghost—their clowning had an edge to it. It was an odd group and I needed some immediate information about what I'd just witnessed.

As Tuckman's ringer, Mark Lupoldi was supposedly vital to the production of high-level PK phenomena, yet we'd all seen something that was beyond the group's normal activity in spite of Mark's absence. I was more convinced now that Tuckman's problem wasn't attributable only to normal, human activity. The recordings and monitor readings might help me figure out what had happened, since I'd been unable to see into the Grey much through the mirror—another thing I'd have to bring up with Mara and Ben Danziger. But first, I needed to find out why Lupoldi hadn't shown up for the séance session. And I hoped he'd be able—and willing—to tell me how the system worked and how one of the participants could have boosted it without anyone else knowing. It looked paranormal to me, from what I'd seen and from Tuckman's reaction. But as Dornier had said, I'd have to prove it couldn't be anything else.

I paged Quinton and left a message that I couldn't pick up Chaos yet. He might be stuck with her furry company for a while longer. I had to pin down Lupoldi.

CHAPTER 5

I drove over to Lupoldi’s apartment in the Fremont district. Autumn twilight was already falling with a scent of impending rain. I knew the address was near the troll under the Aurora Bridge—a cement sculpture of a life-sized monster crawling from beneath the structure to snatch an ancient VW. Along with the amusement rocket mounted to a building and the heroic bronze of Lenin that stood in the patio of a fast-food restaurant, it was typical of the neighborhood the locals had dubbed the Center of the Universe and others called the Haight-Ashbury of Seattle, in spite of a recent spate of yuppification. Parking is always bad in that funky little neighborhood and worse so close to quitting time, so I didn't even try to get close. I left my old Land Rover in a pay lot near the supermarket on Fremont Boulevard and started hiking up the hill.

The street was choked with cop cars. An unpleasant cold trickled down my spine at the sight. I paused outside the building and looked it over; a grim black and yellow haze wrapped it. I narrowed my eyes, searching the Grey shroud for anything that might be lurking, but all I spotted were confused or fragmented shapes and shadows.

My study was interrupted by a voice near my ear. "You have business in this building, Ms. Blaine?”

I shook myself and refocused my vision on the man in front of me. Detective Rey Sous: a wiry, dark-haired Colombian émigré with a face like the surface of Mars. I hadn't seen him since wed both been looking for the same hit-and-run witness over a year ago. His sloe-eyed calm was as impenetrable as ever but the uncharacteristic red-orange gleam around him made me wary. This aura thing might be useful once I figured it out, but that particular color didn't reassure me.

"I thought I did," 1 replied.

"Now not so much?”

I tried to shrug, but it didn't come off so well. "Don't know. What about you?”

"Homicide.”

I felt sick. Solis watched me. He glanced at the building, then back to me.

"I wanted to talk to the tenant of apartment seven on business.”

"Client?”

"No, just information-gathering for a case.”

Solis made a tiny tilt of his head. "Come up.”

I followed him into the old brick building and up to the second floor. The dim hallway smelled of musty carpet and resonated with conversations and TV noises from the open doorways of curious neighbors. The closer we got to apartment seven, the colder and queasier I felt.

The door was open, bright light flooding out, and the crime lab crew was still crawling over everything. The photographer was done and heading out the door as we stopped just outside. Solis stood with his back to the room. Looking at him, I could also study the room beyond without entering the crime scene.

It was a small no-bedroom apartment with a Murphy bed folded up into the hallway wall and a long counter that served as a kitchenette to the left of the door. A bicycle with a U-shaped lock leaned against the far wall under the window. The closet and bathroom shared the wall on the tight with a blood-spattered dent about the size and shape of a man. The room was hazy with layers of memory and Grey shapes left by past occupants and, to my eyes, thick with a swirling miasma of red and black. The reek of the fumed cyanoacrylate used to pick up fingerprints carried an unca

Solis noticed my gagging shudder. "We don't have a positive ID yet, but I'm assuming the victim was the tenant. Can you identify him?”

I shook my head. "I never met him. He was supposed to show up for a lab demonstration at PNU, but he didn't. I came to find out why.”

The coroner's crew was preparing to bag the body, which lay crumpled and facedown on the ragged carpet by the dented wall. As they rolled it into the bag, the weirdly limp form flopped and the misshapen head lolled, turning its staring face my way for an instant.

The silent force of an unreleased scream crashed into me. I jolted backward a step, squeezing my eyes shut and pressing my hand over my own mouth. The shock of the blow drained away. Solis put his hand on my shoulder and I shook him off. "What did that?" I demanded. I thought, if he'd been dead a few hours, shouldn't the body be stiffer?