Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for Greywalker

  “Nonstop action with an intriguing premise, a great heroine, and enough paranormal complications to keep you on the edge of your seat. Richardson’s characters are multidimensional and engaging, and I enjoyed this book all the way through.”

  —Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author of Definitely Dead

  “Contemporary fantasy meets urban noir in Richardson’s intriguing debut. . . . Well produced, pleasingly peopled, with a strong narrative and plenty of provocative plot lines: a superb beginning to the series that’s unquestionably in the offing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

  “A genuinely likable and independent heroine with a unique view of reality. Following in the tradition of Tanya Huff and Jim Butcher, this is a strong addition to the growing body of urban fantasy mysteries.”

  —Library Journal

  “An appealing debut, Greywalkerhas an opinionated, stubborn, and likable heroine, and a plot that clicks along with nary a hitch.”

  —Romantic Times

  “This book kicks ass. . . . Like Charlie Huston’s Already Dead and Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, Greywalkeris a perfect blend of hard-boiled PI and supernatural thriller. It’ll grab you from the first page and won’t let you go until the last.”

  —Crimespree Magazine

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Kathleen Richardson, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRATA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Richardson, Kat.

  Poltergeist / Kat Richardson. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-62018-8

  1. Private investigators—Fiction. I. Title PS3618.I3447P’.6—dc22 2007004844

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  THIS IS FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WORKING TO LEGALIZE FERRETS IN CALIFORNIA.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to all the usual suspects for their support and patience: my husband; my mother-in-law, Sandy, the guerrilla bookmark distributor; my family in California, who forbore to slap me silly when I deserved it; my fabulous agents, Steve and Joshua, and all their associates; the stellar team at Penguin/Roc—Anne, Ginjer, Cherilyn, Sarah, and the talented production team too numerous to list; the lovely lunatics at Bouchercon, RAM, and Crimespree; friends and family in person and those online; all the wonderful writers who’ve helped me along the way and put up with my whinging about this book; and the readers who pestered me to “write faster !” And a shout-out to the Seattle bookstore folks who let me run rampant through their shops in this novel.

  Special thanks to: Richard Kaufman of the Genii Forums for help with table-tapping techniques; Detective Nathan Janes for information about SPD criminal and homicide investigations (I fudged a bit here and there to make things more dramatic); and to the friends who let me borrow their names for characters in this book (Ken George, Ana Choi, Rey and Karen Solis)—any resemblance to their real selves or lives is strictly imaginary.

  If I’ve forgotten someone—and I’m sure I’ve forgotten many someones—I hope they will forgive me my Swiss-cheese memory. I’m indebted for everyone’s assistance, and where I’ve gotten things wrong, it’s entirely my own fault.

  PROLOGUE

  Living, lambent fog overlay the living room around me. Vague shapes and eddies moved through the gleaming mist trailing subtle colors while the bright gold of the house’s protective spell coiled around the structure like a friendly vine. It was almost restful in that place and company, though I doubted I’d ever come to like it. Though Mara Danziger was safely in the normal world while I was in the Grey, I was able to see the sleeping child in her lap as a white shape, and my friend had been shrouded in a blur of blue light and gold sparks. I was even able to hear her, though the sound had a slight underwater quality to it.

  “You know, you don’t go slipping accidentally anymore,” Mara said in her tumbling Irish voice. “That’s good. Are you still seeing things the same way?”

  “Yes, and no,” I murmured, sitting on the couch—the shadowy shape of a couch on my side—and closing my eyes. “When I’m in here, it’s not much different. When I’m outside, I can look at it without having to go all the way into the Grey, but I see layers now, and colors—people and things have . . . colors, like threads, tangles, glows. I can slide down below the fog if I want to and look at the power lines—”

 
“Can you, indeed?”

  “Yeah. The deep part of the Grey is like . . . It’s all bright lines, like computer drawings.” Then I shut up because I didn’t want to say that the lines weren’t just lines or conduits or paths; they were somehow alive and I felt compelled to conceal that.

  Mara was quiet a moment. “I think that’s the grid itself—the network I’ve told you of, through which raw magic flows.”

  “What are the colors? What do they mean?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry to say you’ll know more than I on that score. I don’t see magic as you do. The glows are auras, but the others . . . I’d guess they’re connections, like electric cords that connect related things in the Grey to each other or plug the things into the power grid, but I’m not sure. Y’could ask Ben, if he can stay awake long enough. Between the class schedules and keeping after the child, we’ve neither of us enough free time to spit.”

  The Danzigers were both instructors at the University of Washington—Mara taught geology and Ben languages and linguistics—but they each had personal interests in the paranormal and they’d helped me out with this Grey business from the very beginning. Ben was the theoretician and scholar. Mara, being a witch, was a bit more practical.

  Mara continued. “Still, you’re doing much, much better than a few months ago. Feeling better about it?”

  I drew a deep breath, pushing the Grey away, and opened my eyes as I exhaled. “I don’t feel sick all the time,” I replied. “And I don’t have to live in it, most of the time. Sometimes it still gets the better of me and I fall in, but mostly I have control of it more than it has of me.”

  Mara grinned at me from her couch, her green eyes sparkling, and said, “Don’t go getting too cocky, now, Harper. There’s still a vast trickiness to the Grey.”

  I snorted. That was not news to me, even then.

  That was a couple of months ago. We’d been sitting on the matching couches in the Danzigers’ living room, a sunny, comfortable spot and a far cry from the slippery mist-world of the Grey—the here/not here place that lies like a fringe of shadow between the normal and the paranormal. It’s the world of ghosts, vampires, and magic, and I am one of its few dual citizens. There are people like Mara—witches and so on—who can touch the Grey in some way and draw power or information from it, but as far as I know, only ghosts and monsters truly live there. I, however, seem to be half in and half out all the time. I can’t do magic, or exorcise spirits, or anything flashy like that: I’m a Greywalker—a human who can enter the Grey and move through it as if it were the normal world. Apparently I got this way when I died for a couple of minutes.

  So far, no one had been able to explain why me and not everyone else medical technology pulls back from clinical death, but I seemed to be the only Greywalker around the Pacific Northwest. There didn’t appear to be a cure or even a way to quit, but Mara and Ben had been teaching me how to keep it under control and how to stay out of trouble, insofar as I could stay out of trouble. My work and the Grey seemed to intersect more often than I’d have liked and it hadn’t been pleasant. As a private investigator, I usually carried a pretty dull case-load, but once the ghosts and vampires found me, things got weird fast.

  In October, months after the calm on the couch, I wished that the meeting I was driving to would be normal, even boring, but since I’d been recommended by Ben, the self-proclaimed “ghost guy,” I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope. Within a few minutes of my arrival, even that bit of hope was totally dashed.

  ONE

  I sat in a boxlike office for twenty-three minutes as Professor Gartner Tuckman told me that he and a motley group of strangers had made a ghost. Not in the film noir, bang-bang sense but in the creepy, woo-woo sense. Frankly, I found Tuckman creepier than some of the ghosts I’ve met. He was thin and intense with a hectoring, arrogant manner, a sharp voice, and the cultivated piercing gaze of a silent film villain. He was also a liar—at least by omission.

  I held up a finger to stem the battering wash of his words. “Let me see if I understand this, Dr. Tuckman. You put together a group of people who made up a ghost and haunted themselves?”

  “No. They did not ‘haunt’ anything. There is no ghost. It’s an artificial entity powered by their own belief and expectation. The parapsychologists would call it a group thought-form—”

  “I thought you were a parapsychologist.”

  He scoffed. “I’m a psychologist. I study the minds of people, not spooks. The point of this project is observing how rational individuals become irrational in groups and how that is reinforced by the group itself. In re-creating the Philip experiments, I gave them an acceptable focus for their irrationality.”

  “The group in the Philip experiments claimed to have created an artificial poltergeist, right? Psychokinetic phenomena and all.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Overly simplified, but yes.”

  “So you told your group to make up a ghost, believe in it, hold these séances, and they’d get phenomena. Did they?”

  Tuckman tossed his head. “Of course they did. Regardless of anything else questionable about the Philip experiments, they did, undeniably, manifest minor instances of psychokinesis—PK. Once my group had that information, they became open to the idea that it could be done. Then I supported their belief in the phenomena so they produced PK effects on their own.”

  “You’re sure this isn’t a real poltergeist?” I asked.

  “Poltergeists don’t exist. They’re the conflation of simple events, suggestion, coincidence, and minor stress-induced PK activity by the operator. There is no ‘ghost’ involved. Just people. By reinforcing their expectations and subconscious irrational beliefs, I hope to see how far they’ll suspend rationality before they rein themselves in.”

  “Your group produces measurable, reproducible PK phenomena?”

  “Yes. But suddenly the phenomena are off the scale. We’ve had a massive jump in the number and strength of the phenomena, as well as the kind. I think one of the participants is faking additional phenomena. I want you to find out who is doing this and stop them, help me get them out of the group before they ruin the experiment.”

  “If the faked phenomena are helping the group believe in ghosts, how is that bad for you?”

  Tuckman glowered. “Because those phenomena aren’t under my control and are too far outside probability to be legitimate responses.”

  I sat back in my slick chair and let Tuckman stew in his angry silence. His request—and his anger—didn’t make sense. He wanted to see how far his group would go, but when they went farther than he expected, he assumed he was being scammed. He didn’t seem to believe in the paranormal himself, but he’d accepted PK—or had he? I tilted a glance at Tuckman through the Grey and watched green tendrils dart out from around him like tiny snakes striking at flies. I hadn’t seen anything quite like that before, but I could make a good guess what it meant.

  “Why do I have the feeling you’re not telling me something, Dr. Tuckman?”

  “Nothing you need to know.”

  Fat chance. I stood up and slung my bag over my shoulder. “Dr. Tuckman, I doubt Ben Danziger told you I was an idiot when he recommended me, so why you’re treating me like one I don’t know. But I don’t need the money enough—or the aggravation—to work for a client who lies to me or hires me under false pretenses. If you want a serious investigation, you’ll have to level with me about your ringer, because I’d find him or her eventually. But if what you really want is a patsy to go through the motions and take the blame for something, you need to look elsewhere.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I gave him the tired face. “Bullshit. You said you reinforced the group’s expectations. The easiest way to do that is to create apparent PK phenomena yourself—or have a confederate do it for you. I’ve seen plenty of con games and this is pretty much the same thing—get someone or a group of someones to believe they’re special, then you see how much you can get from them before the
y figure out they’re being conned. Now, I don’t care about the particulars of your experimental technique, but if you want me to find your problem—assuming you really have one—you have to disclose the truth. What you tell me is confidential, but I don’t work well in the dark and I get a bit testy when I feel like I’m being had—or set up.”

  I stood and stared at him a moment. He gave me the villain eyes again. I rolled mine in response. “Fine,” I said and turned to go.

  Tuckman leapt up. “No, wait.” I felt his hand close on my upper arm. The cold of his personality licked my skin like the little green snakes I’d glanced in his aura.

  I spun back, yanking my arm loose, and gave him a glare that burned up from the very depths of the dead through the network of Grey that limned my bones—the “gift” of a meddlesome vampire that tied me into the grid at the deepest level of the Grey. Tuckman pulled his hand back to his side with a sharp inhalation.

  “I’m—I apologize, Ms. Blaine. I need to find the individual who’s undermining my project and I cannot do it myself. I do have a . . . confederate in the séance group who helps reinforce the phenomena. Please sit down and we can discuss it further.”

  I sighed and gave the chair a sour look. It was bowl-shaped and upholstered in repulsive green vinyl. I threw my bag into it and pulled out my notebook, again. Still on my feet, I turned back to Tuckman as he returned to his desk chair.

  I can’t like every client—economics doesn’t let me be that choosy—but I disliked and distrusted Tuckman and was sure I’d regret staying on. I comforted myself with the petty pleasure that at five foot ten I towered over him.