Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2)

by Kat Richardson

  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.”

  “ ’Scuse 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.

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday morning my headache had abated but I woke up feeling tired nonetheless and wished I had been drinking to justify feeling so hungover—at least then I’d have felt I deserved it. My morning run seemed to be uphill all the way and the air was thick and unpleasant. The ferret demonstrated a degree of ire at being returned to her cage that is more commonly seen in goofy Japanese cartoons, so at least I went on my way chuckling at her expense.

  I hung out in the PNU Psychology Department office until Denise Francisco showed up for work. She took a look at me as she ducked into her desk and dropped a large, black canvas purse on the floor with a thump.

  She avoided eye contact. “Tuck isn’t in yet,” she said. She snatched a lumpy blue coffee mug the size of a walrus off the desktop and headed back out the door. I followed her.

  “I’ve seen all of Dr. Tuckman that I care to for a while,” I said. “I came to talk to you.”

  Still thirty going on nineteen, she was wearing a short, flippy skirt over her pudgy hips with several layers of too-tight tank tops under a black denim jacket. If she hadn’t been wearing cherry red Dr. Martens she would have scurried, but no one scurries in midcalf mosh boots. She whisked into another doorway that turned out to be a break room. She snatched the coffeepot off its warming plate and cursed loudly and creatively as the merest gloop of black, overboiled coffee oozed into her mug.

  “Thirteen paralytic virgins and a partridge in a rutting pear tree! Who drank all the coffee already! You people suck, do you hear me? You S-U-Q-Q, suck! You couldn’t give a blow job in a wind tunnel! If manners were makeup, you’d need plastic surgery first! Homeless winos put their hands on their wallets and cross to the opposite side of the street when they see you p
eople coming!”

  A voice floated out from somewhere deeper in the warren of offices: “Keep goin’, Frankie. My abs need the workout.”

  She bent over—almost exposing more than the stiff black net of her trendy petticoat—and scrabbled through a cabinet beneath the coffeemaker. “Goddamn it,” she muttered. “They got the hazelnut.” She straightened and glared at me. “Do you drink coffee?”

  I blinked at her. “Yes.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Starbucks?”

  “Only when desperate.”

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “The project. Terry said you worked on it for a while. I need to know more.”

  She shoved her massive mug at me. “Get this filled with hazelnut coffee that doesn’t taste like crude oil and I’ll tell you anything.”

  I looked at the cup, then looked back up at Frankie. “No.”

  She pouted. “No? Why should I tell you anything if you won’t do something for me first?”

  “Because I can just sit and watch you have a coffee jones until you give in and it costs me nothing, whereas filling that portable black hole of a mug will cost me twenty dollars and a half hour of time I won’t enjoy in the least.”

  She stared at me and poked the tip of her tongue out to flicker over her top lip like a snake tasting the air. Then she huffed and turned away, saying, “I’ll be right back.”

  She marched off into the warren and I heard the laughing voice yell briefly before she returned with the mug half full.

  “OK,” she announced. “I can stand to shackle myself to this job for about half an hour now. Or until Tuck gets in.” She rolled her eyes. “Whichever. C’mon. Back to the pillory.”

  Frankie slurped some coffee and headed to the Psych office with me in tow.

  “You don’t seem too . . . pleased with this job,” I hazarded.

  “Oh, God, no,” she replied, sliding back behind her desk. “I only came because of Tuckman. I used to be one of his grad students at the University of Washington—I thought he glided across water like eiderdown. Tells you what a big dope I was, huh?” She slurped coffee at every conversational turn.

  “Anyhow, so, when Tuck got the chop at the U, I was still trying to finish up my thesis, so I transferred here to follow him and the project. I helped him set up the room and the protocols, and I’m still typing up his project reports, but . . .”

  “I heard that coming. But what?” I asked, leaning on the counter.

  “I have learned to my sorrow that Dr. Gartner Tuckman is a particular variety of dickweed that grows in the slimiest of swamps composed of rotten, overinflated ego. He is—to be delicate about it—a manipulative, unethical jerk who slants his protocol to get the result he wants. He only got the offer here because PNU was too starry-eyed about him to see he thinks this school is a second—no—a third-rate babysitting service for spoiled brats too stupid to get into a ‘real’ college. And he’s got too big an ego to realize how lucky he is that no one spilled the beans about why he left U-Dub in the first place.”

  “And why did he?” I prompted, not because I had to, but because it was obvious she wanted me to and I didn’t mind playing along a little, so long as she was talking.

  “Technically it was a cutback, but really they were looking for a reason to get rid of him without looking like big idiots. His last couple of projects were major money pits. He’s got a magic touch for making money go places it shouldn’t and getting away with it, but his last projects at U-Dub didn’t clean up so well and they both got buried because Tuckman’s favorite thing is manipulating his subjects—and his assistants—into going way too far for safety or good sense. He likes to push people and he sets up experiments that push them to push others. People got hurt, but Tuck was able to blame some of the assistants and the participants and get away with it—mostly. Everybody on the review board must have known he’d been playing fast and loose with the cash and messing up his subjects, but they didn’t have enough proof to do anything but unload him at the first opportunity. Which they did.”

  “And he took up where he left off when he got here?”

  Frankie nodded. “Pretty much. He always wanted to try this ghost thing. At first I was all for it—I thought it would be kind of neat—but it’s not. It’s crap. And he’s not being straight with anybody. He’s doing the same bad things.”

  “How so?”

  “OK, you understand this experiment is a really dangerous idea. Tuck’s got this bunch of kind of wacky people thinking they can levitate stuff and make things appear out of thin air. This was supposed to be PK by committee, remember, but Tuck’s stopped emphasizing that little detail. He’s letting them think they have the power individually as well as collectively. Can you imagine what’s going to happen to them when this project breaks up? He’s got these guys thinking they can do anything—like they’re all Superman or something—that the rules of the normal world don’t apply to them. You know what we call people who think like that? We call ’em psychopaths. The whole thing’s just creepy and I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to show, but I’m betting it’ll be nasty—’cause with Tuck it always is.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “Because I now owe PNU for my graduate program. So I took this job and—naturally—they put me in the Psych Department, where I have to see Mr. Ego every day except Friday. I’m trying to get a different job, but there isn’t anything available midterm. Unless someone dies.”

  “You know, Tuck thinks someone is sabotaging his project. . . .”

  She giggled and drained the coffee mug. “Well, it’s not me. I’m trying to make sure no one gets hurt if I can help it. That’s why I volunteer to clean up the room for him—so I can see if he’s changed anything. I wouldn’t put it past him to electrify the chairs or something like that if he thought it would get him a novel reaction or push his subjects just a bit further. So I check for stuff every time I do the room. So far, so good. Although, you know, I heard he’s got a theft problem.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. His poltergeist is a magpie. Likes shiny things. Steals people’s keys and loots the women’s purses. Always has, from day one. I was kind of surprised he just let you have those keys since he’d be in six feet of deep-fried trouble if they got lost.”

  “How much trouble would he be in if he lost an assistant?”

  “Depends on how he lost him,” she chortled. “You mean, like, quit—no problem. You mean, like, dead—not so good.”

  She didn’t know. “Do you read the paper or watch the news?”

  “As infrequently as possible—I don’t need any more nightmares than I got out of Tuck the past few years. Why?”

  “Did you know Mark Lupoldi?”

  “Tuck’s special effects guy? Sure.”

  “He was killed last Wednesday. He didn’t make it to the session.”

  Frankie’s jaw dropped open. “You’re kidding. Right?”

  “No. The cops are looking into it.”

  “Holy . . . shrimp basket. For real?”

  “Real as it gets.”

  Frankie gaped and started shaking her head. Then she stopped and stared into her coffee cup. She didn’t look up when someone entered the office, but I did. A lanky gray-haired man in a sweater stood in the doorway holding a coffee mug almost as large as hers.

  “Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt. I was bringing Madam Frankie coffee. Before she decides to have my head boiled in it. Is she in here? I thought I heard her. . . .”

  I pointed over the counter. “She’s a little upset.”

  He gave me a cockeyed smile. “She can’t be too upset—she’s not swearing.” He looked over the counter. “Oh. Oh, no. That looks bad.”

  “A friend of hers died.”

  “Oh.” He went behind the counter and crouched down next to Frankie, pouring the coffee into her mug with care. “Brought you coffee, Frankie. Hello. Earth to Frankie. Time for verbal abuse—it’s Starbucks.
”

  “You brought me Starbucks . . . ?” she muttered.

  “I know how you love to complain. So. I hear you’re feeling like crap. . . .”

  “I don’t feel like crap. I feel like the lowest trilobite fossil ever ground up and dumped on a roadbed in Tumwater under half a ton of tar.”

  “That good, huh?” He glanced up at me. “I’ve got her. She’ll be all right.”

  Frankie exploded in tears and crammed her face against the man’s shoulder. He looked startled, but waved me away.

  I felt strange about leaving. It was my fault she was upset. But she wouldn’t have felt any better about it tomorrow when it came from Solis. At least tomorrow she would see it coming.

  I found a dry place to stop and make a phone call to the Danzigers. I wanted to double-check Frankie’s story about Tuckman’s exit from UW with Ben. As amusing as her version was, she had an axe to grind and that tends to color people’s statements. But the Danzigers didn’t answer their phones and I had to leave messages.

  I didn’t like the odd sensation in my gut. Maybe I was starting to get premonitions or something, though that seemed unlikely. Still, what I knew about Greywalking I’d come by largely through the worst kind of bumbling firsthand experience, so I might be wrong. I hoped not.

  I had an appointment to talk to Wayne Hopke at one thirty and plenty to keep busy with until then.

  Wayne Hopke lived on an old forty-foot powerboat that smelled of cigarettes, beer, and citrus-based organic cleaner. The boat was moored on the canal near the Ballard locks and Hopke had come out to greet me on arrival with a big grin on his face and a brew in his hand. He was, as Cara had said, a likable old sot who felt the loneliness of retirement and chased it off with conversation and cold ones as often as possible. Though he’d been fully retired from the army for a while and was approaching seventy, he was still sinewy and wore his white hair in a military buzz cut. The rest of his appearance had gone civilian—blue jeans, deck shoes, and a loose sweatshirt.