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?”
