something that doesn’t affect you? To be intoxicated you’d have to have blood flow to the brain to begin with and they don’t. I figured the token beer was like the smoked sturgeon: a polite deception and a sort of payment for taking up space. Personally, I’d have liked to have a beer myself by this point, but I was having enough trouble keeping the soda down. I’d noticed the unhealthy thinness of everyone involved in the case and suspected it was now affecting me, too—the connection Carlos had mentioned in passing the night before might have had something to do with it, but I wasn’t certain.
My reading material wasn’t really helping on the digestion score, either. The more I read about her, the less I liked Linda Hazzard—and I hadn’t had a soft spot for her at the beginning. The author wasn’t sure how many people she’d killed in two U.S. states and New Zealand, but estimates ranged from a dozen to forty. Hazzard had believed fervently that fasting would “purify the blood,” improve health, and cure anything from shingles to cancer—and, of course, obesity. She’d left her home state of Minnesota for Washington in 1906. At least one victim of her fasting regimen was already in the ground by then. She hadn’t been prosecuted for that one, since as an unlicensed practitioner, she couldn’t be tried for malpractice under Minnesota law at the time. Apparently, killing a patient you had no right to treat wasn’t malpractice or murder.
Ironically, the opposite was true in Washington. She’d had no advanced medical training, but due to a quirk of state law, she was licensed as a doctor in Washington in 1907—where she was also immune from prosecution for the death of patients so long as they had been undergoing her “therapy” willingly. She wrote a book about her curative process and published it in 1908. She killed her first Seattle patients the same year—among them the mother of Ivar Haglund, the founder of Ivar’s Acres of Clams and the Salmon House in Northlake. Most of those who died under Linda Burfield Hazzard’s care had never had a chance to protest that they wished to quit the regimen of watered-down tomato broth, daily enemas, and violent “massage” that left fist-shaped bruises on their backs and foreheads, since she kept their friends and families at bay by locking the patients up in hotel rooms in Seattle or in cabins on her property in Olalla. When the patients died, their relatives rarely saw the bodies, and all valuables they’d owned vanished into Hazzard’s coffers. Sometimes she even billed the family for her services.
Enough patients simply lost weight, felt better, and left her care that she continued to attract more, even when her failure rate was suspicious—the richest patients tended to go home in urns. One went home with a bullet in his head. Whether he’d been killed by someone on the Hazzard property or shot himself to escape the treatment, no one knew, but it was interesting that though he was technically an English peer, his family was broke. Before she was finally caught and tried, Hazzard had managed to bury at least one Englishman who actually was wealthy, a lawyer, several socialites, a publisher, a civil engineer, and a retired U.S. congressman, among sundry others who were merely well-to-do and foolish.
She was brought to trial in 1912 over the death of an Englishwoman and the near-starvation and imprisonment of the woman’s sister. She had a studio photo taken of herself for the papers in which she wore a dress she had “inherited” from the dead sister. The author speculated that the photo was carefully engineered to create a sympathetic image of Hazzard as a beautiful woman who couldn’t possibly be a killer, thus softening up the jury to rule in her favor. It must have worked, because while it had taken a nurse and the British vice consul to bring her down, Hazzard had still skipped away to New Zealand with a revoked medical license after serving only two years for manslaughter—because her patients had “taken the cure” voluntarily, even if it killed them. No one seemed to know how many Kiwis had died under her care, only that she’d offered the same “cure” under various titles while she lived there.
She’d returned to Washington in the 1920s and operated her “sanitarium” in Olalla as a “School of Health,” until it burned down in 1935. No one else apparently died there except Hazzard herself, who continued to live on the property until she became ill in 1938 and, true to her beliefs to the bitter end, starved herself to death while fasting for “the cure.”
I looked up from my book, relieved that such a monster was long dead, and worried about what she might have been up to in the afterlife. I couldn’t fathom what the ghost of a fasting quack would be doing with the spirits of her victims and others like them, but it couldn’t be good.
Carlos noticed my blanched face and seemed about to speak when Stymak trotted into the pub and up to our table, wafting a hint of Washington’s finest weed in his wake.
“Hello! Ready to . . . tip some tables?” he joked.
“Yes,” I said. Carlos just looked amused as I stood up to follow Stymak to the back room.
Stymak gave Carlos a glance that turned into a scowl with a side dish of fear. “You’re . . . the psychometrist?”
Carlos nodded, but neither spoke nor offered his hand.
I recaptured Stymak’s attention as he recoiled—though I wasn’t sure if it was the vampire thing that was giving him the heebie-jeebies or the necromancer thing. He looked at me as if he would have said something, but shook it off, upset but trying to hide it.
“Let’s get started. Then we can get done faster,” I said.
Stymak nodded with the enthusiasm of a bobblehead doll in the back of a lowrider. “Yeah! I’ll go get John to unlock for us,” he added, almost sprinting to the bar to get a key from the man behind it.
I followed more sedately, keeping Carlos next to me. “He doesn’t like you,” I muttered.
“A good sign. I had half imagined he would be a charlatan. But I shouldn’t have doubted your abilities in reading . . . people,” he added, casting a glance at the book I’d stuffed back into my bag.
“I read just fine, thanks,” I replied.
“Without doubt. Let us discover what this bitch is up to.”
His use of the pejorative surprised me. “You mean Hazzard?”
“Hers is the name that all the artifacts sing. And not in praise.”
Carlos is a cruel bastard, make no mistake, but whatever he’d already gleaned from the objects I’d brought him seemed to have convinced even him that Linda Hazzard was as despicable in death as she had been in life. Without further comment I followed him into the back room that Stymak had unlocked.
Stymak had turned on the lights and was keeping busy around the wooden table and chairs in the middle of the room. The space looked as if it was usually used for storage, cleaning supplies, and occasional breaks for the staff. The lighting was harsh, but didn’t quite penetrate the corners, where shadows curdled. Stymak was nervous now, fidgeting with a messenger bag he’d unslung from his back and kept moving from chair to floor and back again.
“Um,” he started. “I’d usually lower the lights a bit. . . . I have a little electric lamp to put on the table, but if you guys don’t feel comfortable with that . . .”
It was Stymak who was uncomfortable, but even as I thought it would be better for him not to see Carlos so plainly, the vampire spoke up for me. “Neither of us is afraid of the dark. Do as you would prefer. We are in your hands.”
I wasn’t sure that made Stymak feel better, but it at least goaded him to stop fiddling and finish his preparations. He set the small lamp on the table. Then he arranged some chairs and put a few more items from his bag on the table: a pad of paper, some easy-flowing markers, and a large plate that he filled with fine white sand. He placed his digital recorder on the table also and stood back to study the setup.
Stymak looked at me. “I used to use candles—ghosts like the smoke—but I had to give that up when a few things got set on fire. And of course, you can’t smoke in bars anymore. Think it needs anything?”
I shrugged. I’d never experienced a true seance before, only fake ones, so I had no idea what might be useful.
Carlos caught my eye. “The objects you showed me. Put them on the table.”
I dug them out of my pockets once again and put the collection of odds and ends on the table near the lamp.
“Where did those come from?” Stymak asked, eyeing them with a frown.
“They came from various parts of Pike Place Market,” I said. “They seem to belong to some of the spirits who are possessing the patients.”
Stymak nodded. “Well, I think that should do it. Would you turn off the room light? Then we can get started.”
Carlos beat me to it and we sat down around the table as Stymak turned on his digital recorder and the little lamp.
