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Authors: Kat Richardson
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actually show up for our dinner with Phoebe and her family—it had been planned for a while and I wouldn’t be forgiven easily for missing it. Quinton, though, usually got off the hook of Phoebe’s ire through sheer charm. Still, I’d rather be chasing my comparatively mild case of possession than dealing with James Purlis and whatever gang of human spooks he had with him.
I couldn’t talk directly to the local vampires during the day and in this situation I thought it best not to leave a detailed message with their daylight assistants, but I left call-back requests and hoped for the best. No one called back.
Frustrated, I put that task aside and tried to listen to Stymak’s recordings, but they were static-filled and confusing. I don’t know how it happens, but electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is always lousy—full of background noise, electronic feedback, pops, hisses, dropouts, and overlapping voices that have to be filtered, isolated, and pulled apart for analysis. I didn’t have those skills or the right tools on my computer even if I knew how to use them. Stymak had filtered quite a bit, but Julianne’s voice was still broken and difficult to pick out and the only thing I was able to hear consistently was a sudden clear voice that said, “Beach to bluff,” which put me in mind of Julianne’s paintings but didn’t clear up any of my questions. The whispering of ghosts overlapped Julianne’s strange mutterings and the sharp screech of electronic feedback in the presence of the uncanny marred the playback, making me wince. After an hour of gritting my teeth and trying, I had to give up and put it aside for Quinton when he had time.
I went to bed that night without having heard more from Quinton or gotten any response from the vampires. I’d keep trying on both scores, but the most pressing thing was finding the other PVS patients. In the morning I went back to tracking Sterling and Delamar through cyberspace.
It’s easier to get information about politicians’ questionable funding and personal activities than it is to get information about medical patients—which is as it should be. The back door to this stuff, however, is insurance. As 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
I couldn’t talk directly to the local vampires during the day and in this situation I thought it best not to leave a detailed message with their daylight assistants, but I left call-back requests and hoped for the best. No one called back.
Frustrated, I put that task aside and tried to listen to Stymak’s recordings, but they were static-filled and confusing. I don’t know how it happens, but electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is always lousy—full of background noise, electronic feedback, pops, hisses, dropouts, and overlapping voices that have to be filtered, isolated, and pulled apart for analysis. I didn’t have those skills or the right tools on my computer even if I knew how to use them. Stymak had filtered quite a bit, but Julianne’s voice was still broken and difficult to pick out and the only thing I was able to hear consistently was a sudden clear voice that said, “Beach to bluff,” which put me in mind of Julianne’s paintings but didn’t clear up any of my questions. The whispering of ghosts overlapped Julianne’s strange mutterings and the sharp screech of electronic feedback in the presence of the uncanny marred the playback, making me wince. After an hour of gritting my teeth and trying, I had to give up and put it aside for Quinton when he had time.
I went to bed that night without having heard more from Quinton or gotten any response from the vampires. I’d keep trying on both scores, but the most pressing thing was finding the other PVS patients. In the morning I went back to tracking Sterling and Delamar through cyberspace.
It’s easier to get information about politicians’ questionable funding and personal activities than it is to get information about medical patients—which is as it should be. The back door to this stuff, however, is insurance. As 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
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