I stepped back, letting them go back to work as she obviously wished to do. I noticed she had to nudge the dreamy-eyed Sean to attention as I started to leave. I carried on, hoping to find some other buskers before the market closed, since I'd already missed office hours. The music followed me up the stairs.

Back on the street level, I waded into the swirling ghost fog of the market's main street and made my way with care across the road to the Sanitary Market Building, sure that I'd seen musicians and other performers in several locations along that block of Pike Place and Post Alley. It was hard to pick out specific strands of music or patter above the general hubbub of cars and trucks, shoppers, ghosts, and vendors that flowed all over the street and sidewalks like a river flooding its banks while the fish tried to swim any direction they could. I felt distinctly like a salmon trying to get upstream.

At the first corner, next to the Greek take-out place, a man dressed head to foot in bright blue was bending balloons into hats, animals, and flowers for the amusement of small children and their parents standing in line for a quick bite to eat. Next to him, a ghostly double made a balloon poodle and wafted the finished phantom animal into the air, where it dissolved into sparkles that rained down on the creations of the living man beside him. A little boy in a striped shirt scampered over from his parents, waving a dollar bill, and offered it to the man in blue. The man bent down to listen to the boy's whispered request.

He laughed and straightened up to inflate some balloons and begin shaping them. The spirit beside him did the same. I watched from the crowd-eddy created by a spiral staircase behind them as the living balloon man shaped a monster's head and added goggly eyes by scribbling black pupils on two small white balloons, which he then tied onto the green monster face. Done, he showed it to the boy and asked, "How's that?"

"Great!" the boy yelled, jumping up and down in excitement and causing a few people to step off the sidewalk to continue onward in safety.

The balloon man laughed, once again mirrored by his incorporeal double, and put the monster onto the boy's head as a hat. The boy growled and pranced back to his parents, saying, "I'm a t'ranasaurus! Grroww!"

The boy reminded me so much of the Danzigers' son, Brian, that I laughed myself, and then felt a pang that my friends were still in Europe and I hadn't seen them in a couple of years now. I hoped they were doing well, but I still missed them-even troublesome Brian, who would have been starting school this autumn if I remembered correctly. I sidled closer to the balloon man as he started on a long-stemmed balloon flower for a little girl.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi there, pretty lady! Be right with you."

"I don't need a balloon. I just wanted to ask you a question."

"OK, then. Fire away." He bent a long red balloon into loops and twisted it around a green balloon to make the blossom, without looking at me, concentrating on his creation and sending an occasional wink to the little girl in front of him. His ghost did the same, ignoring me completely.

"Do you know another busker named Jordan Delamar?"

"Not sure. What's he do?"

"That's what I don't know. But I think he was injured a few months ago."

He stooped and handed the balloon flower to the girl and received a few bills from her parents in exchange before he turned to me, absently twisting a balloon between his hands into crazy loops.

"Oh . . . yeah. Didn't know his name. About . . . six or seven months ago, I think that was-around December. Part of an awning in the slabs came down and hit a guy. Knocked him flat. They had to take him to the hospital."

"Do you know what happened to him after that? Is he back?"

"Umm . . . I don't know. I haven't heard any more about him. I'm not here much in the off-season-not a lot of call for balloon animals when the kids aren't around. I do a lot of theater stuff and private parties then, instead. I get some good gigs around Christmas to keep kids entertained while their parents are shopping or waiting in line for photos with Santa. That sort of thing." Another child tugged at his pants leg and he smiled down before he gave me a quick glance, saying, "Sorry-I have to get back to work here."

"Oh, just one more question-what's 'the slabs'?" I asked.

"Oh, that's the outdoor vendor area at the north end of the main arcade building, near Steinbrueck Park. Doesn't get much use in the winter, except for the wreath vendors around Christmas." He turned his attention to his young admirer.

"Thanks for the help," I said, dropping a bill into his balloon-bedecked tip jar.

"Thank you!" he called after me as I shoved my way back into the diminishing stream of shoppers, heading northwest, toward the world's first Starbucks store and the slabs.

But by the time I reached the row of horizontal cement tabletops attached to the wall where Western Avenue swept up to meet Pike Place and Virginia Street, it was nearly seven and the only people willing to talk to me were the vendors who hadn't yet started packing up for the day.

A thin, long-haired man wearing sunglasses and sitting in a cloth lawn chair beside a selection of small paintings and T-shirts of cartoon cats committing dastardly deeds nodded when I asked about the accident in December. "Yeah, I remember that. There was a big awning over this area because of the rain-we all chipped in to put it up so we could do some holiday business. There was a work crew up here doing something about the tunnel. Some kind of study about vibrations or sound waves. They were drilling a hole. . . . I don't remember exactly why. Anyhow, whatever they were up to, it was real messy and made the awning collapse at the far end. This guy was standing under it at the time, so he took a nosedive into their dirt pile and got clonked on the head pretty good by the falling awning."

"Did you know him? The man who got clonked on the head?" I asked.

"Not particularly-I mean, like, I didn't know his name or anything. Mostly we called him Banjo Guy."

"Have you seen him around since then?"

He shook his head and started folding T-shirts now it was obvious he wasn't going to make any more sales today. "Nope. Not that I can recall. I suppose I might not recognize him without the banjo. He wasn't an unusual-looking guy. Black guy. Kind of average, kind of not too distinctive one way or another. Young-mid-twenties maybe. Sorry I'm not much help."

"No, no-the information about the awning was a lot of help. Thanks." He clearly had no more information to give me.

Jordan Delamar had been injured about the right time according to the insurance billing records I'd been able to snoop. But whether he was the Banjo Guy or "the boy who played" I wasn't yet certain. The only thing I was pretty sure of was that he wasn't an engineer or architect or computer modeler, so that wasn't the link between the three patients. I'd have to come back in the morning and see if he owned a performer's badge and if he did, verify that he was the person who'd been injured here. Then I'd have to find out where he was. I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to catch any of the buskers on their way out of the market for the day. Most of the vendors and shopkeepers were already closed and the buskers had disappeared while I'd been talking to the man with the bad-kitty pictures.

I started to turn around and go up the steep block of Virginia Street to First to catch a bus back to my office-where I'd left the truck-but paused as I thought I saw a familiar face. Across the street on a small promontory of the old bluff that the market stands on was Victor Steinbrueck Park. Against the Tree of Life homeless memorial-backlit by the summer sky that was darkening with unusually black clouds-was a skinny, restless figure that rocked from foot to foot, flapping its arms as if cold. I knew him-a homeless man I'd met on a case in Pioneer Square a few years back and continued to see around-though I couldn't recall when I'd seen him last. He was called "Twitcher" by almost everyone-he suffered from a rare neurological disorder that set him in constant motion. I frowned and walked toward the park, thinking I could ask him if he'd relocated up to Steinbrueck Park and if he'd been around when the awning accident had occurred.

Twitcher stood near the glass "pool" around the memorial that had been installed last October. He turned his head as if he saw me, and I paused for a moment, shocked at how emaciated he'd become. Twitcher was always nervously thin, since he was literally never still. Most people thought he was crazy, or stupid, or both. He wasn't either, but he was afraid of doctors and he had difficulty making his needs known between his spastic motions. He'd given up and begun living on the streets when the state stopped paying for his treatment.

A car blared its horn at me from my blind side as I started across the street and I turned to shout at the driver for running the Stop sign. When I turned back, Twitcher was gone. Not a hint of him could I find, even when I ran up and down Western for a block in each direction looking for him. There was nowhere to hide-and why would he when he had seemed to be waiting for me? I'd have to ask his friends Sandy and Zip-fellow Pioneer Square homeless people-if they knew what Twitcher was up to. Tomorrow.

As I waited for the bus to take me back to Pioneer Square, rain began to fall. The clouds that had rolled in as I searched for information about Delamar-or "the boy who played"-let down a steady drizzle that thickened into a summer downpour by the time I had to exit the bus. It looked as if we'd have the usual gloomy, wet Fourth of July that we'd had more often than not since I'd moved to Seattle. It wasn't my fault, though; the occurrence was common enough to rate a joke that summer didn't start here until July fifth, just to make sure we all knew where we were. I wasn't really dressed for the rain and my thin jacket was soaked through by the time I got to my office building, but the sudden storm had one bright side: James Purlis wasn't too likely to be tailing me in this weather.

I really needed to talk to Quinton about his father's interference. I didn't like being the rope in this tug-of-war and if the situation didn't improve soon, I'd have to make my position a bit more clear to Papa Purlis. I suspected he still thought I was mostly harmless-he struck me as overly confident or maybe he was just a misogynistic ass-but I had no problem with proving him wrong. In a way, I was looking forward to it. . . .

TEN.

I headed upstairs to my office, yanking off my wet jacket as I went and shaking the worst of the water out of my hair. I thought I should make sure I didn't have mail or messages pending, but what was waiting for me was Olivia Sterling.

She was plopped on the creaking wooden floor of my historic building right outside my office door, doing split stretches, but she bounced up as she caught sight of me, wincing slightly as she put her weight back on her feet. "Ms. Blaine, I'm so sorry-I should have called, I know, and I was going to, but I had the chance and I just dropped in. I was going to leave soon, but I thought I could wait just another minute and-"

She was so preoccupied by her story that she didn't seem to notice I was wet. I put my free hand up between us to stem the fast flow of her words. "It's all right, Olivia. You don't have to excuse your presence and you don't have to tell me everything in five seconds or less. Slow down."

She caught her breath, nodding and sending her long blond ponytail bobbing and swaying, leaving trails of color and mist on my Grey vision. "You asked me to call, but I couldn't," she said. "I got one of my dad's scribbling pads, but the reason I didn't wait is that he did something really, really bizarre today and it freaked my mom out. I had to call the nursing assistant to come and help with my dad and then Mom was still freaking, so the nurse said she'd stay for a while to calm her down, so I snuck out with both pads."

"Both pads?" I asked as I unlocked my office door and waved her inside.

She nodded again, still seeming breathless in her excitement, and scooped a large shoulder bag up from the floor. She followed me into my office, saying, "Yeah. I picked up some of the more recent ones to bring you, but the thing Dad did today was on a new one, so I wanted to bring that, too, and I had to be kind of sneaky to get it and then leave most of the others so I could get out without anyone noticing I had them. I didn't want Mom to freak out more and you really need to see this."

She started digging in her bag, looking down, and stumbled into the client chair, stubbing a toe. She winced again.

"Why don't you sit down first?" I suggested as I hung my dripping jacket on the coatrack. "Then I can see what you've brought without you falling over." I turned on the heater, which rattled as it started up.

Olivia slid into the chair and put her bag on her lap, then dug back into it. She pulled out two pads of lined yellow paper-one dog-eared and the other still crisp and sharp-edged except for the top few pages, which were bent and creased. She held out both of the pads to me. "This time, I think Dad is writing to us-or to my mom at least. We used to think he was when this started, but then we figured out that he wasn't and most of what he wrote was just crazy stuff, but this is not like that. Here."

I took the pads and sat down so I could study them under the stronger light from my desk lamp rather than the diffused room light. I had to hold them at an angle so my hair wouldn't drip on them while I read. I counted myself lucky that my shirt was only damp and might dry before I had to head out again.

The first two pages of the newest pad were the same mad scribbling I'd seen at the Sterling house, but the third page, written crosswise, read, "Mary. We die by inches in the noisy dark. If not soon, I will not come b . . ."

I looked up from the page into Olivia's face. Her eyebrows were high and her eyes wide as she bit her lip, trying not to pant. "My mom went crazy when she read it. That's her name-Mary. And the writing is Dad's, not like most of the other writing. He wrote it with his right hand. All the other stuff he did with his left." She watched me for a moment, waiting for my response.

I was stunned and it took a few seconds to figure out what I wanted to say to her. "You're certain the writing is your father's?"

"I saw him do it," she replied.

"No. I meant to ask if you checked the writing against a sample to be certain. You said the rest of the writing on these pads isn't like his. How are you sure of it?"

"I know what my dad's writing looks like! But yeah, I did check, because it's been a while and I . . . was trying to calm Mom down, but it only made her worse." She hung her head. "He's trying to talk to us and it's just making things worse!" She began crying, her ponytail flopping over her face as her shoulders shook with the spasms of her weeping.

I came around my desk and tried to soothe her, but I'm clumsy and self-conscious with kids of any age and I wasn't quite sure what I should do and what I shouldn't.

Olivia threw herself against my chest, flinging her arms around me and squeezing hard enough to shorten my breath, wailing her turmoil. "It's not fair! It's not fair! He's dying and there's nothing I can do!"

She had me trapped, so I put my arms around her waist and let her hold on and cry. I felt her warm tears soaking through my shirt and figured it was just one of those things-I wasn't destined to be dry today. "Olivia," I whispered. "Olivia, there's still hope. Don't cry. Dying isn't dead. Not yet. We'll find a way to help your dad. I promise."

I knew I'd regret it, but I had to say it, even if it ruined me.

"Real promise?" she asked, snuffling against me.

"Real promise. He broke through long enough to leave a note for your mother-and you. He's just like you and your mom-stronger than he looks. I will find a way. You'll help me, won't you?"

She loosened her grip and leaned back to look up at me. Her face was red, swollen, and streaked with tears and snot-she looked frightful, but she wasn't crying now. "Me? How can I help you more than I did? I don't understand."

"You brought me this note. I'll read the rest of the pages. I know they have clues, but I may need to ask you questions or I might need you to do something to help your dad."

She looked hopeful, then wary. "Like, what kind of thing?"

"I don't know yet. Nothing gross or inappropriate. Probably nothing big-it's almost always something that seems trivial that turns out to be the key."

"You're sure?"

"No. I'm making my best guess, but I have done this kind of thing before."

She let me go and sat back in the chair, wiping her face with the backs of her hands. "You have?"

"Once or twice."

She stared at me, biting her lip again, and probably trying to decide if I was crazy or not. She started to nod, making up her mind, but squeaked when a sharp little tune squealed from her bag. She dug frantically and found her cell phone. She glanced at it and moaned. "Oh no! I have to go!"

"Do you need a lift?" I asked as she scrambled around, getting up and heading for the door.

She glanced back over her shoulder. "No. I can manage. I have a friend downstairs. . . . I-do you really promise . . . ?"

I nodded. "I do."

She gave me a trembling smile before she turned and bolted out my door. I could hear her running down the stairs until her footsteps died away. I hoped I wasn't going to disappoint her-it sounded as if Kevin Sterling was fading, as if he were already a ghost himself. I doubted Julianne and the mysterious Jordan Delamar were any better off. I had to find Delamar and the thing that linked all three patients soon or none of them would ever wake up.

In spite of my discomfort in my damp state, I threw myself at the notebooks and Stymak's recordings for hours, until I was dizzy and exhausted from fighting my Grey vision and beating my brain against the apparent nonsense of the sounds and the words. I was drier, but no wiser. I gathered up what I had and took it home, hoping I'd find my lover there, teasing the ferret and ready to show off. . . .

Still no Quinton when I got to the condo, nor later that night, and no reply to messages. I was frustrated and starting to worry and only the thought that James Purlis wouldn't have been shadowing me if he already had his son's forcibly bought attention gave me any solace. I hadn't considered how much time Quinton and I spent together these days. We hadn't for the first two years we knew each other. Even after becoming lovers, we were more often apart than together, since neither of us was comfortable changing our lives to that extent. But since then things had evolved so slowly I hadn't noticed that we now saw each other nearly every day and he slept with me more often than we slept apart. Without any intention, without realizing how we had changed, we had become a couple and I liked it more than I would have imagined. More than I would have liked it years ago when I felt I needed no one but myself-could trust no one but myself-to make my life what I wanted. The downside was this worry I had over what might be happening where I couldn't see and shouldn't intrude in his life. No matter how much I loved him, or how much our lives had become entwined, each of us had our own needs and our own problems that couldn't be changed by the other's desire for it. I still didn't like sitting it out, though. Eventually, I'd have to go looking for Quinton or his father and put a stop to the battle of wills that had me in the middle-and I knew whose side I'd be on.

I played with Chaos for a while and tried to sleep, but did a lousy job of it and got up in the morning grumpy and still half-blind. Besides my work, Quinton and I were supposed to have dinner with Phoebe Mason tonight. Right now I wasn't sure he'd make it. Uncomfortably aware of my aloneness, I decided to take the ferret with me back to Pike Place Market. The main arcades are, by default, open to animals because it's impossible to close them-the Sanitary Market Building is called that not because it's any cleaner than the others but because it used to be the only building people couldn't take their horses into. These days, horses are about the only animal you won't see passing through the market from time to time. I doubted anyone would have a problem with Chaos peeping out of my bag as she likes to do. Not to mention, she's more of a "people person" than I am and today was going to be a long round of talking to strangers. A little edge in the conversation would be welcome.

Last night's unexpected downpour had already been swept away on the morning breeze-even if the gray sky hadn't been. The air was cooler, but not enough to frighten off the tourists, so I was reasonably confident I'd be able to find some buskers around if the market office wasn't able to give me a line on Delamar's whereabouts. I wasn't foolish enough to go out without my coat this time, though. I've gotten used to getting wet, but that doesn't mean I like it.

I got to the market office just a few minutes past opening. Like the rest of the place, the office was thickly haunted and looked fog-bound to my vision. One tall female ghost with a hard face under a pile of dark hair glared at me as I entered and watched me the entire time I was there. I chose to ignore her-I'd have time to figure out her problem later, if I gave a damn.

The office was as busy in the normal plane as in the Grey. When I entered I found a frantic secretary and a handful of other people dashing in and out of the front room with an odd assortment of objects, paperwork, and problems. One of the problems was a monkey at which Chaos took one look before she dove to the bottom of my bag.

The woman holding the monkey tried to put it on the secretary's desk, but each time she put it down, the monkey jumped back onto her chest and climbed up to sit on her shoulder, wrapping its arms around her head. "Get this damned thing off me!" she yelled. "It's been crawling all over my stall and throwing fruit on the ground since six a.m. and if I'm stuck with it for one more hour I'm going to drown it. And if that means drowning myself in the process, I will!"

"Where's Animal Control?" the secretary asked the nearest person passing by. "Didn't anyone call them?"

"We did, but they said they can't come for the monkey until they deal with a bear out in Crown Hill," came the reply as the person vanished behind a wall.

"Oh God . . . is this some kind of hoax? What is this, Animal Planet?"

"City Fish lost a monkfish this morning, and a bunch of shrimp got loose in the main arcade stairway, too," the absent person called back, accompanied by a lot of rattling and clanging.

The glaring ghost seemed to find the hullabaloo amusing; she smirked at me as if, somehow, this was all a joke I should have gotten. I stared blankly back until she was distracted by something else.

"Please tell me the monkfish wasn't alive when it went AWOL," the secretary said.

"It was still flopping. . . . Ah! I got it!"

The woman with the monkey on her head unwound the creature's arms one more time and held it at arm's length. "Please let it be a shotgun. . . ."

A man with a pile of cloth in his arms came out from the other side of the wall. "Monkfish was apprehended in the women's bathroom on Down Under One. And, yes, we have no shotgun-also no bananas-but we do have a tablecloth! Hold the monkey where I can get it. . . ."

"If it were that easy, we'd have wrapped the little bastard up hours ago!"

The man threw the large, dirty tablecloth toward the struggling monkey. The monkey tried to dodge by biting the woman holding it and scrambling up her arms again. It nearly made it, but one side of the cloth got over its head and the woman, now screaming and trying not to move back or sideways, juggled the miscreant up and down, bouncing more of the fabric over the beast's head. "Get it, get it, get it!" she screeched. "Oh God, just get the little monster off me!"

The man who'd brought the tablecloth grabbed at the wriggling shape under the folds of dirty linen and wrestled it free of the woman, wrapping the extra bits of fabric around and around, imprisoning the monkey in the folds.

"Don't suffocate it!" the secretary exclaimed.

The monkey, realizing it was trapped, began to howl and let out an unpleasant stench of an origin I didn't want to think about.

The man fighting with the cloth gave the secretary an exasperated glare. "I don't think there's much chance of that. Someone find a damned cage or a box."

One of the other milling people dragged a large plastic file box into the room, hastily emptying the contents in armfuls onto the secretary's desk. Once the box was empty, the cloth-bound monkey was dumped into it and the lid slammed down and latched.

"Do you think it'll be OK in there?" the secretary asked.