Gathering Dark

by Fox, Candice

  ‘In the corner,’ he said. ‘The black one.’

  ‘Now fuck off,’ Mike said.

  Sneak and I walked numbly to the back of the parking lot. In the furthest corner, parked with its wide rear against a chain-link fence, was a 1988 Chrysler Fifth Avenue, its glossy black paint job lit with red highlights from the neon sign of The Viper Pit. The car had been fitted with huge chrome rims and a hood ornament of a rearing cobra. I opened the car and looked in at the interior, which seemed to be crocodile or caiman leather. Huge black scales rolling over every surface, including the dash and steering wheel. The car screamed drug dealer. Arms dealer. Killer. Thug-for-hire. It screamed Ada Maverick. It was a Gangstermobile.

  Sneak opened her mouth and I shook my head before she could speak.

  ‘Just get in,’ I said.

  JESSICA

  On Thursday, 1 January 2009, at approximately 2.25 am, Blair Gabrielle Harbour left her house at 1109 Tualitan Road in Brentwood through the front door and turned right to walk down the steep driveway. Across the street, at 1108 Tualitan Road, 51-year-old Derek McCoy and his wife, 49-year-old Teresa McCoy, were arriving home in a taxi from a New Year’s Eve party organised by Derek’s workplace. Derek McCoy spotted Harbour as the sensor light at the bottom of her driveway illuminated her on her path towards the house next door to hers, number 1107. In his witness statement, McCoy described Harbour’s walk towards the house next door as ‘determined’. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say angry. But she had a long stride and she didn’t look happy. I knew she’d been having some troubles over there with noise.’

  Harbour had indeed been having trouble with the couple at number 1107 and their noise for a period of thirteen months. In that time there had been three complaints made to police from the Harbour residence about music coming from 1107, synthesised dance tracks that had heavy bass and were played after 10 pm and before 7 am above the allowed forty-decibel limit set by the Los Angeles Municipal Code. The couple at the residence, Adrian Orlov, the property owner, and his girlfriend, Kristi Zea, had been confronted by LAPD noise enforcement officers in response to each complaint. Harbour had complained to two other witnesses in the street about the music at 1107 within the thirteen-month period. She was pregnant, lived alone, and had described experiencing difficulties sleeping due to the unborn child and the noise activity at the adjacent property.

  According to Zea’s witness statement, Zea had consumed approximately three to four standard alcoholic beverages throughout the night while Orlov had consumed five to seven standard alcoholic beverages. The two had taken what Zea described as a ‘small amount’ of cocaine. They were dancing on the second floor mezzanine of the property when Harbour opened the front door, which had been unlocked and was in full view of the mezzanine. Zea testified that Harbour shouted for the pair to come downstairs and turn off the music. It was obvious to Zea that Harbour was hostile, due to her aggressive stance and a threat she issued to call the police if the couple did not comply with her demands. In her haste to get downstairs to acquiesce Harbour, Zea lost her footing on the stairs and fell, causing minor injuries to her leg and upper arm. Orlov became agitated that Zea had injured herself in her attempt to appease Harbour and shouted angrily at Harbour. In response, Harbour raised her fist and struck Zea twice in the face. Orlov came down the stairs and the three became engaged in a physical struggle.

  On the dining room table in the next room, approximately fifteen feet from where the trio fought, lay Orlov’s registered Smith & Wesson 625 revolver, which Orlov had been cleaning that afternoon and had not returned to its case in the upstairs bedroom. According to Zea’s statement, Harbour disengaged from the fight in the foyer and ran to the dining room, where she took up the pistol and pointed it at the pair. Zea’s statement said of the incident:

  ‘She was crazy. Like, wild, crazy eyes. She told us she hadn’t slept in days and started rambling about all this stuff she thought had been done to her, like we’d stolen from her and scratched her car. I thought she might have been high but I wasn’t sure. She said she knew we had been poisoning her and, like, trying to drive her insane. I think she thought we were sneaking into her house and putting stuff in her food. She told us to get on our knees. Adrian made a grab for the gun but she cocked the hammer and backed away. We got on our knees saying we were sorry and we wouldn’t do it again, you know, with the music. She wouldn’t listen.’

  According to Zea, Harbour shot Orlov in the chest at a distance of approximately five feet. Zea took refuge under the dining room table, and while she hid there, Harbour stood silently over the body of Orlov for an unknown period of time. Harbour then went to the kitchen with the gun and proceeded to wash her hands and the weapon in the kitchen sink. At no time while at the 1107 property did Harbour attempt to call 9-1-1 or instruct Zea to do so. It appeared to Zea that Orlov had died instantly, and though she wanted to render assistance to her boyfriend, she was too afraid of Harbour to come out from cover. Zea, in distress, watched Harbour construct a cheese sandwich from supplies she found in the couple’s refrigerator, which she partly consumed before leaving the premises through the front door, closing it behind her.

  Jessica scraped the oily red clumps of rice from the bottom of her Poquito Mas takeout container as she browsed the reports on the Harbour/Orlov case that lay on her lap. A crimson sunset loomed overhead, making purple flickers on the surface of the pool. The pool filter at Stan Beauvoir’s home hummed gently by her side, her feet and ankles cooling in the water.

  It was in sheer, petty defiance that she had returned to the Brentwood property after leaving Goren’s house. If she had been even pettier, she’d have taken up residence on the expansive front porch to read the file she’d retrieved from the station that day, so that street crews doing drive-bys would see her. She thought about flipping them the bird as they went. What pissed her off most about the Beauvoir inheritance was the assumption by her LAPD ‘family’ that she would take the reward. It was seven million dollars. She’d never make that kind of money as an LAPD officer, not even if she made it to Chief of Police and became the most corrupt person to ever hold that seat. From the moment Wally had heard about the inheritance, he’d assumed she would cut him out, make a fool of him for slacking on the Silver Lake case, walk out the front doors of the West Los Angeles office triumphantly, leaving him to wallow, to dream. Now deadbeat patrol cops she didn’t even know were checking in on her, trying to catch a moving van in the driveway, Jessica herself visible through the huge windows, instructing decorators. Only Captain Whitton had bothered to ask her directly if she was going to take the reward or refuse it. The crazed drug addict who had attacked her and almost eaten her alive, a man she’d only fallen victim to because of the inheritance, seemed like an afterthought. Everyone assumed she would spend her trauma leave living it up in her new mansion.

  Jessica wasn’t taking the house. She was sure of it. Yes, it was more money than she’d ever imagined possessing. Yes, she understood Stan Beauvoir’s feelings of impotence at his daughter’s loss, his desire for something good to have come of what the slain young woman had left behind. But Jessica was a cop. She had been doing her job, not at a level that was ‘obsessive’ or ‘unhealthy’ but to her normal standard. She expected the same kind of commitment from her colleagues. Okay, she’d lost weight and some sleep. She’d become befuddled. She’d pestered witnesses and the victim’s family, put in hours she didn’t necessarily log as overtime. But how the hell did anyone get anything done without doing that?

  Taking an extraordinary gift would mean admitting she’d done an extraordinary thing, and doing whatever it took to solve a goddamn murder wasn’t extraordinary. It was required.

  She shuffled the papers on the Harbour/Orlov case and tried to focus. She remembered Derek McCoy, the neighbour from across the street, vividly. Jessica had just made detective, and she’d taken too many notes on McCoy’s description of Harbour’s walk to her neighbour’s house, the detective and witness standing
on McCoy’s porch with red and blue lights flashing on them. In a squad car nearby, Blair Harbour sat with her hands cuffed behind her, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, her face passive and her lips pressed together. From the outset, Jessica knew Harbour was a woman who had simply snapped. She’d seen it before. Psychologists at the academy had talked about a parting with reality, a deepening crack that slowly filled with strange ideas, like water seeping into treated wood, eventually rotting the layers underneath until the piece of wood gave way. Jessica had really liked ‘shrink week’ at the academy. She’d paid particular attention to delusions associated with schizophrenia. Persecution and poisoning were common among them. Harbour had likely constructed her own world in which Orlov and Zea sat next door at all hours of the day and night planning her demise, escalating pranks like the unexplained scratch on her BMW and a strange tint to the colour of her orange juice all precursors to violence on the horizon.

  Jessica took a photograph of Orlov’s body from the file and held it in the falling red light. Zea had been right about her boyfriend’s death. It had been painful, but almost instant. The man was slumped on his side, one arm folded over the wound, his mouth open in shock against the marble floor. A tendril of blood curled from his lip. Jessica flipped to the picture of the wet gun by the kitchen sink, a forensic photo of Blair that had been leaked to the newspaper the next morning, her hands spread open for examination, the beginnings of a pregnant belly pressing against the chain between her wrists. A photograph started to slide out of the pack and Jessica caught it before it could get completely free. The infamous cheese sandwich sitting on the cluttered kitchen counter in the Orlov house, one bite taken from the corner.

  Jessica realised only when pain zinged through her finger that she’d chewed too hard at a hangnail. She shook herself. There was a tension running through her, a wire so taut it was ticking, and she knew exactly what it was. She’d begun questioning the case against Blair Harbour. Her case against Blair Harbour. It was undeniable now – Jessica liked the kid next door. He was smart, funny, weird. And if Jessica was wrong about Blair being a killer all those years ago, Jessica had kept the kid’s mother from him for his entire life. If she’d overlooked even the slightest detail, she’d have put an innocent woman in prison.

  All this, she told herself, was just her tired, fractured mind picking at seams, trying to unravel herself faster than the drugged zombie attack and the surprise inheritance were already doing. She did this when she was down. Kicked herself. She reminded herself that this time, she was right. That she’d done nothing to warrant the abuse she was getting from her colleagues, Wallert and Vizchen abandoning her at the scene in Linscott Place. She was a good cop, and deserved her title as detective. If she was right now, she knew she was right then, when she arrested Blair Harbour for murder. She would have checked all the boxes. Made sure she was covering all bases. She was that kind of officer. Thorough. Sure.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Jessica turned and looked. The boy was at the gate again, a blue silhouette behind and to the right of her, beyond the glass wall bordering the pool. She found herself smiling, and wondered if it was in pity at the boy’s fate or amusement at his stealth and unapologetic nosiness. Jessica had known a few cops in her time who had been inspired to enter the force because of murders in their family history. The child might have a bright future in blue ahead.

  ‘Work,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘None of your business, kid.’

  ‘Have you decided if I can help you with the gardening yet?’ the boy called. ‘Or do you still need more time to think about it?’

  Jessica packed the file back into its binder and lay it upside down beside her with a sigh.

  ‘Get over here.’

  She watched the water and listened as the boy vaulted the six-foot-high wooden gate, rattling the latch he’d decided to simply ignore, rustling the vines that almost blocked the view between the two properties. He landed on the grass with a dramatic grunt of effort and appeared at the poolside, hanging his wrists over the glass fence, almost casually but not quite.

  ‘Are you a cop?’ he asked.

  ‘What would make you say a thing like that?’ Jessica frowned, shifting the file to the other side of her. ‘Get in here, for god’s sake. I’m not having this conversation across the yard.’

  ‘I’m not allowed in there.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because I can’t swim.’

  Jessica stared at Jamie. He stared back.

  ‘You know you’re in California, right?’ she asked. She regretted it instantly. The boy looked away in feigned aloofness, gave a weak shrug.

  ‘My mom doesn’t like the beach. She hates sand. And we don’t have a pool.’

  Jessica stood and went to the glass.

  ‘Come here. If you fall in, I’ll only let you flounder around for a little while before I pull you out,’ she said, lifting the safety latch. The boy skirted the glass fence to the pool stairs, stood four feet back from the edge. Jessica put her feet back in the water and sat with her thigh pinning the file on the child’s mother shut. ‘Why do you think I’m a cop?’

  ‘I saw you today outside the police station.’

  ‘Oh, great.’ Jessica nodded. ‘That’s just great.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I’m Jessica. Nice to meet you.’

  The boy shook her hand. When he did she dragged him towards the pool edge and forced him down beside her. He grabbed a handful of the waist of her shirt, then put his bare feet nervously in the water.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you about something important.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jamie huddled in, letting go of her shirt with effort. ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’ve probably heard adults say it’s bad to keep secrets from your parents, right? If anyone ever asks you to keep a secret, it’s bad news, and you should tell them right away.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jamie said. ‘They taught us that at school.’

  ‘Well, I actually am a cop. So it’s . . . um. It’s okay in this case to keep a secret. But this is the one and only time, okay? These are what you call special circumstances.’

  ‘Special circumstances.’ The boy nodded again, wiggling his toes in the water. ‘Got it.’

  ‘You ever talk to your mother?’ Jessica watched the boy’s face carefully. ‘The one you were telling me about the other night? Who had the accident?’

  ‘Sure, all the time.’ He shrugged. ‘We have ice cream.’

  ‘What do you mean, you have ice cream? At the prison?’

  ‘No, at the pier.’

  ‘She’s out?’ Jessica turned her body and the Harbour/Orlov file almost slid into the pool.

  ‘Yeah. She got out of prison like a year ago.’

  ‘Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.’ Jessica massaged her brow. ‘Look, it’s really important, under the circumstances – the special circumstances – that you don’t tell your mom that I live here.’

  ‘My mom or my mother?’

  ‘Blair.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jamie pursed his lips.

  ‘I mean, I don’t actually live here . . .’ Jessica glanced towards the house. ‘I just hang around here sometimes. And I’m going to stop doing that. But you can’t tell her about me at all. Not my name, not that I’m a cop, not what I look like. Nothing. All right?’

  The boy was silent.

  ‘You haven’t told her already, have you?’

  ‘Nope.’ He looked away. ‘How come I can’t, anyway?’

  ‘It would just be easier all round, for everyone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just would.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Boy, you don’t need to know everything that’s going on in the world,’ Jessica said. ‘I know you think you do, but you really don’t. It’s a life lesson I’m giving you here. Sometimes the Earth just turns a little more smoothly on its axis when a person shuts up and does what he’s told.’


  ‘Okay.’ The boy tested the water with his fingers. ‘I won’t tell, then.’

  ‘Good kid.’

  ‘So are those papers police papers?’ he asked, leaning over. ‘With, like, scary photos of dead bodies and guns and stuff?’

  ‘Sure are.’

  ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘I could show you,’ Jessica said. ‘But then I’d have to drown you.’

  BLAIR

  I fixed Sneak’s ear at my apartment, telling the crew of kids who came to the door to play me a group rendition of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Castle on the Hill’ that the blood on my shirt was tomato juice. When I’d showered and changed for my evening shift at the Pump’n’Jump I’d expected her to be making moves to leave, but instead she was standing by the front windows, talking on her phone and chewing her nails.

  ‘I’ll be here for a few days at least,’ she said, and gave my address.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked when she hung up.

  ‘Girl who takes my mail.’

  ‘Did you just tell her you’d be staying here for a few days?’

  ‘Don’t freak out. I need a home base,’ Sneak said. ‘I haven’t had a fixed address lately.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly? Are you homeless? Where’s all your stuff?’

  ‘I was living with a dude, kind of casual. We had an arrangement. All my stuff’s there,’ she explained. ‘It was going great, but I think he got possessed by a demon, so I scrammed.’

  ‘Sneak, honestly.’

  ‘He was totally normal, and then he went out one night and got a tattoo of a weird symbol on his chest.’ She sniffed, rubbed her nose. ‘Couple of days later I find him naked in the kitchen at midnight. He was, like, wriggling around on the floor, clawing at the tattoo and groaning. He started shouting, “You can’t take him! He’s mine! He’s mine!” If that’s not demonic possession, you tell me what it is.’