Gathering Dark

by Fox, Candice

  ‘I don’t live here.’

  ‘Can we just talk?’ Harbour glanced at the lycra women again. ‘We’re causing a scene. And you’re not going to shoot me, because I’m not a threat to you. I come in peace.’

  Jessica thought there was something pretty ironic about the Neighbour Killer’s stance on shooting people who were not a threat, but she didn’t have the sense of humour to make a joke about it. She went inside but kept the gun hanging, ready, by her thigh. Blair followed her through the living room to the first-floor kitchen, glancing thoughtfully at the pile of soap suds slowly dissolving on the otherwise empty living room floor that was visible through the large passageway.

  ‘Here’s what’s not happening,’ Jessica said when they arrived. ‘I’m not reviewing your case so you can seek exoneration and a payout from the state. I’m not appearing in a true crime documentary about you, and I’m not saying nice things about you to a judge so you can get custody of your son back. If you’re here to apologise as part of some bullshit twelve-step circle-jerk then do it and get out.’

  ‘It’s not about any of those things.’

  ‘Then what the hell do you want?’

  Blair looked around for somewhere to sit or lean, but there was nothing available, only a kitchen bench that would have left her standing far too close to the cop who had arrested her. So she stood in the empty space, alone. The detective didn’t answer when Blair had finished telling her story about Dayly Lawlor and the amateur investigation she had launched with Dayly’s mother. She just stood there, her hand on the gun resting on the counter between them.

  ‘We’re not completely out of our depth,’ Blair went on. She cleared her throat, winced in the stinging silence. ‘We’ve found some good leads, I think. But we’re getting to the stage where someone in law enforcement on our side would be really helpful. Invaluable, actually.’

  ‘This friend of yours, Sneak,’ Jessica said. ‘I understand her coming to you to question you. You were the last person to see her daughter alive. But why is she hanging around? You’re not a private investigator. You’re a doctor.’

  ‘Not anymore,’ Blair said. ‘They cancelled my medical licence.’

  ‘Thank Christ,’ Jessica said. ‘Why doesn’t she just go to the police?’

  ‘She may be . . .’ Blair gave a big sigh, paused for a long time to weigh her options. ‘She may be wanted.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘She’s not sure.’

  ‘Oh, great.’ Jessica nodded. ‘That’s just great.’

  ‘Dayly’s disappearance is with the police. That much became clear when I went to inquire about it myself. I was handled . . . aggressively.’

  ‘I’d probably have handled you aggressively, too, if it was me,’ Jessica snapped. ‘You’re a killer. Not just that, you’re a parolee hanging out with a known criminal. How the fuck are you not behind bars again right now?’

  ‘I’ve been lucky,’ Blair said. ‘But the aggression wasn’t related to that. The detective on the case is named Al Tasik. Do you know him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He treated me as if I was fishing around in something that was off limits.’ She shifted uncomfortably and looked out at the pool. ‘And he’s since made a play at getting me thrown back in jail.’

  ‘Made a play?’ Jessica asked. ‘You mean, did his job?’

  Blair folded her arms, stared at the carpet, seemed to consider something. Jessica watched, the heat burning in her cheeks, her neck. The heat that told her something was wrong here. That she was fighting for the wrong side.

  ‘I’m asking you not to follow the same course of action,’ Blair said. ‘As a kindness.’

  ‘You can ask all you want.’

  ‘Maybe it was a mistake to come here,’ Blair sighed.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t desperate. Believe me, you’re the last person in the world I want to see again after what happened.’

  Jessica’s hand tightened on the gun.

  ‘But I’m willing to set aside our history and work with you on this,’ Blair said carefully. ‘Sneak is my friend, and I believe her daughter is in real danger. And maybe you were just doing your job the best way you knew how when you put me away. You were wrong about me, of course. I didn’t kill Adrian Orlov because I was paranoid or angry. I did it because I had no choice. I believed he was going to kill his girlfriend right there in front of me, and as a doctor I was trained to protect life. You didn’t believe me, but everybody makes mist—’

  Jessica shook her head. ‘There was no fucking mistake, Harbour.’

  ‘But like I said’—Blair put a hand up—‘I’m not here about that. I came because Dayly Lawlor put a gun in my face, and that gun wasn’t as scary to me as the look in her eyes. She looked like a hunted animal.’

  Jessica watched her visitor across the wild, hot, empty space between them, the burning knowledge of what they had once been to each other. Hunter and hunted. When Blair met Jessica’s gaze, it was all Jessica could do not to look away.

  ‘Will you at least see what’s going on at your end?’ Blair asked. ‘Where the investigation stands and why Al Tasik—’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ Jessica said. ‘Right now my only plans are to watch you get in your car and drive the hell away from here.’

  She walked out of the kitchen. Blair followed her to the front door. There was some kind of drug-dealer special parked in front of the house. Jessica marvelled at it, the glimmering chrome rims and hood ornament. She could only imagine what stories might be cooked up at the station the next day if a patrol drive-by spotted the car parked next to hers out front. Blair Harbour was hardly out the door when she slammed it shut, twisting the deadlock closed.

  Three seconds.

  She watched helplessly as her own hand twisted the lock back again. With a will that was not her own she wrenched open the door. Blair paused on the stoop.

  ‘The Orlov bathroom,’ she said. ‘First floor or second floor?’

  Blair looked back at her, her features a mixture of confusion and fear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you saw Orlov and his girlfriend fighting in the bathroom that night,’ Jessica said. ‘You saw them from your kitchen window. Was the bathroom on the first or second floor?’

  Blair searched her memory, her eyes roving the ground at her feet. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s a simple question.’

  ‘It’s been ten years. It was a horrible night. I’ve tried not to think about it.’

  Jessica scoffed, was surprised by the nastiness of the sound. ‘You ever go into the Orlov house before that night?’

  ‘No,’ Blair said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘So how do you remember a thing like that, and not what floor the bathroom was on?’

  ‘Why are you asking me this?’ Blair asked. Jessica opened her mouth to answer, but whatever had been controlling her had fled. She shut the door and locked it again.

  Jessica watched through the glass panels beside the door as the killer she had once arrested walked down the driveway towards her car.

  BLAIR

  I hadn’t dreamed of the murder in many years. The dreams had always come unexpectedly, surprise attacks that arrived in the middle of a good week, when my mind was furthest from the night filled with blue lights and red blood. Sometimes I was pregnant, the way I actually had been when I killed Adrian Orlov, and sometimes Jamie was a small child tucked into a crib in the beautiful nursery I’d made for him. I was standing at the kitchen window of my house, watching gold explosions dazzle on the horizon towards the coast, young revellers getting rid of their after-midnight fireworks. Dark landscape burning. I’d never been an enthusiastic New Year’s reveller, and, being unable to drink, I’d decided to spend the evening by myself watching Sex and the City reruns in my cotton pyjamas instead.

>   It was on one of my frequent night-time trips to the toilet that I’d stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk. Almost as though its inhabitants could feel my exhausted presence, music started up at the Orlov house. I sighed, leaned and looked at the house next door. Gold light in a tiled room. Kristi Zea storming in, thrusting open a cupboard that was immediately slammed shut by her boyfriend’s hand. His wide, boxy fist pulling back as if he’d drawn a bow, snapping forwards, smacking into her temple with a noise I figured I could hear from where I was standing.

  My mouth fell open. Next came the moment that changed everything. Not so much a decision, but an instinct to turn towards the stairs and run down them rather than heading back to my bedroom to grab my phone and call 9-1-1.

  Stupid. Arrogant.

  Later I knew what it was: sheer, ridiculous bravado. I was wild with instant adrenaline, with the belief that I was untouchable. That because I could somehow manage to create a thriving human life inside my body from nothing at all, that I was clearly some kind of god. I was a doctor. I created life. Sometimes I brought life back to the dead. Miracles. The week before the killing, I’d performed surgery on a five-year-old girl who had been paralysed in a horrific pile-up on the I-10. Her nerve endings had been as fine as hair. I’d saved her from a lifetime of paralysis. Intervening in a fight between a man and a woman at the house next door seemed like child’s play. I’d march in and know exactly what to do, just like I did in the operating theatre. I was heading down the driveway towards the Orlov house, shattering my own life one self-righteous step after the other.

  Then a hand was on my mouth.

  Weight on my back.

  I was suddenly not in my old driveway in Brentwood eleven years ago but here, now, in my bedroom in my apartment in Crenshaw. The dream fell away like a dropped curtain and I felt stubble against my cheek, my ear. He didn’t say anything. In the nightmares shown on true crime television, they always say something. Don’t scream. Don’t move. Don’t panic. I bucked and felt his hips against my buttocks. An animal scream ripped loose from me, high and primal, full of shock and outrage.

  I called Sneak’s name, though some cold corner of my mind told me that this man and I were alone in the apartment. I thought about the gun I’d refused from Ada, about the gun I’d once killed a man with, how easy it had been. My mind raced through a list of humans in proximity. The man with the guitar school whose name I didn’t know, probably snoring loudly in his bed only feet away. Celeste, the kid who had visited me that afternoon to play Pearl Jam at my door for treats, long gone hours ago. The men on the bikes. Was he one of them? All of this mental chaos crashed into my mind in mere seconds as he found my arm and dragged it behind me.

  Once he has you tied up, I thought, that’ll be—

  I didn’t need to finish the thought. I snapped my head backwards, hopeful but off with my aim, glancing him on the jaw. It was enough to startle him, to loosen the hand on my mouth, which was pressed so tight against my lips it was crushing them against my teeth, making them bleed. I caught a minuscule roll of calloused skin between my teeth and bit down hard. A yowl. He mashed my head into the pillows. He was turning me, trying to roll me over, maybe to punch me, subdue me. My arms were free. I punched and kicked, wailing with effort and terror, the man easing back in the darkness just enough for me to slither off the bed.

  He went for my hair. In prison, that’s the first and easiest mistake a fighter can make. A big wad of an opponent’s hair makes a good handle to control their head, but you leave their arms and legs loose, the primary weapons. With enough adrenaline pumping, a fighter can lose a chunk of hair and not even feel it tearing away. I struck out with a punch in the dark, caught thigh, denim. My knee hit a boot on the carpet. I aimed again and hit paydirt. The man folded in two above me, slammed into my bedside table, all the wind leaving him as my fist sank into his balls. His hands released my hair, flying away to cover his tender parts. I scrambled out from beneath him, grabbed what I could on my way to the door and hurled it back in his direction. My work bag. A laundry basket. A shoe. In the hall I was hit with a wave of nausea, dizziness, my brain failing to keep up with my fighting, fleeing body. He was there. He caught my ankle as I steadied myself in the doorway to the kitchen. I hit the floor with a whump.

  JESSICA

  ‘What kind of experience are you seeking tonight, Jessica?’ he asked.

  Jessica stretched, suppressed a shiver as his hands worked into her hair, tugged the tie away gently as he always did, began to smooth and knead the taut muscles at the base of her skull. Goren had taken another last-minute appointment. He didn’t seem perturbed, but Jessica knew she was pushing her luck. Still reeling from the Harbour woman’s visit, on the doorstep of the three-storey terrace she’d received a text from Wallert.

  I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.

  She’d known then that she needed this, that without Goren’s treatment she’d never sleep, never be able to escape the trauma of her day. Sometimes it was her only source of release, distraction. To let go, to have someone take her away from herself without the guilt or awkwardness of mutual affection. She paid the money, he opened the door to sweet relief. She left, feeling warm and light and tired. It was a good system.

  ‘I want to play the game,’ she told Goren. Jessica looked behind her and saw a wry smile on his face as he knelt on the ottoman at her back.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will you be in charge, or will I?’

  ‘You,’ she said.

  Jessica thought she saw the whisper of some kind of excitement run through him, but it was probably just an act. This is what he did, and the women and men who came here would be looking and hoping for that same excitement, dreading the slightest slump of his shoulders or look of reluctance in his eyes. Everyone wanted to be desired. Yearned for. She stood while he stripped her gently, running his hands up her ribs as he pulled off her top. He went to the large dresser and took a blindfold, slipped it expertly across her eyes and tied it. He led her to a room that was warmer and somehow felt smaller, even in the dark. She had been in this room before, knew the red walls and dark velvet curtains. Sometimes it had been her fitting his ankles into thick leather straps on the vertical table, him behind the blindfold. The big table, she knew, could be adjusted into a range of positions with the flick of little gold switches.

  As was his routine, he stood her against the table and pulled the straps tight on her ankles, then worked the belt at her hips extra tight, as she liked. Jessica could feel the tension falling away from her muscles immediately. The simple pull of the straps took the weight of her worry over the Harbour/Orlov case, her guilt about the boy next door, the fury and hatred boiling inside her for Wallert and her colleagues.

  The strap across her ribs was her favourite. It constricted her breathing just slightly and forced her to focus on her own heartbeat. Goren guided her left wrist into place and pulled the strap tight there. She could feel his breath on her face. His crotch, hard and warm against her own. Intrusions attempted to break through the rapidly falling relaxation. A distant siren. The screech of tyres. She gave a sigh that pulled the strap around her ribs tight as he guided her other hand into place.

  Three car doors slamming nearby. Very nearby. At the front of the house. Jessica felt him pause. They both waited.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, looping the strap over her right wrist.

  A pounding at the door, three thumps, a noise she had heard a million times.

  ‘Police! Open up!’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ they said in unison. He let go. Jessica reached out, expected to find him there, bent, unstrapping her. Nothing. She swung wildly, felt only vacant air. Heard his footsteps in the hall, heavy, running. The cold emptiness of losing him sliced through her. She ripped off the blindfold. He was gone.

  ‘Goren! Goren! Fuck!’ She was panting. Near screaming. ‘Come back! Come back! Don’t leave me like this!’

 
She knew it was no use. Jessica began frantically working her trapped wrist free of the buckle when she heard the downstairs door slam open.

  BLAIR

  A punch to the back of the head. Effective. Dulling. My face smacked against the chipped linoleum. My brain told me to sleep. Concussion slipping over me like a hood. A voice pushed through – my own voice, the words I’d spoken to hundreds of kids who’d fallen out of trees or down cliffs, had been pulled from crushed vehicles, were sinking into fever. Stay awake. Stay with me. Listen to the sound of my voice. He stood above me, one foot on either side of my ribs. In a single, surging move, giving it everything I had, I sprang upwards, toppled him into the wall and was immediately wrapped in his embrace. We wrestled in the kitchen, clawing, snarling. I heard Hugh Jackman’s ice cream container hit the floor along with a set of knives, a coffee mug, papers. I palmed at my attacker’s face, used the momentum to shift around him, felt the drywall crunch as he smashed me into an embrace again.

  ‘Get off me! Get the fuck off me!’

  The howling, snapping words were unrecognisable, even as they flew from my lips. A dog that never barks, never growls, suddenly backed into a corner. We tumbled into the counter. I grabbed what came under my hand, a jar of sugar I kept for guests’ coffee, and smashed it against the top of his head.

  It was enough. He slumped sideways in the dark. I danced past him, sprinted across the living room and threw myself at the door, unlocking it with slippery, shaking hands.

  I ran out into the night and didn’t look back.

  JESSICA

  Footsteps on the stairs. Two men. Jessica’s hands were numb, unusable, all the blood in her body rushing to her heart and her head. She managed to get the buckles at her wrist, ribs and waist undone. But as she reached for the straps at her ankles the door to the room burst open. She sank into a crouch to protect her naked body, the table too close at her back, tipping her forwards so that she had to steady herself against the floor with one hand. The buckles cut into the front of her ankles, painful, a distraction she tried to savour as she felt their eyes wander over her.