Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘What do you think your daughter’s into?’ I asked.

  Sneak pursed her lips and looked away from me. ‘I don’t know. It can’t be drugs. She’s so disgusted with who I am as a person, she’d never go there.’

  ‘Don’t bash yourself up so much, Sneak,’ I said. ‘That sort of thing won’t help right now.’

  ‘She’s a good person.’ She thought about it and shrugged, bewildered. ‘I don’t know how she ended up that way. She was preaching to me about rehab. She’s really smart. Likes animals. Wants to do something with that. Study them or whatever. This thing is completely out of character. Dayly is not like me. I was never around her long enough to stain her that way.’

  Dayly’s apartment building was a stucco and terracotta-tiled place near the Warner Bros. lot. I watched the billboards roll by, prime-time television shows I was never at home to watch, Ellen DeGeneres’s cartoonish eyes peering over a cut-foam letter ‘E’. Sneak headed up the stairs before me and stopped abruptly. There were people on the landing. Residents of the building, it seemed, four or five of them hanging around looking bemused. One man was wearing a blue towelling robe. Sneak went directly to a young woman, a thin redhead wearing a T-shirt that read Be Kind To Bees, standing in the open door of one of the apartments.

  ‘What happened? What happened?’ Sneak asked the girl. Her voice was higher now, almost shrill. She didn’t wait for an answer, went inside the open apartment. The girl turned to me and the crowd.

  ‘We should call nine-one-one.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just telling these guys,’ the girl in the bee shirt said, gesturing to the people around us. ‘I was out last night. I had an audition. I stayed with my boyfriend. This morning I came back and the door was open and the place is . . . There’s blood in there. Hey! She shouldn’t go in there. That’s Dayly’s mom, right? She should come out. I think . . . It might be, like, a crime scene. What if it’s a crime scene? Do we call nine-one-one?’ The girl fell into tears. No one seemed game to hug her.

  I entered the apartment. There were droplets of blood on the carpet just inside the door. An overturned chair on the way to the tiny kitchen, a little table knocked askew. There was smashed glass on the floor, papers brushed off the front of the fridge where they had been arranged with colourful magnets. It was the sight of all the lights on in the apartment that made my stomach plunge. Whatever happened here, it had happened in the dark hours.

  Sneak had been right – her daughter had been doing well for herself. The apartment was cluttered and small but obviously shared between two young women who worked hard at their dreams and lived busy lives. A dying peace lily on the kitchen windowsill told me they were rarely home. Dust on a magazine near the couch. There was another blood smear and a picture knocked from its hook in the hallway. I found Sneak in Dayly’s bedroom, standing by the desk.

  ‘Her bag’s here.’ Sneak pointed to a handbag on the floor by the messily made bed. The bag flopped open, showing the usual things a woman kept in her everyday carryall: tissues, a notebook, some make-up. I knelt and went through the bag, moving things about with my knuckle when I could to avoid leaving prints.

  ‘No phone,’ I said. ‘Did she have a car?’

  ‘No,’ Sneak said.

  ‘Well, she does now.’

  There was no blood in this room, no signs of disturbance. I noticed a laptop charger peeking over the edge of the desk, leading to a clear space where the laptop must have belonged among the papers, takeaway coffee cups and pieces of stationery that covered the surface.

  ‘Laptop’s gone,’ I noted. ‘So she’s somewhere, and she’s got her phone and her laptop. But no bag. Or a different bag than her usual one.’

  ‘You see a bag on her at the Pump’n’Jump?’ Sneak asked.

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘So what did she do? Put the laptop on the ground outside before she robbed you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sneak.’

  ‘Whoever attacked her has got the laptop, probably the phone, too.’

  ‘We don’t know she was attacked,’ I said.

  Sneak didn’t answer. We stood quietly together, locked inside a bubble of dread. I tried to take Sneak’s hand but she pulled away from me, went to the little desk and picked up a flyer that was sitting there.

  ‘Parachuting?’ She showed me the brochure. A flight school in a place called San Chinto was advertising tandem parachuting adventures for $200 per drop. A windswept, grinning couple was leaping out of a plane on the cover. Sneak pocketed the flyer and went to a table by the door, which held a fish tank. I picked up a strangely shaped piece of plastic from the desk. Layers of sticky tape rolled into a small tube, cut and unravelled, like snake skin. There were notes pinned on the backing of the desk. Reminders, it seemed, from Dayly to herself. Stay on track! Chin up! I dropped the tape and peeled off a small yellow note that was stuck to the edge of the shelf above the desk.

  BIRDS ONLY.

  When I joined Sneak at the fish tank, I noticed the thing had no water, just a layer of sawdust and a blue plastic wheel.

  A small, brown, rat-like creature was huddled in the corner of the tank, licking its small pink paws and brushing them against the backs of its tiny ears.

  ‘Oh, wow. What is it?’ I asked, whispering in case I startled the animal. ‘A hamster?’

  ‘A gopher.’ Sneak picked up the little creature from where it crouched and cupped it in her hand. ‘She found it sitting in a driveway, poisoned.’

  ‘So she brought it here?’ I asked. I’d had gopher men to my house in Brentwood more than once to poison dozens of the creatures that were digging holes in my lawn. I’d never seen one, only their small round tunnels and the devastation of my expensive landscaping. The gopher ran across Sneak’s palms as she made an endless track for it, putting one hand in front of the other.

  ‘She’s like that. A bleeding heart,’ Sneak said. ‘Always picking up wounded and stray things. I was the same when I was her age. I picked up a few birds. They all died.’ I looked at the Birds only note on the desk and wondered if it was somehow connected.

  ‘Sneak, we should go,’ I said. I could hear voices in the living room. ‘This might be a . . . It might be important for the police to see the place untouched.’

  ‘I knew a guy once,’ Sneak said, focused on the gopher. ‘His daughter was kidnapped down in Mexico. Young kid, like seven. They grabbed her out of a playground toilet block, asked the family for money. The cartels, they’ve got this rule – sometimes they let you switch out another family member for your kidnapped loved one if, like, they’re too vulnerable or whatever. The guy I knew, he tried to give the cartel his wife and his sister in exchange for the daughter, just while he drummed up the money.’

  Sneak had been renowned for her ‘I knew a guy once’ or ‘I knew a chick once’ stories in prison. Either they were all elaborate falsifications or she alone had somehow befriended all of the wildest, most eccentric and misfortunate people who ever lived. Most compulsive thieves I had known in prison were also gifted liars. Sneak’s ‘I knew a guy once’ stories always ended in tragedy.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, regardless. ‘He get the kid back?’

  ‘No. The cartel took the wife and the sister as well and tripled the ransom demand.’

  ‘We can’t think like that right now, Sneak,’ I said. ‘And we can’t hang around here much longer. We’ll get caught together.’

  ‘We can go.’ Sneak nodded, replacing the gopher and taking Dayly’s bag. She wavered, the vodka and whatever she’d taken before it hitting her suddenly. ‘Wherever my baby is, she’s not here.’

  JESSICA

  The house on Bluestone Lane was still, unnaturally quiet, cast in yellow morning glow. At every other house on the row, gardeners in wide-brimmed hats worked, dragging tree trimmings towards their battered trucks or sweeping hoses over colourful garden beds. The house Jessica watched was empty, almost posing, like a real estate p
hoto. Imagine entertaining your rich and famous friends here. Cocktails by the pool. Intimate dinner parties on the back deck. Bentleys parked on the enormous river stone drive (designer landscaping by Exotiq Impressions). Jessica waited, watching a group of deeply tanned women powerwalk by. French-polished nails and expensive cheekbones. A little dog that cost more than the Suzuki she was sitting in was going mad behind a fence covered in ivy.

  Brentwood on a Saturday.

  Rachel Beauvoir’s arrival interrupted the third drive-by of a private security car, nervous about a Latina woman sitting idly in her shitty vehicle. Jessica got out of the car and smelled desert plants. Something was ticking in her temple, a tiny trapped animal under the skin, suffocating in the heat. Rachel stopped in the big double doorway, her key out and ready.

  ‘My god.’ Rachel’s right hand fluttered at her chest. ‘What happened to you?’

  They’d met before, briefly. A cursory interview early in the investigation about the victim, Bernice Beauvoir, Rachel’s niece. Rachel had been aloof and sceptical, but Jessica found all rich white people like that. Jessica and the elderly woman had exchanged a nod at Stan’s funeral a month ago, but now her wide eyes wandered over the bandages on Jessica’s neck and arms, the bruising on her face.

  ‘I had a run-in with a zombie,’ Jessica said.

  ‘That was you?’ Rachel pointed at her like an accuser in court, her mouth hanging open. ‘I saw the news report. A man bit you?’

  ‘It’s over,’ Jessica lied. ‘I’m fine.’ Really, it would be approximately forty-eight hours before it could be fine, before Jessica received the results of her HIV and hepatitis screenings. ‘Let’s just get on with this.’

  The slender, bird-like woman unlocked the door to the sprawling mansion.

  ‘Well, here it is,’ Rachel said, as if Jessica hadn’t seen the place before. In reality both women knew that Jessica had spent days here, altogether, sitting with Stan Beauvoir, looking at pictures of his murdered daughter, listening to his stories, searching the girl’s room over and over. It wasn’t the first murder Jessica had worked in the area. She recalled one three streets away, a shooting, a dispute over neighbourhood noise gone horribly wrong. Neighbour on neighbour, highly strung rich people with guns.

  The women stood together before the stairs in the massive foyer. The house was empty of furniture, recently cleaned, the carpet spotless and fluffy and the air hanging with citrus scent.

  Jessica put her hands in her pockets. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come here to see the house. I came to say this is all a waste of time. This is not happening.’

  ‘You said that on the phone.’ Rachel walked through the foyer and into the vast living room. ‘“This is not happening.” Thing is, detective, it’s already happened. You’re named as the beneficiary. It’s on paper. You can’t take that back. Stan’s dead, so he’s not undoing it, and I’m not challenging it in court. Lord knows I don’t need another real estate portfolio heaped into my lap.’

  Jessica had no choice but to follow the woman through the living room towards the deck as she spoke.

  ‘Now you get to decide what’s done with the place. You can sell it. You can split it with your’—Rachel waved her hand dismissively—‘your partner. You can toss the keys in the gutter and walk away. Let the house rot to the ground. I don’t care. But until you make a decision, you’re in this, Jessica. It’s not going away.’

  The two women stood on the massive, empty deck overlooking the glittering pool. Above them, two more storeys of the house yawned upwards. Huge sheets of glass and artistically laid stonework. Jessica sighed loudly without meaning to. She walked to the edge of the deck, sat down with her legs hanging over the manicured lawn, and rubbed her ticking temple.

  ‘I had an appraiser come through on Thursday.’ With difficulty, Rachel Beauvoir sat on the edge of the deck beside the detective, smoothing her skirt over her knees, a woman lowering herself beneath her usual standards. ‘It came in just under seven million.’

  ‘I don’t need to know things like that.’

  ‘I’ve got to tell you, Detective Sanchez, I’m a little surprised by your reaction to all this. You’re LAPD. What have you been making the past two decades of your career? Eighty grand? That ridiculous car out front makes me think a windfall like this is beyond anything you’d ever have imagined.’

  A windfall like this will turn the entire Los Angeles Police Department against me, Jessica thought. It will destroy my relationship with my family in blue.

  ‘How long have you been riding around in that beat-up old car? It’s embarrassing,’ Rachel sighed.

  ‘Leave my car alone. It’s got a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it and it runs like a dream.’

  ‘I’m just saying, this could change your life.’

  ‘It’s already changed my life.’ Jessica pointed to the bandaged bite mark on her shoulder. ‘You see this? This happened because of this house.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My partner didn’t back me up last night because he was so pissed about the inheritance. He was assigned to the case too. He thinks he deserves half.’

  ‘I notice you say assigned to the case, rather than worked on the case.’ Rachel gave a wry smile. ‘If he didn’t back you up when you needed him, he doesn’t sound like a man who particularly likes doing his job.’

  ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’

  ‘I only ever heard Stan talking about you.’ Rachel shrugged. ‘Jessica is coming over to show me some footage. Jessica called again. Jessica might have a new theory.’

  Jessica said nothing.

  ‘Stanley wanted this.’ Rachel turned to her. ‘It’s all he wanted, in the end.’

  Jessica watched the morning light flickering on the surface of the pool.

  ‘When the Silver Lake killer . . .’ Rachel trailed off, then cleared her throat. Swallowed hard. ‘I refuse to say his name. I just call him the killer. When he took my niece, Stan told me that his time thinking of himself as a man ended. He was a father who could not protect his daughter. Bernice was gone and he – well, he was impotent. There was no revenge, there was no closure. He was helpless. Then you came into our lives and you worked and you worked until Stanley almost felt like you were haunting him.’

  Jessica smirked.

  ‘You were showing up here in the dead of the night trying to track down an item of her clothing. Pulling up the floorboards. Clambering around in the attic. Searching her room for the eighteenth time. He told me all about it. You sounded obsessed.’

  ‘That’s what it takes,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Not everyone would agree with you, it seems,’ Rachel said. ‘Not the officers who were on the case before you. It had been ten years, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I was just doing my job.’

  ‘Stanley didn’t believe that,’ Rachel said. ‘He believed you went beyond the call of duty. And though he couldn’t do anything for Bernie, he felt as if he was doing something when he decided to pay you back.’

  Jessica didn’t reply.

  ‘If you refuse to take this house,’ Rachel said, ‘you’ll be denying my brother his—’

  ‘Stop.’ Jessica held up a hand. ‘I don’t want to hear that shit.’

  Rachel pursed her lips, wounded. She took a set of keys from the pocket of her skirt, and held them in the air before them, counting off the keys one by one.

  ‘Front, back, deck, pool gate, side gate, pool house.’ She pointed. ‘Garage.’

  Jessica felt a stab of pain in her chest. She didn’t want to enter another garage, maybe ever again. Just the thought of one was unsettling.

  ‘You’ve got my number,’ Rachel said. She left the keys on the deck between them and stood, walking out without another word. Jessica looked at the keys for a long time, but didn’t touch them.

  There was a kid watching her.

  Jessica became aware of him in the yard behind the Bluestone Lane house as she lit her cigarett
e, wondering if smoking was even allowed in Brentwood, if a private security guard would turn up and hose her if the smoke carried too far on the wind. She noticed a shape moving behind a lattice gate in the back wall, covered with vines. She ignored him. When the cigarette was gone but the boy was still there Jessica went to the gate, skirting the huge, humming pool behind the glass fence.

  ‘Are you our new neighbour?’ the kid said before she could offer a greeting. Jessica stopped in her tracks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ Disappointment.

  ‘I’m just sort of . . . taking care of the place. For now.’ She felt a strange obligation to comfort the child she could barely see through the leaves. She caught a glimpse of sandy blond hair and a wide blue eye.

  ‘Mr Beauvoir was a really nice guy,’ the boy said, gripping the gate so that his fingers wiggled through on Jessica’s side, curious worms. ‘I’m kind of sad he’s gone. He died, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He used to let me help him with the garden sometimes. See those purple flowers over there? The big ones? They’ve got thorns. Don’t go near them. You’ve got to wear gloves and long sleeves or they’ll get you.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jessica lit another cigarette, nodded. ‘Good advice.’

  ‘If you want someone to help you with the garden, I can do it.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll come to that.’

  ‘Mr Beauvoir used to give me five bucks every time.’

  ‘I can see why you miss him.’

  ‘You were sitting there for a long time. Were you thinking about something?’

  Detective Sanchez looked back towards the house, the sweeping windows and the deck. ‘People are usually thinking about something, kid,’ she said. ‘You make it your mission to spy on people?’