Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is this Jessica Sanchez?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Listen up, bitch,’ the heavy, male voice said. ‘You need to stay away from Kristi Zea. She doesn’t want to talk to you, and she doesn’t want anything to do with the old case if it’s being reopened. If Kristi—’

  ‘Who is this?’ Jessica leaned back on the warm car and watched the horizon.

  ‘Just listen,’ the voice said. ‘Kristi will get a lawyer if she has to. She’ll come after you for harassment and emotional trauma. Psychological, uh, you know. Stress. Point is, you got no right to chase her around, and if she has to, she’ll sue your ass off for doing it.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Jessica said.

  ‘Yeah, really, bitch.’ The man was pacing. Jessica could hear boots on a wooden floor. ‘But we won’t start out that way. The legal route is the nice way. That comes second. First, we start the not-so-nice way.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Jessica asked. ‘Come around my apartment and beat me up? Throw my shit around? Break my thumbs?’

  ‘If it gets to that,’ the man said.

  ‘Okay. Understood. Now how about you take a minute to listen, pal,’ Jessica said. ‘Kristi, you listen too.’

  ‘She’s not—’

  ‘I know she’s there. You’ve got her on speaker phone because you’re trying to make her feel better. You were hoping she could listen in while I whimper that I’m terrified by your threats and I’ll stay away. I’m guessing you’re a brother or a close friend, maybe someone she met drinking her guilt away at a piece of shit dive bar.’

  There was silence on the line.

  ‘She called you up this morning, right?’ Jessica continued. ‘She spent the night crying and drinking and freaking out about my phone call last night. You said you’d set things straight. Show this bitch cop that Kristi is not alone, that she has people looking out for her. She said it was a bad idea. You demanded the number. Am I close to the truth here?’

  Jessica heard an intake of breath but carried on before the man could speak.

  ‘You’re not going to come to my apartment and heavy me into leaving Kristi alone. Kristi’s not going to get a lawyer to make me go away. Both those options exist in a fantasy land where you, whoever you are, are willing to risk an assault charge for helping your friend, and Kristi is willing to stand in a courtroom in front of a judge while I explain to him why I’m so interested in talking to her. No; in reality, where we live, Kristi is going to sit down with me and answer my questions.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Because the kind of harassment you’re threatening to sue me for hasn’t even begun yet,’ Jessica said. ‘I’ve made one phone call so far. From here, I begin turning up unexpectedly in Kristi’s life. Maybe I pop into the bar she frequents and start talking to the local dropouts, poking around, demanding answers. I swing by her workplace and ask to speak to her boss. I knock on her mother’s door and invite myself in for tea. I find out who you are, and I pay a visit to you in the middle of the night, maybe with five SWAT guys and a search warrant. All the while, as I’m touring Kristi’s inner circle, I’m staying eagle-eyed for bullshit charges I can drop on the people in her life. After I’ve got Kristi’s friends in my hand, I start messing with her. I speak to her landlord. I flag her with the tax department. I report her to the ASPCA for kicking her dog.’

  There was a scraping noise, and Jessica thought she heard hurried, muffled voices in the background of the call.

  ‘Tell her she needs to speak to me,’ Jessica insisted. ‘She needs to put things straight.’

  The line went dead. Diggy gave an appreciative whistle.

  ‘You’d really do all that stuff to get Zea to talk?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t need to.’ Jessica tapped out a message. ‘I’ve done this a few times. You start with the mother’s house. As soon as you get to the mother, the kid folds.’

  Jessica tried to focus. The Harbour case could wait. What she was seeing before her now had sent tingles of nervousness up her spine. Wherever Dayly Lawlor was, she needed help. Jessica sent a message to her forensic technology contact. She had been forced to go two states over to find an investigator who would help her track down the anonymous payer that had sent $800 to Dayly’s bank account. All the police resources she tried in California were either busy, annoyed by the Brentwood house situation or too amused by the video of her at Goren’s house to offer anything but clever quips. It had taken an hour and a half to find the current whereabouts of a woman named Mariana who had shared Jessica’s dorm room at the academy, who was now bunkered down in a basement lab in New Mexico.

  You got anything on that anonymous account yet? Jessica asked. Her phone blipped almost instantly with a response.

  I’ve got the guy, Mariana said. Sending address. But if you’re going to visit him, I’d suggest you take backup.

  BLAIR

  I’d sent Sneak into a gas station to get me an ice pack for my sore head, but she returned with a bag of popsicles that was difficult to mould around my brow, even more so when she extracted one and started sucking on it. I stood in the desert sun with condensation dripping down my face while she read text messages between Officer Lemon and a contact named only ‘D’, which we took to be our missing girl.

  LEMON: R we really gonna do this?

  D: We give it a try. Y not? Worst case scenario someone finds out and beats us to it.

  LEMON: Worst case scenario I end up fired and u end up with ur ass in jail. I said it to u last nite and I’ll say it again now. I WILL turn on u if I have to.

  ‘What the hell are they talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re going to commit some kind of crime, clearly.’ Sneak frowned at the phone, sucking her ice pop now and then, which was staining her lips green. ‘We just have to figure out what it is. Bank heist? Murder?’

  ‘Someone beats us to it,’ I repeated.

  ‘Here’s a thought,’ Sneak said. ‘Might be crazy. But maybe ten years ago I knew this guy who worked in a station in San Bernardino. A cop. Johnny Reselt. He figured out that every time there was an earthquake, the cameras in the evidence lock-up blinked out. Not for long, maybe twenty seconds. So he gets himself assigned down there. The only way you can get put in the evidence lock-up is by getting in trouble. Bringing the police force into ill repute, for example. So he paid me a grand to get caught with him doing coke in a public toilet. I got a drug charge and he got assigned to the evidence dungeon.’

  ‘Where is this story going?’ I asked, massaging my stiff neck.

  ‘Give me a minute. So Johnny’s working in the evidence room. He starts quietly looking around at what they got down there. He figures out that the most high-profile case on the shelves is this rape charge against a local celebrity chef. Pretty famous guy. Does some TV shows, lives in a big house in the mountains. Apparently the chef guy cornered a teenage apprentice and locked her in the freezer room, and wouldn’t let her out unless she gave him a blow job. So Johnny works in the evidence room, waiting patiently for an earthquake. Months go by, but then it comes. When the cameras blink out, he goes into the evidence box for the chef case, nabs the key piece of evidence against the chef and stuffs it in his backpack. It was a shirt, in case you’re wondering. The apprentice’s shirt. Had the chef’s jizz on it.’

  ‘How does all this relate to Dayly?’ I asked.

  ‘Johnny sold the evidence bag to the chef for, like, fifty grand.’ Sneak sucked the remnants of her popsicle from the wrapper. ‘Maybe there’s something similar going on here. Dayly and Officer Lemon are teaming up to rob the evidence room.’

  ‘And they’re worried someone in the station is going to beat them to it?’ I asked. ‘Before the case goes to trial? What are the chances of two crooked cops having the same crazy idea?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever this is, it has to have something to do with cops. Dayly’s not making friends with Crips on one hand and cops on the other.
’

  ‘Or it might just have to do with Lemon himself. The fact that he’s a cop is a coincidence.’

  ‘I’m just spitballing here.’ Sneak hefted her handbag onto her lap and took a bump of cocaine.

  ‘Keep reading the messages,’ I said.

  ‘There’s not much else. Looks like Dayly and Lemon were meeting regularly.’ Sneak scrolled through the phone. ‘They meet . . . four times over the space of three weeks.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘The messages just say stuff like I’m here and Three minutes. I’m out back. Caught in traffic.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘There’s a conversation two weeks ago that’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Let me read it to you.’

  D: What do you think?

  LEMON: He knows his shit.

  D: But can we trust him?

  LEMON: I’ve looked at jacket. He’s good for this sort of thing. If u want, I can try to get something on him but I don’t think we need to do that. If we piss him off he’s gone and so is whole deal.

  ‘I’ve looked at jacket?’ I said.

  ‘His jacket,’ Sneak said. ‘His rap sheet. Lemon has run a check on a guy, whoever it is they’re trying to decide if they can trust.’

  The radio in the passenger-side footwell crackled to life. Sneak and I looked at each other as we listened through the open windows.

  ‘Dispatch, this is L81, can you start me the paperwork on a stolen phone? Some asshole nabbed my cell while I was attending to that 211, over.’

  ‘Oh, man, Marcus, are you serious? Over.’

  ‘Yeah. Right out of my cruiser. I’ve checked the surrounding CCTV but I was parked in a blind spot. Witnesses saw a fat blonde woman.’

  ‘Tough ride.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘Marcus, while I’ve got you, go show your face at the Mesa, would you? Ronnie’s over there trying to steal bottles from the dumpsters again. In progress.’

  ‘Be there in five. Over.’

  I drove with Sneak to the Mesa Inn, a tiny dive bar nestled in a strip mall between an insurance salesman’s storefront and a pawn shop. The lettering on the front of the building looked reused from a cinema; green block letters on white racks. I parked a good distance from Lemon’s cruiser, knowing that he would recognise the Gangstermobile from the earlier crash if he spotted me in the street. We sat watching as he negotiated the release of a hessian sack full of beer bottles from a man standing in the street behind the bar. Lemon’s manner was gentle. His hands were out, open, appealing. I thought about his voice, warm and encouraging, as he guided my car back onto the road after issuing me a caution for reckless driving, with much professed reluctance. Sneak was leaning wide out her window, squinting in the sun.

  ‘We need binoculars,’ she said.

  ‘Police radio. Binoculars. Some GPS trackers. You could get yourself fully set up as a private investigator. Get a licence and start charging for this stuff.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? You’re good at it.’

  ‘I’m never gonna leave the life,’ she confessed. ‘The street. I was made for it. For falling down over and over. That’s my destiny.’

  ‘What bullshit.’

  Sneak laughed and looked at me.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You could change your destiny right now. Change it back to what it was originally, before the accident that wiped you out of the Olympics. You were on track for great things.’

  ‘So was Dayly.’ She shrugged. ‘And now look. Something’s turned her down the dark path. Maybe it’s genetic. A family curse. I knew a guy once who was cursed. Ex-girlfriend put it on him. He was killed by a pelican.’

  ‘We don’t know what’s happened to Dayly.’ I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sure, it doesn’t look good, but she might come out of this okay.’

  ‘They say all that stuff in rehab, you know,’ Sneak said. ‘“You can change your destiny right now”, that kind of thing. They’re all about their quotes. Affirmations. They’ve got them painted all over the walls in pretty colours. Sometimes they put them on bracelets and T-shirts, wear them around. Believe in yourself. Be grateful for every moment. Make a plan and stick to it. Trust the process. Problem is, they’re not from anybody, those quotes. They’re not tried and tested in real life.’

  ‘Have you got a quote you live by that’s tried and tested, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Mike Tyson,’ she said, watching Lemon return to his vehicle. ‘“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”’

  I thought about that. About how many wonderful plans I’d had for Jamie and myself before a set of handcuffs snapped shut on my wrists for the first time. Until life itself punched me in the mouth. Sneak righted herself in her seat and flicked a hand in Lemon’s direction.

  ‘Let’s follow him for a while,’ she said.

  JESSICA

  Jessica didn’t take backup to the neat little house on Hill Street in Walnut Park. She parked under a street sign that read, ominously, Bumps ahead and watched the house, waiting for the object of Mariana’s warning to reveal itself, but it did not. The business address of Scream Inc. was a pretty stucco place with arched windows and low palm trees in the front yard, a red hummingbird feeder hanging from a rail near a door inlaid with stained glass. She went and knocked, waited, listening to the sound of footsteps on stairs. The woman who opened the door was younger than Jessica expected, squat and round, her hair dyed a blue-black that was stark against her pale and ginger-speckled skin.

  ‘Jessica Sanchez?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I’m Tania Austen,’ the woman said, and smiled. A strong southern accent. ‘Come on in.’

  The house was as classically tidy and ordinary inside as it was on the outside. Persian rugs on hardwood floors, a rack on the wall for coats or bags that was emblazoned with the word Family. Jessica guessed the young woman lived with her parents. A stirring feeling had begun in her stomach as soon as she passed the threshold, a feeling at odds with her pretty surrounds. She followed Tania to a door off the kitchen and watched the woman fish for the right key from a bundle she extracted from her hoodie pocket.

  ‘So you didn’t say on the phone which item you were interested in,’ Tania said, slipping the key into a heavy padlock on the door. Jessica hadn’t said much on the phone at all, only that she wanted to speak to Tania about a purchase she had made the previous month. Sometimes Jessica found cases unravelled themselves much more easily when she just showed up, not announcing her presence as a cop, not trying to dig too deeply into the situation in which she was about to find herself. Too many questions would make doors start blowing shut. As she followed Tania down a set of narrow basement stairs, the woman ahead of her didn’t know Jessica was armed, that she technically required a warrant to enter the premises.

  ‘I’m here to talk to you about Dayly Lawlor,’ Jessica said vaguely.

  ‘Ah, right,’ Tania said with a smirk. ‘I’m not surprised. I haven’t even put those letters up on the site yet. But word gets around, doesn’t it?’

  A rigidly organised basement. Jessica stood before a wide rosewood desk and looked at the shelves around her, custom-built display cabinets that were packed with labelled items. There were shelves of unframed sketches and bright acrylic paintings of ghosts and beautiful women next to items that seemed to have no category: a handbag with a torn zipper, and a pink teddy bear that appeared burned on one side, the cotton-candy-like fur curled and blackened. Jessica turned and looked at a rack full of hundreds of tiny jars, each labelled with a name: Schaefer, G. J. – Jones, J. – Gacy, J.W. – Norris, R. – Pike, C. She stepped closer and saw that some of the tiny jars were filled with what looked like hair. Grey, black, brown bundles. Others contained sharp, yellowish fibres in the shape of crescent-moons. Tania was searching in a huge filing cabinet. Jessica spied files labelled with the words Transcripts, Psych reports, Auth certs, Scene/autopsy pics.
The feeling in her stomach was deepening, a sick tightening just above her pelvis.

  ‘It’s in here somewhere, don’t worry,’ Tania said, thumbing through the files. ‘Go ahead and admire the shop while you’re waiting, but I’ve got to let you know, you’re on three different cameras right now. Last year I had a guy come down here and try to steal a jar of Berkowitz’s fingernails. I got the only jar in the country that’s for sale and has an attached certificate of authenticity. That’s one of the premium jars, top shelf. If you buy Dayly’s letters, I can give you a good deal on a couple of non-premium jars.’

  ‘Are you talking about . . . David Berkowitz?’ Jessica asked. ‘The serial killer?’

  ‘Son of Sam,’ Tania said. ‘I’ve also got a pair of his prison shoes, too, if you’re into that guy.’

  Jessica looked back at the shelves. At the little jars of hair and fingernails labelled with the names of famous killers. In the corner of the room was an old fridge, humming, bolted and padlocked at the door. Jessica went to the opposite wall and examined a frame hanging high on the wall. In the frame was a slice of cream carpet partly soaked in a reddish-brown substance. She noticed the back of the frame was screwed to the wall.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not for sale.’ Tania came to Jessica’s side. ‘That one’s mine. That right there, missy, is a square of carpet one of the forensic investigators cut from the floor of the Columbine High School library two days after the shooting. I’ve got a certificate of authenticity for that one, too. It’s worth more than everything else in here.’ She put her hands on her hips proudly. ‘Someone wanted to trade me a pair of Jeffrey Dahmer’s glasses for it a couple of weeks ago. I thought about it, I tell ya. I really thought about it.’

  ‘So this is all . . .’ Jessica wheezed.

  ‘Murderabilia,’ Tania said, nodding. ‘You must have thought this was prison letters only?’

  ‘I didn’t . . .’ Jessica lost her words.