Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘This way,’ Jessica said. She led Diggy up the wide, carpeted stairs to the second-floor kitchen, a sprawling space dominated by huge slatted windows looking out over the forest-like backyard. Jessica remembered when it was Blair Harbour’s things adorning this room. A ‘Kiss the Chef’ apron hanging from a rail on the navy blue six-burner commercial oven. A ceramic chicken with a succulent growing from its back on the windowsill by the sink. There had been an unopened box containing a baby bottle steriliser on the island in the middle of the room, Jessica recalled. Mommy getting ready early, nesting, checking off her list. She went slowly to the windows that faced north and looked out towards 1107, gripping the edge of the marble counter with white knuckles.

  She didn’t realise she was holding her breath until it gushed from her lips with relief.

  ‘What is it?’ Diggy stepped up beside her.

  ‘You can’t see the bathroom of 1107 from the kitchen window,’ Jessica said. She took another deep breath, let it out slow. ‘That’s all I needed to see. We can go.’

  ‘At least explain to me what we’re looking at,’ Diggy said. Jessica rummaged in her shoulder bag and brought out the Harbour/Orlov murder book. She flipped through to a section of notes near the middle of the book.

  ‘Blair Harbour’s statement about what happened on the morning of 1 January 2009 changed a bunch of times before trial,’ she said. ‘But in the first rendition, she said she went to 1107 because she saw Orlov strike his girlfriend, Kristi Zea, in the face, through her kitchen window. She said she looked out when the music started because she was annoyed by the noise, and she saw Orlov and Zea standing in the bathroom, arguing. He hit her. Harbour went over there to intervene.’

  Jessica leaned forwards and pointed left towards a window inset on the side of what had once been the Orlov house. The window was twenty feet away and seven feet to the left of where they stood. All that was visible was a slice of window frame.

  ‘You can’t see in,’ she said.

  ‘I concur. You cannot,’ Diggy said.

  Jessica nodded, smoothed her hair back. ‘This is a good enough hole in the story for me. Harbour was very clear in her first statement. She was standing in her kitchen, and she saw them in their bathroom.’

  ‘Did she say where in her kitchen she was standing?’ He shuffled sideways, trying to find an angle on the bathroom window. He went into the dining room and back. Jessica watched, satisfied. He went to the furthest corner of the kitchen and stopped.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  Jessica went to his side. He was pointing to a window at the back of the Orlov house, lower and wider than the bathroom window. It was on the first floor, not the second.

  Jessica flipped through the murder book to a floor plan of the Orlov house. She found the room and tapped it with her finger.

  ‘That’s the laundry room.’

  ‘You can see into that room a lot better.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s the laundry.’

  ‘It has tiles on the walls.’

  Jessica leaned over the counter and looked. ‘So what?’ she asked.

  ‘Is it possible Harbour saw tiles and assumed it was a bathroom? Had she ever been in the Orlov house before? Was there any reason she would be able to discern one tiled room from another?’

  Jessica realised she was cracking her knuckles for the third time in a row. Her fingers ached. She shook her hands out.

  ‘No,’ she said. She went to the murder book and took out a sleeve of photographs, slapped them on the countertop. ‘She said she hadn’t been in the Orlov house before. But that window wasn’t visible either.’

  She shuffled the pictures frantically and spilled some in the sink.

  ‘This is a series of photographs of the Orlov house taken from these windows back in January 2009,’ she said, spreading the images on the counter. ‘They were taken from this very spot. You can’t see in the second-floor bathroom because of the angle, and you can’t see into the first-floor laundry either, because the view is blocked by vegetation.’

  ‘Just stay calm.’ Diggy put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder. ‘If there’s been some mistake, we—’

  ‘I am calm.’ Jessica tapped the photographs too hard. ‘There’s been no mistake. I don’t make mistakes. Look at the photos, Diggs.’

  Diggy looked at the photographs in turn. He examined each closely, then went to the window and looked at the first-floor of the house next door. He repeated this process three times.

  ‘Would you just agree with me so we can go?’ Jessica wiped sweat from her brow. ‘Jesus fuck, I thought you didn’t want to be here.’

  ‘There’s foliage in front of the laundry window in this picture,’ Diggy said, selecting the photograph and presenting it to Jessica as though she’d never seen it before. ‘So the laundry window was not visible. It was blocked.’

  ‘I just said that.’

  ‘There’s a problem.’

  ‘What?’ Jessica gripped the picture hard, crumpling the corner.

  ‘The bush that was down there blocking sight of the window, in the picture; it’s not there now.’ Diggy pointed.

  ‘It’s been ten years. Who keeps a bush for ten years?’

  Diggy stared at her. ‘Plenty of—’

  ‘I know. I know. I’m panicking. Go on.’

  ‘If the bush was there today, perhaps we could examine it.’

  ‘Examine it! For what?’

  ‘Hear me out.’ He took the photograph from Jessica’s hand and placed it on the counter. ‘The time stamp on these photographs is three weeks after the shooting.’

  ‘Yes, we took them after the prosecutor briefed us on what we’d need for trial.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Diggy nodded. ‘So perhaps three weeks earlier, when Harbour looked out her window, she could see into the laundry. Maybe by the time these pictures were taken the bush had grown up over the window, blocking the view.’

  ‘No.’ Jessica shook her head. ‘No. We checked it.’

  ‘You checked it?’

  ‘My partner at the time. He checked it. Once I heard the story in the interrogation room, I sent him up here to check the angle. It was maybe twenty-four hours later. You couldn’t see in the bathroom window.’

  ‘Would he have considered the other window? The laundry window?’

  ‘He . . .’ Jessica couldn’t answer. She stared at her hands.

  ‘Who was your partner?’

  ‘Ira Andermann.’

  Diggy pursed his lips, looked away. Jessica knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing she was thinking: that Ira Andermann was not a cop who paid attention to details, who tested hypotheses and considered angles or nuances or possibly misinterpreted laundry room tiles. He was a dreamer. A dullard. She had once seen him pour dishwashing liquid into his coffee instead of milk on a late shift. It had taken three sips before he’d realised. He’d been fired from the West LA station years ago for stealing toilet paper from the men’s room. If he’d been told to look out the kitchen window of the Harbour house and determine if it was possible to see through the bathroom window of the Orlov house, he’d have done just that and nothing more.

  ‘A bush couldn’t grow that high in three weeks,’ Jessica said. ‘Not in winter.’

  ‘Depends on the bush.’ Diggy shrugged. ‘It’s grown right up to the bottom edge of the window in the photograph. Depending on a thousand different variables, it’s not impossible.’

  ‘What variables?’

  Diggy sighed, opened his hands. ‘The species of plant, its germination and heritage, the nitrogen and acidity levels in the soil, sunlight, watering and fertilisation, pruning history, fluctuations in the weather patterns in the area, humidity, elevation, the effects of climate change—’

  ‘Stop,’ Jessica said. She covered her eyes. ‘Stop.’

  Diggy didn’t speak in the moments she stood there, staring at the terrifying dark of the backs of her eyelids, a darkness pregnant with the crushing possibility that she
had sent an innocent woman to prison for a decade. In time she dropped her hands and walked back out to her car.

  They were silent all the way back to the station. When she parked in the underground parking lot of the West LA police station, Diggy held the handle of the door but didn’t get out.

  ‘What are you doing, poking holes in this case?’

  ‘Trying to find the truth.’ Jessica held on to the steering wheel, stared straight ahead.

  ‘I mean, what inspired it?’

  ‘I found out the Harbour kid lives directly behind the house in Bluestone Lane.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I talked to him. I like him. He’s a good kid.’

  ‘Plenty of murderers have good kids,’ Diggy said. ‘It doesn’t mean you were wrong about his mother. Why did her story change so many times at trial, and before it, if she was innocent?’

  ‘She got an expensive lawyer,’ Jessica said. ‘A Brentwood-woman’s lawyer. The guy bled her dry in legal fees, took the house and everything, and he did that because he could – because he had a zero-loss score at trial. The only way you get a zero-loss score is by making your clients plead out. He pitched every story under the sun to prosecutors so they’d bump the charge down to manslaughter. Self-defence. Accident. Provocation. Insanity. Nothing worked, and Harbour was half-hearted about the alternative stories. She was backing herself. She said she was defending Zea and she believed that.’

  ‘Well, it’s possible she was lying,’ Diggy said.

  ‘It’s starting to look like she wasn’t, Diggs,’ Jessica said. She could hear the terror in her own voice. ‘The cheese sandwich.’

  ‘Okay,’ Diggy said. ‘So we looked at a photograph of the cheese sandwich Harbour allegedly made and partially ate after the killing. We determined that it was most likely made by Orlov. Male bite mark, definitely not female. But that doesn’t mean anything. Just because Zea lied or was mistaken about a sandwich at the crime scene doesn’t mean the rest of what she said isn’t true. She might have panicked and her brain constructed the tale. She might have seen Harbour go into Orlov’s kitchen, seen the crime-scene photos later and assumed that’s what Harbour did in there. She might have deliberately bolstered her story with the sandwich detail simply because she was angry and wanted to make sure Harbour went down.’

  ‘You might be wrong about the bite mark being male,’ Jessica added.

  ‘Unlikely, but possible.’ Diggy shifted in his seat. ‘And the bush under the window today. That’s another minor detail that could be explained in a thousand different ways.’

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Jessica said. ‘As soon as I met that kid I started getting whispers in my mind that something was hinky about this case. Now that whisper is a scream. What are the odds that the kid lives there behind the house that I inherited? It’s fate.’

  ‘Jessica,’ Diggy sighed.

  ‘Harbour is back in my life because I made a mistake. I have to keep looking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t fuck up like this.’ Jessica turned to him. Her face felt tight, almost bruised with tension. ‘This is not me. I’m a good cop. I check things. I make sure. I don’t take babies from their mothers unless the moms are violent killers.’

  ‘The kid was a newborn when he was taken away,’ Diggy said. ‘He wouldn’t have had the core neurodevelopmental capacity at that age for the absence of his biological mother to have affected his psychological and emotional wellbeing—’

  ‘Diggs,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Look at the bigger picture.’ Diggy put his hands out. ‘The whole equation. You’re not picking at the edges of a scab here. You’re cutting into something that is already completely healed. If you reopen and disprove your own case you’ll leave yourself exposed to appeals from any and all of the scumbags you have put away in the past ten years, or longer. A real killer might be released from prison simply because you want to find the truth.’

  ‘You say “find the truth” like it’s a bad thing,’ Jessica said. ‘Like it’s stupid.’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘In this particular case, it isn’t reasonable or viable. Blair Harbour has already done her time. Obtaining an exoneration for her would not be worth what you risk in doing so. You risk ruining your career and further damaging the reputation of your partner on the case, Ira Andermann. You risk opening old cases and setting guilty people free. You’d bring public disgrace on the department and gouge its resources thanks to a huge compensation claim by Harbour and her lawyers. The sacrifices outweigh the payoff here, Jessica. It’s simple maths.’

  Jessica said nothing.

  ‘Sometimes you have to conduct an experiment and find the truth, yes,’ Diggy said. ‘But sometimes you have to consider that you might burn the lab down in the process.’

  Diggy looked at her eyes. What he saw there made him sigh.

  ‘We’re building a new lab,’ Jessica said.

  ‘I assumed as much,’ Diggy said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Work on the bush theory. Calculate some of the variables, as many as you can. Have your professor double-check the bite mark photograph.’

  He saluted and got out of the car. Jessica watched him go, then drove to the lower level of the parking lot, rolling slowly towards the south-east corner, where Wallert’s Mustang stood parked against a concrete wall in its usual place. She got out and went to the back of her vehicle, popped the trunk and took out a towel, which she wrapped around her neck. She thought about how grateful she was to have Oliver Digbert on her side, as she hefted a huge plastic tub full of sloshing, jostling materials to the side of Wallert’s car. Good investigative company had been hard to find lately.

  Jessica went back to her car, opened the glove box and extracted her crime-scene kit. She pulled a mask over her nose and mouth, and gloves onto her hands, then returned to the tub by the Mustang. As she lifted the lid a wave of feral, fetid stench enveloped her, making her gag. The smell of the urine bottles was strong enough to penetrate the garbage bag they lay in, but not the tub itself. She took the towel from around her neck, spread it over the driver’s-side window of Wallert’s car and smashed the window with her elbow, a soft crunching sound emanating across the lot. She cleared the glass away, glanced around the interior of the car. Wallert spent a lot of time on his car, she discerned. The leather interior was shiny, oily, smelling of eucalyptus. She took the first piss bottle from the bag in the tub, unscrewed the cap and leaned away from the car as she emptied it into the front seat.

  She bent for another, thinking about the Harbour kid, about truth, about guilty men roaming free. The hobo urine sloshed over the centre console and onto the floor of Wallert’s car. She dropped the bottle into the vehicle.

  Thirty bottles to go, she estimated.

  BLAIR

  Sneak hung an elbow out of the car, the desert winds rustling her curls. She was not a desert person. Two bright-pink blotches had emerged on her cheeks at the northern edge of Lancaster city, and there they remained, slick and round, as we drove through the brown, sandy nothingness. The Chrysler had no working air conditioning. I wiped the condensation from a bottle of water we’d bought from a Native American kid running a roadside stall in Mojave across my forehead.

  ‘It’ll be a body,’ Sneak said. I didn’t need to ask her what she meant.

  ‘If it’s a body, we play it nice, nod and smile, and get the hell out of there,’ I said. ‘We say, “Thanks very much for dealing with our little problem, Ada. Have a great day.” Then we step on the gas and get to the nearest police station.’

  Sneak didn’t answer. That wasn’t her plan. I knew that if Ada Maverick had killed Dayly’s boyfriend I’d turn around and find Sneak gone, and I’d be stuck trying to explain to the police that she and I had only wanted to question Dimitri Lincoln when we made the mistake of sharing our predicament with a psychopath. We were headed for a pin marked on a map, well away from any paved roads or structures. I glanced at the phone as we rolled throug
h California City, a lonely row of shopfronts in the middle of a vast, flat void three hours from Downtown LA.

  Like the planned and failed utopian community partly built and now rotting by the Salton Sea, California City was marked out on Google Maps as much bigger, grander and wider than it was in real life. We drove past ghost streets, working our way north through a dream that never materialised. I turned off the main road onto a strip of dirt cutting a path through low, sparse desert scrub, heading towards the flat, hazy horizon. Wind-scattered piles of trash rolled past the car. A rusted oven resting on its side. A clump of children’s toys and clothes half buried in sand. Sheets of corrugated iron making shelters for snake families in the boiling sun.

  I saw Ada’s car two miles before we arrived at it. A candy-pink Porsche Panamera gleaming so brightly I couldn’t look directly at the paintwork. Ada was standing ten yards ahead of it with her foot resting on an upturned blue plastic bucket. Her black leather pants and boots were dusty, and she’d stripped down to a black singlet top. There was a leather jacket on the hood of the car, which told me she’d been out here since the chill of morning. The shovel on the ground beside the car nailed it. The guy was dead and buried. I stopped but didn’t put the car into park.

  ‘Should we just go now?’ I asked Sneak.

  Sneak got out of the car. I parked and joined her. That voice was whispering at me again, the one that told me I had got myself into this mess, that I was getting deeper and deeper with every second I hung around these women.

  Ada flicked her cigarette into the wind and jutted her chin at me.

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘We left when you called.’ I shrugged.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You got a vat of soup in the car?’ she said.

  ‘That’s just how I drive.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Sneak broke in. I looked and saw that her fists were clenched. ‘Did you at least get something out of him before he died?’

  Ada stepped off the bucket, kicked it so that it flipped off of a human head sitting on the desert floor.