Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

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 well-being—”

“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 Nandermann. 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 math.”

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 toward the southeast 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 center 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