Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

I thought was a rather minor drug habit. I’m sorry to hear she is an addict now. I’m not surprised you have “mixed feelings” about her. It’s a hard life, having been given up. My mother was a prostitute, and I was raised by my grandparents in Utah. Most people don’t bother looking into my history to try to figure out why I did what I did, but that was a big reason; the abuse and neglect I suffered at the hands of my grandparents and the feeling of abandonment when my mother dropped me on their doorstep at age six and drove away forever. You might be interested to know that I’ve been seen by plenty of psychologists over the years, and have been tested to have an IQ of 142. There have been no findings to support a brain malfunction or tumor or psychological condition to account for me killing all those innocent people that day in Inglewood. I’m just a broken man who was pushed too far.

So, yes, it’s possible you may have some claim to my DNA. Whether or not you want to confirm that is something you should probably think hard about.

I’ve never had contact with Sneak in here, and I’m surprised by that, now that you say she’s an addict. There are a lot of former and current addicts in here, and all they ever want to ask me about is the money. I hit a lot of banks over a long stretch of time. The theory is that if I was stockpiling money from all my different jobs, surely it would be stupid to put it all in one place. But even if there was, say, another large cache of money hidden in Los Angeles or its surrounds somewhere, none of these guys would be able to spend a fraction of it in here. There’s only so much commissary you can eat, and they’d be relying on someone on the outside to take care of the rest of it for them without running off. A lot of times these guys just want to know the answer to a question. Questions and secrets can eat away at you in prison, with us all sitting in our cells twenty-three hours a day with nothing to do.

Most guys on the row are indigent, meaning they live off what the state provides for them in postage, commissary, and phone call allowances. Some of the more notorious inmates, serial killers for example, smuggle out pieces of themselves to a broker to sell online. My neighbor on the left gets about $50 on the internet for a lock of his hair. He’s got about six rape/murders under his belt. I have a broker who sells my letters for a lot more than that. People are convinced that one of these days I’m going to drop a hint about more hidden cash, disguised somehow in a letter. They think perhaps I’ll write a message in the first letter of every line, or gradually leak numbers that translate into longitude and latitude. I’ve heard you can leave invisible messages in paper with lemon juice. But I’m not that stupid. The first person to notice something like that hidden in a letter would be a guard. They read, scan, and chemically test our mail, and there’s no way I’d risk one of those bastards getting any of my money. If I wanted to give some secret information to someone, it would have to be in person.

This is all hypothetical, of course, based on the public presumption that there’s more of my money out there. I stole a lot more than I ever spent or gave away, including what was found. But you know how ignorant the public are. They’ll latch on to an idea just because it’s exciting and romantic.

I hope you write back, but, like I said, think about whether or not you really want to know the truth of your parentage. I can tell you, some parents aren’t worth knowing. And think about selling this letter on the internet. A smart cookie like you should be able to figure out where. Some places, you can get up to $500 for them. At least, that’s what my broker tells me, but there’s no way for me to know if he’s holding back.

Take care,

John Fishwick

P.S. Why anyone would rescue a gopher or a pigeon is totally beyond me, but your photo is cute. You’ve got my eyes. Tell Sneak I say hello, next time you talk to her.

JESSICA

Jessica sat at her desk in the Homicide department, ignoring the eyes on her, scrolling through the six-hour initial interrogation of Blair Harbour over the Adrian Orlov shooting. She had not seen Wallert or Vizchen on her way into the building, but her shoulders ached with tension at the inevitability of their arrival, a feeling that mingled with the dread of someone pointing out that she should be nowhere near the station on account of her trauma leave. On the screen, Blair Harbour seemed shrunken in her chair, the forensic body suit ballooning around her, a smear of blood still in her hair. Jessica had always liked to do that, to get the first interview with the perp as soon as possible after the crime, make it as long as she could. Adrenaline from the crime makes them chatty, and the ensuing exhaustion makes them stupid. She liked to make the perp stare at the blood and dirt under their nails and try to explain it all away. Jessica was leaning forward in her chair in the video, while her partner at the time, Nandermann, stuck to the corner, a silent sentinel. Jessica pressed the right side of the headphones closer to her ear, watched the blurry image of Harbour’s face as she spoke.

HARBOUR: I had nothing against them. They seemed nice enough. It was just the noise that bothered me. Aside from speaking to them about the noise I really didn’t know