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

sinks and washed her face. Her whole body trembled with fury. Panting, she looked at herself in the mirror and noticed blood spots peeping through the fabric of her white T-shirt from the big bite on her left shoulder.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered, lifting her shirt.

She was standing in her bra, peeling away the bandage tape carefully when Oliver Digbert walked in. Digbert always used the female bathrooms on the third floor, because the forensic pathologist had determined them to be the cleanest in the building.

“Diggy,” Jessica grunted. The last thing she felt like doing was talking, but the plump, freckled pathologist had come through for her on a rape case years earlier that meant she had been able to snatch an innocent suspect out of the clutches of a life-in-prison term a day before the jury went out on his trial. Digbert liked pleasantries, and she watched him smile in the mirror as he headed to the stalls. His shirt was a shade of fluorescent pink with tiny black teapots patterned all over it like polka dots.

“Someone’s having a rough day,” he said as he closed the door behind him. The toilet seat creaked as he sat down. Jessica listened to him pee as she examined the red and blue mess that was her shoulder, guessed peeing sitting down was cleaner and more efficient, which was very like Diggy. When he emerged to wash his chubby hands, the pathologist hit the soap dispenser five times. “I heard about the inheritance. I presume your distress is due to Whitton giving you a hard time because you told him you’ll take it.”

“You think I should take it?” Jessica smirked. She could feel her pulse slowing. “You’d be the only one in the building.”

“It would be the only sensible economic decision,” Diggy said, frowning as he scrubbed the webbing between his fingers. “The property value is considerably above anything you’ll ever make in your current role, even projecting out to consider future pension and long-service compensation versus property fluctuations and—”

“I get it.” Jessica patted his shoulder. “It’s not that. It’s the betrayal. Turning my back on the team. On the job.”

“I don’t understand.” Diggy dried his hands. “Your job is solving crimes. With that kind of money, you could open your own private detective agency. Employ a slew of top-notch investigators. Delegate your cases based on your interests, and not on the woeful backlog-versus-urgency system. Your considerable monetary advantage would provide you with plenty of opportunity to test forensic material privately and in a timely fashion.”

Jessica leaned in to the mirror to look at the bite wound and dabbed at the wet spot with a paper towel. Diggy nudged his glasses back onto his nose.

“I heard about the house, but not the assault,” he said.

“Yeah, zombie got me,” Jessica said. “You don’t watch the news? It made the top stories.”

“Modern current affairs journalism is a diabolical slurry of political corruption and the flimsy whims of narcissistic millennials,” he said.

“Flimsy Whims,” Jessica said. “That’s your porn star name.”

“Who was the guy?” Diggy asked, looking at the wound in the mirror.

“How do you know it was a guy?” Jessica turned to him.

“Well, a layman might have guessed a female aggressor,” Diggy said. “Statistically, women are more likely to bite in a fight. But, luckily, this observer was raised from a young scientific larva to gifted specialist by Dr. Richard Rhodes of the Virginia Commonwealth University.”

“Gifted, huh?” Jessica smiled.

“Dr. Rhodes’s research focused on determining gender and ethnicity through odontometric analysis of the maxillary arch and maxillary and mandibular teeth. He used mesiodistal, labiolingual, buccolingual, and distobuccal measurements to determine the characteristics of biters in a range of medico-legal case studies. I tended his lab and basked in his unquestionable greatness,” Diggy said.

“So you’re saying you can look at this and tell me it’s a male bite mark?” Jessica pointed to the wound on her shoulder.

“Within a certain range of probability.” Diggy leaned over, studied the bite mark. Jessica noted he had not glanced at her chest even once. “Remember,” Diggy said, “I was the apprentice, not the master. But what I believe I’m looking at is a bite from a male of Caucasoid ethnic heritage. Am I correct?”

Jessica stared at the man in the bathroom with her. She folded the bandage back down over her wound and pressed the tape tight against her shoulder.

“Come with me,” she said. She grabbed her shirt from the edge of the sink and threw it on. “I want to show you a photo of a sandwich.”

Dear John,

Thanks for writing back. Crazy stuff. Especially about the guy selling his hair. What you’d even do with a serial killer’s hair once you got it is a pretty creepy prospect. I did what you said—I looked online and toured through the “murderabilia” sites. A lot of Charles Manson stuff is going for a mint because he’s dead. The guy sure did a lot of crappy artwork. Gacy, too. You were right, there are a couple of your letters going for upward of $500. The seller says “strong suspicions of clues to hidden cash” for each. Everybody’s got to have their side hustle, I guess. I might sell the letters. I could use the money.

At first when I read what you wrote about how having a terrible childhood and being abandoned had an effect on your decision to kill, I thought—that’s bullshit. There was a seven-year-old kid in that bank. I put the letter down and walked away. But I guess now I’m thinking more about it. I haven’t come to a decision, but I’m thinking. It’s because who I am as a person is so tied up in where I’ve come from, what Sneak did to me. I don’t want to get too heavy with you, but from the moment you learn you were abandoned there’s a kind of break inside you. Like you become disconnected from everyone else, everyone who grew up loved and wanted. Everyone who wasn’t a