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

“It was an untested hypothesis.” He shrugged. “Based on cognitive neuroscience. I was just saying that maybe there’s a party in your striatum, which is housed in your basal ganglia, when you work with a partner. And when you’re working alone perhaps there’s not.”

“I’m gonna kick you in the basal ganglia if you don’t start talking like a person soon.”

Diggy considered this.

“Get in that house.” Jessica pushed at him. The two got out of the car and walked across the leafy street, up the driveway toward 1109.

This was where it had happened. Jessica could see it clearly now, put sights and smells and sounds to the memory that reading the report on the Orlov murder had been unable to evoke. She remembered Blair Harbour now the way she had found her, standing in her driveway with her mobile phone in her hand, watching the squad cars approach with the stunned, shaken look Jessica had seen so many times, the look of one who has just taken a life. She remembered patrol cops standing on the wet, slightly overgrown lawn, smoking and laughing about Brentwood females and their tempers, about dragging drunk rich girls off each other at parties here during vacation season when the parents were in the Bahamas. As she approached the door, Jessica remembered plastering the crime scene tape here herself, sealing off both the Orlov and Harbour houses as a paramedic briefed her on Orlov’s state. The thought pulsated in her consciousness, a ticking, returning rhythm: if she had made a mistake in the Harbour arrest, this was where that mistake had begun.

The Japanese housekeeper, Yume, made three phone calls before letting Jessica and Diggy through the door. Though she stood out of earshot, peering over her shoulder now and then at the two of them standing on the stoop, Jessica was sure the woman mentioned the shirt to the house’s current owners. After fifteen minutes they were admitted, and the woman went back to vacuuming the downstairs bedrooms.

“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 forestlike 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 sterilizer on the island in the middle of the room, Jessica recalled. Mummy getting ready early, nesting, checking off her list. She went slowly to the windows that faced north and looked out toward 1107, gripping the edge of the marble counter with white knuckles.

She didn’t realize 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 January 1, 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 forward and pointed left toward 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 realized 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