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

dented your front bumper. Sit there and take a load off while I call this in to dispatch. How’s your neck?” There were people gathering behind him, staring worriedly at me. “You’re fine, ma’am. There’s no need to cry.”

The scene I had caused was working, apparently. Cars were slowing on the other side of the street to take in both accident sites. People were exiting shops and gathering on corners of the intersection. As Lemon radioed his station for backup, I watched a baby-blue Porsche Cayenne cruise by, the elbow of a leather jacket hanging from the driver’s window.

Fred and Mike. Ada’s men. They stared impassively at me as they rolled by. I shook my head. What were the chances? I told myself the shock of the crash, and my nerves at making it happen, were playing with my mind.

I sat back and looked in the rearview mirror. Sneak was nowhere to be seen.

JESSICA

The car sat facing down the slope of the ravine north of Glendora, sunken on melted tires, the empty, glassless windows like dark eyes absorbing nothing of the daylight. Molten metal had made a shiny skirt for the front of the scorched vehicle, silver rivulets dried into tendrils in the sand. Jessica ducked under the police tape surrounding the car and held it up for Diggy. Her friend was surprisingly unsteady on the loose ground for a big man with wide, flat feet. He stumbled over a rock and had to right himself against the car, brushing cactus needles from the hem of his jeans.

“Do we know this is the car?” Diggy asked.

“It’s a Honda, so that’s a start,” Jessica said, checking the notes on her phone. “Some rangers reported it just four days ago, so the timing’s good. Urgh, the smell.”

The air tasted of burned rubber, gasoline, and leather. She looked out over the San Gabriel Mountain range around them, rolling, scrubby slopes. Cactus and mesquite on some of the mountainsides was chest high and so tangled it was impenetrable. Though she could see no movement, Jessica knew the sheer hillsides would come alive at night with howls and screams and squawks, mountain cats and coyotes digging rodents and rabbits out of tunnels, owls waiting for those brave little souls that escaped the paws and claws to venture out onto the rocky flats. This was a place of danger, of hunting, of feet scrabbling in sand and thorns hooking into flesh and blood spilling on stone. Whatever stage this had been in Dayly’s downfall, Jessica sensed that the girl had been chased here, up against the rocks and cliffs, cornered by some predatory thing.

Diggy was sweating as he jimmied open the back door of the car with a crowbar. The trunk was ajar and empty. That was how burned-out cars were treated by the LAPD. After the initial report, the vehicle was searched for bodies, drugs, or weapons, then taped off and left to bake.

While Diggy checked the car, Jessica looked at the sand around the vehicle. There were the telltale footprints of rangers, police officers, and perhaps a couple of looky-loos. But there were two trails that led off between the creosote bushes away from the car, away from the road, into the hills.

Stepping carefully, Jessica followed the trail to its conclusion, knelt, and looked at the marks in the sand and gravel. There were scrapings she recognized from similar crime scenes she had seen in the past. The soft, wide indentations of a pair of buttocks and shoulders. Below them, maybe two or three feet down, sharp, curved crescent moons: the heels of shoes digging in, trying to find traction. Someone on their back, struggling. There was no blood here, but the moons in the sand made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

“This doesn’t look good,” Diggy said when she arrived back at the car.

“I was about to say those exact words,” she said. “I’ve got signs of a struggle over here.”

“I’ve got this.” He tossed her a tiny shred of metal. Jessica looked at the blackened, L-shaped piece in the light.

“What is it?”

“It’s part of a SIM tray from an iPhone,” Diggy said. “It pops out the side so you can put your SIM card in the device. There’s a little door with a hole in it you have to open with a key. When I was in college I worked in a phone repair shop. I’d know that shape anywhere.”

“So where’s the rest of the phone?”

“Exactly,” Diggy said. “That minuscule shred of the phone is all that I can find. The rest was probably consumed in the fire. We also have this.” He placed a flat shard of burned metal on the hood of the car. Jessica had to peer closely at the object to discern what it was.

“A laptop?” she asked.

“Just the base,” Diggy said. “The screen has melted away. The extreme heat scorched the outside to a crisp. This was the keyboard.”

She watched him run his finger across a slash of burned black plastic melted to the top of the shard.

“Laptop and phone in a burned-out car,” Jessica said. “This is bad news. Blair Harbour said Dayly didn’t have anything on her when she robbed the gas station. Just a gun. No laptop. And if she’d had the phone with her, why would she have called Sneak from a pay phone? Doesn’t make any sense that both should be here right now, with the car we know she was in.”

“So, what…” Diggy thought out loud. “She’s stolen Blair’s car, gone back to her apartment, and retrieved her phone and laptop?”

“Possible,” Jessica said. “Unlikely. Would she go back to the place where she was attacked just to retrieve these items? Or is it more likely she was attacked again here, and whoever had her phone and laptop brought them along and disposed of them in the car fire?”

“The latter sounds more likely.” Diggy gave a rueful sigh. “Will you tell the mother or keep