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

“I don’t know. Not much point. We won’t learn anything solid from this. The phone’s gone, and if this was Dayly’s laptop, any chances we have of searching it for clues are well and truly fried.”

“Don’t lose heart.” Diggy gave a shifty smile. “I’ve actually seen a laptop come back from a worse state than this.”

“Come back?”

“Yes, come back, return from the other side, be resurrected,” he said. “Become the undead. Zombie tech.”

“You think you could still get something readable off this?” Jessica picked up the shard of laptop and watched chips of ash fall from it to the hood of the car. “It looks like burned tree bark.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Diggy took the remains of the laptop from her carefully. “All we have to do is figure out if it was a hard disk drive or a solid state drive and work with what we find. If it’s the hard disk, it’ll be more difficult, certainly. We’ll have to realign the drive and the controller card. Like putting a broken turntable back together, matching up the needle and the record. If it’s a solid state drive we’re just looking for a microchip, which might still be intact. The drive is protected by an industrial strength rubber gasket which can withstand temperatures of 620 degrees Fahrenheit.”

“What temperature do cars burn at?”

“About 1500 degrees.”

“Oh.”

“You never know. There are variables.”

“You seem excited,” Jessica commented.

“Oh, I am.” He smiled. “I’ve never done this before. There’s something almost archaeological and redemptive about it. As if we’re reassembling the artifacts destroyed by ISIL in Palmyra. All those shattered and burned and busted treasures meticulously put back together. If I hadn’t gone into forensics, I certainly would have pursued a career like that.”

Jessica nodded encouragingly and looked for a license plate on the car. There was none. She lifted the hood to check the VIN number, took her phone from her back pocket to check it against the stolen car report Harbour had entered at the West LA station. As soon as she looked at the screen, it went dark. Unidentified number calling.

“Hello?”

“Is this Jessica Sanchez?”

“It is.”

“Listen up, bitch,” the heavy, male voice said. “You need to stay away from Kristi Zea. She doesn’t want to talk to you, and she doesn’t want anything to do with the old case if it’s being reopened. If Kristi—”

“Who is this?” Jessica leaned back on the warm car and watched the horizon.

“Just listen,” the voice said. “Kristi will get a lawyer if she has to. She’ll come after you for harassment and emotional trauma. Psychological, uh, you know. Stress. Point is, you got no right to chase her around, and if she has to, she’ll sue your ass off for doing it.”

“Oh, really?” Jessica said.

“Yeah, really, bitch.” The man was pacing. Jessica could hear boots on a wooden floor. “But we won’t start out that way. The legal route is the nice way. That comes second. First, we start the not-so-nice way.”

“What are you going to do?” Jessica asked. “Come around my apartment and beat me up? Throw my shit around? Break my thumbs?”

“If it gets to that,” the man said.

“Okay. Understood. Now how about you take a minute to listen, pal,” Jessica said. “Kristi, you listen too.”

“She’s not—”

“I know she’s there. You’ve got her on speaker phone because you’re trying to make her feel better. You were hoping she could listen in while I whimper that I’m terrified by your threats and I’ll stay away. I’m guessing you’re a brother or a close friend, maybe someone she met drinking her guilt away at a piece of shit dive bar.”

There was silence on the line.

“She called you up this morning, right?” Jessica continued. “She spent the night crying and drinking and freaking out about my phone call last night. You said you’d set things straight. Show this bitch cop that Kristi is not alone, that she has people looking out for her. She said it was a bad idea. You demanded the number. Am I close to the truth here?”

Jessica heard an intake of breath but carried on before the man could speak.

“You’re not going to come to my apartment and heavy me into leaving Kristi alone. Kristi’s not going to get a lawyer to make me go away. Both those options exist in a fantasyland where you, whoever you are, are willing to risk an assault charge for helping your friend, and Kristi is willing to stand in a courtroom in front of a judge while I explain to him why I’m so interested in talking to her. No; in reality, where we live, Kristi is going to sit down with me and answer my questions.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because the kind of harassment you’re threatening to sue me for hasn’t even begun yet,” Jessica said. “I’ve made one phone call so far. From here, I begin turning up unexpectedly in Kristi’s life. Maybe I pop into the bar she frequents and start talking to the local dropouts, poking around, demanding answers. I swing by her workplace and ask to speak to her boss. I knock on her mother’s door and invite myself in for tea. I find out who you are, and I pay a visit to you in the middle of the night, maybe with five SWAT guys and a search warrant. All the while, as I’m touring Kristi’s inner circle, I’m staying eagle-eyed for bullshit charges I can drop on the people in her life. After I’ve got Kristi’s friends in my hand, I start messing with her. I speak to her landlord. I flag her with the tax department. I report her to the ASPCA for kicking her dog.”

There was a scraping noise, and Jessica thought she heard hurried, muffled voices in the background of the call.

“Tell her she needs to speak to me,” Jessica insisted. “She needs to put things straight.”

The line went dead. Diggy gave an appreciative whistle.

“You’d really do all that stuff to get Zea to