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

“I wouldn’t need to.” Jessica tapped out a message. “I’ve done this a few times. You start with the mother’s house. As soon as you get to the mother, the kid folds.”

Jessica tried to focus. The Harbour case could wait. What she was seeing before her now had sent tingles of nervousness up her spine. Wherever Dayly Lawlor was, she needed help. Jessica sent a message to her forensic technology contact. She had been forced to go two states over to find an investigator who would help her track down the anonymous payer that had sent $800 to Dayly’s bank account. All the police resources she tried in California were either busy, annoyed by the Brentwood house situation, or too amused by the video of her at Goren’s house to offer anything but clever quips. It had taken an hour and a half to find the current whereabouts of a woman named Mariana who had shared Jessica’s dorm room at the academy, who was now bunkered down in a basement lab in New Mexico.

You got anything on that anonymous account yet? Jessica asked. Her phone blipped almost instantly with a response.

I’ve got the guy, Mariana said. Sending address. But if you’re going to visit him, I’d suggest you take backup.

BLAIR

I’d sent Sneak into a gas station to get me an ice pack for my sore head, but she returned with a bag of popsicles that was difficult to mold around my brow, even more so when she extracted one and started sucking on it. I stood in the desert sun with condensation dripping down my face while she read text messages between Officer Lemon and a contact named only “D,” which we took to be our missing girl.

LEMON: R we really gonna do this?

D: We give it a try. Y not? Worst case scenario someone finds out and beats us to it.

LEMON: Worst case scenario I end up fired and u end up with ur ass in jail. I said it to u last nite and I’ll say it again now. I WILL turn on u if I have to.

“What the hell are they talking about?” I asked.

“They’re going to commit some kind of crime, clearly.” Sneak frowned at the phone, sucking her ice pop now and then, which was staining her lips green. “We just have to figure out what it is. Bank heist? Murder?”

“Someone beats us to it,” I repeated.

“Here’s a thought,” Sneak said. “Might be crazy. But maybe ten years ago I knew this guy who worked in a station in San Bernardino. A cop. Johnny Reselt. He figured out that every time there was an earthquake, the cameras in the evidence lockup blinked out. Not for long, maybe twenty seconds. So he gets himself assigned down there. The only way you can get put in the evidence lockup is by getting in trouble. Bringing the police force into ill repute, for example. So he paid me a grand to get caught with him doing coke in a public toilet. I got a drug charge and he got assigned to the evidence dungeon.”

“Where is this story going?” I asked, massaging my stiff neck.

“Give me a minute. So Johnny’s working in the evidence room. He starts quietly looking around at what they got down there. He figures out that the most high-profile case on the shelves is this rape charge against a local celebrity chef. Pretty famous guy. Does some TV shows, lives in a big house in the mountains. Apparently the chef guy cornered a teenage apprentice and locked her in the freezer room, and wouldn’t let her out unless she gave him a blow job. So Johnny works in the evidence room, waiting patiently for an earthquake. Months go by, but then it comes. When the cameras blink out, he goes into the evidence box for the chef case, nabs the key piece of evidence against the chef, and stuffs it in his backpack. It was a shirt, in case you’re wondering. The apprentice’s shirt. Had the chef’s jizz on it.”

“How does all this relate to Dayly?” I asked.

“Johnny sold the evidence bag to the chef for, like, fifty grand.” Sneak sucked the remnants of her popsicle from the wrapper. “Maybe there’s something similar going on here. Dayly and Officer Lemon are teaming up to rob the evidence room.”

“And they’re worried someone in the station is going to beat them to it?” I asked. “Before the case goes to trial? What are the chances of two crooked cops having the same crazy idea?”

“I don’t know. Whatever this is, it has to have something to do with cops. Dayly’s not making friends with Crips on one hand and cops on the other.”

“Or it might just have to do with Lemon himself. The fact that he’s a cop is a coincidence.”

“I’m just spitballing here.” Sneak hefted her handbag onto her lap and took a bump of cocaine.

“Keep reading the messages,” I said.

“There’s not much else. Looks like Dayly and Lemon were meeting regularly.” Sneak scrolled through the phone. “They meet … four times over the space of three weeks.”

“How can you tell that?”

“The messages just say stuff like I’m here and Three minutes. I’m out back. Caught in traffic.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a conversation two weeks ago that’s interesting,” she said. “Let me read it to you.”

D: What do you think?

LEMON: He knows his shit.

D: But can we trust him?

LEMON: I’ve looked at jacket. He’s good for this sort of thing. If u want, I can try to get something on him but I don’t think we need to do that. If we piss him off he’s gone and so is whole deal.

“I’ve looked at jacket?” I said.

“His jacket,” Sneak said. “His rap sheet. Lemon has run a check on a guy, whoever it is they’re trying to decide if they can trust.”

The radio in the passenger-side footwell crackled to life. Sneak and I looked at each other as we listened through the open windows.

“Dispatch, this is L81,