Gathering Dark

for working his daughter’s case when I was first assigned to it,” Jessica said. “It wasn’t a bribe. The first I heard of his reward was when I was called by his sister, the executor of his will.”
“You were obsessed with that case. People were getting concerned around here.”
“This is exactly my point.” Jessica threw up her hands. “You give a case everything you’ve got and people start getting concerned.”
“You lost weight. You lost sleep. You never went home. You tried to walk out of the locker room to attend an all-staff meeting without a shirt on.”
“I was tired.”
“Just tired?”
“I felt it.” Jessica paused, trying to find the words. “I felt the … the heat.”
“The heat?” Captain Whitton asked.
“You know when you’re in the dark.” She struggled with her words. “And, uh, someone’s there. You can’t see them or hear them but you can feel, like … a kind of heat? Like a body heat?”
The captain stared at her.
“I felt him. I felt how close I was to catching him.”
“Do me a favor,” the captain said. “When you leave here, don’t tell anyone else you caught the Silver Lake Killer because you felt his metaphorical body heat in the dark. You sound crazy.”
“What can I say?” Jessica said. “The guy’s in jail now. You want to talk about crazy? Let’s talk about me sitting here getting chewed out for doing my job too well.”
“Look, all bullshit aside, I don’t think IAG will believe, given the circumstances, that you were just overeager on that case,” Whitton said. “The investigators are going to say it was more than simple passion for the job driving you. Some people are whispering about a relationship between you and Mr. Beauvoir. One that would contravene other LAPD policies.”
“I didn’t fuck the seventy-five-year-old father of one of my victims, Captain.”
“I’m just telling you what people are saying, what IAG might bring up.”
Jessica shrugged. “I stopped giving a shit what IAG thought about me a long time ago.”
“Nevertheless,” he said, “if you take that house, Sanchez, you’re out of the LAPD. One way or another, they’ll see you out that front door and you’ll never be welcome here again. I think that would be a shame. You belong here, Detective. This is your family.”
Jessica left Whitton’s office quietly, the throbbing rage she’d felt when she’d entered it slightly dissipated. Members of her LAPD family watched her make her way to the elevator. They watched her standing there, and in the burning quiet her eyes wandered to the records room door to the right of the elevators.
She felt a surge of defiance hit her. A great, silent wave of anger. While a pressure was forming behind her, a will to see her pushed out the door among the men and women she had once trusted, she was grasping at anything to try to stay where she belonged, where she felt safe.
The police made a mistake, the boy had said.
I don’t make mistakes, Jessica thought. I was right then. I’m right now.
She broke away from the elevators and backtracked to the records room. Jessica found the book for the Harbour murder, a thick blue binder stuffed with papers. She tucked it under her arm and walked down the fire stairs.

BLAIR
When I gave birth to Jamie, one of my wrists was shackled to the bed in the infirmary at Happy Valley. I strained against the chain as the contractions thundered through me, feeling something like a wild pig in a pen waiting for slaughter, trying to break free. I got to hold my child for an hour before the social worker came. I didn’t feel anything in that moment, handing him over.
Looking down at Jamie on my chest in the room in which I’d birthed him, I’d thought how beautiful he was, how appropriate it was that this perfect little thing should be on his way out of the ugliness of that institution in only moments. I hadn’t been sad for me. I’d been relieved for him.
The deliberate peeling away from the present I’d been doing from the moment my fate was sealed meant I spent the next few months swimming in a fantasy of my own creation. The other inmates had little to do with me. I was generally considered too “spaced out” to bother with. I lay silently on my bed most days, dreaming my incarcerated sisters and I had been abducted from Earth by aliens, and the prison was a kind of holding facility for humans under observation by the extraterrestrial overlords. I’d given up my baby so that he could go back to Earth, where it was safe.
I didn’t see Jamie in person for the first nine years of his life. It had been a necessary choice for me. The decision meant I didn’t have to watch him grow up behind glass, and that I could imagine him romping around the green fields of the Earth in my imagination, carefree and joyous under endless blue skies. He would be untouched by my imprisonment when I was finally released, a perfect boy, ready to welcome me as his mom, his only living kindred spirit. We would continue on the plan I’d made for us before the murder.
It had been a good plan. Measured and calculated, almost clinical. My relentless pursuit of my career after med school had meant I’d fallen into a pattern of casual dalliances with men—usually other doctors, who were as neurotic about their careers as I was. I’d had no desire to get serious about finding a man when I realized I wanted to be a mother. Signing up for a sperm donor hadn’t been weird. I’d had a vision for Jamie and myself, the son that wanted for nothing and the mom who would make him proud. Until I was released, all I had to do was survive. Things would resume like a play after an intermission when I finally came home to my son.
But now a year had passed since I was released,