Gathering Dark

and stray things. I was the same when I was her age. I picked up a few birds. They all died.” I looked at the BIRDS ONLY note on the desk and wondered if it was somehow connected.
“Sneak, we should go,” I said. I could hear voices in the living room. “This might be a … It might be important for the police to see the place untouched.”
“I knew a guy once,” Sneak said, focused on the gopher. “His daughter was kidnapped down in Mexico. Young kid, like seven. They grabbed her out of a playground toilet block, asked the family for money. The cartels, they’ve got this rule—sometimes they let you switch out another family member for your kidnapped loved one if, like, they’re too vulnerable or whatever. The guy I knew, he tried to give the cartel his wife and his sister in exchange for the daughter, just while he drummed up the money.”
Sneak had been renowned for her “I knew a guy once” or “I knew a chick once” stories in prison. Either they were all elaborate falsifications or she alone had somehow befriended all of the wildest, most eccentric and misfortunate people who ever lived. Most compulsive thieves I had known in prison were also gifted liars. Sneak’s “I knew a guy once” stories always ended in tragedy.
“What happened?” I asked, regardless. “He get the kid back?”
“No. The cartel took the wife and the sister as well and tripled the ransom demand.”
“We can’t think like that right now, Sneak,” I said. “And we can’t hang around here much longer. We’ll get caught together.”
“We can go.” Sneak nodded, replacing the gopher and taking Dayly’s bag. She wavered, the vodka and whatever she’d taken before it hitting her suddenly. “Wherever my baby is, she’s not here.”

JESSICA
The house on Bluestone Lane was still, unnaturally quiet, cast in yellow morning glow. At every other house on the row, gardeners in wide-brimmed hats worked, dragging tree trimmings toward their battered trucks or sweeping hoses over colorful garden beds. The house Jessica watched was empty, almost posing, like a real estate photo. Imagine entertaining your rich and famous friends here. Cocktails by the pool. Intimate dinner parties on the back deck. Bentleys parked on the enormous river stone drive (designer landscaping by Exotiq Impressions). Jessica waited, watching a group of deeply tanned women powerwalk by. French-polished nails and expensive cheekbones. A little dog that cost more than the Suzuki she was sitting in was going mad behind a fence covered in ivy.
Brentwood on a Saturday.
Rachel Beauvoir’s arrival interrupted the third drive-by of a private security car, nervous about a Latina woman sitting idly in her shitty vehicle. Jessica got out of the car and smelled desert plants. Something was ticking in her temple, a tiny trapped animal under the skin, suffocating in the heat. Rachel stopped in the big double doorway, her key out and ready.
“My god.” Rachel’s right hand fluttered at her chest. “What happened to you?”
They’d met before, briefly. A cursory interview early in the investigation about the victim, Bernice Beauvoir, Rachel’s niece. Rachel had been aloof and skeptical, but Jessica found all rich white people like that. Jessica and the elderly woman had exchanged a nod at Stan’s funeral a month ago, but now her wide eyes wandered over the bandages on Jessica’s neck and arms, the bruising on her face.
“I had a run-in with a zombie,” Jessica said.
“That was you?” Rachel pointed at her like an accuser in court, her mouth hanging open. “I saw the news report. A man bit you?”
“It’s over,” Jessica lied. “I’m fine.” Really, it would be approximately forty-eight hours before it could be fine, before Jessica received the results of her HIV and hepatitis screenings. “Let’s just get on with this.”
The slender, birdlike woman unlocked the door to the sprawling mansion.
“Well, here it is,” Rachel said, as if Jessica hadn’t seen the place before. In reality both women knew that Jessica had spent days here, altogether, sitting with Stan Beauvoir, looking at pictures of his murdered daughter, listening to his stories, searching the girl’s room over and over. It wasn’t the first murder Jessica had worked in the area. She recalled one three streets away, a shooting, a dispute over neighborhood noise gone horribly wrong. Neighbor on neighbor, highly strung rich people with guns.
The women stood together before the stairs in the massive foyer. The house was empty of furniture, recently cleaned, the carpet spotless and fluffy, and the air hanging with citrus scent.
Jessica put her hands in her pockets. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t come here to see the house. I came to say this is all a waste of time. This is not happening.”
“You said that on the phone.” Rachel walked through the foyer and into the vast living room. “‘This is not happening.’ Thing is, Detective, it’s already happened. You’re named as the beneficiary. It’s on paper. You can’t take that back. Stan’s dead, so he’s not undoing it, and I’m not challenging it in court. Lord knows I don’t need another real estate portfolio heaped into my lap.”
Jessica had no choice but to follow the woman through the living room toward the deck as she spoke.
“Now you get to decide what’s done with the place. You can sell it. You can split it with your”—Rachel waved her hand dismissively—“your partner. You can toss the keys in the gutter and walk away. Let the house rot to the ground. I don’t care. But until you make a decision, you’re in this, Jessica. It’s not going away.”
The two women stood on the massive, empty deck overlooking the glittering pool. Above them, two more stories of the house yawned upward. Huge sheets of glass and artistically laid stonework. Jessica sighed loudly without meaning to. She walked to the edge of the deck, sat down with her legs hanging over the manicured lawn, and rubbed her ticking temple.
“I had an appraiser come through on Thursday.” With difficulty, Rachel Beauvoir sat on the