Gathering Dark by Candice Fox (best life changing books txt) 📕

very spot. You can’t see in the second-floor bathroom because of the angle, and you can’t see into the first-floor laundry either, because the view is blocked by vegetation.”

“Just stay calm.” Diggy put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder. “If there’s been some mistake, we—”

“I am calm.” Jessica tapped the photographs too hard. “There’s been no mistake. I don’t make mistakes. Look at the photos, Diggs.”

Diggy looked at the photographs in turn. He examined each closely, then went to the window and looked at the first floor of the house next door. He repeated this process three times.

“Would you just agree with me so we can go?” Jessica wiped sweat from her brow. “Jesus fuck, I thought you didn’t want to be here.”

“There’s foliage in front of the laundry window in this picture,” Diggy said, selecting the photograph and presenting it to Jessica as though she’d never seen it before. “So the laundry window was not visible. It was blocked.”

“I just said that.”

“There’s a problem.”

“What?” Jessica gripped the picture hard, crumpling the corner.

“The bush that was down there blocking sight of the window, in the picture; it’s not there now.” Diggy pointed.

“It’s been ten years. Who keeps a bush for ten years?”

Diggy stared at her. “Plenty of—”

“I know. I know. I’m panicking. Go on.”

“If the bush was there today, perhaps we could examine it.”

“Examine it! For what?”

“Hear me out.” He took the photograph from Jessica’s hand and placed it on the counter. “The time stamp on these photographs is three weeks after the shooting.”

“Yes, we took them after the prosecutor briefed us on what we’d need for trial.”

“Exactly.” Diggy nodded. “So perhaps three weeks earlier, when Harbour looked out her window, she could see into the laundry. Maybe by the time these pictures were taken the bush had grown up over the window, blocking the view.”

“No.” Jessica shook her head. “No. We checked it.”

“You checked it?”

“My partner at the time. He checked it. Once I heard the story in the interrogation room, I sent him up here to check the angle. It was maybe twenty-four hours later. You couldn’t see in the bathroom window.”

“Would he have considered the other window? The laundry window?”

“He…” Jessica couldn’t answer. She stared at her hands.

“Who was your partner?”

“Ira Nandermann.”

Diggy pursed his lips, looked away. Jessica knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing she was thinking: that Ira Nandermann was not a cop who paid attention to details, who tested hypotheses and considered angles or nuances or possibly misinterpreted laundry room tiles. He was a dreamer. A dullard. She had once seen him pour dishwashing liquid into his coffee instead of milk on a late shift. It had taken three sips before he’d realized. He’d been fired from the West LA station years ago for stealing toilet paper from the men’s room. If he’d been told to look out the kitchen window of the Harbour house and determine if it was possible to see through the bathroom window of the Orlov house, he’d have done just that and nothing more.

“A bush couldn’t grow that high in three weeks,” Jessica said. “Not in winter.”

“Depends on the bush.” Diggy shrugged. “It might have grown right up to the bottom edge of the window on the night of the murder. Depending on a thousand different variables, it’s not impossible it might have continued growing and blocked the window by the time it was photographed.”

“What variables?”

Diggy sighed, opened his hands. “The species of plant, its germination and heritage, the nitrogen and acidity levels in the soil, sunlight, watering and fertilization, pruning history, fluctuations in the weather patterns in the area, humidity, elevation, the effects of climate change—”

“Stop,” Jessica said. She covered her eyes. “Stop.”

Diggy didn’t speak in the moments she stood there, staring at the terrifying dark of the backs of her eyelids, a darkness pregnant with the crushing possibility that she had sent an innocent woman to prison for a decade. In time she dropped her hands and walked back out to her car.

They were silent all the way back to the station. When she parked in the underground parking lot of the West LA police station, Diggy held the handle of the door but didn’t get out.

“What are you doing, poking holes in this case?”

“Trying to find the truth.” Jessica held on to the steering wheel, stared straight ahead.

“I mean, what inspired it?”

“I found out the Harbour kid lives directly behind the house in Bluestone Lane.”

“So?”

“So I talked to him. I like him. He’s a good kid.”

“Plenty of murderers have good kids,” Diggy said. “It doesn’t mean you were wrong about his mother. Why did her story change so many times at trial, and before it, if she was innocent?”

“She got an expensive lawyer,” Jessica said. “A Brentwood-woman’s lawyer. The guy bled her dry in legal fees, took the house and everything, and he did that because he could—because he had a zero-loss score at trial. The only way you get a zero-loss score is by making your clients plead out. He pitched every story under the sun to prosecutors so they’d bump the charge down to manslaughter. Self-defense. Accident. Provocation. Insanity. Nothing worked, and Harbour was half-hearted about the alternative stories. She was backing herself. She said she was defending Zea and she believed that.”

“Well, it’s possible she was lying,” Diggy said.

“It’s starting to look like she wasn’t, Diggs,” Jessica said. She could hear the terror in her own voice. “The cheese sandwich.”

“Okay,” Diggy said. “So we looked at a photograph of the cheese sandwich Harbour allegedly made and partially ate after the killing. We determined that it was most likely made by Orlov. Male bite mark, definitely not female. But that doesn’t mean anything. Just because Zea lied or was mistaken about a sandwich at the crime scene doesn’t mean the rest of what she said isn’t true. She might have panicked and her brain constructed the tale. She might have seen Harbour go into Orlov’s kitchen, seen the crime-scene photos later