Jessica wasn’t taking the house. She was sure of it. Yes, it was more money than she’d ever imagined possessing. Yes, she understood Stan Beauvoir’s feelings of impotence at his daughter’s loss, his desire for something good to have come of what the slain young woman had left behind. But Jessica was a cop. She had been doing her job, not at a level that was “obsessive” or “unhealthy” but to her normal standard. She expected the same kind of commitment from her colleagues. Okay, she’d lost weight and some sleep. She’d become befuddled. She’d pestered witnesses and the victim’s family, put in hours she didn’t necessarily log as overtime. But how the hell did anyone get anything done without doing that?
Taking an extraordinary gift would mean admitting she’d done an extraordinary thing, and doing whatever it took to solve a goddamn murder wasn’t extraordinary. It was required.
She shuffled the papers on the Harbour/Orlov case and tried to focus. She remembered Derek McCoy, the neighbor from across the street, vividly. Jessica had just made detective, and she’d taken too many notes on McCoy’s description of Harbour’s walk to her neighbor’s house, the detective and witness standing on McCoy’s porch with red and blue lights flashing on them. In a squad car nearby, Blair Harbour sat with her hands cuffed behind her, staring straight ahead through the windshield, her face passive and her lips pressed together. From the outset, Jessica knew Harbour was a woman who had simply snapped. She’d seen it before. Psychologists at the academy had talked about a parting with reality, a deepening crack that slowly filled with strange ideas, like water seeping into treated wood, eventually rotting the layers underneath until the piece of wood gave way. Jessica had really liked “shrink week” at the academy. She’d paid particular attention to delusions associated with schizophrenia. Persecution and poisoning were common among them. Harbour had likely constructed her own world in which Orlov and Zea sat next door at all hours of the day and night planning her demise, escalating pranks like the unexplained scratch on her BMW and a strange tint to the color of her orange juice all precursors to violence on the horizon.
Jessica took a photograph of Orlov’s body from the file and held it in the falling red light. Zea had been right about her boyfriend’s death. It had been painful, but almost instant. The man was slumped on his side, one arm folded over the wound, his mouth open in shock against the marble floor. A tendril of blood curled from his lip. Jessica flipped to the picture of the wet gun by the kitchen sink, a forensic photo of Blair that had been leaked to the newspaper the next morning, her hands spread open for examination, the beginnings of a pregnant belly pressing against the chain between her wrists. A photograph started to slide out of the pack and Jessica caught it before it could get completely free. The infamous cheese sandwich sitting on the cluttered kitchen counter in the Orlov house, one bite taken from the corner.
Jessica realized only when pain zinged through her finger that she’d chewed too hard at a hangnail. She shook herself. There was a tension running through her, a wire so taut it was ticking, and she knew exactly what it was. She’d begun questioning the case against Blair Harbour. Her case against Blair Harbour. It was undeniable now—Jessica liked the kid next door. He was smart, funny, weird. And if Jessica was wrong about Blair being a killer all those years ago, Jessica had kept the kid’s mother from him for his entire life. If she’d overlooked even the slightest detail, she’d have put an innocent woman in prison.
All this, she told herself, was just her tired, fractured mind picking at seams, trying to unravel herself faster than the drugged zombie attack and the surprise inheritance were already doing. She did this when she was down. Kicked herself. She reminded herself that this time, she was right. That she’d done nothing to warrant the abuse she was getting from her colleagues, Wallert and Vizchen abandoning her at the scene in Lonscote Place. She was a good cop, and deserved her title as detective. If she was right now, she knew she was right then, when she arrested Blair Harbour for murder. She would have checked all the boxes. Made sure she was covering all bases. She was that kind of officer. Thorough. Sure.
“What’s that?”
Jessica turned and looked. The boy was at the gate again, a blue silhouette behind and to the right of her, beyond the glass wall bordering the pool. She found herself smiling, and wondered if it was in pity at the boy’s fate or amusement at his stealth and unapologetic nosiness. Jessica had known a few cops in her time who had been inspired to enter the force because of murders in their family history. The child might have a bright future in blue ahead.
“Work,” she said.
“What kind of work?”
“None of your business, kid.”
“Have you decided if I can help you with the gardening yet?” the boy called. “Or do you still need more time to think about it?”
Jessica packed the file back into its binder and laid it upside down beside her with a sigh.
“Get over here.”
She watched the water and listened as the boy vaulted the six-foot-high wooden gate, rattling the latch he’d decided to simply ignore, rustling the vines that almost blocked the view between the two properties. He landed on the grass with a dramatic grunt of effort and appeared at the poolside, hanging his wrists over the glass fence, almost casually but not quite.
“Are you a cop?” he asked.
“What would make you say a thing like that?” Jessica frowned, shifting the file to the other side of her. “Get in here, for
