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 towards their battered trucks or sweeping hoses over colourful 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 sceptical, 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, bird-like 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 neighbourhood noise gone horribly wrong. Neighbour on neighbour, 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 towards 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 storeys of the house yawned upwards. 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 edge of the deck beside the detective, smoothing her skirt over her knees, a woman lowering herself beneath her usual standards. ‘It came in just under seven million.’
‘I don’t need to know things like that.’
‘I’ve got to tell you, Detective Sanchez, I’m a little surprised by your reaction to all this. You’re LAPD. What have you been making the past two decades of your career? Eighty grand? That ridiculous car out front makes me think a windfall like this is beyond anything you’d ever have imagined.’
A windfall like this will turn the entire Los Angeles Police Department against me, Jessica thought. It will destroy my relationship with my family in blue.
‘How long have you been riding around in that beat-up old car? It’s embarrassing,’ Rachel sighed.
‘Leave my car alone. It’s got a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it and it runs like a dream.’
‘I’m just saying, this could change your life.’
‘It’s already changed my life.’ Jessica pointed to the bandaged bite mark on her shoulder. ‘You see this? This happened because of this house.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My partner didn’t back me up last night because he was so pissed about the inheritance. He was assigned to the case too. He thinks he deserves half.’
‘I notice you say assigned to the case, rather than worked on the case.’ Rachel gave a wry smile. ‘If he didn’t back you up when you needed him, he doesn’t sound like a man who particularly likes doing his job.’
‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’
‘I only ever heard Stan talking about you.’ Rachel shrugged. ‘Jessica is coming over to show me some footage. Jessica called again. Jessica might have a new theory.’
Jessica said nothing.
‘Stanley wanted this.’ Rachel turned to her. ‘It’s all he wanted, in the end.’
Jessica watched the morning light flickering on the surface of the pool.
‘When the Silver Lake killer . . .’ Rachel trailed off, then cleared her throat. Swallowed hard. ‘I refuse to say his name. I just call him the killer. When he took my niece, Stan told me that his time thinking of himself as a man ended. He was a father who could not protect his daughter. Bernice was gone and he – well, he was impotent. There was no revenge, there was no closure. He was helpless. Then you came into our lives and you worked and you worked until Stanley almost felt like you were haunting him.’
Jessica smirked.
‘You were showing up here in the dead of the night trying to track down an item of her clothing. Pulling up the floorboards. Clambering around in the attic. Searching her room for the eighteenth time. He told me all about it. You sounded obsessed.’
‘That’s what it takes,’ Jessica said.
‘Not everyone would agree with you, it seems,’ Rachel said. ‘Not the officers who were on the case before you. It had been ten years, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I was just doing my job.’
‘Stanley didn’t believe that,’ Rachel said. ‘He believed you went beyond the call of duty. And though he couldn’t do anything for Bernie, he felt as if he was doing something when he decided to pay you back.’
Jessica didn’t reply.
‘If you refuse to take this house,’ Rachel said, ‘you’ll be denying my brother his—’
‘Stop.’ Jessica held up a hand. ‘I don’t want to hear that shit.’
Rachel pursed her lips, wounded. She took a set of keys from the pocket of her skirt, and held them in the air before them, counting off the keys one by one.
‘Front, back, deck, pool gate, side gate, pool house.’ She pointed. ‘Garage.’
Jessica felt a stab of pain in her chest. She didn’t want to enter another garage, maybe ever again. Just the thought of one was unsettling.
‘You’ve got my number,’ Rachel said. She left the keys on the deck between them and stood, walking out without another word. Jessica looked at the keys for a long time, but didn’t touch them.
There was a kid watching her.
Jessica became aware of him in the yard behind the Bluestone Lane house as she lit her cigarette, wondering if smoking was even allowed in Brentwood, if a private security guard would turn up and hose her if the smoke carried too far on the wind. She noticed a shape moving behind a lattice gate in the back wall, covered with vines. She ignored him. When the cigarette was gone but the boy was still there Jessica went to the gate, skirting the huge, humming pool behind the glass fence.
‘Are you our new neighbour?’ the kid said before she could offer a greeting. Jessica stopped in her tracks.
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment.
‘I’m just sort of . . . taking care of the place. For now.’ She felt a strange obligation to comfort the child she could barely see through the leaves. She caught a glimpse of sandy blond hair and a wide blue eye.
‘Mr Beauvoir was a really nice guy,’ the boy said, gripping the gate so that his fingers wiggled through on Jessica’s side, curious worms. ‘I’m kind of sad he’s gone. He died, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘He used to let me help him with the garden sometimes. See those purple flowers over there? The big ones? They’ve got thorns. Don’t go near them. You’ve got to wear gloves and long sleeves or they’ll get you.’
‘Okay.’ Jessica lit another cigarette, nodded. ‘Good advice.’
‘If you want someone to help you with the garden, I can do it.’
‘I don’t think it’ll come to that.’
‘Mr Beauvoir used to give me five bucks every time.’
‘I can see why you miss him.’
‘You were sitting there for a long time. Were you thinking about something?’
Detective Sanchez looked back towards the house, the sweeping windows and the deck. ‘People are usually thinking about something, kid,’ she said. ‘You make it your mission to spy on people?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And what about asking a million questions to people you just met. You do that a lot?’
‘Yep.’
The woman and the boy stared at each other through the leaves. A squirrel scaled a tree nearby, scuttling upwards fast.
‘Did Mr Beauvoir’s daughter get killed?’ The boy gripped the wood tighter. Jessica laughed awkwardly at the question, punched by the sudden severity of it. The kid couldn’t know all that his question entailed. The years of work she’d put in to answer it completely.
‘Yeah.’ Jessica craned her neck and tried to see the house the boy belonged to, looking for parents to interrupt the neighbourly interrogation. ‘She was killed.’
‘Murdered?’
‘Yes.’
‘He told me she died but he wouldn’t say how.’
‘It’s nothing for you to worry about.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘Okay, good.’ Jessica laughed again, bemused.
‘Sometimes, people who kill other people – it’s, like, an accident, you know?’ the boy said. ‘That happens sometimes. It’s not on purpose and they’re really sorry afterwards.’
Not in this case, Jessica thought, but said, ‘Sure.’
‘My mom killed someone.’
Jessica reeled. She put a hand up against the daylight and saw the boy watching her carefully for a reaction.
‘Jesus. That’s . . . That’s sad,’ she offered. ‘Is that something you tell a lot of people?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Right.’
‘It was an accident, but she went to jail anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She wasn’t supposed to go to jail. It was a mistake. The police made a mistake.’
Jessica felt something twist in her stomach. Her cigarette suddenly tasted like bile in her mouth. She dropped it on the wet grass, stubbing it out carefully. She remembered the shooting three streets over. The pregnant woman with the long face and sad, wild eyes reflecting the blue lights of the cruisers. It had been Jessica who’d cuffed her. You never forget people like that, the ones you escort from their everyday lives into their personal hell. She was afraid to ask her next question, even as the words left her lips.
‘What’s your name, kid?’
‘Jamie Harbour.’ The boy smiled.
‘Oh, fuck my life,’ Jessica sighed.