The noise around them had become nothing. Jessica gripped her drink and waited, like a rider on a roller-coaster slowly making its way up the biggest hill. The plunge was coming. There was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘Adrian and his brother, Brosh, were part of this . . . organisation.’ Zea opened her hands. ‘The mob, I guess. I don’t know. I’d seen other Armenian men at the house, and I’d overheard phone calls. But I don’t know if it was like you see in the movies, with the meetings and the structure and all that stuff. I think they were just edging their way in, relying on their family connections to get work. Adrian came home really happy one night. He said they’d been given an amazing job by their cousins. He put this big duffel bag full of coke on the bed in front of me. When it hit the bed it was so heavy it made the whole mattress sink in the middle.’
‘When was this?’ Jessica asked.
‘A week before the murder. Adrian said we were going to sell the coke, distribute it and make a lot of money, and then his cousins were going to make it a regular thing. I was just so excited that he was telling me all this, you know? He’d always been so cagey about what he did, about his brother. I felt as though I was being let in. It was a new step for us in our relationship.’
‘How romantic.’ Jessica caught the eye of the bartender who had wiped their table earlier. The crowd was thinning. He seemed to have decided the no-table-service rule no longer applied and nodded to indicate that he’d fetch Jessica another drink.
‘I thought when Adrian said “we” that he meant, like, we,’ Kristi said, pointing to Jessica, then herself. ‘So I wanted to help. Adrian wouldn’t let me work. I was stuck in the house all day. I had no friends. But I knew these guys who could move junk like that real quick, so I took one of the bricks from the bag while Adrian was out and gave it to them. They were supposed to get the money back that afternoon. It was going to be a surprise, you know? It was supposed to show Adrian how useful I could be. I mean, it was New Year’s Eve. Who has trouble moving drugs on New Year’s Eve?’
‘Your guys, evidently,’ Jessica said, feeling the roller-coaster crest the hill.
‘When I told Adrian, he was livid,’ Kristi said. ‘He started shouting, so we put on the music, but after a while he started beating on me. He’d smacked me a few times before, but nothing close to this. He said the drugs weren’t supposed to be sold off like that. There were already buyers. Now they were down a whole brick, and my guys weren’t coming through. I tried to hide in the laundry but he came through the door, and I guess that’s when Harbour saw us through the window.’
‘Did she walk in and go right for the gun?’ Jessica asked.
‘No, she . . .’ Kristi stared at the table, remembering. She gave a small, sad laugh. ‘She tried talking to us first. But I couldn’t hear her. I was getting my ass whaled on. And he didn’t even know she was there. When he got into those rages he would just zero in on you and nothing could stop him.’
The two women sat together, one remembering, one visualising. They held their drinks, staring into them. Jessica could see the house in Brentwood. Blair Harbour walking through the door, stopping dead in the foyer at the sight of small, lean Kristi Zea flopping around in Adrian Orlov’s hands. Blood on the floor. The smack of flesh on flesh. It was something totally outside Harbour’s world, her circle of existence filled with beautiful rooms in beautiful houses, stark, white, clean surgery rooms, the occasional upmarket restaurant with friends. People didn’t fight in Harbour’s world. They didn’t put their hands on each other except to caress, comfort, embrace, heal. All blood was expected. Jessica imagined her shouting and pleading and not being listened to, trying to get into the fray, coming up against the hard muscles of a rage-filled man and never having felt something so impossibly immoveable before.
Jessica could see Orlov turning at the sound of the hammer on the gun. Outrage, panic, both he and Harbour moving, two steps in a dance that was over before the music began – him coming at her, her blasting him away.
‘She picked up the gun as a warning, I think,’ Kristi said. ‘He went for her, got within a few feet and bang. She shot him. Just like that. I could see he was dead before he hit the ground, even from where I was. She was right to do it. He was going to kill me. There’s never been any doubt in my mind about that.’
Jessica held the table with both hands. The second drink came, and she didn’t move. She knew what happened next, but needed to hear it. Needed to feel it rushing by her. Moments she could never recover, never correct.
‘You called nine-one-one,’ Jessica said.
‘Not right away,’ Kristi said. ‘I told Harbour that I would. I told her to go wait outside. There was no helping Adrian. She wanted to stay, help me, but I shouted at her. I told her to flag down the ambulance when it came, because our house number was real hard to see with all the palms out front. I knew the police would look at my phone, so I took one of Adrian’s burners and called his brother. The bag of coke was still upstairs in the fucking bedroom, sitting out there in plain sight, and I didn’t have time to hide it. I don’t think I could even have lifted it.’
‘Was it his idea to lie?’ Jessica asked.
‘Yeah,’ Kristi said. ‘He said I was going to tell the cops that Harbour shot Adrian for some bullshit reason. That would get them focused on her. On her house. On her life. We didn’t want them walking around our house, trying to come up with reasons why Adrian would want to hurt me like that, trying to, like, find out if the shooting was justified. I was going to be really upset, stricken with grief, you know? That way I’d get them out of the house as soon as I could. It was me who came up with the crazy stuff.’
‘What crazy stuff?’
‘The weird stuff I said Harbour did. Like with the cheese sandwich,’ Kristi explained. ‘And the, uh, the poisoning of the orange juice. See, I had an uncle with schizophrenia. He thought he was being followed around. That people were poisoning him. That Jesus was talking to him all the time. He went crazy in a Walmart and the cops shot him. Nobody asked any questions. He was crazy, right?’
‘So you never went into Harbour’s house?’ Jessica said. ‘You never tampered with her food?’
‘No,’ Kristi said. ‘Oh, I mean, we did scratch her car, accidentally, but she was fine about it. She knew we didn’t mean it. And she would complain to us about the noise, but she was never crazy. Not like I made her sound in my statement. I just followed the patrol officer around the house and pointed to things and said, “Oh, yeah, she came in here and made a sandwich. She said the clock was talking to her, telling her to burn the house down. She stood here at the sink staring at nothing.” Half that stuff was from my uncle. When they shot him in Walmart he was trying to make a cheese sandwich behind the deli counter. I figured if I made Harbour sound crazy enough she might get off. You know, like, not guilty by reason of insanity?’
‘Ingenious,’ Jessica said.
‘The plan worked,’ Kristi said. ‘The cops stayed on the main floor. They took photos of the crime scene, took Adrian away, sat me in a corner where I could see what everybody was doing, gave me a drink of water and listened to what I had to say. Nobody went upstairs for very long – they did a quick sweep to make sure no one was there. When Brosh turned up they let him walk right in. He said he’d go upstairs and get my laptop, get my contacts list, start calling people to tell them the news. No one stopped him. He took the bag with the coke and walked right out the back door with it. By the time the cops did a proper search later, the coke was gone.’
Jessica could see Brosh Orlov, another big, broad man, exiting the house, skirting the boundary of the property, walking out into the street with the bag, unnoticed, like someone walking to the gym in the early hours with his bag of sweats and towels. Jessica knew exactly where she had been when this happened eleven years earlier. She’d been asking questions of Harbour on her doorstep while officers searched her house. She’d been telling Harbour to turn around. She’d been reciting the Miranda warnings and unhooking the cuffs from her belt while Harbour stood there stiffly, shell-shocked, trying to understand what was happening while her world closed in around her.
Jessica took her phone from the tabletop and slid it into her pocket, drained the last of her bourbon.
‘Where are you going? We’re not done here.’
‘We’re done enough,’ Jessica said. ‘For now. I’m going to tell Harbour that her time as a known cold-blooded killer is over.’
‘What, right now?’ Kristi Zea stood with Jessica. ‘But you said the case isn’t being reopened. I mean, what’s the point? Aren’t you just going to upset her?’
‘Upset her? No, I don’t think so.’ Jessica put more money on the table. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fucking elated. She’s trying for increased custody of her son. The case isn’t reopened yet, but this will reopen it. That’s for damned sure.’
‘Okay, hold on, whoa.’ Kristi grabbed Jessica’s shoulders. ‘You’ve got to think about me for a second here. Brosh and his guys, they’ve been relying on me to keep quiet all these years. If this gets out, they’ll come looking for me. This was all meant to be for you. You made it sound like it was just for you.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Jessica said. She turned to go. People were beginning to stare at them.
‘I’ll deny everything,’ Kristi said. She was shaking all over, her mouth twitching with rage. ‘You put me on a stand and I’ll say exactly what I did the first time. That she shot him. That she’s crazy. That she beat me, and-and-and for weeks she’d been threat—’
Jessica crossed the room, went out into the gravel parking lot, took her phone from her pocket and stopped the recording app. The scrolling numbers froze, sealing the end of her interview with Kristi Zea. She emailed the file to herself and unlocked her car. As she slipped into the driver’s seat, an email from Diggy landed in her inbox.
It’s aliiiiiive! the subject header read. Interesting bits recovered from Lawlor laptop.