Текст книги "The Gift of Death"

Автор книги: Sam Ripley

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THE GIFT OF DEATH

BY

SAM RIPLEY

1

She stared at the sea and thought of death. The sound of the waves rising and falling against the shoreline reminded Kate Cramer of the last breaths of a dying woman.

She tried to force the image from her brain, but it was no use. The sibilant whisper of the sea transported her back to the hospital where she had sat by the bedside of a young woman and listened to her die.

The girl, Allie, only in her early twenties, had been attacked by a stranger and stabbed a total of sixty-six times. Josh – this was in the days when they were still together – had told her that when Allie had first been found her body had looked like something you’d see in a slaughterhouse. The medics had done their best to stitch up her wounds, but during the frenzied attack she had lost so much blood that it was unlikely she would ever regain consciousness. But there had been a small chance. That was why Kate had stayed by her bedside for two days in the hope that the girl might wake up and help her piece together a facial portrait of her attacker.

In the past she had been called to the beds of a handful of victims who had been diagnosed as too severely injured to recover and, in the case of an elderly woman, she had managed to secure enough information to draw a mock-up of the perpetrator before she died. It was only a makeshift sketch, but the release of the image to the media had resulted in the arrest, and subsequent prosecution, of a violent criminal and serial murderer.

Although she had not been able to help Allie – or the police, who still had not found her murderer – at least she had been there for her in those last hours. Unlike her parents, who had taken one look at their daughter and had left the hospital, too distressed to return. Apart from the team of medics who moved in and out of the room like ghosts, and the police stationed outside the door, Kate was the one who had stayed with Allie and who had watched her breathe her last. On her final exhalation the girl had opened her mouth as if to form a silent word. Then she had passed away.

That’s why the sea holds such a spell over us, she thought. Not because it takes us back to the womb, but because it takes us forward to the moment of death.

God, she was in a good mood this morning. She imagined what her father would have said to her if he could have heard her. ‘Gee, honey,’ he would have drawled, ‘I didn’t realise we had a fuggin’ philosopher for a daughter.’ Her smile was undercut by an unexpected surge of sadness. It had been two years since the cancer had eaten him away. And despite what people said it didn’t get any easier. Every day she missed him, every day she still woke up with the same ache inside her.

She picked up her camera bag from beside her and brushed off the sand from its canvas casing. The sun had just risen over the sea, sending shards of light over the Pacific. The contrast between the dark shadows deep inside the waves and the reflected rays on the surface would add depth to the photographs, which she would then print herself in black and white. She took out her camera, turning it around in her hands, the bulk of it giving her an irrational sense of satisfaction. If there was one thing that made her happy it was this. Sitting alone on an empty beach, a heavy camera lying in her palms, a sense of anticipation rising within her.

She eased off the lens cover and looked through the viewfinder trained out to sea. Nothing but a grey blur. Kate deftly turned the lens, letting in more light and focusing the camera. After only eighteen months she had gone from keen amateur, messing about with a tiny digital, to fully-fledged professional; her next exhibition, in a fashionable Santa Monica gallery, would be her second, and her dark, moody prints sold for upwards of a couple of thousand dollars a piece.

She knew it was a better way of making a living than imagining the faces of murderers, rapists and other assorted psychopaths. Slowly the images of the dead were beginning to disappear, to be replaced by the ever-changing surface of the sea.

But she was not entirely convinced. She pretended that what she felt was not guilt, but what other word was there? She had stepped away from her position as a forensic artist in order to have a quieter, steadier, more normal life. But all those victims out there – the mutilated, the raped, the abused, the butchered – did not have that luxury. They were defined by the crimes inflicted upon them, the scars etched into their bodies and their faces, marks that inscribed their bleak futures. The lucky ones were the ones who had died.

Perhaps that newspaper article was getting to her after all. At the end of the month it would be exactly ten years since the arrest of Bobby Gleason. To mark this ‘anniversary’ Cynthia Ross of the Times had written a feature looking at what had happened to some of the people involved in the case. Ross had contacted her gallery, asking for an interview, promising her some great publicity. Of course neither she, nor Cassie Veringer, Gleason’s last victim, had participated. What was the point? But that hadn’t stopped the reporter from digging up some old quotes, which together with the photographs of the two women, looked as though they had been interviewed at length. Ross had managed to speak to Jordan Weislander, the state prosecutor who had worked on the case. What was it Weislander had called him? A coward and a pathetic excuse for a human being. True, thought Kate, but he had also been one hell of a sadistic son of a bitch.

What was she doing thinking of Gleason? He belonged to a past long gone. And she had work to do.

She moved closer to the shore and brought her camera up towards her face. She wanted to try and capture the moment when a wave was at its peak, the split second between its rise and its fall. So far she had taken five rolls of film, out of which she was happy with maybe eight images. For her exhibition – which had a working title of Waves in Motion – she would need something like thirty photographs.

Kate knelt down on the damp sand and peered into the depths of the ocean. A sudden gust from the sea swept her silver grey hair off her face, sending it dancing in the air. Every pore of her porcelain-white skin seemed to come alive. She tasted the salt in the breeze and felt the fine spray of the ocean on her face. She edged a little closer to the shore, careful not to risk her camera getting wet, finally feeling herself totally focused and in the moment.

She moved the camera, trying to find the perfect frame for a shot, pressing the shutter just before a wave was about to reach its peak. She wound on the film quickly and shot again, as the water rose into the air and then again just as it was breaking. She stepped further back from the shoreline and looked out to sea, remembering the childhood game she had played with her father. They would both sit here, just down from the beach house, and try and track the progress of a single wave, from its birth out at sea to its final crash onto the sand. Even though she always managed to lose her chosen wave – and, today, she realised it really was an impossible task – her father lavished her with praise when the surf of ‘her’ wave crashed on the beach.

She felt tears forming, but she bit her lip, determined not to cry, blinking to stop the tears from falling. The sea was a blur now, water seen through water. She wiped her eyes, trying to see clearly. There was something out at sea. She blinked again, quickly, but her vision was fogged. She picked up her camera and zoomed in on the object. What was it? A small seal? Part of a whale? Every few moments it would disappear under the surface of the water and then re-emerge.

Automatically, without thinking, she took a couple of shots. A large wave took hold of it and carried it towards shore. For a moment it was lost in the surf. She squinted as she tried to find the object in the midst of the spray. But then the water tossed it onto the surface once more. The viewfinder framed it perfectly. She took five or six shots before an awful realisation came to her.

She threw her camera down on to the sand and ran to the shore, tearing off her grey cashmere hooded top as she moved. She was slightly afraid of the sea, but she plunged straight in, the sudden cold taking her breath away. Her white jeans clung to her skin, her black long-sleeved shirt billowed out like a sinister balloon, but she launched herself into the water. She could hear her own breath – shallow, loud and terrifying – as she swam with all her strength. She could feel the quickening beat of her heart, but she could not let up. As she came nearer, her worst fears were realised.

The baby – a naked little girl – lolled in the water like a grotesque doll, its eyes large, glassy, and wide.

With one last stroke she took hold of the baby. Her flesh was ice cold, but she knew she had to try to bring her back to land, back to life. With the last of her strength, Kate dragged herself back to shore, trying hard to keep the little girl’s head above water. But a sudden wind whipped up the waves, sending them crashing over both of them. The force pushed Kate under, nearly wrenching the baby from her grasp. She held on, but took in what seemed like a lungful of salt water. She blinked through the water to see the shoreline quite close now. A couple more strokes and she would be on the sand.

The waves bore her in, beaching her like an injured sea creature, and for a couple of seconds she could only lie there, vomiting sea water and trying to catch her breath. As soon as she had recovered her strength she manoeuvred the baby away from the water’s edge and opened its little mouth. A stream of salt water, grit and sand dribbled out. She placed her fingers delicately over her tiny nose and tried to blow life back into its white body. The baby’s lips were blue, its mouth a perfect Cupid’s bow. On its head was a tuft of black hair. She willed it to live, but no matter how many times she forced her breath into her, the little girl did not stir. She had gone.

Kate fell backwards on to the sand. She fought against the nausea that rose inside her, shouting her rage and grief at the sky. Then the professional that she had for so long tried to bury suddenly came alive as she realised that she needed to get help. This was, she thought, a crime scene. What the hell had happened here? Various scenarios ran through her head – a woman suffering from post-natal depression perhaps driven to an awful act of desperation; an angry father, convinced his partner had been unfaithful, snatching the child and swimming out to sea, killing them both; a frightened teenager unable to face the future with a new, unwanted baby, taking her daughter down to the beach and abandoning her to the elements.

She stood up, unsteady on her feet, and tried to run towards the house. Her legs felt like they were melting beneath her, and the beach shifted under her feet as if it were quick sand. As she ran she looked around for help, scanning the stretch of shore for any sign of life. It was still too early in the morning for the joggers or the dog walkers.

Then, in the distance, towards the very end of the beach, she thought she could just make out a figure. A man dressed in black. She tried to shout, desperately waving her arms, but realised he couldn’t hear her. Slowly the silhouette seemed to turn and look at her, pausing as if to assess her, coldly. Although she could not see his face, she felt his eyes on her. She felt a sensation of terror deep inside and, for a moment, she could not move.

Then, without thinking, her right hand moved from her side and came to rest on her stomach. She stared down at her belly. She was frozen in fear.

When she looked up again the figure had gone.

2

The beach house had been invaded by what seemed to Kate like half of the LAPD: uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives, forensic teams, fingerprinters, photographers and the one man in the world she did not want to see – Josh Harper.

When she had made that call to 911 she knew that, as Josh was one of the Robbery-Homicide division’s (RHD) chief detectives, he would turn up at the scene. And here he was – the tall, dark, handsome man who had fucked up her life. As she repeated the details of what she had seen to one of the interviewing officers she observed Josh from the corner of her eye, careful not to let him know she was watching. If he looked over towards her she refocused on an object across the room, a painting on the wall, a pile of books on a shelf. To her, he was more or less invisible. Not worth the space he occupied. What was it her girlfriend, Lisa, had called him? The human slimeball with the slicked-back hair.

‘So, just to get this straight,’ said the officer, ‘you rose early to take some photos? And as you were photographing – what was it, the sea, the waves, you say – you saw the little girl in the water?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Kate, sitting in the kitchen with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her silver hair, still damp, hanging lank around her face.

‘Can I get one thing clear here? You saw the child in the water and yet – yet – you continued to take pictures of her? Even as she was drowning?’

He looked at her as if she were some kind of sicko.

‘I think, officer,’ she said, trying to control her sarcasm, ‘your forensics people will most likely find that she had been dead for a couple of hours.’

‘So as well as being a photographer you’re an expert in the science of –‘

‘Peterson, she was the best forensic artist the force had,’ said Harper, placing a hand on the officer’s shoulder.

Kate had seen Josh approaching, but had pretended to herself that he was going to walk past her and out of the house. Just like he had done less than a month ago.

‘Hi, Kate,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘How are you?’

She remained silent.

‘Peterson, could you let me have a few minutes with Miss Cramer?’ said Harper.

Josh pulled up a chair and sat down at the glass table. He looked out at the stretch of beach and to the Pacific beyond. He imagined what it must have been like for Kate to find that dead child. He pictured her wading into the chilly water, swimming out to rescue it, bringing it back to shore. Her desperation to breathe life back into its tiny body. His hand started to reach out to touch her hair – her beautiful silver mane, he had called it – but he stopped himself.

‘L-look, I know this is not going to be easy, but –‘

She arched one of her eyebrows, a gesture that he knew from their time together to be far more effective that any stream of expletives.

‘But,’ he said lowering his voice, ‘I just want to make sure you are okay. Why don’t we go some place where we can talk?’

Again nothing but that cold, hard stare. The first time he had seen her, with her immaculate silver hair, clear blue eyes, unlined alabaster skin, and inscrutable expression he had christened her the ice maiden. It had taken him months to get her to warm up, but finally – no, there was no point going back.

‘We need to act like professionals here,’ he said.

The words stung her, reminding her of something she had said to him when they had first met five years before.

He saw her nostrils flare, her eyes light up with anger.

‘So, that’s it, is it?’ she said, looking at him with disdain. ‘That’s all we are now – ‘professionals’. You’ve managed to put me in a little box in your tiny brain so that you don’t have to bother thinking about all that other complicated personal stuff.’

Her voice began to rise now, attracting the stares of the police working nearby.

‘Kate, come on, I know you must have had a traumatic morning –‘

‘Traumatic? You don’t know -’

‘Look, if we are going to have this conversation why don’t we go outside at least.’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘I know I didn’t behave exactly like a saint,’ he said. Most of the officers had discretely melted away from the kitchen, but Peterson was within earshot and so he tried to quieten his voice. ‘But you know you were hardly easy to talk to.’

‘So it’s all my fault, is it? My fault that you went off and screwed some short order cook at some downtown deli.’

Jules was a trained chef at one of the city’s top restaurants. But he let Kate enjoy her insult.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth – that’s all. A small thing, I know, but obviously something completely out of your reach.’

‘Come on, Kate, that’s not fair.’

‘Fair? You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

‘I can see we’re not going to get very far today,’ he said. ‘But call me when you feel a little calmer.’

He stood up to go.

‘And – Kate,’ he said. ‘You did a great job this morning. I know you did everything you could to save that child.’

She bit her lip, almost tasting the blood beneath the skin.

‘Do you know who – who – she was?’ she said, softening.

‘We’re not 100 per cent, but we have an idea. Got reports of a missing child from a young couple over in San Feliz. We need a positive I-D before we can say for certain.’

‘And how she died?’

‘Again, it’s too early. She’s been taken off for a post-mortem now. But it looks like she died in the ocean, either from hypothermia or drowning.’

‘Was it one of the parents, do you think?’

‘They’ve been brought in for questioning, but we don’t think so. Broken to pieces, poor kids. Normally the little girl slept in a cot in the parents’ room, but that night they wanted a little privacy – their words – so they moved the baby into the next room. In the middle of the night the mother went in to the spare room to check on the baby and discovered it was missing from the cot. It was a one-storey house, you know the type and –‘

‘Jesus, but who would do a thing like that?’

‘You know what’s out there, Kate.’

‘I know, but a baby – why, for god’s sake?’

She thought of the feel of the little girl in her arms, her flesh cold, wet and clammy. She remembered her glassy eyes staring into nowhere.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said urgently.

‘What is it?’ said Josh, his eyes searching the room for one of his deputies.

She looked at him and changed her mind. She wasn’t ready to tell him. Maybe she never would.

‘I’m going to spend a few days at my mother’s house, so I’ll be there if you need to get hold of me.’

***

Earlier that day, after she had put the phone down from 911, she had walked into the bathroom to get a small towel with which to cover the dead child. She couldn’t bring her back to life, but at least she could give her a little dignity in death. As she opened the door to the bathroom cupboard to grab a towel she spotted, on the shelf above, a clutch of pregnancy test kits. She took hold of the towel and was about to walk out of the room when an overwhelming compulsion came over her. It was irrational, inappropriate, just plain stupid. She was due to have her period any time now. She was just late. But the urge was so strong that neither logic nor decorum could defeat it. She knew she should head back down to the beach, but what she had to do would only take a matter of minutes.

She sat on the edge of the bath, her hands shaking. She felt nervous, a little nauseous. She took a deep breath and stood up, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes. A mass of white hair. Her pale skin an even more ghostly white. She stripped off her wet clothes, quickly towel-dried her face and body and threw on a pale grey bathrobe. Then she locked the door and took out one of the testing kits from the cabinet. All the other times had been negatives, so what made her think this was going to be any different?

She unwrapped the box and automatically went through the procedure. Who needed instructions anymore? Then she sat on the john, waited and remembered the first time she had seen him.

A body had been found by a hiker just off one of the trails in the hills behind the observatory. A white male, roughly 45 years old. Badly decomposed. No dental records. No DNA matches. So she had been called in to do a facial reconstruction. First of all she had made a negative image of the skull from alginate, into which she poured plaster. Into the copy of the skull she had then placed a series of pegs, the depth of the pegs calculated according to the sex, age and racial origins. She worked out the detail of the facial structure – the jaw and set of the teeth, the shape and projection of the nose, the nostrils, the width of the mouth, the projection of the eyes, the shape of the eyelids, the size and shape of the forehead. Then she rolled out strips of clay, which she then moulded onto the skull, until she had pieced together a portrait of the unknown dead man. Many of her contemporaries worked with computer modelling, but Kate preferred the ‘British’ method, which she had learnt in Manchester, England. She liked the sticky feel of clay between her fingers, the features forming in her hands, the very real sense of giving birth to an unknown identity. For all her scientific training, she felt she was still an artist at heart.

She recalled that just as she had been working on the dead man’s lips, delicately shaping them with a scalpel, she had got a phone call in her lab. She had ignored it – her assistant Tom Horking was on vacation and her fingers were covered in clay – but then her cell rang.

‘Okay, okay,’ she had said to herself, tearing off a piece of paper roll. ‘Dr Kate Cramer, hello.’

‘Detective Josh Harper, I’m heading up the John Doe investigation, and I’m standing outside your lab. What have you got for me?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said what have you got for me? A face, an image, whatever it is you have I need it now.’

If there was one thing that annoyed Kate it was the assumption that you could do her kind of work quickly.

‘I’m afraid this is not a fast food outlet, Detective Harper,’ she had said.

‘Look – I’ve got a body with no name, no identity, and I’ve been –‘

‘Well, if you don’t let me get on with my job –‘

‘Cut the bullshit, Dr Cramer. When can I have a result? That’s all I need to know.’

Kate had remained silent.

‘Hello?’

‘You will get the ‘result’, as you call it, when it’s good and ready,’ she had said coldly, cutting the line.

The mobile rang again, but she ignored it. Asshole. Probably some alcoholic, middle-aged man trapped in an unhappy, sexless marriage and surviving on coffee, take out, and Pepto-Bismol.

She had worked for a half an hour more, washed her hands and checked herself in the mirror. Earlier she had scraped back her hair, fixing it in place with an old rubber band. Should she wear it loose over her shoulders? Nah, she was only going to get a salad. Then she’d be back at her desk.

She had keyed in her passcode at the secured exit, but just as she had gone to turn the handle she felt the door being forced towards her. She had pushed back, but she had not been strong enough.

‘What the fuck …’

‘Dr Cramer, Detective Harper,’ he had said, brandishing a badge.

‘Exactly what do you think you are doing?’

‘Trying to get what I need to do my job, ma’am, that’s all.’ His accent was vaguely Southern. Texan, maybe?

‘I told you on the phone that it’s not finished.’

‘Can you not show me the work in progress,’ he had said, smiling, a glint of mischievousness in his black, snake-like eyes.

‘Tell me one good reason why I shouldn’t call security?’

‘What, and go to all that trouble? Don’t forget we are all working on the same side, Dr Cramer.’

She gave him one of her withering, icy stares.

‘Okay, but remember, I’m only doing this because I pity you,’ she had said. ‘This way.’

She accompanied him to her work desk, where she showed him the model. She talked him through what she had done, tried to make him aware of the intricacies of the process, the importance of not rushing. She caught him looking at her, eyeing her severe hairline. If only she had taken her hair out of that goddamn rubber band, she had thought, before telling herself not to be so pathetically, adolescently stupid. The man clearly was – what was the expression her father always used – a fuckwit. Yet, there was something about him. What was it?

‘Well, thank you Dr Cramer, that was – interesting.’

‘No problem.’

‘And – sorry to ask you this again – but when – realistically – do you think you might be able to release the image to me? I need to get it out to the media as soon as I can.’

‘I’ll do my best, okay. I can’t promise, but if I work around the clock you’ll have it by tomorrow a.m.. Is that quick enough.’

‘I guess it will have to be,’ he had said, his dark eyes glinting again.

She accompanied him back to the door of the lab. He stopped and turned towards her.

‘Look – sorry I behaved like an asshole earlier. But can I take you out to dinner to make up?’

Of course, she had wanted to say ‘yes’. Instead, she looked straight through him, keyed in her code on the security pass and opened the door for him.

‘I don’t think that’s such a great idea. Let’s stick to being professional, shall we Detective Harper?’

And with that he had walked out. Not the most promising of beginnings, thought Kate. Maybe she should have taken her own advice. Then she would never have found herself sitting on the john, waiting for the result that would change her life.

***

She had taken a deep breath as she had picked up the kit. She had closed her eyes for a moment of two. On opening them she had seen the two distinctive pink lines that confirmed that she was pregnant. She should have felt overjoyed. After all, Kate had been trying for a child for two years. But instead she had just felt flat, numb.

What a time for it to happen, she had thought. Just my fucking luck.

How many attempts had there been? First of all naturally – god, those were the days – and then with IVF. They had both been optimistic at first, confident that it would work for them. But as time had dragged on the process seemed to eat away at the foundations of their relationship, undermining it like a plague of termites burrowing beneath a wooden-frame house. From the outside it still looked handsome, healthy, but inside it was decaying. Perhaps she had placed too much pressure on Josh to have a child. Perhaps lovemaking had come to be associated more with mucal temperatures, menstrual cycles and medication than raw passion. Perhaps she had mutated into one of those neurotic women – the type she vowed she would never turn into – that obsess over baby-making to the detriment of everything else.

And yet she still couldn’t forgive him for what he had done. Jules. God, she hated that name.

It made perfect fucking sense now, of course. She had discovered the truth about Josh and Jules less than a month ago, just after their last session with the fertility clinic. The drive back in the car was silent, the air poisonous with unexpressed emotion. At the beach house she had noticed that Josh didn’t want to meet her eye. Finally she could bear it no longer and asked if there was anything wrong. Initially, he had said no, he was just beat, that was all. Working long hours on a case of child pornography and internet paedophilia. That was enough to send even the sanest amongst us into silent mode, she had said to herself. Yet – there was something that wasn’t quite right. She had seen Josh handle difficult, disturbing, outright obscene and sick cases before and he had never been like this. She had got the feeling that he would much rather be some place else. Over supper, on the terrace overlooking the ocean, she had asked him if there was anything else bothering him besides the investigation. He had looked down at his steak and had said that he thought maybe they should give the fertility clinic a break for a while. It had been getting too much for him – all those tests, the pressure, the emotional highs and lows.

‘And maybe it’s not such a good idea, anyway,’ he had said, as something of a throwaway remark, pouring himself another glass of Rioja. ‘I mean, we’ve both got our careers to think about – your photographs, the exhibition. Maybe there’s a reason why we can’t have kids.’

‘What?’ she had said, nearly choking.

‘Just that I think we should have a rethink about a few things.’

‘Josh, it’s a bit late to start saying that now.’ She hated the sound of desperation in her voice.

‘I know, but –‘

‘But what, Josh? I thought we were both into this. Don’t you want a child now? Is that it?’

‘Yeah, sure, but maybe we should wait a couple of years.’

‘I’m thirty nine, Josh. I know you say I don’t look like it, but there’s no way I can wait. I need to do this now, you know that.’

‘That’s the problem, though, isn’t it,’ he had said, his voice taking on an edge of bitterness. ‘It’s always what you want, what you need.’

‘Excuse me?’ She had never seen him like this before, his eyes hard and ugly, his voice harsh and accusing. ‘What is it, Josh. I know there’s something else.’ Was he actually squirming in his seat? ‘Or someone else.’

There had been a long, horrible, ugly pause. Please god, no.

‘Josh?’

‘It’s been hard, Kate, you know that.’

‘Oh, no, please, no.’

The food in her mouth suddenly tasted rotten.

‘It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing. Just a fling. Sex, that’s all.’

‘Is that not enough?’

‘Come on.’

‘Who is she? What’s she called?’

He hesitated.

‘Jules. She’s called Jules.’

‘And what does she do?’

‘Why do you need to know? You don’t need to know.’

‘I asked what does she do?’

‘She’s a chef.’

‘Where?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Where?’

‘At the Amalfi, downtown.’

‘I see – just round the corner from your office.’

‘I guess, but –‘

‘Can you please go now.’

‘Kate, let’s talk this through. Come on –‘

She had looked at him with cold, bare hatred. ‘Just go. Please.’

He had touched her on the shoulder – a caress that made her shrink into herself – and then he had let himself out.

God, that had seemed so long ago. Yet it was only a month. She started to go over it all again in her mind – were there signs she should have seen, hints she should have taken notice of, things she should have done differently? – but then the doorbell rang. The emergency services had arrived. She knew Josh would be amongst the throng. She quickly pulled on some dry clothes and ran to the door, realising the terrible ironies of the situation.